From the blog of Roger Pielke Sr. http://climatesci.org/
Erroneous News Article In The Times
Thanks to Andrew Forster of Local Transport Today in the UK for alerting us to the erroneous news article from the Times on December 27 2008 titled
The war on carbon – Arguments of 2009: Can Copenhagen save the planet?
An excerpt reads,
“The stakes at Copenhagen could not be much higher. Global surface temperatures have risen by a tolerable three quarters of a degree celsius over the past century, but the rate of increase is accelerating. The Kyoto Protocol has had negligible impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and projections for the mean global temperature rise in the next century range from 1.1 to 6.4 degrees. Whether fast or very fast, the Earth is heating up.
There will be continued argument about the science of climate change over the next 12 months, but not, except on the conspiratorial fringe, about the threat. Climate change is real and worsening, and there is an overwhelming likelihood that much of it is man-made.”
This is a erroneous report on the climate system! The rate of increase is NOT accelerating. There is absolutely no question that global warming has stopped for at least 4 years (using upper ocean data) ; e.g see
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55.
http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-334.pdf
and over 7 years using lower tropospheric data; e.g. see
Figure 7 TLT in http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html.
With respect to the surface temperature trends [which have a warm bias in any case, as we have documented in our peer review papers; e.g. see], a good set of analyses on this subject has been posted over the last few years at http://rankexploits.com/musings/ [you should scroll back over the last several months to view; it is an excellent comparison with model predictions]. As discussed on that website, even with the warm biased global average surface temperature trends, the models have over-predicted warming. The GISS data itself even shows recent cooling in the ocean sea surface temperatures [see their figure for Monthly-Mean Global Sea Surface Temperature; http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/ where it has cooled since 2002.
The writers of the Time article, and other journalists who write similar misinformation, damage the liklihood of responsible environmental actions as a result of their overstatement and erroneous communication to the public and policymakers of climate science.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So how do we bell this cat?
When does this cross the line from sloppy reporting to an outright LIE?
At what point will people actually realize that they are being lied to? What will they do about it? My guess is they will do the same as when CNN admitted lying about Saddam….
Conspiratorial fringe? With increasing numbers of scientists speaking out against the AGW belief system it may just be that the AGW proponents will soon themselves become that fringe.
“At what point will people actually realize that they are being lied to? What will they do about it?”
What I suppose will happen is that when it becomes so obvious that it isn’t warming that not even Hansen can “adjust” for it, the media will go absolutely silent on the issue. They will not allow the information to get to the airwaves and onto paper. They will remove all of the “oxygen” from the issue in hopes that people will simply forget about it. And their online archives will likely be stripped of the most alarming “predictions” so that historians in the future will find nothing of the hoax.
Actually, that is my main problem with news moving from ink on paper to the web. With the web archives, history can be changed by editing or removing past stories. It is currently being done quite often. Historians will not be able to trust archives from our era. At least with ink on paper stories, they could be microfilmed and archived for research later. You can’t “unprint” a newspaper.
It’s ironic that they’ve also got this story on their site.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article5420871.ece
As a long-term student of history, I can suggest an alternative: start an institute dedicated to preserving such predictions.
Well, there is http://www.archive.org … there should be more of the same, though. One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that there is no such thing as “impartial”, and just because there is a website dedicated to archiving is no guarantee that said site won’t be equally sanitized.
Historians will not be able to trust archives from our era.
But, the idea that there will even be/are trustable “Historians” is doubtful in itself. From what I’ve seen, our current “Historians” nearly all seem to be political. And why should we expect anything else from the Progressives, who have managed to, in some extent, infiltrate our rational-ethical systems?
Instead – not that they won’t rise again – their “thought” must in effect die…here….now. Much as is the case with the Islamofascists, with whom the Progressisves seem to have so much similarity to, and affinity with.
Reply: Please, a polite request to not wander too deeply into the issues of progressive or conservative politics and various tangents, even if it feels relevant to the individual poster. ~ charles the moderator
I went to the Times and posted a short comment (300 character limit) on their sloppy journalism. If enough others do the same they may get the idea that they need to do some real reporting instead of parroting the party line. Until then they will remain Norwegian Blues pinin’ for the fjords.
“The writers of the Time article, and other journalists who write similar misinformation, damage the liklihood of responsible environmental actions as a result of their overstatement and erroneous communication to the public and policymakers of climate science.”
Since when were “responsible environmental actions” ever part of the Times (and the like) agenda? Expecting honesty? That hasn’t worked since Diogenes. Probably didn’t work before then.
Reasons why Global warming might not exist in the UK Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/4029837/Global-warming-Reasons-why-it-might-not-actually-exist.html
Good grief. Holy smoke. My goodness.
