So one of the great bastions of climate change / global warming ignorance is at it again. The National Post and Lorne Gunter in
Denier Cluster Fest
particular have been exposed repeatedly before (and here), but like Undead Zombies they simply rise again, this time with “Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof“.
I apologise in advance for the rather lengthy nature of this post, but the Gunter piece is such a turgid example of the Gish Gallop that, as discussed before, it requires effort to untangle the nonsense.
“a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming” Really? Where? what scientists? No sources, no names, just his claim.
“it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.” There are 6,400 peer reviewed science journals in the world spread across almost every nation and involving tens of thousands of scientists, and we are asked to believe that they are all controlled by the environmental movement? Does anyone with more than 2 neurons to rub together actually believe this? The unbelievable stupidity of this claim is discussed here (and earns him 40 points on the Crackpot Index).
From there we go to the debunked Cooling Myth with an irrelevant example instead of actual global temperatures. He attempts to justify this logical fallacy by commiting the Straw Man fallacy, pretending the climate science somehow says that all other climatic factors such as PDO are no longer operating. Naturally climate science says that CO2 driven change is happening as well as, not instead of other factors. Someone should let him know that two logical fallacies do not cancel one another out.
We then learn that Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbar “scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.” OK, i) as above, climate change is as well as, not instead of natural factors, so totally irrelevant point, ii) as above, it is global, not local, iii) we are supposed to be talking about climate, not weather, iv) scoffing is not the same as providing evidence to refute the actual science, and v) who? Turns out he is 1/3rd of the partnership at the MetSul Weather Center, a private Pop and Pop weather and climate Denier1 operation in Brazil.
Next we are subjected to Craig Loehle who showed us that the Medieval Warm Period was really hot and therefore anthropogenic climate change is wrong, or some such nonsense.
Sigh; i) Loehle published in the non-peer reviewed “The Journal Energy and Environment” which is social science ’scientific’ vanity press which publishes most of the Denier dreck because actual scientific journals insist on publishing only actual science, ii) no matter how hellishly hot or cold the MWP was it is irrelevant to the data supporting anthropogenic climate change (Red Herring Falllacy, what’s his Crackpot score now? 150? 200? I’ve lost track), iii) he got his results by just chucking the data he didn’t like and his ‘work’ has been debunked by real science, and iv) the MWP Denier Myth is just that, a myth.
Then we get a misrepresentation of Easterbrook; if you look at the actual paper (radical concept) Easterbrook is suggesting that it the next 3 decades will be only slightly less hot than the past few, hotter than the century before that, and after that it will get really hot. Spelling it out, he is suggesting other factors will dampen the effects of anthropogenic climate change for a few decades after which we are really screwed. i) Even if true this in no way invalidates anthropogenic climate change, and ii) Easterbrook has been debunked.
Getting the drift here? Be brave my worthies, we’re almost done.
Next we have Michael J. Myers inflicted on us: “that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
And if CO2 simply disappeared every year it might not be a problem, but what matters is atmospheric concentration, not annual emissions. Unfortunately CO2 has a “mean residence time” (persistence in the atmosphere) of thousands of years if it is not actively removed, and as a result CO2 concentrations are increasing. His claim is so mind bogglingly stupid (and another Red Herring) that I am gob smacked that anyone would bother repeating it. Those interested in CO2 may want to look at “The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps” and “Yet more CO2.”
Finally we get to Douglas and Christy who “dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month” … except their work has been trashed; see “Tropical tropospheric trends again (again)“, “Fact Sheet for “Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere”, and most particularly “Yet another denier talking point melts down.” The scientifically inclined can check those out while the rest of us skip to that abomination of a graph.
OK, I call it an abomination for the simple reason that the “Global Trend Line” is not any sort of statistical analysis; at least the last section is a hand drawn and utterly meaningless projection that is about as unsupported by the data as possible without going off the page entirely.
Original from the National Post
To illustrate the point I have done similar projections starting in 1994 and 2004 (red line) as if they had been done in 1998 or 2006. These are just as supported by the data as the projection given, and just as false.
The 2008 projection is based on the 2008 minimum, but we saw similar minimums in 1997 and 2000 (blue circles), and of course climate change did not suddenly go away.
