Heartland Institute Building Anti-Science Curriculum

[klapauzius]

I like the idea of the domes...

To the skeptics:

Unless you have stock in coal, gas and oil companies, what do you think we are losing by reducing our Co2 output? Given that you acknowledge at least the theoretical possibility of a bad outcome due to Co2, what is keeping us from "erring" on the side of caution?

What are the good reasons to keep up the pollution (or perceived pollution)?

 

[Herm]

Herm, have you ever considered reading the links that Andy left?

I read the first one.. CO2 is going up so quickly that we should know soon.

 

[Herm]

..what do you think we are losing by reducing our Co2 output?

There is an economic benefit to reducing CO2, if done with common sense.. mostly by efficiency increases and reducing consumption. It is unavoidable that most the oil and bitumen in the world will be consumed, and lots of the available coal and NG... if not by us then by 3rd world countries with increasing prosperity. Luckily I dont consider CO2 to be a pollutant, the world will adapt to rising levels.

Besides efficiency increases you can do other things such as photovoltaics, windmills, BEVs, nuclear power and geologic sequestering of CO2 to enhance oil recovery. CO2 separation is a standard byproduct of modern coal/NG gasification plants and sequestering the resultant CO2 can be a profit maker.

 

[Stoaty]

Luckily I dont consider CO2 to be a pollutant, the world will adapt to rising levels.

It is good to find out that you are more knowledgeable than the EPA, the court, and all the scientists who contributed to the PDF I referenced. We are certainly fortunate to have you in our midst. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[Fabio]

The world will adapt without a doubt. We humans, not so much. Ultimately...

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish". Jonas Salk

Luckily I dont consider CO2 to be a pollutant, the world will adapt to rising levels.

 

[AndyH]

Deniers - read it and weep. The Geological Society of London (yes, the guys that LOVE few things more than finding new oil deposits) agree on global climate change statement:

“In the light of the evidence presented here it is reasonable to conclude that emitting further large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is likely to be unwise, uncomfortable though that fact may be.”

http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange

Bryan Lovell, President, Geological Society of London

The beauty of looking at the rock record is you don't have to run a computer model to see what's going to happen - you see the whole thing. And when you put, say, 2000 gigatons or thereby of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly, a certain number of things happen: It gets hot, the oceans get acid, they run short of oxygen, and as a result quite a number of animals become extinct. And in the rock record what you see subsequently, obviously the extinction event is recorded, and you see the draw-down over a period of 100-200,000 years the carbon in the atmosphere, which is manifested on the floor of the ocean as a development of a carbon-rich 'mudstone.' ...

The people who were saying to us: “We’re carrying out an experiment with Earth and we really don’t know the outcome.” Well, that sounds dramatic but strictly speaking it’s not true. Earth itself has run the experiment a number of times. 183 million years ago something very comparable. And the fascinating thing that seems to be emerging is as we look at the various time scales…other past warming events…we find that whatever the starting conditions, amazingly, you get the same outcome. Every time we pull the this particular carbon trigger at a certain rate and dump it in the atmosphere, that’s what you get.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXTCai_NAFk[/youtube]

By the power vested in me as the originator of this post, I declare this stage of the ongoing planetary extinction to be the "Herm Memorial Mudstone Event." All hail the founder. :roll: (yes, Herm, now - this is where you dive into the Gulf of Mexico and settle to the bottom to start the colony. It's ok - your dome is on the way...)

 

[AndyH]

Back on topic...sorta...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH2_ueCeVv4[/youtube]

 

[klapauzius]

Luckily I dont consider CO2 to be a pollutant, the world will adapt to rising levels.

You have taken a lot of flak for that already, but why are you lucky?
That is a bit like someone committing suicide telling others that he considers a bullet to the head not to be a major problem.

Obviously you dont die outright from CO2 (but try to survive in a room full of it....), but
have you spend some time thinking about what a global rise of temperatures COULD mean?

There will be some 9 billion people on the planet and many of them live in regions where a change of climate could seriously destabilize the food supply.

Of course nothing really bad will happen to us in the US right away...we will just watch the riots, wars and famines on our favorite news channel for a while....Eventually such violence will spill over though, and the economic consequences wont be fun either...

No problem of course if you are a retiree already...By the time things get ugly you might comfortably have become part of the environment again and wont have to worry about such things...

 

[BRBarian]

Of course nothing really bad will happen to us in the US right away...

Aren't you the optimist.

