Guest post by Harold Ambler of “Talking about the weather”
Climbing down is seldom anything less than complicated.
Here’s something that you can bring to the bank: With regard to global warming, the major purveyors of news in the industrialized world will be climbing down from their various versions of frenzied alarmism. Here’s something else that you can bring to your banker: the climb-down will be sneaky. On the other hand, when the series of editorial re-positionings is visible to casual members of the public at all, it will be beyond awkward.
How do I know? Because the process has already begun.
When in 2009 Arianna Huffington approved my piece about the merits of skeptical climate science, the HuffPo was attempting to get a start on its own climb-down. As I had written to Huffington, more than once, and heard back from her personally, more than once, I knew that she had considered my argument that it was not a question of whether the big news dogs would have to eat a little humble pie on climate but rather when. Huffington’s response was to publish “Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted.” It is safe to say that she badly underestimated two things: (1) the amount of traffic that the article would receive and (2) the amount of pressure that would be applied to her for the heretical decision to publish it. As for the former, the piece remains the third-most e-mailed blogger piece in HuffPo history. This, despite the fact that “Apology Accepted” was removed from the front end of the site. (Google searching the story still calls it up.) Within hours of being put up on HuffPo, the article had gone viral (to the extent that a climate piece can). Eventually, the piece wound up being translated into dozens of languages, getting cited by television pundits, and being published in part in The Wall Street Journal and The National Review Online, among many other places.
You could argue that the tempest in a teakettle was representative of the surprise – and in some cases horror – that a solidly left-leaning American media outlet like the HuffPo had betrayed its own principles. You can also see, especially in retrospect, how the global warming alarm industry was rightly perceived as vulnerable, standing, as it were, on quivering legs above the precipice of truth. This was the news in the brief, but red-hot, global response to a lone blog article: maybe the climb-down would happen faster than even the most hopeful skeptics could have imagined.
That’s when the second thing that Huffington underestimated – the storm of protest from her own camp – came into play. Whatever was said to her publicly, and privately, was enough to induce her to disavow knowing anything about me, or having read my piece at all. Again, however, she had already corresponded with me by e-mail more than once by this time. My final e-mail to her, prior to publication, was this:
Hi Arianna. Happy New Year! I have written a 2,000-word piece on why Al Gore is wrong about climate. May it increase your enjoyment of the New Year so much that you feel compelled to publish it!
All the best,
Harold Ambler
Arianna’s response:
Many thanks, Harold. I’m CCing our blog editor, David Weiner to coordinate. All the best, Arianna.
Three days later, however, Huffington had a sudden change of heart, issuing a statement that included the following:
When Ambler sent his post, I forwarded it to one of our associate blog editors to evaluate, not having read it. I get literally hundreds of posts a week submitted like this and obviously can’t read them all — which is why we have an editorial process in place. The associate blog editor published the post. It was an error in judgment. I would not have posted it. Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues.
The key word in understanding Huffington’s original acceptance and later misstatements is “coordinate.” If you’re going to take her word for not having read the piece you have to argue that “coordinate” means read and evaluate. This would mean that a busy editor is delegating authority, rather than exercising it, and runs counter to any reasonable reading of Huffington’s message. If she were to delegate authority to an underling for deciding whether to publish what was a potentially scandalous piece, she would not do so in view of the writer. What “coordinate” clearly means, in the context of the warm phrase “many thanks,” is “I have green-lighted this, and the editor I’m cc’ing is going to do be the one to get your piece up and on the site.”
What could get a high-powered editor to move from friendly acceptance to public disavowal in three days’ time? My own theory is that it was the threatened withdrawal of her blog’s funding. (Huffington declined to respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.)
It is highly unlikely that any media outlet will be able to compete with The Huffington Post for awkward climb-downs on climate, after this particular debacle. But, strange as it may seem today, even Huffington’s website will have to honor its master’s flickering epiphany of early 2009, and step away from the global warming cant prevalent during the past two decades. Having been first to the skeptic party among liberal media players, The Huffington Post will now, after its hasty departure, likely be the last to return. So, which publication will be next, and what kind of rhetorical outfit will it put on?
