42 Comments

I would add that how you formulate the Hypothesis leads to different interpretations. If you test the Hypothesis H that "TCs are stronger", then the data says "low confidence". If you test the null hypothesis Ho (TCs are not stronger) then the result is " Accept Ho and reject H". It is scientific sleight-of-hand to even say "low confidence" of stronger TCs.

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Or formally, Ho = "No change to TC strength"

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Franklin Roosevelt's iconic quote, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself", an attempt to calm a country, prevent disorder and think rationally, is still relevant but in a perversely different context. Governments with the examples of the efficiency of fear as prime motivator for defense by recent wars, now uses it for longer term ambitions as in E. C. Climate Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard's 2013, "We are right even if we are wrong" statement defending crippling cost increases,

"Let's say that science, some decades from now, said 'we were wrong, it was not about climate', would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?"

"Unless you do as we say... you, your children and the entire planet will die!" falls a bit above the level of microaggression.

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Long wave radiation is absorbed by molecules with carbon-oxygen, carbon-halogen, ozone (O3) etc and that energy is spread to other molecules through collisions. There is also an excitation and re-radiation of very short wavelength that is unable to warm anything (unless the thing is already exceptionally cold). While trained as a scientist i have not practiced for decades and you should treat this with skepticism, it’s garnered from reading stuff like Roger’s but interpreted by me and poorly regurgitated.

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Would someone please explain to me how CO2 "re-radiates" energy? I've read it only absorbs photons, which then increase the kinetic energy of the molecule, which then loses but spreads that energy through collisions with other molecules. The half-life of the excited electron is very long, so once a CO2 molecule absorbs energy, it cannot absorb any more.

I have not seen anything where CO2 absorbs a photon, has an electron excited into a higher orbital shell, and then the unstable electron drops back to it's lower shell, re-radiating some sort of energy/radiation.

Or, when they say CO2 "re-radiates" they mean something else?

This seems crucial to me.

I'm very skeptical of any sources, so would appreciate someone "neutral", or an explanation in your own words that seems credible.

I don't believe 99% of what I read, on any subject. I follow Roger because I believe that even when I think he might be wrong, he's wrong in good faith. Nearly everyone else is wrong in bad faith.

TIA.

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After two degrees in Engineering, I have been in the financial/trading markets for 43 years. We have a saying, "Let me pick my beginning and end points and I can "prove" anything."........

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Not to mention John Von Neumann's observation about models, "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, with five I can make him wiggle his trunk".

The persistent public confusion of synthesized "model output" with observational "data" forces us to"Never Never Land".

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And then the evergreen "If you torture the statistics long enough, you can get them to say anything." ; )

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As a non coffee drinking Stanford freshman, I learned about "confirmation bias" in Chem 101 lab by falling into the 7.30 AM section which had a 10 point lower average than the 8.30 section.

Amused to see another freshman's curiosity take down Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne for data falsification in his "research".

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I was on the other coast. MIT. 7:30? AM? You're a better man than I.... ; )

Kind of ironic, as I had to get up at 5:15 am for 17 years to get down to the Chicago Board of Trade to be ready to trade options on the 30 yr bond future, which started trading at 7:20 am, CT. Done at 2 pm though. : )

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Well, Palo Alto weather was better...but my Chemistry is still in a fog.

55 years later, I realize so much of what I learned was not on the curriculum but more in the older tradition of a "well rounded" education.

I fear the narrow focus of research and the ignorance of the world beyond a siloed specialty, very troubling. Grant seeking popping up as the first obvious application of AI to suggest itself, verifies Eisenhower's Farewell Address, "the power of money is ever present---and is greatly to be regarded."

A remarkably prescient document, especially in his original pencil edited copy. https://eisenhowerfoundation.net/primary-source/item/farewell-address-speech-draft

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I'm sure it was. Fall in Boston was awesome though.

