The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

Some two or three years ago I researched as best I could the published
evidence for and against 'global warming', as it was called then.

Then your best was just not good enough,

Well, perhaps it escaped your attention that, in a publication loaded
with bright primary colours and infant-school pictures, a major
government origanisation published a graph that said "there are twelve
suspected forcing mechanisms, and we know next to nothing about eight
of them. In the light of this profound lack of knowledge, this other
mechanism is the only one of importance".

If you can't manage to grasp that, then your best is, well, just not
up to it.

All you see is a bludgeon with which to beat those who disagree with you
and sneering at a site you are using to support your argument does
nothing to advance it.

That's how you choose to read it.

That is how it comes across. You can huff and puff all you like and
swear you are a fully paid up scientist but on Usenet you are what you
post and there is nothing of the disinterested observer about you.

I read it as a confirmation of the great lack of knowledge in the
area, and a reason not to jump on one bandwagon merely because it's
fashoonable and amenable to taxation.

So you totally ignored the fact that they had quantified each effect.

The graph in question shows the extent of the
warming or cooling effect of each factor. What is not well understood is
the mechanism by which they act.

I don't suppose you noticed that the CO2 column in that graph also had
two or three other effects added on top - just happening to give the
whole thing a taller column than it would otherwise have had.

If you had bothered to read all of what I wrote in a previous piece you
would have been aware that I had noticed they had stacked all the well
understood greenhouse gases in one column.

Why didn't they do that with the cooling mechanisms - is it because
they look like outweighing the CO2 column? Nah, no-one would ever
mislead people like that.

I didn't find it misleading in the least. However I would have found
what you suggest misleading as it would mask, for instance, the
differing role of O3 at differing heights and completely bugger the
picture of anything that worked across the divide.

Also, o-one has yet answered, let alone respond to, several other
points I made.

Roughly these we

- Why the last ice age ended, and whether those mechanisms are in
place and functioning

Try google.

- Why the Global Wamers chose 1960 - 1980 for their baseline, knowing
it covered an unusually cold period

Is it? Did they? Are you sure it just isn't the last two decades at time
things started looking serious?

If what you allege is true why didn't they pick 1900 - 1920 which was a
whole lot colder. 1960 - 1980 was as much unusually cool as 1935 - 1945
were unusually warm. Even picking 1950 - 1970 might have given a lower
base line.

We do at least know why the Denyers chose 1998 as their base year. It
sticks out like a sore thumb.

- Why the modellers chose to knowingly tuned their models to get the
same answer as the others

You have said that before so it is about time you cited your source.

- Why we know so much about one forcing mechanism, and choose to
pursue controlling that, when we know nothing about eight others, and
a little more than nothing about a couple of others.

We know the size of each effect. That is a great deal more than nothing.

As I have said before if the greenhouse effect is real than reducing
atmospheric CO2 will lead to lower temperatures than would otherwise be
the case. It doesn't matter that other independent factors are already
working in the opposite direction (unless they can be increased to
counteract the effect of increased CO2) other than if the effect of CO2
is largely counteracted already reducing CO2 will have a bigger effect
than might seem possible at first glance.

PS: the graph I referenced gave very little weight to the effect of
clouds. I suggest you look up the research that was done of the days
post 9/11, when no aircraft flew in the airspace over the US, and
climatologists took the chance to measure something that would have
been otherwise impossible. But this time, you can look it up yourself,
and form your own opinion; I've given you enough to go on. Note I
haven't said which side of the debate, if any, it supports.

Thank you but I am already aware of the con trails evidence.

--
Roger Chapman

Roger wrote:

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

I don't suppose you noticed that the CO2 column in that graph also had
two or three other effects added on top - just happening to give the
whole thing a taller column than it would otherwise have had.

If you had bothered to read all of what I wrote in a previous piece you
would have been aware that I had noticed they had stacked all the well
understood greenhouse gases in one column.

Why didn't they do that with the cooling mechanisms - is it because
they look like outweighing the CO2 column? Nah, no-one would ever
mislead people like that.

I didn't find it misleading in the least. However I would have found
what you suggest misleading as it would mask, for instance, the
differing role of O3 at differing heights and completely bugger the
picture of anything that worked across the divide.

So that's all right then, even if we don't know any of the mechanisms
or how they might or might not interact.

Also, o-one has yet answered, let alone respond to, several other
points I made.

Roughly these we

- Why the last ice age ended, and whether those mechanisms are in
place and functioning

Try google.

If you are saying the Google can turn up the answers, then post them.

- Why the Global Wamers chose 1960 - 1980 for their baseline, knowing
it covered an unusually cold period

Is it? Did they? Are you sure it just isn't the last two decades at time
things started looking serious?

If what you allege is true why didn't they pick 1900 - 1920 which was a
whole lot colder. 1960 - 1980 was as much unusually cool as 1935 - 1945
were unusually warm. Even picking 1950 - 1970 might have given a lower
base line.

You are supposed to have read the Met Office publication, which I
maintain shows a graph of forcing mechanisms which they claim very
little understanding of and for which you claim rubbishes any case I
am trying to make, yet you seem not to have noticed the graph on page
25 that would not only answer your questions, but also show I was
correct.

And, if you plot the Met Office's own figure of 0.37 degC on the Met
Office's own graph, it would show you that the expected temperature
difference for this year is below the maximum value shown; that is,
the planet might be cooling even by the Met Office's own data; and is
certainly about the value for the late 1990s, implying a peak in value
between 2000 and now. An inconvenient truth, perhaps.

"Met Office forecast for global temperature for 2008

Global temperature for 2008 is expected to be 0.37 °C above the
long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, the coolest year since 2000,
when the value was 0.24 °C."

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporat...r20080103.html

But note that temperatures fell from 1945 - 1970 (Met Office figures)
so the prediction of a rise of 0.37degC is from an unusually low
figure. Pick a different range, and you could also find the planet is
cooling. Why didn't they pick, say 1980 to 2000? Is it because that
would show the planet as cooling?

PS: the graph I referenced gave very little weight to the effect of
clouds. I suggest you look up the research that was done of the days
post 9/11, when no aircraft flew in the airspace over the US, and
climatologists took the chance to measure something that would have
been otherwise impossible. But this time, you can look it up yourself,
and form your own opinion; I've given you enough to go on. Note I
haven't said which side of the debate, if any, it supports.

Thank you but I am already aware of the con trails evidence.

In that case you will doubtless find that the effect of clouds is
greater than anyone has forecast - supporting the case that water
vapour has a far greater effect than CO2, and is not man made, rather
harder to tax, and not subject to human control.

Which is more or less what I've been saying all along.

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

snip

Not a program I ever remember watching but have you any evidence that
DNA relating to the Solutreans or native Americans of similar antiquity
has ever been extracted?

The US scientist who was following this showed the DNA traces, and
again AFAIIA they have not been seriously challenged.

See above. Where have I said that they have?

It was a comment, not an accusation.

More of a red herring. What has been challenged is the route by which
that DNA reached America.

The programme was about the 'Clovis point spear', which was first
discovered in North America. Later, it was related to the identical
spear-point developed by the Salutrians, but 10,000 years previously.

You are really getting very careless Terry. Hand made artifacts are
never identical, even when made by the same hand. What seems convincing
is the technique for making the spear points which was the same and more
sophisticated than what followed on in Europe. The 10,000 years you use
is also way out.

It was 'identical' in that no substantive differences could be found
in shape or manner of shaping. Not being an expert on stone
tool-working, I took an expert's view that the limited number of ways
that the point could be made would have resulted in noticeable
differences, of which there seemed to be none.

A very unscientific version of identical. And it is not beyond the
bounds of possibility that the technique was established independently
in separate areas. However I am with you on the point that the
similarities of the spear points points to some sort of connection
between Europe and America.

The search was on for a connection between the Salutrians and North
America, and it was some time before the scientist, who was working on
other programs at the time, realised that he had not only the DNA from
the Salutrians (or possible their descendents, I can't recall which),
but that it was matched by that of a single tribe of NA Indians, the
inplication being that the Salutrians took their spear-point design to
North America.

So the real Terry Field is coming out of the shadows regurgitating half
remembered 'facts' gleaned from a TV program when a quick google would
have shown how wrong said 'facts' are.

What make you believe that is worse that regurgitated 'facts' from
Wikipedia?

The information is readily available from a variety of sources. You got
Wikipedia as it was the last site I visited. If you don't like Wikipedia
you could easily follow up the footnote references.

But 20,000 years ago, the ice-cap stretched from France to NA, and
gave rise to the speculation that the Salutrians, who lived in a style
much like the Innuit, could have paddled along the edge of the
ice-cap.

Solutrean BTW, not Salutrian. Sticking to your wrong spelling is a
further demonstration of how impervious you are to reality.

The BBC is good at turning supposition into concrete fact - vis walking
with dinosaurs.

You've just shot down the BBC's programme shown last Sunday, that set
out to show how fake the anti-global-warming debate is, and which was
mentioned earlier in this thread.

As for alternative routes for DNA, the obvious one is a minor European
contamination of the largely Asian DNA of the Native Americans.

The possibility of contamination wasn't mentioned in the programme, so
I can't comment.

Technically not contamination but I was looking for a short way of
expressing a very minor element in the genetic make-up of modern native
Americans.

From Wikipedia:

"In addition, certain mtDNA anomalies in pre-Columbian Amerind
populations leave open the possibility of alternate migration patterns
into the Americas. Geneticist Douglas Wallace of Emory University,
studying the mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, found an mtDNA type
called X. Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer reports that X occurs 'only
among Europeans and Native Americans, with a single report from southern
Siberia, but the link between the Old and New Worlds is up to 30,000
years old'[3]. However, the most recent study of complete genomes
suggests a single founding population, including type X, arriving via
the Beringia route from Asia.[4]

Ah, Wikipedia again.

Why not. Or are you on your bad research kick as it doesn't agree with
your beliefs.

In short, the idea of a Clovis-Solutrean link remains rather
controversial and does not enjoy wide acceptance. The hypothesis is
challenged by large gaps in time between the Clovis and Solutrean eras,

....which I mentioned.

No, you claimed a much longer gap.

a lack of evidence of Solutrean seafaring,

I mentioned kayaking, for which 'seafaring' - a term you haven't
defined - may not be necessary.

You are clutching at straws. They certainly couldn't have used inland
waterways. Anyway there is no evidence that kayaks date back anywhere
near that far. The hypothesis that you are trying to ape seems to
confine itself to skin boats and and a resemblance to Inuit lifestyle.
But they could have walked all the way and confined their
fishing/hunting to the edge of the ice sheet.

lack of specific Solutrean features in Clovis technology,

Apart from the striking similarity of the spear-points, and a time
defference, mentioned by you above, that would have allowed the
transfer to take place.

and other issues."

I'm bowled over.

Oh really? Bowled out more like. You had a tall tale about a misnamed
people migrating by boat along the the edge of the ice as fact when in
reality it is highly contentious. You tried to bolster this by
misrepresenting the DNA evidence and you have ignored the bit above
about the latest evidence from studying complete genomes.

--
Roger Chapman

Roger wrote:

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

snip

Not a program I ever remember watching but have you any evidence that
DNA relating to the Solutreans or native Americans of similar antiquity
has ever been extracted?

The US scientist who was following this showed the DNA traces, and
again AFAIIA they have not been seriously challenged.

