UPDATE: Below is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. Comments are open. – Anthony
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Various You-Tube videos by a former “science writer” who uses a speleological pseudonym “potholer54” sneeringly deliver a series of petty smears about artfully-distorted and often inconsequential aspects of my talks on climate change. Here, briefly, I shall answer some of his silly allegations. I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him, so the sentences in quote-marks may not be word for word what he said, but I hope that they fairly convey his meaning.
For fuller answers to these allegations, many of which he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, please see my comprehensive written reply to that video at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.
The allegations, with my answers, are as follows:
“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.
“Monckton says he wrote a peer-reviewed paper. He didn’t.” The editors of Physics and Society asked me to write a paper on climate sensitivity in 2008. The review editor reviewed it in the usual way and it was published in the July 2008 edition, which, like most previous editions, carried a headnote to the effect that Physics and Society published “reviewed articles”. Peer-review takes various forms. From the fact that the paper was invited, written, reviewed and then published, one supposes the journal had followed its own customary procedures. If it hadn’t, don’t blame me. Subsequent editions changed the wording of the headnote to say the journal published “non-peer-reviewed” articles, and the editors got the push. No mention of any of this by the caveman, of course.
“Monckton says the Earth is cooling. It isn’t.” At the time when I said the Earth was cooling, it had indeed been cooling since late 2001. The strong El Niño of 2010 canceled the cooling, and my recent talks and graphs have of course reflected that fact by stating instead that there has been no statistically-significant warming this millennium. The caveman made his video after the cooling had ended, but – without saying so – showed a slide from a presentation given by me while the cooling was still in effect. Was that honest of him?
“Monckton says Greenland is not melting. It is.” Well, it is now, but for 12 years from 1992-2003 inclusive, according to Johannessen et al. (2005), the mean spatially-averaged thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet increased by 5 cm (2 inches) per year, or 2 feet in total over the period. The high-altitude ice mass in central northern Greenland thickened fastest, more than matching a decline in ice thickness along the coastline. Since 2005, according to Johannessen et al. (2009), an ice mass that I calculate is equivalent to some six inches of the 2 feet of increase in Greenland’s ice thickness over the previous decade or so has gone back into the ocean, raising global sea levels by a not very terrifying 0.7 millimeters. According to the Aviso Envisat satellite, in the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 2 inches per century. Not per decade: per century. If so, where has all the additional ice that the usual suspects seem to imagine has melted from Greenland gone? Two possibilities: not as much ice has melted as we are being told, or its melting has had far less impact on sea level than we are being invited to believe.
“Monckton says there’s no systematic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic. There is.” No, I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009. The caveman, if he were capable of checking these or any data, would find this to be so. In fact, he knew this to be so, because the slide I was showing at that point in his video, taken from the University of Illinois’ Cryosphere monitoring program, shows it. Of course, the slide was only in the background of his video and was shown only for a few seconds. Since that particular talk of mine the Arctic sea ice has declined again and came close to its 2007 low in 2011. But it is arguable from the descriptions of melting Arctic ice in 1922 that there may have been less sea ice in the Arctic then than now.
“Monckton says there has been no correlation between temperature and CO2 for the past 500 million years. There has.” Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor, as the slide (from a peer-reviewed paper) that the caveman fleetingly shows me using at that point demonstrates very clearly. For most of that long period, global temperatures were about 7 Celsius degrees warmer than the present: yet CO2 concentration has inexorably declined throughout the period.
“Monckton says a pre-Cambrian ice-planet shows CO2 has no effect on climate. It doesn’t.” No, I cited Professor Ian Plimer, a leading geologist, as having said that the formation of dolomitic rock 750 million years ago could not have taken place unless there had been 300,000 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere: yet glaciers a mile high had come and gone twice at sea-level and at the Equator at that time. Professor Plimer had concluded that, even allowing for the fainter Sun and higher ice-albedo in those days, the equatorial glaciers could not have formed twice if the warming effect of CO2 were as great as the IPCC wants us to believe. At no point have I ever said CO2 has no effect on climate, for its effect was demonstrated by a simple but robust experiment as long ago as 1859. However, I have said, over and over again, that CO2 probably has a much smaller warming effect than the IPCC’s range of estimates. The caveman must have known that, because he says he has watched “hours and hours” of my videos. So why did he misrepresent me?
“Monckton said there had been no change in the Himalayan glaciers for 200 years. There has.” No, I cited Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who had told me on several occasions that the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change”: indeed, it is the opposite, for advance and retreat are both changes. Why did the caveman misrepresent me?
