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Monday, March 14, 2016

Assaulting Reason: The Climate Inquisition and silencing science - with Tim Ball and Chuck Wiese

Sou | 9:31 PM Go to the first of 47 comments. Add a comment
Be afraid. Be very afraid...Climate science deniers are running scared. Tim Ball has donned his sandwich board and picked up his megaphone. He is broadcasting to the little conspiracy theorists at WUWT that they are all at risk of being hung, drawn and quartered. He warns them of the coming Climate Inquisition, which is apparently like the Spanish Inquisition only worse. The headline for Tim's latest meandering diatribe is: "Use of Fear to Silence Climate Skeptics Is An Assault On Reason" (archived here).

The dim deniers are putting on a brave front, faking bravado in the face of imminent peril. They are proud of their allegiance to the war against knowledge. They refuse to be cowed by the scary thought that they will soon become martyrs for the cause or sent to FEMA camps in chains.

I wondered what it could be that so made the WUWT-ers so fearful (this time around). (Conspiracy theorists are a weird bunch who thrive on paranoia.) Tim Ball mentioned the US Attorney General, so I did a Google search. It turns out that it's not just the dim deniers at WUWT who are shaking in their boots. Science deniers in other dark corners of the Internet are panicking. The rumour has gone around that there are to be RICO prosecutions of climate science deniers.

The facts are different, of course. Deniers have a narcissistic streak. When Senator Whitehouse and A-G Lynch were discussing investigations they were referring to fossil fuel companies, in the wake of the Exxon scandal exposed by journalists at InsideClimateNews. The investigation is to see if there is sufficient evidence of orchestration and funding of climate science disinformation campaigns to prosecute.



There were a couple of other things curious about Tim's article. He was very down on George Bush's response to the 911 attacks and seemed to be arguing he was too draconian. He also stuck up for the Quebec separatist terrorist organisation, that engaged in bombings, kidnapings and murder. Tim thought the response of the then Prime Minister was over the top.

On the other hand a quote-mine digs up some things in Tim's article that many normal people would agree with:
  • "Fear is aided and abetted by exaggeration, distortion, and falsehoods" (link). Tim apparently does excel at aiding fear among deniers. In Australia ex-PM Tony Abbott used fear as the basis of his election campaign, in the style of the US Tea Party, relying on exaggeration, distortion and falsehoods.
  • "If that doesn’t work, you manufacture the material and hire spin doctors to spread the lies and misinformation more effectively. The truth doesn’t need spin doctors." (link) Think Marc Morano, who I'm told earns even more than the lesser spin doctors - Pat'n Chip. I don't know if Tim has been hired by anyone lately. Maybe some extreme conspiracy groups pay him for his efforts, but I doubt he'd be hired by any "mainstream" anti-science lobby groups.
Then there are some that are a big stretch. For example, Tim starts with President Bush's National Security Directive after the 911 attacks, which Tim paints as a suspension of the US Constitution, and suggests that the White House might use the directive in respect of climate change:
At what point would the White House decide that the threat of climate change and the subversion of “big oil” and their skeptical lackeys justify suspending the Constitution? After the 911 attack
President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51). This, for the sixth time, extended for one year the emergency proclaimed on September 14, 2001. It empowered the President to personally ensure “continuity of government” in the event of any “catastrophic emergency.”
And from there to his conclusion, suggesting that the White House has designed a website purposely so that it can declare a state of emergency and, by implication from Tim's earlier comments, suspend the US Constitution:
The White House web page is pure propaganda deliberately designed to strike fear so they can come to the rescue of people and the planet by declaring a state of emergency
If you're wondering why Tim thinks the climate science on the White House website is "pure propaganda", it's because Tim is an climate science denier. He's more than a global warming denier, he's a greenhouse effect denier and wrote the first chapter of the Skydragon Slayer book (rejecting the greenhouse effect).


