A question and a challenge.

Q. What do you think the ALP will be plotting to do about Higgins? Would you care to comment on my supposition, that, to start with, it doesn’t think Clive can win, and is far from sure that it would want him to? (It doesn’t want any encouragement for the idea that inner urban ALP seats can be won by Greens). So, it’s objective will be to cause maximum pain for Greens and for the relationship of Greens and Liberals. The ideal would be to make sure the Liberals had all the material to humiliate the Greens in such a way that the hard core of Green supporters would be thoroughly antagonised by the Liberal campaign. Make sense?

My challenge is for you to find time to read three articles cited

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2009/00000020/F0020001/art00006 [or the last digit may be 3] wherein Martin Hertzberg in a January 2009 article purports to show that cloud albedo explains all the warmings we are interested in. Then
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity where Nir J. Shaviv explains why (although he is all in favour of reducing the burning of fossil fuels) he doesn’t find the sensitivity of the global atmosphere to CO2 to be great enough for alarm (maybe one degree by 2100 or maybe that is in another linked article by him) and says that there is an alternative explanation to the AGW and CO2 one for recent warming, namely variations in cosmic ray flux caused by variations in solar radiation and (possibly anyway) variation in the CRF in our galaxy. This would link to the cloud/albedo explanation of Hertzberg because the place of CRF in all of this is in its ionising effects leading to more water vapour and cloud droplets when the increased solar radiation hasn’t pushed the CRF out of the way.

I haven’t been able to find adverse comment on or answer to this by searching the Internet despite at least part of Shaviv’s work to the above effect being several years old.

Shaviv is also strong on the uncertainties to be found in the IPCC’s reports, on which he relies for a lot of the data he cites.

Then there is the paper calculating low climate sensitivity that I cited earlier
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/E&E%20douglass_christy-color.pdf

As you would know that is also the line of one of Australia’s most respected meteorologists Dr William Kininmonth.

And that peer-reviewed article is very recent.

WHY THE CHALLENGE? When the Higgins by-election is over and you have time to consider whether you have enough evidence not only to believe that the most probably course of climate change this century is disastrous but also caused by emission of CO2 from fossil fuels but that it is better for Australia to attempt things we know will be futile by way of reducing CO2 emissions in Australia (and preaching to the rulers of some billions of our fellow human beings most of whom would vote for their leaders rather than Kevin Rudd) than to pursue a hard-headed approach to making ourselves rich enough to provide for the care of an aging population, a revolution in Aboriginal affairs, ensuring water supplies for a much enlarged population etc. *will you not want to have another look at whether the scientific basis for making such a decision is sound?*

You may find that there really is too much doubt about the predictions that we are in grave danger unless we reduce our own and/or the world’s CO2 emissions for it to be responsible of you to promote radical changes to our economy. Perhaps you would give more time to brushing up your maths and physical sciences and following up on the latest sceptical papers rather than putting so much trust in one major sect of the priesthood of Athena whose sects have been so often in the past intellectually corrupted by every variety of human folly and weakness. There have been so many conventional wisdoms in science (including medicine not least - and who has ever accused a medical researcher of being off-centre ethically or intellectually!!) that have been exploded even if you only start with the domolition of ideas about the lumeniferous ether in the late 19th century.

Destroying Australian jobs and prosperity, or, it it is an alternative successfully promoted by an ETS, keeping poor c0untries underdeveloped so we can buy carbon credits from them, seems to be a goal, or mere possible outcome, which needs constant reviewing against the evidence. You don’t sound like someone who is prepared to be a mere footsoldier like a crusader going in to destroy the Muslim cities because the Pope and his bishops told him it would save his soul for eternal life. And if you were, maybe you could find your way to choosing a different scientific Pope and College of Cardinals.

Do you think that what Ian Pilmer wrote is right because:

a) You have looked into what the other (mainstream) side of the scientific debate has said, and having weighed up the evidence you are comfortable that the majority of experts in the field are wrong, or

b) Pilmer reinforces your belief that climate change is wrong, so therefore, even though you believe that mainstream science is wrong, you are comfortable to use the views of one controversial scientist to support your case?

