Ben Webster in The Times writes:
Alarmist claims about the impact of global warming are contributing to a loss of trust in climate scientists, an inquiry has found.
Apocalyptic language has been used about greenhouse gas emissions as “a deliberate strategy by some to engage public interest”. However, trying to make people reduce emissions by frightening them has “harmful consequences” because they often respond suspiciously or decide the issue is “too scary to think about”.
The inquiry, by a team of senior scientists from a range of disciplines, was commissioned by University College London to find better ways of informing the public about climate science.
Public interest in climate change has fallen sharply in the past few years, according to a survey last month which found the number of Google searches for the phrase “global warming” had fallen by 84 per cent since the peak in 2007.
Confidence in climate science was undermined in 2010 by the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN scientific body which advises governments, had falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.
Scientists have also been accused of exaggerating the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice by claiming the North Pole could be ice-free in summer by 2020. Other scientists say this is unlikely before 2050.
Claims were made a decade ago, and later retracted, that the snows of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, could disappear by 2015.
The inquiry, led by Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum, concludes: “Alarmist messages that fail to materialise contribute to the loss of trust in the science community.”
The report says climate scientists have difficulty “delivering messages that are alarming without slipping into alarmism”.
It says the media is partly to blame for seeking “a striking headline”.
However, the report says there was also a “preconception that communicating threatening information is a necessary and effective catalyst for individual behaviour change”.
It says the “climate science community” is quick to challenge those who downplay climate change but less willing to question “alarmist misrepresentations” of climate research.
Doom-laden reports may make people feel anxious but their concern does not last.
“Over time this worry changes to numbness, desensitisation and disengagement from the issue altogether.
“The failure of specific predictions of climate change to materialise creates the impression that the climate science community as a whole resorts to raising false alarms. When apparent failures are not adequately explained, future threats become less believable.”
The report says the 30,000 climate scientists worldwide are at the centre of an intense public debate about key questions, such as how we should obtain our energy, but are “ill-prepared” to engage in it.
It adds that this difficulty in communicating their work is “proving unhelpful to evidence-based policy formulation, and is damaging their public standing”.
Full story (subscription required)
Something about killing tha goose….?
Who could have guessed, based on famous, historical doomsayers, that doomsayers would eventually doom themselves by predicting doom? Perhaps there is a new saying in the making – “Mann, you’re really doom.”
Took ’em several decades to figure out the point of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
“The report says climate scientists have difficulty “delivering messages that are alarming without slipping into alarmism”.”
Climate “Scientists” have difficulty telling the truth as this would greatly reduce their position and grant money!
They can’t adequately explain why their alarmist claims were not realised because they were never valid claims in the first place: now there’s yer problem!
I always ask the same simple question of supporters of AGW. Give me a single example that you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that man’s tiny contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere has caused a bad thing to happen? They never give an answer or if they do it’s filled with “maybe, could, it is possible, computer models,etc.” To paraphrase Richard Feynman, “If your experiment or observation of reality doesn’t match your guess (theory), it’s wrong. It doesnt’ matter what your name is, how famous you are, how rich, etc. it is WRONG.” How could this be any clearer about AGW
There is a link to the full report that’s being referred to (156 pages!) at Bishop Hill and at my blog.
It’s all the usual stuff – we have to work harder to get our climate message across to the public…
I just LOVE the Alarmist! They can’t help themselves, they just can’t keep their mouths shout. I say just let them keep putting their foot in their mouths. Their mouths have so many feet in there now that it’s hard to understand what they are saying. And that my friends is a good thing! More speech’s Chairman Gore!
This gold mine has played out. It’s time for Big Green to come up with another cash cow disaster scenario to keep that money flowing in. Fracking, anyone?
In 1998 world temperatures were higher than what was predicted by the models and in 2014 they are lower than the models predicted. In other words, the models were wrong then, and they are wrong today.
The dim bulb is staring to glow a little brighter in the skulls of some of these types, but little good it will do them. Without the alarmist hype, the climate issue is dead and buried. It became an issue only through the hype and it will die when the hype dies. Joelle Gergis and her “guerilla warriors” wil not even get the benefits of a veterans pension.
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard
The whole approach of “How are we as AGWers going to communicate with the public?” instead of “Should we truthfully re-examine our methodology?” is also doomed to fail.