What about tornadoes? What we'll start to see are devastating twisters coming earlier and earlier in the season. We might even see them in February and March!! And the big ones that usually come later in June... Who knows... We might someday even see an F6 touch down in the US somewhere.

What about malaria? All too soon, the anopheles mosquito will find America very accommodating. Are you ready for that?

What about rising sea levels? You favorite beach spot may be gone (as well as your favorite coastal cities). Northern hemisphere melting raises sea levels in the Southern hemisphere, and that's been the bulk of the melting so far, but when Antarctica starts to melt, watch out America! The ocean rise will be amplified as the center of mass of the Earth moves Northward.

Maybe you like hurricanes?

How about acid rain? Trees like CO2, but not acid.

How about drought. We might start seeing devastating wildfires in places like central Texas.

How about eco-system damage. What happens when some important cycles go off-kilter?

Oh yea.. Nothing really bad will happen here. Our advanced technology will keep us safe...

 

[klapauzius]

Aren't you the optimist.

What about tornadoes? What we'll start to see are devastating twisters coming earlier and earlier in the season. We might even see them in February and March!! And the big ones that usually come later in June... Who knows... We might someday even see an F6 touch down in the US somewhere.

What about malaria? All too soon, the anopheles mosquito will find America very accommodating. Are you ready for that?

What about rising sea levels? You favorite beach spot may be gone (as well as your favorite coastal cities). Northern hemisphere melting raises sea levels in the Southern hemisphere, and that's been the bulk of the melting so far, but when Antarctica starts to melt, watch out America! The ocean rise will be amplified as the center of mass of the Earth moves Northward.

Maybe you like hurricanes?

How about acid rain? Trees like CO2, but not acid.

How about drought. We might start seeing devastating wildfires in places like central Texas.

How about eco-system damage. What happens when some important cycles go off-kilter?

Oh yea.. Nothing really bad will happen here. Our advanced technology will keep us safe...

I am an optimist...I think people will see sense here in the US as well and the worst can be avoided...

Overall I think this country is still relatively thinly populated (compared to Asia and Europe) and so food supply wont be a problem. Eco system damage will be bad here, but not deadly (at least for most of us)...

 

[Herm]

My house has a 3ft crawlspace under the floor, then sand.. so I should be ok when the ocean level rises. My floor is about 8ft above sea level, and I can take care of the mutant zombie hordes in Miami.

Another interesting article from the ever handy WUWT blog, force yourself past the physics at the beginning.. the good stuff is about half way down, the models are spanked:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.

I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.

Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.

In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of ****. "

 

[BRBarian]

"The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate....

Sure there has... and an intense one, at that. The competition amongst scientists is as intense as any competition anywhere. From the outside, it may not appear to be so, but try living on the inside for a while. The weak, with bad theory and bad models, are simply crushed.

The rest of what you posted is pure unadulterated irrelevant claptrap written by either an idiot, or someone who is trying to spread BS... Lies not worth responding to in detail.

 

[BRBarian]

Hey Herm! I looked up the bio on the author of the piece you cited. He's not a professor (like his cv says), but only a lecturer at Duke. He's only published one research paper in the last dozen years. He's not doing real science, but he is writing lots of "popular" books and material, mainly targeting the GW denier and other "popular" science communities. Yep.. he's just in it for the bucks, and you've bought his schtick, hook line and sinker. His "analysis" is truly dishonest.

 

[klapauzius]

Another interesting article from the ever handy WUWT blog, force yourself past the physics at the beginning.. the good stuff is about half way down, the models are spanked:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I read the whole thing. And yes, I can sympathize with a lot of the arguments there about the lack of precision...but to quote Dr Brown
"but it is very clear indeed that the latter 19th through the 20th centuries were far from normal by the standards of the previous ten or twenty centuries."

You left that out of your previous quote.
Anyway, you wonder why this of all things is "very clear" to him, while at the same time he takes issue with imprecise measurements elsewhere? Does he believe the records after all then?

The reference to the sun-spot activity he makes has been refuted recently, not sure if he was aware of that at the time of his post? The reference to the world wars and the nuclear testing seems as much BS as he thinks climate science is...If anything, nuclear testing would COOL the planet not warm it (which maybe explains the cooling back in the 50s and 60s he mentions???)

Does this make Dr. Brown very credible? I dont think so.


Unlike pure physics, in most other science it is often impossible
to get precise data and statistics play a much more important role. You dont have to nail global
temperatures to high precision, you only need to establish a trend.

