Tuesday
Dec152015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Sierra Club silliness
Dec 15, 2015 Climate: Surface Greens Many thanks to John Shade for this hilarious video from the US Congress, which I hadn't seen before.
Dec 15, 2015 Climate: Surface Greens
Reader Comments (145)
So, the most sophisticated method of uniform monitoring of the global temperatures yet developed is not as trustworthy as sending oiks out 4 times a day to make some observations at randomly-scattered and sparse locations around the world. Especially when it has been decided that historical records are not actually accurate, and need to be amended to – well, what a coincidence! – to match the latest theory! Wow! Who would have believed it? Ain’t "science" wunnerful?
Phil Clarke, you really are clutching at straws, aren’t you? Either that or you are firmly entrenched in the saddest denialist bubble in existence.
Phil Clarke is clearly driven by dogma. It is also probable that he is paid by the word, judging by the way he drones on.
Top tip Phil. If your eternal verities change now and then, depending upon the latest line you are required to propogate, you are not seeking the truth, you are pushing dogma
Does the US operate free flights from Australia, under the terms of Extraordinary Rendition?
Phil Clarke is the only one here that appears on the photograph. The rest of you are just smudges. Wannabes for sure but that's about it.
Speaking of which, Cruz is supposed to be very smart but didn't show any of it and came across as smug. He regurgitated whatever his "advisors" told him to say but clearly does not understand a single thing about it. Besides, he crashed into the scientific consensus wall just like everyone else does.
EO - 'eternal verities' is perhaps the most unscientific phrase I have heard of late. I follow the evidence, and it took me to Paris.
Your dogma, by contrast seems to have left you in a tiny, sidelined and redundant minority.
Or, as we say in IT, deprecated.
Cruz came across as a lawyer, forensic, slightly dull but painstakingly accurate.
Mair, from the Sierra club, came across as a complete airhead. I would not trust that guy to fill my tank with the correct fuel
So, Phil Clarke, Aila,
I've always wondered what it's like to have a split or dual personality, not a very happy situation to judge by their/his/her comments. Total denial is the term that comes to mind. I don't think I've ever seen one original thought from either of them, just regurgitation of the warmist creed.
Phil Clarke, if you are up to it, try and critique Spence's comments on the UAH satellite readings from first principles, and referral to a third party is not allowed.
Should Phil Clarke have responded with anything different than the Sierra Club Meathead, when posed the same questions from Cruz in the video?
Lets ask him.
Andrew
The Sierra Club guy was poorly-prepared and made a fool of himself. This tells us a lot about the usefulness of a Congressional hearing for establishing fact, but little about the facts.
Montford's cherry-picked extracts notwithstanding, if you watch the Cruz's follow-on hearing, as I have, what shines through is the paucity of the talent on show for the 'sceptic' cause (mark Steyn, FFS!) and the patient and telling demolition of the same by Rear Admiral Titley https://youtu.be/ZCSnKNoyWtw
https://youtu.be/ZCSnKNoyWtw
"The Sierra Club guy was poorly-prepared and made a fool of himself."
Typical AGW Scaremonger, then.
Andrew
Forget an irrelevance like Phil Clarke.
He was very careful to make sure he had NOT lied to Cruz. He repeated ad nauseam the 97% Conspiracy of Scientists, as his sole defence. He has pointed the finger of blame at those that told him, to plead the 97% Amendment.
Cruz was probably quite happy to leave it there. Cruz, as a lawyer, is running for the POTUS. He doesn't need to do anything more, for the moment. Trump is making the news and scoring points against Obama, though his stardom may wane after Christmas. US Presidential contests are tediously long, and Cruz seems to have more patience.
Andrew
Maybe you need a pink slip to ask IT a question?
Green Sand,
When playing the Game of Trolls, one doesn't need to lower oneself to direct questioning of them.
That just encourages them.
Andrew
You surprise me, Aila; I hadn’t realised you could make such a mistake – Cruz was the one asking the intelligent questions; the other guy was the one who ran into the 97% wall, regurgitating whatever his “advisors” told him, not understanding a word that was passing his own lips. I suggest you watch it again, just to put your perceptions right.
"I hadn’t realised you could make such a mistake"
I think Alia is poorly-prepared and made a fool of itself.
