Sounds like convincing evidence that there really is no scientific consensus on global warming, doesn't it? Well it may sound that way, until you read between the lines.
Here's what physicist Dr. Joseph Romm says about Senator Inhofe's list.
As it turned out, the list is both padded and laughable, containing the opinions of TV weathermen, economists, a bunch of non-prominent scientists who aren't climate experts, and, perhaps surprisingly, even a number of people who actually believe in the consensus. But in any case, nothing could be more irrelevant to climate science than the opinion of people on the list such as Weather Channel founder John Coleman or famed inventor Ray Kurzweil (who actually does 'think global warming is real'). Or, for that matter, my opinion -- even though I researched a Ph.D. thesis at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on physical oceanography in the Greenland Sea. What matters is scientific findings -- data, not opinions. The IPCC relies on the peer-reviewed scientific literature for its conclusions, which must meet the rigorous requirements of the scientific method and which are inevitably scrutinized by others seeking to disprove that work. That is why I cite and link to as much research as is possible, hundreds of studies in the case of this article. Opinions are irrelevantfrom The Cold Truth about Climate Change by Joseph Romm
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/global_warming_deniers/index.html
Senator Inhofe's list of 413 skeptics included:
20 economists
49 who are retired
44 television weathermen
70 scientists with no expertise in climate study
84 scientists who are either connected with the oil industry or are paid by it.
Scientists who were included against their will, and who agree with the IPCC
Inhofe and Morano misinterpreted a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. It should be pointed out that Morano is no more a scientist than Senator Inhofe. More on Morano below.
They claimed that it showed proof that the sun was responsible for the warming that's been observed. The paper they quote says exactly the opposite from what they claim. This has been verified by the author of the paper.
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/12/scientist-our-conclusions-were-misinterpreted-by-inhofe-co2-but-not-the-sun-is-significantly-correlated-with-temperature-since-1850/
note:
The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
What about that Wall St. Journal article, proclaiming global warming a myth? Let's first look at how science is done. Scientists submit their work for peer review by other scientists before it can be published in peer reviewed science journals, like Nature, Science, Journal of Physical Oceanography etc. Then it either gets left in the dustbin of science, or becomes part of the mainstream. In other words that's just a beginning, in becoming accepted science. The two scientists, who the WSJ quotes, never even had their work peer reviewed. Instead of presenting it to other scientists for peer review, they went through the main stream media, the WSJ, to influence the public, rather than convincing scientists first, that their work was valid. And the WSJ was more than happy to print any story discrediting the AGW theory. Here's one climate scientist's take on the article:
The conclusions reached by Robinson et al., upon which The Wall Street Journal news item was based, in my opinion and that of my class, cannot stand the scrutiny of objective peer-review. Our judgement notwithstanding, The Wall Street Journal presented an unpublished manuscript as actual science to a gullible business world. Giving support and credence to an unpublished manuscript certainly reflects poorly on The Wall Street Journal and its standards of reporting and objectivity. We know The Wall Street Journal’s science reporting cannot be trusted if they don't know the difference between opinion and science, or worse, if they do know the difference, then they're just dishonest.Prof. Joseph E. Armstrong
http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v06/n08/...
Want to know Who spreads much of the disinformation on climate change, that the Republicans keep regurgitating?
Murdock, News Corp spreads disinformation on climate change at all his news outlets, wordwide, including FOX News of course.
He pretty much has a newspaper monopoly in Australia, with 70% of the newspapers.
(The same conservative think tanks from the U.S., who spread denialist PR here, have played a big role in spreading it to Australia. - for example, Competitive Enterprise Institute , Heartland Institute. )
At the climate change blog Deltoid, Tim Lambert of Australia has written over 75 articles with the title - "The Australian's War On Science" showing how fake climate science is printed in this newspaper regularly. Not exactly the occasional erroneous article on climate change.
- an article describing how another Murdock paper in Australia does the same thing as the Australian. This is one of at least ten such articles at this site.
"Herald Sun War on Science: manipulating graphs to “hide” global warming"
[at Watching the Deniers blog]
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/herald-sun-war-on-science-manipulating-graphs-to-hide-global-warming/
The Wall St Journal, which is a Murdock news outlet, recently put out a completely false amatuerish skeptic article signed by 16 so called "skeptic scientists". Well only two of them have actually published any peer reviewed climate science in the last 30 years and only 4 have ever published such research ever, and these are long discredited crank skeptic scientists. Other than these four, none of the 16 are climate scientists, and some not scientists at all.
Don't just form an opinion based on the excerpts here. Go read some of these articles.
The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction
If we boil down this op-ed to its basics, we're left with a letter signed by only two scientists with peer-reviewed climate research publications in the past three decades, which exhibits a serious lack of understanding of basic climate concepts, and which simply regurgitates a Gish Gallop of long-worn climate myths
Just when we thought the op-ed letter couldn't get worse, these fake skeptics have the gall to suggest that we "follow the money," because climate "alarmism" supposedly brings bountiful research funding, "an excuse for governments to raise taxes", "big donations" for environmental groups, and other similar tinfoil-hattery. Considering that at least 43% of the letter's signatories have received money from the fossil fuel industry, being given large sums of money just for being climate "skeptics" and publishing error-riddled nonsense like this op-ed, the sheer nerve it must have taken to make this "follow the money" argument is astounding. Do follow their advice: research the signatories of this letter and follow their money trail, which leads straight to the fossil fuel industry.
[read at Skeptical Science]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/examining-the-latest-climate-denialist-plea-for-inaction.html
Panic Attack: Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Finds 16 Scientists to Push Pollutocrat Agenda With Long-Debunked Climate Lies
A tad more surprising is that 16 admittedly non-leading scientists would choose to soil their reputations by stringing together a collection of long-debunked falsehoods. What is surprising is that these falsehoods are more easily debunked than the typical disinformer clap-trap because they are so out-of-date!
Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:
[read at Climate Progress]
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/29/413961/panic-attack-murdoch-wall-street-journal-finds-16-scientists-long-debunked-climate-lies/
Yet this same WSJ refused to print a letter on climate change signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Science, the pre-eminent U.S. science organization. That group included 11 Nobel Prize winners in science.
That's how Murdock operates. It's how Fox operates.
One of FOX News' favorite "climate change experts" is Steve Milloy, a NON SCIENTIST, who is actually a paid lobbyist for fossil fuel interests, and who runs the very aptly named Junk Science blog, where he further misinforms the public. Milloy has also served in this capacity to deny the science showing tobacco to be harmful, and was paid by Big Tobacco also. FOX has a few other non scientist climate change 'experts' as well.
And those "scientific conferences" with hundreds of skeptics? These aren't real scientific conferences, they are propaganda events. They are hosted by right wing propaganda mills like the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, who offered $1,000 per speech and $10,000 per manuscript to skeptical scientists. The Heartland Insitute is largley funded by Exxon/Mobile. These are both right wing propaganda mills, and are definitely not scientific organizations.
Keep in mind that with the tens of thousands of climate change skeptics on the planet if only 1% of them are corrupted by the $10,000 payment (or bribe) currently being offered by Exxon through AEI then you will have at minimum 200 skeptics/deniers. So far 200 skeptics/deniers have not turned up.http://environment.newscientist.com/
He's referring to the "tens of thousands" of skeptics who are claimed to exist.
Maybe you heard about the Oregon Petition, supposedly signed by 19,000 skeptical scientists.
I have a 60-person sample of the signatories of OISM at my website here. While it's refreshing to know that dead people, people who make smoke alarms, my cat's doctor, and a partridge in a pear tree think global warming is a scam, I was unable to find any actual people in the climate science field.Chris Colose in comment at: http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/11/so-thats-wherethe-junk-mail-came-from.html
It was a hoax. Go to the link below and read the whole story:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
This group OISM is run off of a farm in Oregon and contains no climate scientists at all. ...The petition is from the 90s and was passed around with a fake article that fooled some scientists into thinking it was a peer reviewed paper from the National Academy of Science.
As for the new claim of 32,000 leading scientists who are skeptics, its basically an extended version of the Oregon Petition, and just as padded. Lets see how their numbers compare with the general population of scientists, using their own parameters for inclusion.
That should be easy, since their only requirement for inclusion is a bachelor degree in any field of science or engineering. Absurd, but here we go.
Total number of scientists in the United States 12,944,000
Number of scientists who signed the Oregon petition 31,486 or 0.24% of the total
That's right, the Oregon Petition signers are less than one quarter of one percent of the number of scientists in the U.S., which isn't much to brag about. Maybe 150 are actually climate scientists. which is 0.3% of the 50,000 members of the AGU in Europe and the U.S., for perspective.
Scrutinizing the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
http://www.skepticalscience.com/scrutinising-31000-scientists-in-the-OISM-Petition-Project.html
Arthur Robinson's paper claimed to show that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a good thing
As a result, Robinson concluded, industrial activities can be counted on to encourage greater species biodiversity and a greener planet.
and here's a quote from Robinson's paper.
As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people.If you believe this claptrap you are not smarter than a fifth grader.
Human activities are believed to be responsible for the rise in CO2 level of the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life as [sic] that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.
According to the book "The Carbon Age" by Eric Roston:
Humans have sped up the global carbon cycle at least one hundred times faster than usual, transforming the world into one that we eventually might not recognize as our own.
Manmade global warming is a geological aberration, nearly meteoric in speed. Human speed has crunched the geologic timescale in to half a century. Events that typically unfold over many thousands or millions of years have begun to occur within a human life span.
Life has always been driven by geology. The flow of carbon through living things entwines evolution with the inanimate forces of nature. But there is no evidence before now to suggest that biology has ever accelerated the long term carbon cycle onto a short term path. Nothing other than meteorites have changed geology as quickly as humanity. Industry is a powerful new path of interaction between life and geology.
In a short period of time, humanity has gone from an influential species, to the most powerful driver of evolutionary and geological change on the planet - more powerful than plate tectonics, silicate rock weathering, solar hiccups, or orbital perturbations. Some scientists, amateur astronomers, and Hollywood filmmakers look fearfully to the skies for civilization ending bolides. They should look inward. We are the meteor.
Industrial energy policy is a biogeochemical force and should be thought of as a cousin of earthquakes, volcanoes, pandemic disease, erosion and other phenomena that shape the face of the earth.
This is not just another global warming book. It’s a facinating book about the beginnings and development of the planet, it’s atmosphere, it’s life forms, and how carbon with it’s unique properties, make it all possible. Describes the carbon cycle - how carbon cycles through the atmosphere, soils, oceans, life forms, etc.
It took something like 65 million years for coal to develop in the earth, by precipitating out of the short term carbon cycle, and being locked away in coal deposits and into the long term carbon cycle. I refer to this as mother nature's carbon sequestration, similar to what is being proposed for clean coal. Now we are releasing this 65 million year accumulation of carbon back into the atmosphere and thus, back into the short term carbon cycle, in a few hundred years, or a geological nanosecond. This is an unprecedented occurance, probably in the history of the planet.
I would like a skeptic to explain how this is part of a natural cycle, or is anything like any natural cycle that the earth has been through before. I mean ones that didn’t wipe out 90% of life on the planet.
It took 100 millions years to replace the biodiversity that existed before one of the great dying offs.
Atmospheric CO2 changes - 450,000 years
Notice how long it took to change by appoximately 100ppm each time.
Then look at the last line and how fast it is. That's what humans have done.
Keep in mind that it has been known since 1859 that CO2 warms the atmosphere.
-----------------
450,000years ago, it was at ~200ppm and it took ~50,000 years to go to ~ 280ppm.
It was at ~280ppm 400,000 years ago and it took 50,000 years to go down to 190ppm.(Ice age)
It was at ~190ppm 350,000 years ago and it took 25,000 years to go up to 300ppm.
It was at ~300ppm 325,000 years ago and it took 74,000 years to go down to ~180ppm.(Ice age)
It was at ~180ppm 260,000 years ago and it took 20,000 years to go up to ~300ppm.
It was at ~300ppm 240,000 years ago and it took 20,000 years to go down to ~200ppm.(Ice age)
It was at ~200ppm 220,000 years ago and it took 20,000 years to go up to ~260ppm.
It was at ~260ppm 200,000 years ago and it took 60,000 years to go down to ~180ppm.(Ice age)
It was at ~180ppm 140,000 years ago and it took 15,000 years to go up to ~290ppm.
It was at ~290ppm 125,000 years ago and it took 100,000 years to go down to 180ppm.(Ice age)
It was at ~180ppm 25,000 years ago and it took 24,800 years to go up to ~280ppm.
It was at ~280ppm 200 years ago and it took 180 years to go up to 400ppm, today.
--------------
And the result of all that CO2?
The world has warmed more in the last century or so, than it warmed or cooled for the entire Holocene, or the last 11,500 years. And far faster. About 8,000 years ago at the Holocene Optimum, the temperature peaked.
Then is stabilized for a few thousand years and started cooling about 5,500 years ago. The cooling continued until the late 19th century. The warming since then is 50 times faster than the planet cooled over 5,500 years. See Marcott et al 2012
Acidification of the oceans, as a result of the excess CO2 emitted by humans, is the evil twin sister of global warming. When CO2 disolves in seawater, carbonic acid is formed. Shellfish and coral need calcium carbonite to make their shells. Calcium carbonate is alkaline, the opposite of acid.
Not only do the coral and the shellfish we are familiar with depend on a certain pH level in seawater, so do coccolithophores, tiny plankton that are armored with calcium carbonate shells, just like the more familiar shellfish. Except these little guys are critical to a balance in the carbon cycle, that has supported life as we know it for hundreds of millions of years. And besides that, they are the very bottom of the food chain that all other sea life depends on.
They cannot survive in acidic water, because they can't form their alkaline shells. And they are one of the biggest carbon sinks on earth. Their shells eventually fall to the bottom of the deep sea, locking carbon, in the form of calcium carbonate, out of the carbon cycle, and thereby helping keep the cycle in a balance that has supported life as we know it.
'Basic chemistry leaves us in little doubt that our burning of fossil fuels is changing the acidity of our oceans,' said John Raven, professor of biology at the University of Dundee, UK. 'The rate of change we are seeing to the ocean's chemistry is a hundred times faster than has happened for millions of years. We just do not know whether marine life which is already under threat from climate change can adapt to these changes.'http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2005/July/01070501.asp
"Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred"
http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/18/ocean-acidification-study-mass-extinction-of-marine-life-nature-geoscience/
Earth's acid test
According to projections, most creatures with calcium carbonate shells, such as mussels and snails, could run into problems within a few decades. By the end of this century, the acidification could even impede the growth of important groups of plankton, thus endangering entire marine ecosystems, from fisheries to coral reefs.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110309/full/471154a.html
What Robinson and the OISM say is nonsense. Yes, increased CO2 might make plants grow better, but to interpret that to mean that global warming will be good is completely misleading. After all, there was a time much earlier in the life of the planet, when plants thrived in an atmosphere with lots of CO2 and no Oxygen. There were no oxygen breathing animals at all. Scientists say even areas that would initially see increased crop yields, like Canada or Russia, could only expect that for a decade or two, when more serious effects of warming would set in, cancelling out this supposed "benefit" from climate change. Meanwhile much of the world would be devastated with drought, famine, floods, sea water incursion, complete lack of freshwater for one billion people because of lost glaciers and snowpack, etc.
The OISM seems to have forgotton that plants need more than CO2, like water in the right amount at the right time of year, and the right kind of soil. Ask any farmer who has seen crops ruined by not enough rain when it is needed, or too much rain at the wrong time. There has been a recent study showing that plants fed CO2 to make them grow faster, have less protein content, so as far as nutrition, one thing cancels out the other. Like I said, it's claptrap.
Robinson and his son are the source of the phony Wall St. Journal article as well.
For much more on this and the Oregon Petition go here:
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/the-oregon-petition/
More on the "CO2 is plant food" myth in the Skeptic Arguments section, further down the page.
Perhaps this anectodal story will illustrate my point about consensus.
from http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/8/1227/22627 posted by Andrew Dessler:
A journalist friend recently sent me this:
"I just got my 'Journalist's Guide to Global Warming Experts' from The Heartland Institute in the mail. They list four 'experts' in Texas. It's an awesome list. ...
Robert Bradley, energy expert.
H.Sterling Burnett, policy analyst for Heartland Institute
Dr. John Dale Dunn, emergency physician
Michael Economides, petroleum engineer
As you probably know, the Heartland Institute is one of the world's premier climate denialist organizations, so you can be pretty sure these guys reject the mainstream scientific view.
Notice anything odd about the list? Despite the fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of reputable climate scientists working in Texas, the Heartland Institute is unable to get a single one of them onto their list. Apparently expertise is not required to be an expert for Heartland. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you can repeat the following phrase -- "the climate stopped warming in 1998!" -- you qualify.
This reinforces a point I've been making for a while: there are a few credible scientists who dispute the basic message of the IPCC. But not many. You can probably count them on your fingers and toes: Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Spencer, Christy ...
Fred Singer is linked to the fossil fuel industry and was once a hired gun for the tobacco industry to give "expert" testimony that cigarette smoke is not bad for you.
Linzen was paid $2,500/day to be a consultant for the fossil fuel industry. His trip to Washington to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuel co. Lindzen appeared in "The Great Global Warming Swindle" a documentary that was denounced by the Royal Society, the chief scientific advisory group to the British government, and the equivalant of our National Acadamy of Science. Some parties threatened to sue the director of the film for gross misrepresentation of science.
The Heartland Intitute also received funding from tobacco companies in their effort to deny the science on the dangers of tobacco and smoking.
No group typifies this more than the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based "think" tank that simultaneously operates the "smoker's lounge" and "global warming facts" sections on their website. The former arguing for "smoker's rights" and railing on about the need for "sound science" on tobacco issues and the latter arguing that "global warming is not a crisis.http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-deniers-take-tobacco-smoke
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-and-academy-tobacco-studies
These 32 organizations have all been involved in the tobacco industry's campaign to deny the science showing the dangers of tobacco.
They are all now involved in the campaign to deny the science of climate change.
1. Acton Institute
2. American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
3. Alexis de Tocquerville Institute
4. American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
5. Americans for Prosperity
6. Atlas Economic Research Foundation
7. Burson-Marsteller (PR firm)
8. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW)
9. Cato Institute
10. Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
11. Consumer Alert
12. DCI Group (PR firm)
13. European Science and Environment Forum
14. Fraser Institute
15. Frontiers of Freedom
16. George C. Marshall Institute
17. Harvard Center for Risk Analysis
18. Heartland Institute
19. Heritage Foundation
20. Independent Institute
21. International Center for a Scientific Ecology
22. International Policy Network
23. John Locke Foundation
24. Junk Science
25. National Center for Public Policy Research
26. National Journalism Center
27. National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI)
28. Pacific Research Institute
29. Reason Foundation
30. Small Business Survival Committee
31. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC)
32. Washington Legal Foundation
#5 and #9 were created by the billionaire oil and lumber tycoon Koch brothers, who fund all kinds of anti-enviromental PR. They also fund denial of the science saying formaldahyde causes cancer. This is no surprise, since they are major owners of Georgia Pacific lumber company.
#24 Junk Science, which is aptly named, is run by Steve Milloy, who Fox News likes to feature as an "expert" on climate change. Milloy is NOT a scientist. He's a paid lobbyist for fossil fuel interests and a professional PR man. Did Fox ever divulge that? I doubt it. And Milloy gets funding from, guess who? - the Koch brothers.
"Koch Industries Facts
2010's Dirtiest Opponent of Clean Energy"
http://kochindustriesfacts.com/
"Koch Money Fuels AFP Misinformation Campaign On Gas Prices"
http://www.desmogblog.com/koch-money-fuels-afp-misinformation-campaign-gas-prices
Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.Said by a tobacco industry executive:
People generally do not favour action on a non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt. The weight of impressions on the public must be balanced so people will have doubts and lack motivation to take action. Accordingly, means are needed to get balancing information into the stream from sources that the public will find credible. There is no need for a clear-cut ‘victory’. [...] Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary.Said by a Tobacco Industry Lobbyist
This is how they roll. 'Skeptics' have a habit of appealing to the uninformed and often science challenged public, rather than having their claims scrutinized by other scientists. Science is done by scientists, not public opinion, talk show hosts, scientifically illiterate congressmen, or you and your uncle Joe.
The greenhouse effect has been accepted science for a century.
Fourier calculates colder earth without an atmosphere (1824)
Tyndall discovers relationship between CO2 and long-wave radiation (1859)
Arrhenius calculates global warming from anthropogenic CO2 (1896)
Chamberlin models global carbon exchange including feedbacks (1897)
Callendar predicts global warming increase catalysed by CO2 emissions (1938)
Revelle predicts inability of oceans to sequester anthropogenic CO2 (1958)
from "The Discovery of Global Warming" by Spencer Weart. (This is a good place to start, if you want to learn something)
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
the greenhouse gas effect was first proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824, proven to exist by John Tyndall in 1858, and was first quantified by Svante Arrhenius ~1896. In other words, the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases was first estimated. And that estimate is very close to the IPCC's consensus estimate, more than a century later.