“Monckton says only one Himalayan glacier has been retreating. Many have.” No, I mentioned the Gangotri and Ronggbuk glaciers as being notable examples of glacial retreat in the Himalayas caused by geological instability in the region. To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating. Why did the caveman misrepresent me? It is this kind of intellectual dishonesty that permeates the caveman’s cheesy videos. He has not the slightest intention of being accurate or fair. If he had, he would surely have mentioned that the IPCC tried for months to pretend that all of the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035. The IPCC’s own “peer-reviewers” had said the figure should be “2350”, not “2035”, but the lead author of the chapter in question had left in the wrong figure, knowing it to be unverified, because, as he later publicly admitted, he wanted to influence governments.
The caveman says I misquoted the lead author who had left in the erroneous date for the extinction of the Himalayan glaciers, but here is what that author actually said in an interview with the Daily Mail: “We thought that if we can highlight it [the erroneous date], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” For good measure, he said I had misquoted Sir John Houghton, the IPCC’s first science chairman, who had said that unless we announced disasters no one would listen.
Sir John, too, tried to maintain that I had misquoted him, and even menaced me with a libel suit, until I told him I had a copy of the cutting from the London Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995, in which he had said, “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster”, and that I also had a copy of an article in the Manchester Guardian of July 28, 2003, in which Sir John had luridly ascribed numerous specific natural disasters to “global warming”, which he described as “a weapon of mass destruction” that was “at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism”. Perhaps the caveman didn’t know any of this, but here’s the thing: I do not recall that he has ever bothered to check any of his “facts” with me (though, if he had, I wouldn’t have known because he lurks behind a pseudonym and, even though I am told he has revealed his identity I have no time to keep track of the pseudonyms of people who lack the courage and decency to publish under their own names).
“Monckton says Dr. Pinker found that a loss of cloud cover had caused recent warming. She disagreed.” No, I drew the conclusion from Dr. Pinker’s paper, and from several others, that cloud cover does not remain constant, but waxes and wanes broadly in step with the cooling and warming phases respectively of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I did not misrepresent Dr. Pinker’s paper in any way: I merely used it as a source for my own calculations, which I presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists in 2010, where they were well received. Less cloud cover, particularly in the tropics, naturally warms the Earth: the point is surely uncontroversial. If one removes the influence of this natural warming phase from the record since 1976, it is reasonable to deduce that climate sensitivity based on that period is much lower than the IPCC thinks. Strictly speaking, one should study temperature trends in multiples of 60 years, so as to ensure that the warming and cooling phases of the PDO cancel one another out.
Frankly, that’s quite enough of these dull allegations. There are others, but they are all as half-baked and dishonest as these and it would be tedious to deal with each one. You get the drift: the caveman is a zealot and we need not ask who paid him to watch “hours and hours” of my YouTube videos to realize from these examples that his videos are unreliable. More importantly, it would interfere with my research: I hope shortly to be in a position to demonstrate formally that climate sensitivity is unarguably little more than one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate. My objective is to reach the truth, not to distort it or misrepresent it as the caveman has done.
He concludes by challenging his small band of followers to check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible”. Of course the Earth has been warming since 1750: I have at no point denied it, though that is the implication of the caveman’s statement.
And of course there are scientists who say CO2 is “largely responsible” for the warming: that is the principal conclusion of the IPCC’s 2007 report, reached on the basis of a fraudulent statistical abuse: comparison of the slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines on the global-temperature dataset falsely to suggest that “global warming” is accelerating and that it is our fault. Not that one has ever heard the caveman utter a word of condemnation of the IPCC’s too-often fictional “science”. But it is also reasonable to mention the growing band of scientists who say CO2 may not be “largely responsible” but only partly responsible for the warming since 1950. Would it not have been fairer if the caveman had pointed that out?
Climate skeptics have come under intensive attack from various quarters, and the attacks have too often been as unpleasantly dishonest as those of the caveman. Also, there is evidence that someone has been spending a lot of money on trying malevolently to discredit those who dare to ask any questions at all about the party line on climate.
For instance, after a speech by me in in the US in October 2009 went viral and received a million YouTube hits in a week (possibly the fastest YouTube platinum ever for a speech), a Texan professor who monitors the seamier side of the internet got in touch to tell me that someone had paid the operators of various search engines a sum that he estimated at not less than $250,000 to enhance the page rankings of some two dozen specially-created web-pages containing meaningless jumbles of symbols among which the word “Monckton video” appeared.
