Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Climate Change Skeptic And Creationist Has New Paper Out

Many people have noted the similarity between some of the tactics employed by Climate Change Denialists and Intelligent Designers. Specifically, sow doubt and demand that the media "report the controversy". But before hearing about Roy Spencer, who has guest posts on both Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science and Anthony Watt's "Watts Up With That Blog" , as well as a new paper out, I had never heard of a climate change denier who was in addition an acknowledged IDer. In 2005, Mr. Spencer wrote:

And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

Now, astrologers, water witches, La Rouchians...the ranks of the deniers is filled with their like. But a Creationist? Surely Climate Change Denialism is on the march!

And seeing this guy appear on Watt's site doesn't surprise me. What is strange is the connection with Roger Pielke Sr., who appears to have forgotten the old adage about laying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.

But since he's stooping to this level: yo Roger! I have a midget who insists its all down to C02, and a talking duck that taps out climatological equations with his beak. Can they do a guest post too?

h/t to Steve Bloom.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Right. And the first loony to post is . . . tah dah !! ti-guy

So perfect.

Us skeptics are waiting for the High Priests of NASA, especially Pope Hansen, to reveal their secret data correction algorithms they used to torque the actual temperature data.

Show us the beef. Reveal your secret potions.

You know . . the scientific method.

Open.
Honest
No predetermined political agendas

Ti-Guy said...

No, I meant loonies like you, Ding-dong...

Are you ever sober? Gosh, I wish I lived in Alberta where you can be stinkin' 24 hours a day.

Oldschool said...

Why do you suppose it is that the Cretch and his Lieberal cronies got us the biggest "Kyoto" CO2 Giveback on the Planet??? And, then proceeded to do absolutely nothing . . . for years??? Where were all the Cdn Believers then . . . why they were sitting quietly at the Lieberal Koolaid stand. Since 2006, after the election defeat, this has suddenly become a huge issue for the "Religious Left". Kyoto is a flop . . . it is about Globalism, Socialism/Progressivism and destroying western economies . . . nothin more.
The earth today is nowhere near as hot as it was when forests grew in the Arctic, and of course it was much cooler when there was a mile-deep glacier in Winnipeg.
If the "believers" just presented facts . . . supported by real science . . . . they would be very quiet!!!!

Ti-Guy said...

You should join SUZANNE on her right-to-life crusade, Unschooled. She needs people like you.

Oldschool said...

Ti-gy . . . . the depth of your intellect, your use of rational thought and intelligent debate tells me a lot about you.
This is why you partake of the Algoar Koolaid stand nonsense. Al never had one provable scientific fact in his crummy movie. But to some folks "Facts" never matter its only what you believe!!!
You probably attend one of our fine institutes of lefty-learning.

Deno said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Deno said...

Oldschool

Don't waste your time on Tri-fool. The man/child? has the IQ of a peanut. I stop reading and responding to his lunacy months ago. When I see a post from him I simply move on to the next post because I cannot waste my valuable time reading the writings from a man who belongs in a straight jacket and is probably right now rocking back and forth with saliva dripping from his mouth screaming the world is warming! The world is warming! The world is warming!

Deno

Deno said...

"Now, astrologers, water witches, La Rouchians...the ranks of the deniers is filled with their like. But a Creationist? Surely Climate Change Denialism is on the march!"


Aah BCL, Al Gore is a creationist who does not believe in evolution so what does that say about the AGW guru? Hell, he even believes in Adam and Eve.

http://blog.antidelusionist.com/2007/04/23/al-gores-slideshow.aspx

Funny you would bring up creationist BCL; I find no difference between AGW believers and creationist. No matter how much proof is shown to you that your belief in creationism/AGW is false and doesn’t pass the common sense test, you still have faith in your beliefs. This is why I call AGW the new religion of the 21 century. Like all religions AGW believers believe in good and bad, AGW believers/god are the good side and the AGW sceptics/devil are the dark side. Gee, you even believe in Armageddon. You scream at the AGW sceptics/sinners that if we don’t change our ways the world will end in dare I say it, fire/hell/global warming.

Also like any bible thumper who want to force non-believers to repent or else, AGW believers want to force their religion on everyone else no matter if these people believe in their religious dogma or not. “Believe in AGW or else!” is the rally cry of AGW believers

BCL, I’ve read your blog long enough to know you are not a dumb man but I’m afraid that your faith in AGW has clouded your judgement and made you into an irrational person waiting for Armageddon.


