Shun the Climate Change Deniers

I can absolutely sympathize. I myself am childless, but still came to the same conclusion, and my sister, who had her first not long ago, has done the same. I suspect the generational dynamic described here is more common than supposed.

I think you will come to realize you are making a mistake for your kid. Unless your dad is Donald Trump, as in the president, then these things don’t scale. Your kid is going to be worse off not knowing his family than the 10 or so votes you might get by using him as a tool to leverage support even if something was actually on the ballot. Don’t use a kid that way. They are not political tools or instruments for change.

A bit too emotive, a bit too strident, a bit too self righteous.
One can claim till the cows come home, but; it is not settled science.
Good science is never settled…

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

Even without Global Warming, we are cooking ourselves to death with our energy use.

Unfortunately politicians listen to economists more than physicists.

CO2 catastrophists have been shunning serious debates with qualified opponents since as long as at least Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. (E.g., Gore himself.) There have been a handful or so of exceptions that I know about – which ended up on youtube, anyway. (I know of only 2 exceptions within the last year; one that I posted in the previous diary; and also one involving Judith Curry and – much to my surprise – Michael Mann. I despise Mann, but give him credit for at least exposing himself to a debate.)

This should make you very happy. Ah, but alas, it’s not enough for you, is it?

There was a VERY interesting interview OF Tucker Carlson, that I heard just yesterday, that I believe properly contextualizes the mindset of the writer of a piece like this. (Significantly more interesting than a typical Carlson program). Carlson was interviewed by a former “lefty”, Dave Rubin. Unless you want to understand yourself, better, I suggest you NOT watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpTyHXOdlFs

I have no problem with shunning. There should be consequences to self-serving stupidity. There aren’t two sides to every argument. Climate change deniers are kith and kin to holocaust deniers and flat earthers. Human driven climate change is settled science. It is a deceptive, dishonest nihilist argument to maintain that we must understand completely all aspects of climate change before we can assert anything about it. This is a standard that occurs nowhere else in science and willfully disregards what science is and how it operates.

Our first duty is to be responsible, informed citizens. So I also do not accept the “I’m too busy to pay attention to the critical issues of our times.” That’s a cop out. People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children? Give me a break.

The shunning of yore was a denial of community resources, often fatal. Doesn’t apply these drugged and distracted days. Doubtful they would even notice.

Interesting post. It’s not my place to insert myself into such intimate family dynamics. I can see both sides depending on how much you weight different aspects of your life.

But it does bring up an interesting follow up question: What about the people who claim to agree with the science of climate change and yet continue to live in ways that exacerbate the it?

The person who buys expensive luxury cars? Check it out. CO2 emissions for production of a vehicle are a sizeable portion of lifecycle emissions and they do scale with cost. And that includes everyone’s favorite upscale virtue signaling device the Tesla.

The guy who has a wife and one kid and yet buys a 3000 square foot (or even larger) McMansion with all the trimmings and a 55 minute commute?

The lady with a $10,000 wardrobe that gets replaced every couple years?

The kid who goes through thousand dollar phones like twizzlers?

The couple who just have to redo the kitchen in the latest fashion every 3 years?

And on and on and on and on and on?

Consumption fuels climate change. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’m not saying that anyone is a hypocrite because they don’t go around shaming anyone with a higher lifestyle than their own. I’m asking an honest question and really do want to hear the response of anyone who cares to do so.

Reason I am asking is that I really do feel that there are implications to adequately addressing climate change. And they are anything but painless. Isn’t it possible that the pain that everyone but an economist can see coming if we cut CO2 emissions play more of a role than we are willing to admit?

I really don’t think it is stupidity or intellectual laziness or anything of the kind in isolation. I could be wrong.

Will

It sounds like you just realized you brought a child into a heartless world. You’ve realized it too late to accomplish anything. Though you egotistically think you have some sort of control over the outcome, you’ve decided to blame others and are showing your child how to use emotional blackmail to get other people to think just like you do, or at least say they do. Right now your teaching your son what happens when people don’t think like you do, you cut them off. I’m sure you’ll have a great future relationship where he’ll know he can come to you about all of life’s questions…
I have no desire to join your self defeating cult though, even assuming the worse case scenario comes about. Firstly, because even if one assumes we live in a democracy, we would be hard pressed to do anything to change the current trajectory considering the economic impacts. There is no avoiding the coming crisis, only mitigating their aspects. The cost will be borne by everyone, not just the ones who think like you do. In times of crisis, one generally relies on “family”, if not blood relatives then the kind of family that arises from shared hardship. Removing people from that pool is irrational, especially if you have more than just yourself to take care of. Anyone who won’t kill you and your child, rape your wife, and take your resources should be looked at as a necessary potential ally.

Second, you are talking about models. People made up the rules for those models and their interactions and people are often wrong. Being more shrill doesn’t make your models more correct. It is reasonable that someone would disagree or want to understand your model, just as it is reasonable that they might want to turn to expert opinion. That means there should be a process of learning, not berating or dismissing, that we should have been following for a long time now but have not. That is a problem on both sides of this issue. That combined with a working democracy might have put us in a better position now, but it never happened.
Its everyone’s fault to some degree, but unless your relatives are all billionaires, they probably have less responsibility than most. Probably about as much as you have or will have in your sons eyes. A rational person could probably some that up to or close to 0% or 0.001% or so. How could it be more when you don’t have the power to change anything?
Of course you have decided to limit your social power by closing off those who don’t believe like you. So does that make it 0.005%? I have no idea. It’s a useless exercise to play the blame game, especially with so many variables and outcomes and our lack of control over any of it.