See above. Where have I said that they have?

It was a comment, not an accusation.

More of a red herring. What has been challenged is the route by which
that DNA reached America.

The programme was about the 'Clovis point spear', which was first
discovered in North America. Later, it was related to the identical
spear-point developed by the Salutrians, but 10,000 years previously.

You are really getting very careless Terry. Hand made artifacts are
never identical, even when made by the same hand. What seems convincing
is the technique for making the spear points which was the same and more
sophisticated than what followed on in Europe. The 10,000 years you use
is also way out.

It was 'identical' in that no substantive differences could be found
in shape or manner of shaping. Not being an expert on stone
tool-working, I took an expert's view that the limited number of ways
that the point could be made would have resulted in noticeable
differences, of which there seemed to be none.

A very unscientific version of identical. And it is not beyond the
bounds of possibility that the technique was established independently
in separate areas. However I am with you on the point that the
similarities of the spear points points to some sort of connection
between Europe and America.

The search was on for a connection between the Salutrians and North
America, and it was some time before the scientist, who was working on
other programs at the time, realised that he had not only the DNA from
the Salutrians (or possible their descendents, I can't recall which),
but that it was matched by that of a single tribe of NA Indians, the
inplication being that the Salutrians took their spear-point design to
North America.

So the real Terry Field is coming out of the shadows regurgitating half
remembered 'facts' gleaned from a TV program when a quick google would
have shown how wrong said 'facts' are.

What make you believe that is worse that regurgitated 'facts' from
Wikipedia?

The information is readily available from a variety of sources. You got
Wikipedia as it was the last site I visited. If you don't like Wikipedia
you could easily follow up the footnote references.

But 20,000 years ago, the ice-cap stretched from France to NA, and
gave rise to the speculation that the Salutrians, who lived in a style
much like the Innuit, could have paddled along the edge of the
ice-cap.

Solutrean BTW, not Salutrian. Sticking to your wrong spelling is a
further demonstration of how impervious you are to reality.

The BBC is good at turning supposition into concrete fact - vis walking
with dinosaurs.

You've just shot down the BBC's programme shown last Sunday, that set
out to show how fake the anti-global-warming debate is, and which was
mentioned earlier in this thread.

As for alternative routes for DNA, the obvious one is a minor European
contamination of the largely Asian DNA of the Native Americans.

The possibility of contamination wasn't mentioned in the programme, so
I can't comment.

Technically not contamination but I was looking for a short way of
expressing a very minor element in the genetic make-up of modern native
Americans.

From Wikipedia:

"In addition, certain mtDNA anomalies in pre-Columbian Amerind
populations leave open the possibility of alternate migration patterns
into the Americas. Geneticist Douglas Wallace of Emory University,
studying the mitochondrial DNA of Native Americans, found an mtDNA type
called X. Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer reports that X occurs 'only
among Europeans and Native Americans, with a single report from southern
Siberia, but the link between the Old and New Worlds is up to 30,000
years old'[3]. However, the most recent study of complete genomes
suggests a single founding population, including type X, arriving via
the Beringia route from Asia.[4]

Ah, Wikipedia again.

Why not. Or are you on your bad research kick as it doesn't agree with
your beliefs.

In short, the idea of a Clovis-Solutrean link remains rather
controversial and does not enjoy wide acceptance. The hypothesis is
challenged by large gaps in time between the Clovis and Solutrean eras,

....which I mentioned.

No, you claimed a much longer gap.

a lack of evidence of Solutrean seafaring,

I mentioned kayaking, for which 'seafaring' - a term you haven't
defined - may not be necessary.

You are clutching at straws. They certainly couldn't have used inland
waterways. Anyway there is no evidence that kayaks date back anywhere
near that far. The hypothesis that you are trying to ape seems to
confine itself to skin boats and and a resemblance to Inuit lifestyle.
But they could have walked all the way and confined their
fishing/hunting to the edge of the ice sheet.

lack of specific Solutrean features in Clovis technology,

Apart from the striking similarity of the spear-points, and a time
defference, mentioned by you above, that would have allowed the
transfer to take place.

and other issues."

I'm bowled over.

Oh really? Bowled out more like. You had a tall tale about a misnamed
people migrating by boat along the the edge of the ice as fact when in
reality it is highly contentious. You tried to bolster this by
misrepresenting the DNA evidence and you have ignored the bit above
about the latest evidence from studying complete genomes.

Perhaps the mistake I really made was to make a throwaway remark about
stone spears to illustrate that 20000 years ago the ice cap extended
down to circa mid north atlantic levels, and followed with a question
that asked what mechanisms warmed the planet at that time, and whether
they operate today.

No-one, including yourself, has sought to answer that, but you seem to
be keen on picking up spelling errors and quoting wikipedia while
rubbishing TV, unwilling to admit that both are ways of distributing
information whether good, bad, indifferenet, or biassed.

Take one of your statements above: "there is no evidence that kayaks
date back anywhere near that far"; got a reference for that?

Take another: "The hypothesis that you are trying to ape seems to
confine itself to skin boats and and a resemblance to Inuit
lifestyle"; can you cite any other actual method of living on a polar
ice cap?

Take another: " Technically not contamination but I was looking for a
short way of expressing a very minor element in the genetic make-up of
modern native Americans." Got a cite for 'minor element'?

No wikipedia 'references', please.

The message
from Roger contains these words:


[Terry]

- Why the modellers chose to knowingly tuned their models to get the
same answer as the others

You have said that before so it is about time you cited your source.

More than time by now.

--
Roger Chapman

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

I don't suppose you noticed that the CO2 column in that graph also had
two or three other effects added on top - just happening to give the
whole thing a taller column than it would otherwise have had.

If you had bothered to read all of what I wrote in a previous piece you
would have been aware that I had noticed they had stacked all the well
understood greenhouse gases in one column.

Why didn't they do that with the cooling mechanisms - is it because
they look like outweighing the CO2 column? Nah, no-one would ever
mislead people like that.

I didn't find it misleading in the least. However I would have found
what you suggest misleading as it would mask, for instance, the
differing role of O3 at differing heights and completely bugger the
picture of anything that worked across the divide.

So that's all right then, even if we don't know any of the mechanisms
or how they might or might not interact.

You are misrepresenting the case again. A low level of understanding is
not a complete lack of understanding which is what you keep on
pretending is the situation.

Also, o-one has yet answered, let alone respond to, several other
points I made.

Roughly these we

- Why the last ice age ended, and whether those mechanisms are in
place and functioning

Try google.

If you are saying the Google can turn up the answers, then post them.

I haven't the time or the inclination to search out something that most
scientists seem to think has been resolved and which you would
undoubtedly rubbish if I posted it.

- Why the Global Wamers chose 1960 - 1980 for their baseline, knowing
it covered an unusually cold period

Is it? Did they? Are you sure it just isn't the last two decades at time
things started looking serious?

If what you allege is true why didn't they pick 1900 - 1920 which was a
whole lot colder. 1960 - 1980 was as much unusually cool as 1935 - 1945
were unusually warm. Even picking 1950 - 1970 might have given a lower
base line.

You are supposed to have read the Met Office publication, which I
maintain shows a graph of forcing mechanisms which they claim very
little understanding of and for which you claim rubbishes any case I
am trying to make, yet you seem not to have noticed the graph on page
25 that would not only answer your questions, but also show I was
correct.

I was looking at a more easily available graph which is much less
distinct. The page 25 graph certainly does not show that the period 1960
- 1998 was unusually cool. 1950 - 1960 might not be marginally cooler as
I originally thought but the decline over the period 1950 - 1980 is
minimal compared to the steep increases 1920 - 1945 and 1974 - 2004. And
you will note (and disregard) that the base line of this graph is the
temperature at the end of the 19th century.

And, if you plot the Met Office's own figure of 0.37 degC on the Met
Office's own graph, it would show you that the expected temperature
difference for this year is below the maximum value shown; that is,
the planet might be cooling even by the Met Office's own data; and is
certainly about the value for the late 1990s, implying a peak in value
between 2000 and now. An inconvenient truth, perhaps.

There is too much year on year variability to make any prediction for
the future on the basis of just one year and dubious to make one even on
several.

"Met Office forecast for global temperature for 2008

Global temperature for 2008 is expected to be 0.37 °C above the
long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, the coolest year since 2000,
when the value was 0.24 °C."

Isn't 2008 being influenced by a La Nina event which is generally
accepted to depress the annual average just as a El Nino event increases
the annual average.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporat...r20080103.html

But note that temperatures fell from 1945 - 1970 (Met Office figures)
so the prediction of a rise of 0.37degC is from an unusually low
figure. Pick a different range, and you could also find the planet is
cooling. Why didn't they pick, say 1980 to 2000? Is it because that
would show the planet as cooling?

There you go again. Unusually low to describe a level that is well above
average for the period 1861 - 1980.

And do tell me when they first adopted the period 1960 - 1980? Lb to a
pinch of salt it was well before 2000 so your suggestion of 1980 - 2000
is preposterous.

PS: the graph I referenced gave very little weight to the effect of
clouds. I suggest you look up the research that was done of the days
post 9/11, when no aircraft flew in the airspace over the US, and
climatologists took the chance to measure something that would have
been otherwise impossible. But this time, you can look it up yourself,
and form your own opinion; I've given you enough to go on. Note I
haven't said which side of the debate, if any, it supports.

Thank you but I am already aware of the con trails evidence.

In that case you will doubtless find that the effect of clouds is
greater than anyone has forecast - supporting the case that water
vapour has a far greater effect than CO2, and is not man made, rather
harder to tax, and not subject to human control.

Would that be daytime clouds you are on about or night time clouds?

And would you be arguing that water vapour works in the same direction
as clouds or in the reverse direction?

Which is more or less what I've been saying all along.

No, what you have been claiming all along is that CO2/global warming is
a myth and anything that doesn't support that claim is badly researched
rubbish or worse.

--
Roger Chapman

In message , "dennis@home"
writes

Anyway the best thing to do is to reduce the water vapour as it is
water that carries the energy to create storms, etc. The only way to do
that is to stop them burning the rain forests and let them re-grow.

You do spout some ********

most of the water vapour in the air comes from evaporation from the
oceans

--
geoff

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

big snip

I'm bowled over.

Oh really? Bowled out more like. You had a tall tale about a misnamed
people migrating by boat along the the edge of the ice as fact when in
reality it is highly contentious. You tried to bolster this by
misrepresenting the DNA evidence and you have ignored the bit above
about the latest evidence from studying complete genomes.

Perhaps the mistake I really made was to make a throwaway remark about
stone spears to illustrate that 20000 years ago the ice cap extended
down to circa mid north atlantic levels, and followed with a question
that asked what mechanisms warmed the planet at that time, and whether
they operate today.

No-one, including yourself, has sought to answer that, but you seem to
be keen on picking up spelling errors and quoting wikipedia while
rubbishing TV, unwilling to admit that both are ways of distributing
information whether good, bad, indifferenet, or biassed.

Take one of your statements above: "there is no evidence that kayaks
date back anywhere near that far"; got a reference for that?

Don't be silly. What you need is a reference to the antiquity of the
kayak and there doesn't seem to be much for that. About the only quote I
can come up with is:

"Archaeologists have found evidence indicating kayaks to be at least
4000 years old."

