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!
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Matt: “Which part of ‘I get hundreds of these and haven’t read it’ don’t you understand?”
The bit where she doesn’t say “And I don’t even read the ones I publish”
John Whitman says:
October 25, 2010 at 12:06 pm
“What has played out in the blogosphere does need to be constantly summarized, consolidated and chronicled.” – Agreed; – and constantly recalled, lest we forget. However it will probably be sanitized as such: The politicians will claim they acted on the advice of their scientific advisors. The Scientists will claim they were following the science. The media will claim they were reflecting the scientific view. In the end they will all claim that “science “is the winner, that the scientific method is “healthy”. This skepticism will have become redundant, the counter arguments and rebuttals assimilated. The “system” will take the credit and so in the end maybe it will be science that “wins”.
I’ve been wondering if the end will come when the story about the biggest fraud in history is bigger than the story about some climate disruptions somewhere possibly causing some damage. Could be a Tipping Point there somewhere.
You really don’t understand the MSM.
Never explain!
Never apologise!
Simples!!
Good one RK. “their solutions were still correct” My Sister-in-law who lives on a disabled pension has had to suffer in a cold house all winter because of the increased power bills (with massive increases to come). With any luck she will die 10-15 years prematurely thereby reducing the drain on the planets resources.
“crosspatch says:
“Here is exactly is what the climate climbdown will look like:
Did you hear that? It will be just plain silence. ”
kwik says:
Damn, maybe you are right crosspatch. thats what happened to the ozone hole, wasnt it?”
I don’t know about elsewhere, but it’s also what happened in the UK in regard to AIDS. Once upon a time there were virtually daily stories about how there would be an enormous body count throughout the country – we’d be stepping over corpses in the streets. You couldn’t read a newspaper without being aware of the impending megadeaths.
Now, I can’t remember when I last noticed an article about AIDS in the UK.
And how many articles/TV reports have I seen wondering what happened to all the predictions? None. Not a single one. It’s like it never happened.
The average man in the street doesn’t care that much. He may notice a slow trend towards ethanol blend fuel and political jabbering about CAGW but largely, this debate is yawn yawn, not affecting him today and is just the same noise as all political debate. This is a debate held on the fringes by zealots who care one way or another and scientists and financiers who look to make money out of it. Your local nightly news will not lead with it but may have the ocassional gratuitious reference given by some alarmist “expert” (we have Tim Flannery) dragged out to comment on the science. The only climb down we will see is when there is no longer any support AND there is someone to blame for misleading us (eg “the Team”). If you look carefully, it will begin with less zeal from the reporters who will quietly back out the debate and begin blame shifting to “experts” so as to demonstrate a level of deniability if/when the worm turns.
I think that most commenters here are underestimating the good sense of an increasing percentage of the general public and their increased abilities to see through scams of all types.
First, a much larger number of ordinary citizens of the last couple of generations have travelled quite extensively and been exposed to different and for them, new ideas and thinking.
Secondly, the public have been very exposed to a continuing saga of major scams and social and economic disasters all of which were very heavily promoted by the MSM [ but was eventually and widely exposed through the medium of the internet ] as the “next great thing” so there is a wariness and a cynicism and a rapidly decreasing trust in the MSM, the politicals and bureaucracy that was not evident a couple of decades ago.
We have been fooled just a few times too many!
Thirdly, the internet has brought immense amounts of alternative information formerly only available from the MSM and public libraries, to the public at the press of a few buttons.
Fourth is the fact that our populations in the west are aging.
A higher percentage of older and more experienced people now make up the population base and those older generations have experienced and seen a few too many scams in their lives to just blindly accept another possible scam without harboring quite a few doubts and wanting to be completely convinced.
This older generation have also seen most of the huge changes and variations in the everyday and seasonal weather / climate patterns.
They have experienced the almost continuous advocacy by the modern day MSM in support of numerous unproven and politically correct causes followed by the exposure and collapse of those same causes as well as the over the top promotion by the MSM of “cannot lose” corporations that have then collapsed in monstrous financial scams.
They are now cynical about many of the claims that are now part and parcel of the MSM’s offerings to their reading public.