When “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, climatologists should have been lined up denouncing the movie as alarmist and inaccurate. Instead they seemed to take the view that lying for a good cause is excusable.
Their reward has been a loss in credibility.
The news today is about a new bipartisan report that predicts a high toll on the economy and coastal flooding caused by global warming. But if you look a little more closely you will notice it’s just another computer model projection.
“It says the media is partly to blame for seeking “a striking headline”.
Let’s try and spread the blame. And all those papers with pre-packaged headlines for the media had nothing to do with it? I wonder which “media” in particular…The Guardian?…Nature?…Al Gore and his documentary on which the alarmists and Ecoterrorists were only too quick to leap onto the coat tails?
Is this “inquiry” an autopsy or part of a plan on how alarmists can repackage their message and keep the money flowing?
Consensus is a double-edged sword?
The projections are pure shape-shifting anyway. Now they just tailor them a bit and proceed with the politicians who love the excuse.
The inquiry, by a team of senior scientists from a range of disciplines, was commissioned by University College London to find better ways of informing the public about climate science.
————
They can fancy up the package, but it’s still a turd they’re trying to sell.
Like putting lipstick on a pig 🙂
They built their House of Climate on a bed of sand, being eroded by water from above and below, and now they are trying to blame the materials used and the workmanship. LOL.
A reprieve from climate burnout is at hand. Though alarming to those susceptible to being duped by a pseudoscientific argument (e.g., President Obama), the utterances of IPCC climate “scientists” formerly bored the scientific sophisticate because the claims of their climate models were non-falsifiable thus being unscientific. In Chapter 11 of the report of Working Group 1 in IPCC Assessment Report 5, the IPCC breaks new ground by presenting model predictions and comparing the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the associated events. It follows that a portion of the claims made by these models are falsifiable. Are these models falsified by the evidence? This is a scientifically interesting question..
HAH, HAH, HAH.
Climate Cultists meet petard.
Does anyone have a link to the report itself? A quick google for ‘”University College of London” climate report’ didn’t seem to produce it.
Don’t blame the media, they just copy press releases. People that asked, “but is it true?” have been villified since the onset of the climate scare.
Oh dear, “Snake Oil” commodity futures seem to be in a death spiral………
Wolf!!!!
No, I really mean it this time!
“This gold mine has played out. It’s time for Big Green to come up with another cash cow disaster scenario to keep that money flowing in. Fracking, anyone?”
Jim said it right. This is Big Green’s doing. It’s really they who have contrived this hysteria to fill their coffers. Climate Science’s sin is acquiescing to their hysterical browbeating and going along with it. It is climate scientists that will suffer for it in the long run. The green running dogs like Suzuki are never held accountable and they will move on to the next hysterical money-maker leaving those who went along isolated and discredited.
The problem is that it is and always was about how we generate power. The environmentalist movement in the 1970’s decided to campaign against the use of carbonaceous fuels (let’s call them what they are) and looked for a basis to do so. They noted the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and revived the 19th century observation of the mechanism by which this and other gases could cause retention of heat in the atmosphere. They put two and two together and a scapegoat was born. They then set about demonstrating their hypothesis and through inevitable confirmation bias believed that they had proved an anthropogenic cause of climate change. Because of the underlying ideal, variation from the theory could not and still cannot be allowed, but credibility is finally waning.
Sure, blame the public, the media, big oil, scientist’s, inept governments, aerosols, flat earthers and probably aliens for not getting the “message” . Everybody gets the “message” , its just that fewer and fewer believe it. The problem is the message.
“The report says the 30,000 climate scientists worldwide…”
Really? Thirty thousand? Does anyone have a list of names? I don’t believe it. More of the same exaggeration. And this 30,000 produced only 12,000 papers for the Cook survey? Excuse me for having a doubt.
“However, trying to make people reduce emissions by frightening them has “harmful consequences” because they often respond suspiciously or decide the issue is “too scary to think about”.”
….or because they get mad and start voting the scam directors out of office!
Good, let’s shake out the amateurs & rascals and get down to business. I’m a former consultant to BOC Gases (now Linde), and we harvest carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to use in beverage carbonation, water treatment etc. See: http://www.boconline.co.uk/en/products-and-supply/speciality-gas/pure-gases/pure-carbon-dioxide/pure-carbon-dioxide.html
Carbon dioxide is a very valuable substance, and we shouldn’t be blowing it into the atmosphere. Just emphasize the use of the stuff as a raw material, give some incentives, and let industry take over. The plants will be gasping for CO2, we’ll pull so much out of the air.
