What about visual confirmation? Does that count for nothing? We have polar ice caps melting, and the fact that the poles are warming faster than temperate regions is EXACTLY what AGW theory set forth in a well-known prinicple of geophysics: colder bodies warm much faster than bodies relatively warmer to start. This fits why we can OBSERVE–human-emotion emails and faux codes or not, what we have about Arctic ice meling, and why people remark that little has changed in climate in the regions where most of us live–the temperate zones.

In fact, at this point the “theory” angle of this is purely academic. (Thus for example I’m quite sure the residents of Hiroshima would laugh at the notion that theories about mass to energy conversion are not fully tested, even if the term STILL technically applies to radiation. Yep–it’s a “theory”.

A friend of mine had the following précis on all the foregoing, and it might be worth a gander:

CLAIM: Scientists had private doubts about whether the world really is heating up.

Skeptics have been pointing to an email from scientist Phil Jones where he said he used a “trick” with his data. As climate expert Bob Ward writes, “Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something — a short cut can be a trick.” RealClimate also explained that “the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to … ‘a good way to deal with a problem’, rather than something that is ’secret’, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.”

OK. I know I’m late on the draw here, but still.

A few points, in the order that my extreme tiredness can recall while juggling 100 other things this week:

Okay, to start with, I did read both the Newsweek and the New Scientist articles and neither addresses any of the technical issues myself and others have raised. In particular, they don’t answer my specific objections about the slipshod and amateur that the most important computer software in the world was created and maintained. Neither article is actually a technical analysis at all but just repeated arguments from authority that say trust us.
They answer absolutely nothing.

Question (1) answered by the Factcheck link I provided…There’s your vaunted transparency.

Well, no unless I can go online and download both the raw data and the code as well as a log of all corrections applied to the data. I repeat, given the seriousness of the decisions we are being asked to make why shouldn’t we make the process completely transparent?

You haven’t answered the question.

I do believe the articles answer the Far Right Wing’s absurdist claim of these guys serving as Soro’s sockpuppets, if nothing else. The data is available online.

I realize that the link from FactCheck, Begley over at Newsweek, and the others have not answered the issue of CODING per se, which seems to be your focus now, unlike most other Doubting Thomas type sites out there at the moment. What was also detailed in those stories is that the emails revealed only nasty habits, and not conspiracy. It also gave the lie to the notion that large reams of data are flushed down the Great Water Closet and unavailable. Also untrue. So on that note alone 98% of the Right Wing blogosphere is hunting down a phantom. Yours is the only site that deals with this code issue; the climate scientists ARE also reviewing these materials–including the computer programs, and while some minor blips have shown up, the consensus among the climatologists (as the articles also pointed out) is that nothing is out of order. As to the issue of science in general being one of testing and not observation, you’re technically correct of course on the methodology. But observation must come first, and even if we had flushed all the data of decades down the commode, we still have the observation of polar ice cap melting, glaciers retreating, hummingbird migration pattern shifts, crop failures even in erstwhile favorable zones, and dozens of other anomalies that have hit the earth like a bolt out of the blue. Coding or not, that needs to be answered by the Skeptics as well. It has not so far. Coding faux pas or not, it is not necessary for any of that ongoing fret to see animal migration shifts and polar caps melting. Any input on THAT?

(2) was answered by Factcheck and NS. The issue of the coding was already answered. The corrections were explained as necessary and rather common and mundane.

As noted above, they merely say that the corrections are mundane but they don’t print the code and show why it is mundane. I have personally looked at one section of code that applies different correction based solely on the date the observation was taking. It “corrects” temperatures in the past to be cooler and “corrects” temperatures more recent to be warmer. As a result, even if you ran the same fixed temperature every year through the code, it would produce a warming trend. Nothing in the documentation justifies this “correction” other than as an attempt to force the data to agree with another data set.

Fair enough. If that’s truly the case, then you’d raise some eyebrows over at Newsweek and New Scientist. They don’t seem aware, and……They need to hear from YOU, not guys like me.

But what else am I supposed to do generally but go to the climate scientists? You ask me to piddle with the code, albeit we both freely admit I’m not into this kind of gig, and yet this would be the equivalent of handcuffing my arms and legs and asking me to do cartwheels and expert gym flips on the sawhorse. Instead, I move to go to consensus among the scientist who actually do the encoding, their testimony, mind you, and YET this is STILL not good enough due to some Crichton-sounding conspiratorial mindset that says they must be compromised due to working primarily for government agencies of one descript or another and on the public dime. But what else am I to do but to defer? Would I trust mine or (no offense) your judgment on the expert preparation of Hollandaise sauce if we’re not professional chefs? And are the scientists in this field really all that more compromised than Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels and even some non-scientists like “Lord” Monckton when chiming in on this issue? Are the capabilities of others who work on the public dime or with partial or mostly public funding part of some mass, humanity-killing spree with CapnTrade notions dancing in their heads due to the socialist overlords like George Soros? How then are they SUPPOSED to be funded????? Donations only? This is all so surrealistic and conspiracy sounding. I don’t ask the climate scientists, however much I might like to keep more tax money, about hair styling methodology. And by the same token I think my wife would leave the issue of climate to the experts and not her friend Darlene down at SuperCuts. Michael Crichton like to use these handy aphorisms like “consensus is not science, and science is not consensus. True for what the wording is, but like most aphorisms like “location, location location” this too leaves out vast swatches of context. The AGW climate workers across the PLANET have for the most part all arrived at the same consensus. That’s when consensus is important and DOES very well mean something. Whom then shall I ask otherwise?

I see the skeptics making detailed technical arguments and the alarmist making hand waving, “trust us this is all normal” counterarguments. Given the seriousness of the issue, I think it reasonable to insist on the highest standard.

I’ll be convinced I’m in the wrong–and indeed all the AGW community who piddles at a higher level than I can with all this–when leading scientists not financed by Exxon or under the tutelage of CEI affirm in mass numbers that manipulation was nefarious

So, you’re saying that you believe in CAGW because of who says it is happening? That is not science. Science works regardless of the personal biases of scientist. Free-world and Communist physicist all arrived at the same scientific conclusion.

That’s right. Now we can get around to figuring out why you think the public dime makes about 99.9 percent of all climate scientists compromised. See above again. The WHO of this CAN be important. Skeptics always make detailed arguments, on ANY issue at hand. That’s not a problem in and of itself, of course, and gets some stones turned in time, and is healthy for the overall situation. But we’re at the point now that once the issue is settled on the part about the mundane corrections being some kind of conspiracy, we’re getting into annoyance. See Steve Hoofnagle’s site on this one over at Denialism.com. I’m looking not for potshots from Skeptic Zoners and non-scientists, but from vast throngs of climate scientists suddenly saying WHOA HORSEY!

Also, one last thing on the coding issue. Who put the code in, and who developed it? I would agree they need to be looked at. But if we find that the issue here is (as my understanding) not that complicated compared to other kinds of encoding, then the argument is finished.

This is the exact dynamic at play circa 1980 during the energy crises. Back then I would have been arguing that we had plenty of oil world wide and that the crisis was purely political. I would have pointed out some scientist and experts in the petroleum industry who would explain things. You would respond that all the real scientist understood we were out of oil every where and that anyone who said otherwise was just a pawn of the oil companies.

I believe we are undergoing the exact same dynamic now as then. I think that people like you with no technical understanding of the issues choose to believe in the crisis du jour because authority figures that you ego identify with tell you the crisis is real.

Anyone who says you should not trust technical work because the person who did it belongs to some despised out group is trying to manipulate you.

More importantly, do you really want to start a discussion about motives? Why would money from the oil industry distort science any less than money from the government. Can we trust climatologist when tens of millions in grants, their personal reputations and careers and the status of the entire field rest on CAGW occurring?

See above. Why is private industry any more or less sacrosanct than government work? Can or should I choose on that basis, or should I have no choice to but to delegate that issue to those who actually work in the field? How and why are you making the distinction? The oil barons and coal burners have motives as well, and that’s why it was the force of law that gave us Cap1, regarding sulfur emissions, though most people forget.

So either you did not answer the question or you can’t think of any scientific evidence that would convince you instead. Instead, you will decide it is wrong only when authority figures that share your prejudices tell you it is wrong.

Well, again that depends on just what authority is saying what. Where else am I to go but the majority of climate researchers, who you seem to think are under the funding gun and so can’t feel “free” to be honest about their findings. You’ve handcuffed me and wish to see flips. See much of the above again regarding consensus and government work. If I need a public defender, I don’t generally have a valid (certainly not provable) reason to doubt the integrity of his or her work due to the fact that the taxpayer undergirds his or her salary. I don’t detect any nefarious, underworld interest or even raw self-interest. Continued funding would continue regardless of their findings but simply be chunked into a new direction regarding something else, or something more particular.

Actually, no, my question has nothing to do with politics of any kind. If we respond aggressively now to head off global warming we will kill hundreds of millions of people over the coming decade by starving them of life saving energy. It doesn’t matter what social, economic or political mechanism we use, we will still kill them. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted every country for all time into a liberal-democracy with free-market.

Most unlikely.

Energy is life. The industrial revolution was an energy revolution and all the benefits we take for granted come form using more and more energy. People who are poor lack energy, not money. To raise their standard of living, we have to make more energy available to them. That is physics, not politics.

To head off CAGW decades down the road, we have to restrict our use of energy with the technology we have here and now. That means doing things like producing less cement (very energy intensive and done exclusively with fossil fuels). That however will mean less concrete to make water, sewage and flood control systems in places that desperately need them. That means people dying from contaminated water, sewage born illnesses and floods. That is just one example of every single life giving technology we use all of which require energy to be created and used.

