Proponent comment of the day March 12, 2013

The people who frequent the excellent Watching the Denier’s blog are familiar with the class clown, Eric Worrall. He is …… nevermind. Let’s just say that out of the top 100 denier memes featured over at SkepticalScience, he has so far uttered about 65 of them. I’ve done a few DOCD’s on him here, here and here. I also did a longer piece here. Anyway, in a particularly epic comment thread, Eric had been spouting his usual nonsense, this time talking about shooting all the crocodiles in Australia because they are child killers and shifting the polar bears to the Antarctic….no, I’m not kidding, when along comes the voice of reason, Nick. I don’t need to analyze or explain anything about  this comment because it is perfectly self-explanatory. Here it is, and thankyou Nick…

Indeed.

 

 

Proponent Comment of the Day, January 26, 2013

I probably need to change the names of these “comments of the day, for a couple of reasons…

1. I don’t do them daily.

2. I rarely do them on the day the comment was made.

But then, if I see the comment on a given day then from my perspective it is the comment of the day…I think I’ll stick with the format.So today, I was looking for info for an upcoming post and stumbled onto a comment that really gave me a chuckle. Ignore the fact that its more than 2 years old. To me, given my affection for the Climate Sceptics Party, it is timeless (as long as they exist). I really couldn’t resist this comment. It is a simple yet profound comment.

For context, the author, one Sam Wylie was lamenting the disproportionate representation Tasmania has in the federal lower house virtue of a conflict between the constitution and Australia’s population distribution. So here is his comment…

“On the matter of close elections, my vote could still decide the outcome of the whole thing.  I live in the electorate of Hasluck in WA.  Ken Wyatt (Lib) leads Sharyn Jackson (Lab) by only 300 votes and the gap is narrowing.  I am proud that the first indigenous member of the lower house may be elected in Hasluck.  Not by me though.  When I went into the polling booth my green paper showed  7 candidates for the lower house.  One was from the Global Warming Skeptics party, so I knew straight away who to put last.  Unfortunately, the Liberal Party itself is a party of global warming skeptics so I reluctantly had to put Mr Wyatt near the bottom too.”

Beautiful isn’t it? The full post is here.

Proponent Comment of the Week, December 2012

Over at Peter Sinclair’s Climate Crock’s, Peter and many of his commentators provide other readers with well written, informative answers to questions raised in the comment sections. For my mind, this is one that not only falls into the category I mentioned but does so in such an easy to read blunt but courteous manner it makes for compelling reading. If more people could explain things as simply as this gentleman does, many others would be better informed.

tweetingdonal Says:

December 14, 2012 at 12:33 am 

 Calving like this is not “ONLY” explained by global warming. There are lots of conditions that have to be met for something like this to happen. If we look at the last 4.5 billion years, this has undoubtedly happened before. In fact it’s likely happened in the past 50 million years quite a few times.

While we can’t prove it definitively, events like the extreme calving seem to have been rare since modern humans emerged. Has the human race seen circumstances like this before? Something similar might have happened, but not often.

The Climate System is still catching up. We’ve forced more heat and more contaminants onto our planet faster than has EVER happened since humans have existed. One way to look at how fast we’re changing things is to compare the average temperature change leading up to one of the global extinctions. The average temperature change leading up to the most recent global extinction was between 4 to 7 degrees over the course of 5,000 years. Since 1900 our average temperature change has been around 0.7 degrees.

It might sound like a small rise in temperature, but the rates of temperature change are more telling. Doing the arithmetic, the average temperature change per decade around extinction events was about 0.008 degrees per decade. Since 1900 we’ve been averaging a 0.06 degree per decade change. (Per the European Environment Agency). So that 0.7 degree change is over 7 times as fast as the events leading up to the last great extinction even.

Our rate of change in the last decade has grown from 0.06 to 0.20 degrees, making the rate of change about 25 times the last global extinction event. As a cross check to that number, our current rate of species extinction is actually around 45 times the normal “background” rate.

Thinking about it this way, we’re changing the planet faster than an extinction event that wiped out 2/3 of all land species and nearly 90% of all marine species. Roughly 7 times faster.

Please tell your friends and your representatives that we need to address this now. We’re already close to a quarter of the way there, and the climate system doesn’t change with the flip of a switch. And because of CO2′s long “hang time” in the atmosphere, it will take hundreds of years to straighten out what we’ve already done.

Let me know if you want references, I’ve already typed too long here so I’ve left them out.

 

 

AGW proponent comment of the day, September 12, 2012

Over at Watching the Deniers, Zeph made the following comment in response to a denier. There is no need for me to post the denier’s initial comment as that becomes quickly apparent in Zeph’s response. He says,

“At the time when you rejected the hockey stick based on not seeing the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, were you of the impression that these were known to be established global trends versus regional ones? Did you research that distinction before concluding that the science was wrong, or afterwards?

Do you consider your graph analysis to be of publishable quality? Are you fairly confident that it would not be shown to be in error if you submitted it?

Are you really asserting that the released e-mails provided a sufficient explanation for you? If so, it’s possible that your initial “skepticism” jumped the rails into conspiracy dynamics at that point and that your further investigations were tainted by confirmation bias (as a hypothesis to consider, not asserted as a fact).