Kayaks would have to date back at least 17000 years if they were in use
in Europe at the end of the time the Solutrean are suposed to have
occupied parts of France and Spain.

Take another: "The hypothesis that you are trying to ape seems to
confine itself to skin boats and and a resemblance to Inuit
lifestyle"; can you cite any other actual method of living on a polar
ice cap?

Take another: " Technically not contamination but I was looking for a
short way of expressing a very minor element in the genetic make-up of
modern native Americans." Got a cite for 'minor element'?

No wikipedia 'references', please.

You can't have everything. Wikipedia happens to be the easiest. You will
be pleased to note that the author(s) of this article thinks that the
Haplogroup X is a major element in Northern North America. You will be
less pleased to learn it is by no means confined to one obscure tribe.

************************************************** *******************************

In human mitochondrial genetics, Haplogroup X is a human mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup which can be used to define genetic populations.
The genetic sequences of haplogroup X diverged originally from
haplogroup N, and subsequently further diverged about 20,000 to 30,000
years ago to give two sub-groups, X1 and X2. Overall haplogroup X
accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East and
North Africa. Sub-group X1 is much less numerous, and restricted to
North and East Africa, and also the Near East. Sub-group X2 appears to
have undergone extensive population expansion and dispersal around or
soon after the last glacial maximum, about 21,000 years ago. It is more
strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean
Europe; and somewhat less strongly present in the rest of Europe.
Particular concentrations appear in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (in
Scotland) (7%) and amongst the Israeli Druze (26%); the latter are
presumably due to a founder effect.

[edit] North and South America

Haplogroup X is also one of the five haplogroups found in the indigenous
peoples of the Americas.[1] Although it occurs only at a frequency of
about 3% for the total current indigenous population of the Americas, it
is a major haplogroup in northern North America, where among the
Algonquian peoples it comprises up to 25% of mtDNA types. It is also
present in lesser percentages to the west and south of this area -- in
North America among the Sioux (15%), the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (11%–13%), the
Navajo (7%), and the Yakima (5%), and in South America among the
Yanomami people (12%) in eight villages in Roraima in northwestern
Brazil.

Unlike the four main Native American haplogroups (A, B, C, and D), X is
not at all strongly associated with East Asia. The sole occurrence of X
in Asia discovered so far is in Altaia in South Siberia (Derenko et al,
2001), and detailed examination (Reidla et al, 2003) has shown that the
Altaian sequences are all almost identical, suggesting that they arrived
in the area probably from the South Caucasus more recently than 5000 BP.

This absence of haplogroup X2 in Asia is one of the major factors
causing the current rethinking of the peopling of the Americas. However,
the New World haplogroup X2a is as different from any of the Old World
X2b, X2c, X2d, X2e and X2f lineages as they are from each other,
indicating an early origin "likely at the very beginning of their
expansion and spread from the Near East".[2]

The Solutrean Hypothesis posits that haplogroup X reached North America
with a wave of European migration about 20,000 BP by the Solutreans, a
stone-age culture in south-western France and in Spain, by boat around
the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack.

Another possible way to explain existence of haplogroup X in mtDNA of
indigenous peoples of the Americas is that it was brought to North
America with the people of Caucasian origin through the Bering land
bridge. [3]

************************************************** ********************

--
Roger Chapman

"geoff" wrote in message
...
In message , "dennis@home"
writes

Anyway the best thing to do is to reduce the water vapour as it is water
that carries the energy to create storms, etc. The only way to do that is
to stop them burning the rain forests and let them re-grow.

You do spout some ********

most of the water vapour in the air comes from evaporation from the oceans

You do keep up with your stupid trying to score points cr@p.
So what if most is evaporated from the oceans, an awful lot is trapped by
the rain forests and precipitates out.
All of that has to go somewhere else.
It isn't a coincidence that rain forests are wet and near the equator.

AJH wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:30:14 +0100, "dennis@home"
wrote:

Anyway the best thing to do is to reduce the water vapour as it is water
that carries the energy to create storms, etc. The only way to do that is to
stop them burning the rain forests and let them re-grow. You may have to
fight a war to do this.

How much water is transpired from rainforests (or any vegetation)
compared with that from the oceans?

Cutting CO2 is not going to fix the main problem.

There seems to be some disagreement as to what the "main problem" is!

I've only just dipped into this thread but I gather:

1) the greenhouse effect is real, well known for 2 centuries and
necessary to keep the earth's surface warm enough to sustain life as
we know it. Many gases in the atmosphere will trap long wavelength re
radiation from the surface, having passed the higher energy solar
input, but absorption bands differ. Those wavelengths that atmospheric
water absorbs on a clear day already get intercepted to a large
degree. Those that CO2 absorbs don't all get caught whilst CO2 is a
small portion of the atmosphere. Catching re radiation should warm the
atmosphere but measurements are uncertain??

2) Whilst CO2 has formed a much larger proportion of the atmosphere
and in the last 400, 000 years has cyclically tracked ice ages between
levels of about 185 and 285 parts per million (according to ice core
data which may be disputed) in the whole time hominids are known to
have existed these limits have not been exceeded till iron age man
started clearing forests.

3)Since the beginning of the industrial age CO2 atmospheric levels
have risen from 300 parts per million (the level I was taught at
school) to ~385 parts per million. This level is proportional to
estimates of fossil carbon burned but is less than a direct
relationship, indicating that the biosphere buffers some and I'm not
sure where cement making fits in to this as a CO2 source.

4) rain falls as carbonic acid and the sea is measurably more acid,
this inhibits the beasties that store CO2 as calcium carbonate.

5) Of the three major organs of the biosphere (land, oceans and
atmosphere) we dump most CO2 into the smallest by mass, the
atmosphere, such that its stock of CO2 has grown from 550,000 million
tonnes to 700,000 million tonnes in 200 years and is rising by 6,000
million tonnes/annum increasing, this is 10% of the annual (natural)
CO2 flux between land an atmosphere. Indicating the atmospheric CO2 is
recycled every 3.5 years.

6) apart from trapping exhaust gases and storing them the only
mechanisms for getting CO2 from the atmosphere are biological
processes like photosynthesis and bugs directly creating carbonates.

So the question I would like answered is does it matter if CO2 levels
reach 500 parts per million?

The pundits seem to say yes but not necessarily because of warming,
more because of changing patterns of rainfall which agricultural
systems cannot adapt to. The causal link still needs to be explained
to me a bit better. I can understand that, from life experience, that
such a drastic change in CO2 isn't likely to have no effect and
probably is likely to have a bad effect. We've seen a previous
atmospheric pollution problem, loss of parts of the ozone layer,
solved quite quickly (or is it??) by global agreement, I think the
same is true of acid rain.

Having changed from a nation producing 75% of our own food in a benign
temperate climate to one importing 50% of it's food and an
agricultural system that cannot adapt...

Now I appreciate I have limited intellect, the very fact that I'm
wasting my unwelcome additional free time looking at this box when I'm
still capable of work proves that, so has anyone an actual solution or
is it just an argument?

I attended a conference recently where a solution was put forward but
it depends on global co operation, which I frankly do not believe will
happen, it suits me because it relates to my trade. It also panders to
rich nations as it seems to offer a buy out option.

AJH

I'll take your exact figures on trust, but I think that is a fairly
accurate summary.

There area few other items to add.

Things like pollution, water vapour and certain other chemicals that are
greenhouse contributors wash out of the air pretty quickly: Co2 does not.

The issue as to whether it matters is that even if the risk of it
mattering is relatively small, the chances are that if it matters, it
really really matters, are rather large. I.e. the risk of a very
significant effect is pretty large. Its not like oh well, theres a 30%
chance it will be a bit warmer for a few years, its more like well there
is a 5% chance that human life will become impossible on 90% of the
inhabited land surface. That's the worrying thing.


Ultimately we (in te west anyway) can create live and grow food in
artificial ecospheres if we have to, but boy we will need a lot of
energy to build and run them.

And if that energy produces more Co2, and that is implicated in the
problem its no solution at all.

Terry Fields wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Terry Fields wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

What you fail to realise, is that the 'there is no CO2 driven global
warming' is another agenda driven by peole who have other ideas tat are
more about short term profit.

You have become their sock puppet.
But it could be said, and doubtless has been, that "What you fail to
realise, is that the 'there is CO2 driven global warming' is another
agenda driven by people who have other ideas that are more about
raising taxes. You have become their sock puppet."

Good game, this.
I totally agree Terry, but its babies and bathwater. Just because people
are running cynical marketing campaigns on the back of ecology, doesn't
mean the ecology itself is false.

If you look at my posts, you will find I have defined a word for it .
Ecobollox. I.e. my position is that the problem exists all right, but
the solutions on offer are just so much hot air and marketing fluff.

I'm trying to say something similar, in that the solutions proposed
deal with just one problem, that might turn out to be a minor
perturbation caused by the other eight or so problems about which very
little is known.

I don't think that is the case. However the argument is rapidly becoming
irrelevant: a crashing world economy will use less fuel, and buys us
more time, and in the end only nuclear power will work, and we should
have just about enough time to get it onstream before the lights go out.

Carbon fuel just got too expensive compared with nuclear. Bye Bye petroleum.


It used to be called 'putting all one's eggs in the basket', and I
can't see that that is a good way of going forward.


I dont think you are representing the situation accurately. For whatever
reason, the Age of Oil is dead. Over. Finished.

In this country oil/gas burning probably accounts for about 90% of
carbon emissions,. stop burning it and there is no argument. Use as many
ordinary lightbulbs as you like.
What we need to do is to build nuclear power stations and a bloody great
grid, and make everything that doesn't move run off electricity,
starting with home heating using heatpumps if possible.

That alone, if we had the nuclear capacity to generate it, would
probably knock 15-20% of the carbon we use, on the head: add in
industrial static use and its nearer 40%. Make sensible electric
commuter cars and we are probably over 55% reductions, and with a bit
more effort. long distance trucks and the like, and we are up to getting
on for 60-65%.

Whats left is hard to reduce: aircraft? well no suitable alternative
exists, on intercontinental stuff, but high speed trains are more than
fast enough for transcontinental journeys. So that might take us up to
maybe 70-75% reductions.

The bitst that are left include military and civil emergency forces,
that mauy have to operate without electricity for extended periods, some
intercontinental air travel, a few things like portable gas stoves and
blowlamps, and the petrochemicals industry.

Even these are possible to either synthesise fuel for, or do with
electricity..I mean a blowlamp is only a hot air gun write large..

WE dont actually NEED carbon fuel at all. We do need carbon as a
reducing agent and chemical component in e.g. steelmaking, but we
actually have nearly all the steel we need.

What we DO need is massive amounts of cheap energy, and there is only
one way we know how to do that that doesn't burn carbon fuel..

Terry Fields wrote:


Perhaps the mistake I really made was to make a throwaway remark about
stone spears to illustrate that 20000 years ago the ice cap extended
down to circa mid north atlantic levels, and followed with a question
that asked what mechanisms warmed the planet at that time, and whether
they operate today.

I think it was more like the cessation of an effect that profoundly
cooled the planet.

Fr instance the sort of effect a meteorite impact of sufficient size
might have is to cool the earth susbstantially for several years: if
that then resulted in excessive snowfall, and increased albedo, then
even when the dust settlled, you have an icebound planet. That might e
a stable state until e.g. a large volcanic eruption spews dust into the
air..causing rapid cooling, then emits vast amounts of Co2, which sets
the planet on a longer term warming course. Solar radiation is not a
constant, nor is the screening effect of the earths magnetic field,
which wanders about, changes strength, and occasionally flips altogether.

