Sigh, it is the same old tired hateful argument from Dessler about tobacco. On the plus side is shows how desperate they are to have to resort to this garbage. [Full disclosure- both of my parents died prematurely from tobacco related diseases. – Anthony]
Climate Change Prof on PBS ‘Frontline’ Tuesday | TAMU Times
http://tamutimes.tamu.edu/2012/10/22/climate-change-prof-on-pbs-frontline-tuesday/
Climate Change Prof on PBS ‘Frontline’ Tuesday PBS Frontline, the popular investigative TV show, will feature Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler in a segment titled “A Climate of Doubt” at 9 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 23) on KAMU-TV. Following the broadcast, it will also be available for viewing here.
The episode will center on the public perception of climate change and how that perception has changed since the 2008 elections to this year’s political joust. After being hotly discussed in 2008, climate change has since been less of a factor in the political arena, observers note.
“Four years ago, there was widespread acknowledgement and the argument was ‘how do we deal with this,’” Dessler said. “What the skeptics have done is made a huge effort to cast doubt on the science of climate change, much like tobacco companies’ efforts to cast doubt on the science connecting tobacco and lung cancer.”
Even though the argument is made that thousands of scientists dispute the science of climate change, there are few true experts on climate change worldwide that doubt its occurrence because the science is solid, Dessler noted.
“There is some legitimate uncertainty, of course,” Dessler said, “but that is whether the climate will warm four or eight degrees over the coming century –whether it will be bad, or catastrophic – not if it’s happening.”
Frontline will spotlight the organizations that have been the most influential anti-climate change voices and attempt to explain how they succeeded in shifting the public debate and opinion.
There is a wide array of reasons for opposing action on climate change, but by delaying the corrective process, the opposition is only making the situation worse, Dessler said.
“Every year you wait makes the degree of change worse, and makes altering the change more expensive,” Dessler said. “They are giving people an excuse to do nothing by inducing doubt.”
Less of a factor? It has become political death as it is now associated with taxes, fascism and phrenology.. All rolled into one.
Reality is against him, so Dessler has to cling to his cherished delusions and continue to read from the script.
“What the skeptics have done is made a huge effort to cast doubt on the science of climate change, much like tobacco companies’ efforts to cast doubt on the science connecting tobacco and lung cancer.” – strange I thought Climategate and poor climate modelling did most of the damage!
If they have to resort to something which pretends there is a parallel with tobacco, they really are quite disgraceful people. They make my skin creep.
Frontline is going to spotlight the CRU emails and the phoney investigations?, well that would be a first for them.
Somebody needs to inform Dressler that it stopped warming 16 years ago, based on HadCRUT4 “adjusted” temperature data. Without all those adjustments (e.g. TOBS, homogenization, interpolation), we’d probably be seeing a noticeable cooling trend.
Dressler’s alarmist predictions are based on faulty general-circulation models. And as we know, in the world of climatastrology, model projections always trump observational data.
When even the most blatant criminals hauled into court are entitled to being called only ‘alleged’, we need to be equally vigilant in calling AGW dogmas the accurate term ‘alleged’. Imagine how much more frantic the Warmistas will be if the world never gets warm at all!
“Every year you wait makes the degree of change worse, and makes altering the change more expensive,” Dessler said.
And the solution is to scrub the air of e-e-e-v-i-l CO2. What could go wrong with that? Oh…. wait….
Going by the quotes, it is not going to be a very compeling show to watch. I am already falling asleep with due to over propagandized speak.
Dessler is basically a barking dog whose job is to write papers that “debunk” Spencer’s papers. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/research-pages/the-spencer-braswell-dessler-papers/ for examples.
Many AGW alarmists seem obsessed with smoking and tobacco. Did many of them recently quit smoking? Or do they still smoke? Or what, then?
In any case the logic of their efforts as applied to the AGW issue would be along the lines of:
“Some of the people who disagree with us today were on the unpopular side of other issues in the past, therefore all of the people who disagree with us today must be wrong”
I’m not sure to what logical fallacy that corresponds.
Mr. Dessler! And the 4 or 8 degree rise in temps over this coming century is based on what evidence again? Oh ya, untested, crude climate models that do not meet the tenets of the scientific method. If you make climate predictions to the year 2100, the scientific method requires one to gather data to the year 2100 so that it may be properly analyzed. Where did you obtain your education Mr Dessler? If I were you, I would request a refund, because you obviously forgot the very basics. Your poor students at Texas A&M are getting short-changed.
Why is PBS giving these Alarmists a speaking platform?
Time to pull the funding of PBS
Another CAGW clone! Why do they all look alike?
Wasn’t Dessler the same guy saying Texas was in a permanent drought this year?
a terrible appetiser:
FRONTLINE | “A Climate of Doubt” Preview | PBS
22 Oct: PBS Press Release: HOW THE SKEPTICS CHANGED THE GAME ON CLIMATE CHANGE
FRONTLINE presents Climate of Doubt
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, “I fully expect that after this program airs I’ll get another FOIA request for all of my emails with you. And you know, I’ll just deal with that. As a climate scientist, I think a lot about the future. It goes with the job. And I want to make sure that in 50 years or 100 years or 200 years, nobody could ever say we didn’t warn them.”
FRONTLINE also investigates the funding that powers the skeptic movement in the name of free market, anti-regulation, small government causes. Hockenberry finds that funding has shifted away from fossil fuel companies to more ideological, and less public, sources. According to Robert Brulle, a sociologist studying the funding patterns of these groups, “The major funders of the climate counter-movement are ideologically driven foundations that are very much concerned about conservative values and world views.”
