Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Megalodon]

I was a Biology major before I switched to Math.

I was a marine biology major and didn't switch... or from my MSc in marine studies, or the PhD in geosciences.

...plankton will adapt fairly quickly. As I said earlier, they've been through periods of high CO₂ (and rapidly rising or falling CO₂) before, and adapted.

You simply ignored what I explained to you, didn't you? How do you expect to be taken seriously when you refuse to acknowledge that you're wrong and learn?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Malcolm, would you still assert - knowing that we know that it's false, and seeing as you are unable to present evidence for it - that Freeman Dyson disputes the physics underpinning AGW theory?

1. "Still"? I never did. If you go back, I said that Dyson's position was that the concern was exaggerated. "The polar bears will be just fine".

No, in fact, you really didn't.

(Malcolm Kirkpatrick): "1. This is not my understanding of Dyson's position. He wrote that he told his wife after they saw Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth": "The polar bears will be just fine". I'll accept a correction, here, but Dyson seems to consider C0₂ a minor factor, not worth much worry. If the basic physics is rock solid and implies warming, did Stephen Scneider not know any physics back in the 1970s?
2. Dyson certainly is expert in basic physics. Either that basic physics does not imply what AGW theorists suggest or that basic physics is not so basic and is over the heads of Dyson, Lubos Motl, and other physicists (and chemists, who will have taken basic physics) who dispute the AGW theory."

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I was a marine biology major and didn't switch... or from my MSc in marine studies, or the PhD in geosciences.
You simply ignored what I explained to you, didn't you? How do you expect to be taken seriously when you refuse to acknowledge that you're wrong and learn?

Carbon enters the ocean (among other routes) as dissolved CO₂. True or false?
Forams and many other organisms incorporate CO2 into their shells. True or false?
I answered this question:...

Can you guess what happens to the CO2 when it gets "stored" in the ocean?

Foraminifera incorporate it into calcium carbonate and it precipitates and forms chalk.

You akcnowledge that this was once true and predictthat it will no longer be true. I supplied two reasoons to dispute that prediction (the wiki quote about enhanced incorporation and the observation that plankton continued to sequester carbon during ages with higher atmospheric CO₂.

How do you expect to be taken seriously when you refuse to acknowledge that you're wrong and learn?[/QUOTE]
btw. What's the name on your birth certificate?

 

[aleCcowaN]

We certainly shouldn't exaggerate Murdoch's influence. His first objective is achieved if he can persuade politicans that he can deliver the masses - or turn them away - at the polls. That's when he takes effect and can further his megalomaniacal programme.

I mean that literally : Murdoch is a megalomaniac. He checks every box.

OK, I got it. Ruperto is a megalomaniac and he will die exclaiming "rosebud!" but, isn't insisting about his megalomania another way to avoid thinking about the cultural factors in the Anglo-Saxon archipelago that make it the promised lands for negationism? C'mon, are everybody saying that things were pretty calm and balanced 'til Ruperto came and tilted the playground?

Ruperto aside, I think that it deserves a good deal of attention to find essays and research about general attitudes in your countries towards twisting disciplines to make them fit certain needs and mind-frames, and also find websites that are the Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, Korean or Colombian version of wattsupyourhat and skepticscience. A great deal about the whole business can be learnt from that.

There's some discussion on these lines at SkS http://www.skepticalscience.com/Vivid-demonstration-knee-jerk-science-rejection.html (you may have seen it). Comment 39 by Kevin C is worth a look.

Comment #37. It's OK, but the "dehumanization" is the same natural mechanism that allows to hunt a prey and doesn't need an explanation. How people indulge themselves in the ways of hooliganism, including those stylish and demure, that's a good question.

The Church was more understanding of economic realities in those days, and more flexible (for a consideration, you understand, a dip of the beak in that colonial gold). The cattle ranchers had connections, and with any luck a cardinal or two in the family.

There was no American cardinal until 1850 and this was in the 1600s. Beef was simply the only food the poor could afford. You had to be midclass to eat wheat bread, as flour was imported from Spain (a century later wheat was imported from ... Cuba!).

My grandfather was a sailer and Boner's Airs was one of his regular runs, shipping out sheet metal (for tins) and shipping back corned beef (in tins). Capitalism at its most efficient .

Now we export sheet metal and keep the beef.