Thee are all known effects as its orbital perturbations: the exact
impact of them is somewhat hard to say, because we never had a need to
really try and work things out, and its hard to actually do the
experiments without wrecking the planet. We are engaged in the
experiment now 'let's see what happens if we burn all the fossil fuel we
can dig up'

Its likely to be very instructive, and potentially very destructive.


Whatever you think, I can almost guarantee that it won't have any
measurable effect.

Man has been screwing the environment ever since he got clever enough to
do it, and kill off any predators that might have stopped him. Hes not
alone in this: Overgrazing and deforestation probably created most of
the sahara..its as easy for sheep to wreck a field and goats a forest,
as it is for humans...
..

In message , "dennis@home"
writes


"geoff" wrote in message
...
In message , "dennis@home"
writes

Anyway the best thing to do is to reduce the water vapour as it is
water that carries the energy to create storms, etc. The only way to
do that is to stop them burning the rain forests and let them re-grow.

You do spout some ********

most of the water vapour in the air comes from evaporation from the oceans

You do keep up with your stupid trying to score points cr@p.

because you keep on spouting ********

and you annoy me

So what if most is evaporated from the oceans, an awful lot is trapped
by the rain forests and precipitates out.

go on then - come up with a sourced percentage of rain forest
contribution to global water vapour levels

All of that has to go somewhere else.
It isn't a coincidence that rain forests are wet and near the equator.

Try the oceans ... they are wet - and cover approx 2/3 of the earths
surface. What percentage of the earth id covered in rain forest ?

less than one percent ?


--
geoff

"Tim S" wrote in message
...
....
My daughter is being taught to recycle at school, which, at here age, I
aplaude. But I tried a little though experiment on her (she's 4). I showed
her a package from Tescos. It was a little cardboard box of pills encased
in a plastic "clam shell". I cut off the clam shell and asked her what she
thought about it. Reply: "Recycle it Daddy". I said "good", "but how about
if it wasn't made in the first place?" "Carboard comes from trees and you
can grow new trees, but plastic is made from oil which is a precious
resource which cannot readily be regenerated".

The technology for using algae to convert human and animal waste to oil has
been around for decades. However, at present, it is a lot easier and cheaper
to extract the stuff from the ground, so the process has not been refined
into a commercially viable operation.

"Why did they put a nice
little cardboard box that worked perfectly well in a silly plastic shell
whose sole purpose is to cut my fingers before I chuck it in the bin?"

The shells are optional extras on many goods and are classed as anti-tamper
devices. They stop people damaging goods by opening them and also stop
people stealing the contents, but leaving the empty box on the shelf.

Colin Bignell

Roger wrote:

No, what you have been claiming all along is that CO2/global warming is
a myth and anything that doesn't support that claim is badly researched
rubbish or worse.

Forgive me if I don't answer directly the rest of the points you made,
partly because you've demonstrated that you can't read a graph or use
it's data, thus bringing into doubt the rest of your comments. For
that graph is essentially a key piece of data.

I was looking at a more easily available graph which is much less
distinct. The page 25 graph certainly does not show that the period 1960
- 1998 was unusually cool. 1950 - 1960 might not be marginally cooler as
I originally thought but the decline over the period 1950 - 1980 is
minimal compared to the steep increases 1920 - 1945 and 1974 - 2004. And
you will note (and disregard) that the base line of this graph is the
temperature at the end of the 19th century.

I'm not responsible for the way the graph was presented, but
nevertheless in order to place the Met Office's own estimate of the
increase for 2008 on the Met Office's own graph it isn't actually
necessary to involve the baseline. I'm surprised you seem unfamiliar
with such straightforward data-handling.

I did not choose the 1960 - 1990 as a baseline, the Global Warmers
did. By choosing a different baseline, the planet can be shown to be
cooling, and possibly cooling for some years now. If you don't grasp
this simple concept, the your search for 'the truth' will founder on
this very simple and very clear concept.

And, if you plot the Met Office's own figure of 0.37 degC on the Met
Office's own graph, it would show you that the expected temperature
difference for this year is below the maximum value shown; that is,
the planet might be cooling even by the Met Office's own data; and is
certainly about the value for the late 1990s, implying a peak in value
between 2000 and now. An inconvenient truth, perhaps.

There is too much year on year variability to make any prediction for
the future on the basis of just one year and dubious to make one even on
several.

Scientists are used to handling data; it's their bread-and-butter.
Banks, supermarkets, health services, traffic handlers and
half-a-hundred other industries are used to handling variable data.
Sophisticated tools exist to handle data. To an analyst, there can be
no such thing as 'too much variability'; your statement is a nonsense
and shows your simplistic approach and technical ignorance.

Roger wrote:

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

big snip

I'm bowled over.

Oh really? Bowled out more like. You had a tall tale about a misnamed
people migrating by boat along the the edge of the ice as fact when in
reality it is highly contentious. You tried to bolster this by
misrepresenting the DNA evidence and you have ignored the bit above
about the latest evidence from studying complete genomes.

Perhaps the mistake I really made was to make a throwaway remark about
stone spears to illustrate that 20000 years ago the ice cap extended
down to circa mid north atlantic levels, and followed with a question
that asked what mechanisms warmed the planet at that time, and whether
they operate today.

No-one, including yourself, has sought to answer that, but you seem to
be keen on picking up spelling errors and quoting wikipedia while
rubbishing TV, unwilling to admit that both are ways of distributing
information whether good, bad, indifferenet, or biassed.

Take one of your statements above: "there is no evidence that kayaks
date back anywhere near that far"; got a reference for that?

Don't be silly. What you need is a reference to the antiquity of the
kayak and there doesn't seem to be much for that. About the only quote I
can come up with is:

"Archaeologists have found evidence indicating kayaks to be at least
4000 years old."

Kayaks would have to date back at least 17000 years if they were in use
in Europe at the end of the time the Solutrean are suposed to have
occupied parts of France and Spain.

For your information, the term "at least 4000 years old" does include
something that is "20,000 years old"; unless you have evidence to the
contrary. Otherwise, you are merely speculating.

Take another: "The hypothesis that you are trying to ape seems to
confine itself to skin boats and and a resemblance to Inuit
lifestyle"; can you cite any other actual method of living on a polar
ice cap?

Take another: " Technically not contamination but I was looking for a
short way of expressing a very minor element in the genetic make-up of
modern native Americans." Got a cite for 'minor element'?

No wikipedia 'references', please.

You can't have everything. Wikipedia happens to be the easiest. You will
be pleased to note that the author(s) of this article thinks that the
Haplogroup X is a major element in Northern North America. You will be
less pleased to learn it is by no means confined to one obscure tribe.

************************************************* ********************************

In human mitochondrial genetics, Haplogroup X is a human mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup which can be used to define genetic populations.
The genetic sequences of haplogroup X diverged originally from
haplogroup N, and subsequently further diverged about 20,000 to 30,000
years ago to give two sub-groups, X1 and X2. Overall haplogroup X
accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East and
North Africa. Sub-group X1 is much less numerous, and restricted to
North and East Africa, and also the Near East. Sub-group X2 appears to
have undergone extensive population expansion and dispersal around or
soon after the last glacial maximum, about 21,000 years ago. It is more
strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean
Europe; and somewhat less strongly present in the rest of Europe.
Particular concentrations appear in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (in
Scotland) (7%) and amongst the Israeli Druze (26%); the latter are
presumably due to a founder effect.

[edit] North and South America

Haplogroup X is also one of the five haplogroups found in the indigenous
peoples of the Americas.[1] Although it occurs only at a frequency of
about 3% for the total current indigenous population of the Americas, it
is a major haplogroup in northern North America, where among the
Algonquian peoples it comprises up to 25% of mtDNA types. It is also
present in lesser percentages to the west and south of this area -- in
North America among the Sioux (15%), the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (11%€“13%), the
Navajo (7%), and the Yakima (5%), and in South America among the
Yanomami people (12%) in eight villages in Roraima in northwestern
Brazil.

Unlike the four main Native American haplogroups (A, B, C, and D), X is
not at all strongly associated with East Asia. The sole occurrence of X
in Asia discovered so far is in Altaia in South Siberia (Derenko et al,
2001), and detailed examination (Reidla et al, 2003) has shown that the
Altaian sequences are all almost identical, suggesting that they arrived
in the area probably from the South Caucasus more recently than 5000 BP.

This absence of haplogroup X2 in Asia is one of the major factors
causing the current rethinking of the peopling of the Americas. However,
the New World haplogroup X2a is as different from any of the Old World
X2b, X2c, X2d, X2e and X2f lineages as they are from each other,
indicating an early origin "likely at the very beginning of their
expansion and spread from the Near East".[2]

The Solutrean Hypothesis posits that haplogroup X reached North America
with a wave of European migration about 20,000 BP by the Solutreans, a
stone-age culture in south-western France and in Spain, by boat around
the southern edge of the Arctic ice pack.

Another possible way to explain existence of haplogroup X in mtDNA of
indigenous peoples of the Americas is that it was brought to North
America with the people of Caucasian origin through the Bering land
bridge. [3]

************************************************* *********************

Perhaps the mistake I really made was to make a throwaway remark about
stone spears to illustrate that 20000 years ago the ice cap extended
down to circa mid north atlantic levels, and followed with a question
that asked what mechanisms warmed the planet at that time, and whether
they operate today.

No-one, including yourself, has sought to answer that, but you seem to
be keen on picking up spelling errors and quoting wikipedia while
rubbishing TV, unwilling to admit that both are ways of distributing
information whether good, bad, indifferenet, or biassed.

"geoff" wrote in message
...
In message , "dennis@home"
writes


"geoff" wrote in message
...
In message , "dennis@home"
writes

Anyway the best thing to do is to reduce the water vapour as it is water
that carries the energy to create storms, etc. The only way to do that
is to stop them burning the rain forests and let them re-grow.

You do spout some ********

most of the water vapour in the air comes from evaporation from the
oceans

You do keep up with your stupid trying to score points cr@p.

because you keep on spouting ********

and you annoy me

I do something right then.


So what if most is evaporated from the oceans, an awful lot is trapped by
the rain forests and precipitates out.

go on then - come up with a sourced percentage of rain forest contribution
to global water vapour levels

Not a chance, it annoys you that I don't.
You can use google the same as anyone else and you have already decided to
argue with anything I post.


All of that has to go somewhere else.
It isn't a coincidence that rain forests are wet and near the equator.

Try the oceans ... they are wet - and cover approx 2/3 of the earths
surface. What percentage of the earth id covered in rain forest ?

less than one percent ?

Roger wrote:

The message
from Roger contains these words:


[Terry]

- Why the modellers chose to knowingly tuned their models to get the
same answer as the others

You have said that before so it is about time you cited your source.

More than time by now.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6934

"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to
be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the
University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's
terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the
world," he explains.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:45:52 +0100 someone who may be The Natural
Philosopher wrote this:-

I don't think that is the case. However the argument is rapidly becoming
irrelevant: a crashing world economy will use less fuel, and buys us
more time, and in the end only nuclear power will work, and we should
have just about enough time to get it onstream before the lights go out.

