BPSDB
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Meme watch
Inhofe
APS, ACS & AGU
PETM
McLean, de Freitas and Carter
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It’s all just the sun cosmic rays orbit
A new paper in Science, Evidence for Obliquity Forcing of Glacial Termination II has already become “Wobbling Earth Triggers Climate Change“. No doubt it is an interesting contribution to our understanding of Milankovitch cycles, assuming it holds up to scrutiny.
Needless to say this is meat for the climate change Denier ‘New 
Study disproves/overturns/undermines global warming/climate change science/models/theory!“ canard, and equally obvious is the fact that it does no such thing. Expect this one to be turning up in our comments sections, and on forums and news sharing sites for the next little while. If anyone puts together a quick rebuttal it would be appreciated.
Well, it has been three weeks since McLean, de Frietas and Carter, so we were due for a new one. Anyone want to whip up a quick model predicting the longevity of memes in the Denialosphere?
Orbit Recycled Methane
And of course “MIT Team Says “Global Warming Part of Earth’s Natural Cycle” -A Galaxy Poll” which was posted today is just an attempt to resurrect the “Comfortably Dumb: The TGDaily MIT/Methane Fraud” from last fall. Look for it on a wingnut blog near you!
It’s just weather
I always like to have a couple of current links to slap on to the standard “my fridge was cold this morning so climate change is a hoax” comments and stories, so here’s this months:
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) has determined that July of 2009 was the second warmest July globally, since records were kept going back well over a hundred years. Second Warmest July on Record Globally
The record heat of Summer 2009 continues to break records in Texas, especially for longevity in the southern part of the state. Texas Heat Records Continue Falling
Why am I not surprised?
I assume everyone has heard of “The Family”? the Christian “C Street House” group that is the subject of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power*. It is a group that literally believes in divine right to rule; ie God chooses the males who should lead the rest of us lumpenproleteriat, and things like democracy etc are just silly.
Well one of the political figures exposed as being involved in The Family is none other than one James Inhofe, a name that climate science folks know only too well.
I guess that would explain the fascination with the “Medieval Warm Period”;
it’s not the medieval climate that they want, it’s the political system.
* As Capital Climate notes, if you have missed out on the story you can get a pretty good summary by following Doonesbury’s coverage, starting with this one.
Enemy at the gates
I recently did a couple of posts about the assault on academic societies to try get them to ‘review’ their official stances on climate change. There have been a few developments:
APS
Probably the best way to be well informed about what is going on with
the American Physical Society is to somehow track John Mashey through the web and read his comments as you find them; best, but not necessarily the easiest. He promises to post as soon as he finishes his analysis, which should be quite interesting as he is analysing the signatories on the letter.
Who are they is an interesting question. Apparently there are now 80 ” prominent scientists, researchers and environmental business leaders.” Have you noticed how they are always “prominent” when they sign a Denier document?
What exactly is an “environmental business leader” by the way? and why a little further in the article have they become “scientists and academic leaders“? Where did the environmental business leaders go? Note that this copy of the Open Letter is hosted by the “Conservative Business Network.” Who knew they took such an interest in physics? I guess it’s the influence of those disappearing environmental business leaders.
One name on the letter is particularly interesting; Chris Colose has noticed that the dead Victorian era Paleontologist Hugh Falconer is a signatory. Hard to believe that they would deliberately try such an appalling fraud on such a public document, but a google search turns up no ‘Hughen Falconer’ anywhere, and there is certainly no Hughen or Hugh Falconer on faculty at The University of Aberdeen.
The closest I can find associated with Aberdeen are:
- Falconer, D. F., Research Student, School of Medicine & Dentistry, Division of Applied Health Sciences;
- Falconer, M. R., Human Resources Adviser, Human Resources, Human Resources Services;
- Ranald H Falconer who was awarded an Honours degree in Sports and Exercise Science;
all of whom I thought unlikely to be a current or former APS member. Unless it’s Ranald H., could he be the prominent scientist with his recent honours degree? So is it an error of some sort? or are they that crazy?
ACS and AGU
In the American Chemical Society debacle Michael Tobis notes that the number of members letters received by the ACS that actually dispute current climate science is actually only 19 out of a membership of 160,000.
