GERALD FLEMING ON RTE LAST NIGHT

Storm 10 wrote: »

Coming from a woman who is in the Air weekly flying around the World makes me sick listening to walk this room and gloom until the rest of the World sign up we are pi...ng in the wind

Here is another famous pontificater about the climate crisis and staving little black babies 'n' stuff, hanging out with his genocidal Bush buddy:



Truly vile people.

riffmongous wrote: »

Your first link is blocked by my adblock.. tracker warning. Might be worth doing a scan if you aren't aware

Eh, you wouldn't be presenting a 5 year time block as evidence here would you? The irony

riffmongous wrote: »

Try looking at it again. His claim is related only to the last few years of the data. Which is technically correct the way it's phrased (if you trust the unsourced data I can't access), but the oldest tactic of the denialist is to claim short periods aren't suitable, hence the irony

Which link do you mean? They all work for me anyway, not sure about anyone else. You seem to be implying that my data are unsourced, which is a little disingenuous to say the least. I did six of the charts myself, using the data quoted, and the other two were taken from the 2018 PROMICE annual report, which I also referenced.

I'm not talking about a 5-year block of data. I don't know where you got that from. I'm talking about the last decade, one quarter of the total observational set. This last decade came after a continuous downward trend, a trend which has been used in all the climate alarmist propaganda. I was merely pointing out that that downward trend has stopped. For how long remains to be seen. Similarly the Greenland ice data. Again properly referenced.

It seems that you have a problem with me for highlighting data that seems to ask questions of the current hype we're being bombarded with. I was waiting for someone to try to find issue with it, but the usual two I had expected have so far not remained quiet. Maybe they're able to see the data for what they are and aren't keen on attacking the messenger.

So let's be having your debunk of the data above then.

Oneiric 3 wrote: »

Yes, it is only 5 years of data, which on the scale of longer climate scales, is but a mere blip.

It's funny though how the cultists, from one side of their mouth will dismiss periods of data like this as being 'insignificant' and a 'denialist tactic' yet from the other side of their mouths, hysterically cite every single half significant weather event as being directly down to 'climate change'.

The mind baffles.

RTÉ mentioned this morning that the mayor of Venice stated that the recent flooding in the city "Is due to climate change". That's it.

Two things here:

1) The mayor is talking through his hole,
2) RTE chose to quote a mayor talking through his hole because it's their Climate Week.

The mind boggles indeed.

riffmongous wrote: »

This is what I see when I click on your first link
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=495338&stc=1&d=1573753797

Where did you get the actual data for the plots from, from the report? Can you also show some uncertainty/error for the measurements? Then we can have a good look. It does look like to me though that you might have got lucky getting such a perfectly flat trendline in your graphs. In 3 years time, even if sea ice melt does remain level, a decade analysis will still show a decreasing trend. If you made this graph last year, you would still see a decreasing trend, not a very steep one but still, decreasing.

I collect the data and do my own research, professional ly/academically, my colleagues use it in their climate studies

My first link is to the data page of the National Sea Ice Data Center. Here it is again. I didn't just make it up.

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/sea-ice-tools/

I took the data for the first 4 plots from there. They are not my data, they are theirs. The data files don't give error bars, but this doesn't seem to be a problem for anyone who wants to show a decreasing trend in the previous decade.

I didn't "just get lucky" with the flat trend. It's as if you don't trust my charts. If you want to be really picky about it you could say that in fact the last 13 years (one third of the total period) has had no loss or even a slight gain. I posted both linear trends and 5-year running means, so there can be no denying the trend. I have also posted the four decadal extent trends in a previous post , again using the same dataset. The 2000-09 downward trend is very handy for the alarmist brigade and never brough into question by them when quoted, so why should the next decade be treated any differently?

The Greenland melt data are from the two sources I quoted. I don't know what else I can give you. Go and plot the data yourself if you're such an expert and post your charts here so we can all compare them. I've laid out the data, quoted my official sources. Do with it all what you will.

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

RTÉ mentioned this morning that the mayor of Venice stated that the recent flooding in the city "Is due to climate change". That's it.

Two things here:

1) The mayor is talking through his hole,
2) RTE chose to quote a mayor talking through his hole because it's their Climate Week.

The mind boggles indeed.

Did you see their take a pledge? I made a pledge to turn off RTE for the week, not that I ever watch anyway.

easypazz wrote: »

David Attenborough is a scientist and regularly appears in the news and speaks at these events.

He did a two year science degree and it wasn't studying climate either.

riffmongous wrote: »

Which file did you get the volumes from? Anyway it's not important it's seem right and I will take your word for it. Well the error estimates should still have been included, but looking at the data they weren't so essential previously as the trend was quite clear, it would take very large errors to make a difference. For the last decade though when it's not so clear it would be interesting to see.

It's lucky in the sense that it's an arbitrary time period that gives a nice result, but shift it a few years either direction and you'll get a different, downward trend. Do I need to make the graphs, it should be pretty clear?

Ok, you've spent much longer than me looking through the data, what do you think about the idea that the 2010 - 2015 period is actually just a small cycle superimposed on the trend? That there is a very sharp decrease from 2010 - 2012, and 2013 - 2015 is just a rebound. You see similar behaviour from 1990 to 1998, a large decrease is followed by a large increase, but the overall trend is still decreasing

Jesus you're completely nitpicking now. Shifting it one way or another/looking 3 years ahead, etc., just to try to get back your downward trend. I took the data to date. That's it.

