Pushbutton Denialism.

For the life of me I don’t know why I do it. Listen to right wing radio talk shows I mean. They really do elevate my blood pressure, and I’m getting to the age where that kind of stuff matters, but I insist, contrary to my advice, on tuning in and pounding the dashboard.

There are three shows I tend to listen to, John Gormley Live, The Adler Show and Roy Green. I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the Gormley show, and at one time had a good relationship with his producer and with John himself. I even respected his opinion somewhat despite disagreeing with it most of the time.

But now… But now, he, along with the other two anti-science bozos, has decided to jump on the anti-AGW bandwagon and put out his opinion, full of sound bites by the likes of Tim Ball, Potty Peer Moncton, and the Aussie hack Plimer, as if it is an informed opinion. Of course his opinion in this is absolute nonsense, but take a moment to call him on it and he’ll push that button. Oh yes, I forgot to mention, he has this little button under his sweaty pudgy fingers that disconnects the phone line. Because of the delay in broadcast he can actually chop off 7 seconds of your comment. Typically he’ll slam that sucker down as soon as he disagrees with you and figures he, despite his obvious lack of knowledge, knows more about the situation than you do, and will then bravely make some totally nonsensical comment when you can’t respond.
It looks like he has convinced himself that his ability to push that button, cut you off, and then offer up his twisted and meaningless opinion, and do so without any rebuttal being voiced, makes him correct.

Obviously if no one rebuts him he’s right, isn’t he?

In his world that works I guess, but not in the real world.

Gormley, instead of having professional denialists do your thinking for you, do a little research of your own, preferably from professional journals known for their integrity. And when someone with more information than you gets on the line, have the guts to argue the points without running to the button.

 

Sometimes we just have to start beginning all over again.

A good friend of mine just asked when I was going to get this blog going again but I didn’t have an answer handy, which isn’t unusual for me and is perhaps the main reason this blog has lain fallow for so long. It isn’t that I don’t have opinions to argue against, the several talk shows I listen to regularly spew enough anti-science crap to give me a full time job researching and countering their nonsense, and it’s not that I don’t understand the concepts and import of the debate, I do get it. I guess the problem is that I don’t know that I can add anything to the debate. I also don’t really want this to primarily become an anti-Gormley blog.

Since I have a lot of respect for this friend, even though we don’t agree on this particular subject much, I will give this a bit of serious consideration. I may be able to find an half-hour several times a week to add my thoughts to this overly opinionated world.

Thanks SC/PH

 

John Gormley’s ego takes over the air waves.

Well, John Gormley has done it again, he’s confused himself over weather and climate. Poor bastard.

On top of that he seems to feel his little neck of the woods, his .04% of the world, represents the entire globe, at least as far as temperature goes.

You see the weather around here has been extremely cold of late, sometimes 20C lower than the average for this time of year. According to the infinite wisdom of good old John Gormley, and his rabid right wing sycophantic followers (can’t let them go unnoticed can we?), because Saskatchewan Canada has lower temps than previous years, global warming is falsified.

Geez John, that’s pathetic.

As I’ve informed you before, local short-term variation, such as how cold it is today, is weather. It’s part of the normal variation in conditions found at any given point on the Earth determined by geography, cloud cover, surface water and air flow. Weather is chaotic, in fact the science of chaos comes directly from the attempt to predict weather which has little ups a downs very difficult to predict. Climate on the other hand, is a statistical representation of all of the weather, and the general weather patterns, scattered over the entire globe.

Let’s take an example from statistical mechanics (you’re a big boy, look it up). Take a box filled with gas at thermal equilibrium, the gas doesn’t matter, nor does the density. In that box of gas, atoms and even free electrons, are all bouncing around and vibrating, banging into each other just enough to keep the temperature stable.

We have no way to predict which two atoms will smack together.

If we add a little heat to one end of the box, the atoms at that end will become more energetic and start bumping into more neighbours more frequently. We have no way of determining which individual atoms will take part in the change from a waltz to a polka but we can statistically determine the behaviour of the atoms in the box as a group. The average temperature will go up. We can even calculate what the average temperature will settle to when equilibrium is again reached.

Weather is like those individual atoms, difficult to predict, and climate is like the box of atoms – we may not know which individual atoms will do what, but we can predict the system at large.

You might also consider what an unusually low temperature in .04% of Earthly surface area does to the Average Global Temperature. I hope my emphasis makes you consider the words.

One day’s weather does not make a significant impact on climate, in the grand sceme of things it is just noise in the system. That is why the WMO, even before the inception of the IPCC, determined 30 years of accumulated full globe weather was necessary to tease out a temperature trend.