My only suggestion is to learn to come together with disparate people and teach your children the same. You’ll need them later. Oh and its worth mentioning that the climate denial movement was a brainchild of the tobacco companies and their assault on science. It wasn’t just laziness that brought your relatives to their erroneous conclusions.

Seriously deniers, what’s to lose? Would the global economy be obliterated if every government suddenly pulled together to limit CO2 production? What’s the downside for you, personally?

Sounds far more like the defense of tribal strictures to me.

Most change deniers are flock/school/herd… animals. They’ll do a 180 pivot as soon as the group does, after the leaders do, just alike a swirling flock of starlings or school of sardines. The difference with humans is they don’t rationalize why. Theoretically any bait ball of fish could turn on their predator to destroy it, if they only knew how and had the collective will. Even sharks have unprotected and vulnerable parts, easy for tiny fish to cripple. But most deniers are oblivious to who their predators even are. The most successful human predators cloak themselves well.

As for shunning, I’ve been hard shunned (workplace mobbed) and soft shunned (by conservative evangelical family). I’ve learned that the true purpose of any shunning is to cut off a declared interloper (actual or not) from tribal resources, and that shunnings are usually orchestrated by a single ‘leader’ for their own selfish purpose of retaining or enhancing their own power/control over a group.

I’m not sure how well it works when a single member shuns the entire tribe. It might be smarter to put that energy into studying the situation first, before taking some action.

People forget, or never knew, that global warming was generally accepted by politicians and the public during the Bush, Sr., administration. What happened was a concerted effort to combat that idea, by those who stood to lose profits if CO2 production was restricted. Al Gore was responding to that backlash.

I grew up in a conservative area, where conservatives believed in conservation. OC, conservatives do not like government regulation, but by the 1980s the success of environmental regulation was obvious. It took real effort to reverse that trend in the 1990s. In part the backlash has been successful because of the success of previous environmental regulation. When you have people dying because of smog, when you have rivers catching fire, when you have people dying of skin cancer, people notice. Once regulation has significantly reduced those dangers, people start to chafe under that regulation. With the increasing dangers of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, and heat waves, people will take notice again and demand government action. It’s only a matter of time. When powerful companies like Allstate Insurance take out ads focusing on climate change, the days of denial are limited. Look for a resurgence of environmental movements, such as Zero Population Growth, Grow Your Own, and Back to the Earth.

Nothing precludes re-connecting once said relatives pull their heads out of their ass.

“proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.”

Slight problem here; those candidates don’t exist. Centrist liberalism in the style of Obama or Trudeau is basically the most “ecologically sane” style of politics that wealthy western nations will tolerate, and it’s laughably inadequate to address the problems that you see coming. In fact, not just inadequate, in some cases actively destructive, as I pointed out in my comment in the previous thread. If you think that shaming your relatives at Thanksgiving dinner into voting for the Green Party is going to make any headway on the problem I’ll just charitably call that charming.

Do you drive a car, live in a heated house, consume mass-produced foods? If you do any of those things, or any of a hundred others I could name, not only will you have to commit immediately and irrevocably to scaling it way back, everybody else will also have to at the same time. See the problem?

So you perceive the future as being such a catastrophe in the making that you are willing to destroy long-standing relationships because of it. That’s your call. But what else can you do?

1. Stop having children. If the future is dystopian and your relatives are such awful people that you have to shield your children from them it seems strange to me that you’d want to have them in the first place.
2. It’s OK to drive a Prius and recycle your Coke bottles. Doing so is probably a pathetically inadequate response to the problem but I can’t rule out that it will do SOME tiny bit of good, so go ahead and do those things.
3. Move to Canada (if you aren’t there already) and vote Green. Unlike the US the Greens are not 100% irrelevant there (though they are close to it). In British Columbia they are even a small part of a coalition government, though that hasn’t stopped a huge LNG project, much beloved by the country’s Liberal PM, from going through. Understand, though, that moving to Canada and voting Green is mainly just to make you feel better, it won’t likely have a measurable impact on climate trajectory.
4. Have a plan for 20-50 years from now and a mechanism in place to force yourself to stick to it. Our centrist liberal elites have such a plan, it’s to be retired in a Swiss chateau with a strong security perimeter, but assuming you’re not that rich you should start formulating your plan right now.

People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children?

In many cases, I think, people put so much time into distracting media precisely to avoid spending any time on life and death questions. When one feels powerless to affect change, the difficulties posed by social structures are nothing but stress, and avoiding that stress is an adaptive act. As Ian often says, humans are weak. I don’t think this problem can be fixed without addressing the despair issue first.

What would a sustainable world look like? I suspect something like 100 years ago in advanced economies, with electronics and household gadgets. Transportation would be nothing like today, so globalization would not be the same. Forget long supply chains. Forget free shipping. 😉

Our great grandparents lived that way, so it’s not so bad. However, without economic growth the opportunity for social mobility would be low. People have lived that way for centuries: look at India and feudal societies. But I think that people would rebel against high inequality. They did 100 years ago.

Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to get back there in two decades.

Years ago I was in a night class with a Turk and a Kenyan. The three of us took breaks together. They were far more knowledgeable about American issues than the average American was. Later, same place I met a couple Gambians. Same thing. Wife has relatives in west Canada, myself in east. Knew more. Indians, yup. Iranians, Brits somewhat the same. Just a few personal samples. I’m starting to think that apathy due to feeling powerless is an American culture thing.

Wow, just wow. Punishing the kid, punishing the relatives, punishing himself too, come to think of it–all for the cause of voting for good candidates. What if there are only bad candidates? What if the good ones aren’t, on closer examination, all that good?

Not a peep about lifestyle changes, which at least would give him the very human satisfaction of doing something. Plus he could do things that bring the family together instead of pulling them apart—things like sharing skills, running errands together, and enjoying free and low-cost recreation close to home. All of these actions would be just as good for the earth as waiting for the right politician to show up.

What he’s doing is unproductive, like spraying Roundup on his vegetable garden.

So, I have read the post and the comments. Can Eric Anderson or anyone else explain which of the serious-on-their-face comments are straw men? And why?

( I am of course leaving aside simple blurts like Lemonhead’s comment, and leaving out any slickly argued denialist comments which may slither in here).

Willy:
“aside from possibly hastening their “hit bottom”.

Willy, I’ve gained nothing but the deepest respect for you over the years on here. Your honesty is admirable and I applaud it. So, I’ll take one last bite.

You know Webstir the recovered alcoholic. That said, let ’em hit bottom. The sooner the better. Anything else is enabling.

Which is precisely the point of my post. Calling my family’s “love” bluff.
If you love yours, truly, then bottom is the only way. I probably wouldn’t be here today if my family hadn’t hastened my bottom by shunning me.

“Love is constant interrogation.”
— Milan Kundera

Thanks WebEric.

A wise old manager once told me that the smartest guys in the room are usually a combination of confidence and humility – they know much, but as a result now know how much more there is to know. Unfortunately his being a good guy was his undoing and he got blindsided by his mentor who took his job, then proceeded to run the place into the ground. Same thing happened again at the very next place I gigged at. I became a fan of the Dunning Kruger theory (and studies of sociopathy). But not so good at my perceived next step, how to keep their kind out of power. Still much to learn. So I’m here repeating all the same old questions looking for answers.

You might be right. The alcoholic in my life only started changing after I set to shunning (albeit gradually). I still don’t understand the mechanism behind that.

V has changed his own posting identity how many times? I’m also here for the laughs. My favorite DK posts elsewhere. After a heated exchange he (an oligarch-loving change denier neocon) started calling me a gay conspiracy theorist, which could not possibly be discerned from anything I’d ever typed there. The very next day his hometown meatspace buddy Jim Hoft came out as gay. Good stuff. I still laugh over that one to this day, but get too-serious again when I remember how common his kind is out there.

I post quasi-anonymously because the less I reveal, the more I can say.

Starting to look like a classic case of inmates running the asylum.

Bueller? Bueller?

I understand the logic of what you’re saying, on a society wide scale. But within the confines of close family? What would even be the point? It isn’t likely to change their thinking, and even if it did what they, or a hundred thousand other people like them, think isn’t going to change anything. All you’d be doing is negatively impacting the familial ties of your kid.

Also, I feel compelled to point out something that I feel is really obvious. And you’re really not going to like it. You have so much loathing for climate deniers, as well you should. But what can be said of someone who knows the climate is going to hell, and yet still chooses to have a kid?

What to do about deniers is completely immaterial at this point. Twenty years ago it might have mattered, but we’re already over the edge of the cliff. We’ve already emitted enough CO2 to push us over the (almost certainly too low) two degrees danger threshold. The positive feedback loops have already started. It’s over. Humanity lost. At an absolute minimum we’re looking at the end of industrial civilization as we know it. Your son, if he’s still alive, is likely to be particularly healthy or happy forty or fifty years from now.

” If you want to rant on about climate denial—target the climate scientists who seem to think they are doing something meaningful by flying all over the world to attend conferences. ”

Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark are physicists who have worked on climate change. They’re even worse than the climate change physicists that you mention. That’s because they do research that shows that the climate scientists making comfortable livings either embracing a catastrophist viewpoint, or else, as Lindzen has pointed out, just keeping their mouths shut about their non-catastrophism, because “it makes their lives easier”, have been surpassed. *

Their GCM models have not only been found wanting (old news), but the mechanism underlying the highly variable solar magnetic effects on earth’s climate (unlike Total Solar Irradiance, which varies very little) are being elucidated by the likes of Shaviv and Svensmark.

https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/12/svensmarks-enghoff-shaviv-publish.html

As you are likely to be an American, which means a 60% probability that you don’t even have a single high school course in physics under your belt, you will likely not process the above. While you could seek out people capable of understanding it, why bother?

Wouldn’t it be more fun to confront the likes of Shaviv and Svensmark, video camera rolling, and ask them why they’re such deniers? (Of course, they don’t deny that climate changes. They deny the catastrophist viewpoint, based on inferior research to their own. Ah, but why concern yourself with disambiguating the two? The goal here is to have fun at the expense of the sorts of people who are LITERALLY enabling the planet’s demise. As well as vengeance.)