Because by today you would need to explain how other groups with other data have fairly well reproduced Mann’s “hockey stick”, and the easiest way is to cope with that new evidence is to assume a nearly seamless global conspiracy to cook the data. The cool thing about that approach is that it can explain anything, and needs no ongoing evidence, mechanism, reality checking. Conspiracies allow unbounded extrapolation from limited data points – “gee, X appears to have happened in one place, so I need no further evidence to assume that Y and Z and W are all happening as well, where I get to specify any Y, Z and W needed to fill in the gaps of my predetermined theory”. It all makes sense now! All the pieces not only fit together, they fit together perfectly!

Actually critiquing the various published articles on proxy based climate reconstructions with analysis worthy of publication would be a whole lot more work, when “the climategate emails can explain away anything and everything which is inconvenient to my current beliefs”.

Oh, here’s another handy application. If your graph of “all the data” which fell between the “alarmists” and the Russians isn’t accepted for peer review, it must be because of climategate. It couldn’t be because you failed to read and take into account the other papers which analyze heat island effects in some detail.

Really, if climategate explained it all for you, then you are set for life and need never again worry about having your favored theories challenged by inconvenient contrary evidence.

I’m not saying that you will use climategate to extrapolate way beyond the evidence, only that it’s going to be a temptation, if “being right” in an argument (or at least in your own mind) is of high importance to you.

Politics has indeed invaded science. Think you that it’s on but one side?

By the way, I do agree that there has been a lack of full transparency in climate science that needs to be addressed. Luckily we are not alone in that, and many climate scientists agree (even those supporting AGW). So that condition seems to be gradually improving – more raw data and more software are being released, which is good for all of us. So far, no smoking guns – each release has been pored over by opponents of AGW seeking major flaws they have assured us must exist, only to fall silent without apology when they fail to find them. I hope that eventually all relevant data and software will be released for open review when results are published; where there really is shoddy science or deception it needs to be fixed, period – whether the author supports or opposes AGW or takes no position. But I predict that AGW opponents will continue to be highly disappointed and that the new openness will strengthen AGW rather than torpedo it. Luckily there’s still the seamless global scientific conspiracy to explain it all, for those whose conclusions are pre-determined.”

Thankyou Zeph.

AGW proponent comment of the day August 28, 2012

I don’t know who NealT is, but his comment over at WTFIWWAW is a good one. Not just for the content, but also the seemingly calm and measured language in it. I have reproduced it below without permission because I don’t know who he is. I hope he doesn’t mind.

NeilT says:

August 27, 2012 at 2:25 pm

Dear me, predictions come in all sizes and types. In fact 4 out of the 5 key objections here were predicted back on August 12 and like pavlovs dogs, WUWT gladly ranted their hearts out.

The only prediciton which did not get fulfilled was sensor failure…. I must admit I’m a little surpised as WUWT always claims that DMI sensors have failed every time it drops like a stone. Funny satellites those which fail and then start working perfectly when eggshell thin ice re-forms very rapidly very late in the season….

However Anthony you are bending the truth, yet again. NSIDC is almost the LAST record to fall. Not the first or the only. But, of course, you had to wait until the situation settled enough before you could start spreading your poison so it would be believable.

I see a trend here. People on the board keep saying we’re recovering from the little ice age and so there should be a melt. Yet there is a second and almost constant thread which says that ice is recovering. These two opinions are diametrically opposed yet everyone here seems to think they make the case in two different ways.

WUWT has been making constant noise about how the ice is NOT melting yet the WUWT submissions for SEARCH have dropped by 1msqkm between 2007 and now.

Pinnoccio methinks your nose is growing.

As the weeks go on and the ice does not recover, you will, again, say absolutely nothing. You will only perk up again when the temperature drops to -100 for a week and generates 6 inches of flash frozen ice in a sudden spurt. Then again it’ll be a sudden and “unprecedented” re-freeze of the ice. Never mind the fact that the ice will not reach the 2006/9 low ice winter levels. The fact that the average winter temperatures around Greenland will be 30C – 40C higher than normal over a period of weeks, no let’s ignore all that.

Only on WUWT could the arctic sea lose heat all winter but not gain heat in the summer, creating a net effect of cooling which will then melt even MORE ice the following year.

Escher had nothing on the logic of WUWT. But of course it’s not logic is it. It is simply making any claim which could possibly be believed by anyone so that an incredible and impossible claim can be upheld.

True to form and true to type. Even more so as the whole site lacks logic so badly that nobody can see the basic inconsistency of the position. One key message I use to make people wake up and understand the position is the basic inconsistency of the denialosphere arguments. Argue one thing one day and another the day after. Never cross check to see if you are making sense, what good would that do? Belive me you make my case much more forcibly than I could. All I have to do is point out the basic inconsistency of sites like this and I have people convinced.

What thousands of graphs and billions of lines of data will not do for the common person, WUWT does for me perfectly.

Keep it up. It helps me enormously.

Well said NeilT, well said. I got banned for less.