“At what point will people actually realize that they are being lied to?”
Oh maybe when they’ve suffered through 4 or 5 bad winters, cool dry summers, and a few May freezes. Perhaps there will be a breaking point when the taxpayers will be required to pay taxes to correct a problem that only exists in the mind of the bureaucrats.
Thank you Rodger Pielke Sr.
When the goalposts are in the stands.
“At what point will people actually realize that they are being lied to?”
What worries me most is that most partisans don’t care. They may learn that it’s all a lie, but continue support it anyway because they don’t like to admit they were wrong.
“At what point will people [Californians, for one group] actually realize that they are being lied to?” That, is the right question. [from the movie I, Robot]
As many of you know, California enacted a Climate Change Initiative, AB 32, in 2006. The law required a Scoping Plan be adopted before 2009, so the Air Resources Board wrote then adopted (after suitable public comment) the Scoping Plan in December 2008.
There is NO PROVISION for softening the plan requirements, nor for repealing the law should the horrible rise in ocean level not occur, and/or the overheating of the Sierra mountain snowpack not occur.
Both events are trumpeted as sure to happen by the legislature, and are just two of the threats that are used for scaring the children out here. It is said that the rise in sea level would cause problems in the low-lying river delta areas around the San Francisco Bay, and the melting snowpack would deprive Californians of most of the fresh water supply.
As was amply discussed in earlier posts, the seas are not rising. Plus, from the severe snows so far this winter, the Sierra snowpack is doing just fine.
As a resident of California, I watch with great interest how this is playing out.
Just what evidence will be sufficient for Californians to vote to repeal this law? Perhaps when the seas don’t rise, and the snow doesn’t melt, and when power prices have doubled due to renewable energy mandates, and unemployment lines are longer than they are now [unemployment state-wide is around 9 percent], and even more businesses leave the state for economic reasons? I suspect that when our already high taxes are raised yet again to make up for budget deficits, that might be a tipping point! For the Europeans reading this blog, I know, your taxes are much higher than ours.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
I have one problem with this Pielke’s findings. If the upper 700 m of ocean heat is going down why is Arctic Summer ice melt going up?
If we know how the oceans’ Great Global Conveyor works:
http://www.niwa.cri.nz/__data/assets/image/0005/49712/circulation2_large.jpg
then why cannot we assess how much heat is arriving in the Arctic? Yeah, I know there are other soot and wind factors but ocean heat must be the major forcing agent? And Arctic Summer Ice melt is now the main living proof of AGW consenters and their orthodoxy.
Also, can some-one tell me if we always know when there is sub-oceanic volcanic activity – in the mid North Atlantic Ridge for example and how much heat it is giving out?
Journalists who write such misinformation risk being scooped by reporters who report reality. And newspapers which publish fiction tend to get non-journalistic reputations.
“So how do we bell this cat?”
– Graeme Rodaughan
At the risk of sounding clichéd, belling the cat doesn’t work (they’ll simply find a way to silence the bell – trust me, I grew up with cats). Good, solid, common sense, together with accepting that the cat will behave this way is the only way to deal with it. Adherence to hard and indisputable facts is the only way.
To quote E. E. “Doc’ Smith, “Prove it! Save it!”. Incontrovertible data and complete transparency. The apparent antithesis of the mainstream media and politicised science :).
Seven years and four years qualify as weather. is climate.
Fat Fingers.
Seven years and four years qualifies as weather. This is climate.
When is WUWT going to get a ‘preview’ button? 😉
It is quite justified to take a newspaper to task for erroneous reporting. But really, I would have thought the example given was a fairly mild one, and certainly nothing out of the ordinary. I mean, aren’t most people getting bombarded with that sort of nonsense, and worse, all the time. For example, I have been accosted in the last 24 hours by http://www.carbonzero.co.nz/index.asp and http://www.350.org.nz/ . Sickening, it’s true. But hey, we have to recognise that this is currently mainstream.
The Times of London is no longer the paper it once was.
John Philip:
I’ll see your UN/IPCC chart, and raise you with a UAH-based chart: click
[And I don’t think WordPress provides a preview button. But I could be wrong.]
Steve Schapel (02:10:56) :
Good grief. Both those sites are ridiculous. However, a study of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Zealand explains, in part, why AGW has such a grasp on the minds of officials.
NZ, since becoming a Dominion in 1907, has always had socialist leanings. In 1935, the first Labour Government was elected and control of the population has been the predominant wish of succeeding governments. The Green party relishes its power and the population is complicit in its subjugation. It’s the NZ mindset.
BTW, I have lived there and I’ve since met hundreds of Kiwis here in the UK. Most are socialist greens with whom I have nothing in common. A pity really, as some were quite good looking women. But that’s another story.