Regular WUWT readers know of the issues related to Arctic Sea Ice that we have routinely followed here. The Arctic sea ice trend is regularly used as tool to hammer public opinion, often recklessly and without any merit to the claims. The most egregious of these claims was the April of 2008 pronouncement by National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Dr. Mark Serreze of an ice free north pole in 2008. It got very wide press. It also never came true.
To my knowledge, no retractions were printed by news outlets that carried his sensationally erroneous claim.
A few months later in August, when it was clear his first prediction would not come true, and apparently having learned nothing from his first incident (except maybe that the mainstream press is amazingly gullible when it comes to science) Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral” and” The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030″. In my opinion, Serreze uttered perhaps the most irresponsible news statements about climate second only to Jim Hansen’s “death trains” fiasco. I hope somebody at NSIDC will have the good sense to reel in their loose cannon for the coming year.
Not to be outdone, in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.
So it was with a bit of surprise that we witnessed the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a number of bloggers and news outlets when in his February 15th column, George Will, citing a Daily Tech column by Mike Asher, repeated a comparison of 1979 sea ice levels to present day. He wrote:
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
The outrage was immediate and widespread. Media Matters: George Will spreads falsehoods Discover Magazine: George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking Climate Progress: Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist? One Blue Marble Blog: Double Dumb Ass Award: George Will George Monbiot in the Guardian: George Will’s climate howlers and Huffington Post: Will-fully wrong
They rushed to stamp out the threat with an “anything goes” publishing mentality. There was lots of piling on by secondary bloggers and pundits.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I got interested in what was going on with odd downward jumps in the NSIDC Arctic sea ice graph, posting on Monday February 16th NSIDC makes a big sea ice extent jump – but why? Then when I was told in comments by NSIDC’s Walt Meier that the issue was “not worth blogging about” I countered with Errors in publicly presented data – Worth blogging about?
It soon became clear what had happened. There was a sensor failure, a big one, and both NSIDC and Cryosphere today missed it. The failure caused Arctic sea ice to be underestimated by 500,000 square kilometers by the time Will’s column was published. Ooops, that’s a Murphy Moment.
So it is with some pleasure that today I offer you George Will’s excellent rebuttal to the unapologetic trashing of his column . The question now is, will those same people take on Dr. Mark Serreze and Al Gore for their irresponsible proclamations this past year? Probably not. Will Serreze shoot his mouth off again this year when being asked by the press what the summer ice season will bring? Probably, but one can always hope he and others have learned something, anything, from this debacle.
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail.
By George F. Will, Washington Post
Friday, February 27, 2009; A17
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.
Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.
On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis” — a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news — accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.
Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing — sometimes a distinction without a difference — concerning today’s climate controversies.
Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts — how does he know this? — that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just “a pause in warming.” His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive — it concerned controversies already many days running — that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that “experts said” this columnist’s intervention in the climate debate was “riddled with” inaccuracies. Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.
As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.
So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying “we do not know where George Will is getting his information.” The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
I was just about to ask about this in the North Dakota entry!
Has the sensor been fixed, and when will they be updating the (obviously erroneous) ice area graphs on Cyrophere Today?
REPLY: It has been fixed (by switching to a different sensor platform) and Walt Meir has promised a guest post about it on WUWT, but he’s missed three promised self imposed deadlines now, so I may just put up my own analysis. – Anthony
As is always the case with our media, the alarmists’ claims are on page one and the evidence that they are full of it is on page 46 or not mentioned at all. It’s nice to have George Will on board, though.
If WUWT gives awards of some sort George Will should get one.
[snip – way wayyyyyyy off topic]
So who is going to get this analyzed?
http://nsidc.com/arcticseaicenews/ hope you guys kept the previous data!
In fact Cryosphere Today has removed 2009 from the menu. They note that they will “re-construct the missing plots. They also still have the knee-slapping joke about the missing data posted, to wit:
“Note – these missing swaths do not affect the timeseries or any other plots on the Cryosphere Today as they are comprised of moving composites of at least three days.”
So, Your bank made a one day error on your balaces of -50,000 bucks and they want to replace your balance with a three day average. Okay with you?
😉
Will’s article is hillarious! Lotsa egg on lotsa faces.
From this posted on cryosphere (link)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf
To NYT Rivkin interchanges with Cryosphere leaves me with no doubt these people have an agenda. Are they now re-creating “real time data” to make the story stick. It seems so. Maybe CA could audit this last little “patch-up” from NSIDC and Cryosphere? Its all getting a bit obvious
http://mikelm.blogspot.com/2007/09/left-image-was-downloaded-from.html
and records are being kept for future reference. BTW temps plunging everywhere Atmospheric to below 2007 levels now…see AMSU satellite data
Most of the MSM so-called “environmental journalists” are strictly alarm advocates. I regularly refer to the global sea ice link on Cryosphere today to get picture of the long term trend:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
You might think the so-called journalists might have enough intellectual curiosity to check their facts. But I guess they consider the NOAA a shill for the oil and tobacco industry. Who knew?
I read George Will’s column and immediately sent him an email thnanking him for his past work and his attention to detain on this matter. Suggest others who regularly read this board consider doing something similar. We, the deniers, have to speak out at every opportunity, especially to our fellow citizens who just believe the media driven hype. Obama’s cap-n-trade proposal could have major negative impacts on the US econmy if implimented. I’m encouraged that the EU cap-n-trade program is imploding with prices at only 8 pounds/ton vs. 32 when implimented there.
Bill
I’m still wondering, who are Revkin’s “experts”?
I know he has excellent contacts in the Arctic and Antarctic research community. I’d speculate that a few Dr.s So-and-so assured Mr. Revkin that George Will was wrong as they referred Andrew to the (incorrect) satellite data that the polar researchers should have been questioning themselves.
I’m just guessing here but I think Mr. Revkin is remaining silent to protect the (embarrassed) guilty parties. Don’t attack your inside sources if you want to continue to call on them.
Advice to AGW-supporters: Don’t get in an essay writing contest with George Will.
It’s just like my mother in law told me.If you give them enough rope they will hang themselves.Just A thought but why is it when there is record cold the global warming crowd tries to find out if they can make it appear there is an error but if there are record warming then thats just fact . No need to verify to see if equipment was wrong oh and see its GLOBAL WARMING.
This interweb thingy is good isn’t it! If you’r going to quote something controversial you need to keep it in context, please!
The quote about ice free pole (not arctic!!!!!)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13779?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_dn13779:
“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.
[…] Young and thin Arctic ice at its maximum in March, but that maximum is declining by 44,000 km2 per year on average, the NSIDC has calculated (see graph, top right). That corresponds to an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey.
What is more, the extent of the ice is only half the picture. Satellite images show that most of the Arctic ice at the moment is thin, young ice that has only been around since last autumn (see picture, right).
Thin ice is far more vulnerable than thick ice that has piled up over several years.
Net loss
“There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment,” says Serreze. “This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
Despite its news value in the media, the North Pole being ice free is not in itself significant. To scientists, Serreze points out, “this is just another point on the globe”. What is worrying, though, is the fact that multi-year ice – the stuff that doesn’t melt in the summer – is not piling up as fast as Arctic ice generally is melting.
[…]
Ice still possible
Together, these are the factors that have led to most of the Arctic ice now being so young and thin.
“Even if you lost only half of the first-year ice this year – which would be average – you are still in for a very low ice extent this summer,” says Serreze.
Some factors could still save the day, though. In summer 2007, warm winds favoured melting. “If we have an atmospheric pattern like we had last year, we are going to lose a whole bunch of ice this summer, but if we have a cooler, more cyclonic pattern, that might preserve some of that ice,” says Serreze. Watch this space
This is NOT a definitive statement in my books!
Mike
REPLY: Maybe so, but it what is reported in the media that counts in the court of public opinion, not the context. Also you write: “The quote about ice free pole (not arctic!!!!!)” if you’ll look carefully, that is exactly what I said in my article and the link to the news item confirms it. No need for !!!! – Anthony
Why go for the scientist making an obviously tenuous PREDICTION if it is the warped “media” doing the hype?
Mike
REPLY: Because scientists need to learn that when speaking to the media, they have to be very VERY careful what they say. Most reporters are science challenged and when scientists talk of cycles, methodology, and other technical minutiae, reporters often blow right past them. It is the “soundbites” they latch onto, in this case “ice free north pole in 2008”. Further, why put yourself in the position in the first place. Making a suggestion like that, something that has never happened in recorded history, really puts you out on the limb. Serreze botched it, badly. Then repeated his mistake a second time. I make no apologies for my criticism of his press demeanor. – Anthony
George Will says:
George Will certainly has a very low standard for factual accuracy. Apparently quoting something completely out-of-context doesn’t qualify as a factual inaccuracy in his view? How else can one explain that he seems to think that it is not factually inaccurate to quote the Science article by Shackleton et al. in the way that he did:
The “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” actually appears in the Shackleton paper ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;194/4270/1121 ) in this context:
(The quote about extensive glaciation also appears in the abstract of their paper in a sentence that provides less detail but still emphasizes both that they are “ignoring anthropogenic effects” and discussing only “the long-term trend over the next sevem thousand years”.)
Does anybody think that Will has actually been honest here in using the Shackleton quote in the context that he did given the context in which it actually appeared? Does anybody believe that this prediction is not also basically in line with current scientific thought (with the one modification being that current thinking is that, even in the absence of human intervention, the current interglacial might actually last another 40,000 to 50,000 years)?
REPLY: So, Serreze and Gore get a free pass in your view? You certainly have a very low standard for factual accuracy. – Anthony
Anthony to quote you:
“To my knowledge, no retractions were printed by news outlets that carried his sensationally erroneous claim”
the Serreze claim is
“This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
using the words “spectre”, “possibility”, “could” does not claim much.
There is the spectre of a possibility that I could win the National lottery this saturday is not an erroneous claim
Mike
REPLY: Mike, its about media savvy, Serreze needs to learn that statements like he made will get plucked for maximum impact by the media. As a member of the media myself, I speak from experience. And where’s Serreze making the corrections to the reporting? Show me where he asked for and got a correction and you may have a point. Otherwise my criticism of his choice of words stands. “spectre” ??? Serreze knew what he was doing. – Anthony
The best way to settle these debates is with cold, hard facts. Empirically speaking, let’s put Revkin in a kayak and have him paddle to the ice-free N. Pole.
Once again the amount of publicity one story gets depends clearly on which side of the debate it comes from… It’ll be doubtful that the amount of apology that Will’s rebuttal should elicit will match the size of outcry that greeted Mr. Will’s initial column.
Yet, even if one is right, the damage is done. Those are PR tactics, used now even by research scientists to sexy up their upcoming papers in the hope it is alarmist enough to be picked up by a major newspaper or press agency -which in Canada is the same since Thomson Reuters owns CTV Globemedia the parent company of the Globe and Mail- affording its author his/her 15 minutes of shameless fame.
Somehow it highlights the undercurrent that Mr. Gore and his followers are trying to skew science with. The question is now supposed to be, conveniently, beyond the realm of science into the realm of moral, in which we all know, shades of grey abunds and cannot be disproved, only disapproved. If ever these people truly get their way, the only good thing is that the Golden Gate bridge has been renovated and that it’ll be safe to jump from it.
“This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
Actually, Serreze raises the spectre.
This is why I started a contest for the– Most Extreme Predictions of 2009
I’m collecting them on my blog, the link is at the top. Put the quote, quoter, source and date and we’ll vote on them in Jan 2010. So far it’s pretty hard to beat Hansen.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/global-warming-most-extreme-preditions-of-2009-contest/
It’s hard to imagine what they are actually holding back.
thefordprefect (14:33:08) :
You can parse what you wish out of Serreze’s words, but that doesn’t change how the media reported them.
The attacks on George Will, and the media’s complicity in them, are done in full knowledge of the underlying weakness of climate science’s claims.
Empirical science is now and always has been rife with arm waving statements. The media knows this and recklessly uses these statements with to sell soap (or perhaps public policy).
[snip – improper labeling of individuals]
In keeping with the theme of other posts, you might want to point out that the picture included at the top of this post is not actually George Will or any specific hotheaded ice alarmist and is representative only… ?
“There is the spectre of a possibility that I could win the National lottery this saturday is not an erroneous claim”
Mike
Yeah, but if a journalist misquote you and prints that what you said was “I am using my sub-etha sens-o-matic to win the National Lottery this Saturday’ you will post a press release clarifying that you were misquoted.
Apparently, Dr Serreze didn’t feel the need to clarify anything about what the journalists said what his predictions were.
The following article appeared in yesterday’s (Feb 26) Daily Mail, pg.19:
“Antarctica (sic) glaciers melting at alarming rate, warn international team of
scientists.
Glaciers in the Antarctic are melting faster than previously thought,
causing higher sea levels, scientists warned yesterday.
The Pine Island Glacier – the biggest in West Antarctica – is moving 40
per cent faster than in the 1970s, discharging water and ice more rapidly
into the ocean. The Smith Glacier is moving 83 per cent faster than in 1992.
Glaciers in the area are now losing a total of 103billion tons a year. ‘We
didn’t realize it was moving so fast,’ said Colin Summerhayes of the
International Polar Year research project.
Antarctica’s average annual temperature has risen around 1 degree
Fahrenheit since 1957.
In 2007 sea levels were forecast to rise 0.7 to 1.3 metres this century,
flooding low-lying areas.
‘If the West Antarctica sheet collapses, we’re looking at a sea level rise of
between 1 and 1.5 metres,’ said Mr Summerhayes.”
The on-line version can be found here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1155544/Antarctica-glaciers-melting-alarming-rate-warn-international-team-scientists.html#comments
It is phrased slightly differently and includes comment not in the printed article. E.g. It says: A report by thousands of scientists (sic) for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year said the western part of the continent was warming up as well as the Antarctic Peninsula.
It all reads like a poor school essay. Could someone tell me whether any single fact, and/or inference drawn, is correct?
Monbiot had a go, you say? Actually I think that being the subject of a stream of invective from him should be taken as a good sign. He is quite one of the most unbalanced of the Grauniad’s odd bunch.
The 1970’s were also notable for a now long-forgotten bit of sensationalistic Whole-Earth Modeling called “The Limits to Growth”, sponsored by a fancy-sounding but entirely self-serving Mutual Admiration Society called “The Club of Rome”.
Surprisingly, I have seen NO mention of the Limits to Growth anywhere. The Meadows (Mister and Missus) who authored this screed predicted that chromium, for example, would DISAPPEAR in the early part of the current century. I was in engineering school at the time at the [Ivy League] institution sponsoring these idiots, and I took strong exception to the notion of chromium “disappearing”. I told my proffessors that such a thing was not possible in a market economy (even a relatively inefficient one) since if chromium got too expensive, folks would be going around “sucking it off bumper hitches”. And in any case, the “Limits” modellign assumed NO change in consumption patterns due to changes in technologies.
I was not popular with the faculty. That much has likely not changed, although I suspect a lot of them have now gone to their graves having conveniently forgotten that they once predicted The End Of Chromium.
Perhaps I will try to dig-up a copy of this drivel in some second-rate second-hand book store and “republish” it. Not that any of the current crop of tiny-brained over-educated AGW nitwits would see any connection between two quasi/pseudo-scientific Luddite movements more than 30 years apart.
Oh, in case no one’s been checking, Sunspot 1013 is definitely GONE already. I am looking forward to next month’s itty bitty tiny SC24 sunspot (assuming that it WILL BE a SC24 spot!)
“So, Serreze and Gore get a free pass in your view? You certainly have a very low standard for factual accuracy. – Anthony”
In the post above, you claim that Serreze’s sin was making a statement that the media could take out of context, and then go on to claim (without evidence) that “Serreze knew what he was doing”. And note that realclimate certainly discussed the unfortunate media over-hype of the issue well before the peak of 2008 summer: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/north-pole-notes/langswitch_lang/de. Also note that Serreze’s statement was not “false” given the caveats.
In contrast, Joel Shore demonstrates that George Will quoted the Science paper pretty dramatically out-of-context. Either he copied the short quote from a standard denialist site without looking it up himself, or he pretty deliberately cherry-picked the original quote.
I think you should examine your own standard for factual accuracy here…
(btw, your overall point – that “alarmists” are willing to give “alarming” statements a pass more often than they’ll give “denialist” statements a pass is probably true. I just think that the Serreze 2008 north pole quote is a really poor example of that. Of course, “denialists” give “denialist” statements a pass much more often than they’ll give “alarmist” statements a pass – just look at all the arguments on your own site about whether doubling CO2 has a 1 degree effect in the absence of feedbacks, or whether the CO2 rise is anthropogenic in nature)
(of course, I happen to believe that an ice free Arctic by 2030 is possible, if not very likely, and, assuming BAU, I believe an ice free Arctic by 2100 is extremely likely, so I’m less liable to see Serreze’s 2030 quote as wildly off the mark than you are)
thefordprefect ,
The problem with comparing “multiyear” ice and “new” is the assumption that “multiyear” ice melts slower than “new”.
My educated guess is that multiyear ice has more carbon soot from diesels europe has switched too and because the albedo is lower, it will actually melt quicker.
And 2008/2009 seems to be proving me right.
Anthony: You said
“The most egregious of these claims was the April of 2008 pronouncement by National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Dr. Mark Serreze of an ice free north pole in 2008. It got very wide press. “
The apparently true quote set out above, which is not at all the same thing, is
“There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment,” says Serreze. “This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
You’ve criticized Serreze for making a prediction, and when called on that, said that even if he wasn’t making a prediction, he should not have said something that the media could misuse. But the quote above is from the media. Do you actually have examples of major media implying that Serreze made a “pronouncement” that there would be an ice-free North Pole? Or is that your own construct?
REPLY: It’s not a construct, it’s a descriptive term, I could have chosen “statement, quote, or announcement” . And yes, Serreze IHMO knew what he was doing, because he’s chosen to use alarming phrases twice now in similar interview situations. The word “spectre” is telling. NSIDC needs a press person to take point. Further it appears that NSIDC has a bias, because they put support for Gore’s AIT on their own web page.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20060706_goremoviefaq.html
If Pielke, Lindzen, Spencer, or any other skeptical scientist put such a thing, say a review with agreement on “Swindle”, on their official organization web page, many like yourself would be upset about that. The whole point here in the article is that such questionable practices seem to get a free pass when alarming statements are made by pro AGW folks. When scientists start endorsing movies on publicly funded web pages, there’s something wrong. – Anthony
Was this winter in the Arctic colder than the last several winters? The reason I ask is that if it was, I think there might be some deliberate tampering or hiding of ice area data in order to hide ice growth that has been more than expected. I know I sound cynical but I don’t trust the believers given Hansen’s massaging of temperature data, the placement of many temperature recording stations, and Mann’s 1st Hockey stick fiasco.
Make no mistake, in the 70’s there was widespread alarmism about the new Ice Age. I was there and had the habit of reading. Science literature, fact and fiction as well, were full of this stuff. Time, Life, Popular Science and others all ate that up because, well, it sold.
That’s just the same today, but amplified by the omnipresent media of today.
this time around, concerning global warming.
