Predictors of climate alarmism and scepticism

Posted on 20 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

A year ago when the results of the survey were coming in, I started preparing to write a paper by doing a literature search to see what comparable research had been done. It was not a pleasant experience. The academic literature on sceptics (almost none of alarmists) was some of the most hate filled, dishonest garbage it has ever been my misfortune to read.
For example, in one paper alone I counted around 100 intentional insults about sceptics. That in a peer reviewed paper. It was what might best be described as “climate porn” not academic literature. However, just because a lot of the views are not credible, that did not mean that those papers did not have some information material to this survey and its analysis.
I forced myself to read these studies and as such I was able to tease out a few facts that do help draw some wider conclusions from the survey data which I would now like to present in a summarised form:
Terminology
The term “sceptic” is a very apt name for those sceptical of the claim of catastrophic global warming. However, from previous efforts to find an acceptable term for those on “the other side” I know there is extreme resistance to any group name. I suspect this in itself says something important about this group but I do not know what. But any categorisation however well intentioned appears to cause offence. So, as offence will be taken whatever term I use, I will use that which I believe to be most accurate which is “alarmist”. This refers to those participants on line who are alarmed by the prospect of catastrophic warming. And in this article I am not suggesting that alarm is unwarranted.
However, please note, whilst some academics such as Michael Mann make colourful contributions online, due to the anonymity of contributions no inference can be drawn from this work regarding other climate academics.
1. Suggestibility is linked to alarmism.

Perhaps the one  significant finding from the survey is that sceptics are very confident data analysts:  by education, by training and by experience.
In contrast, research by of all people, Lewandowsky (who is notorious for his attacks on sceptics) shows that alarmists were suggestible. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, My Best Articles, Survey | 8 Comments

What should define the start of the next ice-age?

Posted on 20 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

I’ve often wondered what will be taken as the “start” of the next ice-age. Assuming the start is fairly gradual, we’d expect to see something that either has never happened before starting to happen or something that happens quite often becoming regular.
My own preferred measure would be something very simple, such as the first year in which ice remains continuously on the Scottish mountains.
However looking today I see that WUWT have an article: “4 of the 5 Great Lakes about to freeze over” and I thought that perhaps the first year of a succession when 5 of the 5 might be more likely.
Any thoughts?

Posted in Climate, Sceptics, Survey | 5 Comments

Joannne Nova: strips the climate scam bare.

Posted on 19 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

Posted in Climate | 3 Comments

The Caterpillar Theory and it's use in predicting earthquakes

Posted on 18 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

After the boxing day & Japanese earthquake and Tsunamis are geologists ignoring a vital tool that could be used to help predict earthquakes?
In the last article I provided a quick summary of the Caterpillar theory of plate tectonic movement. Put very simply, this is that warming & cooling over 1000s of years causes the crust to expand and contract. Expansion pushes the crust down at subduction Zones and contraction cause it to shrink causing fissures to form in the mid oceans which are then filled with magma which solidifies.
The result is that when the earth is subject to regular cooling and warming as we have over the 100,000 ice age cycle, this will cause the earth’s crust to move rather in the form of some caterpillars.

However, so far I have just treated the crust as a single entity. In reality, the above “arching” of the back of the caterpillar is very realistic. Because far from the entire crust expanding and contracting, the reality is that the expansion and contraction is greatest near the surface.

Ice-age temperature change1

Change in crust temperature. Note, this is the change in temperature on top of the ADDITIONAL temperature gradient as we get deeper into the crust.


