KÃ¥re Fog has examined the lists of alleged errors in An Incovenient Truth put out by Monckton, the CEI and so on and counted how many actual errors they found. The score: in the film and book combined there were 2 errors and 12 flaws. (Fog
defines a flaw as "a misleading statement which does not fully agree with the facts".)
For comparison, Fog lists 110 errors and 208 flaws in Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
A complete list of the errors in AIT:
F, B p174: "We´ve had 30 so-called new diseases that have emerged in just the last quarter century." Diseases referred to in the book and/or the film are Dengue fever, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, arenavirus, Machupo virus, avian flu, Ebola virus, Marburg hermorrhagic fever, E. Coli 0157:H7, Hantavirus, Legionella, Leptospirosis, multi-drug-resistant TB, Nipah virus, SARS and Vibrio Cholerae 0139.
Most of these diseases are not affected by climate change.
F: "That is why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand."
B p186: (showing a photo from one of the Tuvalu islands) "Many residents of low-lying Pacific nations have already had to evacuate their homes because of rising seas."
While some people from Tuvalu have emigrated to New Zealand because of the threat of rising sea levels, the wording implies that entire populations have left. Gore's spokeswoman said:
We acknowledge that the wording of the film here is unfortunate
I don't have room to list all of Lomborg's errors, but he has more errros than Gore makes in total just on the subject of polar bears.
Lomborg has always been laughably crazy when it comes to population biology (his first book actually claimed that since we're catching so many fish, fisheries must not be in decline), but he reaches new heights when talking about polar bears.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/29/bjorn_lomborg/index2.html
Lomborg says polar bears will escape climate change unscathed, because apparently they have the power to consciously seize control of their evolution and will choose to turn into some different sort of animal, more or less immediately. He got his diploma from Pokemon University.
But as we all know, not all errors are equal! Under the framework of £reedom $cience -- as defined by experts in the field such as Steven Milloy -- we should distinguish between freedom-loving errors and freedom-hating errors. Even 1,000,000 freedom-loving errors are nothing compared to 1 freedom-hating error. Therefore, the score isn't Gore 2 : Lomborg 110, it's more like Gore 2,000,000 : Lomborg 110. Quo errat demonstrator.
I'm not completely convinced this is a fair comparison. "The Skeptical Environmentalist" contains a lot more material and covers many more subjects than An Incovenient Truth. Therefore, all things being equal one would expect more errors. However, even given that 110 to 2 is significant.
Bah. The Skeptical Environmentalist is 540 dense pages of specific referenced claims. Both the movie and the book version of an Inconvenient Truth convey over an order of magnitude less textual information content and the info they do convey is mostly unreferenced and vaguely stated so it's easy to argue that the false claims made therein aren't really errors or aren't "important" errors.
Have you read the book? AIT has large type, large spacing, large margins and huge pictures, often alternating a short, narrow column of text with a two-page photograph. (You can verify this with Amazon's "search inside the book" feature - their featured "excerpt" starts with 25 lines of text in two columns with a lunar landscape taking up the bottom third of the page, then two pages of space pictures - no text at all there - then a page of black with a thin single column of text off on the upper right side of a black page.)
In short, AIT is a picture book. So errors per page probably isn't the right metric. Errors per sentence would be an umambiguous improvement. Better yet, find some way to compute the percentage of testable, specific claims made that are erroneous. I suspect Lomborg would win by that metric.
Similarly when measuring "errors per minute" in the movie, it might make sense to leave out the significant chunk of the movie where Gore is reminiscing about life back on the farm or on the campaign trail or talking about how losing his sister changed his life.
FWIW, my favorite bit of misinformation in the AIT movie was the claim that a frog in water that is heated slowly won't jump out. It's blatantly false - Gore is passing along as truth an old urban myth because he likes the symbolism of it. Which seems like the problem of the whole movie in a nutshell.
And presumably you'd want to add the, ahem, unfortunate error in claiming that a copy of the hockey stick was one of Lonnie Thompson's ice core records?
Bishop, that's being counted as a flaw, not an error. See for yourself (which should have been the first thing before posting): http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/Goreacknowledgederrors.htm
I mentioned the frog partly because it's not listed in that allegedly "complete list of errors", demonstrating that the list isn't actually complete but merely some sort of representative sample. (And partly because the frog thing is an error that should have been obvious to any intelligent editor - it didn't require special domain-relevant expertise to tease out what might be going on there: it's just a flat-out lie.)
Referring to Mann's hockey stick as "Dr. Thompson's Thermometer" was actually listed (as a "flaw") in the "complete list of errors" so Fog gets half credit. I would count it as an outright error because if you look at the *correct* chart, the one that actually came from Lonnie Thompson, rather than the false hockey-stick chart Gore shows, the Medieval Warming Period is no longer such an insignificant red blip. Gore isn't only saying "I'm showing you data from Dr. Thompson" - that would be a flaw - he's also saying "The data from Dr. Thompson shows an insignificant MWP" - that part is the error.
#5 Bishop Hill: Read the page. That's listed there as a 'flaw' (defined, as Tim notes, as "a misleading statement which does not fully agree with the facts").
Since the information appeared in a paper by Thompson (as a comparison to ice core records, to boot), but was itself a combination of MBH98 and the HadCRUT data (and was cited as such in the Thompson paper), all Gore got wrong was the citation, misleading audiences from the source.
Considering the NRC exoneration of the hockey stick's general conclusions and the point Gore was using the graph to make, correcting this flaw amounts to no change in the overall message.
I'd suggest looking a bit deeper into the 'Gore and "Thompson's Thermometer"' argument.
