In article ,
says...

On Monday, June 4, 2018 at 3:12:00 PM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article ,
says...

I claim the current consensus is biased and those who fawn over it are
likewise biased,

It indeed is ... biased towards the truth.

I disagree.

Do you prefer some other kind of bias?

I would prefer that AGW advocates not try to shut down research that might
affect their agenda in a contrary way. Example: attempting to stop CERN
from doing the CLOUD experiment.

The CLOUD experiment seems to be alive and well. And while the
contribution from cosmic rays in forming clouds in our atmosphere might
be interesting, I don't see the relevance of it to the AGW question.
After all, the amount of cosmic rays striking the Earth is quite
independent from our emissions of CO2.

BTW which climate researchers have tried to stop the CLOUD experiment at
CERN? Please name a few of them, preferably with relevant references.
ANd, yes, they should be researchers in climate science, not zealot
advocates of any kind. Zealit advocates are hardly interesting -- they
are a matter of psychology and mass communication, not of the Earth
sciences.

even to the point of denigrating skeptics

Skeptics are of course ok. Deniers are not ok.

In your not-so-humble opinion.

Do you disagree with me? DO you think deniers are ok?

with claiming that "overstatement" is not bias. It CERTAINLY is since
they're concocting a false argument. This is baloney. It's also ad
hominem rather than to the discussion.

And this is how AGW advocates tell the truth?

Are you commenting on yourself?

You seem to have missed my earlier point that water vapor is a red
herring; it may contribute more to the greenhouse effect directly than
carbon dioxide, but it's an effect, not a cause.

I think I answered it, but I'm not sure. It's not necessarily an effect.
Certainly, air can hold more water vapor if its warmer, so IF CO2 causes
an increase in temperature, there will be more greenhouse effect than
what comes directly from the CO2. For some reason, however, this effect
is less than what the climate models predict.

On what do you base this claim? Cherry-picking empiical data? Something
else?

http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/

This is not a climate model but merely a radiation model.

Yuu wrote "this effect is less than what the climate models predict"
where youwrote "climate models" in the plural form. So you must have
examined more than just one model which isn't even a climate model. Which
climate models are you referring to here? All existing models, without
exception? Or only some models -- which ones?

Play around with it. A doubling of the CO2 level from 400 ppm to 800 ppm
results in about a 1% decrease in the outgoing IR flux, or about 3 W/m^2.
Reduce the level from 400 to 200 ppm increases the outgoing IR flux by about
1%, or about 2.7 W/m^2. Going from 200 to 400 ppm results in a decrease of
2.7 W/m^2 whereas going from 400 to 800 ppm results in a decrease of about
3 W/m^2. As I understand it, IPCC climate models assume a linear effect,
whereas MODTRAN shows it to be quite nonlinear.

3 W/m^2 is equivalent to the variation in the solar constant and earth's
albedo variation, so doubling the CO2 level, which won't happen for 200
years at the present rate of increase, is almost in the noise.

I played around with it and it was fun. However, it gives you the upwards
IR radiation as seen from an altitude of 70 km, well above 99.9% of the
greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. And what you see there is the
radiation from these greenhouse gases, not from the ground. Look at the
diagram to the right, which shows the radiation intensity as a function
of wavelength (or wavenumber). Although the ground temperature is 300K,
the upward radiation temperature from 70 km altitude never reaches 300K.

So what you see here is the radiation balance between the Sun and the
upper atmpsphere of the Earth. OF COURSE the upward IR heat flux at this
altitude is quite independent of the number of ppm's of CO2, as you
noted. The heat flux from the Earth into space must, on the average,
naturally equal the incoming light and heat from the Sun. This says
little about the temperatures at or near the ground, which is what
concerns us humans who live on the ground.

You would obtain a similar result at Venus: the upward IR radiation from
Venus is on the average the same as the incoming light and heat from the
Sun - revealing little about the oven-like temperatures on the surface on
Venus.

This radiationb model also gives the ground temperature as very nearly
300K (299.7K to be precise). But that value seems to be hardwired into
the program - you can change it by switching from "Tropical atmosphere"
to "Midlatitude Summer" or "Subarctic Winter" or 3 other choices. But
apart from that it seems completely unaffected by e.g. the amount of CO2
I choose. I tried values from 0 ppm CO2 to 999999 ppm CO2 and the ground
temperature remained at 299.7K (Tropical atmosphere), not changing by
even 0.1K. So you are deluded if you use this model to conclude that
"changing the amount of CO2 does not affect the ground temperature".

The fact that most of the "climate skeptics" among scientists have
turned out to be in the pay of oil companies, though, is indicative.

And "climate scientists" work for governments, which they rely on for
their paychecks.

Which makes them much more unbiased than if they get their paycheck from
some private company with a business agenda. You do recognize that
researchers are humans too which must make their living somehow, don't
you? Give one example of making your living in a way which makes you more
unbiased than if you get your salary from the government.

I worked most of my career on gov't contracts so you bet I was biased.

You failed to give an example of making your living in a way which makes
you less biased for research.