Given the crashing world economy and the high cost of building
nuclear power stations then the money is unlikely to be available to
build the things, even if one ignores all the other problems the
things pose.



--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

Roger wrote:

No, what you have been claiming all along is that CO2/global warming is
a myth and anything that doesn't support that claim is badly researched
rubbish or worse.

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41
references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and
more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Near the start, it says this:

-----
(G)LOBALLY-AVERAGED land and sea surface absolute temperature TS has
not risen since 1998 (Hadley Center; US National Climatic Data Center;
University of Alabama at Huntsville; etc.). For almost seven years, TS
may even have fallen (Figure 1). There may be no new peak until 2015
(Keenlysideet al., 2008).
-----


So, planetary temperatures may be falling, and may have been doing so
for some years, according to a number of researchers, including the
Met Office's own Hadley Centre. No mention of warming at all. And
these are not figures measured from some arbitary 'baseline'; they are
absolute figures.

Worse, it goes on to say this:

-----
The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in
€œglobal warming€�; nor (until trained ex post facto) the fall in TS
from 1940-1975; nor 50 years cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al.,
2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005); nor the absence of ocean warming
since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski&Koltermann, 2007); nor the
onset, duration, or intensity of the Madden-Julian intraseasonal
oscillation, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical
stratosphere, El Nino/La Nina oscillations, the Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that has recently
transited from its warming to its cooling phase (oceanic oscillations
which, on their own, may account for all of the observed warmings and
coolings over the past half-century: Tsoniset al., 2007); nor the
magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval
Warm Period or the Little Ice Age; nor the cessation since 2000 of the
previously-observed growth in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC,
2007); nor the active 2004 hurricane season; nor the inactive
subsequent seasons; nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had
forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously);
nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun
was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the
past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solankiet al., 2005); nor the
consequent surface €œglobal warming€� on Mars, Jupiter, Neptunes
largest moon, and even distant Pluto; nor the eerily- continuing 2006
solar minimum; nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in
TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of
the observed warming of the 20th century.
-----

Note that statement: "nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8
°C in TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost
all of the observed warming of the 20th century."

That's surely worth a headline....the whole of the 20th Century
'global warming' just about gone in a year. The expensive models
failed to predict that, along with just about every other variation.

Figure 1 is a graph, which cannot be reproduced here, but the notes
accompanying it say this:

-----
Since the phase-transition in mean global surface temperature late in
2001, a pronounced downtrend has set in. In the cold winter of 2007/8,
record sea-ice extents were observed at both Poles. The
January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the greatest
since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley Center
monthly combined land and sea surface temperature anomalies;
University of Alabama at Huntsville Microwave Sounding Unit monthly
lower-troposphere anomalies;
-----

What was that? "In the cold winter of 2007/8, record sea-ice extents
were observed at both Poles". And the figures are from that pesky
Hadley Centre again.

Oh....so the planet's cooling, and sea-ice has broken records...not
for melting, either.

And even better, or worse, according to one's view, is this:
"January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the
greatest since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley
Center". Oh!

There then follows a long destruction of the IPCC assumptions, which I
will leave you to read in slow time., but if you wish to skip the
description of IPCC mendacity, go to Figure 7, entitled "Fluctuating
CO2 but stable temperature for 600m years"

Average Planet Temperatures have varied between 12 degC for an ice-age
and 22 degC for - a picture of a planet in flames springs to mind
here, where did that come from?

But "global surface temperatures was ~22 °C, even when carbon dioxide
concentration peaked at 7000 ppmv, almost 20 times todays
near-record-low concentration." Another headline?

But look at this:

-----
Figure 7 indicates that in the Cambrian era, when CO2 concentration
was ~25 times that which prevailed in the IPCCs reference year of
1750, the temperature was some 8.5 °C higher than it was in 1750. Yet
the IPCCs current central estimate is that a mere doubling of CO2
concentration compared with 1750 would increase temperature by almost
40% of the increase that is thought to have arisen in geological times
from a 20-fold increase in CO2 concentration (IPCC, 2007).
-----

Oh!

-----
The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2
concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it
relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the
difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply
global averages that lead to error.
------

Oh!

And finally the killer paragraph:

-----
Such solecisms throughout the IPCCs assessment reports (including the
insertion, after the scientists had completed their final draft, of a
table in which four decimal points had been right-shifted so as to
multiply tenfold the observed contribution of ice-sheets and glaciers
to sea-level rise), combined with a heavy reliance upon computer
models unskilled even in short-term projection, with initial values of
key variables unmeasurable and unknown, with advancement of multiple,
untestable, non-Popper-falsifiable theories, with a quantitative
assignment of unduly high statistical confidence levels to
non-quantitative statements that are ineluctably subject to very large
uncertainties, and, above all, with the now-prolonged failure of TS to
rise as predicted (Figures 1, 2), raise questions about the
reliability and hence policy-relevance of the IPCCs central
projections.
-----

Note: "...including the insertion, after the scientists had completed
their final draft, of a table in which four decimal points had been
right-shifted so as to multiply tenfold the observed contribution of
ice-sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise."

Post-facto decimal-point shifting, in the direction that someone
wanted it to go in?

I look forward to your receiving comments on the data in the paper, of
which the above is a small but significant sub-set.

You might also like to read this paper:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/2...0corrected.pdf

especially the section entitled "Can Computer models Predict Future
Climate"

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

No, what you have been claiming all along is that CO2/global warming is
a myth and anything that doesn't support that claim is badly researched
rubbish or worse.

Forgive me if I don't answer directly the rest of the points you made,
partly because you've demonstrated that you can't read a graph or use
it's data, thus bringing into doubt the rest of your comments. For
that graph is essentially a key piece of data.

I can read a graph quite adequately thank you so if you think I can't
that is a reflection on your poor skills, not mine.

I was looking at a more easily available graph which is much less
distinct. The page 25 graph certainly does not show that the period 1960
- 1998 was unusually cool. 1950 - 1960 might not be marginally cooler as
I originally thought but the decline over the period 1950 - 1980 is
minimal compared to the steep increases 1920 - 1945 and 1974 - 2004. And
you will note (and disregard) that the base line of this graph is the
temperature at the end of the 19th century.

I'm not responsible for the way the graph was presented, but
nevertheless in order to place the Met Office's own estimate of the
increase for 2008 on the Met Office's own graph it isn't actually
necessary to involve the baseline. I'm surprised you seem unfamiliar
with such straightforward data-handling.

Another red herring. You have a bee in your bonnet about the use of the
period 1960 - 1980 as a baseline. I merely pointed out that the base
line in this graph is lower.

I did not choose the 1960 - 1990 as a baseline, the Global Warmers
did. By choosing a different baseline, the planet can be shown to be
cooling, and possibly cooling for some years now. If you don't grasp
this simple concept, the your search for 'the truth' will founder on
this very simple and very clear concept.

Careful Terry. It looks as though the wheels are really coming off your
argument. You can't even get the period you question right anymore and
your argument has changed from picking a unnaturally cool period to
magnify any warming to saying that changing the baseline changes whether
it is cooling or warming during any period. Pure bull****. Whether or
not the planet has been cooling for some years now (your words) depends
entirely on temperatures during that period and has nothing at all to do
with whatever base line is picked for the graph.

I see you have chosen not to answer the simple question I had posed as
to how the scientists involved could have chosen to use a base line 1980
- 2000 before the year 2000.

And, if you plot the Met Office's own figure of 0.37 degC on the Met
Office's own graph, it would show you that the expected temperature
difference for this year is below the maximum value shown; that is,
the planet might be cooling even by the Met Office's own data; and is
certainly about the value for the late 1990s, implying a peak in value
between 2000 and now. An inconvenient truth, perhaps.

There is too much year on year variability to make any prediction for
the future on the basis of just one year and dubious to make one even on
several.

Scientists are used to handling data; it's their bread-and-butter.
Banks, supermarkets, health services, traffic handlers and
half-a-hundred other industries are used to handling variable data.
Sophisticated tools exist to handle data. To an analyst, there can be
no such thing as 'too much variability'; your statement is a nonsense
and shows your simplistic approach and technical ignorance.

Scientists may be used to handling data but you are obviously not.

Reading from the page 25 graph the approximate values for 1998 to 2004 a

1998 0.84
1999 0.81
2000 0.61
2001 0.72
2002 0.81
2003 0.80
2004 0.75

Over the same period the moving average goes from 0.68 to 0.75 on an
approximate straight line with the maximum deviation being that sore
thumb, 1998.

The figures for later years are no doubt available somewhere but not the
crystal ball to predict the rolling average.

Now from those figures you can if you like work out the standard
deviation and from that the 95% confidence limits for 2005. I can't be
bothered but I suggest that if you go down that route it will be so wide
that any prediction would be meaningless.

You could of course be a bit more sophisticated and adjust for El
Nino/La Nina events but whatever you do you will not get a reliable
trend out of anything less than several years. I could be wrong but as
the graph currently ends at 2004 the Met Office seem to be using 5 years
for their moving average.

--
Roger Chapman

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:48:34 +0100 someone who may be geoff
wrote this:-

because you keep on spouting ********

That is one of the antis' tricks. It allows them to waste your time.
I think it is best to rebut them occasionally, with links to more
information which those with an open mind can follow and decide for
themselves.


--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

"David Hansen" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:45:52 +0100 someone who may be The Natural
Philosopher wrote this:-

I don't think that is the case. However the argument is rapidly becoming
irrelevant: a crashing world economy will use less fuel, and buys us
more time, and in the end only nuclear power will work, and we should
have just about enough time to get it onstream before the lights go out.

Given the crashing world economy and the high cost of building
nuclear power stations then the money is unlikely to be available to
build the things, even if one ignores all the other problems the
things pose.

I bet they still waste money on modeling GW though.
Despite

"The climate is "a complex, non-linear, chaotic object" that defies long-run
prediction of its future states (IPCC, 2001), unless the initial state of
its millions of variables is known to a precision that is in practice
unattainable, as Lorenz (1963; and see Giorgi, 2005) concluded in the
celebrated paper that founded chaos theory -"

Now why do I not trust GW models?
In fact why do they give the same answers when it should be impossible for
them to do so?
The fact that they do agree indicates that they are being fiddled to make
them agree.
They do appear to be fraudulent or at least the reports on what they show
do.

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

"Archaeologists have found evidence indicating kayaks to be at least
4000 years old."

Kayaks would have to date back at least 17000 years if they were in use
in Europe at the end of the time the Solutrean are supposed to have
occupied parts of France and Spain.

For your information, the term "at least 4000 years old" does include
something that is "20,000 years old"; unless you have evidence to the
contrary. Otherwise, you are merely speculating.

Don't be silly. That is the sort of logic used by the proponents of
intelligent design.

You can't prove the absence of anything without searching absolutely
everywhere. After all if whatever you want to find is not in the likely
places then you would have to take in all the unlikely places as well
starting one presumes in Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. Oh sorry even that
won't do being less than 8000 years old.

Why don't you stop digging Terry. Every time you come back your argument
gets more and more preposterous.

--
Roger Chapman

Roger wrote:

Careful Terry. It looks as though the wheels are really coming off your
argument. You can't even get the period you question right anymore and
your argument has changed from picking a unnaturally cool period to
magnify any warming to saying that changing the baseline changes whether
it is cooling or warming during any period. Pure bull****.