I think the reason you're doing all of this is that you're actuall shocked at the data, after being conditioned towards the opposite message all this time. Understandable, I suppose. Without actually looking at the data yourself you would be forgiven for thinking the death spiral is continuing as normal. Official reports now no longer speak of trends anymore but mostly refer to this year's rank in the records. "This year's value was the 2nd lowest on record...", etc. If you've had a flat trend for the past 10+ years then every year within that time span will be close to the minimum record. Using such terms keeps the alarmist message going, but God forbid anyone actually looks at the data in detail.

riffmongous wrote: »

Nitpicking? God forbid I would like to see the original data and errors :rolleyes:

Do you actually get the trend issue? You've got one graph at an arbitrary interval that supports you and you're refusing to look at it any other way

And then you go on to say your little rant instead of even arguing any other interpretation, particularly the last line. Seems like you don't like being challenged on your own cushy little consensus here. Like I said before, if you're so sure of it write it up and publish, but good luck to you with it

If you've a problem with the data challenge the NSIDC or NOAA or whoever else generates data. I just posted them for all to see. No need to write a paper on it.

Are you saying there hasn't been a levelling off? I think you're the one whose cushy consensus is being ruffled and you don't like it. Who knows what way it will go in the future. Maybe the trend will start to go down again, maybe it won't. Either way, plot the data and have a look (not a hissy fit).

I look forward to my trip to visit the lovely city of Athone-by-the-sea, capital of Ireland and gateway to the Costa del Longford.

We can only have a vague set of probability outcomes for something as complicated and basically unknowable as the interplay between human modification and natural variability. This is self-evident since our "science" is so weakly advanced that we can barely go a week or two before running out of reliable forecasts, even though there is no shortage of effort to overcome that. So if we can't really say with much confidence what the climate will do in 2-4 weeks, then 2-4 years or 2-4 decades would obviously be a larger unknown. I do recognize that within that paradigm you could justify saying "well it has to turn warmer within a certain range" but that's not my personal belief, I think it could stay anywhere from slightly colder to much warmer depending on how those factors interact.

Natural cycles are still larger than the presumed human signal and not only that, they are more dynamic (meaning that they shape and reshape the atmosphere) in comparison to our rather broad warming of the profiles presented. And since we aren't too sure what causes natural variability but leading candidates are external drivers (most notably the Sun itself) then our internal fiddling with the system is on a different scale. Whatever we are doing to the atmosphere will continue at the pleasure of those largely unpredictable long-term natural variations.

The current conventional wisdom about how to tackle this problem (if it is in fact a problem) is very likely about as useful as trying to duct tape the hole in the Titanic as a means of keeping the ship afloat. Our response (certainly now if not from the very start of this period) needs to be ready to mitigate and adjust to changing circumstances that we cannot realistically hope to control. With any luck there won't be much to mitigate or respond to, and there could even be positive outcomes. The climate might actually get more bland which is going to kill off interest in the weather (a bad thing for us) but might make for a less stressful climate that favours economic growth. Cold times are usually hard times. Of course it can also get too warm. If we go into a slightly warmer and less variable sort of pattern then things become more predictable for agriculture and commerce. Not everything about human modification is necessarily going to be bad for our futures.

In any case I think far too much attention is being given to a problem that might turn out to be relatively minor, when what we should probably be doing is concentrating our efforts on mass desalination projects, irrigation, expansion of arable land especially in the subtropics, and working out better co-operation that can end the useless diversion of resources into mutual assured destruction approaches to security. Instead of waiting for the seas to rise, why not divert them into desalination and irrigation on a large scale. We can engineer this so that an early stage won't lower sea levels appreciably, but later stages could do so if we perceive the need to keep sea levels constant.

This might take 40 to 80 years to plan, engineer and accomplish, about the time scale we are told the catastrophe could unfold. It seems unlikely to happen without a massive international agreement to co-operate. Two key areas would be west Africa and the Persian Gulf, areas that are beset by a lot of sectarian divisions not really of our making (by us I mean the developed countries) so it becomes tricky to work out any strategy that might induce co-operation there. It would not hurt the world of the future if that came about, and maybe that's one hidden benefit of the problems many think we are facing.

As to what will really happen, I have to confess an almost total ignorance, it could range anywhere from a climate a bit colder than we have nowadays with some return to the peak ice and cold conditions of the LIA, to steady-state or slight warming, to runaway warming. And to be frank, any of those could happen even if we weren't here. The idea that the weather of the past century (let's say 1880 to 1980 as a period before AGW) is somehow "normal" and should be maintained is rather bizarre when you consider how dramatically the climate has shifted in the past.

One other point that sometimes comes up in these discussions, what about the natural cycles that produce glacial periods (ice ages although technically we are still in one)? The best research on that seems to indicate that by luck we have hit a sort of flat zone in all the orbital cycles that are heading to weak variations for many thousands of years, meaning that unlike the brief pause between glacial periods in the past two major events, we will get a longer pause perhaps 20,000 years or longer, with variations between warm and cold but essentially non-glacial climates. So if we're warming that up slightly, it may not be too bad an outcome but we can't assume that we are staving off an inevitable ice age around the corner.