Guest post by David Middleton
Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist? This should matter to the Associated Press, but it clearly doesn’t.
When I opened up the Real Clear Energy webpage this morning, I found the usual mix of articles relevant to energy (~20%) and environmental nonsense (~80%), including a particularly ignorant rant from Seth Borenstein. When did energy and climate science become conflated? If climate science is actually science, shouldn’t it be on the Real Clear Science webpage?
Anyway, back to Seth Borenstein’s amazingly ignorant rant…
WHY IT MATTERS: Climate Change
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Aug. 29, 2016 2:30 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — WASHINGTON (AP) — THE ISSUE: It’s as if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump live on two entirely different Earths: one warming, one not.
Clinton says climate change “threatens us all,” while Trump tweets that global warming is “mythical” and repeatedly refers to it as a “hoax.” Measurements and scientists say Clinton’s Earth is much closer to reality.
As heat-trapping gases in the air intensify and hot temperature records shatter, global warming is taking a toll on Americans’everyday life : their gardens, air, water, seasons, insurance rates and more.
[…]
WHY IT MATTERS
Dozens of measurements show Earth is warming. And it’s worsening. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists and nearly every professional organization of scientists have said climate change is real, man-made and a problem.
[…]
Hold on there a minute Seth… Dozens of measurements show that Earth has warmed since the mid-1800’s and all of the non-Hockey Stick climate reconstructions show that this warming began around 1600 AD (plus or minus a couple of decades). However, there is no basis to claim that “it’s worsening.” The data demonstrate that the rate of warming has actually slowed down…
While “every professional organization of scientists have said climate change is real” (even the AAPG)… None say that it is exclusively “man-made” and most say that computer models predict that it could become “a problem.” Maybe it’s a verb conjugation issue… Warmed becomes “warming”, could be becomes “is.” Whatever the conjugation, this is noting but argumentum ad verecundiam.
Borenstein: The last 15 months in a row have set records globally for heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Here are the 15 hottest months in the UAH 6.0 satellite temperature record:
1) 2016.08 0.832
2) 1998.25 0.743
3) 2016.17 0.734
4) 2016.25 0.715
5) 1998.08 0.653
6) 1998.33 0.643
7) 1998.42 0.575
8) 2016.33 0.545
9) 2016 0.541
10) 1998.58 0.516
11) 2010.17 0.514
12) 1998.5 0.511
13) 2010 0.502
14) 1998 0.479
15) 1998.17 0.475
Only 5 of the 15 hottest months “on record” fall within the “last 15 months in a row.” 8 of the hottest months on record occurred 18 years ago.
Borenstein: The world is on pace to break the record for hottest year, a record broken in 2010, 2014 and 2015. The five hottest years recorded have all been from 2005 on and it is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago.
The world appears a lot less likely “on pace to break the record for hottest year, a record (not) broken in 2010, 2014 and 2015.
The 1998 record appears to be intact and might just survive the monster El Niño of 2015-16.
Borenstein: But it’s more than temperatures. Arctic sea ice keeps flirting with record low amounts.
*Arctic* sea ice keep “flirting with record low amounts” while Antarctic sea ice keeps “flirting” with record high amounts. (My Marine Science professor used to castigate anyone who used the word “amounts” when discussing quantities.)
The sea ice record only dates back to 1979 and the flirtations with record lows are barely exceeding 2 standard deviations (AKA natural variability).
Furthermore, the Arctic has been ice-free during the summer throughout much of the Holocene.
Borenstein: Hot water has been killing coral as never before seen. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to extreme weather, including deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.
Unsubstantiated, unquantified drivel.
Borenstein: They even have connected it as one of several factors in the Syrian drought and civil war that led to a massive refugee crisis.
The region has been drying out since the Medieval Warm Period.
Borenstein: Climate change is causing the seas to rise, which threatens coastlines. Sea level has risen a foot in the waters around New York City in the past century, worsening flooding from Superstorm Sandy.
Here is that 1 foot of sea level rise plotted at the same scale as the Statue of Liberty…
Sea level, as measured by tidal gauges, is currently doing exactly what it is has been doing since at least 1850…
Regarding Frankenstorm Sandy, the 1 foot of sea level rise is totally insignificant relative to the normal tidal ranges and worse storm surges hit the region long before Seth Borenstein started propagandizing for the Warmunists.
Borenstein: And it is making people sicker with worsened allergies and asthma, heat deaths, diseases spread by ticks and mosquitoes, dirtier air and more contaminated water and food, a federal report said in April.
More unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
Borenstein: Changing the world’s economy from burning fossil fuel, which causes global warming, has a huge price tag. So does not doing anything. The world’s average income will shrivel 23 percent by the year 2100 if carbon dioxide pollution continues at the current pace, according to a 2015 study out of Stanford and the University of California Berkeley.
Even more unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
The price tag of decarbonization is in the range of $20 trillion (just for the U.S.) to avert a 10% chance “of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity’s atmospheric experiment.”
Two Harvard economists, after trawling through voluminous, authoritative research, said last year that the odds of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity’s atmospheric experiment is about 10 percent. That’s a conclusion that can focus minds pretty quickly—and perhaps turn the expenditure of trillions of dollars over three decades into only a tough, but manageable, problem.
[…]
Jacobson researches how states (PDF) and countries can achieve 100 percent renewable energy systems—even more ambitious than the cuts President Barack Obama wants by 2050 and which informed Heal’s study. What Jacobson calls a mistake in his colleague’s paper concerns the overall estimate, which accounts only for reductions from electricity generation, transmission, and storage.
But electricity makes up only 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. To account for the other two-thirds of energy use—transportation, industry, and residential and commercial use—that total should be much higher, Jacobson said.
By his measure, that would leave an economy-wide, 100 percent renewable price range of between $5.3 trillion and $22 trillion by 2050, closer to Jacobson’s own central estimate of about $14.6 trillion, he said.
Once Jacobson expanded Heal’s estimate so that it covered 100 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from all key sectors, their approaches stood about $8 trillion apart.
Heal did estimate that electrifying American transportation—cars, trucks, trains—would require approximately $620 billion in additional generation capacity. Beyond that, he didn’t go into non-electricity costs because the numbers would be smaller (billions, not trillions). “These costs will be small relative to the massive numbers associated with energy production and storage,” he said.
[…]
My back-of-the-envelope calculations put the price tag closer to $40 trillion, just for U.S. electricity generation… Whatever the number, it’s in the trillions and it will avert a 10% chance of catastrophe. That’s idiotic – Particularly since the 10% chance is based on computer models using the RCP 8.5 scenario… Models that have failed 95% of the time.
Borenstein: Just the Obama administration’s efforts to cut carbon pollution from 1,000 power plants projects to cost about $8 billion a year, but save several times more than in reduced health problems.
Apart from the very real $8 billion per year, more unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drivel.
Borenstein: The world’s largest general scientific society warns of “abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts.”
Argumentum ad verecundiam, based on projections from computer models that have failed 95% of the time. “Same as it ever was”…
Featured image borrowed from Climate Depot.
The arctic sea ice record now extends with confidence back to 1850 – and now it is lower than ever. This article gives background to the latest comprehensive assembly of arctic sea ice data:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-piecing-together-arctic-sea-ice-history-1850
“the new dataset allows us to answer the three questions we posed at the beginning of this article.
First, there is no point in the past 150 years where sea ice extent is as small as it has been in recent years. Second, the rate of sea ice retreat in recent years is also unprecedented in the historical record. And, third, the natural fluctuations in sea ice over multiple decades are generally smaller than the year-to-year variability2
Arctic sea ice is now the second lowest in the satellite record (i.e.second lowest since 1850)
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
and we haven’t hit 2016 minimum yet…
Splicing a high resolution satellite data set onto a low resolution reconstruction from old maps and anecdotal records is just Hockey Sticking,
That said, sea ice should have covered a much larger area in the 1800’s. Neoglaciation reached its peak in the 1800’s.
Its a collection of all available evidence…
We can say with confidence there is no evidence to show it was lower in the 30s/40s as often alleged.
It’s good data for low resolution reconstructions.
We can’t say that with any confidence at all because we have just as reliable anecdotal records that the Arctic was more navigable the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Griff, that is incorrect. There are DMI ice maps for August up to 1939. Larsen did the first ever single season NWP transit in 1944, East to west. Took him two years west to east 1941-42.