What you’re looking for is to capture the guilt-ridden bowing of heads that Shaviv and Svensmark will doubtless display. Their defensive evasions. Etc., etc. Ya know – you can document their shame, for all eternity. Or, if you’re lucky, for evidence to be presented in climate change denial trials – hopefully with death penalties meted out, involving excess heat. Boiling in oil, burning at the stake, that sort of thing.)

Of course, if Shaviv and Svensmark look at you with pity, or just burst out laughing in your face, that would ruin part of your joy.

Not to worry. The videographic evidence of such will infuriate the jury at their climate change denial trials, even more. They may opt for a slower form of death penalty to be executed. Ya know – SLOWLY immersing into a vat of boiling oil. That sort of thing.

* Likewise, as both Happer and Lindzen have pointed out, framing or reframing research as climate related makes it MUCH easier to get funded. I myself used to play basketball with a guy in Princeton who hired Ph.D.’s, who told me he had run into 6 individuals (probably all physicists) who claimed climate related activities on their resumes. When he asked them what the connection was to climate, they all admitted – nothing.

People have plenty of time for their cell phones, social media, video games, and TV. But they can’t find an hour or two a week for life and death questions that affect and will affect them and their children?

A bird in the hand is much more distracting and convenient than two in the bush.

On the topic of the original post: If you’ve already decided that your family members don’t love your son and are too selfish and destructive (in their politics) to maintain contact with, then you actually have three paths to take. (1) Do/say nothing, just accept this is how they are, and maintain contact mostly for your son’s sake. (2) Shun them in the hopes that they will change their beliefs, as you have done. (3) Maintain even closer ties with them, which let’s you (a) keep talking to them about climate change and the likely impacts in the future, giving you more opportunities to change their minds and (b) utilize whatever contacts they have (social, business, political) and whatever money/inheritance-type resources they have to better safeguard your son’s future.

I don’t know your situation, so I can’t say which is right for you, but, absent that information, (3) seems like the best generic choice, even if it is a bit mercenary.

@Eric

Outside of those who maintain that the science is not settled (it is btw) the internal logic of my choice is unimpeachable.

And that we proceed to ignore the precautionary principle is unforgivable.

Blood is not thicker genocide.

Everyone makes mistakes. One sign you might be making a logical error is to use assertions that contract each other.

I apply the precautionary principle. I look both ways before crossing the road. I double check my math. I “sleep on” big decisions. I constantly reevaluate my stance based on new information.

None of this jives with saying your logic is unimpeachable. Hubris and logic rarely work well together. Humility and Uncertainty are Reason’s handmaidens on the other hand.

None of it is consistent with having family members that are committing genocide, which you don’t even really believe. Have you called the police, pressed charges. or filed suit? It sounds like you have family stuff to sort out that doesn’t have anything to do with environmental catastrophe. There is plenty of genocide going on by the way, actually real, verifiable and attributable genocide. If no ones interested in stopping that, do we have a right to expect a difference when it may impact us personally?

And what’s up with deniers vacillating between “it’s not possibly happening” and “it won’t be so bad”? Jordan Peterson (anti-warming expert via the science of psychology), stated in his 12 rules that one should avoid lying. I’d think one is not being honest if they’re experimenting with both denier tracks, even claiming expertise with both. Maybe just pick one and stick with it?

“the internal logic of my choice is unimpeachable.”

Well, sure, assuming all the unstated premises. Namely, that family shunning will lead to any meaningful change in voting patterns, which will lead to the election of preferable candidates, which will lead to a slowing or halting climate change. All of those premises are problematic, some more than others. Now, if you’d simply made the case that shunning your denialist relatives is something you do to make yourself feel better, fine, it’s your own personal business and all of us make similar calculations in our family lives.

@different clue

As far as I know, it doesn’t have a singular name. It’s also bunk. It’s impossible to square with the simple fact that we’re in the weakest solar cycle in a century, and yet the planet continues to warm.

metamars is a perfect example of someone who should be shunned. They have nothing beyond argument from authority, both for their sources (who they’re convinced are brave antiheroes, as opposed to hacks who are intellectually and ethically bankrupt), and for why you should listen to metamars (“I have degrees!”). Also they peddle in the downright hilarious conspiracy that there’s some vast nefarious plot by mainstream scientists to conjure up a fake climate crisis so they can live off the money it brings in. Oh yeah, those $40,000 a year research grants really let you live the high life!

Svensmark, by the way, doesn’t just have different ideas about why the planet is warming. He doesn’t think it’s warming dangerously to begin with. That alone shows he’s not worth listening to. It’s 100% pure bullshit. The arctic has melted so much that tankers are now crossing it, in winter, without the aid of icebreakers. We’re well past the stage where ‘it’s not happening’ can be met with anything other than mockery. Hell, increasingly regular people can see first hand how the seasons are messed up right where they live.

@Plenue

“As far as I know, it doesn’t have a singular name. It’s also bunk. It’s impossible to square with the simple fact that we’re in the weakest solar cycle in a century, and yet the planet continues to warm.”

And here we see the working of a political, tribalistic mind. Not a scientific one. A scientific mind can operate in a mental space of multiple causation, such that causal forces can reinforce, or counteract each other. Indeed, a scientific mind HAS to operate in a space of multiple causation, typically; and certainly when dealing with complex systems.