Well, this made me want to take the Lord’s name in vain. IF the message you want to communicate is actually alarming, then some alarmism can easily be excused. The problem you have with your FUBAR communications is that the science is incredibly weak and tendentious, and reality is not behaving in an alarming way. This combination makes you out to be, at the very least, mistaken, and at worst, liars, propagandists and totalitarians. THAT’S the money quote, even if the study folks and Ben Webster don’t have the brains or stones to say it.
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – The late Stephen Schneider. Schneider later complained that this statement is often taken “out of context” but it seems to provide plenty of context for most anybody to understand what he was advocating.
He was not shouted down by other climate scientists for making such an idiotic, anti-science statement, and even today that statement is actively defended by well known climate scientists… that fact alone is quite enough reason to have enormous skepticism about everything that climate scientists do and say. The implication is clear: many really DO believe pretty much the same sorry rubbish as Schneider did.
Their ‘stories’, whether published in journals or informally presented, continue until today to follow Schneider’s unwise advise: rich in conjecture and poor in substance, with conclusions which are overstated compared to the scientific content, and filled with weasel words (may, might, could possibly, etc.) which provide for a future escape, so that no projection, no matter how absurd, can ever be proven plainly wrong by evolving reality. And of course, one of the conclusions in most EVERY publication is that it is ‘worse than we thought’, even when a sleepy 6 year old could see clearly that it is often actually quite a lot ‘better than we thought’.
Can climate scientists drop the policy agenda, stop exaggerating their scientific work, stop the scary scenarios, and play it straight with the public? I suppose in theory they could, but I have seen very little evidence they even want to. Until climate scientists stop acting like a bunch of lobbyists working to advance a public policy agenda, their science is never going to be considered by the public to be accurate. And the public will almost certainly be right in that assessment: advocacy has absolutely no proper place in science, and almost certainly distorts it and introduces bias. The issue is NOT a lack of communication, it is policy advocacy which discredits that communication. Public policy is not being inhibited by a lack of information reaching the public, it is being inhibited by a lack of credibility of climate scientists and their projections.
The report says the 30,000 climate scientists worldwide are at the centre of an intense public debate about key questions, such as how we should obtain our energy, but are “ill-prepared” to engage in it.
They are confused. The only group of “30,000” scientists [there are not “30,000 climate scientists” in the world] are the 31,487 scientists and engineers who co-signed the OISM statement:
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
Those 31,487 scientists and engineers — every one of them possessing a degree in the hard sciences, among them are more than 9,000 PhD’s — had to physically sign that statement, and mail it in. No emails accepted. They went out of their way to take a stand, and the names of every one of them are available online.
That shows the true ‘consensus’, for whatever that is worth. The alarmist clique has never come anywhere near those numbers. Truth be told, not very many scientists would disagree with that statement, because there is no evidence to contradict it.
Personally I don’t see the number of google searches to be that good a metric on interest in climate change. Really, how often do YOU google ‘global warming’ these days? I’ve got a list of Climate related blogs and news sources I check every day and leave it to them to find the interesting new stuff.
Didn’t someone say –
“Those that live by the sword, die by the sword.” or something to effect?
Steve Fitzpatrick says:
Can climate scientists drop the policy agenda, stop exaggerating their scientific work, stop the scary scenarios, and play it straight with the public? I suppose in theory they could…
I don’t believe they can, even in theory.
Which field of science allows scientist to become a celebrity and a hero, provide them with unlimited adoration of actors, politicians and media? Who’s better known to general public – a “generic” Noble Prize winner in physics or Jim Hansen? This stuff is worse then crack – there is no way climate scientists can stop exaggerating and drop policy agendas.
NPR did their part to promote alarmism again this morning. I was only half awake, but I know parts of Florida and S. Carolina are in danger of rising sea levels. A naval base will soon be under water, I think. They even interviewed two people who were not concerned at all, which is a first, far as I know. The tone was ‘matter-of-fact’, global warming is happening now and we are in for it.