Andrew
OK, not much more time this evening but will tackle one more quick example of how wrong Swanson's complaint about the satellite data is.
Swanson complains that the satellites don't cover beyond 82.5 degrees N and S. Notably, none of the surface temperature data sets cover those areas terribly well either. But let's work out how big a deal this is.
The lost area as a percentage of the earth's surface can be computed from the calculation of the area of a spherical cap. We can compute this as pi times the sum of the squares of the height and radius of the cap. To make the calculation simpler, I'll approximate the earth as a sphere using the polar radius; for the cap this will be a reasonable approximation (not so for the whole area)
So the radius of the cap is simpler a=R*sin(7.5 degrees) where R is the polar radius of the earth (6356.8km), and 7.5 degrees is the half-angle of the spherical cap. This gives approx radius of a=830km. The height of the cap is simply h=R*(1-sin(82.5 degrees)), which comes to around h=54km. This allows us to calculate the area of the cap as pi*(h^2+a^2), which I calculated using full precision to be 2.17 million sq km. Now we have two of these areas (N+S) so we get a total of 4.34 million sq km.
I can't use the spherical approximation for the area of the whole earth, the oblate spheroid would be needed to get an accurate answer - but luckily google has already done the sums for me, and assuming google is correct, the total surface area of the earth is 510.1 million square km.
We find that the area outside of 82.5 degrees latitude is then 4.34 / 510.1 = 0.0085, or less than one percent, of the earths surface. Again, if we look at GISTEMP, even *with* the 1200km extrapolation, they only get 99% coverage of the globe. Note that the missing polar cap is no more than approx. 850km from satellite measurements anyway!
Can Swanson really be arguing that the missing 1% of data from the poles is going to make any significant difference to the result? Maybe if it had warmed by 50 degrees more than everywhere else, it could influence the global temperature average by as much as 0.5 degrees! I'm pretty confident the poles haven't warmed by 50 degrees lately.
Furthermore, surface temps often interpolate over the Arctic anyway, and often over a much larger distance. So such criticism would have to be leveled at all data sets.
Once again, we see that when the numbers are crunched, the claims by Swanson, presented here by Clarke do not hold water.
Andrew
Yeh, just an IT wannabee with <return> built in.
I can not be the only person thinking this has become the battle of the front men.
The battle of the personalities.
Obviously, we can not vote for the positives of our own guys, or the negatives of theirs.
So I would vote for Gavin -'a man of principle. would even refuse to debate a 5 year old girl who was a contrarian'
Gore - 'Driven to support the local economy by buying a beach mansion, despite the flooding'
Mair -'Unflappable in the face of adversity. or data'
Turney -'Planted more trees than Jack. or Mawson'
I can not be the only person thinking this has become the battle of the front men.
You know, I think you might just be.
Spence_UK
I seem to recall many moons ago CRU predicting/proposing the future use of satellite data for their sea surface data?
Also, though it has to be IIRC don't all the so called 'near surface' data sets have some element of satellite data in their sst input?
Spence Swanson complains that the satellites don't cover beyond 82.5 degrees N and S.
For the lower troposphere, RSS go no further than 70S, due to problems merging datasets and interference from high ground.
Not exactly global.
EternalOptimist
Cruz knows that Computer Adjusted Climate Science Fraud is probably the greatest threat to the average American's financial future.
That is why Phil Clarke, Aila et Al, have donned their superhero capes of anonymity, because the 97% conspiracy has yet to be tested in legal debate. Now that Paris is over, Mann's financial backers have no need to keep paying for further stalling.
2016 could be a bumper year for Lawyers.
Should Phil Clarke have responded with anything different than the Sierra Club Meathead, when posed the same questions from Cruz in the video?
Lets ask him.
Well, Cruz promoted the lie that the '97%' number is based on a single survey, when in fact at least three peer-reviewed studies, and several less formal surveys have confirmed the extent of scientific agreement.
Cook et al asked authors to self-rate papers and came up with the same number. Richard Tol found fault with some of the methodological details however noted that
The consensus is of course in the high nineties. No one ever said it was not. We don’t need Cook’s survey to tell us that.
I think I would then ask Cruz to confirm that the number of scientific associations who disagree with the IPCC is, um, zero.