And now that cynical attitude is slowly swinging into the scientific arena with all the down side consequences that will create for the funding and respect for the science of the future.
[ It would be interesting to see a breakdown into age groups of the levels of belief in the AGW premise and the trust in science and scientists in general. ]
The open access to to mankind’s information base through the internet has also required the development of an individual’s personal filter to filter BS from genuine and solidly based information.
So a good percentage of the public now may say they believe in or accept the AGW premise but they may well have some deep internal doubts about the real truth of the AGW claims and are quite open to being convinced otherwise about AGW when the mass of opinion swings away from the AGW premise.
And this personal filtering of information due mostly to the role of the internet now plays in disseminating information almost instantaneously has had another effect of bringing doubt upon the many claims of the MSM even more so when the MSM’s news stories are shown [ by web based sources ] to be false, corrupted or biased and slanted towards a particular ideology or advocacy.
Hence the continuing fall in the present day’s MSM’s standing and the continuous drop off in circulation numbers.
The MSM, scientists, politicals and extremist advocates are slowly drifting into a situation that they have never faced before in that all their pronouncements on any subject can be recalled almost instantaneously possibly for many decades ahead.
Unlike previous times when to check a story and a source you had to slowly, with a lot of time and labour, wend your way back through vast quantities of old papers or spend hours in dusty libraries to find the information, now you press a few keys, spend perhaps a few minutes to an hour or so and there is the story in all it’s original former glory and from which the promoter of that particular story or advocacy cannot escape.
The longer term consequences for the lives, careers and social advancement are still completely unrealised by the vast majority of those who are outspoken and extremist advocates of scenarios which will and have been proven to be false and possibly nefarious in their intent.
Their record will remain there on the WWW in the decades ahead for all to see.
Will the AGW cult go away?
No, cults just disappear after all the believers are dead.
And as was once said, Science advances death by death and so it will be with global warming/ climate change.
Cassandra King wrote:
And the funny acronym you’re looking for is IPBES (or ipBes if you prefer the less bureaucratic, logo-friendly version): “Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services”.
Not sure what the difference is in UN-speak between a “Panel” (as in IPCC) and a “Platform” (as in IPBES), and there may or may not be any significance to the proximity of Science and Policy on this Platform, but it does suggest that someone’s been listening to those “scientists” who insist that governments should pay more attention to their recommendations.
And/or perhaps this “Platform” is intended to give greater legitimacy to the green NGO’s – who have performed midwifery tasks (above and beyond the call of duty) in the birth of IPBES.
I’m inclined to think that the “climbdown” will be will be buried under many hops, skips and jumps to the new, improved “scare”: “unprecedented loss of biodiversity seriously compounded by global warming”. IOW, the new, improved scare’s starting point is already “unprecedented loss”, so it can only get worse! Quelle surprise, eh?!
“Tipping points” are all lined up as are “mechanisms” such as “biodiversity offsets or other schemes to mitigate and/or compensate…”
Move over IPCC … here comes IPBES
Although we may see an intermediate skirmish of “sibling rivalry” between these two UNEP acronymic offspring. Something along the lines of “Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the biggest crisis of all?”
Of COPs, MOPs and a global battle of duelling doomsayers
Meanwhile … on the other side of the pond (where “climate scientists”, as I recall, were predicting the disappearance of snow from the British landscape) …
The recently coined phrase “global climate disruption” is clearly the first toe inching down with respect to the forthcoming claims by the MSM that man’s actions are the primary climate driver no matter which direction it seems to be headed today. It gets them all warm and fuzzy (a Chris Matthews-like tingling, no doubt) thinking how self-important we are.
The only satisfying media “climb down” would be a small amount of time in free-fall followed by a catastrophic stop once they reach the bottom.
richard telford says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:41 am
Methinks Mr. Telford (or whoever he is) won’t be climbing down anytime soon. I think the most interesting question for Mr. Telford is if he is in fact employed by the global warming industry (i.e. a recipient of government money). As long as there are billions of dollars in Climate Ca$h and parties in Bali and Cancun for the climate ruling class, no self-respecting climate scientist would agree to climb down…
Give them another winter or two.
Nothing smarts quite like holding onto tools crusted up with plenty of ice.
