Maybe someday you'll sober up?

Lol!

Liberals are centre left.

Obvious Cats!

I don't use long form census data in any way, shape or form. Nor do I benefit from it. IN fact it is harmful to me because it drives left wing policy making.

I think Tony Clement is to be congratulated for engaging with his critics on twitter.

I think Stephen Gordon shows a complete lack of class every time he talks to Tony. He's snarky, rude, petulant, need I go on ?

Fed up Cats!

Yes, yes supposedly it helps us all.

Except to me all it does is drive leftwing policy decision making. Kids living poverty ? Ok big new social program !!

Women making less than men ? Ok special treatment time !

Minorities don't have enough bedrooms in their apartments ? Ok social housing time !

I have no use for long form census data, in fact I would BENEFIT if it was destroyed since I don't believe to any aggrieved special interests groups.

Last time I checked they didn't deliver a census form to felines.

Cats!

Can Cats perhaps explain how Marc Carney of the Bank Of Canada, who has expressed alarm at the changes to the long form, is leftwing?

'Elite' means the best.

As in a nation's elite forces, or an elite surgeon….something you'd want during an operation.

An elite governor of the Bank of Canada is a good thing.

wow…you are seriously repulsive…….

Gordon is explaining that if someone criticizes something the Harper government does, then you should not screech: "You only say that 'cause you're an evul librull!" but instead you should actually show that the criticism is incorrect or else admit that it is correct and that the government will need to change what it is being criticized for.

Stephen Gordon has stated that he is not a liberal on his blogsite. My guess is he's a Conservative. I know your head will probably blow up if you try to process that info. It doesn't pass your litmus test. :)

Yes indeed, try to focus. GIGO. Try upgrading the operating system. Dos is so 90s.

HS: "You only say that 'cause you're an evul librull!"

I rather doubt he supports the current Conservatives at this point.

The only one embarrassing himself is Gordon.

"Gordon is acting like a drive-by twitter troll."

Good one. I agree. Gordon is poor loser if he is still squawking.

Actually, it's painfully obvious he lost both.

Am not. Is so.

(Lame arguments time?)

Sorry, lost birds, confused mice, fish heading south fast!

The Tories have lost a toe, having really shot themselves in the foot over this.

Um right.

Except the entire history of science has been about accepted "facts" being overthrown and replaced with new ones.

Confused mice, rolling around birds, queen of fishes, the pope and Galileo went out for lunch, Emils was their waitress.

Wow you just agreed with my point.

Except you put "no" and added an insult at the end.

Weird. Its like you're so rabid in your anti-Harper, anti-CPC ways that you can't ever, EVER, agree with someone else.

I mean c'mon, (Emils GREATEST HITS TIME) do you still maintain that Peter McKay doesn't have any human emotions for dead soldiers ??

You're still being called out on that one!

Foot in mouth, the other, prideful, and prejudiced, spiteful, and incredulous, mice playing, fish confused, birds heading east?

So that means you think Peter McKay IS capable of human feelings now ?

Even though you're still bitter much for him destroying your PC party ?

Cats!

Direct quote:

"Yeah, Mackay is 'emotionally invested' in the troops well-being alright. Until he gets shifted to finance or health or some other portfolio. LOL"

-Someone takes you to task on this, your response-

"Seriously? Are you so partisan that you don't realize it's just a portfolio? Give your head a shake."

You got called out hardcore on your "Peter McKay doesn't care about the troops" meme. Just like you got called out on your "the Democrats will win in November, don't trust the polls" meme!

Seriously Emils, I see nothing wrong with holding you to account for some of the ridiculous things you say.

You're starting to get a certain reputation around here.

Victorious Cats!

"You're starting to get a certain reputation around here. "

starting? LOL

Nope.

Just take everything with a grain of salt, that's all. Even the "conventional wisdom".

Best fishes.

A lot of science is gobbeldy gook.

Having other high priests endorse the work of other priests is hardly a surprise. But it doesn't mean it should be accepted uncritically.

There are other frames to look at issues, including the moral aspect of government actions.

We needn't be slaves to technocrats. That will put us on the road to serfdom.

Mice day all.

This is kind of funny. No one said anything about accepting anything uncritically. In fact, most experts become experts because they are able to look at research critically. That is the point.

Maybe you should just admit you are wrong. Try looking at yourself critically.

Lobotomies were accepted practice for a long time. Even a Kennedy got one, unfortunately for her.

