wgstrand rarely even approaches anything amounting to a real rational argument rather than disparagement and other troll like behavior. If there was any indication he even attempted substantive arguments rather than disruption, that would be different. I encourage substantive debate. I encourage those who are merely trying to annoy those who engage in substantive discourse to top wasting our time and recognize they make themselves and in this case NCAR look bad. I have no connection to NCAR.. but despite disagreeing with some of the work coming out of there.. I understand and sympathize with their desire not to have their employees making climate research look worse by commenting on it in ways that undermine their credibility.

I mentioned the memo in case the poster had missed it or something or failed to comprehend it and would go back and read it. What sort of "threat" is implied by mentioning it? Thats silly.. the poster is posting message on a public forum anyone there might run into, if the memo implied a threat to employees (I haven't seen it to know).. that is NCAR's issue, not mine.

Again, difficulty with reading comprehension on the part of the poster. NCAR sent out a memo.. not me.

I would suggest that commenting on this thread on posts re: climate emails is essentially commenting
to the press. I heard that a memo went out at NCAR telling people there not to do so. The question is whether that troll had difficulty comprehending that just as apparently he has difficulty comprehending the fact that his comments on this page and elsewhere re: climate seem to serve no useful intent other than to waste peoples time (ie, no actual argument made, but mere disparagement) and only serve to undermine the reputation of those claiming to be involved with climate work. This comment I make here is disparaging of a post.. but it is done due to a continuing pattern on the part of that poster of posting only trolls and wondering if the fellow will wake up and listen to what NCAR suggested rather than wasting time of those here on the climate topic.

This post further illustrates the point of my last post.. but I made the mistake of editing it to change just 1 number and the poor quality comment software sent if off for moderation so you may not see the post here.

Interestingly the columnist above also ignores the obvious variation on an idea she mentioned in a column recently. She cited a technology from a company in Boulder that sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere... and here ignores the potential to similarly address the issue of carbonic acid in the oceans through sequestering it or via substances to counterbalance it. Amusingly the columnist apparently had no clue she was describing geo-engineering at the time and was directly contradicting herself within the space of 3 sentences here:

"Our problem with burning fossil fuels really is the carbon dioxide, not just the climate havoc it creates, and this harm cannot be mitigated by geo-engineering.

Now, aren`t you ready for a little good news? How about a plan to reduce atmospheric CO2 at industrial scale in a safe and economically attractive scheme?"

I would have hoped she understood that to be at all useful "industrial scale" and "economically attractive" presumably must translate into the ability to be used widely enough to have a global impact.. ie geo-engineering. Geo engineering isn't confined to using other techniques to alter climate but can simply involve reversing directly changes humans make like sequestering CO2,

The columnist seems to be suffering from a major misunderstanding at the core of her article which seems to imply those involved in the work released (likely by a whistleblower) from CRU are geniuses.

Stephen Hawking would be considered a genius. However not all scientists are geniuses.. and certainly as those emails serve to illustrate the relevant climate scientists like Phil Jones, Michael Mann et al show no signs of being anywhere near that level.. nor would you expect them to be. The degree of difficulty of different types of scientific activities varies wildly and a real genius would be bored out of their minds wasting their time measuring tree rings or dealing for years with whatever paperwork, data collection, tweaking, etc is involved with gathering temperature data. This isn't quantum physics they are dealing with.

The columnist apparently failed to learn anything about the nature of how science as a human process works which the climategate folks were apparently hoping to undermine (re: influencing the peer review process). Science approaches truth over time through various hypotheses and theories being proposed and tested and critiqued . That process is undermined by working to prevent critique and hiding data&algorithms needed to confirm (or refute) conclusions. Its usually 2nd tier folks and not geniuses who will feel the need to hide their data from critique and to make the peer review processes based less on merit and more on politics and agreement with the status quo views.

I just posted a comment dealing with the lack of basic scientific understanding on the part of the columnist who seems not to have understood high school chemistry, but the buggy comment software system just swallowed my post and sent it off for moderation despite there being nothing but innocuous words in it. I many not take time to figure out the bug in the comment software to get it to post but wait and hope a moderator actually gets to it.