The press doesn’t want to hear about ice ages, little or big but -this time -there are genuine anomalies in many aspects of the Sun’s behavior that says what will come next has not been seen for at least a century and possibly three.
Re: English Phil’s post….AP article bylined Eliane Engeler in yesterday’s local paper headlined ANTARCTIC GLACIERS MELTING FASTER THAN FIRST THOUGHT, SCIENTIST SAYS reporting the head of IPCC Wednesday (2/25/09) told the U.S. Senate committee on the environment and public works that the earth has about SIX MORE YEARS at the current rates of carbon dioxide pollution before it is locked into a future of severe global warming.
What odds that the alarmist hysteria will center on Antarctica now?
Good article! My brain gained a wrinkle and I chuckled when reading “- meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.”
Thank you to Mr. Will and Mr. Watts
“Glaciers in the Antarctic are melting faster than previously thought,
causing higher sea levels, scientists warned yesterday.
The Pine Island Glacier – the biggest in West Antarctica – is moving 40
per cent faster than in the 1970s, discharging water and ice more rapidly
into the ocean. The Smith Glacier is moving 83 per cent faster than in 1992.
Glaciers in the area are now losing a total of 103billion tons a year. ‘We
didn’t realize it was moving so fast,’ said Colin Summerhayes of the
International Polar Year research project.”
If these glacier’s were landlocked, wouldn’t this indicate that the glaciers were growing? My understanding is that glaciers expand or contract in proportion to the amount of new snow/ice that’s building at the top of the glacier, hence merely stating that the glaciers are pushing into the ocean at a faster rate could easily indicate that there is a net increase in the ice content of the glaciers.
hareynolds (15:16:28) :
Not that any of the current crop of tiny-brained over-educated AGW nitwits would see any connection between two quasi/pseudo-scientific Luddite movements more than 30 years apart.
The club of rome is still very much alive and kicking, and has high profile members who are very much part of the AGW higher echelon. The agenda is still anti freedom and all about top down power and control.
These people always seem to be advocating less travel and population reduction, but always seem to have large houses with big heating bills, and lots of air miles between them.
I always get amused when waterboys for AGW like thefordprefect, Marcus, and Joel Shore try to parse obvious bottom line stories with comments to the effect that “it wouldn’t be impossible this could have happened”, or “it was quoted out of context”. The bottom line is that global ice is roughly at 1979-80 levels. Period. You guys are really advancing the scientific debate.
My wife and I have started a little game…
Every time we hear something incredulous, we attribute it to global warming. For example:
“It’s 13 below zero today. Must be global warming.”
“The New York Times subscription numbers are down again. Gotta tip the hat to global warming.”
“HE WAS WIDE OPEN…HOW DID HE DROP THAT BALL!!!!! Man, I hate this global warming!!!
Nick Stokes (15:41:41) :
Do you actually have examples of major media implying that Serreze made a “pronouncement” that there would be an ice-free North Pole? Or is that your own construct?
I have an email from the BBC regarding a complaint I made about a scare story they ran on their kids news site ‘Newsround’ saying that the North Pole could be ice free by 2013.
In it, they say their info came from the NSIDC and they don’t question such sources because they are ‘respected scientists’. I will be linking this thread in my reply.
Bravo Anthony, you are right to highlight these issues and I will continue to chip away at the BBC for their scurrilous lack of journalistic integrity.
From above
From above
“”You’ve criticized Serreze for making a prediction, and when called on that, said that even if he wasn’t making a prediction, he should not have said something that the media could misuse. But the quote above is from the media. Do you actually have examples of major media implying that Serreze made a “pronouncement” that there would be an ice-free North Pole? Or is that your own construct?””
I guess you missed the GW special produced by ABC news. (Shown on Discover and the like. Karen Vargas interviewed on one show, Gore, Hansen, and Serreze among others. They have no credibility what so ever left, with Vargas taking Queen Green Squeeze of the year.
so when Revkin replies: “near or slightly lower than” area observed at a similar time of year in 1979, not equal to it” as his defence re: Will assertions that it was equal, you definitely know that the NYT (or Revkin) is 100% biased.. What a silly defense! he actually exposes the whole AGW scam LOL. BTW the more intelligent alarmist posting here the better, as censorship in other sites such as RC and NYT is condemming them the waste basket…
Billy Ruff’n is a 47 ft. steel-hulled, well-found, full-equipped sailing vessel. It is as capable of completing the Northwest Passage as any sail boat currently afloat. If Dr. Serreze and Al Gore are serious about demonstrating to the world that the Arctic is melting, I offer them the opportunity to put their bodies where their mouths are.
Here’s the deal: Sign as crew for a transit of the NW Passage. I’ll fund the trip. If it’s as warm in the Arctic as they say it is, we’ll all have some fun, they can shoot some video and show the world what a cake walk it was. If we can’t make it through and get stuck in the ice, they agree to spend the winter on the boat.
Deal?
Serreze made a prediction of something that he thought MIGHT happen. (And, as thefordprefect noted, was even more caveated and uncertain if you read what he actually said rather than the part that was reported.) It did not happen. He made another prediction that you may not believe but since it is still 21 years in the future, you don’t have the ability to ascertain whether or not it will turn out to be correct or not. That is very different than willfully quoting someone completely out of context.
As for Gore, when he says something that is inaccurate, he should be corrected. I believe the reference you are making is to a slide that Gore pulled from his presentation this week after he was told that it was inaccurate. As I recall, what I said in response is that I wish commenters like Smokey who link to deceptive graphs would exercise the same sort of restraint after the deceptiveness of the graph has been explained to them…and they did not even try to defend against the points made.
REPLY: There are plenty of examples for Gore besides that, so let’s just both agree then that he’s peddling a number of inaccuracies. As for Serreze, what possible motive could he have for saying such a thing? What probability value does such a prediction have when it has never occurred in recorded history, nor even got close last year? IMHO his statement was for emotional impact to the masses, not for backing up any science he’s done. It was a “shoot from the hip” prediction. If it was not, then we’d see something in writing, some theory, essay, proof or paper, that outlines his theory and why it could become reality. To my knowledge, there is no such supporting science paper or essay from him that says an equivalent statement that he made to the press. – Anthony
English Phil (15:15:14) :
“Glaciers in the Antarctic are melting faster than previously thought,
…in 2007 sea levels were forecast to rise 0.7 to 1.3 metres this century,
flooding low-lying areas. if the West Antarctica sheet collapses, we’re looking at a sea level rise ofbetween 1 and 1.5 metres,’ said Mr hing Summerhayes.”
0.2 to 0.3 additional meters per 100 years would not be anything to worry about. It would be still within the typical increases since the little ice age.
Around 2 years ago the same hysteria went around the globe concerning the Greenland ice sheet
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&ei=XJKoSdWzONjZkAWOotTbDQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=greenland+glaciers&spell=1
Today Greenland is back to normal
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/greenlands-glaciers-take-a-breather/
…and the AGW crowd has to worry about one of the other very few places left, that show anything that may be interpreted as warming.
I am a subscriber to Newsweek in which George Will writes a column about 2 weeks of of 5. He is the only voice in that magazine who has occasionally voiced doubts about global warming. Meanwhile, Newsweek scientific journalist Sharon Begley, who obviously has been drinking increasing doses of Al Gore’s Kool-Aid, keeps harping endlessly about the impending climate catastrophe.
Speaking of irresponsible predictions of an ice free arctic, don’t forget the University of Manitoba’s David Barber, who claimed the Arctic would be ice free by 2015.
hareynolds said:
I was actually given a copy of this book (the 2nd ed. published in 1974) by my girlfriend’s father a few years ago having heard plenty about it…about all the alarmist predictions that it made that didn’t come true. However, what has interested me is that most of the predictions that people seem to claim they made seem to be figments of the imagination. Indeed, this is the case with your chromium prediction as near as I can tell. They actually use chromium as an example of how different assumptions can change when the reserves are depleted but not by as much as you’d expect. For example, they point out that at the current consumption rate, the known reserves would be depleted in 420 years but if you assume the consumption grows exponentially at the current rate of growth of 2.6% per year then the known reserves are depleted in 95 years, and that if you assume this exponential growth but posit that we discover 5X as much chromium as the current know reserves than this only increases the depletion time to 154 years. Then they go on to do some more complicated modeling where they put in economic factors. None of these examples are predictions and even if they were I don’t see any that suggested depletion in less than 95 years. For those who have access to the book, I am referencing Fig. 11 on p. 62 and the accompanying discussion about it. [Actually, there are other materials like Al and Cu that they derive shorter years-to-depletion based on exponential growth in usage but none of these are predictions but merely pointing out that we can’t continue growing our use of these materials forever and/or have to recycle and that even if the known reserves turns out to be several times greater than the current estimates, the nature of exponential growth means that it doesn’t change the story as much as you might expect.]
Actually, you can get the “30 year update” at amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193149858X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235785290&sr=8-1
Well Andy Revkin’s has revealed some experts on his dotearth blog and his main expert seems to be Serreze himself. Revkin even uses an invective filled diatribe of Serreze to demonstrate that Will is clearly in error would you believe. Serreze also maintains that the satellite error doesn’t matter. The NSDIC experts have also come out and admitted that while yes the global ice situation is indeed much the same or slightly less as 1979, that isn’t the same as “equal”, nor apparently is it even important because only the Arctic is important for AGW and anyway models already predict something about the Antarctic ice increasing under a global warming scenario. And of course another Revkin expert doesn’t forget to mention that 2007 had a massive melt in the Arctic which clearly demonstrates AGW almost one sentence after having berated Will for using a single year’s data rather than a trend. What an abject farce.
WestHoustonGeo says:
Well, I was pretty young in the 70s so I can’t testify from personal experience as to what appeared in the popular press but in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, future “global cooling” was not only not the consensus view, it was not even close to being the majority view as documented here: http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf [4 Mb PDF file]
Furthermore, even the views presented in the press tend to be exaggerated in retrospect. For example, George Will’s column quotes quite a bit from a New York Times article that appeared on May 21, 1975 entitled “Scientists ask why world climate is changing; major cooling may be ahead” but strangely gives no quotes from another article by the same reporter on August 14, 1975 that is entitled “Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due.” Go figure!
tommoriarty (17:50:12) :
Gee, Tom you beat me to it.
However, there is a new article in the Feb 21, 2009 Winnipeg Free Press where Barber is again interviewed and predicts there will be no ice in the summertime between 2013 and 2030.
http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=119295
If you read the article his explanations of meteorology leave a bad taste in you mouth. He seems to make up the explanations as he goes along. Try ” The warmer water also attracted bad weather, as storms that would have usually travelled over the continent were steered towards the open ocean, bringing with them lots of snow.” Looks like he has not heard of the levels the steering flows are located.
WestHoustonGeo (16:12:40) :
I’m another of the old geezers who remember the “inevitable” approach of the next ice age, which apparently began during the Eisenhower administration. I remember sitting with my farmer father in an ag extension meeting in Illinois, with a whole bunch of flat-earthers (seriously, have you seen central Illinois? Flat, really flat.) while the smart guy from the University of Illinois told us to expect a huge influx of Canadian farmers who wouldn’t be able to grow wheat in all that cold. We didn’t know much about Canadians, but if they were farmers, we could probably get along. The general agreement was that we would do our best to feed and house them as they fled south, and try to get their men-folk decent jobs. These Canadians were Midwestern sons of the soil, like my dad, and his generation and theirs had just fought a war to get rid of Nazis. So we’d share our bounty, shoulder their burdens, too, and make do somehow. Just one thing, though.
We’d rather they didn’t speak French. Especially around the children.
Joel Shore,
Please don’t cite anything by William Connolly. He is incredible. As in not credible. Connolly is the prime reason that Wikipedia articles on AGW and global warming are worthless; they are generally propaganda, with Connolly as the gatekeeper.
You may have been a youngster in the ’70’s, but I clearly recall the continual hyperventilating about the imminent specter of global cooling. Anyone who believes that human nature was different then, and who believes that the consensus wasn’t chasing grant money, is naive.
Here is a very typical article citing studies done, and also citing the NOAA’s view: click
Here is another article showing the ebb and flow of media stories, which alternate between global warming and global cooling alarmism: click
Anyone claiming that in the 1970’s there was not a consensus that global cooling was approaching is either ignorant of the facts, or devious. In William Connolly’s case, there’s no doubt that it’s the latter. Connolly has an agenda. Please don’t refer to him again.
Joel Shore (18:24:45) :
It is interesting how everyone jumps up and says “not me” when they do not want to be associated with a particular view. In the mid 1970’s a colleague and I showed a film to the public about the coming Ice Age. It was based on ice cores and some other items. I would like to find it now but they likely chucked out the 16mm films from the library. At that time I did not have any clear opinion one way or the other, but the Canadian government seemed to be more concerned with cooling than warming in those years so we did our duty. I still have the copy of the 1976 National Geographic which featured an article on the concern over possible cooling. The comments there were split.
Well I was studying geology in the late 70’s early 80’s and can tell you that the coming ice age was the general prediction.
Joel Shore (18:03:05) : said:
“{Actually, there are other materials like Al and Cu that they derive shorter years-to-depletion based on exponential growth in usage but none of these are predictions but merely pointing out that we can’t continue growing our use of these materials forever and/or have to recycle and that even if the known reserves turns out to be several times greater than the current estimates, the nature of exponential growth means that it doesn’t change the story as much as you might expect.]”
Aluminium??????
Sorry but wiki (and elsewhere says that ‘Aluminium is the most abundant metallic element in the Earth’s crust (believed to be 7.5 to 8.1 percent)” It might be true that the cheap sources will be depleted, but we will run out of water before running out of aluminium on earth.
27 June 2008
North Pole notes
Filed under: Reporting on climate Arctic and Antarctic Instrumental Record Climate Science— gavin @ 3:04 PM
I always find it interesting as to why some stories get traction in the mainstream media and why some don’t. In online science discussions, the fate of this years summer sea ice has been the focus of a significant betting pool, a test of expert prediction skills, and a week-by-week (almost) running commentary. However, none of these efforts made it on to the Today program. Instead, a rather casual article in the Independent showed the latest thickness data and that quoted Mark Serreze as saying that the area around the North Pole had 50/50 odds of being completely ice free this summer, has taken off across the media.
The headline on the piece “Exclusive: no ice at the North Pole” got the implied tense wrong, and I’m not sure that you can talk about a forecast as evidence (second heading), but still, the basis of the story is sound (Update: the headline was subsequently changed to the more accurate “Scientists warn that there may be no ice at North Pole this summer”). The key issue is that since last year’s dramatic summer ice anomaly, the winter ice that formed in that newly opened water is relatively thin (around 1 meter), compared to multi-year ice (3 meters or so). This new ice formed quite close to the Pole, and with the prevailing winds and currents (which push ice from Siberia towards Greenland) is now over the Pole itself. Given that only 30% of first year ice survives the summer, the chances that there will be significant open water at the pole itself is high.
The actuality will depend on the winds and the vagaries of Arctic weather – but it certainly bears watching. Ironically, you will be able to see what happens only if it doesn’t happen (from these web cams near the North Pole station).
This is very different from the notoriously over-excited story in the New York Times back in August 2000. In that case, the report was of the presence of some open water at the pole – which as the correction stated, is not that uncommon as ice floes and leads interact. What is being discussed here is large expanses of almost completely ice-free water. That would indeed be unprecedented since we’ve been tracking it.
So why do stories about an geographically special, but climatically unimportant, single point traditionally associated with a christianized pagan gift-giving festival garner more attention than long term statistics concerning ill-defined regions of the planet where very few people live?
I don’t really need to answer that, do I?
Share This 45 blog reactions
827 Responses to “North Pole notes”
Andy Gates Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:11 PM
Already the denial community is giving credit for Arctic melting to the sea-bed volcanic activity (eg: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/haog-fut062508.php). It would be great to have an analysis of that idea with actual numbers and science.
[Response: That’s hilarious (if unsurprising). I’ll see what I can do… – gavin]
Richard Pauli Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:17 PM
Ah ! Finally RC moves from atmospheric sciences to human psychology. Much deeper, impossible to know, and still interesting.
Bill Durbin Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:19 PM
Gavin, I’ve been hoping you would do a post on Jim Hansens’ testimony before the Congressional Committee on the 20th anniversary of his appearance in 1988. Would you consider doing so? I have found it to be somewhat bizarre that there has been so little follow up in the press.
Andy Revkin Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:19 PM
There’s a very simple answer to why this got traction: Drudgereport.com. TV producers sift it continuously, then rush coverage.
You can find out more (and see links to my earlier coverage of Arctic sea-ice trends, and what’s going on with sea ice at the other end of the planet) in my latest post on Dot Earth.
More on how the media could do much better covering climate can be found in one of my two book chapters on the media and climate, which the radio show On the Media posted online.
pat neuman Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:21 PM
My bet is that this year’s Arctic Sea ice extent ice will not fall below
last year’s minimum (4.28 or 2.77), because last year’s minimum was very
low in comparison to all other years of record (1979-current).
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Sep/N_200709_area.txt
Arctic sea ice monitoring at NSIDC
http://npat.newsvine.com/_news/2008/05/27/1514154-arctic-sea-ice-monitoring-at-nsidc
Mark C. Serreze Says:
27 June 2008 at 3:31 PM
Gavin:
I hope that I will not be pilloried by the community for being a part of this story. From what I can gather, it started with a piece in “National Geographic Online”, moved to a piece in “The Independent”, another piece on CNN, and then quickly grew out of all reasonable proportion. A positive feedback process. I’ll be the first to agree that losing the ice at the north pole this summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful.
[Response: As we are seeing! We should perhaps tap into it more often. – gavin]
For those who missed the Newsweek article:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/the_cooling_world_newsweek_2.jpg
It seems to me that someone with a PhD, and I refer to Dr. Mark Serreze, should recognize that it is necessary to be very careful and accurate when issuing a statement to the press.
To many I may be splitting hairs, but one of the things that stands out to me is his use of the phrase, “North Pole.” There are several magnetic North Poles, but only one Geographic North Pole.
Then saying, “This raises the spectre — the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.” No Marc, I don’t think I’ll, “… become ice free at the North Pole this year,” because I don’t intend to ever travel to a North Pole again.
I know that is not what he meant, but that is certainly what he said. This does not seem to me to be the type of pronouncement that should be expected out of a PhD in any scientific field.
I agree with Anthony, Serreze was ‘shooting from the hip,’ or firing for effect!
at 20km (50mb) AMSU temps showing lowest recorded temps on record Feb 2009. (compared with recorded years on graph since 1979? Can anyone elaborate?
About the Antarctic ice melting faster, the AP article that appeared in the Detroit Free Press states that the study has been conducted over the last two Antarctic summers. It is not all that uncommon for ice to melt in the summer on the western coasts. That it may be melting faster I would think would be hard to detect only studying it for two years.
Consider this sentence:” By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 to 5 feet–levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.” This is pure speculation. There is zero evidence that this ‘accelerated melting’ will continue for 91 more years. This kind of arbitrary speculation is the same thing Anthony is up against with Mr. Serreze. It’s not hard to understand though when one considers that government granting agencies are handing out millions of taxpayer dollars to study potential, possible disasters. We have to keep the money rolling in you know.
