And so it begins . . .

"

DalaiLama wrote:

If Exxon funded a study that produced data refuting climate change who would accept it? If you were a university scientist and you asked for money for a study that you felt would refute climate change theory, would you be likely to get the money, or likely to have your tenure track canceled and your contract not renewed?

I'm pretty sure private funding dried up when things started to get relatively settled. I remember having read about the Koch brothers funding a skeptic than eventually found results consistent with the current theories. It was hilarious. So, no, there is no money for that because the supply of good skeptical science is becoming non existant.

...

By the way, that graph I analyzed comes from a site of a denier, it's easy to figure from the link, I know the blog from before. It's that kind of data manipulation that I dislike a lot. It shows dishonesty and a lack of transparency.

I wonder if the whole exageration thing than many claim is just scientifics improving their work and then other people blowing it up out of proportion, really. One side is just worse than the other about that, to the point of being blatant.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'm not quite as tinfoil as Dalai about the motive behind the environmentalist movement, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that's part of what keeps it going now. Although I doubt you'd find many eugenics supporters among the crowd which thinks ever owl life matters.

Hmm, I wouldn't say most scientists have a conscious motive to hide or disguise anything. Probably not even an unconscious motive.

What they are faced with is backlash, ridicule and job stagnation or job loss if they speak up. That is true of just about any job in a big organization. "Just get in the boat and row" is a mindset that's tough to break when your livelihood is at stake.

If the academic, governmental and journal publishing grandees welcomed the dissent, there would barely be any issue at all. While the presumptive leading theorists wouldn't have time to field every skeptical critic's idea, they could hold regular conferences or periodic holding symposiums where both sides were welcome and lauded for bringing facts to the table where they can be dissected and measured.

That there might be a handful of corrupt/unethical scientists is not really a concern, as that happens in every field that I am aware of, and they are not representative of the whole at all.

The overall movement has a momentum that is on its third generation (maybe second if you consider when the educational system really started emphasizing environmentalism). That is tough to break.

Even if space aliens landed tomorrow and provided positive proof that they made the world and humans it would be 20-30 years before the public began reluctantly accepting it.

That is also true of the climate change skeptics. Pushing people towards an opinion isn't going to make them agree with the climate change group any faster.

Somewhere there must be a giant cave where people pupate in absolute darkness in a mechanical cocoon, taught to speak by twitter and educated by facebook and tumblr before they eagerly spread their wings and become public policy makers. I haven't seen any metadata suggesting 17 year cycles though.

"

DalaiLama wrote:

My main point in starting this topic was not to claim whether one side of the issue was right or wrong, but to point out that BANNING knowledge or ideas is typically the tactic used by despots.

Brave New World, Animal Farm, Catch 22, Green Eggs and Ham, 1984, Charlotte's Web, To Kill a Mockingbird and many others were banned.

I take it you are only expressing a worry over the possibility of slipping down a slope, but if the removal of factually incorrect "education" material is really comparable to the subjugation and persecution of people then you might as well be fighting for creationism in biology class or (ironically, and pardon the Goodwin) holocaust denial in history class.

"

NeroNoah wrote:

"

DalaiLama wrote:

If Exxon funded a study that produced data refuting climate change who would accept it? If you were a university scientist and you asked for money for a study that you felt would refute climate change theory, would you be likely to get the money, or likely to have your tenure track canceled and your contract not renewed?

I'm pretty sure private funding dried up when things started to get relatively settled. I remember having read about the Koch brothers funding a skeptic than eventually found results consistent with the current theories. It was hilarious.

...

By the way, that graph I analyzed comes from a site of a denier, it's easy to figure from the link, I know the blog from before. It's that kind of data manipulation that I dislike a lot. It shows dishonesty and a lack of transparency.

Denier? As opposed to a climate Proselytizer site? Maybe Climate Evangelist is a better term?

Like the pro - X and pro - Y movement, separating people into two camps makes it easier to control what they think. If you've read 1984, you'll immediately recognize what movement leaders are doing when they separate people into various groups.


If you mean the Wattsup site https://wattsupwiththat.com, then you should look very carefully at the site again. When graphs or data are originally posted there, they are usually sourced (references given so that you can check them out) or direct links from the original site. Sometimes the original site is no longer extant - which happens to a lot of information over time.

