Post by Dr. Ryan Maue (cross posted at my Policlimate)
“Must watch TV: Nye expounds on theory of racism”
Much “debate” has erupted in the liberal mainstream media concerning the effects of global warming on Hurricane Irene. With a few notable exceptions (Henry Fountain awesome), many of the journalists butchered the science and generally constructed disjointed narratives that quoted a variety of favorite experts which left me wondering why they even bother (Politico). Rush Limbaugh provided a compelling alternative explanation for the hurricane hype: “Politics is part of everything. The weather’s been politicized; the climate’s been politicized…Both Obama and the media were hoping for a disaster to revive his presidency and help prove climate change theory…The New York Times is trying to say that this violent hurricane is indeed indicative of global warming. It was a tropical storm when it left New York.”
But Bill Nye takes the “anti-science” crusade to a new level by showing up on Fox Business with my KFI 640 Saturday friend Charles Payne and embarrassing the hell out of himself. Once you watch the video and read the transcript, you will be left in amazement at his utter lack of comprehension of the topic at hand on national television! But, alas, Media Matters thinks Nye owned Payne (h/t to Andrew Revkin to Tweeted this). And CBS News headlines it as a story! Unbelievable!
The left actually thinks Bill Nye is a brilliant ambassador for their brand of global warming alarmism — a legitimate guy that understands the science and can articulate an explanation. However, Nye has no credentials or expertise with respect to global warming and hurricanes, at all. Not one iota.
Video is embedded or to go to CBS News and watch the Fox Business embedded video there. “Heady stuff, but Nye receives my respect for retaining his patience in outlining a life’s worth of work in a six-minute segment.” says Andrew Nusca. He has no idea that what Bill Nye is saying is disjointed and amateurish. Intricacies? Nye got almost everything wrong.
I transcribed my own transcript from the first 3 minutes of this (all I could take). Emphasis — bold and italics are my comments.
Charles Payne: While hurricane Irene brought more than just wind damage and flooding to the east coast, it’s revived a national debate as to whether global warming might be causing an increase in hurricanes and other extreme weather. In fact a recent cover story in Newsweek declared that this kind of wild weather may be quote “the new normal”. Here with insights on this is Bill Nye, otherwise known as the science guy.
Ok Bill, I’m going to come right at you. Um…Hurricane Irene – proof of global warming?
Bill Nye: Oh, I don’t think the word proof is what you are looking for – evidence of, a result of, yeah, yeah. Now here’s what the people will tell you that run these climate models. Now everybody, the word model in this usage is a computer program. A very sophisticated computer program. So you take data from satellites about the thickness of clouds and the extent of cloud-cover over the sea. You take data about the temperature of the sea surface. You take data about the existing weather say in North America or the Gulf of Mexico as this storm moves into it. Then you compute how much rain fell out of it, how much energy must have been put into it to create that much rain. It takes many months to analyze an event like Irene. Now the climate colleagues that I have will not tell you today that Irene was evidence or a result of climate change but check in with them about March next year after they have a few months to collect all of these millions and millions of data from weather services and satellites and compile them and run a climate model and show that Irene was a result of the world having more energy in the Earth’s atmosphere.
(Ryan: First of all, charitably, I think Nye is confusing a real-time operational weather forecast with a climate model. Climate models do not assimilate satellite observations of a given event — and it wouldn’t take months and months to compile the data. I have everything sitting on my server which generates my old FSU weather map page. Check back with them in March — that’s when they’ll have their climate model results back proving Irene was the result of more energy? This is a pretty unconventional way of doing climate or extreme event attribution. Bill Nye follows the “anti-scientific” method: I’ll give you the answer now, and then in 6-months, check back when I have the proof. )
CP: But here’s the thing here bill, ever since Katrina, right, we’ve heard that every year the hurricane season is going to be more devastating and apocalyptic, and the reality is we haven’t seen that. So how can Newsweek say “hey, this is a new normal”? is that irresponsible – is there any science behind that?
