Excerpts:
Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future “such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent”. He didn’t explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.
The paragraphs above are from Christopher Booker in his Telegraph column. He also cites a recent WUWT post, among others.
h/t to Richard North of EU Referendum
No way Ryan. Consider the following.
Today is hot, science says that there will be more days like this in the future due to climate change… in NO WAY attributes the current day to climate change.
Ahhh George Gr…. you mean I should take account of something not quoted by booker, or referenced by Booker, when discussing the content of his opinion piece? opf course why didn’t I realise!
Got this from David Holland:
Some people may have missed the important confession from the Met Office Chief Scientist in the only public session on Climategate held by the House of Commons Select Committee on 1 March 2010.
MP, Graham Stringer, asked in Q209:
“Is there a problem with scientific software? We have had emails from Professor Darrel Ince and from Professor Les Hatton saying that there are severe problems with scientific software. Do you think that is a general problem in UK or world science?”
Met Office Chief Scientist Julia Slingo replied [Emphasis added.]:
“Yes. Around the UEA issue, of course, we did put the code out at Christmas time, before Christmas, along with the data because I felt very strongly that we needed to have the code out there so that it could be checked. If you think about the sorts of codes that we use in climate modelling, we are literally talking of hundreds of thousands of lines of code–I know because I have written some of them–and of course, there will be errors in them. At least for the UK the codes that underpin our climate change projections are the same codes that we use to make our daily weather forecasts, so we test those codes twice a day for robustness.”
Graham Stringer then asked:
“You do not always get it right though, do you”
Professor Slingo replied [Emphasis added.]:
“No, but that is not an error in the code; that is to do with the nature of the chaotic system that we are trying to forecast. Let us not confuse those. We test the code twice a day every day. We also share our code with the academic sector, so the model that we use for our climate prediction work and our weather forecasts, the unified model, is given out to academic institutions around the UK, and increasingly we licence it to several international met services: Australia, South Africa, South Korea and India. So these codes are being tested day in, day out, by a wide variety of users and I consider that to be an extremely important job that we do because that is how we find errors in our codes, and actually it is how we advance the science that goes into our codes as well. So of course, a code that is hundreds of thousands of lines long undoubtedly has a coding error in it somewhere, and we hope that through this process we will discover it. Most of the major testing is very robust.”
See:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38724.htm
There is no point in trying to reason with MattB, he is well known on other Forums as a hardened warmist who totally ignores any facts presented to him.
But we can try, Chris Booker was only using part of the WWF quote as Matt well knows here is some of the rest of it:
Quote:
“I think that the heat we are suffering from now as well as very low temperatures we had this winter, are hydro-meteorological tendencies that are equally harmful for us as they both were caused by human impact on weather and the greenhouse effect which has grown steadily for the past 30-40 years. Besides, if 15 years ago we registered only 150-200 negative climate alterations, now we are facing 350-400, mainly storms, hurricanes, floods, heavy snowfalls, which are all very harmful”, said Alexey Kokorin.
The British Telegraph newspaper is regularly read by ‘educated’ people, Mr Bookers column appeals to the higher end of the educated as they can understand what he writes, without relying on drawings and pictures, not being British nor well educated, I find myself sympathizing with Mr Booker it appears that even here on WUWT their are people with profound learning difficulties.
@Andrew W
Booker dismisses an individual weather events as proof of ACC, which is fair enough, but then hypocritically sights an individual weather event 130 years ago as proof against ACC.
Ridiculous.
I think you have completely missed the point. Booker was saying that if there was a similar event 130 years ago (which can’t have been due to AGW), why does the current event have to be due to it ? Every time you read a media statement that says “worst this or that in 100 years, and this is evidence of AGW”, can’t you see how ridiculous the statement is ?
The photo is beautifully composed, and is reminiscent of paintings of the American West, as DirkH noted above (July 25, 2010 at 7:12 pm). I meant nothing more.
/Mr Lynn
Mattb says:
July 26, 2010 at 1:40 am
“More likely, having now read your blog and life story, it appears likely that you’ve never really made a science based call in your life, and you used to blindly follow the warmists without really knowing what was going on, and now you follow skeptics without really knowing what is going on.”
How typical, just like the rest of the supporters of CAGW cargo cult climate science served up by the IPCC, Mattb has resorted to personal attacks once the debate has been lost!
From this point on I will no longer be bothering to read any of Mattb’s hysterical and biased drivel.
I’m guessing this is what Booker read.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100721/159893787.html
For the past four weeks temperatures across western Russia have topped 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), killing scores of people and creating what is thought to be the worst drought since 1972.
“Such long periods of summer drought have been registered before, for instance, in 1936, but over the past few years they have become more frequent,” Alexei Kokorin, the head of WWF Russia’s climate program, told RIA Novosti.
End
hehe
When was the last worst drought?1936,1972 or over the past few years?
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100720/159876475.html
funny article
The Russian traffic police chief ordered on Tuesday an examination into the effects of high temperatures on drivers and police officers as the abnormal heat continues to ravage Russia.
