Cenk Uygur and Jimmy Dore of The Young Turks have offered to contribute an extra $10,000 each to my challenge. I have accepted their very generous offer and will do everything I can to keep their money safe.
They did a nice piece on my challenge that you can see on You Tube here.
Comment left on the you-tube video:
ReplyDeleteThe 10,000 has already been won - here http://dialoguesonglobalwarming.blogspot.fr/2014/06/10000-challenge-submission-amo.html
But Keating is ignoring it, making the most pathetic excuses, and refusing to pay out. He's a charlatan. Doing it for publicity to sell his book.
My responses are posted for all to see. If you find any credible scientific errors, let me know and I will address them. Temper tantrum and foot-stomping on the part of deniers does not constitute scientific evidence. I would like for you to give an example of how I refused to pay and show how I was in the wrong.
ReplyDeleteAs for publicity, I'm doing to to publicize how deniers make false claims in the hope of fooling people. And, its working out pretty well. You just demonstrated it yourself with your false claims.
Do you really think this is all about promoting my book? Just how stupid are you? Or, is it because you are incapable of caring about the millions of people suffering because of global warming. I'll be you are even one of them. There are pretty good odds your utilities, food and insurance bills are all higher, but you're glad to send your money in anyway. That's devotion to a cause.
DeleteAs for my book, if your name is Stephen Hawking or Neils deGrasse Tyson, a science book isn't going to sell much. That isn't why I wrote it. I wrote it because it was something I wanted to do.
Dr. Keating, I am a believer who desperately wants the world to grow up and take responsibility for the mess we've caused. That said, I have absolutely zero knowledge of climate science. To me, the AMO graph shows that the temperatures and AMO "swap" at 1970, but apparently that's a flawed understanding.Since Wikipedia has a tendency to be verbose on scientific topics, I was wondering if you could give us a quick rundown of what exactly is the AMO, how do we read it and what is it for? To be completely fair it does seem like you've abandoned the thread over there.
DeleteI have not abandoned that thread. I just am ignoring Rum Runner because he is simply rejecting the evidence.
DeleteThe AMO is an long-term shifting of the surface temperature in the North Atlantic Ocean. It will alternate between being warmer than the long-term average and cooler than the long-term average. That difference from the average is known as an anomaly. The anomaly sounds small (only about 1 degree), but the effects are very large. When the AMO is positive it causes warming in the atmosphere and when it is negative it cools the atmosphere. This leads to all sorts of resulting events. Eventually, the average global surface temperature will reflect that positive or negative value and become warmer or cooler itself. There has been a big correlation between the two through history. Then, in the 1970s, the correlation stopped and became a negative correlation. The AMO went negative and the global surface temperature went sky rocketing in the positive direction. Then, when the AMO switched to positive in the 1990s, the global average surface temperature slowed down. These events since the late 1970s is completely out of synch with the historical record of the AMO and temperature. In other words, something happened to break the correlation. Temperature went the opposite way it should have if the correlation still existed.
'I just am ignoring Rum Runner because he is simply rejecting the evidence.'
DeleteI am incredulous. And amused. What evidence have I ignored? I ask because you haven't provided any evidence. None. You've just claimed that I'm wrong, when it's obvious to anyone with the requisite number of eyes that you are talking out of your hat about the correlation breaking down.
Here is the correlation myopic Chris says has broken down:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/mean:30/from:1970/plot/hadcrut3vsh/mean:30/from:1970/plot/esrl-amo/mean:30/from:1970
By the terms of your revised challenge, you've lost. In all three categories. All I ask is you start to act like a penis owner.
Dead Mr. Christopher Keating,
ReplyDelete(Sorry if I accidentally double post, I'm not quite sure how this blog works)
I have a few concerns about your challenge, though I appreciate your effort to engage in dialogue.
