Cartoon history of the world part 94

The above comes from this post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/14/an-engineers-take-on-climate-change-2/ entitled An Engineer's Take On Climate Change by Ronald D Voisin.  I refer you to the right hand end of the squiggly blue line.  I shall not draw your attention to the y axis which is marked with three temperatures.  I don't know if they are true but I am prepared to bet that there is a chance the figures are somewhat wrong.

I shall not draw your attention to the joke of an x axis with its long ago and today labels.  After all, the thing does say it is a "Cartoon of Earth Temperature History".  Cartoon is right.

Let's look at the empires.

Egypt - which one do you mean?  Lots of choice of dynasties and kingdoms but generally what we call Ancient Egypt lasted from 3150 to 332BCE.  That's a long time but Voisin rather seems to think that it had one spell and one spell only.   2818 years

Greece - it is generally accepted that what we call Ancient Greece lasted from the 8th century BCE to the 6th century AD. Approximately 1400 years.

Rome - Rome began annexing land in the third century BCE and attained it's maximum extent four centuries later.   Rome was sacked in 410AD.  Approximately 700 years.

Oh, and I think the idea of the Dark Ages is rather passe but never mind.  I am guessing that Voisin went to an American high school and I am not sure what the curriculum was like in the humanities.  Did all right for himself in the workshop though and has a good track record in lithography.

So let's be charitable and say that Voisin is cherry picking his history to fit with his favourite hypothesis.  If nothing else it is a Eurocentric view.  What about empires out in the east, or in the Americas?  Were there really episodes of civil chaos and mass migration?  Sort of but if those labels are to mean anything they have to have been migrations in search of better conditions.  In the Celtic dispersal in the middle of the last millenium BCE, the probably heterogenous group is tracked through culture rather than genetics and it is wholly possible that what is being traced is the exchange of ideas and not actual movement of people.

As evidence, of course, the graph is nothing but propaganda and deserves to be screwed up and thrown in the bin. Especially since those with very little between the ears, sorry, the average climate science denialist, won't look at the niceties of whether or not any of it is even remotely true but nod sagely and agree that this climate change malarky is a dodgy business, what with those nasty emails, all two or them out of, how many was it, oh, five thousand.  It is a disgrace that this site won an award for its science content.  And not one that said this site should be avoided like a very nasty rash.

If you don't believe me, here is a quote, lifted directly from Voisin's piece:

"The current spike in atmospheric CO₂ would most likely be larger than now observed if human beings had never evolved. The additional CO₂ contribution from insects and microbes (and mammalia for that matter) would most likely have produced a greater current spike in atmospheric CO₂."

Where to start?  It is estimated that the global biomass of insects is 1000000000000kg.  Lots of insects that one.  But the biomass does not remain as biomass for long.  Insects die. They decay, they respire and they fart. In short, biomass generally returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide before long. That's where I shall end up.  But there is pretty much equillibrium in the carbon cycle, unless something unbalances it and guess what that something has been since the last ice age.  Yep, humans.  We've been changing the habitats of plants for several thousand years by clearing forests and planting crops, which we then eat so we can respire them and turn them back into atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than locking the CO2 up in nice tree trunks for hundreds of years.

And we stick our domesticated meat machines on the fields to turn more of that juicy vegetable biomass back into CO2.

And humans don't just stop there.  We hack down whole forests so we can build on them, concreting them over (limestone cycle: thermal decomposition of limestone producing more carbon dioxide for the air that was captured millions of years ago in sea creatures) and burning fossil fuels.  I cannot see, and Voisin doesn't justify, how you can actually make his idea of insects making more CO2 than humans work.  Yes, individually there are more ants than humans.  And in terms of biomass too.  But ants and termites are producing CO2 in ways they didn't, for instance, in the middle of the last ice age, or the one before that.

The carbon cycle, for those who haven't met it before (sorry, miss, I was away that day...)

