I was writing about the deceit from disingenuous bloggers about global warming... But then I had a correspondence with a person (XXX) in America that can shed some light upon this topic... Here is this email log:
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XXX, 
I have been researching global warming in earnest since the late 1980s, but have been involved since the 1970s, in many projects in which climate change was paramount in the study of the evolution of plants and animals from 3.5 billion years ago. I saw your article in the YYYY... Thank you for presenting this complex subject as simply as possible with authority... Yet some of the comments attached to this article from readers defy belief. Some seem to come straight from comic books or scientifically illiterate and idiotic... 

Sorry to use words like this, but ignorance in my view is not bliss... Here is a recent post that I place on a website called yourdemocracy.net.au where our main plan of attack is satire, cartoons and proper information and analysis of many political issues... We have been tackling global warming since the onset of the website from various angles. Thanks for your attention. Best.
[http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279#comment-24049]
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to which XXX's answer was:
Gus, thanks for writing and for the attachment. I agree a lot of the comments posted to my piece were not particularly helpful nor reassuring about the level of scientific literacy out there. Thanks much...XXX
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I replied:
Hi XXX... Thanks for writing back... I have the feeling that, like many articles published on how global warming works — or promoting that global warming is real — your article was the target of a concerted orchestrated effort by "professional" denialists... (which also include creationists). This was going to be the subject of one of my next article at yourdemocracy.net.au... (yet to be posted). The same silly comments seem to appear over and over at the end of articles such as yours — all around the world...

In the same way as the tobacco industry used (still does?) websites to deny the effects of tobacco and used (still does?) bloggers to place pro-smoking comments everywhere, I am guessing the anti-global warming lobby has an "army" of paid (poorly paid — young students?) people working a network of anti-global warming websites — and posting anything anti-global warming, on all articles published on the internet, or in letters to the editors of newspapers. 

The idea of course is to divert away from the original "common sense" from good articles on global warming, by placing somewhat borderline ridiculous wild claims that some other "blogger" will attack, taking the discussion away from topic into obscure pits of ignorance — while forgetting the original article's relevance. 

Thus I would not be surprised if some of the "anti" and the "pro" people who comment, are coming from the same denialist-stable to give an impression of a debate — which is usually won by the denialists... as their "pros" often bring in unscientific and weak defense against the anti lobby who also make non-verifiable "scientific" claims but with more "passion"...

I hope this makes sense...

Best. G
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XXX replied:
wow, thats an interesting idea -- that some of the "pros" are actually "antis" in disguise...hmmmm....certainly one hears echoes in the denials, the constant invocations of al gore....thanks gus for writing. best, XXX 
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To which I finally replied:

I am presently writing a book called "the age of deceit"... (I hope to finish it before I die) ... Some of the chapters of which appear unedited in yourdemocracy.net.au... In one of the chapter, I make reference to "pros and cons" being stage managed by the same people in order to maintain doubt and steer the "truth" into the ditch. 

Science is not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of experiment and interpretations — interpretations that can be sustained by repeats of the experiment until proven otherwise. Most of science is highly accurate these days (even a Higgs boson can only be "proven" to 99.99999 %). 

But the smart fools are trying to tug our coat to tell us that they have a different "opinion"... Opinions come from beliefs... Even clever people create statistics and we build our own entire "democracy" on polls based on what people believe and, if the majority believes such, then that's the rule, even as unscientific or as whacko as it can be... 

By now you would have guessed Gus Leonisky is only a nom-de-plume behind which I hide in order to protect my sources... ASIO (the Australian spying agency) would know my identity since I came into this country and protested against the Vietnam War, against US armed nuclear warships entering Sydney Harbour and the like...

I think I mention the "other side" controlling the debate in "double-crossed"... (http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6744#comment-8863 — sorry I do not do the automatic links in such correspondence as anti-virus software often rejects such emails). 

I make a reference to a certain J C Masterman who used to control double agents during WWII in the UK. I was put on to him by a highly respectable English woman (dead now) who used to be a spy in his Lebanon network... His work is fascinating and explains a lot of things we suspect but can't really place our finger upon...

Best. G

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End of this current correspondence, but hopefully more will come with YYY,  XXX and ZZZ... Who knows... I sometimes appears like a crackpot...
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But by now you would know where I am coming from... 
Science is under attack from well-orchestrated powerful sources. 

