Like what Judith Curry saw recently at NCAR’s seminar, he seems to think it is all about communication.
Part of the problem, he said, was that the climate sceptic lobby employed communications professionals, whereas “scientists are just barely competent at communicating with the public and don’t have the wherewithal to do it.”
Yet sceptics are the ones without any MSM support. So where do they get this idea? Full story here
A few things come to mind that he didn’t cover as other possible reasons skeptics are winning:
1. We don’t hide behind FOIA laws, then circumvent them when we lose. If you’d shared the data when asked, Climategate would never have happened.
2. We don’t rewrite history, either by deleting>morphing commentary like Skepicalscience does, or by creating questionable paleostatistical methods to enable pretending the trees tell us last 900 years were flat without any possible natural variance.
3. We don’t call people on the other side of the debate ugly denigrating names like deniers and flat earthers.
4. We don’t keep trying to link weather patterns/weather events to climate in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Burning issue: Hansen’s evidence that the world is hotting up
Moscow, August 2010
Russia experienced its hottest-ever summer last year – for weeks, a large portion of European Russia was more than 7 °C (12.6 °F) warmer than normal, and a new national record was set of 44 °C (111 °F). Raging forest fires filled Moscow with smoke, forcing the cancellation of air services and obliging people to don face masks.
Jim, get a clue, the Moscow heat wave had NOTHING TO DO with global warming. It was a blocking high weather pattern. NOAA’s own work concludes this:
NOAA finds”climate change” blameless in 2010 Russian heat wave
We mentioned this previously on WUWT, now it is officially peer reviewed and accepted.
NOAA: Natural Variability Main Culprit of Deadly Russian Heat Wave That Killed Thousands
Source here
Daily Moscow temperature record from November 1 2009 to October 31 2010. Red and blue shaded areas represent departures from the long-term average (smooth curve) in Moscow. Temperatures significantly above the long-term average scorched Moscow for much of July and August. NOAA credit. – click to enlargeThe deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new NOAA study. And while the scientists could not attribute the intensity of this particular heat wave to climate change, they found that extreme heat waves are likely to become increasingly frequent in the region in coming decades.
So Jim, when you try to tell us that the 2010 Russian heat wave was caused by global warming, people who know better have no choice but to call post normal science BS on you.
h/t to Kevin Hearle
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See ICECAPs take on the same subject. Great post, as usual :
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
Don’t worry what Hansen says. Nobody takes him seriously anymore. It’s what the IPCC says that the world has to pay attention to… the IPCC and its pseudo science. The day the IPCC acknowledges that it has got it wrong about catastrophic man-made global warming and climate change being driven by Co2 emission from human activities, that will be the day to rejoice. However, as long as the IPCC is still being influenced by pro global warming government bureaucrats and individuals like Australia’s Dr David Karoly, expect more of the same global warming bullshit in the next IPCC report!
Yup the skeptics are winning ONLY because NATURE HAS FALSIFIED your CO2 Climate CAGW Doomsday Rapture hypothesis. It’s simple really. Let’s let a physicist explain it to you so you might have a chance of getting it.
“No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” – Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York
Also this guy had a very cogent point relevant to your particular brand of bad science Hansen:
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford
http://www.PathsToKnowledge.net/think
The wheels have fallen off Hansen’s bandwagon and he’s still flogging the dead horses up front. Reality is starting to peek through the curtains of delusion. Hansen shows a lack of empathy yet again. Professionals have a career to retain. Communication professionals can minimize fallout from bad situations. They can promote results from good events. They can improve the meaning of the message. What they can’t do is tell porky pies and embellish falsehoods. That remains the territory of the used car sales professional.
Its not that the skeptics are winning, it is that the climate is not doing what Hansen predicted.
If temperatures were +1.1C right now as Hansen’s science predicted, they wouldn’t need to communicate better.
Eventually, Hansen will have to admit that the skeptics were right all along, not just winning some “imagined communications war” in the interim.
It appears that Hansen has recognized the truth in Lincoln’s quote: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Additionally, as P. J. O’Rourke noted in his recent book: even if climate change is occurring, there isn’t anything you can really do about it.
What’s really amusing now is that the same University-based climate scientists are now starting to say that ‘Oh yes, the sun has a role to play in Hale cycle modulations’. But of course, global warming is caused by carbon dioxide. Look at an ICSM researcher on the BBC this week…..
Five years ago, anyone who said the sun had anything to do with anything was trashed. They were right, but they were trashed.
Now the sun has to do with climate MODULATION, but not to do with global warming.
You know what I think. Next iteration is this: solar issues modulate on a decades-long thing, but oceans modulate on a 70 year cycle. But carbon dioxide is still the driver of global warming.
When it actually starts getting colder but carbon dioxide keeps going up, the game’s up.
And in the mean time a bunch of lying charlatans will have trousered about £100bn in fees, grants etc etc peddling shit.
The world does indeed work in mysterious ways……
Well how does it go? you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.
Time has run out for the models, real life has caught up or almost, even the “dopeys” of the world are beginning to see the light. When our politicians stop spouting AGW dogma and focus on the real world i WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER MAN. Keep spreading the truth!