Silencing science


The main thrust of Tim Ball's article is not clear as usual. He wanders all over the place. Going by the headline he is complaining about being silenced. I dread to think what he'd be like if he wasn't being silenced.

That's in contrast with the next article at WUWT (archived here), in which the author wants to silence science. That article is by a science-denier from way back called Chuck Wiese, Meteorologist, Weatherwise, Inc. The closest to Weatherwise Inc that I found on the Internet was an air-conditioning business in Florida, but I doubt that's him. Chuck is an anti-science activist who campaigns mostly in Oregon. He was writing a WUWT rebuttal to two papers by Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus about links between Arctic amplification and extreme weather in mid-latitudes. The first paper was published in GRL in 2012 and got a lot of attention. The second was published last year in ERL and doesn't seem to have got the same amount of attention, or not in the mainstream media.

You might be aware of the debate about the Francis hypothesis regarding effect of Arctic warming on the jet stream and mid-latitude weather. I won't go into it in detail here except to say there are arguments for and against. The argument against centres around the fact that Elizabeth Barnes and colleagues couldn't find evidence supporting the hypothesis. The argument for counters that Arctic warming has been sudden and there may not have been enough time for the data to show up with statistical confidence (but the data suggests the trend favours the hypothesis). There's an article at Scientific American, and another in Nature, which discuss the scientific arguments for and against.

All I really wanted to point out are two things:
  1. Some deniers complain of intimidation preventing them from speaking out (with no evidence to support it, and no sign that the complainants have stopped "speaking out")
  2. Chuck Wiese calls for one or both scientific papers to be withdrawn, on the grounds that he doesn't agree with it (or them). 
Chuck wrote:
FV (2012) cited in the introduction of this article is fatally flawed, incorrect and should be withdrawn by the authors. 
I suppose Chuck can be forgiven for not understanding that this is not how science works. After all, from what I can tell he's never had a research paper published in his life. Thing is, if he wants to dispute findings then what he needs to do is avoid publishing his rebuttal on denier blogs and instead submit it to a journal. He could try ERL or GRL.  That's what Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus did. That's what Elizabeth Barnes and her colleagues did. That's what Judah Cohen and his colleagues did.

This Arctic / mid-latitude link is a current example of how scientific differences are explored and eventually, I expect, a clear picture of what is happening and why will emerge.

Rather than learn from real scientists, Chuck wants to silence the people he doesn't agree with, stop any debate and prevent the science from unfolding. Chuck didn't mention the Barnes work or the Cohen work or any other recent work that I could see, so it seems to me he wasn't interested in the scientific debate. He's a denier and the purpose of his article is encapsulated in his headline: "A Warming Arctic Would Not Cause Increased Severe Weather or Temperature Extremes". He attempted this through lots of equations, some diagrams, and what look like extrapolating to illogical conclusions. His article might be cited by deniers a whole lot more if he'd kept it simple, in keeping with WUWT. As it is, He could have just said "Francis is wrong", and that would have been enough for deniers all over to say that the work of Jennifer Francis has been disproved. But he didn't. So I don't think it will be much use, except for the occasional link by Anthony if he is able to figure out the general topic that Chuck is writing about.

If you're curious about Chuck's own hypothesis, I don't know that I'd call it that, but anyway you can read it here. For me, I'll wait until he publishes. (Chuck's arguing that the research scientists have got 1940s meteorology wrong. I wouldn't bet on it.)


From the WUWT comments


Here are some comments under Chuck's equations:

Wayne Delbeke appreciated the coloured pictures:
March 13, 2016 at 5:16 pm
Wow! That’s going to take a bit to digest. Nice graphics and in line with what we see from the satellites. I imagine the comments thread on this one will bring in lots of good discussion. Thank you.

Marcus has a headache:
March 13, 2016 at 5:28 pm
.Well , that’s gonna take at least 4 Tylenol to ease the pain in my wittle bwain !!! These kind of posts should come with warning labels !! LOL 

Paul767
March 13, 2016 at 6:14 pm
I just skipped to the money quote at the end!

