Y2Kyoto: The Rain In Spain

20 Replies to “Y2Kyoto: The Rain In Spain”

1. How long before we hear this refrain?
   “But any change, up or down, is evidence of global climate change. Unless everything stays absolutely the same for the next hundred years, it will be evidence of anthropogenic global climate change”

2. Roy Green is talking about the Kyoto subject right now with Lorrie Goldstean.
   Listen here.
   http://www.900chml.com/

3. At the PetroCan in Courtenay BC, gas was 99.9 cents per litre yesterday.
   A few weeks ago, the Saudis bumped the oil barrel price downward to $55. Since then the cost has been creeping upward to around $59.
   With the quickly growing rate of hybrid auto sales you would think there would be a drop in the price of oil.
   The price however is probably more affected by the heat between the USA and Iran.
   Iran is poorly governed with rusulting high unemployment and failing stock markets. Their one saving grace is the high return on oil and gas.
   Understandable then that Ahmadinejad would rant about Nuking Israel when every wild outburst raises the price of the oil he sells.
   A spring warming trend across America shouild bring a drop in oil prices, barring anything too wild out of Iran. = TG

4. The Kyoto mantra is that they can set the thermostat for the earth, just show them the money.

5. Here we go agin. Remember the famous Hockey Stick Graph concocted by Mann et al..which showed that the worlds temperature has ben rising. This was the graph that IPCC used to proove that Global warming was happenning. The social scientists ran with this and came up with the Kyoto protocol. Well after the protocol was implemented, Mann finally released his data and no other scientist could duplicate his results. When scientists analyzed Manns computer data they realized that his program would disregard any information or data that didn’t support his Hockey Stick conclusion. But it’s too late the media and social scientists already had made up their mind and basically got the public whipped into a state of fear.
   Now we have Déjà vu all over again. The latest release from the IPCC comes to the conclusion that again says that Global warmong is here and they have published their conclusions. Interestingly enough the data that is supposed to support these conclusions won’t be made available to the public until May. Why? Are they going to fabricate data to support their conclusions or are they going to erase and disregard any data that doesn’t support the recent conclusions. Why isn’t the press asking theses questions before its too late to make any difference.

6. A said on an earlier thread: “Can anybody here name a single independent scientific body, as a proxy for a peer-reviewed locus of knowledge, that argues that the AGW thesis is without merit?”
   Therein lies my chief objection to AGW. The supporting studies published in journals ARE NOT PEER REVIEWED. That is my understanding; please correct me, and cite references, if I am in error.
   The IPCC is a political body created to confirm AGW. The latest report was written by bureaucrats and politicians. I understand they took the worst-case scenarios of their comprehensive report, to be released in May. So, if we accept AGW as proven theory, or at least having substantial scientific support (which I would accept), we know it has become politicized and some of the conclusions, especially concerning temperature and sea level rises, represent worst outcomes, and my understanding is they have been “sexed up.”
   Stern’s report, again from what I’ve read, has made some serious methodological errors which taint his conclusions.
   Al Gore has taken this exaggeration further, amplified it, to produce ridiculous conclusions.
   Again, I’m not saying AGW is complete bunk, I’m saying it has not passed the science test yet; I am willing to stand corrected on this. I just get suspicious when anytime an objection is raised, someone is smeared as an oil lapdog or we get a pat on the head from Suzuki and are told everything is OK. Please enlighten me.
   Kyoto is another matter, especially for Canada. Destroying western economies will not help the environment. I am all for getting rid of CO2, as long as we reduce “emissions” of CO, metals, radon etc. At some point, the modernizing world, particularly China and India, will have to use a carbon-alternative fuel. We must develop it here; that’s why we can’t send credits abroad. We can develop clean technologies. Canada currently has the safest nuclear reactor in the world, the Candu, which uses spent nuclear fuel rods from less efficient light-water reactors. If anyone wants citation to this Toronto Star article (amazing eh?), I will try and find it. Sequestration, where CO2 is buried is also inefficient, because you end up using a lot of CO2 et al, just to get it into the ground, something like 20% of the emission itself. Chemical sequestration is a better approach, along with scrubbers.
   Kyoto hasn’t been thought through correctly, so Canada must resist it, while doing all we can to develop clean technologies and reduce all polluting emissions.
   Rather long winded, but I hope people get the point that dissenters are not just mouth-breathing neanderthals; they have thought this thing through too.

7. Here we go agin. Remember the famous Hockey Stick Graph concocted by Mann et al..which showed that the worlds temperature has ben rising. This was the graph that IPCC used to proove that Global warming was happenning. The social scientists ran with this and came up with the Kyoto protocol. Well after the protocol was implemented, Mann finally released his data and no other scientist could duplicate his results.
   …it is a preposterous order to teach first and to learn after, yea…, to learn and practice together, is neither commendable for the workman, nor safe for the work.” –1611 King James Translators to the Reader

8. on oldy but still a goody.
   3w.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
   All the real data the IPCC ignores and Dr. Fruit Fly says is funded by Big OIl . . when ya can’t beat ’em, smear ’em.

9. Shamrock: A said on an earlier thread: “Can anybody here name a single independent scientific body, as a proxy for a peer-reviewed locus of knowledge, that argues that the AGW thesis is without merit?” Therein lies my chief objection to AGW. The supporting studies published in journals ARE NOT PEER REVIEWED. That is my understanding; please correct me, and cite references, if I am in error.
   And here is my reply from the earlier thread.
   Actually, the supporting studies are almost all in refereed journals or other peer-reviewed arenas. Oreskes’ (2004) study of 928 journal abstracts with “climate change” as a keyword, none of which diverged from the “consensus” view, is often cited (you can find it by googling “Oreskes 2004”). The formal statements put out by the national academies, the US National Research Council, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meterological Society, etc. are vetted by members, which may or may not be stringently peer-review. Despite being an intergovernmental group, the IPCC’s reports are written and reviewed by scientists, and summarize data primarily published in peer-reviewed sources. I encourage you to download the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report and peruse the references yourself.
   The IPCC is a political body created to confirm AGW. The latest report was written by bureaucrats and politicians. I understand they took the worst-case scenarios of their comprehensive report, to be released in May. So, if we accept AGW as proven theory, or at least having substantial scientific support (which I would accept), we know it has become politicized and some of the conclusions, especially concerning temperature and sea level rises, represent worst outcomes, and my understanding is they have been “sexed up.”
   That’s not quite the case. The science behind the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) report is fundamentally sound. From RealClimate (link provided by JM Heindrichs, above): “The process of finalising the SPM…is something that can seem a little odd. Government representatives from all participating nations take the draft summary (as written by the lead authors of the individual chapters) and discuss whether the text truly reflects the underlying science in the main report. The key here is to note that what the lead authors originally came up with is not necessarily the clearest or least ambiguous language, and so the governments (for whom the report is being written) are perfectly entitled to insist that the language be modified so that the conclusions are correctly understood by them and the scientists. It is also key to note that the scientists have to be happy that the final language that is agreed conforms with the underlying science in the technical chapters. The advantage of this process is that everyone involved is absolutely clear what is meant by each sentence…
   “The SPM process also serves a very useful political purpose. Specifically, it allows the governments involved to feel as though they ‘own’ part of the report. This makes it very difficult to later turn around and dismiss it on the basis that it was all written by someone else. This gives the governments a vested interest in making this report as good as it can be (given the uncertainties). There are in fact plenty of safeguards (not least the scientists present) to ensure that the report is not slanted in any one preferred direction. However, the downside is that it can mistakenly appear as if the whole summary is simply up for negotiation. That would be a false conclusion – the negotiations, such as they are, are in fact heavily constrained by the underlying science….
   “Finally, a few people have asked why the SPM is being released now while the main report is not due to be published for a couple of months. There are a number of reasons – firstly, the Paris meeting has been such a public affair that holding back the SPM until the main report is ready is probably pointless. For the main report itself, it had not yet been proof-read, and there has not yet been enough time to include observational data up until the end of 2006. One final point is that improvements in the clarity of the language from the SPM should be propagated back to the individual chapters in order to remove any superficial ambiguity. The science content will not change.” [emphasis mine]

10. RL: Here we go agin. Remember the famous Hockey Stick Graph concocted by Mann et al. which showed that the worlds temperature has ben rising…
    The RealClimate site has a useful reply to your post, RL: 3w.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11. Shamrock, FYI: all the references in the reply are published in refereed journals.
    Interestingly enough the data that is supposed to support these conclusions won’t be made available to the public until May. Why? Are they going to fabricate data to support their conclusions or are they going to erase and disregard any data that doesn’t support the recent conclusions.
    Um, no. The summary report was vetted by the scientists who drafted the full report. The science that’s reported in the former is unchanged in the latter.

11. Thank you A. Here is rebuttal to Oreskes:
    http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/05/oreskes-study-errata.html
    Try to avoid annoying music/clock
    You didn’t directly address my “sexed up” comment re: IPCC executive summary and Stern report.
    WRT vetting/peer review. Again, I understand actual experimental data has not been verified, I believe in some cases the term is “code.”
    Anyway, if you could help me with this, that would be great. Again, a nice debate, so long as it is not used for justification for full implementation of Kyoto, given its very limited ability to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide, in its present form to 2012.
    IMHO, it’s wise to move off carbon fuels, in a truly sustainable way, with a long term focus. The Saudi Oil Minister once remarked that we didn’t leave the stone age because we ran out of stones. The same will apply to oil, unless we take our eye off the ball (real pollution, and yes CO2), and hobble our economies, losing our ability to develop the next micro-energy technology. Then China, India and the rest of us will end up burning up all the oil, with the resultant ecological disaster.

12. From the IPCC website
    “The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
    It’s not there to study climate, it’s to report on human-induced climate change.
    Does anyone think they were going to issue a report that says “Hello, here we are, nothing of note to report. We’re going to disband.”?????

13. Hi Shamrock,
    Thanks for the link. There’s also a similar exchange between Drs. Pielke & Oreskes in the May 2005 issue of Science (linked at the bottom of the Oreskes article on the sciencemag website, under ‘The editors suggest the following Related Resources…’). They basically both concede, along the lines of Dr. Peiser’s argument, that her study doesn’t actually confirm 100% consensus. Anyway, I cited her paper not because of its implications for consensus (or lackthereof) but because you asked for evidence showing that studies supporting the AGW theory are published in peer-reviewed sources.
    I’m not sure what you mean by verifying the actual experimental data. Are you thinking of replication studies? In the standard peer-review process, expert referees critically assess draft versions of a proposed article and offer comments on how to improve the paper. They examine the data as presented in the draft, along with the methodology, but I don’t see how they could verify either independently without doing their own studies. This is basically true with any peer-review journal, whether climate science or psychology or sociology or whatnot.
    Also, as with anything involving human subjectivity, the peer-review process is far from perfect. Still, warts and all, it works a) most of the time, and b) better than anything else we’ve got at the moment.
    Again, not sure what you mean by “in some cases the term is ‘code.'” If you mean that in some cases, the review process is done in an uncritical and cursory fashion to “rubberstamp” the study, well, I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t think it’s standard practise. Reputations–the journal’s, the referees’, the author’s–are on the line, plus academia is a viciously competitive place–from my experience, researchers just love taking each others’ work apart.
    As for sexing up the IPCC summary, again, I suppose it’s possible. We’ll know for sure in May. In either case, I suspect that even the “worst case” scenarios presented in the IPCC reports aren’t ludicrously improbable, just as the “best case” scenarios aren’t ludicrously optimistic. I imagine they’re constrained by confidence intervals of the various climate variables upon which their models are construct, but that’s just my guess.
    I haven’t read the Stern report, so my comments should be taken as such. My impression is that it has its share of assumptions and flaws — it was trying to predict the global economic costs of action versus inaction, after all, so it’s going to be imperfect no matter what — but that its general argument is sound. It may have ‘sexed itself up’ by overstating the costs of inaction/understating the costs of action (e.g., near-zero discount rates), but it got the direction right, which is that doing something now is bound to be cheaper than doing nothing and waiting for the fit to hit the shan.
    I hear you on the Kyoto thing. I’m doubtful myself that the 2012 targets are achievable now. They might’ve been, if the Liberals hadn’t bunged this portfolio up so much during their tenure. But the thing about governing is that you have to actually govern, so in the same way that Premier McGuinty had to stop griping about the huge deficit they inherited from the Ontario Tories, the federal Conservatives will eventually have to stop pointing the finger at Liberal inaction and figure out a way to implement the spirit, if not perhaps the letter, of Kyoto.