UPDATE: 23/10. Thanks to Citizen CEO who found the correct version of the graph in question:
Global Temperature with 100-Month Moving Average
“In this second graph, a couple of things are clear. First, a correctly drawn trend line (in this case a 100-month moving average) shows a flattening but no significant decline. Second, the data in the second graph goes a few months further into 2008, where the temperature anomaly as risen, thus “regaining” about 20 years of the supposed 30 that were lost. The fallacy of the claim is thus clear: The temperature anomalies move in fairly wide swings. What is important is the rising mean temperature anomaly, not what the level is at any given month.” From Citizen CEO
Which brings us to the mega-error that told everyone that this post was utter nonsense right from the start, the title.
Temperature is a symptom of climate change, not a cause. Just as a fever dropping briefly does not make the disease disappear, so the temperature anomaly dropping to zero does not make the CO2 disappear. The temperature anomaly hit the zero baseline dozens of times in the past few decades and it meant nothing. That it has done so again in 2008 means just as much nothing as it did every other time. The whole premise is ridiculous, which is perfectly obvious just by looking at the graph.
Even if the projection were accurate (and not the total idiotic nonsense that it is), it would still mean absolutely nothing. As long as CO2 concentrations remain high we will experience climate change. The weather may vary slightly year to year just as we see in the graph, but the climate will continue to warm.
And I suppose Death, Taxes, and Denier stupidities will be with us as well.
UPDATE 27 Oct 08 Global Cooling … what the?
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Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 15 … still no evidence.
1As I discuss here I do not use the term “Denier” to refer to all climate change doubters. Those who thoughtfully and intelligently address the facts I call ’skeptics’.
Those who irrationally deny the existence of the science and instead propagate the lies and distortions such as those discussed above and linked to the right under “Debunking Denier Nonsense” are “Deniers”.
The choice of the correct term is based on their actions, not their conclusions.
PHOTO CREDITS:
Is your village missing both idiots? by Chubby Bat
idiot Feste by CJ Sorg
Greenfyre's 
Thanks for so quickly identifying Gunter’s quacks for me.
I love the internet.
Peter
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It is easy to dismiss my work in E&E because you don’t like the journal. The special issue, edited by Bernie Pieser, was in fact peer reviewed. I sent the paper to E&E because it is in fact difficult to get contrary papers published–if you don’t publish don’t act like you know (I’ve published 110 scientific papers). For a thorough debunking (you do like that word, right) of the use of tree rings in a peer reviewed journal, try:
Loehle, C. 2008. A Mathematical Analysis of the Divergence Problem in Dendroclimatology. Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9488-8 why does it matter? Because alarmists claim that recent decades are unprecedented, but I believe this is based on flawed science. The hockey stick methods will tend to damp out any past signal because most of the reconstruction is just white noise and for the reasons I show in the above paper. If the MWP was as warm at today or warmer, then maybe recent events are natural and not alarming.
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Two questions for you, Dr. Loehle.
Let’s assume, as you are, that the hockey stick is flawed. (The National Research Council and several independent researchers disagree with you (and the chief criticisms against them, statistical methods and tree ring data, were basically eliminated in the most recent version), but for the sake of argument, say you’re right.)
1) What caused the climate to change before (i.e. the MWP)? Are such triggers present now?
2) When the climate changed in the past, what happened to the Earth’s carrying capacity for human life? And how many humans were on the planet then compared to now? (I understand that these questions aren’t answerable precisely, so ballpark guesses are acceptable.)
(Oh, and mentioning that the issue you were published in was edited by Benny Peiser doesn’t help much. He attempted an Oreskes-styled survey of scientific literature by including the humanities ISI database, and without Oreskes’ scientific background, he thought that these abstracts were denying the consensus. In his defense, he later backed down and said that only one (a non-peer-reviewed editorial from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists) actually did. However, this does call his scientific expertise into question — and remind all of us that E&E isn’t a scientific journal. For those not familiar with academic publications, typically, first a paper is screened by the editor to see if it’s of interest for the journal, and then it hits peer review. Note how effective Peiser was at screening climate papers earlier.)