Just because it is all the data available is not sufficient to make the claim that it is sufficient to generate high confidence.
Prior to the satellite era, all we had was visual observations from the hand full of ships that sailed the arctic. And most of those did everything in their power to avoid the ice.
ristvan – what’s incorrect?
(I note that now a cruise liner is doing the NW passage in a single season and that it has regularly been open to shipping since 2009)
Griff what sort of “shipping” is “regularly” getting through? Ice breakers.
Don’t count the ship of fools until they get through. This foolhardy profit-making should have been outlawed by the Canadian authorities who will have the responsabiltiy of mounting a rescue attempt if something goes wrong.
Note that ship is accompanied by an ice breaker too.
It needs to be remembered that there are two passages across the Arctic – the North West, and the North East. The North East is regularly open to sea-going traffic. The North West, not so much.
Griff: cruise ship? You mean this little adventure?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/17/british-research-ship-in-northwest-passage-cruise-voyage-row/
I would posit that the ability to make this journey, if it turns out successful, has a lot more to do with the construction and speed of the vessel, and being escorted by an ice breaker, more than anything having to do with the ice. Do you really think it tells us anything to compare this to the same feat done by individual, slow wooden ships that accomplished the same thing in the past?
Griff,
Looking at the graphics in your first link,
It is interesting that this particular report goes back to 1850 and basically proclaims that at the start of the industrial revolution (1850) there was more ice in the arctic ocean than today.
It is also interesting that the graphs appear to have been created bt data sources going back to around 1930 then use an “average measurement” to speculate beyond that point.
Starting at the beginningf the industrial revolution is a very safe bet given that we were still coming out of the Little Ice Age period and there was likely more ice there then. But if you could go back to the Medieval Warm Period, there would likely be significantly less ice than today. Lest you forget, the Vikings had colonized Greenland from about 950 to about 1350 AD and didn’t require Ice Breakers to travel around the Northern Atlantic or Arctic Oceans near Greenland on a regular basis.
There was also more ice in 1912 as a Steel Ship was sunk by a berg then and was traveling in what was supposed to be typically Ice Free waters.
Even in todays waters, ships rarely traverse the Northwest or Northwest passages without the assistance of an Ice Breaker Ship
Speaking of the Crystal Serenity, they seem to have reached a pretty thick patch of ice.
http://www.kroooz-cams.com/serenity/serenity1.php
To my untrained eye, that does not look passable, but I am no expert. I am also unable to get the exact location of this. I’m guessing they are in one of those channels around Fort Ross. They left Cambridge Bay a few days ago and they are on their way to Pond Inlet.
Griffy child; it is not all available evidence, it is a highly selective cherry pick of preferred evidence.
No scientific method makes for bogus research.
Plus you have been told this before when you posted the same links, repeatedly, before.
A) Learn what makes for a scientific approach
B) Actually read the alleged research looking for the scientific metrics and controls.
C) Whenever you come across a waffle word; e.g. might, could, likely, possible, model, modeled, estimated, etc etc, realize that the claim is purely subjective and without scientific merit.
Kevin Pond:
To add to your timely Crystal cruise ship Arctic expedition comment:
Port side camera
http://legacy.crystalcruises.com/cache/cyport2.jpg
Starboard camera
http://legacy.crystalcruises.com/cache/cystar2.jpg
Internet lab:
http://legacy.crystalcruises.com/cache/cylab2.jpg
The Russian view of the Arctic ice.
http://www.nsra.ru/files/images/%D0%9D%D0%93%D0%93%D0%9C%D0%9E/20160830en.jpg
Right now, the clock is ticking before the starts it’s winter growth.
I wish I could tell where they are exactly.
https://my.yb.tl/crystalserenity
They are in Croker Bay. This is a sightseeing stop.
Northwest-northeast; what’s the difference ?
My commute route is open in both directions simultaneously. If the arctic ocean is open to passage, it is open. Doesn’t really matter which way the ship goes if it is open.
I went a third of the way; almost a half way round the earth in 1961, and it took a full month including stops along the way at little fishing villages, like Tahiti, Panama (2), Miami, Manhattan.
So what is this crossing the arctic ocean “in a season ” ??
if it was open you should be able to get through there in a week or two, not five months.
G
Wow, visual reports from a handful of sailing vessels is now an “accurate” report of total ice?
What have you been smoking recently.
As to your comment that we haven’t hit the 2016 minimum yet. If you’ve ever said something more stupid, I haven’t seen it.
Yes we haven’t hit the minimum yet, but the current amounts are so far above earlier years that we would have to set off nukes up there to get the total sea ice down to anything close to a record low.
With Clinton’s brain damage, who knows? Nukes??!
“the current amounts are so far above earlier years”
Wrong and needlessly insulting.
It looks like 2016 is going lower than 2007, with the ice in worse condition than 2012.
Choose: extent, area or volume and apart from 2012 show 2016 is ” so far above” anything recent.
Not true, Arctic Sea ice is 2nd lowest recorded at this time of year, only behind the record low of 2012.
nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
The arctic sea ice record now extends with confidence back to 1850 – and now it is lower than ever. This article gives background to the latest comprehensive assembly of arctic sea ice data:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-piecing-together-arctic-sea-ice-history-1850
“the new dataset allows us to answer the three questions we posed at the beginning of this article.
First, there is no point in the past 150 years where sea ice extent is as small as it has been in recent years. Second, the rate of sea ice retreat in recent years is also unprecedented in the historical record. And, third, the natural fluctuations in sea ice over multiple decades are generally smaller than the year-to-year variability2
Arctic sea ice is now the second lowest in the satellite record (i.e.second lowest since 1850)
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
and we haven’t hit 2016 minimum yet…
This post is a joke right? Has to be, using 3 different, incomplete or untested data sets to come to a determination on exact amounts is absolutely unscientific, but you knew that already (I hope). It is like saying the Packers beat the Bears who beat the Vikings, ergo, the Packers beat the Vikings, even though they didn’t play. Making assumptions makes you,……….. well you know the rest.
Its entirely supported by detailed research collected by Judith Curry
https://judithcurry.com/2013/04/10/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-ii-1920-1950/
“The 1920-1940’s arctic sea ice melt can therefore be seen as remarkable, albeit the caveats about apples and oranges need to be applied. Looking at the evidence available from each of the arctic oceans means the ice extent probably lies somewhere within that experienced during the first half of the 2000’s, but was probably not as low as 2007 and 2012.”
There is no evidence of lower ice levels than at present, after a detialed examination of all records… examination of all records shows ice level is lower now.
Certainly we have the second lowest in the satellite record: ice is not recovering to pre-2007 levels
In short, arctic sea ice presents clear and compelling evidence for a warming arctic, with ice lower than in past cycles/ice loss in addition to natural variation.
do post any scientific observation which contradicts…
On a big El Nino year.
Griff,
This constitutes compelling evidence that the 1920’s to 1940’s were comparable to today:
Hence Dr. Curry’s “caveats about apples and oranges.”
The satellite data have far higher resolution than any measurements from the early 20th century. As such, they will resolve higher amplitude changes. The fact that the low resolution data fits in between the high resolution data from 2001-2005 and 2007/2012 isn’t compelling evidence that individual years in the early 20th century weren’t as low as or lower than 2007 and 2012. The older data lack the resolution to make such a claim.
Just to show how closely Griff is paying attention to his sources the article and data was not collected by Judith Curry. The first line under the title may be a clue to the clueless:
“by Tony Brown”
Griff, there are entirely different sets of data at play that are simply not comparable. Now, we can draw some conclusions from them. Most notably that there was significant amounts of ice melt in 1920-1940 and that it was followed and preceded by periods of heavier ice, but attempting to draw a more certain conclusion than that is just not possible.
It’s not that the data is bad, but claiming “worse than ever” is a quantifiable claim, but your data is sorely insufficient to make that claim, and it is countered by numerous examples in your own data.
If I was to conclude anything, it would be that Arctic Sea Ice has a large amount of natural variability and has notably large periods of melting in the recent past. It’s precisely the opposite of your conclusion.
Oh the wicked ways in which people try to deceive.
Your claim(s) are not ‘entirely’ supportive! In fact, reading through them indicates that there are only a few small pieces that might be supportive.
General universal conclusion A): Records are sparse, very locale dependent, inconsistent, and frankly Not Tracking Sea Ice area, but tracking open shipping lanes.
In fact several of the supporting links include similar facts and evidence. Only to be ignored, by surprisingly very recent research, which state a majority of their claims with waffle words.