Well, Voisin is an engineer, not a biologist.  I bet he doesn't spend much time in the garden watching the natural cycles of the seasons, the years, the decades.  Like so many deniers, he doesn't make sense.  For his science to work, all the little bits of science must actually be correct.  It's like making a jigsaw puzzle of Buckingham Palace and trying to shove a piece from a puzzle of the Tower Of London into it.  The thing is wrong and the cartoon graph is just the wrongest.


Post script
In an article with only one diagram, is it necessary to label it figure 1, especially as it isn't even anything worth referring to in the first place.

Update

Here is one comment that caught my eye:

AndyG55 says:

June 14, 2013 at 2:46 pm

@ Tom in Florida.
The subsistence balance state of CO2 v plant life seems to be around 280ppm, where it was before humans, THANKFULLY, started releasing buried carbon in the form of coal and oil.
It is unlikely to drop below this value because plants start struggling and dying this putting CO2 back into the system. Its a predator/prey scenario. By releasing carbon from its buried state, we are altering this balance, and the biosphere is starting to respond as expected. :-)
This carbon SHOULD be in the biosphere, aiding LIFE, not buried and useless.

My bold.

Does anyone really think that? Rather a lot of carbon dioxide buried in carbonate rocks and rather a lot to put into the atmosphere.  I think the environmental destruction would preclude this experiment happening but it would decide the issue once and for all.

For AndyG55 wherever he is, here is a picture of sequestered carbon dioxide exposed at the surface but in many parts of the world lying buried that should, according to you, be in the atmosphere, aiding life.

And chalk is rather common.

Will these people never learn?

Congratulations to the world's premier anti-science site

TWUT recently passed the 150 billion counter mark as seen by the far right.
Guest Post By Ra Ra Rasputin, the third Mad Monckton Of Park Bench

The world's most viewed site on anti-science garbage has recently passed the 150 billion hits mark so may I be the first to congratulate Willard on managing to get every single person on the planet to view the site, some of them more than once.

Of course, far be it from me to produce another list free from real content but I'm going to do it anyway.  Let me know when all you can see are my toenails.

The reason the site has been so successful is simple.  But that's enough about the repeat visitors.  Here's some ideas I had while eating my soft boiled egg with toasty soldiers this morning:

• It posts cherry picked pseudoscience devoid of real references and open to such simple criticism that any simpleton can debunk it
• It distorts the science and economics of climate change, and if that doesn't convince, it goes for name calling.  And it doesn't give a stuff about polar bears.
  
• It does not take sides. One side is enough.
• It does not censor any comments by anyone critical of it, except when it does.  Then it also resorts to name calling.
• It is about as tolerant of trolls as my hay fever suffering granddaughter is of grass pollen.
• It is unfailingly honest, to the point that when mistakes are discovered, they are either totally ignored or whole posts are deleted without acknowledgement of the fact.
• It is bang up to date. So many things are posted in a single day that you can't hope to keep up with which one is the most stupid.  And occasionally something from 1993 is posted without Willard spotting it.
• It never gets off the point, except when Willard thinks he is being funny and Wallace and Gromit are off their heads on cheese again.
• No tax payers money goes into it.  Not a cent.  Instead it is paid for by dodgy charities with multinational oil and tobacco money behind them.
• It is totally ramshackle.  It looks like someone has knocked it up as a 4th grade project in computing.

Above all, I can read it all day long and no one thinks I am reading Fifty Shades Of Green.

[Note: This is unsolicited garbage by Rasputin.  I didn't ask him to write it but since he had a spare couple of minutes while the butler put the olive oil spread on his muffins and couldn't think of anything else to do, I thought it was kindest to humour him and post it when he sent such a sycophantic, gushing and downright brown-nosing piece to me via email - Willard]

 About these ads, annoying, aren't they, but you'll just have to put up with them because without them the Heartless Institute might have to stump up some more money and then they might have to get a better accountant

10 trillion responses to this pile of drivel

Sycophant @ 0.001seconds
Brilliant piece, Mad

Wallace Andgrommitbach @ 0.002 seconds
The best thing you have written since the note to the milkman before you put the cat out last night.