The current proposals on the table at worst, have nothing to do with restricting industry or energy anything of that kind. Just perhaps the methodology in the LONG haul.

Now, if the CAGW models are correct then we must make such sacrifices for the sake of our long term survival. The question I put to you is simply are you confident enough in this data to bet peoples lives on it? Remember, you have to kill people today regardless of whether it turns out to be right or wrong in the distant future. If CAGW prove correct, then you have saved lives net in a grim lifeboat dilemma calculus. However, if CAGW proves incorrect or some future technology easily corrects the problem, then you have killed people for nothing.

So, please answer the question how many lives are you willing to sacrifice based on this data?

I’m confident of the data as currently presented by experts in this field; thousands of scientists who work in this area are in general agreement. As to killing millions and whom to sacrifice, as with the great faux moral outrage over the faux DDT Caper of the early 1970s, this too is hyperbole at most. It’s unanswerable.

It’s like P.J O’Rourke’s old sardonic quip about “Would you kill your grandmother to pave I-95?.”

So I could turn around and ask which horror is the most horrible.

Did you ever see that movie were a ship gets torpedoed and the survivors crowd into one lifeboat? The officer believes that owing to the war they won’t be rescued so they must row to the coast. He calculates how much food and water they have and comes to grim conclusion that they all can’t make it. To have a hope of saving some of the passengers, he has to push some others overboard.

I’ve seen something similar with a similar theme. But mankind does not generally live in such a metaphysical nightmare, and we can’t generally figure things on such scale in the manner you placed it. But, by contrast we DO know we need to take unpleasant actions that can limit and curtail freedoms. Fortunately this unpleasantry will not involve killing half the Third World due to energy starvation. That is hyperbole. Europe has already performed most of these rather modest Cap-n-Trade styled actions based on previous case law and previous morally adequate and tested notions, and they still exist without all the theoretical fallout of civlizational destruction even in the interim. They just made things a little pricier at most, and yet in Germany I can have heart surgery without being in hock to the doctor for the rest of my life.

That’s pretty much the position you find yourself in. How confident are you in your calculations and your assessment of the technological evolution over the next 100 years?

In the movie, a rescue ship shows up right after he drowns the last surplus passenger.

A needless horror is the most horrible. Killing people now to prevent an illusionary horror down the road is the worst horror I can imagine. Killing a few to save the many and the finding out you didn’t have to kill anyone is the worst thing I can imagine.

I would remind you that people have been predicting that we can’t “sustain” ourselves since at least Malthus and every single one of the doomsayers without exception have been proven wrong. Why should we even suspect they are suddenly correct now? After all, the same social/political segment was wrong about the energy crisis,resource-depletion, population-bomb etc so why should they suddenly be correct now?

You should reflect that back in the 60s-70s you personally would have believed just as passionately in the utter certainty of all those predictions just as we you have perfect faith in CAGW today. Doesn’t that suggest to you that something might be wrong with your intellectual process in these matters?

Whew. OK. I’m not sure how to even begin here, because this assumes more than I can attend to at the moment, and quite a bit of hyperbole regarding the notion that governments around the world are going to halt industrial scale production and stop people from building things like roads, infrastructure, water treatment plants, and new improvements on agriculture and medicine. Let me give this a shot here, since I’m old enough to remember those glossy Weekly Readers in school that, along with Newsweek and a grand total of 5 other outlets, supposedly bespoke of horrid predictions of doom, etc., banning of DDT, coming ice ages, etc. More on that momentarily.

Also, as to those predictions from time immemorial? True. But so what, as most of those were prescientific and came in the age where religious dogma came as literal holy writ and based on emotion and scare tactics more than any real evidence and long before the age of discovery and unlocking the secrets of things like modern mining, metallurgy, and modern agriculture. It was a time when you’re held basically ransom to the whims of gods and natural rhythms. And keep in mind Malthus was not disproved, it’s just the modern technology gave us a temporary call from the governor, if you will. A reprieve of sorts, in other words. His charts merely applied to human society at large what was and is still known about the life-cycle of all biological organisms and systems, though admittedly his scale was shorter term for the final curtain call.

I do believe the articles answer the Far Right Wing’s absurdist claim of these guys serving as Soro’s sockpuppets, if nothing else. The data is available online.

(1)None of the links you provided link to the data in question. Indeed you didn’t link to the FactCheck.org itself. If you meant this article, I would point out it likewise contains no links to the data in question but merely points to emails saying by alarmist scientist saying that they have published the data and Factcheck does nothing to confirm that. Indeed, Factcheck simply accepts the word of alarmist as true and makes no attempt to independently confirm them.

For example, Factcheck points out that processing raw data, i.e.”correcting” it is common without explaining that such corrections are forbidden unless they follow strict, predetermined rules which much of the alarmist clearly did not do. Neither do they point out that such processing is the single major source of scientific error. Neither did they point out that all the evidence for the warming comes from the corrections and that the raw data does not show any obvious warming trends at all. They make no attempt to demonstrate that the corrections did not in fact introduce a great deal of error.

However, I have seen quotes where CRU and GISS members tell other researchers that in order to get the raw weather station data, the other researchers must contact each individual country in the world and request the records from the source. Obviously, that is a multi-year job. CRU has admitted they lost some or all of some important datasets. Even f they just lost 5%, that could be critical depending on what that data describes. It only takes one wrong bit to crash a computer.

If you have links to the actual complete data e.g. weather station data, tree ring data, ice core data, satellite data you should post it.

In passing, I would point out that yet again, you offer as proof an article which simply parses the language of the emails. You still haven’t provided links to any serious independent examination of either the data, the methodology or the software. You haven’t provided links that even hint at the corrections logs or the software.

You also seem to forget that I was educated as a biologist, that I am a programmer and that I have personally reviewed a lot of the CRU code and found it to be garbage. I don’t have to understand climatology to see the glaring software mistakes, the clumsy hacks and patches and the lack of proper software development procedure. Since I know, personally, that the CRU software will produce accurate outputs only by mystical intervention, I know personally that the CRU data is highly suspect.

That makes everyone who is defending the output of the software highly suspect as well. This makes me wonder is (1) their software is just as bad and (2) how much oversight and double-checking they’ve actually done on their peers. Clearly, nothing you’ve offered has done anything to dispel these doubts. Once I’ve seen with my own eyes very strong evidence that calls into the question the entire fields competence and integrity, why do think I will accept their verbal assurances that nothing is wrong.

This like me looking at my suddenly empty bank account and accepting my accountants word that he’s done everything right. The rhetoric and the reality do not line up.

But first, you’re offering for the viewing audience here the allegation of a scale of destruction that would outpace that of Stalin and Mao, and at this the issue has no more credibility than the far leftists that get confused with the mainstream scientists who merely are offering a very modest set of rules like Cap-n-Trade to create incentives to make improvements in usage and infrastructure.

No, I’m telling you how many people we will have to kill if we take global warming seriously.

Here’s the thing, the “modest” improvements won’t do squat to prevent CAGW based on the IPCC models. If you believe that the IPCC models are valid, then you must be willing to undertake drastic reduction int CO2 output. There are only two metrics to describe how effective any CO2 reduction will be: (1) the peak temperature that will be reached and (2) date in the future that the peak temperature is reached. All these “modest” changes such as Kyoto only shift the peak temperature a few months ahead and or reduce it by a few tenths of a degree.

At Copenhagen this week the developed nations pretended to commit to a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. The US gets 87% of its total energy from Carbon Emitting Energy Sources (CEES). To hit that goal we will have to restrict our energy consumption by at least 15%. Reduced energy consumption means reduced economic output. People are going to lose jobs and their futures. If we extend that to the developed world people will die.

And no, we can’t just swap Non-carbon Emitting Energy Sources (NEES). Why? Because building that new technology will require energy from CEES. Every new NEES comes prepackaged with a carbon debt used in its creation. Using CEES to create NEES actually raises CO2 output short-term. So, not only must we have to reduce our direct use CEES but we have to reduce it even farther to compensate for the increased CO2 generated by building the NEES.

And that is assuming that (1) we have NEES technology that can step in for CEES (which with exception of nuclear we do not) and (2) that we have the industrial capacity to crank out that much NEES infrastructure and, guess what, we don’t (even for nukes.)

Oh, and did I mention that since we haven’t brought a new nuclear plant on-line in the last 30 years so that starting i 2020 we will start to lose all our nuclear plants to old age? Nukes provide 20% of our electricity total an 80% of our NEES electricity. So that means not only do we have to plan to replace the CEES electricity sources but most of our NEES sources as well.

This is all without considering how we’re going to energy to the people of the 3rd world to raise their standard of living so they don’t die from causes we have the technology to prevent.

I would point out that the only time in last two hundred years in which CO2 production has leveled off was in the period of 1973-1983 during the energy crisis. This is also the only period in American history, including the great depression, in which standards of living in America actually declined. In order to meet the goals of Copenhagen or to fend off CAGW based on the IPCC predictions, we will have to trigger an even larger economic reversal.

The left has long established a pattern in which they claim they have proven without a doubt that some massive catastrophe is looming on the horizon but that the actual changes we have to do to prevent the catastrophe are not only minimal but actually beneficial.

It’s like the left was a doctor and says, “Oh dear, my test show conclusively that you have a cancer that will kill you horribly a few years down the road but I can cure you if you come to my clinic three times a day to each this special belgian chocolate truffle I’ve created! Not only is it tasty but it has no side effects!” Horrible disease, trivial cure. If you believe the cure will work why wouldn’t you accept the diagnosis? Even if it’s wrong, you still get to eat chocolate.