Donald L. Klipstein
March 13, 2016 at 7:07 pm
It will take me some time to digest the math here to see if amplitude of a Rossby wave of a period being a specific fraction of around_the_world changes as jet stream winds slow due to arctic amplification (which is for real even according to one’s choice of of any major dataset for either surface or lower troposphere global temperature anomaly, any version existing in 2008 or later).
My expectation: Arctic amplification merely slightly slows Rossby waves and other weather patterns in the northern hemisphere, without change of wave amplitude. I think the wave speed will scale downward with the westerly wind speed to keep everything constant, except speeds slowing proportionately with the square root of the ratio of temperatures (absolute, in Kelvin) at appropriate latitudes and pressure level.
Also to note: The 600 mb level is not near 18,000 feet above sea level, which is the usual figure for typical of the 500 mb level. The 600 mb level is typically around 14,000 feet above sea level. 

Luc Ozade (@Luc_Ozade) seems to think that Chuck's work is not worth anything to anyone:
March 13, 2016 at 7:33 pm
Thank heavens for people such as Chuck Wiese who have the knowledge, the time and the energy to refute claims such as those made by the warmists in their pal-reviewed paper: FV (2012).
One thing we can be certain of is that Mr Wiese did not receive funding such as the authors of the paper would have done to push their warmist agenda. 

WTF is not very subtle:
March 13, 2016 at 8:43 pm
With its presixties references, why doesn’t Chuck just submit this slam dunk essay to the real scientific community ? 

Well I've found out why Chuck didn't mention the work of Barnes or Cohen. It appears that Chuck Wiese is unaware of the scientific debate on the subject, because he replied:
March 13, 2016 at 8:47 pm
WTF: That’s probably a good idea. It seems they have forgotten the founding principles and never refuted any of them before publishing what they do today.

JohnKnight makes a modest suggestion to avoid defining a word with the same word:
March 13, 2016 at 9:25 pm
Thank you, Mr. Wiese . . Very well done it seems to me.
(“Two terms come into the discussion which are important to define. They are the amplitude and length of a wave, called amplitude and wavelength respectively.”
I suggest instead;
*Two terms come into the discussion which are important to define. They are the height and length of a wave, called amplitude and wavelength respectively.*)

I was tempted to leave to your imagination how the conspiracy theorists lapped up Tim Ball's paranoid mush. (They did.) The temptation has been overcome, but I'll just leave you with five "thoughts", including comments that reek of right wing authoritarianism. With some deniers you've got to wonder if the amygdala is the only part of their brain that is active:

A few people like Saul from Montreal took Tim Ball to task for sticking up for terrorists in Quebec:
March 13, 2016 at 10:15 am
It appears that once again Dr Ball in his zeal to help Anthony Watts, has in his haste to publish neglected to perform due diligence and we have another post that is chuck full of irony that make clear eyed skeptics groan. There is no way the FLQ was anything other than a dangerous terrorist organisation that performing bombings, kidnapping and eventually murdered a hostage.

Paul Westhaver also has a dig at Tim Ball abusing facts (like Velikovsky):
March 13, 2016 at 3:01 pm
Do facts ever really matter? Ghosts of Immanuel Velikovsky haunts us still.
“When the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) sought separation of Quebec from Canada, Pierre Trudeau used the kidnapping and death of an ambassador to act. ”
Pierre Laporte, a provincial cabinet minister of Quebec (Labour), was kidnapped and murdered.
Jame Cross, the British diplomat, was kidnapped and released.
Where is Sturgis Hooper?

It's a conspiracy, sez Pat Paulsen
March 13, 2016 at 6:46 am
This has all be orchestrated. Obama & Trudeau. (sheesh) A community activist and part time drama teacher. They are both experts on the climate? I think not. Who is whispering in their ear, telling them what to say, as they pull the puppet strings?

