Cartoonist John Spooner gets away with saying in text what no one else has said before in The Age: that the skeptics are clawing their way ahead, and winning.
The tide has shifted.
Some excerpts:
WELL, so much for the 2012 apocalypse. If the ancient Mayans ever knew anything about the future, they made a serious miscalculation. The same fate has befallen the international climate change emergency brigade. About $1 billion and 18 “Kyoto” meetings later, the world has agreed to do nothing much more than meet again.
How did this frightening climate threat dissolve into scientific uncertainty and political confusion? What of the many billions of dollars of wasted public resources? Some might blame the “sceptics”, the “merchants of doubt” or the “deniers”. Others point to the global financial crisis.
We can say for certain that many hesitant individuals overcame the pressures of group-think, intimidation and tribal disapproval to have a closer look at the relationship between real science, politics and business.
Christopher Monckton and many other skeptics have been writing to Prof Richard Parncutt who had posted a dissertation telling us “logically” influential climate skeptics should be executed. (His words recorded at Webcite). Below, Monckton points out it is a hate-crime, and he will begin notifying Austrian prosecutors, Interpol, the International Criminal Court, and possibly Australian authorities too. In response, Parncutt unconditionally apologizes and withdraws the suggestion. [For some reason, lots of people can’t see anything at this link, but it works for me. Try cut and pasting <http://www.uni-graz.at/~parncutt/climatechange.html?]
Meanwhile, does John Cook seemingly endorse care enough to post or even tweet or email an objection to the original shocking threat that skeptics should recant or die. So far, no? His ad hominem ambush site (misleadingly called “SkepticalScience“) was referred to as “evidence” by Parncutt. (See also Debunking un-SkepticalScience). Five posts have gone up since Christmas, WUWT has heard from Dana (of Cook’s site), yet neither Dana nor Cook has not issued a single sentence indicating that he doesn’t think killing skeptics is a good idea.* (Dana apparently says privately, We of course don’t agree with giving denialists the death penalty, which is good to hear, though Dana’s baseless namecalling is regrettable). And what of DeSmog? If a skeptic had called for the execution of climate scientists, would they have said nothing?
The University of Graz condemns the appalling threat
Ray S, Monckton, Richard Tol, and others wrote to the Dean at the Uni of Graz, and the Dean replies:
The University of Graz is shocked and appalled by the article and rejects its arguments entirely. The University places considerable importance on respecting all human rights and does not accept inhuman statements. Furthermore, the University of Graz points out clearly that a personal and individual opinion which is not related to scientific work cannot be tolerated on websites of the University.
Monckton gets the threat withdrawn and a full apology
Subject: Death penalty for legitimate scientific dissent
.oOo.
Monckton of Brenchley to Parncutt
Dear Professor Parncutt, – The unhappy history of Austria under the Anschluss should surely lead one to consider the unwisdom of demanding death for those scientists and researchers who today legitimately dissent from the apocalypticist notion that our altering 1/3000 of the atmosphere by 2100 will lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
May I ask you publicly to withdraw your dangerous and offensive demand? Otherwise, the law of Austria – designed precisely to avoid a repeat of the murderous, anti-scientific approach adopted by the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, an approach that you now unspeakably revive – will have to be brought to bear, and you will be prosecuted for your hate-crime.
Since an image of your offending statement was cached before your University realized that you had committed a crime and ordered you to remove your poisonous demand from its website, the evidence against you is clear.
A complaint will go to the Austrian prosecuting authorities unless you are able to notify me within 14 days that you have extinguished your crime by withdrawing your call for the death penalty for the likes of me.
Thanks to Frank Brus, at least one camera is now on YouTube in full, with sound. 🙂 Many thanks to other skeptics who volunteered with other helpful suggestions and ideas: to J.J., Ruth, Jim, and Raymond. Thanks to Steve for info about bit-torrent (at least we don’t have to go there this time).
An excellent talent pool out there. I didn’t even know some people had access to post Very Long Movies on Youtube (1 hour 56 mins.) Some of my favourite points are at the end. Check out the last 15 minutes.
There were two cameras recording at the same time:
View 2 (Front more distant camera)
…
OR (UPDATE) View 1 (Back camera view) closer.
Thanks to Barry Corke for driving hundreds of kilometers with his high tech equipment to record this for no fee at all!
The original post has all the background and information on this video: ABC Doco “UnCut”: Evans, Nova, Minchin and Rose — the full unedited video. Look for the moment when Anna is surprised we agree with CO2 being a greenhouse gas: “How can you be skeptical?” Notice when she describes David’s modeling work as “data entry”.
The videos posted there both had sound glitches after 26 minutes. Thanks to Frank, I think we have fixed it here. If a Youtube becomes available for the other view, I shall add it.
Thank you also to the many people who made a much appreciated Christmas contribution — of all sizes. No tip is too small. I am grateful.
Compare that to the final ABC-Smith&Nasht version that went to air
In the end the “Jo & David segment” was only four minutes long. If they were impartial they would not have spent so much of that four minutes on the “paranoia” and the extra camera-man. Instead they would they have spent, say, two whole minutes showing four graphs, and another minute showing that Jo and David are volunteers, that the big money is on Anna’s side of the debate? What matters more to the Australian debate about whether every family should spend something like $1,000 this year on taxes and fees to reduce the global temperature — the failure of the climate models, or the ABC’s spin on those who resist the government agenda?
Does the Australian taxpayer get value for money with this production, or did they unknowingly fund propaganda and advertising for Labor Party policies?
Would the narrator sum up with the key point that the difference between alarmists and skeptics is that skeptics want observations while the alarmists rely on models? Or that fueling the skepticism is a wealth of data from NOAA, NASA, the Hadley Centre, Argo and weather balloons? Would they have spent 10 seconds explaining that while Jo and David are not climate scientists, David has six degrees in maths and stats including a Phd from Stanford, and both of them won prizes in their areas in university?
Could the doco makers have used proper images of graphs, or did it help the public understand the skeptic case by briefly showing an oblique shaded image, and not explaining the significance of the graph (including that the pre-Argo data is near worthless)?