The site is reputable. Whether you agree or disagree with the site's viewpoints is up to you, but the information there can be easily checked out.

Here's the bio of the site creator:



I’m a former AMS certified (Seal 676 retired) television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air and who also operates a weather technology and content business, as well as continues daily forecasting on radio, just for fun.



Weather measurement and weather presentation technology is my specialty.

As you can see most of my work is in weather technology such as weather stations, weather data processing systems, and weather graphics creation and display. While I’m not a degreed climate scientist, I’ll point out that neither is Al Gore, and his specialty is presentation also. And that’s part of what this blog is about: presentation of weather and climate data in a form the public can understand and discuss.



Anthropogenesis (KOV) 8:7 "Let he who is without carbon footprint casteth the first hyperlink."

Mann 3:16 (KOV) "For the IPCC so loveth the world that it giveth its one and only hockey stick, that whoever believeth in it shall not lack funding but have eternal tenure."

I have caught that guy with the pants down before. No accurate data helps if you obfuscate and misinterprete often. I have no respect for him. He is a sophist.

"

NeroNoah wrote:

^By the way, the paper I linked considers precipitations.

I shouldn't have been so sure about nuclear winter, yet what I searched indicates that is not a totally discarded hypothesis, it's something that keeps being refined.

"Abstract.

"We use a modern climate model and new estimates of smoke generated by fires in contemporary cities to calculate the response of the climate system to a regional nuclear war between emerging third world nuclear powers using 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal) on cities
in the subtropics."



How many of those "Subtropic" nations are on the nuke list? Brazil disavowed its nuclear program, and IIRC, Argentina no longer claims to have nukes, and South Africa is either there or well on its way to being nuke free. I could google and double check that, but the gist is that the only real potential target for 100 nuclear weapons would be India, and Pakistan would be the only one with any real possibility of attacking them.

"Hiroshima size" is great for propaganda/recognition purposes, but 20KT is not a standard size at all. 50KT (tactical) in a patterned MIRV attack, or a .5MT or 1.2MT yield is much more prevalent for a "soft" target like a city. So, this study or analysis is starting out with Garbage in, so is suspect the GIGO model will hold.

"The realization, based on research conducted jointly by Western and Soviet scientists (Crutzen and Birks, 1982; Aleksandrov and Stenchikov, 1983; Turco et
al., 1983, 1990; Robock, 1984; Pittock et al., 1986; Harwell
and Hutchinson, 1986; Sagan and Turco, 1990)"

I don't recall if the 1990 Sagan and Turco study was among those I had previously read about. All the others were thoroughly covered and discredited in the Foreign Affairs.

You can look at an overview of the Harwell and Hutchinson 1986 paper here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219155/

They are still relying on ground blasts, and extrapolating plastic usage and relying on heavy plastic soot for their scenario. They don't really have any new data, just extrapolation, and they have 24,000 nuclear weapons at >1 megaton in their calculations.

Why couldn't they bother reading a single (yes, ONE would have been enough) document from Strategic Air Command or any other nuclear warfare agency such as the department of defense on nuclear strategy?

The bulk of the heaviest nukes are used on the enemy's nuclear weapons and military areas. A smaller portion of the .5 - 2 megaton nukes are reserved for the cities.

Of their supposed 24 gigatons of nuclear weapons, roughly 5 GT would hit major metropolitan areas.

This isn't secret stuff. They just didn't bother doing the research, or the results didn't fit with what they wanted them to be, so they omitted them.

So why did they pick Subtropical areas? If you recall what I said about previous studies and the limited time frame the attack had to happen in, then you will know why.

And here it is:


This long aerosol lifetime is different from results found in previous nuclear winter simulations, which either fixed the vertical extent of the aerosols (Turco et al., 1983) or used older-generation climate models with limited vertical resolution and low model tops
(Aleksandrov and Stenchikov, 1983; Covey et al., 1984; Malone et al., 1986), artificially limiting the particle lifetimes.

In addition, the subtropical latitude of the smoke injections, in the case investigated here, results in more solar heating than in previous nuclear winter scenarios, which considered smoke from the midlatitude Soviet Union, Europe, and the U.S. The lower latitude also ensures that lofting would take place year-round. Therefore the large effects may not be limited to wars that occur in spring and summer, as previously found (Robock, 1984; Covey et al., 1984; Schneider and Thompson, 1988).

