The Hockey Stick and the Disappearing Medieval Warm Period

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For you fans of changing global climate, here is a piece you might find interesting:

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

This article puts a stake in the heart of the infamous Hockey Stick graph.

ruveyn

Try to say that to the peoples of Kiribati.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=3002001&page=1#.T1LXg_XQBOY

Anyway, what good is a more that twenty years old graphic (If it's a true one, denialists like unhetical presentations.) compared to more recent ones backed by thousands of studies. Heat islands? That must mean the places with the highest rise of temperatures, likevery urbanised places such as Arctic and Antartica, right?

I seriously don't want to live on this planet anymore. Half the people in the country with the second largest emissions on the planet don't believe in global warming based on ideological grounds! That's the only reason I can see, as they are capable of instantly abandoning one brand of denialism in favour of another if presented with facts.

The Earth is doomed.

PS: no one is a fan of changing global climate. That's why we want to stop it.

That's all old hat. That particular chart is really old and is even more dishonest than the supposedly misleading "hockey stick" graph. At least the "hockey stick" was constructed based on global historical temperature proxies. There's no evidence that the MWP was global rather than a climate shift local to the North Atlantic region. Asian and Antarctic proxy data suggest no global MWP.

The "hockey stick" itself has been vastly improved since the late 90s when it first showed up. Climate change denialists need to get new information if they want to remain relevant. Real scientists don't argue by constantly using the same recycled memes to reinforce their ideological stance. They're willing to refine their statements and thinking as more data or more current methods present themselves.

Answer this then: Have variations in solar radiance, variations in earth orbit, variations in earth axial wobble, effects of secondary and tertiary rays on cloud formation, non-linearities in feedbacks been positively and definitively eliminated as possible causes for the current warming epoch. Also, what progress has been made in chaotic dynamics? If we cannot predict weather more than ten days out how can we predict climate (which is average weather) decades out? Has climate science (so-called) reached the quality and precision of the Standard Model of Fields and Particles? If not, why should we rely on it as the basis for all of us taking an Oath of Poverty?

And the 1998 version of the Hockey Stick was crappy science. I am happy it has been improved by use of statistical models with so many parameters that they can be made to fit any data and any agenda.

ruveyn

Sorry I'm not addressing all of your points, but I'm trying to avoid the pointless argument that would ensue. But this one rankled me. Being unable to predict the weather, a local phenomenon, is totally irrelevant to whether we can predict the climate. Your comment is like saying that because we can't model gasses by tracking the motions of individual atoms, that any attempt at developing a set of gas laws is doomed to fail.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 05 Mar 2012, 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^ Unfortunately, "truth" is not a matter of peer-reviewed, scientific conclusion but rather a simple matter of convincing a critical mass of people to believe something. I fear that we're on the verge of losing this battle, because apparently there are hundreds of millions of people who don't know the difference between weather & climate. All it takes is a few contrarians with "scientific" credentials, alot of money & media power, & a credulous population willing to believe just about anything if it jibes with their prejudices or preconceptions.

Also, we should all reject the notion that taking steps to reduce carbon emissions or otherwise address climate change constitutes a collective "Oath of Poverty". We should instead ponder the cost of doing nothing - displacement & impoverishment of entire populations, loss of agricultural lands, habitat loss, animal & plant extinctions.

My personal opinion is that a warmer climate may not be that bad a thing. We do need to find a way to stabilize the level of carbon in the atmosphere but there are plenty of other pressing issues we as a human race will have to deal with at some point. Doing nothing about the issue of finding better energy sources because the free-market provides no immediate incentive is recipe for the human race going the way of the Mayans.

You're excruciatingly repetitive. I've already gone over this all with you a year ago or so. I don't have the energy to repeat myself or dig for the old thread. You don't seem to get that arguments of global energy balance do not require absolute determinism. By your ridiculous argument thermodynamic theory is rendered useless because one cannot predict the precise location and movement of each molecule in a fluid or gas.

ruveyn's posts on climate change remind me a bit of the guy who's speaking in this clip around 3:56:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MQvTOSyBqU[/youtube]
The looks on the face of the Liberal (the guy right next to the Independent wing-nut) are priceless.

But to be fair, I think ruveyn is a lot more intelligent.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 05 Mar 2012, 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is what I don't like about this particular debate. Name-calling is not a valid argument.

You can tell when the opposition has run out of facts - it starts making slanderous statements against those with a better argument.

Or it tries to make itself look like a victim and furthermore offers no original research of its own, criticizes the research of thousands of scientists while simultaneously utilizing it to support their industry-backed "arguments", generally offering little actual scientific insight, instead utilizing political machinations to achieve its goals and presenting extremely absurd viewpoints that can only be explained by malice or willful ignorance

Why is "denialist" name calling, or an "argument"? One offers nothing other than politically motivated criticisms about a theory, denies its validity but presents nothing useful of its own- that is not skepticism, that is denialism

I will concede that ruveyn has better arguments when 97% of climate scientists agree with his position.

But seriously, this is incredibly complicated science and, as far as I know, no one on WP is qualified to really critique it. Our "debates" will consist of throwing contradictory studies (those on one side primarily funded by the oil industry) at one another, that neither group will truly understand. I think it is extremely arrogant for someone like ruveyn, smart man though he may be, to assume that he knows better than the thousands of people who have dedicated their life to studying these things.

I was pointing out a flaw I see in the "skeptics's" thinking (namely, that the a single person will use multiple, mutually exclusive, arguments against the reality of man-made climate change), which in my opinion qualifies them as "denialists." I use that term to mean that no amount of evidence will ever convince them that anthropogenic climate change is real, or even that climate change is happening at all. For reasons I alluded to in my original post and in this post, I think that "denialist" is an apt description and I will stand by that statement.

By the way, for those who might want to claim that I will never be able to be convinced that climate change is not happening, that is untrue. I will start to re-evaluate my opinion once a significant number (ie: ~25%) of climate scientists conclude that climate change is not real.

Well, I suppose you could say an invalid argument isn't really an argument.

'Denial' has an implication that someone is really guilty of something, and just trying to cover it up, and the '-ist' ending implies that it is a thing that is believed in or done repeatedly. I'm not sure how you could say it isn't namecalling.


And the other side calls them 'denialists' for politically motivated reasons.


If you pointed out an inconsistency and called them 'inconsistent', that would be fair.

I sometimes make an estimate of the reliability or consistency of a position by looking at the arguments put forward in its support. It's a heuristic, so it certainly isn't infallible. Supporters of climate change tend to use the word 'denialist' or similar dismissive language. That indicates to me that probably they either have a better argument, but choose not to use it, or they don't have anything better than namecalling.


This is a fair point.

Still, I don't think it's entirely over our heads.