Warming skeptics are like a doctor that says, “Well I’m not sure you do have cancer but if you do treating it will require a grueling series of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation whose side effects might kill you and even they don’t will make you wish you were dead.” In this circumstance, you would look very closely at the diagnosis before submitting yourself to such draconian treatment.

Warming skeptics are people who understand just how hard it’s going to be to actually prevent CAGW and what sacrifices in resources and lives we will have to make. As a consequence we look at the science of global warming much more critically than someone who thinks preventing global warming is a trivial exercise

Then of course as with Carbon Capping now, we were told in lugubrious tomes that Sulfur trading was a cynical Green ploy to destroy business, as would be the banning of CFCs (which also worked well and did not bring us to a halt) and that we’d all suffer due to lack of freedom and consumer choice of aerosols and problems with finding refrigerants with cars, and your average power bill would be 1000 bucks a month even if the power company stayed in business, and little ma and pa shops would knuckle under due the tax burden.

(1) Non of these things required us to reduce our energy consumption. Quite the opposite, all these required to increase our energy use. We could only do those things by increasing out energy use overall. It takes energy to remove pollutants from coal. It takes more energy to produce new refrigerants. Taking those steps caused us to produce more CO2 than we would have without them. Likewise, switching to NEES will cause us to raise our CO2 production.

(2) Restriction on coal burning only worked because we’ve relocated much of our industry out from the rust belt to either other parts of the US or overseas. Predictions back on the 70’s warning that reducing emissions would cause serious economic problems were based on the idea that the rust belt would see the same economic growth it had in the post-WWII era. Of course, it did not. The area was economically devastated and now limps along with only a few more power plants than it had back then. (3) The requirements didn’t prevent any environmental damage, it just shifted it to another part of the planet.

This is a textbook case of what it takes to drastically lower energy consumption.

problems with finding refrigerants with cars, and your average power bill would be 1000 bucks a month even if the power company stayed in business, and little ma and pa shops would knuckle under due the tax burden.

So, refrigerants/cars are proportionally cheaper today? We have the same or a higher percentage of mom and pop businesses today as back then? Just because we’re not dead doesn’t mean we didn’t pay a price. Americans in 1950 were better off than Americans in 1940, that doesn’t translate to “WWII was no big deal.” People did suffer from those changes, they just weren’t upper class, urbanites so they’re invisible to people like you.

All right wing scares proved false.

Unlike the numerous leftwing scares of “we’re all gonna die it’s been scientifically proven” that have come true? The left has been overwhelming wrong every time it has launched a nightmare scenario. The fact that we’ve adapted relatively easy to the pollution scares of the past is better evidence that the scares where exaggerated than it is evidence that the problems were easily fixed. If you look at the original claims about what reductions in pollutant levels would be required versus what we have now, we’re not even close.

We’ve adapted to pollution because (1) pollution represents inefficiency so the natural progression of technology always reduces pollution. (The coal plants that were regarded as so awful in the 70’s were literally thousands of times cleaner than those built even three decades before and that was done with virtually zero regulation. It is part of an established pattern in which leftist claim credit for long standing trends.) (2) We haven’t had to reach the levels of reduction the hysterics wanted in the first place. (3) We’ve just shifted a lot of the pollution geographically.

Then, as now, liberal mainstream scientists would have been happy to tell you Erlich was a crank and an hysterical buffoon who’d never heard of Norman Borloug.

Yet, Erlich was a big player in the media, politics and academia. It is a rewrite of history to say that he was a marginal figure. He was actually firmly mainstream left and remains so today. Governments did base actual policy on his recommendation although fortunately, not his most serious ones.

What WILL happen unlike the lifeboat scenario, is that costs will shift to those of us more able to afford this transition (is that unfair???

Really? Is that what happened in the during the energy crisis? Did people in the developed world pay more for oil so that people in the 3rd world could by cheap petroleum products that made a huge impact on their standard of living? I hate to break it to you but they did not. Energy cost shot up in the 3rd world and people died. Millions died. Places like Ethiopia and the Sudan are still suffering the effects.

It would be nice if we could micromanage things to the point were we took all the hit and the most vulnerable saw only benefits but that has never happened in the whole of human history and we should bet people’s live on the premise we can pull it off now.

Nuclear is a fine, carbon free notion but is almost prohibitively expense without the right incentive, but private and public. CapnTrade provides this. That’s modest, not Draconian and boot-stomping.

Agreed, and I would enthusiastically support a plan that put a modest tax on CEES and then funneled that money into building nuclear power plants and researching a new generation of nuclear power plants. I would particularly support a plan which focused solely on increasing energy production and consumption for everyone.

Unfortunately, nobody has produced even the ghost of such a plan. Instead, all the focus is on radically reducing our overall energy consumption and on planning on replacing CEES with unproven NEES technology that people have pleasant emotional association with.

Hell, the very people who today scream the loudest about CAGW are the very same people who stopped nuclear power in the first place, If we’d kept building nukes at the same rate as we were in 1975, we would be automatically Kyoto complaint twice over. Had we embarked on nuke boom like France did, we would have prevented the possibility of CAGW entirely (albeit at the cost of a reduced standard of living.) What makes you think those numbnuts who contributed to the problem more than anyone else will suddenly see the light and go nuke? I mean these are the people that claim to be convinced the climate is changing but who advocate the almost exclusive use of solar and wind power sources that depend on a steady climate to function! WTF?

The reason why so many people are convinced that the left is using the CAGW as a political trojan horse is because their behavior is indistinguishable from someone who was doing just that. Instead of choosing the least invasive ad least political solutions, they choose the most invasive. Every one of their recommendations without exception increases government power and reduces individual freedom. Most damningly, instead of embracing the technology we have on hand that will fix the problem, they instead op for the solutions which will draw the crisis out indefinitely.

My great nightmare is that CAGW is real but that the left is far more interested in sticking it capitalism than it is in preventing catastrophe. They will cause us to wreck our economy and tech base such that we are less able to adapt to CAGW negative consequences. We will end up with the nightmare climate but without the tools to survive in it.

In summation, I think it’s clear that you are willing to excuse the science on global warming because you think that negative consequences of acting on the science will be trivial. You simply don’t care if the CRU software is garbage because you see no serious negative consequence if it is. (I have no doubt that if you thought the consequences were more severe, you would be more critical of the science. )

I do not have that moral luxury. I have spent a big chunk of my life studying the relationship between technology/energy use and standards of living and understand in my bones what the price many must pay to address a problem of the predicted scale in a realistic fashion. Therefore, I will not accept any but the most professional, open, accountable and confirmed by prediction science on the issue. I refuse to make decisions based in whole or in part on this utterly crappy software.

A review of the emails and DATA HAS taken place. It’s as I suspected.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment/

A few points, in the order that my extreme tiredness can recall while juggling 100 other things this week:

Okay, to start with, I did read both the Newsweek and the New Scientist articles and neither addresses any of the technical issues myself and others have raised. In particular, they don’t answer my specific objections about the slipshod and amateur that the most important computer software in the world was created and maintained. Neither article is actually a technical analysis at all but just repeated arguments from authority that say trust us.
They answer absolutely nothing.

Question (1) answered by the Factcheck link I provided…There’s your vaunted transparency.

Well, no unless I can go online and download both the raw data and the code as well as a log of all corrections applied to the data. I repeat, given the seriousness of the decisions we are being asked to make why shouldn’t we make the process completely transparent?

You haven’t answered the question.

I do believe the articles answer the Far Right Wing’s absurdist claim of these guys serving as Soro’s sockpuppets, if nothing else. The data is available online.

I realize that the link from FactCheck, Begley over at Newsweek, and the others have not answered the issue of CODING per se, which seems to be your focus now, unlike most other Doubting Thomas type sites out there at the moment. What was also detailed in those stories is that the emails revealed only nasty habits, and not conspiracy. It also gave the lie to the notion that large reams of data are flushed down the Great Water Closet and unavailable. Also untrue. So on that note alone 98% of the Right Wing blogosphere is hunting down a phantom. Yours is the only site that deals with this code issue; the climate scientists ARE also reviewing these materials–including the computer programs, and while some minor blips have shown up, the consensus among the climatologists (as the articles also pointed out) is that nothing is out of order. As to the issue of science in general being one of testing and not observation, you’re technically correct of course on the methodology. But observation must come first, and even if we had flushed all the data of decades down the commode, we still have the observation of polar ice cap melting, glaciers retreating, hummingbird migration pattern shifts, crop failures even in erstwhile favorable zones, and dozens of other anomalies that have hit the earth like a bolt out of the blue. Coding or not, that needs to be answered by the Skeptics as well. It has not so far. Coding faux pas or not, it is not necessary for any of that ongoing fret to see animal migration shifts and polar caps melting. Any input on THAT?

(2) was answered by Factcheck and NS. The issue of the coding was already answered. The corrections were explained as necessary and rather common and mundane.

As noted above, they merely say that the corrections are mundane but they don’t print the code and show why it is mundane. I have personally looked at one section of code that applies different correction based solely on the date the observation was taking. It “corrects” temperatures in the past to be cooler and “corrects” temperatures more recent to be warmer. As a result, even if you ran the same fixed temperature every year through the code, it would produce a warming trend. Nothing in the documentation justifies this “correction” other than as an attempt to force the data to agree with another data set.

Fair enough. If that’s truly the case, then you’d raise some eyebrows over at Newsweek and New Scientist. They don’t seem aware, and……They need to hear from YOU, not guys like me.