G. Karst is totally freaked out by those dangerous people who want to do such evil as protecting the planet from harm:
March 13, 2016 at 10:24 am
This should be repeated on every thread. People think I am exaggerating when I tell them what greenies really want and say. No power on earth are resisting these dangerous ideas. Scares the bejesus out of me. GK

John Robertson sees nothing but scary stuff:
March 13, 2016 at 11:00 am
When your pampered existence depends on the “Big Lie”.
“Silence I kill you” is never far behind.
Fear is a great tool.
Until those you need to be fearful, decide they have nothing left to lose.
Great short term tool that gets old fast, breeding resentment, anger and vengeance.
The fools and bandits who attempt to install fear into those they seek to rob and control, always seem so surprised when they become the target of the mobs they incite.
Blind worms, gnawing on the foundations of civilization .
Rule of law is under open attack, when the person appointed to uphold national laws is as shallow as this Attorney General.
No wisdom to be found in Obamanation.


References and further reading


Exxon the road not taken - exposé by journalists Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer at Inside Climate News

Climate Change and President Obama's Action Plan - from the White House website

Anthropogenic (Human Caused) Global Warming - Is This The Greatest Scientific Myth of our Generation? - January 25th, 2012, Meeting minutes of the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, where Chuck Wiese and other deniers strutted their stuff

US cold snap fuels climate debate - article by Jeff Tollefson at Nature

How to Prove a Link Between a Warmer Arctic and Wacky Weather - article by By Stephanie Paige Ogburn, ClimateWire on September 4, 2013 in Scientific American

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid‐latitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 39, no. 6 (2012). DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051000 (pdf here)

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence for a wavier jet stream in response to rapid Arctic warming." Environmental Research Letters 10, no. 1 (2015): 014005. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/1/014005 (open access)

Barnes, Elizabeth A. "Revisiting the evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in midlatitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 40, no. 17 (2013): 4734-4739. DOI: 10.1002/grl.50880 (pdf here)

Barnes, Elizabeth A., Etienne Dunn‐Sigouin, Giacomo Masato, and Tim Woollings. "Exploring recent trends in Northern Hemisphere blocking." Geophysical Research Letters 41, no. 2 (2014): 638-644. DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058745 (pdf here)

Cohen, Judah, James A. Screen, Jason C. Furtado, Mathew Barlow, David Whittleston, Dim Coumou, Jennifer Francis et al. "Recent Arctic amplification and extreme mid-latitude weather." Nature Geoscience 7, no. 9 (2014): 627-637. doi:10.1038/ngeo2234 (pdf here)

Cohen, Judah, Justin Jones, Jason C. Furtado, and Eli Tziperman. "Warm Arctic, Cold Continents A Common Pattern Related to Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Snow Advance, and Extreme Winter Weather." Oceanography 26, no. 4 (2013): 152-160. (pdf here)

47 comments:

  1. Sou all I can see in the minds of these deniers is projection. There is no real deep and broad knowledge of anything apart from how to accuse others of holding their own deluded fantasies.

    Their collective minds remind me of a very large cesspool. Repulsive, yet fascinating to watch. Just when you think you have seen the biggest turd an even bigger one surfaces.

    RICO was very effective against organised crime. No wonder they are wetting their beds.

    Bert



    ReplyDelete
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    1. Agree Bert. Occasionally you'll see a "thought" written at WUWT that suggests the author has a spark of critical thinking ability. Most of the time the WUWT-ers display an unbelievable lack of self-awareness.

      Delete
  2. Do you think this would get through moderation at WUWT?: "This is the millionth time I've written to complain about my freedom of speech being infringed."

    And if it did get through moderation, would they get it?

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    Replies
    1. Lol. I doubt anyone would get it. It would be applauded, with lots of 'rah 'rah-ing and me too's.

      Delete
  3. Maybe we commenters should say that Sou's analysis is spot on and absolutely true every time we make a comment so we then fit in to the 97%.

    I made the mistake of reading the 'comments' at the Guardian on the February temperature anomaly.

