Date: Friday January 17, 2014
Subject: “The Global Warming Hoax” and “War on Carbon” Clips
From: Bob Tisdale
To: Jon Stewart
Dear Jon:
I am an independent climate researcher and regular contributor at the award-winning science blog WattsUpWithThat. I am also the author of three ebooks on global warming, climate change and the poor performance of climate models. I am writing to you about your January 6, 2014 episode (full episode here) of The Daily Show. It began with “The Global Warming Hoax” and “War on Carbon” clips, which ran consecutively when aired.
First, let me say that I applaud you and your staff for making The Daily Show a massively entertaining political satire. I enjoy the show thoroughly.
During your January 6th episode, however, you expressed beliefs in climate models and in the climate science community…the human-induced global warming wing thereof. Unfortunately, the climate models used to hindcast past climate and to project future climate are so flawed that they are not fit for their intended purposes. And the climate science community under the direction of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has specialized in only one aspect of global warming, which is why the models perform so poorly. I’ll provide evidence for those statements in the following, including data and peer-reviewed scientific studies.
MUCH HAS CHANGED IN 7 YEARS
For most people, their understanding of climate science comes from the time around 2006-2007 when there was a lot of interest in global warming and climate change. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was getting press and the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Things have changed drastically since then. Specialists in many fields of climate science are now writing papers about model failings, and they’re not small problems. They’re fatal flaws. Skeptics have become much better at presenting and illustrating those model failures, too, and describing why they’re important. And there has been a flood of peer-reviewed papers over the past two years, in which climate scientists are trying to explain the hiatus in global warming—with limited success and limited agreement; that is, there’s no consensus on the cause of the pause. Examples are discussed in the very recent Nature article Climate Change: The Case of the Missing Heat by Jeff Tollefson. Those scientists wouldn’t be writing those papers if the climate models had anticipated the current cessation of global surface temperature warming. Unfortunately, with the IPCC’s focus on manmade greenhouse gases, climate scientists still do not know how to model nature’s handiwork. More on this later.
THE DOCTORS ARGUMENT AGAIN
You presented a clip of Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress who said:
If 97 doctors told you that that lump on your lung was something to worry about, and 3 scientists — er, doctors — told you not to worry about it, are you going to listen to the 97, or the 3? Sounds like you might listen to the 3, which would be sad.
(Quotes from the DailyKos transcript here.)
That argument has been used a lot recently.
You were right to point out the error in the logic of the response to it, which was to the effect of climate scientists are paid to… But the reality of the situation is something altogether different.
The climate science community has specialized in only one aspect of global warming and climate change, and as a result, they have overlooked other major contributors.
I’ve addressed this problem previously in two open letters—one to George Clooney and your associate Lewis Black here, and one to the Executive Producers of the upcoming ShowTime series Years of Living Dangerously here. As I wrote to Black and Clooney:
The climate science community, under the direction of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), has only been tasked with determining whether manmade factors, primarily carbon dioxide, could be responsible for the recent bout of global warming, and what the future might bring if the real world responds to projected increases in manmade greenhouse gases in ways that are similar to climate models. They were not asked to determine if naturally caused, sunlight-fueled processes could have caused the global warming over the past 30 years, or to determine the contribution of those natural factors in the future—thus all of the scrambling by climate scientists who are now trying to explain the hiatus in global warming. Refer to the IPCC’s History webpage (my boldface):
Today the IPCC’s role is as defined in Principles Governing IPCC Work, “…to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation…”
It is not the IPCC’s role to understand the scientific basis for naturally caused climate change, which the Earth has experienced all along. As a result, even after decades of modeling efforts, climate models still cannot simulate naturally occurring ocean-atmosphere processes that contribute to global warming or stop it. So a “doctors” example falls flat because it relies on experts whose understandings of climate are extremely limited in scope.
The response to “97 doctors” argument should have been: “Would you see a podiatrist or proctologist for that lump on your lung?”
CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ABOUT THE IPCC’s FOCUS ON MANMADE GREENHOUSE GASES
The climate science community now understands the problems caused by limiting their research to the increased emissions of manmade greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.
The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) is concerned about the IPCC’s focus. See their document titled Submission by The Netherlands on the future of the IPCC. Under the heading of “The IPCC needs to adjust its principles”, KNMI begins:
We believe that limiting the scope of the IPCC to human-induced climate change is undesirable, especially because natural climate change is a crucial part of the total understanding of the climate system, including human-induced climate change.
This failure to properly account for natural factors also led a former lead author of IPCC reports (Kevin Trenberth of NCAR) to remark in David Appell’s 2013 article “W(h)ither global warming? Has global warming slowed down?”
“One of the things emerging from several lines is that the IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales,” he [Dr. Trenberth] says, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.
To put that into more basic terms: There are naturally occurring multidecadal variations in surface temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere oceans (see the post here), and they were major contributors to the warming experienced since the mid-1970s. Climate models do not simulate those modes of natural variability. To compound the problems, the modelers had tuned their models during the naturally occurring upswings, failing to account for the peaking and downswings in cycles that would eventually occur (and are now occurring). I provided an overview of the potential impact of this in the post Will their Failure to Properly Simulate Multidecadal Variations In Surface Temperatures Be the Downfall of the IPCC?
That article by David Appell is also noteworthy, because it provides another example of the lack of consensus on the cause of the cessation of global surface warming. If climate scientists can’t agree on an explanation for why Earth’s surface stopped warming, it casts a lot of doubt on their consensus on the cause of the warming we had experienced from the mid-1970s to about 2000.
CLIMATE SCIENTISTS DISCUSS THE FLAWS IN CLIMATE MODELS
You mentioned climate models and peer-reviewed science in your clip, Jon. It appears you may not beaware of this, but there are a number of peer-reviewed papers that are very critical of climate model performance. I presented some of them recently in the post Questions Policymakers Should Be Asking Climate Scientists Who Receive Government Funding. Those papers served as references for the following questions, which all began with a common phrase:
After decades of climate modeling efforts…
- …why does the current generation of climate models simulate global surface temperatures more poorly than the prior generation?
- …why can’t climate models properly simulate sea ice losses in the Arctic Ocean or sea ice gains in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica?
- …why can’t climate models properly simulate atmospheric responses to explosive volcanic eruptions?
- …why do climate models continue to poorly simulate precipitation and drought?
- …why can’t climate models simulate multidecadal variations in sea surface temperatures?
- …why can’t climate models simulate the basic processes that drive El Niño and La Niña events?
In that post (linked again here), I quoted portions of the peer-reviewed papers that supported those questions and I translated the science-speak into language that is more readily understood by readers who aren’t intimate with climate science.
BLOG POSTS THAT ILLUSTRATE THE PROBLEMS WITH THE MODELS
If you’re a visual person, Jon, over the past year I’ve presented a series of blog posts that illustrated and discussed many climate model failings, and for those posts, I’ve presented the average of all of the outputs of the current generation of climate models stored in an archive used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report. Climate-related data and climate model outputs are available online to the public, in easy-to-use formats, through the web tool called Climate Explorer from KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute). I have also published posts that provide Step-By-Step Instructions for Creating a Climate-Related Model-Data Comparison Graph and a Very Basic Introduction To The KNMI Climate Explorer. It’s a relatively easy process. In fact, many middle school students could replicate my graphs. Some of the posts that illustrate the many flaws in climate models are linked below by subject. Basically, climate models do not properly simulate:
- Global Surface Temperatures (Land+Ocean) Since 1880
- Global Sea Surface Temperatures Since 1880
- Satellite-Era Sea Surface Temperatures
- Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperatures and the Diurnal Temperature Range
- Hemispheric Sea Ice Area
- Global Precipitation
Those posts and other examples are collected in my ebook Climate Models Fail, which is available in pdf and Amazon Kindle editions. Refer to the introduction here.
