Discussion > The Moral and Intellectual Poverty of Climate Alarm
but the comments made by Judith Curry are those that can be supported with evidence.
The opposite of the truth. Dr Curry made several demonstrably untrue statements (such as this one - I love correct in spirit but incorrect in detail, that's a keeper) that came straight from the book and they was rightly shredded by Dr Schmidt. So much so that later in the exchange she was forced to claim that she was merely restating the arguments of the book, not that she necessarily agreed with them, to which Gavin dryly replied:
Thanks for passing by. In future I will simply assume you are a conduit for untrue statements rather than their originator
The back-peddling gets worse later in the thread when, having repeated a series of grossly incorrect scientific claims, Dr Curry admits Like I’ve said 10 times before, this topic is not my expertise, […] So I have no intention of debating any aspects of the science on this topic.
Pretty breathtaking, really.
Phil Clarke
So
Phil thinks Mann is both omniscient and infallible = a religious cultist then.
that's a keeper
fred
Apr 16, 2020 at 1:54 PM Phil Clarke
From your post it seems you are confident that Schmidt will give Expert Witness Evidence in Court to support Mann and his Hockey Stick.
Many will look forward to it.
golf charlie
More on the life of Fred SInger, with some details of fraudulent and despicable attempts to smear him: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=10084
Extract: 'Now, for any new readers arriving here who wish to see all the instances where I mentioned Dr Singer in a significant way, please check out my tag category for him: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?tag=s-fred-singer For really quick reference, here’s some of the major accusations against him where I detailed extensively how each one of those fall apart, along with two other notions about the way it was imperative to stop what he was doing at all costs:'
There must be scope for a book on the smears used by climate scare campaigners. The depths to which they so readily sink would certainly be of interest to students of human nature and political opportunism.
John Shade
Ahhh, bless.
A quarter-century ago S. Fred published this .
Since then, nothing even vaguely scientifically useful or valid. Prove me wrong.
Phil Clarke
Apr 18, 2020 at 1:45 PM Phil Clarke
Only 22 years since Mann fabricated his Hockey Stick. How many failed attempts to replicate it?
golf charlie
Heh. I just won a bet with myself. And its been 31 years. 31 years!
Phil Clarke
Typo:21 years. Soz.
Still, yesterdays battle.
Phil Clarke
Thank you for that link to a draft report co-authored by SInger in 1994. An impressive, public-spirited piece of work exposing the trashiness of the EPA's approach to scientific discipline. Pretty good for a man of 70 if you ask me. I liked the concluding words for their neat summary of the EPA's cavalier approach;
'...it is unacceptable to distort the science for the sake of policy goals.'
and
''...an Alice in Wonderland quality of "sentence first, verdict afterwards"'
And for your link re the Hockey Stick:
'In 1998 Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes developed new statistical techniques to produce Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 (MBH98), the first eigenvector-based climate field reconstruction (CFR). This showed global patterns of annual surface temperature, and included a graph of average hemispheric temperatures back to 1400 with shading emphasising that uncertainties (to two standard error limits) were much greater in earlier centuries.[7] Jones et al. 1998 independently produced a CPS reconstruction extending back for a thousand years, and Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999 (MBH99) used the MBH98 methodology to extend their study back to 1000.[2][8]'
MBH98 was 22 years ago, and what a dreadful pastiche it was. Montford's 'The Hockey Stick Illusion' is a superb piece of work exposing it all in some detail. If anyone passing this way has not yet read it, may I commend it to them as an extremely well-written analysis. You can get it here
Once again you provide your own petard. A peculiar, albeit convenient, habit of yours.
John Shade
Thanks for that, I needed a laugh.
Phil Clarke
Just a reminder, when Fred Who was not lying about receiving tobacco funding, he was lying about his oil funding.
Such a beacon of integrity. It's not a difficult question, surely? Some examples of his contributions to science since he wrote that denial of the risks of environmental tobacco smoke on behalf of the Tobacco Institute.
Tumbleweed so far….
Phil Clarke
Turn the ECT dial down to 2 or 3 and the paranoia will subside a bit, maybe ask nurse for a couple of beta blockers.
fred
More ad hominem from Bonkers/Clarkers. Feeble.
Charly
One of the rotten fruits of the rotten 'science' and rotten profiteering of climate alarmism is the renewables fiasco. Here is a new post at WUWT describing just what a crazy choice renewables are for the UK, and just how expensive:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/18/excess-costs-of-uk-weather-dependent-renewable-energy-2020/
These are massive losses to our society. All thanks to third and fourth-rate scientists coupled with first-rate propagandists and schemers. Just plain shocking and shameful.
John Shade
With all due respect, John, that post is a heap of crap. You really should do a bit of basic checking before posting this level of stuff on a thread you yourself started on 'intellectual poverty'.
The WUWT post is a reposting from EDMEDOTNET, the personal website of Ed Hoskins, a retired architect and serial peddler of nonsense (BTW It is hard to make a Wordpress site look awful, but Ed manages it).
The post uses data from the Renewable Energy Foundation, which sounds impressive, but is in fact a front group for anti-renewable lobbyists set up by that noted academic, Noel Edmonds. Hmmm.
One of the first claims made is
In 2019 UK Weather dependent renewables generated a total of some 7.3 Gigawatts of power from an installed fleet with an installed Name Plate value of ~35 Gigawatts, thus achieving an overall productivity factor for Weather Dependent Renewables of ~20.9%.
