Climate Change Deniers are “Not Even Wrong”

BPSDB Not even wrong … refers to any statement, argument or explanation that is so at odds with reality that it is considered uncorrectable.

2 + 2 = 4  … is correct

2 + 2 = 5 … is wrong

2 + 2 =  ‘§’ … did not understand the question

(2 + 2)/ zebra * Fugue = “global cooling” … is not even wrong

Climate change Deniers are often (usually?)  “not even wrong”

I want to use one of the perennial Denier fables to illustrate not merely that the Deniers are wrong &/or willfully lying, but that they are not even wrong, ie so totally clueless that it’s a wonder anyone trusts them for the time of day, much less for science.

For this little demonstration I’d like to use that standard “It was cold today/this week/this month/this year in my region/town/yard/basement therefore global warming theory is wrong.”

The Poptart is Cold

For a specific “typical” example I will use PopTech’s (aka PopTart)  1,000 References of Global Cooling. This is a collection of 1000 media stories from the past decade about everything from cold snaps to people dying from cold.

Naturally this Denier fable has been debunked over and over (see at bottom), but rather than jump to what is the right answer let’s take a tour of just how absurdly “not even wrong” the fable is.

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Albert the Knowledge Penguin

BPSDB

Darryl Cunningham Investigates

If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to “Darryl Cunningham Investigates” and check out his climate change comic.

Maybe a “comic” is not your preferred way of learning, but for some it is far more effective, so this is a great tool to have at hand and share. Cunningham is still working on clarifying some of the science and providing all of his sources, but that will just turn ‘good’ into ‘excellent.’

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Potholer54 climate videos, new and some less so

BPSDB Regulars will know that I have been a huge fan of Potholer54 who has done some excellent climate science videos:

• • • 1. Climate Change — the scientific debate
    • 2. Climate Change — the objections
    • Climate Change — Those hacked e-mails
    • Climate Change — isn’t it natural?
    • Climate Change anatomy of a myth

I was not at all pleased with his fourth, “Climate Change — Gore vs. Durkin” where he looks at both “The Swindle” and “An Inconvenient Truth.” Potholer seems to have fallen into a trap of attempting to seem even handed, not favouring one side of the issue or the other, see ‘Very disappointing‘ for the discussion.

I found his most recent one also somewhat disappointing even though it is mostly pretty good.  “11. Climate Change — Hurricanes, atolls and coral” was also released as “Climate Change Are we all going to drown?”

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Digg users hoaxed by Earthsuckers, again

BPSDB

Digg.com is probably the largest social news sharing site on the web. As such it is an attractive target for the climate change Deniers to try and use it to reach a huge audience with their frauds. Their most recent success was the ‘Latif global cooling trend‘ hoax.

For the most part the Denier spam dies a quiet and well deserved death as the more scientifically literate Digg users are able to vote down the idiocy.

However, now and then one of the Denier frauds is picked up by an Earthsucker and makes it to the “front page.” At that point it gets seen by thousands of Digg users, many of whom seem only too eager to believe the most idiotic Denier claims despite the obvious flaws in the stories.

What is puzzling and disturbing about the comments that get made on the stories is the apparent inability of many users to distinguish the vacuous histrionics of the Deniers from rational, fact based points.

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Deniers record high incoherence ratio increasing?

BPSDB The climate change Deniers make four attempts to refute the Meehl et al NCAR: Record high temperatures far outpace record lows study.

Four tries, four epic FAILS!

In reporting on the study which showed that “…daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States.” Wattsupmybutt spins it as Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations ie repeating the false claim that surface station temperature monitoring is unreliable

The Surface Station Meme

(and here).

Not to mention that ” … undergo a quality control process at the data center that looks for such potential problems as missing data as well as inconsistent readings caused by changes in thermometers, station locations, or other factors.”  Record Highs Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.

but fair enough, at least Watts is consistent.

NOT

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George Will, low hanging fruitcake?

BPSDB Debunking the climate change Denierism nonsense that George Will writes is more akin to clubbing plush toys than an actual intellectual exercise.   Shooting fish in a barrel? sure, if we’re talking about the barrel of the gun in question; easy and pointless.

George Will knows perfectly well that he is publishing nonsense about climate science, and he is going to keep right on doing it because he is paid precisely because he writes nonsense, not despite it.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Last winter Will stunned us when his pre-existing condition of climate change Denierism plunged to new lows. However, like the arctic sea ice minimums, it seems to have been merely a sign of an on-going precipitous decline.

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Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across US

From Physorg BPSDB

“This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade.

The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole. Credit: ©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.”

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Independent statisticians reject ‘global cooling’ fable

BPSDB“WASHINGTON — Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press (for full story).”

Nice! Of course the climate science and science blogs have been saying so all along, repeatedly (below), but this independent AP story can be nothing but good news for the fact based, rational world.