Once again little griffy demonstrates an amazing lack of reading comprehension.
In the 2 paragraphs prior to the final “Apples and Oranges” statement are these two gems
Anecdotal evidence that the MWP was warmer than today = rubbish
Anecdotal evidence that sea ice levels were higher in the 40s = gold
Trolls are priceless.
Hear ye! Hear ye! All attendants of intelligence and good faith! Know ye that the malevolent, cowardly and lying troll- Griff- who sought to terrify and do great damage to our little village of the intellectually curious, by bellowing nonsense beyond reason, has been banished! As always in our glorious past, the troll has vanished without even a puff of smoke at the merest mention of simple truth. He always shows himself to be a spineless creature of the shadows, who neither possesses light nor can stand it! The comment here is his last as several comments follow it which gently but certainly make a mockery of the output of poor Griff’s twisted fingers and stunted brain. Hark! I hear him in the distance! “The warming! The warming!”
It’s simply dishonest to claim we have reliable ice extent records going back further than the satellite age. In fact, that goes for land temps as well–all the 1850 claims are bogus. All of them.
You know what we do have? We have photographs of Navy ships at the North Pole with hardly a shave of ice in sight. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/
The claim that the current ice extent is unusually low is, as with your other claims, spurious.
Griff —
Different types of data sets but surprisingly one seemingly valid conclusion can be reached.
Over the past 150 year, sea ice extent in the Arctic has increased and decreased with some regularity — when graphed the changes almost taking the form of a sine wave (alright maybe that metaphor cleans up the data a little too much — but hey, I am a poet and a good metaphor is worth a thousand words!).
So variation in Arctic sea ice extent is natural. You present no evidence (because none exists) that the current arctic sea ice levels are “unnatural” — caused by some new intruding “force” (global warming, climate change, take whatever choice of name you wish to apply to Manbearpig).
But you don’t need evidence do you. You have been conditioned to respond like a good hothead should. That current Arctic sea ice extent is low TRIGGERS YOU — and so you shout — MANBEARPIG!!!!! — as loud as you can.
Eugene WR Gallun
Oh do troll somewhere else Egriff. Everyone knows who pays you to come here.
Griff says “The arctic sea ice record now extends with confidence back to 1850 – and now it is lower than ever.”
Griff then says “First, there is no point in the past 150 years where sea ice extent is as small as it has been in recent years.”
Irrelevant Griff! The Holocene geological record contains abundant empirical evidence which shows that temperatures in the Arctic were significantly higher during the Holocene maximum than they are at present.
Griff, you need an education in ‘big picture’ climate history. A degree in geology would help you a great deal. Your focus on the significance of the most recent 150 years of the 11,700 year Holocene Interstadial invites well-deserved ridicule.
There are also many papers dealing with biodata, and other proxies, that show there was quite often basically ZERO summer sea ice for a large proportion of the pre-neoglaciation period.
At the end of the LIA Arctic sea ice levels would have been at their EXTREME. One of the few places where expansion of sea ice can take place is past Iceland, so let’s look at the Iceland sea ice index.. actual historic data.
As you can see, there was a longish near zero period in the 1930s,40 but the real pointer is that the 10970’s level is not that much less than the 1880’s at the tail end of the LIA.
So what is actually happening at the moment is a RECOVERY from levels only really seen during the COLDEST period in the last 10,000 years.
And unfortunately, with the AMO turning, that level is more than likely going to start to increase again over the coming years.
There was also Tapirs, Crocodiles, and Hippos in the arctic as well back then. Axel Heiberg island was covered in a white pine forest during the same time period. It was a veritable jungle up in the arctic “Way back in the day” 🙂
PS Griff there probably wasn’t any ice in the arctic 3.5 million years ago when this was going on.
Funnily enough the Chinese sailed around the arctic in the 14th century and they stated that they didn’t find any ice there. As Harry Chapin said in one of his songs “All my life is a circle” you know what comes around goes around, everything on this planet has cycles. The problem is that the cycles are longer than our individual lives and as a whole humans have very short memories.
Griff, please explain the antarctic sea ice levels using the same cause and effect reasoning.
CO2 over Antarctica was recently measured at 400ppm.
Griff could also show us the effect of rising on Antarctic temperatures.
We are just getting out of the LIA.
What in the HELL did you expect!!!
Turns out they are making a scheduled stop in Croker Bay. If you look on a map, you can see they have almost made it through the passage. So it looks like they will make it.
https://my.yb.tl/crystalserenity
Yes, Ron Clutz has been following their progress for a while now. They made VERY good time after leaving Barrow; obviously the crew knew they had to hustle if they were going to make it all the way through the NWP. On the other hand, I think it’s pretty doubtful that the Northabout will make it.
You speak about sea ice data as is it is not totally flawed, and comprehensive, which it is clearly not. Too many references to count!
Given that my home, from which I am writing, was under 1km of ice 1200 years ago, it seems quite possible that the Arctic ice is retreating. Says nothing about human influence.
Griff, you don’t know what the hell youre talking about. Arctic ice extent was lower in the late teens & again in the mid to late 1950’s.
Deep tunnels in Northern Greenland have to cut through a layer of tree trunks and roots, indicating that the Arctic was much warmer once and forests flourished. There may have been no summer ice at all at this time. After all, ice caps are unusual in the Earth’s history having only occurred only twice in geological history (help please, maybe this has been refuted since my early uni courses). And where do you think the Antarctic coal measures came from?
It’s probably happened 4 times during the Phanerozoic (most recent 550 MY). Cambro-Ordovician, Pennsylvanian-Permian, Cretaceous (brief, ephemeral) and Cenozoic (Oligocene-present with a possible break during the Miocene).
So Borenstein is a devout green and works in the MSM. Being shallow and credulous is a near requirement for the job as an environmental reporter.
RealClearPolitics links to articles, mostly editorials, from MSM sources daily. Need I add that they’re running about 8 to 1 against Trump? Sounds like the ratio’s the same over on their RCEnergy site. Why are we not surprised? Neither truth nor science are important when you’re being paid to carpet-bomb the public mind with The Narrative.
That’s a nice comment so I’ll put away the terms I had picked out. Disingenuous and imbecilic are probably beyond Griff anyway. He usually disappears once somebody dismantles his idiotic constructs anyway.
Argumentum ad verecundiam
Argumentum ex recti?
Argumentum ex rectum!
Forgotten my Latin. Ablative of um nouns (bellum) should end in o (bello)?
Any Latin scholar on the forum to help me out?
Only second declension (those that end in “-us” or “-um”, excluding the rare 4th declension ones).
It would be ex recto.
nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative
um, i, o, um, o
a, orum, is, as, is
Rectum? Hell, killed him. 🙂
“Argumentum ex rectum!”
Brilliant, I get tired of these pretentious bits of Latin , intended to give the impression of being educated, but I’ll remember this one. Nice.
I think “Argumentum exit rectum!” fits better
“recked em'”? damn near killed em’…..
Dave Middleton, great scene from an excellent movie. Thanks for posting.
I liked the Latin translations. Knew the first one, but not the others. I took Latin 50 years ago. Now about all I remember is “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.” (All Gaul is divided into three parts…”). The nuns beat it into us…
Too bad that clip stopped just before Johnny Ringo’s challenge, and the response from Doc Holliday. That’s a good scene from a fun and historically, a pretty accurate movie.
(Jump to 2:25 if you like, where the Latin clip ends.)
And yes, Borenstein is wrong. Not about everything; he’s just wrong about science. He confuses it with politics. But that hardly makes him unique, just Mannish…
Doc: “Are you my Huckleberry?”
Ringo: needs a change of pants…
It says Romans Go Home!
Or bovis stercore?
http://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339
News in latin. Only in Finland 😊.
Anyone who mentions Syria, drought and civil war in the same sentence, without acknowledging the brutal policies of a monstrous dictator (i.e., directing irrigation away from food production towards cash crop production) can’t be trusted.
But I think we all knew that anyway after we read the byline by “Seth Borenstein “.
+10
Borenstein is paid to write Climate porn. That what his bosses apparently want. No truth needed. If he suddenly found journalistic integrity and stopped writing the propaganda to support Progressive power grabs then they’d replace him.
So the answer is not expecting Borenstein to stop lying. The answer is to ensure enough voters see through the climate lies and vote the Progressives (Democrats) out of office, and break the underlying need for those in power to have the biased media lie for them.