Coral reefs were exposed throughout geological history to higher temperatures and CO2 levels than at present and yet have persisted althiugh calcium and nagnesium conc were different also.

Ian Plimer wote a blog article on the topic. Obviously he is a sceptic but also a respected relevant scientist:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/10/not-enough-co2-to-make-oceans-acidic-a-note-from-professor-plimer/

The articles, like the one I cited from Energy & Environment which was provided by a blogger commenting on Lindzen’s paper, are too recent for published responses other than online, probably in blogs, and that is why I ask those who claim familiarity with the accumulated literature to tell me if there is an answer to what is put there.

The Douglass & Christy article, and, it seems, the one linked by MichaelT go absolutely to the heart of whether the recent (and possibly current despite the 10 year hiatus) warming are something to worry much about and spend a lot of money on. The questioning of positive feedbacks is just about the only game in the end.

As to STEPHEN MORELAND’s notes on the psychology underlying argument over issues the problem is that they are, though not perhaps truisms, of such generality that they could explain folly and error on both or all sides of many a contestable issue. I saw a marvellous Geoffrey Ricardo painting recently where one caricatured figure with a ridiculous nose was pointing to the ridiculous ears of another caricatured figure who was pointing at his nose. It would make a good cover picture for many a set of conference or symposium papers.

But thanks for the Dunning-Kruger reference. I had no idea that D & K had been so clever as to get their names attached to something in 1999 which must have been a common place well before Shakespeare’s eye and ear caught the absurdities of mankind on the hop. I think it might have been put more pithily by a few primary school principals I have known. Nonetheless interesting in reminding of connected ideas, e.g. that an IQ difference of 25 points between leader and led was said in the Britsh Army long ago to be too great for good communication (as a very general rule), and the observation that 15 or 20 points IQ difference can be enough to ensure that a person with the lower one can’t tell which of two people with the higher is actually smarter (admittedly that observation can be confused by the capacity of some people who can perform on an IQ to make a mess of their lives).

My hunch is that a habit of confirmation bias is probably about ten times as common as a habit of determined contrarianism practised either by those who are genuinely rigorous in their reasoning and value it in others and also those who aren’t but have perhaps been brought up in a household where one was expected to be able to sound smart. Any opinion on that?

For my personal views I believe I can put my trust in the science, and that those who really know there stuff have looked at this sort of thing. Those who have doubts are right to look at the papers.

The challenge is, you not only need to understand the paper, and how its conclusions relate to the big issues (Is climate changing? Is this due to us? And Will the effects be bad?) but you then need to know how this fits in with other papers in the field, and what has been the response to this paper.

This is why finding an expert in the field makes things from extremely difficult to quick and not to hard to find out what it all means.

Skip over to Wikipedia and look up:-

Confirmation bias

and

Dunning-Kruger effect (with a special hello to Julius)

I may have started a new thread to this discussion - “Is psychology really science?” That’d be a hoot.

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.

He’s a scientist. Just not your class of scientist apparently.

Also the Labor Party has ensured that your vote will be a meaningless gesture vote whether Liberal or Green.

In the meantime, as someone who reads the science, you might care to look at this link from the blog to that Lindzen link:

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/E&E%20douglass_christy-color.pdf

The rate of increase in temperature seems about the same as William Kininmonth’s figure. Have a look especially at the Summary, including:

“An underlying temperature trend of 0.062±0.010ºK/decade was estimated from data in the tropical latitude band. Corrections to this trend value from solar and aerosols climate forcings are estimated to be a fraction of this value. The trend expected from CO2 climate forcing is 0.070g ºC/decade, where g is the gain due to any feedback. If the underlying trend is due to CO2 then g~1. Models giving values of g greater than 1 would need a negative climate forcing to partially cancel that from CO2. This negative forcing cannot be from aerosols. [There is a citation given on the aerosols point in the main text].”

If Andrew Glikson is still with us maybe he would care to comment, if only on the full implications of that article which deals, inter alia, with latitude bands and the big climate shift of about 1976 which I have seen shown on a chart as the major numerical explanation for the shift in global temperatures to a higher plateau (not excluding some slope of the plateaus before and after).

