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The Need for a Climate Science Red Team

A religious person once defended their beliefs this way: "If I am wrong, I wasted my life, if you are wrong you wasted eternity". What would the world lose if we tried not to sh*t on the planet and see if it would heal? There has to be an effect of all the people and all the changes those people impose on the earth. I'm just sayin'......

Currently loads, 40%+, of US grain is sent to be converted into biofuel. This has raised the price of basic food by 30% to 70%. My guess is 20 million of the world's poorest 3 billion people die each year as a result of this.

Is that at all significant?
 
So, emissions don't matter?


[h=1]Correlation Between Emissions and Warming in the Central England Temperature Series[/h]Posted on 28 Apr 17 by GEOFF CHAMBERS 8 Comments
This article by Jamal Munshi challenges the whole theory of AGW in the most radical way imaginable. From the Abstract: A comprehensive detrended correlation analysis of the daily mean Central England Temperature (CET) series for each calendar month against fossil fuel emissions for the 245-year study period 1772-2016 is presented. Time scales of … Continue re
 
So, emissions don't matter?


[h=1]Correlation Between Emissions and Warming in the Central England Temperature Series[/h]Posted on 28 Apr 17 by GEOFF CHAMBERS 8 Comments
This article by Jamal Munshi challenges the whole theory of AGW in the most radical way imaginable. From the Abstract: A comprehensive detrended correlation analysis of the daily mean Central England Temperature (CET) series for each calendar month against fossil fuel emissions for the 245-year study period 1772-2016 is presented. Time scales of … Continue re

I'm a firm believer that it is the aerosols associated with fossil fuel burning which have more of an effect than CO2. First world nations started with dirty burning and have cleaned up our act. Now, it's the emerging nations producing those nasty aerosols.
 
I'm a firm believer that it is the aerosols associated with fossil fuel burning which have more of an effect than CO2. First world nations started with dirty burning and have cleaned up our act. Now, it's the emerging nations producing those nasty aerosols.

You may be onto something.
 
[h=1]EPA’s Pruitt: Establish ‘Red Team, Blue Team’ of scientists to examine climate risk of CO2[/h]Interviewed by Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says the American people deserve ‘a true legitimate, peer reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.’ Pruitt calls for the establishment of a ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ of scientist to examine ‘what do we know, what don’t we know, and what risk does it pose to health, the…
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It is about time! While the basic Forcing warming from added CO2 is well accepted, it is poorly understood.
Hansen's calculations of warming were based on the energy imbalance at the tropopause, not the top of the atmosphere,
Yet all future refinements of the 2 X CO2 energy imbalance are based on his tropopause number.
 
You have a RED Team with much deeper pockets than anybody on Earth - it's called the Oil Industry. Like BIG TOBACCO in the '60s, they are spending BILLIONS to sponsor fake reports to discredit the 95% of climate scientists who have studied the issue for years and years, and concluded that the Earth is warming, and mankind's activities are responsible. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT!!!
 
You have a RED Team with much deeper pockets than anybody on Earth - it's called the Oil Industry. Like BIG TOBACCO in the '60s, they are spending BILLIONS to sponsor fake reports to discredit the 95% of climate scientists who have studied the issue for years and years, and concluded that the Earth is warming, and mankind's activities are responsible. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT!!!
You are certainly at liberty to continue to believe that, but there are portions of the concept known as AGW
that have not been scientifically vetted.
The most basic concept of the forcing from doubling the CO2 level, still has open questions.
Hansen thinks the place to measure the energy imbalance is at the tropopause,
but we do not have any way to validate an energy imbalance at the tropopause.
The top of the atmosphere would be the place (the edge of the system)
but the numbers there show a much lower energy imbalance.
We cannot just say the Science is settled, and that makes it so, Science is about reproducible tests.
 
You have a RED Team with much deeper pockets than anybody on Earth - it's called the Oil Industry. Like BIG TOBACCO in the '60s, they are spending BILLIONS to sponsor fake reports to discredit the 95% of climate scientists who have studied the issue for years and years, and concluded that the Earth is warming, and mankind's activities are responsible. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT!!!

There is no evidence whatsoever of your alleged Oil Industry funding.
 
There is no evidence whatsoever of your alleged Oil Industry funding.

The naivete and misinformation of your comment is totally outside of reality.