Richard Parncutt, Professor of Systematic Musicology, University of Graz, Austria, reckons people like Watts, Tallbloke, Singer, Michaels, Monckton, McIntyre and me (there are too many to list) should be executed. He’s gone full barking mad, and though he says these are his “personal opinions” they are listed on his university web site.
For all the bleating of those who say they’ve had real “death threats“, we get discussions about executing skeptics from Professors, wielding the tyrannical power of the state. Was he paid by the state to write these simplistic, immature, “solutions”? Do taxpayers fund his web expenses? (And what the heck is systematic musicology?)
Prof Richard Parncutt says:
“I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases…”
“Even mass murderers [like Breivik] should not be executed, in my opinion.”
“GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.”
If a jury of suitably qualified scientists estimated that a given GW denier had already, with high probability (say 95%), caused the deaths of over one million future people, then s/he would be sentenced to death. The sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment if the accused admitted their mistake, demonstrated genuine regret, AND participated significantly and positively over a long period in programs to reduce the effects of GW (from jail) – using much the same means that were previously used to spread the message of denial. At the end of that process, some GW deniers would never admit their mistake and as a result they would be executed. Perhaps that would be the only way to stop the rest of them. The death penalty would have been justified in terms of the enormous numbers of saved future lives.
Recant you foolish deniers or we’ll kill you! Yeah. Welcome to modern scientific debate.
Who should die? Anyone named on Desmog:
Much more would have happened by now if not for the GW deniers. An amazing number of people still believe that GW is a story made up by scientists with ulterior motives. For a long list of climate change deniers and their stories see desmogblog.
So the denier database becomes the “death list”. The list decided by PR experts on a funded smear site, who profit from marketing Green corporations.
But it’s ok, he includes a caveat where he says he didn’t say what I quoted above, so he can later pretend he isn’t discussing real deaths of real people:
Please note that I am not directly suggesting that the threat of execution be carried out. I am simply presenting a logical argument. I am neither a politician nor a lawyer. I am just thinking aloud about an important problem.
And we all feel so much better don’t we?
But seriously, Global warming deniers are the worst vermin on the face of the Earth, worse than holocaust deniers, tobacco deniers and worse than someone who bombs buildings and shoots children en masse:
I don’t think that mass murderers of the usual kind, such Breivik, should face the death penalty. Nor do I think tobacco denialists are guilty enough to warrant the death penalty, in spite of the enormous number of deaths that resulted more or less directly from tobacco denialism. GW is different. With high probability it will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.
Here’s how the deadly reasoning goes
How does he know we are facing disaster?
He knows, because he’s read a blog that pretends to be scientific and it says so. The same site resorts to ad homs, and kindergarden namecalling (like “denier” and “Christie Crocks”) and is debunkedall overtheinternet, but the Prof is too poorly trained in reasoning to spot the cheap tricks, and he didn’t think to search for “SkepticalScience debunked”. Oops.
Finally two hours of entertainment unlike any you’ve seen on TV 🙂
The Media IS the Problem – Part I
When the Smith and Nasht came to our house (on behalf of the ABC) to take footage for the “I can change your mind” documentary, David and I asked fellow skeptic and camera-man Barry Corke if he could film them filming us, so we have our own copy of what happened. He agreed — it was obvious to all of us that we needed some insurance against biased edits. We all knew that petty chicanery was possible. James Delingpole had recently given the BBC three good hours of his time, only to find they trimmed all of his clever answers down, waited for him to have a hypoglycemic vague moment and then crowed about how the great James Delingpole was, can you believe, tongue tied (the failure!)
In the final version that went to air, not only did three of the four key sets of evidence that fuel our skepticism vanish, the editors split and diced sentences to make it appear that David said a sentence he never actually said. He doesn’t think the poorly sited thermometers show the “models were wrong” (we have much better evidence than that); that’s illogical and absurd. Everything I said of any substance was edited out (which I’m kinda proud of). They came all that way to watch me try to convince Anna Rose, then left me with 18 bland words. Perhaps what I discussed (and Anna’s weak replies) was too dangerous, not easy to mock, and they couldn’t ambush Nick Minchin with any experts that could debunk what I said?
Obviously Smith &Nasht were on a fishing trip here (funded by you and me). They were fishing for ways to discredit skeptics. In the end they had to resort to deleting 75% of the evidence, and 100% of my points. Blind commentators later claimed that the bloggers had no credibility. Easy for them to say when they didn’t see most of what we said or the data we presented.
Jo and David’s Kitchen with Anna Rose and Nick Minchin | View 1 (Close camera behind Jo and David)
We were called paranoid for setting up our own recording, but it took one phone call, cost us nothing, and we have a copy, so now (ok, belatedly) the world can decide. Did the ABC fairly represent our views? Were Smith and Nasht serving the public?
There were two independent cameras there on the day:
* UPDATE: For the moment, both these videos have only about 26 minutes of sound. We’re working on an alternative. But it may take a while. (Darn).
View 1 was the main better camera, shot from close up and behind. View 2 is the secondary camera, shot from in front, but more distant. View one is better quality, but you may get tired of looking at my back. All footage thanks to the helpful, talented, Barry Corke.
View 1
UPDATE: These video’s have sound drop-outs from 26 minutes, We’ve found a way to host them in full with sound on youtube. See this post.
View 2
Wise adults are aware that if the editors are not on your side, then all your best moments become invisible, but if you goof it up it’ll be a feature story in Fairfax or the Guardian by the day after tomorrow (as per James). The journalists and editors of taxpayer funded organizations are not even pretending to be impartial anymore. Presumably they justify tossing their journalistic principles to the wind because government-funded-documentary-makers (who are friends of the ABC) “know” the answers to Life, The Universe and Everything, so lies by omission are OK, because the dumb punters might get confused. Alas, once upon a time, a good journalist kept their opinion invisible; now, instead, it’s everything else that’s invisible.
Apologies that this has taken so long to arrange — that Exxon cheque is still missing — but I’m sure people will find this interesting nonetheless. It’s a rare moment when skeptics and believers are in the same room and it’s all caught on camera. Plus, for skeptics who do media work, it’s good practice. (Lesson #1: Bring your own camera).