Thanks for the ad hominem. I'm astonished that you can't grasp that
choosing the baseline is crucial to the GW proponents, and that it's
manipulation to other date ranges changes the picture totally.

Frankly, your previous posting ducks and weaves all over the place,
and it isn't worth answering. Why, for example, introduce standard
deviations, when no-one has done so up to now? Are you trying to cover
an uncomfortable personal relationship to data? Only an ignoramus
would ever say "there is too much variability".

"David Hansen" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:48:34 +0100 someone who may be geoff
wrote this:-

because you keep on spouting ********

That is one of the antis' tricks. It allows them to waste your time.
I think it is best to rebut them occasionally, with links to more
information which those with an open mind can follow and decide for
themselves.

Well so far *you* haven't posted any links to any useful data so I think you
fit your own description quite well.

All you quote is Sun reader press releases and no substance at all.

When someone does post some real data you either ignore it or misinterpret
it.

As for Geoff it has nothing to do with anti he just has a personal grudge
for some reason.

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:


snip

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Near the start, it says this:

-----
(G)LOBALLY-AVERAGED land and sea surface absolute temperature TS has
not risen since 1998 (Hadley Center; US National Climatic Data Center;
University of Alabama at Huntsville; etc.). For almost seven years, TS
may even have fallen (Figure 1). There may be no new peak until 2015
(Keenlysideet al., 2008).
-----

I don't have the time to read that at the moment but I do have time to
repeat what I have said before. Anyone who takes an extreme anomaly like
1998 as a baseline is a charletan.

So, planetary temperatures may be falling, and may have been doing so
for some years, according to a number of researchers, including the
Met Office's own Hadley Centre. No mention of warming at all. And
these are not figures measured from some arbitary 'baseline'; they are
absolute figures.

The Met Office show the trend is rising up to 2004.



Worse, it goes on to say this:

-----
The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in
€œglobal warming€�; nor (until trained ex post facto) the fall in TS
from 1940-1975; nor 50 years cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al.,
2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005); nor the absence of ocean warming
since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski&Koltermann, 2007); nor the
onset, duration, or intensity of the Madden-Julian intraseasonal
oscillation, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical
stratosphere, El Nino/La Nina oscillations, the Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that has recently
transited from its warming to its cooling phase (oceanic oscillations
which, on their own, may account for all of the observed warmings and
coolings over the past half-century: Tsoniset al., 2007); nor the
magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval
Warm Period or the Little Ice Age; nor the cessation since 2000 of the
previously-observed growth in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC,
2007); nor the active 2004 hurricane season; nor the inactive
subsequent seasons; nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had
forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously);
nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun
was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the
past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solankiet al., 2005); nor the
consequent surface €œglobal warming€� on Mars, Jupiter, Neptunes
largest moon, and even distant Pluto; nor the eerily- continuing 2006
solar minimum; nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in
TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of
the observed warming of the 20th century.
-----

The anti wing don't like the IPCC but is any of the above even true, let
alone relevant to the charge that the IPCC has got it all wrong.

Note that statement: "nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8
°C in TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost
all of the observed warming of the 20th century."

Has it really? Oh goody so more snow for winter mountaineering at last.
Pity I am now too old to really take advantage of it.

That's surely worth a headline....the whole of the 20th Century
'global warming' just about gone in a year. The expensive models
failed to predict that, along with just about every other variation.

Figure 1 is a graph, which cannot be reproduced here, but the notes
accompanying it say this:

-----
Since the phase-transition in mean global surface temperature late in
2001, a pronounced downtrend has set in. In the cold winter of 2007/8,
record sea-ice extents were observed at both Poles. The
January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the greatest
since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley Center
monthly combined land and sea surface temperature anomalies;
University of Alabama at Huntsville Microwave Sounding Unit monthly
lower-troposphere anomalies;
-----

What was that? "In the cold winter of 2007/8, record sea-ice extents
were observed at both Poles". And the figures are from that pesky
Hadley Centre again.

Oh....so the planet's cooling, and sea-ice has broken records...not
for melting, either.

I don't have time to try and track that down on the Met Office site so I
will stick my neck out and say it appears that this report seems to have
got that the wrong way round. Surely the record extent of sea ice was at
a minimum, not a maximum. Given arctic summer ice limits for 2007 and
2008 I can't see how the winter ice limit could be anywhere near a
record maximum.

And even better, or worse, according to one's view, is this:
"January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the
greatest since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley
Center". Oh!

No time to check that but the previous biggest drop seems to have been
from 1998 to 1999 and over the subsequent 4 years the temperature
climbed back to close to the 1998 maximum.

snip

--
Roger Chapman

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:52:04 +0100 someone who may be "dennis@home"
wrote this:-

Now why do I not trust GW models?
In fact why do they give the same answers when it should be impossible for
them to do so?
The fact that they do agree indicates that they are being fiddled to make
them agree.
They do appear to be fraudulent or at least the reports on what they show
do.

"'Consensus is collusion'"

"Objection: More and more, climate models share all the same
assumptions -- so of course they all agree! And every year, fewer
scientists dare speak out against the findings of the IPCC, thanks
to the pressure to conform.

"Answer: The growing confluence of model results and the
increasingly similar physical representations of the climate system
from model to model may well look like sharing code or tweaking 'til
things look alike. But it is also perfectly consistent with better
and better understanding of the underlying problem, an understanding
that is shared via scientific journals and research. This
understanding is coming fast as we gather more and more historical
and current data, all of which provides more testing material for
model refinement.

"Viewing the increasing agreement among climate models and climate
scientists as collusion instead of consensus is a rather
conspiratorial take on the normal course of scientific
investigation. I suppose that fewer and fewer scientists disagreeing
with the status quo is indeed consistent with some kind of
widespread and insidious suppression of ideas, but you know, it is
also consistent with having the right answer."

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/13/23211/495



--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:


Careful Terry. It looks as though the wheels are really coming off your
argument. You can't even get the period you question right anymore and
your argument has changed from picking a unnaturally cool period to
magnify any warming to saying that changing the baseline changes whether
it is cooling or warming during any period. Pure bull****.

Thanks for the ad hominem. I'm astonished that you can't grasp that
choosing the baseline is crucial to the GW proponents, and that it's
manipulation to other date ranges changes the picture totally.

Ok take that page 25 graph. Shift the base line so zero is now where 0.2
was. Does it make any real difference to the situation, of course not.
Rising temperatures demonstrate warming, not baselines.

Oh yes and calling your stupidity bull****, apart from being true, is
very mild compared with the way you have sought to disparage my
integrity at every turn.

Frankly, your previous posting ducks and weaves all over the place,
and it isn't worth answering. Why, for example, introduce standard
deviations, when no-one has done so up to now? Are you trying to cover
an uncomfortable personal relationship to data? Only an ignoramus
would ever say "there is too much variability".

I would venture to suggest that only an ignoramus would even attempt to
dismiss standard deviations as of no consequence when discussing
variability.

So stop digging Terry. Otherwise that fundamentalist hole you are in
might collapse on you and you will be buried for good, in killfiles if
nowhere else.

--
Roger Chapman

nightjar cpb@ wrote:
"Tim S" wrote in message
...
...
My daughter is being taught to recycle at school, which, at here age, I
aplaude. But I tried a little though experiment on her (she's 4). I showed
her a package from Tescos. It was a little cardboard box of pills encased
in a plastic "clam shell". I cut off the clam shell and asked her what she
thought about it. Reply: "Recycle it Daddy". I said "good", "but how about
if it wasn't made in the first place?" "Carboard comes from trees and you
can grow new trees, but plastic is made from oil which is a precious
resource which cannot readily be regenerated".

The technology for using algae to convert human and animal waste to oil has
been around for decades. However, at present, it is a lot easier and cheaper
to extract the stuff from the ground, so the process has not been refined
into a commercially viable operation.

"Why did they put a nice
little cardboard box that worked perfectly well in a silly plastic shell
whose sole purpose is to cut my fingers before I chuck it in the bin?"

The shells are optional extras on many goods and are classed as anti-tamper
devices. They stop people damaging goods by opening them and also stop
people stealing the contents, but leaving the empty box on the shelf.


Oh for the days when there were no shelves that customers could get to:
you went to a counter, and stated your problem, and the man behind who
actually knew what he was selling went and got it from a stre-room.

I bought a ladder standoff tis week. It came fully assembled, wrapped in
bubble wrap and packing tape. Not a hint of a manufacturer, not a hint
of cardboard or vac forming..great!


Colin Bignell

David Hansen wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:45:52 +0100 someone who may be The Natural
Philosopher wrote this:-

I don't think that is the case. However the argument is rapidly becoming
irrelevant: a crashing world economy will use less fuel, and buys us
more time, and in the end only nuclear power will work, and we should
have just about enough time to get it onstream before the lights go out.

Given the crashing world economy and the high cost of building
nuclear power stations then the money is unlikely to be available to
build the things, even if one ignores all the other problems the
things pose.



There is plenty of money for things that are fundamentally necessary.

Nuclear power stations are cheaper than windmills and solar panels,
watt for watt.

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:28:05 +0100 someone who may be "dennis@home"
wrote this:-

All you quote is Sun reader press releases and no substance at all.

Yawn. Some people may be taken in by this misrepresentation of what
I have quoted, but most will not.

Anyone who wishes may look at the credentials of those behind
http://www.realclimate.org. The Meteorological Office and Royal
Society have their faults, but their web sites are rather more
advanced than a "Sun reader press release". I make no comment on Sun
readers, but I don't recall quoting a press release in this thread.



--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

Roger wrote:
The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

What was that? "In the cold winter of 2007/8, record sea-ice extents
were observed at both Poles". And the figures are from that pesky
Hadley Centre again.

Oh....so the planet's cooling, and sea-ice has broken records...not
for melting, either.

I don't have time to try and track that down on the Met Office site so I
will stick my neck out and say it appears that this report seems to have
got that the wrong way round. Surely the record extent of sea ice was at
a minimum, not a maximum. Given arctic summer ice limits for 2007 and
2008 I can't see how the winter ice limit could be anywhere near a
record maximum.


That is my take as well.Yes, it was a record year, yes the ice was less
than it had ever been known to be.


That one sentence tells you that this is a complete snow (sic!) job,
prepared by someone with the linguistic skills of a laywer, and the
ethics of a weasel.


And even better, or worse, according to one's view, is this:
"January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the
greatest since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley
Center". Oh!

No time to check that but the previous biggest drop seems to have been
from 1998 to 1999 and over the subsequent 4 years the temperature
climbed back to close to the 1998 maximum.

Right here, the winter of 2008 was the warmest I have ever known.

In he end, the fact that there was hardly a single overnight frost last
winter, wheres in my childhood frosts - and all day frosts at that -
were commonplace, tends to replace any mealy mouthed bull****.

That report is political FUD.


snip

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields
wrote this:-

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41
references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and
more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Ah, the forum/newsletter article by Christopher Monckton. Note that
it is not a (peer-reviewed) scientific paper but is rather a forum
posting. There is nothing wrong with making forum postings, they are
a way of putting across one's ideas to others, but one should check
a posting carefully before relying on it.

