DeSmogBlog could’ve flattened The Skeptics Handbookin just one sentence.
All they had to do was point to empirical evidence that more CO2 forces temperatures up. They can’t and everything else is bluster and bluff.
The question of evidence is on the front page; the book is built around it, and billions of dollars hinges upon it, on this topic, “nothing else matters…”. Yet Jeremy Jacquot’s sole attempt at evidence only shows he doesn’t know what evidence is. Even a bright junior high spark could prove him wrong with a 20 year old encyclopedia. Jacquot uses 3000 words to NOT answer that question, he confuses himself, resorts to cut-n-pasting from the site that does his thinking for him, and makes at least 9 errors of logic and reason. Jacquot complains that I’ve rehashed and repeated old arguments, which only makes it all the more embarrassing that he still hasn’t got any good answers.
But the part I like best was the way he jumps through the hoops just as I predicted. The Skeptics Handbook says when you poke a believer they will bark ‘Santer’, ‘Sherwood’, and ‘amplification’ and he does, right on cue. Yap Yap Yap. DeSmogBlog lives up to it’s name and adds de smog to de science of Global Warming. Part I, Part II, Part III.
Vindicated – Thank you.
Of course, in the usual style of AGW Alarmists they won’t say anything that clear, explicit or accurate straight up, you have to wade through poor arguments, confusing statements, confounding strawmen, irrelevant points and poor science communication to figure it out.
I could stop right now. But for the sake of spreading the word about the marvels of logic and reasoning, l’ll post why nothing Jacquot says, suggests that anything in The Skeptics Handbook is wrong.
…
DeSmog Logic and Reason Scorecard:
Evidence:
0
Points where the skeptics handbook got the science wrong:
0
Bogus evidence
1
Strawman Attack
2
Circular Reasoning
1
Baseless assertion
3
Argument from Ignorance
1
Argument from Inanimate Authority
1
Total*:
-9
Plus 2 bonus Non Sequiturs!
Point 1/ Evidence?
This is it, get ready, the leading line dealing with the paramount point: How do we know CO2 matters?—tell me if you’ve heard this before…—’Venus’.
A donor in the US felt The Skeptics Handbook was so worthwhile that they have paid to print and post 150,000 copies of the booklet through Heartland. Just soak in that number. A “bestseller” only has to notch up 5,000 copies…
As always, Joseph Bast and his team are efficient and ambitious. For starters, the Handbook was provided to everyone who came to the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, but the big plan extends far and wide. It includes some 850 journalists, 26,000 schools, 19,000 leaders and politicians, just to mention a few (see the list at the bottom for details).
My aim, as always, is to lift standards of science communication to help people make up their own minds. Scientists need to stand up and defend the discipline that gave us penicillin, cures for cataracts, and machines that fly round the world in a day. Science has become the victim of politics and economics and like everything valuable in life it needs to be defended against the ever present entropy of unreason. There are infinite ways to confuse, confound and be incorrect.
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Like a book club, if a person is superficially polite but dominates discussion, persistently pushes their view, doesn’t read the posts, and interrupts boorishly, or goes off topic regularly, they will be uninvited. People who take up 10% of the conversation are held to higher standards than people who make one comment in one hundred. Repetition is rude. One polite line said 100 times is pollution.
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Substantiate claims. They focus on the science and not the personalities.
Don’t argue from authority — it’s usually a waste of space. If you don’t understand why visit wikipedia.
Have great manners. It’s top form to thank those who correct us and acknowledge our own errors…
Use numbered points. It’s shows an organized brain. And we can refer to their points easily and follow them up. See the html code for lists.
Below is the email exchange between Skeptico and myself, that started off as a friendly enquiry by me, as to why a self-proclaimed ’skeptic’ thought that anyone raising scientific questions about global warming should be lumped in with creationists, and called a denier. I wondered if he was just innocently unaware that the science has changed (OK—there’s nothing innocent about using the term ‘denier’). [Look for my post hoc additions and comments about the emails are in blue].