The Background
Anna Rose and Nick Minchin travelled all over the world (some 65,000 km) with hours of footage, and Jo and David’s kitchen ended up being 4 minutes and 20 seconds of a 60 minute documentary. It’s tough editing hours of footage, but therein lies the skill — the point of the doco was “to change people’s minds”. So the essence of each interview should have been to capture the strongest and weakest points of both sides — to help the audience understand why Anna is so worried about the climate, and why the skeptics are every bit as worried but about corruption, freedom, and the scientific method (not to mention, our National economy).
Where was the Evidence?
David and I made it absolutely clear that we held our positions because of the evidence (between us we mentioned the word “evidence” nearly 100 times). But this wouldn’t have fitted with the theme later in the show where Smith and Nasht get psychologists to explain that it’s really all about “ideology”, and skeptics are skeptics because they’re old white males. (Like Jo right?) An honest doco would have taken care to at least let David and I explain our position. David showed four pieces of evidence that showed the models are wrong, yet the editors completely removed any reference to three of the four key pieces of evidence. This is despite the graphs being filmed twice, and referred to repeatedly by both David and myself in preps and in the filming. Indeed, I mentioned “28 million radiosondes” five times (a reference to the missing hot spot). Later, David pointed out that ignoring the poor siting of thermometers is one way the modelers conceal the failure of their models. The editors jumbled these two aspects together with tricky snipping to suggest that the photos of thermometers were one of our “two” key points of evidence for the failure of the models.
That number is important: we clearly presented four pieces of evidence (1. models overestimated air temperatures from 1990, 2. models overestimated ocean warming since when we started measuring it properly in 2003, 3. models predict a pattern of atmospheric warming — responsible for most of the warming in the models — that is entirely missing from copious weather balloon measurements, and 4. models predict outgoing radiation increases with surface rising surface temperature when satellite measurements show the opposite). But they moved David’s words around (by cutting and pasting) to make it appear he said he presented two pieces (which he never said), and to make it appear as if the dodgy land thermometers were one of those two pieces of evidence. Net result: they actively concealed from the audience, by trickery, the evidence that mattered and that we presented four independent sets of data in support of our position.
Those photos of thermometers show the scientists are being unscientific, and that the media are not reporting banal and obvious problems that no one needs a PhD to understand (which both David and I explained). No sane person would use them as evidence of model failure.
Does it matter? Absolutely. The documentary was funded by the people of Australia so they could understand the debate better, and was advertised as an effort to understand both points of view. The producers can argue they had to entertain people, this was a reality TV show — yet the entertaining points of high conflict were edited out (the times Anna Rose laid out her best ad hom’s and we sliced the points in seconds). The editors went to great trouble to rearrange sentences and images to create the impression that skeptics couldn’t make a decent argument and had little thought behind their case. It would have taken hours to find and splice up separate audio and visual snippets to “create” a false argument. It allowed commentators to declare the bloggers had nothing much of value — just kitchen “science”.
Spare a thought for people in Russia. Its the coldest winter since 1938. Temperatures may hit -25 in Moscow this weekend. They have already hit -50C in Siberia. Twenty-one people froze to death in one day. (See the Telegraph photo gallery)
Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.
The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.
Across the country, 45 people have died due to the cold, and 266 have been taken to hospitals. In total, 542 people were injured due to the freezing temperatures, RIA Novosti reported.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight — the Australian Press Council manages media standards in Australia, but isn’t doing it well enough according to Mr Finklestein (and fellow regulators), who want it overhauled. They want newspapers to be regulated so they can be as trusted as the ABC “is”.* So Finklestein thinks the ABC complaints process works well, and the APC one is too weak.
This week the ABC announced it was fine to equate skeptics to pedophiles as a researched comment by a host on a “science” show, while at the same time, the APC ruled that it was not fine for a skeptic who used loose satirical colourful language in a newspaper column to repeat a quote from an angry farmer who used the word pedophile to describe wind-farm operators.
DRAWING comparisons to pedophiles to attack your opponents is acceptable under the ABC complaints process – held up as the ideal model by media inquiry head Ray Finkelstein – but has been ruled out of order by the newspapers’ existing regulatory body.
But two decisions this week reveal the APC is tougher on commentators who compare opponents with pedophiles.
James Delingpole wrote an article on May 3 about windfarms:
(he) … quoted an unnamed sheep farmer who said that the “wind-farm business is bloody well near a pedophile ring. They’re f . . king our families and knowingly doing so.”
In response Delingpole says: Australia you are so totally gay. “Australia handed in its testicles to the progressives long ago.” (the) state broadcaster ABC is so hysterically left-wing it makes the BBC look like Fox News… ” like the anonymous sheep farmer I quoted, I feel that the “level of offensiveness” is entirely justified when applied in the context of perhaps the vilest, greediest, most corrupt, mendacious and wantonly destructive industries currently operating anywhere in the world.”
Me, I’d prefer if people left the word pedophilia for debates about pedophiles. But that is for the public to discuss, not a committee to decide. The point here is the hypocrisy of “regulators”. The APC is supposedly not strong enough, but it objected to Delingpole using the term “a kind of government-endorsed Ponzi scheme” to describe how union superfunds profit from wind farms that would not exist if governments didn’t force Australians to pay for them. Was that in the public interest?
The APC found those comments above by Delingpole on May 3 were highly offensive and not justified in the public interest. But these comments below, made on the ABC during something called a “Science” show, are, according to the ABC, quite ok.
During a November 24 broadcast of The Science Show, Williams said: “What if I told you that pedophilia is good for children, or that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths again and again in recent times, distorting the science.”
Two weeks ago, it was all over the news. The ocean near Perth (where I live) was rising at the terrifying rate of 9-10mm per year since 1993, which was, shockingly, “three times the global average”. (Since Perth is flatter than flat, at this rate, in a few years everything bar Kings Park and a few sky-scrapers would be washed away). The myth started because a government department that knows a lot about our roads, trains, and buses wrote a dot point in a Fact Sheet. That was the State of Australian Cities report, and a pollie (Albanese) raved. Then the West Australian newspaper headlined it, and it all got out of hand.