Arrhnenius was researching whether human emissions of greenhouse gases could warm the world. - Over 100 years ago!
For more on the history of climate science, see this article, the first of a three part series, at Skeptical Science.
"Two Centuries of Climate Science: part one - Fourier to Arrhenius, 1820-1930"
26 April 2012 by John Mason
http://www.skepticalscience.com/two-centuries-climate-science-1.html
Many amateur skeptics think that climate science is like a house of cards, and that one dissenting paper or one detail is going to bring it down. That is nonsense. It is a solid body of work, with a mountain of evidence. To disprove it, you would have to disprove over 100 years of chemistry and physics. Not likely.
We know that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. If there was no CO2, in fact, the earth would be a big iceball. This effect has been known and studied for over a century. We know almost exactly how much CO2 we are emitting. We can distinguish that CO2 from other sources of CO2, because it contains a different isotope of carbon than those other sources, that are not from the burning of fossil fuels.
We are measuring the incoming energy from the sun as it enters the atmosphere. We are measuring the outgoing heat energy. Ergo - we know what the greenhouse gases are doing. Heat is being retained, that would normally go out into space. We know we are adding enough greenhouse gases to the system to upset the normal short term carbon cycle. Fossil fuels are carbon that was locked out of that carbon cycle for maybe 65 million years. We have used enormous quantities of it already, in a few hundred years.
It is really quite simple. We know with a high level of accuracy how much radiation comes in, what bands of radiation CO2 absorbs and re radiates, what spectra is not getting back to space and the downwards radiation from the atmosphere.comment by Tony O'Brien at Climate Science Watch.org
But, for Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans and Tea Party, Global Warming is just an agenda cooked up by Al Gore and other liberals.
Little known fact - The real skepics are the mainstream scientists themselves. It's how science works, in part. Scientists question their own work and the work of others, looking for weaknesses. It is a self correcting system. I have not seen evidence that the so called skeptics can say the same for themselves.
Scientists are really motivated by seeking truth. They are eternally curious, always wanting to know more. They are naturally skeptical. People don't go into science to make a lot of money, as a rule. And the money is better in the private sector.
To imagine that the entire world scientific community, which is almost unanimous in agreement on AGW, is motivated by money or some political agenda, is so absurd it is hard to imagine why people believe such drivel. There are occupations where I might be tempted to wonder, if people just did it for the money. Science is one of the last that would come to mind.
Of course, scientists have egos, like anyone else. An expression of that is competitiveness, making a name for oneself, in science. That isn't done by following some herd mentality.
Here's what others say about scientific consensus:
There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton's second law of dynamics.-Dr. James Baker - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
A handful of "contrarian" scientists and public figures who are not scientists have challenged mainstream climatologists' conclusions that the warming of the last few decades has been extraordinary and that at least part of this warming has been anthropogenically induced. What must be emphasized here is that, despite the length of this section, there are truly only a handful of climatologist contrarians relative to the number of mainstream climatologists out there.Stephen H. Schneider Ph.D. Professor at Stanford University
Great site showing overwhelming support for IPCC findings.
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensus.htm
Scientific skepticism is a healthy thing. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge, improve their understanding and refine their theories. Yet this isn't what happens in global warming skepticism. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and yet eagerly, even blindly embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog, study or 15 year old that refutes AGW
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
As commenter Houston so elegantly put it in a response on one of my posts, evidence leads to consensus. Scientists like nothing more than to disprove established theories and upset the status quo. The idea that scientists may be in possession of knowledge that would bring about the biggest scientific upset of recent history, and yet would simply sit on their hands because of peer pressure or grant funding is, quite frankly, ludicrous beyond belief to anyone who knows anything about the scientific establishment.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/consensus-matters-climate-skeptics.php
Remember what I said about peer review?
The AGW theory, as reported on by the IPCC in the fourth assessment of over 20 years of research, has been called the most thoroughly peer reviewed scientific theory in the history of science.
Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History
by Stacy Feldman - Feb 26th, 2010
Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, said the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment report was subjected to several rigorous tiers of review. The study cites over 10,000 papers from the scientific literature, "most of which have already been through the peer-review process to get into the scientific literature."
The report went through four separate reviews and received 90,000 comments from 2,500 reviewers, all of which are publicly available, along with the responses of the authors, Nicholls said.
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100226/climate-scientists-defend-ipcc-peer-review-most-rigorous-history
There are thousands more peer reviewed papers since the 2007 IPCC report.
As far as skeptic arguments getting a fair shake in the peer review process:
Honest skeptics persist at trying to convince their colleagues of alternative conclusions, and they do it by submitting their manuscripts for publication. If they do not get published, then it is because their data, their arguments, their assumptions, and their conclusions did not stand up to careful scrutiny, not because reviewers were predisposed to a different opinion. Oh sure, some reviewers can be opinionated and have their own political ax to grind, but with persistence, you can find enough fair academics to get any legitimate conclusion published. My years as a journal editor, as a reviewer, and as an author of scientific articles validates my position that most academics will give a valid minority position a fair evaluation.http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v06/n08/
And please don't forget that anthropogenic global warming has been for a century the underdog theory, it is only very recently that the mountains of research have dragged a generally conservative scientific community inexorably to a very unpleasant conclusion.http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10...
Here is the list of professional scientific organizations that Do Not Agree with the IPCC.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Canadian Association of Petroleum Geologists (CAPG)
That is the whole list.
The following scientific organizations support the findings of the IPCC. The reason I list the National Academy of Sciences first, is because they are like the Supreme Court of science in America. They decide what is real science and what is junk science.
There are at least 30 more organizations of national or international standing not listed here.
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
NASA
Woods Hole Resesarch Center
US Geological Survey (USGS)
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
American Association of State Climatologists
Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006 (the study authorized by the Bush administration, and then Edited by a Petroleum Institute lawyer under the Bush administration, to water it down)
American Chemical Society - (world's largest scientific organization with over 155,000 members)
Geological Society of America
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
American Association of State Climatologists
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
American Astronomical Society
American Institute of Physics
American Meteorological Society (AMS)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Stratigraphy Commission - Geological Society of London - (The world's oldest and the United Kingdom's largest geoscience organization)
British Antarctic Survey
Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO
Australian Coral Reef Society
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Royal Society, United Kingdom
Russian Academy of Sciences
Royal Society of Canada
Science Council of Japan
Australian Academy of Sciences
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
Brazilian Academy of Sciences
Caribbean Academy of Sciences
French Academy of Sciences
German Academy of Natural Scientists
Indian National Science Academy
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Royal Irish Academy
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy)
Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Union of Concerned Scientists
The Institution of Engineers Australia
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)
National Research Council
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences
Federation of American Scientists
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
World Meteorological Organization
State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
International Council on Science
American Physical Society (APS)
Australian Institute of Physics (AIP
European Physical Society
European Science Foundation
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS
Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN)
Network of African Science Academies
International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS
European Academy of Sciences and Arts
InterAcademy Council (IAC)
International Arctic Science Committee
Arctic Council
European Federation of Geologists (EFG)
European Geosciences Union (EGU)
Geological Society of Australia
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
American Quaternary Association (AMQUA
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians (AAWV
American Society for Microbiology
Institute of Biology (UK)
Society of American Foresters (SAF
Deniers would have you believe that somehow all these organizations and the thousands of scientists from 120 countries, who have been doing the research for 20 years, and over 30 years for some, are all scamming you in some dark conspiracy. Wow, and they call the scientists alarmists!
Regardless of these spats, the fact that the community overwhelmingly supports the consensus is evidenced by picking up any copy of Journal of Climate or similar, any scientific program at the AGU or EGU meetings, or simply going to talk to scientists (not the famous ones, the ones at your local university or federal lab). I challenge you, if you think there is some un-reported division, show me the hundreds of abstracts at the Fall meeting (the biggest conference in the US on this topic) that support your view - you won't be able to. You can argue whether the consensus is correct, or what it really implies, but you can't credibly argue it doesn't exist.NASA's Gavin Schmidt:
The position of a vast majority of people that believe in the seriousness of climate change as a human induced problem is that they believe so because of the following line of reasoning… see if you can follow the complicated steps of logic…http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/11/how-do-we-really-know-humans-are-causing-global-warming/
1) An overwhelmingly vast majority of the scientists that actually study climate science hold this view.
by RhapsodyInGlue
The global warming is a hoax believers don't understand the difference between informed opinion, uninformed opinion, misinformed opinion and totally ignorant opinions.from comments posted by LeeAnnG at grist.org
To hear Rush Limbaugh tell it, a few scientists doing quazi or quack science are behind the global warming hoax. Now, who would you believe?
Of course skeptics, or deniers, don't give up easy. Show them this overwhelming scientific consensus and they tell you it's a hoax, or it's a scam, or conspiracy to raise your taxes, or make you give up your SUV, make scientists rich, get grant money for research, create a world government, make you buy green products, or even become a communist. I'm not making this up. This is how they talk. In fact, this is often how the Republican party talks. The Minnesota State Republican website has proclaimed such things in bold banner headlines at the top of the page. And they call the scientists alarmists. How can a rational person believe that the majority of the scientific community is motivated by any of this nonsense?
The truth of the matter is that the IPCC scientists have understated their case. They have actually been conservative in their projections. Actual recent observations have been worse than what they have predicted.
Here's an article about the conservative nature of climate science and the IPCC.
http://getenergysmartnow.com/2007/03/19/optimists-or-pessimists-what-is-it-with-those-ipcc-types/
and another on the same topic at Scientific American:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=conservative-climate
When you hear Republican politicians claiming climate scientists faked the science, they are referring to the FAKE SCANDAL of climategate.
Seven different investigations found no wrong doing, no faking the science. NONE
-------
This is mostly what it was about. nothing.
Watch out for the scary hockey stick
Deniers hate the so called hockey stick chart of historical global temperatures. That's because it is so startling to look at. The 20th century warming looks like the blade of a hockey stick, with previous centuries being the handle.
They hate it because it has become an iconic image of global warming.
even if it were invalidated, that would not invalidate AGW. The science would still stand on it's mountain of evidence.
Michael Mann's hockey stick temperature chart has been reconstructed by dozens of other scientists, using the same data and with the same result.
The National Academy of Science investigated the issue and found Mann's work valid.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research also validated Mann's work
All seven investigations of the fake scandal of climategate found the same. Nothing.
The "trick" that Mann spoke of in one of the hacked emails was nothing like what has been alleged by deniers.
Mann is a paleoclimatologist, who used tree ring data going back something like 2000 years for the chart. He also used ice core data, coral records etc. These types of paleo-climate data are called temperature proxies.
We have measured temperature records that are pretty reliable back to about the mid 1800s. The tree ring data correlated well with these measured temps, up until the last 30 years of his chart, about 1960. and it correlated well with other proxies up to then.
The tree ring data, for some reason was inaccurate for that 30 year period after 1960.
How do we know? Because we have the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE from both land based and satellite stations.
So Mann patched onto his tree ring chart, the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE for those years.
This was all explained in the IPCC report, where Mann's research paper and this hockey stick chart were published. Nothing was hidden.
And that is the "trick". Not a trick like to fool, but a technique for patching the measured temps onto the chart to represent last 30 years after 1960.
And that non issue, is what all the nonsense is about.
That was the trick.
But the deniers turned it into a worldwide conspiracy by climate scientists, to "hide the decline".
In other words, the skeptics are saying that Mann should have used the tree ring data, that he knew was wrong for those last 30 years, instead of the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE.
Get it?
Much more on climate gate in the Skeptic Arguments section further on in this post.
Make no mistake. There is a concerted and very well funded campaign to muddy the scientific debate about climate change and to keep you misinformed. A large part of the problem is that the news media often plays right into the hands of the science deniers. In a misguided effort to appear fair and balanced, they will give air time to skeptics to give 'balance'.
But this is false balance. They are portraying a controversy that is not real.
Do you give air time to people who think the moon landing was faked, every time there is news from NASA? Virtually every major science organization in the world is telling you that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real.
Comments on the massive PR campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry from
http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam
On the issue of climate change, journalists have consistently reported the updates from the best climate scientists in the world juxtaposed against the unsubstantiated raving of an industry-funded climate change denier - as if both are equally valid. This is not balanced journalism. It is a critical abdication of journalistic responsibility.
The media, which in a lazy and facile attempt to provide "balance" is willing to give any opinion equal time as long as it is firmly in contradiction with another.
But few PR offences have been so obvious, so successful and so despicable as the attack on the scientific certainty of climate change. Few have been so coldly calculating and few have been so well documented. For example, Ross Gelbspan, in his books, The Heat is On and Boiling Point sets out the whole case, pointing fingers and naming names. PR Watch founder John Stauber has done similarly exemplary work, tracking the bogus campaigns and linking various pseudo scientists to their energy industry funders.
This is a triumph of disinformation. It is a living proof of the success of one of the boldest and most extensive PR campaigns in history, primarily financed by the energy industry and executed by some of the best PR talent in the world.
The author of the article goes on to say.
Read everything.
Check out the sites that deny the reality of climate change and then check on www.sourcewatch.org to see who paid for those opinions, read DeSmogBlog. Don't accept the word of people who pass themselves off as "skeptics." Be skeptical yourself. Ask yourself what motive the scientific community has to gang up and invent a phony climate crisis. Compare that to the motives that ExxonMobil or Peabody Coal might have to deny that burning fossil fuels indiscriminately could change irrevocably our existence on the planet.
There is a global warming skeptic book called "The Deniers" by Lawrence Solomon. He called Fred Singer (one of the sources for his book) "one of the world's renowned scientists". Singer can't even get his work peer reviewed, never mind have it pass peer review. That's how discredited he is in the scientific community. More on Fred Singer further down the page.
But skeptics gobble up stuff like this, as if it were the gospel truth.
Comment from climatedenial.org:
Solomon (who is not a scientist) is not really an independent searcher after truth- he is a frontline communicator for a large and influential denial industry that aims to prevent political action and undermine public concern about climate change.
Another piece of denier propaganda with no credibility is the movie called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The one and only "scientific advisor" for the movie is Martin Livermore, who has no scientific credentials other than being the director of an online right wing think tank called The Scientific Alliance, which was established by the anti-green lobbying and public relations company, British Aggregates Association.
One credible climate scientist, Dr. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at MIT was quoted out of context and "duped" into appearing in the documentary. He says the movie was grossly distorted and as close to pure propaganda as anything since WW2.
He is considering filing a complaint with the British broadcast regulator, Ofcom.
Also appearing in the movie is Tim Ball, a retired professor of the department of geography at the University of Winnipeg. In the documentary, he is listed as Professor Tim Ball, University of Winnipeg, Department of Climatology. There is no Department of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg! He has not published a research paper in eleven years. He is a geographer, not a climate scientist.
Tim Ball recently gave a presentation at the University of Victoria's Young Conservative Club. Unfortunately for Ball, a group of graduate students in climate science were in the audience, which I'm sure was not the uniformly receptive audience Ball expected. These students had the facts necessary to debunk the lies that Ball presented as scientific truth. In a victory for truth over pseudoscientific quackery and disinformation, Ball was interrupted numerous times by graduate students, who called him on his blatant lies about climate science. Ball, typical of denier spokesmen, refuses to retract his mistatements and fabrications. He even claimed he receives no funding from fossil fuel interests.
So, Tim Ball thinks it's okay to make public policy on the basis of uninformed criticism of models he has never studied. He argues that 17th century paintings are all the evidence he needs to demonstrate that current warming is natural and not a problem. He says things that are not true and then refuses to acknowledge his error when corrected. And yet he feels confident to criticize the ethics of the best scientists currently working in the field. It's appalling.
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-concert-battered-facts
Also appearing in the film was Dr. Paul Reiter, who's connected with the Annapolis Centre for Science Based Public Policy, another right wing think tank, which received $763,500 from Exxon Mobile.
and there was:
Dr. Paul Copper, Listed as an "Allied Expert" for the Natural Resource Stewardship Project (NRSP), a lobby organization that refuses to disclose it's funding sources. The NRSP is led by executive director Tom Harris and Dr. Tim Ball. An Oct. 16, 2006 CanWest Global news article on who funds the NRSP, it states that "a confidentiality agreement doesn't allow him [Tom Harris] to say whether energy companies are funding his group." The NRSP also has ties to Canadian energy-sector lobbyists http://www.desmogblog.com/search/node/Great%20Global%20Warming%20Swindle
http://www.desmogblog.com/a-global-warming-swindle-play-by-play
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/george-will-and-the-swindle-tell-you-all-you-need-to-know/
Speaking of Tom Harris, mentioned in my last paragraph:
Tom Harris' Carleton University Climate Misinformation Class
A popular climate myth, coming in at #21 on the list of most used climate myths, is that global warming is being caused by galactic cosmic rays. The reason this myth is so popular is that it's a relatively new hypothesis, and thus has only been investigated by climate researchers in recent years. However, the vast majority of studies on the subject have found little if any relationship between galactic cosmic rays and global temperatures.
That didn't stop Harris from exhibiting one of the 5 characteristics of scientific denialism to claim otherwise in his lectures - cherrypicking. As John Cook wrote two years ago in describing this denialism characteristic,
"[cherrypicking] involves selectively drawing on isolated papers that challenge the consensus to the neglect of the broader body of research..."
This is precisely how Harris taught his class, picking out the few scientific studies which seemed to indicate a relationship between cosmic rays and global temperatures, and completely neglecting to mention the vast majority of studies finding little to no correlation between the two"
CASS caught Harris downplaying the influence of CO2 on climate once again, repeating the myth that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas.
Harris of course neglects to mention that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is dictated by the temperature of the atmosphere - water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing.
{read it at Skeptical Science}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1445
In the Classroom
The Committee for the Advancment of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) has issued a report on a course supposed to be about climate change, taught by Tom Harris at Carleton University in Canada. Harris is associated with the International Climate Science Coalition, and is a confirmed speaker for the upcoming climate conference to be hosted by the so-called “Heartland Institute“.
CASS reviewed video of Harris’s lectures, and found a bounty of errors as well as a consistently false portrayal of climate science. Let’s take a look at an example in which Harris indulges in one of the many ways that fake skeptics make fake arguments about global warming.
We keep seeing the same old tactics used over and over again. It’s like a recipe — focus on an area that’s too small and/or a time span that’s too brief, show some graph and say it shows one thing when it actually shows another, avoid any analysis which might reveal what the true behavior is. It’s how fake skeptics convince themselves, and sometimes others, of fake ideas about the science. I’ve gotten used to it. But I find it deeply troubling that it has now invaded the classroom.
{read it at Open Mind}
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/in-the-classroom/
Have you read "The Skeptics Handbook"? Don't bother.
The author, Joanne Nova, has no credentials in climate science and is basically a public speaker on various subjects related to science.
She rehashes old worn out skeptic arguments, like the claim that global warming has stopped. See the skeptic arguments section below, for more on that topic. The handbook is debunked in three parts here:
htt
http://www.desmogblog.com/debunking-joanne-nova-climate-skeptics-handbook-global-warming-real-and-happening
http://www.desmogblog.com/debunking-joanne-nova-climate-skeptics-handbook-part-3-climate-models-have-it-right
and here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/skeptics_handbook_not_novel_no.php
and here:
http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2009/02/global-warming-denial.html
Spinning the failure of the Climategate scandal, (really the climate denial scandal)
"Jo Nova, our resident science mis-communicator is given another chance to confuse the climate debate by posting an article on the ABC’s Drum site:"
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/spinning-the-failure-of-climategate-scandal-jo-nova-on-abc-drum
Nova versus Glikson: finally, we see how empty her claims arehttp://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/nova-versus-glikson-finally-we-see-how-empty-her-claims-are/
Perth’s Jo Nova is a key figure in Australia’s denial movement, and one of the few to have a science background. That her degree in limited to an undergraduate degree in microbiology does not seem to stop her holding herself as a climate change expert.
Joanne Nova holds a Bachelor of Science degree in microbiology from the University of Western Australia. She also has a Graduate Certificate in Science Communications from the Australian National University. After graduation, Nova joined the Shell Questacon Science Circus, a Shell-sponsored program that employs university students to travel around Australia teaching interactive science programs to children. Currently, Nova works as a professional speaker, the Director of Science Speak, and the writer and creator of the blog, JoNova
Nova has no experience outside her undergraduate degree and has published nothing via the peer review system. And yet this former science 'entertainer' believes she can take on the scientific community?
And Jo Nova's book is what the Heartland Institute sent to schools, to misinform school children on climate change.
John Coleman makes a lot of noise in the denier-sphere. Being the founder of the Weather Channel leads many to believe that he has some expertise in climate change.
Not exactly:
Apparently the hope is that people will mistake you (Coleman) for a meteorologist, which as discussed previously is not the same as a climatologist, but is at least a related profession.