Way to sock it to ’em George!
Mr. Will has always been one of the VERY best journalists and columnists around.
His secret weapon?? Logic.
Pure unadulterated logic….and an incessant quest for the TRUTH. (Hmm….sounds a lot like the Scientific Method.)
Its a crying shame that THAT does not rule the day in our publicly-funded government-owned scientific organizations.
We should be leading the world in scientific advancement!
But we don’t because bureaucrats control science in our modern day.
New Term: “Bureaucra-scientist”.
I don’t need to name names for examples…. JAMES HANSEN.
Oops sorry. Turretts Syndrome here.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I’ll be the first to agree that losing the ice at the north pole this summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful.
No doubt you are taking that statement entirely out of context… 😉
Who wrote this?
There are at least two, maybe three misquotes.
First, Mark Serreze did not make a prediction – he made a statement about a possibility and, given the context, it was indeed true that there *was* a significant possibility – so he was correct, and there is no need for a retraction.
I have read many, many articles that reported his words verbatim, and then went on to also give an estimate of probability – from right here where it was estimated to have a low probability, to others that gave it a high probability. ALL were correct, and those that gave the points to support their estimate were even valuable.
Yes, the media does get it wrong, and they *should* be careful in what they say and how they say it. I did read at least three articles that got it wrong; one that misquoted him as saying it *would* be ice-free this past year, and two that referred to the *arctic* and not the *north pole*. Oh, and quite a few articles by writers *here*, that misattributed it as a ‘prediction’… no retractions yet, any idea when we can expect them?
Then, #2:
The quote from this article:
“Serreze made another outlandish statement of “Arctic ice is in its death spiral””
The actual quote:
“”No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season, it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral””
Not the same. To a careless reader it may look nearly the same, perhaps, and certainly dramatic (perhaps overly dramatic) but undeniably true. Whether the ‘notion’ is justified or not, the last two years ice-minimum record does reinforce it.
#3: The video of Al Gore… the quote from the article “in December Al Gore also got on the ice free bandwagon with his own zinger saying on video that the “entire north polar ice cap will be gone within 5 years“. There’s a countdown watch on that one.” is clearly inaccurate.
I could not make out what he was saying while the German newsreader was overtalking the video, but it appeared to me that he was saying “completely gone”, not “will be gone”, and there were clearly several words in between “entire north polar ice cap” and “completely gone in five years” – not only that but this was a predicate phrase, we have no idea what the objective phrase was, of that sentence… why was that cut off? It could be he said
“I will bet you one trillion dollars that the entire north polar ice cap is guaranteed to be completely gone within five years”
or it could be
“If we have a particularly active solar cycle 24, the entire north polar ice cap could possibly be completely gone within five years”
Neither one is likely, but without the full and accurate translation we don’t *really* know what he said. (I happen to believe your quote *could* carry the gist of his message – but I wouldn’t guarantee it as Gore usually parses his statements verrry carefully.)
You point out that the media often misquotes and gets things wrong, on the alarmist side (and you’re right). Why join them? Do you think misquoting in the other direction somehow increases overall accuracy?
I made a critcal post a week or so ago about the tenor of some of the writers here, while still giving you credit… and much to my satisfaction, either everyone redeemed themselves, or you did a great job moderating the day or two of discussion around Meier’s note to you about the satellite data.
To be absolutely honest, many of the articles I’ve read here, and the in-depth links, are causing me to evaluate what I am reading from the AGWers with a more critical eye – mainly because I find most of your articles both credible and well-supported, and have come to expect more of the same.
This one is not.
p.s. perhaps the rest of the article had some further good information, but with a lead-in like the first three paragraphs (and being very familiar with actual quotes cited), I took a pass on the rest. I didn’t see a byline – who wrote this?
Here’s another scientist making a ice-free artic prediction. This one says summer 2009 is the date:
“……The frightening models we didn’t even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true,” Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect – the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts.
According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
“And it’s probably going to happen even faster than that,” said Fortier, who leads an international team of researchers in the Arctic looking for clues to climate change…..”
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=c76d05dd-2864-43b2-a2e3-82e0a8ca05d5&k=53683
Smokey, you are a trip! You complain about ad hominem attacks and then you build a whole post around them. When you have posted things from garbage sites like ICECAP, I have in specific and gory detail explained what is deceptive about them. Yet, all you do here is whine and complain and throw in a few links to a few popular press articles that everyone including Connolley have already acknowledged exist. Why don’t you try responding to his actual points rather than inventing strawmen to respond to?
And, by the way, the article by Connolley is peer-reviewed, which is a lot more than we can say for almost all of what you post.
Whoops…My mistake for referring to an article in a peer-reviewed journal like BAMS when you would prefer to refer to articles on the website of a political think-tank! And, note how their article, like Will’s, cherry-picks one New York Times article from 1975 while ignoring the other written 3 months later! Quality research that is!
…Or they are looking in the peer-reviewed scientific literature or reading the National Academy of Sciences report rather than cherry-picking a few articles from the popular press.
don’t know if mr. serreze is deliberately briefing poorly trained press and poorly trained individuals like mr. gore with a hidden agenda.
however, he starts with “The set-up for this summer is disturbing”, what i find is rather disturbing, as nasa blamed winds and ocean currents as the main factors for sea-ice loss, and even the hadley center admitted recently that the receeding ice may have just been caused a natural variability.
short term natural variability is not disturbing.
for dummies however, a “disturbing” news of an ice free north pole may sound like an ice free arctic. some may even be aware that this would only happen for a very short time in september.
I am yet another voice from the 60’s and 70’s, as I remember all the hype about the looming Ice Age. We also had to read the Limits to Growth propaganda in chemical engineering school, as part of the Environmental class. (Club of Rome). It was a classic howler, as we could easily discredit the assertions.
I agree with the comment earlier — Running out of Aluminum???? On THIS earth??? We might run out of cheap aluminum (bauxite, actually), and begin recycling in earnest if and when the cost of recycling equals the cost of new bauxite mining.
Club of Rome is a huge joke…stating we will be running out of capital to invest (it keeps growing and growing), out of water (it never disappears, folks…and we can purify it easily). Running out of food, energy, land, and all the others. None of it came anywhere close to reality.
Which brings me to my point: the greenies learned a lesson back then. Now we are seeing the new approach. The scientists in the 70’s may have published global warming is coming, I don’t know about that. I was studying chemistry and chemical engineering, not atmospheric science. But, their scientific studies and conclusions did not get much main-stream press coverage. What did get covered, obviously, were “The Ice Age Is Coming” stories.
What is so interesting is, the greenies now pooh-pooh the 70’s Cooling stories as being found only in the MSM. Yet, they go out of their way today to put the Global Warming (oops, Climate Change) stories in that same MSM.
This time around, the greenies are making certain that their scientists get frequent and front-page coverage of the scariest Warming projections even where the data is doubtful, highly questionable, and downright wrong.
What the Club of Rome never took into account is the tendency of men (in the most general sense, no offense ladies) to step up and modify their environment to suit the times. No food shortages occurred because better yielding crops and growing methods were developed. No metals shortages arose because we developed cheaper methods to find and refine the stuff. No energy shortage arose (except for political issues) because, again, we developed technology to find and extract oil, and some nuclear plants were built. No water shortages developed across the globe because we developed better ways to husband our water supplies, such as conservation and recycling and desalination where we could justify the cost. Indeed, in many places there is too much water (floods) at inopportune times.
As I frequently write, Geeks and Engineers. Saviors of Society.
And, to the two or three AGW proponents on WUWT, please, how do you respond to Dr. Pierre Latour’s statements that the earth’s average temperature can never be regulated by manipulating the level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. His website is greenspirit.com
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/articles/biotech-art/moore.html
from
New Scientist
December 25, 1999
By Michael Bond
Why after 15 years of activism did you start to become disenchanted with the environmental movement?
Partly it was the fact that foot soldiers often become diplomats. I don’t think anybody should be required to be in confrontational environmental politics for their whole lives, especially when they start a family. But it was partly the movement’s refusal to evolve. I’m in favour of civil disobedience in order to bring about justice where something really bad is going on such as nuclear testing or toxic dumping. But I’m a Gandhian through and through-I believe that peaceful civil disobedience and passive resistance movements are great shapers of social change. But when industry and government agree that the environment needs to be taken into account in policy making, and when there are ministries and vice-presidents of the environment, it seems to me it would be a good idea to work with them. When a majority of people decide to agree with you, it is time to stop hitting them over the head.
How has the environmental movement got it so wrong?
The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment. To stay in an adversarial role, those people had to adopt ever more extreme positions because all the reasonable ones were being accepted.
But hasn’t environmentalism always been about opposing the establishment?
Environmentalism was always anti-establishment, but in the early days of Greenpeace we did not characterise ourselves as left wing. That happened after the fall of the Berlin wall when a whole bunch of left wing activists, who no longer had any role in the peace, women’s or labour movements, joined us. I would go to the Greenpeace Toronto office and there would be an awful lot of young people wearing army fatigues and red berets in there.
*****************************************************************
My comments:
I’ve been studying the science of climate change since the mid-1980’s. It continues to be a fascinating endeavour.
The politics of global warming are much less attractive, and the lack of balanced, rational debate on this important subject is, at best, tiresome.
Frankly, after avoiding AGW politics for years, I have more recently come to the conclusion that the warmist side of this debate is never going to honesty discuss this subject.
The easy lies, like the Mann hockey stick, just keep on coming. As soon as one such falsehood is discredited, another three take its place – the latest is West Antarctic warming…
I have abandoned the notion that this is an honest debate among sincere people – the warmist side has demonstrated itself to be entirely disreputable.
The cost to humanity of warmists’ falsehoods has been great, and will be even greater, until the weight of their lies ultimately proves their undoing.
That will be a good day, but one problem will remain. After the warmists have discredited environmentalism, who will speak for the environment, and will anyone listen?
http://nsidc.com/arcticseaicenews/
I see they conveniently left in the flat line stretch that started in mid January where they already admitted the errors began.
That graph now has zero credibility.
It’s entirely reasonable to suspect the global fix is in progress.
When one ponders the massive agenda and revenue that relies upon sea ice degradation validating AGW it’s easy to imagine any means necessary to retain and bolster the hoax.
History is full of examples of eggregious steps taken for lesser causes.
I suspect conversations have taken place between AGW stakeholders which have covered the prospect of their being shown to be horribly wrong about ALL of the enormous AGW crusade.
Probably some screaming, threatening and finger pointing was laced through the panic to plot some new tactics.
Of course I could be wrong and the acrtic ice cap could be gone by 2014.
Wow, when George Will opens fire, he doesn’t miss.
A few notable alarmists must be smarting.
That’s like getting tasered. George Will, well I’ll be.
Agreed.
Re: cabrerski (16:46:23)
I too had been in the habit of attributing all sorts of bad happenings to global warming when one day my mother got sick of it and asked me if I couldn’t come up with something else to blame whatever it was on.
So I blamed it on Women’s Lib.
That didn’t go over well.
But, on a positive note, she’s come to accept that global warming is to blame for everything. 😉
Joel Shore:
I didn’t post anything from ICECAP. Ever. Which should cause folks to question your other assertions.
If you are actually trying to argue that there was no consensus in the 1970’s that global cooling was the threat du jour, then you are being willfully blind. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Not so William Connolly, who is in the same camp, and every bit as corrupt and devious, as Maurice Strong.
And regarding the stacked-deck peer-review process in the climate sciences, as we know the system has been gamed, and only those touting the AGW/CO2 meme have an easy time being published [specific citations on request].
Finally, Joel Shore, as I have asked you before: please have those whom you have converted from questioning the repeatedly falsified AGW/CO2 hypothesis, to being new believers in that hypothesis, to step forward here and identify themselves as global warming converts. Failing that, why do you constantly post 24/7/365 to readers of the Best Science site your interminable arguments that convince nobody?
Anthony,
Here is the current Arctic sea ice as developed from the AMSR-E sensor.
I notice it’s not on your resource page. Might as well evolve from cryosphere now, since they will be following shortly.
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_visual.png
By the way, as one example of the peer-reviewed articles from the 1970s favoring warming (and, in fact, presumably one of the articles that led to the N.Y. Times piece from Aug 1975 entitled ““Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due,” here is the abstract of Wallace Broecker’s Aug 1975 article in Science entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;189/4201/460 :
An impressively-accurate prediction, especially given that it was made at a time when global temperatures had been generally falling a bit for several decades (although not in the Southern Hemisphere)! [I think the only thing that modern climatologists would fault him on in hindsight is a bit too much of an either-or attitude in regards to the effect of man-made pollutants and his resulting tendency to attribute the observed cooling only to natural factors rather than at least partly to man-made aerosols that would nonetheless soon be overwhelmed by the warming effects of the GHGs.]
Smokey says:
Do you really want me to go and dig out your previous posts to prove you wrong or are you just quibbling with my use of the word “post” when the more technically-accurate word would have been “link to”?
Joel Shore,
You’re using the AGW bromides.
Much of icecap.us references many other reports and stories so your blanket rejection is as ludicorus as is AGW.
Andrew C. Revkin reported in September, 2008 that “Experts Confirm Open Water Circling Arctic”. This report was not confirmed by National Ice Center, Navy and Commerce Department, who said satellites were misreading conditions, and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through.
Though the report was dubious Revkin used the word ‘confirmed’ in his headline anyway.
Revkin reported it as though it was fact.
He also said “….the North Pole’s being an “island” for the first time in 125,000 years”. His 125,000 years figure is not cited. He links to a Wall Street Journal article that also gives the 125,000 years figure without citation.
Andrew C. Revkin did not use sound data in his blog entry in September, 2008 and he does not use sound data in this case : “Revkin’s supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.”
It continues to look to me that global warming is a political issue and not a science issue. Science is used by the alarmist side. Science is not respected by them. Truth does not matter. Truth is collateral damage in their pursuit.
Reference, Andrew C. Revkin from September 2008 :
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/confirmation-of-open-water-circling-north-pole/#comment-33383
Joel Shore,
Yes, please. Show me where I linked to ICECAP. I don’t read that site, and I can not understand why you would make that assertion. Certainly my posts on this thread do not come from ICECAP. So why did you claim that they did?
Of course, you may be simply attempting to change the subject. So I ask you again: who have you converted from their former questioning [skepticism] of the AGW/CO2 hypothesis, to being believers in that incredible new hypothesis? Either provide specific names, or explain your interminable posts, which convince no one that CO2 is gonna getcha.
Climate is driven (gasp) not by man, but man is driven by climate. There is nothing alarmist warming or alarmist cooling can do to change climate.
The Earth is not at the center of the Solar System, the Solar System is not at the center of the galaxy, and the Milky Way is not at the center of the Virgo Supercluster. Man does not control climate, and if the day comes that he tries to, he will most certainly foul it up to great demise, seeing how poorly is the understanding.
The only thing that can be done is to anticipate what’s coming down the pipe and make appropriate preparations to “Weather It” out.
6,000 years later, and the best man can do is a prophecy here or there that is heeded sucessfully. That’s it, folks. There’s the goal. Understand this stuff well enough to predict what is coming.
As for saving satellites, well, they have thier value, but you can’t eat them.
Well, if we restrict ourselves just to a few selected threads that I looked in over the last month alone, I find a link in your post at 4:14:36 on 28/01/2009 in this thread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/27/james-hansens-former-nasa-supervisor-declares-himself-a-skeptic-says-hansen-embarrassed-nasa-was-never-muzzled/ , in your post at 11:09:18 on 8/02/2009 in this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/05/fear-and-loathing-for-california/ , and in your post at 12:27:33 on 22/02/2009 (click12) in this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/21/co2-does-not-drive-glacial-cycles/ . That is three examples in just a few minutes of searching!
Funny…I was thinking the same thing about you. I am quite sure that you really, really don’t want anybody here to actually read William Connolley’s paper that I linked to http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf (which is why you immediately launched an ad hominem attack on him) And, I suppose that if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want them reading it either!
As to the first question, I don’t know…although there have been at least two people who I remember here saying that, while they themselves are skeptics, they do really appreciate my posts and having the alternate point of view presented. As to the second question, well, I think I have said before that it is a probably a combination of obsessiveness (a la this cartoon: http://xkcd.com/386/ ) and a vain hope that maybe I am making headway!
when discussing the Arctic/antarctic I find it is always about the ice. Area, extent, depth and of course the lack of it, (open water).
When people bring up the subject of sea ice I turn them away from the ice and focus on the the thermal energy. We are afterall talking about global warming, caused by thermal energy.
Most believe that the poles are the planet’s refrigeration units.
These refrigeration units are not just comprised of the ice, they include the sea water beneath the ice.
The effect of polar twilight and darkness on the thermal content of the polar waters is a very real factor.
While ice is more thermally conductive than water, open water is in direct contact with air while one meter of ice is not. The cooling of the sea water goes un-noticed because it sinks below the waves. Water below 0 degrees C sinks pretty fast and pretty far. Just because ice is not forming or isn’t there doesn’t mean that global thermal energy isn’t being lost.
At any given temperature, the thicker the ice, the less thermal loss from the sea water beneath. Open water is where the action is.
To “Joel Shore”
Re: Your Comments on the Meadows Family
Not to speak ill of the dead (Mrs) and the Mentally Infirm(Mr. Doktor Professor), but I actually ATTENDED lectures by these idiots. I presume you did not.
Further, I was subjected at the time to ADDITIONAL lectures by their fellow travelers on the Dartmouth faculty. I presume you weren’t victim of those either.
EVERY ONE of those lectures and “discussions” used the WORST CASE SCENARIO as the “most likely outcome”.
The “running out of chrome” scenario was presented by a tenured full professor in Engineering Sciences. I remember pretty clearly which scenario was presented, as I got into a knock-down, drag-out shouting match with the professor. Don’t remember seeing you there.
In retrospect, the prof’s diatribe sounded like it could have been written by Al Gore, if he hadn’t been serving as the model for Love Story down in Cambridge at the time.
I was there. I heard these idiots IN PERSON. To go back now and cherry-pick their caveats (without reference to what they were actually saying, likely to insure their grant status) is remarkably similar to what our Sunspot Friends at NASA are doing now with their monthly revisions of SC24. What we REALLY meant was….
Let me ask a question that I have posed to the ARRL’s Propagation Guy, a confirmed AGW guy (surprising until you discover he lives in Seattle):
Global temperatures have fallen for eight years. Arctic ice has NOT melted, but may be headed for a 21st century mid-winter record. And the sun is completely blank. Please tell me one thing, one thing only: how many spotless days within the next 365 (which SHOULD see HUGE sunspot numbers, as SC24 should be FLYING according to NASA predictions) would be required before you would concede that (a) there IS no AGW and (b) that we have entered a Solar Minimum Period.
Just mention a number, any number. 100 more spotless days? 200? 300? 365?
(that would be hard to fathom, but at least it would be a number)
I suspect you CAN’T answer that question (just as the the ARRL guy can’t) because you don’t believe that Climate Change has anything to do with natural, Non-Anthropogenic causes.
