Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the US House of Representatives, there is something curiously yclept the “Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming” despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming. They have a very professionally done website, filled with some of the most outrageous misrepresentations imaginable. It is designed to promote the “Waxman-Markey” cap and trade carbon tax bill by means of the historically tried and tested “Big Lie” method, viz:
All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
I’m going to take the website’s misrepresentations one at a time, as time permits. The first one is from a page entitled “Impact Zone – U.S. New England“, which contains this lovely photograph designed to tug at the heartstrings:
Figure 1. Photo of maple trees in New England, professionally chosen for maximum emotional impact.
The accompanying text says (emphasis mine):
Global Warming in New England: Slushier Slopes and Faded Foliage
Life and economic activity across New England is marked by the seasons – maple sugaring in the spring, trips to the beach in the summer, the riot of color of the fall foliage, and the swoosh of skis and skates in the winter. This familiar cycle is already changing in noticeable ways.
Changing seasons
Since the 1970’s average winter temperatures have risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeast region. If the current rate of heat-trapping emissions continues, by 2070 summers in Boston will feel like those of South Carolina today. By the end of the century, temperatures could rise up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit in the region. Cities across New England, which historically experience only one or two days per year above 100 degrees each summer, could average 20 such days per summer, while more southern cities such as Hartford could average nearly 30 days.
The character of the seasons will change significantly. Spring could arrive three weeks earlier, with summer lengthening by about three weeks, autumn becoming warmer and drier, and winter becoming shorter and milder.
So what’s wrong with that?
Well, once we note the conjectures (marked by the weasel words in bold), we see that most of it is nothing but unfounded, un-cited alarmist claims about imaginary future calamities. They have presented only one claim of fact – that winter temperatures in the Northeast Region have risen by more than 4°F.
Now, the USHCN has the data for all of the states, as well as by region. The Northeast Region is the data that starts with “101” in the first column. Figure 2 shows the temperature record for the four seasons, as well as the annual average temperature, for the Northeast Region:
Figure 2. Annual and seasonal temperatures, US Northeast Region. Photo shows winter surf in New England. PHOTO SOURCE.
As you can see, there has not been much of a change over the last 115 years in any of the seasons. The trend for all of the datasets is not significantly different from zero (winter p=0.06, spring p=0.15, summer p=0.34, fall p=0.68, annual p=0.06).
And more to the point, the winter trend over the last 40 years (1970-2009) is only 2.7°F, not the “more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit” claimed by their website. Such a swing is not surprising in a dataset such as the winter temperatures, which shows a 10 °F swing in one year, from 2001 to 2002.
But wait … there’s more. Because of the short length (40 years) and high variability of the 1970-2009 winter temperatures, the 1970-2009 trend is not significantly different from zero either (p = 0.12, a ways from significant).
SUMMARY: Their web page contains two misrepresentations of fact about US Northeast winters, two implied misrepresentations, and a big lie:
Misrepresentation of fact 1: the 1970-2009 winter temperatures have not “risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit”, they have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no rise of more than 4 °F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.
Misrepresentation of fact 2: the 1970-2009 winter trend is not statistically significant, so we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no trend at all, much less a claimed 4 °F trend.
Implied misrepresentation 1: The US Northeast winters are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the winter record.
Implied misrepresentation 2: The seasonal temperatures in the US Northeast are not warming. Over the full period of record (1895-2009), there is no statistically significant trend in the overall record for any season.
THE BIG LIE: When you look at the full record for the US Northeast, there is no statistically significant trend anywhere. Neither spring, summer, winter, fall, nor the full annual average temperatures have any statistically significant trend for the period of the study, 1895-2009. And remember, this is measured by ground stations that contain spurious UHI warming, and there still is no warming trend.
The big lie is that the US Northeast is warming. The best records that we have say that it is not.
I will examine more of the malarkey from their web site as time permits, although the statements are so obviously untrue that it’s hardly sporting. It’s like shooting fish, not in a barrel, but in a bucket …
w.
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that sounded like hitler, but i dont think it was. who did you quote at the top of the article?
Willis writes:
“They have presented only one claim of fact – that winter temperatures in the Northeast Region have risen by more than 4°F.”
Well, yeah, but even that figure is not a report on empirical obsevations. It is a report on multiple temperatures taken on a given day and averaged. What is it with climate change folks that they are so averse to empirical observations. Take readings of temperatures at various times during the day and do not average them, please. Report on the observed facts, not on some human contrivance, which is what an average is. Each such human contrivance must be justified on grounds of scientific methodology when it replaces reports on empirical observations. (Yeah, I know, disk space is so expensive…give me a break.)
I am convinced that these people are delusional. They actually believe their silly conjectures as if they were observable fact.
Well the house _Could_ change hands Nov. and Nancy Pelosi and Waxman _Could_
be out of their jobs. These _Could_ remarks are more likely than Palm Trees in Boston….