It is not generally known that you trained as a journalist. No doubt members of that profession are deeply grateful that this is scarcely known as you are discrediting them with your flagrant disregard for facts or accuracy, never mind your bias.
You went on to be a weathercaster (in effect, a performer) and a business person. None of which discredits anything you may say as such, but it is not the credential you pretend.
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/john-coleman-put-up-or-shut-up/
That's right. John Coleman isn't even a meteorologist, never mind a climate scientist.
At this next link you will learn how oil and coal industry money is funneled through different foundations to bury the money trail, and "wipe the oil" off of it.
They set up organizations like Policy Communications, The Western Business Roundtable, Partnership for America, and Americans for American Energy, to make it seem like there is this groundswell of grassroots organizations opposing the scientific theory of man made climate change and opposing the move to sustainable energy. These are actually all the same people from the fossil fuel industry and mining industry. They are all staffed by the same executives.
It's called "astroturfing" - the setting up of fake grassroots organizations and it's one of the oldest tricks in the books.http://www.desmogblog.com/policy-communications-inc-astroturf-shell-game
Policy Communications
An energy industry-backed astro-turf network concocted by a single PR/Lobbying firm that is working to undermine the efforts of environmental groups and organizations like the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). that are pushing for solutions to climate change.
More on the astroturf group Western Business Roundtable(aka Policy Communications) and what they're up to.
http://www.desmogblog.com/about-western-business-roundtable-wbr
Another example of "wiping the oil' off the money is how the inaptly named Friends of Science(FOS), had money funneled to what they called the Science Education Fund. The money came from the Alberta oil and gas industry through the Calgary Foundation, who funneled it through the University of Calgary and ultimately ending up at FOS.
FOS has funded Fred Singer, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling and Pat Michaels.
If you're unsure of how some of these fossil fuel industry leaders think, perhaps the words of the CEO of Massey energy will give you a clue.
Last Thursday, Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, the fourth largest United States coal company, described his critics as “communists,” “atheists,” and “greeniacs.” In an address before the Tug Valley Mining Institute in Williamson, WV, Blankenship said those who criticize him are “our enemies” like Osama bin Laden:http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/24/blankenship-bin-laden/
Blankenship has spent millions of dollars to influence West Virginia judgeships and state legislative races, and palled around in Monte Carlo with state Supreme Court Chief Justice Elliott “Spike” Maynard and their “female friends” in July 2006. The state court reversed a $77 million verdict against Massey in 2008.
Massey Energy violated the Clean Water Act 4,500 times between 2000 and 2007. In 2000, a subsidiary of Massey Energy had a 300 million gallon spill of black toxic sludge from a coal processing plant in Kentucky ( nearly 30 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill). The EPA called it the worst environmental disaster in the history of the southeastern United States. The water of 27,000 people was contaminated. A plume of sludge extented 75 miles to the Ohio River. There was an investigation by MSHA that was squelched after Bush's election. The investigators were ready to proceed with 8 serious violations, with possible criminal charges. The lead investigator was reassigned, and demoted then fired.
He was replaced with another, who on the first day said he would close the investigation within a week. He later got a seat on the board of directors of Massey Energy. It probably didn't hurt that the coal industry and Massey Energy virtually won W. Virginia for Republicans in an upset victory, after contributing heavily to the campaign.
Massey Energy got off with a $55,000 fine.
Now this environmental disaster has been superceded by an even worse spill of coal sludge in Tennessee just before Christmass 2008. This one is estimated at one billion gallons, or three times as big as the previous spill in 2000.
So much for "clean coal".
http://cleanergy.blogspot.com/2008/12/this-is-clean-coal-massive-coal-sludge.html
"Your tax dollars subsidize the sh*t out of coal"
Great charts showing subsidies to various power sources
http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-14-your-tax-dollars-subsidize-the-sht-out-of-coal
Oil has been subsidized since 1918
Coal has been subsidized since 1932
Economics Stunner: “Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added.”
Accounting for total harm from coal would add "close to 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated."
This study was done by a group of highly respected economists, including economic conservatives.
But now we have some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — making this case in a top economic journal, the American Economic Review.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/13/332882/economics-coal-fired-power-plants-air-pollution-damages/
In this follow up article, Skeptical Science shows that this was a very conservative assessment.
"Correction to the True Cost of Coal Power - MMN11"
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1059
Many, many other studies have found that carbon dioxide causes the earth to warm. This is not controversial, and to continue to deny it is akin to denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer. The evidence for a human-caused warming of the globe is overwhelming. The scientific debate is over, and what we are seeing now is an attempt to mislead the publicJeff Severinghaus - Professor of Geosciences - UC San Diego
Denier Andrew Bolt has used a misquote of Severinghaus' writings in his propaganda.
See here:
http://getenergysmartnow.com/2008/12/20/deniers-quote-true-but-not-truthful/
Seveinghaus says: “At the very least I would like it to go on record that Bolt’s abuse of my science is not done with my approval."
Newsflash 12/19/08
President elect Obama's pick for Presidential Science Advisor
John Holdren -
an expert on Energy and Climate Change, Highly regarded Nobel Prize winner: Former President- American Association for the Advancement of Science:
Current director of the Woods Hole Research Center. (Woods Hole is one of the premier oceanography institutions in the world.): Professor at Harvard and Berkeley on environment:
In Holdren's own words:
The few climate-change “skeptics” with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. The attention and credence they receive are a menace, of course, insofar as this delays the development of the political consensus that will be needed before society embraces remedies that are commensurate with the magnitude of the climate-change challenge.
Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by this vocal fringe should ask themselves how it could be, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that the leaderships of the national academies of sciences, of every country in the world that has one, are repeatedly on record saying that global climate change is real, dangerous, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early and concerted action to reduce those causes; that this is also the overwhelming consensus view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every major university in the world; and that all three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for environmental science, are all leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream.
The fact is that anybody who could believe that the cream of the part of the world scientific community that has actually studied this phenomenon could be co-opted by hoaxers or suffering from mass hysteria is just not thinking clearly.
Finally, some sanity in the White House.
And of course the anti science crowd is already piling on the criticism of Obama's pick. Read about it here.
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/21/john-holdren-john-tierney-rogerpielke-bjorn-lomborg-and-competitive-enterprise-institute/
More of John Holdren's words
We should really call them “deniers” rather than “skeptics”, because they are giving the venerable tradition of skepticism a bad name.
As my original reference to “the venerable tradition of skepticism” indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time — although less often than most casual observers suppose — that views initially held only by skeptics end up overturning and replacing what had been the “mainstream” view.
Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing much of what has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to "mass hysteria” or deliberate propagation of a “hoax”.
The purveying of propositions like these by a few scientists who do or should know better –and their parroting by amateur skeptics who lack the scientific background or the motivation to figure out what’s wrong with them — are what I was inveighing against in the op-ed and will continue to inveigh against. The activities of these folks, whether witting in the case of the scientists or unwitting in the case of their gullible adherents, have nothing to do with respectable scientific skepticism.
Finally, some truth in the Whitehouse. Scientists will once again be free to speak without fear of officially sanctioned censoring and denigration.
The Bush administration has played a major role in the propaganda campaign to discredit science. President Bush authorized a major study on climate change, then had a Petroleum Institute lawyer edit the report done by climate scientists, to water it down.
They also tried to prevent world renowned climate scientist James Hansen from releasing a report about global temperature for 2005. There was a systematic attempt to stifle the free speech of climate scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where Hansen works. They had public policy people inserted into the Institute to ride herd over the scientists.
To learn much more about this, read the book:
"Censoring Science: the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming" by Mark Bowen
I also recommend the books "The Boiling Point" and "The Heat Is On" by Ross Gelbspan, which were mentioned in the quote from Desmogblog above.
Four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/19/bush-climate-impacts-climate-change-science-program-ccsp-muzzling/
More articles concerning the Bush administration and obstruction of science and environmental progress:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/1/22/13834/1335
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/8/133241/5405
http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2004/03/02/she/index.html
http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/12/19/EPA/index.html
Speaking of books and the denier propaganda machine, there are several other books worth reading.
"The Inquisition of Climate Science"
by James Lawrence Powell
"Climate Cover-Up": The Crusade to Deny Global Warming"
by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore
"Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
"Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change"
by Clive Hamilton
He outlines the decade-long, coal-industry funded campaign in Australia to deny climate science.
"Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate"
by Stephan H. Schneider and Tim Flannery
"Global Warming and Political Intimidation, How Politicians Cracked Down On Scientists as the Earth Heated Up"
by Raymond Bradley
"Climate War, True Believers, Power Brokers and The Fight to Save the Earth"
by Eric Pooley
"Climate Change Denial, Heads in the Sand"
by Hayden Washington and John Cook
"FOOL ME TWICE; Fighting the Assault on Science in America"
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
So you see, the real scam is very well documented, unlike the bizarre and absurd conspiracy theories of the deniers, which are based on pure conjecture.
from the book "Fool Me Twice"
Between 1999 and 2010, the energy industry spent more than $2 billion fighting climate change legislation, more than $500 million of it from January 2009 to June 2010
By the way, if you peruse the book shelves at your local Barnes and Noble, you will notice at least as many, if not more, books by climate change skeptics, as mainstream climate science books. There is a reason for this. The same "think tanks" who are spreading the disinformation for the fossil fuel industry, are funding and or publishing most of these books. They promote 78% of skeptical books on climate change. This has resulted in at least 64 climate change skeptic books. Then they organize book buying, to push these books to the best seller lists.
There would be no denialist movement or literature if not for these groups. Books are another part of how they have manufactured the impression of a controversy about climate science, where there really isn't one. The tobacco companies taught them well. They perceived that the American public had a sliver of doubt about climate science, and they endeavored to drive a wedge into that sliver of doubt and widen it. They know they can't disprove the science, but that they can maintain an aura of uncertainty about the science. And that is all they need, to delay or prevent climate action. Unfortunately, the media has been perfectly willing to accomadate them. The media loves controversy. And some of the mass media is in sympathy with these interests, intentionally printing distorted and misrepresented versions of the science and pseudo scientific articles, as actual science.
One newspaper in England printed three times as many articles featuring Christopher Monckton, a non scientist skeptic, as articles featuring Phil Jones, IPCC scientist and head of CRU (Climate Research Center) in England.
Which one would you interview to get the facts? More on Monckton below.
Relevent industries have opposed all sorts of environmental protection. Whether its pollutants that cause acid rain, lead in gasoline that caused brain and neurological damage to children, CFCs that were damaging the protective ozone layer, cancer causing asbestos or formaldahyde, deforestation, health dangers of tobacco or CO2 that causes global warming, big industry has spend millions of dollars in attempts stop legislation designed to protect the public's health and that of the environment, and muddying the scientific discussion of these issues. Why do people think it is any different in the case of global warming?
The tobacco industry set the precedent and the method for raising doubts about the scientific evidence, in order to delay or stop effective legislation to protect peoples health. What they all learned from big Tobacco, was that you don't have to disprove the science. All that is necessary is to make claims that the science isn't 100% certain. (never mind that nothing in science is ever 100% certain)
They have been imitated by all those other industries, including today's fossil fuel industry and their climate change denial PR.
A recent poll shows that 82% of Americans support the EPA and 73% support the EPA restricting greenhouse gas emissions. Guess what has influenced the 27% who don't support EPA action on CO2 emissions. The disinformation campaign on climate change has been very successful. Contrary to contrarian claims, the science has only gotten stronger.
Almost every Republican congressman questions the science. And for anyone who has any knowledge of the subject, it is abundantly clear that these politicians are scientifically challenged, usually not having the slightest clue what they are talking about. Over 80% of oil industry political donations go to Republicans. For the coal industry, 90% goes to Republicans.
from a Greenpeace article "Dealing in Doubt"
The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory has been widely corroborated by decades-worth of data compiled by research institutions across the globe. Climate deniers know they can't attack the science head on, so the only thing left for them to do is muddy the debate by sowing enough doubt to justify further delays. Dealing in Doubt lays out exactly how they've done that for the past 20 years...
here's the direct link to the pdf file: "Dealing in Doubt", which you can download.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/reports4/dealing-in-doubt
It's only 355 Kb, a small file. You need Adobe Acrobat reader, which most PCs have, or you can download it free from Adobe.
"Climate change scepticism - its sources and strategies"
audio of 4 climate scientists discussing the climate debate and denial PR at an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium.
http://abc.com.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2859986.htm
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.Isaac Azimov
"Is climate sanity the kiss of death for Republican presidential candidates?"
http://www.grist.org/election-2012/2011-05-18-climate-sanity-kiss-of-death-republican-presidential-candidates
Let's have some fun a the GOP Science Fun House
Remember; These are some of the politicians who think they know better than
97% of active climate scientists, every National Academy of Science in the world, and virtually every other major science organization in the world, with any relevance to climate and earth sciences.
GOP congressman Rohrbacher suggests trees cause global warming
Speaker of the House Boehner says CO2 emissions nothing to worry about because humans breathe CO2 in and out.
Excuse me Mr. Speaker, ever hear of the greenhouse effect?
Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
"CO2 Is A Natural Gas. Does This Mean That All Of Us Need To Put Catalytic Converters On Our Noses?"
Ever hear of the greenhouse effect? Apparently not.
Michelle Bachman says there have been no scientific studies showing CO2 is harmful.
I guess she missed the 10,000 (up to about 2006) published research papers that show that CO2 causes global warming. There are thousands more since then.
GOP Rep Fred Upton says there can be no global warming because God won't allow it to happen.
And of course, Sen Inhofe says its all a big hoax.
Sure Senator, the entire world scientific community is just trying to get more grant money.
Senator Inhofe;
"Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
Rep Joe Barton (R-TX) describes Christopher Monckton
"as being generally regarded as one of the most knowledgeable, if not the most knowledgeable, experts on the skeptic side."
Monckton is NOT A SCIENTIST!
Monckton, who the GOP loves to call as an expert witness on climate change, is not a scientist. His only higher education is in journalism. Monckton is a complete charlatan, who has been completely and devastatingly debunked on several occasions by real scientists. Much more on Monckton later.
Barton and Inhofe get more oil money than any other legislators, in the House and Senate, respectively.
Minnestota GOP senator claims to have studied all 13 fields of science related to climate change. Just so you know, no climate scientist would make such a claim.
Jungbauer is the leading global warming denier in the Minnesota state senate. Turns out he doesn't even have a bachelor degree in ANY field of science.
Ron Paul wonders why scientists changed the name from Global Warming to Climate Change.
Really? The Intergovernmental Panel on CLIMATE CHANGE was named and founded 23 years ago, in 1988. And scientists have used both terms since the mid 1970s.
Rick Perry likens himself and other deniers to Galileo.
Sorry Rick, but Galileo was correct and had the evidence.
You are wrong and have no evidence, while ignoring the mountain of evidence for AGW.
Perry and the rest are more like the religious authorities who persecued Galileo.
Speaker of the House - John Boehner
"The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical"
No Mr Speaker. What is comical and pathetic is that you believe than any scientist would ever say such an absurd thing. Either that or you are playing to the low information voter.
Rep. Shimkus:
"Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood."
God Help Us.
If you're interested in what real honest to goodness scientific skeptics have to say, read this from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The author is Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/mann_bites_dog_why_climategate_was_newsworthy/
from the above link
Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data using tricks to hide evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They chronically misrepresent the careful published work of scientists, distorting all logic and meaning in an organized misinformation campaign. To an uncritical media and gullible non-scientists, this ongoing conflict has had the intended effect: it gives the appearance of a scientific controversy and seems to contradict climate researchers who have stated that the scientific debate over the reality of human-caused climate change is over (statements that have been distorted by denialists to imply the ridiculous claim that in all respects the science is settled).
And besides what I post here, I can show dozns of more examples of what Mark is talking about.
Here's how Republicans and other deniers think, concerning global warming.
In Febuary 2010, when the lower 48 had a lot of snow and two big snowstorms hit Wash.DC, Republicans were all claiming it proved global warming was over.
Calls to take away Al Gore's Nobel Pize were common. Global warming denier fanatic, Senator Inhofe, talked about making an igloo for Gore in Wash DC.
Other GOP politicians, Glen Beck, Limbaugh and the rest of the extreme right misinformers all jumped on this bandwagon.
And here are the actual facts; Remember we are talking global temps, not the temp at your house.
The past 15 months were the warmest on record (through July 2010)
4th warmest January since 1830.
April was the warmest on record.
Jan-March was the warmest on record
Nov- January was the warmest on record
One of the storms hit on Feb 6, the warmest Feb 6 on record
It snows more during warm winters, because warm air holds more moisture.
It was too warm in Vancouver(55F), where the Olympics were held. No snow.
Vermont had no snow.
No one said global warming eliminates winter. It snows in winter. Duh
This snow was a few days in one region, and is local weather variability, not long term global climate. The U.S. only represents about 2.5% of global land mass.
Climate scientists only say the earth has warmed about 1.4 deg F in industrial times. They didn't say it would be 10 degrees warmer at your house this winter.
Yet that 1.4 F change is enough to melt the glaciers, the polar ice caps, change the arrival time of spring and fall, cause sea level rise, acidify the oceans, screw up the migrating, feeding and breeding of many species because of the timing of spring etc. It is likely a contributor to beetle infestations plaguing temperate conifer forests.
Through May 2012, there were 327 consecutive months with temperatures greater than the mean for the 20th Century
Every single year from 2001 onwards has been warmer than every year prior to 1998, going back as far as reliable records have been kept in the mid 1800s.
The last decade was warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, which were warmer than the 1970s...
The thermal inertia of the oceans, which is where most of the excess heat is going, creates a time lag in global warming. We are now seeing the warming from human emissions in the 1980s. We won't see the full result of our present emissions for about 20-30 years.
If we could magically stop all our CO2 emissions today, about 0.6 C more warming would still be in the pipeline. That's on top of 0.8 C warming so far, after human emissions have raised CO2 levels by 40%. Scientists think that limiting the warming in this century to 2 C, from pre-industrial times is critical to our civilization. On our current path we are headed for about twice that in this century. The majority of climate sensitivity estimates are about 3 C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. On our current path we will reach that by about 2075 or so.
More on the thermal inertia of the oceans
Breaking News...The Earth is Warming... Still. A LOT
how can you work out whether the Earth is warming if you don't take account of all the places where it may be warming? And most commentary seems to only focus on surface temperatures. Which is only 3% of the Total Heat Content change.
Global Ocean Heat Content increase in the last 50 years
How much heat is that?
"This is a rate of heating of 133 Terawatts. Or 0.261 Watts/m2
133 Terrawatts is 2 Hiroshima bombs a second. Continually since 1961.
It would boil Sydney Harbour dry EVERY 12 HOURS!
But why don't we notice this? Because instead of all this heating happening just in Sydney Harbour, this is spread out through out the worlds oceans. And they are huge: approximately 2,300,000,000 times the size of Sydney Harbour.
So HEAT THAT BOILS THE HARBOR (every 12 hours) WOULD ONLY WARM THE ENTIRE OCEAN BY A FRACTION OF A DEGREE .
(my emphasis)
So we don't notice it much. Not that it isn't real, just that we don't notice it.
And if this much heat had instead gone into just warming the atmosphere - you know, that thing we call Climate -
it would have raised Air temperatures by around 42 C over the last 1/2 Century!
(note: 42 C change = 75.6 F change in temperature)
{at Skeptical Science - 3/16/11}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Breaking_News_The_Earth_is_Warming_Still_A_LOT.html
NASA scientists expect more rapid global warming in the very near future (part 2)
Because of the ocean's thermal inertia (it takes a long time to warm up), global temperature change caused by the sun's variabilty lags solar irradiance by about 18 months.
The 'trough' in the solar cycle (figure 1) was therefore still exerting a cooling influence on surface temperatures in 2011. However this is expected to quickly change to a warming effect over the next 3-5 years because the sun is on its ascent to the peak of the next cycle.
As circled in figure 1 - extra sunlight has gone into the oceans in the last 18 months. This warming is a 'train that has already left the station' so-to-speak, and will soon manifest itself in global temperature.
{Read it at Skeptical Science}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/NASA-scientists-expect-more-rapid-global-warming-in-the-very-near-future-part-2.html
The last decade was dominated more by La Nina than El Nino. La Nina cools the atmosphere. We just had back to back La Ninas ending in spring 2012.
2011 was the warmest La Nina year recorded since reliable records began mid 1800s.
While El Nino warms the atmosphere and La Nina cools it, that is only part of the picture. See here:
La Nina and El Nino"
Note what happens during La Nina – a lot of heat gets buried below the surface in the western Tropical Pacific (tilting of the thermocline) and cool water wells up from the deep along the coast of North & South America. These processes cause cooling of global surface temperatures through the ocean-atmosphere heat exchange.
With El Nino, heat wells up to the surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, and the upwelling of cold water along the Americas shuts off. The end result is that a lot of heat from the ocean is given up to the atmosphere, which warms up abruptly and raises global surface temperatures. But much of this atmospheric heat is radiated out to space.