Just tell us: WHAT would change your mind? What condition, or trend, or data would do it? If, as I suspect, you can’t imagine ANYTHING that would change your mind about AGW, if you can’t lay-out EXACT conditions which would disprove this pet hypothesis of yours (as that’s all it is), then you aren’t practicing science or engineering or even logic, you are practicing faith.
As I tell folks who don’t believe in the Theory of Evolution, I respect your right to your faith. Just keep it the hell away from my government and especially from my ever-burgeoning taxes.
It seems to me that many of the self-proclaimed “scientists” of today are completely ignorant of the most important aspect of science: impartiality. Science is conducted entirely through reason and analysis; the moment when political incentives become involved is the moment when science dies. I think it’s absolutely disgusting that we can see legitimate journalists claim to be educated when all they do is echo whatever Gore pulls out of his arse. Modern science is being smothered by a political front that wears scientist masks.
Can it be pure coincidence that those of us who remember the 1970s remember the threat of an imminent ice age? It seems to be the case that commenters from the USA, Canada and the UK all remember that being the prevailing opinion at the time. It was certainly the case here in the UK, to my certain recollection. That it might not have been supported by a majority of authors of articles published in scientific journals did not prevent it being the case that was put to the public and it was not publicly refuted by the authors of those articles. Of course they might not have had access to the media because they were not seen by the news organisations as “the consensus”.
For all I know there is a simple explanation for the ice-age alarmists gaining the upper hand in the media in preference to those telling nothing but the wholesome truth, but I have never heard one.
Perhaps the explanation is that bad news sells whereas good news doesn’t (unless it’s good news like the impending publication of my first work of supposedly humorous fiction, but I would not be so vulgar as to mention that). Tell people that everything will be pretty much as has been experienced during their lifetime and that of their parents and grandparents, and you simply don’t have a story. Tell them the sky is about to fall in and you can run with it for years.
And therein lies both the similarity and the difference between Chicken Licken in the 1970s and Chicken Licken now.
The new ice-age was going to be harsh and kill people but there was nothing we could do about it. The 220 years of global warming we had already caused had not yet been noticed. If only they had thermometers and intelligent people in those days they could have told us to drive more and throw more logs on the fire and all would be well. But as it was the story was just “it’s going to be cold, get used to it”.
Today’s Chicken Licken scenario has the added frisson of a cure. The new warm age is going to be harsh and kill people but there is a solution. Now we know that we have been warming the planet unnaturally since 1750, nearly 260 years, but we can reverse our wicked ways. Now, isn’t that much more of a story for the media to run? It has so many potential avenues to go down, each of which can develop its own momentum and become the story of the month, securing fame and a potential newspaper industry award for the adventurous journalists promoting it.
The whole thing now has so much momentum that they simply cannot afford to acknowledge weaknesses in the underlying quasi-science. Yes, dissenting voices are allowed a column here and there. That’s just fair play, you have to allow those who challenge your cozy sinecure an opportunity to comment so that you can knock them down by impressing that you are part of “the consensus”. And so the story that sells keeps on selling.
Three YouTube videos on “The Coming Ice Age” scare of the 70’s :
Global Cooling: The Coming Ice Age
What Happened to Global Cooling?
Global Climate Models
I suggest book “Fallen Angels” by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn as a very good illustration of common thinking in 70. Both regarding global cooling and regarding man causing it. It is a science fiction and obviously an exaggeration, but it does reflect current (then) thinking. If they were writing it in 90s it would be written with global warming background instead…
However, what has interested me is that most of the predictions that people seem to claim they made seem to be figments of the imagination.
In my younger days I had the pleasure and honor of assisting in a small way on the book that stop-checked Limits to Growth dead in its tracks. (I actually drew some of the S-curves.)
by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.
An impressively-accurate prediction
I’d say that was an impressively wrong prediction. Although, it’s interesting you think it is accurate.
There is a chronic problem on the warming side of the debate which is to blur predictions and current facts. So that for many, the prediction is the current reality.
Joel, you often get a hard time here, and I can admire a man who slugs it out in hostile terrain.
But so far as I can tell, regardless who who is “ahead” in the debate at the moment, the Big Mo is on the side of the skeptics. We hear about scientists jumping off the catastrophic-AGW bandwagon a lot lately. But who is jumping on?
Investment Advice to Joel Shore:
Just looking through my investments, trying to draw the wagons into a circle before the the Obama Nation attacks.
I noticed the prices for big coal (e.g. ACI Arch Coal and BTU Peabody Coal) are starting to look very attractive, on the back of all this AGW talk and a Hawaiian President (“is it chilly in here?”)
If you were a smart boy, you’d hedge your rhetoric with a few hundred shares of each. Just a thought.
In fact, if I ascribed ANY intelligence to the Goreacle at all (that is, as much as his dad and grandad had), I would suspect him of (a) talking his AGW trash (b) shorting coal for a couple of years, then (c) when the tide turns (as surely it must) going LONG coal right at the exact bottom. Al will know where the bottom is, because he controls it; it’s the day before he recants his Inconvenient Truth.
Does anyone have a list of accepted AGW theory predictions and time lines?
I find it amusing how people are now saying that there wasn’t global cooling alarmism in the seventies.
Below is a link to a youtube clip entitled: “The Greenhouse Conspiracy” screened in 1990.
Watch from 7:55 minutes, an interview with Dr Stephen Schneider who admits global cooling was the consensus at the time. He himself was convinced of the next ice age(until temps started rising, then he changed his story)
Joel Shore, the links you’ve pointed out so far have all been to graphics which are hosted there, but he may very well have gotten them from other articles they were hotlinked from, without ever visiting the site or knowing anything about it. That, and one was clearly not even an original product of that particular site. Even more importantly, what are the flaws in the actual charts? I do not claim to know enough to accurately evaluate such things myself, but it seems dangerous to dismiss something just because you don’t care for the source. I’d rather hear it explained why the data is flawed, or be shown contradictory information from a more highly esteemed source.
attn Billy Ruff’n
What a splendid idea.
The Fighting Billy Ruffian which fought at Trafalgar and was so called because her men could not pronounce her name:Bellerophon. She has a modern biography by the way and it is well worth reading.
Still your Billy Ruff’n sounds ideal for the job only provided her steel hull is up to handling Arctic temperatures. Which I am sure it is.
After all if Amundsen could do it a hundred years ago why can we not sail the Northwest Passage today? Especially in such a well found and suitable vessel?
Sorry no.
We might have had a chance in 2007 but now the Arctic ice is closing up again: and with terrifying speed.
I doubt the Northwest Passage will be open again in my lifetime.
But what an adventure it might have been.
Kindest Regards.
“Joel Shore (17:37:06) : Serreze made a prediction of something that he thought MIGHT happen.”
Mark Serreze cried wolf. You can’t be respected as a scientist when you make predictions that are so far off beam. It’s not like he was just a little wrong.
Also, it’s a tough sell to try to convince people that these sort of predictions don’t matter one way or the other.
I could just about kiss George Will for bringing up that BUGABOO of my entire upbringing in the 70s – the **coming ice age**! The ice age was imminent – we would all freeze! And somehow, it had something to do with the garbage. We were all going to be buried in endless mountains of garbage within 20 years, and if that didn’t kill us, the ice age would. Of course once someone worked out the numbers and made fools of the garbage-mountain hysterics (a thousand years of garbage in a 35 mile trench) the garbage part died out, but we were still all going to freeze. If the aliens or the Bermuda Triangle didn’t get us first. And so long as we didn’t get eaten by sharks. Then suddenly the aliens were friendly, so that died out too. Then it was Reagan with his hand on the button – we’d all be fried in a nuclear holocaust and then freeze to death in nuclear winter. Then it was the homeless – we’d all die on the streets. Suddenly they came at us with this global warming hooey, and I said “These people are insane. And evil.” Always with the next holocaust. At least fundamental religions give a slight explanation for their coming ends of the world. These people just make it up as they go.
Hooey!
“I find it amusing how people are now saying that there wasn’t global cooling alarmism in the seventies.”
Haha! It was bigger than global warming is NOW, and a lot more hysterical. Because we were not living in an information age with an information superhighway and skeptics everywhere – it was the age of “In Search Of” and Jim Jones and cults and aliens and killer sharks.
Please. The hysteria was at a fever pitch for most of my childhood about any one of those things, and the ice age was assuredly the biggest, because it was the most “scientific.” (Except, it could possibly be so.)
But seriously, can you point me to prominent people who are actually DENYING the ice age alarmism of the 70s? Because they are either young, ignorant and stupid, or they are LIARS.
Smokey,
Joel is just doing what all the [snip] do; if the information on hand doesn’t agree with the result you want, make some up!
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
Reply: I wish you people would be more polite ~ charles the moderator
After reading interminable “is too,” “is not” arguments, one longs for an issue–any issue–that can be definitively settled. So, although I really could care less whether Smokey has ever cited ICECAP, your links appeared to present a chance for resolving an argument. But when I look at your three examples, I don’t find any such citation on his part. Ay, me canso de tonterias….
Sorry, that last post was directed at Joel. : )
@ Ice Age (21:58:51) :
Orwellian methods, “He who controls the present will control the past”, “He who controls the past controls the future”.
It is simply not true, not only where there lots of articles written, they where also written in other langauges, i do recall enough articles written in Dutch about the comming ice-age and some of the solutions that people came up with to combat this cooling. Even as late as 1983, when i got my hands on a Atomic-War survival book (printdate 1983), the survival part was pretty serious, but the oncomming Ice age chapter was rather silly, especially since the included Astrology to add weight to the theory, pure junkscience in my opinion.
One of those things to combat cooling was a huge dam between Siberia and Alaska that would allow sea-ice to pass into the pacific ocean, but not back into the artic. I also recall on of the drawbacks of this plan, disruption of the current sea surface temperatures by allowing a lot more melting sea-ice into the pacific, they where not sure about the effects but changing weather patterns could cause problems.
Geo-engineering is still a silly, costly (in both resources and money) and a rather dangerous idea, either to combat cooling or warming.
Joel Shore (21:06:45) :
A few points, in the interests of clarity:
If you’re going to quote, please “quote”:-
You posted, “Yes, please. Show me where I posted from ICECAP.”
Smokey posted, “”Yes, please. Show me where I linked to ICECAP.”
These are different. Attention to detail is everything.
William M. Connolley is not the be-all and end-all of climatic knowledge (indeed, Dr. Connolley is a mathematician – currently a software engineer, as if you didn’t know – with some experience of producing computer models of some aspects of climate… and that’s really about it), nor is a paper authored by him – singularly or otherwise – to be taken as gospel. His take on the global cooling scare of the 1970s is nothing more than opinion. Please leave it as such.
“Peer-reviewed” means little more than “friend-reviewed”, not a stringent critique of content and method, nor is it commentary on the reproducibility of any so-called experimental proof. Please refrain from bandying the term about as if it actually counts for anything other than scientific proof-reading.
Thank you.
Joel Shore,
Explain how links to articles from wattsupwiththat equate to IceCap when you are writing on wattsup with that?
Articles are cross linked on a variety of sites, but your whole line of reasoning is a little bizarre. What is your opinion of an international panel of specialistss in January of 1978 that reported on global cooling. “An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.”
It was in large measure in response that the WMO, U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), and International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) sponsored the First World Climate Conference (FWCC) in Geneva in February 1979, focusing on the scientific basis of climatic change. The FWCC addressed issues of northern hemisphere cooling; severe winters that were occurring in the mid-latitudes of the United States and Central Europe; widespread drought and desertification in Sub-Sahara Africa, and public concern about famine and death resulting from the observed effects of climate change on some world agricultural systems. From the FWCC evolved the WMO’s World Climate Program jointly sponsored by WMO/UNEP/ICSU, and the World Climate Data Program, the World Climate Applications Program, the World Climate Impact Studies Program, and the World Climate Research Program.
Some people report history, others try to rewrite it.
People too often only find and report what they are looking for, especially in the climate debate.
Scientists are blamed for statements that could be taken out of context by the media, while George Will is praised for taking quotes out of context and does not acknowledge that he could be wrong, even when the authors and sources of his information say that he is quoting them falsely. George Will and his fact checkers seem to have not even read the abstracts of the scientific articles that he quotes.
While I agree that scientists need to be careful about what they say to the media, they can not be blamed if carefully nuanced statements in scientific publications are quoted without the qualifiers.
BillD
If you think this:
is carefully nuanced compared to this:
Then you may have a point about Serreze’s death spiral quote. Otherwise…
For reference:
Man Made global warming hits North Dakota!!!
Talk about checking the facts…
Eat your heat out ladies and gents.
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/1070/gwfeb09nd.png
George Will has indeed a way with words.
Somewhere in my memory is an old pop song. The main theme words were:
“When will they ever learn?” sung in lament style. Must try and find it again.
There seems to have been a lot of compaction of the Arctic ice this month. That means thicker ice, ain’t going to melt so fast. I think if this summer’s melt does not exceed the 2008 melt then the public will become suspicious. 🙂
I’m glad to see others who have a memory of the 70s (I was born 17 days before JFK was shot) discussing the pervasive nature of the “scientific certainty” of Global Cooling. Only looking back with an altered perspective can anyone deny that Global Cooling was just… how it was. We got hammered with winter after winter of horrible storms, record snowfalls, heavy winds, and cool summers with shortened growing seasons, and it was SO easy to believe.
I can cherry pick just as many “peer reviewed” papers against AGW right now as you can probably find from the 70s that were against The Next Ice Age… but what’s the point? The fact is, the media had the drumbeat, the average Joe on the street was certain of it, and people were all discussing ways to “mitigate” the inevitable icing to come… including outlandish and dangerous ideas like spreading soot on the ice caps to alter albedo.
Here’s probably a good rule to live by in your life: Bandwagons are most often wrong. Bandwagons usually just end up being the attention-getting circus for someone’s agenda… and you probably won’t like the agenda when you find out what it really is. If EVERYONE is saying something, you still need to question it, because chances are it’s wrong. If you go a week in your life without finding out that something you thought you knew just isn’t so, then you’re NOT asking enough questions… or you’re 18 and still think you know everything.
Perhaps another witness from the 1970s is needed, but I too was subjected to required reading of “Club of Rome.” But even more unforgetable was the Walter Cronkite documentary on the coming ice age. He interviewed numerous scientists in describing how awful it would be. No contrary views came out in that documentary described as scholarly and well-researched. (I do wonder if some young readers might not know who Walter Cronkite is.)
Joel Shore (21:06:45) :
Smokey:” Finally, Joel Shore, as I have asked you before: please have those whom you have converted from questioning the repeatedly falsified AGW/CO2 hypothesis, to being new believers in that hypothesis, to step forward here and identify themselves as global warming converts. Failing that, why do you constantly post 24/7/365 to readers of the Best Science site your interminable arguments that convince nobody?”
As to the first question, I don’t know…although there have been at least two people who I remember here saying that, while they themselves are skeptics, they do really appreciate my posts and having the alternate point of view presented. As to the second question, well, I think I have said before that it is a probably a combination of obsessiveness (a la this cartoon: http://xkcd.com/386/ ) and a vain hope that maybe I am making headway!
I appreciate the humor of your last link.
As to converting people, I do not think that blogs convert people, at least not scientists. They may point to useful references of papers.
I have said it before, I was accepting the AGW hype like most scientists who do not meddle with the science of others and expect the same scientific integrity they find in their field. I slowly woke up that something was fishy, starting with the hockey stick plot. I mean medieval warming is within our history, even those delightful medieval detective stories of Peter Ellis, with brother Cadfael and his vineyards. The story of the mummified Alps hunter was fresh in the news when my eye fell on the hockey stick, and those errors looked huge to my trained eye ( experimental particle physicist for over 35 years). What raised my hackles was the IPCC report, as of course I went to the horse’s mouth. I needed no other witnesses. The “science” was so sloppy, the use of model tracks as if they are data defining errors, the lack of true error estimates, the lack of fit in most “fits” where the presenters relied on the spaghetti spread to fool the eye, ….etc. etc.
And then I started blogging and reading links, which confirmed my AR4 physics workgroup reading impression.
Why, even entering a 1sigma albedo error makes hash of any model prediction, moving it of the order of 1C.
Yes, I find ICECAP and Climate Audit and Lucia’s Blackboard very useful sites to get links and study the content.
As for the cooling scare in the seventies, I also remember it, though there was not so much information floating around or “consensus” attempt. Maybe the grant mania had not caught to need to make a consensus. I know that grants in Europe were not centrally controlled, as they are now with the EU.
Joel and Smokey
I researched an article once about Wiliam Connelly . It is not an ad hom attack as I quite admire the guy, but there is no doubt that as the gatekeper of Wikipedia’s climate section he is allowed to show more bias than someone in that position should.
The article follows;
“Quite rightly, strict editorial rules exist to ensure every Tom Dick and Harry don’t try to use Wikipedia to promote their personal half baked theories to a world audience. On the more specific question as to whether the gatekeeper of the Climate science section is more hostile to Sceptic submissions than Warmist ones, the following information may help readers to make their own judgements.
To achieve this aim it may be instructive to follow the role of the administrator of the climate section, Mr William Connelly
Firstly, it is worth restating the criteria for wikipedia in considering submissions made to them;
“Verifiability
Main article: Wikipedia:Verifiability
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. This policy and the verifiability policy reinforce each other by requiring that only assertions, theories, opinions, and arguments that have already been published in a reliable source may be used in Wikipedia.”
To examine the claims of bias often made against William Connelly on the matter of him favouring material submitted to him by warmists, as against that from sceptics, it is worth following a specific case-that of Lawrence Solomons- who wrote the well known sceptics book ‘The Deniers’
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/04/12/wikipedia-s-zealots-solomon.aspx
The above is a very good link re alleged wiki bias, with a subsequent blog of claim and counter claim, including a robust defence mounted by the editor of wiki who was criticised. It is instructive reading and worth staying with to the end.
This is by way of a review of the book by Solomons in The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/may/06/the-climate-change-deniers/
This is another review and provides some further background to the wikipedia bias claim by Solomons, so throws further light on the first link.
http://richardvigilantebooks.com/
The link below is again biased, but throws interesting light on William Connelly (The Administrator) and his alleged bias against sceptics views.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=17981
This is the blog of William Connelly that is accessed from within Real Climate, in which he actively supports them by, amongst other actions, attending a conference in Vancouver.
“ I was there with my Real Climate hat on, to offer ideas and insight on blogging in particular, and public communication of science in general.”
http://www.realclimate.org/
Some people wishing to submit sceptical material question whether wiki should allow people with close links to a web site enthusiastically endorsing the views of Dr Mann (whose Hockey stick reconstructions were thought to have been widely discredited) and has known passions-he stood as a candidate for the UK Green Party-is objective enough to be allowed to oversee the editing of the climate pages of the worlds leading reference source as an administrator (definition and duties here )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
The wiki core element of verifiability rather than truth allows some potential leeway in accepting articles that support a personal view. Consequently wiki’s objectivity- by any reasonable measure- should be called into some question (on certain controversial topics such as climate change) Checking back to original sources should be a follow up to any wiki climate related research, but many people rely on it as their primary and only source, thereby receiving a certain view of the topic.