Seth says climate change is taking a toll on, “….their gardens, air, water, seasons, insurance rates and more.”
This is pure nonsense. My fruit trees and garden have never been better, I haven’t needed to water my lawn in the last 10 years and there have been no water restrictions in over a decade. Illinois farmers are preparing for 2016 to be a new record in corn and soy bean harvest with the average corn yield expected to be 223 bushels/acre. in the 1980s average corn yield was 120 bushels/acre. Anyone over the age of 60 has seen far worse climate in their lives than what we are experiencing in the 21st century.
Like fanatical Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, who to this day still believes he was correct in his views on the ‘Population Bomb’ even though reality shows him to have been terribly wrong in his thinking, Borenstein can’t accept that his Malthusian views on climate are simply wrong. He’s an activist who has dug his heels in and has lost all sense of objectivity and suffers from confirmation bias. Borenstein’s activism feeds public mistrust and further damages his entire industry. Trust in news media is currently at the lowest levels in history and reporters like Borenstein are the reason why.
“My fruit trees and garden have never been better, I haven’t needed to water my lawn in the last 10 years and there have been no water restrictions in over a decade. Illinois farmers are preparing for 2016 to be a new record in corn and soy bean harvest with the average corn yield expected to be 223 bushels/acre. in the 1980s average corn yield was 120 bushels/acre.”
Thus is the TOLL of slightly raised CO2 and temperature.
Truly horrible I tells ya !!!
Indeed – look how hot it got here…
http://www.adn.com/alaska-news/weather/2016/08/29/sundays-heat-blitzed-the-old-anchorage-temperature-record-for-the-date/
Sure one day makes a climate now huh GRIFF?
Totally agree. This year, my apple trees have produced the biggest sweetest fruit and more of it than I’ve seen in a decade.
Sorry ,guys. My most disastrous year ever. Lost all my crops. Potates still in the ground cos ground is too hard to dig. My flowers are dying, my lawn is dead and two of my cherry trees have died.
No rain in more than 3 months and temps 8C above normal throughout the period. Water use allowed only for hygiene.
Where am I?
Exactly. He and his ilk suffer from confirmation bias because they’re Orwellian group-thinkers. They only hang out with people who think the same, work with people who think the same, live with people who think the same, invest with people who think the same…….and close their ears to anyone who dares speak against that which they believe in. Almost like the 3 monkeys except that instead of see no evil & speak no evil, they actively seek out anyone who they disagree with & attempt to destroy them first by shouting them down then by all kinds of wild accusations. To top it off they use the Soviet era Pravda-like media to assist.
Journalists stopped being journalists about a generation ago.
They view their job as molding minds these days.
Well, I had an old editor that was pretty sure that reporters were there just to fill copy to keep the underwear ads from running too closely together…
Too many activists pretending to be journalists wanting to make a difference rather than just report the news and investigate anything “progressive”.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. ~Abraham Lincoln
And who would have thought good old Abe was good for a chuckle now and then?
“As heat-trapping gases in the air intensify and hot temperature records shatter, global warming is taking a toll on Americans’everyday life : their gardens …. ”
It’s really taking a toll on my garden, I have so many tomatoes that we’re letting a lot of them just fall to the ground, does anyone want a 1/2 bushel? We have beefstakes and romas, pick your own.
One year, when my Father’s mini-farm had huge bumper crops of tomatoes and peppers.
After selling, giving away tomatoes and feeding damaged bruised fruit to the pigs, we turned the excess into tomato sauce.
And peeled the majority of wallpaper off of the kitchen walls boiling the sauce down then pressure cooking the jars to sterilize them.
Try to do a good deed and end up with more work; sanding the kitchen walls and repainting it. No more wallpaper!
I hear the gardener lobby is very pro-Hillary.
Must be caused from all that poisonous gas, CO2. You know, that one they had the EPA declare a toxin.
more unsubstantiated, unquantifiable, unverifiable drive
Would like to have your kind permission to use this phrase.
Griff: Arctic sea ice is now the second lowest in the satellite record (i.e.second lowest since 1850)
Satellite Record? 1850?? Maybe you’re confusing NASA with Jules Verne…
Griff wants to make sure no one confuses him with a credible person.
Argumentum ex rectum!
That didn’t take long.
I beg your pardon: I’d had a couple of beers at that point… should have written…
‘since we have reliable records going back to 1850 now, we can say with some confidence then its the second lowest since 1850…’
It’s not compelling evidence of anything. The pre-satellite era data lack the resolution for direct comparison. This is every bit as unscientific and fraudulent as splicing instrumental temperature and CO2 data onto proxy temperature and ice core CO2 data.
The lower resolution data only provide a measure of minimum variability.
Yes. the US has reliable records going back to 1850. But many European countries have records going back much further. I have the Swedish records somewhere. From memory, they show a cooling phase until about 1850 then a warming phase. It’s a great shame that US records started at the lowest point. My city has records from one site that has not been subject to urban influences. The average has increased only very slightly since the 1850s whereas those sites at the airport and in the city show the effect of urbanisation (re-radiation, heat generation, impaired heat transfer through sheltering and impaired mixing).
Michael McCallion · Brock University
So the “Boy Who Would Be King” -BWWBK- reaches into the Liberal Bag of Avoidance & Dirty Tricks and can only come up with the Same Old–Same Old– “it is the Conservative’s Fault”–
Not having Stephen Harper to blame the Smearedia finds the Especially Well-Liked Rona Ambrose as the Next Victim & Chokes; Duh !!–Duh !! -!! What do we Do? Please Please Laurentien Elites– what do we Do?
If we cannot find a Conservative to Blame the Rest Of Canada R.O.C. will tell the Tantrum-Foot Stamping future Leader of the Parti Quebecois Denis Coderre will be finding Himself as the First President of the Nation Of Quebec.
Please Laurentien Elite Give better Directions to BWWBK.
There is of course that mysterious letter of 1817, from Sir Joseph Banks to the lords of the admiralty, advising them of the ice that had encompassed much ofthe Arctic Circle, due to anew source of warmth, had become “much abated”!!! AND even the UNIPCC accepts that it was warmer in the 1940s up there than today!
He’s an activist/advocate. Journalists went extinct around the turn of the century.
A direct cause of AGW.
“Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist?” Since the (highly paid*) directors of AP are all from various left wing news sources, it is highly unlikely that Borenstein and the rest of AP’s staff would be anything other than, political activists. * Mary Junck, AP CEO, is also the editor of the leftist St. Louis Post Dispatch and was paid over $2 million in 2015.”
In case anybody has forgotten Seth Borensteins climate-warrior status, remember this email from the climategate leak:
On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote:
Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano
is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Excellent summary of the groupthink language and clickbait propaganda that is trotted out near verbatim, not only by AP journalist (eco-activist) Seth Borenstein, but by all who are swept up and poisoned by the “Climate Crisis Inc.” virus…
Hilarious how Warmunists love to use Arctic sea ice as a proxy for warming, which not only is not doing what they want it to, but they still haven’t shown any link of the beneficial and unexciting warmup since the LIA to man, try as they might.
Nor have they presented a case as to why anyone should care. Arctic ice up – arctic ice down – no one dies – no one even knows . . .
without someone posting a graph.
Nor do they include the antarctic, even though they carry on about GLOBAL warming
” … and it is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago”
Seriously? Of course he didn’t provide the units, but a 1.8 degree differential is causing all the horrors he listed? How much power can a Stirling Engine generate with a 1.8 degree differential? All that ice was teetering on a 1.8 degree differential?
Since I haven’t seen the scientific definition of “Climate Same”, which must be more desirable over “Climate Change”, I submit my suggestion:
Climate Same is when there is less than a 2 degree change in a contrived average value of Earth’s temperature over 100 years.
What is a fear-mongering warmista to do in the face of such massive Climate Same?
Simples…yell louder!
Climate Same is what we have now.
+100
He’s an activist. And only an activist would avoid context and other details surrounding the facts they use, e.g. El Nino.
Yes, missing context on many fronts. For example, what else do 2012 and 2016 share? How about massive low pressure storms churning the ice near to minima.
See Caleb’s site (Sunrise Swansong) for more on that.
You forget–their Armageddon scene only WORKS in the absence of context! IN the correct context, ain’t nothin’ happenin’ at ALL.
” … and it is about 1.8 degrees warmer than a century ago”
Alarmist BS.