Or are you just lazy? If you had bothered reading the article I linked to, you’d have read,

“the calorimetric sea level based measurements imply that a bit more than half of the 20th century warming should be attributed to the sun.” (The rest is taken to be mostly anthropocentric GHG effects.)

Apparently, his attribution to solar magnetic forcing has been revised upwards from as recently as 2011, as he says, (in his paper with Ziskin, http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/20thCentury.pdf, that is also linked to in the linked blog post that I gave)

“We also show that a non-thermal solar component is necessarily present, indicating that the total solar contribution to the 20th century global warming, of DTsolar = 0.27 ± 0.07 C, is much larger than can be expected from variation in the total solar irradiance alone. However, we also find that the largest contribution to the 20th century warming comes from anthropogenic sources, with DTman = 0.42 ± 0.11 C.”

That is my general answer to your comment.

As for more specifically squaring Shaviv’s ocean calorimetry analysis with the latest solar cycle, I’m not going to address it, but would welcome anybody who honestly looks into this. I retired from trying to rationally engage the climate doomsayers some years ago. The recent Shaviv/Svensmark paper was a pleasant surprise, that I wouldn’t have missed if I had been following climate science as I did before I gave up this fabulously expensive (in terms of time and sacrifice of career) hobby. Your comment, and that of the clueless hugh, are hardly incentive for me to give time and energy doing the equivalent of, to use Barney Frank’s colorful analogy, talking to a dining room table. (I do appreciate, however, different clue’s attitude, which shows him or her to have the sort of mind that could develop into an honest scientist. Even so, finally having a full time job, albeit one that ends in March, I intend to get my z’s, and do my 2 hour commute safely. You’d be better off exploring with the assistance of a professional, working physicist, anyway.)

Of course, they’d have to understand that Shaviv’s method is deeper – both figuratively and literally – than just looking at surface temperatures (as you can grok from one of the comments, regarding a criticism of Svalgaard’s.) The thermal capacity of the oceans is (from memory) about 33x the thermal capacity of the atmosphere. While humans may naturally be “atmospheric-centric”, the laws of physics are not. Ultimately, the ocean’s thermal capacity will be the dog that wags the atmospheric thermal capacity tail.

From Shaviv’s earlier paper, “Using the Oceans as a Calorimeter to Quantify the Solar
Radiative Forcing”

“We begin with a direct reconstruction of the global
oceanic heat flux using the thermal heat content of the top
700m of the global oceans over the past 5 decades [Ishii
et al., 2006], and differentiate it. Since we do not expect the
11-year oscillations to penetrate deeper than about 200m
(depending on the mixed layer depth and the actual diffusion
coefficient), there is no need to add deeper ocean data,
which would just add noise.”

I notice that neither Metamars nor anyone else has offered evidence of any near-future climate-changes which adherents of the Metamars Theories have made, so we can see if their predictions came true or not. In other words, no evidence that any of the Metamars Theories has been put to any sort of real-world stress test.

If Metamars or someone else brings such links, I will go ahead and take a look at them.

@different clue

“I notice that neither Metamars nor anyone else has offered evidence of any near-future climate-changes which adherents of the Metamars Theories have made, so we can see if their predictions came true or not.”

I think you are asking for the impossible. The Shaviv theory integrally depends on solar magnetic effects. While there’s a well known fuzzy periodicity of 11 years in the sunspot cycle, the details are more complicated. It turns out that Svalgaard has recently posted a 9,000 year reconstruction of solar activity. See https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/27/svalgaard-paper-reconstruction-of-9000-years-of-solar-activity/, especially figure 4. It’s resolution is obviously nowhere near 11 year intervals. However, even if you had that sort of resolution, making it agree with the less finely grained results presented by Svalgaard would not inspire anybody into believing they could either predict or postdict sunspot activity with any significant accuracy. I’m not a solar physicist, but I will say that, AFAIK, nobody has even tried to to this.

We can look back at historical data with some surety, but AFAIK, nobody can look forward, not even Svalgaard! Even if you somehow knew the magneto-hydrodynamics of the sun in great detail at any particular instant of time, it’s a chaotic system so you still would have no good means of predicting an exact future. And, of course, you’re not going to know the dynamic state of the sun in intimate detail, to begin with.

So, while you can’t use Shaviv’s analysis to predict the future much, you can still study it’s veracity by examining the past. And Shaviv has done just that.

I suggest you start out by reading Shaviv’s “Reply to Eschenbach” @ http://sciencebits.com/reply-eschenbach . Then, at least look his 2009 paper that he links to, in this section:

“Figure 1: Eschenbach’s figure, where he correlates the altimetry data after it was detrended and had the ENSO component removed, with the sunspot number. He claims that there is no fit, but in fact, one expects the sea level rate to be largest when the sun is most active, and the sea level rate to be smallest when least active. This is seen in the data as expected!

It is quite upsetting that Eschenbach did this mistake even though it was clearly explained in our paper, and it is also explained in my previous paper from 2008, where one can clearly see that the sea level change rate varies in sync with solar activity over more than 80 years.”

Hopefully, you already took a look at Box 5 from the motls link I gave:

“Box 5: Why is the CR/climate link ignored?