So, although it seems counter-intuitive, La Nina is when the Earth gains a lot of energy, and El Nino is when the oceans loses heat to the atmosphere – and the Earth loses energy.
{by Rob Painting at Skeptical Science}
In regard to whether global warming is "causing" extreme weather events.
A better explanation is that global warming plays a part in weather in general now.
Warmer sea water
Warmer air.
More moisture in the air, because warm air holds more moisture.
1 degree increase in atmospheric temperature increases moisture by 4%
Which is about what it is now.
Just common sense would suggest that storms would be more powerful, rainfall and snowfall bigger, floods bigger, etc.
A few analogies are -
Loaded dice. If a die is loaded, you could not say that if a 6 came up, it's because it's loaded.
But you know there is more likelihood of a 6 coming up, because it's loaded.
Another analogy is a baseball player on steroids.
You can't say any particular homerun is due to the steriods.
But you know he can hit more homeruns, due to the steroids.
(assuming he keeps the same skills)
So there's probably some of the global warming element, in all the weather these days.
Several recent studies show that without human emissions and their greehnouse effect, the world would have cooled over the past 50 years or so, from the net natural forcings that skeptics claim are causing the warming.
Lean and Rind Estimate Human and Natural Global Warming
In a paper a few years back, Lean and Rind (2008) performed a very similar study to one we recently examined from Foster and Rahmstorf (2011), filtering out short-term effects on global temperature to tease out the human and natural contributions to global warming
"None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures. In the 100 years from 1905 to 2005, the temperature trends produce by all three natural influences are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the observed surface temperature trend reported by IPCC [2007].
According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years"
{read at Skeptical Science}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lean-and-rind-estimate-man-made-and-natural-global-warming.html
It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was
A new study in Nature Geoscience, “Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance”
"Our results show that it is extremely likely that at least 74% of the observed warming since 1950 was caused by radiative forcings, and less than 26% by unforced internal variability. Of the forced signal during that particular period, 102% (90-116%) is due to anthropogenic and 1% (-10 to 13%) due to natural forcing.....
The combination of those results with attribution studies based on optimal fingerprinting, with independent constraints on the magnitude of climate feedbacks, with process understanding, as well as palaeoclimate evidence leads to an even higher confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times"
Absent the increasing GHGs, we probably would have cooled, since
1.We’ve had a couple of big volcanoes.
2.We’re just coming off "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century."
3.The underlying long-term trend had been cooling (see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, "seminal" study finds).
(That's right. The net effect of the natural climate forcings was cooling.
Skeptics often claim that the warming is from natural forcings.)
{read at Climate Progress}
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/12/05/382209/observed-warming-since-1950-was-manmade/
Foster and Rahmstorf Measure the Global Warming Signal
When the fluctuations in temperature over the last 32 years (which tend to obscure the continuation of the global warming trend) are accounted for, it becomes obvious that there has not been any cessation, or even any slowing, of global warming over the last decade (or at any time during this time span). ..........
In other words, any deviations from an unchanging linear warming trend are explained by the influence of ENSO, volcanoes and solar variability....It is worthy of note that for all five adjusted data sets, 2009 and 2010 are the two hottest years on record....All five data sets show statistically significant warming even for the time span from 2000 to the present.......
The resultant adjusted data show clearly, both visually and when subjected to statistical analysis, that the rate of global warming due to other factors (most likely these are exclusively anthropogenic) has been remarkably steady during the 32 years from 1979 through 2010. There is no indication of any slowdown or acceleration of global warming, beyond the variability induced by these known natural factors.
{read it at Skeptical Science}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/foster-and-rahmstorf-measure-global-warming-signal.html
Do you think just a few degrees difference in global average temperature is no big deal?
People don't realize that a few degrees difference in global temperture is HUGE.
To put things in perspective-- there is only about 5 C difference between today's avg. global temperature and the temperature at the height of the last full blown ice age, about 20,000 years ago.
With just 0.8 C warming from pre industrial times, we already have big effects observable.
Melting polar ice caps and glaciers world wide.
All kinds of species having their migration, hibernation, feeding and breeding times confused because of the changing seasons, early spring and late fall.
We already have pine bark beetles devastating western conifer forests in North America, because they are surviving winters that are warmer than in the past.
We already have sea levels rising at about 3 mm year.
We already have an increased frequency of severe weather events worldwide.
We know the oceans are warming as well as the atmosphere.
There is already 4% more moisture in the air than 50 years ago, because warm air holds more moisture.
What we hope to do is limit the warming to 2 C this century, which will in itself bring huge challenges from climate change.
At 3 C warming 20-50% of species will go extinct.
At 4 C warming, civilization will likely fall apart world wide.
Any warmer than that and most species on Earth could go extinct.
Humans are pretty good at adaptation and it's always possible, even likely that some humans might survive. But for all practical purposes, it would be the end of the world for our civilization.
What many fail to understand, particularly skeptics who go on about climate changes in the distant past, is that the rate of warming and the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration are about 10 times faster than most warming from natural causes in the earth's past.
Dr. Matt Huber (Purdue University) has to say on lessons we can learn from the past:
Climate scientists don’t often talk about such grim long-term forecasts, Huber says, in part because skeptics, exaggerating scientific uncertainties, are always accusing them of alarmism. “We’ve basically been trying to edit ourselves”, Huber says. “Whenever we we see something really bad, we tend to hold off. The middle ground is actually worse than people think.
"If we continue down this road, there are really is no uncertainty. We’re headed for the Eocence. And we know what that’s like."
Dr. Matt Huber, October 2011.
[from Skeptical Science, comment by Albatross]
Ever wonder who makes up those phony lists of skeptic scientists? How about Marc Morano, who was the main source of the equally phony swiftboat attack on Sen John Kerry, and who launched the attacks on and censoring of NASA climate scientist James Hansen. (Hansen is head of NASA's Goddard Intitute for Space Studies.) His resume also includes communications director for Senator James Inhofe and working for Rush Limbaugh. The hysteria drummed up by people like Morano have led to death threats and hate mail being sent to climate scientists. From an article in the U.K Guardian: "Climate sceptic Morano's 'courage' award is a vicious irony"
Morano's impressive track record – he once worked for Rush Limbaugh, played a key role in breaking the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" story which so gravely damaged presidential nominee Senator John Kerry in 2004, and, until recently, was the communications director for Senator James Inhofe - should in itself be enough to cause you to choke on your morning coffee.
But that this award was announced within hours of Morano posting on his Climate Depot website the email addresses of a climate scientist next to a link to my story from last Monday about the said climate scientist, Stanford University's Professor Stephen Schneider, receiving death threats and hate mail should cause you to throw down that coffee in disgust.
Morano is the source of Senator Inhofe's phony list of 413 "prominent scientists" who dispute the AGW theory. Morano has no science background.
http://www.desmogblog.com/400-prominent-scientists-dispute-global-warming-bunk
Now Morano is claiming
"650 International scientists who dissent over man made global warming"
The list includes 3 dead people, the usual fossil industry paid deniers, like Fred Singer, Tim Ball, Sallie Baliunas, an even larger group of "experts" who are not climate scientists, TV weather forecasters, and a sizable number of scientists who agree with the IPCC findings. Also on the list are an anthropologist and a historian who are both strong and outspoken advocates for acting on climate change; and James Peden, who calls himself an atmospheric physicist even though he long ago left climate science, to be a web designer.
The original list of 413 (which was discussed at the beginning of this post) included Meteorologist George Waldenberger, who sent Inhofe an email asking to be removed from the list. They had miscontrued statements of his, to make it sound like he was a skeptic. He told Inhofe that he has never disagreed with the consensus on climate change. And Waldenberger said:
You quoted a newspaper article that’s main focus was scoring the accuracy of local weathermen. Hardly Scientific … yet I’m guessing some of your other sources pale in comparison in terms of credibility.Guess what? He's on the new list of 650 also.
You also didn’t ask for my permission to use these statements. That’s not a very respectable way of doing “research”.
Inhofe and Morano's list gets more debunking:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/650_international_scientists_e.php#more
This article has a thorough analysis of Morano and Inhofe's list of 650:
http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/650Skeptics.HTM
Bottom line: 58% of the "experts" quoted on Inhofe's blog have no credentials in climate research and only 16% have top-notch credentials.
and:
http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2009/02/global-warming-denial.html
Compare these 650 (really less than 100) "skeptics" with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) which has 50,000 members, most of whom really are earth scientists. Only a few dozen AGU members are on this latest denier list.
Who sponsored this latest paper? - Fred Singer's "Science and Environmental Policy Project". Remember Fred Singer, paid by Philip Morris to testify to cigarette smoke's safety?
Oh, did I tell you that Singer also disputes that CFCs deplete the ozone layer? The effect of CFCs on the ozone layer is a well established scientific fact. Since the use of CFCs was limited by the Montreal Protocol, the hole in the ozone has diminished substantially.
Singer even uses skeptic arguments that are so wrong that serious scientists don't even respond to such nonsense anymore. I'm referring to statements from Singer like:
Both greenhouse theory and computer models predict that global warming should be more rapid in the polar regions than anywhere else, but in July the Antarctic experienced the coldest weather on record.This is the dumbest of arguments, the type repeated by the least knowledgeable "me too" skeptics. For a climate scientist like Singer to point to one month in one location as proof against global long term climate change, is to emulate the least informed and most credulous of warming skeptics. (See Skeptic Argument "It's so cold this winter in Peoria" below.) The other reason he is off base is that the IPCC actually predicted less warming in Antartica than in the Arctic. This is a common tactic of deniers, claiming the IPCC made predictions that they didn't make.
If you think this is an isolated case of twisting what others say and mean, you are dead wrong. It's modus operandi for the deniers. Why? Because it works in misleading the public.
Inhofe and sidekick Morano know that it is far easier to perpetuate and mass distribute deception and disinformation than it is to educate and inform people as to the real situation.http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/inhofe_less_honest_than_the_di.php#more
Inhofe's list is lacking in climate scientists. It does have a lot of meteorologists, but these are people who present weather forecasts on TV, not scientists who study climate.
Now, (1/27/08) Morano and Inhofe are attacking Hansen again, with false accusations.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/28/james-inhofe-marc-morano-john-theon-nasa-skeptic-muzzling/#more-4746
Then there's the nonsense put out by Michael Asher on the Daily Tech website. His misrepresentation of science claims that the Arctic sea ice is increasing and is now the largest since 1979. That's interesting, since just a few weeks ago, a report presented at the American Geophysical Union conference stated that the Arctic sea ice is retreating 15-20 years ahead of what was predicted just a few years ago. Asher writes complete trash. Not a word of it is factual. Deniers gobble it up like it was the Holy Grail of science. Here's what actual climate scientists say.
Just last month NASA released a chilling report showing that between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003 – enough to fill Chesapeake Bay 21 times.http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-change-cancelled-whew
The satellite survey of global ice loss showed that in the past five years, Greenland has lost between 150 gigatons and 160 gigatons each year.
"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally. "There's no reversal taking place."
For a clear demonstration of how Asher "cooked" the graph of Arctic sea ice extent, in order to make his false claim, go here.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/cold-hard-facts/#more-1387
More on graphs and 2008 global temperatures:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-if/
More on arctic sea ice extent:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/northern-ice/#more-1189
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/02/dive-dive-dive-arctic-sea-ice-cover-has.html
Asher isn't alone.
Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Watts-Up-With-That-ignorance-regarding-Antarctic-sea-ice.html
Steve Goddard posts often on "Whats Up With That", a popular skeptic website.
He has a habit of posting nonsense charts of artic sea ice extent, sea levels and temperature.
"Climate Cherry Pickers: Falling sea levels in 2010
recent post by Steve Goddard which casts doubt on the fact that we've experienced record hot temperatures over the last year, citing falling sea levels in 2010."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=406
Steven Goddard returns once more to complaining that because the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) doesn’t have 5000 weather stations on the Arctic sea ice their global temperature analysis is a lie composed of 'incorrect, fabricated data'http://wottsupwiththat.com/2010/07/30/giss-polar-interpolation/
Steven cherry-picks June 2010 from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) model for comparison because it’s the only month he can use to 'prove' that the Arctic is colder than GISS reports.
Steve Goddard has brought forth another one of his whistling-through-the-graveyard articles on the Arctic sea ice."
http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-it-works.html
Steve Goddard appears not to understand that Arctic summer temperatures don’t get much above zero degrees Celsius because all the heat’s going into melting ice. As scientists might put it, the temperature is 'constrained' by the melt, and so will only show dramatic increases in summer when all the ice has gone.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/its-grim-up-north-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+co%2FRbRF+%28Hot+Topic%29
Arctic death spiral: Naval Postgrad School’s Maslowski “projects ice-free* fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs)”
But in the land of make-believe, Watts and Goddard say: "Arctic ice extent and thickness nearly identical to what it was 10 years ago."
June 6, 2010
http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/06/arctic-death-spiral-maslowski-ice-free-arctic-watts-goddard-wattsupwiththat/
Arctic sea ice continues to to trend below the numbers for 2007, and indeed below all the years in the IJIS database....And the volume of ice is plummeting, according to PIOMAS
None of this, needless to say, impresses Steve Goddard, who is responding by doubling down on the crazy. Eschewing the wise denier strategy of simply ignoring the unfavorable data in favor of obsessing over cherry-picked short-term trends, Stevie to still worrying the Arctic sea ice, and looking progressively more batty as he does so........
WUWT's increasingly embarrassing "sea ice updates
http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2010/06/tell-tale-ice.html
New Lows: Sea Ice and “Steven Goddard” credibility
September 14, 2011
“Steven Goddard” is a pseudonym used by an anonymous climate denialist crank, so incredibly sloppy that he even embarrassed arch climate denier Anthony Watts, as shown in this link, and as I showed in one of last year’s “sea ice wrap-up” videos.
At least Chris Monckton has a medical condition that explains his break with reality. As for this “Goddard” character, well, I have to let you see this headline to believe it.
How to be a Fake Skeptic
It’s easy to do, just follow these steps:
•1: Make false claims, then draw an outlandish conclusion.
•2: Show a graph — it doesn’t have to support your claims.
•3: Give a link — it doesn’t have to support your claims.
That’s the way Steve Goddard does it. Here is the entirety of his post “Coldest Arctic Start To Autumn Since 1996?:
{Open Mind 2011/09/24}
One of my favorites from the many bunk articles at Watts Up With That.
Watts and D'Aleo make it all up with this claim
"NO WARMING TREND IN THE 351-YEAR CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE RECORD
Open Mind
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/summer-and-smoke/
and they get their heads handed to them by Tamino
Long story short, Anthony Watts (of Watts Up With That) and D'Aleo left out the 19th century and only used summer data, leaving out winter data, to arrive at their quackery graph. Of course summers in the period were relatively cool, while winters were relatively warm. Even for skeptics, this one takes the cake for cherry picking.
Go ahead read it. Open Mind blog.
Its not long. I read stuff like this everyday. This is the kind of junk that real science is up against, and what the deniers have too many Americans believing. Tamino, a professional time series analyst, is brilliant and debunks this kind of fake science regularly. Unfortunately, the public doesn't see much of that, as it never makes it into the mainstream media. But the junk sure does. The real science doesn't have the massive PR campaign to counter it. Yes, there is Al Gore with some serious money to work with, but he's working globally. And it doesn't have the legions of denier fanatics spreading it all over the internet.
This is what the so called skeptics amount to. The public gets an every day constant barrage of this nonsense. It's not about science, but politics and bending the public's perception to their will.
And its just plain wrong. It certainly isn't science.
Sometimes, even the professional deniers tell the truth.
The Global Climate Coalition, an industry-funded group that spent years vehemently contesting any evidence linking anthropogenic activity to climate change, found itself in the uncomfortable position of rejecting its own experts’ recommendations when they reached the inevitable conclusion that the contribution of manmade greenhouse gas emissions to climate change could not be refuted.
That’s right: even the scientists that these companies had consistently trotted out to discredit the findings of the IPCC could no longer deny the truth when faced with the hard facts. They acknowledged as much in an internal report released in 1995 in which they stated unequivocably that:
"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."
When confronted with this frank assessment, the leadership of the Global Climate Coalition did the only reasonable thing: drop the offending passages and expunge the report’s existence from the public record.
http://www.desmogblog.com/when-deniers-deny-their-own
Skeptic Jon Jenkins doctored graphs of global temperature to skew them away from the warming that is happening. He not only skewed the chart but cherry picked the ending date to avoid having to include data from the latest three month period (which was readily available). This three month period included a strong upward move, which would have contradicted what he was claiming the chart showed.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/sixth-degree_polynomial_fits_j.php
This junk science was used in an article by Jenkins in the "Australian", the only major national newspaper in Australia. (a Murdock paper)
Jenkins is known for statements like the following.
The warmaholics, drunk on government handouts and quasi-religious adulation from left-wing environmental organisations, the fraud of the IPCCand this
Cataclysmic volcanic eruptions have often placed more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in (a) few minutes than man induces in a decade.
Yes, there are cataclysmic volcanic eruptions sometimes, like Krakatoa near Sumatra, that erupted in 1883, temporarily altering the world climate. But on average, man emits about 100 times as much greenhouse gases as volcanoes do. And volcanoes are also known to emit aerosols that have a cooling effect. Krakatoa cooled the planet. Scientists learned a lot about volanoes when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991. See the Skeptics Arguments section below.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/the_australians_war_on_science_32.php
For some media outlets, the problem goes way beyond just misguided attempts at balance. The newspaper "Australian" is known for publishing junk, as this article discusses. Another junk science article in the Australian, this time by Bob Carter, on cooling, with this title "Facts debunk global warming alarmism"
It gets debunked here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/the_australians_war_on_science_34.php
Tim Lambert at Deltoid has now written over 75 articles on "The Australian's War On Science", so we are not talking about an occasional misleading climate science article at the Australian. The Australian is part of Rupert Murdock's media empire, along with FOX News and the Wall St. Journal, in the U.S. All of Murdocks news outlets push the global warming denial obfuscation.
There seems no end to the junk science. Here's another example.
Prof. Don Easterbrook has a piece "Global Cooling is Here: Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Nest Three Decades" that has been getting some attention in the blogosphere in which he claims global warming has ended and that global cooling will occur over the next several decades.http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/easterbrook-and-the-coming-global-cooling/
Easterbrook’s analysis is hopelessly flawed, and one is left to wonder just why he would intentionally shoot down his own credibility with such sloppiness. Any support of this work on internet sources is not a support of any actual science or data, but an appeal to authority.
In short, there is absolutely no science in Easterbrook’s article, and much of it is based on misrepresentations of the IPCC and ignorance of the climate system he is analyzing. His implication that a changing PDO almost assures us for a coming cooling period is just wishful thinking, but he doesn’t understand the difference between a “signal” and “noise” or what the PDO actually does. He effectively assumes that greenhouse gases have had minimal impact, and will do so, without quantifying this argument. As such, there is no basis for his conclusion that global warming is over and that global cooling is awaiting us.
This must have been the koolaid that Lou Dobbs was drinking, when he made the following brilliant statement on CNN.
I don't know that it matters to me whether there is global warming or we are moving toward another ice age. It seems really to me that we should be reasonable stewards of the planet. The debate over whether it's global warming, or whether it is moving toward perhaps another ice age, or it's simply business as usual is moot in my mind.
How reasonable.
More on Easterbrook
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/12/03/easterbrook-no-nothing/
http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/13/gregg-easterbrook-still-knows-nothing-about-global-warming-and-less-about-clean-energy/
The incorrigible Easterbrook(he now claims the earth is cooling and he predicted it)
Don Easterbrook? The retired geologist who steals other people’s work and alters it to suit his purposes? The one who uses Greenland ice core data but misunderstands and misrepresents it?
Yup, that Easterbrook.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-incorrigible-easterbrook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+co%2FRbRF+%28Hot+Topic%29
In regard to claims that the planet isn't warming, note the following facts about global temperature anomalies. No one's claiming January only data is definitive, but it is striking.
Consider the warmest year in the 50s; 1958, +0.41C. Without even looking it up, you could guess it was an El Nino year, as indeed it was: the 1958 El Nino peaked at 1.7, compared to the current one which peaked at 1.8. At the time, it was tied for the warmest January on record, a record it held until 1981.
How does it compare to temperatures in the last decade?
2001 : +0.48 C
2002: +0.83 C
2003: +0.77 C
2004 : +0.60 C
2005: +0.87 C
2006: +0.58 C
2007 +1.08
2008: +0.38 C
Recall that the 50s record was +0.41 C. Nine out of ten of the last ten years beat the all-time warmest January from the 50s -- a record that stood until 1981.
http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2010/04/minor-myths-record-warming-is-explained.html
And note that the one year that was cooler than 1958 was 2008, a La Nina year.
La Nina events cool the atmosphere for much of the globe, the opposite of El Nino.