These nonsense pages would not normally have attracted any hits at all, and the search engines would normally have ranked them well below the video that had gone platinum. The intention of this elaborate and expensive artifice, as the professor explained, was to ensure that anyone looking for the real video would instead find page after page of junk and simply give up. The viral chain was duly broken, but so many websites carried the video that more than 5 million people ended up seeing it, so the dishonestly-spent $250,000 was wasted.
At one level, of course, all of this attention is an unintended compliment. But no amount of sneering or smearing will alter two salient facts: the Earth has not been warming at anything like the predicted rate and is not now at all likely to do so; and, in any event, even if the climate-extremists’ predictions were right, it would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective to wait and adapt in a focused way to any adverse consequences of manmade “global warming” than it would be to tax, trade, regulate, reduce, or replace CO2 today.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
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Note: for anyone who wishes to see what this is about, you can see “potholer54” aka Peter Hadfield on Monckton at YouTube here – Anthony
UPDATE: Here is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. – Anthony
Response from Peter Hadfield:
In January, Christopher Monckton criticized me on WUWT after I made a series of videos exposing errors in most of his claims. I have asked Anthony Watts for the opportunity to respond in kind, so that we can put Mr. Monckton’s verbatim assertions up against the documentary evidence he cites.
At first I was puzzled as to what Mr. Monckton was responding to in his WUWT guest-post, because he failed to address any of the rebuttals or the evidence I showed in my five videos. Then I realized he must have watched only the last video in the series, including a light-hearted 30-second ‘mistake count’. So in this response I am going to deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, as shown and rebutted in my videos, rather than what he thinks I think he said, and what he thinks I rebutted.
Mr. Monckton doesn’t claim to be an expert, and neither do I. All I can do is to check and verify his claims. So the question is whether Mr. Monckton has reported the sources he cites accurately in order to reach his conclusions. I have made it very easy for you to check by playing clips of Mr. Monckton making these assertions in my videos, then showing images of the documentary evidence he cites. Since this response is text I will write out Mr. Monckton’s assertions verbatim and quote the documentary sources verbatim (with references in the body of the text.) References to the relevant video (linked at the bottom) and the time on the video where they are shown, will be shown in square brackets.
ON THE COOLING EARTH:
Since Mr. Monckton failed to address the evidence, but implies I was duplicitous in my timing, let’s see what my video actually showed. In a speech given in Melbourne in February 2009, Mr. Monckton said: “We’ve had nine years of a global cooling trend since the first of January 2001” [Ref 1 – 4:06] — and St. Paul in October 2009: “There has been global cooling for the last eight or nine years” [ibid.].
So in my video, the period Mr. Monckton was talking about was clearly identified in his own words, as well as in the graphs he showed, and I showed the dates the speeches were made, and the studies I cited covered the same period.
[“Waiting for Global Cooling” – R. Fawcett and D. Jones, National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, April 2008]
[“Statisticians reject global cooling” — Associated Press 10/26/2009 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33482750/ns/us_news-environment/]
ON THE MELTING OF GREENLAND:
Again, let’s deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, which is what I rebutted. In a speech in St. Paul in 2009, Mr. Monckton cited a paper by Ola Johannessen, and told the audience: “What he found was that between 1992 and 2003, the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet increased by two inches a year.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM 11:40)
No, he found no such thing. Johannessen said he only measured the interior of Greenland above 1,500 metres [1 – 11:59] In fact, he specifically warns that the very conclusion Mr Monckton reaches cannot be made: “We cannot make an integrated assessment of elevation changes… for the whole Greenland Ice Sheet, including its outlet glaciers, from these observations alone, because the marginal areas are not measured completely…. ” [“Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland” Ola M. Johannessen et al, Science November 2005]
ON THE LOSS OF ARCTIC ICE:
Mr. Monckton claimed there is no long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic, and I rebutted this with studies showing a decline in Arctic summer sea-ice extent since satellite measurements began in 1979. [1 – 8:20 onwards]
Mr. Monckton’s response: “I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009.”