When the IPCC talks about global warming and limits of 2 deg C. that is not supposed to monthly or annual means, it’s long term change.
That could be true if nobody was previously looking.
Does anyone know if there is a graph of the number of coral scientists vs. time?
No, but I do know SCUBA gear was invented by some French guy during WWII. Jaques something. Not much coral looking before that.
One of my buddies thinks ‘Jaques something’ was an absolute arrogant twat. Buddy’s opinion was that ‘Jaques something’ claimed to have discovered things that other folks had known about for the last hundred years. Thanks for that, you’ve brightened my day.
I’m working on a correlation of SCUBA diver accessibility and reef health. My anecdotal analysis indicates that reef health is inversely proportional to SCUBA diver accessibility.
David I most certainly understand your observation, being an avid reef explorer with quite a bit of experience, in fact I’m a commercial diver certified in underwater recovery using both open and closed circuit mixed gas. I’ve observed the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific reefs personally but haven’t been to oceans in the Southern Hemisphere.
Your thoughts echo mine, which are that the rapid advance of technology has led us to a place where we just don’t know what’s going on and everything we see is new. It happens both in measurement and plain old “being there to look”. If we haven’t been observing reefs at all for more than 70 years, everything we see is unprecedented. Then there’s satellites; before 1979 we just didn’t have them, and remote sensing technology is advancing in leaps and bounds.
It’s not good enough to say “we’ve never seen this before” because, as you note, we just weren’t looking. More to the point, we weren’t able to look.
Have you heard of snorkeling?
Yes Chris I have heard of it. There have also been sponge divers that pre-dated SCUBA.
In your opinion, has the number of person hours spent underwater by humans increased or decreased significantly since the invention of SCUBA?
Bob writes: “One of my buddies thinks ‘Jaques something’ was an absolute arrogant twat.”
Bob, he was French. I thought I mentioned that? 😛
@Bob: In addition to being an arrogant twat, his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries…
That is a problem with some aspects of “science” today.
What has actually been observed and measured by someone vs what some theory says should have been observed and measured by someone if they were there.
Theories supporting theories. (Sometimes a theory has been used to justify an adjustment to an actual observation.)
Don’t forget (can’t be overstated):
On Christiana Figueres — executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change
02.10.15
Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
Figueres said, ”This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
u , u and u drivel.
IOW
Clotted tosh and curdled balderdash.
(It is the warming that causes the clotting and curdling. Better to keep the balderdash and tosh in the fridge where no-one can see it and laugh about it.))
Dear Seth,
You have a defect that is identified here.
http://www.livescience.com/18678-incompetent-people-ignorant.html
In short it says, “dumb people are too dumb to know it”.
It’s a malleable and presumptuous study that sets up an assessment of ignorant people that is aimed at skeptics and people making bad voting choices.
You know, climate change deniers who are too dumb to vote for Hillary.
There’s a big fatal flaw in the presumption. A flaw that prevents you from recognizing it. t.
“…their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency”.
” “people’s inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society’s ills, including climate change denialism.”
“even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, “they’re really not in a position to evaluate the science.”
“Along the same lines, people who aren’t talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.”
“The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right about the things you believe you’re right about. And if you try to joke about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think.”
The fatal flaw is beyond the obvious that the dumbest are the least qualified to decide who is dumb.
It’s the absence of any measure of honesty applied. People lie. Ignorance is greatly exacerbated by dishonesty.
So as people chew through your gibberish it is not just ignorance that jumps off the page. It’s the rampant dishonesty that reveals your defect.
So, yes it’s true. Dumb people are too dumb to know they are dumb.
But highly skilled yet incompetent people who are also pathological liars are ignorant by choice.
That is much worse than just being dumb.
You may find personal comfort in pretending to have another human defect, “it’s not a lie, if you believe it”.
But liars of your caliber share a Hillary disease that is incurable and untreatable.
That leaves you earning an Alex Epstein Tweet. That is all.
Agree 100% I always say that I am almost smart enough to know how little I know.
Reminds me of one off my favorite secular quotes.
“Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.” ― Will Rogers
Reminds me of this also. I don’t know who said it.
“It’s what you learn after you think you you know it all that matters.”
Well, he’s here as a salesman. That’s pretty obvious.
Go to USCRN, graph the data for august since 2005. Zero warming.
How are Americans already being impacted by warming when America isn’t warming?
To claim that Americans are grappling with warming then showing a chart of global temperatures I’d absurd. Show the us chart with zero warming and then tell us how horrible things are in your own mind.
All of Griff‘s hand waving about Arctic sea ice decline since The Little Ice Age merits a big- So What?
Griff is a paid concern troll.
Must be funded by Big Government. Perhaps a RICO suit is in order
Ho! If I wanted to be paid, I’d get a gig with the Heartland Institute….
https://news.vice.com/article/the-fossil-fuel-industry-paid-this-scientist-to-deny-human-caused-climate-change
So someone who actually works for a living is evil, having been “deeply funded by industry interests” with $1.2M, but not those by the hundreds of billions of dollars deeply funding government propaganda.
“hundreds of billions of dollars deeply funding government propaganda.:
It’s not remotely close to that for scientific research.
Does it? Why?
There isn’t any reason to account for it except global warming and it is definitely, provably now at a much lower level than in over a century, decreasing at a fast rate, not part of a natural cycle, not recovering, etc.
Its a great big smoking gun clue to what’s going on…
Which is what? The ice returned 800 years ago after being melted. Now it is melting, BFD. Where’s the clue?
And what is the cause of the melting? Saying the words “the end of the LIA is the cause” is NOT an explanation.
Choosing Heartland over government is another very bad choice. Not very good at lifestyle decisions, Griff ?
Perhaps he needed a strong piece for his application to:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/27/job-of-the-week-new-york-times-climate-editor/
Seth Wrongenstein.
Well, as they say, if it bleeds, it leads.
Real hacks know you have to occasionally add a real fact or two just in case you are called on your BS and you can at least point out that you got SOME stuff right.
In the case of climate alarmism though, knowing that Generation Scared won’t question anything (and to their credit, have never been taught the skills to do so), you just reel off every scary pessimistic speck of “science”, no matter how speculative, unverifiable or realistic.
Double-checking? They don’t have time for…oh look, its Pokémon!
That’s what happens when Everyone Gets a Trophy and All the Children are Above Average! Generation Special Snowflake!
It’s about time somebody called attention to Borenstein’s incessant proselytizing.
The guy is either an incompetent regurgitator of press releases or not very bright. The one thing he isn’t is unbiased and non-partisan. He violates every tenet of what journalism claims to be about.
Unfortunately, there actually are people who swallow his bilge.
What makes you think those two things are mutually exclusive?
You make a good point.
Stopped reading fantasy stories written by Seth some time ago. He is one of the few writers that can get “and” and “the” wrong in a story.
“think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines”
Yes.
“Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist? ”
No, he is a Gaiantologist.
For those who want to play for blood…..I”m your Huckleberry
If a guy with some tins of food, dogs, and a sled covered all of the Arctic for sea ice measurements as accurate as today to combine them all as a pile of Mann-style dumb numbers, I would have to ask–does a dozen dogs, sled and couple cases of food and a tent cost $450 million? Since I presume not, and the two are claimed to be equally adequate to combine these two data sets, why are we using satellites? Find the grandson of that guy and give him a contract for $10 k.
Borenstein is the worst
A lot of the wire service reporting is hmmmm, shallow. They just don’t look beyond the skim that their sources spoon-feed them. They don’t have/take time to do much digging, weighing the various factors and coming up with a reasoned analysis. And even when they do dig a little, they usually look more for corroboration of “what everyone knows” in their circle of sources rather than info that contradicts or leads to a different POV.
But occasionally they do a little better. It shows through in many subject areas: climate, weather, biochemistry, economics. And individual reporters admit to their limitations from time to time…though usually with little inclination or effort to change. Their impressions are sticky.
David:
You say ….
“and all of the non-Hockey Stick climate reconstructions show that this warming began around 1600 AD (plus or minus a couple of decades). ”
I am not aware of there being any “non hockey-stick” reconstructions that show anything of the sort.
That would require there to be instrumental observation at that time. The earliest I know of is the CET that begins in 1659, and even that had infilling from non-instrumental means along with observations made from inside un-heated rooms.
Off the top of my head… Moberg, Lungqvist, Esper and most of the Greenland ice cores.