    There was a lot of regurgitation of the same absolute crap that the deniers push. Comment after comment of idiots that did not even have the sense to understand how foolish they looked.

    Maybe all papers should start off with 'let there be light'

    Bert

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  4. This application of RICO is obviously modelled on the RICO case against tobacco companies. Here is a good summary of how that turned out. Climate denialists have learned a lot from tobacco-lung-cancer-connection-denialists, so in that sense the parallel is appropriate.

    The RICO case against the tobacco industry was aimed entirely against the tobacco companies. As far as I know, no scientists or journalists were persecuted.

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    Replies
    1. Correct ... and I know Sharon Eubanks, the DoJ attorney who led the RICO case. Read her book to learn about that case. Not easy or quick.

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Nobody expects the Climate Inquisition.

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  7. It always amuses me to see people on the interwebs loudly complaining that their speech is being stifled. I always want to ask, "Then how am I reading your complaints on the interwebs?"

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  8. I recently talked to someone who was recently a postdoc at Rutgers. We didn't get into many details, but he told me that it's pretty well accepted now that Jennifer Francis's ideas aren't correct.

    I've gone a few rounds with Chuck Wiese in comments at the Oregonian's site, and once gave the +AGW side of a talk after him in front of a group in Portland. He considers a post at WUWT to be a "publication."

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    1. I had not known of this Wiese character until his latest article (of several it turns out) appeared on WUWT last night. Turns out he's a Miskolczi acolyte, which pretty much says it all.

      In my research I also found a copy of some meeting minutes on the Oregon Chapter AMS website: http://www.ametsoc.org/chapters/oregon/Minutes/2012/2012_1_25_Meeting/2012_1_25_Minutes.html

      All three speakers shilling the "it's not happening / it's bad physics / it's a hoax" party line under the AMS banner. Disturbing and depressing.

      Good to know there are local voices of reason such as yourself to counter the bullcrap.

      Delete
    2. PS:

      ... it's pretty well accepted now that Jennifer Francis's ideas aren't correct.

      Thanks for that. I read the paper and it made a certain amount of sense, but I don't know enough about atmospheric circulation in general or Rossby waves in particular to have drawn my own conclusions about its veracity.

      In a more perfect world, a less than perfect paper passing peer review and being published in primary literature wouldn't be a big deal, or even necessarily bad. As it actually is, these things give charlatans like Weise just enough legitimacy among the stupids to claim, "x paper is wrong, hence they're all wrong and my wholly non-reviewed blog 'publication' is therefore correct."

      Gah.

      Delete
    3. "I recently talked to someone who was recently a postdoc at Rutgers. We didn't get into many details, but he told me that it's pretty well accepted now that Jennifer Francis's ideas aren't correct."

      If I may be so bold, that's an awfully anecdotal judgement to drop as a segue into a Chuck Wiese dismissal.

      Delete
    4. Brandon, before I even went and looked at the AMS meeting minutes you cited I guessed who the other two were. Gordon Fulks and George Taylor along with Chuck Wiese are all well known entities of the denier circle in Oregon. I've interacted with both of them over the years.

      BTW some were asking about Chuck Wiese's academic qualifications. I believe he has a BA in Meteorology from Oregon State University.

      Delete
    5. I don't get to Oregon as often as I like, but I did gather that those three are often in cahoots. Rest assured, I can think of much better reasons to visit than to check out their shenanigans.

      Wiese might be a perfectly fine meteorologist -- OSU is not a crappy school. His ideas on climate are thoroughly bonkers so far as I've read.

      Delete
  9. Deja vu all over again.... Tim Ball comes back with an error filled conspiracy based thread and fails miserably once more.
    It's time for watts to go to the bench and bring back the #discount_viscount for another of his patented gish gallops which never fail to raise team WUWT's morale

    ReplyDelete
  10. I liked this part of the article:

    "Most people are afraid of lawyers and the law. There is the apocryphal story of a lawyer (solicitor) in England who had a standard letter that said,

    "Sir: This matter has come to our attention, and if you do not deal with it immediately we will do things that will astonish you.""