So, as I said, he did not tell his audience there had been a 30-year decline. Quite the opposite – he said there was no long-term decline. Mr. Monckton showed his audience a slide covering just three years, referring to the 2007 low as a “temporary loss of sea ice” which had recovered by 2009. Then he told them: “So we’re not looking at a sort of long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic.” [1 – 8:27]
ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2 AND GLOBAL TEMPERATURES SINCE THE CAMBRIAN:
Mr. Monckton’s conclusion about a lack of correlation rests entirely on a graph showing CO2 concentration and temperature over the last 500 million years [3 – 0:04]. The graph uses temperature data from Scotese and CO2 data from Berner. Neither researcher supports Mr. Monckton’s ‘no correlation’ conclusion. On the contrary, Berner writes: “Over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the greenhouse effect.” [“Geocarb III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time” — R. Berner and Z. Kothavala, American Journal of Science, Feb 2001]
How so? Because paleoclimatologists have to factor in solar output, which has been getting stronger over time [3 – 4:45]. If the rising curve of solar output is compared to global temperatures over the phanerozoic (500 million years) there is a similar lack of correlation. But it would be absurd to draw the conclusion that the sun therefore has no effect on climate.
So when gradually rising solar output is taken into account there is a very clear correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, and the source of Mr. Monckton’s data points that out. So does another senior researcher in the field [“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004].
ON THE PRE-CAMBRIAN ICE PLANET:
Again, let’s look at what I showed in my video, which was a clip of Mr. Monckton himself, speaking in a debate:
“750 million years ago, a mile of ice at the equator, ice planet all round, therefore at the surface 300,000 ppm of CO2. Will you tell me how that much CO2 could have been in the atmosphere and yet allowed that amount of ice at the equator?” [3 – 5:17]
Since Mr. Monckton thinks this is a puzzle for climatologists, let’s go through the well-understood explanation step by step.
Mr. Monckton agrees with the experts that the frozen planet was due to very weak solar output (about 8% less than today.) And he agrees that the high albedo (reflectivity) of this white surface would have reflected most of what little solar warmth the Earth did receive.
But he doesn’t seem to accept that volcanoes would have continued releasing CO2 into the atmosphere of this frozen planet over millions of years, and that this eventually warmed the planet enough to unfreeze it [“CO2 levels required for deglaciation of a ‘near-snowball’ Earth” T. Crowley et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2001]. He cites no peer-reviewed research showing why paleoclimatologists are wrong. (No, the opinion of “a leading geologist” is not the same thing.)
ON HIMALAYAN GLACIERS:
Mr. Monckton writes in his WUWT response: “the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change””
Then let’s look at what Mr. Monckton actually said to his audience in St. Paul:
“The glaciers are showing no particular change in 200 years. The only glacier that’s declined a little is Gangoltri.” [3 – 10:20]
So is it a pattern of advance and retreat? Or no particular change? Or only one glacier retreating? Which?
In his WUWT resp onse, Mr. Monckton went on to say: “To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating.”
But you DID say it, Mr. Monckton. Here it is again: “Only one of them [Himalayan glaciers] is retreating a little and that’s Gangoltri.”
ON MISQUOTING MURARI LAL:
Speaking about Murari Lal, the man behind the IPCC’s 2035 disappearing glaciers fiasco, Mr. Monckton told his audience there was: “….an admission that he [Lal] knew that figure was wrong but had left it in anyway because he knew that the IPCC wanted to influence governments and politicians.”[4 – 3:50]
This is not even borne out by Monckton’s own source, cited in his response, which is a quote from Lal in the Daily Mail about the 2035 date: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Nowhere does Lal say he knew the figure was erroneous.
MISQUOTING SIR JOHN HOUGHTON:
Mr. Monckton claims Houghton wrote this in the Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” [4 – 5:50]
And I maintain Houghton wrote: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.”
Who is right? Well, both Mr. Monckton and I have exactly the same source [Sunday Telegraph, September 10, 1995], but I actually show an image of it in my video [4 – 7:24]. Take a look. Even though it turns out my quote is correct and Mr. Monckton’s is clearly a gross misquote, he still insists in his WUWT response that he got the quote right.
ON HIS CLAIMS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE SUN…
Mr. Monckton showed and quoted an extract from a paper by Sami Solanki: “The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episodoes on to come.” [5 – 1:21 onwards]
That could suggest the sun is a likely culprit for recent warming. But why didn’t Mr. Monckton tell or show his audience what Solanki wrote in the very next line?
“Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.” [“Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the last 11,000 years” — S.K. Solanki et al, Nature Sep 2004]
ON THE ROLE OF THE SUN IN RECENT WARMING:
Mr. Monckton said: “The solar physicists – you might take Scafetta and West, say, in 2008, they attribute 69% of all the recent global warming to the sun.” [5 – 3:48]
No, they don’t. In my video [5 – 4:32] I showed the actual document Mr. Monckton refers to (an opinion piece) where Scafetta and West wrote: “We estimate that the sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in the Earth’s average temperature.” [“Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, Physics Today March 2008]
I hope we all understand the difference between “69%” and “as much as 69%.” But what about all those other “solar physicists” who purportedly support Monckton’s position? Well, they don’t. Solanki’s figure is up to just 30%, Erlykin less than 14%, Bernstad 7%, Lean ‘negligable’and Lockwood –1.3% [5 — 4:40]
[4:41 “Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?”– S. K. Solanki and N. A. Krivova, Journal of Geophysical Research, May 2003]
[“Solar Activity and the Mean Global Temperature”
A.D. Erlykin et al, Physics Geo 2009]
[“Solar trends and global warming” — R. Benestad and G. Schmidt, Journal of Geophysical Research” July 2009]
[“How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006” J. Lean and D. Rind, Geophysical Research Letters, Sep 2008]
[“Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise” — M. Lockwood, June 2008]
Mr. Monckton then asserts that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) agrees with this conclusion (that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming.) After he had been confronted during a TV interview with the plain fact that it didn’t [5 – 5:49 “Meet the Climate Sceptics” BBC TV Feb 2011], Monckton gave a reason for the error in his WUWT response:
“I cited a paper given by Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at the 2004 symposium of the IAU in St. Petersburg, Fla, but put “IAU” at the foot of the slide rather than Dr. Abdussamatov’s name.”
Maybe so. But that doesn’t explain why Mr. Monckton continued to make exactly the same claim elsewhere. At St. Paul he said:
“Most solar physicists agree [that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming]. The International Astronomical Union in 2004 had a symposium on it, they concluded that that was the case.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:27]
And in his film ‘Apocalypse No!’ a slide headed ‘International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004’ was shown to an audience, along with its main conclusions. Third on the list, Monckton read: “The sun caused today’s global warming.”
Monckton told the audience: “This is not my conclusion, this is the conclusion of the International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004. This is what they said, this is not me talking here.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:34]
Mr. Monckton has to accept that this claim is completely spurious. This is why he dislikes detailed examinations of his sources. While he takes every opportunity to debate on stage, where his speaking skills are essential and his assertions can’t be checked, an online debate is far tougher, because every paper and fact CAN be checked. So come on, Mr. Monckton, let’s debate this on WUWT to see which of us has correctly read your sources.
The rebuttals I made are not “inconsequential aspects of my talks” as Mr. Monckton claims; they include almost every major topic he covers, from the melting of Arctic and glacial ice, to the role of the sun and the correlation between CO2 and temperature. His only recourse in his WUWT response was therefore to call me names, attack my character and my competence, and question my financing and my motivation… anything but answer the documentary evidence I presented. And then he adds one more error — a ridiculous claim that I asked my “small band of followers” to “check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible.”
Since I can’t establish that myself, I certainly wouldn’t advise other amateurs to have a go. So I ask Mr. Monckton to cite the source for this claim, sure in the knowledge that once again we will see a yawning gap between what the source actually says (in this case, me) and what Mr. Monckton claims it says.
References: (Hadfield’s own videos)
1 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM
2 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q
3 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo
4 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA
5 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCyctTvuCo
lljames says:
“ONLY the peer reviewed data can help one understand the measurements…”
Ridiculous. You can learn more here, and you will read both sides of the debate, not just the sanitized views coming out of the journal industry. Modern peer review is a big money construct. If Albert Einstein had to deal with today’s journals he would have a difficult time getting published, because he was well outside the “consensus”.
Apparently you are not aware that the climate peer review system has been utterly corrupted. It is actually “pal review”, as has been demonstrated time after time in the Climategate emails. A small clique of self-serving reprobates led by Michael Mann connived to force mass resignations from journal boards, dishonestly conspired to artificially increase the number of peer reviewed publications, got scientists fired for simply expressing scientific views that Mann disagreed with, and covertly arranged to have friendly “anonymous” reviewers promptly approve their papers, while skeptical scientists [the only honest kind of scientist] were forced to wait for years in some cases to get published [if they got published at all], while Mann and his pals typically gets his submissions published within a few months – or less.
It is absolutely untrue that “ONLY peer reviewed can help one understand…”. That is simply an appeal to a corrupt authority. Mann is guilty of every accusation made against Lord Monckton here, doubled and squared. And you will learn more honest science here than you will find in the pal reviewed literature. You will learn that Mann’s infamous MBH99 “Hockey Stick” graph has been completely debunked by multiple scientists and scientific organizations, so that the IPCC can no longer publish it [and the IPCC loved that scary chart]. You will learn that Mann knowingly used a corrupted proxy [Tiljander] because it gave him the hockey stick shape he wanted – even though he was informed before he published that the proxy was no good and should not be used. Mann has done this repeatedly. And his climate charlatan pals use outlandish “treemometer” proxies like thousand year old trees to preposterously claim to know millennium old temperatures within a tiny fraction of a degree. You will learn that the claim common to the climate charlatan crowd is that a rise in CO2 will cause runaway global warming. And you will also learn that the only real Authority, planet earth, is solidly debunking that belief.