Glen Raphael:
The comparison already accounts for most of your objections. Even considering only the material on global warming alone, Lomborg's errors far exceed those of Gore with flying colours:
And in terms of density:
bi: I just used Amazon's "inside the book" to estimate relative densities of the two books. If the excerpts are representative as to the relative page densities, Al Gore's book would amount to 44.5 pages of Lomborg's type density. So 14 errors amount to roughly one error every three pages. So Gore still comes out better than Lomborg on a per-character metric, but not hugely so.
(Showing my work: I estimate roughly 630 lines of text per 7 pages of Skeptical Environmentalist @ 44 characters per line. I count 95 actual lines of text in 7 pages of An Inconvenient Truth @40 characters per line. Inflation factor due to less text and more pictures: 7.295. This was based on the paperback version of both books. Actual number of lines of text in AIT in the 7 pages surveyed was: {46, 0, 0, 29, 10, 0, 10})
Here is Thompson's "thermometer" and the Hockey Stick from the original paper that Gore used. People can judge for themselves if there is a "signficant" MWP in the Thompson ice core data.
http://cce.890m.com/thompson-mann-rotated.jpg
11:
Good lord. That's what had the auditors red- faced and screeching? That's pretty amusing.
The chart Gore actually presented was actually even more hockeystick-ish than the version in Dr. Thompson's paper, due to creative smoothing, coloring, and recentering. The fact that the MWP was "a tiny red bump" was the result of this creative charting.
What still has auditors "screeching" is the fact that Lonnie Thompson often neglects to archive his data and it changes from one paper to the next so it's impossible to verify his calculations are correct.
Gore used the Hockey Stick from the graphic I provided (top graph). He meant to use the Thompson thermometer (bottom graph). He (or more accurately, his graphics people) improperly shaded the Hockey-Stick/Instrumental overlap, but there was no distortion in the magnitude of present day temperatures.
The MWP itself was shown as it exists in Thompson's paper. Everything above the line was shaded red. Everything below the line was shaded blue. Gore pointed to one little blip as "the Medieval warming period," but as skeptics will tell us, the MWP covers those centuries that are kinda-sorta warmer than subsequent centuries, regardless of where the line passes through them.
Glen, the damn Medieval Warm Period wasn't warmer than today and probably wasn't global, according to every reconstruction made in the last ten years or so. What's your point? That Gore erroneously showed an unimportant MWP before it was clear that the MWP was unimportant? Premature accuracy?
And this has what to do with Gore accidently using the wrong graphic in his book.
Standard denialist horseshit technique you're displaying here. Not merely moving the goalposts, but moving to another playing field altogether.
The MWP was probably global and appears to have been roughly of the same magnitude as recent warming according to a variety of recent reconstructions that don't involve tree rings. Notably, this one:
http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
McIntyre, McKitrick and others have amply demonstrated that the MWP/modern relationship you get depends on what sort of cherrypicking is being done with the data. Choose one set of ice cores and you get a warmer MWP than now; choose a different set and you get a colder one. Choose one outdated set of tree ring studies from the US and get a colder MWP; update to use the most recent set and you get a warmer one. And so on. You only get a *consistent* hockey stick through the combination of bad methods (according to Wegman) and bad data (according to the NAS study which said strip-bark samples should be avoided).
Glen, you should have stopped a few posts ago. By referring to Loehle's paper in Energy & Environment you are only making yourself look even more stupid.
dhogaza: Gore presented the chart of Dr. Thompson's thermometer as a form independent confirmation of the hockey stick curve. One issue with that claim is that the chart he was showing wasn't of Dr. Thompson's results. But a related question is whether Dr. Thompson's actual results - the chart Gore *should* have shown - *do* serve as independent, replicable confirmation. This is relevant to whether the AIT claim should be called an "error". In any case, some of Dr. Thompson's issues can be found here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?cat=26
Ian: Barton said "according to *every reconstruction made in the last ten years or so*." Craig Loehle's paper is a recent reconstruction; Q.E.D.
Yes, the paper has been attacked by various parties. The author has since responded to various criticisms and issued an update (found at the link I gave earlier along with the original paper) which "has data, urls, a map, proper confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, and corrections to dating issues Gavin found." FWIW, he also states that "the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
The NRC panel concluded that the MWP was not geographically diverse and they further concluded, with the same confidence as the IPCC, that modern temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least a millennium. That was based on numerous, non-imaginary, reconstructions and the evaluation of all of the uncertainties involved.
GR,
Put down the Hockey Stick.
Tell us something new.
For reference, the Realclimate article on the Loehle paper:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructi…
OMG. Climate Audit Freaks are here with their discredited, regurgitated arguments!!!
Yes, the paper has been attacked by various parties. The author has since responded to various criticisms and issued an update (found at the link I gave earlier along with the original paper) which "has data, urls, a map, proper confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, and corrections to dating issues Gavin found." FWIW, he also states that "the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
the Loehle proxies, after the corrections, end in 1935.
so no "qed" what so ever.
i doubt that the Loehle trick of adding the SMOOTHED data from GISS to the 1935 reconstruction temperature would pass ANY peer review.
if you splice the GISS data onto the reconstruction and don t SMOOTH it, to lose the last 15 years, you will see that current temp might even be higher than the upper error range.
if you chose an error range for modern temperature (from 1000s of THERMOMETERS) it will be TINY in comparison to the one around the Loehle reconstruction.
IF there is an overlap with the upper error range of the Loehle MWP, then it will be SMALL.
And, of course, he ignored the other issues Gavin raised, without so much as mentioning that those objections had been raised.
Glen Raphael:
So you're saying we should judge Gore's presentation by something Gore didn't show. Holy batman.