Given all the empirical evidence that has accumulated until now, the climate community should have considered it seriously, and even if the actual mechanism was until now missing, the empirical evidence showing and quantifying the solar climate link shouldn’t have been ignored by most of the community.

The reason is actually very simple and lays in the implication of the link. If the sun has a large effect on climate, then its increase activity over the 20th century should have contributed at least some of the global warming. In fact, the calorimetric sea level based measurements imply that a bit more than half of the 20th century warming should be attributed to the sun. If so, the role that humans have had is diminished. In fact, when one considers the role that the sun has had over the 20th century, one finds that a) the temperature variations can actually be much better explained (with a smaller residual) and the required climate sensitivity is on the low side (about 1 to 1.5°C increase per CO2 doubling, compared with the canonical range of 1.5 to 4.5°C advocated by the IPCC, see Ziskin & Shaviv 2012). The low climate sensitivity implies that the same emission scenarios will give rise to more modest temperature increases over the 21st century. These good news imply that we are not in as dire a situations as we often hear. But many do not like hearing this.

Now that the mechanism is actually known, there should be no excuse in ignoring it any further, but given the above implications, it would most likely still be ignored.”

Lastly, as with many things cosmological, the application of COSMIC rays impacting Earth’s climate, similarly to the solar magnetic effects, is sort of breath-taking. I would say even beautiful. We’re talking about an effect that follows from the earth passing through the spiral arms of the galaxy, with a periodicity of something like 100 million years, with 10 million of those years inside the spiral arm.

There was a great film on the subject, I saw some years ago. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ

@Metamars,

I thank you for the obvious time and sincere intent invested in your detailed reply to my comment. While my initial psycho-mental reaction is-in-part one of disappointment, I will read the comment at slow, think, and then either respond or not depending on what usefulness I feel I can contribute.

A lot of people know that guy who had the cool epiphany, some slick idea, elegant no matter how they looked at it, who wrapped their reputations around it, maybe even their livelihoods. But after a while serious problems appeared with the idea and that guy still defended his idea like some dieting lady gobbling olestra chips. And then somebody finally tells the dieting women that not only does her butt still look big, but she’s farting a lot too. I get why they know they’re wrong (at some level), but steadfastly continue to debate for it anyways. I probably do it myself.

I don’t think this is like that.

As the duly designated conspiracy theorist / representative from the kids table, who’s seen one too many Youtube videos about “Century of the Self” and Cambridge Analytica… I think this is how it’s done. You hire a bunch of guys who hire another bunch of guys to dissemble stuff at certain targets, to sow a bit of FUD. Okay, I may be wrong about this, but one thing’s for sure. For better or worse, metamars is now the Cosmic Ray Guy. He’s stuck with that theory. No changing to some other slicker denier theory. And last tag no tagbacks.

Personally, I’d leave it to the big boys over at CERN. But sadly, they’re also mostly “scientists” who cannot be trusted (with many Europeans). Are there any liberty loving laymen available to help out with the CLOUD tests?

Dr Roy Spencer, a famous climate science “denier” (who happens to be a climate scientist, who, of course, has never denied that the climate changes), recently criticized justifying CO2 catastrophism of various flavors, on the basis of protecting children.

“This is the state of climate science today: if you support the alarmist narrative, you can exaggerate threats and connections with human activities, fake experiments, break government rules, intimidate scientific journal editors (and make them resign),and even violate the law.

As long as you can say you are doing it for the children.”

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/09/my-tucker-carlson-interview-last-night-and-calling-out-bill-nye-james-hansen/

If you read the article, you’ll see that “fake experiments” refers to Bill Nye’s fraudulent experiment “demonstrating” the green house gas principle in a tube. It lives on, in youtube, brainwashing countless rubes. I wrote about Nye’s fraud some years ago: “AL GORE/BILL NYE ‘CLIMATE 101’ VIDEO FOUND TO BE FRAUDULENT + HOW YOU CAN REPLICATE THE EXPERIMENT, YOURSELF” @ https://shadowproof.com/2012/12/11/al-gorebill-nye-climate-101-video-found-to-be-fraudulent-how-you-can-replicate-the-experiment-yourself/

@Erik Anderson

No, I do not.

However, I often find myself feeling love and concern for the plight of younger Americans, moreso than other subgroups of suffering souls. Partly because of the fact that I’ve felt a connection to Newark, long before I lived there for just a few years….. ( I believe this is karmic. I was born in Newark, but this soul connection has to be deeper. I’ve felt it basically my whole life.) And partly because I’ve been touched by the series “Best Shot” (episode 4 book mark is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzSEONnq4Wc)…. And partly for other reasons, I believe my next civic oriented web application will not involve politics, at all.

It will, instead, hopefully be used to turn Newark into the “hugging capital of the world”. And then, if successful, will naturally spread to other locations.

I’m not the least bit concerned that the young people I hope to touch will be getting fried because of “climate change”.

I respect the basic idea of following the precautionary principle. Wrt climate change, this was well articulated byNoam Chomsky. However, I’m not impressed with the superficial approach by Chomsky. Does he even know that, historically, cold has killed many times more people than heat? (As mentioned by Dr. Spencer in my last link.) Where is his concern with the precautionary principle for people freezing to death and/or starving to death during prolonged cold spells??