HEARTLAND INSTITUTE:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/conservative-think-tank-mailed-book-145800086.html

The book, "Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change," is a 136-page work that proposes human-driven climate change has been overblown as a threat to global stability in the coming decades.

Koch brothers donated big to ALEC, Heartland Institute - Salon.com

Among the other groups the Koch brothers donated to were the Heartland Institute, the climate change-skeptical think tank, which received $25,000; the Federalist Society, which got $260,000; and the Ayn Rand Institute, which took in $100,000.

Heartland Institute - SourceWatch


The Heartland Institute is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2010-2011...
As a part of its 2013 agenda, ALEC partnered with the Heartland Institute to roll back the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), state-level legislation that requires utility companies to produce a certain amount of their total energy from renewable sources....
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills...
Heartland barely misses being classed more restrictively as a private foundation - according to its 2009 Form 990, "public support" made up just 33% of contributions for 2009 and 36% for 2008. (The bulk of support would have come from large donors.) (If public support falls below 33 1/3% for 2 years, it becomes a private foundation.)...
Tobacco control measures such as tobacco tax increases (the Institute denies the adverse health effects of second-hand smoke)
 
Your charade is plain for anyone to see. I'm just the guy saying it.

Come on guy this whole AGW agenda is he biggest scam in history that has already cost trillions and has achieved exactly nothing ...... what is it you want because our species isn't going to go away any time soon. Perhaps you should go 'loath' yourself somewhere else :roll:
 
We are all smart people, perhaps we can do our own red team blue team!
When you peel away all the layers that is the concept of AGW, you get to one central
core, that doubling the CO2 level will cause an atmospheric energy imbalance, that will cause the
the atmosphere to warm.
This imbalance is usually stated in watts per meter square, Wm-2.
Since James Hansen, started this off, here is what he says, in Hansen,et al 1997.
Radiative forcing and climate response - Hansen - 1997 - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres - Wiley Online Library
Hansen1997TOA.jpg
His Top of the Atmosphere imbalance number for 2XCO2 is 2.62 Wm-2.
This is odd because many of the follow on papers use a number like 4 Wm-2 or 3.71 Wm-2,
which is more like Hansen's tropopause number.
So where should we count system energy imbalance? at the edge of the system, or somewhere inside the system?
Imagine an office building owner who wants to know how many people remain in the building after hours,
does he count people getting on and off the elevators, or the people entering and leaving the building exits?
Clearly the exits, because not everyone uses the elevators!
 
The naivete and misinformation of your comment is totally outside of reality.

HEARTLAND INSTITUTE:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/conservative-think-tank-mailed-book-145800086.html

The book, "Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change," is a 136-page work that proposes human-driven climate change has been overblown as a threat to global stability in the coming decades.

Koch brothers donated big to ALEC, Heartland Institute - Salon.com

Among the other groups the Koch brothers donated to were the Heartland Institute, the climate change-skeptical think tank, which received $25,000; the Federalist Society, which got $260,000; and the Ayn Rand Institute, which took in $100,000.

Heartland Institute - SourceWatch


The Heartland Institute is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2010-2011...
As a part of its 2013 agenda, ALEC partnered with the Heartland Institute to roll back the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), state-level legislation that requires utility companies to produce a certain amount of their total energy from renewable sources....
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills...
Heartland barely misses being classed more restrictively as a private foundation - according to its 2009 Form 990, "public support" made up just 33% of contributions for 2009 and 36% for 2008. (The bulk of support would have come from large donors.) (If public support falls below 33 1/3% for 2 years, it becomes a private foundation.)...
Tobacco control measures such as tobacco tax increases (the Institute denies the adverse health effects of second-hand smoke)

So . . . your big conspiracy comes down to $25,000!?!?! :lamo

And I note you dodged discussion of leading skeptical scientists.
 
A religious person once defended their beliefs this way: "If I am wrong, I wasted my life, if you are wrong you wasted eternity". What would the world lose if we tried not to sh*t on the planet and see if it would heal? There has to be an effect of all the people and all the changes those people impose on the earth. I'm just sayin'......

No one is arguing that taking care of our environment is bad. This is just more false narrative BS Rex. Our problem, those of us that find the AGW position to be in err, isn't the premise, it's the proposed solutions and their accompanying costs. Spending Trillions of dollars, lowering economic potential and restricting access to power sources all in return for a potential meager reduction in possible potential warming is foolish.
 