"FWIW, my favorite bit of misinformation in the AIT movie was the claim that a frog in water that is heated slowly won't jump out. It's blatantly false - Gore is passing along as truth an old urban myth because he likes the symbolism of it. Which seems like the problem of the whole movie in a nutshell."
That's just plain stupid.
Sod: regardless of when it ends, Loehle's "spaghetti graph" demonstrates a significant MWP with essentially global coverage. Barton made *two* claims - that the MWP wasn't warmer than today and that it wasn't global. I was responding primarily to the latter. We can't currently prove it was warmer then than today because our best means of determining the temperature then is to average a bunch of proxies that individually have dating and scaling uncertainties which will tend to drag down any record highs no matter how you combine them. The averages are bound to be less extreme than any highs or lows actually seen; the *smoothed* averages will be even more so. On top of that add in any reasonable uncertainty band and just about any conclusion at all with respect to the modern/medieval relationship will start to seem "plausible" in the IPCC sense.
Nonetheless, here's the overall mean from the original paper, which had decent global coverage and suggest a healthy MWP, one higher than the most modern /proxy-based/ measurements that met his criteria show:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2392/2047251195_13655e6124.jpg
dhogaza: Craig has responded to Gavin's arguments in other contexts but it's silly to expect *every* random bit of mud Gavin chose to sling would be reflected in the *published* corrected and improved article.
One great thing about Craig's article is that he listed *objective criteria* for choosing the series he did and he followed those objectives to the best of his abilities. (Many prior studies seem to have allowed a much wider latitude for cherry-picking, never making it clear why one series was included and another similar series with opposite trend excluded.) Another is that he he didn't base it on secret unarchived data or methods, making it much easier for his critics to raise legitimate issues. Lastly, he responded to most of the issues raised, resulting in a stronger paper.
There were very few criticisms that have been made of Craig Loehle's approach that weren't equally applicable to that of, say, Moberg.
Raphael, here's what Gavin wrote:
(emphasis mine)
Does this sound like "a random bit of mud"?
Especially when denialists, um, 'skeptics' themselves try to discredit the use of climate models precisely by pointing to an alleged lack of validation -- the good old "climate models can be rigged to fit any data" canard? (Yes, validation is an important issue; but the denialists are being bogus because real climate scientists do take care of validation.)
And again, Raphael, what's the great idea with judging Gore's book and presentation according to something Gore didn't show?
Uhg. Defending the smoothed hockey stick graph used by Gore again...
What about if we find a new consenus with the latest peer reviewed paper on this subject?
Loehle's 2000 year reconstruction goes back further.
climatepatrol:
...what?
Sod: regardless of when it ends, Loehle's "spaghetti graph" demonstrates a significant MWP with essentially global coverage. Barton made two claims - that the MWP wasn't warmer than today and that it wasn't global. I was responding primarily to the latter.
sorry Glen, but you claimed:
"the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
Loehle was forced to change his "end date" back from 1980 (still pretty far behind "today") to 1935.
so you don t think that the form of a HOCKEY STICK changes "appreciably", when you cut of the blade?
----------------
Uhg. Defending the smoothed hockey stick graph used by Gore again... What about if we find a new consenus with the latest peer reviewed paper on this subject? Loehle's 2000 year reconstruction goes back further.
i would prefer to speak of a 1900 years reconstruction. i DO notice, that you guys prefer to leave out comments about the END DATE (1935!!!), when plotting the Loehle results.
ps: i haven t seen any evidence that E&E does peer review. if they do, they missed that Loehle had his end date wrong by 50 years. the magazin is doing it s best, to discredit its own WEAK credentials.
Glen Raphael posts:
[[You only get a consistent hockey stick through the combination of bad methods (according to Wegman) and bad data (according to the NAS study which said strip-bark samples should be avoided).]]
The NAS study said that fourteen subsequent studies to Mann et al. all got hockey-stick curves, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about.
Someone should be doing this with all the books on ID to reveal all the errors in them.
The latest version of the Hockey Stick goes back 2000 years. Others go back that far as well. In fact, the NRC report was titled "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years." They concluded that you can only go back to about 900 AD and still retain any confidence in the results.
Barton: The NAS study didn't bother to determine whether those subsequent studies *shared the same flaws as MBH*. For instance, NAS said strip bark samples should be avoided, but many of those subsequent studies used strip bark samples. You can't reasonably say "sure, this study had flaws X and Y, but its conclusions were broadly confirmed by other studies (that also had flaws X and Y), so the flaws in the original study don't matter." That's essentially what NAS did.
The more general problem is that the subsequent studies weren't really *independent* - they didn't just use the same *type* of data, they often used the exact same series. To get *independent* confirmation, you'd need to go out and collect *new* data that hadn't already been mined and analyzed as part of the original argument you're trying to confirm.
Bring the proxies up to date!
http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?p=89
Matt: this sort of error-auditing often been done with ID and creationism sources. Google "talk.origins" and "talk design" for a starting point.
LOL!
ROTFL!
(Apologies for explaining the joke: it's correct, grammatical Latin and means "thereby errs the demonstrator". Where did you get this gem? Did you discover it yourself?)
Glen Raphael plays the stripped bark card.
I'd like Mr. Raphael to explain exactly what the problems associated with core sampling of trees with stripped bark are.
Color me suspicious how this throw away line with no supporting discussion or explanation made it's way into the NAS review.
It is not surprising it has become an icon of the CAuditors and their transcendental capabilities of weaving such apparently indubitable doubt from the most gossamer of threads.