Order them each a complimentary pair of Winter Fireball gloves along with the next article submitted.
John Diffenthal says:
October 25, 2010 at 3:21 pm
“…what is the mechanism which delays the impact of a temperature in 1200AD to a CO2 level in 2000AD?”
Maybe this will help.
[From this page, which has lots of interesting and relevant articles.]
richard telford says: “A more interesting question would be when will the last pseudoskeptic cease to proclaim every snowflake as the start of the next ice-age? Will it be when the global mean temperature is a degree higher, perhaps in 2050? Or will they then have changed the argument to how wonderful Canadian podsols are for agriculture? Surely the last bleat that reality contradicts the second law of thermodynamics must come before the global mean temperature rises three degrees, perhaps by the end of this century.”
And perhaps not for another 100,000 years. You’re going to have a long wait, Dick.
“the major purveyors of news in the industrialized world”
Is there an objective and scholarly database of these people and institutions? This is the internets. We have really cool compuer technology these days that allows the interactive visualization of facts. Sorta like a Fuller Geoscope for social influence.
Harold – After reading this post I went and read your blog at HuffPost and a few reactions. Interesting and well reasoned. You are on the right track and have done your homework, never mind those idiots who want to put you down as a musician. As a scientist I have found that nearly every problem you face in real life lacks a textbook solution and you have to educate yourself about it from the ground up. Most “climate scientists” in fact were never educated in climate science. Hansen was an astronomer on the NASA Pioneer Venus probe before he joined GISS. He just quit the project before the spacecraft reached Venus because “The composition of our home planet was changing before our eyes.” And now he wants to close all coal-burning power plants. My previously published work had nothing whatsoever to do with climate but Al Gore made me take up climate science and I guess I have been a climate scientist ever since “What Warming?” came out. That was late last year and you unfortunately did not get a chance to read it before you wrote to Huffington Post. There are a few things you missed that I suggest you put into your future arsenal of climate discussions. Your first problem is that what is written about the El Nino and La Nina is all trash. They have no connection with the PDO and are strictly a tropical Pacific phenomenon. They involve the two equatorial currents, the trade winds, and the equatorial countercurrent in between. The trade winds push the water west where it piles up near the Philippines and New Guinea. Return flow is via the countercurrent and is periodic because of wave resonance. The El Nino wave is a mass of warm water that runs ashore in South America, spreads out, and warms the atmosphere. The rising warm air interferes with trade winds and raises global temperature by half a degree. The El Nino wave then retreats, water level drops by half a meter in its wake, cold water from below rises to take its place, and a La Nina is born. As much as the El Nino raised the global temperature La Nina will now lower it by the same amount and a temperature oscillation results. The eighties and the nineties saw such oscillations. They have existed since the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea and can be found in all global temperature curves if some idiot did not wipe them out with a running average. There can be irregularities and the super El Nino is an example. It was not part of the ENSO system and was probably caused by a storm surge that brought much warm water to the start of the equatorial countercurrent near New Guinea. As to the PDO I have reservations about calling it an oscillation. The reported period of thirty years is too long to be accommodated by any ocean basin. The length of the ENSO period is about five years and it involves the width of the entire Pacific basin. By that measure an oscillation taking thirty years could exist only in a basin five times as wide as the Pacific and I don’t see where it could be. The only thing that has the requisite length is the thermohaline submarine current starting in the Arctic, rounding Africa, and resurfacing in the Northern Pacific. I can’t imagine how it can oscillate but I can imagine how its flow could influence North Pacific temperatures. Be that how it may be, for me PDO is a pure hypothesis, not proven to be an oscillation. The second important thing to note is that Arctic warming has nothing whatsoever to do with the greenhouse effect. It started suddenly at the beginning of the twentieth century and has been going on, with a pause in mid-century, ever since. Carbon dioxide cannot start a sudden warming unless its concentration in the air takes a jump and this did not happen. What apparently did happen was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the twentieth century that directed the Gulf Stream onto its present northerly course. A lesser amount of warm water enters the Arctic on the opposite side through the Bering Strait. Thanks to prevailing winds more than the usual amount of warm water came through the strait in 2007 and melted a large patch of sea ice on that side of the ocean while the Gulf Stream side hardly changed. Look at NOAA maps for September 2006 and 2007 and compare. Oh, one more thing about carbon dioxide. Miskolczi has found, using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948, that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared was constant for 61 years and had the value of 1.87. Which means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years has had no influence on the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs or the optical thickness would have increased, and this did not happen. Way beyond logarithmic! And as to that positive water vapor feedback they use in the models, Miskolczy also proved that instead of being positive the feedback is strongly negative.
