Ed Miliband: 'Britain is sleepwalking to a climate crisis'

[SpontaneousOrder]

The ad hominem fallacy.

But if you want to play the credentials game, that particular debunking of the oft-debunked Dr Spencer was authored by Dr Gavin Cawley, a senior lecturer in Computing Sciences at UEA. And its spot on.

John Cook is just one of the Skeptical Science team, and hasn't been a professional cartoonist for many years. He's now Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, and winner of the 2011 Eureka prize ....

John Cook at Skeptical Science Wins Eureka Prize - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal - AGU Blogosphere

Can't even get the ad-homs right ....

FYI, that wasn't an ad hom.

[pjclarke]

?? 'The argument is not credible because its on a site run by a cartoonist'.

Apart from being factually incorrect, seems to me to be a pretty good example of attacking the attributes of the debater, rather than engaging with the argument. Of course JC is not actually a working cartoonist, he's a trained physicist and an award-winning science communicator for a respected University. And he didn't author the post, it was written by another academic. Apart from that ....

[EternalOptimist]

This is how the fellow sees himself




see the full list of his work here

[pjclarke]

What's that noise? Sounds a lot like the sound of scraping. From the bottom of a barrel.

[suityou01]

Wow. Denial 101.



Uptick? it is up > 35%, outside a range it has maintained for at least 600K years (how do we know? Ice cores, Google Vostok). And there are two lines of evidence that the increase is all manmade. One is simple carbon accounting. Most fossils are burnt as part of industrial processes so we have good records of the amount burnt and the resulting CO2 emitted (remember CO2 is the major, but not the only GHG.). The emissions are substantially more than enough to account for the increase, in fact something around 50% has been absorbed by the biosphere and the oceans, decreasing their pH.

Secondly, CO2 from organic sources has a particular ratio of carbon isotopes, in effect our emissions are tagged, (Google the 'Suess effect') and the measurements of the organic fraction are entirely consistent with the increase being manmade, there is no other plausible source.

So what data should people be looking at, that the entire scientific community has missed?

On glacial/inter-glacial timescales it is true that CO2 levels lag temperature changes. On these timescales CO2 is released from the oceans as temperature rises due to gradual changes in the planet's orbit and rotation, and acts as a lagging positive feedback as the planet warms, and vice versa. This is entirely different from the modern situation where the carbon is being dug up and released into the atmosphere at the rate of several billion tonnes a year. In this scenario, the CO2 drives the temperature increase, acting as a primary forcing rather than a feedback.

Well established science.

The weakening of the earths magnetic field. The fact that the magnetic north is galloping along at 40 miles per year, and it is likely we are seeing the beginning of a pole flip.

[SpontaneousOrder]

?? 'The argument is not credible because its on a site run by a cartoonist'.

Apart from being factually incorrect, seems to me to be a pretty good example of attacking the attributes of the debater, rather than engaging with the argument. Of course JC is not actually a working cartoonist, he's a trained physicist and an award-winning science communicator for a respected University. And he didn't author the post, it was written by another academic. Apart from that ....

There is definitely room for interpretation in Blaster's post, but questioning someone's credibility due to a perceived lack of credentials is very different from questioning their credibility because they create cartoons.

[doodab]

The weakening of the earths magnetic field. The fact that the magnetic north is galloping along at 40 miles per year, and it is likely we are seeing the beginning of a pole flip.

Leave the magnets out of this. They aint done nuffink wrong.

[pjclarke]

Ok. Withdraw 'ad hominem'. Substitute:-

(a) Argument from authority and
(b) Not a reality-based statement.

[EternalOptimist]

There is definitely room for interpretation in Blaster's post, but questioning someone's credibility due to a perceived lack of credentials is very different from questioning their credibility because they create cartoons.

and make photo shop images of themselves driving tiger tanks, and their opponents semi naked.

[suityou01]

Leave the magnets out of this. They aint done nuffink wrong.

Oh but they have. Our shield against the sun has weakened considerably since the beginning of AGW data, say around 1950. This is our interface with the sun, yet no one in the AGW crowd is prepared to plot this against temps against CO2 because it is the real cause, and as we agreed earlier, Co2 lags rising temps closely.

Sod ad Homs, there's enough data freely available online to rip the arse out of any AGW argument.

Just the facts ma'am.