I'll ignore -PAT- and his victory lap (its easy to declare the winner when you just frame the contours of the debate to your exact prejudices).

Instead i'll engage with Emils and her ridiculous point about peer review research. Research climategate. The lid has been blown off that one.

When a scientists gets to choose who reviews them, and the journals only print reviews they agree with, well then its all just self reinforcing nonsense.

NO moral advancement ? We're just cavemen with better tools ? That explains a lot! Yikes, throw out that philosophy and art, that literature and jazz !

Of course there is a "moral aspect" to government action! There is a moral aspect to EVERY action. Ignoring this, well THAT is the road to serfdom.

Cats!

Wow. You didn't read about the scientific journal being pressured by climate gate scientists NOT to let dissenting reviews into it ??

That's how you choose your peers. You bully and threaten journals into not letting people publish reviews that are critical of global warming.

Nobody is talking about governments determining our morals. We're talking about the morality of what the government does. IE is it good or bad ?

And not, is it good or bad for the majority of the citizens. Is it intrinsically good or bad.

Forcing people to complete the census could be *good* for the majority but then again so could forced medical experiments on prisoners.

Do you support THAT ?

Cats wants to know!

Heh.

Perhaps you ignore me because it is easier than addressing my points?

Methinks you just admitted I am right.

Editors are editors generally, not writers of the items they publish…to eliminate that bias.

Yes, things can be influenced by belief the writer is wholly unconscious of…which is why we have peer review.

When you have hundreds or thousands of scientists agreeing on something…you should pay attention to what they're saying.

IRC meets TWITTER. big deal….

The top researcher of sun spots believes that global warming is caused by sun spots and not manmade activity.

Is he a hack without credentials ??

And no, tis not 1 in 1000 who doesn't believe in manmade climate science. That is a ridiculous assertion.

Babel in the mirror, mice on the floor, fishes disjointedness, birds questioning your relevance here.

Conclusions!!

And then random graphs to back it up!

Oh wow. That settles everything. Never mind the fact that both pro and anti global warming types have graphs galore.

And yet they can't seem to agree.

Appeal to authority DENIED. The only authority I recognized is that of the Fish-Mice-Birds GOD!

How does expertise in sunspots confer climate expertise on this researcher?
Does he how explain how his theory withstands the fact that temperatures have been at or near their highest in more than 100 years, while sunspot activity has been at its lowest?

It's about as close to the actual science that the conversation usually gets. I'll pose a question to you that had Holly Stick a bit flustered a while back. (re-phrased)

Does the fact that tree proxies, as indications of temperature, have proven to be unreliable beyond 1950 suggest that perhaps trees are not such good proxies for global temperature? If this were so, should they be removed?

Also, you'd have to really be in denial to not catch a whiff of activism, when examples of exagerated claims about Himilayian glaciers disappearing and the like are around.

Lomborg had a good piece in the G&M, that kinda comes close to my position.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/sure…

About treerings; they diverge after 1960 and the reasons for that are not known yet:

"…The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies…"
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies…

So before 1960 tree rings data is confirmed by other data and other proxies; after 1960 it is not. Real scientists try to consider as many lines of evidence as possible, so they can compare them and test them against each other.

A real scientist wouldn't "conclude" anything from the fact that treerings diverge after 1960. A real scientist might present theories for why that might be.

I do agree with you, though, that a lot of scientists seem to have forgotten to phrase their
"theories" as "theories" and instead speak of them as if they are "conclusions". That is a problem.

Okay, I was just using it as an example. I know nothing about trees and their diverging habits.

False. They don't diverge all the time.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies…

"prior to the last half-century or so, proxies are all there is to go on" Also false. temperature records go back to 1880 1 and a third centuries.

And false that there is huge disagreement; in fact, the models are quite reliable. http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-in…

Yopu believe something by a written by a denialist and posted on a couple of denialist blogs? Don't waste everyone's time.

Read here about Christy: http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2010/…

"All the blog has done is compared the model predictions from Hansen to the actual readings. "

Fail.
Apparently it is too complicated for you.
Maybe this comment from your link puts in in terms you can understand.

Don't feel too bad. Indeed, any honest person (such as yourself ) would only compare surface temperature projections to suface temperature observations. You can be forgiven for assuming others have the same integrity.
Such a comparison can be found here.

Hansen's projections aren't being compared to troposhere temperatures. Try reading the WUWT piece again.