Indeed Hansen, and they realized this in the 90s, so they hired PR firms to create RealClimate, Desmog, and others. The problem isn’t your years of patronage of PR firms. The problem is your message is so contradictory to reality that even children can see you are no longer scientists explaining the bounds of human uncertainty, but peddlers of an unwanted world government to deal with the impossibility of human-caused calamity.
We’ve been hammered over the head with the catastrophic global warming message for decades. I remember the first time I saw it “embedded” in a movie (The American President: 1995) I knew that it was going to be the new “China Syndrome”. Even though I knew it was coming, I was surprised at the hubris that followed. “An Inconvenient Truth” wins an Oscar, Gore and the IPCC win a Nobel Peace Prize, and a NASA Scientist runs a blog that’s little more than a mouthpiece to help his boss sell more books. The amount of doublespeak is embarrassing, with predictions that encompass nearly every conceivable meteorological phenomenon: rain, drought, lack of snow, blizzards, hurricanes, wind shear, heat waves and cold snaps. They’ve become masters of the art of postdiction, the opposite of prediction, when you look at something that occurs and claim that it’s proof of CAGW, even though you never actually said it would happen.
Facts are stubborn things. The Belt Parkway is still above water. The US climate, which involves 3 oceans, the tropics, the arctic and the largest lake system in the world, is still the same as it’s been for hundreds of years. Of the 50 state record high temperatures, 41 were set prior to 1985. Of course, we’re always reminded that the US only occupies 2% of the world’s area, so what about global records? Of 8 continental extreme highs (including Oceania) none were set in the global warming era, but in 1994 Australia experienced its all-time record low. Surely the catastrophic increase in temperature should have shattered records across the globe? Nope.
If we’ve learned one thing it’s that canaries should be renamed “Lazarus Birds”, because they keep dying in metaphorical coal mines and, within a few years, magically spring back to life. Extreme weather events come and go, just as they always have. The only difference is that now they get trumpeted loudly as harbingers of doom.
Sorry for the long rant, but the hypocrisy is maddening. If scientists predicted that an asteroid were going to strike the Earth, but their response was to call for a tax on nickel and iron, everyone would be skeptical of their announcement. If they claimed that radio and microwaves were causing cancer, it would seem odd if they continued to use cell phones, and downright bizarre if they invested in a broadcasting company. Yet that’s exactly what we see. Hansen flies to Australia to warn them about the dangers of fossil fuels, and we’re supposed to be impressed that Al Gore minimizes the carbon footprint of the small village that he calls a “house”. Let them become beam-free before they start taxing my motes.
fredb says:
“I think you’re conflating strategic positioning for advantage in the political game of climate negotiations with the idea that these nations deny the reality of climate change. The USA is unique in that it’s motivations for resisting response to climate change is rooted in denial…” &etc.
The only people who “deny the reality of climate change” are the misguided acolytes of Michael Mann, who has mendaciously attempted to erase the LIA and the MWP from the historical temperature record. Now they respond with obvious psychological projection, pretending that skeptics deny the reality of climate change.
Apparently fredb is one of those acolytes who still denies the reality of climate change. Unlike climate alarmists, scientific skeptics have always known that the climate continuously changes.
To Jim Cripwell
October 11, 2011 at 6:27 am
The Carbon Tax will be passed by the House of Representatives (lower house) this week. The Greens (the reason why we have a minority government) have the majority in the Senate (the upper house) so it’s a given that it will pass unchallenged.
Anthony, I beginning to wonder whether what Hansen is saying is right!
Honestly, I think he may be right, the problem is communication. And, it’s not that climate scientists have problems failing to communicate but that we sceptics have problems communicating, not to ourselves obviously, but to those who matter like the media and politicians. If anything, climate scientists are more like the general public than we are, so any problems they have may by many times worse for us. Aren’t the ones who are really having problems getting their message across the sceptical community?
That would make sense. Why, when we have such a strong argument – one which most of us find compelling, have/can we been totally ignored?
The reason dawned on me when I did an analysis of Judith Curry’s responses to the last article on climate communication. It shows that the posters were 20x more likely to report personality type “mastermind” than the general public and 3x more likely than climate scientists. The other half were in what I call “engineering” type personalities. That may sound good, but masterminds are notoriously bad communicators and engineers are little better. Almost no one was in the personality groups you typically expect of politicians: “empathy (F) or wanting to keep the debate going (P)”.
My feeling was confirmed when I asked a friend who is a journalist to view the Dr. Nir Shaviv video which I had found so compelling on solar activity. Her response was “I watched it, but it wasn’t my sort of thing”. She was totally cold to the message, and she is by no means stupid.
After doing some research, I’ve tried to translate our message into something that politicians would be more likely to understand:
We all appreciate that rising global temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century were a concern. So isn’t it good news that the temperature has not risen in the 21st century? Isn’t it also fantastic that we can be comforted by report after report showing that we have nothing to fear from extreme weather events because there is no evidence they are increasing. Why aren’t climate scientists and people like the Met Office hearing this “good news”? Why do they continue to see doom and gloom when the outlook looks so good?