Currently loads, 40%+, of US grain is sent to be converted into biofuel. This has raised the price of basic food by 30% to 70%. My guess is 20 million of the world's poorest 3 billion people die each year as a result of this.


Just for the benefit of other readers, I will repeat (for about the 20th time) the facts that this is a claim

> which from the beginning Tim clearly showed us was a product of malice and dishonesty by his repeated slander of multiple forum members as being 'complicit' in his made-up number of deaths;
> which is literally impossible given the global death rates and hunger-related death rates (being less than half his number);
> which is over one hundred times larger than the figure that even a right-wing think-tank produced, which he's been repeatedly shown;
> which he never even tried to substantiate for the first couple of years he was using it;
> which, when he finally tried to retrospectively justify it, was vastly larger than the figure which his own dodgy guess-based maths produced (he was out by a factor of 40 even if his baseless assumptions were granted);
> which was still vastly larger than the figure which his own dodgy guess-based maths produced the second time he tried to retrospectively justify it (that time he was 'only' out by a factor of 22; the final result would have been ~875,000 even if all his baseless assumptions and impossible made-up numbers were granted).



It's worth noting that no matter how frequently and dishonestly Tim promotes his ridiculous claims, he is never challenged on them (at least as far as I recall seeing) by the other posters who share his opposition to action on climate change. Readers can infer whatever they will from this apparent contempt for truth, evidence and honesty.
 
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Just for the benefit of other readers, I will repeat (for about the 20th time) the facts that this is a claim

> which from the beginning Tim clearly showed us was a product of malice and dishonesty by his repeated slander of multiple forum members as being 'complicit' in his made-up number of deaths;
> which is literally impossible given the global death rates and hunger-related death rates (being less than half his number);
> which is over one hundred times larger than the figure that even a right-wing think-tank produced, which he's been repeatedly shown;
> which he never even tried to substantiate for the first couple of years he was using it;
> which, when he finally tried to retrospectively justify it, was vastly larger than the figure which his own dodgy guess-based maths produced (he was out by a factor of 40 even if his baseless assumptions were granted);
> which was still vastly larger than the figure which his own dodgy guess-based maths produced the second time he tried to retrospectively justify it (that time he was 'only' out by a factor of 22; the final result would have been ~875,000 even if all his baseless assumptions and impossible made-up numbers were granted).



It's worth noting that no matter how frequently and dishonestly Tim promotes his ridiculous claims, he is never challenged on them (at least as far as I recall seeing) by the other posters who share his opposition to action on climate change. Readers can infer whatever they will from this apparent contempt for truth, evidence and honesty.
And yet no one can deny that the doubling of the corn price since the US started making corn ethanol, has cause
many people who were in the marginal food category to go hungry.
 
And yet no one can deny that the doubling of the corn price since the US started making corn ethanol, has cause
many people who were in the marginal food category to go hungry.

The problem with the zealots here is that they get piqued when someone points out that tying a tourniquet around the economic throat of our species in order to staunch some imagined future nosebleed is a very bad idea

This whole agenda is simply the politics of envy in a green cape. The policies they hope will penalise the rich will inevitably impact the rest of us very badly indeed
 
The naivete and misinformation of your comment is totally outside of reality.

HEARTLAND INSTITUTE:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/conservative-think-tank-mailed-book-145800086.html

The book, "Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change," is a 136-page work that proposes human-driven climate change has been overblown as a threat to global stability in the coming decades.

Koch brothers donated big to ALEC, Heartland Institute - Salon.com

Among the other groups the Koch brothers donated to were the Heartland Institute, the climate change-skeptical think tank, which received $25,000; the Federalist Society, which got $260,000; and the Ayn Rand Institute, which took in $100,000.

Heartland Institute - SourceWatch


The Heartland Institute is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2010-2011...
As a part of its 2013 agenda, ALEC partnered with the Heartland Institute to roll back the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), state-level legislation that requires utility companies to produce a certain amount of their total energy from renewable sources....
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills...
Heartland barely misses being classed more restrictively as a private foundation - according to its 2009 Form 990, "public support" made up just 33% of contributions for 2009 and 36% for 2008. (The bulk of support would have come from large donors.) (If public support falls below 33 1/3% for 2 years, it becomes a private foundation.)...
Tobacco control measures such as tobacco tax increases (the Institute denies the adverse health effects of second-hand smoke)

Do you like using logical fallacies?

