Andrew Bolt has
responded
to Tim Flannery's
correction of
some Bolt's egregious errors. Bolt's primary tactic in his criticism
of Flannery is to go out of his way to misinterpret Flannery's writing
and then when Flannery corrects the misinterpretation to insist that
his strange reading is the only correct one. Bolt isn't even bothered
when his readings of Flannery are contradictory. Flannery wrote about
the relative stability of temperatures since the last Ice Age:
For the past 10,000 years, Earth's thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius.
According to Bolt, Flannery was denying the existence of the Medieval Warm
Period and the Little Ice Age.
When Flannery pointed out that he discusses both in his book Bolt
maintained that because they weren't mentioned in the extract
drafted in the paper as well, Flannery was up to no good.
In an obvious reference to the last Ice Age, Flannery said:
A few thousand years ago, when the world was five degrees cooler,
this coastline, this beach here was 100km south of here.
Bolt decided that the only possible meaning of "a few thousand" was
5,000 even after Flannery explained the obvious reference to the Ice
Age. So Bolt decided that Flannery was both saying that there had
been no change in temperatures in the past 10,000 years and also that
it had been five degrees cooler 5,000 years ago.
Bolt also claims that in his Age piece Flannery:
warned that Hurricane Katrina, which tore into the United
States in August, showed we were making changes to the climate that
"can threaten civilisation as we know it".
Flannery did not say that Katrina showed anything of the sort. What
he actually
said
was that global warming could make hurricanes like Katrina more
frequent, not that Katrina proved the existence of global warming.
Bolt also writes:
ask yourself if I've indeed lied
OK, done.
Tim,
"As the planet warms, of course a lot of heat transfer is going into the ocean, so we have the potential to generate massive storms like this.
The atmosphere warms the oceans.
Right.
Stick to C++
Nice try, Louis, but I don't think you will ever top [this one.](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/hissink.php)
This inspired me to read Mr. Bolt's initial article (titled "Hysteria heats up") as Tim linked to under "The Weather Makers". The first thing that caught my eye was this:
But as glacier researcher Roger Braithwaite noted in Progress in Physical Geography, some glaciers are growing and "there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years".
While Dr. Braithwaite does say this in his paper Glacier mass balance: the first 50
years of international monitoring, he is presenting it in a statistical sense at 95%. He goes on to say that the effect from global warming should not become evident from a mass balance for several more years.
However if you look at his Figure 9 titled "Mean mass balance and 95% confidence interval (16 years) plotted against region number" you will see that out of 11 regions, there are:
7 where the 95% CI is still negative (showing a loss of mass),
1 where the mean is negative but a significant amount of CI is positive,
2 with means of almost 0 and,
1 showing a positive mass balance however the CI extends significantly into negative territory.
Thus while he is correct in his quote, I feel that the context does not really support his premise.
John.
Well you can't blame Bolt for that. I'm sure he's never read Braithwaite's paper and got the quote from Junk Tech Science Station or the like.
"However if you look at his Figure 9 titled 'Mean mass balance and 95% confidence interval (16 years) plotted against region number' you will see that out of 11 regions"
Looking for a CI95 out of 11 regions? Seems to me to be reporting a precision which does not actually exist within the data.
Tim,
Your purported quotes in 2 above might result in some serious monetary discomfort for you, which I am eager to follow, sensing success.
Should I proceed?
Louis - What you seem to have not understood, and this seems only to need to be explained to you, is the assumed words in the quotes.
"As the planet warms, -insert for Louis - from the increase in trapped long-wave radiation - end of insertion - of course......"
Perhaps you should stick to peddling pseudo science on Thornton.
Flannery uses language that is at best ambivalent; in this piece (and there are plenty others) he does say that GW contributed to Katrina;
TIM FLANNERY: Well look, when you're talking about any individual climatic event like that, you can't really assign a cause to it. These systems are a bit chaotic and why and where you know, hurricanes originate and where they end up dissipating all that energy is pretty much in the lap of the gods.
But what we can say is that the underlying conditions that give rise to those big events has been affected by the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1467377.htm