Note also what it says at the top of the article, which is referred
to below, as well as what it says at the bottom, "The Forum on
Physics and Society is a place for discussion and disagreement on
scientific and policy matters. Our newsletter publishes a
combination of non-peer-reviewed technical articles, policy
analyses, and opinion. All articles and editorials published in the
newsletter solely represent the views of their authors and do not
necessarily represent the views of the Forum Executive Committee."


Having said that, let's see what Gristmill has to say on this
"paper".

"The American Physical Society denies the so-called consensus"

"Objection: The American Physical Society with tens of thousands of
member scientists no longer believes that the science of global
warming is conclusive. So what about that so called consensus?

"Answer: The APS has not reversed its position on climate change:

" Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are
changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.
Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous
oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion
and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

" The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the
Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security
and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases beginning now.

"This statement was reaffirmed on July 22, 2008 in response to a
controversy prompted by the publication of an article by amateur
climate skeptic Christopher Monckton. That article was published in
the APS Forum on Physics and Society Newsletter, not a scientific
journal, and is not peer reviewed science, nor is Monckton a
scientist. The material Monckton presented has been thoroughly
refuted by many working climatologists and the apparent
embarrassment of the APS over how this happened has prompted them to
preface that article with the following disclaimer:

" The following article has not undergone any scientific peer
review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical
Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the
following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body,
the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: 'Emissions of greenhouse
gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that
affect the Earth's climate'.

"So, what about that consensus? Far from a skeptical institution,
the American Physical Society is well in agreement with the IPCC
consensus statement and their statement agrees with all the other
endorsements from all the other major scientific institutions and
national science academies from around the world. The consensus of
scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming is alive and
well."

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/17/114958/077


For more robustly expressed views on this "paper" see

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/18/american-physical-society-reaffirms-it-is-incontrovertible-human-emissions-are-warming-the-globe-and-must-be-cut-beginning-now/

"Physicists forced to reaffirm that human-caused global warming is
'incontrovertible'

"The Drudge headline blared 'Group Repping 50,000 Physicists Opens
Global Warming Debate…' The link was to a story 'Myth of Consensus
Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate.' Since it was a denier
website, I ignored it. Then I got forwarded an e-mail from one of
the top journalists in the country titled 'This may be important'
with the same opening paragraph as the denier article:

" The American Physical Society, an organization representing
nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change
and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in
human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public
debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of
the society had previously called the evidence for global warming
'incontrovertible.'

"Now you can be just as sure that any denier talk point is wrong
without studying it in detail as you can be sure that a perpetual
motion machine is not, in fact, perpetual without studying it in
detail. But as a former American Physical Society Congressional
science fellow, I feel obliged to point out that the obvious way to
figure out what the American Physical Society believes is to go to
their website, www.aps.org, and see what they say:" [snip]

and

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/19/american-physical-society-stomps-on-monckton-disinformation-thank-you-climate-progress-readers/

"The country’s largest organization of physicists is working fast to
restore its good name, which was damaged by one ignorant editor of a
non-peer-reviewed newsletter. That editor, Jeff Marque, published a
previously-debunked analysis by failed conservative politician and
non-scientist Lord Monckton.

"The Council of the American Physical Society quickly responded to
the uproar over this disinformation by adding a new disclaimer to
the Monckton article:" [snip]

"There is no need to waste any further time here debunking
Monckton’s 'sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary,' as RealClimate put
it. As the APS makes clear, just because somebody uses a lot of
numbers and formulas, that doesn’t make their analysis either
scientific or credible.

and

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/20/irony-gate-viscount-monckton-a-british-peer-says-his-paper-was-peer-reviewed-by-a-scientist-how-droll/

"Should you be interested in learning more about TVMOB [The Viscount
Monckton of Brenchley], go to the Science & Public Policy Institute
website where he is Chief Policy Adviser. You will learn he has
astonishing scientific credentials such as a 'Nobel prize pin,'
because he commented on the IPCC Fourth assessment report. This has
'earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin,
made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to
him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of
Rochester, New York.' Also 'his limpid analysis of the
climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of
Roger Pielke, Sr.' I kid you not.

"Monty Python is alive and well. Oh, and TVMOB knows how to use the
words 'primo' and 'secundo' and 'tertio.' Some of us can only dream
of such scientific achievements.

"Finally, if his writing has made you a fan of TVMOB, you can go to
'HouseOfNames.com' and purchase products labeled with the Monckton
family crest, including mouse pads."




--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields
wrote this:-

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41
references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and
more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Oops. I forgot to add the robustly expressed article at
http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/24/how-to-diss-a-peer-real-climate-scientists-take-on-tvmob/

"The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley just can’t catch a break. Not
only does TVMOB have to deal with well-deserved mockery for his
un-peer-reviewed paper. He also has to deal with factual debunking
from real climate scientists, in this case, the scientists at
RealClimate. Here is a taste:" [snip]

"That is how to diss-a-peer."

What is snipped is the majority of the article at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/once-more-unto-the-bray/langswitch_lang/in
which in full is

"We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few
words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As
many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an
un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite
sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a
new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous
arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is
negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of
the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time
in working it out themselves, here are a few highlights.

"As Deltoid quickly noticed the most egregious error is a completely
arbitrary reduction (by 66%) of the radiative forcing due to CO2. He
amusingly justifies this with reference to tropical troposphere
temperatures - neglecting of course that temperatures change in
response to forcing and are not the forcing itself. And of course,
he ignores the evidence that the temperature changes are in fact
rather uncertain, and may well be much more in accord with the
models than he thinks.

"But back to his main error: Forcing due to CO2 can be calculated
very accurately using line-by-line radiative transfer codes (see
Myhre et al 2001; Collins et al 2006). It is normally done for a few
standard atmospheric profiles and those results weighted to produce
a global mean estimate of 3.7 W/m2 - given the variations in
atmospheric composition (clouds, water vapour etc.) uncertainties
are about 10% (or 0.4 W/m2) (the spatial pattern can be seen here).
There is no way that it is appropriate to arbitrarily divide it by
three.

"There is a good analogy to gas mileage. The gallon of gasoline is
equivalent to the forcing, the miles you can go on a gallon is the
response (i.e. temperature), and thus the miles per gallon is
analogous to the climate sensitivity. Thinking that forcing should
be changed because of your perception of the temperature change is
equivalent to deciding after the fact that you only put in third of
a gallon because you ran out of gas earlier than you expected. The
appropriate response would be to think about the miles per gallon -
but you'd need to be sure that you measured the miles travelled
accurately (a very big issue for the tropical troposphere).

"But Monckton is not satisfied with just a factor of three reduction
in sensitivity. So he makes another dodgy claim. Note that Monckton
starts off using the IPCC definition of climate sensitivity as the
forcing associated with a concentration of 2xCO2 - this is the
classical 'Charney Sensitivity' and does not include feedbacks
associated with carbon cycle, vegetation or ice-sheet change. Think
of it this way - if humans raise CO2 levels to 560 ppm from 280 ppm
through our emissions, and then as the climate warms the carbon
cycle starts adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere, then the final
CO2 will be higher and the temperature will end up higher than
standard sensitivity would predict, but you are no longer dealing
with the sensitivity to 2xCO2. Thus the classical climate
sensitivity does not include any carbon cycle feedback term. But
Monckton puts one in anyway.

"You might ask why he would do this. Why add another positive
feedback to the mix when he is aiming to minimise the climate
sensitivity? The answer lies in the backwards calculations he makes
to derive the feedbacks. At this point, I was going to do a full
analysis of that particular calculation - but I was scooped. So
instead of repeating the work, I'll refer you there. The short
answer is that by increasing the feedbacks incorrectly, he makes the
'no-feedback' temperature smaller (since he is deriving it from the
reported climate sensitivities divided by the feedbacks). This
reverses the causality since the 'no-feedback' value is actually
independent of the feedbacks, and is much better constrained.

"There are many more errors in his piece - for instance he accuses
the IPCC of not defining radiative forcing in the Summary for Policy
Makers and not fixing this despite requests. Umm… except that the
definition is on the bottom of page 2. He bizarrely compares the net
anthropogenic forcing to date with the value due to CO2 alone and
then extrapolates that difference to come up with a meaningless
'total anthropogenic forcings Del F_2xCO2?. His derivations and
discussions of the no-feedback sensitivity and feedbacks is
extremely opaque (a much better description is given on the first
couple of pages of Hansen et al, 1984)). His discussion of the
forcings in that paper are wrong (it's 4.0 W/m2 for 2xCO2 (p135),
not 4.8 W/m2), and the no-feedback temperature change is 1.2 (Hansen
et al, 1988, p9360), giving k=0.30 C/(W/m2) (not his incorrect 0.260
C/(W/m2) value). Etc… Needless to say, the multiple errors
completely undermine the conclusions regarding climate sensitivity.

"Generally speaking, these are the kinds of issues that get spotted
by peer-reviewers: are the citations correctly interpreted? is the
mathematics correct? is the reasoning sound? do the conclusions
follow? etc. In this case, there really wouldn't have been much
left, and so it is fair to conclude that Monckton's piece only saw
the light of day because it wasn't peer-reviewed, not because it
was. Claims that the suggested edits from the editor of the
newsletter constitute 'peer-review' are belied by the editor's
obvious unfamiliarity with the key concepts of forcing and feedback
- and the multitude of basic errors still remaining. The even more
egregious claims that this paper provides 'Mathematical proof that
there is no 'climate crisis' ' or is 'a major, peer-reviewed paper
in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong
American Physical Society' are just bunk (though amusing in their
chutzpah).

"The rational for the FPS publication of this note was to 'open up
the debate' on climate change. The obvious ineptitude of this
contribution underlines quite effectively how little debate there is
on the fundamentals if this is the best counter-argument that can be
offered."




--
David Hansen, Edinburgh
I will *always* explain revoked encryption keys, unless RIP prevents me
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm#54

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:48:30 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Oh for the days when there were no shelves that customers could get to:
you went to a counter, and stated your problem, and the man behind who
actually knew what he was selling went and got it from a stre-room.

Four candles?

:-)

--
Frank Erskine

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

8

Right here, the winter of 2008 was the warmest I have ever known.

Totally irrelevant.
That's the trouble with the GW debate, everyone talks about specific events
that prove their case when its the average of the system that matters.

Even when graphs are printed people look at the peaks and say "its rising"
they don't integrate the graph over time to get the correct answers.
I guess its just poor education leading to people not being able to use
statistics correctly.

David Hansen wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields
wrote this:-

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41
references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and
more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Ah, the forum/newsletter article by Christopher Monckton. Note that
it is not a (peer-reviewed) scientific paper but is rather a forum
posting. There is nothing wrong with making forum postings, they are
a way of putting across one's ideas to others, but one should check
a posting carefully before relying on it.

Check?

The guys quotes sourced data, with no mainpulation. Roger wanted data
and he got it in spades.

Note also what it says at the top of the article, which is referred
to below, as well as what it says at the bottom, "The Forum on
Physics and Society is a place for discussion and disagreement on
scientific and policy matters. Our newsletter publishes a
combination of non-peer-reviewed technical articles, policy
analyses, and opinion. All articles and editorials published in the
newsletter solely represent the views of their authors and do not
necessarily represent the views of the Forum Executive Committee."

It's known in the trade as CMA.

Having said that, let's see what Gristmill has to say on this
"paper".