(note that the numbers above are temperature anomalies, or differences from the mean temperature over a base time span)
The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It’s made up to look like science, but it’s PR.David Archer
And then there's the misrepresentation of science in the ISPM(Independent Summary for Policymakers) published by the Fraser Institute. It was issued days after the release of the Summary for Policy Makers by the IPCC, in Febuary 2007.
According to the Fraser Institute:
An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.Just the use of the word "alarmism" should ring a bell that this is not an unbiased paper. It's a derisive term used by the denier crowd, and you wouldn't find such terms in any real scientific study.
The ISPM claimed that the report from the IPCC
is neither written by nor reviewed by the scientific community.
This was not true. Here's what Desmogblog says about it.
In fact, the IPCC summary was written and reviewed by some of the most senior climate scientists in the world, without political or bureaucratic input . And the Fraser Institute’s 'scientific' staff – which is led by an economist – includes a group of junior or retired scientists, most of whom have direct connections to energy industry lobby groups.
Fraser Institute said:
There is no compelling evidence that dangerous or unprecedented changes are underway.
Compare that claim with what Dr Andrew Weaver, lead IPCC author and chairman of the Canada Research in Climate Modelling and Analysis says.
The IPCC report presents 1,600 pages of compelling evidence, that’s the whole point.
Sourcewatch says that Fraser Institute's ISPM errors include:
Several incorrect statements concerning tropospheric temperature trends derived from satellite data.The ISPM states:
Misdentification of peak temperature year in GISS and NCDC global surface temperature data sets (1998 given instead of 2005).
Mistaken citation of projected sea level rise to 2100 of only 10-30 cm, instead of 21-48 cm given by IPCC
Several examples of "cherrypicking", inexplicable omissions and misrepresentations.
There would also appear to be an unstated implication that temperature may have reached a plateau or even decreased since 1998.
Sourcewatch:
the ISPM fails to mention that the smoothed temperature statistic for the combined data sets continued to show an upward trend through 2005.
The ISPM conveniently omitted the following information from the IPCC report.
2002 to 2004 are the 3rd, 4th and 5th warmest years in the series since 1850http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ISPM#Errors_and_discrepancies
Eleven of the last 12 years (1995 to 2006) ... rank among the 12 warmest years on record since 1850.
Surface temperatures in 1998 were enhanced by the major 1997–1998 El Niño but no such strong anomaly was present in 2005.
More on Fraser Institute's twisting of science at:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/fraser-institute-fires-off-a-damp-squib/
Economist Ross McKitrick, who is mentioned later in the climategate discussion(along with McIntyre), was head of the Fraser Institute when the ISPM was published.
You will find this under Argument: Climategate in the Skeptic Arguments section below.
Sterling Burnett, who FOX News calls a "leading authority" on climate, and who appears frequently on Fox news, claimed that global warming is a hoax because it was cold in Minnesota that winter. Will someone please tell Mr. Burnett that what he is referring to is called weather, not climate, and it isn't global. It's Minnesota.
And let him know that the numbers are in for 2008, which was cooled by the La Nina ocean phenomenon. It was the 9th warmest since 1880. Globally that is.
Burnett is the same guy who on Fox tv compared Al Gore's movie to Nazi war time propaganda.
Burnett is financially linked with Exxon/Mobile.
For someone who claims to be a climate expert, he doesn't sound very bright, if he's using beginner skeptic arguments that everyone knows are bogus. But it actually doesn't matter to some of these guys. They know the public doesn't follow the subject close enough to know the difference, or to know who funds the message.
H. Sterling Burnett is a research fellow on climate and environmental policy at The Heartland Institute -not a scientist. He has an environmental ethics Ph.D
Another of Fox News' favorite climate experts is Steve Milloy. He's not even a scientist but a professional PR man, and a registered and paid lobbyist for fossil fuel interests. Has Fox ever disclosed this to viewers? I doubt it.
Milloy's foundation has been involved in both the campaign to deny that tobacco is a health risk, and the global warming denial PR campaign. He runs the denier website Junk Science, which is very aptly named.
And there's Myron Ebell, the non-scientist right-wing lobbyist who Faux News turns to as an 'authority' on global warming. He's connected with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and with Petroleum Institute lawyer Philip Cooney who edited the federal climate science study done by scientists at NASA, to water it down. Cooney was also involved with the censoring of climate scientists at NASA's GISS.
Danish author Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book called "The Skeptical Environmentalist" that sought to portray environmentalists as completely offbase. Lomborg is not a scientist. He does have a doctorate in political science. He is a skillful debater, who uses a lot of scientific truthiness, but little truth.
The Danish Research Agency has condemned Lomborg for "scientific dishonesty," deeming the book "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice" and systematically one-sided. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty conducted a six-month review of the book after several scientists filed complaints; despite the damning conclusions it reached, the group stopped short of finding Lomborg guilty of gross negligence or deliberate attempts to mislead readers. Lomborg rejected the committee's findings and said it could get him fired from his new post as director of the Danish Institute for Environmental Assessment, but government officials said his job was not in danger.http://www.grist.org/news/daily/2003/01/08/loser/index.html
My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is: How much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary? Lomborg is evidently over the threshold.
Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark a Skeptical look at the "Skeptical Environmentalist" by a panel of specialists.
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/of/
including the one on extinctions below:
Lomborg's estimate of extinction rates is at odds with the vast majority of respected scholarship on extinction. His estimate, "0.7 percent over the next 50 years" -- or 0.014 percent per year -- is an order of magnitude smaller than the most conservative species extinction rates by authorities in the field.by biologist Edward O Wilson - Harvard professor for fourty years, author of 20 books, winner of two Pulitzer prizes, and discoverer hundreds of new species.
Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was (very roughly) one species per million species per year (0.0001 percent). Estimates for current species extinction rates range from 100 to 10,000 times that, but most hover close to 1,000 times prehuman levels (0.1 percent per year), with the rate projected to rise, and very likely sharply.
Other links that debunk Lomborg
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
A whole website devoted to debunking Bjorn Lomborg's work.
Joseph Romm - Debunking Bjorn Lomborg Part 1 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/13/105130/672
Debunking Bjorn Lomborg Part 2 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/14/142514/357
Debunking Bjorn Lomborg Part 3
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/17/151133/245
NY Times aricle by Andy Revkin on Lomborg's book.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE5DB123EF93BA35752C0A9659C8B63
Greenfyre's
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/bjorn-lomborg-admits-his-intellectual-bankruptcy/
The Way Things Break
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/lomborg-yet-again-tries-to-mislead-on-slr-gets-taken-to-the-woodshed-by-rahmstorf/
Still think Lomborg is your man? Still think Al Gore is full of it?
Ok, then lets compare them.
Comparison of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and Lomborg's work from the website devoted to debunking him, shown above.
Al Gore´s film: 2 errors, 8 flaws, 10 in total.
Al Gore´s book: 2 errors, 11 flaws, 13 in total.
Film and book together: 2 errors, 12 flaws, 14 in total.
Chapter 24 on global warming in "The Skeptical Environmentalist": 22 errors, 59 flaws, 81 in total.
(This is more than one distortion per page).
"The Skeptical Environmentalist" in total (up to now 12/9/09):
117 errors, 219 flaws, 336 in total.
"Cool it!", British edition: 48 errors, 111 flaws, 159 in total (up to now, with about 40 % of the book investigated).
(This is nearly two distortions per page)..
And now there's a book devoted to debunking him.
"The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming" by Howard Friel
Energy Bookshelf: "The Lomborg Deception" leads to a question: Does the Washington Post have any honor left?http://getenergysmartnow.com/2010/04/21/energy-bookshelf-the-lomborg-deception-leads-to-a-question-does-the-washington-post-have-any-honor-left/
April 21st 2010
Lomborg is seriously deceptive -
Even more deceptive than I had realized and I was already aware that Lomborg (politely) selectively quoted and was creative in citations - having footnotes that led nowhere near the point he claimed they supported. There have been scientific reviews (and rebukes) of Lomborg, in multiple arenas highlighting his deceptions, articles, letters, blog posts, and otherwise making clear that Lomborg was a serial deceiver
Page after page, citation after citation, Friel’s forensic work finds situations where cited material doesn’t seem to exist, the cited documents don’t have material relevant to Lomborg’s point, and - all too frequently- the cited material actually contradicts Lomborg’s point.
For more on mistakes in Al Gore's movie, see the arguments section below.
Rush Limbaugh's favorite skeptic scientist is Roy Spencer
I view my job a little like a legislator,
supported by the taxpayer, to protect the
interests of the taxpayer and to minimize
the role of government.
-- Roy Spencer
No, Roy. You are paid to do science, period.
Roy Spencer is on the board of directors of the George C. Marshall Institute, a decidedly anti environmental group of hard right ideologues.
Spencer is also a CREATIONIST
Almost all of the skeptic climate scientists you have heard of, are paid by the fossil fuels industry, either directly or indirectly.
And most of them hold to hard right, anti regulation, anti environmental political ideology, like Spencer.
Hey, it's okay with me if somone is a creationist, and a conservative, but not when religous beliefs and political ideology effects their 'science'.
Just Put the Model Down, Roy (Spencer)
by: Barry Bickmore July 26, 2011
I could go on with more nitpicks, but I’m going to stop here, because it should be clear that, once again, Spencer has made a big deal out of something that doesn’t have any evidentiary value. So if, as Spencer claims, "[t]he evidence for anthropogenic global warming being a false alarm does not get much more convincing than this,then can we please move on? Can Roy PLEASE put his toy model down?"
"Actually “this” (as in this post) is about whether Spencer is right or wrong. But Hansen’s model does in fact “fit reality” quite well, and has for several decades."
- comment by Dana1981- from Skeptical Science
{read at bbickmore at WordPress - Barry Bickmore's blog}
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/just-put-the-model-down-roy/
Climate Skeptic Fool's Gold
Dr. Spencer has become notorious for frequently using variations of a simple climate model - not too dissimilar from those climate scientists were using in the 1980s - to make wild claims that mainstream climate science is wrong, and man-made global warming is nothing to worry about.
The real problem is that while most climate modelers constrain the possible values of their variables based on physical reality, Dr. Spencer does not.
intead of constraining his variables using physical measurements and then running his model to see if it fits observations, Dr. Spencer just runs his model without limits and tweaks the parameters until it matches the data. This is a practice known as "curve fitting" or "cooking a graph
{read at Skeptical Science}
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-curve-fitting-fools-gold.html
Andrew Dessler's New Paper Debunks Both Roy Spencer And Richard Lindzen
Both were co-authors on peer-reviewed papers released this year (Spencer & Braswell [2011] & Lindzen & Choi [2011]) which, once again, sought to overturn the orthodox view of climate. Dessler (2011) finds that the conclusions of these two papers are unsupported by observational data.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Dessler-2011-Debunks-Roy-Spencer-And-Richard-Lindzen.html
Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing agrees that Spencer and Braswell (2011) should not have been published; resigns
{read at Deltoid blog}
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/09/editor_of_remote_sensing_agree.php
Spencer and Braswell fundamentally flawed, journal editor resigns
{read at Our Changing Climate}
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/spencer-braswell-fundamentally-flawed-journal-editor-resigns/
The Damaging Impact of Roy Spencer’s Serially-Wrong ‘Science’
by Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham, and Peter Gleick
{read at Climate Progress}
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/05/311864/roy-spencer-wrong-science/
A Bag of Hammers
So Spencer’s “Significantly, … EXACTLY THE SAME as that seen in the trends!” is nothing more than an obvious consequence of the way he analyzed the data. It’s not “significant” and it means absolutely nothing except that Spencer really doesn’t understand what he’s doing.
......Claims that atmospheric CO2 increase isn’t due to fossil-fuel burning are about as dumb as it gets. The destructive aspect is that here we are wasting time on a subject about which there is no doubt. Seriously: we might as well be discussing whether the earth is flat......This really is a litmus test. I’m not the least bit interested in hearing your arguments about how maybe, just maybe, the increase is coming from the oceans or soda pop or space aliens so I should keep an open mind about it. Keeping an open mind doesn’t mean removing your brain.
{read at Open Mind archives}
Bag of Hammers II
When it comes to global warming, Murry Salby is the darling du jour of fake skeptics everywhere. His thesis was touted on WUWT, lauded by JoNova, and even earned a 'wow' from Judith Curry. And what is his thesis? That it’s temperature increase which is causing CO2 increase, not the other way around
If this is the best they can come up with — if this is what they laud as a “bombshell” — if this is what they actually take seriously — then it reveals just how fake is their “skepticism.” They aren’t the least bit skeptical, they are the epitome of gullibility.
{Open Mind 2011/08/06}
Then there is TV weatherman and climate skeptic Joe Bastardi.
Can Bastardi Learn?
Joe Bastardi was so kind as to grace us with a comment on a recent post. I congratulate him on an impressive achievement that few others could surpass: it would be difficult to squeeze more fallacies into a single comment even if you tried. Bastardi’s lack of comprehension shows such breadth and depth that it’s reminiscent of an elementary-school book report — from someone who didn’t read the book.
{read at Open Mind}
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/can-bastardi-learn/
Another prominent voice in global warming denial is Christopher Monckton, or the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley as he likes to be called. Monckton claims to have discovered the cure for many diseases. He is well known in the world of GW skeptics. He is a real slick showman who is constantly on the campaign trail spreading his psuedo science, and who lies, twists and distorts the science and is a complete fraud. Among real climate scientitsts he is something of a joke. He is considered one of the least credible of skeptics and that is saying a lot. Scientists consider him a joke, but are aware of the danger of men like this to the public's understanding of science. He is clever and knows how to persuade an audience, unlike most real scientists, who aren't very good at public speakng and being persuasive.
He also makes lots of money spreading this confusion.
Monckton's claim to nobility has long been suspected of being false. That was recently confirmed by an inquiry to the British House of Lords, who said: "Christopher Monckton is not and has never been a Member of the House of Lords. There is no such thing as a 'non-voting' or 'honorary' member."
Despite this, Monckton has insinuated himself to the U.S. Congress as an envoy from the British Parliament. He likes to embellish his temperature graphs and such, press releases, etc. with a very close approximation of the crowned portcullis, symbol of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He's balmy, I tell ya.
Monckton has no scientific background, his only higher education being in journalism. Yet, he is Chief Policy Adviser at the Science and Public Policy Institute a global warming skeptics group.
This is who Republicans brought to a U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing as an expert witness. Energy and Commerce Committee Minority Ranking Member Joe Barton (R-TX) referred to Monckton, in his opening remarks, as being generally regarded as one of the most knowledgeable, if not the most knowledgeable, experts on the skeptic side. Global warming is not a matter of opinion, its a matter of science. Monckton is showman, not a scientist. And what he claims is science isn't. He is known to make completely absurd claims, like that industrialization helps the environment and that global warming will be beneficial.
And now in May 2010, U.S House Republicans have chosen Monckton as their only expert witness for a hearing at the Select Committee On Energy Independence and Global Warming
Some people never learn.
http://www.desmogblog.com/gop-chooses-lord-hitler-youth-monckton-expert-witness-climate-change-science
Monckton was behind the effort to have Al Gore taken to court in Britain, to challenge Gore's movie being shown in public schools, demanding that "The Great Global Warming Swindle" be shown in schools also, if Gore's movie was allowed. The judge allowed the showing of "An Inconvenient Truth", with the caveat that a few uncertainties about impacts were mentioned. He saw no reason to show "The Great Global Warming Swindle" to children. But skeptics go around claiming that a judge in England condemned Gore's movie. More proof to them, that AGW isn't real.
Contrary to what 'skeptics' believe, Al Gore won the court case.
Monckton claims the earth is cooling. Or is it that global warming will be beneficial? Or is it that something other than greenhouse gases are causing global warming? Apparently he can't quite make up his mind. But that doesn't matter to these guys, they will say anything that sways a crowd. He's a charlatan.
Monckton gets debunked regularly on science blogs. Unfortunately, very few members of the public read these blogs, but his nonsense gets disseminated by the news media and skeptic blogs, not to mention his busy speaking schedule where he misinforms the gullible.
Here's a video showing Monckton in action, and in what the author of the article calls Beyond Parody.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/monckton-goes-bp-in-bonn/
Here is a video of professor John Abraham demolishing every point Monckton had made in a university presentation.
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/jpabraham/global_warming/Monckton/index.htm
The number of errors Chris Monckton makes is so enormous it would take a thesis to go through every single one of them.... Nonetheless, you rarely see such a thorough debunking of an anti-science disinformer as this astonishing point-by-point evisceration put together by John Abraham, an engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MNJoseph Romm
Debunking Lord Monckton King of the Teabaggers - live with Peter Sinclair - video
http://www.desmogblog.com/debunking-lord-monckton-king-teabaggers-live-peter-sinclair
Monckton is a crock (part two)- video
Part two of Climate Crock maker Peter Sinclair’s demolition of the potty peer.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/monckton-is-a-crock-part-two/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+co%2FRbRF+%28Hot+Topic%29
more on Moncktons pseudoscience:
Monckey Business April 12, 2010
I noticed something odd in Bickmore’s revelations about Monckton’s manipulation of IPCC CO2 scenarios. Monckton insists that actual CO2 concentration isn’t rising exponentially, that in fact the increase is linear.
For some reason, I don’t feel inclined to take Monckton’s word for it. I guess I’m just a natural-born skeptic
So let’s calculate the trends over successive periods of, say, ten years, with startpoints separated by one year to find out whether or not the CO2 concentration change has been flattening out appreciably. Well well! Over time, the growth of CO2 has NOT been linear, but it also has NOT been exponential. It’s been faster than exponential (as the logarithm has grown faster-than-linear, i.e., it has accelerated). And yes, the acceleration of log(CO2) (the faster-than-exponential growth of CO2) is statistically significant. That settles it.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/monckey-business/
Barry Bickmore, professor of geology at Brigham Young University.
"The moral of the story is not that amateurs should stay out of the debate about climate change, rather, the moral is that when you see a complete amateur raising objections about a highly technical subject, claiming that he or she has blown the lid off several decades of research in the discipline, you should be highly suspicious."http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/04/monckton-jumps-shark-gets-eaten.html
I won't bore you with dozens of other articles on Moncktons absurdities.
In 1991, Western Fuels Association(coal) paid $250,000 to have a video produced, which they called "The Greening of Planet Earth". This video was shown around Washington extensively in an effort to undermine policy making aimed at mitigating global warming. It was similar to the writings of Arthur Robinson of Oregon Petition infamy, in that it sought to paint a picture of a greener more lush world as a result of industrialization and increased CO2 emissions. There is no doubt that some areas might enjoy increased crop yields as a result of increased CO2 and warmer temperatures, but this would be short lived, and ignores every other negative consequence of global warming, like devestating impact on crop yields in much larger areas of the world. To use this as an argument against taking action to reduce CO2 emissions is downright dishonest.
And it still misses the point that it is the rate of change that is so dangerous. (See skeptic argument section below.)
Western Fuels Association created the World Climate Review magazine in an attempt to counter the mainstream view of climate change, they had the help of Pat Michaels, Robert Balling, Fred Singer.
Their Greening the Earth video had Sherwood Idso as narrator and featured Richard Lindzen.
ICE (The Information Council on the Environment) was founded in 1991 by a group of coal and utility companies to launch a propaganda campaign to convince people that global warming was only a theory and not a scientific fact. According to Ross Gelbspan in his book "The Heat is On", (almost everything in science is 'only' theory. Gravity is a theory.)
they targeted "older less educated men" and "young low income women" in electoral districts where coal powers the electricity. The plan was to use Robert Balling, Fred Singer and Pat Michaels in media interviews, op ed pieces etc.
After using misleading ads in newspapers with the lamest examples of skeptic arguments, ICE was exposed by some environmental groups, which put an end to the group.
This handful of dissenting scientists, has gotten equal time with congress, and with the media out of all proportion to the weight their opinions carry in the scientific community. This, despite the fact that they are paid by the single largest entity in the world, with a stake in denying global warming -the fossil fuel industry.
Pat Michaels received over $165,000 over a five year period in the 90s from the fossil fuel industry. Michaels' books and other publications are funded by the coal industry.
Michaels also has admitted that at least 40% of his funding is from the fossil fuels industry.
Robert Balling and his associates received $300,000 from the fossil fuel industry in the 90s. He recieved $50,000 from mining company Cyprus Minerals. Cyprus is the largest funder of an extreme anti environmental group called Wise Use. Cyprus also gave money to Pat Michaels. Balling has received money from the German coal industry and the British coal industry as well.
Ballings book "The Heated Debate" was funded by a right wing think tank(Pacific Research Institute) whose goal is the elimination of environmental regulations.
Kuwait funded his Arabic edition of the book.
Only under oath have either Michaels or Balling disclosed who funds them. Disclosure of funding is normally considered mandatory in science, for obvious reasons.