THE SHIP OF FOOLS
Back to your January 6th episode. You played a clip of Fox News’s Eric Bolling stating:
I gotta tell you, I think these scientists are laughing from their lavish laboratories, and their vacations up at the Arctic, in their nice boats that are well-equipped.
While first showing a image of an ice field and then showing a photo of the Akademic Shokalskiy caught in sea ice (screen cap below), you replied:
This Arctic? This lavish boat?
A minor problem: That “lavish boat” was not in the Arctic. The AkademicShokalskiy, one of the “Adventure Class” tour boats from Southern Explorations, was caught in the sea ice of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. And it was just after the start of the Southern Hemisphere summer a few weeks ago. Tours on that ship are not inexpensive. Rates range from “$5,720 to $21,590 per person”. The Mark Steyn: Global warming’s glorious ship of fools article at TheSpectator is a very humorous overview of the fiasco involving the Spirit of Mawson researchers, their families, tourists and reporters getting stuck in the sea ice…and the international rescue efforts. On the more technical side, Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit has documented the sea ice conditions leading to the debacle, including where the data contradicts the claims made by the lead researcher. See Steve’s post Ship of Fools. Recall also that climate models simulate that sea ice should be decreasing in the Southern Ocean, but it has increased in area since 1979.
DATA SHOWS NO CHANGES IN EXTREME WEATHER OR RELATED INSURANCE LOSSES
Early in the show, Jon, you mentioned weather extremes (my boldface):
There you have it. War on Christmas is over, the War on Carbon begins. Global warming, just one more liberal conspiracy. Because even though there is a great deal of scientific data establishing climate trends, even though many of the models of global warming predict more extremes of weather — not just warming — apparently decades of peer-reviewed scientific study can be, like a ficus plant, destroyed in one cold weekend.
As presented earlier, climate models are flawed, likely to the point that they are not fit for purpose.
Data from the real world present an entirely different picture of extreme weather events. In my Open Letter to the Executive Producers of the Years of Living Dangerously, (also linked earlier) I included graphs of data from the testimony of Roger Pielke, Jr. at the U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment held on December 11, 2013: A Factual Look at the Relationship Between Climate and Weather. So please click on the link above to Dr. Pielke Jr’s testimony for graphs of the data. The following are the take-home points from his testimony, points that are supported by data (my boldface):
- Globally, weather-related losses have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP (they have actually decreased by about 25%).
- Insured catastrophe losses have not increased as a proportion of GDP since 1960.
- Hurricanes have not increased in the US in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900.
- There are no significant trends (up or down) in global tropical cyclone landfalls since 1970 (when data allows for a comprehensive perspective), or in the overall number of tropical cyclones.
- Floods have not increased in the US in frequency or intensity since at least 1950.
- Flood losses as a percentage of US GDP have dropped by about 75% since 1940.
- Tornadoes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.
- Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”
I also addressed sea levels and Hurricane Sandy in that Years of Living Dangerously article.
A COUPLE OF QUICK MODEL-DATA COMPARISONS
Let’s return to climate models: how poorly they simulate global surface temperatures. The following graphs are very easy to understand. They are model-data comparisons of global surface temperatures for the past 3+ decades. The start time is dictated by the use of satellite-enhanced sea surface temperature data. The graph on the right compares global land air surface temperature data with climate model simulations of it. The models performed reasonably well on a global basis when simulating land surface air temperatures. Before we move to the graph on the left, you have to understand that the vast majority of the rise of land surface air temperatures in the real world is in response to the warming of the surfaces of the oceans. Land surface air temperatures mimic and exaggerate the variations in the surface temperatures of the oceans. Now, the graph on the left compares global sea surface temperature data with climate model simulations. The models doubled the rate of warming of the surface temperatures of the global oceans for the past 3+ decades. Doubled. That, in and of itself, is horrendous. Now consider that the modelers had to double the rate of warming of the surfaces of the oceans in order to get the land surface air temperatures near to where they needed to be.
(Click to enlarge.)
A BIG FLAW IN THE MODELS
I’m sure you’ve heard of the global warming hiatus, the pause, etc. I presented the following in a post that I linked earlier, but it should be repeated. Recently, there have been two very enlightening peer-reviewed studies on the topic of the recent cessation of the warming of global surface temperatures. The first is Von Storch, et al. (2013) “Can Climate Models Explain the Recent Stagnation in Global Warming?” They stated:
However, for the 15-year trend interval corresponding to the latest observation period 1998-2012, only 2% of the 62 CMIP5 and less than 1% of the 189 CMIP3 trend computations are as low as or lower than the observed trend. Applying the standard 5% statistical critical value, we conclude that the model projections are inconsistent with the recent observed global warming over the period 1998- 2012.
According to Von Storch, et al. (2013), both recent generations of climate models (CMIP3 used by the IPCC for their 2007 4th Assessment Report, and CMIP5 used by the IPCC for their recent 5th Assessment Report) cannot explain the recent slowdown in global surface warming. The models show continued global surface warming, while observations do not.
The second paper is Fyfe et al. (2013) “Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years.” Fyfe et al. (2013) write, requiring no translation from science-speak:
The evidence, therefore, indicates that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group, with the CMIP5 prescribed forcings) do not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years.
Looking at this realistically, if the climate models cannot explain the current slowdown or halt in global surface warming, then they cannot be used to explain the warming that had occurred from the mid-1970s to the late-1990s. In turn, they have little value as tools for making predictions of future climate. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the sad reality of the state of climate science today.
CLOSING
In closing, Jon, when people imagine climate models, maybe it’s best to think of early generations of CGI (computer generated imagery). A decade or two ago, we’d go to the movies and be amazed at the images on the big screen. And we probably thought some of the video games at that time were also impressive. Looking back at them now, they look hokey.
Climate models used by the IPCC for hindcasting and projections of future climate are at the hokey-looking phase of development. And the more you investigate them, the hokier they look.
Jon, if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment on any thread at my blog Climate Observations.
Sincerely,
Bob Tisdale
PS: If you should know of a comedian who’s tired of the tripe we’ve been seeing from the catastrophic manmade global warming wing of the climate science community, please let them know I’m looking for a co-author for my next book. Working title: The Oceans Ate My Global Warming. I’m looking for someone to help make it fun to read.
Thanks.
If you should know of a comedian who’s tired of the tripe we’ve been seeing from the catastrophic manmade global warming wing of the climate science community,
The American comedian Evan Sayet would seem to fit the bill — he recently published a book called The Kindergarden of Eden, which takes issue with the overall “progressive” mindset of which the global warming scare is a subset.
Brilliant Bob – thank you
I wish these people would actually sit down and read what you wrote. Unfortunately they fall into two categories.
1. They know CAGW is a hoax and have a monetary interest in making sure the Hoax is not uncovered. Would you trust “Bernie” Madoff for financial advice?