In contrast, Chris Gillham got the raw data (something you’d think The Department of Infrastructure might have thought of), and shows below why its nonsense on stilts. The rate is not measured from when records began, but from 1993, which (surely it’s just a coincidence) also happens to be the lowest level in local tide gauges since 1941. (See that second last “dip” near the right-end in the graph below?) If they’d started the “rate” from the year 1999, the headlines would tell us the seas were falling…
If that’s not bad enough, the sea level data comes from two spots, 20 km apart (Hillarys and Fremantle), and Gillham points out that the rates are quite different. Apparently parts of Perth are subsiding by as much as 6mm year thanks to groundwater extraction, and one of those parts doing-the-subsiding happens to be around a tide gauge. More than half the scary rise is due to the gauge sinking.
As far as global sea levels go, Fremantle is a rare long record from the Southern Hemisphere, and is based on a very stable continent — shame about that aquifer that’s mucking up the record. Odd how mistakes, like not-correcting-for-the-subsidence make their way past scientists, bureaucrats, department heads, ministers, and then journalists too. Doesn’t anyone check these any more? Are they all incompetent, or in the grip of a mind-numbing religion perhaps?
All credit goes to Chris for doing so much research here. — Jo
100 years of tidal records at Fremantle show a fairly steady small rise. Note how high the oceans were in the 1940’s and how low it was in 1993. Given past rises and falls, why are we getting excited about a rise since the dip in 1993? (Data: Bureau of Met.)
Guest post: Chris Gillham
——————————
Perth sea level myth swamped by a rising tide of facts
A myth was started in early December that sea levels off the Perth coastline have been rising at 9-10mm per year since 1993, three times the global average. The West Australian newspaper published a page 3 story quoting a State of Australian Cities report that Perth sea levels have been rising far quicker than anywhere else, which Federal Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese described as “disturbing” and “extraordinary”. The foreboding news was quickly propagated by other mainstream media and the sea level myth took hold.
The facts
Closer analysis of the claim shows it is based only on a selective comparison of 1993 and 2010 sea levels off Perth that are monitored by tide gauges in Fremantle and Hillarys. The averaged mean sea level at Fremantle in 1993 was the lowest recorded since 1941, which makes it an extraordinary year for comparison since this critical fact is ignored by a Federal Government department, a Federal Cabinet Minister and the media. The mean sea level at Fremantle and Hillarys was higher in 1999 than in 2010, the most recent year of publicly available data, and a comparison of averages in the first and second halves of the 18 years since 1993 shows sea levels have risen about .61mm per year at Fremantle and 2.2mm per year at Hillarys.
Not quite so disturbing or extraordinary, is it?
Fremantle sea levels 1993 – 2010 (Note the high point was 1999)
That sinking feeling
If you’re curious about how sea levels can rise at such different rates, it’s worth noting a university report published by the Journal of the Royal Society of WA in April 2012:
When Robyn Williams recently equated skeptics to paedophiles on the ABC “Science” Show the skeptic-most-targeted was Maurice Newman, former chairman of the ABC itself. Newman responds to these deplorable and unscientific insults in today’s Australian and throws down the challenge to the current board.
On November 24, Robyn Williams intoned to his audience on ABC’s The Science Show, “if I told you that pedophilia is good for children, or asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma, or, that smoking crack is a normal part and a healthy one of teenage life, you’d rightly find it outrageous. Similar statements are coming out of inexpert mouths again and again, distorting the science”. My article was given as an example of an anti-scientific position.Really? Questioning climate science is like advocating pedophilia, abetting mesothelioma and pushing drugs to teenagers? Well yes, according to the ABC’s science man. Stephan Lewandowsky, a guest on the program, asserted that those with a free market background were, according to his research, more likely to be sceptical of science. As well as climate science, “they are also rejecting the link between smoking and lung cancer; they are rejecting the link between HIV and AIDS”, the professor said. Happily, it was extremely difficult to detect people on the “Left side of politics who are rejecting scientific evidence”.
Williams confirmed that after “a learned lecture” by one of the world’s most famous scientists, bankers remained unconvinced.
So there you have it. No more proof needed. Free marketers, bankers and science contrarians are simply despicable flat earthers. Best to keep away from them.
Ordinarily it should be unnecessary to object to such appalling commentary. It should have been automatically withdrawn. But no. An ABC response used sophistry to satisfy itself “that the presenter Robyn Williams did not equate climate change sceptics to pedophiles”. Tell that to his listeners.
Newman points out this is more politics than science: No deceit is too great. Character assassination is the name-of-the-game and he found comments from a skeptical scientist who once lived under a communist regime to be apropos.
Lubos Motl, a climate commentator and string theory physicist, said about the ABC’s Science Show: “We used to hear some remotely similar (Czech) propaganda programs until 1989 … but the public radio and TV simply can’t produce programs that would be this dishonest, manipulative, hateful and insulting any more”.
The ABC Charter is clear, it is supposed to represent all Australians:
Because the AR5 report is now leaked into the public domain, Christopher Monckton has released his AR5 review comments on the Lord Monckton Foundation site. Notably, Monckton does his absolute best to help the IPCC operate as a useful honest public service. In the most statesman-like manner, Monckton works from the principle that the IPCC’s credibility could theoretically be rescued. (How generous is he?) Monckton also provides a few peer reviewed papers that the team of hundreds of experts has missed — just the odd 450 references or so. As always, meticulously researched, carefully thought out, and with impeccable logic. The IPCC must be paying him well for this rigorous input… oh wait…
In order to produce a respectable useful document the IPCC has to improve:
The IPCC needs to address the failure of their past key predictions.
Split up the science from the politics. (Political appointee’s can write their own chapter*, not rewrite the scientists ones).
The alterations to the scientists final draft need to be marked as such and sent back to the expert reviewers.
All references from gray literature (eg activist press releases) should be removed.
To stop the goal posts moving, the IPCC should update projections based on the original scenarios (it is hard to compare projections made to new, different scenarios).
All data related to the report should be archived and publicly available.
How did the IPCC arrive at the Planck or zero-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter? The details should be made explicit.
We need to know the projected impact of climate feedbacks over time. (Which means we need a graph of the evolution of the value of the climate sensitivity parameter).
Feedbacks are nearly twice as important as CO2 in the models — The IPCC needs to explicitly list all the feedbacks and make an estimate of each (with error bars)
There has been 16 years of no statistically significant warming. The IPCC must stop ignoring this. (In 2008, modelers said a stasis of 15 years would mean the models were wrong. Ergo…? )
On the economic front, the IPCC needs to do the cost-benefits on adapting to a warming world compared to the cost benefit of changing the weather.
(Australians and New Zealanders will be delighted to know that Monckton is coming to tour again in March 2013. Details coming.).
UPDATE: to clarify. I’m quite certain Monckton knows the IPCC was never supposed to be a “public service”. But it’s an excellent rhetorical technique to expose how far from that they are, by carefully methodically documenting what they would be doing if they were such an institution. The contrast speaks for itself.
The IPCC need to pretend they are transparent, open to review, based on evidence, and unbiased.
Monckton’s strategy is to pretend that they might be those things.
General comments on the draft of WG1’s contribution to AR5
—————————————–
1. Comment #1: Ch. 0, from page 0, line 0, to page 0, line 0
To restore some link between IPCC reports and observed reality, the report must address – but does not at present address – the now-pressing question why the key prediction of warming in earlier IPCC reports have proven to be significant exaggerations.
Reason: The IPCC’s credibility has already been damaged by its premature adoption and subsequent hasty abandonment of the now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph as its logo; by its rewriting its Second Assessment Report after submission of the scientists’ final draft, to state the opposite of their finding that no discernible human influence on climate is detectable; by its declaration that all Himalayan ice would be gone in 25 years; and by its use of a dishonest statistical technique in 2007 falsely to suggest that the rate of global warming is accelerating. But the central damage to its credibility arises from the absence of anything like the warming it had predicted. Example: In 1990 the IPCC’s central estimate was that warming would occur at 0.3 K/decade and that by now some 0.6 K warming would have occurred. Since then observations show warming has occurred at 0.14 K/decade and 0.3 K warming has occurred. There has been no global warming for 16 years.
The IPCC are now adding citations of critics (so they can’t be accused of ignoring them completely), but they bury the importance of those studies under glorious graphic art, ponderous bureacrat-speak, and contradictory conclusions.
When skeptics point out that the IPCC admit (in a hidden draft) that the solar magnetic effect could change the climate on Earth, the so-called Professors of Science hit back — but not with evidence from the atmosphere, but with evidence from other paragraphs in a committee report. It’s argument from authority, it’s a logical fallacy that no Professor of Science should ever make. Just because other parts of a biased committee report continue to deny the evidence does not neutralize the real evidence.
Alec Rawls pulls him up. Sherwood calls us deniers, but the IPCC still denies solar-magnetic effects that have been known for 200 years. This anti-science response is no surprise from Sherwood, who once changed the colour of “zero” to red to make it match the color the models were supposed to find. (Since when was red the color of no-warming? Sure you can do it, but it is deceptive.) That effort still remains one of the most egregious peer reviewed distortions of science I have ever seen. — Jo
—————————————————–
Professor Steven Sherwood inverts the scientific method: he is an exact definitional anti-scientist
Guest Post by Alec Rawls
I leaked the Second Order Draft of the next IPCC report, and, not surprisingly, am being attacked. In an interview with ABC on Friday Steve Sherwood tried to denigrate my key point:
He says the idea that the chapter he authored confirms a greater role for solar and other cosmic rays in global warming is “ridiculous”.
“I’m sure you could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude exactly the opposite – that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible,” he told PM.
Set aside the impression Sherwood gives by saying he “authored” the chapter (he was one of fifteen lead authors along with thirty other contributing authors and editors), his response flies directly in the face of the change that was made from the First Order Draft.
My submitted comments on the First Order Draft of AR5 accused the IPCC of committing what in statistics is called “omitted variable fraud.” As I titled my post on the subject: “Vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5.”
How vast is the evidence? Dozens of studies have found between a .4 and .7 degree of correlation between solar activity and various climate indices going back many thousands of years, meaning that solar activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of all past temperature change (citations at the link above).
Solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from 1920 to 2000 (Usoskin 2007). Might this explain a substantial part of the unexceptional warming of the 20th century? Note also that, with the sun having since dropped into a state of profound quiescence, the solar-warming theory can also explain the lack of 21st century warming while the CO2-warming theory cannot.
Now take a look the radiative forcing table from any one of the IPCC reports, where the explanatory variables that get included in the IPCC computer models are laid out. You will see that the only solar forcing effect listed is “solar irradiance.” In AR5 this table is on page 8-39.
There is not even a category for solar magnetic forcings. The IPCC denies that it could affect the climate.
What was the point of keeping the IPCC draft secret? The point is so the IPCC can control both the content and the PR. The IPCC wants a free kick, and they get one if the world doesn’t see how they arrive at the conclusion, and if critics can’t specifically point to errors or flaws until weeks after the giant press circus has done its megaphone production.
It’s how the media game works. First they release the “up and coming” scary headline. (Already done for AR5.) Critics can’t criticize what they can’t see.
Then they release the Summary with a three ring display of terrifying headlines. The black box that justifies it is shown off in all its mysterious glory: 4,000 experts labored for 5 years, produced 2,000 papers, 2 million emails, and rigorously, savagely dissected the science to give you this ominous, frightening message. Pay us your tithe! We will stop the Storms! The inner workings of the black box are held in the Sacred Vault. Those who question it are “deniers, nutters, conspiracy theorists, believe the moon landing was faked, are simultaneously paid by Exxon and suffer from ideological mental deficits — they wouldn’t accept any evidence anyway because they are old white male conservatives (that’s why we have to save the world by hiding the science — it simply is not a fair competition: the IPCC only has billions in funding, the support of the UN, most large banks, all western governments, most university money managers, the thought police in the press, the $176b carbon trading market, and the $257b renewables investment scene. Skeptics have wit, evidence, and the world wide web.)
Then finally they release the long paper with a few more headlines, but the circus has moved on. The people “know” the message. The press is bored, and the critics will need weeks to study the massive document in any case.
Professor David Frame and Dr Daithi Stone have produced a paper claiming the IPCC predictions in 1990 were successful and seem accurate.
Those who read the actual FAR report and check the predictions against the data know that this is not so.
They ignore the main IPCC predictions (the prominent ones, with graphs, in the Summary for Policymakers)
They don’t measure the IPCC success against an IPCC graph or within IPCC defined “uncertainties”.
They measure success against a “zero trend” — something they defined as any rise at all beyond what they say are the limits of natural variability (which they got from the very models that aren’t working too well). Circular reasoning anyone?
Frame and Stone themselves say the IPCC models didn’t include important forcings, and may have been “right” by accident.
Why did Nature publish this strawman letter? It’s an award-winning effort in selective focus, logical fallacies, and circular reasoning to be sure, but does it advance our understanding of the natural world? Not so.
Frame and Stone have produced a Letter to Nature saying that 3 is a lot like 6 (they are both larger than zero). If you ignore the Summary for Policymakers, pick a line from page 177 and add caveats and conditions that nobody mentioned in 1990, then redefine success by using modern unverified models, it’s possible to pretend to verify the unverifiable and slap an A+ on a failed paper.
Careful, scrutinizing scientists like Matthew England, Stephen Sherwood and Penny Whetton, tossed their scrutinizing in the sea, and leaped to hail the paper. Perhaps they have read the Frame and Stone paper, but it doesn’t appear that they’ve read the IPCC First Assessment Report. To know this paper had flaws, all they had to do was read the IPCC predictions and check them against the temperature records. It’s so easy, even unpaid bloggers can do it.
Ignoring the IPCC’s main predictions
It’s telling that Frame and Stone don’t use IPCC graphs, and they don’t quote the Summary for Policy Makers. That’s where the IPCC made brave, clear, defined predictions and got them wrong. That summary was the reason Policy Makers decided to spend billions of dollars to reduce emissions.
The IPCC said the world would warm by 0.3C per decade, and the warming trend would be at least 0.2 C/decade and 0.5C/decade at most. They also said (with graphs) that it would be a mostly linear trend (especially from 2000 on), and with text they said even if we kept our emissions at 1990 levels we’d still get 0.2C/decade for the next few decades (see page xxii). Make no mistake, a policy maker reading that would be left under the impression the IPCC predicted the world to be about 0.6C warmer by 2010 unless we cut our emissions drastically.
What we got was between 0.14 – 0.18 C/decade — about half the rate of the best estimate and below the lower bound estimate as well.
It’s a fail.
What prediction do Frame and Stone check?
Frame and Stone don’t mention the predictions in the Summary, but they found this one, somewhere…
[The FAR] “included an estimate of climate change as a predicted rise from 1990 (to 2030) of 0.7 – 1.5 C with a best estimate of 1.1 C (refs 1,2).”
Ref 1 is the whole FAR report — Frame and Stone don’t list the page numbers. Ref 2, is Bretherton et al in… the whole FAR report. Again, no page numbers. Thanks to the power of a global internet with advanced keyword searches, I’ve discovered that Frame and Stone could have said “FAR Chapter 6 “. I guess they weren’t anxious to help people find the quote. (It’s page 177.) That’s over four decades, so that would be 0.175 – 0.375 C/decade. Not that they mentioned that in the Summary. (There, they said 0.2C minimum.)
The strawman graph the IPCC didn’t use
The only graph in Frame and Stone is this one below, and it’s nothing like any in the IPCC report. (Was there any hint from the IPCC that temperatures could be lower in 2010?) So Frame and Stone set up a strawman prediction. One the IPCC never really made.
The cheap trick in this graph is to visually make the difference between the “prediction” and “observation” lines look as small as possible. (What’s 0.2 degrees between friends?) Those black vertical “unforced variability” lines, say “look at me”, “look at me”. But they don’t say “this is rigorous science”. The world has been warming for 300 years, and if the IPCC had ruled a line through the last 140 years it would have run smack through the middle of the observations. Instead it took millions of dollars, hundreds of man-hours and the largest computers in the world to make a prediction of a new higher trend that didn’t happen.
This graph in Frame and Stone is not like any graph in the IPCC FAR report.
Prof Matthew England proves he is either willing to stretch things beyond reason “for the cause”, or he doesn’t know what he is talking about, or both. Sarah Clark at the ABC didn’t do five minutes research on the story to check the facts or ask informed questions. This is not science, and it isn’t journalism either.
The Facts:
The IPCC used the word “prediction” in 1990 and predicted a best estimate of 0.3°C with a range of 0.2°C – 0.5°C per decade
Even with the most generous overestimate of current trends, the temperature trend has fallen below their lowest estimate, while CO2 emissions were higher than expected. The 1990 predictions can not be called “true”, “consistent” or to have “occurred” by any definition in any English dictionary.
The IPCC Prediction was Wrong
The quote from the first page of the Executive Summary of the Summary for Policy Makers, FAR 1990:1
“Based on current model results, we predict:
Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3C per decade(with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C – 0.5°C)” [IPCC FAR summary]
The caption on Fig 8. IPCC FAR Summary makes it clear that the realized temperature is a prediction caused by Business-as-usual “emissions“. The predictions are linear from the year 2000.
The IPCC FAR report 1990.
Furthermore they say that even if emissions are stabilized at 1990 levels temperatures should rise by 0.2C per decade for the first few decades.
The outcome was 0.14°C – 0.18°C (about half of the best estimate)
Foster and Rahmstorf 2011 looked at five temperature series and calculated trends from 0.14°C to 0.18°C per decade, lower than the 0.2°C per decade trend which marks the absolute bottom of the IPCC prediction. They are sympathetic to the IPCC aims. These values are as good as it gets for the IPCC. They fail.
Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) confirmed in 2010 that the decadal trends for the last 150 years peak at 0.16°C per decade. In other words, what happened since 1990 was stock standard normal warming as per the last 150 years yet the IPCC could not even predict a continuation of a straight line. (An eight year old with a ruler would have been cheaper and more accurate.)
Remember, these predictions were based on business as usual (1990) CO2 emissions. But emissions have been much higher. If the models were right about CO2 the temperatures should be trending in the upper half, not below the lowest estimate.