So what? He's just made an adjustment. The trends are the same. Are you seriously trying to argue that while surface temperatures are rising, then tropospheric temperatures are not? No matter how the adjustment is made, the direction of the graphs tell the story, you're just talking about the values along the Y axis.

If the tropospheric temperatures have been flat, so have the surface tempatures. What you're talking about is window dressing.

Yes. It seems that proponents of AGW will reach for the flimsiest excuses to ignore the contrary evidence.

"The trends are the same."

Fail.(high school math apparently)

You make the mistake of looking at a single data point. If you look at the first three quaters of 2010 you'd see that we're now actually above C. But the trend is what's relevant.
Regardless, if you read the link you'd see that current models use a slighly lower climate sensitivity than that of 22 years ago, and current temperatures and projections hardly suggest we're "doing alright".

"According to Hansen circa 1988 we should be well above A. "

No. Co2 concentrations are slightly below B.
The trend for B is .26c/decade. The record shows .19c/decade. And note that B and C are little different until they diverge after 2005.

"More relevent to today would be whether or not the troposphere is heating up as quickly as our current models say it should. I don't think you'll like the answer to that. "

How is that particularly relevent? And I know the answer – satellites don't show a "tropospheric hotspot" but it's presumed to be due to a shortcoming of the measurement methodology, not the lack of a hotspot. The hotspot should be there due to any warming (anthropogenic or otherwise) and we know that its warmed. It's not a unique signature of greenhouse warming.

Your comment is just so convincing. Keep up the good work and keep that head planted firmly in the sand.

Real scientists have reproducable results. The jury is still out on tree-rings as proxies for global, or hemisphere temperature. That was my point.

I don't think truncating it where he did, and then melding the HS graph so that it was hidden, was very honest of Mann at all.

You know what Holly, I'm all about solutions also; rather then just nit-picking the science.

Solutions like this would separate the genuine AGW concern wheat, from the activist chaff.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=…

You're right. I've decided to sell my car, and not heat my house this winter. Thanks for setting me straight.

Do you have any further details about the "unit"? Not judging the unit (yet), just curious about the nuts and bolts.

If my mental math is correct each unit would need to soak up 1000 tonnes of carbon (almost 4000 tonnes of CO2) per year. That's not a ridiculous number by any means, but is the sorbent used once, or is part of the idea to drive off the concentrated CO2 in a sorbent regeneration step? And if that's the case were there any details about the eventual sink for the CO2?

(I don't have a subscription to SciAm, so I only got the teaser version of the article at the link.)

Thanks muchly!

As you said, not a panacea (do panaceas exist at all?), lots of followup questions, but some interesting ideas there.

My take on the CO2 for greenhouse use is that you would only do that strictly for the benefit of the greenhouse, not for any AGW reason.

Also, making methanol is interesting, in particular the sourcing of the hydrogen.

And to close, not sure how much CO2 can be stuffed back into delpeted or depleting oil fields – presumably somewhere in the gigatons, but not enough to stuff all of the CO2 that has come from fossil fuel combustion…..although it probably isn't necessary to capture it all.

Anyhoo, thanks again for the links…interesting indeed.

If the goal is to capture and then semi-permanently sequester CO2 perhaps some/many/all of these units would need to be coupled with a greenhouse that grows "weed" trees…..after the trees mature they can be cut down, cut up and then stacked in backyards across the country….no burning though (well only a small percentage, on special occasons)!!

I meant weed trees, as in trees that grow relatively quickly (eg some of the popular poplar species seem to grow very quickly, almost too easily in some cases).

And yes, for best results you can't just let the entire woodpile rot in your backyard…you should build a woodshed or at least throw a tarp over them. But even if all those piles of wood loose a certain amount of mass due to rotting each year, there is still an inventory of carbon that has been stockpiled, and as long as you keep adding fresh logs to make up for the losses you have still moved in the "right" direction.

Food has the same drawback as rotting, no? The food that is consumed also becomes more CO2 when it leaves your/my windpipe/tailpipe, and the rest rots.

Burying reminds me of the idea that we should not recycle used paper – rather we should just throw used paper down an abandoned mine shaft and keep on using new paper which is often made from trees grown specifically for that purpose…another CO2 sink.

I'm pretty sure that you are mistaken about the carbon content of food….one of us should do some research to confirm…I'll do some poking around on the interweb thing later on this evening.