But what else am I supposed to do generally but go to the climate scientists? You ask me to piddle with the code, albeit we both freely admit I’m not into this kind of gig, and yet this would be the equivalent of handcuffing my arms and legs and asking me to do cartwheels and expert gym flips on the sawhorse. Instead, I move to go to consensus among the scientist who actually do the encoding, their testimony, mind you, and YET this is STILL not good enough due to some Crichton-sounding conspiratorial mindset that says they must be compromised due to working primarily for government agencies of one descript or another and on the public dime. But what else am I to do but to defer? Would I trust mine or (no offense) your judgment on the expert preparation of Hollandaise sauce if we’re not professional chefs? And are the scientists in this field really all that more compromised than Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels and even some non-scientists like “Lord” Monckton when chiming in on this issue? Are the capabilities of others who work on the public dime or with partial or mostly public funding part of some mass, humanity-killing spree with CapnTrade notions dancing in their heads due to the socialist overlords like George Soros? How then are they SUPPOSED to be funded????? Donations only? This is all so surrealistic and conspiracy sounding. I don’t ask the climate scientists, however much I might like to keep more tax money, about hair styling methodology. And by the same token I think my wife would leave the issue of climate to the experts and not her friend Darlene down at SuperCuts. Michael Crichton like to use these handy aphorisms like “consensus is not science, and science is not consensus. True for what the wording is, but like most aphorisms like “location, location location” this too leaves out vast swatches of context. The AGW climate workers across the PLANET have for the most part all arrived at the same consensus. That’s when consensus is important and DOES very well mean something. Whom then shall I ask otherwise?

I see the skeptics making detailed technical arguments and the alarmist making hand waving, “trust us this is all normal” counterarguments. Given the seriousness of the issue, I think it reasonable to insist on the highest standard.

I’ll be convinced I’m in the wrong–and indeed all the AGW community who piddles at a higher level than I can with all this–when leading scientists not financed by Exxon or under the tutelage of CEI affirm in mass numbers that manipulation was nefarious

So, you’re saying that you believe in CAGW because of who says it is happening? That is not science. Science works regardless of the personal biases of scientist. Free-world and Communist physicist all arrived at the same scientific conclusion.

That’s right. Now we can get around to figuring out why you think the public dime makes about 99.9 percent of all climate scientists compromised. See above again. The WHO of this CAN be important. Skeptics always make detailed arguments, on ANY issue at hand. That’s not a problem in and of itself, of course, and gets some stones turned in time, and is healthy for the overall situation. But we’re at the point now that once the issue is settled on the part about the mundane corrections being some kind of conspiracy, we’re getting into annoyance. See Steve Hoofnagle’s site on this one over at Denialism.com. I’m looking not for potshots from Skeptic Zoners and non-scientists, but from vast throngs of climate scientists suddenly saying WHOA HORSEY!

Also, one last thing on the coding issue. Who put the code in, and who developed it? I would agree they need to be looked at. But if we find that the issue here is (as my understanding) not that complicated compared to other kinds of encoding, then the argument is finished.

This is the exact dynamic at play circa 1980 during the energy crises. Back then I would have been arguing that we had plenty of oil world wide and that the crisis was purely political. I would have pointed out some scientist and experts in the petroleum industry who would explain things. You would respond that all the real scientist understood we were out of oil every where and that anyone who said otherwise was just a pawn of the oil companies.

I believe we are undergoing the exact same dynamic now as then. I think that people like you with no technical understanding of the issues choose to believe in the crisis du jour because authority figures that you ego identify with tell you the crisis is real.

Anyone who says you should not trust technical work because the person who did it belongs to some despised out group is trying to manipulate you.

More importantly, do you really want to start a discussion about motives? Why would money from the oil industry distort science any less than money from the government. Can we trust climatologist when tens of millions in grants, their personal reputations and careers and the status of the entire field rest on CAGW occurring?

See above. Why is private industry any more or less sacrosanct than government work? Can or should I choose on that basis, or should I have no choice to but to delegate that issue to those who actually work in the field? How and why are you making the distinction? The oil barons and coal burners have motives as well, and that’s why it was the force of law that gave us Cap1, regarding sulfur emissions, though most people forget.

So either you did not answer the question or you can’t think of any scientific evidence that would convince you instead. Instead, you will decide it is wrong only when authority figures that share your prejudices tell you it is wrong.

Well, again that depends on just what authority is saying what. Where else am I to go but the majority of climate researchers, who you seem to think are under the funding gun and so can’t feel “free” to be honest about their findings. You’ve handcuffed me and wish to see flips. See much of the above again regarding consensus and government work. If I need a public defender, I don’t generally have a valid (certainly not provable) reason to doubt the integrity of his or her work due to the fact that the taxpayer undergirds his or her salary. I don’t detect any nefarious, underworld interest or even raw self-interest. Continued funding would continue regardless of their findings but simply be chunked into a new direction regarding something else, or something more particular.

Actually, no, my question has nothing to do with politics of any kind. If we respond aggressively now to head off global warming we will kill hundreds of millions of people over the coming decade by starving them of life saving energy. It doesn’t matter what social, economic or political mechanism we use, we will still kill them. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted every country for all time into a liberal-democracy with free-market.

Most unlikely.

Energy is life. The industrial revolution was an energy revolution and all the benefits we take for granted come form using more and more energy. People who are poor lack energy, not money. To raise their standard of living, we have to make more energy available to them. That is physics, not politics.

To head off CAGW decades down the road, we have to restrict our use of energy with the technology we have here and now. That means doing things like producing less cement (very energy intensive and done exclusively with fossil fuels). That however will mean less concrete to make water, sewage and flood control systems in places that desperately need them. That means people dying from contaminated water, sewage born illnesses and floods. That is just one example of every single life giving technology we use all of which require energy to be created and used.

The current proposals on the table at worst, have nothing to do with restricting industry or energy anything of that kind. Just perhaps the methodology in the LONG haul.

Now, if the CAGW models are correct then we must make such sacrifices for the sake of our long term survival. The question I put to you is simply are you confident enough in this data to bet peoples lives on it? Remember, you have to kill people today regardless of whether it turns out to be right or wrong in the distant future. If CAGW prove correct, then you have saved lives net in a grim lifeboat dilemma calculus. However, if CAGW proves incorrect or some future technology easily corrects the problem, then you have killed people for nothing.

So, please answer the question how many lives are you willing to sacrifice based on this data?

I’m confident of the data as currently presented by experts in this field; thousands of scientists who work in this area are in general agreement. As to killing millions and whom to sacrifice, as with the great faux moral outrage over the faux DDT Caper of the early 1970s, this too is hyperbole at most. It’s unanswerable. It’s like P.J O’Rourke’s old sardonic quip about “Would you kill your grandmother to pave I-95?.”

So I could turn around and ask which horror is the most horrible.

Did you ever see that movie were a ship gets torpedoed and the survivors crowd into one lifeboat? The officer believes that owing to the war they won’t be rescued so they must row to the coast. He calculates how much food and water they have and comes to grim conclusion that they all can’t make it. To have a hope of saving some of the passengers, he has to push some others overboard.

I’ve seen something similar with a similar theme. But mankind does not generally live in such a metaphysical nightmare, and we can’t generally figure things on such scale in the manner you placed it. But, by contrast we DO know we need to take unpleasant actions that can limit and curtail freedoms. Fortunately this unpleasantry will not involve killing half the Third World due to energy starvation. That is hyperbole. Europe has already performed most of these rather modest Cap-n-Trade styled actions based on previous case law and previous morally adequate and tested notions, and they still exist without all the theoretical fallout of civlizational destruction even in the interim. They just made things a little pricier at most, and yet in Germany I can have heart surgery without being in hock to the doctor for the rest of my life.

Whew. OK. I’m not sure how to even begin here, because this assumes more than I can attend to at the moment, and quite a bit of hyperbole regarding the notion that governments around the world are going to halt industrial scale production and stop people from building things like roads, infrastructure, water treatment plants, and new improvements on agriculture and medicine. Let me give this a shot here, since I’m old enough to remember those glossy Weekly Readers in school that, along with Newsweek and a grand total of 5 other outlets, supposedly bespoke of horrid predictions of doom, etc., banning of DDT, coming ice ages, etc. More on that momentarily.

But the Right had its foibles as well. One of the most famous mythologies that ties into your claim that millions have or might or will die due to radical nutcase Greenie legislation of a Draconian nature was that due to Silent Spring and cranks like Ruckelshaus, DDT was “banned’ worldwide. It was not. It was banned for MOST applications in the US, and most of Europe, but basically given free reign in the Third World. And it is used today in some applications, though with more caution as advised by Carson. (She did NOT advocate it’s complete ban, contrary to mythmaking on the Right). So millions have not died from lack of DDT and the resurgence of malaria. However, what WAS done was the prevention of resistant strains of mosquitoes getting the better of that chemical, which is a common problems in pesticides, and was with DDT as well. An American icon of a bird was spared and is making a slow comeback and so too were tens of thousands of Americans spared tumors. So even if used on larger scale it’s effectiveness would be in question by now anyhow for mosquito resistance, though Michael Fumento does claim it still repels mosquitoes if coating yourself and surroundings, etc.

Then of course as with Carbon Capping now, we were told in lugubrious tomes that Sulfur trading was a cynical Green ploy to destroy business, as would be the banning of CFCs (which also worked well and did not bring us to a halt) and that we’d all suffer due to lack of freedom and consumer choice of aerosols and problems with finding refrigerants with cars, and your average power bill would be 1000 bucks a month even if the power company stayed in business, and little ma and pa shops would knuckle under due the tax burden. All right wing scares proved false.

What the Right “right” about then? Not much, other than the predictable fact that the Greens had among them ideological and quasi-religious intonations just as the Right Wingers did at the Holy Alter of Ayn Rand who felt it a damnation of your freedom if you can’t burn tires in your backyard at whim.