UPDATE: The new corrected dataset of UAH has reduced the rates shown above so that the UAH rate is lower and even further from the IPCC 1990 estimates.
Is Prof Matthew England incompetent?
The IPCC made a wide prediction (0.2°C – 0.5°C per decade) and yet they were wrong. Matthew England not only hides this from the people who pay his salary, he describes this scientific failure as: “consistent with its original predictions”, “projections of that report have actually come true”, “warming has progressed at a rate consistent with those projections”, ” the projections have occurred”.
England calls us liars for quoting the IPCC documents that he apparently has not read:
“And so anybody out there lying that the IPCC projections are overstatements or that the observations haven’t kept pace with the projections is completely offline with this. The analysis is very clear that the IPCC projections are coming true.”
England called the 1990 IPCC report “very accurate” in April. I raised the error then, and he replied here, he had two excuses, the first was wrong, the second, irrelevant:
He claims the IPCC don’t predict straight line warming and that it was supposed to be a lower rate now, and a higher rate later. Look at the graph above. Where is the “higher rate”?
He claims I plotted a satellite record rather than the surface temperature, so it’s and oranges and apples comparison. But according to the models the troposphere is supposed to warm more than the surface, and the Hadcrut surface record doesn’t show a large enough trend in any case (see Forster and Rahmstorf).
I then explained exactly what these IPCC quotes were and why they were wrong. I also described why the un-SkepticalScience defence of the IPCC uses a trick to hide the IPCC failures. John Cook and dana1981 don’t quote the IPCC predictions, they changed the captions on the IPCC graphs, and talk about “radiative forcing” instead of emissions.
Sarah Clarke failed to do any critical research – the ABC acts as PR parrots for pet causes, not as journalists
Sarah Clarke is paid by taxpayers to investigate and inform them. Knowing she was about to interview Matthew England, all she had to do was spend ten minutes on the internet looking for information in order to ask him smart inquiring questions which would have exposed the complete untruth or irrelevance of what he was saying. She could have started with reading the IPCC summary for policy makers from FAR. But she didn’t need to even do that … others have already done the research for her.
Read this IPCC quote and then read what England and Clark make of the 1990 report. This below was the message the scientists wanted the world’s decision makers to read and remember (again from the first page of the Executive summary of the summary for policy maker:
“This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1° C above the present value by 2025…”
Neither England nor Clarke mention that. Instead Clark helps England to propagate a misdirection:
SARAH CLARKE: So the forecast was of a predicted rise of 0.7 to 1.5 degrees, is that right?
MATT ENGLAND: That’s right, and it’s by 2030, so we’re halfway through this projected period. And the warming to date is consistent with that projection.
We are 22 years into a 35 year prediction of a 1C rise. We should have seen about a 0.6 rise, instead we’ve seen (at most) a 0.36C rise, and which is not accelerating, but flattening. There are complexities and caveats in the main body of the report, but ultimately, policy makers made decisions involving billions of dollars based on the summary.
The questions Sarah Clark would have asked if she was doing her job:
1. Prof England, isn’t it true that the IPCC best estimate prediction in 1990 was 0.3C per decade and yet the warming came in at about half that?
2. Isn’t it also true that their range of uncertainties was 0.2C – 0.5C, yet despite the wide range, they missed. Peer reviewed estimates of warming came in between 0.14 – 0.18C per decade.
3. To translate this into numbers people find easy to understand, if the IPCC effectively predicted a result of “60” with a range of “40 – 100”, how can you say that getting measurements of 28 – 36 is success? In any normal report in science, or economics, or in tests in primary school, this would be called failure. Is 36 consistent with 60?
4. The IPCC described the warming trend of the 20th Century as being “broadly consistent with climate models, but also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability”.2 They specifically pointed out that the observed increase up to then could be largely due to natural variation. Given that the rate of the warming trend since then is no higher than the rates they were talking about as “natural”, doesn’t that suggest the current warming could still be largely natural also?
5. Our emissions have been 58%* higher since 1990, yet the rate of the warming trend has not increased. Isn’t this “broadly consistent” with CO2 having only a small effect, or possibly no effect at all?
We’ve all heard the dire prophesies: Rising seas will reshape the world’s coastlines, a one meter rise will inundate 7000 sq mi of dry land, and cost over $100 billion in the United States alone. Worse, we thought things were bad before, but now it’s even rising faster than we predicted. (“We” being the unvalidated computer simulations, and “rising”, as it turns out, being one interpretation of some highly adjusted, carefully selected data, all possibly “corrected” by one outlying tide gauge in Hong Kong).
Nils-Axel Mörner is here to point out that the raw satellite data shows barely any rise, and furthermore, the observations from places all over, like the Maldives, Suriname, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, Venice, and Germany show not much either. It’s close enough to zero to call it “nothing”. Oh.
But that’s only spots from The Atlantic, The Pacific and The Indian… there are other oceans. 😉
As we graphed before with Frank Lansner, most of the current “rise” is due to man-made adjustments, not man-made emissions. According to Mörner, it’s not that the sea levels are rising less than expected, it’s more like they aren’t rising much at all, and haven’t been for years . — Jo
At most, global average sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 2-3 inches per century. It is probably not rising at all.
Sea level is measured both by tide gauges and, since 1992, by satellite altimetry. One of the keepers of the satellite record told Professor Mörner that the record had been interfered with to show sea level rising, because the raw data from the satellites showed no increase in global sea level at all.
The raw data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON sea-level satellites, which operated from 1993-2000, shows a slight uptrend in sea level. However, after exclusion of the distorting effects of the Great El Niño Southern Oscillation of 1997/1998, a naturally-occurring event, the sea-level trend is zero.
The GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites are able to measure ocean mass, from which sea-level change can be directly calculated. The GRACE data show that sea level fell slightly from 2002-2007.
These two distinct satellite systems, using very different measurement methods, produced raw data reaching identical conclusions: sea level is barely rising, if at all.
Sea level is not rising at all in the Maldives, the Laccadives, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, French Guyana, Venice, Cuxhaven, Korsør, Saint Paul Island, Qatar, etc.