2. They are fanatics whose minds are set in concrete. They do not care whether CAGW is true because they see it as a way to further ‘The Cause’
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” ~ Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official
Another great article, Bob. Some people just won’t get it until you hammer it in.
The question is, does Jon Stewart have sufficient character to reject the invalid data sets on which he based his programme of 6th January, or is he just a deluded comedy actor?
While I realise that on open letter isn’t just for the benefit of the addressee, I’d suggest that if you actually want him to read it then perhaps it should be a lot shorter. All good stuff though in any case.
I suspect your open letter is over the head of Mr. Stewart and I would be surprised if he or any of his staff had the attention span to make it all the way through. In entertainment terms he is akin the the Star Trek character ‘Q’; a smart guy with an entourage of cheering or sneering sycophants waiting to be told which reaction to display. He’s going for laughs, not facts.
Rick Bradford, thanks for the tip.
@Blair – the letter is indeed over the head of Jon Stewart. But it is a good reference work when debating the type 2 people that Gail Combs talks about. While it will not change their minds (as she says, they are fanatics), it will show the casual observer the emptiness of their fanaticism.
Jon Stewart Leibowitz does simple Brechtian Agitation & Propaganda. He’s not about facts or truth but about earning big bucks for ramming through his political agenda. We have BTW an imitation of him in German state TV and it’s just as repulsive.
Up to your usual high standard Bob, thanks,
PS, I thought you were reducing output, obviously not. Keep it up.
This is probably over the head of comedians but not because they choose to ignore it. rather becasue it outside of their field of expertidse.
This requires analysis of measurements. “Journalists” analyse sources. This technical report fails against the authority of the UN IPCC.
However, satirists are the one group of journalists who may look critically at authority. So it is worth a punt.
Bob,
Your open letters are pearls before swine.
More to the point, “Would you see those 97% if their misdiagnosis rate were 95%? The actual global temperature is going to fall below their 95%-confidence range this year.
It’s too much to expect anyone with a regular show on TV to take a contrarian position, because they’d lose so much of their audience and draw so much vitriol. They most we can expect from non-heroic humanity in their positions at this point is silence or waffling.
Incidentally, has Jay Leno made any cheap jibes at contrarians? (I know Letterman has.)
Everyone has biases, both personal and professional. Most people come to think of their collective biases as “mature judgement”.
“Fish gotta swam; birds gotta fly …”
Surgeons have a bias towards surgery; bureaucrats have a bias towards regulation.
Comedians have a bias toward what’s funny. TV show personalities have a bias towards what fits the average viewer’s attention span.
The problems with your open letter with respect to Jon Stewart are it isn’t funny and it isn’t brief.
I loved it, but I don’t do a weekly commentary/comedy TV show for a living.
Educational read as always. Sadly another I fear will fall on deaf eyes, so to speak. I doubt very much that Jon Stewart would welcome the education. There is no material in the truth.
hunter says:
January 17, 2014 at 4:32 am
Bob,
Your open letters are pearls before swine.
________________________________________________________________
That was the phrase that came to mind. Does Stewart have the the intellectual depth or interest for this letter to make any impression? One of our problems is an amazing percentage of people get their news from Jon Stewart. I know some very bright college professor types who get most of their national news from Stewart.
Still, it was an excellent letter one that should be written. Good job, Bob
Actually if I were writing to Jon about his coverage of climate change, I’d ask him to consider whether he wasn’t perhaps guilty of viewing the issue through exactly the same polarized left vs right political lenses that he accuses news organisations of using. Fundamentally this issue isn’t political Jon. Or it shouldn’t bel. The twits from Fox news keep trying to make it political. I wish they’d go away because they just stir the pot without adding anything of value to the discussion. The serious skeptics are skeptical for reasons havingf to do with the fundamental weakness of the scientific case, and they come from across the political spectrum.
And please also consider directing some of your razor wit the other way. There are some really pompous balloons in Big Green who deserve to be pricked. For example you were quite right to ridicule those who tried to link the cold snap to global warming. How about also ridiculing those who try to turn every storm, tornado, forest fire and flood into a hollywood global warming disaster movie.
Alan Watt, exactly. Arguing difficult facts with people only looking for the funny angle in anything is futile. If anyone in Stewart outfit reads it all, it will be with an eye to finding a quote that can be taken out of context and twisted so as to “expose” the insanity of the “denialists.”
Gail Combs says:
January 17, 2014 at 4:00 am
I wish these people would actually sit down and read what you wrote. Unfortunately they fall into two categories.
1. They know CAGW is a hoax and have a monetary interest in making sure the Hoax is not uncovered. Would you trust “Bernie” Madoff for financial advice?
2. They are fanatics whose minds are set in concrete. They do not care whether CAGW is true because they see it as a way to further ‘The Cause’
————————————————————————-
If you mean by “these people” people who believe, or claim to believe, in CAGW then you have missed out some massive categories.
I am sure other people can add others but here are two:
One group are those people who have not studied the issue at all, never read a sceptic blog and have pretty much ONLY heard the warmist view through the media. They may never have heard a sceptical argument actually put forward by a sceptic. Not surprisingly, if asked, they would agree with the warmist view but otherwise don’t think about it much.
Another massive group are more fervent believers. They may or may not have purposefully sought out information about CAGW but believe mainly because it fits their world view and is the default position of their group (e.g. the liberal left) and the media they consume and trust and to question CAGW it would require an heroic effort of rethinking on their part. Most importantly the arguments against CAGW are mostly put forward by people with whom they, by default, disagree Add their trusted media’s evil caricature of anyone who questions CAGW and there is almost zero chance they will question their received beliefs while they remain the group orthodoxy.
This second group includes, i suspect, almost all non-scientists you ever hear in the media being vehement about global warming and condemning sceptics. Virtually all comedians, writers, filmmakers, commentators etc you have heard on the subject fall into this group including, I believe, Jon Stewart. They are particularly influential because they are often popular, articulate, evidently bright and capable of putting an argument across in a convincing manner no matter how factually wrong it is..
I suspect there are comedians etc who privately question CAGW and avoid speaking directly about it in public because they realize that at the moment it would be career and personal relationship damaging to “come out”.
I’ve said before that we will know that the CAGW scare is really dead on its feet when “credible” comedians routinely make jokes about it on mainstream television. Even though things can change quickly, that’s still a way off.
Bob Greene says:
January 17, 2014 at 4:44 am
“I know some very bright college professor types who get most of their national news from Stewart.”
He plays them like a fiddle and you call them bright?
DirkH says:
January 17, 2014 at 4:25 am
Any particular reason for not just using Stewart’s professional name which everyone knows him by?
I, for one, don’t want to have anything to do with anyone using someone’s mere accident-of-birth ethnicity against them. I hope you don’t either.
Nice letter but I can assure you of one thing: That idiot is unable to read a letter as long as this. His type lives in soundbites. He does not have the attention span to read so many words in one sitting.
I watched the program that day, and considered writing a letter to Jon Stewart as well. Of interest, at least in my TV market; one of the ads that played right after the “Global Warming Hoax” segment was “Save the polar bears.”
Stewart will never own up to his mistakes, especially when it comes to the cause du jour.
I mean, seriously: do these liberal media personalities become famous by being measured and thoughtful, or by being relentless and uncompromising?