Now that we have a candidate for the by-election in my seat, I don’t have time to get into lengthy discussion.

If you are in Higgins (or in Nelson’s seat), then you have an important decision to make later this year on this matter.

You can either decide that the probability that the scientist are right is high enough, and the effects if they are right is bad enough, that the moral and prudent thing to do is vote Green.

Or you can decide that you are happy to do nothing about climate change and wait to see what happens. (If the scientist are right then the effects of climate change will be much worse and more expensive to adapt to, and if they are wrong then we can all sit back and relax.) In this case you will vote Liberal.

This is called democracy.

And if the electorate gets it wrong, the people should accept the moral and economic responsibility for their decision.

My attempt to test Michael Wilbur-Ham’s idea that the piecing together of lots of discrete bits of scientific work by people who are not specialists in more than one or two of the areas covered is not in any way problematic by analogy with the co-operation involved in the massive area bombing campaigns of WW2 could be answered as Michael does with the distinction that the objective was chosen by political process. However, that is not good enough. Apart from noting that the political element in the IPCC process has been criticised as dominant there is the fact that, amongst all those experts who contributed to the bombing raids there must surely have been some who doubted the efficacy of what they were doing, quite apart from not thinking it a good war aim to kill lots of civilians. Those higher up the chain of decision making - equivalent perhaps to those preparing IPCC summary reports for politicians - may well have ignored the doubts that pathfinder flares to pinpoint factories were actually going to contribute anything useful to the defeat of Germany or even the reduction of its industrial capacity. So, part of the planning included the latest and best ways of pinpointing with flares the principal targets, but the latest and best, though included in the product, was just not up to standard. So, many suspect, with the IPCC’s cut and paste jobs.

What Linzen shows by measurement is that there is much more radiation from the planet back into space than the IPCC assumptions for their models.

If accurate, it means essentially their computer models are meaningless and are likely to be even more inaccurate as they’ve proved to be over the last decade.

Re nuclear reactors, it’s still in a talk stage, if we’d started building them when France did, we’d have them by now. Instead we had a *moratorium* on the use of nuclear power, and councils around Australia had a w*nkfest of declaring their area to be ‘nuclear free’

I quoted Ziggy Switkovsky above as saying that in some places a reactor can be built in four years. In an earlier thread I quoted the Switkovsky report as saying that the first reactor in Australia would take between 10 and 20 years, given the need to change regulations and install licensing procedures.

Admittedly in the several years since the Report, Australian public opinion and international licensing procedures have improved considerably. However, it may well be that the first production reactor in Australia would still take 10 years to get over public concerns and bureaucratic obstacles, activate engineering skills and get reliable supply to the grid. ANSTO probably has already updated Canberra on the timespan.

On the other hand, the wider technically inclined public ought to know that (subsequent) modular reactors may take as little as four years from first concrete to first electricity.

Worldwide, the time required to propagate engineering skills means that the conversion of a country’s grid to nuclear would have to start with one, then two, then four, then eight, etc rather than all at once.

Once those engineering skills are in place, our industries have the capacity to supply nuclear energy to other processes than electricity. By installing an increased number of reactors, hydrogen might be distributed or transport fuel might be synthesised. That may imply 200 GW for 30 million people by 2100.

Ziggy’s envisaged fleet of 50 reactors by 2050 had better start soon!

Something as simple as ending old growth logging would instantly make a significant reduction on Australia’s emissions. Scrapping the billion dollar annual subsidiary on company cars, and putting this money into public transport would be another simple act which would make a big difference.

I have also lost all interest in the discussion about whether APW is real and hence the ‘talk’. Regarding the ‘walk’, however, the tendency to want someone else to take action is why CO2 reduction can never really be a question of individual choice. Its too much of a ‘free rider’ situation in which you benefit from my CO2 reduction and so don’t do anything yourself (nothing personal, just an example). That is why it must be driven by governments so that everyone, wailing skeptics included, gets on board.

I second the request for you to let us know why this paper puts into doubt that the climate is changing or that this change is man-made or that the consequences are not bad.

That details within this big picture are “debated” in the literature is how science works. If scientist thought that they had it all perfect then there would be no need for further research.