The 3 front runners for the Republican nomination are Rubio, Cruz and Trump. They all think Computer Adjusted Climate Science is a scam.
Now the wealthy and powerful Sierra Club have just cited the 97% Conspiracy theory as their most reliable source, and it is available on YouTube.
Paris in December 2015, is not going to be remembered well by December 2016. Hardly the fault of the Parisians
Sepp Blatter is not happy with the Ethics Committee of FIFA, and they haven't started either.
The 3 front runners for the Republican nomination are Rubio, Cruz and Trump.
Just Sad.
Phil Clarke
As I've shown, global coverage by surface data is generally worse than satellites, and only gets to a similar level by ludicrous 1200km extrapolations - which would cover the poles if the same were done to the satellite data.
In short, if you throw out the satellite data you have to throw out the surface data too.
But only an innumerate fool would throw out an average because only 98% of that space was sampled, whether surface or satellite. I guess sampling theory is not your strong suit.
Phil Clarke, do carry on relying on 97% Conspiracies, if that is what you want to believe. In a genuine free society, freedom of choice and opinion, is normally one of the first freedoms to be removed by dictators, whatever their political inclination.
Ask Lewandowsky, it is one of his genuine areas of expertise. Just don't rely on everybody sharing your complicity.
Also interesting to note that Phil Clarke avoids discussing RSS (an independent processing of the data) until the switch to complain about coverage.
Notably, the difference between using 70S vs. 82.5S is in significant, well wI thin the CIs of eachievement other. Anyone with basic numeracy skills would understand why - it actually represents a trivial surface area and unless something really odd was going on would not be expected to make a difference.
The numerical incompetence of the environmental activists never ceases to amaze me.
Phil Clarke, do carry on relying on 97% Conspiracies, if that is what you want to believe.
Go on, then, name a single dissenting scientific association. Who is the real conspiracy theorist here?
Phil Clarke, A Republican winning the US Presential race would be great news for climate science around the world.
In the UK we could stop burning a figure of Guy Fawkes on Nov 5th, and instead just burn images of the IPCC, as a reminder to our descendants for another 400+ years, not to believe in fraudsters and con artists trying to take over the world.
Phil Clarke, I have never been that interested in seeking the views of professional bodies. But you are very confident that they have all conducted fair and reasonable opinion surveys, of those motivated to express an opinion. Climate research is obviously funded so well for opinion surveys, but can't give a scientific consensus on the cause of the pause.
Come back in a year, if you have any science to add. Stick to cat food surveys, if you prefer 2nd hand opinions, that smell fishy.
I've go to admit. I always find it strange that, after years reading on here, WUWT and a bunch of other sceptic sites, we still get the guys and gals from Troll Central being paid to watch for new postings and hasten to try to derail them and to generally sneer and insult us.
After all, apparently we are all just a tiny, tiny group of half-crazed, anti-science, sad old gits who are lavishly funded by BigOil, BigGas and BigCoal.
Since Troll Centre knows even better than we do how much money is being pumped into this scam by BigGreen, BigWind, BigInsurance & BigPlutocratCharityTrusts, not even to mention BigHugeGuvmint, there can be no doubt we are out-gunned by many orders of magnitude.
And as at least 97% of RealBigScientists stand shoulder to shoulder with their BigCult and have the full and unquestioning support of all the BigScienceTradeUnions (not to mention BigBBC and almost all of BigMedia); surely it must occur to the CultMasters that they may as well leave us poor benighted old buffers to stew in our own juice?
I mean, seriously, what are they scared of?
Have they really not got anything more important to do, than coming here to spread their putrid bullshit around?
Could it be that, like Stalin, like Hitler, like Mao and all the rest, they have recurrent nightmares about the 0.1% of happy voters who somehow put their cross in the wrong box on the ballot paper?
Do they wake up at night and look anxiously through the curtains to be sure the peasants with their pitchforks and burning torches haven't started to assemble?
It's obviously tough when you're at the top.
And a long time to wait for their next jolly in Marrakesh.
'but 97% of the other generals support Herr Hitler'
"the science behind (it) and its effect on minority communities" "should not be up for debate"
..Seems to be the Sierra Club's man's lines.