I wonder if some climate scientists might consider saving their last shred of credibility for when the time comes to warn us all about the onset of glaciation.
This is why I love Cook and Lew so much. Their stupid dramas (and bomb widgets) will always come home to roost, and yet they stand surrounded by feathers scratching their heads and wondering aloud ” Why doesn’t the public believe us?” I’ll say it again, idiots like Lew and Cook and Nutterelli have done more to discredit AGW than any of us could ever hope to!
Udar,
The average person couldn’t name a Noble Prize winner, much less tell you who James Hansen is. I promise.
As an alumnus of UCL (BSc, PhD and former assistant lecturer) I am appalled that a college with a history founded on Jeremy Bentham and Nobel Prize winners like Ramsay should stoop to this example of deliberate mis-information. What a sorry state of affairs
Tony Berry
@Aphan
Good point on the useful idiots
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
If you scream “the sky is falling” long enough, and yet the sky doesn’t fall, people eventually stop listening.
WOW, who could have guessed that ….
How can there be 30,000 climate scientists when we rarely seem to hear from more than a few dozen who claim to speak for all??!!
… and then there are the survey studies which narrow down the number of relevant climate scientists to under 80……
Look at the insurance company ads on TV today. They learned a log time ago that fear does not sell. That has been known by motivational psychologists for decades.
Actually that speaks well for the general intelligence of people. While they do not do so consciously, most do evaluate risks versus rewards subconsciously. And when they see the risk declining (by not materializing) they shift into reward mode.
So the more doom and gloom, without fruition, that the alarmists proclaim, the less the general populace will react. The low brow and religiously faithful will bound the table. But the rest of the guests will just go home.
Didn’t Carl Sagan say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When the people making the claims refuse to publish their proof and then when the proof is stolen and the proof turns out to have been manipulated it’s hard to maintain your facade if “scientific objectivity.” This “global warming” religion is clearly agenda driven by governments seeking to expand themselves.
Consider, we all know that environmental research conducted by private sector businesses most especially oil companies is biased. If this bias is factual then how is it that environmental research conducted by a government not biased?
We should all thank Al Gore. He has provided the world with more climate skeptics than the alarmist world can contain. He peaked into Pandora’s Box and all his bad data escaped into the hands of the scientific realists.
‘The inquiry, … commissioned by University College London to find better ways of informing the public about climate science.’
Sorry guys, there is no better way to communicate it. The answer why is perhaps too obvious for these academics to see so let’s do a thought experiment to illustrate the inherent, and insoluble problem.
Let us consider a televised, somber, assemblage of top tier medical professionals gathered to educate the public about the dangerous health ramifications from cigarette smoking. The presentation begins as a renowned cardiologist ambles up to the podium to begin his speech. Sure, he’s a bit overweight but what the heck. He softly taps the microphone to test it then reaches under his suit into his shirt pocket and a familiar pocket-sized rectangular package emerges in his hand. Deftly, as if he’s done it a million times before, he raps the opened end of the package against his other hand causing a couple of white tubes with sand colored ends to slide partway out. In one fluid motion he brings the package with the tubes up to his mouth, pulling one out, sandy colored end first, with his lips. It’s a cigarette, of course. And he’s quite familiar with the ritual. He returns the package to his pocket, pats around his coat, searching. Ah, he forgot his lighter, but like any experienced smoker he has a pack of backup matches. Utilizing only one hand – he’s a pro – he fires one up, brings it to the cigarette, and takes a deep satisfying inhale as if he’s been waiting for this moment, and lights it up.
Now his presentation begins. The cigarette remains, ever present, lovingly nestled between his middle and index fingers, and at the ready. It doesn’t find it’s way into the ashtray on the podium – he’s going to smoke this baby! And, as any smoker can tell, he’s genuinely smoking it – deep drags straight into the lungs. The doctor’s speech, depicting the deleterious effects of nicotine on the functioning of the heart, is interrupted numerous times as he takes one drag, and another. He smokes the cigarette right down to the filter, right down to the quick, tamps it out, and voila, out comes another one as he continues his explanation.
Seated in rows to either side of the podium are other renowned doctors, thoracic surgeons, pulmanologists, other cardiologists, each waiting to deliver their own presentations on the health hazards of smoking. During the most noteworthy aspects of the first cardiologist’s talk they erupt in moments of applause, but first they have to put the cigarettes they themselves are smoking into their mouths so as to free up their hands to clap them together.