Climate skeptic bloggers like to suggest, in an effort at comedy, that media outlets warning of a global meltdown will casually ease themselves back into the journalistic garb of “a manmade ice age is nigh.” The idea here is that, whenever possible, writers and editors will prefer to skip the skeptics’ ball altogether. If the prognostications of Russian solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov and others like him, predicting a solar-driven descent into cooler temperatures during the next few decades, prove to be correct, this seems likely. Pointing to the shift in direction of the global mean temperature and asserting that “it’s mankind’s fault, we were right all along, only it’s going to be dangerously cold,” is likely to be the dress worn by The New York Times, for one. For the Times has been shifting out of warming and cooling scare story gowns for more than a hundred years. Whoever else in the media world has been especially wrong about global warming is likely to put on this same dress, too. A brief list of outlets that have made a name for themselves in global warming alarmism: The Weather Channel, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, NPR, PBS, the BBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, and, last but not least, my former employer: The New Yorker. This last takes great pride in getting the facts right, and yet has gotten the central fact about Earth’s climate, that it is cyclical and has been cooling since several thousand years ago, wrong.
When The New York Times Magazine published a long story about Freeman Dyson last year, it was arguably the start of a down-climb on the part of the newspaper as a whole. Howls of scorn were heard throughout the media world over the piece. It turns out, when it comes to climate, that such agonized sounds are the tell-tale signs that the journalists have gotten something right. Since the piece about Dyson, of course, the Times, led by Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Andy Revkin, has returned to the position that if it’s weather and it’s bad, then it was caused by global warming.
If past experience is any guide, when the Times’ climb-down eventually begins in earnest, most people will barely notice. But you will!
There are some AGW proponents that will _never_ climb down. One can imagine them stood at the end of the Mississippi Glacier watching it calve into the Gulf of Mexico saying “when this lot melts its going to get really hot!”.
They can go jump.
The BBC has been mentioned several times here, and it should be pointed out that their coverage of climate change has been heavily criticized to the point of a new directive being forced upon all their editors from on high. Look at this report:
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13 Oct 2010
BBC told to ensure balance on climate change.
Climate change sceptics are likely to be given greater prominence in BBC documentaries and news bulletins following new editorial guidelines that call for impartiality in the corporation’s science coverage.
The BBC has been repeatedly accused of bias in its reporting of climate change issues. Last year one of its reporters, Paul Hudson, was criticised for not reporting on some of the highly controversial “Climategate” leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, even though he had been in possession of them for some time. Climate change sceptics have also accused the BBC of not properly reporting “Glaciergate”, when a study from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that glaciers would melt by 2035 was discredited.
But the BBC’s new editorial guidelines, published yesterday after an extensive consultation that considered over 1,600 submissions by members of the public, say expressly for the first time that scientific issues fall within the corporation’s obligation to be impartial.
“The BBC must be inclusive, consider the broad perspective, and ensure that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected,” said BBC trustee Alison Hastings. “In addition the new guideline extends the definition of ‘controversial’ subjects beyond those of public policy and political or industrial controversy to include controversy within religion, science, finance, culture, ethics and other matters.”
In 2007, a BBC Trust report called “Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century” said: “Climate change is another subject where dissenters can be unpopular … The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.”
The BBC Trust is also currently conducting a separate review into impartiality in the corporation’s science coverage, led by Professor Steve Jones from University College London, which will report in the spring of 2011. Professor Jones has been asked to consider whether the BBC’s output “gives appropriate weight to scientific conclusions including different theories and due weight to the views expressed by those sceptical about the science and how it was conducted or evaluated.”
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BBC producers are in a bind about this. They have a fanatical devotion to AGW, and yet are now being ORDERED to balance their “man-made global warming” messages and bulletins with heretical inputs from sceptics. What are they to do? Simple. Don’t mention any phrase which links any events (especially weather events) with “climate change”, “global warming”, or man-made carbon dioxide because that would trigger an automatic right-to-reply from the sceptics. And that’s why they’ve become very quiet on the “global warming” front. They still allude to “climate change”, of course, but the days of letting the “global warming” mob run rampant all over BBC TV and radio channels unchallenged are well and truly over.
I really DO have a profound admiration for the Japanese.