How does it sound if there are any “FP” personalities reading this?
More importantly, I think we need to test this hypothesis. If results from Dr Curry’s blog apply here, then it goes a long way to explaining our problems and it may show us a way to get our message across. So it would be very useful to repeat the study on WUWT asking as many people as possible to undertake an MTBI personality test to see whether we find similar results here.
The MTBI link is here
John W says:
October 11, 2011 at 6:09 am
Thanks John W for reminding me how sick that 10:10 video is.
“The world’s most celebrated climate scientist ” ?
The liars sliped that in there.
Just how many celebration events have any of us been to to celebrate James Hansen as a climate scientist? I’m guessing a grand mass accumulated total of …. zero.
If he had just shown the incontrovertible proof for such a claim, we would all be on the bandwagon. That is why skeptics are more believable. Hansen, standing naked in front of the whole world wants us to admire his new clothing assemble, when any observer can clearly see he is as naked as a newborn babe. Ideology does not stitch into clothing sufficiently to cover his buttocks.
Hansen does not need to retire. He should be fired outright, as he does not act like the scientist, he was hired to be. Whoever hired a political activist to play the role of chief scientist should be dismissed also. Will there never be accountability within the bureaucracy that we are all paying treasure to maintain?! I fear not! GK
Smokey, thanks for your response to my comment. I think this illustrates my point well. When one perceives individual positions or nation’s responses in either-or terms, or only as being on one or other side in a perceived disagreement, then one is closing the door on developing reasoned debate. The politically contaminated global strategic maneuvering is nuanced and complex, as is the climate systems response to forcing. Neither are amenable to simple one-line position statements. And, to try make my point a third time, when a nation positions itself on a foundation of stark absolutes, it loses the edge in the global game of chess. Such is, in my opinion (and like everyone’s comments, it is opinion), the situation of the USA, where the rest of the world is progressively out maneuvering the simple stance taken by the USA. I suspect it is rooted in the history of leadership as a global super-power status, and the inertia to engaging in a new world paradigm of competitiveness.
I am a sceptic, an I have never been arrested!
Mr. Hansen, sceptics:
1. Don’t have an entire UN agency set up to prove their point.
2. Did not remove the MWP from the first IPCC report.
3. Do get fired from jobs for thier understanding of climate.
4. Did not get to testify before Congress until recently.
5. Are wiling to debate anywhere and time with anyone and usually win. (always so far I think)
6. Don’t have entire university department dedicated to prove AGW.
So you see sir your wrong in so many ways. As Albert said: “it only takes one person with one fact to prove me wrong.” Mr. Hansen you’ve been proven wrong.
Scotty,
You’re assuming some innocent confusion or resistance.
The AGW movement has long been riddled with thoroughly untethical participants who found that morbose pays.
“Why do they continue to see doom and gloom when the outlook looks so good?”
It’s either that or admit they have been lying and throw their own careers away.
There’s potential lawsuits, liability, crimnal prosecution etc.
It’s not like they can claim they just got the good news when they have been doctoring data and cooking up phony evidence of AGW for years.
Are you suggesting they can simply say “Gee whiz looky here, good news, So never mind”?
Hansen is demonstrating the next step for the perps. Another twisted squirm on their road to ruin.
“So Jim, when you try to tell us that the 2010 Russian heat wave was caused by global warming, people who know better have to choice but to call post normal science BS on you.”
There are two very important issues with this sentence. The most important is the typographical error. The second problem is with possible misinterpretation of the meaning of BS, some interpretations of which might be insulting to those with a Bachelor of Science degree. Perhaps not as bad as the unintentional slight suffered by a chemist that I once worked with. His last name was Baetz and he had a Master of Science degree in chemistry. Once a person respectfully addressed him as Master Baetz.
The meme that “the other guys are winning because we are scientists not PR professionals” is itself a PR campaign developed by dedicated PR elements in the ‘global warming’ industry.
The cynicism that these bastards can stomach in support of their religion/business model is astounding.
The problem that ‘global warming’ is facing is not that the scientists aren’t PR experts, it is that they are not scientists.
I think the reason why the “skeptics are winning” has nothing to do with lack of PR. I think it has more to do with:
1. Air temperatures aren’t warming for the past decade.
2. Ocean temperatures aren’t warming.
3. Sea levels are not rising any faster than they had been before.
4. There is no catastrophic melting of polar ice.
They can stand on the hill and cry “wolf!” all they want but at some point the wolf needs to appear or people are going to stop listening. Hansen says they just need to yell louder. I say they need to produce evidence of a wolf.
The record should reflect that the “moon conspiracy” program was broadcast on Fox TV, not Fox News Channel, and was part of a series. . I recall seeing Leonard Nemoy as the narrator of one such show involving the search for Atlantis. Other programs involved UFOs, crop circles and the like. Hey, if you thought the X-Files (also a Fox TV product) were based on reality, you would have loved that kind of nonsense!
It’s not a battle dammit… It’s supposed to be science!