Now, we all know that the foregoing description exists as a thought experiment and a thought experiment only for the obvious reason that we’d never really see the foregoing presentation populated by doctors smoking like chimneys. And, if we did, we’d be justified in not believing that smoking is truly dangerous to one’s health. But we know that cigarette smoking is unhealthful because the doctors who tell us so would never be caught in public anymore than they’d be caught in private smoking.
Now consider the 5 star beach resorts for IPCC meetings, the POTUS’s vacation trips on Air Force 1, the limousines brought into Copenhagen, Kerry’s 5 mansions, Antarctic ecotrips on diesel yachts…
On a related idea, has anyone else noticed that there seem to be an incredible number of severe weather alerts these days? And when I go to look at them, I wind up scratching my head and wondering so what wouldn’t constitute a reason to issue a sever weather alert? There must be an awful lot of wolves around for all the crying of “Wolf! Wolf!”
When there is a genuine emergency, we will have trained everybody to tune out.
It’s increasingly difficult for even ardent believers to continue their support of this farce when they are confronted with daily examples like the following:
Greenpeace executive flies 250 miles to work
Environmental group campaigns to curb growth in air travel but defends paying a senior executive to commute 250 miles to work by plane
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/10920198/Greenpeace-executive-flies-250-miles-to-work.html
My daddy used to say Your can put a fancy saddle on a jackass but you are still riding a jackass.
Headlines you will not see publicized by the administration’s ABCNNBCBS news media:
Today, 23-24 June 2014 – at the peak of the NH summer solstice, the “excess” Antarctic sea ice area of 1.78 million square kilometers exceeds the total area of Greenland’s 1.7 Mkm^2.
(Somewhat sarcastically, one could also ask how many “Manhattan-sized” icebergs that excess sea ice anomaly would equal ? )
Now, a couple of things reduce the impact of this near-record high sea ice. In the Antarctic winter, much of the Antarctic continental and permanent shelf ice is in the dark part of the day, and the entire region between 67.5 south and the pole is in the dark for varying times of the day between now and late July. BUT – the minimum yearly TOA radiation occurs July 5 at 1310 watts/m^2 (right when the hours-per-day of Arctic insolation is at its yearly maximum. Also, the “excess” Antarctic sea ice IS in the sunlight at 72-73 south latitude, so it IS reflecting solar energy more this year than in any years past. The reduced arctic sea ice is at its yearly low albedo of 0.45 due to melt water and soot and dirt, so the sea ice up north is absorbing nearly as much energy as the open ocean is at low angles of the sun half the day. Net effect? For a few weeks, the Arctic open ocean is absorbing energy, but not for many more weeks of the summer.
Analysis spreadsheet for the energy gained/reflected at each latitude at each day-of-year for each hour-of-day available for comment/criticism upon request.
The burnout is already here. The American public consistently ranks global warming/AGW at the bottom of their concerns. There are various reasons for this, including our lousy economy and lingering unemployment and the understanding that anti-AGW polices are job killers. The oversaturation of the doom-and-gloom with none of the predictions coming true is undoubtedly a considerable factor as well.
How about the AGW proponents have been shown to be con men, liars, scallywags, and scoundrels thus not to be believed or trusted in any way.
I guess it’s time to turn the effort over to the billionaire hedge fund climate scientists. Money talks
The failure of specific predictions of climate change to materialise creates the impression that the climate science community as a whole resorts to raising false alarms.
Yeah. And as damning is their explicit and repeated calls for dishonesty, for making up baseless “scary scenarios,” for flat out lying:
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Greenpeace
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.” -leftist Senator Tim Wirth, 1993
“I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation… on how dangerous it is.” -Al Gore
“We have to offer up scary scenarios… each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.” -Stephen Schneider, lead ipcc author, 1989
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, first ipcc chair
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” -Daniel Botkin, ex Chair of Envinronmental Studies, UCSB
“Only sensational exaggeration. makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ attention… this is the only way to assure any political action and [get] more federal financing.” -Monika Kopacz, Atmospheric Scientist
Aphan says:
June 24, 2014 at 10:10 am
Udar,
The average person couldn’t name a Noble Prize winner, much less tell you who James Hansen is. I promise.