I, too, have friends who get their news from Jon Stewart, and their moral guidance from South Park. And people wonder why we’re nearly bankrupt?
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to construct this very well crafted, factually driven view of global warming/climate change.
Wow !! Just wow !!
Thank you. Even if your letter does not achieve its intended result, it is an exceedingly useful collection of information and logic that can be used elsewhere.
Jon goes for the easy target, and unfortunately, Fox News provides a lot for him. I like his show, but last summer when he was away his replacement John Oliver was funnier and more erudite.
Sorry Bob, you can’t just give people a brain dump. They won’t sit still for it. Give them a short, interesting paragraph at most, and a link for the detail. I learnt this myself from a stinging comment from one of my own students, quoting Voltaire: “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
The world is in the midst of a political war on this, and I must be blunt. You are entirely too respectful of peer-review and the “authorities” engaged in it–we are in this mess because it has failed to provide self-correction to the science, for 40 years now or more–and too wordy and specialized in your detailed enumeration of scientific details, that again are too respectful of the generally bad work being done by climate scientists, deluded as they are by the unphysical theories they have been brainwashed to accept without question. You even fail to call out the models for what they are: crude, and obviously wrong, curve-fitting, using physical variables whose individual atmospheric effects are still largely unknown and hence wrongly applied, and whose supposed commingled and global effects are without any observational support whatsoever (because they are all addressed via a bogus “radiation transfer” theory that replaces real heat transport with “radiation”, and ignores the real processes of heat transport–to wit, conduction and convection, in addition to radiation–within the atmosphere). You haven’t put anything in your presentation that speaks to Jon Stewart the Widely Popular Entertainer, and would put his audience to sleep in less than a minute. And your referring to David Appell, who is a total fraud as a competent scientist (or a competent “science journalist”), marks you yourself as still deluded on who should be taken seriously in the climate debates. You’re a good, competent technical researcher, but you need to grasp the thorny political situation driving this mess, reject it out of hand, and communicate how badly real science is being served by consensus climate science now, after two generations of miseducation of the scientists themselves. As my Venus/Earth tropospheric temperatures comparison showed–over 3 years ago, but still 20 years after climate scientists should have been aware of it–the utterly stable Standard Atmosphere model of the troposphere truly represents our atmosphere, not the upside-down physics of the consensus view, of an atmosphere balanced on the razor’s edge of pretended “radiation forcings”.
I wish you well, but the doors of real communication and understanding–particularly in the public discourse, where outright fraud reigns–are all closed now, and must be forced open.
Jon Stewart is funny. Hilarious, in fact. But funny and hilarious are not the same as informed and correct. One of the great vehicles of politics is the witty quip. Long on humor, short on substance. Light, airy silliness has a place in the world, thanks, but Jon’s panning of the climate sceptics is as tasteless as a clip of Rajendra Pachauri and Richard Branson giggling about shooting ‘deniers’ into space on a one way trip. It serves only to make the fanatics more smug, and less substantial.
Re: comedian collaborators. It’s a pity George Carlin is no longer with us.
the sentence with “If climate scientists can’t agree on an explanation for why Earth’s surface stopped warming, it casts a lot of doubt on their consensus on the cause of the warming we had experienced from the mid-1970s to about 2000.”, really says it all.
the most disconcerting thing is that just yesterday during the senate environmental hearing Boxer makes the claim about the 97% and the RI senator whose name escapes me , refers to the ‘deniers’ scientists and their methods as the same as those from the tobacco industry days. THEY READ FROM SKEPTICALSCIENCE AND HUFFPO BLOGS verbatim! and they are the committee’s chairs!
I think Penn and Teller made Trenberth’s missing heat disappear.
Sigh, I thought that would display the YouTube display. Here’s the URL by itself.
Bill Maher is worse ……………….IMO
philjourdan says: @ January 17, 2014 at 4:24 am
….While it will not change their minds (as she says, they are fanatics), it will show the casual observer the emptiness of their fanaticism.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are so correct.
The fight is for the minds of Joe Mainstreet. Unfortunately he has no real interest in anything until it directly effects him. When he loses his job or can no longer make ends meet because his energy costs doubled THEN he will listen. However as the bank bailouts showed by then it is too late and the new laws and regulations are cast in concrete. That is what the Type twos are counting on. Boiling the frog slowly.
Curse you Bob Tisdale. I need to get to work and figure out how I made four computers in Utah unbootable. And here I am rewatching this Penn & Teller program. I sure hope you haven’t left for work yourself and are similarly pinned.
cynical_scientist says: @ January 17, 2014 at 4:48 am
….The twits from Fox news keep trying to make it political. I wish they’d go away because they just stir the pot without adding anything of value to the discussion. …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Fox news is “The Controlled Opposition” They are there to make people [think] we are a free country with a free press and not being fed propaganda 24/7 by all the news outlets. See ownership of MSM The goal is to made Fox distasteful to the undecided middle of the road bunch and corral the right and keep them on the topics the elite want them to think about.
Notice how the political arguments have not really moved on from the 1960s – 70s. Religion, abortion, racism, gays, with a nod to the 2nd Amendment. None of it has anything to do with the critical issues today.
(NOTE: I tossed my TV in 1975.)
Jon is a fairly bright guy – William & Mary alumnus. I doubt he’d have any trouble understanding the letter as presented. He is, however, an entertainer and a leftist. While the arguments and data may compel him to reconsider his personal position, it won’t alter the way AGW is presented on his show.
artwest says: @ January 17, 2014 at 4:52 am
….If you mean by “these people” people who believe, or claim to believe, in CAGW then you have missed out some massive categories…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are talking about the targets of the propaganda war. I am talking about those manufacturing the propaganda, Jon Stewart being one. (Sorry I did not make that clear. I wrote before my first cup of tea.)
Bob!
For a Co-Author, Alfonso “Zo” Rachel is your man! See him on you tube.
Stewart (or that other Cobert guy) isn’t even vaguely funny. Whoever heard of a “comedian” that doesn’t even have the courage to parody the current president? The funniest SNL stuff was the presidential parodies.
beng says: @ January 17, 2014 at 6:27 am
….Whoever heard of a “comedian” that doesn’t even have the courage to parody the current president?….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes and look at what happen to the poor rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask. Obama-mask clown gets lifetime Missouri fair ban. (I have friends who were rodeo clowns and injured repeatedly by the bulls as they protected the riders.)
Stewart can be funny at times, but never forget that he is a hard-core leftist whose only real trick is using cynicism and snark aimed at his millenial audience to try and pretend he isn’t one. He’s a representative of that hipster class that loves to pretend they aren’t political at the same time as they base every belief they have on their political beliefs.
If Stewart was even the slightest bit interested in evenhandedness, he could get quite a few laughs from someone like Nucitelli – but you’ll never see that happen, because he and Nucitelli are on the same side, and Stewart knows that no matter what, you have to defend the narrative.
[snip – offtopic, – Anthony]
[snip – offtopic, offensive, stupid – Anthony]
Thoroughly enjoyed this summary and it is certainly layman-friendly. I get the gist and I’m not a scientist. We are a long ways away from an appreciation of science for science’s sake — the quest for truth that science is supposed to be about; however, critiques like this are certainly a start. A desire to understand how the earth’s climate works should by rights be exciting to any thoughtful person. Perhaps Mr. Stewart can be persuaded to take an interest in nature “just because,” without the phoney veneer of politics, and to feel a sense of wonder about the earth and its complexity.
