Decision ‘08

An Inconvenient List

Has there been a movie of the last ten or twenty years (or a man) more inviting of satire than Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”? I’m hard-pressed to think of one…and that’s a shame, because as I’ve stated before, I’m the (rare? almost unique?) Republican who thinks global warming is real and that it has to be addressed, though I’ve often stated there is a real debate over the extent of global warming (presumably pretty huge, however), the contributors (I’m convinced it’s partially man-made, partially cyclical, but this is not a plea for inaction), and the remedy (oy, don’t get me started on that one).

Nevertheless, Gore’s absolute certainty over things that are not certain, and his insistence that there is ‘no debate’ among ‘rational’ scientists, leave him wide open to the glee with which global warming opponents will welcome stories like this one:

A High Court judge today ruled that An Inconvenient Truth can be distributed to every school in the country but only if it comes with a note explaining nine scientific errors in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film.

The Government had pledged to send thousands of copies of the film to schools across the country, but a Kent father challenged that policy saying it would “brainwash” children.

A judge was asked to adjudicate between Stewart Dimmock and the Department of Children, Schools and Families. Mr Justice Burton ruled that the film could be sent to schools, but only if it was accompanied by new guidlines to balance the former US vice-president’s “one-sided” views

The judge said some of the errors were made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration” in order to support Mr Gore’s thesis on global warming.

He went on to list those errors:

Error one

Al Gore: A sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”.

The judge’s finding: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s ”wake-up call“. It was common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - “but only after, and over, millennia.”

Error two

Gore: Low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls are already “being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming.”

Judge: There was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

Error three

Gore: The documentary described global warming potentially “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor” - the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe.

Judge: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it was “very unlikely” it would be shut down, though it might slow down.

Error four

Gore: He asserted - by ridiculing the opposite view - that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed “an exact fit”.

Judge: Although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts”.

Error five

Gore: The disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was expressly attributable to global warming.

Judge: This “specifically impressed” David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, but the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

Error six

Gore: The drying up of Lake Chad was used in the film as a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming, said the judge.

Judge: “It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution. It is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.”

I’ve left off the other three, so you’ll have to click through to read them…

Now, let’s repeat: this is not an indictment of the theory of global warming, but rather of the absolute certainty displayed by those who cannot be certain (rarely do scientific theories lead to absolute certainties). It should also be noted that a judge is not a climate expert (though he apparently consulted experts), and it should also be noted that Gore had a lot more facts in the film that the judge apparently had no problem with.

Moral of the story: don’t use these ‘inconveniences’ to trumpet your own certainty that global warming is a myth, but beware of those on either side who display that certainty so characteristic of the true believer…

As for Al Gore, he’ll get over it quite soon when he wins the Nobel Peace Prize later this week (yes, I’m predicting it…with a 65% likelihood. You see, I’ve learned my lesson about absolute certainty)…

31 Responses to “An Inconvenient List”

1 Fargus Says:
October 10th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I can appreciate criticism of the thing, to be sure, but some of those seem weak enough as to be almost invented simply to have something to say. Especially points two and five, which in their disagreement insert some wording that is not in the statement of the error.

Maybe it’s just the way it’s condensed, but the list as offered seems a bit like for-the-sake-of-it contrarianism.
2 Andy Says:
October 10th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Mark, I agree that we need to take some action, I just object to breaking the bank to counter something we don’t totally understand and certainly without sufficient data.

I fail to understand Gore and his Chicken Littles’ absolute certainties and truths when new major discoveries continue to be made that directly affect “established” equations. The problem for Gore is that this is his religion based not on faith that it will turn out as he predicts and not on science subject to new knowledge. In fact, if anything, the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know diddly about nature, nor climate.

To whit, the recently discovered climate system engine-room. If this is the ocean’s missing link, how many other links are sitting under our noses?

Australian scientists have discovered a giant underwater current that is one of the last missing links of a system that connects the world’s oceans and helps govern global climate. The newly discovered current sweeps past the island of Tasmania towards the Southern Atlantic.
[SNIP]
The newly discovered Tasman Outflow, which sweeps past Tasmania at an average depth of 800-1,000 meters (2,600 to 3,300 feet), is classed as a “supergyre” that links the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic southern hemisphere ocean basins, the government-backed CSIRO said in a statement on Wednesday.