(Ryan: this is a great question by Payne. Since global hurricane activity — the number of storms, hurricanes, and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) is at historical lows — collapsing since Katrina — as I showed in my recent GRL peer-reviewed paper, how on earth can you attribute one hurricane (Irene) to climate change.?)
BN: well there’s a lot more science behind that than just saying it’s not. But, uh, that aside. That’s only 6-years – in geologic time in terms of climate events, is not very long. Furthermore there is a lot of debate about this cool thing or remarkable thing is that the Sea-surface in the Pacific gets warmer, in the Pacific Ocean! Okay, tens of thousands of nautical miles away. As that gets warmer, it will strangely serve to decapitate certain hurricane or cyclonic storms off the coast of Africa – and actually get a few fewer hurricanes.
(Ryan: no kidding Nye, however, you haven’t come up with any science. Nye then launches into a tortured explanation of the El Nino Southern Oscillation warm phase — El Nino where the waters in the tropical Pacific cyclically become anomalously warm. But, it’s not “tens-of-thousands nautical miles away” — that’s more like the distance to the moon. There is actually little consensus in the climate community about the future of El Nino as the planet slowly warms. The CMIP3 models used for the IPCC AR4 report fail to reproduce historical ENSO events or variability, and therefore are useless prediction devices for the future. We already have a pretty good handle on the “teleconnection” effects of El Nino and La Nina on Atlantic hurricane development with research pioneered by Dr. Bill Gray and furthered by Dr. Phil Klotzbach who produces Colorado State’s seasonal hurricane forecasts. 2011 is a neutral-to-building La Nina year, so we should expect weaker vertical shear in the Main Development Region of the tropical Atlantic. It’s bizarre that Nye brought up El Nino which contradicts his original assertion that Irene was evidence of global warming.)
CP: But Bill, that’s not…
BN: This is another thing that’s very hard to show.
CP: But the Pacific Ocean, getting warmer, but that’s not from man.
(Ryan: excellent point again Charles. The tropical Pacific does not have a strong global warming signal over the past 30-years, which is due to the cyclical nature of ENSO on 2-7 year time scales. Our sea-surface temperature (SST) records get worse as you go backwards from the beginning of the satellite era in 1979. Nye has no answer.)
BN: (waving hands): you’re acting that you are dismissing those things like they they are not relevant.
(Ryan: Nye is defeated, and he knows it. After wagging his finger like Judge Judy, he pretty much has spent his arsenal of facts on this issue.)
CP: I’m not dismissing it, but you have so much information, I want to get to all of it. Are you saying though that it’s manmade, though?
BN: Well the world is getting warmer, uh, everybody, the world is getting warmer. I believe the debate is whether humans are causing it…Do we not agree that the world is getting warmer?
(Ryan: The world is getting warmer — so Irene has to be influenced by global warming. Maybe Irene did NOT reach its maximum potential because of global warming — has anyone considered that. Why must ALL of the climate change effects be a certain sign? Why didn’t Irene reach Category 5? Why did it weaken so fast if the SSTs were so warm? This is where the real tropical cyclone researchers will take over from the media hacks, and, yes, they will come with an answer in March. But, they will follow the “scientific” method and not the “I’ll get the proof later” Bill Nye “anti-science” method.)
CP: I have no idea. Someone told me that it’s warmed 1-degree over the past 100-years. I’ll take their word for it.
(Ryan: Charles is right.)
Show continues to talk about racism and shows the Al Gore “racism” clip – but Nye then really goes off into a different realm discussing that. I’m convinced that Fox News booked Nye knowing that he would butcher the science, and force me to write this post.
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With guys like Nye fronting for the AGW crowd….it’s beginning to look more and more like the AGW crowd is a Super Bowl Halftime wardrobe malfunction. Entertaining, but completely without merit.
Funny. Another ideal AGW spokesman.
I particularly liked the part about tribalism ‘millions, or at least tens of thousands of years ago.’