    Sounds suspiciously like Christopher Monckton.

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    Replies
    1. He can't even get his apocrypha right. From 29 Feb 58 Time: In London, attempting to point up the "rather monotonous English style in legal documents," the Law Society's Gazette printed a letter written by an Indian lawyer to a client: "Dear Sir, Unless you pay the rupees within seven days, we shall take such steps as will cause you the utmost damned astonishment."

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Of course, the reply to such a letter should follow the precedent of "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram"

      Delete
  11. I don't understand why WUWT does not wholeheartedly embrace Chemtrails/Geoengineering - it solves all sorts inconsistencies and fallacies in their position - and it is a logical extension of their conspiracy laden claptrap

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    1. Chemtrails run counter to Anthony's odd sense of respectable credibility. Geoengineering would be a tacit admission that we're actually having a noticeable effect on climate and that we can and should do something about it.

      Delete
    2. I know - it was a whimsical comment really, but nevertheless as the posters at WUWT get ever more conspiratorial it would allow some acceptance of the data without compromising the "new world order" "agenda 21 one world government" claptrap - the great thing about conspiracies is that they just expand to accommodate any new data / evidence

      and it keeps the traffic up!!

      Delete
  12. Chuck Wiese runs Weatherwise, Inc. in Portland, OR, USA. I found a reference to a patent on a weather instrument which was granted to him in 1994, so he's been involved for a couple of decades. His argument is very technical and one must understand the math to form a conclusion about his claims regarding Francis and Vavrus.

    I had some disagreement with Francis on the subject. Her claims about Arctic Amplification are the result of earlier work she did with Mark Serreze, now Director at NSIDC, regarding the amplifying effects of sea-ice loss on climate. The claim is that there is a large difference in albedo between sea-ice and open ocean, which is not strictly true due to the large zenith angle of the incoming sunlight under clear sky conditions. But, this difference has no effect during winter and much of the summer, there is considerable cloud cover, which limits the energy reaching the surface. Clouds do also have an impact as they radiate IR downward and reflect and scatter LW, which would result in a large difference in albedo, but for only a small fraction of TOA energy. Not to forget, the albedo of sea-ice drops considerably in areas covered by melt ponds, which tend to cover a large fraction of first year ice during the summer and the absorbed energy results in enhanced sea-ice melt, not warmer water below.

    That said, Wiese may have a point if his analysis is technically correct, which is beyond my ability to determine. There are other points of view to consider as well, such as the fact that a warmer Earth will result in a thickening or swelling of the tropical atmosphere, which would tend to increase the tropic to pole geopotential gradient. It's very difficult to understand all of this, as we mostly see the Earth as stationary when, in fact, it's rotating, thus the Coriolis Effect. The atmosphere tends to move on it's own, having a velocity near that of the the ground at the surface, but moving in tracks more like a satellite in orbit at higher elevations. The mathematical result are the Rossby Wave calculations, IMHO, which are a effort to describe this confusing dynamical situation from an EARTH fixed point of view...

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  13. Wiese has participated on a thread at SkS..

    http://skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=1&t=85&&n=1967

    The fluid dynamics of the PJS are much more involved than his arguments.
    His arguments are not simple to refute, especially as he provided no references for them (even after repeated requests from mods at SkS).
    Feed-backs of LH/extra moisture into Eurasian snowfields in the late Autumn/early winter due to the E Siberian Seas being open (and >5C above normal) have been correlated to increased winter blocking .... and this irrelevant of the equ-pole DeltaT.

    The main thing as I see it is the conservation of momentum inherent in a fast moving PJS. It does not want to change direction overly from the dominant W to E.

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  14. It would be nice to think that they really are crapping themselves. If they have no consciences, then at least their paranoia might be troubling them.

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  15. wheelism: I wasn't judging, just repeating what I heard. I didn't mean it as a proof or disproof of Weise.