Fred Singer clung to his claim that CFCs weren't harming the ozone layer in the atmosphere, even after the scientific evidence became unassailable, and a Noble prize was awarded to three scienists who dug up the evidence, and even after CFCs were banned and the ozone layer hole mostly closed up as a result. He is funded by Exxon, Unocal, Shell, Atlantic Richfield, Sun Oil and the Reverand Sun Myung Moon.
Richard Lindzen doesn't dispute that CO2 emissions contribute to global warming, but he believes it won't be that bad. Lindzen is the most credible of the well known skeptic scientists and has the best scienitific credentials of the bunch. His main difference with the IPCC is centered around the issue of water vapor as a feedback mechanism, which he believes is self limiting.
Lindzen's theory was that convection in the atmosphere would move water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it would dry out and stop amplifying the greenhouse effect.
Satellite and baloon observations have shown this not to be the case. Lindzen subsequently withdrew this theory. Four years later, he tried to use the same argument. He is on the advisory board of the George C. Marshal institute, an extreme right wing group that seeks to discredit the IPCC and it's findings.
He has made false accusations against leading figures in the IPCC, accusations that have been proven false.
Interestingly, Lindzen has also criticized fellow skeptics, Pat Michaels and Robert Balling. In a conversation that author Ross Gelbspan describes in his book "The Heat is On", Lindzen tells him that Michaels comes to the climate debate from the "scientific backwaters of climatology- he doesn't really know physics like he should". And he said Ballings had a crude understanding of climate dynamics. Gelbspan describes Lindzen as someone with the most extreme political ideology, that is decidedly anti-environmental.
Richard Lindzen is a favorite for the skeptic crowd, because of his credentials and affiliation with MIT . That's all well and good, except Lindzen is consistently wrong.
Skeptical Science demonstrates this clearly in the following articles.
Lindzen Illusion #1: We Should Have Seen More Warming
John Christy and Richard Lindzen.http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-1-should-have-seen-more-warming.html
Disappointingly, but perhaps predictably, both climate scientist "skeptics" used the opportunity for some serious Gish Galloping, as though they were in competition to see who could regurgitate more climate myths in his Australian radio interview. ....a rather old and stale myth; one which Lindzen has been making at minimum on an annual basis since 2002, and was making as early as 1989, despite the fact that it is flat-out rubbish.
"Examining Dr. John Christy's Global Warming Skepticism"
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=786
Lindzen Illusion #2: Lindzen vs. Hansen - the Sleek Veneer of the 1980s
In 1988, Hansen et al. published a global temperature projection which thus far has turned out to be quite accurate, and yet which numerous "skeptics" have widely criticized and misrepresented. As brought to our attention by Skeptical Science reader Jimbo, noted "skeptic" climate scientist Richard Lindzen gave a talk at MIT in 1989 which we can use to compare to Hansen's projections and see who has been closer to reality over the past two decades
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-2-lindzen-vs-hansen-1980s.html
Lindzen Illusion #3 and Christy Crock #5: Opposing Climate Solutions
Their main argument seems to be becoming a favorite amongst "skeptics": "CO2 limits will make little difference."
Lindzen claims that global emissions cuts "wouldn't make a lot of difference."
But let's say international negotiations succeeded in convincing countries all around the world to reduce global CO2 emissions by 50% below 1990 levels by 2050. Now suddenly instead of 2,200 Gt CO2 emitted in the next four decades, it's only about 820 Gt. Now instead of 550 ppmv in 2050, we're looking at about 450 ppmv.
Instead of committing ourselves to 2.9°C warming above pre-industrial levels as in business as usual, we're only committed to 2°C, which keeps us right at the cusp of the global warming "danger limit." Plus rather than blowing past the danger limit with CO2 levels continuing to rise rapidly, we'll have set up the technologies and infrastructure necessary to continue reducing emissions to safe levels. Remember, the last time atmospheric CO2 was at current levels, global temperatures were 3 to 4°C warmer than pre-industrial, and sea levels were around 25 meters higher than current sea level.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-3-christy-crock-5-opposing-solutions.html
Lindzen Illusion #4: Climate Sensitivity
Really, Dr. Lindzen? "What we've seen so far" suggests that climate sensitivity is no higher than 1°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2? Sorry, but that's a load of baloney.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-4-climate-sensitivity.html
Lindzen Illusion #5: Internal Variability
In a recent media article which was uncritically re-posted at a number of websites like "skeptic" blog WattsUpWithThat, in amongst many other erroneous statements, Richard Lindzen attempted to blame global warming on natural internal variability
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-5-internal-variability.html
Lindzen Illusion #6: Importance of Greenhouse Gases
in a 1992 article, Lindzen said: "Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect." So when it comes to governing global temperature changes, Lindzen's statement is backwards. CO2 plays a much larger role than water vapor and clouds, which act to amplify the CO2-caused warming, but don't remain in the atmosphere long enough to drive global temperature changes themselves.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-6-importance-of-ghgs.html
Lindzen Illusion #7: The Anti-Galileo
His combination of expertise and "skepticism" make Lindzen an appealing figure to 'skeptic'". He's even been compared to Galileo quite frequently.
But there's one major difference between Galileo and Lindzen: Galileo was right.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=730
And of course, there is Willie Soon and Sally Baliunas
Willie Soon is a name that pops up every so often in climate ‘debate’. He was the lead author on the Soon and Baliunas (2003) paper (the only paper that has ever led to the resignation of 6 editors in protest at the failure of peer-review that led to its publication).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/how-soon-is-now/
That peer reviewed article by Soon and Baliunas had a little help getting published.
"But according to my new analysis [PDF] of the papers published in Climate Research, there is a very clear gap in credibility during the years 1997-2003 when Chris de Freitas served as one of the journal's editors. During this time, de Freitas oversaw the publication of 14 papers from notorious skeptics - half of them authored by fossil fuel industry pal Pat Michaels - many"
"Skeptics Prefer Pal Review Over Peer Review: Chris de Freitas, Pat Michaels And Their Pals, 1997-2003"
by John Mashey
http://www.desmogblog.com/skeptics-prefer-pal-review-over-peer-review-chris-de-freitas-pat-michaels-and-their-pals-1997-2003
Willie Soon has received over $1 million from the oil and coal industries in the past decade.
Obviously, the fact that a scientist is connected with an industry, doesn't necessarily mean that his science or his opinions aren't his own. But are you starting to see a pattern here? Where are the well known skeptical climate scientists who aren't funded by the fossil fuel industry? Notice how the same names come up over and over again?
Most of the debate about global warming has taken place in the United States. It was almost uniquely American, until Pat Michaels, Robert Balling and Fred Singer helped found the skeptic organization, ESEF, in Europe in 1996. The ESEF takes the same absurd position as OSIM, the group who issued the Oregon Petition . They want you to think global warming will be good for you.
Those three skeptics sure get around, don't they?
Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.Chris Mooney May/June 2005 Issue- As The World Burns -for the full article go to:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html
And how else, but by virtue of the fossil fuel industry's influence in Washington, could it possibly be, that Congress, during congressional hearings before the House Science committee, gave more weight to the opinion of Pat Michaels than to that of their own scientists at NOAA, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and a co-chairman and lead author of the IPCC's 1995 report? Well, they say Michaels has a charming personality. I'm sure.
Pat Michaels was pitted against Jerry Mahlman, Chairman of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth Scientific Advisory Committee, and director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
They were questioned by Representative Rohrabacher (R CA), who by his own words doesn't know the difference between carbohydrates, hydrocarbons or CO2. He grilled Malhlman, and didn't listen to anything he said, then gave a free ride to Pat Michaels, praising him for his contribution. Mahlman had the disadvantage of talking in unemotional, factual scientific terms, which Rohrabacher couldn't care less about.
Scientists are not usually trained in public speaking. As a rule, they are not skilled debaters, and are at a disadvantage when debating media savvy skeptic mouthpieces, who are not really interested in truth, so much as winning the hearts and minds of an audience, and advancing the political agenda of their fossil fuel paymasters. Real scientists tend to understate conclusions and speak in terms of probabilities of outcomes, which to the untrained ear, make it sound like they are unsure of the science. This is all people like Rohrabacher need to hear, as they percieve this as a weakness to be exploited.
Robert Watson
lead author 1995 IPCC report on climate change impacts:
Senior scientist of White House Office of Science and Technology
Elected Chairman of IPCC by unanimous vote in 1996.
He was pitted against Robert Balling who out and out lied about what science knew about rising temperatures in the Arctic, claiming temperature there hadn't risen in the last 50 years. In fact, NOAA had found temperatures at 9 Arctic stations in Alaska had increased by 5.5 C (9 F) over thirty years. Soil temperature had increased 2-5 C. Rohrabacher dismissed outright whatever Watson had to say, and only gave credence to Balling's testimony
Robert Watson headed the IPCC until the Bush adminisration used their influence to have him removed because he was convinced of AGW. They had him replaced by Pauchari, who was agnostic, but now is also convinced. So now the deniers attack him.
This is the same group from Congress who fought against the moratorium on CFCs which damage the ozone layer of the atmosphere. And of course Fred Singer, who they can always depend on to testify against mainstream science, and not necessarily in the best interest of the public, but in the interests of tobacco, chemical companies and the fossil fuel industry, was there to help them.
In Congressional testimony, scientists like NOAA's Mahlman and Watson of the IPCC, are conservative and cautious in all their statements, not making bold claims and sweeping generalizations, which is in direct contrast to the testimonies of the skeptics.
But these Congressmen listened with their minds already made up. They never deviated from the script. Rohrabacher, who has no grasp of science whatsoever, showed nothing but contempt for the testimony of Mahlman, and Watson, valuing his own ignorant opinion over theirs.
Science fiction writer Michael Crichton was even given more credence than the distinguished scientists from NOAA, NASA, IPCC etc. Senator Inhofe invited this "climate expert" to testify before the Environment and Public Works committee. There is apparently no difference between science fiction and actual science in Inhofe's confused mind.
Crichton wrote a novel called "State of Fear" that portrayed the whole global warming issue as cooked up to raise money for scientists. See the Skeptic Arguments section for why this is an absurd accusation.
Crichton is thoroughly debunked here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
More on Inhofe and Crichton here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=188
Remember these names. They are some of the anti science congressman who should be voted out of office at the first oppurtunity.
Sen Inhofe (R-OKlahoma), Representatives Tom De Lay, Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) John Doolittle, Robert Walker, Joe Barton (R-TX), Fred Upton (R- MN,Rep. Ed Whitfield (R - Kentucky), Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois), Rep. Colin Peterson (R-MN), Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN), Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
The Carbon Brief (TCB) has a nice analysis on the not-very-startling coincidence that at least nine of the top 10 'skeptical' 'scientists' who are publishing on climate change have direct links to Exxon.http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/04/900-papers-supporting-climate-scepticism-exxon-links
Analysing the ‘900 papers supporting climate scepticism’: 9 out of top 10 authors linked to ExxonMobil
In a second instalment, TCB also took a closer look at both the quality and content of the purported "900+" science papers identified by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) as somehow skeptical of the science of climate change. The news, for the skeptics as for the climate, turns out to be all bad.
Only a small number of the papers actually appeared in reputable publications (eg., 34 in Nature, 33 in Science), and many of those either don’t address the climate question directly or do NOT come to the conclusion that the GWPF attributes
97% - 98% of active climate scientists agree on man made global warming, or AGW - anthropogenic global warming.
If 97 out of 100 neurologists and neuro surgeons told you you needed brain surgery or you would die, what would you do?
3 of the 100 doctors are telling you not to worry about it, and that the other 97 are scamming you.
Now imagine that the 3 doctors, who say not to worry about it, are paid by the industry that makes the product that somehow caused you to need brain surgery.
Uninformed climate change 'skeptics' are like someone who would trust the 3 doctors
This disinformation campaign has little to do with science and much to do with political ideology and corporate interests. People like Morano are nothing but right wing mouthpieces and strategists. That is their only motivation.
It is transparently obvious to what lengths the tobacco industry went to hide, deny and play down the dangers of cigarette smoke, yet deniers can't seem to imagine the same kind of agenda when it comes to the fossil fuel industry, which has an even larger financial stake in denying scientific evidence. The fossil fuel industry makes the tobacco industry look like a mom and pop grocery store by comparison. It's the biggest economic enterprise in the history of the world. And it isn't going to give up easy.
Can you say gullible and ideologically blinded?
This is how the blinding occurs.
"Why Climate Denialists are Blind to Facts and Reason: The Role of Ideology"
by Johnny Rook
Your adversary will deny the facts, cherry pick the scientific evidence for bits of data that, taken out of context, support his/her denialist view, or drag out long-debunked counter-arguments in the hope that they are unfamiliar to you and that you will not be able to refute them. If you succeed in countering all of his arguments he will most likely reword them and start all over again.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/12/143145/743/173/513430
The answer is simply that you are operating off of a mistaken premise. You think that the question of whether or not climate change is real and has an anthropogenic (human) cause is a question to be answered by application of an open mind, research, facts, and critical thinking. Isn't that how scientists approach these problems? They're skeptical and critique each others work, discarding ideas which fail to stand up to scrutiny by their colleagues and replacing them with ones that better describe the facts.
Denialists, however, have no interest in facts except as weapons in an ideological struggle. They don't even care if "facts" are correct or not, since their intention is not to establish that something is true or false, but rather to win a battle in an ideological war.
I'm not talking about people who are skeptical only because they are uninformed about the issue. Nor, am I talking about scientists who disagree with other scientists over the details of global warming.
For conservative/libertarian ideologues who compose the overwhelming majority of denialists, Climaticide is just such a case. If a conservative/libertarian ideologue were to accept global warming as real then he/she would be forced to admit that the problem is so big and so complex that government action is required to deal with it. But for an conservative/libertarian ideologue that is impossible because he/she believes that government is the cause of ALL problems and that the solution to all problems is "freedom".
Denialists frequently make this attitude explicit when they accuse the "liberals" concerned about climate change of having invented it as an excuse to expand government. The latest version of this tactic that I've encountered is that none of the science in support of global warming need be taken seriously because it is the product of government-paid scientists who are only doing their bureaucratic masters' bidding, apparently forgetting that the current "masters" are themselves Climaticide denialists. (Bush was President when he wrote this)
Government science is corrupt science because it's government science. "Scientists" in the pay of the oil and gas industries on the other hand are free of this corruption because they are doing science for the capitalist heroes who defend our "freedom".
And they call the scientists alarmists!
The disinformation campaign today borders on crimes against humanity. We do know the consequences of inaction.Climatologist James Hansen
Religous fundamentalism plays a part for some climate change skeptics.
In the words of Edward Blick, Professor Emeritus of the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, Universtity of Oklahoma, who is on both Inhofe's list and the list of evolution deniers from the Discovery Institute.
The predecessors of today's unbelievers replaced the Holy Bible's book of Genesis with Darwin's Origin of the Species. Now with the help of Al Gore and the United Nations they are trying to replace the Holy Bible's book of Revelation with the U.N.'s report Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I think the following pretty much sums up the denier position.
The current stance among the denialists of my acquaintance is that global warming, for which no evidence exists, is part of a harmless natural cycle that will increase agricultural yields and save lives, unless we try to do something about it, which is a) impossible; and b) pointless, because the climate has actually been cooling this whole time, so there. Which proves that the entire thing is the invention of unregenerate Marxists searching for post-USSR relevance.posted in a comment by Phila 1/15/08 at: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/the_australians_war_on_science_33.php#more
News outlets that regularly put out misleading articles on climate change, besides the Australian
FOX
Washington Times
Wall St Journal
Daily Telegraph
Daily Mail
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledgeCharles Darwin
The problem with arguing with skeptics is that they continually repeat arguments after they have been thoroughly disproven by science.
It's easy to refute all the contrarian arguments, but that seems to have very little effect on how commonly they are believed. Refuted arguments seem to live on in the public imagination.Michael Tobis Ph.D. - University of Texas Institute for Geophysics
Australia's chief climatiologist Michael Coughlan had this to say about skeptic arguments.
We have produced rebuttals of all of these arguments - they have all been addressed. But they just keep trotting them out. No matter how many times you tell them they're wrong, they just keep going. The general approach seems to be - if we keep banging away at an untruth, people will start to believe it.
Roy Spencer and John Christy are both well known scientists among the climate change denier crowd . These two single handedly gave deniers amunition for a skeptic argument, about whether satellite data confirmed the global warming that the surface data showed. Deniers used this argument for a decade, encouraged by Spencer and Christy. It is well known that Spencer and Christy made serious and numerous errors in their data analysis. They were wrong. But this skeptic argument is still repeated all the time by deniers. Read more here: http://climateprogress.org/2008/05/22/should-you-believe-anything-john-christy-or-roy-spencer-say/
and more of Spencer's miscalculations and blatant mis-reprepresentaion of facts to reach an invalid conclusion.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/how-to-cook-a-graph-in-three-easy-lessons/langswitch_lang/in
John Christy
Christy Crock #1: 1970s Cooling
In the recent U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology climate hearing, Dr. John Christy was the main witness presenting the opinions of the global warming "skeptics." As we previously noted, the quality of Dr. Christy's testimony was extremely disappointing, as he frequently repeated and affirmed climate myths. Perhaps the worst example of this misinforming behavior was his response when asked about the 1970s global cooling predictions,http://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-1-1970s-cooling.html
Christy
"In this sense yes [1970s cooling predictions were similar to current warming predictions], our ignorance about the climate system is just enormous"
It's a felony to misinform Congress. Christy knows this is a bogus argument. Global cooling was a minor hypothesis, not a theory. There were a total of 7 research papers investigating the potential for cooling aerosols, such as sulfer oxides. These are released when fossil fuels are burned. During the the same time frame, there were 44 papers projecting global warming from greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 emitted by human burning of fossil fuels. None of the authors of the cooling papers held that view for long. For contrast, the IPCC's 4th Assessment report is the result of over 10,000 research papers reviewed by 2,500 climate scientists.
AGW is a theory, not a hypothesis. Gravity is also a theory, in case you thought being a theory somehow detracts from the credibility of AGW. For Christy to glibbly claim that the two are equivalent, thereby encouraging continued belief in this false argument, is just plain dishonest.
Christy Crock #2 - Jumping to Conclusions?
During a Congressional hearing for U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology, Dr. John Christy made the following statement:
" I think there's been too much jumping to conclusions about seeing something happening in the climate and saying -well the only way that can happen is human effects"
Dr. John Christy did not produce any work of significant merit or abundance, or highlight anyone else's, to refute these basic findings on multiple lines of evidence, through differing methodologies, of the human influence on the global temperature change
http://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-2-jumping-conclusions-not-us.html
Christy Crock #3: Internal Variability
In the recent U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology climate hearing, Dr. John Christy was the main witness presenting the opinions of the global warming "skeptics." Dr. Christy touted the myth that internal variability could be the cause of the current global warming:
"When you look at the possibility of natural unforced variability, you see that can cause excursions that we've seen recently"
As we will see here, this statement is simply false. Natural variability cannot account for the large and rapid warming we've observed over the past century, and particularly the past 40 years.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-3-internal-variability.html
Christy Exaggerates the Model-Data Discrepancy
More to the point, in his interview John Christy specifically said that models exaggerated the observed warming by a factor of two "over the past 34 years." However, this claim is untrue. The factor of two discrepancy only exists over approximately the past decade, and using the methodology from Foster and Rahmstorf (2011), the preponderance of La Niñas alone over the past decade accounts for roughly half of that discrepancy .................Ultimately while Christy infers that the discrepancy between the data and average model run over the past decade indicates that climate sensitivity is low, in reality it more likely indicates that we are in the midst of a 'hiatus decade' where heat is funneled into the deeper oceans where it is poised to come back and haunt us.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1495
Here you'll find a decent debunking of many skeptic arguments and myths.
http://techskeptic.blogspot.com/2007/04/techs-post-on-global-warming.html
These are the same points brought up 10-20 years ago and are truly unchanged and tired. They were excellent points back then. However anyone still using these points are sadly and terribly not up to date with their data.
"The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism"
Scientific skepticism is healthy. In fact, science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means considering the full body of evidence before coming to a conclusion. However, when you take a close look at arguments expressing climate ‘skepticism’, what you often observe is cherry picking of pieces of evidence while rejecting any data that don’t fit the desired picture. This isn’t skepticism. It is ignoring facts and the science.
"The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism" looks at both the evidence that human activity is causing global warming and the ways that climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can mislead by presenting only small pieces of the puzzle rather than the full picture.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Guide_to_Skepticism.pdf
Skeptic Arguments:
Here are some common arguments which are repeated hundreds of times a day on the internet. Maybe you believe some of them. None of them are true.
Argument:
It's so cold this winter in Peoria (fill in the location of your choice), what happened to global warming?
Answer:
That's not climate, that's weather. One week, month, winter or year are way too short to be meaningful, when talking about long term global climate change. Climate is measured over time periods of 30-100 years, not year to year fluctuations. And it is global, hence the name.