Climate of Doubt is a FRONTLINE production with The Documentary Group. The producer and writer is Cathering Upin. The correspondent is John Hockenberry. The executive producer for The Documentary Group is Tom Yellin. The deputy executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning…
Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/environment/climate-of-doubt/press-release-19/
Notice Dessler and probably Frontline will never define what it is they claim is being denied or obscured by their claimed manufactured doubt.And by using this nebulous term, climate change, while implying CAGW they cause an increase in public cynicism.This man should do a fine job of shooting the feet of his team.Remember its all about the cause.
Arguments over the ‘science’ aside, what these guys all have in common is a complete lack of commitment to their own cause. They all advocate immediate action to avert some imagined manmade fossil-fuelled climate catastrophe yet they themselves carry on business as usual. Does Dessler own and drive a car? Does he live in a nice house with air con and electricity? Does he fly anywhere? Does he use fossil-fuelled public transport? Or has he decided to lead by example and give up his car and all the trappings of a modern lifestyle made possible by so-called ‘fossil fuels’ – especially oil in all its forms and off-shoot byproducts? Has he decided to do something himself in order to save the planet? No. Of course he hasn’t. He bitches about it instead. Dessler’s attitude is similar to Gore’s who wants everyone else to give up using fossil fuels and swallow the resultant hardships for the good of the planet, but he won’t do so himself. So until these guys lead by example and actually do what they believe is necessary to ‘save the planet’, I see them as charlatans and mountebanks who should be mocked and ridiculed. First, they need to come up with sound sicence that can’t be demolished in five minutes flat with a few inconvenient truths; and then they need to lead by example. They’ve failed miserably in both.
PBS makes clear this is to influence the election:
” October 4, 2012 – PBS announced today that the award-winning documentary series FRONTLINE has added two election-themed programs to its lineup in October, as part of the PBS Election 2012 programming initiative.”
Not too much doubt about which way they lean:
“Today, public opinion about the issue has cooled, and politicians either ignore the issue or loudly proclaim their skepticism of scientific evidence that human activity imperils the planet. Hockenberry goes inside the organizations that fight scientists, environmental groups and lawmakers, hoping to shift the direction of the climate debate and redefine the politics of global warming.”
So WUWT is a fight club?
De-fund the PBS bird brains.
Just gotta keep saying this – Al Gore’s family fortune comes from Tobacco. Perhaps he should look a little closer to home if he wants to find obfuscation.
As science does not support the extreme AGW paradigm it is necessary to attempt to attack the messengers.
The extreme AGW movement has a significant logical problem and a media message problem. Unaltered data and unbiased analysis does not support the extreme AGW paradigm. Lindzen and others, have unequivocally shown that the planet resists warming due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere by increasing cloud cover in the tropics thereby reflecting more sunlight off in to space, which is called negative feedback. If there is negative feedback as opposed to amplification (positive feedback) a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in less than 1C warming. The IPCC have stated that there goal is to limit the planet’s warming due to atmospheric CO2 increases to a doubing of atmospheric CO2 to 2C. Mission accomplished. A doubling of at atmospheric CO2 will result in less than 1C warming. 1C warming with most of the warming occuring at high latitudes will result in the biosphere expanding.
Trillions of deficit dollars are being advocated to be spent on the green scams to fight a problem that is not a problem.
http://www.johnstonanalytics.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/LindzenChoi2011.235213033.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000- 2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation … …we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. ….
…The heart of the global warming issue is so-called greenhouse warming. This refers to the fact that the earth balances the heat received from the sun (mostly in the visible spectrum) by radiating in the infrared portion of the spectrum back to space. … ….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of well mixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/
There is a wide array of reasons for opposing action on climate change, but by delaying the corrective process, the opposition is only making the situation worse, Dessler said.
Really? Just what might those reasons be Mr. Andrew Emory Dessler. Let me guess. Might one be a 8.1% unemployment rate? Oops, silly me, I forgot that – in one month – it mysteriously, magically dropped to a mere 7.8%. Could another, and allied, reason be 22 or 23 (who’s counting?) million people unemployed? Or, maybe the Federal Reserve’s announcement of a new round of Quantitative Easing? You know, the Fed’s purchase of 40 billion dollars, each and every month, in mortgage backed securities. Or, how about allied fears of inflation? Could an additional reason be GDP that has, over 4 wonderful years, barely broken 2.5% and last quarter juiced out at a sizzling 1.3%? Could another be trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see? Explain to me dear Mr. Dessler, could these be some of the array of reasons? Perhaps? Maybe? I can see from that picture of you, bright bespectacled eyes staring smartly up and into the future from your well fed face, that you know. We live in the down and dirty but you, you Mr. Dessler live in that rarefied atmosphere that allows you to ignore these pedestrian concerns and therefore possess a truly unbiased viewpoint. So tell me, could the aforementioned array of reasons be responsible for the newfound flippant attitude towards global…er…what?
My mother, a smoker, died of lung cancer. That was in 1980 and the Waxman Hearings were in 1994.
http://www.jeffreywigand.com/7ceos.php
The executives of the tobacco companies at least had an economic reason – their company’s survival – to make the sorts of statements they did. I was skeptical of their science while understanding (not approving of) what they were doing.
Now I am skeptical of “climate science” as defined by “Climate Change Prof.” Andrew Emory Dessler. I do not understand what he and others are doing. It isn’t science and it isn’t right/smart/helpful.
[snip – multiple blog policy violations -mod]