They improved their atmospheric model (which is good)but then they specifically biased their study by using initial conditions that would guarantee the results they wanted.

I hope I'm disillusioning you on scientists. Most of them are honest.

"

Upandatem wrote:

"

DalaiLama wrote:

My main point in starting this topic was not to claim whether one side of the issue was right or wrong, but to point out that BANNING knowledge or ideas is typically the tactic used by despots.

Brave New World, Animal Farm, Catch 22, Green Eggs and Ham, 1984, Charlotte's Web, To Kill a Mockingbird and many others were banned.

I take it you are only expressing a worry over the possibility of slipping down a slope, but if the removal of factually incorrect "education" material is really comparable to the subjugation and persecution of people then you might as well be fighting for creationism in biology class or (ironically, and pardon the Goodwin) holocaust denial in history class.

The factually incorrect information (verified data, not assumptions) shouldn't be in the textbooks. If a subject is in dispute, it should be listed with a small paragraph that indicates such and the nature of the dispute. Removing books with factual information and opinions that do not gibe with the consensus opinion is indeed heading down that slippery slope.

The Big Bang theory wasn't always the prevailing theory, for instance, and even when it started becoming dominant, there were still mentions of competing theories such as steady state theories. String theory is mentioned in physics classes, with no real verification .... yet, although it looks very nice on paper.

Theoretical physics is a completely different animal though. A lot of it isn't verifiable through testing and with some the only 'scientific' evidence they have are internal mathematical consistencies. Disputing and debating such theories is a must to prevent a kind of scientific religious zealotry from developing around them.

Climate change is in a different category with the evidence providing concrete testing and modeling based on proven science.

"

DalaiLama wrote:

They are still relying on ground blasts, and extrapolating plastic usage and relying on heavy plastic soot for their scenario. They don't really have any new data, just extrapolation, and they have 24,000 nuclear weapons at >1 megaton in their calculations.

Can you tell me where it is that assumption (the abstract talks about 100 bombs)? I can't find it. Personally, I don't have any trouble if they pick the conditions (given that I was talking about if it was possible to do, not if it was likely; any rational actor would avoid that scenario as the plague). I have problems with financing shallow research, though. At worst what you said puts it at a silly, unlikely, useless research cathegory rather than false. If the nazi communists wanted to do it, they could...with a truly staggering ammounts of effort, I guess.

"

DalaiLama wrote:

I hope I'm disillusioning you on scientists. Most of them are honest.

Never cared either way, science is science, no matter if results don't agree with one ideas of how things should be. Personally, I don't care if nuclear winter is an exageration/lie, nukes would cause enough destruction as it is, and I would have a talking point less (humans can change climate...with a lot of effort!).

DalaiLamas post in the previous page is a perfect example of a conspiracy theory. I mean, comparing climate change to eugenics..... Sarah Palin did that, 'nough said. You are bringing up a social issue that came up in a world state that slavery was still existent, and even caucasian women in western developed societies could not even vote.

Anyway, this "debate" is a US issue. In EU pretty much everyone has accepted that is happening for too long now. There was never a "debate".


Other than that:

In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.[2][3][4][5][6][7] No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[8] though a few organizations with members in extractive industries hold non-committal positions.[9] Disputes over the key scientific facts of global warming are more prevalent in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where such issues are treated as resolved, and more prevalent in the United States than globally.[10][11]

Many of the issues that are settled within the scientific community, such as human responsibility for global warming, remain the subject of politically or economically motivated attempts to downplay, dismiss or deny them – an ideological phenomenon categorised by academics and scientists as climate change denial. The sources of funding for those involved with climate science – both supporting and opposing mainstream scientific positions – have been questioned by both sides. There are debates about the best policy responses to the science, their cost-effectiveness and their urgency. Climate scientists, especially in the United States, have reported official and oil-industry pressure to censor or suppress their work and hide scientific data, with directives not to discuss the subject in public communications. Legal cases regarding global warming, its effects, and measures to reduce it have reached American courts. The fossil fuels lobby has been identified as overtly or covertly supporting efforts to undermine or discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy