Readers may recall the strange series of events leading up to the post facto revisionism at the Vail Daily News when Dr. Michael Mann sent an angry reply letter to the newspaper and then the original letter from Dr. Hertzberg disappeared then reappeared sans a couple of paragraphs that Dr. Mann didn’t like.
Dr. Hertzberg sent this letter to me today, while at the same time sending it to the Vail Daily News. I reproduce it here in entirety, with no edits or changes of any kind.
Response to Michael Mann
When Scott Glasser’s comment of 9/26/11 referred to me indirectly as an “inaccurate” and “irresponsible” “fool” for challenging the theory that human carbon dioxide emission was causing “global warming / climate change”, I felt compelled to respond. My 9/30/11 comment cited the facts and the data that supported my challenge to the theory. In that article, Glasser defended what has been come to be known as the Mann “hockey stick” curve. I responded in my article with the well documented criticism of it from a large number of scientists who carefully reviewed his claims. Also, the so-called “climategate” e-mails revealed an appalling lack of scientific integrity and manipulations by a cabal of advocates of that theory. Mann responded on 10/1/11 accusing me of “false and defamatory statements” packed with “lies and distortions”; of “lying to the public about science”; of a “string of lies tied together”. He stated my “lies are pernicious” and that I am a “charleton”.
In his response, Mann uses an ad-hominem overkill accusing me of lies and lying some six times! Methinks he doth protest too much.
When I am engaged in a scientific dispute with an adversary, and that opponent instead of citing the facts or the data that might support his argument, instead directs an intense barrage of ad-hominem slurs toward me, I am fully confident that I am winning the argument.
My response now is to cite the data. The IPCC report of 1990 prior to Mann’s publication of his “hockey stick” showed a Medieval Warm Period considerably warmer than today with its peak temperature in about 1250 AD. That was followed by a Little Ice Age considerably colder than today with its coldest average temperature in about 1700. Mann’s “hockey stick” curve shows a flat line temperature during those same periods. It finally got rid of the embarrassing Medieval Warm Period that the “climategate” cabal hated so much because it showed a higher temperature than today at a time when the human emission of carbon dioxide was trivial. The more recent and reliable reconstruction for the same time period using 18 other different temperature proxies that are much more reliable than tree rings, reaffirm the 1990 IPCC report. The pesky Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that Mann obliterated with his “hockey stick” are still there!
For a detailed look at that data and much more, go to www.youtube.com and enter “climategate” and “hertzberg” in the search column. For a more detailed discussion of the “hide the decline” issue, go to Prof. Richard Muller’s talk on the subject at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk.
In any case, don’t take the word of someone like me who Mann characterized as a “charleton”. Here is the much earlier opinion of a distinguished Australian scientist, John Daly:
“The evidence is overwhelming from all corners of the world, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age clearly show up in a variety of proxy indicators, proxies more representative of temperature than inadequate tree ring data.”
“What is disquieting about the hockey stick is not its original publication. As with any paper, it would sink into oblivion if found to be flawed. Rather it was the reaction of the greenhouse industry to it – the chorus of approval, the complete lack of critical evaluation of the theory, the blind acceptance of evidence that was so flimsy. The industry embraced the theory for one reason and one reason only – it told them exactly what they wanted to hear.”
Not long after those comments were written, John Daly died. In one of the climategate e-mails, his death is mentioned as a kind of fortunate occurrence, some “cheering news” that removed one of their adversaries.
So much for scientific integrity!
Dr. Martin Hertzberg
Ph. D. Stanford, 1959
www.explosionexpert.com
Izen says:
“I always find it strange that it is the skeptics who seem to be arguing for GREATER past variability against ‘warmists’ arguing for less.”
Wrong! It is the alarmist crowd that argues that the planet’s temperature was essentially unchanging, until the rise in CO2. But they have beeen repeatedly proven to be flat wrong.
Izen is yet another alarmist who denies climate change – a scurrilous false accusation that is routinely made against scientific skeptics [the only honest kind of scientist].
Climate sensitivity to CO2 is minuscule, on the order of ≈1°C per 2xCO2, ±0.5°C, based on empirical observations. Izen’s beliefs don’t matter. Real world data matters. And real world data falsifies Izen’s beliefs. Observational evidence proves that climate sensitivity to CO2 is minor, and can be disregarded for all practical purposes. But there’s no money in that fact, so the alarmists’ lies continue.
@- Smokey says: October 8, 2011 at 4:30 am
“Climate sensitivity to CO2 is minuscule, on the order of ≈1°C per 2xCO2, ±0.5°C, based on empirical observations.-[link]- Izen’s beliefs don’t matter. Real world data matters. And real world data falsifies Izen’s beliefs.”
I have a real problem with belief. I am prone to doubt and always question the basis of any belief I find I hold. I always welcome the falsification of a belief because it means belief has been replaced by understanding based on real world data.
The link you provide Smokey might be more convincing if had up-to-date real world data since 2008. Or perhaps not as it doesn’t really engage with the issue of climate sensitivity does it?
If past climate variation were large, so that the RWP was GLOBALLY as warm as the present then the amount of temperature change in response to extra energy must be large. We know solar activity and GCR flux was little different because of the Be isotope data and consistency of the C14 dating system. Big global temperature changes in the past would indicate that the negative feedback proposed by Spencer and LIndzen where warming causes more cooling from increased cloud cover is small and incapable of significant influence on global temperature.
First law of Thermo… you don’t get global warming without adding or retaining more energy. You don’t get cooling without reducing or losing more energy. The climate sensitivity is how much the temperature changes for a given change in energy. If past climate variations like the MWP RWP or Holocene optimum are larger than we think then climate sensitivity must be higher.
Or you need to find a source of extra energy greater than any known for those past events.
It is not a matter of belief, but of empirical data. To re-frame the old joke, we have moved on from the question of WHAT we are doing to the more important issue of ‘How much?’ – as the ‘actress’ said to the bishop…
Izen, your belief system is at odds with empirical observations:
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/5721/newhadcrut3warming.png
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/3434/ipcchansen1980to2020.png
http://thetruthpeddler.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/graph-apr1100-54-323636779785.gif
Climate sensitivity is so low as to be inconsequential. That is a real world fact, not a computer model.
Smokey says:
October 8, 2011 at 3:49 am
Get a clue, Telford. The MWP was a global event.
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Another website that thinks the MWP occurred between ~800AD and 1400AD depending on where you look is not convincing evidence that there was a global MWP that was warmer than modern.
@- Smokey says: October 8, 2011 at 5:26 am
“Climate sensitivity is so low as to be inconsequential. That is a real world fact, not a computer model.”
Thank you for the links, two of which are to graphs of surface temperature trends of less than a decade and therefore irrelevant to the issue of climate sensitivity. One of which is of a graph comparing the three decades from 1960 to the 90s with three decades from 1980 to the present. It shows a warming of ~0.3degC over that 30 years while CO2 was rising by ~20%. Not sure what implication you think that has for climate sensitivity.
The other link is to an article by a crank claiming that all the work done by Plass and others on radiative transfer in the atmosphere, much of it for the military connected with missile detection systems, is wrong. AGW theory uses the same physics as the rest of science, if that nonsense was right the surface of Venus, Mars and Jupiter would be very different…
If climate sensitivity is so low why did the Pinatubo eruption cause at least 1 degree of cooling, and then subsequent warming when the effect wore off?
The change in energy from this event is apparently well constrained by real world empirical observations. For climate sensitivity to be so low there would have to be an additional factor altering the energy balance to cause that much cooling from volcanic eruptions.
We are still arguing about ‘How Much?’ – with you advocating the minimum price!
Thomas says:
October 7, 2011 at 9:26 pm
“… And it was [Dr. Hertzberg] who declared that Mann’s work was “fraudulent”, “fabricated” and “phony”, all in one sentence. So in other words the one to whip out the ad hominem assault was Hertzberg.”
Except that you haven’t provided an example of ad hom. So how about you run off and do some homework.
Izen dismisses the late, great John Daly a “crank”, thus confirming that Izen is a jamoke who gets his talking points from censoring alarmist blogs. Daly made a fool out of the incompetent Phil Jones, and Daly’s naver-falsified work was recognized by scientists worldwide.
And the Pinatubo cooling effect was caused primarily by reduction of insolation. The belief that it was caused by “carbon” is just that, a belief.
If CO2 had more than a minuscule effect on temperature, then temperature would closely follow changes in CO2. But it doesn’t [note this chart goes back to 1895, eliminating Izen’s quibble]. This bar chart shows clearly that CO2 has a negligible effect, therefore the sensitivity number must be quite low.
Izen needs to run along now to Skeptical Pseudo-Science for some new talking points, because he certainly lacks facts to back up his fictional high sensitivity claims.
And thanx to Richard Telford for his personal opinion. But all the same, I would rather listen to someone who knows what he’s talking about:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication
Got plenty more MWP links. Will post on request.
Smokey says:
October 8, 2011 at 9:05 am
And the Pinatubo cooling effect was caused primarily by reduction of insolation. The belief that it wwas caused by “carbon” is just that, a belief.
—————–
Who thinks the the Pinatubo cooling was caused by carbon? Nobody I know of. But we can use it to estimate climate sensitivity, as the climate response to different forcings is approximately equal on a per watt basis.
The extra-tropical northern hemisphere is not the whole globe, so Ljungqvist’s work cannot answer the question of whether the whole globe warmed during the MWP. An infinite number of links about the MWP would not change that.
@- Smokey says: October 8, 2011 at 9:05 am
“Izen dismisses the late, great John Daly a “crank”, thus confirming that Izen is a jamoke who gets his talking points from censoring alarmist blogs. ”
While your loyalty in defending the reputation of John Daly is undoubtedly admirable, in this case it is misplaced.
The link you provided was to John Daly’s website, but it was to an article by Dr. Heinz Hug. Based on a limited laboratory measurement ans mathematical modeling Dr Heinz Hug claims that all the physics behind the warming effect of a greenhouse gas is wrong. His claims would also apply to water vapor…
Roy Spencer and Judith Curry have both tried to dispose of the quack claims that there is no ‘greenhouse’ effect. The climate-etc site have a ‘Slaying the Dragons’ series. I think this may be because those on the skeptic side with some scientific knowledge know that such nonsensical rejection of empirical real world measurements of the DWLR and OLW at TOA make the ‘skeptical’ side look stupid.
“And the Pinatubo cooling effect was caused primarily by reduction of insolation. The belief that it was caused by “carbon” is just that, a belief.”
No scientifically literate person believes the Pinatubo cooling was caused by carbon.
Neither, if you wish to be accurate, was it PRIMARILY caused by a reduction in insolation. Solar output was unchanged by the eruption, it was the atmospheric albedo to the spectra of sunlight which was the PRIMARY cause because it was changed by the SOX into the stratosphere.
That, as a secondary effect, changed the insolation at the surface.
The point is that it is one short-term, but measurable, example of a change in the energy arriving, retained and lost from the different levels of the atmosphere. The temperature change that caused can be used to estimate the sensitivity of the climate.
Perhaps you have alternative examples of a change in the energy flux into and out-of the Earth which indicates climate sensitivity from the resultant temperature change?
Tim Minchin says:
October 7, 2011 at 6:26 pm
We need a homeless person with no assets to make a public defamation (altrhough of course it would be actually true) of Mann and have him sue that homeless person. Using discovery and pro bono legal we’d rip him a new digestive excretion system.
=============================================
Tim – how about Al Gore?
@Tim.
Sorry Tim. I thought you said “hopeless” and not “homeless”.
@- Smokey says: October 8, 2011 at 9:05 am
“If CO2 had more than a minuscule effect on temperature, then temperature would closely follow changes in CO2. But it doesn’t-[link]- [note this chart goes back to 1895, eliminating Izen’s quibble]. This bar chart-[link]- shows clearly that CO2 has a negligible effect, therefore the sensitivity number must be quite low. ”
The first graph does go back to 1895, and seems to show a specific CO2 level long before it was directly measured starting in the 1950s. Presumably that reconstruction of past CO2 levels is based on sound proxy evidence…
But rather more limiting is that the temperature graph is of a very limited geographical region of less than 3% of the global surface.
Between the minimum temperature of 1910 and the highs of the mid-1940s there was a measurable increase in solar output to which is attributed a proportion of the temperature change globally during this time. This solar effect does depend on a certain value for the climate sensitivity of course…
The second bar chart claims that while temperatures increased by 0.37 degC from 1881-1944 the increase during the next 64 years, 1945-2008 was only 0.27degC.
HADCRUTv3 and GISSTEMP both give an increase of well over 0.45degC for the 1945-2008 period.
The warming seen from ~1900 to the known rapid rise in CO2 measured in the 50s does require an explanation. Usually the increased solar output and the reduction in major volcanic events are invoked. But this requires that climate sensitivity is somewhere around the middle of current estimates. If the natural variation in the past was LARGER than we think without the influence of CO2 then the climate sensitivity must be larger than we think.
[snip – this has nothing to do with Dr. Martin Hertzberg. Your threadjacking days are over. If the comemnt you give is not on-topic then snip snip snip – getting tired of moderating this stream of threadjacks from you – Anthony]
Izen,
My mistake; I posted a link to John Daly’s site and assumed that you were calling him a crank, since you didn’t attach any particular name to the label ‘crank.’
I generally admit mistakes when I make them. You say: “The warming seen from ~1900 to the known rapid rise in CO2 measured in the 50s does require an explanation.” The following explanation is not a mistake:
First, you do not know that the warming from ≈1900 was caused by the rise in CO2. You are making an assumption. Probably a small part the warming was caused by CO2, but most was, and is, natural. The rate of warming is consistent with warming since the LIA. There is no unusual acceleration, which would surely be the case following a ≈40% CO2 rise – if CO2 had the large sensitivity number claimed. Therefore, the sensitivity to CO2 must be low. My own estimate, posted here many times, is ≈1°C warming for 2xCO2, ±0.5°C. In other words, inconsequential, and on balance a net benefit to the biosphere.
The charts concocted by Michael Mann, USHCN, HADCRU, GISS, and just about everyone flogging the CAGW horse have a major [and deliberate] flaw that makes normal temperatures look scary: they use an arbitrary temperature or zero line, instead of using a trend line.
Here is an example of the temperature trend from the LIA. This WFT trend line shows the temperature trend from the early 1800’s. Another view. [More on request.]
By deceptively using an arbitrary temperature or zero axis, the charts are deliberately employing propaganda.
Looking at the long term trend, it is obvious that nothing unusual is happening, and that CO2 has had little effect. The planet is simply warming naturally from the depths of the LIA. And the warming has been unusually mild.
• • •
Richard Telford, thank you for your opinion, which any number of links will never change, because your mind is closed to any other possibilities. For you, “the science is settled.”
Shrug. I was replying to the points Izen made.
http://gay-jenkins.suite101.com/english-wines–a-brief-history-of-wine-making-in-england-a289054
Hmmmm !! so it was warm enough, then not warm enough. then again, warm enough, but then, not warm enough.. what are these folks smokin.. don’t they know the climate was flat lining at this time???
regards