Anthony, I believe you are a pretty well educated fellow, both in Weather, climate, and dare I guess CULTURE!
Now it is little remembered that over 1000 Japanese military officers “did the honorable thing” on the steps of the Imperial Palace in the month after the war was over. (Special guards eventually were posted to try to intercept the remainder as it was getting to be a problem, even health wise, all the “bio-essense” left in that small area…)
I would humbly suggest that the “Al Gore” side are going to “lose face” in a major way in the next year or two. A variety of things will “come together” to cause that.
I just wish that they had 1/2 the integrity of the Japanese military command, with regard the “proper thing to do” after such a major loss of face. Alas, they’ll probably just try to re-write history, as Arrianna did…and say, “Hey, we were just mis-understood! Did we say ‘Global Warming’…whoops, TYPO, we meant cooling..”
Search for “climate change” on these pages.
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/08/06/conservation-a-disease-could-wipe-out-bats/
http://www.apocadocs.com/cgi-bin/docdisp.cgi?tag=white+nose+syndrome
“Regardless of what you think about climate change, here are a bunch of things that are smart to do. It will save consumers money, it will save the country as much money going into foreign oil imports, so let’s concentrate on things that we just know are smart to do.”
The President of the United States: Monday, 25 October 2010
http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/complete-transcript-of-obama-interview-20101024
Turboblocke says:
October 25, 2010 at 1:26 pm
“JimG: You don’t have to have Dutch parents to have Dutch citizenship:”
You may be right as I was going by :
1. Wikipedia
2. What I had heard from other sources word of mouth.
Should have known better. My comment still stands, however, regarding the exogenous variables of immigration, nutrition and genetics not being equal and the better methodology of change in generational stature as a better measure of what is going on as opposed to using the stature per se to sell socialized medicine.
AGW gang, please do not climb down……Jump!
Harold Ambler,
Outstanding work! I’m delighted to hear third-most e-mailed blogger piece in HuffPo history, but I’m also a little disappointed that I didn’t know it has been sitting there for almost 2yrs.
Thanks,
Dave
Here is exactly is what the climate climbdown will look like:
Did you hear that? It will be just plain silence. They will simply not say a word and try to behave as if nothing had ever been said on it. They will just go silent on the issue. The damage is done, we have a generation of children who have been indoctrinated that it is a fact. They really don’t need to say anything more at this point, they have won. Facts are beside the point.
Frank Lee says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:48 am
“Another question is this: How will skeptics handle the collapse of alarmism? I, for one, am in no mood to be nice. My career, my social life, and my sanity have been harmed by vicious attacks by alarmists. I’m not going to forget that.”
I’m with you. I intend to be as rude and obnoxious as I can be to the these idiots. The academics who have pushed this bs on the politicians need to lose their jobs and pensions.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for any mea culpas. This “climb-down” will be neither smooth nor easy (nor even civil), there is just too much money involved. Ask yourself this question: Will outlets like the New York Times and others risk alienating the few remaining readers they have on the left in order to attract new readership from a more independent or conservative market demographic? They might, but I haven’t seen this happen as their market and economic prognostications have fallen into ruin. On the other hand, they might end up like the buggy whip manufacturers; they still exist but when was the last time a representative of this industry was ever ask for his view of the larger economic issues.
James Hansen? Al Gore? Pachauri IPCC?
The biggest villain in all this alarmist claptrap is of course James Hansen who is little known among members of the ordinary public.
By the way, the climbdown is going to be SLOW, the SLOW speed of which will depend on the the weather/climate turn-around.
Which part of ‘I get hundreds of these and haven’t read it’ don’t you understand? It seems very plain to me. Maybe you have gone a bit astray in finding something in a plain statement that simply isn’t there?
If you apply Occam’s razor you can do without your theory.
richard telford says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:41 am
“………Surely the last bleat that reality contradicts the second law of thermodynamics must come before……..”
Yep, that’s probably why we have all of those perpetual motion machines running to and fro right now. Do you guys ever tire of showing yourself to be wrong? It is sooo tedious to read anymore.
Here, chew on this for a while….