It does peer review but it's not a scientific journal (except maybe "social" or "political" science) so who knows what qualifications the "peer reviewers" have. The editor does not claim to use peer scientists for reviewing.
So which proxies apart from Fennoscandia (which is in Europe) show any significant MWP? Answer: none.
All of this to-do over a paper that has nothing to do with showing that global warming is happening, it merely shows how significant the current global warming is compared with natural climate variations over the last 1000 years.
David MarjanoviÄ:
Oh... I found it on Wikipedia.
On £reedom $cience, I must admit a shameful error: while replying to the post Riyadh Lafta, I discovered that the methodology of £reedom $cience isn't the totally unprincipled mess that I thought it was. The truth is that £reedom $cience is a long, arduous, painstaking, and rigorous process. The selection of Patriotic Americans for the research team, the removal of liberal bias, and the submission of the fruits of research to Peer Review (by reviewers such as Michelle Malkin et al.) -- each of these steps is fraught with great difficulty, and must be executed with extreme care.
(On a less flippant note, it does now seem that movementarians have erected their very own "rigorous" "academic process", except it's organized along totally different principles.)
= = =
Regarding my point on validation, I hear Raphael saying,
And luminous beauty says,
I nominate the above phrase for the award of Best Phrase Ever. :)
It's at that point that Mr. Raphael and Mr. McIntyre suffer from cognitive failure. Their comfort zone is the quote: NAS said strip bark samples "should be avoided". Don't expect them to ever venture outside their comfort zone.
What's the problem with this or another kind of peer review of the new reconstruction? The important thing is that the non-treering proxies Loehle had already been peer-reviewed to start with. I would like to ask the specialists here if you know an exact description about the proxies used and the splicing of proxy data with giss data? Heck. It was about as warm as now at the peak of the early mevieval warm period. The short-term peaks (less than 29 years) may have been higher such as for instance January 2007 was about 0.8°K higher than January 2008. So what's this unprecedented warming if the whole globe can cool by 0.8°C in one year?
the proxies used and the splicing of proxy data with giss data? : In the mann spaghetti graph I mean?? What does make Mann more credible a source than Loehle? Politics? Majority rules? Or the description of the accurate science?
What do barks tell us about the winter season? Close to nothing in higher latitudes. That's high school knowledge, isn't it?
climatepatrol:
You're so open-minded and so interested in the subject that you can't be bothered to read the explanations people have already given?
Oh sorry, I shouldn't have asked. After all, the open-minded, skeptical climatepatrol has branded me as an "evil mind".
I know the answer to some of my questions have already been given. Gavin of RC seems to be some sort of archscientist in the AGW community. Most people feel save just to quote him.
OK bi. The human heart/mind is ever so deceiving. No bi, I don't judge you. No man and no woman is only good or only bad. Neither am I:-). As long as you discuss in a fair way and bring new basis for discussion, I'll try to respond. But where you just linked my eye is where I didn't find any relevance. Sorry. There was relevance by LB alright. It led to an article by Gavin I had already read. Nothing new under the sun:-).
luminous: As I understand it, the problem with strip bark samples is that their relationship to temperature is unclear.
Problem #1: strip bark samples show *too strong* a growth signal in the early 20th century to be merely reflecting temperature. A popular theory regarding this is that the extra growth is due to CO2 fertilization, but not everyone accepts this theory and it's not clear how much one should correct for it to improve the signal.
Problem #2 aka "the divergence problem": strip bark samples often suggest *cooling* in the 1990s. If you take some series used in MBH which ended in the 1960s or the 1980s and go back to resample (Gavin would call this "validating using out-of-sample data" :-) ), you would expect to find warming in the 80s and 90s, but this is not the case. Rather, you often find a flat or declining signal.
Again, there are interesting and potentially plausible theories to account for it. For instance, perhaps the tree growth/temperature relationship is an inverse U shape rather than linear, where you get *more* growth up to some optimum temperature level, then you start to get *less* growth when the temperature exceeds that level. If this is true, then it could prevent tree samples from correctly showing how warm it was in the distant past; we would expect it to "diverge" then just as it has today.
Problem #3: the most likely connection should be between tree growth and *local* temperature, but often the strip bark samples show a spike that is particularly unrelated to local thermometer-measured temps. Mannians have been known to introduce the notion of "teleconnection" to deal with this sort of thing - perhaps the temperature increase over *here* somehow affects the climate in other ways that improve tree growth over *there*.
In summary, strip-bark trees don't make a good temperature proxy today - when we have good temperature records - so the case for using them as a temperature proxy for centuries ago has issues. Until these issues are resolved, their use should be avoided. As the NAS recommended.
What does make Mann more credible a source than Loehle?
you mean apart from Mann being a climate scientist?
and apart from publishing in REAL scientific magazins?
your hero Craig Loehle is working for an institution, that describes its purpose like this:
NCASI's Mission: To serve the forest products industry as a center of excellence for providing technical information and scientific research needed to achieve the industry's environmental goals and principles.
http://www.ncasi.org/about/default.aspx
If you expect to be taken seriously by scientists, you don't ignore the kind of criticism you'd get if you were to submit a paper to a scientific journal. Especially when that criticism comes from a leading scientist in the field, and when you can't get any support from any other reputable scientist in the field.
The paper would never have passed peer review if it had been submitted to a serious venue.
