Could be bad news for us in the north east.

Don't be so sure that peer review is infallible, especially when it comes to AGW..


AGW proponents have long pushed specific papers through "friendly" publishers..:
www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/24/the_fix_is_in_99280.html


Just a few papers supporting skeptics in AGW? Try 1350 papers to start(just because the
media and the green movement hush the facts doesn't mean they don't exist):
www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

Lots of scientists disagree with the common AGW rhetoric, but rarely get cited nor heard:
www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/

And to those who still believe that line about "hottest (month) on record" here is a good
editorial about a secretive fraud review of temp data and the obvious "adjustments" made to 
the DECREASING raw temperature data into an INCREASING temperature "product" that is 
massaged and "adjusted" by a single source and disseminated out to other scientists:
www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html

Or how about scientists resigning from prestigeous scientific societies because they can't
blindly follow the agenda they are being pushed to follow:
www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366



The major problem is that most publishers cherry pick whom they accept for peer-review to
begin with, before they even publish them. The agenda shown by these publishers is 
obscene, and they push their selectivity as "preserving science" in such a way to attempt 
convincing the common reader that they are doing us a justice by weeding out "non-science", 
when in reality they are suppressing opposing views that might sway a reader's opinion.

There's multiple problems with many of these articles - along with the fact that things like opinion polls do not a study make. But let's start at the start:

The Fix Is In: First of all there's no explanation or email transcripts provided but near as I can tell, the purpose of providing data is that the data is to be provided to journals, other peers or universities for attempts to recreate methodology or for related projects and occasionally for review of statistical methods. It is not necessarily for public exposure because the work itself is the property of the University - it's worth money. Especially to Steve McIntyre who is, as the wiki says:

 is a Canadian mining exploration company director.

Second of all - that statistical trick - the "Hockey Stick" they rant of as being the source of evil? It's the result of an averaging process - that's not incorrect, but these guys clearly want to use statistical deviation as an indication that they're wrong. When you go back to the source of the accusation (Steve McIntyre...golly!) we see him attempt multiple averaging algorithms that can roughly match it and then some speculation. This is not proof - this is feeding technical jargon to hobbyists to justify a standpoint. He doesn't mention that all statistics employs averaging windows, he doesn't mention the p function and he doesn't have any transcript to show he attempted to get the original methodological data. He's just out to "smash that stick".

Yeah, absolutely not permitting this as some sort of unbiased scientifical discourse. This is some libertarian scumbag's blog as to why it's okay to do what he does for a living. This man has a clear industrial and financial bias and it's not BIG ACADEMIA keeping his tinfoil capitalism out of the loop. Tea Party esque grass-roots right at its worst, simply gross.

Pop Tech Archive

An archive of papers is great, but the title and the nature of this archive is nonsense. Some papers are out-dated or providing case arguments for bygone studies (For instance some debate Polar Bears becoming a threatened species, when the ecology community made that classification years ago). Some even have implicit problems that they argue global warming is a good thing: link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01027343

Which nonetheless means the premise of global warming is true. But I'm not here to pick this apart. I'm here to repeatedly demonstrate that this is a bunch of oil tycoon lead industrialist bullshit. 

Top Scientists Start To Examine Fiddled Global Warming Figures

I didn't think I'd ever read an article by a living man who thought cigarettes and asbestos aren't carcinogenic, but here I am.

First of all - the man outright lies. He claims that this body who will investigate these errors is run by a team of Climate Change believers - but the opposite is the case. The Global Warming Policy Foundation is one of the UK's most prominent Climate Change-denial organisation. And, ironically, this same institution has refused Freedom of Information act requests on their financial history. So much for transparency.

Secondly it's not a scientific enquiry. The website lets you submit any errors you spot by PDF - meaning Jonny A. Tinfoiller with his background in paranoia and Orange County Chopper enthusiasm is really the only target audience. Scientists would usually do the research themselves or request cooperation from universities, not ask the internet.

This is the same group behind the "Climate Gate" controversy. The same one that the academic community just shrugged at once people had read the emails. Quoting this is ludicrous.