This is William Connellys blog leading to various other topics he is interested in.
http://www.blogger.com/profile/05836299130680534926
The guy is no ogre, has an obvious sense of humour, and has a particular world view as a UK Green party candidate. The policies of the party in general are here-they have sometimes been described as the green successors to the communist party and anti capitalist. In Britain they have a Euro M.E.P in Caroline Lucas.http://www.amazon.co.uk/Babylon-Beyond-Economics-Anti-capitalist-Anti-globalist/dp/0745323901
This about other Green party links to anti capitalist, socialist, communist and marxist movements
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/theory/ecology.htm
The Green party’s specific policies and philosophies can be read here. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfsspb.html
This page states the green party’s current understanding of climate change and their own mitigation policies
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfsscc.html
William Connelly’s politics and beliefs are his own business in his personal life. Where they might impact on the public in a wider sense, some might say that his own deeply held beliefs and links may make him insufficiently objective to administer the climate science pages of the worlds most referenced information source.
Footnote-There is something of a Catch 22 situation. As the IPCC report -warts and all- is considered the pinnacle of verifiable climate science it is referenced accordingly by Wikipedia, so even debatable information is presented as factual. Consequently sceptical information -which by definition is therefore incorrect- will achieve limited profile. The end result is that those from the wider world seeking information on the subject will always end up with IPCC supplied ‘factual’ data and will take a view on climate change accordingly.”
End of Article
Incidentally I also did similar research on the people who nominated Al Gore for the Nobel prize and there was a similar degree of green activism behind some of them.
TonyB
I too, vividly recall my 8th grade self being very scared by what I read in the national school publication “Weekly Reader” (sent to schools across the U.S.) in 1975. I remember being kept awake at night by my worry and fear of what the world would be like before I even reached 30. The scenarios painted were detailed. The outcomes were certain. Being still naive to the ways that the media (and some scientists) can lie and twist things, I took it all at face value. It had a very negative emotional effect on me.
Little did I realize at the time that this being inflicted on me would actually contribute over time to forming one of the most valuable lessons I would learn during that period. More than any other event in my early life this taught me the importance of approaching things with a deeply skeptical viewpoint. The more extraordinary the claim, the higher the standard of proof required. The more immediate the claimed need for radical, extreme action, the more careful, thorough and dispassionate the meticulous analysis must be. In fact, the “Coolists” of the seventies essentially inoculated me to the “Warmists” of the nineties. They helped make me a better and more committed “inactivist”!
Seeing the cooling juggernaut and the Malthusian lunacy of “The Population Bomb” both completely disproved by subsequent events taught me to adopt a default mode of disbelief toward doomsday scenarios in general. Based on my first-hand experience during these painful episodes I consider every dramatically dire doomsday scenario to be false until empirically and repeatedly proven true beyond any shadow of doubt.
Joel Shore:
I had reason to follow quaternary geology pretty closely during the seventies, and it is definitely true that global cooling and the threat of a new ice age was the dominating paradigm. It was not unanimous but it was certainly the “consensus”, and it was supported by many of the big names in the field like Kukla, Shackleton and Woillard.
To claim anything else is a falsification of history.
Anniee451 you forgot about the Algorean wannabee of the early 70’s, Erich von Daniken
Remember his world wide lecture tours and promotion of his “We are not alone” theory? Chariots of the God’s etc etc
I think Mr Will should reflect on the old adage that when in a hole the best thing to do is to stop digging. He claims that the ACRC data supports his position, but the only part of their response that he quotes is
‘we do not know where George Will is getting his information.’
whereas the full para reads
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
So we are still left wonderng where Will got his 3% number from, and his reputation for factual accuracy remains tarnished. The Washington Post ombudsman has now commented on the furore in a piece that begins …Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they aren’t free to distort them and on the specific point has this to say The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will’s assertion that global sea ice levels “now equal those of 1979.” I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.
Readers of WUWT are well aware that (cherry) picking two points from a time series and drawing a straight line between them is a lousy way of determining a trend, a bit like reading the first and last chapter of a book and saying you know the whole story, and yet this is exactly what the Daily Tech piece does.
George Monbiot was correct.
It seems to me that the outlandish opinions of these scientists expressed in media interviews are a symptom of the bias with which they approach the actual science. That bias is then reinforced by the interpretation they put on the data they are supposed to be assessing dispassionately.
This is hysteria not science.
Reply to John Philip:
Praising George Monbiot is like praising an errant foul-mouthed child.
Geroge Monbiot always attacks the person but never the arguement.
Another brick for the wall of “climate change” – Climate Widget for unarmed in inquisitive nature. From NAS/JPL/Global Cimate Change: VITAL SIGNS WIDGET
The all essential indexes are going in the direction “they should go” (up or down).
In the same realm of the post: ‘Stimulating’ Scientists Into Proving Global Warming
Have a nice weekend, to all.
John Philip
You happen to forget:
1. The figure for Feb 15 2009 is known to be about 500,000 sq km too large for the northern hemisphere plus an unknown figure for the southern hemisphere, due to the SSM/I sensor failure.
2. The figures George Will were quoting were for JANUARY 1, not FEBRUARY
15. And since the SSMI figures are now known known to be too low since at least early december 2008, it is even possible that the global ice area on Jan 1 2009 was actually larger than on Jan 1 1979.
So George Monbiot was wrong
cabrerski (16:46:23) :
“My wife and I have started a little game…
Every time we hear something incredulous, we attribute it to global warming.”
Politicians and their fellow travellers now do this routinely! When you get it wrong, first look for someone (or -thing to blame).
Smokey: “Either provide specific names, or explain your interminable posts, which convince no one that CO2 is gonna getcha.”
Everyone has their own reasons for posting. Personally, I find Joel Shore’s posts to be well-written and informative, and I think he adds value to this site. Certainly, he forces his opponents to marshall their arguments, and that can only be good for them.
As for William Connolly, the paper he co-authored on the myth of the 1970s cooling consensus presents a persuasive and well-supported argument. I think you should give it another chance.
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf
Connolly also has some interesting and informative comments about consensus as it applies to science. I know you have some concerns about the notion of consensus, Smokey, and I am sure that Connolly’s comments will set your mind to rest. Worth a read, anyway.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86
It would appear that -50C weather at Resolute in northern Canada is delaying the Catlin Arctic Survey expedition which aims to study the ice to help scientists understand the impact of climate change.
Expedition leader Pen Haddow has said, “Given the complexities of trying to fix and retest equipment out on the ice, in minus 50C temperatures extra time sorting out in Resolute is by far the safest and most sensible option. ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/feb/27/poles-climate-change
It looks like this global warming expedition has been hit by the Gore Effect.
On the irony!
The discussion about William Connelly has left me confused.
I really had to look twice at the name.
We in Scotland were treated to: “Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World can been seen on ITV1, Thursdays at 9pm”.
Connolly is a well known Scottish …eh… Arctic explorer.
http://www.discover-the-world.co.uk/en/misc-pages/journey-to-the-edge-of-the-world.html?gclid=CMuunaSF_5gCFQ0gQgod4X5tlg
I take it that this is not the same William Connolly?
You can understand my confusion.
Cherry picking?!?!?
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009,
His report was submitted on the 1st of January 2009 and cited data Dec 79 to Dec 08. So what has the period Feb 79 to Feb 09 got to do with the original article?
Update on Resolute’s climate in Canada:
Average HIGH for February: -30C
Average LOW for February: -37C
Record LOW: -52C, Jan 1966.
So at -50C, the Catlin Arctic Survey expedition is experiencing near record low temperatures for a February. No wonder they are having problems with their equipment.
Well, all the hard work is for not!
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-elements-energy27-2009feb27,0,641645.story?track=rss
Cap and Trade is coming to an energy bill near you.
When folks finally get a look at the results of their
advocacy, punch drunk comes to mind!
“But the administration argues that action cannot
be delayed on climate change and that, over time,
the plan will help the economy recover and grow again.”
Oh really? well, that’s OK then……if it saves the
economy and the planet! And what about the third world poor?
This is truly sad!
It was a nice try Mr. Will.
John Philip, you’re comparing George Will with George Monbiot?? Please. The only possible comparison is with their given names: click click click [All links from another site I ran across recently.]
And Joel Shore, it appears that you are correct about a few of my past links to graphs coming from ICECAP, at least in a roundabout way. “Appears” is the operative word here, since as I said I don’t visit the site [or didn’t until yesterday; I may start to check it out now]. I’m sure I copied the charts from links by other WUWT posters. I like charts, and I’m a big believer in their value as visual aids; some people’s eyes tend to glaze over when faced with reams of technical explanations, and charts like these cuts to the chase: click click click
I’ve read George Will often in the past, though, and the frenzy with which the AGW crusaders have attacked him over their belief that they can read his mind, and know exactly what he meant with no other possible interpretation, is typical of their mob style and counter to the many years of rational comment that is Will’s trademark.
Amazingly, those same AGW promoters generally accept at face value and without question the pronouncements of Al Gore, James Hansen, George Monbiot, Michael Mann and the UN/IPCC politicians at face value. I’ll take Will’s well constructed and unemotional columns any time over those folks with an AGW agenda.
@cabrerski (16:46:23) :
“My wife and I have started a little game…
Every time we hear something incredulous, we attribute it to global warming. For example:
“It’s 13 below zero today. Must be global warming.”
“The New York Times subscription numbers are down again. Gotta tip the hat to global warming.”
“HE WAS WIDE OPEN…HOW DID HE DROP THAT BALL!!!!! Man, I hate this global warming!!!”
Spot on, sir! I’ve been using the phrase ‘That’s global Warming for you”, for some time now, to describe unwanted events and I’ve gained a modicum of gloat as others, around me, have trotted out the same phrase!
It’s amazing just how quickly catch-phrases – err – catch on.
No. Will is attempting to rewrite history – Feb 15th is the relevant date, unless you want to redefine the word now, here is the Arctic Climate Research Center’s response in full …
In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states ‘According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.’
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts. ,
Monbiot and others are still right, then.
Besides which, if a method gives one result in January, and a different one in February it indicates the method is not robust, no?
The public is growing suspicious of AGW, much the same as they grow tired of watching the same movie plot too many times. It was cool for 15 minutes, and it was hot for 15 minutes. Journalists too, such as George Will, grow skeptical and see easy pickins for scathing articles in which to roast thier unwitting prognosticators.
Top proponents of AGW don’t see it coming, thinking they can handle the backlash with data monkeying and forecast twisting. It won’t work. The 15 minutes of fame works both ways. They are now in the crosshairs of MSM finger puzzles. The harder they struggle, the tighter they will squeeze them.
My advice to them is to go queitly, or get used to nursing your self-inflicted wounds.
John Philip (03:44:55) :
our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.
These figures don’t account for the changes in the definition of coastal ice and sea ice which have taken place. These lower the extent measure in newer readings.
“I think if this summer’s melt does not exceed the 2008 melt then the public will become suspicious. :-)”
If only that were the case. “The Public” doesn’t even get suspicious when a half-million miles of ice disappears almost overnight. “The Public” doesn’t get suspicious when C02 continues to rise while temps level off or drop. “The Public” doesn’t get suspicious when oceans DON’T rise, polar ice caps DON’T melt, the Northwest passage DOESN’T open up…etc…etc.
No…”The Public” won’t be bothered by a slight shift in ice at all. They’re either A) too lazy, B) feel too powerless, C) don’t have time to understand the issue, D) think that taxing the bejeezus out of everything that breathes and walks upright is exactly the correct thing to do for any number of reasons.
JimB
Richard111 (23:58:06) :
Pete Seeger – written in 1956 – “Where have all the flowers gone?”.
Covered many times.
Pete was an environmentalist when that actually meant protection of the environment and not merely protection of environmentalists and their salaries.
His testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee is a study in patience. We deniers could, and possibly must, learn much from his encounter with government. He was sentenced to a year in jail for contempt of Congress but appealed his case successfully after a fight that lasted until 1962.
Current “green” policy and its advocates are the environment’s worst enemy. They are ignoring, or wilfully ignorant of real problems as they focus on their altered reality. Meanwhile the real polluters laugh all the way to the carbon bank.
I could only hope that Mr Will will now take on the discovery of that “Miracle Water” in the Antarctic. You know what I’m talking about – that’s where when the average temperature down there went up 1 degree F over 52 years (1957-2009) from -51 all the way to -50, that the ice started melting twice as fast! Maybe the Anti-Freeze conglomerate is trying to keep this new discovery hidden.
“If we’re discussing what the facts MEAN…we’re having a debate. If we’re discussing what the facts ARE, then we’re lost in a …”
I forget the rest of the quote…but you can pretty much infer the meaning…
And it’s what’s taking place with Phillips/Shore/Smokey.
Need to agree on facts, or it will never move forward.
JimB
Joel Shore,
I presume that you write these posts yourself, which would imply that you can write.
But, if, when you went to school, did they teach you to read? Try some history, it can on occasions be quiet enlightening (as in sun)
“Robert Bateman (03:48:32) :
The public is growing suspicious of AGW, much the same as they grow tired of watching the same movie plot too many times.”
I agree. And we seem to be seeing more articles to that effect. However, as I said in my 04:09:19, there are a host of reasons that this seems to not have any real impact.
Look at the polling for the bank bailout…about %85 of the country opposed that action. Approval rating for Congress? About %12? How many Ethanol plants are still being built in the midwest, even though science has show the benefits to be marginal, at best. If we get to the point where %85 of the population are against Cap and Trade, the result will be the same. Until there is a clear cut means to turn that into meaningful action, I fear it will have little to no impact on events in our government.
JimB
John Philip (03:44:55) :
No. Will is attempting to rewrite history – Feb 15th is the relevant date, unless you want to redefine the word now, here is the Arctic Climate Research Center’s response in full ….
I have the impression that Cryosphere removed the comment after an interaction with Anthony who pointed out that the article had first appeared in December. Unfortunately the search engine here is not helpful in finding stuff, so I cannot link to the post.
JimB (04:09:19)
There is also the lack of information in the media informing ‘The Public’ and giving them choices without bias.
I haven’t seen this http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/629.pdf (41kb) reported in the MSM but I did glimpse it somewhere on the web during the past few days and finally found the source.
Les Francis (02:09:51) wrote: … lecture tours and promotion of his “We are not alone” theory? Chariots of the God’s
Memory Lane stuff, Les. I really wanted to believe him…
Of course the the difference in wanting to believe him and wanting to believe AWG is that in the former no one got hurt.
Joel Shore (14:20:51) :
“Does anybody think that Will has actually been honest here in using the Shackleton quote in the context that he did given the context in which it actually appeared?”
Mr. Shore attempts to challenge Will’s honesty by selecting a single quote from a paragraph documenting the media’s trumpeting of global cooling in the 1970s. The point of the paragraph was to clearly demonstrate the “consensus” amongst experts and their media wags that *global cooling* was the climatic catastrophe du jour. Will includes 19 different quotes from various journals and publications, especially the NY Times. Shore selects the quote “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” which Will correctly credits to Dec. 10, 1976 Science magazine – to challenge.
Perhaps Mr. Shore is unaware of argumentation’s process of foundation as the basis for drawing conclusion. What Mr. Will was doing with razor-sharp accuracy was demonstrating the then media and expert “consensus” for catastrophic global cooling. That the quote Shore challenges was originally issued by Shakleton and references a 20,000 year trend is utterly irrelevant. To suggest that it is an indication of dishonesty on Mr. Will’s part is to confirm Mr. Shore’s confusion with the English language. ALL the quotes in the paragraph are taken out of context for the express purpose of demonstrating the vast media and expert acceptance 30 years ago of global cooling.
To further Mr. Shore’s confusion he goes on to ask: “Does anybody believe that this prediction is not also basically in line with current scientific thought…?” If this is his belief then his many protestations favoring global warming would indicate his own questionable “honesty.”
Marker (01:32:51) wrote in part of his 8th grade self: Seeing the cooling juggernaut and the Malthusian lunacy of “The Population Bomb” both completely disproved by subsequent events In fact, the “Coolists” of the seventies essentially inoculated me to the “Warmists” of the nineties. They helped make me a better and more committed “inactivist”! …
Seeing the cooling juggernaut and the Malthusian lunacy of “The Population Bomb” both completely disproved by subsequent events …
Those memories give me considerable hope, Marker, that the obscene terrifying of children by the AGW industry may have a redeeming feature (though not justification).
Unfortunatele, it also has the negative effect of blunting the cry of ‘Wolf!” when that cry is true and urgent. (Which is of course the message and the moral of the original.)
Joel Shore (18:24:45) :
“Furthermore, even the views presented in the press tend to be exaggerated in retrospect. For example, George Will’s column quotes quite a bit from a New York Times article that appeared on May 21, 1975 entitled “Scientists ask why world climate is changing; major cooling may be ahead” but strangely gives no quotes from another article by the same reporter on August 14, 1975 that is entitled “Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due.” Go figure!”
Nor did he include this article by the same reporter December 21, 1975, some four months later:
“Experts Fear Great Peril If SST Fumes Cool Earth”
An article detailing how carbon emissions from supersonic transports in the stratosphere will cause global cooling. Go figure!
The truth about GW is located inside the Goracle’s Bank Account.
Time to accept the challenge from John Kerry?
Facts Are Stubborn Things: George Will and Climate Change
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-kerry/facts-are-stubborn-things_b_170657.html
“Stubborn or stupid — lets have a real debate and lets have it now.
I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival.”
So it means John Kerry disagrees with Al Gore…. the debate isn’t over after all?
“REPLY: It has been fixed (by switching to a different sensor platform) and Walt Meir has promised a guest post about it on WUWT, but he’s missed three promised self imposed deadlines now, so I may just put up my own analysis. – Anthony”
OK, now how about the graph of ice area? The sensor underestimated the amount if ice by 500K km^2. The graph hasn’t changed. IF there was 500K km^2 more ice than being reported, than the revised graph should show an increase now.
Why doesn’t it?
REPLY: That’s why I’ve been waiting for Walt…but it appears he’s AWOL on the guest post. – Anthony
B. Kerr
You are not alone in your confusion – I too am watching the series on Scottish ITV where the advert “compare the meercat” / “compare the market” heightens one’s feelings of impending madness. Billy Connolly’s odyssey implies a full navigation of the North West Passage, and I can’t wait to see the final episode. Will he come out the other side? Will I come out the other side…….Aaaaah?
FatBigot (21:29:52)
Brilliant
Smokey says:
Smokey, thanks for the the admission…Or sort of admission. However, I guess it doesn’t particularly give me a warm fuzzy feeling to hear that you link to charts that other people post without asking any questions about them, such as who is the original source of these charts, what agenda might they have, and in what ways might the charts be deceptive? That hardly seems like the the motis operandi of a “skeptic” in the larger sense of the word.
John Philip,
“Besides which, if a method gives one result in January, and a different one in February it indicates the method is not robust, no?”
Kinda like saying Antarctica has been warming for the last 50 years while it has been cooling for the last thirty. (Steig, et.al.)
John Philip (02:28:51) :
Perhaps true, lest he run into the likes of Schmidt and Steig and they get shovels tangled.
