Another Guest Post
Greg Hancock
I received an e-mail this week giving a link to an explanation of the current controversy about fabrication of climate change data. The link is http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/
understanding_climategates_hid.html.
Briefly, It appears that by manipulation, massaging and careful choices of of various sources of data about climate and temperature it is possible to prove almost anything.
Traditionally there was a medieval warming period from AD 1000 to 1400, followed by a little ice age. These are reasonably well documented by stories of Irish boats traveling to North America via "Iceland" which was in fact warm and Greenland which was green. The Frost Fairs on the Thames attest to the little ice age.
I received an e-mail this week giving a link to an explanation of the current controversy about fabrication of climate change data. The link is http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/
understanding_climategates_hid.html.
Briefly, It appears that by manipulation, massaging and careful choices of of various sources of data about climate and temperature it is possible to prove almost anything.
Traditionally there was a medieval warming period from AD 1000 to 1400, followed by a little ice age. These are reasonably well documented by stories of Irish boats traveling to North America via "Iceland" which was in fact warm and Greenland which was green. The Frost Fairs on the Thames attest to the little ice age.
18 comments:
Thanks for this.
I like to have access to both the argument and the counter-argument on any issue.
I am ambivalent about the threat of climate change. I would rate myself as 65% convinced that it is real, in need of a solution or a very strong threat. The other 35% of me is cynical, thinking that we are being manipulated, things are being exaggerated and public opinion "managed"
As with most things, the true-belivers on either side often make pronouncements that are hard for a common sense person to swallow. That doesn't do anyone any favours in trying to understand the issue properly.
Here is someone's visual attempt to summarize the story - although I dislike when issues are reduced to two opposing views.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/
That's quite a website. Along with denying climate change, it promotes Sarah Palin as the potential leader of an "american renaissance", advocates a complete moratorium on legal immigration, and makes it's opposition to abortion rights very clear.
There's more, but I saw all I needed to discount whatever positions it takes. Lest I forget, it had fulsome praise for the tea party movement too. Ugh.
I would heartily recommend that the person who posted this item check out rabble.ca for a more reliable take on current events, from a Canadian perspective rather than Republican.
Bjorn Lomborg is the environmentalist/statistician that is most credible to me.
All these players, especially the politicians, are like the big duck in the small pond who knows that in a larger pond, he`d just be one of many little ducks quacking in the wind.
Now would be the time for Thompson and Delanty to dust off their alleged leadership qualities and announce the resumption of the committee`s work. That would really show some class.
On the subject of "Climategate," I agree with what's said in Rick Salutin's column in today's The Globe and Mail, "Climategate's not evil. It's just unhinged"
rabble.ca is a crap-hole for progressives, the very people who brought us Robert Mugabe, and the Castro brothers dynasty, amongst many other dictatorshits as well the censorious Human Rights Commissions.
Rabble.ca is the opposite side of the same coin of political stupidity as the paleolithic Pallin.
PRZT! to both of them.
Wow.
What a difference a bit of editing makes.
My original post contained:
"By choosing to rely on tree rings, and ice core samples, rather than records of temperature, and by switching measurement systems in mid stream climate researchers have managed to show that these temperature fluctuations, traditionally due to wobbles in the earth orbit, did not actually happen and they can therefore claim that temperatures have consistently increased since 1000 AD and "have never been warmer" and are really due to excess CO2 production.
To attribute all changes to CO2 production is foolhardy since it leads to pie in the sky schemes such as unproven CO2 sequestration and "carbon tax trading" where it is permissible to continue doing things as long as you pay a tax. It also means that traditional means of preventing sea levels from threatening land such as the dykes that the Dutch have built for 400 years, and the Thames barrier against high tides are going out of fashion. If one misdiagnoses the problems the cures are unlikely to do any good.
Nothing in this analysis should be seen as arguing against reductions in "pollution" which of course includes acid rain and asthma causing smogs, but the techniques to reduce pollution are not necessarily the ones to reduce CO2.
Even if one doesn't believe conspiracy theories, nor in challenging conventional wisdom, I still recommend reading the article at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html "
The foregoing, and some graphs, were dropped when my posting was published by Ben
To get the article it is necessary to click on the whole web site address. For some reason the link did not go to the article but gave contents list, so you may have missed the important stuff.