Poor people do indeed need energy–and industry as the outgrowth of that availability. But Copenhagen does not nix that possibility, just as Sulfur Trade deprived us of nothing either. It made things cost a wee bit more in the interim transmission period, and likewise Carbon Trade will make us pay somewhat higher fees and, yes, save some freakish and perhaps unneeded birds migration routes, but also force us to find alternative paths to energy. The Third World is truly not going to stand by and allow your dystopian mode of thinking even IF the Copenhageners under the lordship and tutelage of George Soros stenographers did have this in mind. No way. What WILL happen unlike the lifeboat scenario, is that costs will shift to those of us more able to afford this transition (is that unfair???) and provide alternatives to China and India and some others bringing on line nothing but coal plants at the rate (last checked) of about 10 per month. Even for those doubters that linger, 10 new power plants of month belching carbon and soot is not acceptable. What else do you propose then???? Nuclear is a fine, carbon free notion but is almost prohibitively expense without the right incentive, but private and public. CapnTrade provides this. That’s modest, not Draconian and boot-stomping.

Also, as to those predictions from time immemorial? True. But so what, as most of those were prescientific and came in the age where religious dogma came as literal holy writ and based on emotion and scare tactics more than any real evidence and long before the age of discovery and unlocking the secrets of things like modern mining, metallurgy, and modern agriculture. It was a time when you’re held basically ransom to the whims of gods and natural rhythms. And keep in mind Malthus was not disproved, it’s just the modern technology gave us a temporary call from the governor, if you will. A reprieve of sorts, in other words. His charts merely applied to human society at large what was and is still known about the life-cycle of all biological organisms and systems, though admittedly his scale was shorter term for the final curtain call.

Okay, to start with, I did read both the Newsweek and the New Scientist articles and neither addresses any of the technical issues myself and others have raised. In particular, they don’t answer my specific objections about the slipshod and amateur that the most important computer software in the world was created and maintained. Neither article is actually a technical analysis at all but just repeated arguments from authority that say trust us.

They answer absolutely nothing.

Question (1) answered by the Factcheck link I provided…There’s your vaunted transparency.

Well, no unless I can go online and download both the raw data and the code as well as a log of all corrections applied to the data. I repeat, given the seriousness of the decisions we are being asked to make why shouldn’t we make the process completely transparent?

You haven’t answered the question.

(2) was answered by Factcheck and NS. The issue of the coding was already answered. The corrections were explained as necessary and rather common and mundane.

As noted above, they merely say that the corrections are mundane but they don’t print the code and show why it is mundane. I have personally looked at one section of code that applies different correction based solely on the date the observation was taking. It “corrects” temperatures in the past to be cooler and “corrects” temperatures more recent to be warmer. As a result, even if you ran the same fixed temperature every year through the code, it would produce a warming trend. Nothing in the documentation justifies this “correction” other than as an attempt to force the data to agree with another data set.

I see the skeptics making detailed technical arguments and the alarmist making hand waving, “trust us this is all normal” counterarguments. Given the seriousness of the issue, I think it reasonable to insist on the highest standard.

I’ll be convinced I’m in the wrong–and indeed all the AGW community who piddles at a higher level than I can with all this–when leading scientists not financed by Exxon or under the tutelage of CEI affirm in mass numbers that manipulation was nefarious

So, you’re saying that you believe in CAGW because of who says it is happening? That is not science. Science works regardless of the personal biases of scientist. Free-world and Communist physicist all arrived at the same scientific conclusion.

This is the exact dynamic at play circa 1980 during the energy crises. Back then I would have been arguing that we had plenty of oil world wide and that the crisis was purely political. I would have pointed out some scientist and experts in the petroleum industry who would explain things. You would respond that all the real scientist understood we were out of oil every where and that anyone who said otherwise was just a pawn of the oil companies.

I believe we are undergoing the exact same dynamic now as then. I think that people like you with no technical understanding of the issues choose to believe in the crisis du jour because authority figures that you ego identify with tell you the crisis is real.

Anyone who says you should not trust technical work because the person who did it belongs to some despised out group is trying to manipulate you.

More importantly, do you really want to start a discussion about motives? Why would money from the oil industry distort science any less than money from the government. Can we trust climatologist when tens of millions in grants, their personal reputations and careers and the status of the entire field rest on CAGW occurring?

So either you did not answer the question or you can’t think of any scientific evidence that would convince you instead. Instead, you will decide it is wrong only when authority figures that share your prejudices tell you it is wrong.

Question (3) is a theoretical that assumes horrific, dystopian Orwellian nightmares of a police state GONE ABSOLUTELY APE CRAP with utterly no accountability in an advanced industrial or post industrial society where the end consumer is constantly nitpicking the politicians of all stripes.

Actually, no, my question has nothing to do with politics of any kind. If we respond aggressively now to head off global warming we will kill hundreds of millions of people over the coming decade by starving them of life saving energy. It doesn’t matter what social, economic or political mechanism we use, we will still kill them. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted every country for all time into a liberal-democracy with free-market.

Energy is life. The industrial revolution was an energy revolution and all the benefits we take for granted come form using more and more energy. People who are poor lack energy, not money. To raise their standard of living, we have to make more energy available to them. That is physics, not politics.

To head off CAGW decades down the road, we have to restrict our use of energy with the technology we have here and now. That means doing things like producing less cement (very energy intensive and done exclusively with fossil fuels). That however will mean less concrete to make water, sewage and flood control systems in places that desperately need them. That means people dying from contaminated water, sewage born illnesses and floods. That is just one example of every single life giving technology we use all of which require energy to be created and used.

Now, if the CAGW models are correct then we must make such sacrifices for the sake of our long term survival. The question I put to you is simply are you confident enough in this data to bet peoples lives on it? Remember, you have to kill people today regardless of whether it turns out to be right or wrong in the distant future. If CAGW prove correct, then you have saved lives net in a grim lifeboat dilemma calculus. However, if CAGW proves incorrect or some future technology easily corrects the problem, then you have killed people for nothing.

So, please answer the question how many lives are you willing to sacrifice based on this data?

So I could turn around and ask which horror is the most horrible.

Did you ever see that movie were a ship gets torpedoed and the survivors crowd into one lifeboat? The officer believes that owing to the war they won’t be rescued so they must row to the coast. He calculates how much food and water they have and comes to grim conclusion that they all can’t make it. To have a hope of saving some of the passengers, he has to push some others overboard.

That’s pretty much the position you find yourself in. How confident are you in your calculations and your assessment of the technological evolution over the next 100 years?

In the movie, a rescue ship shows up right after he drowns the last surplus passenger.

A needless horror is the most horrible. Killing people now to prevent an illusionary horror down the road is the worst horror I can imagine. Killing a few to save the many and the finding out you didn’t have to kill anyone is the worst thing I can imagine.

I would remind you that people have been predicting that we can’t “sustain” ourselves since at least Malthus and every single one of the doomsayers without exception have been proven wrong. Why should we even suspect they are suddenly correct now? After all, the same social/political segment was wrong about the energy crisis,resource-depletion, population-bomb etc so why should they suddenly be correct now?

You should reflect that back in the 60s-70s you personally would have believed just as passionately in the utter certainty of all those predictions just as we you have perfect faith in CAGW today. Doesn’t that suggest to you that something might be wrong with your intellectual process in these matters?

Question (2) was answered by Factcheck and NS. The issue of the coding was already answered. The corrections were explained as necessary and rather common and mundane. We all do this kind of correcting and compensation and as explained by NS not doing so is the worst thing you can do. If it is discovered that measuring devices were too close to heat islands, or areas of draft or moisture that pulled temperature down due to evaporation, for example, you’d have to “rightsize” the data.

I’ll be convinced I’m in the wrong–and indeed all the AGW community who piddles at a higher level than I can with all this–when leading scientists not financed by Exxon or under the tutelage of CEI affirm in mass numbers that manipulation was nefarious.

Question (3) is a theoretical that assumes horrific, dystopian Orwellian nightmares of a police state GONE ABSOLUTELY APE CRAP with utterly no accountability in an advanced industrial or post industrial society where the end consumer is constantly nitpicking the politicians of all stripes. The system is not perfect, but borrowing from Winston Churchill is the least bad of all the bad options in a Murphy’s Law reality.

This bureacratic overload stuff from the Far Right has been bunked out by Steve Kangas among others, who pointed out as have many since his death that it is the socialistic, bureacratic, supposed nanny-state Europeans who while imperfect and given to acting like spoiled teens, have surpassed the US in GDP percentage increase even in frowsy economic times, and provide more for the average citizenry than we do or can. Their stats under “socialism” and nanny-statism whip ours (we rank low on the totem, brother) in almost all areas. Less crime, better working conditions, better retirement plans, better management of resources, less major scandal in all government levels generally, lower premature births, lower infant mortality, higher potential from educational opportunity. Better health care, better stats on well-being and longevity. All this with higher taxes and a supposed crushing and interfering overlord bureacracy. Hmmmmm.

Ever convert dollars to Euros? It’s well…..a very humbling experience for an American.

Seeing that CapnTrade and these other horrid draconian measures to put us under heel is an extrapolation of how they’ve done things in Europe for some time now (in some ways, the nanny state governance has gotten well into personal issues!) it seems somewhat less frightful than first glance.

But for now, I think it’s safe to assume that a warmer climate with gutloads of carbon is, pace the glibertarians, as damaging to the ecosystem as increased warmth and certainly more horrid than any draconian measures that even right wingers agree to some degree are requisite to at LAST get us AWAY from the continued financing of the House of Saud.

That last part in an of itself is something to cheer about and do fistpumps in the air.

The old refrain that we’ve already mucked things up by introducing invasive animal species and even pets is not solid enough, as has already been explained (this is an issue of scale, as the NS commentator mentioned) as has the notion of extra co2 being beneficial, etc.