But there is another curiosity. For simplicity, I’m going to refer here only to the change in temperature due to thermal change at the surface without the general increase we get with depth. So, when I say “cooler”, that is cooler with respect to a nominal very long-term temperature we expect at that depth.
Notice for example, if we pick the yellow line starting at +2C. Here the surface shows less warming due to this cycle than a few hundred meters down. So whereas the surface is beginning to cool, down at 1000m, the crust is still expanding. If we then look at the next green curve. We see that crustal cooling has reached down to around 1.2km. So above 1.2km, the crust is now cooling, but below 1.2km the drop in temperature that occurred has still not penetrated to that depth and it is still responding to the previous cooling of the globe from almost 100,000 years before.
However, if we go even further down into the rock, whilst the amplitude diminishes, we find that whilst the surface is cooling, then lower the rock is warming, if we go further down we find that again the rock is cooling and below that it is warming. So, in effect the temperature of the surface is going down through the crust in waves.

The Caterpillar Theory and Earthquakes

Therefore, one prediction of the caterpillar theory of plate movement is that earthquake zones should be depth related and that the depth of earthquakes should gradually move down into the crust over thousands of years.

Differential thermal expansion

Below is the graphic showing how expansion of the crust leads to earthquakes. What it does not show, is that almost invariably, the rock on either side of the subduction zone will be of different types and therefore expand at different rates.
plate-subductionNor does it show how the waves of expansion and cooling will move down into the crust. So, in a real situation with different rock on either side, the situation swill be more like the following:

Subduction zone showing waves of ice-age cycles going down into the ground with rocks with different thermal conductivity on each side. (Note in reality the isotherms will be curved near the fault line, but for simplicity this has not been shown).

Subduction zone (extended vertical scale) showing waves of ice-age cycles going down into the ground with rocks with different thermal conductivity on each side. (Note in reality the isotherms will be curved near the fault line, but for simplicity this has not been shown).


Now, instead of the rock expanding or contracting uniformly across the fault line with a gradual change with depth. Now, there are a series of pulses of hot and cold going into the ground and along the fault line one side may be cooling whilst the other is warming. Now these zones of stress will move slowly into the ground making it very likely that they will at some point trigger an earthquake.

Posted in Caterpillar, Ice age | 2 Comments

Toward a new theory of ice-ages XV (implications)

Posted on 17 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

In this article I want to explore what this new theory implies about the present political debate called “global warming”. Continue reading →

Posted in Caterpillar, Ice age | 2 Comments

The Caterpillar theory of tectonic plate movement – it's just simple physics.

Posted on 17 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

Thanks Josh cartoonsbyjosh.com

Thanks Josh cartoonsbyjosh.com


Ice Pressure Ridge

Ice Pressure Ridge


There can be few new ideas which are so simple and so fixed in basic science:

  1. When solids heat up they expand and push out in all directions
  2. That material occupies more space in all directions.
  3. So it expands upwards but also outwards.
  4. That expanding material must go somewhere.
  5. So When you have a large sheet of material such as the ice sheet to the right, somewhere the sheet must give. It will either buckle & break forming a pressure ridge as shown, or move out into open water, or one sheet will be pushed over the top of another.

Thermal expansion is just settled science.

But so too is thermal conduction. Solids are also thermal insulators. When we have a thick sheet of material it will take time for any change at one surface to penetrate the sheet. The distance this heat (when applied as sin wave) penetrates a solid is proportional to the square root of the time.
Taking the earth as an example, a 10C change between night and day, penetrates around 20cm. In other words, below 2ocm, the change from day to night will be small. But likewise a similar 10C change from summer to winter won’t be equally noticeable beyond about 4m (0.2m x √365).
And we can work out very approximately how far into the ground the 8C change over the approximately 100,000 years of ice age will penetrate. This we can do by simply extending the change from the surface as follows:

4m x √100,000 = 1.2km

It turns out that the real figure is slightly higher (rock is a better conductor than soil), so the top couple of kilometers of crust will heat up and cool. And therefore it is just straightforward physics that the top layers of the earth will expand and contract as a result of the ice-age cycle.

There is really nothing controversial so far!