Borenstein has been an idiot for years. 3.5 years ago he still hadn’t learned that ice melts at 0 C and snow cannot form above that temperature.
Whac-a-moling Seth Borenstein at AP over his erroneous extreme weather claims
Posted on February 19, 2013
Comments on Yesterday’s paean to Global Warming
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/19/whac-a-moling-seth-borenstein-at-ap-over-his-erroneous-extreme-weather-claims/
Recently I saw a link (it might have been in a comment somewhere in this blog) about David Melgueiro, a Portuguese navigator who it is claimed navigated the North East Passage in the years 1660-1662. If those claims are true they imply that the amount of ice in the Arctic must have been unusually low then. Here is that link and another one about David Melgueiro.
http://ecotretas.blogspot.co.uk/p/david-melgueiro-english.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Melgueiro
Over the years I have attempted, with a notable lack of success, to introduce the notion from economics of Opportunity Costs to the continuing blathering about climate. To perhaps oversimplify, Opportunity Costs are the costs of all the real and meaningful things we cannot invest in because we have squandered our limited assets on unproductive follies. The most pointed story I have come across that really illustrates the kind of potential “catastrophe” we may be facing due to the unconscionable waste of these fruitless but ruinously expensive efforts to line the pockets of all the crony fascists, I refuse to call them capitalists, comes from the tale of how Warren Buffett came to own the company that became the titular brand of his massive financial empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
In the early Sixties Buffett made some speculative investments in BH stock even though its core textile business was declining. When BH’s corporate leadership tried to buy him off he felt that they were trying to cheat him and he got mad and decided to buy the company and fire the then CEO, which he did. Dealing with the declining fortunes of the textile business delayed his entering into the business model that lead to his eventual fortune.
“In 2010, Buffett claimed that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway was the biggest investment mistake he had ever made, and claimed that it had denied him compounded investment returns of about $200 billion over the subsequent 45 years.[9] Buffett claimed that had he invested that money directly in insurance businesses instead of buying out Berkshire Hathaway (due to what he perceived as a slight by an individual), those investments would have paid off several hundredfold.”
I haven’t been able to find the price he paid to acquire BH, but I doubt it was more than $100 million. This climate boondoggle looks to be running up a tab in the tens of trillions in the present to be compounded, not over 45 years, but over 85 years, which by Mr. Buffett”s estimate indicates that by the time we get to the turn of the next century humanity will be facing a shortfall in global wealth of Quadrillions of dollars due solely to all these “green” efforts which have proved to be green only for the pockets of politicians and there cronies.
There was a recent article showing that over the past 30 years 80% of Americans are experiencing better weather (less stressful, less extreme). So much for “already suffering”. Borenstein is using “future present tense”: models say it is going to happen therefore it is already happening.
Their misconjugation of verbs is very consistent with their Mannian miscorrelation of low frequency proxy and high frequency instrumental data. /sarc
Climate propaganda by AP, BBC, ABC, and other National services is old hat. They obviously fixate on a current event spinning it into the larger narrative. Whatever happened to the increased tornadoes and hurricanes predicted for the US? Malarkey.
Meanwhile in the real world government sponsered Tesla is struggling to bail in government sponsered Solar City. These entities are not the same as dam and highway building by taxpayers. They are the White Sea Canal of our time.
I’m not familiar with Borenstein but it occurs to me that someone could put together a pro-warmist article using ONLY those warmist tropes that have been thoroughly exploded, and get it accepted even by supposedly science-savvy authorities. That would be by way of being a prank, though, and this guy sounds serious.
Only today I heard someone refer to “Saving the Planet”, even though the old global meltdown version of climate change hysteria went out of fashion twenty years ago. Nowadays it’s rising sea levels and the spread of Ebola, and the planet is going to be fine. Yet that phrase lives on, like a sort of vermiform appendix. I’ve also noticed the spread of the use of the word “Eco” as an adjective, often in situations where it clearly has nothing to do with the environment and just means something like “doubleplusgood”.
The whole Climate Change meme seems to be disintegrating into a mess of catchphrases.
I have to say that if I were wanting to further debate in a sensible manner right now, I would convene a public discussion about one central question:
‘What general range of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere do we believe will allow life on earth to flourish most effectively in the future?’
That question removes blame games, it removes fixations about particular targets, it doesn’t claim that carbon dioxide is evil and most of all it doesn’t contend that it’s the only thing that is important.
It allows experts, the public alike to discuss what the world might look like at different carbon dioxide concentrations (in fact the question to be asked is just what difference there actually will be between 250 and 750ppm of carbon dioxide) and affords the chance to discuss what the world looked like in the past when carbon dioxide levels were in the thousands of ppm….
The current debate looks to me like farmers fighting nature to grow food.
The best farmers always work with nature to grow food.
Perhaps debates should focus on working with the natural world, rather than trying to fight it, eh??
Griff: “There isn’t any reason to account for it except global warming…”
Ahhh! The fallacious “Argument from Ignorance”! IOW, “what else can it be”?
Thanks, Griff, for exposing your “reasoning”.
I’m surprised Seth didn’t drop by for a flogging.
Borenstein: Hot water has been killing coral as never before seen. Scientists have connected man-made climate change to extreme weather, including deadly heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.
Daivd Middleton said:”Unsubstantiated, unquantified drivel.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00097.1
Substantiated. Quantified.
Chris, having read the linked piece, I feel your comment’s last words need more exposition.
eg: Substantiated that this is Quantified drivel. (fify)
Note that they show their model against the observations of 1910-1939, but not the period of interest. Note also that this is a models all the way down study. There is no section showing statistics indicating greater incidence of “deadly heatwaves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours.”
John_C – fair enough. I was trying to post a link to a paper that was a subset of the overall BAMS supplement, but it kept pointing to the entire doc. Here is a story about the Australian heat wave of 2013. 5 different groups studied the data, and all concluded that carbon emissions were a major factor in that heat wave: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/australias-2013-heatwave-due-to-climate-change-researchers-conclude-20140930-10o1sj.html
Where?
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353164/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-08-15_zpsc0bxngk3.png
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353166/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-08-31_zps8rmym1xs.png
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353165/Screenshot_2016-09-03-13-07-28_zpso09rdltb.png
This is simply more unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel…
Based on what? A model.
Saying, “We can’t think of anything else,” isn’t science.
Out of hundreds, if not thousands, of heat waves over the past century, this remarkable employment of GIGO has pinned one heatwave on AGW…
From NOAA’s US Climate Extremes Index, Extremes in Maximum Temperature…
2012 83.10%
1934 62.00%
1912 53.60%
2006 49.50%
1999 46.40%
1921 45.70%
2014 43.80%
1954 42.50%
1939 40.50%
1958 40.30%
Of the 10 worst heat wave years since 1910, 6 occurred before 1960. 2 of the 3 years in which >50% of the contiguous US experienced extremes in maximum temperature occurred before 1935.
Of course you have to use models – it’s complete and utter drivel to think there is any other way. Say the earth warmed by 5C during a single year. You still need to build a model that looks at other possible causes- orbital changes, insolation changes etc. What, do you think the cause just writes itself on the sky?
Let’s look at this a different way. What would convince you that AGW is real?
AGW is real; there’s just no evidence that it is significant. Otherwise, the models would have demonstrated predictive skill.
If natural variability and climate sensitivity were well-understood, the models would be predictive of subsequent observations. The models have not been even close to predictive.
Therefore, any conclusions drawn from derivative models are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel… GIGO.
The models match the measured results quite well, actually. http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/robust2015/background.html
Abject nonsense…
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353167/Screenshot_2016-09-05-05-50-52_zpsy8hq03uw.png
Reality (heavy black curve) totally diverges (red arrow annotated with “divergence) from the model (heavy red curve) during its predictive mode (to the right of the yellow band). In any scientific field, apart from academic and government climate science, this is called a falsified hypothesis.
The models consistently underestimate natural variability and/or overestimate climate sensitivity to greenhouse forcing. Therefore all claims that the models conclusively demonstrate that AGW must have caused unexpected observations are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel. If the purveyors of these conclusions are cognizant of the lack of predictive skill in their models, they are engaging in fraudulent behavior.
The models demonstrate no predictive skill. When you construct a model that matches the past reasonably well , but totally fails to predict subsequent observations, it has no predictive skill… it is wrong… it is GIGO… and all conclusions drawn from derivatives of that model are unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel.
