The populist notion that all climate sceptics are either in the pay of oil barons or are right-wing ideologues, as is suggested for example by studies such as Oreskes and Conway (2011), cannot be sustained.
Mike Hulme, in his new book. An extract of the chapter is at his website.
H/T Tallbloke and Bishop Hill
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Lewandowsky gets ripped a new one at the Financial Post:
Mr. Lewandowsky’s work in fact provides a window into the lurid fantasies of those who are so committed to the paradigm of climate catastrophism that they have abandoned all trace of objectivity or balance. It also demonstrates a clear link between catastrophism and the urge to demonize markets.
Last May, the journal Psychological Science carried a paper by Mr. Lewandowsky and co-authors Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac with the stunning title: “NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.”
Perhaps the most effective instant rebuttal of the paper’s outrageous thesis was that two prominent skeptics — Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldrin — had in fact been to the moon!
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/08/08/peter-foster-crazy-over-climate/
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No GHG impact from KXL pipeline:
IHS CERA’s independent report released this week finds that Keystone XL will have “no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions,” and therefore, meets President Obama’s clearly stated test for approval of the pipeline. Further, the report addresses opponents’ charges head on regarding the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement findings, eviscerating their oft-repeated claims that without Keystone XL Canadian oil sands will stay in the ground.
http://oilsandsfactcheck.org/2013/08/08/ihs-cera-keystone-xl-will-have-no-material-impact-on-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
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In case you missed it: Skeptical “Science” suggests that the Black Death caused the Little Ice Age
The Black Death caused a decrease in the human populations of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East during the 14th century and a consequent decline in agricultural activity. A similar effect occurred in North America after European contact in the 16th century. Ruddiman (2003) suggests reforestation took place as a result of this reduced human population and agricultural activity, allowing more carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere to the biosphere, thus having a cooling effect.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2013/08/in-case-you-missed-it-skeptical.html
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The Medieval Warm Period in China
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a global climatic anomaly that encompassed a few centuries on either side of AD 1000, when temperatures in many parts of the world were even warmer than they are currently. The degree of warmth and associated changes in precipitation, however, varied from region to region and from time to time; and, therefore, the MWP was manifest differently in different parts of the planet. In this Summary, what occurred in China is reviewed.
http://sppiblog.org/news/new-paper-at-sppi-medieval-warm-period-in-china
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Meet the New Models: Are They Any Better Than the Old Models?
In a paper published in Nature Climate Change, Knutti and Sedlacek (2013) write that “estimates of impacts from anthropogenic climate change rely on projections from climate models,” but they say that “uncertainties in those have often been a limiting factor, particularly on local scales.” However, as they continue, “a new generation of more complex models running scenarios for the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) is widely, and perhaps naively, expected to provide more detailed and more certain projections.” But are these expectations really being met?
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2013/aug/7aug2013a1.html
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Rare TV Climate Debate: Meteorologist Joe Bastardi debates warmist Discover Magazine editor-at-large…
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2593834248001/colder-weather-coming/
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Global warming litigation goes cold
Within a matter of just a few days, the federal courts put an end to climate change litigation, including one case that had originated in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=253dae70-7328-459f-bf8b-6ef8a7aa12c4
I don’t think they want to try ‘Global Warming’ in a court of law because the facts might just come out and send the whole edifice tumbling.
The more detailed the models get, the more the uncertainties will dominate them. Lesson: You don’t know jack.
One little problem with SKS’s theory is that according to the ice cores CO2 levels showed a small peak around 250 years after the MWP.
Yet another SKS case of “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
If Black Death explains the lack of warming dues to a population dip, does the population increase since then not make the earth boil over.
It’s not just the Black Death / Little Ice Age nonsense. I’ve seen a number of reports over recent years that have suggested various Holocene temperature patterns have been due to human activity in either clearing forests or their regrowth, suggesting that CO2 levels would then have changed and led temperature.
Why, then, do the CO2 levels from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores suggest no such pattern in the Holocene? A pretty monotonic drop from 265ppm 10500 years ago to 260ppm 7000 years ago (Holocene Optimum), then a monotonic increase to 280ppm a few hundred years ago.
Which way do the warmists want it? Are the peaks and troughs of the Holocene natural, or are the CO2 levels in the ice cores dampened?
A couple of comments:
#1 – I guess SkS is going to get roasted by the Malthusians for accidentally revealing the game plan of the alarmist. i.e. The Eradication of Man.
#2 – If Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldren say the moon landings were faked, it must be so! /sarc
“…IHS CERA’s independent report released this week finds that Keystone XL will have “no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions”….”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In actual fact the keystone pipeline will have LESS impact since less energy is used to move oil via pipeline than to move the oil via ship to China or by rail to the USA.
The models won’t go away because environmental catastrophe is at the center of global education reforms insisting we need new kinds of minds. It is all grounded in the Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein book from that convenient and busy year of 1989 New World New Mind.
It’s also at the center of the political efforts that we shift to a so-called cooperative commonwealth model where the common good” as decided by government officials will be paramount. The Democracy Collaborative out of U Maryland has been quite busy on this note as has Gar Alperowitz on his book tour.