The Glibertarians in fact might be technically correct on sustaining things we should not be doing NOW, such as population increases that will take us disasterously to about 9 billion in two decades or so, and at that point we’d welcome forced culling (speaking of horrific far beyond anything proposed under the gentle push of CapnTrade or other regulations and supposed socialist albeit moderate measures, as SciAm pointed out recently) before being forced to eat our daily algae slurry for breakfast. ONLY.

So I could turn around and ask which horror is the most horrible.

Didn’t mean to make that anonymous.

That post was in fact mine, Wakefield Tolbert

That’s just for starters. The full monty is found over on the NS article I’ve already linked.

Thanks.

See my next post in this series: Scientist are not software Engineers. It contains an explanation as well as links to detailed reviews of the software.

Even more damning, I think, is the fact that no one I can find has come forward to defend this software. Nobody has said it is acceptable at all.

Observation is science also.

No, it is not. Science is the testing of hypothesis by demonstrating that the hypothesis can predict the outcomes of experiments. We had observation long before we had science. It is the scientific method that tells us what we are actually observing and what we are actually seeing.

I appreciate that more than you know, because the general response of Devil’s Advocate postings is just to proclaim the guests of the Savage Nation and the cockamamie opines of dumbbunny factories like Sarah Palin to be gospel, and to some that’s darn good enough.

Without endorsing any particular personality, I would point that the last time we had a similar situation during the “energy crisis” of the period of ‘73-’84, the “rightwing extremist” were proved correct. For 11 years it was considered completely and utterly obvious, scientifically proven in fact (they had lots of studies and computer models) that the earth was out of oil and by extension all other material resources as well. The public dialog now over global warming is an exact duplicate of the dialog back then. Just as now, leftists (in many cased the same actual individuals as now) explained how rapacious, greedy and short-sided capitalism had gobbled up the fixed and finite naturals resources and how the only possible solution was an expansion of government power to ratio the ever dwindling resources. Just as now, anyone who questioned the concept was stigmatized as either morons or sell outs. Probably 80% or more of the population was convinced that oil would be in permeant short and every shrinking supply. We based all our economic, national foreign policy on the idea. The only people who questioned the idea was a small handful of scientist, a handful of free-market economist, a handful of people in the energy industry and a whole lot of “rightwing extremist” who basically believed that if the entire issue was fabricated by the left as a power grab.

In the end, the energy crises turned out to be a massive, world wide shared delusion/hysteria. In 1984, minor changes in US and UK law caused the price of oil to utterly collapse and it has been in plentiful and increasing supply ever since. The leftists and conventional wisdom proved dead wrong and the extremist were proved correct albeit for the wrong reasons. There never was a conspiracy, just a diffuse cultural susceptibility to any explanation that created a justification for more power for leftists.

So, I would say that based solely on their track record, the “rightwing extremists” are more likely to be correct today than the leftists who so consistently mock them while being very careful not to bring up their own history of buying into a fake crisis.

There was no real “secrecy” in the common sense of that word if by that you mean is the data generally available?

CRU has admitted they lost their original data. Most of the train wreck in the code is a desperate attempt to reverse calculate the original data from the published data. All the major warmist data is secret in that no one has independent access to it. Given that there is no logistical reason in the internet age not to provide the data, this alone raises questions. I mean, this is the most important data in history. Why would we trust just few dozen people to review it in detail?

But the issue of cover-ups and deletions and missing data was answered by LGF and NS quite well, as the data in question can all be found over at NOAA.

I have not seen their articles. I was basing my arguments on my own direct examination of the code and that of others. In any case, given the corruption at GISS I don’t know why I should take any of these people’s word for anything. After all, this is the most important data in history. I think I can ask for a much higher standard of transparency than normal.

Also pointed out, 50 requests under the guise of FOI is indeed a form of harassment, no matter the urgency some might feel for revelation in the space of, say, 96 hours or so.

You keep saying that but you never answer how many of the 50 request were answered honestly and full. As near as I can tell, the number is zero even partial responses. Complaining that people are burying you in FOI request after you refused to answer any of them screams dishonesty. Plus, we have the entire issue of why it would take an FOI request to get the information in the first place. What they couldn’t take 15 minutes and upload the files to one of the many sites that provide file hosting? What was so damn hard about fulfilling the request.

And again, given that this is the most important data in human history, what is the rational for refusing to divulge it in full to any random person that ask for it? What is the rationale for not making generally public?

Tim Lambert over at Deltoid on Science Blogs

I wouldn’t put much stock in Tim Lambert. We’ve locked horns before over the Lancet Iraqi Mortality survey and I was proven correct eventually, ironically by the people who did the original study. Lambert defended their obviously silly conclusions and their dishonest presentation all the way to the ground. I can only assume he is doing the same again.

Lambert is actually a textbook case of someone who will instantly and reflexively subvert his scientific understanding to politics.

I would ask you to answer these questions. Keep in mind that if we overreact to global warming, we could kill hundreds of millions of people over the next few decades by depriving them of the energy they need to survive. Remember we have to kill people now long before the predicted disasters materialize.

(1) Given the horrific decisions we have to make based on this data, why shouldn’t the process be utterly transparent? Why shouldn’t request the highest standards of software project management?
(2) What would convince you the data and the models that use them are wrong? Note, I’m not asking about a social process, I’m asking about physical scientific evidence.
(3) How many people would you conceptually be willing to condemn to death based on this data? Even conceptually, if you had to choose between killing people today to prevent much larger numbers of death decades down the road, how many people would you kill based on your assessment of the quality of this research?

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

Shannon:

“I understand why the emails have drawn so much attention. They represent the human element in the story that most people can understand better than the science. However, the emails are not the scientific story here. The emails can be explained away if a person is willing to give the authors the benefit of the doubt.”

Indeed. But along those lines we also see there is far less to the conspiracy factor than is made out to be. It’s the equivalent of saying the bloat of a grape is on par with a Macy’s balloon. The emails might not seem the FULL story, but DO indicate the human desire to make sure certain standards of behavior were adhered to, and some of the small failing that TRULY, as you said, has no real bearing on the science of all this. We merely learned the shocking fact that scientists are human and feel emotion and are not automatons following some preordained script, as the Deniers often argue in conspiratorial mode.

“What cannot be explained away is the utter train wreck of the computer code as well and the blatant manipulation of the data revealed by that computer code.”

You need to provide some good examples of that, and why simple addition and correction of temps turned out to be such a train wreck. Apparently, this has NOT come to the attention of RealClimate or Sharon Begley and most others. The emails DID in fact point out WHY you often need to do self-correction when anomalies turn up. I was under the impression that was rather clear. And at that, they’ll need to be some realy hum-dingers.

“All attempts to make this about the emails are attempts to distract people from the real story. The real story is the computer code and the data files!

Nothing in the several hundred words you wrote addressed any of the real concerns about the code. Nothing you wrote addressed the fact that (1) the software was written by amateur programmers (2) there were no professional standards of design, documentation, oversight and quality testing of the software (3) there was no independent outside review of the software.”

That’s a rather heavy piece of artillery you’re pointing at someone who is actually a friendly witness to your site (a capitalist money-monger businessman and Ayn Rand fan) and most of your core libertarian/conservative beliefs. So please don’t shoot the messenger who merely did a few clicks of legwork, even if that yielded someone ELSE’s hundreds of words THEY felt important. It merely seems yours truly posted the words. Most of them, however, are from New Scientist. THEY apparently felt the need to explain the full context of the emails, which, while you claim they are not the focus nor the real problem, ARE the main issue for MOST of the conservative blogosphere. It’s the emails and the resultant commentary that are causing all the gnashing of teeth and claims and counterclaims about conspiracy and “cover-ups” and false charges of deletions and data dumps. Not the encoding of the Fortran. One search of Hot Air or Mark Steyn or Michelle Malkin and dozens of others indicates no results of Fortran encoding or any such beast. It’s the emails that drove this, and so it’s the emails the LGF and NS responded to.

“Remember, this is the software upon whose output we are supposed to decide to let hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades die from energy starvation. I think we can all agree that the quality of such software and the degree of oversight of that quality should be equivalent of that used for banking and military software.”

If such is so damning, then YES I’d agree with your concern. But yours is one of the few sites on either side to make much noise about coding one way or another. Better have some hum-dinger examples of that, if so much is at stake as you say.

“The question that warming alarmist need to ask/answer is why any of this data was ever such a closely guarded secret in the first place? Why did anyone have to file a freedom of information request just to look at it? (Besides the fact that as CRU admitted they had actually lost the data.) The files were already on computers. It took the whistleblower just a few minutes to upload all the files. The CRU scientist could have done the same years ago and they wouldn’t have to worry about it since.

Why the secrecy? Why the hysteria over sharing the data about the single most important scientific question of our era? What public good is served by anointing a priest-caste who will read the secret entrails and then tell all the rest of us how to run our lives? Why appoint the (unfinished?)

If you really believe the science on CAGW is sound (despite you self-admitted inability to judge that soundness) then you should support making the scientific process about CAGW perfectly transparent. Only people with something to hide require secrecy, especially in science.”

You’re right. I’m not a scientist, and don’t play one on TV or the Net. Glenn Beck’s antics with blackboards and ACORN/SEIU frets/conspiracies gets to fill in for that gig.

There was no real “secrecy” in the common sense of that word if by that you mean is the data generally available? Also pointed out, 50 requests under the guise of FOI is indeed a form of harassment, no matter the urgency some might feel for revelation in the space of, say, 96 hours or so. Secrecy? No, it’s all there, even if certain select men working on dissertations or publishing at some institutions kept some things close to the chest for a few months or years, etc. As to CRU themselves, it seems only about 5% of the raw data is gone from THEIR location, and they dumped only the parts considered crap. If the crap is that valuable as some claim, my understanding is that NOAA and Tim Lambert over at Deltoid on Science Blogs are more than happy to track it down.

I understand why the emails have drawn so much attention. They represent the human element in the story that most people can understand better than the science. However, the emails are not the scientific story here. The emails can be explained away if a person is willing to give the authors the benefit of the doubt.

What cannot be explained away is the utter train wreck of the computer code as well and the blatant manipulation of the data revealed by that computer code.

All attempts to make this about the emails are attempts to distract people from the real story. The real story is the computer code and the data files!

Nothing in the several hundred words you wrote addressed any of the real concerns about the code. Nothing you wrote addressed the fact that (1) the software was written by amateur programmers (2) there were no professional standards of design, documentation, oversight and quality testing of the software (3) there was no independent outside review of the software.

Remember, this is the software upon whose output we are supposed to decide to let hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades die from energy starvation. I think we can all agree that the quality of such software and the degree of oversight of that quality should be equivalent of that used for banking and military software.

The question that warming alarmist need to ask/answer is why any of this data was ever such a closely guarded secret in the first place? Why did anyone have to file a freedom of information request just to look at it? (Besides the fact that as CRU admitted they had actually lost the data.) The files were already on computers. It took the whistleblower just a few minutes to upload all the files. The CRU scientist could have done the same years ago and they wouldn’t have to worry about it since.

Why the secrecy? Why the hysteria over sharing the data about the single most important scientific question of our era? What public good is served by anointing a priest-caste who will read the secret entrails and then tell all the rest of us how to run our lives? Why appoint the

If you really believe the science on CAGW is sound (despite you self-admitted inability to judge that soundness) then you should support making the scientific process about CAGW perfectly transparent. Only people with something to hide require secrecy, especially in science.

What about apparent attempts to avoid freedom of information requests?



In some emails, Jones – who has stepped down pending a review of what went on – discusses ways not to fulfil requests made under the UK’s freedom of information laws. In one, he calls on other researchers to delete certain emails. While on the face of it this does not look good, whether any researchers broke any laws or breached any university guidelines remains to be determined.


In other cases, however, it is clear that researchers could not comply with freedom of information requests because they did not have the right to release all the data in question. There is also no doubt that climate change deniers have been using freedom of information requests to harass researchers and waste their time, with the CRU receiving more than 50 such requests in one week alone this year.


What’s more, individual researchers have little to gain from giving away data and software they have spent years working on. Scientific careers depend on how many papers you publish. If you keep data to yourself, no one else can publish papers based on it before you do.


This does not mean researchers should be allowed to hold onto their data. It is undoubtedly in the public interest for there to be full disclosure of the measurements upon which climate scientists are basing their conclusions. In fact, much of it is already freely available. But the pressures climate researchers are under does help to explain why many are so reluctant to make all data public.


Clearly, the leaked emails have caused disquiet in some quarters. There’s no doubt there are concerns about the content of some of the emails – even when you know the way science really works – as laid out above. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the University of East Anglia are now holding investigations to determine if anything unethical did go on. But nothing in them justifies claims of a massive conspiracy, or undermines the certainty about climate change and its causes.

Seems her argument is that the emails in the first place contained nothing damning other than the very real and difficult/tedious work of REAL climate scientists, who got quite understandably frustrated with the dumbbunny denialist crowd, and some email correspondence detailing said frustration.

Many of us would sooner not have some emails revealed and aired out in broad daylight, no?

About the same line of thinking, it seems (though they no longer allow new registrations for comments) showed up on Little Green Footballs, which in turn references an article in New Scientist.

Some excepts from NS:

Well, good points. NO?

“Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.


You can’t fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.


None of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.”

And then we have, from the same article:

Also:

“So why are scientists “fixing” the temperature data?


Some of the contents of the hacked material, such as the “Harry_read_me.txt” file, might appear shocking, with its talk of manipulation and “tricks”. But raw data almost always has to be “fixed”.


For example, suppose you and your neighbour keep a record of the temperature where you live, and decide to combine your records to create an “official” record for your locality. When you compare records, however, you’re surprised to find they are very different.


There are many reasons why this might be so. One or other thermometer might be faulty. Perhaps you placed your thermometer in an inherently warmer place, or where it was sometimes in direct sunshine, or took measurements at a different time of day, and so on. To combine the two records in any meaningful way, you’ll need to adjust the raw data to account for any such factors.


Not doing so would be pretty dumb. Where possible, scientists should always look at their data in the context of other, comparable data. Such scrutiny can often reveal problems in the way one or other set of data was acquired, meaning it needs adjusting or discarding. Some apparent problems with the predictions of climate models, for example, have actually turned out to be due to problems with real-world data caused by the failure to correct for factors such as the gradual changes in orbits of satellites”

“But what about that ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’?

One of the leaked emails refers the “trick” of adding the real temperatures, as recorded by thermometers, to reconstructions of past temperatures based on looking at things such as growth rings in trees.


The problem is that some sets of tree-ring data suggest temperatures start falling towards the end of the 20th century, which direct temperature measurements show was not the case. So the researchers instead replaced the reconstructed temperature data for this period with the directly measured temperature data.

Is this an unjustified “fix”? No, because some sets of tree-ring data can be compared with the direct records of local temperature for the past century. Up until the 1960s, there is a very close correlation between the density of growth rings in trees in northern latitudes and summer temperatures, but after this it starts to break down.”

As to the other condemnations of faux outrage (this time, morals of the methodology and “suppressing” dissenting papers):

 “Some of the leaked emails reveal the climate researchers’ unhappiness with the publication of certain scientific papers questioning the global warming consensus, and discuss removing journal editors they perceived as being sympathetic to global warming sceptics. This sounds horrifying to some non-scientists. But many are confusing two very different things: attempting to block publication in certain scientific journals and the suppression of information.

“But surely any attempt to block publication of sceptical scientific papers is indefensible?

Scientific journals are only supposed to publish papers that meet certain scientific standards. Researchers work for years on papers and then submit them to the top journals in their field. The editors select the ones they think are most important or noteworthy, and send them to a handful of reviewers – scientists working in the same areas. Each reviewer sends back a report suggesting acceptance, rejection or revisions, and the editor decides whether to publish based on these reports. Most papers sent to leading journals get rejected.
  This system of “peer review” has its critics, but is generally regarded as the least-worst system to ensure the quality of published scientific research. Researchers whose work is rejected can resubmit their papers to other, less high-profile journals. Failing that, anyone is free to publish their views on global warming online, or in books and newspapers if they can.

Many leading scientists think that the papers mentioned in the emails had serious scientific flaws and possibly should not have been accepted by the journals in question. If this were the case, it would raise questions about the role of the editors at those journals. It is hardly outrageous behaviour to call for the replacement of people who are, in your personal view, not doing their jobs properly.”

Said another, in response to the glib notion that some Denialists posted that at least we’ll have lots of CO2 “plant food” in reserve to help with crops, etc:

 So it goes, then.

“Like many of the arguments made by global warming deniers, this is simplistic. Plants will consume more food–up to a point–then, like an over-fed goldfish’s bowl, they’ll die. In the case of over-feeding the goldfish, algae will consume the excess “food” and you’ll get a mini-dead zone like those that have been forming at the mouths of major river basins over the last forty years. But the same thing happens to land plants–the soil and the plants can only absorb so much CO2 and when the limit is reached, it has detrimental effects. What is worse, most trees like to maintain their leaves at a steady temperature and when it gets too hot, they suffer. This temperature is about 25 degrees Celsius. Over 30 degrees Celsius and even tropical trees suffer. Increasing CO2 threatens tropical rainforests which are at the limits of viability for trees. It also forms carbolic acid in water, which threatens shellfish, bony fish and corals. Anybody living in the developed world should know that there is such a thing as too much food–and that’s not just for people and pets.”

________________________________

See also Elizabeth May’s piece on all this, who–to her undying credit–has apparently done what the vast majority of the Denialist Crowd has not:  Read ALL of the damned emails.

Any input, Boyz?

I’m a piker and was able to pull some good retorts in the space, of, oh, about 20 minutes of casual Net wandering.  Not looking good for the Denialist crowd even with just a simple search.

Said one commenter, at the bottom of the article, this whole allegation of “ClimateGate” is really little more than a Right Wing tabloid “feeding frenzy” for dummies, the scientifically illiterate rednecks of Jesusland, and the moronic.

Thanks for returning to form, good post.

I won’t try to convince you that considerations of energy reduction are not trivial or naive, if anyone else wants to reply to you in this vein then I’ll leave that up to them. There might be someone out there with the science to support the idea.

And I won’t bother trying to convince you that I am not one of the naive ones — in your eyes I damned myself too many times, so be it.

And yes, Popper probably would have rolled his eyes at the CAGW theory, but he was a guy who felt most theories were at best conjectures that had never been falsified. On the other hand, even Popper eventually warmed up to natural selection. So as I said earlier, as falsifications are shot down, CAGW acceptance will be strengthened.

Or not. As CAGW “facts” are disproved, CAGW will lose it’s attraction.

I am not sure, however, if you would support my previous sentence. Because if you believe that the majority of CAGW believers are people whose belief

“rises in direct proportion to [their] hostility to the productive classes and (2) as noted above, the vast majority of CAGW proponents do not endorse solution that we know would solve the problem but instead endorse solution that call for expansion of government power and a reduction of individual freedom, especially the freedom of the productive to create”

then I am not sure you have much faith in the rationality of the many people who are CAGW proponents. You doubt their ability to change their position.