As Mike would ask, why wasn’t this work published in a science journal? As a fellow academic (in an interdisciplinary field, no less, which means my work lacks any clear journal choices for publication), I can say that “it’s too hard” isn’t a good answer here: peer review is supposed to be brutal, and I’ve spent months looking for journals which would accept papers just for editorial review (let alone peer review). There were shitty journals that I probably could have published in much quicker, but with miniscule impact, I wouldn’t be taken seriously, so I kept the search up. It’s part of the job. Saying “it’s too hard so I’ll take the shortcut” is sort of like a martial artist entering a competition and shooting his opponents because grappling and throwing them was too hard.
Brian: Ignoring the insults in your post, I will address your questions.
1) What caused the climate to change before (i.e. the MWP)? Are such triggers present now?
Over long time periods there are orbital effects. The Holocene Optimum about 6,000 to 8,000 yrs ago was the likely peak of the current interglacial. The MWP and other climatic fluctuations were the result of other factors such as solar variability which still require investigation, and which I am studying now. For example, during the last glacial Dansgaard-Oeschger events recorded in the ice caps show major sudden warming events whose cause is unknown.
2) When the climate changed in the past, what happened to the Earth’s carrying capacity for human life? And how many humans were on the planet then compared to now?
During the MWP the civilizations in Europe and China did well because agriculture did well (little data exists from elsewhere). During the LIA (Little Ice Age) there were more wars and crop failures, even disastrous ones. In general, the last ice age was much drier than today, so warmer probably also means wetter (not everywhere on Earth of course).
As to your complaint that I should have tried harder to get my paper into a peer-reviewed journal, I did not feel that taking 2 years to do this would be of service to society, and I don’t need more notches on my belt. You will note in my post above that my follow-up paper was published in Climatic Change–is that mainstream enough for you?
[…] Mr. Gunter, unfortunately, is widely known for his outlandish claims. For a wonderfully detailed and well-linked analysis of other errors in the aforementioned Gunter article, see this greenfyre post. […]
[…] average, even a linear trendline, clearly paint a different picture. The rest of the article didn’t help much, either. __________________ The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to […]
I’ve been playing around with graphing data sets in Excel once I realized the program could do it last week… I started playing with the UAH data when I saw Gunter’s article. Though I don’t know the statistical relevance of it, I was able to replicate his trendline with an order 6 polynomial. Is this the usual skeptic cherry picking? A moving average and linear trendline *clearly* show warming.
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Voodoo Ben Franklin: The only reason why I wouldn’t call it “usual” is because you used an order 6 polynomial as opposed to a hand-drawn line. (I’m impressed you were able to replicate it at all.) Often, the skeptic in question doesn’t understand a linear regression or statistical significance, or that the human eye is naturally drawn to outliers (which has a dramatic impact on their ‘trendline’ sketch if the outlier happens to be at the end of the dataset; Mike’s version above is a great example of this).
If you’re interested in learning more about what the data tell us, head on over to Open Mind and look around; he’s got a knack for explaining statistical processes at a level anyone reasonably proficient with basic math can follow. He also highlights some other examples of the cherrypick and bogus analysis (such as when Watts posted an analysis correlating time with time (after sorting!), therefore proving there was no anthropogenic climate change, QED), in addition to exploring legitimate and original data analysis. He’s truly an excellent resource.
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Perfect! Thanks for the link, Brian. I’ve been readin’ Tamino’s blog for a little while, but I had forgotten about that post. That was exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks again!
Mike, in the post right before that one, he literally flipped an increasing graph upside down to reverse the trend.
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I think we should take up a collection and buy the owner of this website a life.
Always a smirk for any suggestion that climate hysteria is not warranted. Deep and convoluted arguments drawing on scientific data no ordinary reader could possibly understand or verify. A paternatistic snort saying “yes, you may think that but all of us clever people know it could not possibly be so”.
I agree with Gunther that climate skepticism is growing. One reason has to do with the arrogance of those on the other side who want to wreck our economy and our lives in the name of disputed, corrupted “science”. Please spare us the bromides. As the economy tanks you become less and less relevant.
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[…] It turned out that Gunter’s column had been posted on WattsUpWithThat.com and had received a thorough going over at Greenfyre’s (which means I need not take on that thankless task again – been there, done […]