bobcarter
tlambert | July 13, 2011Bob 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…
tlambert | July 3, 2011On 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…
tlambert | June 30, 2011John 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…
tlambert | June 25, 2011The 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…
tlambert | January 24, 2011The 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.
tlambert | October 7, 2010Bob 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…
tlambert | March 28, 2010Well, now we know why McLean's Reply to the demolition of their paper was rejected. In a response being published by SPPI (was it rejected by even Energy and Environment?), they claim this was because of a vast conspiracy against them. But they make the mistake of including the rejected Reply, so anyone can see that they admit that their analysis was "based on differentials between 12 month averages", which removes any long term trend. That they don't find a long term trend after removing does not show that there is no long term trend. No doubt the referee's reports made this point as…
tlambert | March 21, 2010James 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…
tlambert | February 19, 2010The Australian Government has set up a Coasts and Climate Change Council to plan how to adapt to increases in sea levels and cyclone intensity that global warming will most likely bring. Since its about adaption to climate change and planning for the future, in a rational world even on opponent of mitigation like The Australian would be on board, but they are not. The Australian is certain that scientists are wrong about sea level rise and they have an impeccable authority:
Bondi veteran Lee Boman has swum at the beach for more than 30 years and was adamant he had seen "no change" to the…
tlambert | August 6, 2009It's only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The authors are G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth and the abstract says:
McLean et al. [2009] (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly (GTTA) and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude…
tlambert | July 28, 2009John 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…
tlambert | June 26, 2009Senator Fielding has rejected the science and now claims:
Over the last 15 years, global temperatures haven't been going up and, therefore, there hasn't been in the last 15 years a period of global warming,
Clearly there was never any chance of convincing someone who can look at a graph like this one and not see any increase in temperature since the mid 90s:
Fielding has released a reply from his four denialists to the answers to his questions. Basically they just continue to insist that global warming stopped in 1998. Tamino takes them apart with lots of graphs:
It's appropriate to end…
tlambert | June 24, 2009Last 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…
tlambert | April 13, 2009Some 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…
tlambert | March 16, 2009Allow me to shorten Heartland's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change for you.
Joseph L. Bast: Bray's survey shows that there is no consensus.
Vaclav Klaus: Environmentalists have a secret plan to "return mankind centuries back".
Richard Lindzen: It is an error to say "It's the sun!"
Tom McClintock: Al Gore is fat. And, it's the sun!
Lawrence Solomon: Environmental organizations are pawns of the foundations that fund them.
Tom Segalstad: Total human emissions of CO2 are twice the alleged increase in atmospheric CO2, therefore human emissions cannot be the cause of the increase.
Syun…
tlambert | January 19, 2009Today'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…
tlambert | December 18, 2008The Australian seems to have realized that their delight over Rudd's ETS was a giveaway and they are trying to provide some cover. Today we have a piece from Henry Ergas opposing the scheme:
As for the emissions trading scheme, if the main emitters are not reducing their emissions -- as the Government's 5 per cent target assumes -- why go it alone?
And a piece from Bob Carter with some almighty whoppers about the science.
First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate or magnitude…
tlambert | December 13, 2007Bob Carter has managed to get a whole bunch of people to sign a letter touting his warming ended in in 1998 claim. Here's what they signed:
there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
I bet that they didn't include a graph of global temperatures:
You know, even the CEI admits that this "warming ended in 1998" claim is disingenuous, but look at all the people who signed Carter's disingenuous letter.
And look…
tlambert | July 17, 2007John Quiggin details how the ABC made lemonade from the lemon that is the Great Global Warming Swindle. You can see the video of Tony Jones' questioning of Martin Durkin here, or read the transcript here. Durkin was unable to offer any defence of his misrepresentation of the science.
David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Coughlan have a paper in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society on the Swindle:
In summary the documentary is not scientifically sound and presents a flawed and very misleading interpretation of the science. While giving the…
tlambert | April 10, 2007Hey, remember how all the global warming skeptics used to say that warming wasn't happening because the satellite data didn't show a warming trend. Until in 2005 when they found a mistake in the satellite data and what do you know, it did show warming. And they stopped using that argument? Well Bob Carter isn't going to let a little thing like that bother him. He is still claiming that satellite data shows no warming.
Here he is in the denialist Daily Telegraph:
However, our most accurate depiction of atmospheric temperature over the past 25 years comes from satellite measurements (see…