bobcarter
tlambert | April 3, 2007John Baez invented the crackpot index, a simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:
A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. ...
And so on, down to the high scoring items like:
40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
Guess who just got the big 40 points?
Our old friend, Bob Carter.
And I can't resist pointing out some of Carter's one point scores. You have to…
tlambert | January 26, 2007Earlier I wrote about Khilyuk and Chilingar
their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not.
So who has discredited themselves by citing them?
Robert M. Carter, C. R. de Freitas, Indur M. Goklany, David Holland and Richard S. Lindzen
Ron Bailey
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Andrew Bolt
Tim Blair
The Idsos
Pat Michaels
Pat Michaels went way beyond merely citing them, writing over a thousand words about how it was peer-reviewed and how the authors were from USC and how it…
tlambert | January 17, 2007The Stern Review: A Dual Critique was published in an economics journal and critiques climate science. Not surprisingly, as Nexus 6 reports, peer review was grossly inadequate. The critique slams Stern for, get this, ignoring Khilyuk and Chilingar. That's the paper that compared human CO2 emissions with natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet and concluded that human emissions didn't matter.
Here's why Khilyuk and Chilingar is the gift that that keeps giving: their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or…
tlambert | November 2, 2006Today's Australian has a Bob Carter opinion piece attacking the Stern report. Carter lets fly with his usual over-the-top rhetoric:
the Stern review is destined to join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and think tank the Club of Rome's manifesto, Limits to Growth, in the pantheon of big banana scares that proved to be unfounded. It is part of the last hurrah for those warmaholics who inhabit a world of virtual climate reality that exists only inside flawed computer models.
Carter sounds like the Creationists who claim that evolution is a theory in crisis.
But what is going to prove all…
tlambert | June 15, 2006Matt Drudge recently linked to a web site claiming that climate experts disagreed with Al Gore about global warming. Hundreds of blogs uncritically swallowed the claim.
One of the few skeptics was Bruce Perens who wrote
We ran a pointer to a global-warming-doubter story this morning. Here's the link. I decided to pull the story after reviewing the author attribution (he's from a paid political PR agency), and the venue's other coverage on this issue. Sorry.
Hey, I've got my doubts about global warming too. But it does seem that the "con" side of the argument often comes from people who are…
tlambert | May 9, 2006In the olden days to become a leading climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
A group of leading climate scientists has announced the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about man-made global warming. ...
The coalition includes such well-known climate scientists as:
Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most recently a visiting scholar at…
tlambert | May 2, 2006One favourite tactic of creationists is that of "quote-mining", using out-of-context quotes from scientists that appear to support the creationists' position. Global warming skeptics play this game as well and a recent Calgary Herald column Tim Ball is a good example of the practice. He quotes James Hansen, Stephen Schneider, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth all of whom apparently agree that we don't know enough about climate to justify something like Kyoto. He ends up this one:
Schneider told Discover Magazine: "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements…
tlambert | April 23, 2006
James Annan writes about two programmes on the BBC. First, a good one on overselling climate change. I think that what gave the programme credibility was that they didn't talk to any of the global warming skeptics. RealClimate also has an interesting discussion.
Second, a crappy one where Bob Carter was allowed to misinform listeners and Phil Jones was given insufficient time to reply. Carter said this:
We are at the top of a little temperature cycle. And as Professor Jones knows, since 1998, which was a peak and an extra peak because of an El Nino warm year, that since 1998 the…
tlambert | April 16, 2006Bob Carter's fraudulent claim that global warming ended in 1998 seems to have been swallowed uncritically by lots of gullible global warming skeptics. Jim at Our Word is our Weapon plays whack a mole with a couple of them, Madsen Pirie and Scott Burgess. Coby Beck has more comments on Carter's cherry picking.
Also worth a look is Daniel Kirk-Davidoff at Real Climate on a Richard Lindzen op-ed that is doing the rounds.
tlambert | April 9, 2006Bob Carter has a piece in the Telegraph where he claims:
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you…
tlambert | April 8, 2006
Six Australian business leader reckon that the debate is over and climate change is real:
Six business leaders yesterday stepped into the greenhouse debate, and blew the whistle. Game over, they said: climate change is real, it's going to hurt, and unless we act now, it's going to hurt us a lot.
These guys know how to play the game. Westpac's CEO David Morgan is a former Treasury official, married to former Labor minister Ros Kelly. They weren't going to criticise John Howard over his handling of climate change; he doesn't like criticism. They just urged him to shift ground, and fast.…
tlambert | October 30, 2005The Australian reported:
THE debate on climate change is over. As far as the Howard Government is concerned, Australians must accept that humans contribute to global warming and adapt their behaviour to save the planet.
Emerging from a bush walk through the Tarkine forest in northwest Tasmania, Environment Minister Ian Campbell told The Australian that argument about the causes and impact of global warming had effectively ended.
"There is a very small handful of what we call sceptics who, in the face of seeing all of the evidence about carbon increases and all of the evidence about impacts on…
tlambert | October 9, 2005Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here.
Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn't happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who
writes:
The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. ... The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle's role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system.…
tlambert | July 16, 2005On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying:
Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth's surface warmed by
approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth
century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) projected that the average global surface
temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4
centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990
levels, by 2100.
The scientific understanding of climate change is now
sufficiently clear to justify nations taking…
tlambert | June 20, 2005Last week I wrote about
how Bob Carter was out by a factor of 20 in an estimate of how much
warming could be attributed to human activity. He has now posted the
text of another
talk where he
gives a source for his bogus claim. It's
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123013,00.html"
rel="nofollow">this FOXNews opinion piece by Steve
Milloy. Carter is a
Research Professor at James Cook University, so you would have thought
he would be aware that opinion columns by non-scientists aren't the
best source of scientific information, but I guess not.
Some highlights of his talk: He…
tlambert | June 14, 2005This
[story](http://theage.com.au/news/Science/Global-warming-cyclical-says-climate-…)
on Bob Carter in the Age is a good one for playing
[Global Warming Skeptic
Bingo](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/gwsbingo.php). Though I think I
should add a rule to the effect that if a numerical claim is wrong by
more than an order of magnitude you get a free square on the bingo
board. Look at what Carter claims:
>Carbon dioxide was a minor greenhouse gas, responsible for 3.6 per
>cent of the total greenhouse effect, [Carter] said. Of this, only 0.12 per
>cent, or 0.036 degrees Celsius…
tlambert | May 17, 2005 Last year, global warming denialist Bob Carter wrote a Tech Central Station article where he claimed that satellite measurements
show little or no long-term trend of temperature change.
I emailed him to point that the satellites actually showed significant warming. He replied that this didn't count because:
this trend is most likely produced by the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.
This year, he has written a paper where he asserts (my emphasis):
Four alternative predictions of near-future climate, based on empirical models drawn from the palaeoclimatological record, are…
tlambert | April 14, 2005 Michael Duffy has followed up his radio show that misrepresented the science of global warming with more of the same. He had Bob Carter on this time and Carter trotted out all the favourite falsehoods of the global warming sceptics. Actually, Carter complains about being called a sceptic:
Such persons, and myself as you introduced me, are often termed 'sceptics' and that's meant to be a term of denigration, but I'm a scientist...it's my job to be a sceptic, Michael, and those who are not sceptical towards human-caused global warming or, indeed, towards any other fashionable environmental…