For something that massive, sounds to me like it’s back to the drawing board and super-computer modeling time. And by the time they flesh this out, who knows what new info they’ll gain? Maybe tis the Indian Summer before global cooling.
3 Mark Says:
October 10th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Fargus, true, some of the nine are more egregious than others - #1 and #3 seem fairly major, though…
4 Fargus Says:
October 10th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Agreed. As you say, though, my worry is that people will take it as an excuse to dismiss Global Warming out of hand. 1 and 3 seem bigger, for sure, but they also seem to be potential errors of degree, rather than fabrications.
5 CrawlinKingSnake Says:
October 10th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
If wrapping a well known theory in a nicely skewed package without adding anything scientific is worthy of a Nobel, then count me in for the next round.
6 Andy Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Concur CKS.

Cascade of Stupidity discusses the dangers of consensus among scientists and how it can lead to huge, society changing mistakes.

[A] cautionary tale from the NY Times (shock) about how a few scientists issuing reports from august institutions can influence public policy, which results in new laws and programs that often cost millions of dollars. And all based on mistaken conclusions.
[SNIP]
‘Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.’ — Nietzsche

IOW, when a leading scientist start off his report by saying “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for yaddy-ya-ya…”; be ready for a snow job, because he/she doesn’t have all the necessary facts, but is bound and determined to make you take heed by dint of position.
7 mikebdot Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
#1 is not an error. James Hansen says it could happen in this century, but not necessarily, maybe a few hundred years, but not likely 1,000.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh031907.shtml

Look at the very bottom.

I suppose they’re just scaremongers though.

Furthermore, it looks like Mark is becoming a much hated “relativist” more and more every day…it’s a slippery slope Mark. You better watch out. Once you say “there are no absolute certainties” the logical next step is to apply that to all other logical arguments…even when they happen to relate to morality.
8 mikebdot Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
And “error 3″ is just asinine. “Potentially” is not included by “not likely”? WTF? This just reaks of a political circus. P.U. Or is that hiding behind semantics?

Is the statement “Your unborn child could potentially be autistic” an “alarmist” statement? Or “Your unborn child could be born with a tail” or “Your unborn child could be born with both sets of reproductive organs and you might have to choose which sex they are”. How would those statements be considered “alarmist” if you made a movie called “Things you might want to consider preparing yourself for when you are about to have a baby: a closer look at various birth related topics”.
9 mikebdot Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Gore: Coral reefs all over the world were bleaching because of global warming and other factors.

Judge: The IPCC had reported that, if temperatures were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and mortality, unless the coral could adapt. But separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing, and pollution was difficult.

No crap, that’s why the blanket “and other factors” ought to cover him.

This whole thing is just plain goofy.
10 Andy Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Oh noooo! Chicken Little says the earth has the potential to get hit by a large meteor with the power of 1 thousand Hiroshimas. We better spend whatever treasure we have to ensure survival now. Wait a moment, NASA says it is “very unlikely” such will hit us within th next 100 years.

Big difference between the words potential & very unlikely as to the odds of said event happening.
11 Mark Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
mike, I’m not becoming a relativist, not to worry…there is a distinction between saying ‘we don’t know for certain’ and ‘we can’t know for certain’ - and I’m certain that I know the difference…there, you see?…
12 mikebdot Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Mark: I don’t think there is a difference in those statements, but I can’t be sure. I do know there is a distinction due to customary use in language, but that doesn’t mean there HAS to be.

Andy: “very unlikely” = 1-10%. 10% is actually a pretty high likelihood in my book. Using the word “potential” for a much lower percentage, say 0.1%-1% might be a stretch, but in this case I think you’re wrong.
13 mikebdot Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Andy: If they said “exceptionally unlikely” then maybe you have a point. See Table 6.2. Chance of having a child with autism is 1/150, which is “exceptionally unlikely”. So I’ve already addressed your [weak, in my opinion] point.
14 Andy Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Hence the stretch from Gore that the sea level will rise 20 feet. All his sturm and drang over the global climate ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The finite solar system will degrade and eventually die with or without us.

Do we need to be more efficient in our use of energy? Of course!

As such, we can’t even begin to define the “ideal” natural temperature of the earth unlike the human core temperature. In the median, as compared to the history of earth, perhaps it should be 10 degrees Celsius warmer or colder, who knows?!?!