Check it against the transcript
Other Videos John Shade shared
* 2014 3min Lord Christopher Monckton vs Greenpeace - German Protesters were unable to answer his simple questions "but you, you have a lot of facts ! A lot more facts than I have"
* 2009 10 mins Lord Monckton addresses a Greenpeace-campaigner on global warming Germnay Protesters protesting against a Skeptics meeting. "I have FAITH in organisations like Greenspeace"
* 2012 3 mins Protesters gathered outside the Heartland Institute's 7th International Conference on Climate Change, Their response to simple questions was to refuse to answer, but chant and namecall instead.
"Cruz was excellent but he should have emphasized that the 97% was old bunkum while the pause is here and now." --Tim Spence
Cruz did that, and very quickly. He already had his opponent on the ropes and didn't want to let him run to another corner while Cruz was already scoring rapid points in this one. The Sierra Club is an organization of and for scientific ignoramuses.
So NASA claims "97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree" (based upon John Cook!) but Mr Mair widened it to 97% of all scientists.
One thing that might usefully be up for comment, if not "up for debate", is the whole idea of an "average global temperature".
The latest boring troll takes issue with the satellite record. OK, maybe it isn't perfect.
Is it SERIOUSLY suggested that the surface temperature datasets are better? Really? With all the 'adjustments' of both present and past? With all the extrapolations, interpolations and homogenisations? With all the old surface stations no longer fed into the dataset (not just those in the north of the old USSR, just look at the GISS series and note how many Australian stations have been dropped)? With the realisation that many of the remaining datasets are of blatantly pathetic quality (just look at the WUWT surface stations project)? With the vast tracts of the Earth's surface that are not measured? With the laughably sparsely covered surface of the 70% oceans?
And we are expected not to laugh when the BBC claims that an alleged 0.01 degree C increase averaged across the globe and across 365 days is, not only a "record" and "unprecedented" but something to justify "de-carbonising" the economy, even with absolutely no evidence that human CO2 emissions are even partly to blame? And when the claimed accuracy is to a tenth of a degree? But in reality, is most unlikely to be plus or minus a full degree?
Let's also not forget that, as the old point has it, if your head's in the freezer and your feet are in the oven, is your "average temperature" just like Goldilocks' porridge, "Just Right"?
In fact, the Cultists keep suggesting that de-carbonisation can be achieved if only we commit the same resources that we put behind the Apollo mission.
I'm sorry, I don't believe we could accurately measure the global average surface temperature within an accuracy of plus/minus one tenth of a degree C, just once, on any date you could suggest. Even with Apollo Mission funding. And neither would I be convinced that it meant much if you could.
To me, this is all very interesting. But what actually matters isn't the BBC's "unprecedented" agit-prop. Or even for how long the "pause" has been going on.
What matters is energy policy, where the facts are quite clear and the results are obvious. Senator Cruz very briefly but correctly touched on the costs, job losses and economic damage that the Green Blob has already inflicted and which they plan to increase by an order of magnitude. Whose bank account is swelling as a result of all this nonsense, all these bare-faced lies?
That's the real question.
First of all, endearing naïfs, I'm rubber and you are glue.
Second, Cruz had no response to the climate consensus. That's a fact. And if he knew to ask "Why not 93% or 87%? On whose authority 97%?" and didn't then he is pulling one on you lot to advance his political agenda.
I don't happen to think that the "97% of scientists agree" issue is that important anyway. If the data shows that there has been no significant warming for almost nineteen years, as it self evidently does, any number of scientists saying it isn't true won't change the fact that it is.
To paraphrase Phil, "These are not the data you are looking for". The farce is strong in this one.
Dec 15, 2015 at 4:52 PM | Unregistered CommenterPhil Clarke
We are firmly in the realm of making excuses.
Mair makes excuses why Sierra Club knows little about aspects of science.
Then you attempt to make excuses for Mair by quoting the letter from Phil Clarke.
With all respect, the discussion is not about whether Dr Christie and colleagues have or have not published a paper on the design and operations of the system givinbg, in popular terms, "satellite temperatures".
The ONLY question that you could raise validly is "All systems have errors. Do we have evidence of unacceptable errors in the UAH system?"