Eli has some updates on the ACS and AGU. He also has a call for letters of support for the Chemical & Engineering News editor Rudy Baum with reference to the American Chemical Society debacle in particular. This definitely worth doing if you are anyone the ACS is likely to consider credible.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Memes
Now that we have all had a chance to catch our breath Realclimate has done thoughtful overview on the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum story of a month ago. See PETM Weirdness and the comments for what it all may mean, and just how much it did not ‘disprove/overturn/undermine global warming/climate change science/models/theory’, despite the Denier claims to the contrary.
Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe
For the more technically inclined Grumbine has also had a go at the McLean, de Freitas and Carter paper, but from a different angle. As the title “How not to analyze climate data” suggests, while he discusses McLean et al in particular the lessons are much broader. For eg he offers
So, some ‘weeding sources’, or ‘scientific specificity’ signs:
* When a paper makes a conclusion about the correlation between A and B, verify that it is A and B that they are correlating.
* If a filter is applied, look for the authors to discuss a) why a filter is being applied at all, and b) why the particular filter they chose was used.
Meanwhile, in case anyone hasn’t heard that the Big guns brought to bear:
It’s only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Two weeks from blog post to paper submitted
The 9 (!) rebuttal authors span the globe from Japan to the UK to New Zealand to Colorado and New York, reading like a who’s who of global climate science: G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth.
and most curious is this comment at Open Mind
A message on behalf of the editors of JGR Atmospheres: as editors, we do not discuss the details of the peer review process and we will also not do that in this case. We will say that despite all the hard efforts made by reviewers and editors, the peer review process is not perfect. Occasionally, papers that contain errors or controversial statements without adequate discussion do get accepted for publication. In these cases, JGR Atmospheres encourages the scientific community to submit comments and discuss these papers in the peer-reviewed literature.
As James Annan notes “Not that the contents of the comment are particularly interesting, but the fact that they felt that they needed to say it at all…”
“Extreme” rainfall events now more frequent and even more extreme than they were in the 1950s. In the Great Plains, for example, the amount of rain that falls during the heaviest one percent of rainy days has grown by 15 percent over the last 50 years.. Earth Gauge
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 290 … still no evidence.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Satellite from Wikimedia Commons
Gossip Girl’s by Ferdi’s World
Comment Policy
Comments that are not relevant to the post that they appear under or the evolving discussion will simply be deleted, as will links to Denier spam known to be scientific gibberish
- The “Mostly” Open Thread is for general climate discussion that is not relevant to a particular post. Spam and abuse rules still apply;
- The “Challenging the Core Science” Comment Thread is for comments that purport to challenge the core science of anthropogenic climate change.
Greenfyre's 
[…] More here: Climate Denier meme watch and other gossip […]
So this obliquity is this?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt
A slow 41,000 year cycle that we already knew played a role in ice ages, and this study says it plays a slightly stronger role? And it caused global warming 141,000 (+/-2500) years ago, so it would have happened 18,000 years ago and will next happen 21,000 years from now? Am I understanding that much correctly?
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Yes, that is about right.
The odd thing is that obliquity should be the strongest of the three orbital variations that affect the climate, and indeed it was from about 3 million years ago until 800,000 years ago when glacial cycles switched from a roughly 40 ky period to one of roughly 100 ky. What caused the switch is the subject of some debate.
Tamino delves into the maths here.
And yes, we’ve known about it for a long time. Milankovitch is the name that usually springs to mind, but local hero James Croll had considered it almost a century earlier.
Orbital changes should mean that we’re cooling at about 0.1 degrees per millenium, but in fact we’re warming at about 200 times this rate.
The Family:
Don’t miss Doonesbury’s serial skewering of those hypocrites starting here.
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re: APS, soon, but there are actually more than 80 now, although the signer prominence seems to be dropping with each round.
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Hugh Falconer is another local hero.
Educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, he was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and contributed to the development of the theory of evolution. On his death he left £500 for the foundation of a museum in his home town of Forres, which still bears his name. Some of his correspondence with Darwin is on public display.
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re. APS.
My God, it just keeps getting funnier.
Give me a second to wipe the tears out of my eyes and get up off the floor. Stop it! 🙂
Here’s a new one from the Douglass/Knox team to keep an eye on – in fact I’m surprised it’s not being spun by microWatts already – Changes in net flow of ocean heat correlate with past climate anomalies. Two key statements to raise suspicions:
…and…
Of course, this may be groundbreaking work, but given the author’s past history one might be forgiven a little honest scepticism… 😉
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Edwin X. Berry is one of the signers of the APS memo.