That is not what I was talking about – most people would know someone like Einstein, for example.
I was making a statement that average person would more likely to know name of climate activist such as Hansen, because media loves people who are “saving the planet”, rather than name of a Noble Prize winner in hard sciences.
Would that make Climate Cultists “petarded”?
Maybe they forgot about Climategate in 2009. These things happen.
There really is a communications problem I see. The North Pole being ice-free is nothing new or alarming. Polynas et al. Maybe they should get their act together before attempting to alarm.
People in Europe and USA were told to expect warmer winters. When that failed to materialize they were told that the Climastrologists were mistaken and that they had in fact meant freezing winters. Dr. Viner also told the children of the UK they would not know what snow is. 10 years later many could not go to school because of too much snow. The Scottish ski industry was said to be in terminal decline. Viner in fact said in 2004 “it’s just getting too hot for the Scottish ski industry.” The Cairngorns had to close down in 2010 because of too much snow.
Yet they keep the jokes coming. Now Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has predicted that the Arctic would become ice free in 2015 or 2016. I will end my cruelty for now.
The reason why their alarmism fails is because it was garbage and exaggerations from day one. It always was garbage and the chickens are coming home to roost. The jig will soon be over Warmies.
Every time the words “It’s worse than we thought” are used the models/theories/projections/possibilities/forecasts are proven wrong.
Yet, this never seems to get through their thick skulls and they continue to want us to believe that they have all of the answers, both to the theories of how climate works and the best methods to counteract it.
Surely Lew can find a few papers in studying this cognitive dissonance.
RACookPE1978 says:
June 24, 2014 at 11:50 am
Also point out the Record anomaly was 1.84 Mkm^2.on 20 dec 2007
The inquiry, led by Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum, concludes: “Alarmist messages that fail to materialise contribute to the loss of trust in the science community.”
Well merited that loss of trust is too. Society in general seems to have scientists up on some kind of pedestal. A ridiculous view of self-sufficient, 19th century, gentlemen scientists just out for nothing but the simple kudos of a purely scientific discovering.
That ethic, if it ever really existed, probably died with Queen Victoria.
If climategate and the current fiasco that is calling itself “climate science” serves anything to society it will be to take the blinkers off and break the myth of how science works.
If other fields of science have remained curiously silent about the misdoings in climatology that impacts the image of all science, it’s because they fear criticising climatology risks turning the spotlight on their own field and shattering that pedestal too.
The sad reality is that as in all walks of life it’s he who pays the piper that calls the tune. Scientific “studies” function like opinion polls.you decide what result you want, then pay someone with a the appropriate letters after their name to prove it.
Greg:
Alarmists have, however, circumvented a loss of trust among the faithful from failure of their messages to materialise through failure to identify the events being predicted by these messages.
dipchip says: Also point out the Record anomaly was 1.84 Mkm^2.on 20 dec 2007
what’s a megakilometer ? Is that the same as a Gm^2 ? Stacking prefixes is not allowed, for the good reason that it becomes ambiguous.
Maybe you meant 1.84 x 10^6 km^2
Udar, : The average person couldn’t name a Noble Prize winner
Oh come on now, everyone knows Micheal Mann won a Noble [sic] Prize, he told us he did. Doesn’t a Mann’s word mean anything any more??
Greg:
When I was in school 60 years ago
1km= one kilometer
Km=1000 meters
1Mkm = 1 million kilometers
1 million kilometers = 1x 10^6 km
Perhaps I’m obsolete.
dipchip
Re 1.84 Mkm2
Do you mean 1.84 Tm^2?
“Only one prefix should be used in forming a multiple of an SI unit”
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they get angry at you, then they lose interest, the they laugh with you, then they get angry with you, and THEN you win…” ~ Samurai
And so it begins.
More disturbing, more ominous, the Antarctic sea ice high was NEVER above 1.25 Mkm^2 before 2007, and “touched” 1.0 Mkm^2 (1.0 million km^2 for the purists above) 5 times since 1959. Now, since 2007, at the height of the global warming scare tactics about arctic sea ice, the antarctic sea ice extents anomaly CONTINUOUSLY exceeds 1.25 Mkm^2 for 3 years straight now, and is larger than 1.5 Mkm^2 so often for such long times that it is not even newsworthy on a skeptic site.