These include the "entrepreneurs", all the industries that depend on burning fossil fuels, the conservatives already mentioned, the creationists, and many of the churches and their sub-branches. All of these would use "organised" groups of "independent" 'letter-writers" and bloggers. Professional bloggers possibly paid by the post or group of posts. 
The tone and the consistency in the posts attached to discussions of global warming articles suggest these bloggers are not just doing so to satisfy their ideologies, but mostly to pander to their paying ideology masters who provides them with a wad of readymade posts... It's a bit like the recent "briefing notes" to the Liberal (Australian conservatives) politicians where answers to possible questions are pre-planned, pre-set and rigourously vague on substance, but full of sloganeering. 

I believe the professional bloggers would scour the internet for any article that explains climate change (or even mention it in passing) and they quickly take over the comment columns — saturating the whole lot with inane unscientific comments. They can even provide the "retorts" — comments that are weak and incomplete in the defense of global warming... 
It's a very well known trick that is akin to "double agents" and "agents provocateurs" who infiltrate a group of dedicated people until the time they can strike — such as during a peace protest that these agents make sure turns nasty... Usually these agents have discreet identification so they escape the police wrath and batons... Some groups have been known to be infiltrated by police... This a small example of what I mean:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd/dci-briefing-04252008.pdf

Here I repost a picture of such "police-agents" wearing "identifying" beanie and gloves during a bust-up disrupting a political meeting in Paris when I was visiting, late 60s?...
Picture by Gus, circa 1969...
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Today is the release of the Climate Assessment 2011: State of the Climate in 2011:

"2011 was notable for many extreme weather and climate events. La Nina played a key role in many, but certainly not all of them," said Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s National Climatic Centre.

Last year was among the 15 warmest since records began in the late 1800s, and the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes with sea ice at below average levels, according to the report.

Greenhouse gases from human pollution sources like coal and gas reached a new high, with carbon dioxide emissions exceeding 390 parts per million - up 2.10 parts per million from 2010 - for the first time since modern records began. [Gus note: the latest figure as of July 2012 is more than 400 ppm above the Arctic].

Despite the natural cooling trend brought by back-to-back La Nina effects, which chill waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, 2011 was among the 12 highest years on record for global sea surface temperatures.

The double La Nina punch influenced many of the world's significant weather events, like historic droughts in East Africa, the southern US and northern Mexico, the report said.

La Nina trends also were associated with the wettest two years on record in Australia.

An accompanying analysis in the same journal, titled "Explaining Extreme Events," examined the links between human-driven climate change and six selected weather crises in 2011, including the Texas drought that lasted half the year.

The authors found that "such a heat wave is now around 20 times more likely during a La Nina year than it was during the 1960s," said Peter Stott, climate monitoring and attribution team leader at the UK Met Office.

"We have shown that climate change has indeed altered the odds of some of the events that have occurred.

"What we are saying here is we can actually quantify those changing odds."

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Science dwelling in odds? 

Sure.... science is mostly about the study of "repeats" of experiments, observations and about formulation of such repeats. Through this study, science can make some startling highly accurate prognosis when all the factors are known and the equations are solid... If science was stupid or wrong your cell-phone would not work...

 

In complex systems such as global warming, the next predictions can be very iffy and demand some very spiffy mathematical permutations. But unlike the odds on horses or poker machines the scientific odds are closer to 99,999 per cent of certainty. When scientists are pointing out that they can quantify the odds, it means they can calculate the chance of repeats in a specific timeframe to near 99.999 per cent. 

 

Of course instrumentation error and the behaviour of nature can sometimes provide the wrong result. But on global warming, the science is accurate as much as that that helps your car move forward...

 

Since the 1930s, the study of many scientific discipline has sharpened our knowledge greatly. even earlier, some dedicated scientists were doing some astonishing experiments...

Imagine people disputing the speed of light today — first calculated in 1850!:

The Fizeau–Foucault apparatus (1850) was designed by the French physicists Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light. The apparatus involves light reflecting off a rotating mirror, toward a stationary mirror some 20 miles (35 kilometers) away. As the rotating mirror will have moved slightly in the time it takes for the light to bounce off the stationary mirror (and return to the rotating mirror), it will thus be deflected away from the original source, by a small angle. If the distance between mirrors is h, the time between the first and second reflections on the rotating mirror is 2h/c (c = speed of light). If the mirror rotates at a known constant angular rate dθ/dt, the angle θ is given by:

In other words the speed of light is calculated from the observed angle θ, known rate of rotation, and measured distance h as

The detector is at an angle 2θ from the source direction because the normal to the rotating mirror rotates by θ, decreasing by θ both the angle of incidence of the beam and its angle of reflection.