If you have 40,000km of crust all pushing outward(1), like the song “there were ten in the bed and the little one said rollover … and one fell out”. Like the ice on the ocean, when the whole of the earth’s crust is expanding outwards, the end of that crust has to go somewhere. There is no open water, so either that thermal expansion will cause pressure ridges, or one layer will slide under another in a process called “subduction” or something else will happen, but …

The crust cannot heat up and do nothing!

So what happens? Recent evidence makes it clear. That evidence is that tectonic plate movement is directly affected by this ice age cycle.

Fig XX Bathymetric and ice-age cycle (CO2) data normalized to a aximum amplitude of 1, and superimposed

Correlation between oceanic crust formation and ice-age cycle


Continue reading →

Posted in Caterpillar, Climate, Ice age, My Best Articles | 15 Comments

How to convince a sceptic – just give them the data

Posted on 16 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

Over the years I have constantly heard the view that what climate academics are failing to do is “communicate with sceptics”. This is the biggest load of claptrap I’ve ever heard. It shows those doing this kind of research have no real understanding of sceptics.

The “communication is all that is needed” argument

The logic of this argument is this:

If person A is the authority on a subject and they assert B, then if person C rejects the assertion B, it is either because they have not been able to hear the fact B or they do not know that authority A is the authority.

This is because in social “science” like most arts subjects, most of what is written is mere opinion without many hard facts to back it up. In contrast real science is based on the facts and not opinion. But because social “science” is more an art than a science, when social “scientists” look at climate , they immediately accept that their own colleagues must be right and accept them without question them as the undisputed authority. Therefore when they see sceptics they believe that our rejection of the statements of their authorities must in some way be because the communication of the views of their authorities has not got through for some reason.

The autonomous sceptic

In the previous article I mentioned that I was developing a theory that sceptics tended to be more autonomous and able to think for themselves than alarmists who tend to be group-thinkers who need and value a consensus. Continue reading →

Posted in My Best Articles, Survey | 16 Comments

A few summary graphics from survey

Posted on 16 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

The last post is a complete report of the full survey results. The following are some of the graphs I started preparing before I realised that it was not a task I could do on my own.

The response to the survey by time

The following graph shows how the total number of survey responses changes with time as a percentage of total reponses to the question do you agree “CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming”. This shows how its announcement of various blogs resulted in “blips”.
Continue reading →

Posted in Survey | 1 Comment

Toward a new theory of ice-ages XIV (Putting it all together)

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic

In this final article I try to tie together what I know about the ice-age cycles – and perhaps as relevant, what I do not know. Continue reading →

Posted in Caterpillar, Ice age, My Best Articles | 4 Comments

Results of online survey of participants of the climate debate conducted early 2014

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Scottish-Sceptic
Before Xmas I started publishing the survey results from last year, but unfortunately Xmas got in the way. So, I was intending publishing the whole report as a booklet but then I worked out a way to put it on wordpress in one go. So here is the report:-

Original Questions

For reference here are the original questions

Introduction

In Early 2014 following an article “Sceptics Versus Academics” Mike Haseler & the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum (SCEF) conducted an on line survey of the participants of the online climate debate.
With only around 100 responses expected, the survey was intended to get qualitative information from a low sample for which a simple spreadsheet would be adequate. As it turned out over 5000 surveys were completed.
“We knew we had problems when the spreadsheet intended to analyse the results  refused to open the data download” said Mike Haseler then Chair of SCEF. There is a huge amount that can and should be teased out of this data.
“So we approached both the UK and Scottish government for help to complete the analysis of the survey and publish the results. Despite regularly making false statements about us sceptics, neither government were interested in the facts.”
SCEF also approached the few academics who had showed themselves to be impartial and not part of the regular attacks against climate sceptics but none could help.
A year later, with no sign of the necessary funding to do a proper statistical analysis Mike Haseler feels that is is time to release the raw report that as is.
Please note this report uses the full dataset and e.g. it has not been possible to remove a couple of dozen “test” responses. However the number is small enough not to change the main results. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, My Best Articles, Survey | Tagged | 11 Comments