If we fail act now, to stop Run Away Man-Made GlobalWarmingClimateChange from Evil Man-Made CO2, then low-lieing areas could flood like they did before 1930:
http://www.stormsurge.noaa.gov/event_history_pre1930s.html
Wait, what! Before 1930!
Yes. The panic business just isn’t what it used to be.
Read what’s being said. “We’re losing credibility because our theory predicted things that did not come to pass.” At this point, they’ve reached a logical fork in the road:
1) Do we restore credibility by acknowledging that our theory has not withstood the test of time and promising to seek revisions to that theory that comport with demonstrable reality?
2) Do we save face by maintaining that this is all a big misunderstanding, promise to do a better job of “communicating” and reiterate that our theory is perfectly sound?
They’ve chosen fork number two. Good grief!
Claude Harvey:
You’ve neglected logical fork number three: Do we avoid losing credibility by making our claims non-falsifiable and cover up the pseudoscientific nature of our “science” via applications of the equivocation fallacy that rely upon the polysemic natures of terms such as “predict.” Until recently, they’ve chosen fork number three.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology have just announced, that warmer temps will continue into spring, because of the El Nino. Now yesterday and the day before a cold front came through and delivered unusual snow falls, electricity black outs in Victoria. The sky fields in NSW and Victoria had a really good dump, and temps there went to minus 20 C. The cold wind and temps are still down and actually I think they must all live in the NT or North Queensland!
CRS, DrPH says:
June 24, 2014 at 9:04 am
Good, let’s shake out the amateurs & rascals and get down to business. I’m a former consultant to BOC Gases (now Linde) . . . .
Thanks for the link CRS. I’ve added this to the comprehensive list of anthropogenic ways of manufacturing CO2 – from yeast fermentation (in global bread production) to human cremation.
And it all still accounts for just 3.225% of all CO2 (96.775% of CO2 being naturally occuring).
“Climate burnout is fast approaching”, . It really is. I am so tired of hearing all the BS everywhere I am even not coming to WUWT site as much as I used to. We have just had one of the coolest June and springs I have recorded but every one just brushes it of.
When did the Union of Climate Scientists and the Sci-Fi Screen Writers Guild merge? Was it 1984? Can someone do a Wiki search?
Terry Oldberg says:
June 24, 2014 at 8:22 am
“In Chapter 11 of the report of Working Group 1 in IPCC Assessment Report 5, the IPCC breaks new ground by presenting model predictions and comparing the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the associated events. It follows that a portion of the claims made by these models are falsifiable. Are these models falsified by the evidence? This is a scientifically interesting question..”
Too little too late. Warmism is populated to 90% by NGO apparatchiks and every sociologist/ethicist/philosopher there is anyway. Western science has become one big parasite bent on sucking the system dry. The parasites will not allow any modeler to suddenly come clean. Look what happened to them in Oz. They will fight to their death to keep the juice flowing.
Which will be very amusing to watch as we go into the death of the Petrodollar.
rabbit says:
June 24, 2014 at 8:07 am
When “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, climatologists should have been lined up denouncing the movie as alarmist and inaccurate. Instead they seemed to take the view that lying for a good cause is excusable.
Along that line, an interesting poll was released recently describing the priorities of six different political groupings: Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Conservatives, Moderates, and Liberals.
Of the six, only Liberals put “Climate Change” ahead of “Morals” on their scale of importance. Very telling, I thought.
CRS, DrPH says: June 24, 2014 at 9:04 am
We harvest carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to use in beverage carbonation. Carbon dioxide is a very valuable substance. The plants will be gasping for CO2, we’ll pull so much out of the air.
______________________________
And I … hic … will be putting … hic … it all back in the atmosphere … hic … with each gin and tonic … hic … and gin and tonic. And did i mention … hic … with each gin and tonic??
Rod Everson says:
June 25, 2014 at 7:50 am
“…an interesting poll was released recently describing the priorities of six different political groupings: Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Conservatives, Moderates, and Liberals.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please provide a link to the results of that poll.
Reap, sow, etc. Back to work!
For years, I was silent on the issue but I am a meteorologist and I owe it to my science to speak what I see as the truth. And what I see is that climate change, by 2007, had become the most over-rated environmental problem of all time.