As someone has said, anyone can be funny if you have two dozen writers and multiple takes…
It reminds me of a poll recently when one of the actors on one of the approximately 200 police procedure shows was voted as “most intelligent” person on TV.
all of these ‘open letters to…’ will never be read by their intended recipients because they are just too long. its the same for letters to Congressmen, etc. the point has to be made in less than 5 paragraphs or their eyes (or more likely those of a staffer) will just glass over and they will move on to the next one
Bob:
You really don’t believe that Mr. Leibowitz has either the intellect or background to understand a single word you said. Do you?
It’s the PS that’s the best part of this letter. An astute gamble that Jon Stewart could be converted, and even more… Imagine a popular TV show that would endorse the anti-AGW position.
But of course, there is a 99% chance that Mr. Stewart won’t even get to see this letter, as it will be filtered out by one of his staff.
Kudos Bob, Well written.
The omission of his given name “Liebowitz” is only interesting because it signifies that Jon is one of those ultra-modern hipsters of jewish descent who are deeply ashamed of their jewish ancestry, so much so that they will go to any lengths to hide it. It’s a measure of his fundamental hypocrisy.
Stewart’s reply
“I was told there would be no math.”
Flyfisher says:
January 17, 2014 at 7:41 am
Stewart’s reply
“I was told there would be no math.”
Actually, it will be more like “I’m just a comedian”.
Much like Michael Moore’s “I’m just a film maker”. Or Neil Young’s “I’m just a singer”.
When confronted by facts, many advocates will retreat to this meme, and get on to the next skit/propaganda film/song. As the saying goes, “bums in seats, laddie, bums in seats!”.
Bob, your letter is instructive, but will have no effect on Jon Stewart’s actions, which are planned and performed wholly in support of an agenda. Stewart is merely a propagandist, an apparatchik of the state. It would be kind to say that Stewart will not change until he understands his true role. Cynics would say that Stewart knows what he is doing.
Bob – excellent missive – please keep it up.
Folks – don’t underesmate Stewart.
I believe he is an extremely intelligent guy.
He is on the wrong side of this one, but that is not a surprise in the world he inhabits. Dissent on CAGW is not allowed to get anywhere near his world without being thoroughy rubbished by institutions that really should be trust worthy and know better.
Understanding this nonsense requires a journey, and I’m sure most of us have taken it, along the way becoming astounded at the behaviour of once venerable and trusted institutions. That is not an easy journey to take, depending of course on your starting point.
Also, satire has historically been an extremely powerful tool against establishment politics (which CAGW clearly is).
Good satire is hard to do. It requires intelligence and a very strong grip on the issues.
Stewart isn’t there yet on CAGW, and maybe he won’t get there.
But God help the CAGW establishment if he or someone like him does figure it out.
It would provide more progress than a thousand congressional hearings.
That’s why your approach is worth the considerable effort you have clearly put into it Bob.
First, thanks Bob for your comprehensive response to that episode, which I also happened to see. It was cringing to watch, it was so uninformed, filled as it was with obvious pre-packaged catch-phrases.
It happens that the local Federal MP has this week jumped on the CAGW bandwagon and he really needs to be mailed a pointer to this thread.
@RogerKnights says:
>>The response to “97 doctors” argument should have been: “Would you see a podiatrist or proctologist for that lump on your lung?”
>More to the point, “Would you see those 97% if their misdiagnosis rate were 95%? The actual global temperature is going to fall below their 95%-confidence range this year.
My response would be, “Would you see those 97% of doctors who have never made a single correct diagnosis or one of the 3% who are inerrant 95% of the time?”
Obviously the 97% thing is bunk as well but who’s counting.
@jon Stewart
I really like your show – it is brilliant, but your team’s anthropogenic global warming angle is totally off base. Someone is likely to do a brilliant job of sending up your apparent ignorance on the subject even more effectively that you send up Fox News employees. No kidding, your team looks more ridiculous that FOX NEWS! OMG that is hard to believe possible but on this point it is true.
Get with the program. The surface temperature of this planet has not increase in 17 years! It matters! Even the worst alarmists admit it! Make fun of the idiots who are claiming it has. They are the brainless judge and the armless black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. At least find a middle ground and poke fun at the climate fanatics for their physically impossible predictions of doom if we don’t let them empty our wallets. In a sane world it would be called “robbery with menaces”. As we both know, it is not sane. Please help us make it so.
Thanks
Your fan
Crispin
Bravo, Bob, but John Stewart is a paid mouthpiece. He will continue to speak what he’s told to speak, refrain from what he’s told to refrain from. John Stewart did not get where he was by being an individual. He sold out to the money and fame, just like all other celebrities. And there it is. John Stewart is a celeb plain and simple. As all in the holly world know – you can and will be ripped from your seat in New York minute, blackballed and ridiculed by the same goddess which spawned you. All you gotta do is open your mouth and speak your mind. You will be destroyed. John Stewart and all others will do nothing of the kind, they will parrot what the parrots parrot no matter how ridiculous it may be. Politicians are under the same thrall, that’s why they wait until their deathbed to breathe anything like the truth. Still, letters like yours may serve to give the man some guilt. Who knows? Maybe Stewart will make a deathbed confession?
Who is Jon Stewart?
Jon Stewart, if you are reading this please note that the IPCC in their latest report said they don’t know why Antarctica sea ice extent has been on an increasing trend since 1979.
Here are a few short abstracts you might also want to read about concerning the other ice-cap since it was mentioned by you.
You will find that Arctic sea ice extent and volume at the end of the melt season of 2013 was up dramatically on 2012.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25383373
Here is a list of failed predictions and pending predictions for an ice-free Arctic.
The North Pole has been ice free within the last 100 years. There is much more I can add such as polar bear numbers are up, there was a huge warming of the Arctic between the early 1920s to around mid-1940s etc.
There is much more regularly covered on WUWT and other blogs.
Bob: you left out a big question.
Where are the models that correctly predict cloud cover?
Where are the models that predict cloud formation?
If models can’t do that, they are useless. And cloud cover is a weather circumstance which has been documented for far longer than temperature!
…The response to “97 doctors” argument should have been: “Would you see a podiatrist or proctologist for that lump on your lung?”…
Er, NO!!! Not at all!
The warmists try to persuade people that they can be trusted. One of their arguments is “You would trust a doctor who said you needed treatment, so why not trust us? In other words, they say “You want to know if you should trust us? Well, you trust the most trustworthy people in the world, so why not us?” Put like that, you can see the logical disjoint.
I prefer to present the ‘doctor’ argument thus:
You notice that your child has a bit of a fever. Getting a bit hot, perhaps nothing to worry about, but you want to be sure. So you go to a hospital.
There you meet a doctor. He says “We doctors in this hospital operate a thing called the precautionary principle. There is an illness called meningitis – it’s not common, but it can be very serious. Your child is running a slight fever – that’s how it might start. I recommend immediate brain surgery – removal of the temporal lobes or a lobotomy. Your child won’t be able to develop to his maximum potential after that, but at least he’ll be alive. Perhaps we should amputate a leg as well, just in case that scratch I noted ends up with septicemia. After all, you can’t be too careful. …”.
