Posted by This piece by Arthur “Let’s bomb Iran!” Herman published by the Australian and the CIS, has it all.
- the author is a historian, not a scientist
- every single claim about the science is wrong
- climate scientists are called “knaves” , “a priesthood” and likened to the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis
- there is ridiculous alarmism about the costs of mitigation (“trim Australia’s GDP by several percentage points a year”)
Nexus 6 and Gary Sauer-Thompson have already taken Herman’s article apart, but I think it is still interesting to look at what he got wrong about the science (everything!) to see if there is a pattern to his errors.
Here’s Herman:
It’s been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in America. First the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934.
In fact, NASA never claimed that 1998 was the warmest year in the US. And if you are interested in global warming, then the relevant temperatures are global ones, not those in the US. And the correction that left 1998 and 1934 virtually tied in the US was made last year, not this year.
Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003.
There was a paper published, not this year, and not last year, but in 2006 which claimed that oceans had cooled from 2003 to 2005. But it turned out that there was an error in some of the data. Remove the erroneous data and the cooling goes away
Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see “the end of winter as we know it.”
This is a cherry pick, since one season in one country doesn’t tell us much about long term global temperature trends. And it’s also wrong. The NCDC report on the winter of 2007-2008 states:
In the contiguous United States, the average winter temperature was 33.2°F (0.6°C), which was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century average – yet still ranks as the coolest since 2001.
I don’t think that 2001 was decades ago. Back to Herman:
In the May issue of Nature evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least.
Not exactly. Here’s the researchers’ own summary:
“Just to make things clear: we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought”, explains Prof. Mojib Latif from IFM-GEOMAR. “What we are saying is that on top of the warming trend there is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years”, adds Latif.
Their conclusions aren’t forced by falling global temperatures (because global temperatures aren’t falling, duh), but are based on periodic oscillations being superimposed on a warming trend. And they did not say that warming would stop for at least a decade, but rather that warming would slow for a decade and then catch up with the long term trend. (Their conclusions are also disputed.)
Herman’s final piece of evidence:
Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’ article in the Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become “pretty conclusive.”
Unfortunately, Evans got all his evidence wrong.
I think it’s clear from the pattern of Herman’s errors that he didn’t bother to find out what NASA or the the NCDC or that May article in Nature had to say, but got all his information about climate science second or third-hand from ideological sources like the Australian and Rush Limbaugh. This picture shows how the system works:
Over on Planet Janet we find a bit more from Herman:
Arthur Herman, another panel member, predicts that in five years there will be a spate of books and articles wondering how politicians, the media and the people were all so comprehensively conned by global warming alarmism.
I wonder if he really thinks that? Do you think he would be willing to put money on it?
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