The point of my comment in #2 is that they have made dire predictions based on what little they thot they knew and now we find a critical link to climate control that was NOT factored into any earlier calculations.

Not too many years ago, Britain was warm enough to grow grapes. In any case, the eco freaks worship at the altar of Gaia and tend to be racist and/or elitist. Why? In a nutshell, they got theirs and now are determined to deny the rest of the world for their cause.

Since this is a false religion, it is only a matter of time before the average Joe sees thru the bombastic distortions of facts and the GW will be thoroughly discredited. And this is the shame of it, in that some of the principles of conserving our natural resources are valid, yet rendered trivial by the outright lies propping up this house of cards designed to scare us “straight”.

To wit, DDT is proven to do more to eradicate malaria more than anything else, nets included. Nets, when used only reduce the odds of being bitten by mosquitos when sleeping. It is totally ineffective during one’s waking hours and does nothing to address the breeding of the skeeters. Yet we care more about ensuring that Africans get the bandaid rather than the cure. This is but one example.

3rd Worlders are not fooled by all the eco-rheotoric. They know that they are being denied the opportunity to grow and develop, raising their standards of living and that the elites want to keep them back as some sort of human pet. So while we go about undercutting our economic growth with fanciful carbon schemes, they will continue to develop as best can and if that means more pollution, so be it.
15 mikebdot Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Andy: Now you’re making claims that we not only KNOW the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is true, but that you have enough of a foundation on the matter to speak to it. How the heck is anything Gore has said in conflict with the 2nd law of thermodynamics?

“who knows?” So let’s just quick. Take our ball and go home. You’ve got all the answers.

DDT costs a lot of money, it’s more effective to use nets per dollar. It’s a business decision, surely a Republican can understand that.
16 mikebdot Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
quick? I guess I want to leave work or something. “So let’s just quiT”.
17 Andy Says:
October 12th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
From Wikipedia:

In simple terms, the second law is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process has progressed.

There are many versions of the second law, but they all have the same effect, which is to explain the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature.

In a nut shell, there’s a time to be born, live and then die. It’s called a law, because the theory has been proven. In relation to earth’s climate, she will continue to decay until one day, life is no longer sustainable. Whether that occurs before or after our sun burns out who knows.

All in all, it is too early to tell if the GW even know what the heck they’re talking about. Get real! Whether you believe the earth is 6K or 600,00K years old, we only have only recorded at best 150 years of intermittent temperature readings. The tree rings tell us that earth has seen global warming and global cooling multiple times and at temperatures significantly higher/lower than what we’re currently experiencing. For all we know, when averaged out, our current temps may not be ideal.

When I say “who knows?”, I’m not suggesting do nothing, I’m suggesting that while we can take definite steps to leave the world a better place than we found it, we certainly can’t go around saying we’re in a global crisis. Meddling with something one doesn’t understand is ripe for disasters that could have been avoided in the first place by not panicking.

DDT costs a lot of money! Really? Nets are more effective to use per dollar! Really? Please enlighten this capitalist.
18 Andy Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 1:13 am
Anyone else thinks Gore has finally jumped the shark?

I’ve seen plenty of commentary today on both sides of the Bore. But in Al Gore and the Peace Prize, the writer compares Gore to others who won the high-water mark prize and proceeded to jump the shark.

Come to think of it, I’m glad Gore won it, now we can get down to the serious business of green efficiency.
19 Jacques Distler Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 2:21 am
From Wikipedia:

In simple terms, the second law is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process has progressed.

There are many versions of the second law, but they all have the same effect, which is to explain the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature.

In a nut shell, there’s a time to be born, live and then die. It’s called a law, because the theory has been proven. In relation to earth’s climate, she will continue to decay until one day, life is no longer sustainable. Whether that occurs before or after our sun burns out who knows

I’m sorry. But this really pisses me off.

If you don’t even know the difference between an open and closed system, then citing a bowderized version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics just makes you sound like an idiot.

There’s no gentle way to say that.

Whether you believe the earth is 6K or 600,00K years old…

If you believe either of those, then you are an idiot. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. This is not a subject of “debate” among reasonable people.

…we only have only recorded at best 150 years of intermittent temperature readings.