"The American Physical Society denies the so-called consensus"

"Objection: The American Physical Society with tens of thousands of
member scientists no longer believes that the science of global
warming is conclusive. So what about that so called consensus?

"Answer: The APS has not reversed its position on climate change:

" Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are
changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.
Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous
oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion
and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

" The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the
Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security
and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases beginning now.

"This statement was reaffirmed on July 22, 2008 in response to a
controversy prompted by the publication of an article by amateur
climate skeptic Christopher Monckton. That article was published in
the APS Forum on Physics and Society Newsletter, not a scientific
journal, and is not peer reviewed science, nor is Monckton a
scientist. The material Monckton presented has been thoroughly
refuted by many working climatologists and the apparent
embarrassment of the APS over how this happened has prompted them to
preface that article with the following disclaimer:

" The following article has not undergone any scientific peer
review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical
Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the
following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body,
the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: 'Emissions of greenhouse
gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that
affect the Earth's climate'.

"So, what about that consensus? Far from a skeptical institution,
the American Physical Society is well in agreement with the IPCC
consensus statement and their statement agrees with all the other
endorsements from all the other major scientific institutions and
national science academies from around the world. The consensus of
scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming is alive and
well."

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/17/114958/077


For more robustly expressed views on this "paper" see

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/18/american-physical-society-reaffirms-it-is-incontrovertible-human-emissions-are-warming-the-globe-and-must-be-cut-beginning-now/

"Physicists forced to reaffirm that human-caused global warming is
'incontrovertible'

"The Drudge headline blared 'Group Repping 50,000 Physicists Opens
Global Warming Debate€¦' The link was to a story 'Myth of Consensus
Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate.' Since it was a denier
website, I ignored it. Then I got forwarded an e-mail from one of
the top journalists in the country titled 'This may be important'
with the same opening paragraph as the denier article:

" The American Physical Society, an organization representing
nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change
and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in
human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public
debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of
the society had previously called the evidence for global warming
'incontrovertible.'

"Now you can be just as sure that any denier talk point is wrong
without studying it in detail as you can be sure that a perpetual
motion machine is not, in fact, perpetual without studying it in
detail. But as a former American Physical Society Congressional
science fellow, I feel obliged to point out that the obvious way to
figure out what the American Physical Society believes is to go to
their website, www.aps.org, and see what they say:" [snip]

and

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/19/american-physical-society-stomps-on-monckton-disinformation-thank-you-climate-progress-readers/

"The countrys largest organization of physicists is working fast to
restore its good name, which was damaged by one ignorant editor of a
non-peer-reviewed newsletter. That editor, Jeff Marque, published a
previously-debunked analysis by failed conservative politician and
non-scientist Lord Monckton.

"The Council of the American Physical Society quickly responded to
the uproar over this disinformation by adding a new disclaimer to
the Monckton article:" [snip]

"There is no need to waste any further time here debunking
Moncktons 'sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary,' as RealClimate put
it. As the APS makes clear, just because somebody uses a lot of
numbers and formulas, that doesnt make their analysis either
scientific or credible.

and

http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/20/irony-gate-viscount-monckton-a-british-peer-says-his-paper-was-peer-reviewed-by-a-scientist-how-droll/

"Should you be interested in learning more about TVMOB [The Viscount
Monckton of Brenchley], go to the Science & Public Policy Institute
website where he is Chief Policy Adviser. You will learn he has
astonishing scientific credentials such as a 'Nobel prize pin,'
because he commented on the IPCC Fourth assessment report. This has
'earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin,
made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to
him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of
Rochester, New York.' Also 'his limpid analysis of the
climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of
Roger Pielke, Sr.' I kid you not.

"Monty Python is alive and well. Oh, and TVMOB knows how to use the
words 'primo' and 'secundo' and 'tertio.' Some of us can only dream
of such scientific achievements.

"Finally, if his writing has made you a fan of TVMOB, you can go to
'HouseOfNames.com' and purchase products labeled with the Monckton
family crest, including mouse pads."

I note that none of the data quoted has been challenged.

Or the shifting of decimal points in the 'correct' direction, after
the scientists had drafted it.

Thanks for taking the trouble to post the above, but it has no greater
credence than a character assassination - a sure sign of insecurity
by those undertaking it.

"David Hansen" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:52:04 +0100 someone who may be "dennis@home"
wrote this:-

Now why do I not trust GW models?
In fact why do they give the same answers when it should be impossible for
them to do so?
The fact that they do agree indicates that they are being fiddled to make
them agree.
They do appear to be fraudulent or at least the reports on what they show
do.

"'Consensus is collusion'"

"Objection: More and more, climate models share all the same
assumptions -- so of course they all agree! And every year, fewer
scientists dare speak out against the findings of the IPCC, thanks
to the pressure to conform.

"Answer: The growing confluence of model results and the
increasingly similar physical representations of the climate system
from model to model may well look like sharing code or tweaking 'til
things look alike. But it is also perfectly consistent with better
and better understanding of the underlying problem, an understanding
that is shared via scientific journals and research. This
understanding is coming fast as we gather more and more historical
and current data, all of which provides more testing material for
model refinement.

Read the articles.. you can't predict it whatever the model.
So the fact the models agree implies there is something wrong to get the
same result.
The results should vary widely but they don't.

Look at weather forecasts as they have the same problem with predicting in
advance.

In fact the met office do lots of runs with different starting data to see
how much the predictions diversify or converge for each forecast. Some days
it always diversifies and they know the forecast is cr@p. They get around
this they are constantly updating the starting conditions, something the
climate modelers can't/won't do.

Now go and produce some more cr@p quotes rather than actually thinking about
it like you always do.

David Hansen wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields
wrote this:-

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41
references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and
more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newslet...7/monckton.cfm

Oops. I forgot to add the robustly expressed article at
http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/24/how-to-diss-a-peer-real-climate-scientists-take-on-tvmob/

"The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley just cant catch a break. Not
only does TVMOB have to deal with well-deserved mockery for his
un-peer-reviewed paper. He also has to deal with factual debunking
from real climate scientists, in this case, the scientists at
RealClimate. Here is a taste:" [snip]

"That is how to diss-a-peer."

What is snipped is the majority of the article at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/once-more-unto-the-bray/langswitch_lang/in
which in full is

"We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few
words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As
many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an
un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite
sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a
new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous
arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is
negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of
the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time
in working it out themselves, here are a few highlights.

"As Deltoid quickly noticed the most egregious error is a completely
arbitrary reduction (by 66%) of the radiative forcing due to CO2. He
amusingly justifies this with reference to tropical troposphere
temperatures - neglecting of course that temperatures change in
response to forcing and are not the forcing itself. And of course,
he ignores the evidence that the temperature changes are in fact
rather uncertain, and may well be much more in accord with the
models than he thinks.

"But back to his main error: Forcing due to CO2 can be calculated
very accurately using line-by-line radiative transfer codes (see
Myhre et al 2001; Collins et al 2006). It is normally done for a few
standard atmospheric profiles and those results weighted to produce
a global mean estimate of 3.7 W/m2 - given the variations in
atmospheric composition (clouds, water vapour etc.) uncertainties
are about 10% (or 0.4 W/m2) (the spatial pattern can be seen here).
There is no way that it is appropriate to arbitrarily divide it by
three.

"There is a good analogy to gas mileage. The gallon of gasoline is
equivalent to the forcing, the miles you can go on a gallon is the
response (i.e. temperature), and thus the miles per gallon is
analogous to the climate sensitivity. Thinking that forcing should
be changed because of your perception of the temperature change is
equivalent to deciding after the fact that you only put in third of
a gallon because you ran out of gas earlier than you expected. The
appropriate response would be to think about the miles per gallon -
but you'd need to be sure that you measured the miles travelled
accurately (a very big issue for the tropical troposphere).

"But Monckton is not satisfied with just a factor of three reduction
in sensitivity. So he makes another dodgy claim. Note that Monckton
starts off using the IPCC definition of climate sensitivity as the
forcing associated with a concentration of 2xCO2 - this is the
classical 'Charney Sensitivity' and does not include feedbacks
associated with carbon cycle, vegetation or ice-sheet change. Think
of it this way - if humans raise CO2 levels to 560 ppm from 280 ppm
through our emissions, and then as the climate warms the carbon
cycle starts adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere, then the final
CO2 will be higher and the temperature will end up higher than
standard sensitivity would predict, but you are no longer dealing
with the sensitivity to 2xCO2. Thus the classical climate
sensitivity does not include any carbon cycle feedback term. But
Monckton puts one in anyway.

"You might ask why he would do this. Why add another positive
feedback to the mix when he is aiming to minimise the climate
sensitivity? The answer lies in the backwards calculations he makes
to derive the feedbacks. At this point, I was going to do a full
analysis of that particular calculation - but I was scooped. So
instead of repeating the work, I'll refer you there. The short
answer is that by increasing the feedbacks incorrectly, he makes the
'no-feedback' temperature smaller (since he is deriving it from the
reported climate sensitivities divided by the feedbacks). This
reverses the causality since the 'no-feedback' value is actually
independent of the feedbacks, and is much better constrained.

"There are many more errors in his piece - for instance he accuses
the IPCC of not defining radiative forcing in the Summary for Policy
Makers and not fixing this despite requests. Umm€¦ except that the
definition is on the bottom of page 2. He bizarrely compares the net
anthropogenic forcing to date with the value due to CO2 alone and
then extrapolates that difference to come up with a meaningless
'total anthropogenic forcings Del F_2xCO2?. His derivations and
discussions of the no-feedback sensitivity and feedbacks is
extremely opaque (a much better description is given on the first
couple of pages of Hansen et al, 1984)). His discussion of the
forcings in that paper are wrong (it's 4.0 W/m2 for 2xCO2 (p135),
not 4.8 W/m2), and the no-feedback temperature change is 1.2 (Hansen
et al, 1988, p9360), giving k=0.30 C/(W/m2) (not his incorrect 0.260
C/(W/m2) value). Etc€¦ Needless to say, the multiple errors
completely undermine the conclusions regarding climate sensitivity.

"Generally speaking, these are the kinds of issues that get spotted
by peer-reviewers: are the citations correctly interpreted? is the
mathematics correct? is the reasoning sound? do the conclusions
follow? etc. In this case, there really wouldn't have been much
left, and so it is fair to conclude that Monckton's piece only saw
the light of day because it wasn't peer-reviewed, not because it
was. Claims that the suggested edits from the editor of the
newsletter constitute 'peer-review' are belied by the editor's
obvious unfamiliarity with the key concepts of forcing and feedback
- and the multitude of basic errors still remaining. The even more
egregious claims that this paper provides 'Mathematical proof that
there is no 'climate crisis' ' or is 'a major, peer-reviewed paper
in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong
American Physical Society' are just bunk (though amusing in their
chutzpah).

"The rational for the FPS publication of this note was to 'open up
the debate' on climate change. The obvious ineptitude of this
contribution underlines quite effectively how little debate there is
on the fundamentals if this is the best counter-argument that can be
offered."

I look forward to Monckton's reply, hopefully at a near future date.

Interestingly, I turned up references to a model that was used in, I
think, economics. The proponents of this model had such a powerful
grip on the field that one could not get academic tenure if one
expressed any doubts about the model; at least one well-known academic
suffered because of this.

Then, one day, the model stopped working.

The possible parallels here might prove interesting.