The Clausius theorem (1854) states that in a cyclic process
The equality holds in the reversible case and ‘less than’ is in the irreversible case. The reversible case is used to introduce the state function entropy. This is because in cyclic process the variation of a state function is zero.
Frank Lee says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:48 am
Another question is this: How will skeptics handle the collapse of alarmism? I, for one, am in no mood to be nice. My career, my social life, and my sanity have been harmed by vicious attacks by alarmists. I’m not going to forget that.
Alarmism won’t collapse, there will be a swing to global cooling, and it will still be our fault, so the same stupid solutions will be put out there, except this time lowering CO2 will warm the planet so we don’t all die in another ice age. Or we could find something else to be alarmed about, not sure what it would be, but there must be something.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for any kind of climb-down by any side in the debate.
ZZZ @ur momisugly October 25, 2010 at 11:26 am
In 1980, prior to the first presidential election in which I was to vote, I clipped a column from the paper explaining Reagan’s foreign policy vision, that he truly believed the USSR was on its last legs and the Cold War could be won. The firestorm which erupted in the letters to the editor was something to behold. When I shared the column with liberal friends, they all scoffed that it just showed how out of touch the old man was.
Today, they say the USSR fell because of it had strayed from the ideal of Communism, and anyone can see in retrospect that it was doomed, and Reagan had nothing to do with it. And, of course, they have no memory of my sharing that column with them.
Gareth Evans says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:25 am
Biodiversity is the new big one
While climate models cannot possibly tell the future, many species are already extinct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Extinct_subspecies – do you see the difference bewteen theory and practice? It would be sad to live in a world without a tiger…
As i’ve commented before this turned political years ago, a couple of scape goats and Buisness as usual. Don’t expect much from people that towed the political line, your be disappionted if you do.
Vuk etc. says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:44 am
“Humans are very adaptable creatures,”.
Yes, and journalists are VERY adaptable. They will be like vultures on the AGW carcass when the avalanche starts. Believe me. They will just sell it as yet another story.
crosspatch says:
October 25, 2010 at 2:20 pm
“Here is exactly is what the climate climbdown will look like:
Did you hear that? It will be just plain silence. ”
Damn, maybe you are right crosspatch. thats what happened to the ozone hole, wasnt it?
The BBC as I understand has invested billions of pounds of pension fund moneys in green companies and carbon .They will start pushing biodiversity and ocean acidification,because their all caused by the same co2 bogeyman.
Invariant
We can’t freeze nature in time, species will be made extinct throughout our lives. I’m all for minimising man’s contribution to the extinction rate, but I’m not for another expensive propoganda exercise that has the sole intention of levering more money and power towards the UN. Read the link I provided and you’ll see they’ve used the exact same template as that used for AGW. We’ll be paying through the nose for a self appointed ‘gold standard’ of science which is actually nothing of the sort. Like the IPCC before it, the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has been set up with premeditated conclusions and goals that are non-negotiable. It is quite unashamedly a tool for global wealth redistribution.
I do have a problem with a paragraph in the original article, but it’s possible that I am confused. You say:
“In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not “complicated.” When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998. ”
Now I can understand why the changes you mention might have caused those ripples in the CO2 record, but what is the mechanism which delays the impact of a temperature in 1200AD to a CO2 level in 2000AD? What are the physics involved? Perhaps you can understand why I’m struggling. It isn’t enough to say that the 2 variables are correlated – you are suggesting that the correlation is causal and that’s what makes me confused. I don’t think we know enough over 800 year timescales to know what is causal and what isn’t.
I think there’s some wishful thinking here. To the extent that there is a “climbdown” it will be more along the lines of a “forgetting”. A slow deflation of climate news which will be replaced by something else over the years.
The harm done will not be acknowledged…nor the ongoing programs ended. We will still have CFL or LED lightbulbs….still drive smaller cars….etc. We still may have carbon taxes because it is a form of consumption tax which raises more money for the government
Nuclear will still be feared, Coal will be dirty and unsafe, oil will still have to be conserved at all costs. Domestic production will still be profoundly restricted….scaring the land, dirty, and ugly…oh did I mention dirty?
So even tho the wizards of smart maybe have gotten it slightly wrong, their solutions were still correct