For plenty more on the reprehensible Michael Mann and his cronies, I recomment A.W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, available on the right sidebar. It is thoroughly referenced, unimpeachable, and you will never again view climate peer review as being anything other than a self-serving vehicle to promote the interests of Mann’s clique. For a taste of Montford’s writing, see here.
Daniel says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:51 am
What?! 😀
You even don’t understand, or care, about stablished rules of qouting others, now wonder you don’t know what peer review means.
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Yes, because punctuation and appeals to authority are so important to climatology. Oddly, spelling isn’t.
[snip]
“And of course there are scientists who say CO2 is “largely responsible” for the warming: that is the principal conclusion of the IPCC’s 2007 report, reached on the basis of a fraudulent statistical abuse: comparison of the slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines on the global-temperature dataset falsely to suggest that “global warming” is accelerating and that it is our fault. Not that one has ever heard the caveman utter a word of condemnation of the IPCC’s too-often fictional “science””
Why don’t you write a scientific paper in a peer reviewed journal detailing this alleged “fraudulent statistical abuse”?
David Hitchen says:
“Why don’t you write a scientific paper in a peer reviewed journal detailing this alleged “fraudulent statistical abuse”?”
Why doesn’t pothole write one? Answer: Because no journal would publish it.
“You will learn that Mann’s infamous MBH99 “Hockey Stick” graph has been completely debunked by multiple scientists and scientific organizations, so that the IPCC can no longer publish it [and the IPCC loved that scary chart].”
Is this a joke? What you’re saying is the exact opposite of reality… The hockey stick has been confirmed over and over again… where were you?
Phil Joseph Juliansen says:
“What you’re saying is the exact opposite of reality…”
We’ll see who is grounded in reality. As I made clear, the chart I referred to was the MBH99 chart. Specifically, this chart.
If you can produce the current IPCC Assessment Report showing that chart, I will concede. Don’t try bait and switch by showing some silly spaghetti chart, or other imitation of Mann’s debunked hokey stick chart. Show the original, which the IPCC used over and over – until McIntyre & McKitrick proved it was complete junk science.
And if you can’t show Mann’s original chart in a current IPCC AR publication, then answer a question for me: what color is the sky in your reality?☺
Phil Joseph Juliansen says:
February 9, 2012 at 11:06 am
“You will learn that Mann’s infamous MBH99 “Hockey Stick” graph has been completely debunked by multiple scientists and scientific organizations, so that the IPCC can no longer publish it [and the IPCC loved that scary chart].”
Is this a joke? What you’re saying is the exact opposite of reality… The hockey stick has been confirmed over and over again… where were you?
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Sigh……… are you kidding me? Tell me Phil, what temperature is indicative of no ring growth? That is to say, when the tree rings are not growing, what is the temperature? What’s the average temperature? What is the low and what is the high? Confirmed? Confirmed by what? More dendrophrenology? And before you start blathering about anything, you should read Mann’s acknowledgment of missing cool summers from the chronology record…… then I’d ask you to do a bit of critical thinking on your own and try to understand the implications of such an acknowledgment. Turns out, becoming a brain surgeon never really was an option for many of these people.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-tree-underestimate-climate-response-volcanic.html
REPLY: Actually, its a play on his nom de plume, potholer… most people miss that as you have. -A
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You do realize you’re taking away a point of which I could have ridiculed these people about……. 🙁
[snip – calling other posters brain damaged and then diagnosing specific brain ailments isn’t gonna fly here. Take a 48 hour timeout Mr. Greer – Anthony]
[snip]
You don’t even allow an open forum.. I knew it.. Why not? Tell me?
REPLY: Read the policy page – your comment violated policy, this one does not. If you really want “open” then I suggest you put your name to your denigrations. -A
@Johannes
Johannes your “And to me, this is serious stuff”, “I strongly disagree”, ” so many errors”, “this is indeed a serious issue” and ” this is serious” are totally out of proportion. The “Caveman” thing is a bit of harmless fun. I *Strongly* suggest you either,
A. Locate a sense of humour.
B. Get a Life, or
C. Drop the “Concern Troll” personna and return to whichever “Believer Cesspit” you originate from. Haven’t you got any any “precautionary principle” stairs that need hiding under?