But since you’re in the habit of parsing, no comment on the the fact that the NSIDC had just addressed the issue of the end of 2008 being almost precisely the same as the end of 1979 with regard to global sea ice? Hardly falls into the category of “we do not know where George Will is getting his information” now does it?
Maybe you’ve got something there. I look forward to your complaints about shorterm “trends” or cherry picked time frames in the future. There’s a tornado in the southeast today that should give you plenty of opportunity to examine the claims that are sure to result.
As another example, while we have the attention of so many outraged climate scientists who are concerned about context and sentence construction, anyone want to tackle this gem from CBS news?
http://cbs11tv.com/greenlife/global.warming.birds.2.931818.html
That particular CBS quote strikes me as being somewhere between; completely lacking in actual meaning; and being a “howler”.
You can start by defining what they might mean by “average” for us.
Maybe I missed it, but where are the outraged comments from climate scientists pointing out the extreme cherry picking and complete lack of statistical rigor for that claim?
Having worked in news and television for many years I can attest that news people tend to be very gullible when information conforms to their preconceived ideas and core beliefs. At a certain weather network in particular there is a strong global warming belief that fuels not only the network agenda but individual fear, distrust of humanity, and personal political opinions. When someone like Gore says the sky is falling these people buy it without question or verification. Whe i t proves untrue or based on a faulty sensor the knee jerk reaction is to respond well they just miscalculated how long it would take. It reminds me of the oil depletion predictions, in 1914 it was predicted to run out in 1924, 1939 predicted oil gone by 1952, 1951 they said 1964, in the 1970s they changed to 2050. Most people don’t question if it will run out only, when.
“It was bigger than global warming is NOW, and a lot more hysterical. Because we were not living in an information age with an information superhighway and skeptics everywhere”
If anyone wants to document the Cooling Craze, which was not recorded on the Internet, they can now search by keyword (filtered by date and location and publication if desired) through over a thousand (I estimate) old newspapers at a pay site, http://www.newspaperarchive.com
It’s a good tool for researching many topics.
Parse Error says:
Well, let’s take this one for example: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2MSU.jpg It may look dramatic how the CO2 is rapidly rising on that graph while the temperature is not. However, the author of that chart has chosen the relative scales used for the CO2 and the temperature. The questions is: Has he chosen them in a realistic way? This is not hard to answer because in fact there is a well-defined way to relate the two scales, through what is called the “transient climate response” which tells us the rate at which temperatures are expected to rise given a certain rise in CO2. It turns out that the IPCC estimate for this parameter is that it is somewhere around 2 C (somewhat lower than the best estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3 C).
However, with the scales on this graph, how high would the transient climate sensitivity have to be in order to expect to see the temperature follow a curve of the same slope as the CO2 curve, the answer is 9C! So, in other words, the rise in CO2 is shown with about 4-5X the slope as we expect the temperature rise to show if the IPCC is correct. If we scaled the CO2 curve down by such a factor, it would be quite apparent that within the noisiness of the temperature trend, there is no real disagreement between the two curves. (Another deceit in this plot is the cherry-pick in this curve is the choice of starting in 1997, which is not as bad as starting right at the El Nino peak in 1998 but still doesn’t provide as good context as starting anywhere earlier when it would become apparent how much of an outlier the peak in 1998 was relative to the temperatures of the years before it.)
English Phil (15:15:14)
Re your query, I think this may help:- http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Alarmism_by_the_Numbers.pdf
Richard111 (23:58:06) :
George Will has indeed a way with words.
Somewhere in my memory is an old pop song. The main theme words were:
“When will they ever learn?” sung in lament style. Must try and find it again.
The song is “where have all the flowers gone?”
wikipedia link here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_have_all_the_flowers_gone
Written by Pete Seeger and sung by The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and even Marlene Dietrich in German. I’ve always enjoyed Dietrich… listen to her German version of “Lily Marlene”…. I once made the the “mistake” of asking a lounge pianist if he could play that… and was treated to a half hour of “lily Marlene” in at least ten different styles, ranging from a German Oompa Band approach to Blues to a tender French Ballad.
I see comments about William Connolley above.
William Connolley ran for office five times in the Green Party in the U.K. He lost all five times.
Connolley is not a climatologist. He is not a meteorologist. He has no education in the area of climate. He has a B.A. in math, and a Ph.D. in math.
His embellished Wikipedia profile :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley
Article about William Connolley :
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/03/who-is-william-connolley-solomon.aspx
Photo of William Connolley :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/William_Connolley.jpg
William Connolley is spawn of the 60’s. I commented about the 60’s before and how global warming is spawn of the Baby Boomer’s militant hippies of that time. I remember the 60’s/ early 70’s. I am a Baby Boomer too.
Connolley and his associates have butchered Wikipedia :
ref :
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/04/12/wikipedia-s-zealots-solomon.aspx
William Connolley has used bean counting of environmental/atmospheric data and combined it with his radical green views to produce his opinions on global warming.
1) Will calling DailyTech a “technology and science news blog”, without mentioning Asher’s severe anti-AGW bias is a joke.
2) What relevance does winter arctic sea ice extent have?
3) Doesn’t a rapid increase in ice cover as we go into a sunless winter just emphasize how low the summer extent is?
Not sure if others mentioned it yet! but I thought you had already published those pictures of 3 american submariens at an ice-free North Pole in 1987.. so I assume it is a mistake when you replied to “thefordprefect” :
“”It is the “soundbites” they latch onto, in this case “ice free north pole in 2008″. Further, why put yourself in the position in the first place. Making a suggestion like that, something that has never happened in recorded history, really puts you out on the limb. “”
I distinctly remember the Global Cooling “science” of the 1970’s, but I couldn’t recall being concerned about it.
Then I remembered why: Global Cooling meant Great Skiing, Great Skating, and Great Hunting (whitetail don’t have snowshoes)! At the time I had two pairs of alpine skis (215s and 205s(!!)), 2 pairs of nordic skis, 2 pairs of snowshoes (bear paws and slender “running” ones), a couple pairs of Sorels thick felt liners, and a pair of Super Tacks (with the Kangaroo boots!). I kept a 12 gauge side-by-side and a bolt-action 9mm Mauser in the gun safe at the campus police dept. (!!) [everything but the Tacks and Sorels were used, which meant PATINA.]
I distinctly remember sitting on a tamarack stump during partridge season, smoking Balkan Sobranie in a disgusting corncob pipe with the 12 gauge broken across my lap, with snow coming down across the valley. Nice.
I wonder where we lost the concept of taking what God gives you and making the best of it. Maybe it’s Anthropogenic Loss Of Testosterone, or (better) Anthropogenic Girly Whining. Nah, it’s just that there isn’t any God anymore.
Buy Coal.
tty says:
Well, show me where Shackleton actually said this. I have quoted extensively from Shackleton’s 1976 paper above and in fact it is very, very clear in noting that they are predicting cooling due to the orbital variations only timescales of 20,000 years without being able to say anything about what will occur on shorter timescales and that it neglects “anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels”. I don’t see how Shackleton et al could have been any clearer on this!!! And, scientists today would basically agree with Shackleton except that there is now a fairly strong belief that the current interglacial might be exceptionally long-lived (due to the current very low ellipticity of the earth’s orbit) and thus may actually last another 40 to 50,000 years.
As for Kukla, here is a recent interview with him: http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/an_unrepentant_prognosticator.php and he is pretty much of an AGW skeptic, so his views have not swung dramatically…It is just that he is now in a smaller minority than he was then. (Actually, it is not really that the minority has gotten smaller but that the majority has gotten much bigger as the field has grown in both size and confidence that they can make projections about the future.)
Again, looking into everything that everyone says here does not alter the story from what the paper that I linked to discusses in detail: http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf In the 1970s, people were studying various aspects of the climate, with some of them (like Shackleton) focusing on the long-term natural trends toward another ice age, some of them focusing on the effects of aerosols (which most correctly believed would favor cooling, although even this was not yet a unanimous view then), and some of them focusing on the warming effects of greenhouse gases.
And, yes, there were some stories and books in the popular press that got it wrong by claiming that there was general agreement on cooling, likely because the cold winters that we did experience in the early- to mid-70s provided the “hook” for reporters to discuss the climate. However, even in the popular press, there was significantly more discord than is often claimed. For example, 1975 saw the publication of the book “Hothouse Earth”, the 1973 movie “Soylent Green” imagines a future earth in which we have turned the earth into a dried up wasteland through the greenhouse effect, and the New York Times in 1975 published an article entitled “Warming trend seen in climate; two articles counter view that cold period is due” three months after publishing the oft-cited one entitled “Scientists ask why world climate is changing; major cooling may be ahead”. Still, overall if people want to argue that a lesson from the 1970s is that the popular press cannot be relied upon to get the scientific story right, you won’t find any argument from me. However, if they want to argue that there is a lesson that we can’t trust the National Academy of Sciences or a consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature then I would say that such a claim is completely and utterly unsubstantiated by the actual facts.
John Philip (03:44:55) :
Besides which, if a method gives one result in January, and a different one in February it indicates the method is not robust, no?
Not that surprising since global seaice hits a maximum of ~22Mm^2 in November and a minimum of ~16Mm^2 in February (presently ~15Mm^2).
The minimum in 1979 and 1980 was between 16 and 17Mm^2 whereas we are at 15.3Mm^2 so Will’s claim was clearly bogus.
Wikipedia edits done by William Connolley :
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=William+M.+Connolley
There are more than 500 in the last 17 days. More than 20,000 in the last 3 years. You can click back through his history of edits at Wikipedia to see.
How does one have the time to do this much editing on the internet?
hareynolds says:
I’ll admit that I did not. So, without transcripts of these lectures available, it is basically a stand-off. I can’t argue against your recollection…and perhaps it is correct. All that I can say is that what you actually find by them in print, which is the record that we have preserved, is quite different from what you recollect hearing.
It amuses me that you make this analogy because, regardless of which scientific point-of-view regarding AGW that you believe to be correct, I think that there objective measures by which we can say that the analogy with between AGW and evolution works better the other way. I.e., it is not the evolutionist side who claims that the peer-reviewed journals are biased against them, that the larger scientific community systematically excludes their views, or who finds it necessary to publish lists of individual scientists who support evolution as a way of arguing that there is not a consensus in the scientific community. Also, with evolution you have a broad array of scientific organizations like the NAS, AAAS, and the various scientific societies endorsing the theory, just as is true for AGW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
Fatbigot.. “Chicken Licken”??
the majority has gotten much bigger as the field has grown in both size and confidence that they can make projections about the future.
They’ve grown fat on big grants and still they can’t make accurate projections about the future.
Buried in Chapter 2 of IPCC AR4 are these gems concerning the way the models fall short of understanding the really important processes which drive the earth’s climate:
While GCMs have other well-known limitations, such as coarse spatial resolution, inaccurate representation of convection and hence updraft velocities leading to aerosol activation and cloud formation processes, and microphysical parametrizations, they nevertheless remain an essential tool for quantifying the global cloud albedo effect.
…
Models also have weaknesses in representing convection processes and aerosol distributions, and simulating updraft velocities and convection-cloud interactions
…
Modelling the cloud albedo effect from fi rst principles has proven diffi cult because the representation of aerosol-cloud and convection-cloud interactions in climate models are still crude (Lohmann and Feichter, 2005).
…
Using these data some studies (Sekiguchi et al., 2003; Quaas et al., 2004) indicate that the magnitude of the RF is resolution dependent, since the representation of convection and clouds in the GCMs and the simulation of updraft velocity that affects activation themselves are resolution dependent.
But they have got better at making uncertainty sound certain, and better at training the compliant media to swallow and regurgitate the rubbish they feed them, I’ll give you that.
Smokey – your links seem to be to a site making childish jokes based on Monbiot’s surname and run by a blogger who has no problem with facetious ad hom comments such as
wow they dont get anymore homely then this double ugly moonbat pig
If you take the trouble to visit Monbiot’s site and read one of his pieces [ example ] you will find he is generally meticulous about giving the sources of his information and the basis of his conclusions. Nobody is perfect and he has made the occasional slip, and has issued corrrections. I don’t share all of Monbiot’s opinions, however I would be grateful if you can you point me to a rather more serious example of his making a claim unsupported by the facts or where his conclusions have been contradicted by the agency providing the his data, and by his own ombudsman, as has just happened to the other George?
thanks!
Re the “cooling crisis” of the 1970’s:
I received my first degree in 1971 and was active in the fledgling environmental movement starting in the late 1960’s, so I paid attention to these matters.
I recall both Time and Newsweek had major stories on the global cooling threat in ~1975 – at least one was a cover story. I seem to recall Stephen Schneider being very concerned about global cooling.
Minor global cooling actually did occur, from ~1945 to ~1975, just as minor global warming occurred from ~~~1900 to ~1945, and again from ~1975 to ~2000. It is probable that the 1930’s were warmer than than even the late 1990’s, although global ST data may not be sufficiently accurate to prove this contention. It is also probable that there has been no net global warming since ~1940, despite an ~800% increase in humanmade CO2 emissions.
And now it is getting colder again. Warming and cooling are cyclical – some paleoclimatologist have linked these climate cycles to solar cycles such as the Gleissberg. Others have linked to the PDO – perhaps both are more or less correct.
CO2, humanmade or otherwise, is not a significant driver of global temperature.
This line of argument infuriates the warmists, because it lays bare their many frauds:
– They eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age from the climate record, to support Mann-made global warming.
– They invented atmospheric aerosol data, to force their flawed climate models to duplicate the 30-year cooling period that ended in ~1975. Douglas Hoyt is on record as saying that actual readings do not show any such aerosols – only volcanic eruptions are noticeable in the data.
– They write papers alleging “hot spots” in the troposphere where none exist, and mythical warming in West Antarctica.
It’s a beautiful day and I intend to enjoy it – may I suggest all of you do so as well.
Best regards, Allan
Watts, you are such a joke. You never print anything that shows how wrong you have been in the past. What a hypocrit you are!
REPLY: Hello Tenney. Such a nice first impression you’ve made on your visit here.
You are certainly most welcome to think of me however you wish. But given these numbers, I don’t think your view about me being a “joke” is well shared. – Anthony
Richard2 says:
Wow…I never thought someone would serously defend Will on this. First of all, the one quote that I selected was the ONLY one of the quotes that was actually from a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which is kind of important if you want to actually show what the scientific experts were saying. And, in addition, I have also pointed out how Will has also cherry-picked his popular articles to support his point of view, quoting extensively from one N.Y. Times article on cooling but somehow neglecting to include any quotes from one three months later that focused on warming. (You point out that there was another article on cooling that he didn’t quote from either but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Will’s study is selective…and in no way a rigorous review of what was out there. He may not have found every cooling quote but my hypothesis would be that he left out much more on the warming side than the cooling side.)
You can’t demonstrate something by cherry-picking and quoting out-of-context. You also are not on very strong grounds demonstrating anything about the scientific community by relying only on the popular press (with the exception of one horribly out-of-context quote from the peer-reviewed literature).
So, it is utterly irrelevant to point out that what Will is pointing to is a discussion about climatic trends over the long term and in the absence of anthropogenic influences that is not in dispute even today (modulo the question of whether it is 20,000 or 40,000 years in the future)? I would say that rather undercuts Will’s argument that scientists can’t be trusted because they were previously warning us just as vociferously about something that they no longer believe to be true. Will hasn’t even come close to demonstrating this thesis of his, which isn’t surprising given that it is demonstrably false. And, the quote from Shackleton is useless in this regard unless it is taken completely out-of-context as Will does.
What?!?! What is relevant to us at the moment is what is going to happen to the earth’s climate over the next few hundred years because of our influences. What might have happened in another 20,000 years due to natural processes had we not started to significantly interfere with the earth’s climate system is scientifically-interesting but rather academic to us at the moment.
RoyfOMR (03:24:18) :
“Spot on, sir! I’ve been using the phrase ‘That’s global Warming for you”, for some time now, to describe unwanted events….”
Right, plus, we just can’t get away with blaming Bush for everything much longer.
I’ve also taken to thanking GW for respites from the long Winter.
A few weeks ago I ran into a guy high away from civilization who I know to be a Warmer [by a bumper sticker saying “Live long, then die off” and another saying “Reelect Gore in 2008”] on a warmer, beautiful sunny Winter day. He remarked upon the welcome weather, and so I naturally thanked Global Warming. He almost couldn’t help but agree!
As the commercial says, “Now that’s ‘Progressive’.”
Related: recently, a “Joe 6-pack” guy I run into fairly often when out away from civilization who is not a Warmer, QED, but still an avid explorer, was taken aback when I briefly described the data manipulation going on in AGW “science”, as also related to the “Antarctic is warming” fiasco.
Seperately, a third guy whom I’ve never seen before was listening to my “Global Waming Update” – which I now always give to a fourth guy when visiting his business – regarding the failed NASA CO2 satellite and the existence of the functioning Japanese and Canadian satellites immediately said, “Why can’t we just use their data?”. It got pretty funny from there on. ‘Must be the too much beer and clinging to our families, rifles, etc. [h/t Alkabata], not to mention the fearful ~”racism” [h/t Mr. President] from the Central Gov’t not giving us enough stuff.
Joel Shore (06:49:14)
Feel free to post your own charts …which you don’t seem to do very much.
I post charts for readers’ consideration and interest. In most cases they seem to be appreciated. Sorry they don’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling. It must be time for another viewing of An Inconvenient Truth to convince you you’re on the right track.
Perhaps Serreze’ “raising the spectre” was unintended but his post at RC (“North Pole notes” via johnlouis (18:53:45) ) and Gavin’s response are quite telling (emphasis mine):
Don’t know about anyone else but to me that sounds a lot like agreement with Schneider’s “To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios”.
CodeTech says:
Actually, we are pretty close to the same age as I was born a few months after JFK was shot. I don’t have the same strong memory as you…but since I wasn’t reading the peer-reviewed literature and I guess may not have been as interested in the popular literature on the subject at this time, I wouldn’t take my own memory as gospel on the subject.
Read the actual paper that I have linked to: http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf They did not cherry pick. They explain the methods by which they looked at the peer-reviewed literature. And, global cooling wasn’t even close to being the majority opinion, let alone the consensus opinion in that literature. In fact, it is hard to even find a paper in the literature that says something that we would consider to be seriously off-base now…About the only concrete example that I have seen of this is the 1971 Rasool and Schneider paper and even they were very clear, particularly in a response to a comment on their paper, that their model was a first attempt at the question and not the final word.
(Technically, what your sentence above says may be true if one looks at absolute numbers simply because the number of papers on climate change was orders of magnitude smaller then than it is now. However, what would be relevant is the FRACTION of papers that were against global cooling then vs those that are against AGW now and there you would find that the numbers are not even close to being close.)
By the way, even before the paper that I linked to above came out, I (being the skeptical type in the broader sense of that word) had already done my own search although I just did it in Science rather than the peer-reviewed literature as a whole. And, the conclusion I reached from that smaller sample (though I was less quantitative about it) was in agreement with theirs.
If true, a good reason why you should not trust the media for your scientific conclusions.
What a weird rule! So, does that mean I shouldn’t believe in evolution…The scientific bandwagon is quite strong on that. How about the germ theory of disease or the Big Bang Theory?
