Agree entirely.

Herbert, I like and agree with your link:

http://www.capitolreportnewmexico.com/?p=6848

I have issue with SPQR's assessment of David (Peter) Hume, "whose every post reads like a mini-master piece of analysis and logic", but that is SPQR's history (and confirmation bias) at play.

Steven's thread is good ... but my wounds need tendering :)

quanda,

I may cop some flack for saying so, but yours have been the most sane posts on this thread, and the most believable. The lengths to which some others will go in chucking dirt and niggling and wriggling, with or without any foundation, is a real education.

Steven made a good case in his article, and a fair challenge, but as you have rightly observed it was always a lost cause. So many are so set in their ways and in their resistance to any suggestion of AGW that there was never any hope of getting them to appreciate the intricate nature of climate science, or to even consider the prospects and the potentials involved.

If AGW is a non-event, well and good. If taking counteractive measures can be done without significant damage to a "realistic" global economy, well and good, and the world and the environment will be thankful. If the global economy continues with its current progression and with its current disdain for the environment, then it won't matter if AGW is real or not, for the dice will have been cast, and it will only be the last man standing who will be able to review the wreckage.

I can't decide which would be most apt in the circumstances - "none so blind ....", or "to err is human .....", or "look before you leap ..." or "he who hesitates is Lost". Sad that consensus has to be such a challenge.

The quote on this thread which sums it up best I think was posted by Squeers, and, if memory serves, was a response by Mahatma Ghandi "What do I think about western civilization?". "I think it Would be a good thing." Such amazing foresight. It certainly seems that humility and forebearance are now in very short supply amongst the powers that be; and that mankind's arrogance is likely to be the keynote in his eulogy.

Some general comments:

Many sceptics seem to think that climatologists as a group are either stupid or dishonest.

It's a large group and some are both. However those I've encountered, either in person or via email, were neither dishonest nor stupid. They may be mistaken but I do not believe they're acting in bad faith. They've always given reasoned answers to my questions.

Sceptics also seem to think that these fools or charlatans have managed to deceive or manipulate most of the members of the world's peak scientific bodies into going along with a fraud. I suppose it's POSSIBLE but it seems very IMPROBABLE.

To return to the famous hotspot.

We have a paper by Douglass et al claiming the hotspot does not exist.

We have a paper by Santer et al criticising the authors of "Douglass" for, inter alia, their statistical techniques. Santer and his co-authors have also published a "fact sheet " of their critique. I don’t have a link but I have a pdf. If Graham agrees I'll send it to him and he can forward it to whoever is interested.

Allen et al published a paper in which they claim to have found evidence for the existence of the hotspot from wind shear data. (I linked it above)

Graham draws out attention to a paper by Fu and others which claims the hotspot exists but is not as intense as climate models claim. Here is a link:

http://europa.agu.org/?view=article&uri=/journals/gl/gl1115/2011GL048101/2011GL048101.xml

This is consistent with a report of another paper Graham pointed me to:

A NEW, LOWER ESTIMATE OF CLIMATE SENSITIVITY

(I linked it above)

Graham,

To me what you appear to be saying is that the substance of global warming is correct but it's not going to happen as fast as some people think. Global temperatures are less sensitive to CO2 increases than was feared a few years ago.

I have no quarrel with that. The expected temperature increase per doubling of CO2 levels is NOT part of the overall scientific consensus to which I referred. It is one of the questions that is being researched.

Have we, in fact, detected the hotspot?

All papers assume on this topic assume we can model certain atmospheric phenomena, such as lapse rates, with sufficient accuracy to "spot a hotspot." In my amateur way I beg leave to doubt that. My own feeling is that for now we do not have the capability of detecting a hotspot even if one exists.

This would not be the first time scientists inferred the existence of something before we had the ability to detect it. Pauli inferred the existence of neutrinos in 1930 but they were not detected experimentally until 1956. Scientists inferred the existence of genes decades before the discovery of their physical manifestation in the form of DNA.

And not all theories turn out to be correct. I for one doubt we shall find the Higgs boson.

So maybe the hotspot exists and maybe it doesn't. The only realistic answer for now is "wait and see."

To quote myself:

>>My personal, AMATEUR opinion is that climate is too complex to be modelled in detail. The best you can is estimate general trends. Based on the laws of physics the trend points to a hotter world. But don’t expect a smooth trend. In the real world no trend is ever smooth.>>

In this global warming is like many other complex phenomena.

Consider for example chemistry. We inferred the existence of chemical bonds and were able to make use of them to practise chemistry long before we understood how they worked.

We were able to predict the trajectories of the planets in their orbits about the sun long before we understood the mechanism involved.

Even today biologists who do not for an instant doubt the reality of evolution argue fiercely about the mechanisms involved.

So it is with something as climate. We may infer the existence of global warming and find some evidence for its existence without knowing in detail how it works.

This is how it has always been in the world of science.

Well, my day job beckons but I'll try to respond to some of the other issues later.

Steven’s challenge was on the criterion of rationality so it is enough to point out rational defects in the AGW argument to dispose of it, which has now been done several layers deep.

Steven originally hitched his wagon to the star of professional science as against its amateur critics. However in the nature of climatology , it is much harder for a professional climatologist to make out a sound theory establishing CAGW, than it is for an amateur to pick logical holes in it and thus rationally refute it.

The very fact that the issue is *anthropogenic* global warming just says it all. For if the problem were *really* global warming, what difference should it make whether or not man had caused it? Thus on critical analysis, the whole hoo-haa is not really about climate, it’s about original sin.

This is also shown by the method of knowledge used by the warmists. It turns out, when we chase all the rabbits down all the burrows, that underlying all their argument is simply this:
“It is because it is because it is.”
– for example see the reasoning in Steven’s and qanda’s last posts.

This blatant circularity is then insulated from the acid of rationality by layers of
“You’re too dumb to question your intellectual superiors”.

Many warmists – for example Saltpetre - start from the conviction that man’s use of carbon simply must be having a negative effect on the climate, and proceed from there. But this is not science, it’s a gut feeling, and gut feelings are often wrong.

The warmists in here, and everywhere, keep displaying the same methodology:
• Assuming it must be true in the first place, as Dessler explicitly did
• Seeking to confirm instead of to falsify it
• Relying for knowledge on the pronouncements of authority and orthodoxy, as Steven does
• Actively fleeing rational disproofs by the method of *repeating* that the premises must be true - as Steven did by way of mind-reading: (skeptics *seem to think* climatologists are *motivated by* fraud, whereas Steven’s *personal impression* is that they aren’t);

(cont.)