What’s the most embarrassing thing that could happen to a skeptic? Could it be worse than being exposed for believing anything and everything a government committee (the IPCC) tells them?
“Science without debate is like business without competition and a trial without a defense. It’s a sham.”
Unfortunately some of the loudest skeptics are the part-time ones. They busy themselves ‘catching out astrologers’, but then suspend all their usual rules of logic to defend the largest scientific scam in history. Ironically, at the same time as the scammers plot to suck billions from citizens, pretenders like Skeptico arm themselves to the teeth to, wait for it… fight for “authority”. (He actually does this—the unthinkable—he claims that argument by authority is legitimate in science. Holy-Cringeoli! Let’s bow to the bureaucrats.)
Here Skeptico responds to my emails by publicly trying to justify his belief in the AGW theory. In response, he steadily exposes himself for having faith, trust, and poor reasoning skills, he proves to be a ‘denier’ (of the need for empirical evidence), a name caller, as well as patronizing, and totally unaware of his religious faith to boot. All that, and his reading and comprehension is not so hot either.
Carbon credits are a form of fiat currency, yet as calls for carbon trading grow, ironically, another fiat currency collapses—destroying life savings, wiping out jobs, and taking down historic institutions overnight.
“Just because other currencies have failed and wreaked havoc doesn’t prove that a carbon currency won’t work. It’s possible that for the first time in human history,we might get the regulation right, enforce the accounting, and fix the legal loopholes. But if most of the leading democratic sovereign nations can’t keep their own currencies from imploding, what chance is there for an international currency that
buys and sells theoretical atmospheric nullities in the third world?”
The US dollar is imploding. This is the real hockey stick graph.
Money base US dollar Jan 2009
Helicopter Ben is at work
As far as the currency goes, once or twice a century our monetary system breaks. To
get an idea of the scale of the current crisis look at the Federal Reserve Bank graph (above) of the monetary base. It’s a graph to take your breath away.
The financial crisis meets the carbon scam. Hoping for a happy outcome is no reason to risk hand-feeding financial sharks. I’ve put together a paper for the SPPI:
why carbon credits, like any fiat currency, will almost inevitably lead to fraud and corruption
how the current US economy is so sick it’s on life support
how the derivative bomb could take down our financial system
why the same speculators behind the debacle in our currencies and banks want to play in the carbon casino
NOTE: Above is a spoof. All credit to Marc Morano. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is a complete embarrassment”. The New York Times conceded this week that tropical rainforest problems had been hyped, nearly a decade after Morano pointed it out.
The New York Times
February 2, 2019
Scientists Now Say Global Warming Fears Fading Away – Claim Warming Consensus Never Existed
By Andrew Revko – New York Times Environmental Reporter
As the Earth continues to cool, UN scientists now concede that CO2 was never the climate driver many made it out to be. The entire multi-trillion dollar global warming movement now appears to have been a result of massive funding, media hype and group think.
The UN IPCC claims it never really promoted man-made climate fears and instead urged media outlets to cover its new environmental claim, the scarcity of oxygen on Earth.
Disclaimer: For those who don’t have a good grip on reading and comprehension, note that nowhere here do I claim any of the statements by these experts proves anything about the science. This post is – as it claims, just about the possible chic-ness of being a skeptic.12-2-09
This must be it, surely, the point where being a skeptic has more scientific cachet than being a believer. The trickle is becoming a flood. We are reaching the stage where independent scientists will want to make sure they are known to be on the skeptical side of the fence.
None other than the guy who used to sign off James Hansens funding at NASA has just announced that not only is he a skeptic, but that Hansen is an embarrassment to NASA and was never muzzled. In a message to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee, Theon wrote:
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made, …I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results”
“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon
Theon joins a growing list of over 650 prominent skeptics. Here’s how the list is becoming a story all of it’s own, and the drive to publicly announce skepticism is picking up pace.