NAS's "While "strip-bark" samples should be avoided" quote is based on the paragraph on the previous page of their report that begins with "The possibility that increasing tree ring widths in modern times might be driven by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, rather than increasing temperatures, was first proposed by LaMarche et al. (1984) for bristlecone pines". So they're not suggesting (and neither does anyone else) that there is any problem with this proxy before atmospheric CO2 levels started to increase. Indeed, MBH99 shows very good agreement between the North American PC#1 and the composite northern treeline series (which only goes back usefully to 1428 AD) until rising CO2 levels started making a difference. (Or perhaps we should tell those naughty northern treeline trees not to "teleconnect" with bristlecone pines.) So the bottom line is that bristlecone pines make good proxies before CO2 levels started to rise and the only significant issue for using them in reconstructions for this period is how to calibrate them. So arguments over anything other than calibration don't make sense.
dhogan: Every proxy Loehle used had already been previously validated as a temperature signal in the published scientific literature, putting him well ahead of many of the studies Gavin supports. Nobody is saying Craig should ignore any criticisms or that this is the final word on the matter, but the question of what needs to be addressed in *this* article (as opposed to some future one) is not Gavin's decision or yours. This well may not be the article Gavin would have written but it stands on its own merit doing exactly what it claims to do and acknowledging what it doesn't. You might even want to try reading the paper before dismissing it based on Gavin's sneering assessment.
Chris wrote: *"So which proxies apart from Fennoscandia (which is in Europe) show any significant MWP? Answer: none."*
Good grief. Maybe it's too much to get you guys to read the entire original Lohle paper, but how about just the supplement? It's short, really. Here's a link:
http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/AGW/Loehle/SupplementaryInfo.pdf
The "References" has some nice plots starting on page 14.
and
There seems to be some misunderstanding of what gives "peer review" its value and consequently the value of papers that are "peer reviewed". A "peer" review is only as good as its reviewer's expertise in the subject so if, for example, Einstein's paper on the photo-electric effect had only been reviewed by zoologists then I very much doubt that he would ever have got a Nobel prize for it, regardless of how good the reviewers might have been as zoologists. The same thing goes for reviewers for "Energy and Environment". The editor makes no claim that her reviewers are credible climate scientists so the papers it publishes are not credible climate science papers.
You may find this link of interest:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shaopeng/97GL01846.pdf
Alan, the paper you link has already been [discussed here](http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/more_boring.php). Only skeptics take it as showing a MWP.
#53-#56
Sorry, Tim, I take your hint that we should stick to the main topic. We skeptics just have to accept the fact that school books regarding the MWP have to be rewritten since the existence of the IPCC and that Gore represents the mainstream with his presentation on this one (Science, Nature, AGU,...) albeit labelled as "flawed".
Nevertheless, here is a list of the 18 previously peer-reviewed "proxy record papers" as used by Loehle (not just bore wholes):Loehle proxies
climatepatrol:
Why not, you know, "stick to the main topic", which is Gore vs. Lomborg?
We're talking about grave issues like massive flooding and loss of arable lands, climatepatrol. Not some fantasy issue about what you want your precious textbook to read like.
The "flaw" was just in saying "Thompson" instead of "Mann". Way to go in manufacturing a mountain of doubt from a shred of nothing.
Sure. I brought this to an end I hope. And if you really want to talk about those grave issues and not merely the adaption of polar bears to a changing environment (with or without AGW), here is the link to an online version of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Glen,
Nothing in your rant explains why stripped bark trees should be avoided. Any of your problems could apply to any set of trees. They are problems of selection. Some tree's growth is dominated by moisture changes, others by temperature changes, some by fire incidents, some by disease and insect infestations, some by changes is soil, some provide a record of regional volcanic activity, some have no useful information at all. That they could be problems with MBH98 are belied by MBH's careful and expert selection and validation process, which the CAuditors ignore in favor of their fevered fantasia of imagining remotely possible errors that, if they were real, still wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.
Why do professional dendrochronologists avoid stripped bark trees as a general principle? What is different about bristlecone pines that makes them an exception to that general principle?
If you can answer these questions, I'll begin to believe you might have the slightest grasp of the subject.
Only in the event that they contain claims about the MWP being global rather than just European. Since the historical records were only European, there was never justification for claiming global observation.
Again, if it had been submitted to a peer-reviewed science journal, the author would've had NO CHOICE but to respond to the criticisms to the satisfaction of the editor and reviewers.
There's a reason crap like this gets submitted to E&E rather than a science journal. It's to avoid having to respond to valid criticism in peer review, or outright rejection due to fatal flaws.
You're right, though, if someone chooses to publish a climate science paper in a journal reviewed by social scientists, they don't have to respond to meaningful criticism by climate science reviewers. That's their right. And it's the right of the climate science community to laugh at their errors, and to write about them in as scathing a manner as they choose.
Bias upon bias
Here is just one example of KÃ¥re Fog's many doubious claims of a Lomborg-
ERROR:
And here are the latest facts:
gistemp map January 2008 but then I am not qualified as a peer;-).
#59: The main topic of this thread was the number of ridiculous, permanently disqualifying errors Lomborg has made on many topics, including polar bear survival in the face of AGW. And I again point to his glib laymanisms about how polar bears will surely save themselves by evolving into something else, on purpose and immediately.
I had the very great pleasure of spending seven days in the field several weeks ago with a very well-known North American carnivore ecologist, who was in Australia on sabbatical and who was interested in the biology of the carnivorous marsupials that I and my colleagues are frantically monitoring, in the face of the decimation of their populations. She and I spoke for many many hours on the plights of our various target species, and one of her primary ones is the polar bear.
Make NO mistake - this species is in great peril, the delusions and the wishings otherwise of the denialists notwithstanding. I grind my teeth to stubs whenever I am cavalierly informed, by ignorant twits, of the capacity for adapTAtion by polar bears in response to warming of their habitat. And I am all the more chagrined to be thus informed that such adapTAtion may be possible when the informer is of a religious bent that essentially denies (there's that word again...) the concepts of evolution and its concomitant processes of natural selection and thereby adapTAtion.