If you were convinced you had some divine mission to create a new world order, devoid of development, but made of butterflies, windmills, and organic food (and maybe you also just happened to be a wacko nutjob who thinks half of earth’s population needs to be exterminated), How big of lie might you tell? What if your cult grew to millions of members, many in positions of world power, and a devoted following of voters to keep you there? When rational information was placed directly in front of you, perhaps you would be incapable of accepting the truth. Your propaganda might grow ever more extreme.
We don’t need merely to win the scientific debate. That appears done. This is a battle between servitude and freedom. We need national leaders who recognize this as a dangerous cult that is already bleeding our country dry. (And somehow, strangely embraces communist ideology)
It’s worse than we thought…..
The warmists will say, that’s not our website, and hey, one small error, that just happens from time to time (see glaciergate).
It’s not a lie if you believe in it.
The slumbering giant has been awakened in MA. Senator Brown is now more popular than Senator Kerry or President Obama. (Source: Boston Globe Survey) People are starting to understand what the Cape Wind project will do to their electrical bills.
Willis:
You said: “despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming.”
If AGW were a fact, it would be reasonable to promote both lowering CO2 production and oil consumption. For example, additional nuke power plants used to charge vehicle batteries (either plug-in hybrids or pure electrics), would be a good policy direction. And before somebody points out the limits of the power grid, there is a lot of excess capacity at night, when most vehicle charging would be done.
Of course, AGW is not a fact, and Waxman-Markey is not a good way to accomplish these goals.
Things are strange all over.
Just this week, the US constitution came up for vote in the Supreme Court. The consitution won on this day, but only by a five to four margin.
mike-“that sounded like hitler, but i dont think it was. who did you quote at the top of the article?”
It actually does originate with Hitler, but it was more often repeated by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Interestingly, they actually weren’t outwardly admitting to using such a technique themselves, but accusing others of doing so. Of course, like all powerful leaders in History, then had no problem using it themselves. Their most incredible lie may have perhaps been that they weren’t the ones who did this, but their enemies were. The US Office of Strategic Services had this as part of Hitler’s psychological profile:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
I wonder why they haven’t sent out teams to find Al Gore’s missing warm swaddling blanket of CO2 around the equator. In a sane world it’s absence would be the end of the lies.
As a resident of New England, I think it’s probably true that winters, on average, have been getting somewhat milder. On the other hand, my perception is that summers are about as they were in my youth. It’s interesting that the GHCN charts seem to agree with the anecdotal evidence.
The source for the “4 degree figure” may be explained by a statement on the overview page, http://globalwarming.house.gov/ : “over the last 30 years, New England’s winters have warmed by 4.4 degrees.” So perhaps you should run your regression over a slightly shorter period. If you (carefully) choose the period 1976-2005, you can get a value like that.
Of course, that’s just cherry-picking at its best. Of course, it wouldn’t do to take a century-long trend; from the data you cited, the trend from 1895-2009 is 1.7 K / century.
As to where they got the 14 deg F (8 K) increase by the end of the century, I can only assume they’re looking at the very tail of an assumed distribution of outcomes.
On the other hand, it *is* a very pretty web site, very well executed. Can’t say I’m thrilled to see my tax dollars at work on it, though.
By environmentalists’ lies like this one reported by Willis Eschenbach, 40% people in the world don’t trust any longer in science. I’m sure money won’t make those people trust in science again.
Not exactly Hitler’s thoughts on the “Big Lie”, but rather his thoughts on why the Big Lie would work. From the chapter of Mein Kampf where Hitler was was describing the three kinds of newspaper readers:
Not much has changed…
Well so much for their professionally selected emotional impactphoto. I can show you pictures of 100 places in Washington and Oregon, that look exactly like that photograph in the fall; and don’t even get me started on the Yukon Territory.
So I wouldn’t set foot in any of those New England States if they paid me to do an all expenses paid tour. I’d like a dollar for every one that the nutcake politicians that they keep re-electing in those States; have personally cost me, as a result of their ultra liberal policies that they have helped inflict on the whole Country. I wouldn’t commit a dime to the economies of that part of the country.
But other than that, I’m glad they are there, and not here in California; we’ve already got all the fruits and nuts we need ourselves.
“the 1970-2009 winter temperatures have not “risen more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit”, they have risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no rise of more than 4 °F in the winter temperature record, no matter where you start.”
Not true – they said since the 1970’s, which is a bit vague. But from 1977 the rise was 4.3F, and from 1978 it was 4.6F.
You are fond of saying that because a rise is not “statistically significant” then it’s not a rise. But statistical significance applies to a particular model of random variation imputed to the data, and yours (independent, normally distributed residuals, I presume) is only one of many possible.
In any case, a rise is a rise. A hot day is never statistically significant, but it is still hot.
I went to the web site and as I live in Australia, I had a look at the Australian section.
What a collection of misinformation !
Section on drought. We have always had drought, the driest inhabited country on the planet, but at the moment, is covered in water. Just ask the people who live in western Queensland and north western New South Wales. Lake Eyre in central Australia is full and the tourists are flocking there to see this event. Even today the flood waters are still making their way down the Darling River.
