March 2004 archive of Aaron Oakley's blog, Bizarre Science

COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 68.64.90.88 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 02:21:23 AM There is also the Leipzig Declaration which disputes the global warming hypothesis. It has 4,000 signers including 102 Nobel prize winners. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: frank borger EMAIL: fborger@pensys.com IP: 12.73.153.176 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 04:53:45 AM Slight missed connection. The "Heidelberg Appeal" is currently at about 4000 signers, with something like 100 Nobels. The Leipzig Declaration is only at 170 or so, (130 verified.) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis Hissink EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 07:13:50 AM I recall where I saw that other list here and the arithmetic remains basically unchanged. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joseph Hertzlinger EMAIL: jhertzli@ix.netcom.com IP: 165.247.28.212 URL: http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com DATE: 03/01/2004 12:10:15 PM I don't trust petitions in general. If anything, the need to use a petition probably means there is a lack of actual data on the anti-gw side. Clearly, this means global warming is more of a danger than I thought. In other words... It's time to back Nuclear Winter! After that we take anti-nuclear activists and try them for treason to humanity. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Post Modernism and Scientific Objectivity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 02/29/2004 03:10:17 PM ----- BODY: Most of us are used to the illogicality of Post Modernism which asserts that there are no objective facts - a statement which can be disproven trivially - but I always wondered where this bizarre humanistic notion evolved from. This is an extract from "Omnipotent Government" by L. Von Mises and taken from the Mises web site "The German nationalists had to face precisely the same problem as the Marxians. They also could neither demonstrate the correct­ness of their own statements nor disprove the theories of economics and praxeology. Thus they took shelter under the roof of poly­logism, prepared for them by the Marxians. Of course, they con­cocted their own brand of polylogism. The logical structure of mind, they say, is different with different nations and races. Every race or nation has its own logic and therefore its own economics, mathematics, physics, and so on. But, no less inconsistently than Professor Mannheim, Professor Tirala, his counterpart as cham­pion of Aryan epistemology, declares that the only true, correct, and perennial logic and science are those of the Aryans.[xiii] In the eyes of the Marxians Ricardo, Freud, Bergson, and Einstein are wrong because they are bourgeois; in the eyes of the Nazis they are wrong because they are Jews. One of the foremost goals of the Nazis is to free the Aryan soul from the pollution of the Western philoso­phies of Descartes, Hume, and John Stuart Mill. They are insearch of arteigen[xiv]German science, that is, of a science adequate to the racial character of the Germans". While the communists assert thought is class based, and the Nazis racially based, is the Nazi version of polylogism any different to Post Modernism which is community or tribally (but in reality,racially) based? Or is Post Modernism the latest variant of polylogism to spring from a mindset that is essentially totalitarian in outlook. Link to the article is here Additional comment: Post Modernism is politically based polylogism - though in that sense it comes very close to Lysenkoism which the left routinely resort to when criticising ideas contrary to their own. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.210 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 07:37:31 AM You've beaten me to the punch Aaron in posting the article. `Alternative medicine' boosters run the polylogism line, putting science down as a ` Western' mode of discovering truth and therefore just one among many. `Feminist scholars' do the same, compounded by the Marxist psuedo-philosophy which grounds their work. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 203.54.24.178 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 11:13:01 AM Apologies, you beat me to the punch Louis ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Robert Blair EMAIL: robert.blair@dsionline.com IP: 12.105.149.31 URL: DATE: 03/01/2004 01:27:25 PM Louis, And 'Tolerance' is the populist rallying cry. Remember, you can't 'tolerate' that which you accept as true or right. You can only be asked to tolerate that which you think is wrong, or wicked. When you are told to be 'tolerant' you are really being asked to accept that which you believe is false. Which is only fair, as all is relative, there are no absolute truths, etc etc. 'Tolerance' is the ideal catch-cry for the totalitarian. Who is ever of a mood to prescibe exactly what must be tolerated. Those who don't conform are obviously 'intolerant', and must be dealt with. ----- PING: TITLE: Who's intolerant now? URL: http://slattsnews.ubersportingpundit.com/archives/005003.html IP: 64.5.44.166 BLOG NAME: Slattsnews DATE: 03/01/2004 03:38:07 PM Piece of profundity in comments at Aaron Oakley's: And 'Tolerance' is the populist rallying cry. Remember, you can't 'tolerate' that which you accept as true or right. You can only be asked to tolerate that which you think is wrong,... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: Science and politics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/01/2004 10:55:49 AM ----- BODY: Lowell Ponte's take on the politicization of science. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Volcanic heat STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/02/2004 07:06:46 AM ----- BODY: Nature Magazine notes that volcanoes are no match for humanity in the heat production stakes, Link here. Watch the CO2 freaks make use of this one ! And voila! we have it here and note it fits the 50 year time period which other scares are being predicted to occur in. A temperature rise of 1/5000 deg seems to me to be well within error or beyond our capability of measuring temperature. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Stephen Dawson EMAIL: scdawson@hifi-writer.com IP: 139.168.159.241 URL: http://www.hifi-writer.com DATE: 03/05/2004 10:44:55 AM A small error in your report I'm afraid. The report to which you link on the tiny temperature rise says:
... a tiny fraction of a degree -- five-thousandths of a degree Centigrade, to be exact.
I read this as 5/1000 or 0.005 degrees, not 1/5000 or 0.0002. Nevertheless, I think the point stands. I can only assume that the 'increase' in temperature is greater than the limits of error of their thermometers, but I would have thought that no natural body is so uniform in temperature that such a variance, even from inch to inch within it, would be remarkable. Even agitating the water slightly differently during the measurement process would likely produce some difference in heat (since the mechanical energy is converted to heat energy). Did they conduct 1,000 sample measurements in '65 and now? If so, what was the range of the samples? I'd be surprised if it wasn't a lot more than 0.005. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 03:24:20 PM I stand corrected - however what is even more interesting is that if the measurement is .005 degree C, then the instrument itself must be capable of even higher resolution in order to quantify this measurement. So the measuring aparatus would need to be accurate to, hmm, 0.0001? Golly gosh, such precision for such a body of water. And of course why did they publish it as they did, why not a simple unambiguous numerical description than via the written word? If it was meant to cause confusion, it did. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: Quote of the day STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/02/2004 10:19:39 AM ----- BODY: "I grew up under Marxism. We suffered a lot. You can't find one grain of sand in Russia that is socialist. Kyoto has a similar smell, a very familiar smell. It will become a bureaucratic monster that will decide what happens in every country, their special quotas will throw a net over the world economy, and they will decide who has the right to live and who must die. We called our plans Gosplans, they were hopeless, they didn't work, but their aim was a growing economy. Kyoto is like a Gosplan, but it wants to preside over a declining economy. Kyoto is a death camp. Kyoto is an economic gulag for the world" Andrei Illarionov, Presidential Aide and Economic Adviser, Russia ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/02/2004 11:59:40 AM "Kyoto is a death camp". har har-har! Hows that for doom and gloom? Ultra-rational stuff from Russia there. Very convincing. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: oakley@rsc.anu.edu.au IP: 150.203.2.60 URL: DATE: 03/02/2004 12:10:39 PM Suggestion: look past the flowery language and think about the point Andrei is getting at: The economic damage -with consequent lower living standards- Kyoto will bring. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.28 URL: DATE: 03/02/2004 12:29:12 PM Even Illarianov's testimony won't convince. I have in view former high level KGB officers who have spilled quite a bit about the former regime's efforts aimed at undermining the west in order to overthrow it, including the fact that they set the Greens Party up, starting West-Germany as a Front as a measure indirect of subversion. The rationale is impeecable though dastardly, direct measures were tenuous and quickly discredited. By establishing a purportedly `spontaneous movement' aren't they all ( like the PlO and IRA-Sinn Fein ( whose history runs counter to vulgar belief and with violent aims their respective objectives - Gerry Adams is no `freedom fighter' - he is a butcher, a cold blooded mass murderer and one object was to impose what would have effectivley mounted to as totalitarian rule by IRA-Sinn Fein - yes you Sinn Fein-IRA sympathisers they are nothing but a pack of scum of the worst kind), destablising actions could be purveyed as `democratic protest'. That doesn't figure terribly much for the likes of Fat Aunty Bolshevik Collective, and given its love affair with the greens and all things leftoid, the reality of what the Greens is will be studiously ignored. Needless to say, the ABC ,I predict, won't turn to Illarionov for the authority is on what Kyoto and etc is due tyo, a a communist front, the Greens, establsihed by the KGB to undermine bad old capitalist non commie western countries. Yes, Bod Brown, you commie fucker, without them , you'd be nowhere. ----- PING: TITLE: Great quote URL: http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/archives/individual/2004/03/great_quote.html IP: 63.247.132.12 BLOG NAME: Synthstuff - music, photgraphy and more... DATE: 03/03/2004 06:19:31 AM Found this quote on the Bizarre Science website: “I grew up under Marxism. We suffered a lot. You can’t find one grain of sand in Russia that is socialist. Kyoto has a similar smell, a very familiar smell. It will... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: More Kyoto Lying STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/03/2004 08:45:19 AM ----- BODY: Alan Wood of the Australian 2 March shows another perspective of the Kyoto proselytisers. Aside from the fact the Castles and Henderson criticism has not been disproven, it might be pointed out that economic modelling per se as a technique for predicting outcomes is a serious misuse of the techniques used in the physical sciences. Economic modelling, (whether micro or macro) reduces to first principles as the absurdity of the price of a good or service being dependent on the position of the earth along its orbit around the sun. That is precisely what is meant when prices or economic activity are predicted from economic modelling. Hence the economic models used by the IPCC only work in social democractic utopias. Little wonder the physical evidence for human induced Global warming is so hard to quantify - we are looking in the wrong place - the evidence exists in the virtual world created by the IPCC modelling. Like the afterlife, this domain is inaccessible to scientific scrutiny. And of course the global warmers are now reduced to the absurdities of temperature variations of 1/5000 deg C in oceans as support for their hypothesis of human induced global warming (see volcanoes below). Reductio ad absurdum ? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.23.109 URL: DATE: 03/03/2004 01:33:01 PM Gad, Louis, that is as neatly a cutting a summary as one could read, a sharp hit to the IPCC solar plexus. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Economic Prediction - Greenspan STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: DATE: 03/03/2004 06:40:35 PM ----- BODY: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal reserve said this yesterday "Nonetheless, despite extensive efforts on the part of analysts, to my knowledge, no model projecting directional movements in exchange rates is significantly superior to tossing a coin. I am aware that of the thousands who try, some are quite successful. So are winners of coin-tossing contests. The seeming ability of a number of banking organizations to make consistent profits from foreign exchange trading likely derives not from their insight into future rate changes but from market making. (emphasis added) His full Speech is here. I therefore make the provisional conclusion that the IPCC economic predictions from their economic modelling could just as well be achieved by the flipping of a coin, and as these economic outputs are also the inputs for the climate models, this would mean that the IPCC climate predictions are equally amenable to being simulated by coin tossing. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 68.64.90.88 URL: DATE: 03/03/2004 10:13:29 PM "IPCC climate predictions are equally amenable to being simulated by coin tossing" ABSOLUTELY! In my opinion, the biggest fraud that the IPCC has perpertrated is the notion that computer models of complex non-linear systems have any predictive value. They don't and many scientists who claim they do know they don't. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Say that again? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: quote CATEGORY: quote DATE: 03/04/2004 10:44:38 AM ----- BODY: Spotted this in the February 2004 comment archive on the SEPP site UK minister: "Of course, the carbon tax would be levied on nuclear electricity, otherwise nuclear would gain an unfair advantage." ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.139 URL: DATE: 03/04/2004 12:44:06 PM Rather than let householders and businesses, schools, unis and hospices enjoy the much cheaper electricity gnerated by nuclear power plants. Scargill's ghost walks. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.115.47 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 12:04:20 AM Actually Mother Jones, a very leftist magazine, blamed global warming on nuclear reactors. There is a lot of misinformation out there. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: The meaning of 100% STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Fun CATEGORY: Fun DATE: 03/04/2004 06:36:11 PM ----- BODY: A strictly mathematical viewpoint. .... it goes like this: What Makes 100% ? What does it mean to give MORE than 100% ? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100% ? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103% ? What makes up 100% in life? Well, here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions: If: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Then: H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K is 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98% and K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E is 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96% But, A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E is 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100% And, B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T is 2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103% AND, look how far ass-kissing will take you. A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G is 1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118% So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that ...while Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, ....and Attitude will get you there, ....Bullshit and Ass-kissing will put you over the top. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.23.182 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 07:47:33 AM gad, I realise I went wrong somewhere.A total score of a bitty over 500% is now beyond my reach and inclinations, particularly: ass-kissing - I must be a young old fogey, clinging to apparently the mistaken approach, ass-kicking. attitude,I'm shot out of the water on tthis one : holding hands with all and sundry and making lurvy durvy noises, which seems to be all the rage of not only pimple-headed adolescents but adults. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: ABC Catalyst Progam 8pm Thursday 4 Feb STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/04/2004 07:26:07 PM ----- BODY: It seems the Daintree Rainforest, because of reduced rainfall, is producing more CO2 - via the microrganisms on the forest floor which decompose the leaf litter, than expected. There is not enough rainfall to to allow normal carbon conversion via photosynthesis. So the forest seems at the moment to be a net producer of CO2 and not, as previously assumed, a net consumer. All and well, but then using the IPCC scenario of a 5 Deg Rise in temperature due to Global Warming for the next 50 years, panic has set in. Transcript here I suggest one should stand back, take a very deep breath and then wonder whether this experiment of 2-3 years duration may be need to be extended before useful conclusions can be made. It is only necessary to have the existing dry periods followed by some exceptional wet ones for the measurements to be the reverse. Unfortunately believing in the faith of global warming would tend to produce impulsive interpretations based on incomplete data, hence the alarmist tone of the ABC TV presentation. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.23.182 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 07:41:08 AM They could as usefully intrepret signs and omens. The dog star shines brightly tonight: My god, we're doomed. 24 hours later, a shooting star is spotted: what a relief, we're only partly doomed. On an eclipse, we can be saved if only govts. would implement Kyoto. The hunter is out tonight: we're doomed. AAAAAAAArgh. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.23.182 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 07:50:55 AM Raze the forests, they're killing everyone. Chainsaw,hmmmn, must get a chainsaw. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Secret Pentagon Report? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/05/2004 06:39:28 AM ----- BODY: Looks like Green Clippings are plying the Pentagon report for it it's worth as a secret study, which it isn't of course. Totally predictable. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Walt EMAIL: weloy@earthlink.nospamplease.net IP: 171.75.90.131 URL: DATE: 03/08/2004 10:13:12 AM Typical. You'll note that Clippings links to the newspaper reports, but not to the actual Pentagon paper itself. Turns out to be one of those 'what should we do IF' things. The report doesn't say a thing about whether climate change is likely, just gives the military planners a worst-case scenario to wrap troop deployments around. It'll be filed in the Pentagon basement next to the ones where they've looked at the possible responses to an extraterrestrial invasion (I'm not making that up. They have them.) ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: Evil Corporate Lapdogs oppose Kyoto STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/05/2004 12:03:46 PM ----- BODY: ...well, they must be if they are opposing the One True Faith, right? The Debate Is Warming Up "A couple of weeks ago a smallish volume came out: Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma co-authored by Simon Rozendaal, Dick Thoenes and me. It was dedicated to debunking the man-made global warming scare. What was the reaction so far in our home country, the Netherlands -- a country which is proud to belong to the vanguard of nations in the fight against global warming?" ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.155.83 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 02:28:58 PM Very good article. One thing could be added : forcing a pseudo market in `emissions rights' which does correspond to the otherwise mercantilist rot, commerce is about `winners and losers' so must be managed, thus compelling companies and firms to waste capital in a market in nothing at all, entails swallowing capital which otherwise brings on new generations of technology which are more efficient and, for the greenies, are cleaner. The trajectory of production from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the present is naked evidence of that. But capital squandered, due to dictat,on nothing, brings nothing on, excepting dirigiste govts. and the impoverishment and destiution of many - as the authors observe. I must read the book now. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 02:53:34 PM Bummer - out of print ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 04:49:52 PM Hah, the author told me where to get it ! On its way :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 68.64.90.88 URL: DATE: 03/05/2004 10:55:59 PM Most people are unaware that the now bankrupt Enron Corp. was the largest corporate lobbyist for Kyoto. They spent many millions of dollars to lobby the Clinton and Bush administrations to sign on and create a CO2 emmissions credit trading scheme. Of course, Enron would be the worlds largest trader of those emmission credits reaping a windfall of profits. Today is Enron is defunct and soon Kyoto will join them on the trash heap of history. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/06/2004 03:55:42 AM Wrong, US booksellers have run out - last resort is UK publisher. Cursors. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Grant EMAIL: gperkc@aol.com IP: 195.93.33.11 URL: DATE: 03/08/2004 09:33:43 PM Amazon.co.uk are showing it as 4 to 6 weeks availability. Paperback at a cost of 32.50 sterling. Probably means it is unavailable ... ;( Grant ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: bill EMAIL: mscience@globalnet.co.uk IP: 217.40.114.60 URL: http://www.multi-science.co.uk DATE: 03/09/2004 02:28:45 AM Go to www.multi-science.co.uk to order the book Bill ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: bill EMAIL: mscience@globalnet.co.uk IP: 217.40.114.60 URL: http://www.multi-science.co.uk DATE: 03/09/2004 02:29:03 AM Go to www.multi-science.co.uk to order the book Bill ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: bill EMAIL: mscience@globalnet.co.uk IP: 217.40.114.60 URL: http://www.multi-science.co.uk DATE: 03/09/2004 02:29:03 AM Go to www.multi-science.co.uk to order the book Bill ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 07:26:48 AM Oh look, 3 bills for the same book :-)) ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Glacier melting on Heard Island is due to Global Warming? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/07/2004 10:01:20 AM ----- BODY: The ABC has posted a news item in which a Dr Thost says it is an early warning sign of global warming changes that scientists can expect further south. There is one slight problem - Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak). What was that ? An active volcanoe????? Helloooo ????????? The key word is "ACTIVE" which means "HEAT" and another impulsive interpretation to fuel the global warming hypothesis. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Earth's Rotation affected by global warming STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/08/2004 06:52:55 PM ----- BODY: John Daly's site has posted some interesting comments from 2002 about global warming, due to the increase of greenhouse gases, slowing the earth's rotation. This was in 2002 mind you. Except that for the last 5 years the earth's rotation has stabilised, negating the necessity to add a "leap second" to the atomic clocks, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratory based in Boulder, Colorado. The reference is here. (The time standard is kept in Paris, by the way). So taking the computer predictions versus the cold hard facts, the global warmers have got it wrong again. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 68.64.90.88 URL: DATE: 03/08/2004 09:57:50 PM Here is a prediction of future "scientific" research headlines: "Global Warming causing increased solar activity" ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 08:29:20 AM Ironically the rotation stabilised in 1998, so that fact must have been known to someone researching the topic in 2002. ----- PING: TITLE: Global Warming / Computer Models URL: http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/archives/individual/2004/03/global_warming_computer_models.html IP: 63.247.132.12 BLOG NAME: Synthstuff - music, photography and more... DATE: 03/09/2004 06:18:59 AM >From Bizzare Science comes two links: This first one: “Global Warming Lengthens the Day” was written in Feb. 2002 and says: Global warming caused by increasing manmade carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lengthen the day, according to a s... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Patagonian Glaciers ? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/09/2004 09:53:37 AM ----- BODY: Greanpeace has started another panic - the Patagonian glaciers have melted. Based on a photo in 1928 compared to another taken more recently. This is not a good sample, since in between anything could have happened, but we don't know, so Greenpeace's argument is incomplete. But was the 1928 photo taken in winter and the recent one in summer? If so, then the Greenpeace assertion is false. So task number one is to find the date of the 1928 photo. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 09:58:50 AM Oh, and I recall that on Xmas holidays in Thredbo when I was a young tacker, sometimes Mt Kos had snow on it in the middle of summer, and other years, no snow. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 05:48:38 PM Gosh, I misspelled Green as Grean :-( - Scourging for 10 minutes at least! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.161 URL: DATE: 03/10/2004 07:46:13 AM Not the Patagonian Glacier too, the horror, the horror. Can a man withstand such tragedy and not weep, look on and not sob, purview the devestation and be not moved, be so hardened that neither sweet pity nor compassion fill the veins with the liqor of repentance borne of repugnance, at Greeny stupidity. Shakespeare, Act II, scence 29, para 5698, The Anthropogenic Man ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: American Geophysical Union STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/09/2004 01:47:30 PM ----- BODY: Ken Miles has posted an interesting comment confirming that the AGU is principally for geophysicists, not geologists, and thereby lessens the effect he had of inferring that the AGU's support for Global Warming meant that geologists also support global warming, as a means of criticising Prof. Ian Plimer's assertion that most geologists do not support man induced global warming. Interestingly he refers to "a poster" who alerted him to this error. I was that "poster", so why not identify me? Unless of course the motive is not to give me any attribution. I sense an unusual amount of fear amongst the CO2 freaks, to paraphrase a couple of Jedi Knights. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 06:08:30 PM Ah, no wonder it is so quiet on the CO2 front - Ken no longer has comments to his blogs due to either indigence or to more sinister reasons which I leave to others to wonder about. Censorship I suspect ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/09/2004 06:15:21 PM Oh you have to take word for it, since you cannot verify it anymore - the posts have been removed from access. Like some data which the late John Daly could not access either after a criticism was published of the Mann et al paper. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.161 URL: DATE: 03/10/2004 07:41:24 AM Hmmn: Gary is Lord Sauron Louis is Darth Vader Yikes, who is Aaron, Dracula ? This leaves, Vlad the Impaler, Ghenghis kahn Horace the Viking, Attila the Hun, Maurice the Visigoth, Mike the Vandal, Hamilcar,Caligula, Nero,Ashurbanipal,Hittite Kings, throw in a few Pharoahs, aqnd lo, the ontological argument for re-incarnation is sound. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Global warming versus terrorism STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/09/2004 05:58:24 PM ----- BODY: Another version of parity equalisation where Whitehall has decided to limit comment on man made global warming warnings. If Sir Humphrey is involving himself in this issue, then obviously global warming must be equal to terrorism in danger, so as terrorism budgets are potentially bigger than global warming ones, it is fairly obvious who is being the more disingenuous. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Another snow job STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/10/2004 05:18:24 AM ----- BODY: It seems another lump of missing snow and ice on Mt Kilimanjaro (Kenya) that global warmers reckon was caused by anthropogenic global warming has a more mundane explanation - a climate cycle of 120 years - reference here . ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.161 URL: DATE: 03/10/2004 07:34:04 AM Right, which bastard killed my pet iceberg using their anthropogecens. `Anthropogecen' - morons coin the moronic. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: New Ice Age predicted STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/10/2004 06:33:57 AM ----- BODY: On the basis of a 3% drop in the O2 content of deep sea water between Australia and Antarctica, it is postulated that if this is a global rather than a local effect, then brrrrr we are up for another ice age. Well so this report suggests. Would it not be wiser to first determine whether the effect is local or global before shooting one's mouth off with such an irresponsible statement? And in any case, what on earth is anthropogenic warming predicting - a massive green house or an ice age. The two are mutually incompatible, though I suspect that somehow the CO2 freaks are going to come up with a climate model for all seasons, so that whatever the future climate is, it will always be due to anthropogenic caused global warming. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.161 URL: DATE: 03/10/2004 07:32:23 AM That is something that bamboozles, any omen `indicating'shift to cooler to freezing shift weather is evidence of `global warming' as also the reverse.Madness undilute, on both counts, reading omens and the contradiction: god help any child should they have such morons as their teachers because nothing else will courtesy of socialisto schools. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 07:39:55 AM The Sydney Morning Herald has published this "discovery". Interesting, is it not, that when it warms it gets cold. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Greenhouse Gas - H2O STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/10/2004 03:15:25 PM ----- BODY: Given that of all the greenhouse gases water (H2O) comprises about 90% , it is logical that this gas would have the greatest effect on global warming modelling, since CO2 is supposed to be less than 1% (by volume or mass?). This short discussion should help link The conclusion is that we know even less about this major greenhouse gas than the rest, and it is the biggest factor in the whole shebang. Go figure. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: Upsala Glacier: Greenpeace's Newest Fraud STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/11/2004 03:57:26 AM ----- BODY: According to Greenpeace, "global warming" is responsible for the retreat of the Upsala glacier, in the Glaciers National Park. Analyzing scientific facts, it looks as this is nothing but another of Greenpeace's clumsy attempts to push its green agenda. by Eduardo Ferreyra President of FAEC - February, 20, 2004 ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.200 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 07:54:09 AM Global warming is on a par with `conspiracy theory': it rests on overthwrown teleology of final and first causes which is determinstic and physics explained by a prime mover. The mistake bound up with the teleology is facts are self explanatory, so only sufficent mastery of details is required. Thus, mistake over the nexus between theory and facts, ignorance of: theory is not the explanation of facts, nor the proof of facts , just as evidence is not facts proving a theory.Theory is the explanation of action, with hypothesis as possible theory but might be false ( notice this since today, so many use `theory' when `hypothesis' is accurate'. ?!! someone might object: as Aaron and Louis would, presumably agree, `facts' are evidence, indications of relationships, interactions the `prinicples'/`laws' of which are in need of explanation. An analogy: archaeological record is no more than artefacts from which the historian infers the world of , say the ANE or Rome was. Modern hisotry, evidence is more comprehensive because of documentary records so the historian can examine say the actions of the Iron Chancellor,look at the general history of Prussia and unified Germany, using , for example, economics and jurisprudence to lift out the critical essentials of the 19th century on the one hand but, moreover, to deliver the theoretical load required to explain Bismarck's actions as Chancellor and so to draw out how germany developed. To resume, as such, Global warming purportedly offers an elegant explanation of intricate processes involving an extensive array of interations and relations readily understood by the layman, no intellectual effort and application need be exercised. Due to the teleology, accident and probalility is thus also eliminated. Any x, therefore occurs only because y caused it. That x is most likely a composite event, composed of many events, is entirely lost. Global warming, needless to say, doesn't rank as an hypothesis, the circular argument precludes thhat more modest claim: it is theory. As a circular argument, grounded in the teleology their is no basis on which it can be tested, it is self confriming at all points. Exactly what marks conspiracy theory. I notice also, from the linked article, the matter of `truth inadvertising'. Why are greenies, like other charlatans, an exception? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.200 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 07:55:43 AM Correction: para three `.... but as Aaron and Louis would agree......' ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.30.92.142 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 07:18:52 PM Thinking about this Comment when I have thought it through and worked it out. D. Makes a point, but I need to think it through. In the meantime you might read some of U.G.Krishnamurti's thoughts - in order to understand anything I might write. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.54 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 11:25:50 AM Louis,Your comment would be appreciated. Tried to send of an e-mail request to that effect yesterday, but for some reason the mailer was not sending. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Dirty Northerners (hemisperically speaking) STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/11/2004 08:37:01 AM ----- BODY: John Daly's web site comments on a recent New Scientist article in which it is now predicted the global temperature is expected to rise to 11 deg C! as well as revealing that industrial soot is masking global warming in the northern hemisphere. But look at the graphs on the Daly site - the southern hemisphere temperatures are not showing any warming, only the northern hemisphere. Apparently it is the sooty atmosphere which is masking the global warming, so that if we clean up our emissions, it will become warmer. But as our half of the planet is demonstrably cleaner, and as the temperatures show no warming trend, then cleaning the northern hemisphere should perhaps cause cooling, rather than warming. The essential issue here is that this "global" warming seems to be restricted to the northern hemishere, not the globe as a whole. If so then the global warming model is an abject failure because global warming has to be global, not hemisphere dependent. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 10:27:25 AM A couple of comments: 1. John Daly's graph's do show southern hemisphere warming, it is just much smaller than northern hemisphere (i presume you are talking about the satellite graphs) 2. JD only displays satellite data from one research group. There are at least two other research groups that have produced their own analyses of satellite data, which both show a greater degree of warming than the data JD refers to. 3. Louis, I can appreciate you dismissing simplistic climate analysis, but I don't think you should implement simplistic analysis of your own in its place. The conjecture in your post about northern hemisphere temp vs southern hemisphere temp is v. simple, and fails to recognise that there are probably a host of reasons why temp trends are different in the two hemispheres. For example, one reason i can think of is that the amount of land mass is much less in southern hemishere, which would have a big impact on temp trends, since presumably warming is different over land than over the sea. 4. According to the CSIRO, Australia has warmed by about 0.7 deg in the past century. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.118.56 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 10:53:50 AM If you look at the temperature trends for 1979 to 2001 as a function of latitude (shown at http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/Articles/2002/images/Image20.gif), you see most of the warming is between about 25 and 70 degrees north. If you then look at the temperature changes in those regions and compare them to the greenness of the vegetation there (http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/images/ocp2003/ocpfy2003-fig6-1.htm), you see a good correlation. As these regions get greener (higher NDVI values), they get darker (e.g., see http://www.ier.ml/labosep/images/research/peb/alb_ndvi.gif) resulting in more absorption and higher temperatures. This provides a simpler and better explanation of the temperature trends than do greenhouse gases. Simply put, the land surface areas are getting greener and darker causing them to warm. Removing this component from the observed warming and you have very little warming left over that can be explained by carbon dioxide. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 06:25:15 PM Steve, I note you discern simple from simplisitic. The hemispherical dichotomy seems to be an artefact. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.com.au IP: 218.214.42.234 URL: DATE: 03/11/2004 08:53:40 PM I'm not sure what you mean. Could you expand on your last comment ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 08:32:54 AM Hi Doug, I saw this in the Sydney Morning herald today. It talks about how CO2 can cause trees to grow faster, although the article has a 'global warming is dangerous' tone. The people quoted make the comments that some trees are winners, and others lose out under the changing conditions, due to competition from bigger, faster growing trees. Thought you would be interested. Its just a news story, might be worthwhile to chase up the actual research if you are really keen. Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.108.201 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 10:40:40 AM There is a lack of surface temperature observations in the Amazon where your article refers to (see, for example, http://www.john-daly.com/guests/tempo196.gif). It is probably warming there too, but it covers so little of the entire latitudinal zone that it may not show up. The point in my earlier post was that the warming is biological, land surface effect through solar radiation absorption and has nothing to do with increased thermal radiation from carbon dioxide. Consequently, the Kyoto Protocol will not effect this land cover change induced warming. Perhaps the proper policy would be to cut down the dark vegetation and replace it with brighter surfaces. In the Kyoto Protocol though, they are advocating more trees which may actually increase the warming. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 02:30:50 PM Hi Doug, I understood your point. However, the article you posted does not imply that green vegetation causes temp increase. Rather, it implied temp increase causes green vegetation. And it didn't discuss whether or not CO2 increase causes increased vegetation, although i'm sure the greening earth society covers this in other material they produce. While i can understand that darker surfaces reflect less radiation, i haven't seen anything yet that quantifies the effects of dark vegetation, and argues that darker vegetation is responsible for observed temp increase. Can you post something? There is stuff out there that discusses both the radiative forcing of CO2, and also the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. I'll take a look - i think it was on the CSIRO that i saw a graph that compared the warming/cooling of various phenomena, from atmospheric co2, to aerosols, to variation in solar activity. STeve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 04:02:53 PM Steve, I keep things simple because Greenpeace use the tactic to focus attention. Though one might suspect they use simplistic arguments, rather than simple ones. That said, I cannot recall why I posted the next sentence. It makes no sense. In any case, if increasing CO2 levels cause more radiation to be retained on the earth, then one should see everywhere, either a decrease in cooling, or an increase in temperature away from urban areas. >From the on ground temperature data, any station which shows continued cooling negates the IPCC theory, (irregardless of what D comments on from his perspective). If all weather stations showed a perceptible increase in average temperatures, then yes, one would be motivated to finding a cause - but as some in West Australia show uneequivocal cooling, then clearly the thesis has been falsified. And in a post I put up recently, I find it interesting that a gas component of ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 04:05:17 PM (I must not put less than or greater than symbols in the text! Write on 1000 times !) Less than 0.1 % has such an inordinate effect on the earth's physical state. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 05:17:48 PM Thanks Louis. I disagree with your statement: "In any case, if increasing CO2 levels cause more radiation to be retained on the earth, then one should see everywhere, either a decrease in cooling, or an increase in temperature away from urban areas." Analogy: Think of a pendulum. If you give it a prod in one direction, it oscillates. IT you give it a bigger prod, it will swing further away from you, but will also swing back towards you to a greater degree as well. If there is more CO2, then more ENERGY is being retained on earth. This doesn't have to mean a uniform temp increase everywhere. You'd expect the avg temp to increase, but this increase in retained energy could also give rise to more volatility, more extremes, and perhaps even cooling in some spots. That's not irrational is it? It might not be true of course, bit it isn't an irrational attempt to understand what's happening. I don't think you can say that global warming is bunko just because it has cooled in some specific areas. As for sensitivity to atmospheric CO2: i think that there have been many studies done on the radiative forcing of CO2 in the atmosphere. do a google on "CO2 radiative forcing". I haven't looked hard and i'm sure there is better stuff than this, but i found this Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.111.106 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 12:33:49 AM It is a fact that the surface has been getting darker and it is a fact that a darker surface will be warmer. To argue the other way around is just nonsense. There is an excellent correlation between surface albedo and surface temperature and the changes in surface albedo cause changes in surface temperature. It is impossible for it to be the other way around. Kalnay and Cai (2003 in Nature) compare trends in the USA surface temperature record with "..trends in a reconstruction of surface temperatures determined from a reanalysis of global weather over the past 50 years, which is insensitive to surface observations, to estimate the impact of land-use changes on surface warming. Our results suggest that half of the observed decrease in diurnal temperature range is due to urban and other land-use changes. Moreover, our estimate of 0.27 degrees C mean surface warming per century due to land-use changes is at least twice as high as previous estimates based on urbanization alone." There are lots of studies that show that land use changes are a major cause of observed surface warming. These studies and their results are neglected by those pushing the greenhouse warming hypothesis. The climate models do not even include land use changes in them. The evidence that land use change and vegetation dynamics influences local and regional climate is overwhelming. There have been no studies to refute such an effect. Finally I recommend you look at a paper by Davey and Pielke to get an idea how poorly the surface-based temperature observations are made even with new stations in the US: Davey, C. A. and R.A.Pielke Sr., 2004: Microclimate exposures of surface-based weather stations - implications for the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. submitted. http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-274.pdf The poorer countries must have surface stations that are even less well maintained and sited. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Failure of Climate Modelling - 2004 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/12/2004 08:51:17 AM ----- BODY: Chase, T.N., Pielke Sr., R.A., Herman, B. and Zeng, X. 2004. Likelihood of rapidly increasing surface temperatures unaccompanied by strong warming in the free troposphere. Climate Research 25: 185-190. Quote "at no time, in any model realization, forced or unforced, did any model simulate the presently observed situation of a large and highly significant surface warming accompanied with no warming whatsoever aloft," and the rest here. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bob Hawkins EMAIL: bobhawkins@rcn.com IP: 65.78.24.13 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 12:00:35 PM What's more, in the greenhouse warming model, it is the warming in the lower troposphere that causes the surface warming. If there's no warming in the lower troposphere, the greenhouse effect is simply irrelevant. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 02:43:01 PM Hmm, its getting difficult for me to debate here, since i'm not a climate scientist. I'll give it a go though, since i don't think you guys are either, so we are all in the same boat trying to figure this stuff out. The Chase et al. article seems to assume that there has been no significant warming in the free troposphere. They are probably saying this based on satellite data for the past two decades. As i'm sure everyone is aware, John Christy's group and NASA have been saying that the free troposphere hasn't been warming the way models expect it to, according to their satellite measurements. However, this is an area of controversy. At least two other groups have now gotten a hold of the raw satellite data, done their own analyses, and come up with a greater degree of warming than christy got. I understand that there has been some kind of meeting of all concerned to try and reach a consensus on satellite data, and we can expect a report some time this year. >From my own reading, Christy argues that his analysis concurs with weather balloon measurements. However, I heard word of mouth from Dr David Karoly, an Aussie climate scientist who contributes to the IPCC and is now at the uni of oaklahoma (i saw him give a presentation and i asked the question) that another study of satellite data that shows warming also concurs with balloon data - it depends on which balloons you choose, how you perform the analysis etc. So I think the debate is very far from over, and the chase article is worth ignoring since it does not refer to this uncertainty, it just assumes one analysis is correct. I will also add that there is measured surface warming, and also measured cooling in the stratosphere, results that match with what is expected to occur due to global warming. Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: frank borger EMAIL: fborger@pensys.com IP: 38.119.163.193 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 10:09:53 PM I'm still not convinced they've properly accounted for urban heat islands in their data on surface warming. I've looked at various USHCN records at co2scienc.org. If I look at Milwaukee's Mitchel Field data, is see the oft reported warming up to 1930, cooling to around 1970, and then a general warming. If I look at Watertown, (a small town 30 or so miles west of Milwaukee,) the cooling trend goes essentially from 1930 to 2000. Picking places at random in the US (based on where I've visited for meetings or vacations,) I almost always see a straight cooling trend from 1930 onward, UNLESS it's a large city or a major AIRPORT. Perhapps it's just coincidence, but when airport data disagrees with nearby rural areas, I come up with this question. How do you figure out the corrections to be applied to airport data due to the introduction of jets and the massive increase in takeoffs, especially at night, with the advent of large scale air cargo operations? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 218.214.42.234 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 09:48:56 AM I don't know frank. Although i'd caution against putting too much weight into your own non-exhaustive analysis of weather records around the U.S. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff about how global warming is not happening, and its all the heat island effect causing errors ((john daly's website covers this somewhere), but i find it difficult to believe that scientists couldn't measure this effect, and remove its influence when analysing data. Discussion of the urban heat island effect has been around for years, surely the'yve studied it and accounted for it by now? The Australian CSIRO, an Aust. govt research organisation, has this to say: What about the ‘heat island’ effect? Some people have claimed that measurements of global temperatures have been distorted because a number were made in cities where local temperature rises have been caused by urban development. Climatologists have long recognised the urban heat island effect, and have allowed for it in their assessments. Sea-surface temperatures and small-island temperatures, which are not affected by the urbanisation, also show global warming, as do ocean temperatures to depths of 1000 metres. Other evidence of warming is available from tree rings, ice cores, boreholes and glacial retreat. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 10:39:09 AM Steve, global warming is not a scientific crusade, it is a political one - that is why the obvious doesn't seem to be done. This is the point alot of us are making, and to boot, " "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister, Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998". Or The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority an alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now." Louis Proyect, Columbia University. And >From Dr. Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace There were always extreme, irrational and mystical elements within our movement, but they tended to be kept in their place during the early years. Then in the mid-Eighties the ultraleftists and extremists took over. After Greenham Common closed and the Berlin Wall came down these extremists were searching for a new cause and found it in environmentalism. The old agendas of class struggle and anti-corporatism are still there but now they are dressed up in environmental terminology." "…we have an environmental movement that is run by people who want to fight, not to win." "For me, Greenpeace is about ringing an ecological fire alarm, waking mass consciousness to the true dimensions of our global predicament, pointing out the problems and defining their nature. Greenpeace doesn't necessarily have the solutions to those problems and certainly isn't equipped to put them into practice." "Rather than promoting unilateral boycotts that are based on misinformation and coercion, organizations like Greenpeace should recognize the need for internationally accepted criteria…." "Fifteen years of Greenpeace campaigns later, I had some new insights. It was time to switch from confrontation to consensus, time to stop fighting and start talking with the people in charge. I became a convert to the idea of sustainable development and the need to consider social and economic issues along with my environmental values. I adopted the round table, consensus approach as the logical next step in the evolution of the movement for sustainability." How to counter this irratioanlistyFrom Dr. Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace There were always extreme, irrational and mystical elements within our movement, but they tended to be kept in their place during the early years. Then in the mid-Eighties the ultraleftists and extremists took over. After Greenham Common closed and the Berlin Wall came down these extremists were searching for a new cause and found it in environmentalism. The old agendas of class struggle and anti-corporatism are still there but now they are dressed up in environmental terminology." "…we have an environmental movement that is run by people who want to fight, not to win." "For me, Greenpeace is about ringing an ecological fire alarm, waking mass consciousness to the true dimensions of our global predicament, pointing out the problems and defining their nature. Greenpeace doesn't necessarily have the solutions to those problems and certainly isn't equipped to put them into practice." "Rather than promoting unilateral boycotts that are based on misinformation and coercion, organizations like Greenpeace should recognize the need for internationally accepted criteria…." "Fifteen years of Greenpeace campaigns later, I had some new insights. It was time to switch from confrontation to consensus, time to stop fighting and start talking with the people in charge. I became a convert to the idea of sustainable development and the need to consider social and economic issues along with my environmental values. I adopted the round table, consensus approach as the logical next step in the evolution of the movement for sustainability." If the political Left publicly admit they use the green movement, including global warming as a means to an end, then it is fairly obvious is it not? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 05:07:22 PM Hmm, I think the post above could truly be almost described as a "TimLambertism" - the need to repeat something to confirm a belief. Myself, I am aghast that I did not edit it properly. 6 cuts of the cane. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Composition of Earth's Atmosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/12/2004 03:49:47 PM ----- BODY: I should have known this, but I refreshed my memory and the composition of the earth's atmosphere is: Nitrogen = 78.1% Oxygen = 20.9% Argon = 0.9% & CO2, CH4 and inert gases = 0.1% cf here. H2O the largest greenhouse component, is not quantified. Since CO2 is <0.1% (eliminating Methane and the other inert gases), has anyone seen any study showing a sensitivity analysis of CO2 content vs greenhouse effect? This should be able to be done simply in a laboratory setting. If not anyone know who could? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 04:14:53 PM A Little googling and we have this reference. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/12/2004 05:19:21 PM Do a search on 'radiative forcing'. there is lots of research about the radiative forcing of CO2 in the atmosphere and other stuff. Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 08:54:37 AM Radiative forcing has nothing to do with sensitivity analysis. Sensitivity analysis concerns how much temperature changes with an increase in CO2. Say one upped CO2 to double it's amount in the atmosphere - from less than 0.1 % to say 0.2%. Experimentally what would be the effect of this in the radiative energy received at the measuring end? And if CO2 increases what has decreased in proportion? Makes for interesting mathematics. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Other papers ignored by the Greenhouse industry STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/13/2004 07:22:31 AM ----- BODY: Warwick Hughes' Coolwire web site has referred to some interesting papers here but you need to scroll down to the bottom. Both wack another couple of nails into the Green Coffin. One concerns ladnuse change as affecting temperature measurements, the other on solar radiation etc. Both papers can be downloaded as pdf's. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Kyoto - Who is in and who isn't STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/13/2004 07:34:31 AM ----- BODY: This fromn today's Weekend Australian Newspaper where Christopher Pearson, right at the end of his opinion piece comes up with this gem: "As an end note, it would be remiss of me not to mention a phone call from Peter King, the sitting member for Wentworth. I assumed that a report was accurate in which he was said to have anguished over the Government's failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol to a panel of preselectors. He tells me that in fact he described Kyoto as a flawed process because it left out the main polluting economies - China and India - and penalised Australian plant and equipment owners unfairly" The mail polluters don't have to do anything - and what system of social cooperation do these two have? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 218.214.42.234 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 10:07:56 AM Haha, kyoto leaves out the main polluting economy (at least if you are just talking about CO2 emissions), and it isn't china or india. Peter Kings statements ignore this fact: Regardless of whether it ratifies, Australia is committing to meet its kyoto target anyway, and probably will, due largely to land clearing reductions in NSW and QLD. So i'm not sure how Aust industries are getting penalised if we ratify compared to if we don't. There is also this report (its 2.3MB), which says that Australia will lose more in an economic sense if we don't ratify, because we'll be locked out of international carbon trading and lowest cost international abatement etc. The report found that Aust. GDP would be reduced by 0.11% if we ratify and meet our target, and would be reduced by 0.26% if we met our target (which we seem to be doing) and don't ratify. Peter King must be really annoyed with the Australian govt then. Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Australian Elvis EMAIL: et@home.com IP: 218.214.131.102 URL: DATE: 03/15/2004 03:41:45 PM That assumes Steve, that carbon trading ever takes off. I think it's much more likely the whole Kyoto edifice comes crashing down, like a continent-sized iceberg separating from the Antarctic shelf. In 10 years we could all be looking at Kyoto the way we now look at the Y2K hysteria. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Scientific Criticism of Kyoto STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/13/2004 10:57:26 AM ----- BODY: This extremely important email sent a few days ago to the Canadian Government email and the table of errors here. summarises it well. As I posted below, it's political, not scientific. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/13/2004 11:23:25 AM NOTE: Non industry, Non Govt,etc - and they also reject Kyoto. I am writing to request that a meeting be arranged in which non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate scientists are given the opportunity to brief the Minister of the Environment and departmental advisors about the very serious problems in the Federal Government's interpretation of today's climate science. These misunderstandings were more clearly revealed than ever before in the following recent speeches given by the Minister of the Environment in which there were numerous significant factual errors and misrepresentations: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Fishy Winds off California STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 07:25:55 AM ----- BODY: NASA note that the Santa Anna winds which blow from the land out into the ocean, cause cold water to rise from the bottom of the ocean to the top, bringing with it many nutrients that ultimately benefit local fisheries with the rest of the report here ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Danish Scientific Dishonesty Committee Withdraws Lomborg Case STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 08:22:24 AM ----- BODY: >From the John Daly website except the official announcement is only in Danish. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Useful numbers for Green House STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/14/2004 08:42:52 AM ----- BODY: John Brignell's site mentions some more inanities of the BBC and its understanding of the greenhouse issue , (scroll to bottom of the March edition, section 5 in Continued in our Next). I add Prof Singer's excellent summary of greenhouse gases in which it is fairly obvious that anthropogenic contributions to the greenhouse effect are rather miniscule. It's water vapour stupid! And that is essentially the case as it stands - mother nature dwarfs our efforts. What she cannot dwarf is stupidity. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Update on global warming situation STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 09:02:04 AM ----- BODY: This article is required reading. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: No ice at at the Arctic ? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 12:39:57 PM ----- BODY: One of the axioms of global-warming dogma is the expected decrease of ice at the polar regions. This image of the Arctic for March 13 not only shows no open sea at the Arctic, but actually an awful lot of sea ice - image here. I cannot see any open water down there. Santa is safe! Mind you there are some zones of 80% but 80% isn't open water. Isn't good for the hollow earther's either but then if one wishes to be guilty of branding someone by association, global warmers and hollow earthers would be a useful pair - both would have problems with all this ice at the North Pole. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.207.23 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 01:49:16 AM Unfortunately those treehuggers at NASA have a different take on the situation. They say Arctic perennial sea ice has been decreasing at a rate of 9% per decade but what would they know? See http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2003/1023esuice.html#addlinfo ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 07:35:05 AM What I like is their final para when they show that if all the ice melted at the Arctic, it would not make any difference to sea levels, for obvious reasons. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.211.192 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 05:41:47 PM Let me see if I've got this right. You accept the "global-warming dogma" that ice is decreasing in the Arctic but your position now is that it won't make any difference to sea levels? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/22/2004 06:13:59 AM It is sea ice, floating ice, archimedes principle, just as an iceblock in a glass of water will melt, the level of the water will not rise. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.173.243 URL: DATE: 03/22/2004 04:11:31 PM I'm not disputing that. In fact, if all the sea ice melted the sea level would probably go down (Archimede's principle and all that). My point was that contrary to your post (that you can't see any decrease in Arctic ice), NASA has measured a decrease in the amount of ice at the Arctic. Please stay on topic. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 07:16:09 AM Well in that image, I could not. I was not comparing it with previous images of earlier times, just making an observation and a provisional deduction from that particular image. To wit, there was almost 100 % ice cover over the arctic, at the time of that image. Whether NASA ohas measured a decrease is really neither here nor there - from historical records the amount of ice seems to have fluctuated. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.179.159 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 04:47:02 PM Whether NASA ohas measured a decrease is really neither here nor there Translates as "I've got a great theory, don't bore me with facts". You are as bad as the people you castigate for "bad science". ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 08:30:57 AM Zoot, the ice level at the arctic varies all the time. NASA have measured a decrease in the time specified, and in the next period it could increase. Has in the past, will do so in the future. As for that image - it showed the arctic with almost 100% Ice cover. Which contradicts those comments which assert that the ice has reduced. No theory Zoot, just an observation and noting that it contradicted popular assumptions. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:59:27 PM Just had another look at the Uni of Illinois graphic - yup lots of ice. Sea ice. I see, so what I am seeing is not sea ice but departures from the model of wonderworld. I wonder what the hollow earth types make of this. I would have thought that the sea would have poured into the inner world. See? ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Mysteries of Ozone at the Arctic STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 01:25:37 PM ----- BODY: While much media hype seems to get published on the Ozone hole at the South Pole, I always wondered why so little was heard about ozone at the north pole, and a bit of googling yielded some results. I was drawn to it initially by a review in Nature Magazine online but why one never reads of it in the mass media remains perplexing. After all, there is never any shortage of media commentary for climate issues elsewhere on the planet, unless of course ozone loss no longer is an issue since CFC's have been essentially removed from use. But reading the Nature summary, yup climate change is thought now to affect ozone concentrations in the stratosphere. I especially liked the commment "We never suspected the models were this far out of whack". Oh, I wonder what other climate models are seriously out of whack? And will we read about it in our mainstream media? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Now CO2 surplus is guilty STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/14/2004 01:50:34 PM ----- BODY: Another summary in Nature Science Updates where excess CO2 could lead to demise of slower growing trees. A short quote: What is driving this change? Laurance suspects that carbon dioxide is the culprit. The gas is a staple requirement for plant growth, and as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have climbed through the burning of fossil fuels, it seems that fast-growing trees have seized the initiative and begun to dominate the forest. Something does not gel here - increase CO2 and faster growing trees start to dominate? I wonder if anyone realises that trees,like every other living thing on this planet, age to ultimately die. So if we have a forest where no human has ever been in, and all of a sudden faster growing trees suddenly dominate, then what has CO2 got to do with it? It is the same CO2 concentration for the slower growing trees than for the faster ones, except perhaps increased CO2 levels might accelerate an existing growth differential. Given enough time perhaps the same effect would have happened. Or are we seeing nature dynamically adapting to changed enviropnmental factors - and what has happened over the geological past then? This suggests to me a rather dynamic rainforest system. I wonder if our researchers have heard about evolution? Are we witnessing natural background species extinction? Is this natural, or is the fossil record just a nasty right-wing conspiracy? It seems more like a fear of change more than anything else. Dead things don't change, living things do. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Scientific Dogma STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/15/2004 03:57:35 PM ----- BODY: After reading this quote in a book I am re-reading, it is quite obvious why Anthropogenic Global Warming is the problem it is perceived to be. “Once we have become convinced by our theory, for whatever reason, artifacts of that belief are bound to emerge, for we see the world in the context of our belief....... “If we are in the position of saying ‘Since we now know the theory is correct, what follows’?’, the item under investigation here is not the world of experience, but the theory, for experience no longer has the power to question that belief. The addition of empirical evidence at this point changes nothing, because whatever evidence we include will be interpreted by our theory, producing such artifacts as the illusory ‘confirmation’ and correction above. There should be no confusion about this. A firm conviction precludes any possibility of learning from experience. . . . By treating the theory as a known parameter we approximate tautology . . . the theory is unbeatable because it is allowed to interpret our observations while they are being made or recorded. Once this has been done, it is only logical that the data so collected cannot be used to question the interpretation, being a product of it. cf. R Brady, "Dogma and Doubt," Biological j. Linnean Society, Vol 17, (1982), p. 90. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.175.103 URL: DATE: 03/16/2004 08:36:33 AM I shall have to read that article: I assume Brady is summarising what once would have been regarded as a tad solipsistic notion. Though to be sure, some in the humanities absorded, badly digested at that, vulgarised notions from epistemology, emphasisng subjectivity over objectivity. I'm convinced Hobbes released manya red herring: the brain is a computer, if it doesn't run properly it is merely in need of progrmme correction , begging several questions and firstly, from the obvious, ratiocination doesn't occur ex nihilo. Secondly, enough seems to have been understood by the 17th century that the brain and nervous system is involved - so sense perception. And we see, consequently, the ensuing split, empiricism, sense-perception. idealism, logical positivism, realism. Another red herring is indicated in the quote from Brady and might be assumed of what I had said below vis-a-vis sort, a chicken and egg dilemma. It, one views, it is a false one. If we consider mathematics and its beginnings which, to speculate (though I'm not so sure it is that uncertain, - how do children learn mathematics but from the bottom up), comes with small acquistion, from simple enumeration and adding up, arsing out of daily experience driven by other discoveries and so shifts ( which one ties to the rise of the market economy and for what should be obvious reasons) so that over time, the acquistions, the adaptations in accumulation yield the breakthrough of theory. So, in case it was misunderstood, one doesn't divorce theory from empirical observation and accumulation of theory through observation and reasoning about what is observed.Once, however, the breakthrough by theoretical gains has been made, we are freed to proceed into more intricate matters incapble of being understood without the prior accumulation of theory. Theories and their subsets of simpler foundational theorems therefore arise not independently of experience but that, once they are sufficient, well precisely as in maths and physics, generation of valid does not require first evidence. Next, one should clear up, one is not dismissing facts but facts do not explain the relations of which facts are evidence. Now, it seems to me, that is what is the crucial gain, the principles of action as opposed to remaining `fact bound', illustrated by the false notion `language should be governed by stating the concrete and language must be concrete' which is false anyway since language is abstract. And having compared `global warming' and such like beliefs, by musing on epistemology and, bye the bye, teleology of belief in global warming, to consiracy: the only conclusion one can draw the greenies position is nothing but descent not only into supersition and mystoguogy but insanity.What Brady has summarised of theory is suggestive of the same downward trajectory also. Hmmn, Louis, we might be in need the assistance of someone from the school of logical analysis to clear a few things up and inject things. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/16/2004 08:50:10 AM D, The quote was used to highlight the uniformitarianist view since Lyell 150 years ago - with which we are still in the thrall of. I think the problem here is that having accepted that anthropogenic global warming is fact, research tends to get done and reported to confirm it, and if the data contradict the theory, are ignored. This happens alot in archaeology where they have constructed a chronology on "historial" King Lists, like Manetho's , and find radiometric data contradicting it. As one British Museum expert wrote some time ago - (paraphrasing) "If a date(radiometric) is in agreement, it is put in the main text; if it is mildly out; it is referred to in a footnote, and if widely out, ignored. Note that the theory is not reviewed if the data contradict it - the theory is right - and the data which support it are published. Same as in Climate Science - contradictory data are not published except that Environment and Energy is not regarded as a "proper" journal and is therefore ignored. It seems very much the Catholic Church and its index of books which Catholics are forbidden to read. As Crichton wrote some time ago - it has become a religion and all the logic in the universe won't persuade them. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Climate Science - one, of many, explanations for its approach STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/16/2004 08:34:33 AM ----- BODY: I have just received by airmail the book which Aaron referred to last week - "Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma" by Labohm, Rozendaal and Thoenes. This is a quote from page 5: "Climate science is a fairly young discipline. Thanks to the global warming debate it is becoming more popular nowadays but until recently it was, as Lindzen said in his testimony before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, ‘a scientific backwater’. Lindzen: 'There is little question that the best science students traditionally went into physics, math and more recently, computer science.' Earlier Lindzen commented in an interview that meteorology has always been a science for the less gifted: ‘Not even second best.’ Lindzen: Especially the civil servants who write reports on climate change and the scientists in the meteorological offices knew too little of mathematics and physics. And it is getting worse. The best science students do not want to go into climate science. They think the field is too political.The kids who now enter climate science are sociologists who want to change the world. Or they are older political scientists who studied disarmament in the eighties and who discovered global warming in the nineties.’ This is the problem - politicised science - and so entrenched in our system that it will take superhuman efforts to counter it. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: I'm Back STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/16/2004 02:00:56 PM ----- BODY: I was overseas for a week. Lunky no-one noticed, because Louis has been holding the fort! So anyhow, here is Professor R. Tim Patterson taking Canadian politicians to taks for climate change fabulism. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/16/2004 02:32:14 PM heh heh, welcome back, I see you are busy "quigging". This ref is also referred to my post 13 March :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/16/2004 11:42:05 PM The climate change fabulism would actually seem to be coming from Richard Lindzen. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: oakley@rsc.anu.edu.au IP: 150.203.2.85 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 07:47:35 AM You did a great job of misrepresenting Linzen, Tim. I notice also that you favour the Union of Concerned Scientists, a one-time front group for the Soviet Union. Strange how you attack patisan global warming "contrarians" while giving a free pass to Leftist front groups. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.97 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/17/2004 09:04:23 AM I'm not surprised about Tim, the Soviet Union and Saddam banned guns for its private citizens. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/17/2004 09:09:25 AM Aaron, have you ever considered actually offering evidence to support your claims? Lindzen lied. I have the quotes that prove it and all you do is claim that I somehow "misrepresented" him. Exactly how have I misrepresented him? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 09:39:31 AM Tim, a short note- you quote this in your comments "This is pretty well the opposite of what the panel concluded. In section 7 they actually report: After analysis, the committee finds that the conclusions presented in the SPM and the Technical Summary (TS) are consistent with the main body of the report" The next sentence is "There are, however differences" etc etc. QED. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/17/2004 09:41:41 AM Loius, I suggest you consult a dictionary to see what the word "consistent" means. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 02:43:22 PM Tim, The summaries are consistent with the view that there is global warming. No one refutes that. Whether that warming is due to anthropogenic carbon addition is moot, and so far the evidence does not support your argument. But if you need to argue over semantics, what can I say? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 10:20:40 PM The NAS, just like the IPCC, are promoting "Alice in Wonderland" science. The conclusion has been reached. Now the data will be filtered to support that conclusion. The large body of data that refutes the conclusion will be studiously ignored or attacked. Lindzen great sin is to expose that large body of data that refutes the conclusion. In other words, Lindzen is a classical scientist who doesn't let politics dictate his conclusions. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/17/2004 11:23:00 PM Louis, the NAS report says the the summary is consistent with the report it summarizes. Lindzen was one of the authors of that report. He then turns around and lies about what it says. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 05:40:10 AM Tim, Have you read the NAS report at all ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 05:56:59 AM Tim, on your site you write this "The complete article that this quote comes from is here (scroll down). Lindzen writes: " Now that link sends one to a coal industry website containing various articles on various topics. Which article are you specifically referring to in your comment? That you cite a web page with specificing precisely your reference is being a tad disengenuous. I am not going to waste time locating a reference you are too reluctant to point to directly. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/18/2004 04:42:53 PM Louis, when I wrote "The complete article that this quote comes from" I was specifically referring to the article that the quote comes from. You can scroll down till you see the article, or you could do a search in that page for Lindzen or a phrase from the quote. Or you can do a Google search for a phrase from the quote. Or, if you follow the link that Aaron gave above you get to a page that cites and links to Lindzen's article. Oh, and yes, I have read the NAS report. How do you think I managed to quote from it? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:57:20 PM Oh right you quote it as well here is the article and scroll down. That is like citing a reference in a paper with the instruction, oh it is in Nature magazine, but I am sure if you read all the articles for that year I am sure you will eventually find it byt comparing my extraction to the text that I got it from. Sorry Tim, but explicitly pointing to the article so no confusion is possible is the normal way of attributing a citation. So what is the title of the article then Tim, which is what any reasonable person would have done. It is easy to link the specific article, and not the libary in which the shelf, on which the journal, ofg a specific volume, contains that article. As for the NAS article, just making sure, dotting "i's" and "t's". ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 05:09:08 PM Tim, your link sends one to the web site of the Coal Association - not the article. Sorry about the confusion but that is what the problem is. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 05:10:39 PM And this is the link which "here" refers. http://www.coal.ca/cacnews/CACNEWS04-02.htm ????????? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/18/2004 09:20:19 PM Louis, are you saying that you *still* can't find the Lindzen article? I've given you five different ways to find it. Why is this so hard for you? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 06:30:34 AM Tim, if you refer to an article, please refer to IT, not the page on which it is somewhere located. Thius might be all one can do in respect of sites which concatenate posts down the page, but a page which has distinct links to articles makes it an easier thing to do. In your case you did not refer to an article As you admit. Merely the location on which it could be found. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/19/2004 08:15:11 AM Louis, you didn't answer my question. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 08:25:41 AM Tim, I read, again, the request to the NAS from the White House, and clearly they did not ask the NAS to offer an opinion on the IPCC but to determine whether there were substantive differences between the IPCC reports and the summaries. Lindzen is quite correct in what he stated, and which you continue to evade, while there is consistency, there are however DIFFERENCES between the Summary and the reports, as noted in section 7. The differences are that while the science is far from settled, it seems that the SPM asserts that it is. This is simply untrue. In fact this criticism of the IPCC process occurred at the time of the release of the previous report, in which Frederick Seitz wrote to the Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996, in which he writes: The participating scientists accepted the 'The Science of Climate Change' in Madrid last November; the full IPCC accepted it the following month in Rome. But more than 15 key sections in Chapter 8 of the report - the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate - were changed or deleted after the scientisits charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text. He then lists passages which were included in the approved report (scientific) but deleted from the supposedley peer-reviewed published version.. "1. None fo the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the speicific cause of increase in greenhouse gases. 2. No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [mand-made] casues 3. Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." He then concludes in his letter - " If the IPCC is incapable of following its most basic procedures, it would be best to abandon the entire IPCC process, or at least that part that is concerned with the scientic evidence on climate change, and look for more reliable sources of advice to governments on this important question". Clearly then the summary differed from the reports, and clearly as Lindzen pointed out, the latest also differed. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 04:11:23 PM Tim, I answer your question: yes I found the article to which you referred, and no, your opinion on Lindzen is wrong. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/19/2004 05:21:53 PM Comments from Seitz about a different IPCC report are completely irrelevant. The NAS report stated, quite clearly, (and remember that Lindzen was one of the authors):
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.
How much clearer does this have to be? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 05:48:49 PM Tim, Quite correct. Now go back and answer my question about the DIFERRENCES mentioned in the NAS Study ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 05:51:25 PM Correction My Spilling :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/19/2004 08:05:11 PM Louis, above you claimed
"Whether that warming is due to anthropogenic carbon addition is moot, and so far the evidence does not support your argument."
Apparently, even though I quoted the findings of the NAS panel you still have not understood them. Here they are again, with emphasis just for you:
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.107.204 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 04:23:27 AM A paper by Chase et al. (summarized at http://www.co2science.org/journal/v7/v7n9c1.htm) fails to support the NAS report. Quote: "at no time, in any model realization, forced or unforced, did any model simulate the presently observed situation of a large and highly significant surface warming accompanied with no warming whatsoever aloft". ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 12:03:53 PM Tim, Quite correct - urban development etc are indeed due to human activities. But intriguingly what "changes observed" are likely mostly due to human activities. Temperature? Well yes Urban heat island effects certainly are. Increase in greenhouse gases are also probably related. And indeed temperatures are rising - but temperatures of what? Urban areas. But these temperature rises are not due to greenhouse effects since those effects have to be noticed in the troposphere. And as Doug posted, it is will known that none of the model projections are being verified. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/20/2004 03:36:37 PM Louis, here is the quote again, this time with more emphasis just for you:
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.
Tell us again about those underwater urban areas. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 04:24:45 PM Tim, underwater urban areas? Well the old city of Alexandria in the Nile Delta could be described as an underwater urban area. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 04:31:22 PM Tim, I did a search on the NAS document on "subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" as well as subsets of that phrase. The only time ocean temperatures were mentioned in the document was in the initial opening paragraph which you quoted so helpfully. Like Stephen Schneider, are you also balancing your duty with effectiveness versus honesty? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 04:37:24 PM Tim, and of course "comment by the left-wing climate scientist Stephen Schneider who once stated ”Each of us has to decide the balance between being effective and being honest”. And this is of course the problem with the Greenhouse debate – when the proponents of anthropogenic warming themselves admit to lying, then it is clear that one must adopt a very cynical view of anything they publish. It does not help to read the statement of a former Canadian Minister of the Environment who was quoted : “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister, Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/21/2004 12:13:28 AM So now you bring out the famous doctored quote from Schneider. This reflects very poorly on your character, Louis. Another thing that reflects very poorly on your character is your attempt to impugn my honesty because of your failure to find things in the NAS report. The NAS report doesn't just mention the increase in ocean temperatures in the opening paragraph. You might like to try actually reading it. Nor, in any case, do they say that surface temperatures are only increasing in urban areas -- that is just your misrepresentation. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.219.170 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/21/2004 07:09:42 AM Tim,L I looked at JQ site and the quote was exact and not "doctored" and even the hole paragraph relayed the same sentiments. Isn't there lots and lots single sentence quotes in your writing, why do you expect differently from Louis?. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 08:07:42 AM Tim, apologies for not finding "ocean" in the NAS document - it is mentioned 49 times, so I suspect Acrobat did something unusual (again), or it ignores 'ocean temperatures'. But as far as I am concerned, one fact is all that it takes, but I will quote the following temperature stations away from urban areas - Stations in West Australia - Esperance and Albany show decreasing temperatures since 1961, Gabo Island, Bass Straight, no temperature rise, Mildura and Cobar - no rise, Amundsen-Scott base, no rise, Casey Station, no rise, Mawson a slight decrease, Enderby Land, no rise intemperature. If the theory is correct, that increase in CO2 casues warming due to greenhouse effects then there must be warming at these stations. There is none observed, so one concludes that the increase in CO2 has not caused temperatures to rise as proposed by the theory. (Temperatures are from John Daly's site). Unless of course the CO2 concentration varies in the atmosphere, so that where temperatures drop, there must be less CO2 at that particular station. And that is interesting from a Gas point of view - though I thought that atmospheric mixing seems to be pretty thorough. So one goes back to the drawing board. Actually the Day site for Amundsen-Scott Base is intriging since there is also the CO2 concentration as a comparison. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/22/2004 12:55:00 AM Gary, The quote is doctored because it is taken out of context to make it look like Schneider was advocating dishonesty when in fact he wasn't. If you think the full version says the same thing, you should have no objection to using that instead of the out-of-context quote. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/22/2004 12:59:12 AM Louis, even if your claims about those stations are accurate it hardly disproves the NAS report. The average temperature is increasing. That does not mean that you can't cherry pick stations where it is not increasing. Do I have to remind you again that Lindzen was one of the authors of the NAS report? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.219.86 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/22/2004 09:15:59 AM So you think the quote was out of context but to be effective you had to say doctored. If I think the full version says the same thing Then why reproduce the hole thing. Again you have lots of single sentence quotes in your writing, why do you expect differently from Louis?. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/22/2004 10:53:09 AM It was doctored by removing it from the correct context. I hope that is clear to you now. It is perfectly OK to use one sentence quotes if the quote by itself accurately reflects the overall meaning of the writer being quoted. The out-of-context Schneider quote does not. If Louis uses it again, we can conclude that he is not an honest person. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.219.86 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/22/2004 11:44:21 AM Why didn't you use "out of context" instead of "doctored"?. What balance of effective and being honest did you decide on,Tim Lambert?. Do you prefer hyperbolic rhetoric to accurate meanings? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/22/2004 11:58:04 AM This is what Schneider wrote in APS. I have emphasised what Schneider asserts Simon added. "The full quote follows, where I have italicized what portions of it Simon quoted and bracketed what I did not say but he attributed to me in the APS News article: "On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need [Scientists should consider stretching the truth] to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."" The last sentence is interesting. It means that if your belief in anthropogenic warming is strong, then despite the empirical contradictions to this belief, which one would emphasise if one were honest, one must balance one's belief against that data. Arguing against the data is essentially being scientifically dishonest, isn't it? In fact it isn't really science but technically sophisticated religion if we wish to be pedantic. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/22/2004 10:41:59 PM Louis, scientists believe in anthropogenic warming because that is what the data shows. Here is the NAS panel again:
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.
Hope that helps. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 07:33:28 AM Tim, since there is no such thing as a global temperature, it cannot be measured, and hence one is not able to either note a decrease or increase in it. In the case the NAS report, it actually concluded that everyone was right. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/23/2004 09:43:08 AM No, the NAS report did not conclude "that everyone was right". It actually concluded:
Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.
And there is too such a thing as a global temperature. I get the feeling that you don't even know what temperature is. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 10:13:10 AM Tim, It it is a global temperature "statistic", not a temperature. Since the earth is not in thermal equilibrium, so there is no single temperature. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/23/2004 11:26:52 AM There is a global average temperature. Which has been increasing. Unless you are measuring the temperature of single molecules, all temperatures are averages. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Now it's son of Kyoto !!!! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/16/2004 03:38:31 PM ----- BODY: Wouldn't you believe it, Kyoto is dead, so they have created a son of Kyoto Another feint, another chore, another battle to be fought. Sigh. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 203.54.24.134 URL: DATE: 03/16/2004 04:26:08 PM Carr must be Chretien's twin lost at birth, re-united in mumbo jumbo. Oh well, Carr is right on one thing, for a govt. to beleive in global warming then, many in N.S.W. and elsehere would be affected. Another damned crusader. Crumb. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Greenland's temperatures returning to 1930's levels! Shock! Disaster! Proof of GW! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: DATE: 03/17/2004 05:37:02 AM ----- BODY: Nature magazine rides into another GW scare! read all about it here. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.240 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 11:24:32 AM Agnetha Cuspia:tis chilly tonight,hark! a dog barks, the cat lapeth milk... Bjorn Lucillus: Thou art naked my dearest chuck and they are our fondling pets and, this even, before the cock struck twelve, thou didst a bowl of milk placeth before the cat-flap... Agnetha Cuspia: Husband, dost thou contradicteth me, I your wife, flesh of your flesh. For I telleth thee, they are bad omens... tis the work of global warming. Billy Shakespeare, another unpublished play, Tragedy in Denmark: Death of A Pussy Cat Act III, Scene 9,456,700 1/3, paragraph 3 trillion, line 1 and 19/22. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/17/2004 02:44:50 PM Have you any idea how much time our correspondents are going waste looking for this reference in the 'ether Net' :-> ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.113 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 07:24:58 AM Depends upon how much ether is snorted. But I have crash hot deal going: for $15&67/99ths, I can mail them the whole tomb - just give me a couple of days to write the only extant mss. of the play. Yours, Billy S. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Urban Heat Island Effects now much larger STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/18/2004 06:52:06 AM ----- BODY: This article concludes "A significant, if not dominant, portion of temperature increases in recent decades is the result of local surface heating processes brought on by land use change, urbanization, and anthropogenic greenhouse gases." Even more damning is that "de Laat and Maurellis point out a serious flaw in the IPCC’s surface temperature record. According to their paper, the “global” warming trend is about 0.2ºC per decade (it’s actually 0.17°/decade for the last quarter-century), but the data do not represent global coverage. For instance, there’s virtually no information from Antarctica, which is known to have cooled slightly in recent decades. When the authors calculate the satellite-based temperature trend for the regions covered by the IPCC, they find that the IPCC’s geographic selection results in a thirty-three percent overestimation of warming. Applying their finding to the surface temperature data reduces the “real” warming to something much less than the 0.2ºC per decade commonly claimed. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 203.54.28.167 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 11:16:22 AM Aaron, Louis, everyone, are there any other matters which, for now, should be publicly mentioned re the new Greater Oz Land, cf. Mangled Thoughts. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 11:28:59 AM The UN, where on earth are we going to put that dinosaur ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.159.62 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 01:58:08 PM Well, apparently there is atrailer park beside some rubbish dump which covers an eco firendly Frecnh nuclear weapon prduction factory. It comes with free food: left over bits of fast foods, yum yum - the U.N. brigade like to hog out at the trough free. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bob Hawkins EMAIL: bobhawkins@rcn.com IP: 65.78.24.13 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 11:31:13 AM Douglas V. Hoyt, coauthor of the book "The Role of the Sun in Climate Change," has a global warming website which is very detailed, but hasn't been updated in a couple of years. He looked at the consequences of geographical undersampling of temperatures. His graph summarizing the results is here. In some years, like 1994, undersampling can explain all the difference between the satellite (MSU) and the surface (CRU) temperature. In other years, like 1979, it explains none of the difference. Undersampling appears to be a major problem with the surface temperature record, which almost never is discussed. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 03:43:48 PM Statistically - sample support. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 03:51:12 PM Sampling of these areas has always been theoretically problematical. Statistics deals with discrete objects that have measurable attributes. It is when we wander into areas where there are no "objects" that severe problems occur in the calculation of statistics, since the problem reduces to one of "Measuring WHAT". ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Dinosaur Deaths STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: DATE: 03/18/2004 10:10:25 AM ----- BODY: A colleague mentioned this to me - " a videotaped interview done by Robert Dunlap with a paleontologist in New Zealand who feels that the dinosaurs were killed by the sudden and temporary removal of much of the Earth's atmosphere". (I presume this refers to the K-T Exinction event were it seems the dinosaurs all died out within one year). Now to find out who the NZ palaeontologist was in the interview and what else is published on this interesting theory. Geologically it seems the atmosphere has exerienced a little more than some minor adjustments of CO2 content over time, which is what some of us have saying for quite a while now. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.131 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 11:12:10 AM What has someone done to the template? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 11:14:53 AM Dunno ? If it is what I think you are getting at ;-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.131 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 11:32:17 AM Have you added links or something because that is why they have been moved to the bottom. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 11:43:48 AM no, I have not even looked at the template, though D and I have noticed that sometimes posts sit in archives and then mysteriously appear in main at some unpredictable time in the future. Maybe that is a related problem? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 11:44:30 AM I am away in town for next 5 hours :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.131 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 11:47:41 AM I will have a look at it soon. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:04:55 PM What do you mean links at the bottom? everything at this end has things as they haFF ALVAYS Been! Links on the right :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.214.61 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 04:18:09 PM They were alright a short while ago but it has gone loopy again. Are you boys touching thing you know nothing about ;-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:24:47 PM I have out of editing since midday - so I am innocent ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:46:48 PM rushes out and washes his hands just realising what admin might be talking about ;-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.175.225 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:56:14 PM Enter doorway, look, see suspicious ominous Taliban type question from `Admin', notices Louis rushing out the door to wash hands. Things decidedly looking bad so, I flee too. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 04:58:25 PM And we both look out for a rampant Renault driven by Pierre who expects to get US$5 million for Osama :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.134.175.225 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 05:55:41 PM I'm with you Louis- I've got the 12 guage so we can kill the Renault should Pierre try to get away with out handing over the $5m. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.214.61 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 05:57:19 PM It looks OK now. I think I mite change the site colours to pink with a big pic saying support Bob Brown for PM. Hopefully that will get rid of the gremlins. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 06:02:36 PM Are you incinerating we had been possibly left anted ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.214.61 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 06:11:37 PM I do not know what the problem is. Nothing sinister but I spend some time tomorrow with the template. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 06:15:54 PM Aaa sooo --- temprating :-) well if that is the case it might be an idea to see why new posts pop up in the archive instead and not on main, unless we have a date mismatch on the server? :-) Just a vage feeling that it might be related to that. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Admin EMAIL: Admin@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.214.61 URL: http://www.gravett.org/ DATE: 03/18/2004 06:23:39 PM Will do. If you have eny other problams email me. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/18/2004 06:25:17 PM Woger woger on that one. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: d EMAIL: Douglas@Gravett.org IP: 144.139.21.239 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 10:17:50 AM Admin's suggestion ,changing scheme and and ad for Bob Brown might have merit. I tell you, my epipleptic spastic lunatic, though in straighjacket and heavily medicated, turned on a hell of a fit when I linked to SMH. To illuminate, it behaves reasonably well when linked into the Ring of Evil RWBDs - no rose for guessing why - let's face it, if it tried that lefty antic all the other RWDB pcs would pound the shit out of it. But not when it's linked into the small world of leftoids - like colt before it's gelded, kicks its legs up, gallops around, drools, bites and , quite frankly, is in need of a good shooting. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 03:52:49 PM Put's on his Charles Laugton's act of the hunchback of Notre Dam, "You rannnng, M'lord" ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Over-estimations of water vapour leads to flawed temperature projections STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: DATE: 03/19/2004 09:18:36 AM ----- BODY: I see that climate science is so well developed, it remains only a matter of tidying up a few loose ends, (apologies to Eddington), or so the climate scientists keep stressing in the IPCC summaries. However another dampening of the climate can be read here on John Daly's site. And another here Conclusion? Climate variables are described by non-linear stochastic relations, which in simple language means that they cannot be used to project or forecast anything. However, like econometricians, many climate scientists are in awe of the processing power of computers, but utterly unaware that garbage-in = garbage-out. This is a continuing problem with the social sciences - using techniques of the physical sciences without understanding the limitations of those techniques. Post Modernists would, however, disagree with this statement. As they would. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 11:07:46 AM Louis, Your post rests on the assumption that the IPCC, and climate scientists in general, are unaware of the uncertainty in their research and modelling, and unaware of the limitations in their predictions. This seems an unfair and incorrect assumption to begin from, and the 'garbage in garbage out' maxim applies to your post. Perhaps you are smearing the field of climate science a little too heavily after reading a limited number of media articles and statements from environmentalists? If you read the FAQs on the CSIRO dept. of atmospheric research website for example, I think they are reasonably clear about what they know, and what they are uncertain about. Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.130.118.32 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 11:14:34 AM I suspect the climate modelers will do what they always do when some data does not agree with their models: they will attack the data and after their reanalysis, the data will agree with the models. The models won't change. The paper does show the models overestimate the warming by at least a factor of two and indicate no catastrophe is imminent. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 12:31:53 PM It's not garbage in - garbage out. It's quality data in - garbage out. The model outputs can be tweaked very easily by small changes in the equations. Outputs can vary wildly so the modelers will set limits and vary constants to produce the outputs that are desired. And if the models produce the correct result it is only by chance and not because the models are valid. Models of complex non-linear systems are scientific divination. The models that were used by the IPCC back when Kyoto was created in 1997 have failed to even remotely accurately predict what has happened in the past 7 years. One researcher (i forget whom) calculated that a set of random data produced more accurate results than the real world data in the IPCC global models. This is no suprise to anyone familiar with chaos theory. In pre-modern times, governments had astrologers and other assorted diviners of the future to advise leaders. Today we have computer modelers who fill that job. Fact is, and I'm sure even many global warming sceptics will disagree with me, computer models of complex non-linear systems are no more valid than astrolgy or reading tea leaves. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 01:15:31 PM Doug, since the IPCC presents a range of scenarios, and does not give an indication of the likelihood of any particular scenario being closest to what might occur, I can't see how this statement makes any sense: The paper does show the models overestimate the warming by at least a factor of two and indicate no catastrophe is imminent. Which models? Reid: While I'd agree with you that weather is pretty chaotic, and trying to use a model to predict the weather would be hard/impossible, it seems to me that it might be easier to make statements about longer term climate trends. Climate will vary according to many different non-linear variables, and trying to predict what the climate would be in a particular year would be impossible. But if we know that CO2 in the atmosphere can trap heat, and we know that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, I can't see what the problem is with modelling what the impact of this might be on climate in general. Dumb analogy: I cant predict what the volume in decibels of the sound coming out of my stereo will be at any particular instant with any degree of accuracy. But I do know that if I turn the volume knob to increase the volume, then the sound coming out will be generally louder than before. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 03:34:50 PM Steve, the problem is that I am aware that this site is public, and I have no qualms in sending back unexploded missiles. That being said, I do note you concerns, but my objections are based on more fundamental factors than those discussed here. My posts are, apart from stimulating discussion, also directed to showing those in research that there is a forum in which any contrary opinions can be published freely. I am extremely dubious of the sincerity of any government funded organisation, including the CSIRO, being scientifically "objective". This is not an immediate criticism of the CSIRO but a criticism based on history, and a reluctance to excuse any taxpayer funded organisation from critical scrutiny. It is not too difficult to show that measurements of temperatures, as published, are statistically unsound. The science of statistics was initially conceived to deal with measureable attributes of discrete objects, be they humans, cannon balls, marbles, tennis balls, etc. When restricted to these categories, statistical analysis is sound. However when extended to mining and other phsyical objects, statistics hit a conceptual wall. When one measures the temperature of the air at a particular place, say in Australia, what is one measuring? Is one measuring the attribute of some physical object? If so, what is that object. In the absence of an objective basis, measurements of "un-objects", while measuring something, cannot be amenable to statistical analysis, since the measurements do not have, in the statistical sense, uniform "support". So on this basis, as well as the comment above that climatic parameters are best described by non-linear stochastic relations, any modelling of either economic or physical measurements are problematical. Any comments on the above would be welcome. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: PaulP EMAIL: paulp127@hotmail.com IP: 213.190.145.230 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 06:12:48 PM Steve: We cannot make predictions about climate because the mathematics involve not just non-linear elements but coupling. In other words what happens to one thing affects another which (directly or indirectly) affects the first. So we cannot hold all factors but one constant and then see what pops out of the model as that one factor is varied. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Doug EMAIL: dhoyt@toast.net IP: 65.133.100.165 URL: DATE: 03/19/2004 11:16:04 PM Steve asks "which models?" It is the average of all the models, or more specifically the mean model which gets about a 3 C warming for a doubling. BTW, all the IPCC models say the sum of all the feedbacks are positive, but that is based on guessing. Two recent papers have investigated the feedbacks and find they are negative (listed below and can be found on the web somewhere). The papers imply the warming due to a doubling is far less than 1 C. Douglass, D. H., E. G. Blackman, and R. S. Knox, 2004. Temperature response of Earth to the annual solar irradiance cycle. Physics Letters A, 323, 315-322. Karner, O., 2002. On non-stationarity and anti-persistency in global temperature series, JGR, 107, D20, 1-11. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 02:21:57 PM Averaging climate model projections is much like averaging oranges and pears - easily done but utterly meaningless. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.207.23 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 01:37:25 AM It is not too difficult to show that measurements of temperatures, as published, are statistically unsound. What on earth are you talking about? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 07:29:26 AM It means that the projects of temperature themselve are unsound, if not downright wrong. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.com.au IP: 218.214.42.234 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 09:26:42 AM Hi Louis, It sounds like you think temperature measurements can't be looked at statistically because temperature measuring temperature is measuring on a scale - not measuring/counting discrete objects. Why does that make it statistically unsound? Could you clarify? Steve ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: oakley@rsc.anu.edu.au IP: 150.203.2.85 URL: http://www.gravett.org/bizarrescience DATE: 03/21/2004 09:44:10 AM My position is that weather and climate are a non-linear dynamic system that cannot ultimately be captured by computer models, which must always involve approximations and simplifications. Computers cant predict the outcome of next weeks lotto for the same reason. They are interesting academic exercises, and might be useful for forming jypotheses, but have no predictive value. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 09:48:09 AM Steve, Temperature indicates a condition, not an amount of anything, so one needs to actually measure the enthalpy, and then enthalphy of what. So if we want to calculate a mean temperature, that assumes that the values are symmetrically clustered around that mean. Are they? How we can we check that out? By constructing a histogram of all the data in a specific data set? Are the data taken randomly, are they of the same technique, have they measured the same thing, and once you get into the detail, you start realising that there is more to temperature than the level of a bit of mercury in a glass tube. As Essex and McKitrick argued, 'mean temperatures' do not exist from a scientific point of view. (Taken by Storm, The troubled Science, Policy and politics of Global Warming, Key Porter Books, 2002). If so, then we really can't apply statistics to the data. We can and do, but it is playing with numbers, rather than summarising the data by means and variances etc. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.211.192 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 05:33:43 PM May I suggest some remedial English for Louis. You appear to use "measurement" when you mean "projection". Not very scientific. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/22/2004 06:16:29 AM You mean to say I should have said I projected the temperature rather than say, I measured the temperature with a thermometer? Or have I misunderstood you? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.173.243 URL: DATE: 03/22/2004 04:02:54 PM Let's start with your comment It is not too difficult to show that measurements of temperatures, as published, are statistically unsound. A measurement is just a measurement. Until you have a set of measurements you can't do anything "statistical" with them. The measurements themselves can't be "statistically unsound", only the statistical methods which are brought to bear upon them can be so described. Having read your answer to Steve (re calculating a mean temperature) I see that your English is actually OK; you just have no understanding of statistics. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 07:25:47 AM Zoot, temperature is not property of mnatter, it is a number assigned to an observed physical state. It is a thermodynamic variable that cannot be summarised by an average value. When you measure temperature, you are in reality assigning a number as "an average" of the temperature field at a particular point in time at a particular point in space. But the "avergage" is meaningless because the temperature field has an infinite number of values, and which one is then truly representative. None are, none can be. You might have a global temperature when the earth in thermodynamic equilibrium, but then we would not be there measure it either. So in fact there is no global average temperature - it does not exist. And you cannot have an average of something that has no physical reality. Like taking the average temperature of a glass of ice water at 4deg C and a glass of hot chocolate at 70 dec C. You can compute the average temperature of these two temperatures but the number is totally meaningless because it has no physical reality. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 07:25:49 AM Zoot, temperature is not property of mnatter, it is a number assigned to an observed physical state. It is a thermodynamic variable that cannot be summarised by an average value. When you measure temperature, you are in reality assigning a number as "an average" of the temperature field at a particular point in time at a particular point in space. But the "avergage" is meaningless because the temperature field has an infinite number of values, and which one is then truly representative. None are, none can be. You might have a global temperature when the earth in thermodynamic equilibrium, but then we would not be there measure it either. So in fact there is no global average temperature - it does not exist. And you cannot have an average of something that has no physical reality. Like taking the average temperature of a glass of ice water at 4deg C and a glass of hot chocolate at 70 dec C. You can compute the average temperature of these two temperatures but the number is totally meaningless because it has no physical reality. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.179.159 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 04:38:43 PM Before we go any further, what scientific training have you had Louis? In the spirit of co-operative disclosure I can let you know that mine finished at second year University level (studying Physics, Chemistry and Maths) a long time ago. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.223.203 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/23/2004 04:54:57 PM Before you go and compare the size of your PHD (or whatever you have),zoot. Make shore you provide proof. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.204.12 URL: DATE: 03/23/2004 05:41:27 PM Can't compare the size of anything Gary, cause like I said, I only got to second year. In a pissing contest I'd come last. Even with my limited education it seems to me that Louis is spouting arrant nonsense. If he has a PhD in anything to do with the subject of this post (such as thermodynamics, physics, statistics, geography) I will bow to his superior knowledge. However, I would like to point out that even though he is using this post to argue that temperature is meaningless, in the more recent post titled "Cause of Global Warming" he seems to accept the validity of temperature as a measurement - Since three out of four methods of measuring global temperatures show no sign of warming ... Not the most rigorous of intellects, I submit. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brad Tittle EMAIL: thegerm@charter.net IP: 68.115.2.89 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 06:30:12 AM No matter what model you create, if you want us to take it seriously it has to predict the outcome of a future event. We can model a rolling ball down a ramp and predict when it will get to the bottom based on some fundamental principles. We can do it repeatedly. When it come to GCM's, they can't predict much unless it is more than 50 years out. A GCM is little more than a glorified Finite Element Model. FEMs are wonderful tools for designing a variety of things (airplanes, refrigerators, springboards, etc). We use FEMs to minimize the expense in producing products. We do one important thing with them though, we check to make sure their predictions are accurate. In the case of the Aviation industry, they test an airframe to failure before the plane is released to fly. If the predictions are accurate (or at least close) the FEM is useless. If GCM's are to be believed, we should be able to predict at the very least Temperature, Precipitation and Evaporation for a finite area and finite time. An example would be the Average temperature and precipitation for the state of Wisconsin for each month of the year. I would be willing to accept by quarter, but I think month is probably more reasonable. If you can't predict with some accuracy the interim steps of a situation, you cannot predict the outcome of longer periods. This is just my uneducated opinion (I made it past a couple of years though ;-) ) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 08:22:23 AM Zoot, I have a couple of science degrees, MSc dissertation was on statistics of the geochemistry of an orebody, and I am a geoscientist, so its in my bailiwick I suppose. In answer to (zounds I see I whacked two posts up! wonder how that happened) temperature, imagine a room with a different temperatures in it. In one part the temp is 20 deg C, in another 24, yet another 18, so which temperature is the temperature of the room? And if you come up with an average how did you calculate that, because there are various ways of doing that, and all come up with different numbers. And which average is representative of the room temperature? All are, actually. But if we have a 100 lawn bowls, and randomly select 10, weigh each, and measure say 3 diameters on each bowl (say at right angles to each other) and record these, then we have some data which we can describe all the lawn bowls. There is no ambiguity at all about the weight of an individual bowl, not its dimensions. There is ambiguity concerning temperature, however. The average is the mean of the weights (assuming standard statistical conventions) and the variation in those weights, and dimensions can be descrived by the standard deviation, and so on. Tomorrow if we repeat the measurements, we will get within an error, more or less the same result. This is because these properties are intrinsic static properties of the object. Temperature, on the other hand is not a property of the body, but a measure of its kinetic state. To measure the temperature of something, say a glass of ice-water, you place a thermometer in it, wait for it to relax, and it levels out at 4 deg C, for example. Or in an hour's time, it is 12 deg C. Which is the representative temperature of the object - glass plus water? Note that it's mass has not changed, (the water). A body has a temperature when it is in thermal equilibrium - which means that there is no energy moving out, nor energy moving into the glass. All and good. When the thermometer relaxes to its reading, say 12 dec C the thermometer and water are in thermodynamic equilibrium. The problem is that the earth is not in thermal equilibrium, and while you can compute a "global temperature statistic, it is no better nor worse than any other estimate using a different set of samples. One set could show no warmng, another could. Which is right? Both. And herein lies one of the biggest stumbling blocks for the global warming advocates. Couple that with GC models which, as they admit in section 14.2.2.2 (you can read all the scientific stuff on the IPCC web site)are incapable of prediction, and you start to see that the science does not at all support the IPCC summaries. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: zoot EMAIL: zoot_finster@yahoo.com.au IP: 203.59.211.73 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 05:05:06 PM Louis Well, it would seem that it is your English skills I should have been critiquing To recap: You wrote "It is not too difficult to show that measurements of temperatures, as published, are statistically unsound", which to me is a meaningless sentence. When I asked what you meant you wrote "It means that the projects of temperature themselve are unsound, if not downright wrong." It seemed to me you were using measurement and project interchangeably so I queried your English skills. I think I now know what was happening. From the arguments you have raised since, I infer your original sentence actually meant "It is not too difficult to show that projections of temperatures, as published by global warming advocates, are statistically unsound." Still don't think I agree with you, but at least this construct makes sense as a sentence. Sorry, but at this stage I have to go into Fisking mode. temperature is not property of matter, it is a number assigned to an observed physical state - well we agree on this It is a thermodynamic variable that cannot be summarised by an average value. When you measure temperature, you are in reality assigning a number as "an average" of the temperature field at a particular point in time at a particular point in space - err, no; when you measure temperature (and here I presume you mean atmospheric temperature) you are reading from a measuring device that is in thermodynamic equilibrium with a particular point in space at a particular point in time. You can only get a value for the interface between the thermometer and the atmosphere, no averaging involved. Remember we are talking about measuring temperature, not predicting or projecting it And you cannot have an average of something that has no physical reality - Oh yes you can. Averaging is a mathematical procedure performed on numbers (which have no physical reality). Like taking the average temperature of a glass of ice water at 4deg C and a glass of hot chocolate at 70 dec C. You can compute the average temperature of these two temperatures but the number is totally meaningless because it has no physical reality - and if you take the average of our heights or our incomes it will have no physical reality. Very few averages have any "physical reality" (they're mathematical constructs) whether they are meaningless or not depends on other factors. ... imagine a room with a different temperatures in it. In one part the temp is 20 deg C, in another 24, yet another 18, so which temperature is the temperature of the room? - When we measure the temperature of a room we pick a spot within that room and read the thermometer. For most of us it is immaterial that the temperature at the floor is different to the temperature at the ceiling is different to the temperature near the window. We arbitrarily place the thermometer (usually on a wall) and assign the "temperature of the room" to the value displayed by the thermometer. Most of us have an intuitive understanding that this is not an "average" temperature. In the interests of brevity I'll let your example of lawn bowls pass to the keeper except for There is ambiguity concerning temperature, however which is only true if you are ambiguous in your definitions, and The average is the mean of the weights which you surely know is not strictly true (average and mean are distinctly different). To measure the temperature of something, say a glass of ice-water, you place a thermometer in it, wait for it to relax, and it levels out at 4 deg C, for example. Or in an hour's time, it is 12 deg C. Which is the representative temperature of the object - glass plus water? Note that it's mass has not changed, (the water). - You're defining the question in static terms when we live in a dynamic universe (even a stochastic one). To get any meaningful answer about the temperature of the water you must also state the time of the reading. Your question is meaningless. The problem is that the earth is not in thermal equilibrium, and while you can compute a "global temperature statistic, it is no better nor worse than any other estimate using a different set of samples. One set could show no warmng, another could. Which is right? Both. - Not really sure what you mean by "global temperature statistic" (the name infers one number). But it seems very obvious to me that if measurements are standardised, as they seem to be with meteorological observations, and the same places are sampled at regular intervals it would be quite easy to get meaningful data. Under these conditions I don't see how two different sets of data could show opposing trends, even bearing in mind "Lies, damn lies and statistics". Provided the same analysis was carried out on both sets of data the trends should be the same, even if the magnitude differed. And now I will wish you farewell. I originally had hope for this site's claim of "fighting the misuse of science" but that's not what you're doing. Good science involves testing a hypothesis and discarding it if it doesn't fit the data. You, like many of the groups you castigate, only publish data that fits your hypothesis, so you're fighting the misuse of science by misusing science. I'm not prepared to waste the time. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 138.130.240.78 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 05:15:45 PM 'A body has a temperature when it is in thermal equilibrium...' No temperature is a property of matter that reflects the quantity of energy of motion of the component particles. It is a measure of how fast the molecules are bouncing around (and these are objects - not 'un-objects). If you measure the temperature of a body when it is in thermal equilibrium then that's all you've - waited until the temperature has stopped moving up or down and recorded it. The body still has a temperature before this (unless the molecules stop moving then it would be absolute 0) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 05:50:47 PM Simon, agreed, ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 06:28:37 PM Zoot, I have two rods of steel, say 1cm by 1cm by 1 metre dimension, and say they weigh each, say for example 1 kg each. I have two beakers of water, one at a temperature of 20 deg C, and another of equal mass, at 80 deg C. I combine the two steel rods. The resultant total mass is 2 kg. I now combine the two beakers of water, and what is the resultant temperature? Both are physical objects. Both have measured attributes. And That is the difference between intensive variables, and extensive variables. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 06:53:57 AM To which I answer my own question, temperature is not a quantity but a ranking assigned to some predetermined scale, so one cannot count or divide temperatures as one can length, volume and mass. You cannot count or divide rankings as one can quantities of something. One could just as easily rank temperatures by assigning the letters of the alphabet to the lower phase transition solid/liquid (O deg C), say "A" and the liquid/gas change (100 deg C)to "Z". Then it becomes a matter of wondering how to add C to W, for example and dividing by 2 to get an "average". You cannot. So in the case here if I add the beaker of 20 deg C water to the beaker of 80 deg C water I do not get a beaker containing 100 deg C. In all likely hood it will be 20 deg C once the water equilibrates, providing the beaker at 20 is in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, of course. Much in the same fashion, I can ask for 50 kilograms of lead please, but the notion of asking for 50 degrees of celcius is a nonesense, because temperature is not a number of units of something but a ranking along some sort of scale, be it colour, alphabetic or numerical. Think of it as something that is hotter. And that makes it a misuse of not only science, but also statistics. I think it is called numerology. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 138.130.240.78 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 09:54:46 AM Most measurements are done on an arbitrary scale - length, volume and mass included. cm's, ml's, and kg are all things that we have made up exactly like degrees or the K scale. We say that we need to measure something so we come up with a unit to do it with - are you saying this is an invalid way to do things? On the mixing of two liquids at two different temperatures - if the volumes are the same and if the liquids are the same then the resultant temperature of the mix would be the average temperature of the two + or - any heat of mixing which should be fairly minimal considering both the liquids are the same compound. Temperature is a measure of heat and therefore must follow the laws of conservation of energy. The only way the temperature would end up being 20C is if you mixed them in a container that wasn't very well insulated and you waited for a long time. But knowing the material that the mixing container is made from you would be able to calculate the heat (and therefore temperature) loss over a time period. If you want the forumlas you should grab a physical chemistry textbook. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 10:01:12 AM Simon, no, you can count weights, lengths, and volumes because they are quantities. You cannot count temperatures because temperature is not a quantity but a ranking. It just happens to be a number, that is all. Adding 1 litre of water at 45 deg C to another litre at 45 deg C ends ups as two litres at? 45 C. Without having a thermometer, adding the 20 C and 80 C waht will be the resultant temp? I know that adding the two weights, say 1kg each) will equal 2 kg because weights are "countable". Temperatures are not. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gummo Trotsky EMAIL: gummo.trotsky@composmentis.com IP: 203.45.30.55 URL: http://tugboatpotemkin.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/25/2004 12:32:46 PM If you mix two equal quantities of water, one at a temperature of 20 C and the other at a temperature of 80 C you will end up with a temperature of 50 C. You can easily confirm this for yourself by recalling that the water's temperature is a measure of the amount of "heat energy" (for want of a better phrase) in the water. This is very basic thermodynamics, which used to be taught as part of high school physics and chemistry (which is how I larned it). ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 138.130.240.78 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 02:19:40 PM Ok you asked for it: The heat of an object is given by Q = m.c.T, and the amount of work required to change the temperature of an object is given by dQ = mc(Tf-Ti), where Q is the heat of an object, m the mass, c the heat capacity of the substance, and T the temperature of the object (initial and final). Liquid 1 has a mass m1, heat capacity of c1 and a temperature of 20C, Liquid 2 has m2, c2 and T = 80C the final temperature is Tf. Applying conservation of energy, the total change in energy of the system after we mix the two liquids must be zero. So, we can just add up the individual energy changes (the Q's) and set the sum equal to zero. Therefore the dQ of the system is 0; So: m1c1(Tf-20) + m2c2(Tf-80) = 0; m1c1Tf – 20m1c1 + m2c2Tf – 80m2c2 = 0 Therefore: m1c1Tf + m2c2Tf = 20m1c1 + 80m2c2; Since c1 = c2 and m1 = m2 we can simply this to: 2Tf.m1c1 = 100 m1c1; The m1c1’s on either side of the equation cancel each other, therefore: 2Tf = 100; giving Tf = 50. First year physical chemistry problem – any more? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/25/2004 03:09:19 PM And not only is it possible to average temperatures, temperatures are nothing more than the average energy of the particles in the system. Unless you have just one molecule, any temperature is an average. Louis' beliefs aren't so much postmodern as pre-Joule. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 138.130.240.78 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:10:03 PM Should we then consider the temperature of a molecule to be the average temperature of the atoms and bonds that make up the molecule? Going back to the 2 litres of water at 45C - we 'divide' it into two 1 litre lots and the temperature doesn't change therefore the temperature is measuring an 'un-object' that can't be divided or added or whatever... Say we have 2 litres of salt water from the sea - it's at a concentration of 10 g of salt per litre. We divide the salt water into two lots of 1l each and hey presto - we still have 10 g of salt per litre. Does this make concentration a measurement of an 'un-object'? With both the temperature and the salt concentration, dividing the volume has no effect on the measurement - why? because in each case you have closed systems where mass and energy must be conserved ie no inputs or outputs. When you divide the water into 2 one litre lots you end up with 2 x 1 litres = 2 litres of water. The total volume is the same therefore the temperature has to be the same otherwise you've managed to destroy energy. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:19:04 PM Simon, And in 5 hours time I still have 2 kilograms of waterever, but the 50 Deg C estimated from mixing 20 deg C and 80 deg C is now? Room temp? 24? And if it is kinetic energy we are dealing with why not square the temperatures, add them, divide by 2 and take the square root. That will get you 58 Deg C, Which is the right number then? You see, mas, volume, length are independent of time, that is why they are properties, and countable quantities. Temperature isn't, it may be a number, but it is a number in a ranking system, so it is just as logical to state that C plus M deg C = (C+m)/2. Illogical, because temperature is not a physical quantity. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:35:52 PM Tim, Perthaps you would like to argue this out with Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick? They do, I understand, do a pretty good job on explaining this in their book "Taken by Storm". Other than that, what type of average are you meaning, arithmetic mean, geometric mean? Is the distribution Gaussian, or is it something else. Temperature is a measure of state of matter - not a property of matter which is independent of time. If you are meaning energy increasing, then yes, the energy does increase, because increased energy means something physical. Temperature, in contrast, is not an amount of something. It is a number that represents the condition of a physical system. It is a qualitative measurement, not a quantitative one. In thermodynamics it is known as an "intensive" quantity, in contrast to energy, which have the additive property, which are "extensive" quantity. It is understanding the difference between quantity and quality. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:37:46 PM Temperature is a physical quality. Energy is a physical quantity. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:51:23 PM I am glad Zoot is not here at the moment because I would have been severely chastised for my bad grammar and English by now. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/25/2004 10:05:35 PM It's the arithmetic mean. That's why the answer to your question about mixing the water is (80+20)/2. If you have doubts about this you can check for yourself by doing the experiment. Or you could read a first year physics text. And yes, in thermodynamics temperature is an intensive QUANTITY, just like pressure. This does not stop you from computing average temperatures. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 203.134.46.160 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 10:19:37 PM If energy (heat not kinetic) is a quantity and it is related to temperature (Q = mcT) then T is a quantity. You can't an energy equation that links a quantity to a quality - it simply doesn't make sense. Intensive properties (temperature, pressure, concentration) do not depend upon the sample size. Extensive properties (mass, volume) depend upon sample size. This is not the same as intensive = quality/extensive = quantity. You have to check your definitions - again go check out a text book. Now your comment that temperature is not a inate property of an object consider a gas - the relationship between temperature, pressure, volume and amount of gas (n) is related by the equation PV = nRT, where R is a constant. Now that means that at a P and V for an amount of gas there can be only one T. This means that T is a property of the gas. If you reduce the pressure of a gas and keep the volume constant the temperature of the gas changes. Or if you vary T either P or V must change. Now your glass of 50 C water in a room - since your water has a higher temperature then the air of the room it will transfer energy in the form of heat into the room. The air temperature of the room will rise and the water temp fall until they are in equilibrium. You just have to do the calculation I did early to find out what the final temperature will be. ps the heat capacity of air can be found in text book - I recommend you get one. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.127 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/26/2004 12:00:43 AM "If you mix two equal quantities of water, one at a temperature of 20 C and the other at a temperature of 80 C you will end up with a temperature of 50 C. You can easily confirm this for yourself by recalling that the water's temperature is a measure of the amount of "heat energy" (for want of a better phrase) in the water. This is very basic thermodynamics, which used to be taught as part of high school physics and chemistry (which is how I larned it)."-- Gummo Trotsky That's if you had a way to instantly mix the water. If you were mixing two containers wouldn't you also have to calculate the distance between the containers,poor rate,volume and ambient temperature so you wouldn't end up with 50 C I suspect. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:51:28 AM Properties of matter are independent of time - temperature is a process, a state of a system, not a static property like mass, or length or volume. Measure mass today, measure it tomorrow it is the same. Measure temperature and it is continuously different - there is no unique temperature to a glass of water. There is however a unique mass or volume. Something which varies with time, unpredictably, is not a property - it is a process, a state or condition of a system. Imagine you are asked to bring me the glass that has a temperature of 50 deg C, and you measure it, find it, and bring it, 5 hours later you are asked where is the 50 deg C glass of water. You say, pointing to it, there. I take a thermometer, measure it, and see that it is 24 deg, not 50 deg C. So the glass is not the one that is 50 deg C, is it, because plain as day it is 24 deg C. However it's mass and volume did not change. Or consider that you were asked to retrieve 12 grams of sodium chloride, and you get the bottle, weight out 12 grams onto a petrie dish and you place it on the bench. I can check itby weighing it and yes we have 12 grams of sodium chloride. Now you are asked to bring 50 deg C of water. You can't. Why? Because it is not a quantity, it is a "state" which varies with time. One minute it might be 50 deg C, another it might be 25 deg. It is irrelevant what you do with the numbers, becasue the number assigned to temperature is not a physical object. Since it is not a physical object, it cannot be counted. If the temperature scale was alphabetic, I am sure some of you would argue that you can add C plus M to get some other "thing". ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Simon EMAIL: whiterabbit101@hotmail.com IP: 138.130.240.78 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 10:11:06 AM Gees, temperature is a static property of a gas at a given pressure and volume - it's one of the basic principles of physical chemistry. The relationship has been known for over 200 years. If the volume and pressure of a gas is constant then it's temperature will not change - no matter how long you wait. Go get a text book. And another thing - your volume of water will change as it cools from 50 to 25 C- gees looks like you'll have to throw out volume as a 'object' due to it's time dependance (or maybe if you check the laws of physics you'll see that volume is temperature dependant). And what about the mass - water evaporates over time - throw out that one too. In any open system ie a glass of water in a room all measurements are going to be time dependent - it doesn't make them invalid. Louis have you even bothered to check any of my equations? Looked up any references? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim Lambert EMAIL: lambert@cse.unsw.edu.au IP: 129.94.6.30 URL: http://timlambert.org DATE: 03/26/2004 10:17:10 AM Louis, you don't seem to know anything about the properties of glasses of water. If you had a glass of water at 50 degrees and five hours later it was 24 degrees and actually measured its mass and volume you would discover that both had also changed. It's called evaporation. "Water vapour" is even in the title of your post. And even without evaporation the volume will change with temperature. You see, Louis, things expand when they get hotter. Are you now going to tell us that volume is not a quantity either? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gary EMAIL: Gary@Gravett.org IP: 144.137.220.232 URL: http://www.gravett.org/mt/ DATE: 03/26/2004 01:04:41 PM Tim Lambert So you agree with Louis that climate variables are non-linear?. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 04:14:21 PM Temperature - what is it? Is it a quantity and therefore able to be numerically processed or is it, as it is recognised thermodynamically, an "intensive" variable, incapable of numerical processing, and therefore a subjective class category? Temperature is a subjective assessment of how hot something is, and we rank objects as hot or cold using touch or, if we wish to be a little more precise, by reference to a standardised measuring instrument, the thermometer calibrated according to some agreed standard. Temperature is often considered as some sort of measure of energy, as some would insist, and that therefore temperature is quantity of energy and this capable of being "counted" or added, or divided, as quantities invariably are. It is not - heat content is. We recognise two fundamental concepts - heat content and temperature of an object. Heat content can be interpreted as the mechanical energy of the brownian motion of the objects - vis. atoms. Temperature, on the other hand is quite distinct - it is a subjective ranking scale. We must add a third concept, that of specific heat - which is, according to Ference Lemon and Stephensen, "the number of calories of heat necessary to raise the temperature of 1 gm of the substance 1 deg C. (P.181). The following list details various specific heats of various substances, be they solid, liquid or gas (for temperatures between 0 and 100 deg C), cf Ference Lemon and Stephenson, p 182. Element - Specific Heat (Cal/Gm Deg C) Al - .2175 Au - .0309 B - .26 Cu - .0930 Mg - .247 Ni - .1092 Pb - .0310 Pt - .0318 Si - .177 For solids (various temperatures) Flint glass - .12 Ice - .487 Rubber - .48 Liquids (various temperatures) Sea Water - .95 Ether - .529 Air - .2375 (Composition not specified) Argon - .1233 CO2 - .2025 Hydrogen - 3.4090 Oxygen - .2175 Water Vapour - .4655 (0 deg C) Water Vapour - .421 (100 dec C) A) If we increase each of the above by 1 deg C, assuming 1 gram of each, we have the interesting relationship of 1 deg C, reading down the list, equaling .2175 calories for Al,or .0309 calories for Au, or in the easier notation, 1 deg C=.2175=.0309=.26=.0930=.247 and so on. This is a rather problematical situation if one is a scientist but not if one is a post-modernist or someone who does not understand statistics. B) If we now examine the ranking of sportsmen and have the class best sportsman, we could place Ian Thorpe as a swimmer, Mark Waugh as cricketer, and Dick Johnson as race-car driver, and we could then associate as best = Ian Thorpe=Mark Waugh= Dick Johnson. This is an entirely permissable equivalence and has nothing to do with quantities. It is a subjective ranking and equivalence. Temperature is the same type of category. Heat content is not. (I am using Australian sportsmen as examples). So mathematically A) above is a nonesense if 1 Deg C is regarded as a quantity - but not if it is regarded as a category of subjective value, say similar to the sports category of "Best". This nonesense comes about from the logical fallacy that if my cat has four legs, and my dog has four legs, then my cat is a dog. Therefore temperature is not a measure of heat content. Temperature is therefore not a quantity, it is a class category, conveniently described as a number. It is a means by which we rank hotness. It cannot be mathematically processed. However heat units, or in the modern jargon, energy units, can be mathematically processed. Unfortunately we have specified temperature as a numerical ranking, and this has unfortunately resulted in those in the social sciences assuming that as it is a number, we can do maths on it. (It goes without saying that temperatures can be manipulated mathematically but it is a meaningless procedure). There might an argument that air is air, and that it's specific heat is so and so, and we can count temperatures of air and make a meaningful estimate of it's temperature as an average. No, because it's specific heat is dependent on its composition, since casual inspection of both Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide, two components of air, shows that these two gases have extremely different specific heats. If you wish to compute the temperature average of air at two localities, you must first of all demonstrate that both samples of air are compositionally identical, but it is irrelevant because temperature is not a quantity - it is a category of subjective hotness. If one however uses heat content, or energy content, then one can easily calculate the average energy level of the earth's atmosphere. References: Analytical Experimental Physics - Ference Lemon and Stephenson, 1964, University of Chicago Press, USA. Taken By Storm, Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, 2002, Key Porter Books, Toronto, Canada. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gummo Trotsky EMAIL: gummo/trotsky@composmentis.com IP: 203.45.30.55 URL: http://tugboatpotemkin.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/26/2004 05:16:30 PM I know that I shouldn't really encourage this nonsense, however: Louis: temperature is not a quantity - it is a category of subjective hotness If so, perhaps you'd like to explain what it is that thermometers measure. And what it is that physical chemists mean when they tell you that the boiling point of water is 100% C. And just waht the hell I was doing when I immersed a capillary tube of salicylic acid in an oil bath in a first year chemistry practical class and raised the temperature until I saw it melt, to determine its melting point. I'm sure there are a lot of practicing scientists out there who would be astonished to learn that temperature is only a "category of subjective hotness". It might alarm the manufacturers of thermometers too - apparently they've been conning us for centuries, selling us instruments that don't measure anything objective, merely a psychological state. That's probably something for the consumer affairs people to look into. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 05:44:49 PM Gummo, Thermometers measure hotness not quantity - we decided that the phase change from ice/water to be 0 deg Celcius, and that water(liquid)-->gas to be 100 deg C. The Fahrenheit scale is 32 deg F for the lower, 212 deg F for the higher. The numerical ranges were then subdivided into equal fractions, and numbered accordingly. You added heat to your capillary tube of salicyclic acid, and noted when it melted, and noted on the scale of hotness at what temperature it melted. You did not, however, measure the amount of energy need to raise that sample of salicyclic acid to its melting point. You just noted when Salicyclic acid melted after applying an unquantified amount of heat. If I took 100 grams of copper of specific heat of .0930 cals/gm deg C, and 100 grams of magnesium of specific heat of 0.247 cals/gm deg C, and put both into the same container, and applied heat, the copper would melt before the magnesium. But, importantly, the Magnesium would not be at the same temperature as the copper. Both are equally hot. Both are at the same temperature, except one is liquid and the other a solid. Both in terms of hotness are at the same ranking. I could calibrate the thermometer alphabetically - A is 0 and Z is 100, and subdivide the change equally - so your salicylic acid would melt at, say "M" units of temperature, and no argument with that measurement. If I had equal quantities of copper and magnesium, say 100 grams each, and input 1000 calories of energy into both, what would their temperatures be after that energy input? Without doing the maths, I would suggest that the copper would be at a higher temperature than the magnesium. Disprove my argument please. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 05:47:02 PM Whoops - I erred - remove the sentence starting with "Both are equally hot. Bothe are at the........ Tsk tsk tsk, called shooting one's mouth off without having one's brain in gear. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 06:01:35 PM And also remove the second sentence for the same reason. Sigh,some of us mispill, the rest get their gramma' and sintinces wrong...... C'est la view, Que? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 06:01:51 PM And also remove the second sentence for the same reason. Sigh,some of us mispill, the rest get their gramma' and sintinces wrong...... C'est la vie, Que? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 06:08:12 PM And not encouraging any nonsense Gummo, To get 100 gramms of copper to reach a specific temperature I would need .0930 calories per gram per deg C rise in temp. To get 100 grams of magnesium I would need .247 cals/grm/degC to get to the same temperature. Temperature is therefore not a measure of quantity, since .0930 > .247 unless you are a post modernist and then arguing with an idiot only makes me a bigger idiot. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 06:09:47 PM Correction in my last line - I keep forgetting hypertext conventions, and .0930 is not equal to .247 ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 06:16:05 PM Oh yes it is, I just graduated from PM 101 :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gummo Trotsky EMAIL: gummo.trotsky@composmentis.com IP: 203.45.30.55 URL: http://tugboatpotemkin.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/26/2004 06:38:03 PM Louis, Here's some data I googled up for the following calculations: Melting point of copper: 1084 C; Melting point of magnesium: 923 C; Starting at a temperature of 20 C, melting the copper, as you predict will happen first based on specific heats will require an energy of Q = c.m.dt where c is the specific heat, m is the mass and dt the change in temperature. This works out to Q = 98952. Putting the same amount of energy into 100 grams of magnesium will give a change in temperature of: dt = Q/c.m This works out to 4006 C. If you ever do put 100 grams of copper and 100 grams of magnesium in the same container and apply heat, make sure that the container is evacuated and hermetically sealed. Here's some more data from Google that you might find of interest: Boiling point of magnesium: 1090 C; Flash point of magnesium: 634 C; So what you will probably end up with, if you go on to the point where the copper melts, is 100 grams of molten copper and 100 grams of magnesium vapour heated to way beyond its flashpoint. My guess is that in an open container, the magnesium will start to burn long before the copper melts. You should have done the maths. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:12:15 PM Tim, the IPCC state that climate variables are non linear. 14.2.2.2. I think, so I will be inaccurate so you can score a point. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:27:26 PM Gummo, Copper needs to raise its temperature by 1 degress C .0930 calories per gram per degree C Magnesium needs .247 calories per gram per degree C to get to the same temperature. The melting points of either metal are irrelevant. Using your equations above, assuming Q=c.m.dt, Q for copper = .0930 * 1 * 1 Q for Magnesium = .247 * 1 * 1 I am assuming 1 gram and 1 deg C, so it is specific heat which is the critical variable. So for copper Q = .0930 * 1 * 1 (for 1 deg C increase) = .09030 How did you get the number 98952 ? Assuming we are using the same values. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:44:01 PM Ok, I stuffed up in the arithmetic, transposed a digit here and there, sheesh, Q= 0.0930 Happy ???????? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gummo Trotsky EMAIL: gummo.trotsky@composmentis.com IP: 203.45.30.55 URL: http://tugboatpotemkin.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/26/2004 07:44:34 PM Louis, It's called an order of magnitude error (reading 0.0930 as 0.930). On checking, the temperature of the Mg when the Cu melts is 421 C. Bugger. This definitely isn't shaping up to be my best year ever. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:51:08 PM And I might as well go through the rest to save time - Q = .0930 =.247 * 1 * dt so dt = .022971 deg C, which is somewhat less that 1 deg c. QED. (the calculation is, assuming one gram of substance, .0930=.247 *1 *dt, = .022971) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 07:53:39 PM Gummo, and a few more errors need to be checked :-) No hard feelings, either :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 08:02:26 PM Gummo It is called science. The admission when the numbers say so, one is wrong. Now if it is religion, we would not be having this correspondence, since I would have been killed a long time ago, whether on the stake, or as the result of a Jihad. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 08:07:25 PM Gummo, It is not an order of magnitude error either, actually, an order of magnitude error is when you say it is 1 when it is 10. Magnitude errors are multiples of 10, so .09030 is not a magnitude error. 0.9030 would definitely be. :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/26/2004 08:32:48 PM Gummo, My apology - re order of magnitude as referenced by you above. I erreed, again. :-( but I learn a lot. :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Boris Winterhalter EMAIL: boris.winterhalter@kolumbus.fi IP: 80.186.176.205 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 05:32:15 AM Temperature as a climate parameter is has been widely discussed (e.g. in Taken by Storm). To compare temperatures from different parts of the World is naturally useless. However, what climatologists actually do is compare trends. Thus, if all met.stations show an increasing T trend over a specific time period, it is logical to assume that temperature itself has increased. As an example the warm spell in the 1940ies, cooler spell during the 50ies and 60ies and followed by a rising trend during the past decades is obviously reality. The actual amount of temperature rise is a different matter since T as such is not heat content. What should be discussed is the drivers behind climate change. For sure it is not CO2. Boris ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 07:27:41 AM Boris, yes, but if you look at the individual temperature stations oon John Daly's site, for example, you can see that some stations are showing a lowering rate of temperature. Not what one would expect if the theory of global warming has any veracity. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Climate Modelling - more doubts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/21/2004 09:23:43 AM ----- BODY: This link to a paper in Nature summarises the problems in climate models. Add to this the problem of negative feedback through cloud formation, (where more heat causes more evaporation, which produces more clouds that shield the earth against sunlight) which cannot be modelled, one wonders just what are we trying to achieve with these climate models. The problem is that water is the dominant greeenhouse gase, and if it is resistant to modelling, then whatever the projections from existing models, it means nothing. I very strongly suspect anthropogenic global warming was invented by the greens from the deduction that burning of fossil fuels generates CO2, which is a greenhouse gas and therefore temperatures must rise. May I point out that in terms of coal only, it respresents carbon that was already in the atmophere and that ordinarily living vegetation is in a dynamic balance with CO2 in the atmosphere. Hence these coal deposits can be viewed as carbon which was accidentally taken out of the atmosphere and that the current CO2 atmospheric levels are abnormal. Hence by burning coal we are returning carbon that a freak of nature removed from the system. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: SEWilco EMAIL: scot@wilcoxon.org IP: 209.98.144.16 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 06:40:16 AM Under each square centimeter of the Earth's surface is 20 kg of carbonate deposits. To create that much over the Earth's lifetime, the amount of carbon which now is in the atmosphere and oceans must have been replaced 2,000 times. As the carbonates were created at a constant rate, the atmosphere did not originally have 2,000 times the CO2. So the atmosphere has been refilled at a rate equivalent to the Earth's surface being covered by a meter of methane every 2,700 years. The carbon isotope ratio in carbonates have not been increasing, so there has not been much carbonate deposit recycling to the atmosphere. Thus new carbon is constantly rising to the surface. http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/usgs.html Underground carbon deposits show a pattern of coal above oil, above deep methane. This suggests that coal is derived from deep hydrocarbons and not from surface plants. The few plant fossils in bituminous coal are often filled with the same material, suggesting the carbon was not from the plant itself. Gold suggests the scenario of coal forming from a swamp with a natural oil/methane leak, where bacteria eating the hydrocarbons use up all the oxygen thus the plants can't ferment. So coal is not a layer of plants, but more like a layer of plants covered with oil/tar. (One glance at the web finds http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/carboniferous/mazon.html nodules of siderite, which is likely to form in low-oxygen water with carbon dioxide or other carbon but little sulphur -- a description which fits several scenarios, although not a high-sulphur swamp) So burning coal returns some carbon to the atmosphere, but also adds some carbon which was never in the atmosphere. Not that burning coal is a new event either -- coal can burn underground (search for "coal fire") and natural wildfires would have ignited some exposed coal seams. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.30.92.142 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 07:31:30 AM Yes, all rather complex to be sure, but I have had a good look in one of the open pit brown coal mines in Victoria, and this coal is without a shadow of a doubt vegetation. It remains a complex problem. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Aaron TITLE: Peter Walsh on Lantham and the Greens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/21/2004 09:40:00 AM ----- BODY: Could Lantham be courting disaster? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: TimT EMAIL: seamussillypoppinsmajorus@yahoo.com.au IP: 144.137.73.183 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 01:45:52 PM LATHAM! It's Mark LATHAM! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:56:15 PM no it is not, it is Iron Bark ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Climate Dissention STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/21/2004 12:40:06 PM ----- BODY: There is a little dissention in the climate science ranks ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 218.214.42.234 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 04:00:52 PM Cop9 was last year, cop10 is the next one, why bother referencing an article about COP6? That's so five minutes ago! :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 04:02:42 PM Oh, I thought memories needed jogging every so often :-) Mine in particular. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/21/2004 09:45:51 PM "In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible." -- Final chapter, Draft TAR 2000 (Third Assessment Report), IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Even the IPCC admits computer models don't work in the fine print. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Cause of Global Warming STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/21/2004 01:11:36 PM ----- BODY: This is an interesting paper in which the Mann et al graph is used but by extrapolating the proxy data to the present (Figure 5), one seems to get a different impression of past temperatures. Since three out of four methods of measuring global temperatures show no sign of warming, the author concludes that the warming is due to artificial factors. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Publish or Perish - an ailing entreprise? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/21/2004 01:59:48 PM ----- BODY: An interesting article from Physics Today ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Dairy Food as dangerous as tobacco STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/22/2004 07:13:21 AM ----- BODY: This item was drawn to my attention last week - in the Guardian ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: New Toyoto Gaia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/22/2004 02:32:13 PM ----- BODY: Toyoto as created a new car. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Why Can't the Press get it right STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/23/2004 08:41:44 AM ----- BODY: Once again the journo's get it wrong. This is a reaction to the recent CO2 rise noted on a small hill in the Pacific Ocean. Update: And a comment analysing the above news ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: brad tittle EMAIL: thegerm@charter.net IP: 68.115.2.89 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 06:09:19 AM The analysis of this story (although correct in spirit) is a little off when compared to Fred Singers excellent analysis of CO2 content in the world today and its impact on Global Warming. Namely only about 4% of all CO2 is Anthropogenic as apposed to 12% in the article. I could have misread it through, maybe they were including all burning, which may include natural burning. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/24/2004 10:46:23 AM Gelogists have been scientifically analyzing the carbon cycle long before climatologists ever considered CO2. Yet much of the geologists research regarding the carbon cycle isn't considered by the global warming "calamitologists". The influence of volcanoes is totally avoided by "calamitologists". When Mt. Pinatubo erupted it pumped in a few hours the equivalent of many years of CO2 from human fossil fuel burning. When Krakatoa blew in 1803 it snowed the following year in London in August. Also, the 14% CO2 due to anthrpogenic sources is by far the highest figure I have ever seen. The range I have seen is 0.5 to 5.0 percent. Perhaps Louis can inform us on the carbon cycle from a geologists perspective. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 07:43:35 AM Reid, The carbon cycle per se is not much emphasised, mainly because we have one very large problem trying to work out how the sedimentary rock "dolomite", MgCO3, formed. It is certainly not forming now in any ocean or sea, but it is an enormous amount of CO2 "frozen" in a rock. Whether coal beds are also "frozen" CO2 is another issue, since the CO2 only gets produced under combustion, of course, so coal is a carbon sink. So in a sense coal formation (and that is not being observed either, come to think of it), is really the extraction of carbon from CO2, yield ing O2. Yet we know in the past CO2 levels where 8 to 16 times higher than now, and then where did the CO2 go to subsequently? Into limestone and dolomite? To add to the complexity of the problem, we have lava flows in Africa that are pure carbonate, rather than silicate, low temperature, and where is that coming from? Other unusual intrusions called carbonitites are scattered over much of southern Africa, so there is a vast reservoir of carbonate rocks, both sedimentary and igneous. To be honest, it is something which we know very little about, and when it comes to dolomite, it is downright embarrassing. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 11:26:19 AM The more you know the more you realize what you don't know. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 08:21:43 PM How true Steve, how true... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 08:23:23 PM Except for climatologists, of course. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: ABC TV last night STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/25/2004 07:58:53 AM ----- BODY: An amazing documentary last night on the discovery of a vast prehistoric civilisation in the Amazonian jungle - details here, and plenty of archaeological evidence. While one view for the demise of these people was disease, wiping them out within 100 years after de Orellana first discovered them, there is another factor - humanity tends to develop civilisations in temperate climates, since people living in the tropics tend not to be too active or industrious. Is it possible these ancients were once living in temperate climes which then became tropical? Oh dear - global warming in the 16th century? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: K-T Extinction (Dinosaurs) caused by global warming STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/25/2004 10:24:35 AM ----- BODY: I was wondering when this would happen - read it here ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Checking Results STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/25/2004 11:19:21 AM ----- BODY: A comment by Legates on Mann et al's Hockey Stick Paper makes the interesting observation that "While Mann contends that his curve represents Northern Hemisphere temperature trends, four of the twelve proxy sources used for the A.D. 1000 to 1400 analysis are from the Southern Hemisphere." Hmmm. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: sdp@rm.concentric.net IP: 209.233.16.179 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 03:35:44 PM Sorry for the OT posting, but you really should read the Borlaug article by Easterbrook in the Atlantic (via Instapundit): http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014733.php Among other things, it points out that the Ford Foundation is no longer supporting Borlaug's African efforts because of Green pressure. Borlaug's crime is that he saved the greatest number of human lives in history, the ultimate Green atrocity. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 04:54:27 PM Steve, I will do so :-) thanks for the reference. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/25/2004 08:05:43 PM Steve, check the ABC post below - the "prehistoric" Amerindians seem to have managed agriculture a little more adeptly than we have. The, and I won't try to pronounce it, dark dirt, seems to be some sort of living organism. They mine it, it regenerates, and we have no clue how. OK, we don't. As a scientist I ask what is going on. This needs money spent on it, not global warming, or reducing CO2 emissions. This is exciting! Imagine, burning forest to produce charcoal, not ash, mixing it into the earth, and having 800% greater crop productivity. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Junk Science STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/27/2004 09:24:06 AM ----- BODY: This article should be of interest - liked here ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Reverse Climate change ?? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/27/2004 01:25:43 PM ----- BODY: Caught this jewel of a link on John Daly's site. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Composition of Earth's Atmosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/27/2004 01:41:20 PM ----- BODY: Here are some interesting numbers - CO2 is .033 % by volume of the earth's atmosphere - see link here So little yet so much power - and add water vapour to the system, it must decrease in amount again. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 09:45:28 PM The site contends that anthropogenic sources of CO2 represent 3.5% of the total. One of the biggest misconceptions of the general public is that it is generally beieved that the bulk of CO2 in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel burning. If it was generally known how small the estimated value is there would be far less support and much more skepticism regarding Kyoto. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 06:14:30 AM Do you mean 3.5% of the atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic? It might be very useful getting accurate figures on this because using these numbers, Anthro' CO2 represents (mixing vols and weights here but the order of magnitude is the number I want to stress) 3.5% of .033 is 0.0011% by volume? Gee - that is rather low, but if it is right,....... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 08:23:25 AM "Do you mean 3.5% of the atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic?" Yes, I have seen estimates from 0.5% to 5.0% until you you recently posted an article claiming it was 14%. The fact that there is such a wide range of claimed anthropogenic CO2 contributions is another reason for skepticism. Whether it is 0.5%, 5.0% or even 14% it is a small fraction. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 08:54:56 AM Well, remember it is the popular media quoting these figures....hmm, so what would be the real amount then - maybe Prof Singer's site and the CO2 sites would have it detailed. Another job, another hour, it never ends. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Mass extinctions and the atmosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/27/2004 02:18:22 PM ----- BODY: New Scientist vol 133 issue 1805 - 25 January 1992, page 51 These are some snips from the article a colleage sent me: There are other unusual events in the Late Permian period. Huge volumes of salts were precipitated from sea water in the shallow areas around the edges of the Tethys Sea. This has prompted several geologists, including Renato Posenato of the University of Ferrara, Italy, to propose that the late Permian oceans were correspondingly less salty than sea water today and may have been merely brackish. Brackish waters generally support only a small range of faunas, so such high evaporation could explain the mass extinction. But like the falling sea-level theory, this cannot account for extinctions on land. Also, evaporites (the salts deposited around the Tethys Sea) precipitated before the mass extinction: why was there a gap between precipitation and the decline of life in the seas? Another problem with the theory is that middle Triassic and Jurassic rocks also contain large evaporite sequences, without accompanying episodes of extinction. After the rapid fall in sea level at the end of Permian times, there was an even more spectacular rise - calculations suggest that this happened phenomenally quickly, as fast as several tens of centimetres per year. Tony Hallam, of the University of Birmingham, and I have focused research on the first sediments to be deposited in the Triassic seas. We found that the waters at the sea floor were anoxic or at best very poorly oxygenated. Anoxia and rising sea levels tend to occur together in the geological record, but no one is sure why. The telltale evidence in early Triassic rocks consists of myriads of tiny pyrite crystals, finely laminated sediments and a fauna consisting of a particular type of clam. This was a very specialised creature, that thrived with only low levels of oxygen. Finely laminated sediments form where mud settles gently on the sea floor; it can survive to become a rock with the layering intact only if worms and other burrowing creatures do not churn it up. If the layers persist, then this indicates that the sediment housed few creatures. Crystals of pyrite - iron sulphide - are a sign of reducing conditions at the sea floor; oxygenated water would have oxidised the sulphur to sulphate, forming other minerals. So the Permian-Triassic mass extinction appears to be a story of death by suffocation for both terrestrial and marine life. This explanation best fits the available evidence but we are still left with many questions unanswered. For instance, why was there such a dramatic fall in sea level and then a rise across the Permian-Triassic boundary? Comment: Death by suffocation? Loss of O2? or was it suffocation by loss of the atmosphere? On a previous post on the K-T extinction (if my memory serves me) I mentioned that one NZ scientist thought that as 96% of all the Mesozoic species disappeared, he posited the idea that they were literally lifted off the planet by some catastrophic reduction in gravity at the time of the extinction. No way of testing that of course unless someone comes across a frozen seismosaur carcass in space. But as we can see, the earth's atmosphere has had some pretty catastrophic changes in the past, so I wonder if this obession with global warming is but some deep seated Pavlovian fixation of a past catastrophe deeply embedded in humanity's subconscious? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: "Science !!!!" STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: quote CATEGORY: quote DATE: 03/27/2004 03:22:20 PM ----- BODY: "History shows that new ideas in science, probably in any human endeavor, are repudiated unless initiated by the current authorities. Data will disappear or be unavailable to you if you state your theory. So don't." This is a comment posted by a very reputable scientist who has to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, but it explains what happens when you contradict the prevailing scientific paradigm and dare voice dissent. Rock the boat and your grants disappear, and if you were someone like John Dayton, who wrote Minerals, Glazing and Man, (London 1978), in which he showed that Middle East chronologies were basically wrong, the establishment, unable to refute his evidence empirically got even by closing down the university school which created him. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/27/2004 09:56:33 PM Speaking of rocking the boat, I have just started to read "The Deep Hot Biosphere, The Myth of Fossil Fuels" by Thomas Gold. Gold's theories of the origin of oil and gas are stunning. Gold believes that oil and gas are products of underground bacteria, not fossil decomposition. He has some big names who support his theory such as Freeman Dyson and Hans Bethe. But niether is a geologist. Gold is an astronomer. If Gold is correct it will turn out to be one of the greatest paradigm shifts ever in science. Any comments from Bizarre science's resident geologist? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 06:07:13 AM Reid, Yes Gold's ideas are intriguing - we could also add another possibility mentioned in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, in which he interprets pre Columbian indian stories of "raining" petroleum or something similar a long time ago. Quite extraordinary though you do not mention Velikovsky in polite company - causes all sorts of irrational reactions. But deep in the earth, if Gold is right, raises the issue of increasing temperature and pressure but, I recall the Russians drilling an extremely deep hole and finding that pressures were not so high at all, that there were "holes" in the rocks down there, and so on. I think you can get a reference to it on the web perhaps. William Corliss's publications mention it. (Makes me wonder what happened to the US Project Moho..........) If the earth was inundated with "oil" in its loosest sense, or perhaps bitumen, I don't really know at the moment, just relying on memory, and this stuff ended up in the oceans, then it would unsurprising to find fish remains in it. And if it seeps upwards into the oceans, then yes it might too have fish remains. And Gold also mentioned find oil under granite - if I recall correctly - though I would need to read up on it. Enough on the plate at the moment with skooting off on another tangent. But yes, we know very little about the earth, and there is alot of carbon down there, whether is diamond state or as hydrocarbon. Personally I suspect Velikovsky's interpretation was probably correct (something around 1500 BC) and equally Gold's ideas are also probably spot on. Trouble is we don't see oil accumulating anywhere on the planet as it is supposed to do. Heaven knows since the Jurassic we have had enough time to accumulate some somewhere. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joseph Hertzlinger EMAIL: jhertzli@ix.netcom.com IP: 165.247.48.66 URL: http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com DATE: 03/28/2004 02:32:12 PM There have been lots of Establishment theories that have been refuted. One problem is that the current institutional structure of science is designed to reward people with clear proof that the old theory is wrong. Falsifying a generally accepted theory will win you a Nobel Prize. Reminding people that a commonly-accepted theory has inadequate evidence either for or against will get you almost nowhere. It will alienate those members of the Scientific Establishment who really are bigots and—what's worse—it will bore the rest. That also means critics of a current theory should not exaggerate the amount of evidence against it. If there really is a large amount of evidence against an Establishment theory, the Establishment will not only come out against it, but even find a way to blame conservatives for it. For example, evidence is currently accumulating that carbohydrates (yesterday's hero of nutrition) are more dangerous than fats (yesterday's demon of nutrition). That is, of course, being blamed on corporations. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 03:25:34 PM What concerns me, if Kuhn is right, that the dominant paradigm gets replaced when its supporters die out (of old age hopefully), and with the potential the Kyoto Protocol, and its potential successors, has to wreck the global economy, it may be one paradigm that must not be allowed to follow it's Kuhnian destiny. To do that with minimum collateral damage seems difficult. Ps: The irony is that man-made global warming has not been proved at all, yet the paradigm has been set almost in stone. So one must continue debating until the idea is consigned to the dustbin of history. The tragedy is the billions of dollars wasted on the control of emissions in the mean time. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 03:44:02 PM Reid, just ordered the Gold book from Amazon. Should be interesting reading. Thanks for the reference to it. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Green Murder ? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/27/2004 06:09:02 PM ----- BODY: This is an important comment by an African on malaria but one wonders whether it is the Green Movement's subtle method of reducing the planet's population to sustainable levels? Remember Bob Brown's Greens have the stated policy of reducing Australia's population by 50%. I just wonder how they will achieve that goal if they are ever allowed to govern us. I suspect I will be on their hit list for euthanasing, in a sustainablky ecologically responsible manner of course. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: sdp@concentric.net IP: 209.233.16.179 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 02:32:40 AM If the radical Greens ever got into absolute power, they'd make Pol Pot look like a humanitarian. These folks have an explicit ideology that supports the necessity of genocide. Truly despicable. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Global Warming STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/27/2004 06:16:34 PM ----- BODY: Essex and McKitrick, in reply to one of their critics of their book "Taken By Storm" summarise average global temperature as "reducing ad hoc samples from a continuous field of an intensive variable (in this case temperature) to a single arbitrarily-defined index, then trying to interpret changes in the index as reflecting changes in the underlying field when there is no theoretical or physical guidance for connecting the two.", and the rest of it here. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: 0.005 Deg C ???? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 08:08:12 AM ----- BODY: That delightful website Number Watch written by John Brignell has posted the March number of the month 0.005 Deg Celcius but you need to scroll down to the bottom of it, of course. Note how John Brignell describes how one can experimentally measure such a temperature change. And then seriously think how we can measure that for an ocean over 20 years duration. He also has a link to computer modelling which is required study. John also points out to 800 year old water being mentioned in the article referred. Certainly not based on appearance I suspect. How else could you determine the age of water? Radioactive elements? My goodness I had better read the article to see how they managed that, and report back here. Mind you I reported on this absurd temperature earlier on, either here or was it on the Henry Thornton site. Doesn't matter - Number Watch has elevated it to the number of the month and well deserved it is too. Postscript: Two things - 1. 800 years was not measured it seems, and the story is in the press for 2. Where scientific speculators tread, Hollywood is rarely far behind. In the forthcoming science-fiction thriller "The Day After Tomorrow," due in theaters in late May, a breakdown of thermohaline circulation figures in the onscreen climatic catastrophe. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: The UN and the IPCC STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/28/2004 08:37:17 AM ----- BODY: I know it is not one of the issues one would normally raise here but the oil for food operation in Iraq has been discovered to have been a bit more than what it seems and the article is here. What concerns me, more than anything, is the fact that the IPCC published its latest Summaries for Policy Makers (SPM) 7 months before the main scientific document, on which the SPM is based, was published. How can you summarise something that has not yet been published? Jumping the gun a little are we not? This leads to the obviously impolite thought that perhaps the scientific reports were adjusted to be consistent with the SPM? No surely not but it is little wonder there was consistency in the summary and the main report. Now I understand why Richard Lindzen was saying what he did in terms of the NAS report. So it seems that if we look at the Food for Oil issue and extrapolate that mindset to the IPCC process, one wonders if we need to take a closer look at that process as well. After all, all those COP's and meetings on climate in delightful touristy places must cost us, the taxpayers, fortunes. Or is there more to it than what we are led to believe? And of course we must always reduce our examination to the final question - who benefits from implementation of Kyoto? And which UN leading lights have business connections associated with potential carbon trading companies. Hmmmmm? Isn't this supposed to be the job of investigative journalism? One starts to smell something a little rotten, not in Denmark, but in the UN building in New York. Remember that the smell in Denmark was effectively disinfected a month ago. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: CO2 Content of Atmosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/28/2004 09:49:08 AM ----- BODY: Officially (see the John Daly site) the level of CO2 is 373.07 ppmv. This is the latest figure from the Moana Loa observatory. Which looks like a large number but it isn't - it is 373.07 parts per million by volume where 1000 ppmv is equal to 0.1%v). (373.07/1,000,000.0)*100=.0373%v in case you do not believe my arithmetic. It is 0.0373 % by volume. Of this 14% is anthropogenic CO2 (Taking worst case scenario). This means that 0.00522% of atmospheric CO2 is due to Anthropogenic CO2. So little CO2 has such a great effect on temperature? A barely measureable quantity has such a drastic effect on temperature? COMMENT:Clearly we need to review the theory that burning fossil fuels generates CO2 which, being a greenhouse gas (using this term in the loosest sense), is warming the atmosphere. Computer models based on this assumption have been unable to predict future temperatures. It seems very much like the theory of Anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming is a Green Activist Luddite belief based on innate fear of capitalism rather than a scientifically derived conclusion from experiment. Imagine trying to mix a standard volume of atmosphere in some sort of lab container, adding .0052% CO2, and then seeing what happens to it in terms of heat transference. I actually wonder if it could be measured experimentally? It seems we could be dealing with numbers at the limit of detection. Is the global warming scare another one of the century's great scams? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reid of America EMAIL: reid@aol.com IP: 67.23.26.138 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 11:38:33 AM The Kyoto Treaty is a power grab by the UN. Central planning and socialist economics have been discredited by the fall of the Soviet Union and the chronic underperformance of socialist economies. Kyoto was designed to shift economic power back to the central planners. Someone who clearly sees this is Andrei Illarionov, the economic advisor to Russian President Putin. He stated that Kyoto is a political game that the Europeans are playing with the Americans for global economic control. He correctly called Kyoto "economic Aushwitz". http://www.techcentralstation.com/120903G.html ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 11:54:16 AM Which is incidentally the tack that the authors of Man-Made Global Warming; Unravelling a Mystery are making, albeit in an indirect fashion. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/28/2004 01:56:53 PM Here is a link http://www.physlink.com/Reference/AirComposition.cfm which has CO2 at 0.0314% in 1997. (I was looking for that link and finally found in a folder in the favourites labelled "temp" as distinct from "temperature" folder where it should have been in the first place. At least my arithmetic is OK. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brad Tittle EMAIL: thegerm@charter.net IP: 68.115.2.89 URL: DATE: 04/01/2004 06:47:04 AM The beer drinkers guide to global warming! 4 bottles light beer (aka N2). 1 bottle regular beer (aka O2). 1 tbsp port (aka H20) 1 tbsp grape juice (aka other gases) pipete (using a straw) from the cap of one of the beers filled with Monopoly (100% alcohol)(aka CO2). Mix in a big container and drink up. Ponder the effect of CO2 on alcoholic content. brad Ponder the effect ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 04/01/2004 07:42:38 PM >From which we conclude that A-CO2 is political, not scientific. If so, how the hell so scientists then argue? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 04/01/2004 07:43:06 PM do, do :-( ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Victoria bans GM crops STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 10:20:08 AM ----- BODY: Andrew Bolt writes in the Herald Sun that Bracks has decided to BAN GM crops for four years. Like WA I suspect. This has more to do with getting Green preferences than anything else. The ALP machine men cannot be that stupid can they? Or wait a minute, the left calls the shots in Victoria, so maybe they have gone feral and taken leave of their senses for short term political gain. I wonder if it means going back to an economic depression before we realise what the Green's real agenda is. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Uranium leakage? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 11:02:48 AM ----- BODY: There is something not right here - because if potable water has suddenly got uranium in it (uranium is very soluble in water) one wonders where the company was drawing its water supply from? Let me recount another incident, years ago on the ABC - when (I think it was the 7:30 Report) it showed some video of a timber harvesting operation near the NSW south (Tanja-Tathra area I think) at which an explosion occurred - and cited as a nasty timber company despoiling the lovely trees etc. Odd that was all that was mentioned about the affair - nothing in the news the next day, deathly silence. Except for one glaring inconsistency - how could an amateur video camera user, be on site at a remote timber harvesting operation, on a weekend, at the right place at the right time to record an explosion? It means that the camera operator knew about the explosion before hand, and leads to the extremely impolite thought that perhaps the explosion was engineered by the Greenies as part of their war against civilisation, and the timber harvesting operation in particular. So in terms of the "sudden" appearance of uranium in the shower water and what not, I will bet London to a brick that the Greenies engineered that to gain media attention to try to get the Ranger Uranium Mine closed. No mining operator is that dumb to have potable water resources being mistaken for mine water output. Health and Occupational Safety regulations have specific requirements. No, my guess is that the Greens are behind this little operation at the Ranger Mine in the Northern Territory. (In case someone might think other wise that I may not know anything about uranium, I was part of the exploration team that evaluated the Yeelirrie Uranium deposit; I swam in the uraniferous water, and tasted some of it when we were looking for potable water on the pastoral property, and apart from some horns growing out of my forehead, there is not much wrong with me after all these years. Oh yes, I forgot about my spiked tail which I have to hide, and my cloven feet.) PS - sure was not right - had the wrong link :-( Now fixed :-) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Global Warming - The Movie STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: DATE: 03/28/2004 11:26:32 AM ----- BODY: Well, this is another fine mess Hollywood has got us into, with apologies to Oliver Hardy. A review about an upcoming movie. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Canada heading for the dark ages - one light bulb at a time STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 01:24:14 PM ----- BODY: OTTAWA -- The federal government has issued a national call to battle, a battle in which no sacrifice is too small. It will not be fought on the beaches, but in the kitchens and laundry rooms of the nation; not in the air, but in the attics. Under the One-Tonne Challenge program, officially launched yesterday, Canadians are being urged to take on the enemy -- climate change -- one light bulb at a time. Read all about it here ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Ignoring CO2 as a Greenhouse Gas STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: Comment CATEGORY: Comment DATE: 03/28/2004 02:57:06 PM ----- BODY: John Brignell (Of Number Watch) has some concise explanations of various scientific concepts, as well as those of statistics, in his FAQ section and in the Greenhouse section, he writes that CO2 and CH4 are of such concentrations, that in terms of any Greenhouse effect, they may be ignored. Ignored! Yes Ignored! And my sentiments exactly - I don't think I have read a more concise conclusion any where else, and I can but agree. Imagine a man-made gas comprising 0.0052% by volume of the earth's atmosphere being responsible for its alleged temperature rise. Or is it the land which has got hotter. No it is the sea - some of it rose 0.005 deg C over 20 years, did it not? It was awarded Number of the Month for March 2004! If you follow another link from the Greenhouse effect FAQ, you finally discover that all Human greenhouse effects TOTAL 0.28% of the total Greenhouse effect. But, no, the IPCC and SPM documents state clearly that this is not the case. What the IPCC has omitted to tell us is that Global Warming is not happening on planet earth, but in the virtual Planet Utopia resident in the various climate computers stationed over the earth. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Updated Reality Check STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 05:10:59 PM ----- BODY: The John Daly site has updated its bouncing reality check. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: More Greenpeace propaganda STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/28/2004 05:17:34 PM ----- BODY: Greenpeace has decided that the Exon Valdez disaster has not recovered, but if you read the link to their announcement, no references are cited so you can check out - just more of the usual anti-oil diatribe. Oh they got it from Science magazine, of course. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: Louis TITLE: Global warming spirals upwards? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 2 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 PRIMARY CATEGORY: News CATEGORY: News DATE: 03/29/2004 07:15:47 AM ----- BODY: Fresh from the Independent of the UK! This is the most blatant piece of scientific misreporting yet. They report that "Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control". The reporting is out of control. CO2 has "jumped" from 0.0372% to 0.0379% and note that the jumps are in the 4th decimal place. These levels of CO2 are so miniscule that it is essentially irrelevant from a global warming perspective. Clearly what is warming is the rhetoric, not the earth. This is bizarre science! ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: pilchard27@nospam.yahoo.com.au IP: 203.15.73.3 URL: DATE: 03/29/2004 10:31:45 AM C'mon Louis, Everyone knows the difference between 'the greenhouse effect' caused mainly by water vapor, and 'the enhanced greenhouse effect', which is due to increasing concentrations of CO2, methane etc. The greenhouse effect: If there was no water vapor or co2 or other atmospheric gases, the earth would probably average about -50 degrees or something. The enhanced greenhouse effect: Increasing the concentration of CO2 and methane etc could result in temp increases from 1 to 6 degrees over the next hundred years. You are highlighting the smaller role that CO2 plays in 'the greenhouse effect', and using that to say 'the enhanced greenhouse effect' is wrong. You neglect to mention that the theoretical change in temp due to 'the enhanced greeenhouse effect' is small compared to the warming of 'the greenhouse effect'. (no atmosphere? Brrr!) So it is not necessarily wrong for an increase in CO2 to cause the enhanced greenhouse effect, even though the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is low. The statistic you should have quoted was not the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the increase in that concentration over the last couple hundred years (about a 30% increase isn't it? Higher than its been in the last 400k years?) It is bizarre science to use statistics that are relevant to the former and apply them to the latter. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/29/2004 11:21:24 AM Steve, The one thing I have never seen is a temperature graph of atmospheric temperature vs atmospheric water content vs time. Since water is the dominant greenhouse component, I would have thought that data on this component would be paramount in trying to understand perceived global temperature rises. So it remains bizarre that this most important index is not quoted any where, only CO2. Unless of course they cannot really measure it, and we do know that no one has been able to model water in the atmosphere.....and no one has a political agenda to push with water in the atmosphere, so I suppose that explains it all. How bizarre. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: lars EMAIL: lars@seaice.de IP: 134.102.186.40 URL: http://www.seaice.de DATE: 03/31/2004 12:02:15 AM Louis, that year-to-year increase of CO2 is considerably higher than the average annual increase over the past decade. If you would write 379 parts per million by volume (ppmv) instead of 0.0379%, the jump would not be in the 4th decimal place. This is bizzare science! You should also consider that H2O and CO2 emission spectrum is different! CO2 absorbs radiation at wavelengths (i.e. at ~4um and ~15um) where H2O is transparent. H2O is of course a very important climate feedback parameter. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Louis EMAIL: fgserv7747@fastmail.com.au IP: 211.29.136.12 URL: DATE: 03/31/2004 07:11:34 AM Lars, it is a jump at the 4th decimal place when it is expressed as a percentage. It cannot be construed as a 4th decimal place jump when expressed as ppmv. So it is not bizarre. I am quite aware that H2O and CO2 have different emission spectra, but when CO2, as a greenhouse gas, is compared to water as a greenhouse gas, then it is insignificant. Any variation in CO2 quantities would probably result in a slight increase in the temperature "noise".