Climatepatrol, you are barking up the wrong tree if you think that polar bears have the capacity for more than the slightest adapTAtion to decadal or even centurial change to their narrow bioclimatic envelope. I will trust the wisdom of a 30-year experienced carnivore biologist, who has worked extensively with all of the North American ursine species, over that of someone who has no such experience at all. And I will call you on your experience.
However to be fair I checked your webpage to make sure that you weren't quietly sitting on a font of ecological wisdom that had somehow passed me by. Nothing surprised me though.
Unless of course one counts your posting NH January 2008 Snow Cover Beats Historical 1984 Record. This is a breath-taking example of the cherry picking that seems to be the wont of those of your ilk, and to my mind it seems calculated to present a VERY slanted perspective to those who read your rambling. One swallow does not a summer make, and one month does not a winter make. Most especially, one month does not a longer term trend make, and you should put your imputations in proper context by directing the unsuspecting, who stumble across your site, to a well-presented and supported site such as the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University, where charts such as the November 66 to January 08 Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover Anomalies stick the pin in your denialist bubble. The Lab even provides scads of data for any interested person to play with, and anyone competently doing so would arrive at a very different conclusion than the 'warming is not happening' thrust you seem to be promoting.
Ironically, anyone with half a brain who eyeballed your snowcover graphic would notice the apparent greater preponderance of white bars at the top (the earlier years), and even without performing a perfunctory statistical analysis they would smell a rat. As to your fixation with the January 08 temperature anomaly - well, I'll leave that for another to pick up if it's really necessary, because I think that I have expended enough of my early hours beating my head against a wall that surely has no ears at all.
luminous: Right, it's a selection issue. Now suppose that the pool of available tree records has a significant noise component due to all these problems you mentioned so you have to apply an "expert selection and validation process" to select those whose noisy trends appear consistent with temperature trends during a time when the temperature was rising. What will you see prior to the validation period? The random noise in the period that wasn't selected on will tend to cancel out and it will look flat, like the shaft of a hockey stick. What will you see *after* the validation period if you go back and resample the same trees a decade or two later? A divergence between the tree trend and the temperature trend.
This is what we actually see with the tree samples used by MBH. Implying it was the validation process that created the trend.
I agree that these are problems that could happen with any sort of tree-based records. That is why it was worth trying the experiment of simply *excluding all tree-based records* to see if the trend was significantly different when one used other long-term sources. As it turns out, it was.
Not true and not significant:
http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_congress/7_27_06.cfm
A reconstruction without statistical skill has no statistical skill.
Hi Bernard J.
No, I know next to nothing about the capacity of polar bears to adapt to a warming environment such as the Beaufort Sea. That's why I don't attempt to discuss it. That was just an attempted title. It is such a controversal and emotion stirring subject, and the two groups throw mud at each other. The last year's Summer retreat was so fast that it must have caused some stress to the population of some species there. And yes, the warming in the Polar Region is most pronounced during the summer (which can be seen on the snow chart you mention alright, while there is no significant trend in the winters of the satelite aera.) If you want to say something about the amateur reporting in my blog (with its source citations), you are welcome to comment there. Here it might disturb the discussion "Lomberg beats Gore 110 to 2".
climatepatrol, you didn t seriously try to contradict this:
It is seen here that since the mid 20th century, annual temperatures have increased significantly at the west Antarctic Peninsula and in one coastal station on mainland Antarctica.
with a link to a SINGLE month temperature?
And here are the latest facts: gistemp map January 2008 but then I am not qualified as a peer;-).
Bernard J.
adaptation n (1610): The act ...
adaption n (1704): ADAPTATION
Source: Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edn.
adaptation n E17: The action ...
adaption n M17: ADAPTATION
Source: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 4th edn.
polar bear n (1781): a large creamy-white bear, now extinct in the wild
Source: Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 34th edn.
P. Lewis.
I think bj was pointing out that in English-speaking biology 'adaption' is rarely used by those in the field. the accepted term is 'adaptation' - and its misuse shows to a small extent whether a user is familiar with this field. Editors will correct you - heck, even our favourite search engine will.
I think that bj will be surprised to find that his friend's bears became extinct by the 16th century. It must have been the mwp wot dun it!
Not to mention the irony of the same map showing the huge warm anomaly in the Arctic. It takes a lot of tunnel vision...
Thanks for making that obvious, again.
Having missed the goal the last time, Mr Raphael (like any good troll) moves the goal posts:
If denialists like Mr Raphael were paying attention then they would know that this has already been done eight years ago.
according to a non-peer reviewed paper.
I'll stick to the peer-reviewed paper, thanks.
#69
Sod, you know me enough by now. I will not engage in any arguments about statistics here. I leave this up to the experts. But what I can say is - working in statistics myself - with so little data samples available, like in Antarctica - experts say that there is no significant trend in temperature in mainland Antarctica right now. Period. (It happens to be cooler than normal right now because of shortterm variability, where as over most of the Arctic it is significantly warmer, partly because of global warming with dirty precipitation as an important anthropogenic factor - no need to imply any tunnel vision, Chris). The point I really want to put across here is my observation that the expert KÃ¥re Fog appears to be biased himself when he easily qualifies an ERROR, like this example shows, BUT in the case of - in my humble opinion - an error of even more severe amplitude like Al Gore's presentation of the melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro Fog would just put a COMMENT not even a FLAW. Excuse me! With this kind of lecturing, this does not contribute to increase the trust level among skeptics of AGW. I am sorry to say that. And this is just one example.
