tlambert | August 9, 2008This 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…
tlambert | August 9, 2008Atmoz examines a Climate Audit thread as Steve McIntyre and company wrestle with the question of why the northern hemisphere is warming faster than the southern hemisphere.
tlambert | August 7, 2008Clif at Sadly No mocks some blogger who thinks that because the draft report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States used a photoshopped picture of flood to illustrate a flood, rather than a picture of a real flood, this casts doubt on the science. Following the links I get to Anthony Watts who reckons that it was photoshopped "for better impact" -- I guess he thinks beautiful clean fake water has a better impact than the disgusting brown water you get in a real flood. From Watts I find, surprise surprise, that this story originated at Climate "mountains out of molehills" Audit…
tlambert | August 6, 2008Eli Rabett has the latest: Monckton and SPPI seem to think that if you declare that it is "for educational purposes" you can ignore copyright.
tlambert | August 3, 2008Robert Grumbine writes
Since I'm an ice guy, I'm saddened that a place with ice in its name turned out to be unreliable. Still, I wandered over there and took a look at the first article ... The article was by Joseph D'Aleo ... In very short order, I found a major error, a cherry pick, and an error or at least misleading graphic. I stopped there.
tlambert | August 2, 2008You can now sign the "Sue Us" peition, which calls for those people who keep threatening to Sue Gore and Hansen to do so. See also Frank Bi's post on promoting the petition.
tlambert | August 1, 2008Tamino has written three posts explaining what is wrong with Roy Spencer's calculations of a low climate sensitivity. See Part 1, Part 2and Part 3.
Brief summary: 90 days of data is not enough to estimate climate sensitivity.
tlambert | August 1, 2008Global warming skeptics just keep trying to show that Hansen's projections in in his 1988 climate model were wrong. We've had Pat Michaels, who dishonestly erased scenarios B and C from Hansen's graph, Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit, who used the wrong baseline for temperature data and Steve McIntyre used some erroneous data of satellite-measured temperatures from RSS.
McIntyre is at it again, producing the graph below. I have digitally enhanced the big red dot McIntyre put on the June 2008 GISS temperature.
I think we can all agree that Hansen 1988 completely failed to project the June…
tlambert | July 31, 2008This is the very first paragraph of Monckton's response to Gavin Schmidt's demolition of Monckton's paper on climate sensitivity.
For the second time, the FalseClimate propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of
the now-discredited "hockey-stick" graph by which the UN's climate panel tried
unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent,
scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me.
Monckton goes on to make many more ad hominem attacks on Schmidt. And what are the ad hominem attacks that Monckton alleges that…
tlambert | July 31, 2008Frank Bi suggests on open letter to John Coleman, Christopher Monckton, and Owen McShane, who have been threatening to sue Al Gore and James Hansen challenging them to bring it on.
tlambert | July 29, 2008Undaunted by the dismal failure of its war on science, the Australian presses on, with a piece by Dennis Jensen. Oops, that's not the link, this is the link:
It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.
Actually it was 80%. It doesn't inspire confidence when the Australian can't even report their own…
tlambert | July 29, 2008The latest Newspoll finds that 84% of Australians accept that climate change is occurring and 96% of those that believe that climate change is occurring think that it is wholly or partly caused by humans. A 1993 ISSP survey found that 32% of Australians don't believe that humans evolved from another species -- the comparable figure in this survey is that 15% of Australians don't accept AGW.
It is a delight to note that the poll was commissioned by the Australian, so they had to, in effect, report that their own noisy campaign against the science has been a dismal failure.
tlambert | July 29, 2008David Appell showed David Evans the AGW signature from the IPCC report that Evans claimed was missing. Evans replied:
Comparing a model to observations doesn't prove the model works. It's encouraging to the model builders, but it's not proof. For instance, the model could just be lucky.
So when Evans wrote:
The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
He meant that we had found the signature, but Evans didn't think it should count.
tlambert | July 28, 2008Back in January, Steve McIntyre used some erroneous data of satellite-measured temperatures from RSS to argue that Hansen's 1988 temperature projections were too high. A week later he posted a corrected graph, blaming RSS for not making the error clear:
The fact that users are "falling into the RSS error trap" is one more good reason why RSS should have issued a clear error notice, rather than the obscure readme. They should issue a proper notice of the error in their public webpages and wherever else appropriate.
But McIntyre did not follow his advice to RSS, and failed to make a correction…
tlambert | July 27, 2008Last year Christopher Monckton was threatening legal action if Naomi Oreskes did not apologize to Schulte:
By making the allegations his own and endorsing them with such lamentably unscientific enthusiasm, however, he has exposed himself to the legal action which may well follow if Oreskes does not come forward quickly with an unreserved apology to Schulte.
Now he's claiming that UCSD asked Oreskes to apologize:
Dr. Oreskes thrice publicly accused Mr. Schulte of having misrepresented her when he had not in fact done so, and when she had not read any draft of the paper she said had…
tlambert | July 26, 2008Hey, remember when David Bellamy claimed?
Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.
And George Monbiot's heroic efforts to track down the source of this claim? Bellamy got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age could begin any day"), which got it from Larouche's 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP (presumably S Fred Singer):
The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland…
tlambert | July 26, 2008Tom Bozzo at Angry Bear gives us a shorter Megan McArdle:
I once heard these terms of art from the electricity industry. No quizzes!
P.S., Al Gore is fat.
Bonus McArdle on Gore:
It is a funny but irrelevant fact that freak cold snaps have occurred several times that Al Gore was giving a big speech on global warming. ... the funny bit is that they happen wherever he is speaking.
tlambert | July 25, 2008Catherine Brahic, at the New Scientist enviromental blog has more on Monkcton and the APS:
[Al Saperstein, an editor of Physics and Society,] stressed that that the article was not sent to anyone for peer-reviewing. Saperstein himself edited it. "I'm a little ticked off that some people have claimed that this was peer-reviewed," he said. "It was not." ...
In April, the newsletter ran an article by retired nuclear physicist Gerald Marsh. Marsh argued that solar variations play a major role in the Earth's climate, one which overrides human emissions of greenhouse gases. ...
The editors put out…
tlambert | July 24, 2008A new paper by Chilingar, Khilyuk and Sorokhtin is up to their previous standard.
Here's the abstract:
The writers investigated the effect of CO2 emission on the temperature of atmosphere. Computations based on the adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect show that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere results in cooling rather than warming of the Earth's atmosphere.
Wow! How did they come up with that? Here's their calculation:
To evaluate the effect of anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide on
global temperature,
one can use the adiabatic model together with the sensitivity…