UK energy future

[LucidDementia]

Tell us about Tim Ball.

[pjclarke]

More evidence that sas was right.

PJ continues to destroy you clowns with facts, evidence and peer-reviewed detail and not one of you have anything concrete to refute him with.

The abandonment of evidenced argument in favour of vulgar abuse is usually a clue.

False balance or false equivalence remains a challenge. The agreement in the scientific community that modern rapid warming is largely a result of human activity enhancing the greenhouse effect is in the high nineties, rising to 100% if you look at statements by professional and academic institutions. There remains some room for honest scepticism in regard to the more extreme projections as to how much warmer its going to get, but denial is just denial.

In the media and the blogosphere its more like 50/50, but we need to apply Sturgeon's Law. Look at the sources and their tactics. The SPPI - Science and Public Policy Institute sounds like a respectable consultancy, but is in fact a one-man (two, at a push) front for Christopher Monckton, an aristocrat who seems to have turned to climate denial science as a hobby, and continues despite being serially debunked. The Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, behind the deceptive 'Oregon Petition' ditto, but is in fact an eccentric home-schooler named Art Robinson operating out of a barn in Oregon. 'Popular Technology' clearly mimicing the likes of the reputable Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics etc is in fact an excitable blogger (and IT consultant!).

And so on, in the media and the blogosphere these monkeys and their handful of papers achieve equal exposure as the likes of the Royal Society and the US NAS, EPA etc.


For a while, anyway.

[DodgyAgent]

The abandonment of evidenced argument in favour of vulgar abuse is usually a clue.

False balance or false equivalence remains a challenge. The agreement in the scientific community that modern rapid warming is largely a result of human activity enhancing the greenhouse effect is in the high nineties, rising to 100% if you look at statements by professional and academic institutions. There remains some room for honest scepticism in regard to the more extreme projections as to how much warmer its going to get, but denial is just denial.

In the media and the blogosphere its more like 50/50, but we need to apply Sturgeon's Law. Look at the sources and their tactics. The SPPI - Science and Public Policy Institute sounds like a respectable consultancy, but is in fact a one-man (two, at a push) front for Christopher Monckton, an aristocrat who seems to have turned to climate denial science as a hobby, and continues despite being serially debunked. The Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, behind the deceptive 'Oregon Petition' ditto, but is in fact an eccentric home-schooler named Art Robinson operating out of a barn in Oregon. 'Popular Technology' clearly mimicing the likes of the reputable Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics etc is in fact an excitable blogger (and IT consultant!).

And so on, in the media and the blogosphere these monkeys and their handful of papers achieve equal exposure as the likes of the Royal Society and the US NAS, EPA etc.


For a while, anyway.

So perhaps you can explain why you are ignoring the fact that I have exposed you as a fraud in that you are not interested in solving the problem just interested in pushing your own political agenda?

[LucidDementia]

Tell us about Tim Ball.

Ahem.

[pjclarke]

Ahem.

I'm working. But are you sure you want to go there?

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta...20Herald_0.pdf (esp para 50)
Rabett Run: Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel....
Rabett Run: Tim Ball Folds

[LucidDementia]

I'm working. But are you sure you want to go there?

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta...20Herald_0.pdf (esp para 50)
Rabett Run: Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel....
Rabett Run: Tim Ball Folds

Of course I want to go there.

"Dr. Ball has been the subject of three lawsuits from a lawyer operating in British Columbia. For the first one, he decided to avoid the expense of a challenge and so he withdrew what he had written. Then, within nine days, he received two more from the same lawyer suing for defamation because of harsh criticism he made of a climate scientist. At that point, he and his family decided they had to fight back.
As Ball carries on his legal battle he maintains that climate deception continues and that the public is paying a high price for completely unnecessary energy and economic policies based on the pseudoscience of the IPCC."

And a quick snippet of Dr Ball's wisdom when asked: "What scientific reason do you think CO2’s role is far less?"

Water vapor is 95% of the total greenhouse gases by volume, while CO2 is approximately 4%. The human portion is only 3.4% of the total CO2. They try to claim CO2 is more effective, but it’s a false claim called “climate sensitivity”. The number the IPCC use for sensitivity has constantly declined and will reach zero.

He has a point.

And a couple of questions on your 97% consensus...

1. 1. What exactly do the climate scientists agree on?
2. How do we know the 97% agree?

[pjclarke]

Of course I want to go there.

Its unsurprising that Ball wishes to rewrite history. He was a Professor of Geography at the University of Winnipeg, where inter alia, he wrote four papers on historical climate before retiring in 1996 in favour of a career on the oil-fuelled denier speaking circuit. A decade later he wrote an article in the Calgary Herald with the usual denier nonsense, in which he also inflated his credentials.