1. If I asked you to prove that unicorns do not exist, how would you go about it? The answer is you couldn't prove that unicorns do not exist. At best, you could show that based on the lack on evidence on the existence of unicorns, and using scientific principles such as occam's razor, that the lack of a belief in unicorns is justified. For example, recent experimental results at the LHC have shown, based on the null hypothesis, that there is more than 5 sigma confidence that the Higgs Boson exists; but that does not prove that the Higgs Boson exists. Similarly, proving that human caused global warming is or is not occurring is not possible regardless of the evidence. You really need to rephrase the challenge.
2. The burden of evidence is on the person making the claims, not on the people denying the claims. Asking climate change deniers to prove their positions is somewhat backwards when it is the people making claims about the existence of CO2 that need to support their claims. Of course many scientists have provided more than sufficient evidence to justify the belief in human caused climate change, but doesn't it make more sense to simply present the evidence that humans are causing climate change rather than demand that deniers provide evidence to disprove your claims?
3. You seem to be using a lot of guilt by association on skeptics to tie them to the tobacco or oil lobby (when people can be skeptical about claims regarding climate change for a variety of reasons), while at the same time you downplay the problem of political interference in how scientific research is funded in North America and other parts of the world. In particular, many scientists have incentives to distort their evidence, methodology and approach to various scientific questions in order to get funding and tenure. It is a huge problem in research in many fields (not just climate change), but climate change is particularly problematic because of the political aspect. I do not think doing either of these two things is helpful to the discussion.
4. Do you not think that there is too much focus on questions of 'if climate change is occurring and are humans responsible?', which is pretty well established, and less on questions such as 'is this climate change bad and do CO2 emission mitigation policies make the most sense?'? Because just showing that climate change caused by human CO2 emissions is occurring is no where sufficient to justify CO2 mitigation policies (which I believe you have suggested are justified on numerous occasions). One would still need to show that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations is bad, that the cost of implementing mitigation policies is less than the benefits of mitigation policies, that mitigation makes more sense than alternatives such as geo-engineering, and that mitigation is a politically feasible option based on the fact that you would need to get all of the world's major governments to work together. Furthermore, determining what people should and should not do is outside of the scope of science since science is merely a methodology to find truth. To truly answer the question on what people should do about climate change, you need to look at fields like philosophy, sociology and economics in order to evaluate this question, which is outside your field of research.
Sincerely,
A Physics Graduate Student in Ottawa
If I was going around insisting that unicorns don't exist and that it is easy to prove it, then it would be appropriate to ask me to back up my claim. That is what this challenge is about. I am not asking anyone to prove anything. I am just telling the deniers they have the opportunity to back up their claims.
DeleteI do not need to rephrase the challenge and have no intention of doing so. If they feel that proving man made global warming is not real is impossible, then they need to stop making the claim.
2. See number 1. They are the ones making the claims and I am just telling them I will pay them if they can do what they claim.
3. There have been only two scientific issues that have had such a emotional public debate - climate change and tobacco. Strangely enough, they are also the only two that have had an industry that stood to lose lots of money because of the issue. They are also the only two scientific issues where the industries at risk spent vast sums of money to undermine the science.
4. There are many issues, this is just one. Right now, the biggest obstacle to addressing the problem is the deniers actively working to deny its existence.
Deniers have been working hard to spin this challenge. Like I said, I am providing them an opportunity to do what they claim they can do. If they can't do it, then they should stop making the claim.
See below.
DeleteHi Dr. Keating
DeleteThank you for your reply.
If it is the climate change deniers that are making the absurd claims in the first place then I guess asking them to provide evidence is reasonable. Though asking them to prove it using the scientific method is sort of trolling them. But if the climate change deniers are dumb enough to get trolled then perhaps that is their fault.
Regards,
A Physics Graduate Student in Ottawa
(Edit: sorry about the typo in the last post where I have dead instead of dear)
Hi Dr. Keating,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your reply.
If it is the climate change deniers that are making the claims, then it is reasonable to ask them to support their claims. Though asking them to prove their claims using the scientific method is sort of trolling them. But if the climate change deniers are dumb enough to get trolled them perhaps that is their fault.
Regards,
A Physics Graduate Student in Ottawa
(sorry about the typo in the last post where I accidentally typed dead instead of dear)