Ken and Kieren are two individuals with differing views about global warming. We can't come to a consensus view via logical argument, so we're going to gather data and interrogate it in these set of pages. That's right, we take away the lyrics (the analysis) and leave the music (the raw data), and then sing the song back in our own tune.
These pages originate from a long and pointless discussion on the Crikey Climate Cage Match. We'll present the analysis on this site. All analysis will be done using the open source R statistical software, and we will publish all data and analysis. For the R source code, you'll have to visit the version control repository
Kieren is Climate Convinced. He's pretty sure that human induced climate change is of critical importance. He's sure that the lack of good quality action by government and business over the past 20 or 30 years that we've understood this problem is serious, and that we're running out of time. He's also worked in a few scientific fields, none of which are climate science. The nearest he's come to doing work with physical parameters is in protein chemistry, ecosystem ecology, and measures of intellectual function after brain injury. More recently he's done lots of statistical analysis for social scientists in business. The up shot of this means, while he's not comfortable with physics, he is comfortable with uncertainty, unmeasurability and their implications for truth. He's also an open source software developer with limited but significant credentials.
Ken thinks that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism exaggerates the threat to humankind; that runaway greenhouse effects have never shown in the geological history of Earth despite CO2 levels at many times current levels, that warmer atmospheres may benefit biological and plant growth and human civilization such as in the mediavel warming period (MWP); and that sensible non-economically disruptive moves to non-fossil sources of energy for central electricity generation and transport should be the policy of prudence.
We start with some basic exploratory data analysis on the Stage 1 page. Happy reading! If you want to comment, please request permission via http://climatekaraoke.pbworks.com/request_access.php