You are taken aback at this, but the doctor has a lot of green-coated assistants and ward staff around him – all saying that he must be right, he’s fully qualified, he’s our best expert and he’s written no end of papers on this subject. Apparently 97% of other doctors agree with him. So you sign the forms, and your son gets wheeled into the operating theatre.
Just as they are starting to prep him for the op, you find a doctor from another hospital by your side, watching. You ask him about this case, and whether the doctor doing the operation has a good record. “Well,” says your new adviser, “I don’t like to comment about professional colleagues, but that doctor has just moved into the neighbourhood with a new medical theory. He spends a lot of time advertising it, but no one has yet tested it on a patient. I looked over his papers and found that they didn’t make sense. And a few of us are beginning to think that he is not actually interested in curing a patient, but in making lots of money out of major operations and associated health care.”
What would you do?
If Stewart does read though Bob’s letter he’ll likely be unable to distinguish the significance of it’s content. That is why he believes as he does.
He is afflicted with Significance Recognition Deficiency resulting his perceiving things in a convoluted impression.
He’s impressionable and susceptible to influences without being able to distinguish or decipher levels of significance.
The correct answer in my mind to the 97% of doctors question is “Would you also have taken the 99+% verdict of doctors before 1860 on ‘miasma’ theory?”.
Science progresses. Thinking changes. Evidence accumulates. Pauses happen.
Are you seriously wasting your time trying to talk sense into a stone wall? If you want to see a proper take-down of Jon Stewart, you should watch this.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=1808
This letter is too long and contains too many details.
The way I see it, there are two reasons why he sides with the CAGW establishment:
1.) The most likely reason is he doesn’t understand what all the graphs etc mean. If that is the case then he likely doesn’t care to understand. He wants to leave it up to those who call themselves or have been labeled by media/political forces of power as scientists.
This is the problem the skeptics have with relations to the public. We’ve been trained all our lives to trust in those who have the credentials, no matter what it is they are saying. That is after all why many of us go to school, to get credentials. We assume we worked that hard and learned all those truths so we could make rational evidence based decisions for our employers that they will too. So by this logic Jon says, “This guy is a climate scientist, thus he should understand more about climate than anyone else, and thus I should trust him to advise me in truth to my (the world’s) best interest.”
Knowing this the only way to get people like Jon to come around would be to discredit or remove the credentials of climate scientists so they are viewed as amateurs, hacks, or criminals. So far, CAGW pushers are working hard to do just that to any climate scientist who calls himself a skeptic. It is then our job to do the same, which we’ve been working very hard at, but they key is no amount of graphs or factual representation of data will win. We have to catch them knowingly lieing and commenting to each other about it. Its already been done with climategate, but the more opportunities we get to expose them knowingly misleading us the better.
2.) He is one of those who believes the means is justified by the end. There is nothing else to say here. If he is an environmentalist, he probably is, all he cares about is reduce, reuse, recycle. He believes we must reduce our consumption of EVERYTHING at all costs.
Yes, Jon Stewart is exactly the person / kind of person we need to be moving toward believing us, or at least reducing their belief in what they’ve been told by those granted social power in climate. We need him to make fun of climate scientists. Wouldn’t be great if he said “In other news, an extreme weather event occurred today, OH MY GOD ITS GLOBAL WARMING COME TO KILL US ALL.” Sadly he won’t, or at least not this year.
But in earlier decades, many entertainers of Jewish descent didn’t use their real names for a different reason: because of widespread (though perhaps low-key) anti-semitism. George Orwell wrote a powerful essay or two about how common it was in his day–and how unacknowledged that commonness was. It still persists. So the blame lies mostly with us.
Also, many “stage names” are chosen for euphony. Jon Liebowitz isn’t very euphonious.
@RogerKnights – no, but Fran Liebowitz is a running gag for Fraternities. 😉
Sorry, FAWN Liebowitz.
I saw the Stewart program and flinched, particularly because his remarks were cheered by the audience. To me, they had all been brainwashed by the media, so it was not surprising that they believe as they do. Unlike some posters here, I think Stewart is a very bright lad, and I hope that he will “read, learn, and inwardly digest” the contents of this posting. In view of the many revelations of the shortcomings of others by his program I feel that he would be capable of correcting himself on this matter when the facts are presented to him.
After Stewart, we still have the CBC, ABC, BBC, NPR, PRI, and most of the other radio / TV media plus the print media to correct, and that will probably be a more difficult task that bring Jon S into the realm of reality.
Thank you, Bob, for pulling all this information together and for sending it to Jon S.
Ian M
Global Warming hysteria is fomented by the political Left in the United States and other developed countries, and by undeveloped nations seeking “damages”. Jon Stewart is a card-carrying member of the political Left, and hence voices the memes common to his ilk.
Abraham Lincoln memorializes the Union’s 23,000 casualties and losses and justifies the war which demanded their sacrifice: Gettysburg Address, 278 words.
Franklin Roosevelt condemns a date that will live in infamy, and asks Congress for a Declaration of War against Japan: Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation, 521 words.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr makes the case and lays the course for the Civil Rights movement: I have a Dream, 1,625 words.
Bob Tisdale complains about a comedy routine: 3,000 words.
Thoroughness is a virtue. So is concision.
I watched it too. There are two issues there.
1) Stewart is a lefty and for him global warming is a wedge issue to distiguish between enlightened (97% of scientists say..) liberals and backward republicans.
2) In his segments he showed mostly Fox channel commentators (his favourite target) pronouncing that the cold weather negates global warming. Here he has some merit in denouncing using single weather event as evidence of climate trends. Although I will bet a few bucks that during Sandy he was claiming that was a consequence of the GW.
Tad:
At January 17, 2014 at 9:30 am
I see, so the UK is no longer among the “developed countries”. Of course, that was to be expected when Cameron became PM.
Richard
An open letter to Jon Stewart,
You’re not funny.
If an honest man is wrong, after being demonstrated that he is wrong, he has two options – either to stop being wrong or to stop being honest.
richardscourtney says: @ January 17, 2014 at 9:52 am
For what it is worth President George Bush signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate. Bush also made sure that Maurice Strong was chair at Kyoto. “Interestingly, Strong had initially been blocked from participating in the conference by the U.S. Department of State. When Strong learned of this, however, he persuaded then-President George Bush to overrule the State Department.”
Left vs right has nothing really to do with it. It is all about money, power and control. “Left” and “right” are just methods of confusing the masses. Again read E.M. Smith on “Evil Socialism” vs “Evil Capitalism”
Think about it. How many laws have the Republicans repealed???
As the subject has been mentioned: Jon Stewart goes by that name (nee Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) because he is estranged from his father, hence he chose to drop Leibowitz and slightly change the spelling of his middle name, assuming it as his surname.
His father was, interestingly enough, a physics professor…
Jon Stewart in the past, when called out for inaccuracies, has defended himself by saying he is just a comedian. He said, in his own defense, you can’t take anything he says seriously. I would just go a bit farther and characterize him as a buffoon.
Paying attention to a man who says not to take him seriously is a waste of time. The fact that many young, self-identified hipsters take him seriously is just sad. These same self-identified hipsters look like deer in headlights when you ask them any factual question. Move on. There is nothing to see here.
Jud says:
January 17, 2014 at 8:11 am
“Also, satire has historically been an extremely powerful tool against establishment politics (which CAGW clearly is).”