Is it possible that they might be right on things every now and then?

I would suggest that Heartland is more accurate than Sourcewatch...
 
And yet no one can deny that the doubling of the corn price since the US started making corn ethanol, has cause
many people who were in the marginal food category to go hungry.

Do you believe that's a good reason to continually turn a blind eye when someone constantly promotes blatant lies? If anything, the absolute absurdity of Tim's claims make it look like tinfoil hat nonsense and therefore make a mockery of what should be a serious issue.


FYI a year before the GFC spike, corn prices ranged between $2.90 and $4 per bushel (November 2006 to October 2007). US bioethanol production (<90% from corn) more than tripled between 2006 and 2015 (4,884 million gallons to 14,807 million gallons), and in the comparable period November 2015 to October 2016 corn prices ranged from $3.20 to $4.40. That's a 10% increase. On the other hand, it's almost a 50% decrease from the 2011-2013 prices, despite an 11% increase in production from 2012 to 2015. Bioethanol demand must inevitably have some impact on food prices, but "no one can deny" that those impacts are A) impossible to precisely quantify but B) obviously tiny compared to various other factors that cause short- and long-term fluctuations.

As I've already pointed out, and have pointed out many times before, one hostile estimate of the human cost from biofuel effects on food prices - by a right-wing think tank with an agenda of opposing biofuels and climate change action generally, promoted on WUWT and explicitly shown to Tim at his request by Jack Hays - was in the order of ~200,000 deaths per year, smaller by a factor of one hundred than Tim's lies.
 
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Do you believe that's a good reason to continually turn a blind eye when someone constantly promotes blatant lies? If anything, the absolute absurdity of Tim's claims make it look like tinfoil hat nonsense and therefore make a mockery of what should be a serious issue.


FYI a year before the GFC spike, corn prices ranged between $2.90 and $4 per bushel (November 2006 to October 2007). US bioethanol production (<90% from corn) more than tripled between 2006 and 2015 (4,884 million gallons to 14,807 million gallons), and in the comparable period November 2015 to October 2016 corn prices ranged from $3.20 to $4.40. That's a 10% increase. On the other hand, it's almost a 50% decrease from the 2011-2013 prices, despite an 11% increase in production from 2012 to 2015. Bioethanol demand must inevitably have some impact on food prices, but "no one can deny" that those impacts are A) impossible to precisely quantify but B) obviously tiny compared to various other factors that cause short- and long-term fluctuations.

As I've already pointed out, and have pointed out many times before, one hostile estimate of the human cost from biofuel effects on food prices - by a right-wing think tank with an agenda of opposing biofuels and climate change action generally, promoted on WUWT and explicitly shown to Tim at his request by Jack Hays - was in the order of ~200,000 deaths per year, smaller by a factor of one hundred than Tim's lies.
Wiki, seems to think the US became the world leader in ethanol production in 2005,
On your posted graph of corn prices, the prices were about $2.00 a bushel for 2005.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 increased the amount of biofuel (usually ethanol) that must be mixed with gasoline sold in the United States to 4 billion US gallons (15,000,000 m3) by 2006, 6.1 billion US gallons (23,000,000 m3) by 2009 and 7.5 billion US gallons (28,000,000 m3) by 2012.
In 2006 the price of corn rose from an average of $2 a bushel to an average of $3.8 per bushel,
and has not returned to the $2 range since.
I am not speaking to Tim's numbers, only to the idea that the US corn ethanol program have caused
a considerable increase in would hunger, by nearly doubling the cost of a staple food grain.
 
The Energy Policy Act of 2005

When the Presidency, House of Reps and Senate were all under Republican control...

I am not speaking to Tim's numbers

I know you're not. That's the problem I pointed out: Obvious falsehoods and ridiculous alarmism apparently don't matter in the slightest to you guys no matter how often and how brazenly they are thrown around, if the rhetoric is shaped fit the 'no climate action' agenda.

(The notion that biofuel crops are a 'green' thing itself being yet another misrepresentation, as we see above.)
 