When the bloke in the bow tie started talking sex all I could think of was the phrase from lost in space, danger Will Robinson. I wasn’t disappointed as he totally lost the analogy plot.
R. Gates says:
August 30, 2011 at 8:16 pm
It is entirely possible to melt out the Arctic with a massive pipeline of water direct from the Tropics.
And Sea Ice would temporarily suffer, as it has.
But then the bottom would fall out, same as your AGW.
The Tropics would not be building up oceanic heat, because it is sent North/South in this particular example. The heat sent North/South would not build up the Arctic/Antarctic heat either, as it will escape to space as soon as Polar Winter arrives.
The bottom falling out is the loss of Tropical Heat to space, for the now lowered oceanic heat would result in continental cooling to put the finishing touches on the canvas.
Worrying about a trace gas won’t bring back the missing heat, it’s gone with the Solar wind.
The recent Arctic melt is not a sign nor proof of AGW, it’s the sign of a leak.
I’ve been trying to hold back, but I’ve just got to say it: I’m really disappointed that any TV ‘science guy’ or commentator turns out to be closely affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists – and that the media still uses them. Unfortunately I’m not surprised – but I am sorely disappointed even so.
R.Gates,
I wonder if this article shows an analogous situation with respect to a proposal that having no GHG’s equals having no hurricanes, thusly making the relationship clear .
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2007/08/genetic-vs-heritable-trait/
It seems the same type of logical problem; that is, one could say that no matter that height is , say 80 % heritable in USA, that if there is no environmental ( food) input, there is no bone growth at all. thus the relationship is made clear It’s food.
I think what we have to remember is that we’d have to nail down the variables to see about DIFFERENCES..,e.g. what differences in height occur when “getting enough food” is not the issue – rather than to say “if the genes did not exist” , or “if food, water, did not exist”.
rbateman says:
August 30, 2011 at 9:36 pm
R. Gates says:
August 30, 2011 at 8:16 pm
It is entirely possible to melt out the Arctic with a massive pipeline of water direct from the Tropics.
And Sea Ice would temporarily suffer, as it has.
But then the bottom would fall out, same as your AGW.
The Tropics would not be building up oceanic heat, because it is sent North/South in this particular example. The heat sent North/South would not build up the Arctic/Antarctic heat either, as it will escape to space as soon as Polar Winter arrives.
The bottom falling out is the loss of Tropical Heat to space, for the now lowered oceanic heat would result in continental cooling to put the finishing touches on the canvas.
Worrying about a trace gas won’t bring back the missing heat, it’s gone with the Solar wind.
The recent Arctic melt is not a sign nor proof of AGW, it’s the sign of a leak.
——-
Hmmm…that’s a new twist on an explanation as to why arctic sea ice continues to decline. Because there’s a leak of heat to space? You’ll surely get a Nobel Prize in physics for that bit of brilliance Professor Bateman.
Rational Debate says:
August 30, 2011 at 9:40 pm
He’s a paid actor, not an expert. He’s paid to sell a viewpoint, which is why I refer to “Used Climate Salesman”. It doesn’t matter if he believes the stuff he’s selling or not, he has only to act the role.
Now, the quality of the acting is key.
Matt says:
August 30, 2011 at 9:11 pm
When someone like Bill Nye says the earth is getting warmer, “it’s measurable and irrefutable”, what exactly does that mean? Relative to what temperature (MWP)? What time period constitutes a trend? (For Bill Nye six years is too few to show lack of hurricane activity, but one storm is enough to prove AGW)
That’s a serious question, what does it mean to say that the earth is warming?
Thanks in advance for any serious answers or links to explanations.