Deno

Anonymous said...

Creationists versus dope-smokers! The lines are drawn.

;-)

Anonymous said...

I'm drunk right now and will take on all you mofos. Plus 2-3 gaming boards. Bring it, muthafukkaz!

bigcitylib said...

Hard as it may be to believe, rumor has it TCO is a real scientist.

Anonymous said...

BCL profile:

Astrological Sign: Leo
Zodiac Year: Rabbit

Science?

Anonymous said...

I'm sobering up. Sticking some 7-11 hot dogs down my throat.

P.s. Don't give my secrets away, Canuck.

Ti-Guy said...

Heh.

Anonymous said...

Vernon said:

It seems to me that while there is warming, there is no accelerating warming trend shown with in the US. This raises several questions which the 'warmers' do not seem to want to address.

The first is why do the 'warmers' not want to show how they reach the conclusions that they publish. Just look at what Gavin has to say over on RC.

Because, frankly, I find the ‘audit’ meme a distraction at best. I am much more interested in constructive science. Scientifically, independent replication - with a different set of ‘trivial’ assumptions is far more powerful (vis the Greenland ice core example) than any amount of micro-auditing. If there is a difference, then go to the code differences to see why (ie. UAH and RSS), but if you can show that the main result is robust to all sorts of minor procedural changes, then you’ve really said something. You have all the data sets from USHCN, GHCN, and GISS and you have demonstrated in a number of plots that all the GISS adjustment does is make a bi-linear adjustment to the stations based on close neighbour rural stations. How difficult is that to code? If the net result is significantly different than the GISS analysis then look into it further. If it isn’t, then why bother? In this field, methodology is not written in stone - it’s frequently ad hoc and contains arbitrary choices. Pointing out that there are arbitrary choice is simply telling us what we already know - showing that they matter is the issue. That kind of constructive analysis is how the rest of the field works - if you think you can do better and make better choices that are more robust to problems in the data, then that makes a great paper. Simply saying something is wrong without offering a better solution is just posturing. It’s worth pointing out that the GISTEMP analysis started out exactly because they were unhappy with how the station data were being processed elsewhere. - gavin (PS. edits to keep discussion focussed)]

As Gavin says, he does not want someone checking that his team did it right, he wants new science. That is not what reproducing, i.e. verification and validation, is about in the scientific process. Why do the 'warmers' fight so hard to keep from showing what they did to reach a conclusion?

2. The whole surfacestation.org and temperature adjustments raises some questions. My logic is as follows:

1. GISS compares rural and urban surface stations to determine what the urban heat off-set is.
2. GISS makes the assumptions:
a. All the stations are good.
b. No light at night = rural.
There are two problems with these assumptions, namely, that surfacestations.org is showing that the stations are not all sited IAW guidelines. There are no studies to show what the impact of poor siting is. Finally, that no lights at night is not proof of rural environment.
3. If the UBI off-set is not correct, how does this impact the global warming trend.

This seems important to me since in most countries, there are almost no rural stations. Most stations are in towns, so if the UHI off-set is not the almost nothing that is currently presented, how does this affect the trend.

I would guess that the trend would go down a lot. Which would not be good for the 'warmers', hence, the constant attack on anyone that wants to see behind the curtain.

Anonymous said...

Of course, Spencer is quite right. ID is a theory to explain a phenomenum that has so far eluded explanation, to wit, the massive variety of life forms. Since an act of faith is required to believe Darwin's 'Big' theory (as opposed to his 'Small' theory which only explains variations *within* species, not the huge differences between them), that makes ID believers as 'religious' as Darwin believers. Both theories are equally poor scientifically because neither of them can predict future results and it is impossible to mount experiments to falsify their claims.

Richard J. Bird(*) has, to me, a more compelling theory than either of these two based on mathematics, but as I don't speak the 'language' I have to take it on faith so, hey-ho, we're back to religion!

(*) "Chaos and Life: Complexity and Order in Evolution and Thought", Columbia University Press, 2003.

Ti-Guy said...

Both theories are equally poor scientifically because neither of them can predict future results and it is impossible to mount experiments to falsify their claims.

Equally poor? Do you actually understand the theory of evolution? It develops and is further elaborated through observations of the real world. It can also predict future results as well as any number of sciences that have to use probability and random occurences to make predictions.

ID is not a science...it's an abstraction up from the level of the observable world to suggest an explanation for why intelligent observers detect purpose and order in the universe. As far as I'm concerned, it's self-referential. Things appear designed, therefore there must be a designer.

The problem lies in presenting evidence, which is what science relies on.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, 'Ti-Guy', but Darwin's theory does not predict anything except that things will change over time - hardly a startling discovery! It cannot predict how the changes will manifest themselves, nor when, nor how. It is a theory. ID has focused on certain areas of biochemistry, an area of which Darwin knew virtually nothing, and which pose large and so far unsolved problems to people who believe Darwin's theory. I find the notion of an Intelligent Designer not very convincing, but then again, I don't find Darwin's notion much better, and as for Dawkins, well, frankly he's an embarrassment to everyone including himself!

If I may I will take this part of your sentence and invite any reader to add their own name of choice in the brackets:

"[...] an abstraction up from the level of the observable world to suggest an explanation". Quite so, couldn't have put it better myself!

Ti-Guy said...

Sorry, 'Ti-Guy', but Darwin's theory does not predict anything except that things will change over time - hardly a startling discovery! It cannot predict how the changes will manifest themselves, nor when, nor how.

"Does not predict anything except"...Do you see the contradiction here? You're actually asserting that it does predict something.

900ft Jesus said...

"if the believers just presented the facts...supported by real science."

How many thousands of such reports are needed before deniers will even accept that one has any validity. The research has been done, the papers have been written and reviewed by panels. Al Gore made a film, a documentary. He makes a few references in the film to studies done. I haven't been to his website, but I'm sure he has links to where he got his iinformation. Suzuki does. IPCC has literally hundreds of links showing not only the numerous studies, but the methodoly used for each study, and the methodology used to come to a concensus.

If all of us believers stood in front of deniers, and performed all of these experiments in front of your very eyes, and the results proved conclusively that climate change is happening and at least partially boosted by human activities, I doubt they'd believe it even then. Write it off as Anti-Intelligent-Deconstructionist Interference or some damn thing.

We don't have to prove it. That's been done, and done, and done. Finding flaws in the many related theories, or islated areas that have had irregular patterns doesn't invalidate the bulk of what's there. Global warming - overall averages, global and by usually 30 year clips. Of course there will be anomalies, variations. If there weren't, then hell, we'd have a lot of hard core scientist scratching their heads and wondering, "ould it be? Is it possible? ID?...Naw..."

The research covers over 6 decades. I'm not talking about what period has been researched, but the actual concept of global warming has been developing and been refined since the fifties. Thousands of scientists have been involved. Add in everyone else - assistants, explorers, photographers, sociologists, and deniers are trying to say all of these people from all around the world, different countries, beliefs, political bends all are mutually involved in this huge, co-ordinated conspiracy? And why? So climatologists can get government funding. Oh sure. Makes sense to me.

As I said, we don't have to prove it's real. That's been done. Most informed people know it's true. So really, the majority does not need convincing or proof. deniers do, and it's up to them to disprove existing research. Not just pick away at the odd study, but totally tear that science to shreds and prove, with hard scientific proof, that CO2, methane, and H2O don't cause warming, and prove that this planet's average global temperature hasn't been steadily increasing for decades.

Or don't. But quit trying to win an argument by demanding we do what has already been done.

As for darwin, by using his theories you most certainly can predict reasonable, possible outcomes. Environmental factors cause natural selection. Barring some massive, unexpected environmental change, you can reasonably determine what traits will benefit survival. Point of fact - moths in London during the industrial revolution - were once white; soot from factories covers walls; darker ones live longer; eventually, no whites left. Evolution over a period of a few years. So, what is likely to happen if the smoke stacks stopped pumping greenhouse gases into the air and the buildings were painted sandy-brown? It's not fool-proof, and cannot take into account a wide range of factor or unpredictable events, but it is possible to predict to a degree.

The secret points are cleverly hidden in books and on the Net.

Anonymous said...

'Ti-Guy', here's my prediction:

It will rain here before the end of the month.

Actually, it is a better prediction that Darwin's because it will be tested and possibly falsified.

Even so, it is still a trivial prediction.

Anonymous said...

duff: the theory of evolution does not predict change; it states that selection pressure will be applied to natural variation.

Anonymous said...

Anon: ... and the result is ...?

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