Is Pope Francis right on climate change?

[lynnvinc]

This is the stuff that deepens my skepticism.

Environmentalists who embrace the “religion” of “Global Climate Change” should be working “overtime” to force China to reduce it’s carbon foot print. China is building coal fired power plants while the EPA is regulating ours out of business.

If environmentalists REALLY believed that man made CO2 was remotely responsible for a climate change they would be conducting demonstrations, applying political pressure, and organizing economic blockades against China.

BUT…

All the articles, all the speeches, all the pseudo-scientific papers…all blame the United States, our industries, our life style, and, of course… Capitalism.

What do these anti-Americans want…the destruction of America or a utopian man controlled global climate?

I also blame Americans for some of the pollution and “cancer alleys” in China, since it is emitted in the process of making products for us.

We should be boycotting products from China.

While China has the greatest CO2 emissions, it has 4 times the population of the U.S., so I’m afraid to say but the U.S. greatly surpasses China in per capita emissions…and some of those Chinese emissions are our American emissions to the extent we persist in buying from China.

We don’t have to all live as prisoners in Russian gulags to solve the AGW problem; there are plenty of not-so-drastic measures that will bring about a healthier and freer lifestyle.

Americans used to be intelligent and creative in solving problems…

Think…

 

[sps49]

None of these is “pernicious radical,” but based on solid research and investigations into financing, etc.
…

Furthermore, you are perfectly free to read science journal articles re AGW, which is what I’ve been doing for the past 25 years. Science, Nature, etc. No one is preventing you. I know they are difficult for laypersons to understand, even the abstracts are often difficult to understand, but well worth the effort of reading them.

I understand completely, your blog sources are superior to the skeptical blogs, a proposition I find more than a little hypocritical.

Tell me, lynnvinc, how do you know what I read? Don’t bother answering, it is a rhetorical question similar to yours, but more civilized.
…

There is a war going on between the forces of life and good and the forces of death and evil on this issue of environmental harms. Please read Laudato Si; that is essential.

As for me and my household we choose life and good. I’d hope more Catholics would do the same, not just follow the easy way and what sounds pleasant to them.

There may be a war going on, but I have my doubts about your discernment of the combatants or the issues.

 

[Karen107]

Hi Karen,

So we shouldn’t exploit a resource because it is finite? Dat dunna make no sense!

Why exploit a finite resource… That don’t make no sense!

 

[Karen107]

Of course it’s about politics .The left seized upon this flawed theory to demand the implementation of the same far left agenda they have been pushing for for over a century More govt regulations.more taxes.The Pope,btw, rejected this approach.

left… Right… left … right… how about lets do whats right for the world and leave the politics out of this debate…

 

[Karen107]

WE have more than adequate fossil fuel for the foreseeable future. No reason to panic,no need to impose massive new tax and regulation schemes.

It’s not the taxing for renewable energy that’s the scheme… Its taxing the oil that’s been the scheme… everything that comes up raises or lowers the prices… It’s summer… whoops gotta raise the price of gas… !!! Oh it’s the holidays… .gotta raise the price of gas…

 

[estesbob]

It’s not the taxing for renewable energy that’s the scheme… Its taxing the oil that’s been the scheme… everything that comes up raises or lowers the prices… It’s summer… whoops gotta raise the price of gas… !!! Oh it’s the holidays… .gotta raise the price of gas…

It’s called the law of supply and demand Unlike AGW This theory has been proven again and again

 

[ferdgoodfellow]

Why exploit a finite resource… That don’t make no sense!

Because God gave it to us to use. And when it runs out it will be economical to use something else.

 

[ferdgoodfellow]

It’s not the taxing for renewable energy that’s the scheme… Its taxing the oil that’s been the scheme… everything that comes up raises or lowers the prices… It’s summer… whoops gotta raise the price of gas… !!! Oh it’s the holidays… .gotta raise the price of gas…

I haven’t studied this, but I would guess that the largest determinant of the price of gas is not the price of oil. I would think that the variable state regulations on the legal mix of our gasoline and the amount of refinery capacity (severely limited by EPA and other regs) are highly significant to the price of gas.

Speculation is in the mix, to be sure, but that is the case with every commodity.

 

[Karen107]

It’s called the law of supply and demand Unlike AGW This theory has been proven again and again

uhmm hummm… yes, of course when the oil companies think they can make more profit off of us they go for it, That’s why they oppose change towards clean energy and they will create smokescreens and lmeant to mislead us… They might loose some of their hold on us and they won’t be able to continue to get away with price gouging anymore.

 

[estesbob]

uhmm hummm… yes, of course when the oil companies think they can make more profit off of us they go for it and that’s why they oppose change towards clean energy and they will create smokescreens and lmeant to mislead us… They might loose some of their hold on us and they won’t be able to continue to get away with price gouging anymore.