You were lucky to get a 'well-rounded' education as an undergrad. MIT did "force" us to take 6 "humanities" courses, IIRC. Half I stupidly blew off as irrelevant; but, one class, on Mark Twain, where the Prof LOOKED so much like Samuel Clemens, riveted me. The latter part of Clemens' life was awful and his writing dark, but, oddly, on the money, IMHO. And I followed up with this prof w his class on Literature and Lore of the American West. The AB Guthrie Trilogy. I reread it every 10 years of so. Funny how I went from relating to the young characters like Boone Caudill to the older character, Jim Summers. : )

In my early 30s, I realized there was a whole Liberal Arts world out there I had missed. I commuted to the CBOT every day by car. (Left home before the first train). To avoid killing someone with road rage (mostly kidding....mostly....) I got cassette tapes from The Teaching Company on all the Great Books and Great Dead White Men. Read the books that especially appealed to me. At MIT we'd arrogantly refer to Liberal Arts majors as "Would you like fries with that.". I realized that the LA majors were the Keepers of the Flame. The Western, Enlightenment Values. That while the degree itself had little practical worth, many of these guys would go to Law School, or B-School, J-School, Med School, and they would carry these values with them into these institutions. Much more valuable than any technology we MIT guys might gin up.

Alas, these values are dead in most universities; and if alive, are used as examples of what was awful.

You're right about the power of money. I've been stunned at how the Tech Bro billionaires have no reservations about exercising their pecuniary or technological power. Hedge fund guys too, to a lesser extent. And, sadly, just like we were, they are largely ignorant of the lessons of the Liberal Arts/History and have no idea of the pernicious role they are playing.

I read The Swerve years ago. About how ancient wisdom was lost during the Dark Ages, and then found by a wandering scribe, in far-flung European monasteries. Author's thesis is this precipitated the Enlightenment, Scientific Method, etc. Maybe. But, I've thought about raising a few million dollars to buy hard copies of every Great Book; ever medical, scientific etc textbook printed before 2020, and storing them in a dry desert cave in the US SW.

Hopefully, I'm just getting old. And the world is weird and scary (to quote Grandpa Simpson), because I'm old. But, I'm also educated in history. And human nature never changes. And there is a reason it took homo sapiens tens of thousands of years to get where we are. (We're intelligent, but irrational, apes). And that the massive, and taken for granted, progress we've made is due to Western Classical Liberal/Enlightenment Values/Scientific Method. Which much of the world does not share. And, increasingly, even the West does not. So, while there's a very good chance my trepidation is age-based, there is a very good chance it is based in a knowledge of human nature.

Thanks for the Eisenhower link. My dad was a career AF pilot, so I grew up on WW II literature.

All the best to you.

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Wisely said but painfully gentle. The critique needed at this stage of the climate doom fiasco requires a bullhorn delivered “Stop With The BS.”

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The discussion on understanding attribution is quite timely. Environment Canada has implemented an attribution model for use by mainstream newsrooms in their weather reporting, which is broadcast nationwide. For your information, this news release was published today in one of our major newspapers, The Globe and Mail.

"The heat wave that enveloped Eastern Canada last month was made between two to 10 times more likely due to climate change, federal officials said Tuesday, offering a sobering and rapid analysis of the effect of planet-warming emissions on the record-breaking temperatures.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says the results of its rapid analysis into the mid-June heat wave over parts of Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada shows it was “much more likely” due to planet-warming emissions.

The results mark the public debut of Canada’s new rapid extreme weather event attribution pilot program, which officials say can determine whether and to what extent climate change made a specific heat event more likely.

The analysis helps drive home how the gradual human-caused changes to the climate, primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels, have already upended weather extremes in Canada.

“Climate change is not just something in the vague future, it’s something that we’re experiencing now,” said Greg Flato, director of climate research at ECCC.

While other government offices carry out rapid attribution analyses, Environment and Climate Change Canada is thought to be one of the first in the world to publicly roll out a tool and automatically apply it across the country, with results shared within several days."

Gary Jones

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Desperate times call for desperate measures, so desperate governments require much more desperation.

Greg Flato's Civil Engineering degrees qualified him as a "Climate Scientist", spending "most of my career at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis," using his "Strategic Leadership Skills" for "Key Deliverables" of Canada's "National Adaptation Strategy".

Linkedin credentials "Top Voices" followed list only Ryan Reynolds, the activist actor and Justin Trudeau.

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Thank you, Roger. That is an excellent discussion of how the actual science is distorted to follow the agenda of "human caused climate change". I think this article is easily understandable by the layman (non scientist, non engineer who has listened to the media story about anthropogenic climate change). I am an engineer with a strong science and engineering background. I have never been able to understand the "attribution" argument, and this article helps me to understand this "bogus" argument.

Robert Benson

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People aren’t safe from the ethics of environmentalism, that puts them in danger of Natural acts. Environmentalism coerces Human action to eliminate our influence on Nature but protects Nature’s coercion from Human action.

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Excellent, Roger.

Peter

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Climate Central the extremely well resourced $10M "non profit" media house providing "impactful" graphics and copy for cash strapped TV and newspapers, ran a program to pressure TV weather presenters to attribute all undesirable effects to "global warming" in order to "leverage the power of trusted messengers" to influence opinion.

Environment Canada has just deployed their new "Rapid Extreme Weather Event Attribution" system which will brief media within days on how to show "the degree to which human-caused climate change affected the likelihood of this specific heat wave."

Along with proposed legislation making comments not in accord with "official science" an indictable offence, both media and public should get the message clearly. If you can't manage to accurately forecast weather 3 days ahead, you need to show the money is spent productively.

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We have a serious problem: most of the media lies and/or exaggerates most of the time, and this has been going on for decades, or possibly for centuries. The Iraq WMD, the "Business as Usual" forecasts, Biden is mentally competent, and the "climate extremes are unusually frequent" propaganda are good examples. And I don't see how we can solve this problem. This means Western civilization is probably going to collapse or be replaced by an Eastern Asia alternative I definitely don't want to control the world.

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It is being solved by people not listening to the MSM anymore and many go bankrupt. Repeat after me: "The MSM is Dead".

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Something seems off here. “Is extreme draught [or hurricanes or wildfires or crop failures] increasing?” does not seem like the right question.

The question, it seems to me, ought to be, “How does the accumulatio of CO2 in the atmosphere affect, inter alia, extreme rainfall patterns?” as part of the questions

a) “What are the net costs and benefits of different trajectories of CO2 emissions that would be the result of different policies to affect those trajectories?” with a follow-up question, “Which of those policies, taking account of their cost, is best?”

b) “What are the expected future effects of CO2 already emitted,” as part of the question, “How can we adapt to these expected effects at least cost?”

Granted the media ask this question, but as we learn in media management school, when asked an improperly formulated question in good faith, we re-interpret the question as a proper one.

Presumably the proper answer to “Did climate change cause/make worse this drought/hurricane/flood?” is something like, “It is hard to attribute this event to past accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, but its occurrence is [or is not, depending on the opinion of the expert giving the opinion] consistent with and adds weight to our conclusion that continued accumulatio of CO2 will cause harm that can be reduced if future emissions are reduced.”

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thanks for the clarity and depth of explanation. It's refreshing to get a logical and in depth explanation of extreme events and contrast it with what we hear and read in the MSM.

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Trenberth is an environmentalist: his observation of Humanity is the Human as immoral because he is a polluter.

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Try this:

Noodles have been warming due to human influences, notably increases in preparing meals and boiling more water in kitchen.

Warmer noodles are associated with stronger appetites (cold ones are not);

Beryl's appetite was unusually strong at the beginning of July;

Therefore, Beryl's appetite is an example of how change of appetite results from boiling water.

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