“Russia’s chief sanitary official [Gennady Onishchenko] and I have signed a directive for those regions of Russia where traffic is most intense and where the heat is the same as in Moscow,” Viktor Kiryanov said at a news conference.
“The temperature is about 5 degrees higher because of the asphalt. How does this affect drivers and inspectors?” he asked.
A post of mine seems to have disappeared sorry – I had explained that the booker opinion piece does not make any reference to the extended quotation by the Russian WWF guy, and as such my comments above were based on Booker’s opinion piece and the quotation he used and I stand by my comments.
The longer quote does show that this guy is a lot more certain about it than science would permit so unlike the assertion by AC Osborn I am in fact entirely reasonable and gladly agree that this sort of exaggerated comment is not useful.
Booker twice makes reference to the Grantham Institutes on Climate Change, and their benefactor, money manager Jeremy Grantham. Lord Stern of the Stern Review and Bob Ward reside there.
In his latest newsletter, Jeremy gives investment advice, and inserts two pages about climate alarmism, “All You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes.” Anthony, one of your guest authors might have fun with those arguments.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34545694/Jeremy-Grantham-GMO-Summer-Essays-071910
Just an aside, I find it interesting that Matt calls it ACC instead of AGW. Hell could freeze over and the IPCC would ask for more money to save us from a coming ice age.
As much as I hate giving MSM a pass, we all have to remember that W. R. Hurst taught the MSM how to sell papers. Follow me here, “If it bleeds, it leads.” With their embrace of CAGW, all they’re doing is more of the same.
Very few “News Media” types have any serious degrees in hard science, the sole wonderful exception being the Meteorologists, of whom, our Anthony Watts is a splendid example. It isn’t really coincidence that most of the CAGW believers aren’t really based in hard science. The difference between those who are, e.g. Pielke Sr., and the others is clear in the quality of the papers. I would differentiate between CAGW and AGW, as I agree, we are changing the climate through land use, but no it won’t be catastrophic. In this sense, I place Dr. Pielke in the latter catagory.
Here’s another Telegraph piece about recovered mail from a 60 year old plane crash on Mont Blanc, the 22 yeal old student, who found the mail bag while on the way to the bathroom, was in the Alps studying “Global Warming”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7910096/Letters-frozen-in-time-arrive-after-60-years.html
A cold front over Washington. It’s Global Warming!:
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/news/local_news/New_Jersey_Storm_Damage_07_26_10
Questions for Mr. Watts: If the temperture interpolations and extrapolations for worldwide temperature maps were removed, such that only the actual stations were considered, and then those were split into urban vs rural, oceanic vs land, what would the effect be on calculated global temperature changes? Does the math that creates the temperature maps change the calculated anomalies? If the changes are, indeed, global, should not a subset (the stations only) show the same trends, and show them regardless of where you look?
Doug Proctor says:
July 26, 2010 at 8:22 am
Take a look at the the Chefios analysis of all the various Country’s temperature histories.
You will need to go in to the Categories section of his site because it was done a while ago.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/dtdt/
Mattb
Ryan has it right. He’s talking about an illogical bind. The bind is that there are climate abnormalities. By accepting this you then have to decide if increasing in the future is reasonable. The problem is you have accepted the idea of climate abnormalities without rational thought or evidence. You have already committed without knowing about it.
Robert Cialdini wrote a great book called Influence about this kind of thing.
What you should ask is what are climate abnormalities exactly and show me where you got that?
Abnormalities is an odd choice of word. Extremes would be better. No matter what the climate there are extremely hot days and extremely cold days, but they are not abnormal, in fact there HAVE to be extremes.
Ed Murphy says: July 25, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I seem to recall a lot of people were thinking AGW was bs, only to switch back sides again after it got really hot and dry again following the solar cycle 23 max(s). Anybody else seem to recall that?
I have never seen evidence of a single person who was skeptical of the AGW hysterical theatrics being persuaded to alter his/her philosophy based on temporal weather. Please provide a reference.
Mattb says:
July 26, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Abnormalities is an odd choice of word. Extremes would be better. No matter what the climate there are extremely hot days and extremely cold days, but they are not abnormal, in fact there HAVE to be extremes.
Reply: What is odd is that you now appear to be talking about the weather as opposed to the climate. You are confusing yourself with your Jedi mind tricks!
rplying to Tim Clark (27 JLY 10):
try a look at this one:
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.com
Regards,
Mike the Pundit
Since they are saying that last winter’s weather was due to global warming, it almost sounds like the ‘doublespeak’ of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ has come around about 26 years behind schedule.
Ref – Crossopter says:
July 26, 2010 at 3:28 am
“It was quite something to be in CCCP Leningrad, formerly Stalingrad, just prior to ‘perestroika ‘ in ’89.”
_____________________________
Ohhhhhhh For The Good Old Days! It was so easy then to blame everything on the Evil Empire. Imagine how this AGW stuff would have been handled then. In today’s situation, it’s so very hard to blame your banker and main investor for all your problems; we’re really in a pickle barrel. Schucks! Schucks! Schucks!