But we can nonetheless determine antarctic temperatures back 450 million years. Doing so does not require humans transcribing thermometer readings into notebooks.

The tree rings tell us that earth has seen global warming and global cooling multiple times and at temperatures significantly higher/lower than what we’re currently experiencing.

Significantly lower, yes. Significantly higher, no.

Do you just make this stuff up as you go along?
20 Jacques Distler Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Whoa! The quoting on that one got screwed up (worked fine in the preview). I’m sure people will be able to infer who said what.

And, to forstall the unncessary distraction of a discussion of the ins and outs of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I’ll just point to this old blog post of mine.
21 Mark Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Sorry, Jacques, your first comment got caught up in the spam filter for a while, but it’s free now…
22 Jacques Distler Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Well, now that it’s unstuck, I can correct

“450 million” => “450 thousand”
“bowderized” => “bowdlerized”

Sorry for the typos.
23 Andy Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
OK Einstein, you pegged me, I’m just a layman. If that just pisses you off, then it’s incumbent on you brainiacs to put the esoteric babble in terms we can understand and use, otherwise, we village idiots will bowdlerize everything you say to our hearts content.

To wit: If the 1st law of thermodynamics says you can’t win, then the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says you can’t even break even. Non?

Thermodynamic formulas aside, the end result is that anything left to itself will eventually decay. My point all along is that earth has been in a constant state of change. It is folly to think that if we somehow stop or slow down global warming, we will be able to maintain earth in some arbitrary sort of status quo. Time’s arrow marches on with or without us.

Current science pegs the age of the Earth and the rest of the solar system is about 4.55 billion years (plus or minus about 1%). The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by inference, considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of lead-207 to lead-206 changes over time owing to the decay of radioactive uranium-235 and uranium-238, respectively. (There’s that D word again) Lord Kelvin once estimated the earth to be 100 million years using the best science at the time. With new scientific insight the numbers will likely change yet again.

In any case, we also infer (educated guesses) temperatures from natural records. When GW alarmists say that a couple of centigrades is significant, then yes the earth has seen significantly warmer days. As indicated in your link, the charts suggest that the present interglacial is relatively cool compared to previous interglacials, at least at these sites. Hence would it not be logical to assume that the earth intends to get a bit warmer before cycling again?
24 Jacques Distler Says:
October 13th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
To wit: If the 1st law of thermodynamics says you can’t win, then the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says you can’t even break even. Non?

If you want to use the 2nd Law as a vague metaphor for the hopelessness of the human condition, be my guest. But, if you want to make a scientific argument

Hence the stretch from Gore that the sea level will rise 20 feet. All his sturm and drang over the global climate ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

then it behoves you to know what the 2nd Law actually is.

Lord Kelvin once estimated the earth to be 100 million years using the best science at the time.

Interesting you should bring Lord Kelvin up, in this context, since his computation was a Thermodynamic one: imagine the Earth started as a ball of molten rock. How long would it take to cool solid? The answer is a few hundred million years. Since the Earth was known to have a still-molten core, Kelvin concluded that it must be younger than that.

What he didn’t know about (because it hadn’t been discovered yet) was radioactivity, which serves as an endogenous heat source, keeping the Earth’s core molten for billions, rather than hundreds of millions of years.

With new scientific insight the numbers will likely change yet again.

Not by much.

And this is the standard dodge of the science haters: scientists have been wrong before. Ergo, whatever they say now is just “educated guesses” (your phrase), and hence not really to be taken seriously (particularly if the conclusion happens to contradict one’s prior religious or ideological convictions).

As indicated in your link, the charts suggest that the present interglacial is relatively cool compared to previous interglacials, at least at these sites. Hence would it not be logical to assume that the earth intends to get a bit warmer before cycling again?

The entire history of human civilization (10,000 years) is squeezed into the left-hand edge of the graph. The industrialized era (the last couple of hundred years) is completely invisible. So, while it’s important to understand the mechanism(s) behind the 100,000 year cycle that you see in that graph, it’s nearly as far from “what’s the weather going to be tomorrow?” as it is from the trends measured in decades or centuries, that go by the name “global warming.”