This bit is possibly the mother-of-all unsubstantiated, unquantified, unverifiable drivel…
This is downright Ptolemaic in its idiocy.
Climage models have never demonstrated predictive skill.
1988 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Hansen4.png
1995 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/SAR_zps3478fdbe.png
2001 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/TAR_zpsf2a49c18.png
2007 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353046/AR4_zps4c4ad9ff.png
2011 = EPIC FAIL
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Kaufman-1.png
2013 = EPIC FAIL
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~ed/bloguploads/models_diff_masks_2012.png
“Abject nonsense” – lol. What specifically is causing the warming, if not anthropogenic? Oh, wait, I know – natural causes. That’s the scientifically and intellectually vacuous grab bag used to describe all changes – whether it be increased flooding, droughts, temperature increases or the melting of the Arctic.
I’m still waiting for your answer on what would convince you that AGW is real.
Argumentum ad ignortaum and burden of proof fallacies.
Science doesn’t work this way.
This is argument from ignorance:
This is a scientific hypothesis:
Since you can’t run a controlled experiment on the atmosphere, the only way to test the hypothesis is to construct a model and test it through observations. So far, the observations have falsified this hypothesis, irrespective of the number used to fill in the blank.
The failure of the models (and hypothesis) conclusively prove that either the natural variability is much greater than assumed, the climate sensitivity to greenhouse forcing is much less than assumed or both.
The burden of proof is on the advocates of the hypothesis.
Furthermore they actually have to conclusively demonstrate that the climate has behaved in an anomalous manner since the mid-20th century relative to the rest of the Holocene. The nearly identical nature if the early and late 20th century warming periods falsified any notion of an anomaly.
The advocates of the AGW hypothesis have proven their case to the satisfaction of the vast majority of practicing climatologists, the world’s scientific organizations, governments, and the Fortune 1000. It may not be to your satisfaction, or others on WUWT, or some climatologists. But science doesn’t move forward based on requiring every single scientist or concerned amateur scientist to buy in. It just doesn’t.
I’m still waiting for your answer as to what would convince you that substantial warming due to AGW is occurring.
Argumentum ad verecundiam and populum fallacies.
Furthermore, 0.5% is not a vast majority.
Nor is 52%.
It has never been demonstrated that more than half to two-thirds of relevant atmospheric scientists endorse the notion that humans have been the primary driver of recent climate changes. The obsession with fabricating a 97% is one of many reasons to discout alarmist nonsense.
In order to convince me, they would have to demonstrate that the warming of the late 20th century was anomalous and that their quantified hypothesis had predictive skill. They can only accomplish the former through fraudulent hockey stick reconstructions and have never accomplished the latter.
They basically have to get the science right and stop relying on failed models, fraudulent reconstructions and logical fallacies. If they did all that, they would demonstrate that AGW is insignificant and most of them would be out of work.
Back in 2000 or so, I started to buy into this scam… They had demonstrated a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature in Antarctic ice cores and Mann’s first hockey stick appeared convincing. Then it was demonstrated that CO2 lagged behind temperature in the ice cores and that Mann’s hockey stick was wrong, if not fraudulent.
So let me see here. 66.73% of papers take no position. Here is an example of one: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2010.02241.x/abstract It discusses the impact of warming waters of the Fraser River in BC on salmon mortality. Because it says “climate warming” and not AGW, it would be put into your 66,73% bucket. You, in your math, take that as a “no” vote, or, at a minimum, as a “not yes” vote. That is a false conclusion, we don’t know the author’s opinion, yet you are counting it is a “definitely not yes”, which is wrong.
That is the reason that the author did not include those papers. If a political survey was done on who folks wanted for President, and 20% said Trump, 20% said Clinton, and 60% did not fill out a position, it would be incorrect to say that 80% do not want Trump. But that is exactly what you are doing, and it is incorrect.
That’s not even close to what I’m saying.
Cook et al., 2013 excluded the 66.7% of papers which took no position. An accurate political analogy would be:
0.5% of poll respondents explicitly state they will vote for Clinton.
32% of poll respondents imply that they might vote for Clinton.
66.7% express no opinion.
0.5% of poll respondents explicitly state they will vote for Trump.
Cook et. al,. would conclude from the above that Clinton has the support of 88% of the electorate.
Setting aside the fact that science is not a democratic process, Cook et al., 2013 is not a survey of scientific opinion. It is a survey of the Skeptical Science bloggers’ opinions of the abstracts of papers.
Their definition of “implied endorsement” would include several of my posts on WUWT. They provided this example of an implied endorsement:
Carbon sequestration in soil, lime muds, trees, seawater, marine calcifers and a whole lot of other things have always been important for mitigating a wide range of natural processes. I have no doubt that I have implicitly endorsed the so-called consensus based on this example.
The second largest endorsement group was categorized as “implicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize.” Pardon my obtuseness, but how in the heck can one explicitly endorse the notion that “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic” without quantification? This is the exmple Cook provided:
Wow! I contributed to Romney for President… Yet most of his campaign warchest didn’t come from me. By this subjective standard, I have probably explicitly endorsed AGW a few times.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/18/anatomy-of-a-collapsing-climate-paradigm/
However, the consensus nonsense is still an argumentum ad populum fallacy. There could be a 100% consensus and it wouldn’t fix their failed hypothesis.
“That’s not even close to what I’m saying.”
Yes, it is. Above your first graphic, you say “Furthermore, 0.5% is not a vast majority.” You’ve done exactly what I said you did. You took only those who explicitly endorsed AGW as being the percentage of all scientists who explicitly endorse AGW.
“Cook et. al,. would conclude from the above that Clinton has the support of 88% of the electorate.”
Nope, that is not what they did. From Cook’s 2013 paper: “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” Your statement is incorrect, Cook et al did not do what you said they did. The specifically qualified it as to those who took a position on AGW.
If we take out those who don’t take an opinion, we have .5% + 7.7% + 24.4% that endorse AGW, and .5% + .1% + .1% that minimize or reject AGW. That’s 32.9% compared to .7% – gee, no consensus there. If you want a specific poll, that’s fine, then use a direct survey on the topic: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/
Of climatologists who are actively publishing, the figure is still 97%.
Setting aside the fact that we have now digressed into logical fallacyland… The so-called consensus is that more than half of the warming since 1950 is due to human activities. The only way you can endorse a quantified statement is with an explicit quantified endorsement.
Of the nearly 12,000 papers surveyed by Cook et al., only 64 explicitly endorsed and quantified the consensus. More papers rejected or minimized AGW (78) than explicitly endorsed and quantified it.
Cook et al., made a specific assertion and then excluded papers that expressed no opinion on their assertion and then subjectively claimed that others endorsed their specific assertion. When, in fact, less than 1% of the papers expressly endorsed their specific assertion. See Legates et al., 2013.
Regarding the second part of your latest logical fallacy, the CNN article is referring to Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009. This survey sample was limited to academic and government Earth Scientists. It excluded all Earth Scientists working in private sector businesses. The two key questions were:
I would answer “risen” to #1 and my answer to #2 would depend on the meaning of “human activity is a significant contributing factor.” If I realized it was a “push poll,” I would answer “no.”
Interestingly, economic geologists and meteorologists were the most likely to answer “no” to question #2…
The authors derisively dismissed the opinions of geologists and meteorologists…
No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists.
One of the most frequent refrains is the assertion that “climate scientists” endorse the so-called consensus more than other disciplines and that the level of endorsement is proportional to the volume of publications by those climate scientists. Well… No schist, Sherlock! I would bet a good bottle of wine that the most voluminous publishers on UFO’s are disproportionately more likely to endorse Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a documentary. A cursory search for “abiogenic hydrocarbons” in AAPG’s Datapages could lead me to conclude that there is a higher level of endorsement of abiogenic oil formation among those who publish on the subject than among non-publishing petroleum geologists.
And… no level of consensus fixes their failed hypothesis.
“Of the nearly 12,000 papers surveyed by Cook et al., only 64 explicitly endorsed and quantified the consensus.”
So what? Do papers on cancer treatments start out by saying “just to be clear, we think cancer is bad for you”? Of course not. The paper on water temperatures in the Fraser river is a perfect example. “Mean summer water temperatures in the Fraser River (British Columbia, Canada) have increased by ∼1.5 °C since the 1950s. In recent years, record high river temperatures during spawning migrations of Fraser River sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) have been associated with high mortality events, raising concerns about long-term viability of the numerous natal stocks faced with climate warming.”
