Charlie Brown and the football

I think this is unfair to Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown, it appears, has an unlimited willingness to trust others. It seems rather honorable to maintain this faith in the goodness of humanity even in the case of repeated, painful failure. More honorable, in any case, than to grasp at straws so you can continue a shouting match that makes you feel good about yourself.

This may be stretching the argument, but the Danish translator of Peanuts changed Linus’s name to Thomas, after the skeptical (hmm – this has an tricky connotation in this context) or doubting disciple.

Linus/Thomas certainly would never have rushed at the ball voluntarily – but it is quite likely that Lucy would have used her big-sisterly authority to coerce her baby brother into the enterprise.

(Can we make anything out of the fact that Lucy also changed name? She is Trine – short for Katrine – in Danish).

Anyway, you are working on the assumption that political arguments are based on empirical evidence.

What we should remember is that modern conservatives are in fact true post-modernists: If the conservative discourse says that cosmic rays (or a group of sinister Martians or the guys on Spaceship Enterprise) cause global warming, and the conservative discourse manages to establish itself as the dominant discourse, then cosmic rays (or a group of sinister Martians or the guys on Spaceship Enterprise) cause global warming.

sensible rightwingers

Google can’t find this. Does it exist?

What I wonder is will AEI cut them separate 10K checks or must they share the booty?

Courtesy of the fabulous The Parking Lot is Full

You mean mountains of rhetoric.

I’m behind on my studies, where’s the proof that recent temp change is driven by CO2. Why is temp change better correlated with solar activity than CO2? It seems most recent temperature change is wrongly attributed to GHGs. The science seems to suggest that less than half of the change in forcing over the years is due to GHG concentrations, and the portion due to anthro-emmissions is even smaller.

Since an increase in CO2 tends to warm the Earth by a well-known mechanism, a rational skeptic would have to explain why the Earth isn’t getting warmed by increasing cocentrations of CO2 if the observed warming is indeed attributable to cosmic rays, sun spots, polar wobbles, or the increasing popularity of garden gnomes. There is, after all, no question that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been trending upwards for a long time; and it is equally clear that you can indeed grow cucumbers in cucumber frames. One could devise a story in which the tendency of CO2 to warm things up were counteracted by some paradoxical natural effect. One could, but nobody does.

John, the arguments you present against a solar relationship also apply equally to the attribution of CO2 to global warming. The fact is that we know very, very little.

It’s breathtaking how non-specialists can sum up the science on something as complicated as global warming in a sentence or two, all predicated on the idea that the IPCC is collectively ignorant, stupid, corrupt, or some combination. While they, on the other hand…

Bad as some of the comments here are, the ones linked to in the main post above are worse.

The IPCC took over a decade before it was even prepared to admit that an anthrogenic signature on climate change had been established with reasonable certainty. Since then they apparently have been taken over by a bunch of hysterical ninnies. If you believe some people, anyway.

Hey Aaron, first you need a clue. The first clue is that your ignorance coupled to your arrogance is your problem. You don’t even know how at ask a sensible question.

A good introduction to the subject is Spencer Weart’s the Discovery of Global Warming. There are any number of good books on climate science, for example Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Change by Brasseur Orlando and Tyndall. You might read the IPCC Third Assessment Report which is available on line while you wait for the new WGI report reviewing climate science will be available in May

And, here are some links to > 100KY ice core records. I fully expect you to try and blather about how if one doesn’t know everything one doesn’t know anything. If you don’t get 100 on the test you fail then. Been there. Heard that. It still is a pile of cod’s wallop.

Aaron, the theme of this posting and thread are that people like don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. You’re not an honest seeker of truth.

Heh. And to explore the analogy further, it is more that the dishonest are the ones taking away the ball. Way to much science that casts doubt on how much of GW we cause is wrongly dismissed. We are way less certain of our share of GW than popular culture leads us to believe. The idea that we know half of recent warming is AGW is a flat out lie, theory can only explain about a 10th of it, the rest is speculation based on an observed correlation, which also doesn’t hold if we look further back in time.

External Factors.

CO2 increase lags temp increase Of course, I don’t know if this study observed other GHGs.

And of course, you can always take a quick look at temperature and GHG concentrations to see that there are large fluctuations in temperature that don’t correspond to GHGs. Especially going back over 1000 years.

Ummm… The recent Stott article isn’t about GHGs. Dumbass.

The STEFAN RAHMSTORF reply adresses the certainty of Shaviv’s conclusions, he determines that it is not conclusive, but the data still suggests that it is likely. Also, if you read the reply, he reaffirms that greenhouse gases have not been drivers of climate change historically.

Ignoring that Realclimate is not a credible source, the article also does nothing to confirm CO2 as a climate driver or address the fact that there are more stong climate driver that we simply don’t understand. The argument is simply that CO2 reinforces warming. No disagreement there. But it does nothing to tell us the extent to which it does.

Now, how much does the historical data consistantly suggest that CO2 increases forcing. What is the least amount of warming we get from high concentrations of GHGs? No where near .6C in 30 years.

More.

Well, I guess this exchange does serve to underline John’s point, aaron. You are presently lying on your back, studying the sky after having fallen on your ass three times, and you don’t seem to know how it happened. Read the references Eli kindly supplied, and you will be able to add more to the debate. As a bonus, you will be able to avoid embarrassments like this one.

All of this back-patting is not that impressive. Back when there were more questions than answers, there were plenty of people like Mr. Quiggin here who wanted to dismiss the data in favor of the theory (by accusing people like John Christy of outright charlatanism, etc.). It could have gone either way, but they were ready to go to the mat for what they *felt* was correct, denigrating anyone who dared ask questions. The most laughable of their defenses was – and still is – that all skeptics must be in the pay of Enron, while completely overlooking the fact that this ad hominem works far more strongly against them (the corporate ties are not that strong, but all non-skeptics are definitely in the pay of some gov’t bureau, which are at least as likely to politicize as corporations, who may sometimes change position if they see a benefit to it, e.g. DuPont and the Montreal Protocol).

I wonder how many of those currently signed up for “AGW is definitely happening, definitely a threat, and definitely requires strong central planning” also signed on to the “Premature Ice Age is coming”, “England won’t exist in 2000”, “mass starvation in 1980”, “saccharin causes cancer”, “plastics are causing a drop in our ability to procreate”, “silicon breast implants cause disease”, and “Y2K means the end of civilization” scares? My take is that the skeptics have been far more data-driven than the enthusiasts, with people like Lomborg and Bailey showing more intellectual honesty than people who were ready to believe it the first day they heard of it.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but it’s no justification for that clock’s hubris.

Is Eric H concocting straw men out of thin air? Then they’ll be thin-air men.

The main thrust of Quiggin’s opening post isn’t even anywhere near an ad hominem. Quiggin is simply saying that the “latest story casting doubt on the reality of anthropogenic global warming” is, in fact, an old and discredited one.

“Skeptic” in this case is just a euphemism for “person who responds to evidence with ‘nyah nyah nyah!'”… that is, “denialist”.