The statement “The Murray-Darling River System, which produces well over half of the country’s water supply, dropped 54 percent below its record low.” Is clearly wrong, how can you have 54% less than zero ??? Check out the 1916 picture of the Murray River on jennifermarohasy.com, and while you are there, read the article on the Murray River.
When they say that the Murray Darling system “produces well over half of the country’s water supply”, they give the impression that the water is for drinking, when the river system is in the remotest, least populated part of Australia.
Maybe they should have checked out the Burdekin River system and dam in north Queensland and found that there is plenty of water, more water than the Murray-Darling has ever seen. The water in north Queensland rivers is more than enough to supply all Australia, but there is no infrastructure to capture it and pipe it to the major population centers. We need something like the Californian Canal and then water problems in this country would be solved.
The Barrier Reef, I have never read such nonsense.
I live just south of the Great Barrier Reef, Hervey Bay. Now retired at almost 70, owned and ran a successful tourist business for years, and have never seen any decline in the quality of the reef ! I still travel regularly to Lady Elliot Island and Lady Musgrave and they are as they were 50 years ago. Even the sea level has not risen. I still drop anchor in the same places my father did 60 years ago.
Anyone who found that web site and read that nonsense, would come away with the totally wrong impression of what Australia is really like.
“”” Mike G says:
June 29, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Things are strange all over.
Just this week, the US constitution came up for vote in the Supreme Court. The consitution won on this day, but only by a five to four margin. “””
That’s what happens when you have important decisions made by people who are ESL disadvantaged.
Evidently four of them don’t understand the meaning of the word “infringed”; and they evidently also don’t understand that those “people” they were discussing; who have certain unalienable rights; are exactly the same “people” who about 30 some odd words earlier are guaranteed the right to meet peacably to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
Evidently they think you are only allowed to exercise your free speech or religion rights, if you are a member of an organized militia.
Thanks again, Willis, for another factual post. You seem to do these analyses with more facility that most of us do crude guesses on the back of envelopes. Even the latter, though, seem to be more realistic than the fancy-graphics Official Publications.
Speaking, as we are and as we were in the “Stupidest Article” thread, of expensive publications expressing complete scientific, technical, and economic illiteracy while dancing around the Magic Renewable Energy Fountain chasing the Global Warming Fairy, my vote for the prize goes to the UK — check out http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/
and download their beautifully graphic, full-color book. It’s hilarious.
One way to tell Eschenbach is practicing the Big Lie: He accuses others.
“Malarkey?” Loutish, offensive, and revelatory. Had Eschenbach a case, he’d not be trying a stand-up routine.
Ed Brayton is a lot better at stand-up, by the way.
Per the NCDC’s web site (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/regional.html), the winters in the northeast region are on a -13.2°F trend per century since 1995. I would imagine most NE residents would love to have some of that missing 4°F warming instead.
Leave it to the politicos to just flat-out lie.
p=0.06 is pretty close to significant especially since in environmental monitoring it is not uncommon to loosen the threshold from p=0.05 to p=0.1. What is the statistical power of these tests? At any rate, to argue against p=0.06 we should say that is would take x number of years at x temp to move that to .05.
I don’t know why the alarmists don’t use p=0.1 more often, I think they could make a legitimate argument.
Nick Stokes says: “You are fond of saying that because a rise is not “statistically significant” then it’s not a rise. But statistical significance applies to a particular model of random variation imputed to the data, and yours (independent, normally distributed residuals, I presume) is only one of many possible.”
Yes, it is only one of “many possible”, the only problem for you is that it is a very conservative model, which means just about any other model one could think of, would be even less likely to find the trends significant.
“In any case, a rise is a rise. A hot day is never statistically significant, but it is still hot.”
What a remarkable anti-scientific (by virtue of being anti-statistical) statement! A hot day is not statistically significant, because a hot day is something which occurs by random chance! The purpose of statistical significance is to ask whether something is unusual enough to suggest you need to refine your model. For a rise to be worth even talking about in terms of causation, it needs to rise to the level of actually being distinguishable from “noise”. If it does not, then you can’t say it isn’t just a fluke. I can’t believe you think that a rise that is not distinguishable from white noise is somehow important.
While I’m having my rant, I left out the bit about the “Wild Fires”.
The reasons for the wild fires in Australia are well known, but of course governments won’t address the problems.
Government won’t allow clearing of leaf litter and fuel in the forests because it may destroy the habitat of some form of wild life, which will ultimately be destroyed when the fires do come. Governments “Green” logic.
Fires in the forest have been started by poorly maintained electricity power lines falling down in high winds that come in the dry season.
People die in these fires because they want to live “green” and live in the forest. The government prevents them from clearing adequate fire breaks around their properties, so the houses burn.
The last lot of fires in Victoria showed how inadequate the fire warning systems were. “None”.
People didn’t know they were under threat, while the heads of the emergency services were out to dinner with their mobile (cell) phones turned OFF. ( See the results of the inquiry into the Victorian Bush fires)
Nothing to do with climate change, global warming, just pure human incompetence.