Here is an even better rule: For scientific questions, the best source of information is the scientific community itself, particularly as expressed through organizations like the National Academy of Sciences whose charter is to advise the government and the public on questions of science. It may not be infallible, but it is the best, least-biased view, that we human beings know how to obtain. And, if you let scientific questions be decided instead on the basis of people’s own philosophical, political, religious beliefs or economic self-interest, then it will be a lot worse! In fact, it may lead us back to the Dark Ages.
Joel Shore:
“… the author of that chart has chosen the relative scales used for the CO2 and the temperature. The questions is: Has he chosen them in a realistic way?”
We’ve all seen those scary, steeply rising Mauna Loa CO2 charts, going up at about a 45 degree angle. So let’s ask the same question: are they chosen in a realistic way? Or is this more realistic: click
Wow, Watts, thanks!
I have only been blogging for a bit more than a year, and I don’t invite controversy, I just mostly post the science (real science, that is).
Hmmm, if I had been blogging as long as you, who knows what the figure might show.
btw, this is just one more example of how you just don’t know how to look at data.
REPLY: “and I don’t invite controversy, I just mostly post the science” You mean like this uncontroversial piece?
Capitol Hill coal power plant targeted by environmentalists
I’ve been blogging since late Nov 2007, you started in May 2007 according to your blog. Only 6 months difference, yet you show no significant increase in traffic from that time. Now if I’m in error in interpreting the data feel free to explain it to me. – Anthony
Joel Shore (08:30:22) : I have also pointed out how Will has also cherry-picked his popular articles to support his point of view, quoting extensively from one N.Y. Times article on cooling but somehow neglecting to include any quotes from one three months later that focused on warming.
Nor did he mention the other quotes showing how the NYT seems to in the wind, which I think is what he was trying to say. Like these NYT headlines and titles :
Can’t help but notice the “WIDELY CONSIDERED” used in connection with “COOLING” in the 1975 heading.
That looks pretty significant to me Joel, that’s a 25% increase.
Brendan H at 02 51 57 said to Smokey;
“As for William Connolly, the paper he co-authored on the myth of the 1970s cooling consensus presents a persuasive and well-supported argument. I think you should give it another chance.
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf “
I have seen this article before in another form- the three authors are interesting, including William Connelly-on whom I did a long and thorough piece about his personal agenda as a member of the UK Green party and as gatekeeper of wikipedia climate section (my 01 14 54 earlier today addressed to Joel and Smokey)
The second author was Thomas Peterson, who Anthony has met;
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:xpjH07lfElgJ:wattsupwiththat.com/2007/06/30/+thomas+peterson+noaa+politics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk
Thomas Peterson is the keeper of weather records including weather stations at NOAA Anthony records being co interviewed with him
When trying to continue his surface stations project shortly after this meeting he found;
“You are not authorized to view this information. Your IP address has been logged”
When it came back up Monday afternoon, the “managing parties” field identifying the location of the weather station was gone. I would note that I shared a radio interview with Dr. Thomas Peterson of NCDC last week, so I am certain NCDC is aware of the effort. No notification was given, nor even a professional courtesy to advise of the change, nor any notice on the website.”
The Row over access was repeated in more detail here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1879848/posts
The third author of the piece you cite is John Fleck who is a competent science writer on the Albuquerque journal- he reported his own involvement in the article here;
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/1897180018opinionguestcolumns02-18-09.htm
His politics are left wing -which is his own business- but the reports he co authors need to be seen against that background.
The original report you cite is rebutted here
http://www.openmarket.org/2008/12/09/the-new-ice-age-continued/
For my part I had an involvement, in as much back in the 70’s I was asked to write a piece on climate change and being unsure at that time what was being referred to, collected material from both ‘sides’. There were undoubtedly far more scienctific studies citing cooling rather than warming-whether they survived as digital copies anywhere –and therefore are still being cited-depends on who the record keeper was at the time. I threw away my files years ago and recall the flimsy folder with warming material and the very thick bunch of folders on cooling.
The article you cite makes some interesting comments including;
“Scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s temperatures found it (cooling) was not necessarily a global phenomenon.”
Mitchell had based his calculations on 200 weather stations for his 1963 treatise. Interestingly this was the same number (and appears to be the same ones) that G S Callendar based his work on when he came up with the seminal document on AGW being caused by rising co2 levels back in 1938. He had based his own work by backtracking to 1850 to show rising temperatures and found only 100 weather stations, of which some 50 were flawed and unreliable. Interestingly Charles Keeling admitted to being influenced by Callendars work so based his own hypotheses on the basis that temperatures were rising and so was co2-this latter supposition based on Callendars cherry picking of historical co2 data.
It is certainly untrue to rewrite history and claim global cooling was a myth. It wasn’t. To base a new world order on a tiny number of historical temperature records- many of which were known to be flawed then and are flawed to this day- is clearly absurd.
Sorry Brendan, but the report you cite could easily be rewritten to show a diametrically opposite view and if anyone here would like to fund it I shall be happy to oblige 🙂
TonyB
Joel Shore (08:04:10) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
This page has been edited countless times by our friend William Conolly. 14 times on february 1st this year alone. You and he are flogging a dead horse by appealling to wikipedia as an authority on climate change. It is hopelessly biased in this section. Give it up.
hareynolds: Loved the post on hunting in the snow, more please. 🙂
Joel Shore:
“Also, with evolution you have a broad array of scientific organizations like the NAS, AAAS, and the various scientific societies endorsing the theory, just as is true for AGW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change ”
Why cite Wikipedia for this? Wikipedia is not a peer reviewed journal. It is highly biased and under the thumb of William Connolley for all things on climate.
As for your statement regarding scientific societies endorsing AGW; how
many of these societies actually polled their members on the issue? The AGU Council adopted a position statement without polling their members and then had to revise it because of member objections. They have still never polled their membership and I doubt that the rest of the societies have either.
“First of all, the one quote that I selected was the ONLY one of the quotes that was actually from a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which is kind of important if you want to actually show what the scientific experts were saying.”
Which is why your comprehension of the article is confused. Mr. Will used the entire paragraph not to show what scientific experts were saying – but to demonstrate that the prediction of Global Cooling by reputable publications and their experts – joins a long list of planetary calamities that have failed to occur.
“You point out that there was another article on cooling that he didn’t quote from either but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Will’s study is selective…and in no way a rigorous review of what was out there.”
Your choice of words indicates a reason for your confusion. George Will writes a newspaper column for the Washington Post. His role is that of a particularly articulate journalist observing and commenting on current events. He does not do “studies.” Nor need he do “rigorous review” of all media to support his observations. He has clearly pointed out that the climate hue and cry of the 1970s was impending doom by ice and cold. (FYI there are hundreds of articles on Global Cooling from that time.)
“I would say that [Shakleton] rather undercuts Will’s argument that scientists can’t be trusted because they were previously warning us just as vociferously about something that they no longer believe to be true.”
Again, your own words confound your claim. Mr. Will never makes an argument that “scientists can’t be trusted.” He simply uses the 1970s climate cooling fiasco and other failed predictions to arrive at Montaigne’s axiom: “Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.” In other words Mr. Shore, those who cry loudest and most often are likely to be wrong.
The previous in reference to Joel Shore (08:30:22) :
Re the Global Cooling in the 70’s
This illustrates just how pervasive and convincing the impending doom of Global Cooling was in those days. I was there. It affected me (but in a good way).
Apart from the hysteria from the media, there was ample proof for the average Joe / Jane just by looking at the outside thermometer.
For example, the winter of 1972-73 was notable in Texas, where I was a freshman in undergrad in Austin. Just after New Year’s, the entire state grew very cold for a prolonged period, such that there was not enough natural gas to keep everyone warm (hard to believe in Texas, but it was true).
The extreme cold and natural gas shortage led to natural gas rationing, and non-essential users were cut off, including colleges. The University of Texas made an unprecedented move to remain closed after the Christmas holiday (we were still allowed to call it that, back then). The administration delayed the start of classes for a week as I recall, but it may have been two weeks. Classes were extended into June to make up the lost hours, with much disruption to graduation plans and starting dates for new jobs, as one can imagine.
Lawsuits were filed all around, of course, against Oscar Wyatt and his Coastal corporation. One allegation was that Oscar had over-sold his natural gas delivery capabilities, with the expectation that the entire state would not freeze at the same time. Usually, that strategy worked, but not that winter. (The same Oscar Wyatt who got in rather more trouble recently).
In response to the natural gas shortage, the University dug a big hole in the ground under the south steps leading to the main building, and installed two giant fuel storage tanks. The idea was that they would have their very own little Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and burn fuel oil in the University’s central utility system when a severe cold snap happened again. Classes would not be delayed ever again.
Now, if the Global Warming side was convincing in those days, why would a rather large and sophisticated University go to all that trouble and expense to install their own private SPR?
There was also a really nice (and rare) snowfall in January 1973 in Austin, I remember it being about 6 to 8 inches on the Austin campus. It was much more fun to play in the snow, than go to classes! We loved it. Ahh, to be 19 again!!!
Hey, Al “The Bore” Gore!! Where were you when Rio De Janeiro recorded its first snowfall in 75 years in 2008? Oh, I see. You were busy investing all your oil money in businesses that have to do with alternative energy. How many wind mills do you now own; how many solar panel factories have you invested you Shell Oil holdings in? And have you talked to John “The Erstwhile French President” Kerry about wind mills off the coast of Mass.?
Please, don’t visit the Antarctic. The hot air spewing from your “Alec Baldwin Bloviated Mouth” might set off an avalanche.
All arguments of actual weather that most probably will take place, as US west and midwest droughts caused by PDO an Nina, will be interpreted as caused by “Global Warming”.
Other issue: Have you noticed the similarity between Ap index curve and RealClimate.org? It seems they are going straight to a “Maunder minimum”:)
Tenney Naumer:
Watts, you are such a joke. You never print anything that shows how wrong you have been in the past. What a hypocrit you are!
Here’s a thought: how about instead of hurling insults and baseless accusations you give an example of something you consider to have been “wrong”? Or, just go back to Trolls R’ Us, tail tucked neatly between your legs. Whatever.
Who let the trolls out? Woof!
Smokey says:
Nice try…But this is not at all analogous. There is good reason to plot the Mauna Loa chart in a way that allows one to see the details. And, there is no rule that says that bottom of the chart has to start from 0. Furthermore, anyone with any understanding of graphs can look at the scale on the lefthand-side of the plot and immediately see how much rise there has been.
By contrast, the relative scales thing that I am pointing out has the potential to be much more deceptive (and that potential indeed seems to have been realized). It unfortunately does not seem obvious to many people how to deconvolve from that plot at what rate it would be expected for the temperature to rise if the IPCC estimates of the transient climate response are correct and to realize that the expected rate means that the temperature should rise with a much lower slope than the CO2 rises.
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5. Once you do that, the whole point that you draw from that plot vanishes because it becomes clear that, within the noisiness of the temperature measurement, one cannot really determine from so short a period that the temperature is not behaving as it is expected to. In fact, the temperature behavior seems perfectly compatible with expectations (particularly if one expands the period of time looked at so that it covers more than 10 years).
A question to everybody: How does anybody trust CO2 measures taken at the biggest volcano on earth, the Mauna Loa? I think this observatory was originally intended to check the volcano´s activity.
I think Smokey´s CO2 corrected Mauna Loa CO2 graph should be kept constantly as a banner in WUWT web page, as a demonstration of GWrs´ “will to deceive”
@ice-age and global warming hysteria
the science then was as bad as it is now,
the picture of the future drawn just as catastrophic as now and
consens was falsly claimed by some just as it is now.
but the main difference is, that then, there was much less political interference on top like today, the UN was split and not the monster it is today.
fighting an ice-age would have meant pumping resources into the rich industrialized north to deal with it – what completely contradicts the hidden socialist agenda of today. no way to blame an american suv driver for flooding in the third world. the story was just not sexy enough to mobilze the socialist mob.
Joel Shore – Thank you, now I can bear that in mind when looking at the presentation of such data from any source.
In regard to the debate regarding a “scientific consensus” on global cooling in the 1970’s, I think a couple issues need to be pointed out.
There is a disconnect in the debate in that the AGW supporters generally focus on the peer reviewed and cited literature of the time, and the skeptic view tends to focus on the appearance of a consensus in the publicly available media. Which of these view points is more appropriate?
These are two very different domains and should not be compared directly, as they are in that period, almost totally divorced from each other. The current Global warming main stream media presentation should be compared to the main stream media presentation of the time if you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges. The public perception of the prevailing science in any period is driven by their access to information. If they cannot reasonably access info, for all intents and purposes it does not exist!
In the 1970’s the technical sources that the general public had ready access to, were not peer reviewed papers! That level of access was in a practical sense impossible in the 1970’s for Joe or Jane citizen.
To get access to it you would have to spend weeks digging through manual card catalog indexes and walking the stacks in the major college libraries. At that time documents available were only indexed by 100’s of thousands of 3×5 index cards that listed the documents title, and catalog index. You had to then physically chase the document down. In that time period, the functional equivalent to the modern internet was the specialty publications like Science Digest, The Scientific American, and the since articles in publications like News Week and Time, special features in the major newspapers, spiced with a few special TV features on educational public broad cast TV, and the best selling books of the period, and looking through indexes of periodical literature, or digging through stacks of physical magazines.
For those of us who lived through this era, there was absolutely no doubt that the general impression in all the commonly available sources was that global cooling was a viable theory and under active debate. Based on recent history of very severe winters and media presentations, the “public consensus” was that the scientific community thought global cooling was a real threat to our way of life.
It was sufficiently well recognized, that high profile figures like Stephen Schneider on several occasions both in print and TV explicitly addressed the current “consensus” on global cooling. If you dig through his writings it is clear that personally he was in the long term more worried about CO2, but in the short term cooling due to aerosols was a real concern, as was heating or cooling due to changes in ozone, the atmospheric haze that might result from the flight of the SST, the effect of CFC’s, severe drought in Africa and Asia.
His book Genesis Strategy was not a book on “global cooling” or “global warming” per se, it was a book that pointed out how vulnerable the world was to climatic shifts of all sorts and all causes. Like any good politician he covered his bets and addressed all causes in his book and did not go out of his way to dissuade those who thought global cooling was the most worrisome issue.
I say that both based on his public writings and broadcast media interviews but based on a personal discussion with him. After reading his book, I took advantage of the fact that I lived only a few miles away from NCAR and scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the conclusions of his book.
The meeting left me quite underwhelmed, because he would not discuss the science or even place bounds on which position he thought was most likely. He did not point me at any useful resources, did not give me any copies of study documents to look over, did not give me a bibliography of useful documents to look into, nor did he help sharpen my understanding of the issues or limits of the science. He was basically covering his butt in all regards and throwing out observations that would support all possible conclusions. In short even when you made an attempt to go directly to the sources of the period, you got stonewalled if you were not another Phd scientist, or a media contact that would be able to be exploited for more exposure.
In that sense, the existence of peer reviewed studies in that period that were beginning to shift away from cooling toward warming is irrelevant with respect to the public view of the issue. They were literally unavailable in any meaningful context to the public at large.
For those who have grown up in the internet generation, it is probably impossible to even imagine a situation where it might take you an entire day in a library to even find a title for a document that “might” be worth reading. Then you tried to determine if it was even available in that library’s collection. With the exception of only a few of the largest college libraries, the answer was usually no. You then went to the person responsible for inter-library loans and tried to get the document ordered in.
At that point, you might wait weeks to get access to the document, only to find it was a restricted document and available only in the reference section where you could read it on site taking manual notes of what was in it or pay 10 cents a sheet to copy it and perhaps the better part of a day to xerox it while sharing the xerox machine with a dozen other folks that also wanted to copy documents.
At the time I had just finished engineering courses at the University of Colorado and remember well entire days lost looking for information in Norlin Library, which being a Federal Depository Library, had many government documents that would not be locally available to most of the general public. Even if the document was supposedly on site, it might be lost to the user because it was somewhere in the reshelving process after use by another person and might not re-appear on the shelves for days or longer.
What you can do today on google in 10 seconds might have taken you 3 months in the 1970’s.
The only thing relevant to the public at the time, was the public media articles often quoted. Be they right or wrong with regard to their conclusions, that was the information that was generally available, (not the source documents) and since at the time most folks still trusted the media, it was accepted as a true account of the science of the time.
Larry
Joel Shore (07:13:47) :
Parse Error says:
” Even more importantly, what are the flaws in the actual charts? I do not claim to know enough to accurately evaluate such things myself, but it seems dangerous to dismiss something just because you don’t care for the source.”
Well, let’s take this one for example: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2MSU.jpg It may look dramatic how the CO2 is rapidly rising on that graph while the temperature is not. However, the author of that chart has chosen the relative scales used for the CO2 and the temperature. The questions is: Has he chosen them in a realistic way?
Maybe it would be good if you had a look at the http://www.ipcc.ch “summary for policy makers” , Figure SPM.1., where there are catastrophically rising CO2 curves and other effects. Or maybe you have already conveyed to them your disapproval of such rapid artificial rises in the plotting and how badly it reflects on the sensitivity issue?
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5.
You are talking of transforming CO2 to Watts/m**2 to temperature. It is still instructive to look at the SPm1. figure of the summary for policy makers. The watts are right there with CO2 and methane and everything, rising like the best hockey stick.
The temperatures of the last ten years have stalled, to say the least, and as Lucia has shown at her blackboard, are outside the “statistical” error limits proposed by the IPCC models. The plot you quote is fair enough to show the point, not to write a research paper on.
Joel Shore
At any rate, regardless of whether or not there is intentional deception involved, my major point still stands: If you want to compare the CO2 rise to what sort of rise one expects on average over a climatologically-significant time period from the temperature, then one has to divide that CO2 rise by about a factor of 4 or 5.
You are talking of transforming CO2 to Watts/m**2 to temperature. It is still instructive to look at the SPm1. figure of the summary for policy makers. The watts are right there with CO2 and methane and everything, rising like the best hockey stick.
The temperatures of the last ten years have stalled, to say the least, and as Lucia has shown at her blackboard, are outside the “statistical” error limits proposed by the IPCC models. The plot you quote is fair enough to show the point, not to write a research paper on.
How long has the sensor been failing, it appears there were two sharp downward shifts in November and December when it was expected ice extent would be increasing. If they are now using a different sensor the data should start at least from the END of the last melt season.
How does anyone know that George Will is actually wrong?
Nobody has the data to prove it one way or the other …
… (except for the NSIDC, William Chapman and potentially Jeff Id)
… (and even then, the data is apparently changed every few months sometimes by huge amounts going by the charts they produce – with no data to back them up that is).
If anyone has a source for sea ice extent and area data going back to 1979, please pass it on.
hotrod
So true. Back then one could, and often did, waste weeks of a perfectly good life searching a library for sources for a research paper.
Adolfo Giurfa says:
Lemme c, the view from the parallel universe that runs alongside most of yours is this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked-ice-a-saga-in-five-chapters/
Of course, since this is the view from reality-land, I wouldn’t expect many of you to be able to comprehend it.
