bob carter
Bob Carter has been cherry picking for a long time, trying to make global warming go away. Tamino examines Carter's latest effort. This, for me, was the highlight
Carter does pay lip service to the idea of a trend. But he disdains the trend for the entire data set -- in fact he seems to disdain trends altogether -- instead showing these two straight lines, one ending at 1997, the other beginning at 1999:
He then tells a fable about the 1998 el Nino causing some kind of "shift" in the fundamental state of the climate system, after which it "settled in" to a different basic temperature…
On the heels of his previous piece, Bob Carter has got another opinion published in a Fairfax newspaper, this time in the Sun Herald. (No link, I don't want to encourage them -- you can find it via Sou). Once again, the editor at Fairfax appears to completely indeifferent to whether Carter's claims are true or not. I guess fact checking is too much work these day. See Sou for a detailed examination of many of the falsehoods Carter presents, but I'll just pick out one of the more blatant ones.
For example, the sun recently entered a quietude unknown since the Little Ice Age. Accompanying…
John Cook has already thoroughly demolished this Bob Carter opinion piece in The Age, but I just wanted to highlight the failure in the editing process that allowed Carter's piece to be published as it was. Amongst other false or misleading claims, Carter claimed as a "Fact" that CO2
acts as a valuable plant fertiliser. Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert,
Even someone with a little bit of common sense would notice that the difference between the Amazon and the Sahara isn't that there is a shortage of CO2 in the Sahara, but the editor at The Age didn't see any problem…
The series of articles on climate change in The Conversation concludes:
David Karoly: Bob Carter's climate counter-consensus is an alternate reality:
Let's fall through a rabbit hole and enter a different world: the "Carter reality". In that world, it is OK to select any evidence that supports your ideas and ignore all other evidence. ...
In the Carter reality, "there has been no net warming between 1958 and 2005." Of course, in the real world, there is no basis for this statement from scientific analysis of observational data. The decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, which was…
The ABC's AM radio show had a story on the record temperatures in 2010 and chose to let Bob Carter to spout falsehoods without any challenge. They didn't even ask him about his frequent claims that world had been cooling for a decade. Gareth Renowden has the details.
Bob Ward on the Science Show says:
I looked at one example by Bob Carter, it was published in an Australian economics journal a couple of years ago called Economic Analysis and Policy. And I noted first of all that it had a quote in it, attributed to John Houghton who was a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It includes a quote in there that John Houghton has never said, he's never written and never said, yet it is in this paper by Carter. So that was wrong, I knew.
But the more I looked at the paper, almost on every sentence there was a question over its accuracy…
James Annan writes that their paper debunking McLean, De Freitas and Carter has been published and:
Amusingly, the comment will be published alone, without the customary Reply. Why? Because...McLean et al couldn't muster a reply that was publishable (and not for want of trying, either - it was simply rejected).
I'm sure Energy and Environment will publish it quick smart.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is less kind:
1) Will McLean et al. retract the paper (and will Bob Carter admit fault or even discuss the errors publicly)?
2) Will the denial0sphere and the MSM give this story (a climate change scandal…
John McLean, the guy who kept guiding Andrew Bolt off cliffs, has this time taken Bob Carter and Chris de Freitas with him. As tamino explains, they say that recent warming trends can be attributed to natural variation, but their analysis removed the trend from the data. See also McLean's defence and Robert Grumbine's lucid post. James Annan exposes another error - they fit a step function to that data and conclude that there is step in the data merely because there is a step in the fitted step function. John Lott made the same mistake in his "more guns, less crime" argument, as I showed…
Last week week Senator Fielding met with the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong to discuss the link between global warming and greenhouse gas. While Fielding claimed to have an 'open mind', this was rather undercut by his bringing four denialists to the meeting: Bob Carter, David Evans Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth. Naturally, The Australian gives them space to write about global warming isn't happening and how their questions were not answered. Wong has answers to their questions (written by Will Steffen) here, but I'll give my answers as well:
Carter and co write:
Is it the case…
Some folks suggested the Windschuttle hoax was too subtle, that the claims in the hoax article were not outrageously false. Well it seems that Windschuttle has been tricked into publishing an article by one Bob Carter which has the outrageously false thing covered:
First, there has been no recent global warming in the common meaning of the term, for world average temperature has cooled for the last ten years. Furthermore, since 1940 the earth has warmed for nineteen years and cooled for forty-nine, the overall result being that global average temperature is now about the same as it was in…
Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling
Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?
Well, look at this graph from my previous post. When you want to talk about climate trends, you need to use at a bare minimum ten years and not cherry pick your starting point.
Carter continues:
There are two…
This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
Global temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Global Warming is over.
Answer:
At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analysis. In fact, it was not just a record year, it blew away the previous record by .2oC. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!) According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the…