"Boston" explains a lot of it, and 1958 most of the rest. That and US Americans all being crazy, which goes without saying.

But that doesn't make me calm!

 

[aleCcowaN]

The general outline of the theory suffices to answer the question, in general.
"Platitude"? Certainly. That's what a simple (in broad outline) and generally-accepted theory will resemble. Darwin wrote somewhere that he worried that he'd hypnotized himself and was not sufficiently open to doubt about his theory when he found himself seeing confirmation for the theory everywhere he looked.

You didn't know the answer and wrote that and now you wrote this. I got it. You already had failed to answer why did you disregard sexual and asexual reproduction in another post. So, "Biology major"? Really?

Explanation of what Malcolm did:

Q- This ball is moving .... its weight is ... it bumps into a mass of .... were is it going to be the ball 10 seconds later?
A- It goes without saying.
Besides F = m.a (Ptolomeus the elder),
kinematics will tell you what to do (Wang Mang), and
Newton, Faraday and Einstein (?) got it

By the way, "high-end platitude".

 

[aleCcowaN]

(Malcolm Kirkpatrick): "1. This is not my understanding of Dyson's position. He wrote that he told his wife after they saw Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth": "The polar bears will be just fine". I'll accept a correction, here, but Dyson seems to consider C0₂ a minor factor, not worth much worry. If the basic physics is rock solid and implies warming, did Stephen Scneider not know any physics back in the 1970s?
2. Dyson certainly is expert in basic physics. Either that basic physics does not imply what AGW theorists suggest or that basic physics is not so basic and is over the heads of Dyson, Lubos Motl, and other physicists (and chemists, who will have taken basic physics) who dispute the AGW theory."

Have you problems to understand "No, in fact, you really didn't" or did you need me as a witness? (I hope for your good not as a character witness)

 

[Megalodon]

Forams and many other organisms incorporate CO2 into their shells. True or false?

False... I've explained this to you already. Forams (that for some reason you're so enamored with) and other calcifying organisms do not incorporate CO2 into their shells. They incorporate carbonates, which is not the same thing. They actually remove alkalinity from the ocean photic zone.

I answered this question:...

You answered it wrong, and I explained to you why you're wrong.

Again, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you refuse to acknowledge that you're wrong and learn?

btw. What's the name on your birth certificate?

What reason would you have to want to know that?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

You didn't know the answer and wrote that and now you wrote this. I got it¹. You already had failed to answer why did you disregard sexual and asexual reproduction in another post.² So, "Biology major"? Really?³

1. I gave a more general answer than you wanted. Not an incorrect answer. If this:...

1. Offspring resemble parents but not exactly (traditional. Known for thousands of years).
2. More are born than can survive to reproduce (Malthus).
3. Heritable differences influence reproductive success (Darwin).
4. The Earth is very old (Lyell).
That's enough. Given that, you'd need Divine intervention to keep evolution from happening.

is mistaken, where do you disagree?
2. That detail does not matter for our purposes, seems to me. Or, do you intend to suggest that organisms that reproduce asexually don't evolve? Tell me:...
Did Adam have a navel?
Did the trees in the Garden of Eden have annual rings?
3. Really.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Have you problems to understand "No, in fact, you really didn't" or did you need me as a witness?¹ (I hope for your good not as a character witness)²

1. My witness is this thread. I stated here my understanding of Dyson's position. He accepts CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. It's a minor component of the atmosphere and makes a small contribution to the surface air temperature. Far less disruptive mechanisms can moderate the increase in atmospheric CO₂ than the proposed restrictions on emissions and the subsidization of alternatives to fossil fuel consumption. He questions the accuracy with which the models predict the effects of increasing atmospheric CO₂.

 

[lomiller]

1. My witness is this thread. I stated here my understanding of Dyson's position. He accepts CO₂ as a greenhouse gas.

That is NOT what you said about his position. You brought him up as someone who disputed the basic physics of greenhouse gasses, not as someone who accepts CO2 IS are greenhouse gas.

You were wrong about Dyson, accept it and move on.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

My understanding is that scientists who let a worldview influence their work have little credibility so in my opinion there is a problem with your logic here.

Except that when one worldview dominates, people take less care to examine commonly-shared assumptions (e.g., the case for subsidization of "public goods"). So the assumptions of scientists who share the dominant worldview (in their community) receive less scrutiny than do the assumptions of iconoclasts.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

That is NOT what you said about his position. You brought him up as someone who disputed the basic physics of greenhouse gasses, not as someone who accepts CO2 IS are greenhouse gas.
You were wrong about Dyson, accept it and move on.