The problem with this is that Atmospheric Science and science and environmentalism in general will lose a great deal of credibility. The next time, no one will listen.
If I look ahead to the year 2025, what do I see? IF the warming “hiatus” ends, (big ‘if’) and the 50 year trends resume immediately, then in the year 2025, we have this to talk about…
The first quarter of the century will have 0.1 deg C warming
The first quarter of the century will have 2″ sea level rise
The first quarter of the century will have no increase in extreme weather.
So, will the public and the politicians still care? Can those kinds of numbers in a quarter century possibly keep the interest…and the grant money…flowing? Will we still believe than deep ocean heat and methane bubbles could explode at any moment and push us past the tipping point ? Will we still fear that Miami and Tuvalu are goners ?
I suspect we are in the dying stages of the great global warming scare.
Perhaps I’m wrong and new data emerges and the issue persists. But I think the whole think is already dying a slow death.
To M. Brown… if you read some of the statements by supporters of AGW, humanity is a curse on the planet and the death of many millions will come as great joy to them. The result is the same whether this debate ended favorable for them or not. In addition, because this issue was debated by more than just experts, it has thrown the order of how things are done in science into chaos. This is a big issue with big consequences. So it is true if the warming starts again in a few years AND co2 is the cause, there will be so much doubt no one will listen. Then again they wanted that treaty so bad, I don’t think they were bluffing. Many people don’t know a treaty can not be overturned, Obama issuing edicts, and even congress passing laws, can be overturned.
By the way, among other failed predictions… the Artic was suppose to be completely ice free this past winter, not 2020 as they are saying now. Soon or not, depending, el Niño will come washing up and change the weather. I suppose the great hope among AGW is that it is huge. Hopefully it will occur, but be moderate, California needs the rain, but not too much. I don’t wish ill even at the expense of an argument.
An argument that would be believable to me is one that explains the recent past (last 1000 years) and makes fairly accurate predictions based on that about the future. AGW hasn’t done that. And from what I’ve seen of the science from the IPCC, they can’t.
Actually, I was trying to think of ONE prediction the Warmists have made thar came true. I can’t think of one.
Can someone, in one of these studies give, us a list of where they were right? Without back “adjusting” the data that is. Come to think of it even having adjusted the data, they’re still not right.
Shona:
Prior to the publication of AR5, the IPCC avoided making falsifiable claims (ones that have the property of being true or false) through the use of its climate models. Through use of polysemic terms (terms having more than one meaning) such as “predict,” the IPCC constructed arguments of the form that a philosopher calls an “equivocation.” Being neither true nor false, the conclusion of an equivocation is non-falsifiable. Being unaware of the existence of the related “equivocation fallacy,” most observers didn’t see through this deception thus reaching the logically faulty conclusion that a portion of the IPCC’s equivocations were falsified by the evidence.
In AR5, a portion of the claims that are made by the IPCC climate models are potentially falsifiable; they can be found in Chapter 11 of the report of Working Group 1. However, though each such claim is either true or false and though observed events are available by which the truth or falsity of each such claim can potentially be determined, the authors of AR5 do not tell their readers which of these claims are true and which are false. Thus, from the standpoint of a reader of AR5, all of the claims of IPCC climate models are effectively non-falsifiable. A non-falsifiable claim is unscientific.
In the wake of the publication of AR5 there continues to be no scientific basis for regulation of CO2 emissions. This is not, as commonly assumed, because a portion of the conclusions of the IPCC are false but rather is because these conclusions are neither true nor false. The makers of governmental policy on CO2 emissions have been deceived by the equivocations of IPCC-affiliated climatologists..
As I said elsewhere before:
<<<<<>>>>>
You might also try http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/eating-sun-fourth-estatelondon-2009.html to see what happens when taking the IPCC predicted temperature rise as ‘gospel’. After all, ‘temperature’ is another measure of ‘energy’ when bound to matter….
Our government is so desperate over this warming hoax they’ve decided to start the Cold War with Russia again.
” I suppose the great hope among AGW is that it (el nino) is huge. ”
Why do these people hope for disaster? The climate has changed shockingly little this century in the face of unprecedented CO2 release. This is cause for great joy and a hope that this trend holds for the good of mankind.
Apparently, the recent data suggests, we can have our cake and eat it too. Why such grumpy CAGW folks in the face of such good news ?