If dissenting views have trouble getting published in orthodox peer-
reviewed venues, that usually says something about the quality of the
work involved;

Or it says something about the bias of the "peers."

Precisely that argument is used by flat earth activists....

That's bull****. Don't mention that crap again or this discussion is over.

Did I step on an aching toe of yours?

The argument "bias of your peers" is often used by **anyone** who wants
to oppose the mainstream - as if general agreement by itself always is
something bad. But if we never reach any general agreement, we will be
unable to perform any kind of action which requires resources beyond what
an individual or a small group can provide. Is that your ideal?

So you don't like peer review. With what would you like to replace it? No
review at all?

Peer review is usually okay, but there are problems when it's controlled
by one faction.

Such as the faction claiming that a Perpeetum Mobile is a physical
impossibility? :-)

I could has easily accuse a "conspiracy" of preventing chemical journals
from publishing papers on the chemical (as opposed to nuclear)
transmutation of lead into gold.

The true sciences are much more "settled" than climate change is. We know
A LOT about the energies of the nucleus versus electron energy levels.
There are no "big problems" hanging out there in chemistry, and there are
few in physics.

"Most" is one thing. "Nearly all" is another.

Funny, I know a few PhDs in science ranging from physicists to soil
scientist who claim AGW is bunk and politically motivated. I know none
who are AGW advocates. So my own "survey" is in stark contrast to the
claims bandied about by the advocates.

How many of those are climate researchers?

Physicists are used to simple problems where fundamental effects are
researched. In addition, physicists are used to systems they can perform
experiments on. They are not used to very complex systems like the Earth
with its atmosphere and its climate. which they can only observe, not
experiment on.

Exactly my point. If you can't do experiments or give accurate
predictions then it's not a true science.

That's your definition. But I'll get along with it for awhile -- so let's
say that climate science isn't a "true science" since we cannot put a
hundred Earth's under a hundred glass covers in the laboratory and
subject them to different influences (e.g. increase the CO2 in half of
them and not increasing the CO2 in the other half), and then wait several
centuries to observe what happens. We will never be able to do that, so
in that respect climate science, or any other Earth science, isn't a
"true science" in the same way that e.g. particle physics is. We only
have one single Earth.

So now that we've agreed to label climate science "not a true science",
how do you suggest we should deal with this situation? Should we ignore
climate science completely and let Nature subject us to anything which
may appear in the climate of the future? Even though climate science is
not a "true science", it is still the best we have (or else it would
already have been replaced with something better -- any suggestions for a
replacement?). So why not make the best use of it?

Regarding your suggestion "wait for more data" - that's not always a
feasible option. Consider a village on a slope of a volcano which shows
signs that it may soon erupt. Should that village be evacuated or not? If
we wait until the volcano actually does erupt it will be too late and
most of the villagers will die. How would you act in such a situation?
Would you act differently of some of the villages also were your personal
friends? Having someone as your personal friend **will** make you biased,
that is a well-known fact in the courts all over the world.

So what is being suggested is a radical re-orientation of our society
towards less dependency on energy and less energy use. This would
downgrade heavy industry, and thus impact the military defense
capabilities of the United States of America.

Indeed, but there are other consequences. Anthropologist Carleton Coon
pointed out that civilization itself is determined by converting
available energy into social structure, so less dependence on energy
means a debasing of society.

Furthermore, the developing countries are where the increasing CO2
emissions will be coming from, so it is pointless to harm the USA
in a fanatic process of self-immolation.

Yep -- "harm the USA" -- that's the main preoccupation of climate deniers.
They think it's better to make our civilisation collapse than to
"harm the USA". But they'll shoot themselves in the foot, since a
collapse of our civilisation **also** will "harm the USA"....

If the US collapses the world will be thrown into chaos, so your argument
is baloney. You seem to be a George Soros sycophant.

A collapse of our civilization would not just affect the US, it would
affect Europe and Asia just as much and have consequences there too. In
comparison, the collapse of the US could be relatively insignificant.
Unless of course some future Trump-like idiot president of yours starts
to detonate your nukes to "demonstrate" the "significance" of the US. Is
that your idea of showing the importance of the US?

Doing something about it, in the way we're generally told to, actually
is the alternative that seems to have genuinely devastating
consequences, while it's the risk of doing nothing that's small.

Exactly. I'm not saying to do nothing, but I am saying to take it slow,
improve the climate models, gather more data and move incrementally
toward reducing greenhouse gases (but not water vapor :-)

If you were an extraterrestial, observing the Earth from space, you could
argue like that. But you are a human living on Earth and whatever happens
here will affect you too. The situation here on Earth is a bit more
urgent than you realize. Waiting a century or so (which would be required
to meet your demands) is very likely waiting too long...

As I have demonstrated, you are dead wrong about that.

You've not demonstrated anything. Babbling does not count as
demonstrating.

Anyway, so in your opinion we can continue emitting CO2 as before without
any grave consequenses - correct?

However, the Earth's supply of fossil fuel isn't infinite. With our ever
increasing demand for it, we'll run out of it within a century or so. And
that would certainly "harm the USA" - what's your opinion about that?