None of us may be among the 350 invited guests from all over the world being planned for in this September Meeting of the Minds annual conference http://cityminded.org/events/toronto/agenda but we are all being planned for at the meeting. Don’t miss the US EPA official attending as they work on a different kind of commerce for the 21st century.
They need the supposed AGW crisis. It’s the excuse for all the planning and sought revolutionary transformations. And it all goes on mostly out of sight.
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2013/aug/7aug2013a1.html
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There’s a difference between improving the accuracy of a model that is correct, but has limited precision and squeezing more precision out of a fundamentally flawed model. The former may well be a good idea. The latter probably is a waste of time. I think the current status of climate modeling can probably be summed up as The models embody what we currently know about how global climate works. But based on their results we don’t seem to know all that much
Re: Keystone XL and Alberta Oilsands “staying in the ground”
Not a chance. Those Oilsands will be developed, and every last drop that nature spilled all across the landscape WILL be cleaned up. The fact that people want to buy this natural pollutant is a bonus.
The models are here to stay because they are the bulk of the “proof” that manmade CO2 causes global warming/climate change and it’s “worse than we thought.”
– – – – – – – – –
Conspiracy theories in climate science like Lewandowsky’s and the many associated ones pushed by Cook’s Skeptical[-less] Science site are their attempts at creating mythical villains needed to battle their mythical climate heroes in their self-serving heroic alarmist mythology. Without the villains their heroes aren’t heroic crusaders for salvation of climate.
They really need some professional mythology creators to help them. Lewandowsky, Cook and Mann have only accomplished the creation of self-parodies with their comic mythologizing efforts. Maybe Disney or George Lucas can help them write a good mythology script.
John
WUWT’s posting of Peter Foster’s article in Financial Times on Lewandowsky has given me an parody idea on the next conspiracy farce.
Parody starts/
Climate science conspiracist Lewandowsky takes a position at a UK university, leaving his position in Australia. He needs a new climate science conspiracy launched from his new UK position to sustain the conspiracist career he started in Australia.
Post Normal Science (PNS) creator Jerome Ravetz is also in the UK and is always looking for an new edge to re-stimulate the slumping interest in PNS due to the slumping interest in alarmism on climate advocated by the IPCC.
They meet in their professional capacity at a climatic cocktail party sponsored by the new backroom partnership of The Guardian and John Cook’s Skeptical[-less] Science site.
Ravetz and Lewandowsky form a society called ‘The Society for Skeptical[-less] PNS’. Call it SSPNS.
It is an instant alarmist rave. Skeptics laugh at the nauseous wave of liberal media hype extolling SSPNS as the only hope of reviving climate alarmism so authoritarians can save the free world from its freedom.
/ Parody ends
That was fun in a comically cathartic kind of way. : )
Can I get Al Gore to buy the script?
John
God bless Joe Bastardi.
Gail Combs says:
August 9, 2013 at 4:36 am
““…IHS CERA’s independent report released this week finds that Keystone XL will have “no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions”….”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In actual fact the keystone pipeline will have LESS impact since less energy is used to move oil via pipeline than to move the oil via ship to China or by rail to the USA.”
Pssst. Don’t wake up the little dears with logic.
Ruddiman (2003) suggests reforestation took place as a result of this reduced human population and agricultural activity, allowing more carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere to the biosphere, thus having a cooling effect.
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so cutting down the forests as happened over the past 300 years is what caused the end of the little ice age and the modern warming. As human population grew during the latter half of the 20th century and more and more forests were cut down, this is what caused the “unexplained” warming that must be due to CO2.
So why hasn’t SKS and the IPCC realized this? Why does reforestation cause cooling, but cutting down the forests not cause warming? And why is cutting down even more forests to provide pellets to fire up power stations in the UK and EU a good thing? How is this not going to cause even more warming, the warming they are trying to prevent?
Ferd:
I’m going to disagree with you here;
More forests are now growing in North America and Europe than in the past years (1880-1920-1930) when widespread areas WERE clear cut for farms and logging. But today?
Nope: Many thousands upon thousands of sq kilometers are now regrown with forests since the mid-50’s, and all areas are over-growing as CO2 continues to increase.
An open question – particularly in the tundra and forested Arctic: Does the newly darkened brush and tree-cover DECREASE land albedo and thus increase warming? Or, as the CAGW dogma holds< does the new trees increase cooling – ONLY if those newly treed areas are compared to formerly urban and concrete-covered areas that used to reflect sunlight?
RA;
I think you misread ferd. He was satirizing the illogic at SKS and the IPCC, citing and contrasting the contradictory assumptions implicit in their claims.
“The Medieval Warm Period in China”. There is a good study done by Chinese scientists of the Tibetan Plateau, http://www.gisclimat.fr/en/project/pluies-tibet. This is a great tool to use in answer to someone who states that the MWP was only regional. All of the long term temp graphs came together for me last year, when I read the WUWT post about the JG/U tree ring study. The picture of regional variation was readily apparent. It seems to me that by using all of the regional long term studies that one might be able to flesh out a reasonable attempt at a forecast by comparing current trends to past long term trends.