I'll merely note for now that in real chemistry quantities and reaction rates matter as does understanding of all the other processes involved in a real world situation which may counterbalance/buffer the 1 chemical process mentioned (production of carbonic acid). eg, Throw that 1 piece of chalk into the ocean, will it have a noticeable impact?
Soda water is made by putting carbon dioxide into water.. since only 0.003 percent of it becomes carbonic acid.
The oceans are alkaline and are at most incredibly slowly becoming less alkaline (which is technically becoming more acidic.. but that doesn't mean they are acidic yet.. if ever due to buffering and counterbalancing effects such as some that sequester the carbon), and there is dispute over which way it impacts growth of certain life such as coral which some studies show it benefits.

I've been too busy lately to comment more on the climategate stuff. However this column shows the Camera's level of bias in choosing to print such nonsense that its difficult not to comment on it.

It appears the columnist failed to learn incredibly basic aspects of chemistry and science in high school despite her attacks on others. Merely mentioning one chemical process is rather useless without mentioning the quantities involved and the other reactions and processes which go on at the same time which may counterbalance the effect (or not, the point is that its not as simple as its made out to be).

First of all, most carbon dioxide added to water remains as carbon dioxide, eg soda water is made by adding carbon dioxide to water:

<a href="http://www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2002/press/200005pr..." target="_blank">www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2002/press/200005pr...
"The carbonation leading to the lovely bubbles in our champagne and soda water is usually attributed to carbonic acid. However, this is not entirely accurate. It is actually carbon dioxide (CO2) that was formed during fermentation or forced into the beverage. A mere 0.003 perccnt; of the dissolved gas is present in the form of carbonic acid (H2CO3)."

The NOAA woman added one stick of chalk to the glass, lets add one stick of chalk to the ocean. Would that make a noticeable difference? Obviously not. To keep perspective, according to this (haven't checked the figures but sounds right):

wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/31/ocean-acidification-and-corals/
"Estimated mass of the oceans: 1.37×10^21 kg
Estimated mass of the atmosphere: 5.1 x 10^18 kg
That means there is about 270 times more mass of ocean than atmosphere, and remember the interface between the two is a very very small portion of the two.
Simple arithmetic shows that “our” contribution of CO2 to the oceans is approximately 1/195,714,285 the mass of the ocean, or written out that is about one two-hundred-millionth."

Of course I've seen it claimed it takes 300 years or so for CO2 to disperse through the ocean (unlike its quick dispersal through the atmosphere) and so obviously concentrations vary by depth and a temporarily larger concentration in surface layers might be achieved which effects ph. I say in theory since again of course the amounts matter as do the other processes going on that effect ph, which tend to counterbalance the changes. In actual fact the ocean remains alkaline.. and is only growing less so, no actual climate scientist even on the columnists side claims it is "acidic".. only at most that since it is becoming less alkaline then technically that means it is becoming more acidic, and the rate has been slow:

wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/31/ocean-acidification-and-corals/
" The ocean currently has a pH of 8.1, which is alkaline not acid. In order to become acid, it would have to drop below 7.0. According to Wikipedia “Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104.At that rate, it will take another 3,500 years for the ocean to become even slightly acid. One also has to wonder how they measured the pH of the ocean to 4 decimal places in 1751, since the idea of pH wasn’t introduced until 1909.”

Though the 3500 year figure wasn't accurate (ph not being a linear measure but logarithmic), it serves to illustrate the point that reaction rates, concentrations, and other things matter despite the simplistic posturing in the column above trying to claim that a toy demonstration shows anything useful.

There is also some controversy over measurements of ph and its variation with depth as well as over the flow of carbon within the ocean and between the ocean and the air. The degree of absorption of CO2 in part depends on surface area of the ocean, ie the area of contact available to transfer CO2 from atmosphere to ocean.. and that is effected by waves which are effected by wind, etc.

In addition despite only one side presented above there are conflicting studies as to the effect of CO2 in the ocean on entities that may sequester the carbon as you'll note in the disagreements within the comments on that page (not all of which are cogent or reliable of course.. some even less so than the column above, but include PhD scientists, eg a chemist, who don't find the argument as appealing as the columnist above claiming a high school grad should understand it... but instead illustrate that perhaps the problem is that many high school grads like the columnist above think they understand things far more than they actually do since the world isn't as simplistic as they wish it to be).

re: the notion of "next time it might be your ox that is gored"

Yup, thats why it is tricky to be careful not to over stretch the federal constitution (which is the relevant one, not the state constitution) to mean things that weren't intended by its language. The constitution should be amended.. rather than ignored.