REPLY: What you miss is that there is a distinct difference between comprehension and agreement.
hotrod,
A large section of the populace today believe the media, and are not interested in checking the data on the net, so nothing has altered. GORES film is in every school in the UK and teachers dare not debate the subject outside the party line for fear of loosing their jobs, children believe the rubbish, just as the US believed Orson Wells.
If the Press stated AGW was false, it would end. People don`t read peer review, I knew nothing about AGW until I watched The Swindle. I watched that because of the title and I like documentary’s.
hotrod: Well, whatever you may think about the abilities of the public to access information in the 70s or not, how I see the argument about global cooling used is to discredit the current consensus on global warming by saying that such a consensus existed before on global cooling and if those scientists got it wrong then, why should we believe them now?
So, from that point-of-view, and given that we do now have unprecedented access both to the peer-reviewed literature and to reports by the IPCC, the NAS, and so forth, I think the most relevant question is in regards to whether we can view these as reliable sources. I personally don’t have much interest in arguing that the popular media is a reliable source of scientific information because I strongly question how defensible that position is. (I do think that the extent to which the media are, and have been, unreliable has been somewhat exaggerated by some but overall I would still say that they are not that reliable.)
I have to admit that your description here has me confused. You talk of him as “covered his bets and addressed all causes in his book” and of “basically covering his butt in all regards and throwing out observations that would support all possible conclusions”. You seem offended by this rather than thinking of it as the responsible thing to do given what he knew at the time. In fact, I think you are displaying some of the very traits that I imagine the reporters also displayed and that may have led to some of the poor reporting: Perhaps you wanted simple answers to complex questions and you wanted more definitiveness and certainty than he was willing to provide.
The fact is that, while a lot of the pieces of the puzzle were somewhat understood at the time (ice age – interglacial cycles, greenhouse gases, aerosols), it was not yet understood how they all fit together and especially which one would dominate. Schneider was one who recognized that these were important questions with very important and real implications but at the same time he also recognized that there was sufficient uncertainty that he was not even sure yet whether we had to worry more about warming or cooling. I applaud him for generally not going beyond what he knew and understood.
Brendan H (02:51:57) :
Excellent, helpful reference; thank you, Brendan.
I was a meteorology student at Univ Wisconsin-Madison 1973-1976, where Reid Bryson was on the faculty, already acknowledged as a foremost climatologist. His tendency at the time was to believe cooling was taking place, due to “the human volcano” – i.e., atmospheric dust.
I also remember the alarmist articles in Newsweek and TIME of that era, predicting a coming “ice age.” Bryson was much too intelligent to believe that; he believed climate changes, naturally, and that humans can influence such changes.
He gave an interview to the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News in May 2007. I’ve saved it on-line at http://www.colo-earthfriends.org/bryson.htm. He was very sceptical of the AGW “crisis”; partly for that reason, I am too. Roy Spencer was a student there too.
Prof Bryson, regretably, passed away in June 2008.
Data is easily skewed on both sides. What the heck enjoy yourself today don’t worry about tomorrow ..you’ll be dead in a few years anyway….leave it to your grandkids to deal with………
@ Tenney Naumer
You come onto this website and attack Mr Watts and having had a look at your website, you refer to Watts Up With That as “that Gang of Science Boobs”
-Can you pls tell us why you are so angry?
-Don’t you think your angry attacks negate your message?
-For a person filled with so much anger and hatred, is it worth the effects this would have on your health, just because some people don’t share the same viewpoint as yourself?
Yes I was offended by that, because there is a difference between stating the limits of your information, and intentionally making statements so broad that they can cover any possible interpretation. The specific reason I went to talk to him was to narrow the focus a bit. I took time off of work to go talk to him, I at least expected him to be open in discussing the issue, or pointing me at other useful information.
Sometimes you have to make judgments based on intangible feelings of credibility when the objective data provides no concrete direction, but points in both directions. The impression I got, was instead of talking to a scientist who was trying to help me understand the conclusions of his book, I was talking to someone that was dodging and weaving so that no meaningful clarification could be reached. He was actively avoiding saying anything meaningful.
I would have had no problem with him simply saying “we don’t have a clue, the data points in both directions”. I also would not have had a problem with him saying the data is ambiguous and points to several possible conclusions but at this moment in time, I am inclined to think x is the most likely outcome.
Instead he said data is ambiguous and points to several possible conclusions but at this moment in time, I am inclined to think x is possible, but then again it could be y or z. It was more a case of presentation — my feeling was he was not being honest or helpful and just throwing stuff on the wall so at some later time you could pick out the spatters that matched the then accepted reality.
One of the reasons he is quoted so much, is that you can find a quote of his that supports just about any conclusion possible. I have no problem with a scientist saying the uncertainties are very high on both sides and we need to study x y and z before we can decide between the two. He should at least help focus on what the unknown issues are, and what the implications of that unknown is. Does it make a big difference (ie falsify the theory) does it just change the error range? does it indicate the theory should be modified in a specific way?
If his uncertainty was so high that he could not even quantify the implications and the steps necessary to clear those uncertainties, than he should not have speculated on the issue in the public domain in the first place.
Larry
“Joel Shore (08:56:25) : Joel Shore (14:20:51) : Joel Shore (18:03:05) : Joel Shore (19:50:13) : Joel Shore (20:34:04) : Joel Shore (21:06:45) : Joel Shore (06:49:14) : Joel Shore (07:13:47) : Joel Shore (07:46:05) : Joel Shore (08:04:10) : Joel Shore (08:30:22) : Joel Shore (08:56:25) : Joel Shore (11:47:48) : Joel Shore (14:11:46) :
I can’t help but notice you have several run-on comments. Other commenters have a few long entries. You have many every day. I was just wondering could you economize your writing?
I have noticed many on your side like to have either very long comments, or use caps lock and bold overmuch. Is this an attempt to get people’s attention off the fact the earth is cooling? Or is this the way your side whistles past the cemetery? Both?
TonyB: “It is certainly untrue to rewrite history and claim global cooling was a myth.”
I didn’t say that “global cooling was a myth”. The report I referred to is headed: “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”. Quite a different claim.
As for the opinions and activities of the report authors, I don’t see where they are relevant to my claim that their report “presents a persuasive and well-supported argument”.
As for the 1970s, I was there, but my memory of global cooling claims is faint. I’m sure there were such claims, but memory can be deceptive, and the constant repetition of claims of a cooling scare may well have brought about a rewriting of people’s memories.
“Smokey (18:48:21) :
Connolly is the prime reason that Wikipedia articles on AGW and global warming are worthless;”
Global warming entries in Wikipedia are not data, or findings from scientific studies. These entries have been so heavily edited by William Connolley that they are now the mind of William Connolley.
“That’s why I’ve been waiting for Walt…but it appears he’s AWOL on the guest post. – Anthony”
Thanks Anthony. Keep up the excellent work…
Claims of unprecdented warmth and abnormal melting of meltic arctic ice are unfounded if we look at history;
1 The following link describes the ancient cultures of the warmer arctic 5000 to 1000 years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lithoderm/Inuit_culture
2 This relates to an Arctic culture thriving in warmer times 2000 years ago
From the Eskimo Times Monday, Mar. 17, 1941
The corner of Alaska nearest Siberia was probably man’s first threshold to the Western Hemisphere. So for years archeologists have dug there for a clue to America’s prehistoric past. Until last year, all the finds were obviously Eskimo. Then Anthropologists Froelich G. Rainey of the University of Alaska and two collaborators struck the remains of a town, of inciedible size and mysterious culture. Last week in Natural History Professor Rainey, still somewhat amazed, described this lost Arctic city.
It lies at Ipiutak on Point Hope, a bleak sandspit in the Arctic Ocean, where no trees and little grass survive endless gales at 30° below zero. But where houses lay more than 2,000 years ago, underlying refuse makes grass and moss grow greener. The scientists could easily discern traces of long avenues and hundreds of dwelling sites. A mile long, a quarter-mile wide, this ruined city was perhaps as big as any in Alaska today (biggest: Juneau, pop. 5,700).
On the Arctic coast today an Eskimo village of even 250 folk can catch scarcely enough seals, whales, caribou to live on. What these ancient Alaskans ate is all the more puzzling because they seem to have lacked such Arctic weapons as the Eskimo harpoon.
Yet they had enough leisure to make many purely artistic objects, some of no recognizable use. Their carvings are vaguely akin to Eskimo work but so sophisticated and elaborate as to indicate a relation with some centre of advanced culture — perhaps Japan or southern Siberia —certainly older than the Aztec or Mayan.
3 This link leads to the Academy of science report of the same year regarding the Ipiutak culture described above
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1078291
4 This refers to the Vikings living in a warmer arctic culture 1000 years ago
People might be interested in reading a very interesting book about the Vikings called ‘The Viking world’. It is a very scholarly and highly referenced book running to some 700 pages and deals with all aspects of the Vikings. It is good because it does not have an axe to grind, but deals matter of factly with all aspects of Viking culture and exploration.
There is a large section on their initial exploration of Greenland, the subsequent establishment of their farms there, everyday life, how they gradually lost access to the outside world as the sea lanes closed through ice, a record of the last wedding held In Greenland and how trade dried up. It also deals with Vinland/Newfoundland and it seems that it was wild grapes that helped give the area its name, it being somewhat warmer than today.
This is one of a number of similar books that record our warmer and cooler past throughout the Northern Hermisphere. Al Gore wrote a good book in 1992 called ‘Earth in the Balance’ in which he explored the changing climate that devastated the civilisations in the Southern Hemishpere.
The book ‘The Viking World’ is Edited by Stefan Brink with Neil Price Published by Routledge ISBN 978 0 415 33315-3
I suggest you borrow it from the local library as it costs $250!
5 This refers to a warmer arctic 75 years ago recorded on Pathe newsreel by Bob Morrisey during his journeys there in the 1920’s and 1930’s and reported in all the media
Wednesday, 10th August 1932
The ship rolled heavily all night and continues to do so….
The glacier continues its disturbances. No real bergs break off but great sheets of ice slide down into the water and cause heavy seas. About noon, the entire face of the glacier, almost a mile in length and six or eight feet deep slid off with a roar and a rumble that must have been heard at some distance. We were on deck at the time for a preliminary report like a pistol shot had warned us what was coming. The Morrissey rolled until her boats at the davits almost scooped up the water and everything on board that was not firmly anchored in place crashed loose. But this was nothing to the pandemonium on shore. I watched it all through the glasses. The water receded leaving yards of beach bare and then returned with a terrific rush, bringing great chunks of ice with it. Up the beach it raced further and further, with the Eskimos fleeing before it. It covered all the carefully cherished piles of walrus meat, flowed across two of the tents with their contents, put out the fire over which the noonday meal for the sled drivers was being prepared, and stopped a matter of inches before it reached the pile of cement waiting to be taken up the mountain. Fortunately, in spite of heavy sea, which was running, the Captain had managed to be set shore this morning so he was there with them to help straighten out things and calm them down.”
The arctic has periodically warmed to greater amounts than today. A tiny reduction in ice extent since 1979 is of no consequence if you look at the historical record of this region
Tonyb
Brendan H (15:59:48) : said in reply tp me;
…As for the opinions and activities of the report authors, I don’t see where they are relevant to my claim that their report “presents a persuasive and well-supported argument”.
As for the 1970s, I was there, but my memory of global cooling claims is faint. I’m sure there were such claims, but memory can be deceptive, and the constant repetition of claims of a cooling scare may well have brought about a rewriting of people’s memories”.
Brendan, I try to ptretend I was too young to be there, but unfortunately I was, and writing about it! The article you cited is only persuasive if you were not there or do not remember. There was as much a consensus about cooling as there is claimed to be today about warming.
TonyB
B Kerr (02:57:29) :
I believe that in his more lucid moments and in regard to AGW the Big Yin would have said, “More to be pitied than scolded!”
On the other hand when, in the mid-70s, the Minister of Sport was given the additional portfolio of Minister of Drought, I decided that I liked warm/hot weather and made the decision to emigrate to Australia. The best decision I ever made!
Okay, this proves that George Will is right (for sea ice extent anyway).
Dec, 79 SH sea ice extent – 10.4 M km^2
Dec, 79 NH sea ice extent – 13.5 M km^2
Total Dec, 79 extent – 23.7 M km^2
Dec, 08 SH sea ice extent – 12.2 M km^2
Dec, 08 NH sea ice extent – 12.5 M km^2
Total Dec, 08 extent – 24.7 M km^2
An increase of 1.0 M km^2 from December 1979 to December 2008.
Now watch these charts get pulled by someone (too late I have saved them)
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/S_197912_extn.png
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/N_197912_extn.png
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/S_200812_extn.png
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/N_200812_extn.png
Sorry, should be a 0.8 M km^2 increase.
Dec, 79 extent should read 23.9 km^2
I am sorry but Tenny Naumer is a Dot Earth “groupie” who cannot even use Microsoft EXCEL to plot the GMST herself to see the trend for the last 7-10yrs is negative. Please take whatever she posts in that light please.
Joel shore is fully aware that the most of the MSM is in the business of selling productions to generate income. Most of the editors that conduct their (so called) journalistic “peer reviews” are looking for sensationalism that will enhance corporate bottom lines. These things are written primarily for consumption by people who the editors know have no interest in whether they were peer reviewed or not. People with political agendas like Kerry, Gore et all jump on and further contribute to whatever sensational hair raising band wagon that will elicit attention, money and power for themselves. And Joel, they don’t care whether papers are peer reviewed or not either. The facts are not the issue, the issues are their facts, when and if they support their political aims.
Anthony,
Did you read Friday’s Sacbee? Editorial on the left side below the fold. It is about extended dry periods in California. It mentions 100 year dry spells, and tree stumps well below the surface of Lake Tahoe indicating a forest grew at that level. Yet their stories on the “Sierra in Peril” and the latest one that Tom Knudsen did on rising snow levels never mentioned this reality at all. Also in the late 90s a fisherman on Fallen Leaf Lake hook debris about 50 feet below the surface. When he brought it up it looked like the top of a tree. Investigation showed it to be the top of a 300 feet tall Ponderosa Pine tree, still rooted in the ground. This was also a story in the Bee.
These folks are not only un-inquesitive, they are just plain liars. The real goal is total control at any cost.
Well it appears Gavin at RC has finally jumped into the fray. He wrote a “hypothetical” column of what HE thought Will should have written as a retraction. Kinda sad.
And wow, he really can’t take criticism well either. I commented on the article and made a point of saying it’s funny that he would write that considering his own games on the recent Steig paper. And then asked him how Will’s column is less ethical than that. Needless to say…he chose to “edit” that out so it wouldn’t appear on the website.
Re: This Nancy/Tendency-towards-Boom/baum person –
It would appear that the her/his site “Climate Change: The Next Generation” is a closed (i.e., not open to the unwashed public) site; is this true? (Unlike WUWT or CA for instance?)
BTW, I take exception to her/his cavalier attitude towards those who I see posting here who endeavor in among other areas the applied sciences (as I am) and take what we are tasked with in our our normal duties/obligations seriously, but somehow, seeking to investigate climate science and tangtential areas including the driving, undercurrents of politics we are considered un-thinking, club-wielding neanderthals and I, for one, object to such characterization!
Just want truth… says
I’ll try…But, just to point out (and I think that this may explain what you say about people on “our side” better than your own hypothesis) that our views are in the minority here. So, while you may have a hundred people here generally pretty much agreeing with each other, there are only a few of us to provide some much needed balance!
Also, if you folks would post fewer wrong things that get me all riled up then I promise that I will post less! Is it a deal?
REPLY: Hello Joel and “Just want truth”
Take a time out for a few hours, please?
Unfortunately, Joel, I don’t care one whit if you feel that you are in the minority and that somehow justifies your actions or to suggest actions to others on this forum. Essays and opinions expressed on this blog are clearly in the minority of coverage in media and press, other blogs, and in the scientific establishment. So, with that perspective your minority position here merits no particular or special treatment.
Both you guys, just take a time out and enjoy your evening and start fresh tomorrow. – Anthony
anna v:
No, the plot is deceptive. If it had actually been plotted correctly, you would rightly not have the confidence from the noise in the temperature data to conclude that the temperatures were not following the general expected trend. (It sounds to me that your argument is basically that the ends justify the means…You believe the conclusion that the temperature trends are in contradiction with the rise in CO2 so if someone chooses to vastly distort things to make that point more apparent, what is the harm?)
And, I am rather skeptical of Lucia’s results for a few reasons. First of all, it is difficult to calculate statistical error limits for correlated data and while I know that Lucia has tried to use methods that do account in some way for correlation, one can still question if she has done it correctly. And, in fact, other people who have done it (like tamino) have gotten different results. Neither of these have been peer-reviewed. And, if you want to look at peer-reviewed results, thhe fact is that over a longer period (since 1990) and as of a couple of years ago, the temperature trend was not only in line with the IPCC predictions but was actually running high of the central value: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;316/5825/709 The last couple of years have certainly brought the trend down somewhat but I doubt all that much…and in fact I think it is not wise to base much on a few years of data, lest you get whiplash since past history has shown a few years can make a lot of difference when you are focussing on trends over fairly short time intervals.
Second, the fact is that such statistical arguments have to be used with caution because, for example, about every 20 years you will in fact expect a trend over a certain length of time to fall outside a 95% confidence interval. If you consider trends over many lengths of time, then you will find it happening for at least some of the trends much more often than every 20 years. I would thus like to see results about this that are more resilient to what the exact start date and end date you choose is.
Joel Shore (20:33:22) :
No, I do not say the end justifies the means. It is the IPCC that does that. I am saying that the lens one uses to scrutinize something should be adapted to the purpose on hand. The purpose on hand for the specific plot is to show that CO2 is rising while temperature is stalled.
Now on the errors, you are right. The climate community is very cavalier with the errors. The variations of GCMs initial conditions that are done to simulate ( unsuccessfully in my opinion, but that is another story) the chaotic behavior expected of climate, are not statistical errors. Statistical errors is when one varies the parameters of the simulation while keeping the initial conditions constant. If one does that just the change of 1 sigma in albedo throws the trajectory off by 1C, and makes a mockery of any plots and claimed fits.
So I would agree that far from the science is settled, there is no predictive power in any of the climate plots, using wat are normal statistical expectations.
When the particle community announces the existence of a new particle, there is a four sigma requirement for the fits. 3 sigma are considered very interesting, two sigma maybe to be pursued. One sigma is garbage, but that is what is claimed in this Steig paper to give a warming trend to the antarctica !
I would not mind what the climate community calls reliable statistics, playiing in their sandbox. I object strongly when multibillion stakes are pushed through sot that the western society is stampeded into self immolation.
Second, the fact is that such statistical arguments have to be used with caution because, for example, about every 20 years you will in fact expect a trend over a certain length of time to fall outside a 95% confidence interval. If you consider trends over many lengths of time, then you will find it happening for at least some of the trends much more often than every 20 years. I would thus like to see results about this that are more resilient to what the exact start date and end date you choose is.
I would second this if you would accept that the same holds true for the periods 1940 to 1970 or so, a coolling interval, leaving only thirty years or so for a warming trend, and then now ten years stalling. That the world is coming out of the little ice age is