Dr Frank Spenser @ 0.003 seconds
  The volcano's done a whoopsie in my beret

Chinesereader @0.004 seconds
Those reports from the Heartless Institute, we're publishing them so that real scientists can have a laugh. 

and so on and on and on

This man has got the point about Anthony Watts

And he sings better than me.

Sunday Funnies

Any takers

I forgot

In my rush to get a playlist for my new best buddy Willard Anthony Watts to play to cheer himself up while he contemplates not having his buddies on the group picture of climate science deluders deniers, I forgot this song,

Buy the album.  Support the artist.

Ironically, George was killed by cigarettes.

Idiot Wind

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads headin’ south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

"Idiot Wind",  Bob Dylan 1974

I was thinking about a playlist for Mr Willard Anthony Watts, former weather presenter, aspirant scientist and college dropout.  I suspected that at sometime in the 70s, at one of the frat parties he probably listened to through the wall because he wasn't invited, he heard the words quoted above, with all their venom and anger.  Mr Robert Allen (Bob) Dylan was rather bitter at the time.  Mr Willard Anthony Watts is bitter now.

He's bitter because the government wants to take a few cents off him in order to prevent the oncoming disaster of global climate change and he doesn't want to give them any more money than he thinks they deserve.  And in order to achieve this less than laudable aim, he chooses the sarcasm of science to try to derail the efforts of environmentalists and governments to try to do good.  Didn't know science could be sarcastic? Spend some time amongst the cherry pickings, the improbable outcomes and the outright falsehoods at Wattswrongwiththat for more than a few minutes and you might see what I mean.  Today's postings are tomorrow's digital fish wrappings.  The ever prolific wannabe Galileos and even accredited scientists churn out so many new bits of tortured data that I implore Obama for close WATTMO now, the place where captured emails are interrogated for the whereabouts of the missing decline while having Bon Jovi played at top volume 24 hours a day.

You get the picture.

And tonight a picture is what is most agitating our Willard.  This picture.

For more on the picture, go to http://stevebrodner.com/2013/05/30/the-mad-men-of-climate-denial/

Here is a detail, showing our friend Willard:

It's difficult to work out whether our Willard is annoyed that people around him are smoking ("While the cartoon is funny, the smoking portrayal does bother me a bit about this cartoon,  because it is personal, and the artist of course is just another low information sap who works with popular memes" from Willard's blog) or that some of his buddies aren't there.  There is no Lord Christopher Monckton or Dr Roy Spencer, for example.  Well, the artist had to make a decision and chose to omit that pair, along with a handful of others who spout the pseudoscientific nonsense of climate change denial.  Would I have chosen to expand on the ten and include the mad Monckton, for example.  Perhaps, just to show his ideas up to the light of ridicule and reason, in the reverse order.

Does Willard know that the artist, a talented man called Steve Brodner, is being personal about the smoking?  I doubt it.  The poster is a parody using the TV series Mad Men as a hook on which to hang the satire.  I've never watched the series.  I suspect a lot of the characters are puffing on fags in the show.  But I just don't know.

What I might surmise from Willard's reaction is that he is both genuine in his disgust at smoking and rather paranoid.  Not perhaps a surprise when you look at the company he keeps.  Not necessarily in this picture but on his site.  Some deeply strange connections lie underneath.

Anyway, since I thought I'd give Willard something to listen to, perhaps a few choice tracks ill cheer him up, remind him that his buddies are great to be with (though I should imagine the conversation is more than a little tedious - forcings this, sensitivities that, sixteen years...)

So, Willard, covert these to mp3, put them on your iPod and listen to them this evening to brighten up what must have been a miserable day, another day of posting the fish paper ramblings of wannabe Galilleos.

Predictions for the rest of 2013

The Cat in the hat has stared at the tea bags in the recycling thing the local council gave us recently for food waste and has come up with some predictions for what he thinks will happen in the rest of 2013.  Strictly for fun.  No sueing when it becomes clear that your trip to Paddy Power hasn't yielded the return it might have done had my predictions come true.