You may be correct Shannon — there may be a link between believing in CAGW and being anti-capitalistic/pro-governmental power. But I know a lot of conservatives, even libertarians, who believe in CAGW, so to me this is the weakest part of your argument.

My point here is that going off into imputations of social philosophy does not help us have a rational discussion.

For me the bbest part of this conversation is the clarity you have brought to some of the key issues:

1) that the discussion needs to focus on open development of models with formal oversight, procedures, and accountability
2) that we need to move the discussion away from “trivial” [your term] consumption to industrial consumption
3) that we need to focus on how to produce large quantites of clean power, absolutely including nuclear power.

My addition would be that we need to refrain from imputing motives or ideologies as this just gets us all worked up and keeps us from understanding each other.

I sincerely appreciate your participation in this discussion, hopefully it has allowed people from both sides to understand some of the key issues of the debate.

You say “modern technology is not a luxury” and I hope you now believe that I agree with you.

You say that but in your previous post you analogized energy use to an addiction to recreational drugs. If you really understood the central importance of energy to our lives and to the betterment of lives of all humans, such an analogy would have been so obviously wrong it wouldn’t have even occurred to you.

The classical hierarchy of material needs runs: oxygen, water, food, shelter etc. In the modern world it really should run: oxygen, energy, water, food, shelter etc because without energy most of us cannot get water, food, shelter etc. Just to start, without energy we can’t harvest, purify and distribute clean drinking water.

From my perspective, when you wrote “Look at our history with addictions to nicotine, drugs, …even energy(?)” you might as well have written “Look at our history with addictions to nicotine, drugs, …even clean drinking water(?)” Obviously, anyone who believed that clean water was an “addiction” would be considered shockingly naive. You essentially did make exactly that analogy.

Am I interpreting you correctly when you say that basically we will not be able to do enough in these areas to affect CEES usage, or put another way, that the cost of making changes in these areas will be so high that our way of life is threatened?

I am saying the concentration on trivial consumer consumption first and foremost in debate reveals that far to many people don’t understand the real challenge. The fact that the first example that popped into your head was this common trivial improvement strongly suggested to me that you didn’t actually understand it was trivial. This is especially true when taken in context with your “addiction” comment.

But you think I am naive for,… for what — exploring how we might be able to lower industrial CEES consumption, or for even wondering if that is possible?

Any idea that begins with the idea that we need to use less energy has immediately headed off in the wrong direction. We don’t need to use less energy. The laws of physics dictate that the only way to use less energy is to reduce our standard of living. We need to start all discussion with how to create more energy. It is naive to start any such discussion with conservation.

Indeed, thanks to little economic effect called Jevon’s paradox, increasing the efficiency of a technology like cars cause us to use more, not less energy in cars. Again, naive.

Do you think that this is just NOT POSSIBLE?

It is not possible short term to reduce carbon emissions without some reduction in the standard of living. Right now we getting the atmospheric carbon sink for free. We don’t include that in our accounting anymore than we account for the cost of ambient oxygen. Abandoning otherwise function CEES technology and replacing it with non-CEES technology means diverting resources from increasing/maintaing standards of living to building the new technology. It’s inescapable.

However, it is technologically possible to completely forestall the possibility of CAGW by building large numbers of nuclear power plants. We might still get some warming but nukes will almost certainly head off any catastrophe while at the same time having enough energy to raise everyone’s standard of living to first world levels.

Revealingly, the same people who are the most hysterical about CAGW are also those most hysterically opposed to nuclear power. It’s almost like they don’t want to prevent CAGW but just want to have a state of perpetual crisis.

The only real discussion about adapting to possibility of CAGW is how fast to build what kind of nuclear power plants. All other discussions, without exception are either complete wastes of time or actively and lethally counterproductive.

Well, this is where I may be lacking, because I thought that a scientific model would make predictions and scientists would then try to both confirm it or deny it through observations

This is common misperception. Scientists do not attempt to find evidence to confirm a hypothesis because there is to much conformational information and most conformational information will confirm more than one hypothesis. Instead, they look to destroy the hypothesis.

Karl Popper illustrated the idea by saying, “If you want to test the hypothesis that all swans are white, you don’t go out counting white swans, you go out and look for one black one.” You could spend you entire life counting white swans without actually confirming the hypothesis. However, if you spent your time trying to track down a black swan but never could, then that would lend more credence to the hypothesis than just tallying up white swan after white swan.

In the case of CAGW, you just can’t go around tallying up evidence of warming, you have to rigorously try to destroy the idea that CO2 buildup will lead to catastrophic warming a century ahead. First you must look for some pattern in nature that could exist in principle but CANNOT exist if CO2 is driving significant warming. Otherwise, you just end up counting up white swan after white swan never knowing if the black swan is just on the other side of the reeds.

Finally, in your last 8 paragraphs you swerve off into trying to understand my (”our” because you lump me in with every other CAGW supporter) rationale or beliefs and emotions

I was answering your question of “You are not one of those people who believe that all of us global warmers are conspirators are you?” You lumped yourself together.

In any case, I merely answered with what I saw as the social and intellectual factors that caused people to embrace the idea that CAGW was a dead certainty when (1) the science was far from settled and (2) they didn’t understand the science anyway.

Given that (1) we have seen this exact same pattern in unrelated issue before and (2) the same people who where dead certain and wrong back then about other issues are dead certain now, it is reasonable to ask what mechanism other than scientific understanding is driving their beliefs.

To my mind, the greatest obstacle to human progress is our over emotional communication: if we can discuss an issue without imputing another’s emotions or rationale or belief system, if we can just stick to “the facts ma’am, just the facts” as Sergeant Friday of Dragnet used to say, then our discussions will yield more fruit.

I agree. I suggest you start by getting your fellow warmers to (1) not label as a flake of sellout every scientist no matter of what standing or accomplishments who question CAGW (2) possibly acknowledge that people who have spent their lives in the energy industry and business in general might not in fact be shallow creatures willing to sacrifice the whole of humanity on the altar of short-term profit but might in fact have real solid experience of the scale of the changes we contemplate and be trying to honestly warn us.

It is impossible to read anything about global warming policy without a reading a tirade by CAGW proponents about how anyone who disagrees with them are stupid, greedy and evil while only they have intellect and morality to guide the fate of humanity.

But IMO you are reaching when you say that “CAGW is just another excuse for the non-productive to control the productive,” … I am not sure how you reach that broad conclusion.

Because (1) the propensity to believe in CAGW rises in direct proportion to an individuals hostility to the productive classes and (2) as noted above, the vast majority of CAGW proponents do not endorse solution that we know would solve the problem but instead endorse solution that call for expansion of government power and a reduction of individual freedom, especially the freedom of the productive to create.

Imagine if we faced the threat of viral outbreak and we had a vaccine that could prevent the disease but instead some people wanted to use health inspectors going door to door to find the infected and ship them off to quarantine camps. You would reasonable conclude that the viewed the virus a pretext to exert dominance.

Basically, the people who have always been hostile to the productive and have gone through a long series of justifications for why they should dominate the productive, have (we are supposed to believe by sheer luck) discovered a permanent emergency that will let them do just that.

I would point out that the existence of social or ideological motives to believe in CAGW has nothing to do with the whether it is or is not occurring. It merely puts the political debate and especially the debate over solutions in a broader social context It explains why otherwise intelligent people won’t be as skeptical of CAGW as they should be. It explains why we have college professors, movie stars, politicians etc all creating this enormous groupthink pressure. On some level, they want it to be true. On some level, they think the world would actually be better off long term if it was.

Again, doesn’t affect the actual outcome of the science.

The CCSM is definitely a step in the right direction but is limited by two major factors.

(1) The software requires a supercomputer with hundreds of processors in order to run. Unless all the subcomponents of the software can be run on much smaller computers, we’re not going to see a lot of double checking of how the code actually runs.

(2) The data that CCSM uses to run its simulations were not collected or processed in a transparent and accountable method. That means that even if CCSM were perfect software, the doctrine of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) means that any of its results are fatally corrupted.

We basically need to start over from scratch in collecting and process our climatology data. We need to create formal transparency, formal oversight, formal procedures and formal accountability BEFORE we start recollecting the data.

Only then can we start to focus on making the modeling software as accurate as possible.

http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/download.html

The CCSM (Community Climate System Model) project is described here:

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/CCSM/history.html

“CCSM belongs to an elite category of computer-based simulations known as general-circulation models….”

I trust that, going forward, discussion throughout the blogosphere will take care to remind readers that current-generation modeling code is open to public scrutiny, and that it is, presumably, in general agreement with less-available code.

Recognition of this will doubtless reduce anxiety about misleading science, which (should, I think) please everyone.

I find this to be a great dissertation. I believe capitalism is an engine of continuous technological innovation for mankind and it is the right answer, the best answer we have so far, to any world environmental present of future crisis; our cars today pollute a fraction of what they did 25 years ago and new cars will pollute a fraction of what today’s cars pollute thanks what Shannon calls “the natural progress of technology”, many manufacturing processes have seen, are seeing and will continue to see huge savings in energy consumption thanks to efficiency gains from incorporating software and computerized automated production and maintenance systems and from breakthroughs in all fields of sciences and disciplines that impact production processes and businesses.

New technologies are ever moving in driven by companies seeking recognition, profits and to expand their market pools, they are ever more energy-efficient, ever more clean and beneficial to us, ever more revolutionary, challenging every set of technological assumptions, concepts and paradigms of past and present times, and we are not to thank and revere the “unselfish concern for the welfare of others” of our politicians and scientists turned celebrities who want to impose upon us their grand plans to save the world, but we must thank market driven forces instead.