In the last day or so Climatepatroll has not once, but TWICE, tried to convince the unruly warming hysterics who haunt Deltoid, or those innocent seekers of True Knowledge who read his own blog, that if anything the world is cooling. He says it first here where, referring to the second graphic, somehow one cold month rights decades of a statistically significant rate of anomaly increase.
No less mendacious (if clumsy in the extreme) is his effort above, although if he had considered the first graphic carefully he would have realised that Mercator even more cruelly contradicts Climatepatroll's vision of cooling than do the obvious areas covered by the notable warming anomaly that Chris O'Neill pointed out.
I entreat you Climatepatroll to spend a little time at places such as Tamino's informative and very rigorous site and learn about garbage and wiggles. Consider without prejudice the opinions and knowledge of those folk on Deltoid, and on other sites, who have the appropriate experience and understanding in areas that you clearly are not proficient in. And if you can learn to competently take on board the basics of data interpretation, Tamino even shows you how to put your money where your mouth is.
And when you've done this, and when you've also learned the fundamentals of ecology, we may be able to have a sensible conversation about what the data are really telling us.
Al Gore and his film are known by 99% of the population of the USA. Lomborg and his book are known by a very small percentage.
Al Gore's film has been widely seen, and is compulsory viewing for the children of England.
Al Gore's film was produced with the help of expert world famous climate scientists.
Lomborg's book was the work of a lone maverick non-scientist.
Al Gore was awarded the Nobel prize because of AIT. Lomborg is unlikely to be on the Nobel short list.
Comparing Al Gore to Lomborg is like comparing apples to elephants. To attempt to divert attention from the errors in AIT by saying that "Lomborg is worse" is rather silly.
But what I can say is - working in statistics myself - with so little data samples available, like in Antarctica - experts say that there is no significant trend in temperature in mainland Antarctica right now. Period.
sorry climatepatrol, but in post #63 you made this claim:
Bias upon bias Here is just one example of KÃ¥re Fog's many doubious claims of a Lomborg- ERROR:
the "dubious claim" was Fog´s contradiction of the Lomborg claim, that only a tiny part of antarctic warmed. Fog reply is, that the part is bigger and the trend is over 50 years.
your answer did NOT contradict what Fog said. so you did NOT proof your point, that he is making "dubious claims".
may i kindly ask you NOT to make unsupported DUBIOUS CLAIMS about other people?
Wyvern, by both dictionaries both spellings are acceptable (no preference is indicated for either spelling in either dictionary); no matter what anyone says, both are correct English usage (though there is precedence for "adaptation").
The years in parentheses (or the E17/M17) are the standard ways that dictionaries indicate dates of first recorded use of the words.
I thought my final implication was clear: the "adaptation/adaption" definitions were from the 10th edition of MWCD -- and we are currently at the 11th edition -- and the 34th edn of MWCD is likely to be published some time around 2055 to around 2090 based on recent publication history (but it could be later).
Apologies to everyone if the latter was too obscure.
For a slightly different take on sod's comment above, the quotation of KÃ¥re Fog:
is supposedly contradicted by climatepatrol:
Tell me, what is the difference in meaning of
when KÃ¥re Fog says it and
when climatepatrol says it. Call me blind but I just couldn't work out any difference.
If this is the best example that climatepatrol could come up with of KÃ¥re Fog's "many doubious claims of a Lomborg- ERROR" then I'll take it as an example that climatepatrol has many misunderstandings of KÃ¥re Fog's claims of Lomborg error.
Sod,
dubious = questionable, doubtful and is (after consulting the Webster's and Pons) the appropriate description for the result of a comparison of such different kinds of literature, while not always using the same yardstick for comparison. Yes, I think this is the right word. KÃ¥re Fog has not the wealth of wisdom to make a final judgement on this case. Now, if somebody thinks I am totally off the hook and calls me names (or mendacious) in public, then at least such a person should be of similar calibre as Mr. Justice Burton from the British High Court who identified 9 significant errors in Al Gore's movie including such which just got a COMMENT label by Fog. So my topic related point bears witness. By the way, isn't it that even Mr. Gore said that the whole globe has been warming EXCEPT most of the Antarctica?
And yes, Tamino makes sense with that 2015+ bet. And he is a great statistician and scientist indeed. Until then, we'll have to deal with the outcome of some unknown natural variability, and deal with the "uncertaincy chart" of the IPCC report). This is also in line with researchers who say that the satelite aera has been to short so far to make final conclusions about the magnitude of the human influence in the longterm trend of climate change. May truth prevail, not manipulation.
Oh, now I understand what you mean, Chris. Yes. I agree with Fog that there is no significant longterm trend. In the map I linked, I inserted 1951-2000 as the base period and January 2008 as the NOW. One can argue that there has been a local cooling on most of Antarctica by now, but fair enough, you can start an argument about statistics where experts could say there has been no significant longterm trend. So bottom line, I would call this a FLAW at best. And Gore's claim of the meltdown of Kilimanjaro because of global warming, most experts would also give a FLAW. That would be fair judgment as I see it. And I am by far the only one.
climatepatrol, here is the GISS map, showing the 1950 to 2005 TREND. please look at the antarctic part!
http://tinyurl.com/2rwsdl
climatepatrol,
Here is what Fog says about Gore's use of Kilimanjaro:
This seems a well-balanced review of the pros and cons of expert opinion to my eyes. Perhaps you can discover some subtle flaw in Fog's reasoning?
Compare this to the next comment on the Perito Moreño glacier where Fog does say it's a flaw.
climatepatrol: "I agree with Fog that there is no significant longterm trend."
Lomberg: "The vast part of Antarctica has cooled."
climatepatrol: I would call this a FLAW at best.