Matt
=======================================================
Matt, there is no serious answer. All time to temp considerations are arbitrary. There is no valid argument of an appropriate time period to determining warming vs cooling. Yes, we saw some warming a while back. It hasn’t warmed in over a decade, but if you include this decade with the last two you see warming if you want to see warming. Yes, its likely we’re cooling from the MWP but we’re warming from the LIA. Then some even want to go back 800,000 years or so, but draw the line at a few 100 million……’cause things were different then….. truly funny, but there are some that truly believe that. The warmistas usually say 30 years, but that’s only because if fits their agenda with the current events. If it had cooled for about 30 years they’d sing a different tune…….oh wait….never mind that it was the same tune, just a different verse. All the while demonstrating their cherry picked time period is meaningless.
So, pick your poison.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1981/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1981/trend
But what really makes the discussion absurd, is that no one has determined what the optimal temp of the earth should be. Oh sure, we have geological periods known as this optimum or that optimum, but we don’t know that they were optimal. Me, I definitely vote against something in the temp range of the LIA, which seems to be the target temp of the warmistas, and I think it would be optimal if Greenland actually had some farm land and maybe some other places in Canada, but that’s just me thinking about feeding people. Oh sure, the Russians pretty much have the shipping lanes in the arctic tied up, now, but we can float boats there too, so I think we’d benefit also from an ice free arctic. But then, people would start flapping their arms wildly trying to convince people that we’d drown…….ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of land ice is in the Antarctic and it isn’t going anywhere. And the fact that Greenland is shaped like a bowl…….the rock underneath all that ice is 900 ft below sea level, so most of the water from melt wouldn’t go anywhere there either.
And all of that is pretending we could do something about it at any rate. Its nonsensical to believe we could. But, what the hell? It isn’t as if our generations were doing anything anyway. If we weren’t arguing over the weather, we’d be doing something really important like developing better I-phones and crap like that. Kind of a wild ride…….. going from watching man first step on the moon to having NASA charged with some bizarre outreach program, but we vote for those moonbats. And people lend credence to demonstrably mentally deficient psuedo-intellects such as Bill Nye and Al Gore. If we don’t kill future generations from sheer stupidity, we’ll certainly kill them with laughter and shame of their heritage. They will spend lifetimes looking for that ever elusive missing-link’s DNA just so they can reintroduce it in hopes to reverse the process.
Sorry….. that was about as serious of a response I could muster.
R. gates says:
August 30, 2011 at 10:00 pm
You read it right Professor R.gates: A leak.
Try this at home:
This winter, run your heat with upstairs windows closed, setting the Thermostat so that the heat runs 50% of the time. Take your temp. readings throughout the house.
Next, open 2 upstairs windows and repeat, leaving the Thermostat alone.
The resulting phenomena of heat drafting up and out, along with cold air sinking in should come as no surprise to you.
Neither should the Polar Night shedding heat energy out the Atmosphere.
If the Atmosphere was truly leakproof enough for trace gas AGW, the Earth would now be in an Intervolcanic Pizza Oven instead of an Interglacial.
Kinda like Venus, ya know?
As it happens, I was born in September of 1944 (suburb of Boston). I know from “family stories” that we had a hurricane at the time my mom was bringing me home – the elevator was out, and my mom had to walk down stairs. A nurse lugged me for her (I don’t know why my dad didn’t do it – bringing the car around, I suppose). During my lifetime, there has been an increase in atmospheric CO2 – observed at Mauna Loa, and observed human emissions. R. Gates says it is “plausible” that increased CO2 causes increased hurricanes. I agree, it’s “plausible”. Where’s the observation?
R.Gates cites Arctic sea ice. It’s a little too soon to be sure, but it looks like the Arctic sea ice minimum will be pretty close to 2007 – maybe a little more, maybe a little less. CO2 has increased since 2007. How much ice melt has this caused? Looks to me like “not much” (if any).
R.Gates (compared to other unnamed commenters) is pretty rational in his disagreements with (most of) us, and unfailingly polite (even when some of us are a little “rough” on him). A pleasure to have a discussion with! Wanna talk about sea level? Recent observations seem to indicate a little “blip” in the general increase. WUWT?