However as I noted below in a reply, to some extent if there is real ambiguity in language it makes sense to hope that the broadest rationally consistent view of the language protecting rights is taken.

I'm assuming the argument being made is that the US constitutions' fourteenth amendment's "equal protection" clause (or the "privileges or immunities clause", less likely) protects first amendment rights from being abridged by states. It reads in Section 1: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

I tend to be concerned about the powers of the federal government growing through unjustified overly broad interpretation of the constitution. I'm someone on the fence but tend to think that grants of power should be read narrowly and the protections of rights interpreted more broadly. Here were a couple of quick explanations from top google hits, not necessarily the best ones but match what I've read:

www.answers.com/topic/fourteenth-amendment-to-the...
Contrary to the expectations of some of the amendment's framers, the Supreme Court held that it did not overrule Barron v. Baltimore (1833) to require states and local governments to respect the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.

Another major area of expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment was in the application of the Bill of Rights to the states. As early as 1908, in Twining v. New Jersey, the Court suggested that some Bill of Rights guarantees might limit the states through the Due Process Clause. In Gitlow v. New York(1925), the Court began to apply guarantees of speech, press, assembly, religion, and counsel to the states. The guarantees applied to the states were those the Court considered essential to ordered liberty (Palko v. Connecticut, 1937). A majority of the Court thought that many rights in the Bill of Rights—trial by jury and the privilege against self‐incrimination, for example—did not meet that test. The incorporation of the Bill of Rights accelerated under the Warren Court. By 1969 most Bill of Rights guarantees had been incorporated as limits on state power.

www.krusch.com/real/14th.html
But only three years later, however, the Court did an about-face, and began to institute the "trickle-down" theory of constitutional jurisprudence, better known as the incorporation doctrine. Under this view, the language of the First Amendment was to be "incorporated" - added into - the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, as if it were already present there. The Court decided not to use the privileges or immunities clause for this purpose (the more justifiable clause), but rather the more expansive due processclause (which extends protection not just to "citizens", but to "any person"), even though "due process" under the First and Tenth Amendments explicitly allowed for State regulation of speech! In Gitlow v. New York, the Court decided that

For present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press - which are protected by the 1st Amendment from abridgment by Congress - are among the fundamental personal rights and 'liberties' protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment from impairment by the states.[3]

Six years after Gitlow, the Court anchored this view, stating in Near v. Minnesota that "It is no longer open to doubt that the liberty of the press and of speech is within the liberty safeguarded by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment from invasion by state action."[4]

This, of course, was a dramatic change to the meaning of the Constitution. Prior to 1931, the absolutely written First Amendment was defensible from attack from those who would throw out legitimate hypothetical situations to defend their view that the Amendment should be disobeyed. Prior to 1931, defenders of the First Amendment could claim, accurately, that those hypothetical situations could be regulated at the State level, thus successfully meeting these objections.

After 1931, however, this defense of the First Amendment was no longer available. Under this new interpretation, no State or Federal government could regulate speech in any way, shape, or form.

As Judge Black expressed the supposedly reigning view, "the Fourteenth Amendment applies the First, with all the force it brings to bear against the Federal Government, against the States."[6] As Judge Douglas put it,

There has been debate over the meaning of the First Amendment as applied to the States by reason of the Fourteenth. Some have thought that at the state level the First Amendment was somewhat 'watered down' and did not have the full vigor which it had as applied to the Federal Government. See Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 502-503 . . . So far, that has been the minority view. See Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 10 . . .[7]

You don't claim to be working in the field, it wasn't address towards you. You are attempting to look into it, which is different. Whereas many folks out there know nothing beyond sound bites heard on TV news and think they know just based on that what the science is and cry "denier" without even understanding whether the person might have a point

Oh, and the generic point was after seeing another local model guy on climateaudit.org who failed to understand the basic need for validation against the real world and some other basic issues, and at least one other ncar person posting here.

re: tactics, eg, If someone handwaves at a large document without citing or explaining the relevance.. and I don't see anyor when finally posting clips posts scientific/mathematical discussion which isn't even relevant to the point..

It was also aimed at the current leaked emails and those hiding from FOI requests.
Its frustrating when "denier" is the level of argument used at times, and when as you can see in those letters there is frustration at the mere existence of people trying to get data and critique their work.