ROM you forgot the most important one ” and they aint feeling any warmer” LOL
Mark Wagner said on October 25, 2010 at 11:35 am
there will be no “climb down.” I see two (cooling) scenarios:
1) …the alarmists will claim “victory” over how they “saved us …”
or 2) falling temperatures will result in cries of “thank gaia that natural…”
I see #3, they will increase their numerical manipulation to show global warming (which amazingly mostly takes place where no one lives). Cooling episodes in the past have had hot summers albeit short. Every calving glacier will have a video camera with a live feed to every classroom, with no child left unindoctrinated.
“Most people didn’t know that the Y2K bug only existed in BCD date calculations and only those that use two BCD digits for the year.”
That is not entirely true. It was true of BCD (4 bits to encode 0-9, leaving A-F unused), formats that stored dates as “YY” text strings, or anything that deliberately stored an offset from 1900 internally, with overflow transitioning from 99 to 00.
The funniest of all had to be Al Gore’s presidential campaign site, that said “January 1, 19100”
Hadn’t seen it mentioned yet in this thread or the Sci Am thread from a couple days ago, but the bastion of CO2 alarmism that is Discover magazine has taken one baby step down too.
On page 21 of November’s issue is a page regarding “Urban Canyons” which discusses winds through cities, how planting trees may increase heat by restricting winds, and one breakout point on UHI effects. This is not an article, but a graphic. There is no introduction provided, and no discussion made of the graphic, it simply shows up as a “data sliced” piece.
There is absolutely no mention of the UHI effect on weather data stations, but hey, it is a baby step.
Discover will now be able to say, “yeah, we covered it.” Predictably, no baby step from the Bad Astronomer yet.
The media climbing down is quite obvious also here in Japan, especially after Climategate.
There was almost no coverage of the Busan IPCC Plenary Conference a few weeks ago.
The AGW cult now controls the highest levels of the US and UK governments, so it will continue pushing its destructive and repressive agenda as long as it holds power. The only solution is to kick them out. November 2nd looks to be a good start here in the USA, but even a full Republican Congress might only cause the Obama administration to dig in its ideological heels. True Believers don’t give up easily.
Since the mass media, the academies, the scientific societies, and important industries (like GE and some banks) are in the tank with the Climatist ideologues, it is going to be very difficult to reduce them to impotence. The secret is money. If the Republicans win the House and can hold together against the forces of Climatism masquerading as ‘environmentalism’, they can stop the flow of cash—all spending must originate in the House. But it will be hard: the pressures of politically-correct ‘environmentalism’ are formidable, and politicians are notoriously susceptible.
Help them withstand the Climatists—write and talk to your representatives, and let them know you are on the side of progress and growth, not neo-Luddite and neo-Marxist regression. And teach them about the fallacies of CAGW, that CO2 is not a problem, but if it has any effect on temperature, it is a solution: a warmer, well-fed world is a more prosperous, healthy, civilized world.
/Mr Lynn
I am waiting for the following from George Monbiot.
‘We may have been factually incorrect when it comes to warming but, in practical terms, that was never more than a metaphor for mankind’s destruction of the planet. The details were never important; if the idea of climate change caused a few more people to question the capitalist system’s terrible impact on the planet, then it was, and is, the greater truth.
Natsman says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:21 am
“Maybe someone should have a word in Cameron’s shell-like, as at the CBI conference today he has reinforced his position on “green” jobs, and ludicrously expensive (and poitless) windfarms.”
Isn’t it true that the Brits are rushing into a windfarm disaster that will make Spain’s disaster seem reasonable by comparison? Isn’t it true that the Brit disaster will kill any attempt to do something similar in another country?