The Forbes Article:

It's an opinion poll. You can't quote a fringe idea on the basis that "facts are facts" and then argue you're right because people agree with you. Not to mention including engineers is farcical - they're often technically good, but they have no ecological or meteorological background.

the same goes for the WSJ article. They need to provide specific proof rather than just jumping up and down when they're no longer allowed just sit at meetings and say "All that data is great but global warming isn't real". That's exactly why this was brought in, was to clamp down on non-constructive and irrelevant criticism of global warming studies.

The way these people go on is absurd. These papers do get rejected too. It's not like psychology, methodological flaws can and will be found.

To summarize

Look; the facts are simple. It's happening, and basically everywhere but a large minority of America will pretty much admit that. That's over 7.5 billion people worth of nations in a majority opposition to you, to take the same road as those opinion polls. Sadly it's exactly that deluded under-dog mentality that unfortunately allows these globalist conspiracies to exist. We're the only bastion to be free'd of this menace etc. etc. Well sorry but the consensus is empirical, not liberal. This is not Obamacare, or something else Rush Limbaugh will shriek the evils of in your ear;this is a set of trends that have been repeatedly proven and your wackjob media-industrial complex can't change that. The holes in the OZone layer above New Zealand, the deforestation of Africa's effect on climate, the changes to the size of the Arctic circle, the changing PH and temperature of most oceans. The same bodies that wouldn't step into Rwanda until the Genocide was photographically proven have set up bodies to monitor global temperatures. No tinfoiler or Oil firm quack has yet to explain away any of this. Even China has planted huge amounts of forestry to combat pollution and they don't give a shit about anything.

Transistors are statistically modelled things written about in academic papers too, right? That could be wrong too. But I don't see any Miller-Effect-Gate. Probably because there's no money is disproving base-junction capacitance. It's literally propaganda.

There may be truth in the thought that human activity isn't the sole cause of climate change, but there's no doubt it certainly isn't helping.

From where I sit I'd just as soon not send my federal tax dollars in the form of disaster relief to states that have an official policy of treating climate change as a hoax. Particularly when they get hit with tornado outbreaks, drought and hurricanes that would be typical occurrences every 20 years that now seem to be happening every year. If you're going to make that bed by denying the science, you better be prepared to lie in it... alone.

Climate Change Alarmists will dispute real evidence as it contradicts their "science".

Climate Change Alarmists
We are very quiet. There is no need for any change. We do our things, slowly, much too slow, and we know it. I am even more chilled about it. I don't have kids, i am an atheist and believe that my life ends without anything thereafter except maybe very abstract things like memories of others that live on. I am not alarmed but more in some fatalistic excitement of a very curious mind about how things develope.
Nobody knows how the most rapid temperature changes escalate in detail. But this has happened in the past also, before industrialisation. Right now, it goes slowly, especially for the 1st world countries. Most natural multi-factorial processes don't tend to work in a linear fashion, many systems, esp. closed systems, go belly up/escalate more in an exponential style, like, say, financial processes in capitalism or populations of living organisms. Not what most people get any intuitive understanding for in their lives.
Not a matter of belief against science or against facts. Things will happen with many unknown factors. No matter if anyone believes in it or not. With a bit of luck, i won't experience the near worst in my lifetime...
So much for alarmism on my side...i heard about some of those facts already in the end 80's when we studied together with meteorologists and polarecologists at the institute of physics at the university. Nothing new at all for me in general. Just excited how things develope...

Head scratching because that "real evidence" you speak of doesn't exist, the science is utterly lopsided in the favor of... FACT based science.

to my friends overseas, this is the main (cough!)... "news" source  that most of the right winger/climate change deniers around the US get their info from, nuff said....(and no, i'm sorry to say it's not a joke)

Well...before this thread degrades into one of those horrible, hysteria based, partisan political internet feces flinging tournaments, let me pose a few questions to the folks on both sides of the argument; (keep in mind I'm kind of an objective third party here - I'm 50 years old with no kids; my DNA dies with me so - not to sound malicious - the trials and tribulations of the human race 50 years down the road aren't too much concern to me either way)

Does your perspective on this issue even allow for the possibility you might be wrong?

What are the consequences to posterity if we proceed using your perspective and it turns out you're dead wrong?

Is there any kind of societal benefit to be realized if you're wrong?

Finally, if you're wrong what's your "plan B"?