In the Maldives, a group of Australian environmental scientists uprooted a 50-year-old tree by the shoreline, aiming to conceal the fact that its location indicated that sea level had not been rising. This is a further indication of political tampering with scientific evidence about sea level.
Modelling is not a suitable method of determining global sea-level changes, since a proper evaluation depends upon detailed research in multiple locations with widely-differing characteristics. The true facts are to be found in nature itself.
Since sea level is not rising, the chief ground of concern at the potential effects of anthropogenic “global warming” – that millions of shore-dwellers the world over may be displaced as the oceans expand – is baseless.
We are facing a very grave, unethical “sea-level-gate”.
Monckton writes:
I first met Professor Mörner at a debate on the climate at the St. Andrews University Union – the oldest undergraduate debating union in Britain – in the spring of 2009. The Professor’s witty, eclectic and relentlessly charming speech captivated the House. It was not difficult to see why the citation for the award to him of the Gold Chondrite of Merit the previous year at an international sea-level conference at the University of the Algarve had spoken not only of his “contribution to understanding of sea level” but also of his “irreverence”. The undergraduates loved it.
When a true-believer in the New Religion of “global warming” got up and sneeringly advised the
Professor to see if he could get his ideas about sea level published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, his answer won us the debate: “Madame President, I do apologize that in a 40-year career I have only published 530 papers [now 547] in the peer-reviewed literature, most of them about sea level, but in the light of the Hon. Gentleman’s strictures I will undertake to try harder in future.” The House collapsed in helpless laughter…
The Graphs
The full paper explains the details in a very readable manner, but here is a sample. First — the observations don’t fit the models.
Figure 1. Modelled and observed sea-level changes, 1840-2010. The curve marked “Models” represents the IPCC’s combination of selected tide-gauge records and corrected satellite altimetry data. The curve marked “Observations” represents the observed eustatic sea level changes in the field up to 1960 according to Mörner (1973) and (in this paper) thereafter. After 1965, the two curves start to diverge, presenting two totally different views, separated by the area with the question mark. Which of these views is tenable?
This, amazingly, is the raw satellite data before it was adjusted:
So Monckton snuck onto a microphone and dared break the sacred tabernacle of climate. There are some things you just can’t say…
Tallbloke is having a caption contest for this pic.
E &E Newswire story
After the news conference, and as diplomats gathered for the climate conference president’s assessment of how close countries are to agreement, Monckton quietly slipped into the seat reserved for the delegation of Myanmar and clicked the button to speak.
“In the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming,” Monckton said as confused murmurs filled the hall and then turned into a chorus of boos.
One of the high points was getting this dangerous banner above through the security gates:
They confiscated the banner– but only after reading it. It contained the incendiary words: “No Kyoto 2. New science drives out old fears”. So the IPCC thinks Greenpeace has a scientific message, but eight people armed with 17 degrees (including 3 doctorates) and a tame banner was too much? After many pleas we got the banner back, and took it away…
I’ll never forget David Evans (my other half) smuggling it back in past the same armed guards 30 minutes later. The rest of us smuggled the lab coats through. (God forbid — lab coats?) A 7m banner is no small thing tucked into a backpack, and there were a lot of guards, and they did search the backpacks. He dazzled the guards by giving them all free copies of The Great Global Warming Swindle. They loved it. I’m sure Martin Durkin would be pleased no end. 🙂 See all those photos…
———————————————-
UPDATE:The Video
This video clearly shows the moment Monckton dared make the sane point no one else in the room would make. But the sound is edited — complete silence from 0:48 – 1:03. And most of the mic’s in the room would be muted, so the crowd response would been mostly inaudible in any case. (Shame. It would be good to have had our own camera panning the crowd.).
Fusulo and Trenberth scored headlines around the world recently with a new paper that suggested that a few models got the relative humidity right in some tropical spots, and they also happened to be the models that predicted the hottest global outcomes.
John Christie pointed out that the models with the highest climate sensitivity are also the ones which are the worst at predicting future temperatures.
But there is more to this. It is a likely a case of twenty models predicting 40 parameters, and you can take your pick of the permutations and combinations which give one or two models a “success” here and there on one or two factors. But in the end, as Richard Courtney says, all the models are different so only one model can possibly be The Right One for the whole atmosphere, and quite likely they are all wrong.
In this case, they are still all wrong. The hot spot is still missing, and the region below it with which they scored some success is not that important.
The words hot spot and humidity over the tropics lead many commentators to think this was something to do with the hotspot, but lets make it clear: the (missing) hotspot is at a higher altitude than the area they are referring too. That prediction of warming in the upper troposphere is up around 200-300 hPa. This reduction in relative humidity is centered well below that, at 500Hpa.
Why does that matter? Because the most powerful greenhouse gas (water vapor) does its thing at the top of the troposphere (around 200 hPa) — that’s where it radiates energy out to space. Below that level the energy is effectively ricocheting back and forward — bouncing between molecules or causing collisions and generally rarely getting out to space where it is then gone for good.
This explains the paradox that humidity at lower levels can be relatively unimportant compared to the humidity in the top most layers of our troposphere. Water is so important that the wet part of our atmosphere has a different name to the dry part — that’s the troposphere versus the stratosphere above it. But for most of the thickness of the troposphere there is generally so much water vapor — even at low pressures — that the radiative effect of water is saturated. It’s only on the surface boundary, right at the top of the troposphere, that a change in humidity matters, because it changes the amount of energy that flows off the planet.
Note the strange technique in the graph below of doing relative humidity with the lower numbers on the right. The marketing department probably felt that a line of stars rising from left to right fitted the scare campaign better than a falling line would. This is PR-science, not science for scientists.
…
…
In this graph the colours are for relative humidity, the contour lines are for model predicted cloud loss.
Figure 2: The zonal height structure over ocean of observed climatological annual mean RH from AIRS (2002–2007) (color scale), with model mean projected changes in cloud amount from the CMIP3 model archive (contour lines, 0.5% intervals, dashed for cloud loss). The cloud loss in a warming climate at about 40°N/S coincides with broadening of the dry zones, as indicated by the arrows. Figure 2 from FS12.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
Recent Comments