Cheers!
😉
It is hard to read through all the nonsense posted here.
All I can say is look at Hadfield’s YouTube channel. Besides the Monckton videos he has a whole series on Climate change found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer54#g/c/A4F0994AFB057BB8
Watch them. I’m not sure what the obsession is with Al Gore but let it go people. As Hadfield says in his video series he is not for or against he is about the science and how accurately it is portrayed. He then corrects and goes through the entire major for and against and in the end it’s simple:
Man greatly contributes to Climate Change
There will be drastic results of CC if it’s not corrected.
Some results are happening now while most will be in the future and the longer we take to start the correction the longer the fix will take.
An argument online is kind of like competing in the “Special Olympics”.
Even if you win;
Your Still riding the “Short Bus”…
@GSW
What started as a tongue-in-cheek response to my initial comment has now turned into ad hominem and uncivility. It took just one post.
I don’t originate from any believer cesspit. If you call someone a caveman (and then referred to as “a caveman” over and over again), no matter how “witty” the namecalling might be, you’re losing the argument and you’re behaving like an adolescent. That is my opinion.
Laugh at me all you want and call me humorless. I don’t think that is a good tool when people are trying to have a serious scientific discourse while others (or rather, most participants) are engaged in namecalling. That’s tragedy rather than comedy. And I don’t see how my phrasing can be “out of proportion” when we’re discussing climate change/fraud. Do you really think it is not a serious issue?
I don’t know what gives you the right to presume I have no sense of humor, I have no life and I’m a “concern troll”. Neither is the case. But I don’t let that enter into an scientific internet debate. There’s enough personal stuff on here already, don’t you think?
Smokey, a cooler object can warm a hotter object via radiation. Lasers are used all the time to melt materials with very high melting points. Temperature is an average. We can concentrate radiation enough to have a very high temp in a small area. The second law of thermo is about entropy. We can achieve very high temps essentially if we spend enough energy to do so. Lasers can even be used to cool an object via radiation down to near 0K. The latter is a case of a warm object cooling a colder object.
The atmosphere concentrates energy given by the sun over time to raise temperature much as an oven concentrates over time to raise its temperature when the oven door is closed. At equilibrium, the same energy comes in as goes out but the cavity stays at a high temperature.
Doug Cotton, I agree we should consider many alternatives that show promise.
You have a link to your website, but I see no opportunity to comment on that page. I would like to read the material and have you give me a decent opportunity to reply to the material you posted there (I haven’t read it yet).
I don’t agree with the criticism of Monckton here. Every human being makes mistakes, but the incessant nitpicking amounts to pointing out the mote in Monckton’s eye, while ignoring the beam in Michael Mann’s eye. Mann is a real charlatan, still trying and failing to resurrect his thoroughly debunked hokey stick.
But there is a bigger issue: there is not one alarmist climatologist who is not deathly afraid to go toe-to-toe with those on the other side, like Lord Monckton routinely does. Taking potholeshots from the sidelines in the manner of the craven coward Abraham [who scurried back to the safety of his ivory tower, and who remains in hiding there] is the preferred method of taking the spotlight off of the fact that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. None of the endlessly predicted CO2=CAGW disasters have happened. And the ultimate Authority, the planet itself, is falsifying the belief system promoted by the Mann/Jones clique: the trend from the LIA is the same, no more and no less, over the past several centuries. The rise in CO2 has made zero measurable difference in the natural global warming since the 1600’s. The CO2 scare has been shown by planet Earth to be a false alarm.
So let’s all attack Monckton instead, eh? Maybe people will forget that CO2 is beneficial, not harmful. More is better. And maybe the claque attacking Monckton can make everyone forget that their clique of charlatans studiously ignores the scientific method, and forget that the climate null hypothesis has never been falsified. The CO2 conjecture has been falsified, so it’s full steam ahead with the ad hominem attack. Because that’s all the alarmist crowd has got now; the planet proves they’re wrong.
The alarmist cultists would much prefer to pick nits and try to demonize someone that their HE-ROES don’t have the balls to debate. Get your boy Mann, or Jones, or Schmidt, or Trenberth, or Gore, or Hansen, or all of them together for moral support, and do a repeat of the Oxford debate. But they will chicken out. They will contrive plenty of lame excuses why they can’t, or won’t, then they’ll run yelping out the back door with their tails between their quaking hind legs. You know it’s true. They don’t have the stones to face Lord Monckton in a real, honest debate. They hide out, and let their eco-contingent take potshots from the safety of blog commentary. But they will never go face to face, preferably on television in a neutral debate setting, with a randomly selected audience. They know when they do that they always lose the debate. The public goes in believing in the likelihood of CAGW, but it exits as skeptics.