[UPDATE 22:30 EST The APS story has +100,000 search engine hits already – wonderful! Kudos to Seth Borenstein]

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“Global warming stopped in 1998” Revisited, and Plimergate

BPSDB “1998 Revisited”

“Even some of our most distinguished journalists …” 😆

In the latest Climate Denial Crock of the Week Sinclair has once again debunked the ‘Climate change ended in 1998’  aka ‘it’s been cooling for a decade’ etc climate change Denier meme. If you missed his earlier one Party like it’s 1998 here it is:

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Visualize World Climate

BPSDB

The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for June, breaking the previous high mark set in 2005. NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

5-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies – 1880 to 2008

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Global Warming? why is it so freaking cold?

BPSDB June 2009 was the second warmest on record for June and the January-June year-to-date tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest on record. (NCDC: Climate of 2009 – June Global Analysis).

But it’s been cold and wet here, how is that possible?

There are several layers to that question; the explicit question of how it is possible, and the implicit assumption that it should not be happening. There is a third part that almost never comes up, the question of whether it actually has been cool and wet.

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Climate Deniers literally are “Flat Earthers”

BPSDB

Yes, I know calling climate change Deniers “Flat Earthers¹” is usually used as a epithet to describe those who brainlessly dismiss the obvious facts, such as in “Sir Nicholas Stern: Climate change deniers are ‘flat-earthers’.”

However, what I mean is that the climate change Deniers literally are Flat Earthers; bear with me please.

.

.

Consider two of the Deniers favourite memes:

1) Climate change ended in 1998 (or 2001)

2) It was (record) cold today in ______, that proves climate change isn’t happening.

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Climate Denial Crocks, art and polemics

BPSDB DANGER

Global Warming

Thankfully Peter Sinclair has been keeping himself busy with more debunking of climate change Denier fables, although each of his installments does more than simply debunk the fable in question.

Even if you know why the crock in question is a crock, they are still well worth watching and sharing as broadly as possible (HINT Social networks: Facebook, Care2, Stumble, Plum, Twitter … hint hint hint …)

“The “Urban Heat Island” Crock”

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Global Cooling: proof that summer 2008 never happened!

PROOF! A picture of snow in Miami

PSDBI have been so consistently impressed with climate science as it is practised by climate Deniers such as Bob Carter, Christopher Monckton and others that I thought I would try using some of their techniques myself and see what I could discover.

In the spirit of all of the recent reports about what a cold day they had in Anchorage or St Paul (and therefore global warming is over!) I too decided to choose a single local example and pretend it somehow would represent trends for the whole planet.

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They’ll bet your life, but not their money!

BPSDBWhen it comes to climate change the stakes for humanity are high in the extreme, so you might think the people advising a laissez faire approach (aka Deniers) to the problem would want to be absolutely certain of their facts.

Betting what exactly?

Something they would be willing to bet their money on for example.

Not phony challenges like Milloy’s Carny Scam, but actually risk their own money as well as your life.

Turns out not to be the case.

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2008 will probably be 10th Hottest year on record

Will be Tenth Hottest on Record

BPSDB

• New and improved old memes
• New debunkings
• Arctic Update

New and improved old memes

2008 will probably be 10th Hottest year since 1880. Of course that is not how the Guardian reported it, they said “2008 will be coolest year of the decade“, but in this case those are the same thing.

Already the Deniers are spreading the “coolest of the decade” (ie ‘Climate change has ended‘) meme, a classic example of how the Deniers want you to look at the data, but not too closely.

Three things they do NOT want you to look at in this case:

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“Global Cooling” myth gets fried

The Pan is getting cooler ... really!

The climate change / global warming Denier “Global Cooling” myth just get’s more and more obviously ridiculous every day.

Just a week ago I blogged about the recent Denier spam fest about media reports of local cold snaps.  Several of the points I made then have gotten more empirical support since, so this is a quick update.

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Global Warming is Over … Again

That’s right! The Denialosphere is all a twitter again as parts of the earth have been experiencing some

Global Cooling

record cold from London to Florida. Climate change is over! as long as you are willing to ignore reality in at least four ways.

So certain are they of this absurdity that Marc Morano was apparently willing to spend a significant portion of his life compiling 12 pages of irrelevant news stories. As a tribute to this waste of time Jennifer Morahasey has kindly published them as “News Reports for October Indicate Global Cooling.”

You will recall Morahasey has recently brightened our lives with such great comic pieces as the Denier Top Ten and even reprinted Lorne Gunter’s delusions of adequacy, so this promises to be good.

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Lorne Gunter and the “National Pest” Debunked … Again

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).

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Deniers Prove Staircases are Level!

Climate Change / Global Warming Deniers prove staircases are flat, they don’t go up anymore … and they have been like that since 1998!

OK, as usual the Deniers have proved nothing more than their own gullibility, and in some cases their duplicity and/or gross incompetence. This would not be very interesting if it was nothing more than just another Denier fraud debunked, but I think it gives us some more insight into the whole Denier movement.

In particular I think it is a pretty clear demonstration that Denierism is not legitimate and honest skepticism, but rather the deliberate perpetuation of lies and frauds.  Further, that at least some of those with actual academic credentials (ie “scientists”) reveal themselves as either grossly incompetent or willfully fraudulent. That’s bit more interesting.

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