Best,
Frank
“…and run a climate model and show that Irene was a result of the world having more energy in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
“Furthermore there is a lot of debate about this cool thing or remarkable thing is that the Sea-surface in the Pacific gets warmer, in the Pacific Ocean! Okay, tens of thousands of nautical miles away. As that gets warmer, it will strangely serve to decapitate certain hurricane or cyclonic storms off the coast of Africa – and actually get a few fewer hurricanes.”
————-
So did Bill in these two statements say that heating the Earth causes more hurricanes, but heating the Earth causes fewer hurricanes? I am fairly certain every philosophy professor in the country would fail him from a logic course for making that statement.
Now I am having deep regrets of watching his show when I was a little paleo-nut, though e did do some things that pushed me towards chemistry.
Nye is a big wheel in CSICOP (now CSI), publishers of Skeptical Inquirer, a group that has an emotional need for an essentially infallible process to replace religion and keep the superstitious, irrational rubes in their place. It’s found it in “scientific method,” peer review, and the scientific consensus. The idea that their emperor might be naked or that a rude rube could rightfully call him out, as implied by us scorcher-scam scoffers, would turn their experts-on-top world-view upside down. That’s what’s bugging him.
It may also be what’s behind the knee-jerk tendency of establishment science societies and gatekeepers to close ranks with their CAWGist colleagues.
Hurricanes are caused by global warming.
Irene was a hurricane.
Therefore, Irene was caused by global warming.
The Hurricane of 1938 was much stronger than Irene while covering much the same area.
Therefore global warming was much stronger in 1938.
The BBC must be really jealous when they hear about the likes of Nye, who would fit into their “science” “coverage” so you’d never see the join. They do often have the services of the very popular and similar-sounding actor, Bill Nighy, but I haven’t (yet?) heard them using him for propaganda
brainwashingbroadcasting. Your Nye and his ilk would be really entertaining if it weren’t for the uncomfortable knowledge that so many people accept this BS because it’s all over the media.The guy who professed to knowing very little, clearly had a much better idea of the subject than the idiot who had only one thing to say: “it’s getting warmer” … when over the last decade it has not got warmer.
barry says: August 30, 2011 at 4:39 pm
O/T – it’s been two weeks since we had a post on Arctic sea ice, … Normally there are a bunch of posts at this time tracking the ice melt in great detail – what’s different this year?
Let me see if I can explain? First we got the real final nail in the coffin of global warming in the CERN/CLOUD & final confirmation of Svensmark. Then the single biggest story in science in the last decade: the end of manmade global warming, gets kicked off top slop by an even more pressing story: the all devouring Irene which is supposed to eat up spew out New York, but turns out to be a rather sulky girl who kicks down the odd tree. Then every stops to have a good laugh at the idiots who said “yet more proof of manmade global warming”.
… and then you ask “why aren’t you reported if the ice has melted during the summer?”
REPLY: And right now there’s a story as top post on sea ice, so barry should quit his whining and look at the front page…sheesh – Anthony
Joe Bastardi says: He obviously has no clue as to what went on with the hurricanes of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and by the way, bring up 38,44, or the sisters of 54 and you can really get a deer in the headlight look. I notice his media page never put my debate with him on O’Reilly up. I wonder why? I also wonder why he is doing this,, he must be so overboard leftist he simply lets ideology take over. What else could it be?
That he needs the job. I’m not saying he’d be a skeptic if he didn’t need it; he very likely has a warmist bias aside from any question of a job, but he needs the job, and it’s a lot easier to get a job, or keep a job, on the warmist side. I know almost nothing about him, except that several times I’ve seen him demonstrating his ignorance about global warming, but my Italian-American intuition 🙂 tells me that he’s a guy who needs the job.
Joe, you strike me as a regular guy who must know very well that jobs don’t grow on trees for someone who wants to be at all picky, and is not young. I’m not talking about your own recent change, and I’m not talking about the depression that we’re having right now. I’m talking about the way life is.