Deb: I know that it is easy to judge peole by the company they keep ( a sort of guilt by association) but I am not republican, I do not support Sarah Palin, I am not anti-immigrant or any of the other stuff. I get my Canadian opinion from the Walrus, and the Globe and Mail, although I often find the Globe to be excessively right wing.
The reason I posted the item is because I found the analysis of temperature data to be quite rational, and in fact a mistrust of a belief in "human caused global warming" is a topic that is quite often raised in articles by Canadian professional engineers.
I am sorry I posted something that came from a site that also contained right wing US propaganda and therefore caused dismay to Burd Report readers.
No offense against you intended, Greg. I just get antsy about taking seriously any article that shows up on a website like this.
My endorsement of rabble.ca is not whole hearted either; but I trust their articles more than most.
Just stay away from the babble forum, where strange creatures argue for days, sometimes weeks, about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and if those angels are genuine socialists or closet right wing devils. It's quite disconcerting and makes me glad I don't pretend to be an intellectual.
It all gets down to the need for crticial thinking, whatever it is we are reading or watching. Even here, we need those skills to insulate us from the bull shit.
The science of climate change will be established by the efforts of honest, hard-working experts. On this issue, the opinions, no matter how well meant, of lay persons, no matter how intelligent, are quite irrelevant.
I have studied mathematics, taught statistics, and provided technical support to users of powerful, computer-based modelling software. None of this qualifies me to weigh in on the climate change issue. I don’t imagine that anyone commenting on this blog is other than what I am myself: an intelligent, interested lay person.
Our role is to do the following:
-- support, financially and administratively, the efforts of our experts;
-- insist that their research be rigorously, transparently honest.
Disasters such as Challenger, Chernobyl, Katrina, Thalidomide, and Walkerton have surely convinced us that dishonesty is deadly.
I personally am persuaded by the extensive, clarifying comments of Elizabeth May, who has monitored the progress and the results of climate research, that there is no “climategate” scandal.
Thanks William for the link to Elizabeth May's analysis. That is someone we can trust on this vital, earth changing issue.
It terrifies me to see how this, our most crucial challenge as humans, is being trivialized and denied by the greedy, who aren't willing to sacrifice a single thing to save the entire world from destruction.
It really is that serious.
"..to save the entire world from destruction." - really?
Do you honestly believe that we humans have the power to "destroy" the world? c'mon Deb. We may have the means by which we could alter our world enough to make it inhabitable for humans, and when, and if that should actually happen, once we humans have thusly eliminated ourselves from the earth's environs, nature will take its course, without our "expert guidance" and regenerate itself in whatever form that may be. To say we have the power to "destroy the world" seems a bit over the top to me.
Apart from that, science is incomplete in its ability to explain the universe(s) and it is incapable of determining, with certainty, what the world will be a few thousand years from now, so science is not the only instrument by which we should manage our world today. Science ultimately is also a guessing game, a reasonably good one, but nevertheless an informed (to some degree) guess.
That's one reason why doomsayers are rarely right, or even close to it.
It is always cause for second-thought when I find myself agreeing with Wally but I find Bjorn Lomborg takes a refreshing and realistic approach, too. Balanced without being a denier -- which he has wrongly been accused of being.
Last year I read Bjorn Lomborg's recent and highly intelligent book, Cool It. His web site contains a brief sample from this book.
The sky-is-falling doomster dumpsters hollering on and on about world catastrophe, global apocalypso, armed to the teeth with common-good-compassion, are a serious impediment to identifying real problemsn that need to be addressed with our collectively hard-earned public treasure.
Read it here:
http://www.lomborg.com/cool_it/sample/
Here's an interesting link.
Ralph Torrie, of Cobourg, writing from Copenhagen.
http://www.northumberlandview.ca/modules.php?op=modload&name=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=11&page_id=565
View Bjorn Lomborg as he responds to Elizabeth May's extravagant litany of doom.
Ben,
I hope you are okay.
The most recent comment added to a post that I see on your blog is Monday December 14 2009 3:07 pm.
3 days with no updates.
The most recent post is Friday December 11 2009.
6 days without a new post.
We are starved.
I wish a quick resolution to whatever is keeping your from your self-appointed blog tasks.
Watch Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, lose her rationality in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msKPlM_UmRM
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