Tag Archives: Global Warming

What The HadCRUT4 Update Means

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Building up on Paul Penrose’s comment at JS:

How is this news if the results are not statistically significant? Or do people not know what that means? Once you take that into account what they are saying is: News flash – global temperature has not increased since 1998!

Actually, the news flash should be that, since 1998:

  1. Global temperature has not increased in any meaningful manner
  2. Northern Hemisphere temperature has not increased at all (some bits of the Arctic aside)
  3. At most we could talk of an Arctic, not Global Warming
  4.  All of the above, despite all the continuous fudging and cooling of the past

Once again…Whatever Arctic warming there’s been, it’s also been inconsequential. And if HadCRUT4 doesn’t kill Global Warming, it certainly helps putting it in the right place..

A Sea-Surface Miracle!

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Overlong “On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set” blog post just out (after a few technical glitches) at Judith Curry’s comes to a conclusion that aounds like yet another climate-related miracle…

HadSST3 selectively removes the majority of the long term variations from the pre-1960 part of the record. ie. it removes the majority of the climate variation…

…that cannot be attributed to anthropogenic global warming!

How unexpected!

Two Matters Of Logic (And Timewasting Avoidance)

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A couple of timewasting avoidance schemes when dealing with anti-skeptic Defenders of the Faith in Science:

(1) The Congealed Minds

Some people pop up in skeptic blogs commenting in a way similar to swashbuckling (or marauding), making statements such as “I believe the scientists doing the research are a much better judge of that than you are“.

That’s a very good sign that we’re dealing with people who:

  • Worship mainstream scientific literature
  • Are willing mouthpieces of somebody else
  • Routinely misrepresent science as an organically growing process where past interpretations are cast in stone
  • Act like those philosophers who would reply to Galileo continuously quoting Aristotle and the Aristotelians, rather than accept to reason by themselves

The only question to ask them is: Is there anything anybody could ever say, show, write, demonstrate, ask or explain in a blog or comment to a blog, that will make you change your mind?

The answer will of course be “No”. Therefore there is no point debating with them.

(2) The Deferrers

Another common anti-skeptic tactic is to invoke some Higher Authority, eg: “I won’t presume to substitute my non-professional judgment for that of someone who’s dedicated his career to a pursuit of unbiased scientific knowledge, just as I wouldn’t substitute my judgment for that of an oncologist or a neurologist treating myself or someone close to me“.

That’s a completely meaningless statement, because it is supremely illogical. If a person defers judgment to somebody else, obviously what that person writes has no value at all: we should always be looking for the opinion of “somebody else”. Anybody arguing “don’t listen to me, listen to somebody else” is a prisoner of twisted logic, as the first part of that sentence negates the second one. Therefore there is no point debating with them.