You have a RED Team with much deeper pockets than anybody on Earth - it's called the Oil Industry. Like BIG TOBACCO in the '60s, they are spending BILLIONS to sponsor fake reports to discredit the 95% of climate scientists who have studied the issue for years and years, and concluded that the Earth is warming, and mankind's activities are responsible. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT!!!

Why do you keep propagating a lie? There is nothing that states 95% of climate scientists say that our activities are responsible for the warming.
 
When the Presidency, House of Reps and Senate were all under Republican control...
I am sure that distinction matters little to someone who cannot feed their kids.


I know you're not. That's the problem I pointed out: Obvious falsehoods and ridiculous alarmism apparently don't matter in the slightest to you guys no matter how often and how brazenly they are thrown around, if the rhetoric is shaped fit the 'no climate action' agenda.

(The notion that biofuel crops are a 'green' thing itself being yet another misrepresentation, as we see above.)
While Tim's numbers may be exaggerated, it does not change the fact that US policies have cause corn prices to increase,
and that has limited the poorest in the world ability to feed themselves.
I have always thought placing our machines in competition for our food supply was a bad idea.
 
I am sure that distinction matters little to someone who cannot feed their kids.



While Tim's numbers may be exaggerated, it does not change the fact that US policies have cause corn prices to increase,
and that has limited the poorest in the world ability to feed themselves.
I have always thought placing our machines in competition for our food supply was a bad idea.

You and most reasonable people. But automotive lobbies see it as a way around pesky efficiency standards and increased emphasis on mass transit; agricultural lobbies see a convenient opportunity to call for more subsidies and tax breaks; and politicians see it as a handy compromise which can be blamed on those pesky environmentalists when it inevitably goes bad. The same would undoubtedly be true if the Democrats had held the balance of power when those measures were implemented, but the fact that it was the Republicans shows all the more clearly that action on climate change was never the point.

Biofuels under (belated) scrutiny | Greenpeace
Feature story - 15 January, 2008


Over the last few years biofuels seem to have enchanted governments, car manufacturers and many others who must cut emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. US President Bush, hardly a fan of climate solutions, suddenly started promoting biofuels to make it appear he was taking action to cut emissions. Car manufactures have seized on biofuels as the perfect get-out-of-jail free card. Under pressure, especially in Europe, to meet efficiency targets they have consistently missed for the last 8 years, the manufacturers lobby convinced EU politicians that biofuels were the answer.

Many biofuels targets have been hastily proposed in the last two years for political expediency or to deflect attention from the efficiency targets car manufacturers fight tooth and nail against. But behind the hype, evidence has been mounting that many biofuels might even be worse than fossil fuels.

Put very simply biofuel problems fall in to 3 areas:

- Biofuels made from industrial food crops can produce more emissions due to large fossil fuel use in their production.
- Biofuels from other crops such as palm oil are often grown on land which has been cleared of tropical rainforest, generating huge amounts of carbon emissions.
- Increasing demand for biofuels means land used for food production is taken over driving up the price of basic foods.


The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd November 2004


Used as they are today, on a very small scale, they do no harm. A few thousand greens in the United Kingdom are running their cars on used chip fat. . . .

To run the country's cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the UK. Even the EU's more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all available cropland.

If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.

This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there were unmet demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people's demand for food, the car owners win every time. Something very much like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of livestock on Earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.​

It's worth noting that Tim continued to slander me (and Deuce) as being 'complicit' or not 'caring' about this issue numerous times after we each expressed our clear opposition to biofuel crops, as I linked above. His claims are not merely mistaken, they are wildly obvious and repeated lies which detract from a real issue and which he has proven are motivated by pure malice.

But kudos to you for finally bothering to acknowledge, when called out and asked and pressed again, that his numbers are "exaggerated." If that level of commitment to truth and honesty were shared by all contrarians it would be an improvement... for what that's worth :roll:
 
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But kudos to you for finally bothering to acknowledge, when called out and asked and pressed again, that his numbers are "exaggerated." If that level of commitment to truth and honesty were shared by all contrarians it would be an improvement... for what that's worth :roll:

It seems both sides use hyperbole to state their case!
I happen to think the catastrophic predictions of CO2 warming are based on the worst case, or even implausible scenarios.
As to biofuels, you lay out a good case as to why that is not a path we should take.
 
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