If you have that AND a plausible physical model (increased CO2 emission in the last 150 years) it is LIKELY that there exists a causal relationship. Not acting on things because we are not 100 % ( or 99.999999 %) certain,as Dr. Brown suggests, is foolish...But then we knew that climate deniers are mostly fools (or crooks with an agenda)...

People in physics do not like likelihoods as much as everybody else. I think in order to establish a result there you need p<1e-6 or so (i.e. a one in a million chance that your observed result is a fluke), whereas in the life sciences people are happy with one in twenty.

As far as a potential global catastrophe goes, even a one in two chance of it not being bogus would give me pause.

Besides, the other benefits of abandoning CO2 producing technology go beyond avoiding a "putative" global warming anyway.

 

[BRBarian]

And yes, I can sympathize with a lot of the arguments there about the lack of precision...

No. Don't. This quote is perhaps the largest lie in the whole piece:
"The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years."
It demonstrates a true lack of understanding of the science behind global warming, and it's perhaps the lie that gives deniers their energy... but it's still a lie.

 

[klapauzius]

And yes, I can sympathize with a lot of the arguments there about the lack of precision...

No. Don't. This quote is perhaps the largest lie in the whole piece:
"The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years."
It demonstrates a true lack of understanding of the science behind global warming, and it's perhaps the lie that gives deniers their energy... but it's still a lie.

Well...it would be nice if climate science or the life sciences for example could produce as exact results as e.g. astronomy or particle physics.

That would make it nice and clean. However, I think what most people (including Dr. Brown) don't understand, is that statistical trends with sufficient close confidence intervals are real too and that it is NOT necessary to measure e.g. temperatures to 0.01 C precision to establish those trends...

 

[Stoaty]

Another interesting article from the ever handy WUWT blog, force yourself past the physics at the beginning.. the good stuff is about half way down, the models are spanked:

Herm, you are reading the premier denier site. Facts don't matter there, only an agenda that is impervious to information. You are "cherry picking" your source. Does the weight of the evidence suggest that this blogger knows more than the National Academies of Science of multiple countries, the ICPP, the report to congress from another branch of the federal government, etc? This sounds like ideology over science on your part. Sure it is comforting to be told nothing is wrong and that the 97% of climate scientists who are convinced by the scientific evidence that Climate Change is a very serious threat are all part of a large conspiracy... but that doesn't make it true.

 

[Fabio]

Why doesn't he try to get a paper published in a scientific journal and submits his theories to peer review?
Maybe because he is, how would he put it?.... "full of ****"

Every single point he makes has been proven to be false in scientific papers, that, unlike blogs, are subject to that socialist rule known as peer review.

But he doesn't care as long as he gets paid to lend his non existing credentials to the oil and coal industries.

BTW, he claims to be a physicist, not a climatologist. So if I have circulation problems, I should just get advice from an oncologist. No difference, right?

Another interesting article from the ever handy WUWT blog, force yourself past the physics at the beginning.. the good stuff is about half way down, the models are spanked:
[...]
In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of ****. "

 

[walterbays]

There is an economic benefit to reducing CO2, if done with common sense.. mostly by efficiency increases and reducing consumption. It is unavoidable that most the oil and bitumen in the world will be consumed, and lots of the available coal and NG... if not by us then by 3rd world countries with increasing prosperity. Luckily I dont consider CO2 to be a pollutant, the world will adapt to rising levels.

Besides efficiency increases you can do other things such as photovoltaics, windmills, BEVs, nuclear power and geologic sequestering of CO2 to enhance oil recovery. CO2 separation is a standard byproduct of modern coal/NG gasification plants and sequestering the resultant CO2 can be a profit maker.

I don't know why so many think it's necessary - or possible - to convince Herm that global warming is real, man made, and potentially very dangerous. Myself, I think he's wrong, and if we are fortunate enough to be spared the consequences of inaction then likely our children or grandchildren will not be spared.

But Herm isn't arguing for inaction, at least in the postings I've managed to read. He's doing and supporting pretty much the same actions one might take who accepted climate science. He drives an EV, supports renewable energy and energy efficiency, etc. So why is someone who does the right things for the wrong reasons so bad? The only reason I can see is that Herm seems to love a good argument, and knows how to poke all the right buttons to get one.

 

[klapauzius]

]I don't know why so many think it's necessary - or possible - to convince Herm that global warming is real, man made, and potentially very dangerous.

I dont specifically care about convincing herm.
Its a toy-debate, but we have to have it for real out there in the real world.
So practicing on conservatives at hand is not too bad. I dont meet that many where I live...