You don’t get it Gas supplies are lower in summer because of increased demand That drives the price up. That’s economics 101. The same would be true if we were using so called clean energy

 

[Karen107]

You don’t get it Gas supplies are lower in summer because of increased demand That drives the price up. That’s economics 101. The same would be true if we were using so called clean energy

Sorry Bob but you can’t convince me that the gas companies don’t price gouge.

Hey why aren’t you watching the Republican debate??

 

[estesbob]

Sorry Bob but you can’t convince me that the gas companies don’t price gouge.

Hey why aren’t you watching the Republican debate??

I am sorry you don’t understand basic economics. I am multitasking

 

[ferdgoodfellow]

You’re just barking up a totally irrelevant tree, posing a big fat red herring and kicking a dead horse, since we can totally skip all of Mann’s studies and it won’t do squat to undermine the tremendous evidence that AGW is happening. I’m not saying Mann was wrong. You and your nefarious sources are the ones who are dead wrong. But we really don’t need Mann’s work to prove AGW…

“the tremendous evidence that AGw is happening…” Evidence from whom? The IPCC. The truth is that the IPCC is the primary expert witness on global warming. Yet they, as well as their imitators, enablers and cheerleaders, stand utterly discredited, for reasons I have stated and you have totally ignored.

Mann is not a dead horse. He is the poster child for why the IPCC is a corrupt political enterprise and not a legitimate scientific authority. Michael Mann is not only a very bad scientist, he is a nasty, nasty, person . Yet he is lionized, deified, showered with honors and lotsa lotsa money. A scientific community with any integrity would have banished him. And yet he is one or your guys. Why?

 

[lynnvinc]

“the tremendous evidence that AGw is happening…” Evidence from whom? The IPCC. The truth is that the IPCC is the primary expert witness on global warming. Yet they, as well as their imitators, enablers and cheerleaders, stand utterly discredited, for reasons I have stated and you have totally ignored.

You are acting as if the IPCC were some monograph or single study. It is composed of many 1000s of studies all pointing in the same direction. To knock it I’m afraid you will have to get in there and dispute each and every one of those studies.

But that isn’t really “doing science” now is it.

To do science and come up with proofs for your positions, you have to actually go out into the field or lab, spend months and years collecting data, analyze it using logical hypothesis and valid theories, then have it pass peer-review publishing – which they usually reject because it isn’t up to snuff, or if you are very lucky and your work is extremely solid and valid, they will send back for revisions and corrections and eventually publish.

So then go to it. I figure it will take you maybe 5,000 years to refute all those studies, considering that first you will have to get graduate education and field experience in maybe some 20 different fields and subfields from physics to geology to paleoclimatology to chemistry to hydrology to glaciology to advanced Bayesian statistics to computer modeling to biology to zoology to botany to oceanography to agricultural sciences.

And that’s just for the WGI Science chapters. You’ll need even more for the “impacts” and “adaptations” chapters.

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[ferdgoodfellow]

That Mann is a bad scientist is evident from the record. Good scientists are transparent and readily make their data and methods available so other scientists can try to replicate their findings. Mann was slow to release all his data for his Hockey Stick studies, he refused to release his computer code for his statistical analysis until finally compelled to do so by a congressional subpoena, and he completely failed to release other critical details about how he constructed his graph. To this day some aspects of his methods are a still a mystery.

Good scientists do not materially misrepresent their research, but Mann certainly did. For example, Mann’s 1998 paper stated that he used 112 proxy series, but he later revealed that it was actually 159. His paper reported that he used standard principal components analysis, but he later revealed that he employed a non-standard variation and also a technique called a step-wise procedure. These are material non-disclosures. How can a study be replicated if its methods aren’t accurately described in the journal article?

Good scientists do not hide adverse results. McIntyre’s research eventually confirmed that Mann’s reconstruction failed a standard verification test (R squared), something not disclosed in his paper.

Good scientists do not lie. Mann’s paper clearly states that he calculated R squared. In an interview with Marcel Crok, a Dutch journalist, Mann not only admitted he calculated this statistic, he also claimed the Hockey Stick passed this test, something that later was conclusively proved false. However, in later testimony before the NAS Panel Mann denied he calculated R squared. Mann claimed in his 98 paper that his hockey stick result obtained whether or not he used tree rings. This was conclusively proved not to be true, and files he grudgingly gave up which shed light on his analysis proved that he knew it not to be true at the time he and his co-authors wrote the paper.

Good scientists do not intentionally misuse statistics to get the desired result. Both expert panels convened to assess Mann’s work, even the NAS panel which tried mightily to save Mann’s reputation, agreed that Mann’s unique version of principal components analysis was designed to over weight proxy series with a hockey stick shape and give them prominence in the final result they did not deserve.