Do you see the problem? That's right, a Gigawatt is indeed a unit of power, a watt being one Joule per second. It has a time factor built into the unit. So to talk about so many gigawatts per year is meaningless, has zero semantic content, it is unscientific bollocks, I would say it is a schoolboy error, but few schoolboys are that thick.
Does he mean Gigawatt-Hours? Does he mean the average power? I could probably do a bit of R&D to find out but this is such a dog's breakfast, and Ed obviously doesn't even have the basics, I am 100% sure I would be wasting my time.
Just me, but I think you have to do better than baloney from a retired architect's site based on data collated by a game show host's pet project and reheated by a washed up TV weatherman, if you want to persuade.
Phil Clarke
Apr 18, 2020 at 1:45 PM Phil Clarke
Only 22 years since Mann fabricated his Hockey Stick. How many failed attempts to replicate it?
Apr 18, 2020 at 2:17 PM golf charlie
Heh. I just won a bet with myself. And its been 31 years. 31 years!
Apr 18, 2020 at 2:35 PM Phil Clarke
Typo:21 years. Soz.
Still, yesterdays battle.
Apr 18, 2020 at 2:52 PM Phil Clarke
Did you work out Mann's maths for yourself?
golf charlie
One of the downsides of sceptical blog posts and comment threads such as here, is the low quality of the trolls and critics they attract. Generally armed only with a handful of catchphrases and smears ('in the pay of big oil/big tobacco' for example), they cannot sustain any kind of useful discussion. So what a pleasant surprise when Phil actually spots something useful about a post I linked to. The author of that post does need to tighten up on their definitions for those tables which seem to be missing a multiplier with the dimension of time. Some unit of time is needed, let us say 1 unit. Multiply each number by 1 and the problem might be solved. But it would help if they explained what their time unit was. So thank you Phil for that. Sadly, you revert to type with the facile abuse elsewhere in your comment of April 18, 9:05pm.
John Shade
Yeah, just multiply the nonsense by 1, that will sort it. That error was just the first of many, the whole piece is a farrago of made up 'estimates' and poorly-sourced data.
Another example: his number for electricity generation capacity from solar and wind is 34.95GW, but he claims the actual energy delivered was 7.5GW and that The approximate long-term cost commitment is ~250 £billion according to these calculations. The present long-term cost estimate for the UK Weather Dependent Renewables fleet amounts to about twice the annual, cost of the NHS or about 11% of annual UK GDP
The actual capacity factor varies from 40%-70% for wind power, around 15%-30% for solar, for comparison coal has a CF of around 55%.The £250 billion is sourced to REF so probably came out of Noel Edmonds' bottom, but if you take his cost number and divide it by his 35 GW you get a unit price of over £7 million per MW, which should have rung a few fact-check alarm bells surely?
Apparently not. Good enough for WUWT and a discussion of intellectual poverty. Ha.
Phil Clarke
The actual capacity factor varies from 40%-70% for wind power
whut?
fred
"the figures in the 2019 Output column are the rates of generation of electricity averaged over the whole year, that is, the total energy output over the year in Gigawatt hrs divided by the number of hours in a year."
Charly
Thanks Charly. Are you quoting this comment at WUWT?
I’m not quite clear on the figures. In the first table ‘UK 2019 Weather Dependent Renewables as Installed’, in the 2019 Output column all the outputs are measured in Gigawatts. Watts & Gigawatts are a measure of power or rate of generating energy & as such are instantaneous values. When measuring the output of a generating system over a sustained period like a year as here, surely the figure of interest is the QUANTITY of energy produced which is measured in Watt hours or Gigawatt hours & not the power output. I can only make sense of the table if I assume that the figures in the 2019 Output column are the rates of generation of electricity averaged over the whole year, that is, the total energy output over the year in Gigawatt hrs divided by the number of hours in a year.
We are not really any wiser as the author does not confirm the assumption. I am with the next commenter:
Thanks MB Pinder. I stopped reading when the energy output was given in GW. As you suggest maybe the energy output was averaged over the whole year to give the figure. If the calculation was made to make things ‘easier to understand’ then count me out. Thus the provenance of the data is compromised. It looks spiffy and professional but maybe its been made ‘easier to understand’ . Otherwise called ‘adjusted’?
(My bold). So you are saying that for Hoskins to make sense we have to read the comments to a reposting of his nonsense and assume the assumptions therein are correct?
When in a hole ….
Phil Clarke
I'm assuming that since you didn't italicise it - that paragraph with the bullshit renewable capacity factors is a Phil-ism.
So can we have a confirmation of that ?
fred
As Hoskins was using current GDP for his comparison I quoted CF for modern plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Wind_farm
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1287591/dong-hits-record-capacity-factor
Phil Clarke
Phil Clarke, I have asked him to clarify.
Charly
Apr 16, 2020 at 10:53 AM Phil Clarke
Why support from politicians and the public for Climate Science's selfish interests is tumbling:
"There are few silver linings to the current ghastly pandemic. But one of the benefits of is we’re testing the St Greta method of beating climate change and not liking it very much at all. Let’s hope that means policymakers focus on the technological and economic solutions to climate change, rather than the shrill eschatology of the modern green movement."
https://capx.co/the-crisis-exposes-the-hollow-fantasies-of-greta-and-extinction-rebellion/