Monday, April 6, 2015

WUWT Quote of the Day: Smokey On Cherry-Picking



On the topic of atmospheric CO2 and the fact that it's concentration hasn't been as high in at least 800,000 years, one wonders what Smokey has been smoking.

dbstealey  April 4, 2015 at 2:37 pm (extract)
...I’m not sure myself. But I am pretty sure that CO2 has been up to twenty times higher in the past. Selecting a time frame like ‘800,000 years’ reeks of cherry-picking....

Here's what's been happening with atmospheric CO2. Go towards the end of the video to see the levels over the last 800,000 years.





BTW - put your head in a vice before you read the article by Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.

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30 comments:

  1. Well technically he is correct... but it sounds like he has fallen foul of the "fallacy fallacy" in trying to claim the cherry-picking fallacy.

    And he is oh so ironic when he ends his post with this:

    “Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”

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  2. If anyone personifies Dunning-Kruger then it's Stealey. He's compl unaware of how ill informed he is.

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  3. Stealey is the person who likes to plot "actual" average global surface temperature on a kelvin scale, with the x axis crossing the y at zero. I'd say he is very aware of his shenanigans. (There's no humour in them that I can see, which would have been a saving grace.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What's a little 4-6C increase in temperature amongst friends, it's hardly a blip in absolute temperature terms! The climatologists say the peak of the last Ice Age was 5-8C lower than today and was kind-of catastrophic, but they would say that wouldn't they?

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    2. For purposes of a similar conversation today, it dawned on me to confirm that yes, µK is a practical unit of measuring temperature. I was quite pleased with my "discovery".

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  4. For my money, the funniest dbstealey moment of the day comes when he tries to take a swipe at our Brandon:

    dbstealey April 4, 2015 at 8:37 pm
    I view Gates as a chihuahua nipping at my heels.

    I have to say that anybody who has been caught trying to use sockpuppets to win an argument should probably try to avoid developing a god complex.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, Millicent. I was amused by that one as well: I recently described him here as "Anthony's favourite attack poodle".

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  5. Sou,

    I nearly soiled myself laughing when I first saw Smokey's 800,000 year "cherry-pick" post. Some perspective:

    https://archive.today/mBGBq#selection-17999.0-18003.16

    dbstealey: The basic argument over MMGW was resolved years ago. If global warming was still rising, you might have an argument. But global warming stopped many years ago.

    Accompanied by this Wood for Trees plot: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:2000

    The mind boggles.

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    Replies
    1. PS: BTW - put your head in a vice before you read the article by Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.

      NOW you tell me. A bazillion-tonne hydraulic press is indicated.

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    2. Voisin still forgets that carbon neutral aspect of the microbes and the insects. Just where does their carbon come from? Now, let me think. The atmosphere via the food chain.

      Having failed that little bit of high school science, one wonders about the rest.

      No, scratch that. The whole thing is crap.

      Delete
    3. So, Smokey claims that warming stopped "many years ago" and supports this with a Wood For Trees plot from 2000- present of the NH that shows about .1C of warming over that time. The mind boggles, indeed.

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    4. And if he had chosen the HadCrut4 global instead of cherrypicking the Northern Hemisphere product, it would have been a smaller (but still positive) trend. Dumber than a bag of rocks.

      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:2000/mean:6/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:2000/trend

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  6. I do wonder if the apparent differences in belief between Watts and Smokey are real or whether they are playing "stupid cop / mentally unhinged cop".

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  7. WUWT has become more moribund than usual just recently, I proffer this hypothesis: everyone in California has been asked to reduce water usage by 25% as the drought continues, there is no snowpack, and the Golden State is slowly turning brown and crispy.

    Could Anthony and Smokey be substituting a more intoxicating beverage for the increasingly scarce drinking water?

    http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/01/us/california-water-restrictions-drought/

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    Replies
    1. The drought's a myth. After all, from my kitchen and living room windows all I see is nice, blue water.

      Yeah, OK, Monterey Bay is salt water, but hey, water is water and California has plenty of it!

      While that may seem ridiculous, given that farmers in the central valley claim the drought is "political" because the state continues to allow rivers to flow into the ocean rather than suck them entirely dry, maybe not. Oh, right, desalination is a hot topic right now.

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    3. It was just that I was under the impression it was happening fairly rapidly!

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    4. It's raining dogs and cats here in the Bay Area at the moment. Drought recovery? :-)

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    5. In other news, Willis Eschenbach is trying to up WUWT's game:

      https://archive.today/nriZu

      There simply aren't enough icepicks on the planet for the lobotomy I need right now.

      Delete
  8. We need to talk about David.

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. Off topic, but if people are finding WUWT a bit dead then you could always hop over to Climate Audit. Hyper-genius McIntyre has said some unwise things about the Rahmstorf, Mann et al.paper that's very much in the news at the moment. I thought I'd call by and tell him where he went wrong. Quite a kerfuffle has ensued. Go to http://climateaudit.org/2015/04/01/rahmstorfs-third-trick/

    I turn up at 12:31 pm, manage to persuade Carrick that the hyper-genius was wrong, and get into a delightful chat about the Wegman report with him. Then hyper-genius turns up, and... follow it for yourselves before it gets taken down.

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    Replies
    1. Bill H,

      That was well worth the read. Classic case of catching McI out, all and sundry digging in their heels (save for poor Carrick).

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    2. He doesn't always behave badly, but Carrick is somewhat deserving of the flak that comes his way, recalling e.g. the time over at the Big Bunny's blog when he tried to lecture Harold Brooks about the former's poor grasp of tornado-related science. Harold's reply: "You know nothing of my work." Carrick then vanished without even an apology, presumably right after having googled Harold. Sometimes life *is* like that. :)

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    3. I've never seen him behaving truly badly, but I don't travel in his circles much either. I figured him for consensus view at the very first, from which I learned a lot about how I form impressions of folks when I'm trying to categorize their views. To be honest, I still don't quite know what bucket to put him in.

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  11. If and when it is taken down I've made an off-line copy if anyone would like to upload it: I'm not really into blog hosting I'm afraid

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  12. Bill, use this link, like Sou does, to get an archived copy of the page.

    www.archive.today

    ReplyDelete

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