June

After the coldest spring for (fill in your own number here) years/since records began/since cherry picked date that makes your claim to prove climate change is a hoax, climate change denier sites plan to hold a party.  On the appointed day, wearing thermals and woolie jumpers against the cold, fifteen of the assembled throng of sixteen are treated for heat stroke and dehydration.  Choosing to hold the party during Wimbledon was, of course, a big mistake.  James Delingpole blogs from his hospital bed that the extreme heat wave is a hoax and he has the emails, hacked, to prove it.  The band Heatwave provide the entertainment.

July

The visiting Australian cricket team begin the Ashes badly when they hold a photo shoot alongside the 1985 and 1978-9 teams in an effort to prove that they are not the worst Australian team ever.  Things get even more confused when Australia name Murray Bennett at their spinner and Kim Hughes as captain.  Understandably, England have no clue how to cope with the straight on ball or the odd field placings (fielders can't hear the instructions through the tears) that Hughes sets and capitulate to an innings defeat.  Choosing even more players from the past teams secures Australia an unlikely 5-0 series win.  Tweeting from his retirement home, Shane Warne says "Clearly I wasn't bad enough to get a call up #hairtransplant".

August

As the heatwave continues, the government erects a statue to Dennis Howell, minister for weather in the seventies.  In a glowing tribute, David Cameron tweeted from his sun lounger in Skegness "Here was a man who could control the weather #StopBoris".  Climate change deniers picket the unveiling with placards saying "Hoax" and "Conspiracy" and waving hockey sticks in an ironic attempt to be ironic.

September

The heatwave breaks and James Delingpole is allowed out of hospital, although his carer has to go with him.  Part of his treatment has been to read peer reviewed scientific papers on a wide variety of subjects.  He has been on a strict watermelon only diet.  He announces in his Daily Telegraph blog that he should humbly apologise to scientists the world over.  He write: "I don't have a clue about science but I have asked a reception class teacher if she would explain some things so that I might get myself up to the standard of a five year old and see how it goes from there.  This science thing is actually quite tricky.  You need to understand some sums as well so I might ask the teacher to help me there too.  I reckon I can master the two times table before Christmas, metaphorically speaking."

October

A judge, in a landmark judgement that only judges can adjudicate upon, says "It is not up to courts to decide whether a scientific idea is right or not.  That is for scientists."  Members of the press assembled to hear the outcome of Andrew Wakefield v Intelligent Life Anywhere In The Known Universe, fall off their chairs in amazement.  First time a judge has been known to get it this right since the Dover Intelligence Design case of whenever it was.  This appears to be the final slap in the face for Andrew Wakefield who tweets "Obviously disappointed. Have to sell the house now #KirstyAlsop".  Antivaxxers claim a conspiracy. "It's a conspiracy" says John Stone of Age Of Autism. See, I told you.  Anyway, far from being undaunted, antivaxxers produce three examples of a vaccination that caused a slightly sore arm and begin a new campaign with the slogan "You might feel a small prick but this is actually something really big".  A new paperback edition of Wakefield's book comes out and sells three copies, enough to keep the roof over his head.  In an updated chapter he outlines the unethical procedures he put upon children, such as lumbar punctures and endoscope investigations and how none of that proved anything.

November

Britain's first (or fifth) astronaut, Tim Peake, heads nervously to the launch pad only to find that strong wind has knocked over the milk bottle launchpad and thatwas now pointing in the direction of Skegness.  The launch is cancelled, but there is still chance for a lovely display of Roman Candles, Catherine Wheels and various members of the public holding sparklers in lengthy tongs sonce the sparklers represent a clear health and safety hazard.  The old ones are still the best.

December

As the Daily Mail quotes figures suggesting that the year is heading for its hottest average temperature for, well, since the middle of the Cretaceous, the Met Office hurriedly points out that actually it has not been this hot since the Jurassic.  Anthony Watts of the website Watts Wrong With That says that he has been saying global warming has been correctly predicted all along and you can check his previous utterances on the subject if you wish.  Someone does and finds that he has been a tad mendacious.  Just a tad.  Humiliated, he goes back to weather presenting, this time with Anglia Movie Wireless (KRAP-TV).