Big names like Santer, Sherwood, and Schmidt admit that the models predict more warming 10 km above the equator than what the weather balloons could find. Each time they announce that they’ve resolved the differences, they have to start by admitting there are differences to resolve.
My point here is that some bloggers are variously arguing the nonsensical or irrelevant: that, a/ the hot-spot was always there; b/ it doesn’t matter if it’s not found, and c/ it would occur with all climate forcings. Which disagrees with the top expert supporters of AGW.
The real debate is now about whether the hot-spot has been found or not. The top alarmists argue that we’ve sort of ‘found’ the hot-spot recently with new statistical rehashes or by using wind-gauges instead of thermometers. Note that even when they imply they’ve ‘found it’, after an unfortunate reader wades through the convoluted language, it turns out that they’ve just increased the error bars so they stretch far enough to include the real world results. Thus, it’s no longer ‘statistically different’.
So to state the obvious, from the mouths of the AGW experts themselves…
This is vintage spinmeister-Tim. Overall he claims I’m deluded, confused, constantly repeating discredited arguments, “doesn’t even know what the hot-spot is”, and “doesn’t understand how the greenhouses gases warm the planet”. But when it comes to backing up the giant patronizing put-downs, it amounts to nit-picking phraseology; irrelevant points; straw men; his own false understanding of what a fingerprint is; and then an own goal when he drops in a graph that shows that the hot-spot is indeed missing.
Leo Elshof from Acadia University in Nova Scotia* has written to me asking that I put a comedy disclaimer on the Skeptics Handbook, and otherwise threatens to ridicule me at international conferences and set the media onto me. The email is here and my reply is below. What have our universities sunk too?
Science based ideas are falsifiable, whereas religious ones are not (thanks Karl Popper). That means even our most favourite scientific theories can be dumped in a bin if new evidence shows they are wrong or ‘falsifies them’.
Science depends on observations, made by people at some time and place. Things you can see, hold, hear and record. The real world trumps theory every time. And real evidence must be falsifiable, not faith based.
Evidence is not just any observations, only the relevant ones matter. As far as the question of
carbon as a major cause of global warming, the following lists sum things up.
The gap between real world data and thermometers is a make-or-break issue for the AGW theory. The models predict a hot-spot in the atmosphere above the tropics, but the weather balloons (called radiosondes) can’t find any sign of it. Most claims that the hot-spot has been found are not providing any new data, they are just massaging the same old numbers with a different statistical tool. Here are three variations (though the third is not a statistical-spin, it’s just nonsense).
1–Some AGW supporters claim that Santer et al has found the hot-spot. But his paper boils downs to a statistical reanalysis that suggests that due to noise and error, the hot-spot might be there. Santer hasn’t actually found the missing hot spot. He has a case, but it’s not a strong one. The statistical counterargument is at Climate Audit.
If greenhouses gases are warming the planet that warming will happen first in the cold blob of air 8-12 km above the tropics. It’s freezing cold up there, but it ought to be slightly less freezing cold thanks to greenhouse gases. All 20-odd climate models predict warming there first—it’s the fingerprint of greenhouse gas warming, as opposed to warming by some other cause, like solar magnetic effects, volcanic eruptions, solar irradiance, or ozone depletion etc etc.
Look at A above, the greenhouse gas fingerprint is markedly different from the rest and dominates the overall predicted pattern in graph F. The big problem for the believers of AGW is that years of radiosonde measurements can’t find any warming, as shown in part E of Figure 5.7 in section 5.5 on page 116 of the US CCSP 2006 report
Regarding: the Emissions Trading Scheme, and any tax relating to carbon dioxide.