I mentioned Dyson as an expert in physics. It's nonsense to assert that he doesn't understand basic physics. He does not accept the conclusion that AGW believers assert follows from that basic physics.

 

[aleCcowaN]

1. I gave a more general answer than you wanted. Not an incorrect answer. If this:...is mistaken, where do you disagree?
2. That detail does not matter for our purposes, seems to me. Or, do you intend to suggest that organisms that reproduce asexually don't evolve? Tell me:...
Did Adam have a navel?
Did the trees in the Garden of Eden have annual rings?
3. Really.

1. My witness is this thread. I stated here my understanding of Dyson's position. He accepts CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. It's a minor component of the atmosphere and makes a small contribution to the surface air temperature. Far less disruptive mechanisms can moderate the increase in atmospheric CO₂ than the proposed restrictions on emissions and the subsidization of alternatives to fossil fuel consumption. He questions the accuracy with which the models predict the effects of increasing atmospheric CO₂.

Malcolm, it's hard to believe a real biology major, even from the humblest school, that can't answer the simple couple of questions I asked you. About your "switch" to math -no caring of claiming any degree here?- you have made just two blunders involving arithmetic. So what's behind your intervention here besides claiming John and Mary are great and you are great too because you've read John and Mary and you admire them? What else besides a lot of words and no science? Do you think it's normal that you repeat an error and are corrected again and then you come with exactly the same bull to make it clear for a third time?

You had to answer questions on modern biology that are very simple, the community college kind, in 2012, and one of your answers cites nobody that was still alive 130 years ago, and just for saying generalities (high-end platitudes). So you know, I know and everybody knows what are you trying to avoid and that includes basic things a "biology major" can't ignore.

To add more to that, you tried to conceal that by leading the discussion in an outwards spiral by adding Adam's navel and the tree rings in Eden. You don't even have a palette of misrepresentations of your opponents rich enough to choose something that matches the mental style of them or what they have said in the same internet venue. C'mon, everybody knows -even people who'll read this in the future, just by doing it- that creationism and religious bull is not a part of my mindset.

So, you are busted. Stop pretending.

Besides, you don't understand the nature of a simple problem in science and how it is set out. Your blunder including CO2 and forams is the kind of blunder people make by thinking in a unscientific and uniformed manner and believing there are magical catalytics everywhere or that transformations don't involve energy exchanges. You simply thought that C and O are combined in the air, and as C and O are also combined in sea deposits from biological origin then they get there some way and all the rest is taken care alone. Again, it shows all the scientific fields involved are alien to you and all the degrees suggested or inferred are most probably a fabulation.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I mentioned Dyson as an expert in physics. It's nonsense to assert that he doesn't understand basic physics. He does not accept the conclusion that AGW believers assert follows from that basic physics.

Look, Malcolm, your strategy is extremely obvious. You talk generalities so you can move the goal posts wherever you need. Half of the periods in your paragraphs are non sequiturs, many of them selected to induce an inference because "that" is not really there. Dyson is an expert in physics because you say so and it's nonsense to say otherwise (meaning: you say so and you'll make a tantrum if somebody contradicts you). He does not accept the conclusion that "they" assert. What conclusion? You don't care, but he doesn't accept (the only important thing is he is opposed to "them"). That single conclusion (again, what conclusion?) comes from reasoning departing from basic physics (you don't care here to make clear if you change the meaning of "basic" as you have constantly done during last weak in this thread). So you have to explain what basic physics they are and what Dyson concludes from that that is different to what "they" conclude. All the rest is just you trying to keep it running like the Duracell bunny, just recycling one and again the same boredom.

Your interventions here have the same degree of development and polishing than the music of Triangle Sally.

 

[Corsair 115]

Except that when one worldview dominates, people take less care to examine commonly-shared assumptions (e.g., the case for subsidization of "public goods").

The politics section is elsewhere.

So the assumptions of scientists who share the dominant worldview (in their community) receive less scrutiny than do the assumptions of iconoclasts.

I'm sorry, did I miss where you provided the citations which disprove the empirical evidence supporting AGW that's been gathered over the last thirty years or so?

 

[jimbob]

1. My witness is this thread. I stated here my understanding of Dyson's position. He accepts CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. It's a minor component of the atmosphere and makes a small contribution to the surface air temperature. Far less disruptive mechanisms can moderate the increase in atmospheric CO₂ than the proposed restrictions on emissions and the subsidization of alternatives to fossil fuel consumption. He questions the accuracy with which the models predict the effects of increasing atmospheric CO₂.

The highlighted bit...

The level of CO₂ increase is in line with what a simplistic analysis of emissions would expect.

I understand my limitations, and know that I can only make first-order approximations as I am only an engineer with access to google. I am numerate though.

ETA: from the bit below:

Remember I do not consider myself to have the ability to second guess the atmospheric physics departments of multiple universities (I have a day job already, and can only spend a few hours on this).

Because of this I can only do simple analyses, which I did, because I had heard there was a controversy.

When I did these simple sanity checks, they supported the IPCC statements and not the people who claimed that there was no problem.

This is not an argument from authority: Any moderately numerate person should be able to follow my reasoning, and I would like to know how this could come up with any other answer.

Of course it is possible to say that there might be confounding factors in such a complex system, but this is why you need proper models. We would have to be very lucky for all the confounding factors to be acting agaist there being anthropogenic global warming

The thing that I noticed was that my simplistic approximations were not very far off the claims of the climate scientists, whilst the deniers would need every fudge factor to be in their favour for their situation to work:

From an Earlier Thread

Argument from authority?

Tell me please what would de-confirming evidence look like.

I am a semiconductor engineer, and some time ago, I decided to investigate this, and see whether the simple statistical tools I would use to assess how a process is running could be applied to the data from weather. These tools are used in what is called "Statistical Process Control", and a very good introduction can be found on this NIST website:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pmc/pmc.htm

I have had a similar discussion on the badscience.net website about this, and on this website too:

My analysis and reasoning that led me to conclude that the climate in the region with the longest history of measurements is warmer than in any other period for which measurements exist (which is back to 1690).

You say deniers, I say alarmist. I see no data that shows that we change the climate any more so than it changed before people were around. We haven't made an ice age, or warmed to that extent.

I like the environment just as much as then next guy and conserve as I can.

People who speak of imminent doom are religious zealots wherever you find them. Period.

Further to my post immediately above this one,

There is evidence that the climate is changing, and it is warming at an increasing rate. Your claims about global data isn't really valid for the longest running dataset: the Central England temperature series, that is based on measurements since 1690. It shows unequivocally that England is warmer now than it has been in the last three hundred years. It also says that it is getting still warmer.

I started looking at this data because I wanted to make my own mind up, and to see if the data was clear to me. I have used statistical process control techniques in my work, so I thought it would be interesting to analyse this data as if it were a device parameter running on a particular process. The signal is very strong, especially compared to the sort of data that I am used to in work.


Why does it matter if we are changing the climate or of it is natural variation?

Is the climate changing? The cusum says that England is getting warmer. It also says that the rate of change is increasing. The global data also supports this.

Is this bad? Well probably for crops, especially if repeated globally.

Is there a model that explains this? (well yes) but isn't this irrelevant?

Is CO₂ a greenhouse gas? Well it absorbs IR, and atmospheric physicists say it is. They say that increasing CO₂ woulld make the world warmer. Do we care if the warming is natural or artificial, if we can reduce it (or reduce our addition to it) and we accept that its effects would be bad?

If you want to know how to interpret the cusum, it is hidden in the spoiler below:

Cusums are used in certain types of statistical process control systems, and are very good at spotting when (noisy) processes are drifting from their target values. You decide on the target value (sometimes, but not always, the long term average) and then subtract this from each data point. This gives you the difference (or "Delta") above or below the target that each data point is. The cusum is the sum of all the deltas including the current data point. This is an integration and so removes noise from the signal.

To compare the process to the target, you then look at the gradients: horizontal will mean that it is running at target, upwards means above target, and downwards below target. An increase in steepness means that the process is moving further away from target, i.e. the process is still changing:

If the slope is such that there is an increase of 100 units in 100 readings, then the process is running at about 1 unit higher than the target, if it is 200 units lower in 100 readings then it is running at 2 units beow target etc.

Below I have annotated my cusum to show the different situations, and the increases in temperature:

My reasoning that shows the rate of increase in atmospheric CO₂ is about the same order of magnitude as the emissions

Subject: Global Warming Again - but with an expert

Which of the following do you think is non-factual:

1. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
2. Carbon dioxide is increasing.
3. The new carbon dioxide is from artificial* sources.

Well, I'd like to understand why academic climatologists are so confident about 3. We plainly don't know the mechanisms so thoroughly that we can conclude it can't be anything else.

Does it matter where the CO2 is comming from, we are releasing several PPM per decade of CO2 so reducing that will reduce the rate iof increase of CO2, whatever the cause is.

EDIT:

According to wiki: the total emissions are 27,245,758 thousand metric tonnes per year, a quick sum is that this is about 27-Gigatonnes of CO2 per year.

The atmosphere is about 5-Petatonnes so each year the emissions are about 27e9/5e15 tonnes, or about 5.6 ppm per year. In 2006 the CO2 levels were 381ppm according to the BBC.

The annual emissions are about 1% of the total level, which I'd regard as significant.

And this is my analysis that supports the assertion that CO₂ levels are probably at a (at least 400,000-year high)

Subject: Global Warming Again - but with an expert

BEcause I thought that it also seemed to start about 1850 ( and it was hard to see on the graph originally posted)



Remember this is a log plot, so straight lines are constant ratio changes (horizontal is multiplying by 1 every decade and thus no change)

It does look as if 1850 is when it grows beyond the natural variation...

Original data from here:

You've got to watch your baseline though; using the graph's start time is artificial. If you say there's a permanent step change at 1600, or the period 1050-1600 is unusually high, then 1750 is a good takeff point and coincides with human emissions.

OK, I now found lake Vostok CO2 data (from here) and added that in, again on a log plot with the same scale. This might be dodgy, but they do tend to be similar at around -1k for the law dome data, and -2k for the vostok data. If this is the case,then this is outside the previous 400,000 years variation.





I am not an academic, like you I work as an engineer, and I tend to think like an engineer. I would like to have 95% confidence that a technical decision will be the right one before acting, but if the pros and cons are equal sometimes it is simply best to go with the course of action that is most probably correct.

If you then factor inrisks you might consider mitigation against unlikely events. I certainly consider what I can do to to mitigate the possible effects of something that has a 30% chance of occuring. (And far lower if the hazard is high enough)

And what sums up my attitude

Subject: Global Warming Again - but with an expert

Does it matter where the CO2 is comming from, we are releasing several PPM per decade of CO2 so reducing that will reduce the rate iof increase of CO2, whatever the cause is.

Ah well only possibly. If (for example) change in agriculture is changing vegetation types and so albido and water vapour levels, and CO2 is responding to the temperature rise, then we'll be spending money on the wrong thing and still have a disaster on our hands.

But martin, my fag-packet calculations confirm what I am told. I too can see lots of other potentially confounding factors, which are pretty complex and which is why there are departments of artmpospheric and climatological science.

In several situations the argument *seems* to me to be:

1) The simple model, based rough estimats and simple maths broadly agrees with the IPCC.

2) Ah, but that is only a simple model, what about more complex features which *might* change the story.

To which the answer is that they might indeed, which is why there are scientific papers discussing the features of the models or the data.

If the simplistic treatment disagreed with the acknowledged experts, then I might profitably try looking to see if I could understand why, and be a little more sceptical of their claims.

My simplistic analyses do broadly agree with the acknowledged experts, whilst the possible confounding factors are precisely the sort of confounding factors that I have seen acknowledged in discussing these models. This leads me to the conclusion that the experts aren't missing a trick, and they are probably correct, because they are already attempting to assess the magnitude and direction of these effects.

Remember I do not consider myself to have the ability to second guess the atmospheric physics departments of multiple universities (I have a day job already, and can only spend a few hours on this).

Because of this I can only do simple analyses, which I did, because I had heard there was a controversy.

When I did these simple sanity checks, they supported the IPCC statements and not the people who claimed that there was no problem.

This is not an argument from authority: Any moderately numerate person should be able to follow my reasoning, and I would like to know how this could come up with any other answer.

Of course it is possible to say that there might be confounding factors in such a complex system, but this is why you need proper models. We would have to be very lucky for all the confounding factors to be acting agaist there being anthropogenic global warming


And I am not acctually that interested if global warming is anthropogenic or natural.

CO₂ emissions would add to the warming effect, and global warming will have many bad consequences, just due to changes in weather patterns and movement of fertile zones (especially across country boundries with the additional dnagers of war).

In such a situation, acting to militate against these effects is sound practice whether global warming is natural of artificial.

 

[a_unique_person]

I mentioned Dyson as an expert in physics. It's nonsense to assert that he doesn't understand basic physics. He does not accept the conclusion that AGW believers assert follows from that basic physics.

He is an expert on physics, and accepts the physics, he is not an expert on climate, and does not accept that part of the science. So, what has he got to add to this debate as an authority?

 

[aleCcowaN]

...

When I did these simple sanity checks, they supported the IPCC statements and not the people who claimed that there was no problem.

This is not an argument from authority: Any moderately numerate person should be able to follow my reasoning, and I would like to know how this could come up with any other answer.

...

And those are key points: simple sanity checks (and to be willing to do them), being at least a moderately numerate person

To compare with that, you have the only attempt of being numerate that Malcolm did so far which is in his post #5592

...

Over the long term global temperature depends on energy entering the atmosphere vs energy leaving the atmosphere and the point at which these two reach a balance.

...

We agree. I'm still trying to understand how the surface temperature can depend on anything other than solar output and the radius of the Earth's orbit. Obviously it does, since there's a fairly regular 24-hour cycle in surface temperature where I live and the 8000 mile variation in the distance between me and the sun seems to small, compared to the 90 million+ mile total, to have the daily 10^o F. or so effect that I observe.

Suppose some friendly space aliens told us tommorow that, starting 200 years ago, they had surrounded 200 sunlike-stars with spherical shells of various diameter, thickness, and material composition. They selected these stars and the time of construction such that next week Tuesday at 1200 GMT we would see all of these stars wink out at once and then, over time, begin to glow at a frequency determined by the diameter of the shell and the material of its composition. Eventually, the total energy flux h would depend only on the energy output of the star, and the flux per square meter of shell surface would then depend on h and the diameter of the shell. Right?

Let's construct hollow stainless steel spheres 2 feet in diameter, with a sight glass that lets us look inside. Let's then suspend thermometers on cotton string (non-condicting) inside the spheres, evacuate them as much as possible and bury them underground at depths (to center) of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 feet. Cameras mounted outside periodically photograph the thermometers. What will we see? A daily fluctuation that depends on depth, right? An annual mean temperature that depends on latitude and altitude and nothing else (barring geothermal sources or nearby ocean currents), right?

Let's fill these spheres with various gasses to various pressure and rebury them. What will we see? Because we are basically measuring soil temperature the type of gas and the pressure may influence how rapidly the thermometers reflect outside variation, but the total energy input to the thermometer cannot depend on the pressure or type of gas, right?

Let's dig them up and send them into orbit around the sun. Won't the temperature reported depend only on the radius at which they orbit?

Baby steps in the argument. Please expand.

Let's do the autopsy of such a travesty.

1) Notice the "We agree" in the beginning. We'll come back to this later.
2) He begins a speculation where a numeric little argument is made to say that the "daily" variation of the distance from what is local to him to the sun is meaningless to explain the daily -yet regular- variation in local temperature, so little farther, little closer seems not to be the cause. Nothing is said about day-night, because it's too obvious? well, then, why bothering in analysing the distance?
3) We arrive nowhere and all the paragraph is supposed to say "average Earth-Sun distance is what matters". An assertion, not a conclusion.
4) A different line of argumentation starts (the extraterrestrial loop). Notice the vocabulary choice: "glow at a frequency". That's not bad at all by itself but it promises the lack of knowledge on basic principles and methodology if the person is highly verbally skilled -in relative terms-. The paragraph is intended to show that striking different departures of the same experiment arrive to results that can be categorized the same way (steady state), and that is frequently sold as "different departures arrive to the same outcome" which is intended as a self-regulation of some sort when it is instead "the same kind of structure produce the same kind of results" which really means "Physics has laws, duh!". But we don't know yet where is Malcolm going. I only have to say that I've observed that more than a half of these pseudo-sceptical arguments in scientific vestment are playing with this disregard of basic physics while presenting parts of the same basic physics as "deep sensible knowledge" (double entendre of the "sensible" part) on the subject that they have and their opponents lack.
5) Malcolm has brought us nowhere yet as it was a prologue. Here comes the core:
6) A experiment is started with spheres. Those spheres are going to be the same all along the experiments. Some modifications affecting very small areas will change result only in an imperceptible way. It is important that those spheres are the same all along the experiment, otherwise different conclusions can be made.
7) The underground phase of the experiments begins. Besides the candid approach of a sphere buried 64 feet and having "daily fluctuations of temperature", we only can conclude that the spheres will follow the kind of things buried stainless steel spheres follow in these circumstances. By supposing a ceteris paribus of the earth core, Malcolm soon discover the law of conservation of energy and that vacuum spheres, saber-toothed cat skulls and a Buick Skylark 64 with Jimmy Hoffa's body in it, all of them buried the same deep in the same place sooner or later reach the same temperature and follow what the external source of energy "imposes" to them. The problem is what is the "external source of energy" (remember: "barring geothermal sources ...").
8) Well, here is when the magic trick is done. Let's recapitulate first what was going on: Basically different systems suffer transient states but they arrive to steady states in their own time. A lot of identical spheres experience the same if placed in similar conditions. First order platitudes.

Now the spheres start their spacial loop and the reasoning comes quickly to an end. The spheres are sent to different locations around the sun and it is asked if the temperature will depend on the distance to the sun. Remember, you are not allowed to make changes in the spheres, all identical. That is, there's just one variable in the problem and all the rest is ceteris paribus including the spheres. Like the magic trick, our attention has been carefully misguided to a "conclusion". The matter here is that we better place the spheres in the same "circular" orbit and start changing their surface. For instance, we paint one sphere black and another sphere white. Malcolm, does the temperature depends just on the distance to the sun? Do you know for instance what "albedo" is? Why don't we place the spheres in a way they always face the sun from one side, then let's paint one sphere black in its side facing the sun and white the opposite side and another sphere choosing the opposite colours. Malcolm, does the temperature depends just on the distance to the sun? Let's make some spheres transparent, ...
9) We only arrive to the conclusion that the experiment only points the the circumstances of the experiment itself. The humongous ceteris paribus in this experiment is not what is needed to arrive to a sound conclusion but what is needed to:
a) Hide the inability to analyse dynamic systems.
b) Hide the inability to analyse complex systems.
c) Hide the lack of ability to potentially distinguish between a function, its derivative and its primitive, so only a "stock" variable or a "flow" variable is considered, yet the outcome has to be "a constant value" otherwise the analysis feels iffy.
d) More important, to hide the absence of skills and education to select a proper set of variables to pay attention to.
e) Even more important, to hide the absence of skills and education to change the parameters and make a sensitivity analysis (not sure how you say that in English)
f) And even more important, to hide the inability to design the experiment itself and to accept feedback from others.

I suppose, jimbob, there were circumstances in your analysis when you arrived at a striking different conclusion or a conclusion that violated the principles of the different natural sciences involved, then you checked your calculations and found some mistake you've done and didn't claim "scam!" instead. That happens to every person who has both education and good will. Well, that's not the case with the deniers of the world. Malcolm probably feels that his blunders in this debate are excusable as he is a "humble" fellow but McIntyre and Dyson remain to be right. It's the attitude of a pawn of a higher cause.

EDIT:

I forgot to comment on 1). Malcolm considered that the astronomical position of the earth and the steady state that is reached "at last" are equivalent to equilibrium in energy transactions in high atmosphere.

 

[Dancing David]

False... I've explained this to you already. Forams (that for some reason you're so enamored with) and other calcifying organisms do not incorporate CO2 into their shells. They incorporate carbonates, which is not the same thing. They actually remove alkalinity from the ocean photic zone.

Malcolm, please address the acidification issue.

 

[Dancing David]

1. My witness is this thread. I stated here my understanding of Dyson's position. He accepts CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. It's a minor component of the atmosphere and makes a small contribution to the surface air temperature. Far less disruptive mechanisms can moderate the increase in atmospheric CO₂ than the proposed restrictions on emissions and the subsidization of alternatives to fossil fuel consumption. He questions the accuracy with which the models predict the effects of increasing atmospheric CO₂.

And he also bases that on an understanding of the models as they were 30 years ago and makes a priori assumptions about the nature of modelling without investigating the actual accuracy of the factors that he assumes are wrong.