Foucault based his apparatus on an earlier experiment by Fizeau who, in 1849, used two fixed mirrors, one partially obscured by a rotating cogwheel. Fizeau's value for light's speed was about 5% too high.

[Breguet] manufactured the rotating mirror Fizeau–Foucault apparatus, used by Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau to measure the speed of light (1850). Breguet was a precise clock maker engineer...  Other instruments were developed to do the same thing:

 

These days, one can indulge with the dorks and nerds on the TV show with Sheldon, when they bounce a laser beam from the moon.

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But in contrast there were some doozies... The palaeotonlogical time lines were a bit wonky until better study were made of the fossil record. In 1930 for example, we had the dinosaurs only as far back as six million years ago. 

 

 

Science needed some better tools to measure the age of stuff. The dating is complex but now is very precise in 2012... Nuclear decay, isotopes and better understanding of stratigraphy has given us a far better time line... Even the dorky Monckton accepts this latest time-line despite fluffing the science attached to it... But the creationist idiots still don't... The Earth is still flat and 6,000 years old as well as the universe? Idiots!... But they still blog on and on about "global warming being crap"... No sweat... they are entitled to their wrong opinions as long as it does not interfere with the process of mitigating anthropomorphic global warming.

 

Meanwhile the science of global warming is accurate to a high degree, unlike say meteorology which cannot predict accurately the local weather for the next three days, unless conditions are so hell-bent towards one way that prediction will be in the 80 per cent range. 

 

Global warming predictions are very conservatively restrained, at present... Thus the predictions are below what they should be  — this in order not to spook "people" and discretely entice governments to know better with the real figures... Meanwhile the past record of events such as the one just released is telling us that global warming science is on track... 

 

To put is simply in a schematic linear fashion: 

if one year there are 3 various locality events of say 3 magnitude, say we have a total of 9

Say the following year we have 2 various locality events of magnitude 5, say we have a total of 10

Say the following year we will have X various locality events of magnitude Y, influenced by the previous 2 years as it should. 

At this stage we cannot predict anything precise, but should we have a wad of earlier year records, we can established a fairly accurate prediction. We cannot make a local prediction where the events are going to occur nor as to their local intensity — even if we have more local statistical data. The local conditions predicitons will be less precise that the entire sum of all extrapolated local conditions predictions. Global trend become more apparent, despite apparently "chaotic" local conditions... 

 

Presently global warming science uses billions of items of data, all seemingly disparate but still converging precisely to give a clear picture of what is happening with a mathematically bracketed margin of error. 

 

Scientific experiments and calculations tell us CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas. Extra CO2 means more "greenhouse" effect. Some dorks argue against this as if the effect of CO2 would become "saturated". First this is totally incomsistent with the record and second it's not happening. That is a brilliant porkie that may work with fizzy drinks but does not work with the atmosphere unless we reach 3 gazillion ppm of the stuff... 

 

The proportion of CO2 influence on the atmosphere can be calculated precisely and in most cases it matches the palaeo-geological record within the margins of errors due to instrumentation and observations of the record. 

These days the margin of error is very small. Even in the early days in the 17th and 18th century, for example temperatures could be measured to a tenth of a degree Celsius...

But the bloggers and their silly arguments still push their barrow of silly unscientific emotional arguments pretending to know what they're talking about... They don't. "Passive smoking is not proven, even if you die from it..." that's their view.

We are lucky on this YD site... There is a clear policy that the real name of whoever posts comments — even with a fake name like me to protect the people who talk to me — has to be registered in the administrative record. Thus we don't get those monotonous annoying long lines of argumentative comments where Al Gore is ridiculed every second paragraphs... Here, we ridicule Lord Monckton for good reasons all the time, because he IS WRONG and can scientifically be proven so... 

May the anti-global warming "orchestrated" bloggers get their arse on fire and go to hell for spreading vile porkies...

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6744#comment-8863