I don’t think anyone disagrees with the proposition that it is important to understand things like the 100,000 year cycle, in order to disentangle its effects from those much-shorter term trends, which are human-caused.
25 Andy Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Well that was enlightening, in that I don’t see how it renders my end conclusions moot. Seriously. Seems to me that when the laws of thermodynamics are applicable to chemistry, energy, gases, physics, temperature, etc, it is also a factor in everything else of nature.

I imagine it would upset the purist in you if I paraphrased the special theory of relativity to mean that that Resistance and Power are both but different manifestations of the same thing. Furthermore, the equation P is equal to R I-squared, in which Power (Watts) is equal to Resistance, multiplied by the square of the Current, showed that very small amounts of resistance may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The Resistance and Power were in fact equivalent, according to the formula mentioned above?

Altho I’ve bowdlerized the purity of E=MC2, the result is that the math remains the same for finding the power of energy whether via Ohm’s law or Einstein’s. Altho I do note that in some circles, scientist think that E=MC2 is incomplete.

I’m not a science hater, and do take a interest in new theories. One reason I bring Kelvin up is that his estimates are wildly divergent from current theory on an order of magnitude, yet both are grounded in thermodynamics.

When we compare that saga with the theory that GW could shut down the Ocean Conveyor–singular–as if the Gulf Stream is the only “lung” of global climate. After this notion is declared set in stone and no further debate is required by the Goracle, all of a sudden, we find that earth has yet another lung previously unknown until now. Seems to me that all conclusions derived from the single lung theory is moot until we recalculate the Tasmanian Outflow. Will it negate previous conclusions or ramp it up, and if so by how much?

Educated guesses are just what it means–assumptions to be used until a definitive is found. In my line of work, I use it all the time until I get better datapoints. It’s just that I don’t get so fixated/mesmerized by them that I ignore new information that could change the ballgame.

And why blame it all on humans? Meteors wiped out the dinosaurs. Volcanos erupt from time to time. Both have the net effect of cooling the climate. If we didn’t have either, the earth would likely be a whole lot hotter now. Going back to thermodynamics for a minute, I wonder, what if instead of ash and aerosol, the earth was surrounded by a layer of H20 for a time. What would the climate be like? Could that mantle alter the calculations of the age of earth?

But I guess that would be flat out inconceivable as it’d contradict your ideological convictions. Just as Einstein’s theories were originally not a subject of “debate” among reasonable people. After all, he was just a bastard working in the patent office, what could he possibly know about science? Ironic that less than 70 years later, the very hall where he presented his theory was turned into a disco for a time. But I digress.

Seems to me that rather than focus on pathetically small scale efforts to reduce the free world’s carbon footprint, we’d get better global results pushing for economic freedoms in the rest of the world. Places like Zimbabwe are an ecological disaster due to the thuggish policies of Mugabe. Places like Chad, Sudan among others where sustainable resources are already scare, civil strife is further destroying the fragile balance. Look at the wasteland that is NoKo.

This is why I say most eco-freaks are racists and or elitist, in that they ignore the plight of the suffering and misdirect their self-righteousness at the average Joe here at home. Truth is, for all of our conspicuous consumption, we don’t damage the earth as much as people desperate to survive from one day to the next, where the culprits are oppressive rulers. This is why Kyoto is a sham that congress rightly rejected during the Clinton admin.

One more point about the Antarctic data. Is it OK to lie and distort the data in writing a children’s climate propaganda book? In this case, the author deliberately reversed the chart legend of Siegenthaler et al to show that CO2 preceded temperature changes, rather than the other way around.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/09/are-lies-ok-if-.html

Or how about that James Hansen, the GW hack at NASA making up stuff as he goes along.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/09/is-nasa-the-lar.html

Here’s my prediction. By 2015, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth will be relegated to the ashheap of history like Mao’s Little Red Book.
26 Jacques Distler Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Well that was enlightening, in that I don’t see how it renders my end conclusions moot. Seriously. Seems to me that when the laws of thermodynamics are applicable to chemistry, energy, gases, physics, temperature, etc, it is also a factor in everything else of nature.

A flawed understanding of the laws of thermodynamics can lead you to draw all sort of incorrect conclusions.

[Snip discussion of Ohms Law and E=M c^2. Did you really want me to comment on that?]

Seems to me that all conclusions derived from the single lung theory is moot until we recalculate the Tasmanian Outflow. Will it negate previous conclusions or ramp it up, and if so by how much?