Before Australia commits to any tax the Australian people deserve to know that the taxation rules are based on the latest and best scientific evidence available. The evidence about climate change has changed dramatically since 2003. I was a committed believer that action was needed, but like many other scientists I have changed my mind. Please bear in mind that the theory of greenhouse gas emissions causing atmospheric warming is just that—a theory, and it has no empirical observable evidence to back it up.
The need for any carbon tax regime hinges on the question below:
The Skeptics Handbook is officially launched. It’s been quietly circulating by word of mouth since late July 2008 when it was sent to a few key Australian politicians, and the producers of 60 minutes. The most up to date version is on my Global Warming page.
The Handbook gives policy makers a strategy to cut through the endless irrelevant details of the debate. There are many points where the science of Global Warming is open to challenge (that’s how science works), but debating each one becomes an endless path of swapping tit for tat detail. If you enjoy that kind of stimulating discussion, go for it, but that’s not what this is about.
I want to lift the debate above the mud-slinging, pathetic ad hominem attacks, and specious argument by authority. The basic rules of logic and reasoning have been known since the Greeks. Educated adults ought to do better. Maybe one day, national curriculums will too.
“Use a surgical strike, rather than a scattergun approach”.
As a delegate to the UNFCCC conference in Bali 2007 it was obvious that skeptics need to be organized. The problem was not a lack of material, but rather too much to choose from. The handbook focuses on the only points that matter. Less is more.
If you want to add a link to the handbook, please link to the Global Warming page http://joannenova.com.au/wp/global-warming/, not directly to the pdf file, because it will change and grow as the news, weather or feedback warrants it. Obviously if someone can produce empirical evidence that adding extra carbon dioxide, above current atmospheric concentrations, measurably affects our climate, I’m all ears; I’ll update the handbook and change my mind.
What else would a scientist do?
Links to sources used in the Skeptics Handbook are here.
UPDATE: Feb 20 2012 –– For the petty ad hom minds who are looking for smears… I wrote the Skeptics Handbook entirely unfunded and independently. I offered it as a free PDF purely out of patriotic duty and professional concern. Those who do “science by vested-interests” presumably will become skeptics now right? (lol).
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Would you say that if they were in the same room?
Think of comments as being a book club or a town hall. If you wouldn’t say that to someone’s face in a packed room – is it worth saying at all?
Like a book club, if a person is superficially polite but dominates discussion, persistently pushes their view, doesn’t read the posts, and interrupts boorishly, or goes off topic regularly, they will be uninvited. People who take up 10% of the conversation are held to higher standards than people who make one comment in one hundred. Repetition is rude. One polite line said 100 times is pollution.
1. Real names get respect. Real people post more carefully than anonymous pseudonyms (something to do with having friends, family and an employer maybe?). Anonymous comments that attack real people deserve to be razed.
2. Stay on topic at the top: Please don’t post unrelated material at #1-#10 especially. In six months, if a journalist or politician is looking for thoughts on the topic, the unrelated stuff turns people off.
3. Short comments are better and faster to approve. 200 words is good. 400,”maybe”. Longer comments have to be really good.
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7. Spelling. People who abuse spelling in order to get comments past the moderation filter do not impress us. Likewise secret-circle jargon like “Baxxine” and “clot shot” turns off new readers and is unscientific. We want an open forum everyone can understand. That said, joke spelling is fine if it’s funny.
8. Punctuation matters. It’s banal, but it is easier to read, which is the point, yeah?
9. No advertising: People who post links without any content at all are assumed to be advertisers, not part of a conversation. People don’t sit at the book club and say h.t.t.p.s.backslash.backslash… (but outside links are very welcome if they support a point).
10. No lists of links with no content. Anyone can google ‘a term’ and cut n paste 10 links. Please save us the time of reading a 3,000 word page to find one point.
11. Libel or Defamation: If you get attacked in an unfair way, or see something like this, please email me joanne AT Joannenova.com.au or support.jonova AT proton.me.
12. There is a helpful list of false arguments and fallacies to avoid here.
Top Commenters
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