14. It’s not there to study climate, it’s to report on human-induced climate change.
    Well, yeah, that’s why it calls itself the IPCC, and not the IPC.
    Does anyone think they were going to issue a report that says “Hello, here we are, nothing of note to report. We’re going to disband.”?????
    And you think it’s all just, I dunno, made up?

15. Re: “Can anyone name a peer reviewed article which rebuts global warming ….” Sure — lots: go to google scholar and look up articles on antarctic temperature and ice measurments — a cooling antartic over the past 30 years refutes every model there is. Check out co2 histories by looking at articles using stomatal densities as high resolution proxies and you will find wide variation of co2 levels. Look for articles relating co2 levels and past temperature changes and you will find articles showing co2 increases lag temperature — not a surprise since co2 is quite soluble in water but with an inverse relationship to temperature. Look up McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique of the Mann’s ‘hockey stick’. Look up articles on undersea geothermal activity, such as at Gakkel ridge. Look up articles showing recent oceanic cooling, contrary to Hansen’s warming ocean ‘smoking gun’ claim. The problem with peer review is that it is ‘incestous’ and often overlooks serious errors or does not accept novel theories because you have like-minded ‘experts’ reviewing the manuscript.
    Also, check out Dr. Vincent Gray’s critique of the 2007 IPCC report at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/ for some excellent points regarding the poor data behind many of the AGW claims.

16. And you think it’s all just, I dunno, made up?
    Even a leftard eventually catches on.

17. “Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle. Permit us to question — to doubt, that’s all — and not to be sure.” Dr.Richard Feynman.
    From Richard Feynman’s essay on The Role of Doubt in Science :-
    http://laserstars.org/bio/Feynman.html

18. Re: “Can anyone name a peer reviewed article which rebuts global warming ….” Sure — lots…”
    Actually, what I asked was, “Can anybody here name a single independent scientific body, as a proxy for a peer-reviewed locus of knowledge, that argues that the AGW thesis is without merit.”
    I was pointing out at the time that while there are plenty of individual studies that indicate that the current AGW theory is imperfect and in need of continued research and debate, I couldn’t think of a single scientific organization (I’m thinking here of groups like the Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, etc.) who straight out rejects the AGW premise. Actually, I’ve since found one: the 30,000-member American Association of Petroleum Geologists. They’re the preeminent professional association dedicated to oil exploration and production, which you may or may not think is important to know.
    There’s also additional research and commentary that address the question marks you point out, including the Antarctic cooling thing, the hockey stick thing, the temp-CO2 level lag thing, and the oceanic cooling thing.
    The problem with peer review is that it is ‘incestous’ and often overlooks serious errors or does not accept novel theories because you have like-minded ‘experts’ reviewing the manuscript.
    I agree, except that the alternative is exponentially worse.

19. Fred: on oldy but still a goody…
    Actually, that article has been widely criticized for its outright factual errors and selective use of data, as well as for the context in which it was distributed (non-peer reviewed, formatted to mimic a PNAS article, attached as “evidence” to the infamous Oregon Petition Project). The article lists as lead author Arthur Robinson, founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and his then-22-year old son. I also have my doubts about the OISM itself, which is a single-room operation on a farm in rural Oregon. They seem to be focused quite a bit on nuclear war and civil defence–they even sell a nuclear war survival skills kit. Call me narrow-minded, but they don’t strike me as the most credible source of climate change info.

20. How many trees did the eco-freaks cut down to make those stupid SAVE THE REDWOODS and RECYCLE PAPER AND SAVE A TREE bumper stickers?