Dan Johnson, professor of environmental science at the*University of Lethbridge wrote to the Herald, rebutting the poor science and also pointing out Ball was telling porkies about his expertise and experience. Ball then launched a libel action against the paper for $325K Canadian.

The paper put up a robust defence, claiming that Ball had suffered no loss of reputation and

...never had a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming," and "...is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist."

Ball folded. We'll never know why, however 'true and fair comment' is a legal defence against libel.

He is also co-author of a book, 'Slaying the Sky Dragon' which denies the very existence of a greenhouse effect. This is the extreme end of the denial spectrum, and 'Slayers' are unwelcome even at denial websites.

Such is the calibre of the 'experts' on the contrarian bench. So, having established that he is a scientifically lliterate paid liar its no surprise that he comes out with the scientifically illiterate idea of zero climate sensitivity, which would rule out Ice Ages.

RTFR, I linked to the studies that defined and quantified the consensus upthread. Start with Cook et al.

[DodgyAgent]

With a carefully devised computer model and a forever changing climate that regularly displays itself in extreme and destructive ways it is not hard to make a convincing case that the world is in danger. In the Times today is an example of how computer models cannot act as an accurate guide to the direction that the climate is going:

Ocean plants defy climate forecasters by adapting to fight global warming

Previous studies had claimed that as the oceans warmed, plants near by would become less able to absorb CO2

Previous studies had claimed that as the oceans warmed, plants near by would become less able to absorb CO2 Andrea Francolini/Corbis
Ben Webster Oceans Correspondent
Published at 12:01AM, November 27 2015
The oceans could be better at absorbing carbon dioxide and preventing dangerous climate change than has been claimed, a study has found.
Phytoplankton, which are microscopic plants that live close to the sea surface, can adapt quickly to tolerate higher water temperatures.
All the phytoplankton in the oceans absorb as much CO2 as the world’s tropical rainforests in a natural process that helps to mitigate the impact of man-made emissions.
Previous studies had claimed that as the oceans warmed, phytoplankton would become less able to absorb CO2, resulting in more of it remaining in the atmosphere and contributing to the greenhouse effect.
Researchers at the University of Exeter tested how Chlorella vulgaris, a species of phytoplankton, responded to changes in temperature ranging from 20C (68F) to 33C (91.4F). Initially, the growth rate of the phytoplankton was limited at 33C as they became stressed and less able to absorb CO2 and turn it into new plant material.
It took 45 days for them to evolve tolerance to the increased temperature and to improve the efficiency with which they were able to grow by absorbing CO2.
The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, suggests that the computer models used to predict climate change could be improved by taking into account the ability of natural systems to adapt to rising temperatures.
The study concluded: “Models of climate futures that ignore adaptation would usefully be revisited.”
Daniel Padfield, one of the authors of the paper, said: “We have shown that phytoplankton adapt and that this will affect the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide and keep it within themselves and not put it back in the atmosphere as the climate warms.
“Our results demonstrate that evolutionary responses of phytoplankton to warming should be taken into account when developing models of how climate change will affect aquatic ecosystems.”
The underlying mechanism which enabled the phytoplankton to cope with warmer temperatures was their ability to adjust the balance within their cells between the release of CO2 via respiration and its absorption by photosynthesis.
While the researchers focused on a single species in the experiments, they said that they believed that the same “rapid evolution” in ability to absorb CO2 would be found in other species.

Personally I have little doubt that the climate is changing and that maybe the burning of fossil fuels is having an adverse affect on our environment. What I do not buy are the motives of the zealots like PJ Clarke who have hijacked "the weather" to cynically exploit human beings to yield to their will. When faced with evidence such as I have produced that his ilk are not the slightest bit interested in solving the problem he ignores it in true "politburo" style.

The Times article above shows us that things are not always as people would like us to believe and that there may well be simple solutions to problems that do not involve elevating the wealth and importance of a group of people who would otherwise be "just getting on with their jobs"

[EternalOptimist]

That's a good point Dodgy.
It's a fact that Climate alarmists understand the complex system but refuse to acknowledge it's a complex reactive system
they also understand trends but refuse to acknowledge cycles

put these two traits together and you get a myopic set of sub-standard fools slapping each other on the back in an echo chamber


and one of them will be along in a minute with a graph and a link to try to prove that I am wrong

[DodgyAgent]

That's a good point Dodgy.
It's a fact that Climate alarmists understand the complex system but refuse to acknowledge it's a complex reactive system
they also understand trends but refuse to acknowledge cycles

put these two traits together and you get a myopic set of sub-standard fools slapping each other on the back in an echo chamber


and one of them will be along in a minute with a graph and a link to try to prove that I am wrong

I am awaiting the ad hominen attack on the researcher who did this