However, my guess is that you will not do this, because you seem to belong to the crowd that believes CO2 warms global atmospheres by a worrysome amount despite there being even one single, accepted paper that quantifies the mathematical relation between CO2 concentrations and how they are affected by atmospheric temperatures, if any significant relationship exists. Do I have to quote you AR5 and the huge range for Equilibrium Climate Sensitivities? You are arguing for the selective application of goose and gander logic.
At times like this, I tend to resort to the near reality of human conduct contained in the script of the movie "Dr Strangelove". It has a couple of wonderful applications of the use and abuse of excuse.
"(U.S.A. President) Muffley:
Read it.
Turgidson:
The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
Muffley:
There's nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
Turgidson:
Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
Muffley:
anger rising General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.
Turgidson:
Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up sir. "
Geoff.
"The force is strong in this one." @Gavin used is a line from some movie.
"Cruz had no response to the climate consensus"..CRuz was ASKING the questions ..The troll lives in a fantasy.
Re Average Global temp -Yes it was just a convenient simple PR tool for them.
It was just a proxy for spotting speed of changes in the climate system, as it's just a proxy for how much energy in the climate system.
To me he only thing that really matters is if you get some catastrophic feedback loops, cos over the years places get temperature variations anyway.
"Ted Cruz is set to win cos he's 10% ahead in Iowa and that'd where the poll starts in February" said BBC guy today webnews
BUT that poll may have just be a blip, cos when I check I can see Trump is ahead in newer ones (2 days).
with swings like that the polls don't seem reliable
"I have FAITH in organisations like Greenpeace"
The poor, poor deluded soul.
Spence_UK - Nice work. That demolishes any legitimate criticism of satellite coverage as it's demonstrably no worse and probably much better than surface coverage. Checkmate.
Re the main points about Cruz & Mair, One was asking valid questions while the other was answering like one of those child's dolls from yesteryear, where you pulled a cord out of its back to hear a recorded voice 'speak'.
'97%....97%...97%...I am a Dalek...97%'
The problem with those dolls was that eventually someone would pull the cord too hard and it would break. The doll was then useless and got relegated to the back of the toy cupboard. Mair - and alarmists everywhere, has seen the future.
Of course, the two 97% papers are ridiculous on their little faces. In fairness, Mikey Mann's Hockey Stick had a lot of people fooled until M&M started to drill down into it.
Now the Mann couldn't even find one blowhard cultist to file an amicus brief.
But Cook & Lewandowsky? Even your slightly brighter troll obviously finds them an embarrassment.
And some ripostes are so obvious it is hardly worth making them. 97% of defrocked priests know the little bitch was gagging for it. And so on.
As others have said, even if the 97% figure was actually an accurate figure of how many genuine climate "scientists" really believed that human emissions were likely to have catastrophic consequences (and neither paper actually claims that), would that outweigh the obvious point that all the little Emperors' scrawny arses are so obviously on display?
And check out two other 'consensuses'. First, that the great majority of scientists in the relevant field think properly regulated GM crops are safe and beneficial. Secondly, that fracking is also safe & beneficial.
Would Caroline Lucas & Vivienne Westwood be convinced by these 'consensuses'?
Do please specify the question that got Cruz around the consensus wall. Because on the video he crashed into it, again and again and again.
As you are...
I think we can expect Unprecedented levels of bias by the BBC, against ALL Republicans in the US Presidential contest, as they try to ensure the survival of their New World Order.
CheshireRed said
"Spence_UK - Nice work. That demolishes any legitimate criticism of satellite coverage as it's demonstrably no worse and probably much better than surface coverage. Checkmate."
As the satellite and surface clearly diverge and balloon data aligns with the satellite results there needs to be a scientific explaination of why the surface shows more warming than the troposphere even though AGW theory says the opposite. The complete set of options are I believe,
1) All measurements are wrong
2) Satellite and balloon are both wrong.
3) Surface measurements are wrong
4) All measurements are correct and AGW theory is wrong.
5) Data has been fiddled and climate science should be in jail.
If 1) then nothing is settled and climate science is in the stone age.
If 2) then is it coincidence that balloons and satellites, 2 wholly different measurement methods, are wrong and what correction is required and why.
If 3) then climate science is back in the stone age and AGW predictions are wrong.
If 4) then what's wrong with the settled science of AGW theory?
If 5) give me strength.
Please give me the answer you scientists out there