The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time is just weather, and says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less global climate change.http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10
You wouldn't notice the difference in temperature that scientists say has happened over the past 100 years. They only say the average global temperature has risen 0.8 C degrees in 100 years, or 1.44 F. They didn't say winter would be 10 degrees warmer at your house this winter. Nevertheless, that 1.44 F rise is enough to melt the ice caps and glaciers and have other effects, like earlier spring, changing weather patterns, disrupted feeding and migration of many species, acidification of the oceans, etc. In the Arctic, the temperature has risen at least twice as much as the global average.
Argument:
Scientists in the 1970s were predicting global cooling. Why should we believe their warnings of global warming?
Answer:
Global Cooling in the 70s was NOT the issue. Seven scientific papers predicted cooling. The lead scientist recanted three years later, saying he had underestimated the amount of CO2 in the atomosphere. At the same time there were 44 scientific papers predicting global warming - AGW. So there were six times as many scientific papers predicting global warming as there were for global cooling. But the popular mass media got a hold of the cooling story and publicized it. There was some concern that aerosols like sulpher dioxide, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned, would cause cooling. These pollutants block out incoming sunshine. Starting in the 1970s, we have reduced our aerosol emissions due to environmental laws designed to reduce smog and acid rain.
Argument:
It's the sun or cosmic radiation.
Answer:
This has been completely disproven.
The correlation between sun and climate ended in the 70's when the modern global warming trend began. "The most commonly cited study by skeptics is a study by scientists from Finland and Germany that finds the sun has been more active in the last 60 years than anytime in the past 1150 years (Usoskin 2005). They also found temperatures closely correlate to solar activity.http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
However, a crucial finding of the study was the correlation between solar activity and temperature ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures rose while solar activity stayed level. This led them to conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.
You read that right. The study most quoted by skeptics actually concluded the sun can't be causing global warming. Ironically, the evidence that establishes the sun's close correlation with the Earth's temperature in the past also establishes it's blamelessness for global warming today.
More on this subject at these links:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/30/study-suns-contribution-to-recent-warming-is-negligible/
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2008/09/sunspots-vs-global-temperature.html
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/12/scientist-our-conclusions-were-misinterpreted-by-inhofe-co2-but-not-the-sun-is-significantly-correlated-with-temperature-since-1850/
There has been no change in solar activity or cosmic radiation that would explain the warming between the 70s and today. None. In fact, if anything they have been in decline. And why did warming speed up after 1970? It was partly because we cleaned up our emissions of sulpher oxides and other "aerosols", which counteract the warming effect of greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane. These aerosols block incoming sunlight, whereas greenhouse gases block outgoing thermal radiation, or infrared. This resulted in a speeding up of the warming with the effect of CO2 dominating. In the U.S., we drastically increased our use of coal in the 70s, as domestic oil supplies fell. Oil now only accounts for a tiny fraction of U.S. electric generating capacity. Coal plants emit more CO2 than any other form of power generation.
(we reduced aerosol emissions, because they create acid rain and smog. )
The science of the greenhouse gas effect says that we would expect to see warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere.
That is exactly what has been observed.
If the sun was the cause of the warming, we would expect to see both layers of the atmosphere heat up.
If the sun was the cause of the warming, the largest temperature anomalies, would happen during the daytime.
But what is being observed is more warm anomalies at night, which is what should happen if greenhouse gases are causing warming. (an anomaly is a deviation from the norm)
In other words nights are warming faster than days are.
At night, the earth radiates long wave thermal radiation out into space, releasing some of the heat absorbed during the day. That's why dew forms more on clear nights. CO2 keeps the heat from radiating into space. Warmer nights is another signature of the greenhouse gas effect.
The sun has been quiet since the 1970s, very quiet.
We are also just coming out of a hundred year solar minimum that started about 2008 and lasted into 2011.
Yet we just had the warmest year on record in 2010, and the warmest decade on record.
2011 was the 10th warmest on record. It was cooled by the La Nina event.
2011 was the warmest year on record with a La Nina event.
Argument:
Climate scientist Phil Jones said there has been no global warming since 1995
Answer:
False. He never said that. He was asked if there was a warming trend for the past 15 years. He said it was too short of a time period to be 95% statistically significant, due to the statistical noise from short term variability. Climate science works with 20-30 year periods and longer.
The warming trend was actually 92-93% statistically significant. Using the 95% figure is a convention among scientist. an arbitrary benchmark for statisical significance. It isn't a scientific or mathematical law. He was being an honest, if somewhat naive scientist, when he responded. - Naive about how the science denial echochamber would twist the event into a misinformative PR event.
And that is exactly what happened. The reporter worked for a British newspaper, that is known to print unscientific criticism of climate science. They printed a bogus headline, saying a leading climate scientist said there had been no warming in 15 years. This was picked up by other conservative news media and by the skeptic blogs. It remains a persistent myth among deniers. It is a flat out lie.
Argument:
Scientists are in it for the money, including grant money. Science is one of the last professions that come to my mind, if I think about people doing what they do primarily for the money. I'll let a few of them explain.
Answer:
The problem with this argument is that climate scientists aren't asking you to give them more money. They are asking you to fix the problem. Climate scientists simply do not have the expertise and training to develop nuclear fusion, the next generation of solar panels, or other forms of alternative energy. If we develop those technologies then money would go to people who have nothing to do with climate research. Climatologists also aren't in the position to benefit from carbon taxes. So this argument has some serious flaws. "There is not really a lot of money in science. To paint scientists as greedy and self interested is absurd. "Money and perks! Hahahaha. How in the world did I miss out on those when I was a lead author for the Third Assessment report? Working on IPCC is a major drain on ones' time, and probably detracts from getting out papers that would help to get grants (not that we make money off of grants either, since those of us at national labs and universities are not paid salary out of grants for the most part.) We do it because it's work that has to be done. It's grueling and demanding, and not that much fun, and I can assure everybody that there is no remuneration involved...-RayPierre Ph.D.
One of the many absurd arguments against global warming is that scientists are only in it for the money.... The idea that there are vast wealth and perks to be made from climate science is wrong, and would raise a laugh (albeit a rather bitter one) from anyone "inside"- William Connolley Ph.D.
Scientists are competitive. It doesn't pay to jump on bandwagons.Learn about ten other flaws with this argument here:
Each individual scientist must compete for funding. The best way to advance your career within the scientific community is to prove everyone else wrong. It is their job to poke holes in each others arguments. The fact that nobody can come up with a legitimate theory that debunks the consensus on climate change speaks volumes about the strength of the evidence.
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptic_arguments/funding.html
Argument: The earth cooled in the mid 20th century.
Answer:
In the early 20th century, warming was caused by increased solar energy and increased CO2 emissions. During and after World War 2, there was no increase in solar energy, while aerosols from burning of fossil fuels acted to cool the atmosphere. This went on from the early 1940s to early 1970s.
Starting in the early 1970s we have reduced aerosol emissions with pollution controls on cars, power plants etc. Aerosols, like sulpher oxide, cause acid rain and contribute to smog. The warming forcing of CO2 now dominates. Aerosols are short lived in the atmosphere,unlike CO2.
Even during the cooling period, there was the fingerprint of the greenhouse effect.
I'll let Skeptical Science explain that.
...it is possible to draw similar conclusions by looking at the daily temperature cycle. Because sunlight affects the maximum day-time temperature, aerosols should have a noticeable cooling impact on it. Minimum night-time temperatures, on the other hand, are more affected by greenhouse gases and therefore should not be affected by aerosols. Were these differences observed? The answer is yes: maximum day-time temperatures fell during this period but minimum night-time temperatures carried on rising.
In other words, daily minimum temperatures rose during mid century cooling, even while daily maximum temps decreased.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-mid-20th-century.htm
Argument: Medieval Warm Period was warmer than now.
Answer: False
Some areas of the world were unusually warm, mostly around the North Atlantic, but there is no evidence it was a global phenomenon.
Low latitudes were cooler than now.
Some recent research showed that some glaciers in North America grew during the MWP.
The warming during the MWP occurred in one area in one century and another area in a different century. There was no time when even the whole North Atlantic area was all warm at once. Greenland and Britain's peak temperatures were seperated by 200 years, for example.
The National Academy of Science report on climate reconstructions confirms that todays temperatures are above those during the Medieval warming, globally.
The Medieval era had few volcanos, who's aersol emissions normally cool the atmosphere.
It is thought that solar radiation was at a high then
And changes in the Atlantic ocean currents, especially the Gulf Stream, may have played a role.
Here's another problem with skeptic arguments like this one. You will often hear skepics say or imply that scientists have overlooked some important aspect of the climate. Like the sun, you know, that big
bright ball in the sky? Or they haven't considered cosmic rays, or whatever. Why would someone who is a layman, think he or she has thought of a powerful forcing of climate, or some climate period, that
tens of thousands of scientists and over a hundred years of research forgot to look at? All these things have been studied.
Climate scientists have a pretty good understanding of the Medieval warm period, ice ages, the Little Ice Age. etc.
(see: "How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current global temperatures?" at Skeptical Science, for more info)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm
Argument:
Poor Temperature Station Quality
Anthony Watts' favorite argument, claiming that effects like Urban Heat Island were biasing surface temperature readings toward warming.
Answer
NOAA studied this and found no bias toward warming. In fact, they found a very slight bias toward cooler temp readings.
New BEST study at Berkeley Universtiy, also called the Muller report, did another study for skeptics Anthony Watts etc, and funded by the Koch brothers. To their dismay, it had the same conclusion as the study by NOAA -No warming bias. Watts has been going on about this for years.
Anthony Watts said he would abide by whatever the BEST study found. He has done nothing of the kind, and is now attacking the study and Muller. Muller was obviously something of a true skeptic, because he changed his mind when his own study contradicted his thinking. Deniers, like Watts, don't do that.
What we want to know is if it's getting warmer. What is the trend? So even a biased thermometer would show a trend over time, which is what they do. The same trend as the world average shows. So Watt's argument is an empty one anyway.
Argument:
It's volcanos
Answer:
On average, Man releases at least 100 times more greenhouse gases than volcanos do. Volcanos are also big emitters of sulpher oxides, which cause cooling. Scientists had a good chance to study the effects of volcanoes when the large eruption in the Phillipines happened in the 90s.
Scientists can distinguish between carbon from humans burning fossil fuels and carbon from volcanos, or other natural sources. The carbon in the gases, released when fossil fuels are burned, is a different carbon isotope than the carbon from those other sources. We know how much CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere, and we know that it is upsetting the active carbon cycle,which has been in balance or equilibrium since at least when civilization started, 8-10,000 years ago. We have benefitted from a fairly benign climate and temperature range.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/223957/72
"Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide"
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
Skeptic Argument:
CO2 is plant food, so global warming will be good
Answer:
Plants take in CO2 through pores called "stomata"
When it gets too hot, these stomata close up.
Natural vegetation and agriculture would be threatened by increasing floods, heat waves, droughts, changes in when spring and autumn happen, sea water incursion from rising sea levels, possible changes in pests like insects, fungus, etc.
(a large percentage of agriculture is close to the sea or tidal estuaries effected by tidal range.)
More CO2 might help some plants in some areas, but the overall effect from the other changes will swamp any help from CO2, in general.
Another problem with the CO2 is plant food nonsense
CO2 is seldom the determing factor of whether plants are healthy. There isn't a shortage of CO2.
I am puzzled by this `CO2 is plant food' bit. Many, many years ago, as I recall in primary school, I learned that plant growth has one limiting factor. In most of the world the limit is water. In mid-high latitudes it's sunlight. In really high latitudes
it's water again (for plants frozen water is the same as no water). In tropical rain-forests the limit is trace nutrients; there's practically none in the soil, it's all in the biomass and leaf litter. The thing was that CO2 was never the limiting factor so more CO2 won't give more plant life. Has this changed in the last fifty years?"
(comment by Keith Harwood | May 4, 2010 at Skeptical Science)
Argument:
If AGW is real, why did they change the name from "global warming" to "climate change"?
Answer:
The Intergovernmental Panel on CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) was was founded and named in 1988. That's twenty years ago. The term "climate change" is hardly new. Scientists have been using the terms climate change and global warming interchangably since the mid 70s.
As is pointed out in the next Argument, the threat from global warming is largely in the rate of change, and the changes that may bring to climates around the world.
Some will be dryer, some wetter, for instance. The change in timing of seasons, like the beginning of spring, is already too fast for many species to adapt to. Hurricanes are expected to be more intense because of warmer sea water, which they thrive on. Also, warmer temperatures means more moisture in the air, from evaporation. The science says 1 C degree increase in global temperature should increase the atmospheric moisture content by 4%.
Global average temperature has risen about 1C degree in industrial times. So the term climate change more accurately describes what we are seeing and are likely to see in the future. This goes along with what I said in the argument about it being cold in Peoria.
Argument:
The earth has had much warmer climates in the past. What's so special about the current climate? Anyway, it seems like a generally warmer world will be better.
Answer:
Another version of this argument, is that man has lived through much different climates in the past. That may be true, but were there 6 billion people in a highly industrialized world, burning fossil fuels, etc.? What about all the infrastructure and development like seaports, near or along shorelines that may be threatened by sea levels that might rise for centuries? How do you plan for, and adapt to, that? We are not nomads, with few belongings, ready to migrate at any time.
I don't know if there is a meaningful way to define an "optimum" average temperature for planet earth. Surely it is better now for all of us than it was 20,000 years ago when so much land was trapped beneath ice sheets. Perhaps any point between the recent climate and the extreme one we may be heading for, with tropical forests inside the arctic circle, is as good as any other. Maybe it's even better with no ice caps anywhere.It doesn't matter. The critical issue is not what the temperature is, or may be, or will be. The critical issue is how fast it is moving.http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/1/...
Rapid change is the real danger. Human habits and infrastructure are suited to particular weather patterns and sea levels, as are ecosystems and animal behaviors. The rate at which global temperature is rising today is likely unique in the history of our species.
This kind of sudden change is rare even in geological history, though perhaps not unprecedented. So the planet may have been through similar things before -- that sounds reassuring, right?
Not so much. Once you look at the impact similar changes had on biodiversity at the time, the existence of historical precedent becomes anything but reassuring. Rapid climate change is the prime suspect in most mass extinction events, including the Great Dying some 250 million years ago, in which 90% of all life went extinct.
Argument:
It's water vapour, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Answer:
Water vapour acts as a feed back mechanism, amplifying the effects of CO2. It is not a cause of global warming, but amplifys it, as more water evaporates at higher temperatures.
Water vapour is indeed the most dominant greenhouse gas. The radiative forcing for water is around 75 W/m2 while carbon dioxide contributes 32 W/m2 (Kiehl 1997). Water vapour is also the dominant positive feedback in our climate system and a major reason why temperature is so sensitive to changes in CO2.http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
Unlike external forcings such as CO2 which can be added to the atmosphere, the level of water vapour in the atmosphere is a function of temperature. Water vapour is brought into the atmosphere via evaporation - the rate depends on the ocean and air temperature and is governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.
If extra water is added to the atmosphere, it condenses and falls as rain or snow within a week or two. Similarly, if somehow moisture was sucked out of the atmosphere, evaporation would restore water vapour levels to 'normal levels' in short time.
Water Vapour as a positive feedback As water vapour is directly related to temperature, it's also a positive feedback - in fact, the largest positive feedback in the climate system (Soden 2005). As temperature rises, evaporation increases and more water vapour accumulates in the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, the water absorbs more heat, further warming the air and causing more evaporation.
How does water vapour fit in with CO2 emissions? When CO2 is added to the atmosphere, as a greenhouse gas it has a warming effect. This causes more water to evaporate and warm the air more to a higher (more or less) stabilized level. So CO2 warming has an amplified effect, beyond a purely CO2 effect."
How much does water vapour amplify CO2 warming? Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would warm the globe around 1°C. Taken on its own, water vapour feedback roughly doubles the amount of CO2 warming. When other feedbacks are included (eg - loss of albedo due to melting ice), the total warming from a doubling of CO2 is around 3°C (Held 2000).
Argument:
Al Gore got it wrong.
An Inconvenient Truth was criticized by a high court judge who highlighted "nine scientific errors":
Answer:
This has been grossly exaggerated. To start with, Al Gore is not a scientist. He is trying to educate the public about what the scientists have found. The judge is not a scientist either.
The judge disputed his claim that Himalayan glaciers are melting. The judge was wrong. One section, in the Karakoram mountains was growing, but overall, Himalyan glaciers have been shown to be retreating. According to satellite measurements, they have shrunk 21% between 1962 and 2007.
Gore attributed hurricane Katrina to global warming. While no one hurricane can be specifically attributed to global warming, most climate scientists think hurricanes will intensify because of warmer ocean waters. They predict that these strong hurricanes, like we've seen in recent years, may become the norm in the future.
Gore was wrong on the melting of Mt Kilamanjaro glacier, as it is thought to be a direct result of deforestation in the area. The study that showed deforestation as the culprit came out after Gore's movie, so he could not have known about it.
The movie spoke of the possibility of glacial ice melt shutting down the ocean conveyor belt of currents, as depicted in a recent movie. This could cause a deep freeze in northern Europe and the eastern North American seaboard, if the warm Gulf Stream stopped. The judge was correct in saying that the IPCC thought this was unlikely. That's true, most scientists say it is unlikely, but not impossible.
The movie said that coral reefs were bleaching because of global warming. The judge said separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing and pollution, was difficult. There are two issues here. Scientists say warmer ocean waters cause coral bleaching. Acidification is another issue.
It is well known that acidification of ocean waters is threatening coral reefs. The ocean is absorbing excess CO2, which is dissolved in ocean water, forming carbonic acid. Coral and the shells of shellfish are made of alkaline compounds that depend on the pH of the water being within certain bounds. A recent study found that we have lost 19% of coral in 20 years! Species that rely on coral reefs account for 25% of life in the sea.
Another article on ocean acidification here:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/02/02/tech-acidic-ocean.html
Al Gore is accused of exaggerating possible sea level rise, based on the melting of Greenland's ice cap. The judge said Gore's suggestion that sea levels could rise by 7 meters was alarmist and not in line with the IPCC's view.
Gore does not explicitly say that Greenland's ice will disappear in the immediate future, merely that coastal areas will be dramatically flooded very soon. That point aside, there is, as Burton says, some debate over how quickly the ice caps and Greenland in particular could melt. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report predicts a sea level rise of up to 59 centimetres by 2100, but explicitly states that this excludes any water contributed by melting in Greenland and Antarctica because of the huge uncertainties involved. Many scientists agree that neither is likely to melt significantly before the end of the century. One exception is James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, US. Hansen strongly believes we may see several metres of sea level rise by 2100.http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/10/al-gores-inconvenient-truth.html
Recent studies have shown that the Greenland ice cap is indeed melting faster than previously reported.
Climate scientists often point out that the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC literature are minimal and don't take into account any melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice caps. Nor do these estimates take into account possible acceleration of warming from factors like loss of albedo(reflective power) near the poles. And they don't include the amplifying effects from methane and CO2 escaping from melting tundra. The ice on Greenland alone is enough to cause a 7 meter sea level rise. And just because it may not melt in this century doesn't give much assurance for following centuries, if the warming goes unchecked.
It's been four years since the latest IPCC report, the 4th Assessment. Climate scientists are now projecting sea level rise twice that of the 2007 report. They estimate sea level rise of one to two meters by 2100 on our current path. One meter sea level rise would devastate Bangladesh for starters. And sea levels would continue to rise after 2100.
And here's the judge's conclusion. "Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate" and "substantially founded upon scientific research and fact."
And the judge never said Gore had 9 errors. He said there were 9 points that some skeptics disagreed with and that "might" be errors.
For more analysis of Gore's movie, by climate scientists, see these links.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/convenient-untruths/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/an_error_is_not_the_same_thing.php
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/3/12/233737/021
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/02/al-gore-no-exaggeration-roger-pielke-andy-revkin/
Argument:
Global warming has stopped, we are now cooling.
Answer:
This is a common argument currently. It is also wrong.
It's most common form is where the year 1998 is used as a starting point, then saying that the earth has cooled for the last ten years or at least stopped warming.
First of all, they pick a year as a starting point that was an anomally for two reasons. 1998 featured the most powerful El Nino event in the last century. El Nino years are known to be warmer for much of the world. Warm water in the southern Pacific ocean releases great quantities of heat into the atmosphere.
2008 was in the midst of a La Nina event, known to produce cooler temperatures, when cold water from deep in the Pacific, wells up to the suface, cooling the atmosphere.
And 1998 was also at or near the peak of a well known eleven year solar cycle. 2008 was near the bottom of that cycle. Both of these contributed to 1998 being very warm, in comparison. Using data like this in comparisons is known as cherry picking; intentionally using an anomaly to skew the data, in order to back up your claims.
Nevertheless, this is what NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies climatologists have to say.
Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century.2006 was the fourth warmest year. (written in 2009)
The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.