(note: insisting that you're not wrong is NOT answering the questions)

While I ponder the responses to other questions and comments in this thread, I'll start by answering yours since it's actually pretty well balanced.

Yes, I could be wrong.  I believe that the earth is currently warming, but I do not believe that humanity is the primary driver of earth climate changing.  As an engineer and a scientist, I will always agree that I could be wrong, however, based on the evidence I have seen in datasets and papers that don't/won't get run by the media, I have a good degree of confidence that I am not wrong.  Unfortunately there is too much politics involved in all this AGW nonsense.  Too much money to be made in carbon taxation, too much money to be made in controlling industry and materials in the name of "stopping global warming" for me to ignore that the facts are presented in a wholly one sided nature, in order to convince the public they need a governmental entity to step in, take total control and save us.

Right now, humanity is flourishing.  You'd never believe it due to the constant barrage of commercials for dying kids in africa (yes, I do donate to them), but overall, the earth is the greenest it's been in 100 years, grown food is the most abundant it has been in recorded history, and diseases are dropping to their lowest levels in history.  Some of this is pure technology, some of it is education, but humanity has always done better in a warmer climate, as you can see when looking at population maps, with the majority of the population centering around the warmest places on the planet.  Now, I don't know if humanity will do better than this if the planet warms to temperatures beyond what it has in the past, but right now it seems to be doing pretty well all things considered.

If I'm dead wrong and humanity collapses due to uncharacteristic warming, then the only positive societal benefit will be that the earth will eventually balance out without us or at least those humans left will probably find a better balance with nature. 

Plan B?  Fortunately, it looks like the earth is much more resilient to humanity than has been guessed at previously, so we have some time to work out how to fix the climate.  Unfortunately, our current technology to assess climate change is crude compared to pretty much every other industry (what we have now boils down to barely-educated guessing), so we won't know that climate has been damaged until it already happened, hypothetically speaking of course.  I'm sure future generations will have better technology to determine climate norms.

However, if we could catch any damage, the primary concern will be how to move away from fossil fuels.  Honestly I like the Thorium Breeder fuel initiative for a clean power source.  You load in low quality thorium fuel and it breeds it's own fissile material over time.  The fuel cycle itself is different from our current uranium/plutonium/MOX cycle, and it consumes most of the byproducts of fission, leaving only a small amount of low radioactive wastes that could be cleaned and recycled again.  The amount of wastes would be orders of magnitude lower than current, and the technology has been known since the 1950's to be viable.  This fission cycle is also negative feedback and needs constant work to keep fissioning, thus it's inherently safe from meltdown.  Unfortunately for the general public, thorium cycles cannot produce bomb worthy byproducts, unlike the uranium cycle, and thus the government shut down any further studies on thorium as fuel in the 1950/60 era.  Other problems with high-temp metallurgy capable of handling the heat and radiation have only recently been solved, so thorium fuel is a completely viable option, but only needs about 10 billion dollars invested to see it come to a commercial option.  China has already started work on the world's first thorium fuel reactor, courtesy of the US government.  We recently allowed them to tour the only thorium fuel facility in the USA and gave them all our knowledge on the matter.  It'll be another 10 years or so before they have something on-line.  I suppose we'll wait and see what happens.

pesticides, a decline in bee populations and a sharp rise in yellow jacket populations. Coincidence? Not a chance.

Pollution is the real issue that needs to be dealt with.

I posted plenty of facts with links earlier in the thread, but nobody bothered to read nor reply.  They just kept going with the articulate but fact free diatribes of their own, all while complaining of the same from myself and others.

How about this for fact:

CO2 lags temp in ice cores, showing that temp increases are the cause of CO2 increases.  It's here, it's raw data, it's free from politics, and it categorically proves that the basic tenet of CO2 rise being behind human-caused global warming is false.  Will it be enough to change anyone's mind once they see it?  Nope, not likely.  It only makes folks buckle down on their beliefs and try harder to disprove such "skeptical" papers, rather than accepting the facts laid before them

The global warming believers talk about facts, but when faced with opposing facts, they almost always resort to something along the lines of "paid for by Big Oil" or some other hand-waving nonsense in order to preserve their beliefs and stifle discussion.



From a real Danish research paper no less!:

www.clim-past.net/9/2507/2013/cp-9-2507-2013.html