The topic of the paper is not “is AGW occurring, and what is the contribution of AGW to total warming” – so why would you expect the authors to mention that?
“No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists.”
A person with a BS in meteorology has a better understanding of the nuances of atmospheric sciences than a PhD in atmospheric sciences – that is what you are saying. And your evidence for that is?
Geologists study long term climate processes as they impact the earth’s crust and elements. So what? That has nothing to do with the equations and principles that define the atmosphere. Here’s a geology track – no classes on atmospheric sciences whatsoever. https://geo.ku.edu/general-geology-track
As we drift deeper into your logical fallacyland and analyze your argumentum ad populum fallacy…
So what? It is a bald-faced lie to say that 97% of climate scientists or peer-reviwed papers endorse the so-called consensus. Cook’s own data prove this. This bald-faced lie is the basis of this much more damaging bald-faced lie:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353060/Maobama97_zps6ex3olxp.png
Firstly, the source of Doran & Kendall-Zimmerman’s survey sample was the American Geological Institute’s directory. From this, they only selected Earth Scientists in academia and government. So, very few of the meteorologists and geologists surveyed lacked PhD’s.
The evidence is …
And this…
?w=700
Sedimentary geology is a combination of paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Depositional environments are determined by paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Geologists, particularly sedimentary geologists working Cenozoic basins domnated by glacio-eustatic processes have a far better understanding of the long-term processes of climate change than any other scientific discipline… Particularly since models derived from “the equations and principles that define the atmosphere” have totally failed to demonstrate any predictive skill.
As a sedimentary geologist who took courses in meteorology, oceanography, astronomy, soil science, physical geography (what climatology was in the 1970’s) while getting my BS, I actually know the meaning of the course titles in the KU geology curriculum.
You can’t understand stratigraphy and sedimentation without understanding the nature of depostional processes and environments. The only way to understand past depostional processes and environments is to study modern active depostional processes and environments. This understanding is why the AAPG can confidently state that:
Personally, I think the AAPG’s dissent is far too courteous.
Recent surveys of the American Meteorological Society suggest that half to two-thirds of atmospheric scientists think that human activities have been the primary driver of climate change over the last 50-150 years. You would think that would be sufficient for the Warmunists. It isn’t because they need near-unanimity to push for the destruction of capitalism.
However, all that said. Science is not a democratic process. There could be a 100% rock-solid consensus, the AAPG could even jump on the bandwagon and AGW would still be a failed hypothesis because it has totally failed to demonstrate predictive skill.
Regarding the 97%, as I noted, Cook qualified it to be those whose papers took a position. That is factual. So yes, for someone to short-hand it to leave the last part out is not accurate. On the other hand, what you did with your math was wrong – saying .5% implies that 99.5% do not believe that AGW is real and substantially contributing to warming. As I noted, it is preposterous to expect climatologists to start out every paper with “just to be clear, we think that AGW is real and that the temperature impacts are significant”.
With regards to your comments on geologists, the level of knowledge about sedimentary processes is not in dispute. But how exactly does that knowledge relate to the non-linear differential equations used to model the atmosphere? It’s a different knowledge base entirely. I have a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, with a specialty on control systems. Even though I took undergrad courses in Power Systems, I would not consider myself remotely capable of understanding the complex models used in modeling and designing power plants and grids.
Regarding your charts, why are you using satellite and balloon data only? Tsk tsk, there is a wealth of ground based data, and since we are concerned about temperatures at ground level, that should be used. What is your proof that satellite measurements are an accurate indicator of surface temperatures?
Chris–why use balloon and satellite data? UHI and Thomas Karl.
Outside of the paper, Cook et al., never state that their 97% is of less than 33% of the papers they reviewed. Nor do they acknowledge that 99% of the 97% is subjective. They and others routinely state that 97% of climate scientists and/or 97% of peer-reviewed papers endorse the so-called consensus. The 0.5% (or 0.3% as Legates el al., demonstrated) is exactly correct. Less than 1% of the 12,000 papers explicitly endorse and quantify the consensus.
This is a bald-faced lie from the authors of the paper:
There are actual surveys of actual atmospheric scientists. These surveys indicate that half to two-thirds of atmospheric scientists think that humans are the primary driver of climate changes over the most recent 50-150 years. Why has a cottage industry sprung up to fabricate a 97% consensus? Because 50-67% is not a consensus. Nor does the so-called consensus position state that AGW is extreme, requiring urgent, drastic action. The so-called consensus merely states than human activities, primarily greenhouse gas emissions, are the cause of more than half of the warming since 1950. The real data support 50-67% agreement with this claim, even though the data only support a human culpability in 25-33% of the warming. The actual data support a climate sensitivity of 0.5 to 1.8 °C per doubling of atmospheric CO2; yet the so-called consensus claims that the sensitivity is about 3 °C, possibly greater than 6 °C and can’t be less than 1.5 °C.
Why is there a need to exaggerate the consensus, the warming, the human culpability and the climate sensitivity? Whenever someone demonstrates a pattern of exaggerating the attributes of a prospect, my fraud alarm starts ringing very loudly.
There is only one reason to explain the pattern of exaggeration (well, maybe two reasons):
The only other logical explanation is that grant money, government funding and a lot of climate “science” jobs would vanish if climate change ceased to be an existential threat and the truth was revealed: Greenhouse gas emissions are a manageable problem and can be addressed in an orderly fashion over the next 100 years.
The QED is the fact that these people reject the only economically viable means of rapidly reducing carbon emissions in an economic manner: N2N (natural gas to nuclear).
I don’t have to rely on my minor in math or relive DifEq nightmares to see that the temperature data always drop out of the bottom of the 95% confidence band of the models within a few years of entering predictive mode.
As a geoscientist, I deal with models all of the time. Way back in the 1970’s people noticed than oil and gas accumulations in the Gulf of Mexico were often associated with seismic “bright spots” (amplitude anomalies, hydrocarbon indicators (HCI)). It was determined that there was a physical basis for this relationship. Models were built to determine what sorts of oil and gas reservoirs should exhibit which sorts of amplitude anomalies. These models have been tested thousands of times. While, far from prefect, HCI’s have vastly improved the geological success rate. HCI’s with the proper attributes rarely turn out to be dry holes… Although they don’t guarantee economic discoveries.
In the case of climate “science.” They have drawn a correlation between CO2 and temperatures. They have identified a physical basis for the relationship. Then they constructed a model and proceeded to drill dry holes 95% of the time… Yet refuse to modify the model. They just keep drilling dry holes and claim that the observations are flawed.
Geoscientists in the oil & gas industry routinely have to integrate sparse high resolution data (well logs) with broad low resolution data (seismic surveys). We have to constantly be aware of the resolution limits of our data. We know that low resolution reconstructions of climate data cannot be used to declare that recent changes are anomalous because the reconstructions generally cannot resolve decadal to centennial scale fluctuations.
As a geoscientist, I see sea level from this perspective:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/170mya1_zps8bb5607b.png
I see global temperatures from this perspective:
And I see atmospheric CO2 from this perspective:
The only graph which exclusively used satellite and balloon data was Dr. John Christy’s. The rest were surface data sets or averages of surface and satellite data. In the case of Hansen et al., 1988, I used GISTEMP (his data set, the one that demonstrates the most warming.) The temperature data match the scenario in which atmospheric CO2 stopped rising by the year 2000.
That said, the satellite data are the closest thing to an actual global temperature measurement and they don’t drastically differ from the surface data.
The key point is that the temperature observations consistently track model scenarios in which carbon emissions have stabilized or have been drastically reduced.
Ah, I read the carbonbrief article and it actually starts off quite well. “The main cause of this rapid decline is rising air temperatures. The Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the global average, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Other factors, such as wind patterns and ocean warming, also play a role in the diminishing sea ice.”. I don’t think anyone would disagree.
“However, the early years of this record had significant gaps. Almost no ice information was collected during the second world war, for example. These gaps were filled by using the long-term averages for each month.” One might say that if 2007, 2012 and 2016 can be lows, would it not be possible that something similar could have occurred in one of the many “significant gaps”? Averaging based on previous years when you don’t have data is just not real or accurate. It is wild guess work, at best.
Where it goes into pure speculation is when it starts using ship entries and visual observations dating back to 1850 as “evidence” and as a sea ice reconstruction. It is cherry picking and then trying to compare those methods to the satellite era in terms of accuracy.
Science, indeed.