Sure and saying the vast part of the world has cooled would also only be a FLAW at best. I believe you climatepatrol. Thousands wouldn't, but I do.
Justice Burton [did not identify nine significant errors in AIT](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/an_error_is_not_the_same_thing…)
Thanks Tim for this reminder. I was late in the game. You are of the same calibre as Justice Burton - in your field. A very educational piece and - again - a very sharp and detailed analysis indeed! I am learning, and I think I do well in keeping my own conclusions off this thread...
(To All:)
However, I wonder what a judge would decide if there was a case made here (even with Professor Carter in the picture), whether Lomberg could really beat Gore 110 to 2 when using a 'balanced' yardstick for both Lomberg and Gore.
Whatever the case, let's go back to the example of Kilimanjaro (Gore) versus Antarctica (Lomberg). May I suggest that it is easier to measure the surface temperature on Mount Kilimanjaro and discern a trend to see if the mainstream theory of global warming applies to this particular icecap, rather than to measure the surface temperature trend over the entire Antarctica. So if the scientific case on the issue of Kilimanjaro is indeed not closed, what is really clearly established is the surface temperature record over the past decades and the non-existence of a temperature trend on top of the mountain, and this despite the fact that the albedo effect disappeared over the dwindling glaciers. So for me, this clearly remains a FLAW to blame global warming here. Whereas in the case of the Antarctica, where it is much more difficult to discern a long-term trend in surface temperature, one can easily come to the conclusion (without malice) that most (if not 96%) of the continent has in fact been cooling. (again a FLAW instead of an ERROR).
Best regards, CP
Climatepatrol, regardless of whatever point you are trying to score with Kilimanjaro, if you are trying to use factors behind the phenomenon of its glacial retreat to loosen a tooth in the mouth of climate change, you would need to do it with consideration of ALL glaciers, to start with. You cannot cherry-pick one glacier, no matter how iconic, no matter whether it is or it isn't the best example of a retreating glacier to put into a documentary, to weaken a "scientific case".
If you are trying to demonstrate that it is a "FLAW [for Gore, in terms of 'truth'] to blame global warming" for Kilimanjaro's retreat, you really should carefully consider the quote that luminous beauty posted and explain in your turn, as was requested, if there is a flaw in Fog's reasoning, and just exactly what such a flaw might be. Fog's reasoning in this quote seems eminently sensible to me, and whilst Kilimanjaro might not be the 'best' example to use to illustrate climate change it hardly warrants your fixation with it. Especially if you are ultimately trying to demonstrate the non-existence of global climate change.
With respect to:
I'm also curious to know if you are explicitly trying to claim that a cold Antarctica somehow disproves the existence of global warming. If you are, you should take your insight to the latest thread at Real Climate where some of your compadres would no doubt welcome your contribution as they advance the cause of Truth in the face of the poor, benighted and generally misinformed moderators there. I will watch with bated breath for your wisdom to appear there.
You could be a Hero.
Difficulty always makes things easy.
BTW, Antarctica is Cold? Yeah, We Knew That points out that climate scientists were never surprised by a non-warming Antarctica.
The paper from Thompson 2002 is outdated. Meanwhile, the issue is settled (Kaser et al. 2003, Cullen et al. 2006, Mölg, Cullen, Hardy, Kaser and Klok, 2007), this BBC-article is a nice summary.
What goes for Kilimanjaro, goes for other tropical glaciers - even for South-Eastern Himalayas. Right now, the whole continent of Asia has a positive anomaly of snowcover except for the southern Himalaya banana. The hypothesis is simple - less rain forest - less precipitation. I tried to add more links but the browser doesn't cooperate right now. I will deliver later upon request.
Your other question is a political one. Different questions to the addresses of climate science (and their scientific answers) lead to different suggestions for mitigation: Where does the warming occur most and under what weather and surface conditions? When is the warming stronger on a seasonal and diurnal pattern?
So if Gore's so much smarter than Lomborg why did he refuse to debate him?
Was he busy being supersized at Maccas? :)
Because "debates" of the kind that gets denialists' panties all bunched up... are pretty useless except as a way of creating noise.
Adrien writes:
[[So if Gore's so much smarter than Lomborg why did he refuse to debate him?]]
For the same reason evolutionary biologists don't debate creationists, and historians of the Holocaust don't debate Holocaust deniers. To give them a platform is to say they have a legitimate argument.
The biggest error of Lomborg is calling himself an environmentalist.
That's like calling an arsonist a fireman.
Adrien,
Its too bad I was in the UK giving lectures at several universities when Tim put this thread online.
Here's a fact: I debated Lomborg in Holland in 2002. I don't want to pat myself on the back too much but the consensus view amongst those I spoke with after was that I hammered him. It wasn't hard; since Lomborg admits himself that he is not an expert in environmental science (now there's an understatement if I ever heard one) it was quite easy to find reams of obfuscations in the biodiversity chapter of his book alone. You might recall that I co-reviewed the book with Stuart Pimm in Nature in 2001 as well.
The conclusion is this: Lomborg was offered the chance to debate me once after our first encounter (in Amsterdam: he declined) and to appear as a speaker at another venue in Denmark where I was giving a lecture (he backed out of that one at the last minute so I was told by the organizer). I spoke at Aarhus University and he didn't come to that, either, although he was apparently invited. I have no fear of him or of his 'facts'. Period.
Furthermore, Glen writes, "The Skeptical Environmentalist is 540 dense pages of specific referenced claims". Bullshit. Its 540 pages of cherry picked examples, often ignoring many more studies in peer-reviewed journals with very different conclusions.