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.
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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.