I'll be searching for carbs and calories and metabolize…

So, my conclusions so far:
- I (also) like wiki
- your link is fine as far as it goes, its just too much of a high level "view"
- accumulation of carbon into humans is relevant when babies grow to become adults, when adults continue to gain weight, and/or when the number of humans increases
- other than that (ie for you and I when we are basically eating to provide for energy requirements and "repairs") there really is no accumulation of carbon to speak of

So, some typical numbers:
- daily calorie requirement is ~2000 cal
- typical/recommended carbohydrate consumption is 250g/day, which provides ~1000 cal
- typical/recommended fat consumption is 100g/day, which provides ~900 cal
- typical protein intake should be 60g/day, of which I'll allow half to repair the body and the balance to be consumed for energy, for ~100 cal
- the consumption/"combustion"/metabolism(?) of those three energy sources creates about 400, 240 and 130 grams of CO2 respectively, per day.

Source: wiki articles (for carbohydrates, fats and protien et al) as well as some basic chemistry, and a handful of other web pages. I'm open to correction…..

I'm fairly sure that there are a few different strategies that a society could use to reduce CO2 emissions in the short to medium term. I'm curious which of them is your personal favourite?

Yeah, hope for a response is definitely fading fast. From my perspective that's a bit unfortunate because I find that more often than not Holly adds a POV that I don't mind contemplating.

For example, I could quite easily support a gentle yet relentless ratcheting upwards of fleet mileage requirements as they apply to yearly new vehicle sales as a first step.

Try reading the whole post at the link, and then go and read the frigging links:

"…Has this phenomenon happened before? In other words, can we rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends. This has been a general trend with the divergence problem – trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. The important result from Cook 2004 was that before the 1960s, the groups tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the study suggests that the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and is restricted to recent decades…"
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies…

I pay attention to what people who know more than me have to say at the blogs where they talk about this kind of thing all the time. The only faith I exercise is in my ability to judge who is interested in the subject for its own sake and who they tend to respect.

I'm not interested in judging your state of mind. I think instead of speculating, it's more useful to go and find out.

I don't blame you for not recalling. It was 7 months ago.

Here we are:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/02/24/bernier-uncut/…

You'll have to excuse me if I check out those links later, as looking thru my comments has made me tired of what a blowhard I am.

Here's the money quote from that article,

"Kaser, a lead author for IPCC Working Group I, says he alerted the IPCC about the erroneous paragraph in 2006, before the Fourth Assessment Report was published. Left unclear is why WG II was consulting popular science magazines instead of top IPCC glaciologists? Working Group I chapter 4.5, for example, contains detailed documentation on world-wide glacier melt."

So they were warned about it, and included it anyway.

Lomborg is right that when exagerations like this are exposed, people tend to tune out. I think the world debate is progressing nicely from my POV. More scrutiny is going to be given to both denier, and alarmist claims.

Here is the problem. The lead author of the Asia section of the 2007 IPCC report, Murari Lal, admitted why it was included.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/55556/…

Said Lal: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” In other words, Rose says, Lal “last night admitted [the scary figure] was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”

Spin that one away.

Did Professor Georg Kaser say he sent a letter to Lal warning him of the "error", and then Lal said that he recieved no such letter?

I guess that makes it Kaser and Roses word, against Lal then. Who has the real motivation to lie here?

Dude you should read my reply to Holly just six comments above this one. I pulled this right out of the link she provided.

"Kaser, a lead author for IPCC Working Group I, says he alerted the IPCC about the erroneous paragraph in 2006, before the Fourth Assessment Report was published. Left unclear is why WG II was consulting popular science magazines instead of top IPCC glaciologists? Working Group I chapter 4.5, for example, contains detailed documentation on world-wide glacier melt."

So he did give warning.

At the very best for Lal he is incompetent, at worst he is big time deceptive.

Are you really OK with that claim getting in, and being quoted in all kinds of peer review literature?

You have to admit the IPCC credibility deserved a big hit, and that's exactly what happened.

"What's recieved far more attention than the original himalayan claim, and apparently remains largely uncorrected, are Rose's fabricated quotes"

Yes I remember that making all the major media.

You live in a dream world lenny.

The error was first noticed and an attempt made to correct it, by Georg Kaser, an IPCC author.
If you've got evidence to the contrary, present it.
You've posted more falsehoods in just a few comments here than exist in the thousands of pages of AR4.

That contradicts the fact that Kaser first found and attempted to correct the error, how?
The Indian report in question made no mention of the IPCC Himalayan glacier error.