Skeptics liked to use HADCRUT3 data, when making their claims, because this Hadley data is known to not cover areas of the globe with the most warming, the Arctic in particular. Therefore it typically shows less global warming than other temperature data sets.
Ironically, the Hadley research center is the one where skeptics claim scientists fudged the data, in the fake climategate scandal.
HadCRUT4 was recently released (spring 2012)nand has adjusted some for the lack of Arctic coverage and has some other coverage improvements over HadCRUT3. HadCRUT4 shows 2010 as the warmest year on record, with 2005 and 1998 in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively.
It is now in better agreement with other data sets.
Currently, the Pacific Ocean is in a La Niña phase. During La Niña, cold waters upwell to cool large areas of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This has the effect of cooling the atmosphere. During the La Niña episode of 1999, global temperatures dropped around 0.5°Chttp://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-january-2007-to-january-2008.htm
Here's another way of looking at it. Anyone who has ever studied or used stock charts knows what trendlines and moving averages are. During a long bull market for instance, the chart will have many fluctuations along the way, but as long as stock price stays above a trendline, the bull trend is ongoing. The charts of earth's atmospheric temperature data have not broken the uptrend at all. This year was not as hot as it would have been without La Nina cooling the atmosphere.
And it was still one of the warmest on record.
2011 had the 3rd Hottest Summer Globally and the Second Warmest for the U.S.
1998, 2005 and 2010 are all shown as warmest or second warmest, depending on which of the various temperature data sets you look at.
Ten of the hottest years on record were in the last twelve years.
The oceans are gaining heat also.
Here's a chart of global temperature from NASA's GISS
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
Excellent spoof/demonstration of how deniers cook up their phony claims, like that the earth is cooling now.
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/global-cooling-proof-that-summer-2008-never-happened/
Since this is such a popular skeptic argument presently, here are more links on supposed cooling of late.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/the_australians_war_on_science_16.php
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/index.php?p=632
http://climateprogress.org/2008/08/21/debunking-the-myth-global-warming-stopped-in-1998/
http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/08/yes-the-globe-is-warming-but-how-fast/
http://www.desmogblog.com/skeptics-need-chill-about-global-cooling
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1866862,00.html
Argument:
Anthropogenic global warming is not proven. It's just a theory.
Answer:
People who say this don't understand how science works. Generally speaking, in science there is no such thing as absolute proof. If you want proof you are in the wrong discipline. Absolute proof only happens in mathematics. In science, there is either enough evidence to support a theory, or there isn't. If there's enough evidence that can pass rigorous peer review, the theory is considered valid.
Gravity is a theory.
Evolution is a theory.
We know black holes exist, there is ample evidence to validate the theory, but much is unknown
There is overwhelming evidence that the AGW theory is correct. The IPCC for instance, says the chance that the theory is correct is over 90%. They don't claim absolute proof.
The scientific evidence that cigarette smoke is bad for you is well accepted and demonstrated. We generally trust this as good science. But not everything is known about the biochemical mechanism which are involved in the body getting sick as a result. So should we then reject the overwhelming scientific evidence becuase it isn't 100% proven? This is what we are supposed to do with climate science, according to the deniers.
One of the founders of quantum physics, Neils Bohr, once said: "anyone who thinks they understand quantum physics just doesn't get it". Yet quantum physics is used all the time, in electronics for example.
To give another example, gravity is a pretty well understood phenomenon. But no one knows what gravity is. The concept of gravity changed radically from the ideas of Issac Newton, with the introduction of the relativity theory of Albert Einstein. Yet we use it everyday, and it was useful before Einstein's theory of relativity, which changed the whole concept. It's a valid theory, it's useful. You wouldn't want to test it by jumping off a tall building.
Newton's theories of mechanics have made the modern world, modern science possible, enabling much greater understanding of astronomy, and enabling industrialization, etc. Yet modern theoretical physics, like quantum physics, describe a universe that is far more complex and far more mysterious than the simple 3 dimensional cause and effect universe Newton imagined. Newtons laws break down in the world of subatomic particles.
But you still wouldn't want to jump off that tall building to prove the inconclusiveness of Newton's laws of physics. Are you willing to risk the future of civilization to test the theory of global warming?
Argument: Climategate
Answer:
Many of you have heard about "climategate" and the stolen CRU emails, that has been the subject of much media attention lately. It's really a fake scandal. The refusal by climate scientists to respond to British Freedom Of Information requests happened because they were being harrassed by climate denier spokesmen McIntyre and McKitrick. They flooded IPCC scientists with FOI requests, imposing a burden on their professional and private lives. There were over 60 FOIs received in one weekend. The information was freely and readily available from other sources. Some data was the property of other institutions.
Seven or eight different investigations found no wrong doing, no faking the science. NONE
In one of the hacked emails, two scientists were discussing a research paper, that they didn't think should be included in the IPCC Assessment Report.
That's because the paper was so bad, that 6 editors of the peer review science journal that published it - Quit in Protest.
(And by the way, one of the authors, Willie Soon, received $1 million from fossil fuel interests over a recent ten years.)
Then there was the email discussing using the "trick"
Here's what that "trick" was really about
Nothing
-----
Watch out for the scary hockey stick
Deniers hate the so called hockey stick chart of historical global temperatures. That's because it is so startling to look at. The 20th century warming looks like the blade of a hockey stick, with previous centuries being the handle.
They hate it because it has become an iconic image of global warming.
even if it were invalidated, that would not invalidate AGW. The science would still stand on it's mountain of evidence.
Michael Mann's hockey stick temperature chart has been reconstructed by dozens of other scientists, using the same data and with the same result.
The National Academy of Science investigated the issue and found Mann's work valid.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research also validated Mann's work
All seven investigations of the fake scandal of climategate found the same. Nothing.
The "trick" that Mann spoke of in one of the hacked emails was nothing like what has been alleged by deniers.
Mann is a paleoclimatologist, who used tree ring data going back something like 2000 years for the chart. He also used ice core data, coral records etc.
We have measured temperature records that are pretty reliable back to about the mid 1800s. The tree ring data correlated well with these measured temps, up until the last 30 years of his chart, about 1960. and it correlated well with other proxies up to then. (proxies like ice cores, sea and lake bed sediments, fossil coral, etc)
The tree ring data, for some reason was inaccurate for that 30 year period after 1960.
How do we know? Because we have the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE from both land based and satellite stations.
So Mann patched onto his tree ring chart, the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE for those years.
This was all explained in the IPCC report, where Mann's research paper and this hockey stick chart were published. Nothing was hidden. It was presented that way, so the public and policy makers could see the whole temperature chart up to the present.
And that is the "trick". Not a trick like to fool, but a technique for patching the measured temps onto the chart to represent last 30 years after 1960.
And that non issue, is what all the nonsense is about.
That was the trick.
But the deniers turned it into a worldwide conspiracy to "hide the decline".
In other words, the skeptics are saying that Mann should have used the tree ring data, that he knew was wrong, instead of the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE.
Get it?
For a thorough analysis of the issues raised and accusations made, I recommend the following series of articles at Skeptical Science.
The Fake Scandal of Climategate
http://www.skepticalscience.com/fake-scandal-Climategate.html
Climategate: Tampering with Temperatures?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-temperature-record.html
Climategate: Hiding the Decline?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-hide-the-decline.html
Climategate: Perverting Peer Review?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-peer-review.html
Climategate: Keeping Skeptics Out of the IPCC?
Briffa McIntyre McKitrick Mann
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-keep-them-out.html
Climategate: Impeding Information Requests?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-freedom-of-information.html
As of Febuary 2011, there have now been seven investigations of climategate. All of them found no wrong doing by scientists.
Here is a good overview of climategate
"The Real Story of Climategate"
http://climatesight.org/2010/11/17/the-real-story-of-climategate/
McKitrick is an economist. McIntyre is a mining industry promoter, who has said: "I've spent most of my life in business, mostly on the stock market side of mining exploration deals." He is also a mathematician and statistician.
They are both connected with the Fraser Institute, an industry front group, which you read about above, regarding the ISPM
These two are known to misrepresent the science and make misleading claims, like that Michael Mann's 'hockey stick' graph of global temperatures is not valid. This graph has been reconstructed numerous times by other scientists, always with the same result. It has been validated by the National Academy of Science and other studies. But they keep making this claim, in order to sway public opinion by keeping the controversy alive, when it has been thoroughly debunked. This, as you will see, is common practice in denier land. This is not scientific inquiry. It an attempt to mislead.
Now two different British Parliamentary panels have investigated climategate and have found no wrong doing of any kind. This is in addition to investigations by the Associated Press and the University of Pennsylvania who also completely vindicated all scientists and CRU. Now another investigation has exonerated all parties. -
The Independent Climate Change Email Review or Muir-Russell report. Many media outlets who have falsely reported on this issue owe the world a retractment and correction. This became a media frenzy, which of course is exactly what McIntyre and company intended.
Climategate investigations, round 1: CRU exonerated
March 31, 2010
http://deepclimate.org/2010/03/31/climategate-investigations-round-1-cru-exonerated/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-muir-russell-report/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/07/climate_scientists_vindicated.php
Second expert panel shows "ClimateGate" was a Climate Sham
http://www.desmogblog.com/second-expert-panel-shows-climategate-was-sham
No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page. These people just make up motives for what we might or might not have done.Phil Jones
Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center
The original raw data are not lost. I could reconstruct what we had from U.S. Department of Energy reports we published in the mid-1980s. I would start with the GHCN data. I know that the effort would be a complete waste of time, though. I may get around to it some time. The documentation of what we’ve done is all in the literature.
House of Commons exonerates Phil Jones
http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/30/house-of-commons-exonerates-climate-scientist-phil-jones/
Michael Mann exonerated: As usual, deniers put their spin on it.
http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-skeptics-try-spin-penn-state-exoneration-dr-michael-mann-%E2%80%9Cwhitewash%E2%80%9D
Mann Slandered by YAF (Yappy Americans for Fudging science)http://www.desmogblog.com/mann-slandered-yaf-yappy-americans-fudging-sci
actually, Young Americans for Freedom on the Penn State campus
If the young Republicans had spent even the tiniest amount of time checking their facts, they would have discovered that the decline in question did not refer to global temperatures but to regional temperatures as reconstructed from tree ring samples. Penn State accepted Mann's explanation that the "trick" was a "trick of the trade," a clever and in no way deceitful statistical shortcut. The UK House of Commons report endorsed this finding, saying of the trick: "It appears to be a colloquialism for a 'neat' method of handling data.
The amusing thing about the "hockey stick has been debunked" meme is that it seems to generally trace back to McIntyre, who screwed up his attempted debunking. He blindly assumed that the number of significant components in uncentered PCA would be the same as Mann's decentered PCA - which is not generally the case. (For someone who implies climate scientists regularly screw up statistics because they aren't nearly as competent as professional statisticians...this is particularly egregious.)Posted by: Lotharsson at http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/science_show_on_climate_change.php
And once you apply McIntyre's method properly, you get largely the same hockey stick as the original. So McIntyre in a sense helped confirm the original hockey stick, even as he and his enthusiastic supporters continue to echo the exact opposite conclusion.
McIntyre and McKitrick unmasked
http://www.desmogblog.com/mcintyre-and-mckitrick-unmasked
McKitrick gets it wrong on IPCC
April 5, 2010
http://deepclimate.org/2010/04/05/mcclimategate-continued-mckitrick-wrong-on-ipcc/
There is also a witch hunt being waged by Virginia's Attorney General, Cuccinelli. He has subpoenaed the Universtity of Virginia for all emails and any other correspondence or information regarding IPCC scientist Michael Mann. This witchhunt has been condemned by Nature science journal, the university, and by numerous others, as a miscarriage of justice for personal and political ends. Imagine a lawyer, using his office to wage this kind of campaign, because he doesn't like the conclusions of science.
There was an investigation for the Senate, lead by statistician Wegmann, that has since been found to have been rigged. The oil industry, Republicans, and the industry funded "think tanks, were involved. It was supposed to be an impartial review. They turned down an offer from the National Academy of Science and had a couple of well know fossil fuel industry funded climate denier spokesmen run the show.(McIntyre and McKitrick)
http://www.desmogblog.com/wegmans-report-highly-politicized-and-fatally-flawed
Did Edward Wegman's team commit plagiarism in preparing its 2006 Congressional report on the so-called MBH Hockey Stick? Objectively, yes.
Is there a conspiracy to confuse and distort climate science? Absolutely. If you doubt it, read the John Mashey paper attached (or our book, Climate Cover-up).
Have any crimes been committed? That'll be for a judge to decide. But given that misleading Congress is a felony offense, there might be some justifable nervousness among the people who coached Wegman through his attack on the scientistists behind the Hockey Stick.
As Mashey documents here, so well, this whole party has been a set-up, with scientists on one side, bound by the rules of evidence and by their own integrity, and think tanks, PR counsellors and their aides and allies on the other side, using any technique available (including, apparently, obtaining, using and disseminating stolen emails), to defend the right of fossil fuel companies to continue, unrestrained, in the sale and distribution of a substance that is threatening the human habitability of planet earth.
The manipulation of both data and public opinion are certainly evident in this story. Science has most certainly been politicized. But (thanks to Deep Climate's careful research) the record shows that the manipulation and politicization has been bought and paid for by the energy industry and executed by a sprawling network of think tanks and blogs - and by leading Republicans and their staffers.
http://www.desmogblog.com/plagiarism-conspiracies-felonies-breaking-out-wegman-file
Another false accusation from McIntyre and Mckitrick
In an extraordinary interview with FoxNews in December of last year, economist Ross McKitrick alleged that scientists were "faking the match" between proxy and temperature data. McKitrick averred this was "not being honest with the reader" and even invoked a comparison to falsified experimental medical research.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/03/10/mcclimategate-continues-yet-another-false-accusation-from-mcintyre-and-mckitrick/
McIntyre the quote mining executive
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/05/mcintyre_the_quote_mining_exec.php
Deep Climate exposes more cheating by team Wegman
The blogger Deep Climate has released another devastating analysis of the shoddy scholarship and obvious cheating that characterized the work of the statistician Edward Wegman and his team, authors of a report to Congress that Deep Climate calls "nothing more than a politically motivated attack on climate science and scientists from the start."
http://www.desmogblog.com/deep-climate-exposes-more-cheating-team-wegman
How the ‘climategate’ scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics’ lies
Claims based on email soundbites are demonstrably false There is manifestly no evidence of clandestine data manipulation
Fred Pearce, guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/climate-emails-sceptics
McIntyre is looking pretty foolish. He should be investigated.
In Climate Denier Gate (Stephen Schneider’s term for what the deniers call Climategate), the private frustrations of a few climate scientists was turned into an ostensible plot by the entire climate science community in dozens of countries, hundreds of institutions, and hammered out over 40 years of peer reviewed assessment studies as some kind of fraud. Schneider says, The big untold story here is how broken the 2009 media is for investigating the wrong folks and giving credibility to a non-event that changes nothing in climate science.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/schneider-climate-denier-gate/
So, no conspiracy, no collusion, no manipulation of data, no corruption of the peer-review process, no scandal; just an understandable reluctance to hand over data to dishonest people with a history of misrepresenting it.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/04/04/the-scandal-formerly-known-as-climategate-scienc/#more-22430
The very fact that Climategate was newsworthy is evidence that reporters hold scientists to a much higher standard than they hold denialists, even if they won’t admit it, in their quest to report a controversy.- Mark Boslough, Physicist at Sandia National Laboratories
I have avoided doom and gloom talk in this article because it can be counter-productive. It can cause some people to go into denial, and skeptics tend to dismiss it as exaggeration (I'm not claiming there's been no exaggeration). On the other hand, if you think the IPCC has exaggerated, you are completely misinformed. If anything, the somewhat political nature of the IPCC, which skeptics use as an argument against it's conclusions, has served to water down the scientific evidence, not exaggerate it. Current observations support this entirely. Observations have been consistently worse than what the IPCC predicted just a short time ago.
To a certain extent, the denial and skepticism are one and the same thing. It can be a lot more comfortable to dismiss the scientific evidence, than to face the reality of what it might mean. For one thing, people are afraid their lifestyle will be interrupted. If we do nothing about global warming, the idea of a lifestyle might become a quaint notion from a bygone gilded age.
I am much more interested in solutions and gaining the political will to use them. In fact, it should be seen as an opportunity. That's what my article - "Renewable Energy Potential and Disinformation" is about.
Suppose the vast majority of the world's astronomers told you there was a 90% chance that an asteroid or comet was on a collision course with the earth, but we had the technology to do something about it before it hit, if we acted right away. Would you be arguing about balancing that with economic interests? Would you be questioning whether such actions were worth it economically? Would you refuse to support the efforts because it meant some cooperation with other countries? Would you oppose the efforts because it meant government involvement and action, which went against your political beliefs about small government?
There are some concepts that the public needs to grasp about climate change. One is the idea of tipping points or threshholds. The reason that scientists are recommending immediate steps to combat warming, is that they are concerned that certain tipping points will be reached, beyond which doing anything about global warming will be increasingly difficult and expensive. Worst case scenario is that we wait so long that we can't slow it down. One such tipping point could trigger methane gas and CO2 being released from melting land based tundra in the arctic. Methane is a stronger greeenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn't stay in the air nearly as long as CO2. (CO2 can remain in the upper atmosphere for 200 years.)
Another concept is time lags. CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere now, will have effects decades from now. The ocean is a huge heat sink, that can absorb large amounts of heat without it's temperature rising that much. This tends to lower the rate of global warming. This thermal inertia, or dampening effect, causes a lag of decades. That would mean we are seeing effects from emissions of decades ago. More on this here: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/9/223615/983
A report at the recent AGU meeting in San Francisco said methane is already bubbling up from the arctic sea floor as a result of melting sea ice and warmer water.
Another report at the AGU meeting said arctic sea ice is retreating 15-20 years ahead of what was predicted just a few years ago.
And another report said that Antartica is indeed warming overall, and not just on the western penninsula, as previously thought.
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/22/another-agu-stunner-evidence-that-antarctica-has-warmed-significantly-over-past-50-years/
These findings all reinforce the idea that we don't have time to waste. Global warming is not just some future problem, it's here and is already effecting humans.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere at the start of the industrial revolution was 280 parts per million( ppm). It's now 400ppm. That's an increase of over 40% in about 150 years. If we take no steps toward mitigating man's impact, it will be at least 550 ppm by the end of the century and maybe as much as a tripling of CO2 from pre industrial levels, or close to 1000 ppm. Irregardless of the complex science of climate change, common sense would tell you that messing with the balance of gases in the atmosphere even by the current 40%, might not be such a good idea. At the current rate of increase of 2 ppm per year, we would double concetration of CO2 83 years from now. But the rate of human sourced emissions is increasing, as the population grows and emerging countries industrialize.
The mainstream climate scientists could be wrong. There is always that possibility. In fact, let's hope they are. However, we have to weigh the possible outcomes of following their advice or ignoring it. Many economic studies have been done, 25 of them peer reviewed, that forecast a slight economic loss over the next 20 years from climate change mitigation. A few studies have even predicted a slight gain. One study predicted that GDP would reach $23 trillion in April rather than January of some year in that time frame. If we assume the 0.1% loss in GDP over the next 20 years from one major study, and compare that with the consequences if we take no action and the scientists are right, there is no comparison. In the first case we end up with energy independence and a much cleaner environment and new industries, but at a slight economic cost. In the second case, well, I don't even want to go there. But I will leave you with this one little possible consequence. NOAA just released a report projecting drought in the southwestern U.S., and many other parts of the world, that would last 1000 years, if we don't curb emissions.
For a detailed analysis of the likely outcomes according to climate models, assuming we either: ( 1.) act now decisively, (2.) act now but not decisively enough, (3.) wait too long to act on global warming, (4.) do nothing:
see the following article:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/12/21/hadley-study-warns-of-catastrophic-5%c2%b0c-warming-by-2100-on-current-emissions-path/
I've covered some of the common skeptic arguments.
Skeptical Science covers most of them at:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
as do these sites:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11654 "Climate Change-A guide for the perplexed."
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/sceptic_guide/index.php?page=7
Sources on the Internet:
The Scientific Basis for Anthropogenic Climate Change
http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2007/12...
The 2008 National Academy of Sciences Summary Brochure on Climate Change
http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/clim...
The Royal Society "A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change"
http://royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=1630
An Introduction to Climate Change
http://www.logicalscience.com/climate_change/climate_change_intro.htm
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart July 2009
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
IPCC 4th Assesment Working Group 1 report
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
IPCC 4th Assesment Working Group 1 Frequently Asked Questions
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faqIndex.html
Union of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/
Skeptical Science
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Climate Science from Climate Scientists
http://www.realclimate.org/
The Global Warming Debate
http://cce.890m.com/
U.K. Met Office
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/index.html
The Science of Doom: Evaluating and Explaining Climate Science
http://scienceofdoom.com/