Natural variability in weather is noise. The trend has to be statistically extracted from that noise. The trend tells us what is happening, the noise doesn’t.

Cheers

B

 

John Gormley live tries the old ‘argument from dictionary’.

Back about a year and a bit ago, I called in to the John Gormley Live radio talk show on newstalk980 to help John improve his grasp of the fundamentals of AGW science. Well actually it was just to get him to use the word ‘consensus’ the same way climate scientists do. Good luck right?

His argument was that consensus means 100% agreement and since the science behind climate change does not have 100% agreement (some deniers are actually climatologists – go figure) there is no AGW consensus. I simply informed him that consensus, in this context, means majority.  He disagreed with me then hung up, of course putting me in the position of being unable to defend my argument. Can you guess what the validation for his argument was? Yup, the dictionary lists the 100% definition first. He went to all the work of visiting 5 on-line dictionaries and on 4 of the 5, and even though every one had the definition I told him, they listed his definition first. So his definition was right. At least in his mind.

Well John, I guess you got me there didn’t you? Oops, I guess not, since the meaning behind a word is determined by the issuer of that word and the context it is used in. Sorry Mr. John Gormley, but the argument from dictionary is one of the weakest arguments out there. Epic fail.

John, you might try listening to someone speak and when he/she uses a word with more than one meaning, do your best to understand what he/she means, either through context, assuming that isn’t too difficult for you, or simply by asking him/her  to clarify her/himself.

You are capable of that I hope.

This one, just because of the inadvertent humour, rates a 6.5 out of 10 elephant turds.

Cheers

B

 

Just when things get interesting

things turn busy for my business, preventing me from researching more anti-global warming faux pas and exposing them for what they are – utter nonsense.

There is one making the rounds lately that is interesting – the idea that the years from 1998 on indicate a leveling off of the warming trend, or even a dip in the trend suggesting an end to AGW. Of course this is a bunch of garbage, but for some reason (OK, I know the reason), it has been embraced by the rabid anti-AGW crowd.

It goes something like this; 1998 was the warmest year on record and each year since then has experienced a lower temperature than 1998 so the climate has not been warming. If the climate is not warming each and every year then warming has come to an abrupt end.

Here are the figures: (Left figure is NASA, right HadCRUT3)

What should be obvious is that indeed all the years following 1998 are lower than 1998. Taken out of context, it appears that warming has indeed stopped. But this isn’t the entire story.

When determining a long term trend, any smaller chunk of data has to be examined in context of the larger trend in order to obtain an accurate image of what is really happening. This is, of course, what the Anti-AGW crowd do not want to do, because it undermines their claim of an end to warming.

The first thing that has to be mentioned is that, although lower than 1998, all following years are warmer than any other since 1890.

Secondly, the slope of the linear trend line calculated from these 10 years is still positive (.00468), meaning that statistically, the warming trend is still alive and well. Since 1890 there have been a number of times when 10 year trend lines have had negative slopes yet did not portend the end of warming.

This become obvious in the following graph:

When viewed in relation to the years preceding and following, 1998 can be seen to be highly unusual in that it varies from the mean far more than any other year. This in itself eliminates 1998 from being used as an end point in any trend line or analysis of a trend. For the anti-AGW people to try to use it as such is, in my opinion, dishonest.

I will have to leave a debunking of the idea that each year has to be warmer than previous years for a later date. I believe what I have visually shown here is that a short term downturn in temperatures is not significant when taken in context and that the years following 1998 are not an indication of a downturn.

 

What the hell am I doing?

Well now,

I’ve been arguing with creationists about evolution for several years and have become quite familiar with not just the arguments put forward (insubstantial as they are) but with the tactics used. There seems to be a standard set of logical fallacies and false premises shared by all creationists.

To my surprise, when I started looking into Global Warming/Climate Change I started to see similar tactics used by the anti-AGW crowd. I originally had expected their arguments to be more solidly based on scientific data but quickly found them to be mostly devoid of science and heavy on polemics and rhetoric. It seems their strongest arguments are appeals to emotion, personal incredulity, and a worship of ‘common sense’ even if their version* of it is full of logical and practical errors.

There is a lot of misapprehension of intent, fact and conclusion in their arguments that are, for the most part, quite easily addressed. Although I have spoken at length with Chemists, Physicists, Mathematicians and even Philosophers and have read reports from the NOAA, NASA and the IPCC I am nothing more than a layman when it comes to Climatology. I still feel that the majority of arguments put forward by the anti_AGW crowd are simple enough for a layman such as myself to effectively debunk.

In the coming months I hope I am proven correct.

B_Sharp

*Sorry folks, but common sense is nothing more than the result of our evolutionary development; sometimes it is correct, sometimes, given our current context, it is off the mark.