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  16. David, it just struck me as a shockingly content-less swipe at Dr. Francis.

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  17. Francis's arguments are correct. Very, very measurably so. I call it 'Stuck Pattern Syndrome'.
    They also are among the most important and acute climate changes there exist - prolonging both droughts and wet spells.
    There is more to Arctic (northern hemisphere) Amplification though, since the southern hemisphere seems to arrive in 'Stuck Pattern Syndrome' in recent years too. Check the peculiar prolonged heat waves in Australia in areas where a see saw with a period of four or five days used to characterize the regime.

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  18. What I find most heartbreaking about all this, is that there seems no moral standard of honesty amongst the Climate Science Denying Crowd. They feel fully within their "Rights" to blatantly lie about established facts and studies - and everyone else just plays a long. (… jumping to the whistle they blow.)

    I don't get it.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. "Trust us, we're experts" by Rampton & Stauber will inform you entirely.

      Delete
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    3. @citizenschallenge

      the simple fact is that it is not about the science

      it is about a challenge to their worldview

      Delete
    4. Too true -
      challenge their worldview
      faith in unquestionable certitudes and all that...

      Worse it's about an absolute disinterest in learning about this planet/biosphere that we depend on for everything.
      (It's that disconnect that I struggle with the most, how to spark an interest in this ultimately fascinating Earth, it's process and it's incredible life story?)

      Delete
  19. It's not surprising none of you exhibit any understanding of or interest in the science Chuck presented. Your knee jerk dismissal of it as opinion unworthy of your consumption says it all about who is truly interested in the science.

    Without explanation we are left to assume there some fear element to your chronic avoidance of focus and dialogue that progresses?
    What's so tough about focus?

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    1. Out of curiosity, how would you propose to begin a dialogue with someone who says "CO2 does not drive the earth's climate" and "The Anthropogenic warming hypothesis by atmospheric CO2 is falsified by the real record and radiation physics"? Moreover, why would you want to waste your breath?

      Delete
    2. Are you really curious or are you just pretending.
      Because it is exceedingly obvious that there is much more than the declarations you wish to dismiss.
      You're making my point about inability to focus and engage.
      Wiese was abundantly thorough in providing the "science" behind his analysis which your side is always accusing skeptics of failing to address or consider.
      Which is it. You do want the science front and center for discussion or you do not.

      Delete
    3. Deflection and avoidance. About what I expected, with the added bonuses of sides plus the word science in quotation marks.

      Delete
    4. Anonymous

      Please show us how to focus and engage. By focussing and engaging yourself!

      Sou offered a couple of talking points which you deflected. And fair enough - you may not want to start with those. But if you do not put up a discussable point of your own then you are showing an inability to focus and engage.

      Delete
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    6. Yes, you did deflect. No point doubling up on your deflection.

      If you really want to engage answer Sou's questions - how would you start a dialogue with someone who says CO2 does not drive the climate? If you do not like the question it only takes a little imagination to move the dialogue to the science you believe Chuck is espousing. You could start by showing you understand the several pages of maths he has so patiently put together. You could explain how it is relevant to his hypothesis, whatever that is.

      Delete
  20. The problem is, in the wacky world of science denial - to those trying to counter the avalanche of crap they produce - you inevitably get drawn into a pointless argument debating some esoteric point on the fringes of science

    The central point gets lost in the noise, the act of creating "noise" represents a victory in denierland - it keeps the conversation alive

    They tie you up in their pseudo science - pseudo science that takes a second to construct but hours to refute

    The tactic is to keep the debate going, to a point the existence of this blog (thank you Sou) is a testament of the effectiveness of this strategy

    But I think as "nature" simply fails to enter the debate, more and more this conversation will become an intriguing footnote in humans ability for self delusion

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  21. Just want to thank Sue for the heads up on Chuck Weise. Very useful ammunition. Anyone following the thread - I've done with him.

    ReplyDelete

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