Chomsky teaches at MIT. While Chomsky SAYS that “it’s actually much worse than climate scientist have been telling the public” (not an exact quote) one of the most famous of climate scientists who pooh pooh the alarmist is Richard Lindzen. That’s Richard Lindzen, of MIT. Where is his record of engaging Lindzen – who he literally could have walked over to talk to, or have lunch with?

Oh, right. No accounts of such common sense actions exist – not that I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve paid a lot of attention to both Chomsky and Lindzen. Chomsky – who I take to be not just brilliant, but exceptionally ethical – completely FAILS when it comes to the subject of climate change. Just like he completely FAILED when it comes to so-called “conspiracy theories”. There’s enough evidence pointing to conspiracy behind the JFK assassination to drive a truck through, e.g., but Chomsky is quite the denier when it comes to conspiracies. (A much more rational approach is presented by Michael Parenti, who is also quite the articulate lefty.)

As for you poisoning your own child’s relationships with close relatives – people who naturally have more concern for his welfare than complete strangers – I suggest that you explain carefully that this is your best judgement, and that, like all parents, you can and will make mistakes.

If Svensmark is correct, and temperatures stagnate or decline for 20 years, and your child loses his opportunity to be nourished by loving relationships, during formative years, no less, you will want him to understand that you had his best interests in heart and mind, but that you were just wrong.

Otherwise, you may find him shunning you, in years to come.

@metamars

I’m sorry, are you literally claiming that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas, or that greenhouse gases aren’t a thing?

Again, ships are now traversing the arctic without the aid of icebreakers. No one is buying your bullshit anymore.

Tony Heller (Steven Goddard) has the shtick of claiming that scientists are collectively lying about temperature increases. This flies in the face of cosmic ray causation, which agrees that temperatures are rising but the causes are not man-made.

I’d advise deniers stick to one denier belief system.

Christianity is in steep decline in the USA. The talent pool of faith-based reasoners is declining. Aside from that, younger Americans are more concerned about AGW than older ones:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-younger-americans-worried.aspx

This all means that average citizens are increasingly wondering why deniers have so many different belief systems, when AGW proponents have only one.

Think about it. The time is rapidly arriving when paid kleptocratic shills will be the first to feel the gores and burns from pitchforks and torches. As a simple armchair prognosticator, even I can foresee that it will not be pretty.

Tony Heller = Steven Goddard
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/climate-change-denier-testifies-for-40-minutes-in-washington-senate-environment-committee/

Climate scientists are intentionally altering their temperature data:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/noaanasa-dramatically-altered-us-temperatures-after-the-year-2000/

Tony Heller believes that climate scientists are lying. Yet, you’ve said right here (no link required) that cosmic rays is what’s causing increasing temperatures.

You can’t have it both ways.

And you were always partisan, just not being honest about it. Logic is what should persuade the ‘scientifically minded’ to choose ‘sides’, and never the rantings of “lunatics”.

metamars, I couldn’t care less about your feelings. Trying to emotionally manipulate at the level of a toddler isn’t very scientific.

People around here prefer intellectual honesty. I can admit that I’m a far better bullshit detector than I am a climate scientist. You can’t admit that climatic skepticism is no longer a healthy skepticism.

Once, there were four distinct schools of skepticism:
1. Not happening.
2. Maybe happening, not our fault.
3. Maybe happening, maybe our fault, not gonna be so bad.
4. Maybe happening, maybe our fault, maybe gonna be bad, so lets party like it’s 1999.

So now you’re saying that current denier science attempts to combine all four into a mix which also, accepts that climatologists may also be right about AGW. A little.

Sadly for you, I’m also a skeptic. Healthy skepticism demands that you can call a spade a spade. You once mentioned scientific groupthink. So what motivates all these scientists into groupthink? The meme of “government pays our way” would make sense, if current American government (both major parties) weren’t in bed with big business (no link required, should be painfully obvious by now).

Far more plausible is an energy cabal strategy to keep profits topped up by stalling anti-warming mandates (Google “I-1631” to find out who the primary opponents are) until warming becomes painfully obvious, after which their descendants (they hope) will employ and profit from some kind of CO2 capture technology.

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-co2-usable-energy.html
https://www.cnet.com/news/this-co2-machine-could-transform-the-way-we-fight-climate-change/

Back in my corporate days, we called this “teeter-totter design”. Get the customer to buy that, then buy this as a fix for “that”. I lost my career by being honest, not lying as you claim you would not have, when one of their “this” could have led to many deaths. I doubt you would have had the courage to do what I did. Modern conservatives cannot be relied upon to do the right thing.

But the Koch brothers pay so well. Two billionaires in the pocket is worth more than tens of thousands of scientists in the bush.

Please reconsider taking that action.

I was in approximate agreement with your politics on this until 6 months ago. Not being a climate scientist, I saw no alternative to simply accepting what ‘97% of climate scientists say’. If we can’t rely on the relevant branch of science, we have no collective decision-making mechanism at all, do we?

I have since discovered, through unrelated reading, that consensus narratives in our society do not work the way I thought they did. For many issues, the top-down, establishment-backed secondary sources that most of us rely on flat-out contradict what bottom-up, primary sources say.

This probably includes some scientific issues. I do not yet know if global warming is one of them, but there is simply no way for any citizen to know without studying primary sources. This is a terrible way to run a world, unworkable in fact, and I don’t like it one bit, but it is true.

