Posts Made By: Robert Pasken

Let's look at what else Amir Taheri has said. On May 19, 2006, the National Post of Canada published two pieces, one by Taheri, claiming that the Iranian parliament passed a law that "envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. Numerous other sources, including Maurice Motamed, the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, refuted the report as untrue. The Associated Press later refuted the report as well, saying that "a draft law moving through parliament encourages Iranians to wear Islamic clothing to protect the country's Muslim identity but does not mention special attire for religious minorities.

Looks like he's full of manure on that one.

Taheri fabricated a story published in the New York Post in 2005 that identified Iran's UN ambassador Javad Zarif as one of the students involved in the 1979 seizure of hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. Zarif was Simpson's teaching assistant and a graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University at the time.

Looks like he's full manure on that one too

Then he cann't keep straight the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims as shown by a Wall Street Journal piece where he confuses the two.


You actually believe this guy?


Wrong again

As I recall Diebold is the manufacturer of the both the software and hardware in use in the swing states. I also recall the president of Diebold saying he would deliver Ohio to Bush last time around.

Andreas wrote:

"The data from the antarctic is probably what caused the term global warming to migrate to climate change."

No actually the term global change came from Frank Lutz a republican political consultant, who in 2002 in a memo to the republican party suggested that
"There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." He recommended that his Republican Party clients do just that. He urged them to marshal their own "scientists" to contest the issue on every occasion. He urged them to plead for "sound science" a twist of language of the sort that George Orwell once said was "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."

Outside of those who are do everything possible to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) global warming is a fact. Even strident deniers like Lizden (whose receives $2500 a day from the oil/gas industry), Spencer and Christy all now admit that the earth is warming at an alarming rate. FUD is the only thing the denier community has left. There are far to many different observations to deny.

By the way have you ever heard the term "cherry picking"

Excellent article I loved the meticulous record keeping. I wish I could do the same with astronomical observation records.

I think is a very good video, one of the best for encouraging people to register to vote and then vote I've seen. My only complaint with it is that it concentrates too much on the abortion issue. To be pro-life means from conception to natural death. The abortion issues were well done, it's just that it needed more in the natural death area. I see too many cases of elder abuse and euthanasia and these issues are as important to the pro-life movement as is abortion. Still one of best I've seen.

Kirk Pfau said:

As to the modeling groups I certainly appreciate the work they have put forth in developing their tools, but until they can reliably replicate historical climate from a known historical initialization state, the model can handle and reproduce the climate with at least one or more fixed data sources and the developers/researchers provide full disclosure of the model, data sources, and data handling. Then the model and its outputs are not much better than statistical guesswork.

What makes you think that models have not been able to "reliably replicate historical climate from a known historical initialization state, the model can handle and reproduce the climate with at least one or more fixed data sources and the developers/researchers provide full disclosure of the model, data sources, and data handling." The source for any of the climate models in use (excuse me except from the groups funded by the oil/energy industry) are freely available along with extensive documentation as to the underlying mathematics, the programming techniques used, and the assumptions made, along with a list of papers referenced in the documentation. ALL the models are tested in two ways; the first is to start with observations from a reference date. A common date is January 1, 1950. The model is then run forward to another fixed date, typically January 1 2000 and the results are compared to observations on that date. The second method for testing the model is to start with current observations and run the model backwards to a known date again typically January 1 1950 and again compare the results against observations. I suggest you look at

http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/
or
https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/climate/
or
http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/meiko/apps/wehner/camille.html
or
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelE/

In all cases there is note that says something to effect that the models are "open and free for non-commercial purposes." I suggest you download one or more, run the model at resolution appropriate to your home computer and try them out. Our sophomore climatology students run a reduced resolution version to learn how climate models work

Now I will be rude, before you make statements as insulting as you did why not at least time a few minutes to review past posts, look at the web sites of the people doing the actual work, learn some about the science, rather listening some blowhard who knows absolutely nothing and regurgitating it

Gee I wonder if because

1) carbon capture systems (CCS) at utility scale are not expected before 2030.
2) CCS would use 40% of a powerplants output and would erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years, and increase resource consumption by one third.
3) CCS advocates have no solution to the problem of what to do with the CO2 once it has been captured
4)CCS is expensive would lead to a doubling of plant costs, and an electricity price increase of 21-91%.
5) CCS creates threats to health due to the release of radionuclides and large increases in the amounts of mercury released in the water, soil and air.