See his website, especially the letter to Spokane, but he is firing up a blog debate with a climate scientist, Eric Grimsrud.
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I another development, it seems I am now accused of being the internet prankster pretending to be “Hughen Falconer.” How unexpected.
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This is really quite the exchange and folks may want to have a look.
Mike
Hi Chris and Mike,
We are making pretty good progress on locating specifically who wrote all the signed Falconer emails, we have around 5 of them now with full IP traces.
Somebody wrote them, I wonder who did it? When does a prank turn into internet fraud? When does posing as somebody else become an act the lawyers are interested in? We will have the answers shortly.
Stay tuned!
Best,
Bob
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I look forward to that.
I would be particularly interested in your methods for tracing the culprit, as I work in IT. Probably the most successful approach would be to ask the posters ISP – but you wouldn’t get an answer without a court order.
IP addresses probably are not much help – it will enable you to identify the poster’s ISP (which we already know), but that’s about all, as far as I know.
If there are methods available to you that I am unaware of I would love to hear them.
None of which alters the fact that you have accepted at least one signature with minimal verification (e.g. “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the APS?”).
I’m really intrigued as to why you have five (plus or minus something) emails from ‘Falconer’ – this sounds like an extended conversation rather than a simple “sign me up” message. Will you be publishing the contents of the emails as well?
“When does a prank turn into internet fraud”
Bob, I completely agree.
Besides being demonstrably wrong about science, you are actively opposing informed lawmakers and signing your name to lies and frauds. The APS is obviously embarrassed by this but apparently committed to dealing with you in a fair manner.
You make false claims that should be seen as criminal.
As everyone can see, deniers routinely cut and paste data and paragraphs of research reports from copyright research sites; and deliberately re-interpret the findings in reports by climate scientists and climate research teams and Institutes providing evidence that C02 is the main driver of the current warming, and that this warming is already having negative impacts that are accelerating. Usually, you also claim to be authorities in the field.
Funny how projection works.
You may be an award-winning physicist (I find your research on cell to cell communication fascinating) but you apparently cannot rise to the occasion of social change and are indulging in a range of pranks to resist.
Like the few colleagues of the same generation who deny climate change, you grab at any argument that suits your denial of the fact that the earth’s resources are limited and post-war industrial conversion has overwhelmed the earth’s systems – never mind that it has overwhelmed citizens, who now frequently sit bloated, diabetic and purposeless, amongst their stuff.
Moreover, the overconsumption you are concerned to maintain has not bothered to eradicate child poverty in your country, never mind alleviate poverty around the world.
Your name can be found all over the Internet, lying about the science, the motivations of citizens assisting others with education and adjustment, and the impacts of legislation for C02 emissions control.
You signed your name to the following garbage:
“We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately”
“There is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist.”
“The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy”
“Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Many alarmists are profiting from their activism. There are billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken”
Instead of addressing what we already know about climate change and its association with overconsumption — the damage to human health, lakes, forests, food, glaciers — you are busy using your considerable education to lie and play pranks.
You demonsrate zero knowledge of natural systems, economic systems, or social systems.
The climate crisis is the last in a series of wake-up calls occurring in all three of these systems for the past fifty years, because of the inter-relationships between health, production, consumption, waste, and the living earth.
You also illustrate the need for better minds in the university.
Hi Folks,
“I’m really intrigued as to why you have five (plus or minus something) emails from ‘Falconer’ – this sounds like an extended conversation rather than a simple “sign me up” message. Will you be publishing the contents of the emails as well?”
Yes, we had an extended conversation, over a period of about 3 weeks. First the original email we always send back to the “sign me up” address to verify the person’s APS membership, it came back from “falconer” saying he was indeed an APS former member, then as this fraud continued further emails from the person once we were alerted to Colose’s big discovery, these emails claimed innocence. So the fraud perpetrator maintained his identity as Hugh Falconer for quite a while. And he still does.
Unless one is a paleontologist (I do know of one), it is rather much to expect physicists to connect this name with some rather obscure 19th century paleontologist (BTW there IS a Hugh Falconer in Aberdeen who is very much alive and well in spite of what Mr. Colose would have you believe, but not the person who did the fraud).