And on and on.

 

[ferdgoodfellow]

The Climategate emails reveal that his own colleagues knew that Mann’s work was defective (one called it “sloppy”), but they still rallied around him.

 

[sps49]

You are acting as if the IPCC were some monograph or single study. It is composed of many 1000s of studies all pointing in the same direction. To knock it I’m afraid you will have to get in there and dispute each and every one of those studies.

But that isn’t really “doing science” now is it.

To do science and come up with proofs for your positions, you have to actually go out into the field or lab, spend months and years collecting data, analyze it using logical hypothesis and valid theories, then have it pass peer-review publishing – which they usually reject because it isn’t up to snuff, or if you are very lucky and your work is extremely solid and valid, they will send back for revisions and corrections and eventually publish.

So then go to it. I figure it will take you maybe 5,000 years to refute all those studies, considering that first you will have to get graduate education and field experience in maybe some 20 different fields and subfields from physics to geology to paleoclimatology to chemistry to hydrology to glaciology to advanced Bayesian statistics to computer modeling to biology to zoology to botany to oceanography to agricultural sciences.

And that’s just for the WGI Science chapters. You’ll need even more for the “impacts” and “adaptations” chapters.

Hogwash. Reproducibility is a chronic issue in peer reviewed papers. Not enough information was provided, poor measurements, or even worse and more common, the reliance on other people’s measurements. Climate science peer review is especially problematic, due to the fact that the model codes, data, and analysis are not provided, and are inaccessible to researchers who wish to reproduce the the work.

SCIgen is a classic example of the unwieldiness of the process, scores of papers submitted over years and published with review standards that are hard to believe:

retractionwatch.com/2014/02/24/springer-ieee-withdrawing-more-than-120-nonsense-papers/

There are other examples of this being an issue that permeates the system:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

socialsciencespace.com/2014/12/peer-review-has-problems-lets-fix-them/

retractionwatch.com/2014/03/03/nobel-prize-winner-calls-peer-review-very-distorted-completely-corrupt-and-simply-a-regression-to-the-mean/

forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2015/03/29/solving-the-problem-of-scientific-reproducibility-with-peer-reviewed-video/

nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

This is not to say that good studies do not get published, but the picture is not as rosy as you portray it. I run into this problem a lot in my own work, especially the reproducibility problem. Peer review is not a garuntee that the material is correct, for that you must verify it yourself, especially if the referenced work is a sub component of new or original work.

 

[ferdgoodfellow]

You are acting as if the IPCC were some monograph or single study. It is composed of many 1000s of studies all pointing in the same direction. To knock it I’m afraid you will have to get in there and dispute each and every one of those studies.

The IPCC is an organization comprised of governments from around the world. It is a political organization with a political agenda but with scientific pretensions. It’s scientific credentials are greatly exaggerated.

To be sure, its reports reference thousands of studies (tens of thousands, actually). However, quantity doesn’t necessary translate into truth, especially when the IPCC process and participants’ bias comes into play. It has been conclusively shown that studies which cast doubt on the carbon dioxide theory of climate change have been systematically excluded from review. In addition, climategate shows a concerted effort to keep studies out of step with the party line out of the scientific journals altogether.

 

[lynnvinc]

Hogwash. Reproducibility is a chronic issue in peer reviewed papers.

Even scientists agree that peer-review, while a necessary factor in the science being established, is not a sufficient factor. There is a need for many studies supporting a claim – a need for “robustness.” Which has now happened with AGW, after the first 2 studies reached 95% confidence on AGW (.05 on the null) back in 1995. Over the succeeding 20 years there has been tremendous support of many peer-rev studies from all sorts of angles (not just temps and modeling) that have supported AGW. It’s a done deal.

There are, however, some new studies and claims that are cutting edge re deals of AGW and its impacts, and only time and many other studies will tell whether they pan out.

For instance AGW causing greater and lingering Rossy waves, earthquakes, and volcanoes (the latter two due to land areas and mountains shedding the weight of their glaciers, with the land rebounding a bit).

We’ll see over the years and decades whether robustness in the evidence for these develops, as it has for the basics of AGW and many of its other impacts.

I’m sorry, but the Pope is right and y’all are wrong. And considering this is a life & death matter, I suggest we listen to the Pope and follow what he suggests to the best of our ability.

 

[Karen107]

I am sorry you don’t understand basic economics. I am multitasking

Yes I understand the business aspect of this, that just confirms my belief in the unethical practices of gas companies. I mean they wouldn’t be in business if they never profited off of us. And the oil companies are rich as rich can be.:sad_yes::sad_yes: