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Independent Verification

Carbon emissions

From our Swindon Correspondent:

One of my favourite techniques to verify data is to try and find other data, produced by other, unconnected means that should match an effect. The problem when people are connected is that they can often base their estimations on similar root information that is wrong.

For example. if you wanted to verify your NHS cannabis use data, across the UK, you could ask Esso and Shell for late night food sales. More people using cannabis = more people going to the 24 hour garage for munchies.
I’ve thought about this with regards to climate change. We have all these people telling us predictions. But they’re really all part of the same crowd. They might be nobbled in terms of producing answers, or perhaps are using the same assumptions in their models.
What are the real world ways to observe if all of this is happening? And no, I don’t mean scientists measuring things, because again, they might be nobbling it. What’s the things that we can observe that are independent of those people as a check?
To give one example: beach house prices in the Seychelles. The Seychelles are quite flat. If the sea level rises by a few metres, a lot of houses on beaches will have no beach and be in the sea. So, if people think this will happen in a decade, beach house prices are going to fall a great deal, as you only get 10 years to use it.
There must be others around crop yields or sales of sun tan lotion or something. Any ideas?
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Chester Draws
Chester Draws
3 years ago

The progress of frost sensitive plants. For example mangroves, which aren’t removed by farmers should have moved several hundred kilometres down our coast.

Bloke on M4
Bloke on M4
3 years ago
Reply to  Chester Draws

That’s a good one. I have also thought about wine regions. If the earth is getting warmer, why aren’t the premium wines moving locations? The optimal climate is considered to be Vosne-Romanee, why hasn’t it moved a km or two over 100-ish years?

(and don’t say English wines – most of these are vanity projects, not serious, profit making businesses).

M M
M M
3 years ago

Beach house prices may not go down if they end up fully insured by the government though.

Derrick Byford
Derrick Byford
3 years ago

The first thing to do is to look at what the UN (who commission the IPCC reports) have said in their government negotiated summaries for each of the COPs over the last 20 years. Usually, “this is the last chance to save the planet”. In fact it has generally been “10 years to save the planet” since 1972 and before the COPs

https://order-order.com/2021/08/09/un-has-been-predicting-planetary-disaster-for-50-years/

Charles
Charles
3 years ago

If you’re not prepared to accept “scientists measuring things” then you’re a fool who will never be convinced. Anyone who measures things sufficiently carefully is a scientist. And your examples are seriously flawed. The price of those beach houses depends on the very predictions you are trying to check and the extent to which people believe them. Even if the predictions are wrong, people might believe them, and if the predictions are right, people might not believe them. The only difference between the thing you’re trying to check and your observation is people’s beliefs. Furthermore, your checks only address the… Read more »

Snarkus
Snarkus
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Charles, so confident in the scientific method. As one might be if it was not broken. At the risk of infinite regression falacy, a few studies consistently show unreproducable published results are common, despite peer review. Then we get into issues of self selecting teams, group think and of course the officially recognised state of things, so beloved of bureaucrats. If one really believed in scientific method, new and various independent methods of cross checking would be welcomed. Instead, with climate change, dissent is like your response. Compare this with cosmologists and physisists checking relativity predictions against observations. Any human… Read more »

Addolff
Addolff
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Firstly, an inconvenient fact: CO2 rises AFTER temperature rises (‘ocean outgassing’). Is the temperature higher now than 1000 years ago (Medieval warm period)? – No Is the temperature higher now than 2000 years ago (Roman warm period)? – No Is the temperature higher now than 3000 years ago (Minoan warm period)? – No. Warmer temperatures, all nothing to do with mankind. According to NASA, Global Temperature (not that such a thing really exists) in 1920 = 13.32c Temperature today = 13.86c. It is the most amazing delusion of grandeur that anyone thinks we have such a degree (hoho) of power… Read more »

Snarkus
Snarkus
3 years ago
Reply to  Addolff

Addolff, is that from the same USA government site that shows global temperature has fallen slightly for 5 years ?

Addolff
Addolff
3 years ago
Reply to  Snarkus

Not sure if it is US Gov, but does use NOAA data – but unadjusted:
https://temperature.global/#twitter

Steven C Watson
Steven C Watson
3 years ago
Reply to  Addolff

CO2 is plant food. While the sky has refused to fall an area twice the size of the Amazon basin has greened.

HJ777
HJ777
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Anyone who measures things sufficiently carefully is a scientist. I am a scientist (physicist) by training and I don’t accept that this is true. The most accurate piece of measuring equipment most people will ever use is a tape measure but that doesn’t make them a scientist. Measuring things accurately can be very important in scientific disciplines, but most of the skill is in knowing what to measure, all the factors that can influence that measure and interpreting what has been measured. These things can all be done badly, however accurate your measurement. I am not some sort of ‘climate… Read more »

Bloke on M4
Bloke on M4
3 years ago
Reply to  HJ777

Quite. I’m not a “denier”. We can do lab experiments, but the models are not simply that result. They include things like feedback effects. Global warming, including man-made global warming is happening. But the degree matters. If it’s wildly exaggerated, we should spend our money on other problems (and in terms of deaths, clean water and malaria treatment are more important than climate change).

Addolff
Addolff
3 years ago
Reply to  Bloke on M4

BoM4, “Global warming, including man-made global warming is happening”. I’m sorry, but until it can be proven that the current temps / hurricanes / floods / heatwaves / cold etc. etc. etc. are exceptional, have not occurred before and MUST be due to man, everything they say is supposition, supported by no real world evidence, just computer models, programmed with assumptions biases / agendas of those who wrote them and which are far to simplistic to capture everything which actually does influence climate. This is Neil Ferguson territory. Water vapour is 97% (oh wow, THAT number again) of the ‘greenhouse’… Read more »

Bloke on M4
Bloke on M4
3 years ago
Reply to  Addolff

I didn’t say all of this was about climate change. Just that doing things like burning fossil fuels will raise global temperatures. That can be demonstrated in a lab.

What can’t be demonstrated is all the modelled stuff.

Adolff
Adolff
3 years ago
Reply to  Bloke on M4

The earth is not a sealed jar in a lab. Absorption of CO2 is logarithmic. There have been studies (Angstrom and others) which dispute Arhennius’ findings, but if you do believe that experiment, it showed that a doubling of CO2 raised the temperature by just 1c. The theory is that there will be runaway warming caused by an increase in water vapour (positive feedbacks) is just that, a theory, which is pretty much disproven as we are still here despite CO2 levels being 7000 ppm in the past. And you are right, it isn’t all about climate change – it’s… Read more »

Nomad
Nomad
2 years ago
Reply to  Addolff

Climate models can model clouds but not accurately enough to be of use.. when I was studying for my degree (environment) nearly 20yrs ago we had a distributed climate model called BOINC project it was really interesting my computer was running just a very small part of that model. At the time it was one of the most complex climate models available due to its collective computing power. There are many things that scientists have managed to work out as a net contributer to or mitigator of ‘climate change’ i.e. volcanos cause a net negative effect (on warming) whilst other… Read more »

Phoenix44
Phoenix44
3 years ago
Reply to  Bloke on M4

In what is the human influence on weather proven? The vast majority of days in the vast majority of places have temperatures and other weather that are within 2SD of the mean for any period you want to compare. The vast majority of places, the vast majority of the time, have temperatures nowhere near records. The only place “warming” can be seen is in averages over time, because we have had more warm years than cold years in recent times. That is not “warming” as most people think.

MrVeryAngry
MrVeryAngry
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Indeed. But. Whatabout ‘incentives’? That is gov’t spends our money on things it wants to hear. Scientists are therefore incentivised to bid for that funding by supporting the policy government wants to implement. Policy based evidence making in fact.

Bloke on M4
Bloke on M4
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Well, they’re measuring temperatures sometimes, sometimes doing modelling of temperatures where they can’t measure (which makes no sense). There may be localised factors that change what is measured. And beyond simple stuff about climate change that we can demonstrate in a lab, they’re adding in for feedback effects and making predictions. And there are plenty of cases of scientists having crap models and crap predictions. Hence why I like other data that comes from a totally different place. Measurements of predictions should lead to greedy rational actors responding accordingly. Supermarkets are linked into Met Office weather models because they have… Read more »

Michael van der Riet
Michael van der Riet
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

If two different methods of measuring a phenomenon move in the same direction, they are measuring the same thing. Scientists are not some lofty cadre of saints and if the job tells them to measure warming via beach front house prices or Olympic medals won, that’s what pays the rent. I bet that the organisation you work for sells a product that is not the deserved market leader, in fact you wouldn’t buy it yourself, but you do your best to help it thrive anyway. That’s what pays the rent. There are two gangs of satellite scientists measuring warming and… Read more »

Phoenix44
Phoenix44
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

So you aren’t aware that historical temperatures have been “adjusted” by scientists who believe wholeheartedly in man-made Climate Change? Nor are you aware that those scientists are human and thus might just be tempted to some smidgen of bias? Nor are you aware that for some years scientists managed to miscount the number of chromosomes in a human cell? Or countless other errors of actual, basic counting?

Charles
Charles
3 years ago
Reply to  Phoenix44

I don’t see how that is relevant. Scientists make errors all the time – just like anybody else. But the solution is more science (maybe done by different people, posibly even you) – not merely resorting to people believing what they feel is right or making stuff up.

dodgy geezer
dodgy geezer
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

Actually , the temperature has been flat or falling for the last seven years.

We have been in the up phase of the AMO since about 1980, and the down phase started about 2010. Expect temperatures to bottom out about 2050, and then start rising again….

bloke in spain
bloke in spain
3 years ago

There’s the one I’ve been talking about for years.l The one I’m sitting beside. The Med. Large landlocked sea is the drainage basin for half of Europe & a big slice of Africa. Are we supposed to believe, despite all this climate change we’ve had, rainfall & Alpine glacier melt is exactly balanced by evaporation. How fortuitous! Because there’s been no change in sea levels since Roman times, the currents through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar are what they’ve always been, as is salinity. And for a double check, the Black Sea is a smaller version of the Med. No… Read more »

Addolff
Addolff
3 years ago
Reply to  bloke in spain

BiS, we used to holiday on Rhodes. The rocks around Lindos main beach clearly show the water levels as being far higher than they are today (or it could be the rocks have been uplifted?).
The issue is whether the rate of sea level rise has increased, which would occur if what the eco nutterswere right. It hasn’t, so they are wrong.

bloke in spain
bloke in spain
3 years ago
Reply to  Addolff

You were holidaying in a volcanic zone. Ground going up & down is what volcanos do.

bloke in spain
bloke in spain
3 years ago

Ore another one, not far from me. The Desierta de Tabernas. Europe’s only desert, in the rain shadow of the Alpajarras. That’s a very climate sensitive phenomenon. By rights it either shouldn’t now exist or have spread to cover a big chunk of Andalucia. Still the go-to place for filming spaghetti westerns

dodgy geezer
dodgy geezer
3 years ago

First you have to find out WHAT is being predicted. When you do, you find that every single possible disaster – wet, dry, windy, still -all are going to bring about the end of the world.

It must be quite obvious by now that there IS no solid ‘science’ behind all this – it’s simply telling the grant providers what they want to hear. So no, you will not get verification of any kind. But the minute a whale swims up the Thames, or a whirlwind is seen in Sussex, that will definitely be a climate change marker..

Smithy
Smithy
3 years ago

The Saudis are investing billions in the Maldives which, according to the warmists, is already under water.

Steven C Watson
Steven C Watson
3 years ago

O’Barmpot and his beach property come to mind. The two thirds of Septics that cling to the East and West coasts also. I don’t see droves of folk heading to the Mid-West either. Then there is New Orleans… Meanwhile the Netherlands and Monaco get bigger every year.

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