Monday, November 30, 2015

Take the $100,000 Global Warming Believer Challenge!

Do you believe in the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis? Want to help the IPCC with an embarrassing little statistical problem in their latest report? Want to win $100,000? Today James introduces you to Douglas J. Keenan’s $100,000 contest to identify trend-driven time series. Details are in the show notes. Good luck!
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Comments (4)

  1. Myers says:
    In the sketch [from Monty Python] Michael Palin pays to have a five-minute argument with John Cleese. Despite his protests, all he gets for his money is rapid-fire contradction. Visibly agitated, he complains that he is dissatisfied.
    PALIN: An argument’s not the same as contradiction. An argument is a collected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.
    CLEESE: No it isn’t.
    PALIN: Yes it is! Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just an automatic gainsaying of anything the other person said.
    CLEESE: No it isn’t.
    Like Cleese, many climate “contrarians” have no overall argument. Rather, they offer a series of inconsistent contradictions to specific statements, projecting an overall sense of umbrage instead of a reasoned critique. They claim that the observations are junk, and in the next breath that the observations disprove the models. They claim that temperatures aren’t rising, then that warming is caused by the Sun, or that the non-existent warming is good for us. They remind us that arguments from authority are unscientific, then ask us to respect the authority of retired NASA managers.
    Nobody (even at Heartland, it seems) disputes that CO2 molecules emit measurable heat, or that heat warms things up. But when contrarians assert that burning vast amounts of coal to power new industrial societies of billions of people won’t warm the climate, the onus is on them to provide a mechanism, a reason Earth’s climate should not warm when heat is applied though our everyday experience and common sense screams that it will.
    • nosoapradio says:
      In direct response to Myers’ extract of a Scott Denning article:
      “…Writing on the Yale Forum, Warmist “scientist” Scott Denning wrote an article quoting not one scientific fact but claiming that it is “commonsense” that global warming is going on — and accusing skeptics of irrationality for denying it.
      Lord Monckton wrote a comprehensive reply to Denning which was not published by the Yale Forum. The Forum did however summarize Monckton’s reply as follows…
      Denning in that piece singled-out Monckton and two other climate science skeptics as unlikely to have been swayed by Denning’s 2010 and 2011 presentations before skeptical Heartland Institute annual meeting audiences. He was right on that point, Monckton confirmed in a 10-page 4,547-word essay he submitted for posting.
      * He says “the true difference between [what he calls] the true-believers and the skeptics” is found in temperature feedbacks, which he concludes will be “somewhat net-negative, attenuating rather than amplifying the direct warming and removing the climate problem altogether.” This leads him to conclude that “this century’s CO2–driven warming will be just 0.5 Celsius,” about .8 F…
      * He accuses Denning of setting up “a number of straw men” and maintains that the actual consensus is that “a degree or two [Celsius] of warming would indeed be good for us.”
      * He criticizes Denning for providing “not a single quantitative argument,” but rather for providing a commentary “full of politics and polemics and emotion and a startling number of fallacies.” “This does not impress,” he writes…”
      • Myers says:
        I have written a few posts under these recent articles by James about AGW. I promise this is my last.
        I agree with Denning in that most of what I read or hear on the side of climate skepticism has no overall theory. The only real theory that I do read as to why climate science has grown to be such a large concern within the scientific community, is that it is a liberal conspiracy of gravy-trainers chasing government grants, and faking research on a colossal scale in order to do so. That and/or a mega plot inspired by elites to depopulate the Earth, impose taxes on Carbon.
        One question I keep asking and that I have not read a response to is ‘How does the story of Exxon’s own research findings fit into these theories’? They are not part of the academic world, yet they concluded the same risk in the burning of fossil fuels. They kept it secret, in a way directly analogous to other cases of disputed science (smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion). They went further to deliberately spread disinformation, spending vast sums of money in the process in an act of commercial damage limitation. 
        If there is a genuine reason as to why most scientists who work in Earth sciences consider AGW a serious threat/risk (other than that they are convinced by the scientific literature on the subject), then what is that reason and how does the Exxon story fit with it?
  2. hankblackgraphics says:
    Are hackers and psychics eligible?

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