It is sad to see a childhood scientific icon make such a fool of himself.
In the UK when I was a child several decades ago, we had two great TV science presenters. Professor David Bellamy, who was a real scientist. A botanist of global note and serious conservationist. His career tanked when he refused to drink the man-made catastrophic warming kool-aid. As a scientist, he wanted to see absolute evidence that mankind’s CO2 was warming the planet to dangerous levels. He still has not seen any indisputable evidence. Everything the alarmists put forward can be disputed rationally based upon empirical evidence.
The other great was Johnny Ball, and his “think of a number” show which really enthused me about mathematics, engineering and science generally. He was a marvellous presenter whose enthusiasm and presentation opened up the magic within science and mathematics. He is another person who has not drunk the cAGW kool-aid. I would be very saddened to see Johnny Ball come out on the side of the alarmists.
James Sexton:
At August 30, 2011 at 4:34 pm you say;
“Ryan.
For those concerned about the political bent of the post, most of us here wish to heaven that it wasn’t so, but the CAGW issue is political. It may not have started that way, it may have. But, it is now.”
The AGW-scare was a political – not a scientific – issue from the very start. Margaret thatcher, then UK Prime Minister, started the scare for purely political reasons. I explain this at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Please note the feedback loops in Figure 2 of the article at the URL. Delete all reference to science (i.e. the feedbacks colour-coded green) and the issue continues; simply, the science was an adjunct funded by politicians as a method to ‘justify’ their promotion of the AGW-scare..
The AGW-scare is still political and not scientific.
The ‘science’ in support of the AGW-scare continues to be funded by politicians for political reasons, but a scientific hypothesis would be rejected if it had no empirical support and was denied by much empirical evidence: there is no empirical evidence that supports the AGW-hypothesis and much which refutes it; e.g.
missing ‘hot spot’,
‘missing heat’,
missing ‘committed warming’,
missing correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature,
lack of warming over the last decade while both anthropogenic CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentration continue to rise,
lack of correlation between anthropogenic CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentration,
etc.
The AGW-scare is and always was a political scare and not a serious scientific consideration.
Richard
“we all like doggies. we’re all the same species. the hurricane will be evaluated by models in a few months to fit into the conjecture.”
Well done. Thats the most compelling argument for AGW
R Gates has really outdone himself on this thread. Even more inane nonsense than usual. I suspect a 14 year old kid behind the keyboard. WUWT’s very own clown and jester.
On Nye’s comment that the Pacific Ocean is “several thousands of nautical miles” from the Atlantic here is a link on Gore’s ideas about the temperature of the lower crust of the Earth.
Hyperlink here
R. Gates,
You say no green houses gasses on earth no hurricanes.
I say no oceans and 99.9% of green house gases are gone. Water is the refrigerant in control of our moderated temperature. The tropics are our heat imput that has a built in thermostat .
The poles are radiators to release heat. The temperate zones suffer the weather of an un plumbed chaotic heat pump. The temperate zones are another thermostat that varies heat input or output by cloud cover, these mechanisms are slowly being uncovered by real scientific endeavour. CO2 has no influence in the patterns or frequency or indeed strength of weather.
The mechanics of our solar system and the cyclic sun coupled to were we are at any given time in the galaxy give us all the climate change we need. CO2 is is totally irrelevant and a political construct to to tell us how to behave. BS
R Gates:
You seem to have made a typographical error in your post at August 30, 2011 at 8:07 pm where you say,
“a 40% increase in CO2, and large increases in methane and nitrous oxide over the highest levels they’ve been at in at least 800,000 years might indeed be having an impact on the global climate, as every single global climate model tells us they will.”
A computer does what it is programmed to do so any rational person would have intended to write,
“a 40% increase in CO2, and large increases in methane and nitrous oxide over the highest levels they’ve been at in at least 800,000 years might indeed be having an impact on the global climate, as every single PROGRAMMER of a global climate model tells us they will.”
Surely, that is what you intended to write?
Richard