At least during Obama 1.0 Jon Stewart has never criticized The Won; so he is OBVIOUSLY the establishment. What in the world makes you think that Stewart starts disliking being the establishment?
I’ve posted this before but here’s my take on the Doctor Analogy:
A man goes to the Doctors for a routine check-up.
The Doctor says “You are very sick. We have no time for further tests. We must act now,”
“But I feel fine. I have no symptoms…”
“NOW! We must act now! I am an expert, a world renowned highly qualified medical practitioner” Do as I say,”
“OK. What must we do?”
“I’m just going to cut off your left leg, your right arm and your genitals”
“What?”
“Come on, hurry up, leg or whatever first? Oh, don’t worry I’ll do whatever I want”.
“Wait, can I have a second opinion?”
“No time.”
“But there’s no sign I’m sick. How about I get a second opinion as to whether there’s time for a second opinion?”
“NO! They are deniers! The ones who disagree with me… they’re paranoid you know… they believe in conspiracies and they are all paid by big business who want you dead…DENIERS!!!”
The Doctor pauses, and then says in his most professional bedside manner, “There is no time. You must just trust me. I’m the expert, you know.”
Dodgy Geezer says:
You notice that your child has a bit of a fever. Getting a bit hot, perhaps nothing to worry about, but you want to be sure. So you go to a hospital.
…
=================================
That hits the nail right on the head. I like this analogy a lot because it refutes a likely talking point by warmists. Remember that in that original survey the authors cut out about 97.5% of the respondents – saying that they were only including the 79 (out of 3146 respondents) they ended up with because they were the ‘experts’ (peer-reviewed papers, etc.). So their take is likely to be, “Yes. Go with our 3% because they know what they are talking about” – even though they only represent 2.5% of the sample population.
on the 97 figure, maybe point out that is was 97% of 77 “scientists” who completed a survey.
so 75/77 suddenly is 97% of all climate “scientists” and billions or more have been wasted.
Great Bob but it is way too long.
It is truly humorous just how wrong the warmists are. A couple graphs showing this might have sufficed.
open letters are the most ineffective methods of changing people’s minds. It’s more self display or rhetoric for internal consumption rather than good persuasion. In short, open letters are used to communicate to the faithful ( watch me take on the big guy) rather than actually persuade the big guy. They are addressed to the big guy who is absent, but the audience is not the big guy.
In short this letter is addressed to john stuart but is not written for him to read. it is written for the agrandizement of the author and the pleasure of his choir.
This is known as the scheme of apostrophe in rhetoric.
This particular letter however shows bad kairos, see if you can tell why
Steven Mosher, I’m guessing you think that the letter is too late as the show cam out on the 6th. But the warming has still stopped and the models are still unable to explain that and the topic is still newsworthy – even if AR5 was ignored by the press. So the points still stand.
Although you are right that an open letter is preaching to the choir more than to the addressee. But does that matter? The internet has already replaced old media for news and weather updates. Satire will follow – it is also contemporary.. Mr Stewart is not that important.
Thanks Bob. Nice letter. I hope Jon will take the time to read it and think about the real status of the science and the climate.
Re: Stephen Mosher
The letter was not addressed to “John Stuart”, but to “Jon Stewart”.
If you’re going to be critical, you might at least try to get the details right.
Steven Mosher says: “In short this letter is addressed to john stuart but is not written for him to read.”
It was written with hope that Jon Stewart and a few of his fans would read it, and take the time to understand it. Same holds true for all of my open letters.
Have a nice day.
If 97 doctors told you …
Merck had:
Years of research.
Peer reviewed papers.
Computer models for number and distribution of ill effects.
Medical studies.
Patient testimonials.
Favorable publication in scientific magazines.
Thousands of doctors believing them.
Millions of people believing them on multiple continents.
There was a consensus in the scientific and medical community, there was no denying the benefits of Vioxx.
Then people started to die, too many people. The data on fatalities in the real world did not match the information from the computer models published in the scientific journals.
The courts in multiple countries uncovered that Merck, their researchers, the reviewers and the scientific publications had been lying and/or had been deceptive the whole time, and that Merck had paid scientific publications to print lies and the scientific publications knew it.
Perhaps we need something like the Merck/Vioxx trial to bring out the fraud in this whole AGW thing.
There was a consensus.
Jud says:
January 17, 2014 at 8:11 am
Bob – excellent missive – please keep it up.
Folks – don’t underestimate Stewart.
I believe he is an extremely intelligent guy.
Big difference in being intelligent and being wise. I see little if any wisdom coming from the global warming crowd.
johnmarshall says: “PS, I thought you were reducing output, obviously not. Keep it up.”
I have reduced output. I should have published this last week. I should have written a post about the Nature/PDO/Trenberth article yesterday morning, but I still haven’t finished it. I’m hoping to finish it tonight or tomorrow morning. Last Friday’s post on ENSO basics was basically a cut and paste exercise–took about an hour, but I held off on posting it until Friday so that I could answer questions that night or over the weekend. The other two posts were quickies.
If 97% of climate scientists said I’m under the weather, would I believe them?
97% of doctors held doubts stomach ulcers could be cured with antibiotics and one of them cut 2/3’s of my dads stomach out. Another 3% were shouted down and reviled for even suggesting bacteria lived in the stomach.
3% (supposedly) of doubting scientists must be feeling like Galileo after Jon Lie-bovines outburst.
Being a paid mouthpiece of the left, what he thinks or knows has nothing to do what his scriptwriters tell him. Just another pawn in the machine that loves to make people laugh; not from what he says but by how he tells it.
The best way is to play his game, without him.
Jon Stewart is capable of reading the letter but may not have the time or patience for the subject. However, he does produce a news show for people who still move their lips when they read, so maybe he is the guy to co-author a book with you.
“PS: If you should know of a comedian who’s tired of the tripe we’ve been seeing from the catastrophic manmade global warming wing of the climate science community, please let them know I’m looking for a co-author for my next book.”
I know of a good one: Evan Sayet. Saw him at the Comedy Store recently. He’ll give you a ton of great anecdotes about how liberals think like Rain Man or 5-year olds. “Clean air good, dirty air bad”.
Pine Island Glacier
They won’t read that. It’s too long for a skit. But good job writing it in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand. That’s no easy task.
Congratulations again Bob! Although I expect your open letter to be quite over the head of Mr. Stewart and Co. I was thoroughly amused by its narrative. It is very good to see you once again stepping up your output to a high level. You speak for all of us and so much better too. It is getting easier and easier these days to assemble massive fact sheets against CAGW and we need to launch them.
For Jon Stewart, use BIGGER LETTERS and shorter words.
Thanks Bob. I’m bookmarking this page as a great resource page where I can get my hands on the relevant facts, explanations and peer-reviewed articles quickly. My friends keep quoting the 97% BS and I need a page like this to shoot them down.
Last week I got this from my friend. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2014/01/10/about-that-consensus-on-global-warming-9136-agree-one-disagrees/
I know it’s BS but my friend will only shut-up if I can do a quick comeback of the same visual imagery which rebuts it. So once again, many thanks Bob.
And of course, “Stewart” is a stage name. Perhaps he’s not so keen on his Balkan ancestry.
Why does anybody care what a television comic hack says? He’s a progressive totalitarian, of course he buys into the green nonsense. He is preaching to his own choir, a choir that does not care about truth any more than the messengers themselves do. Surprise, surprise, a green liberal. Duh.