Here’s something I have looked into a bit: there’s a good chance institutional science doesn’t know how the freaking sun works.

I’m probably average-left relative to the readership here, but having spent a few months looking at what’s been swept ‘under the carpet’ in a variety of areas, I’m coming to share the right wing’s distrust of the pronouncements of our present intellectual elites. This is by no means anti-intellectualism — I actually have a recent Ph.D. in an unrelated area of science. I think we have structural problems.

Be kind to your right-wing friends and family. There’s some chance their instincts might be closer to the mark than yours here.

Willy,

You are correct re: the scope of what I am claiming. Yes I am aware of it. I see that you find it as distasteful as I do. I cannot help that.

I’m saying our society is presently structured in such a way that it is not at all irrational for citizens to doubt that accredited experts are free to “try their best to use the most objective methods available”, or that they are incentivized to do so.

There’s no way for me, guy on the internet, to prove to you that I’ve come to this place reluctantly, after a half century of being a good little authority-believing straight-A student, so I won’t try. I’m probably just a crazed woo seeking conspiracy kook.

@Jim

I love the idea that a great mass of scientists trudging along on minuscule research grants are the villains, and the billionaires and oil companies whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuel industries continuing to exist are the ones we should trust.

https://twitter.com/scottwesterfeld/status/446805144781348865?lang=en

Hey, Erik, thanks for alerting me to Goddard/Heller’s twitter feed! One of his tweets points to a youtube of Rep Hank Johnson, a Democratic climate science expert who won reelection with 73 percent of the vote.

https://realclimatescience.com/2018/11/guam-is-safe-again/

Maybe you should show this video to your son, so he can appreciate the Democrats who have educated themselves on the climate change issue, and all the great politicians and scientist who have locked arms to save us from this coming scourge.

@ Willy

“The incentives are far more on the denier side of the fence.”

Oh, really? Why don’t you look into this SERIOUSLY, and report back your findings? (Preferably in a new diary, as this one is getting long in the tooth.) Fortunately for you, I didn’t find the reference I’ve quoted in years past, after searching for 3 minutes, so am not going to bother.

metamars, how did you get to this place? I’ve already told you my story. You don’t really want us to assume that you were unfairly denied access to climate school and want revenge, do you? And you surely don’t want me to lump you in with the common tribal denier who makes a big deal out of a snowy day.

As I’ve already stated, I’m open to the possibility that our corporate overlords have all of these things under control, with the perfect warming solution sitting in some secret warehouse awaiting that right time when it can be heroically unveiled, without profits skipping a beat.

But then, I’ve had sit downs with three different VP level overlords from a famous name global corporation. I was not impressed. In fact, this regular schmuck came away extremely disturbed. I was expecting somebody worthy of the corner office, the fancy suit and the travel entourage well stocked with lovely assistants. But instead of some genius-wizard-guru I found a player. Those clowns didn’t know shit. Worse, they cared little about the company that fed them or about taking care of the grunt-level integrity it desperately needed to compete. If they are an accurate sample of the overall situation, we’re all gonna be in a world of hurt.

No offense bro, but I won’t let you off the hook.

@metamars

Haha. you really don’t comprehend that a million and a half is chump change to the oil industry, do you?

Regardless, I don’t care particularly about any individual scientist. I care about the consensus. Which, yes, is over 90%.

@Eric, how would you react if one of your relatives decided to shun you, including telling their child(ren) to also shun you, because they think some political issue is important and you don’t?

I sincerely hope your approach works and we’re wrong. Perhaps you would be kind enough to write a follow-up article in, say, a year’s time to share the results with us.

Leviticus 18 implies that global warming is being caused by sexual deviancy. May want to add that one to the list.

I once started with beliefs, as taught to me, then built up a system of facts to support them. The results were disastrous.

Far wiser would have been to stay humble, objective and disciplined while collecting facts before coming up with beliefs. Part of that discipline would be to make sure all the facts jibe, lest I be shunned by those I could learn much more from.

So what if the idea is over 100 years old? Anthony Watts accepted CO2 as a green house gas well before I saw the article on his website about direct evidence for CO2 as a green house gas.

I’m not interested in explaining the difference between an idea, and evidence for that idea; nor will I explain the difference between a quantitative statement or theory and a qualitative statement or theory.

I doubt that you’d be interested in such ‘details’, anyway.

You appear to know nothing about the details of the arctic “melting” over the course of the last hundred years, much less just a few millenia. History does not begin with the satellite era.

Your physorg link is so superficial, it’s laughable.

With a major caveat, there was another article at physorg regarding Zharkova, et.al., which treated the subject seriously, and not just as a lightweight exercize in reinforcing the catastrophist narrative: https://phys.org/news/2015-07-ice-age.html#nRlv

The major caveat regards the following section:
“The magnetic field of the Sun grows, which means that the flux of cosmic rays decreases, increasing the number of clouds and leading to the warming again. Next comes the reverse process, when the magnetic field of the sun decreases and the intensity of cosmic ray rises, reducing the clouds and making the atmosphere cool again.”

Actually, increased cloud cover leads to a cooling effect, because solar radiation is reflected back out into space. So, the coming causal chain is as follows: lower solar magnetic shielding -> more cosmic ray bombardment -> increased clouds -> cooling effect