On the other hand the large number of hydro-electric plants are being torn down, particularly in the northeast. In the 80's and 90's every single lock and dam along the Mohawk river (New York barge Canal System) had turbines to generate electricity for towns along the river. There gone now

You know Doug since you copy and paste so much from places like Steve Miloy and Anthony Watts web pages maybe you should ask for 15 cents every time some reads your junk. The real plot is attached and comes direct from the UK met office. Quoting directly from the source of the data being twisted out of shape; "The La Niña has strengthened further during early 2008 and is now the strongest since 1988/89, significantly contributing to a lower January temperature in 2008 compared to recent years." According to the Hadley Center 2008 is the mirror image of 1998. It also seems they are a bit miffed that their results are being twisted out of shape. The UK met office says "Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand"

Just to remind every one in 1998 the HADCRUT temperature anomaly was 0.515 deg C. Miloy, Watts Singer Christy etc., were silent, the climate community said one year a trend does not make. Do not misconstrue this one year value as a trend. Look at the 20 year trend. Then along comes 1999 with a HADCRUT temperature anomaly of 0.262 deg. C. Suddenly Miloy, Watts Singer Christy etc., are jumping up and down screaming through out the blog-o-sphere that global warming had stopped. The climate community said one year a trend does not make. Do not misconstrue this one year value as a trend. Look at the 20 year trend. Then in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 when the HADCRUT anomalies were 0.455, 0.457, 0.432,0.479 respectively suddenly Miloy, Watts Singer Christy etc., were again silent. The climate community said one year a trend does not make. Do not misconstrue this one year value as a trend. Look at the 20 year trend. Along comes 2008 (which hasn't yet finished yet by the way) with a HADCRUT temperature anomaly of 0.292 suddenly Miloy, Watts Singer Christy etc., are once again jumping up and down that global warming had stopped and deliberately leaving out the obvious and clearly stated reason for the lower ONE YEAR temperature anomaly. The climate community says one year a trend does not make. Do not misconstrue this one year value as a trend. Look at the 20 year trend.

Doug, when will you learn to separate your politics from the science? Take look at the Carbon Capture System discussion with Jason and Andreas. A useful discussion about the positive and negative aspects of CCS is going on I may disagree with Andreas, but at least a discussion of solutions is being carried on.

Exactly how is this post and data source any different from your post in the "food for thought" thread Doug? This is the same bogus material that you post earlier, it is just rehashed from the same collection of sites. The answer to your question "Where's the beef? " was answered in the previous thread. The answer is the same. The per decade change is claimed to be 0.17C per decade. How can you get a 10 year average when you only use 6 years of data? Why do I get a very different number from your sources when I go directly to NCDC/GISS and HADCRUT and actually compute a 10 year, 5 year mean? Why weren't you jumping up and down claiming global warming was occurring when the 3 year average around 1998 was 0.5C? Why do you ignore the statements by the sources of the data you are using that the decrease is due to "the unusually cool global average temperature in January 2008, it looked as though smoothed global average temperatures had dropped markedly in recent years, which is misleading."

Why do continue to post discredited material from websites and authors who publicly acknowledge that are deliberately manufacturing artifical doubt in the scientific process.

You might want to check these papers for the research concerning solar influences on the temperature anomalies. They seem to draw a different conclusion.

* Solanki 2008 reconstructs 11,400 years of sunspot numbers using radiocarbon concentrations, finding "solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades".

* Ammann 2007: "Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century."

* Lockwood 2007 concludes "the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."

* Foukal 2006 concludes "The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years."

* Scafetta 2006 says "since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone."

* Usoskin 2005 conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."

* Haigh 2003 says "Observational data suggest that the Sun has influenced temperatures on decadal, centennial and millennial time-scales, but radiative forcing considerations and the results of energy-balance models and general circulation models suggest that the warming during the latter part of the 20th century cannot be ascribed entirely to solar effects."

* Stott 2003 increased climate model sensitivity to solar forcing and still found "most warming over the last 50 yr is likely to have been caused by increases in greenhouse gases."

* Solanki 2003 concludes "the Sun has contributed less than 30% of the global warming since 1970".

* Lean 1999 concludes "it is unlikely that Sun–climate relationships can account for much of the warming since 1970".

* Waple 1999 finds "little evidence to suggest that changes in irradiance are having a large impact on the current warming trend."

* Frolich 1998 concludes "solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade"

I find it curious that Scafetta in 2006 (see bold reference above) says "since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone.", yet in the Physics Today article he claims something different. It may well be that he deliberately wrote a provocative opinion piece to draw comments.