As the article makes clear, IPCC reviewers found the error before Indian published it's contradictory report (which makes no mention of the IPCC error). You say that Kaser was ignored, then you provide a quote from Pachauri dismissing India's report, yet you somehow then credit India with first finding the error?
Who's lying?

Bjørn Lomborg has just reversed his opinion on climate change. It made all the news media.

Not to mention that he's an associate professor of statistics at a business school, not a climatologist.

Do you mean reversed, as in 180 degree reversal, or reversed, as in 15 degree course correction?

My recollection is that a few years ago his position was something along the lines of "I'm fairly confident that humans are influencing the global climate, but that the medium to long term effects are generally overstated, so we shouldn't get all bent out of shape about AGW. There are other issues that are having much more dramatic effects on the global population right now, and the global community should concentrate more effort on addressing those problems. As well, "reversing" global warming is probably not going to be the best way to deal with AGW – instead we should be thinking about adaptation strategies."

And it seemed to me that his recent pronouncement was not all that much different. Can you provide some quotes that show a 180 degree reversal? My modest perusal of his recent comments didn't turn up anything dramatic.

He has been reported as doing a u-turn, but it's not necessarily so; he's probably just re-packaging himself to sell his new book.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30…

I'm pretty sure that you are making at least two assumptions about me that aren't warranted.

Care to hazard a guess or two?

Lindzen the shill. What poor judgment you have.

No, he doesn't.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/201…
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/the_austr…

OTOH it is fairly easy to imagine some future grad student somewhere getting approval to write a paper on the topic of "The Relationship Between Internet Savvy Citizens And Policy Development In Early 21st Century Canada", which will conclude that a tweeter named harbles amongst others was able to engage senior politicians in limited discussions with no real effect. Of course the future media will headline a brief story about the grad students paper with "Tweeters were government puppet-masters".

I say all of that with a rueful expression rather than a disgusted or sneering expression.

are you predicting that the media of the future will still be sensationalistic to the point of inaccuracy?

Do bears sh!t in the woods?

or

You betcha

or

I'm prepared to wager obscenely large sums of money on it

or

……..

Heh. Good luck finding someone brave enough or optimistic enough to take you up on that wager. It looks like a sucker bet to me. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Good point, but as data storage expands exponentially there are large archiving efforts trawling the internet for data. For example, Paul Wells was worried that his 2003-2005 blog archives were gone for good (having been mistakenly deleted by his employers), but it turns out they were archived at <a href="http://www.archive.org” target=”_blank”>www.archive.org.

Every tweet ever tweeted could be archived in a few terabytes. I'm sure a lot of trivial stuff on the internet in the last decade will be available to future researchers.

Doubtful….there isn't actually a debate to settle.

I don't see what that TED guy, who is talking about feelings, has to do with AGW. There is no scientific AGW debate; The people who deny AGW have their own reasons for denying it, but have provided no scientific alternative explanation for global warming to replace the accepted explanation that the CO2 we produce is pushing the warming.

Of course there are uncertainties and more things to find out. Science is not a TV detective show that provides all the answers in less than an hour.

Certainly there is ongoing research….but since most climatologists agree on GW as done by man….there is nothing to debate there.

Of course since we're throwing something like 90,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere everyday,anyone could have figured out that out. LOL

I don't think 99.9% agreement is all that meaningful. What matters are the arguments. If there are legitimate objections are important and have yet to be addressed then is it not at all clear that public policy should flow immediately from science. Academic debates are not popularity contests.

Btw, did you watch the TED video? Waddya think? Cool? Waste of time?

Long term digital store is a really sketchy proposition. While there's probably archival quality stuff available and there will probably be machines that can read such things in the future, the chance of something like Twitter getting properly archived is no something I'd bet on. If the company goes under, that data is probably getting wiped and the servers are getting sold. Even if they don't go under, no bets on them keeping it all around forever.

But how much of the chatter resides on the client device? I believe rather little – most is server based, no?

I was in the storage biz for many years … people had reams of trouble reading data from last generation – let alone getting info from media from several generations before. Data needs constant migration to newer media to survive. (constant meaning every few years or decades at this point)

Future media might be so cheap that that if someone can automate the conversion process, then trivial data might survive wholesale – but it is more likely to be just odd scraps, much like our current archaeology looking at the past.
Facebook is significant and will be studied … most of the content will not survive, imho.

I don't think we are actually disagreeing. I imagine only a tiny fraction will survive, but even a tiny fraction would be a lot of data.

Quickly!