Mark
I’d like to hear about any response you get. My bet is that the producers will either ignore you or try to laugh the whole thing off. One of the benefits of being a comedian is that you can say practically anything without having to worry about a lawsuit; and after all, most of Stewart’s audience leans as far left as he does.
“PS: If you should know of a comedian”.
Plenty of them at the UEA, they have even written their own book – ‘The Dog Ate Our Data’.
Many comedians use social issues as material. Only the likes of Jon Stewart present it in the format of journalism (when it suits them). Much like Rush Limbaugh, Stewart is just trying to sell a ham… but without making you cringe.
Writers, he’s got writers; literally, he reads what he’s been ‘fed’ …
Everyone else Steyn, Limbaugh – do it on their own (NO WRITERS, no dress rehearsals!!! No sycophantic audience to feed off of, or laugh tracks added!)
BTW, thanks Bob.
While I’m here, anybody else ever catch the Chris Wallace interview of Jon Stewart?
Part 1
Part 2
.
Jim, I have a whole article on Leibowitz, I mean “Stewart”,
“The Truth about “Jon Stewart”
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/10/the-truth-about-jon-stewart.html
“I think I would say I’m more of a socialist” – Jon Stewart, 2000
“My comedy is informed by an ideological background. There’s no question about that. […] Oh, there’s no question that I don’t tell the full story.” – Jon Stewart, 2011
Millennials can’t handle the truth.
Far too prolix. Way too long even for fans let alone a vacuous comedian.
Same problem with your book titles. You suffer from a fear of not being heard. Well, you’re centre stage now. Follow Orwell’s advice on writing and chop it down, down down.
If it takes longer than 8 seconds to read, you’ve just lost 90% of your potential audience. If you can’t edit it down, get the help of someone who can. Seriously, your message needs to fit the medium better. And the medium isn’t dry debates on a blog, you have a worldwide audience in the making.
flyingtigercomics says:
January 18, 2014 at 2:31 am
“Far too prolix. Way too long even for fans let alone a vacuous comedian.”
Let’s see how you would explain climate in 8 seconds. Give it a try ….
How’s about keeping it short enough for a comedian to understand?
Null Hypothesis = Scenario C
We had one foot of global warming yesterday and after I had run the snowblower after work yesterday evening, another foot of global warming landed here in the mystically white middle of Norway during the night. After yet a round with the snowblower I marvel at the wonders of global warming as it produces all kinds of weather irrespective of the IPCC.
1) Open letters are actually read. They are not responded to, but they are read. In general, one letter represents quite many viewers/readers. The media may hate it, but they read it and make a note. They actually do not so much react to a single letter as to a trend. Therefore, the scary stories in Norway are way down in rate of occurrence these days, also because there are people who take the time to write these letters.
2) Bob’s summing up, as aimed on the intelligent reader who hasn’t had time to read every post on the wuwt blog already, is an excellent summing up, especially for those with intelligence who haven’t yet had time to look into the science of the global scare and therefore rely on authority, that is, state-salaried cllimate researchers who are pulled out of their office by the media to give a short comment on any weather-related event and thus must speak in headlines.
3) WUWT has a tremendous – and rising – impact on the global warming cult and it appeals to intelligent people. Your article, Bob, stands out as a superb introduction for intelligent people. Especially because you show respect for the receiver of the message.
4) I would recommend studying G. K. Chesterton’s journalism if you wish to immerse your serious articles in humour. An excellent introduction to his way of treating serious subjects with humour can be found in his “Orthodoxy”, 1908, the story about how he became a believer in the Chistian faith only through reading atheists and believers in strange religions. It is at the same time hilarously funny and deeply philosophical.
John Stewart is a left-wing propagandist. He is firmly in the employ of big green, makes mega bucks off of the scam by selling the nonsense to the general public. Don’t think he will fess up to his errors. Too much at stake for him.
Other JJ –
We are asked by Anthony and the site moderators to stick to one unique handle. I have been posting on this site for several years as JJ. Please choose a different handle.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global warming, is an intelligence test.
Those who bought it are on the suckers list.
As with any cult there are levels and cliches within, the top of this pyramid scheme are the Al Bore, UN bureaucrat types.
Then there are those who profit from the madness of others, they are acting true to their creed.
If government is going to throw away buckets of tax dollars, hey I paid taxes is justification enough.
But the followers, who have enabled this group madness, are natural true believers, this is the path of the holy, all who doubt are evil and stupid.
Every visitor here has conversed with these people.”Everybody knows” is their first defence, then the authority argument, but always the assumed superiority of their cause.
Logic will not reach them.
However most of our friends and family have neither bought in or out, they have other priorities.
So the bullet point;”CAGW is an intelligence test”.
The great, the good and those here to help have demonstrated a sad lack of intelligence in this matter.
Linear extrapolation of natural cycles? What could go wrong?
In future perhaps they can be persuaded to seek other pursuits, than grasping after power over others. Painting roses?
What a stick for us against the next round of alarmism (a consensus on acidification, probably) that 97%-argument will be after the warm turns.
Oddly I think Stewart is intelligent. Comics often are. Humor is tough. But he is also an uber capitalist benefitting from the ignorance of his audience – the low information voter. Facts aren’t important to his very funny, smarmy style. He knows though pulling the curtain back on this shameless scam would be the honest, nearly heroic thing to do, given his influence, it would destroy his ratings. I actually think he wrestles with this. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he wakes up with a set one day.
The easiest way to verify to anyone that they do not value/understand natural contribution:
Ask them: “Can you show me the control? Namely, if man had not evolved, if man were not a factor, at what point will the Holocene end and the next glaciation begin?”
Brutally, if they claim certainty of the mechanism by which man is creating warming now, including predictions of total ice melt etc., then there MUST BE solid, irrifutable science that understands natural cycle with utter certainty, and can thus predict the return of the ice.
Bob – your work ethic and patience are motivational. I believe Jon Stewart could put together a comical short on how poorly the supposed 97% performed.
Perhaps Bob, you could have led with facts that disprove CAGW such as
No warming for 17 years
Mediaeval Warm Period hotter with much less CO2
Temperature rise precedes CO2 rise by 800 years.
It’s been warming at the same approx rate for 300 years well before humans could have had an effect.
There is no mid tropospheric hotspot outright disproving the models.
Antarctic ice is at record levels.
No sea level rise increase.
No significant sea temperature increase, there is no heat found to account for the pause.
He needed those compelling facts to slap him into reading the lengthy letter.
sabretruthtiger says:
January 21, 2014 at 1:01 pm
Perhaps Bob, you could have led with facts that disprove CAGW such as
No warming for 17 years
Mediaeval Warm Period hotter with much less CO2
Temperature rise precedes CO2 rise by 800 years.
It’s been warming at the same approx rate for 300 years well before humans could have had an effect.
There is no mid tropospheric hotspot outright disproving the models.
Antarctic ice is at record levels.
No sea level rise increase.
No significant sea temperature increase, there is no heat found to account for the pause.
He needed those compelling facts to slap him into reading the lengthy letter.
+++++++++++++
Good points, except, that was not the explicit purpose of Bob’s open letter. Rather it was to respond to several expressed beliefs of Jon S.
Facts don’t matter. John Stewart’s crony capitalist advertisers won’t let him say anything adverse to AGW.