I’ll send you people the email messages once we have finished our investigation. You can then draw you own conclusions as to the morals and ethics of the person who did this, and whether he is an honorable person.
I am doing no pranks, I am trying to find out who did do a fraud, and I will. You can question me as a scientist, God knows the NIH review panels routinely do….I really do also like my work on cell-cell communication, thanks… but nothing justifies what was done here. There is no excuse for fraud in science, never. For the record, I am fully aware of global warming and agree it has happened in the last 200 years, it is the extrapolation of the computer codes into the future that I worry about. I am an alarmist skeptic, not a “global warming denier”. Make note of that difference please. Then read Paul Ehrlich’s 1970 screed “The Population Bomb” to see how badly awry alarmist predictions can be.
By the way, I have been living in Hong Kong for a year. I know a lot about Asia. I bet my carbon footprint is smaller then anybody on this blog. Try traveling to Tibet to see what life is like when you really have a low carbon footprint.
More later as we untangle who the person was. I am learning a lot about internet fraud. Moving beyond the IP address we have should be interesting indeed. If somebody wants to help me rather than throw stones at me I would welcome that. None of us likes a cheat, right?
Best,
Bob
Absolutely. 🙂
I would be happy to help – I have 30 years of experience in IT.
But you do still need to acknowledge that adding Falconer’s name to the list shows a lack of quality control.
There are 6 people listed as H. Falconer in BT’s directory for North East Scotland.
3 of them live in Moray, one in Banff, one in Peterhead and one in Sauchen (about 10 miles west of Aberdeen).
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Indeed – how many are called Hugh, and not Hamish or Horace or Helen or Heidi or …
Austin said:
Then why do you deniers use it so frequently and blatantly?
You are as guilty of fraud as the other deniers if you condone and ignore it when it happens.
Shame on you if you are a real scientist.
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“There is no excuse for fraud in science, never. For the record, I am fully aware of global warming and agree it has happened in the last 200 years, it is the extrapolation of the computer codes into the future that I worry about. I am an alarmist skeptic, not a “global warming denier”. Make note of that difference please.”
Bob,
You signed your name to the following ‘open letter’ to Congress, which states deliberate misrepresentations of the science:
“The facts are: The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.”
(Bob, where are you getting this? Weather is not climate. Short-term changes are not trends. The past decade is still the warmest on record. Every record high is typically followed by a few cool years and apparently everyone but you is aware of this. You misrepresent the Tsonis study, all over the Internet. If you have some climate science data that shows that the world’s climate scientists are wrong, that the earth is cooling and there is no longer a warming trend, please tell everyone at once by posting it on the science thread.)
“The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN’T EXIST.”
(Bob, again – weather is not science. Climate predictions are reliable, and the balance of evidence is certain regarding human-caused warming and the immediate need for significant C02 reductions. You seem to claim that the evidence for AGW is not clear and also that it does not suggest the need for immediate and significant C02 emissions reductions. You say there is no evidence.
None. Are you serious, or were you boys drinking when you wrote that up on a napkin? It is hard to see you as a credible scientist in your own field, never mind in another field, when you have signed your name to something that is so carelessly written and inaccurate regarding the evidence.)
“The proposed legislation would cripple the US economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors. For such drastic action, it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not just computer projections, and not false claims about the state of the science.”
(Bob, where do you get these economic ideas? Certainly not from economists. I can only guess that you are personally grieving the departure of George Bush, who forced the American economy to rely on fossil fuels despite the need to cap emissions. The legislation you are opposing will reduce the burning of oil and coal. This means that the U.S. will finally diversify its economy and that’s a good thing. Energy-related pollution control will be developed and a consequence will likely be that the big polluters will have to reduce their production costs, but this should be manageable given their levels of profit. Only oil industry leaders are claiming that there will be no growth in their sector if climate change legislation is introduced: economists calculate continued growth. There is also nothing to suggest that consumers can’t become more efficient at conserving, just like industry. With the development of renewables we can increase our reliance on local energy initiatives and decrease reliance on the petroleum market fluctuations.
“SCIENCE IS GUIDED BY PROOF, NOT CONSENSUS”
(Bob, the main guide for evaluating scientific claims is evidence — not proof. Proof is for math and logic. I recommend that you refresh your failing memory of the concepts of science by re-reading Popper. I don’t think I have ever seen a real scientist make such careless mistakes.)
“Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. It is always instructive to follow the money.”
(Bob, here we agree. And when we follow the money, it does not lead to the bank accounts of ordinary citizens and educators.)
I can’t imagine anyone being so distracted by your pathetic (but amusing) email trouble to the point that they fail to spot the real trouble for you, which is your blatant misrepresentation of the science to suit your denialism.
So I again agree with you: there is no excuse for fraud in science. You have no excuse.
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p.s. GreenFyre,
Bob Austin wants us to follow the money. Let’s do that. He suggests that climate change scientists, ordinary citizens making changes, educators assisting with those changes, and activists, are rolling in cash for the taking. Somehow, I suspect that scientists who are obsessed with money would do better being hired by the energy industry — no?
Can you please tell us what was on your last cheque? 😉
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Hi S2:
“I would be happy to help – I have 30 years of experience in IT.
But you do still need to acknowledge that adding Falconer’s name to the list shows a lack of quality control.”
Thanks for the offer. We have pretty good evidence on who did the fraud, but moving beyond the IP addresses would be great. Does one really need a court order to find the identity behind a email address? I am in contact with a lawyer of course.
As to our quality control, I guess our big mistake was assuming that people are honest. We first checked to see if the name was on the present APS membership list (unless you are a lifetime Fellow like me you have to re-enroll every year), and then in our return emails to the petitioner we would ask for verification. Apparently, “our lack of quality control” was as I said assuming people were honest when they confirmed what they had sent us. That seems to have been a mistake, we dig deeper now that we realize there are really bad guys out there. Sorry!
I don’t know why everybody thinks I am some Bush-loving, gun-toting, redneck from Tulsa, OK. I thought Geo. Bush was the worst president ever, a catastrophe. I just am an alarmism skeptic based on my data analysis, very simple. One can be an alarmism skeptic and a liberal at the same time. I also think as a moral relativist, and it has been re-enforced by this fraud, that BOTH sides have really bad people associated with them. Beware.
By the way, emoticons are really lame.
Best
Bob
If your mysterious poster really did post from a Yahoo account (as seems likely, as you exchanged several emails with him) then his ip address will point to a block of ip addresses owned by a service provider. These are usually allocated on the fly, if you’re a home user – so your address will vary with time. You might be able to identify which country he lives in, but that’s about all.
Indeed, since Yahoo allows people to send and receive emails via a browser, you might find that the IP address is a Yahoo server.
Yahoo are unlikely to be cooperative (they will probably point to your lack of quality control, and ask exactly what damage the mystery poster has caused).
That’s a matter of opinion. 🙂
Hi Folks,
I checked the Terms of Agreement at Yahoo:
“You agree to not use the Yahoo! Services to:
upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any
impersonate any person or entity, including, but not limited to, a Yahoo! official, forum leader, guide or host, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;”
I’d say the court order to reveal the true identity of the Hugh Falconer who defrauded us is in the bag.
Bob
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Robert
You fail to cite the relevant policy regarding yourself i.e. ‘no spam, no harm, no copyright violations’.
Your posting of deliberate, repetitive and fraudulent mis-interpretations of the work of climate scientists is spam. You are delaying action on climate change and confusing the pubilc, so it is causing both direct and indirect harm. And it is done in willful violation of research data copyright laws.
No one cares about your email issue – it is a minor issue.
If you have the motivation and the resources, you can get a court order for the release of whatever information the server has on an IP– which may or may not result in identifying an individual. Obviously, if this was straightforward, everyone would be tracing the addresses of the many child predators on the Internet through an IP.
Even when we know the name of someone who is simply violating a policy or who is in violation of copyright laws protecting research data and interpretation — such as yourself — it is usually not possible to make an individual legally acccountable. Surely you are aware of the resources required to pursue that. Such is the current state of the Internet.
Your minor email issue is all the more ridiculous, given that you apparently do not understand the difference between an APS committee that is struck for the purpose of dealing with the demands of a small group of its members with a petition; and an actual review of APS’s policy. What has occurred is the former, not the latter. Either you don’t understand your own organization’s governance, or you do not understand the relative unimportance of your personal demands.
“I think as a moral relativist.”
There are rather obvious ethical and philosophical problems with such thinking, Bob, especially for a scientist – but it does explain alot.