I’m no expert, but I expect that it wouldn’t affect the conclusions at all.

Surface ocean currents — the ones that directly affect climate — are well-mapped. The deep ocean currents, which represent the “return flow”, are not so well-mapped. We know they must exist (after all, the water has to get back to where it started, somehow), but their precise course is, in many cases, unknown. In terms of the direct effect on climate, however, their precise course doesn’t matter.

As to the effect on the stability of the gulf stream, last I checked, Tasmania was in the South Pacific, and I don’t see why the precise path of a deep ocean return current in the South Pacific should have any effect on the calculation of circulation patterns in the North Atlantic.

Perhaps I’m missing something. If so, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

Going back to thermodynamics for a minute, I wonder, what if instead of ash and aerosol, the earth was surrounded by a layer of H20 for a time. What would the climate be like? Could that mantle alter the calculations of the age of earth?
But I guess that would be flat out inconceivable as it’d contradict your ideological convictions. Just as Einstein’s theories were originally not a subject of “debate” among reasonable people.

Are you asking about The Flood?

Since you’re quoting the exact phrase I used in connection with the age of the Earth, it sure sounds like you’re hoping it might yet turn out to be 6K years old.

If so, then it’s rather pointless to be debating global warming with you. Our disagreements run much, much deeper than that.

Just as Einstein’s theories were originally not a subject of “debate” among reasonable people. After all, he was just a bastard working in the patent office, what could he possibly know about science?

You are, of course, completely wrong about the contemporary (post-1905) reaction to Einstein’s work, at least among physicists. But, since there are several lovely books on the subject, I’ll leave it to, say, Abraham Pais to dispel your misconceptions.

[Snip rant about how liberals don’t care about poor people. That was teh funny.]

In this case, the author deliberately reversed the chart legend of Siegenthaler et al to show that CO2 preceded temperature changes, rather than the other way around.

Thanks for the link about the mislabeled graph in the David/Gordon book on global warming. It was hilarious surfing around the “denialist” blogosphere, to read the reaction to this “discovery”. You’d think it was RatherGate all over again. [FWIW, here’s David’s response]. But what’s particularly hilarious — at least as I read the correctly labeled graph — is that the correction doesn’t appear to support what the sceptics think it does.

Yes, it’s true that the peaks in CO_2 levels lag those of temperature. That is, CO_2 levels keep rising, even after the temperature has peaked. But it’s also true (looking at the same graph) that troughs in CO_2 levels (the point after which CO_2 levels start rising) seem to be consistently earlier than the corresponding troughs in temperature. That is, when you label the graph correctly, CO_2 seems to lead temperature during warming, and lag temperature during cooling.

That’s not something I’ve heard stated before, and it come from eyeballing a noisy graph, rather than doing proper statistics. So, take it with a grain of salt.

Or how about that James Hansen, the GW hack at NASA making up stuff as he goes along.

Tracing this one back, it originates in a blog post by Steve McIntyre. Some people really enjoy debunking Steve McIntyre. I find it just plain tiresome.

And, speaking of Lambert, here’s his close reading of the Judge’s decision in the case that is the subject of this post.
27 Jacques Distler Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Hmmm. Seems my response was flagged as spam … again.
28 Peter Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Poor Al Gore. From today’s Borowitz Report:

“Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on global warming, the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Nobel and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.”
29 Mark Says:
October 14th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Jacques, sorry, truly…my spam filter has been catching some things it shouldn’t lately…I may have to loosen the settings…I’ll find your latest and free it…
30 mikebdot Says:
October 15th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Andy: When I asked what you knew about the 2nd Law and the first thing you did was point to wikipedia you told me all I need to know. So does your comment on the special theory of relativity. And the flood. Good times.

Jacques: You always have great comments.
31 Mark Says:
October 16th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
For those of you who don’t know, Jacques is a physicist here at the University of Texas with his own excellent blog (though the topics are frequently over this layman’s head by a good country mile). Though we don’t agree politically on much, I’m always fascinated by his comments, as well…I usually consider myself the smartest person in almost any room, but in anything related to science, I yield the floor to his greater wisdom 99.99% of the time…it’s nice that we can have a good debate on these type issues from both sides of the aisle, and with people who have obviously considered the issues at more depth than the sound-bite level…