Can anyone here imagine having Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt appear at RealClimate, and defend his position like Monckton does here and everywhere else? With scientific skeptics allowed to ask pointed questions, and with no arbitrary, echo-chamber censorship? Don’t be silly, Mann would lose the battle and the entire war if he allowed that, because Mann’s pseudo-science is fakery. Mann is a coward who hides out from any setting that isn’t closely scripted 100% in his favor, just like Algore.
I double-dog dare anyone riding the climate grant gravy train to do what Lord Monckton is doing here, under the same terms and conditions. But you know they won’t. They’re cowards.
Smokey, I don’t see how those graphs you just linked to falsify global warming. The temp is going up, but, more importantly, we would have to look at more data points than just a few major cities.
There are some good reasons why many scientists might not care to do a live debate. Science is not done on the hot seat. It’s easy to lie on the hot seat and sound convincing. To show something accurately requires careful thought and analysis and potentially a very long explanation to an audience that frankly doesn’t care about details. A bunch of blogs have sprung up to try and explain some of the many formal papers that keep getting written. Scientists do science, not perform public debates. It can be hard enough to teach undergraduate students who are not interested in a subject. Now imagine trying to teach a general audience of laypeople who gathers to see fireworks and get a simple to digest answer in a few minutes. Can I ask you why do you have a problem with a debate taking place in non-real time? Science just has never been done in real time. The whole point of science is that lot’s of people have lots of time to digest the material and try to verify it for themselves.
Also, if you want to understand the anger at Monckton, look at how many people appear rather angry and Mann. I’m sure neither of them is getting a fair shake by their greatest critics. People do make mistakes and sometimes even take a few chances in stretching their predictions or not crossing all t’s thinking they are probably correct anyway.
Jose-X says:
“… I don’t see how those graphs you just linked to falsify global warming.”
They do not falsify global warming! Natural global warming has been a fact since the end of the Little Ice Age. What the charts do is falsify the falsified conjecture that the warming is due to an increase in CO2.
The whole issue of AGW/CAGW is a fight over the public’s perception of whether or not they should be alarmed. Public debates resolve this perception. Since CO2 is harmless and beneficial, debates are a good thing. Only cowards and those who don’t have the science backing their alarmism are afraid of debating. Let the public decide after they have heard both sides in a fair and unbiased public debate. Anything else is just an excuse to allow propaganda to dominate. The alarmist crowd wants propaganda; the scientific skeptics want open debate. Which side shall it be? It is an either/or question.
Smokey says:
February 9, 2012 at 8:00 pm
I don’t agree with the criticism of Monckton here. Every human being makes mistakes, but the incessant nitpicking amounts to pointing out the mote in Monckton’s eye, while ignoring the beam in Michael Mann’s eye…………
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Smoke, it isn’t just confined to Mann. Sure, he’s fun to make fun of, but there’s much more to this than that.
Christopher, failed on his usage of quote marks……… Yes, that’s horrible! Quoting and paraphrasing is important in climatology!!!!
Christopher had the audacity to state what we all already knew about the Himalayan range. Today, it is confirmed. Many people owe him an apology. Including Hadfield.
Chris had the audacity to interpret data from studies on his own…..
Chris had the audacity to point out that the earth hasn’t warmed for quite some time. In fact, I have 5 grandchildren who have never seen the global anomaly rise over a 3 year period of time. Yet, they are indoctrinated that the earth is warming…… yet, in their lifetimes, it hasn’t, it has cooled.
I could and should go on, but I’m a bit tired. At every point of contention Hadfield has mentioned was either wrong or, we worried about something as trivial as quote marks. Christopher loses a point for being grammatically incorrect. I would encourage him to consult prior to writing……. I’m free of charge. 🙂
To me, this was funny….. Hadfield took the time to make a series of videos. 5 of them, Monckton responded, and he has 10 points of contention……. from the 5 videos. But, it’s worse than that…… Chris paraphrased!!!!! Hadfield doesn’t understand the present participle! Nor does he understand subjective vs. objective! And, neither do the people who followed him here.
Which is fine….. in this thread I’ve had people reference works of art and attempted to pass them off as works of physics. These are the types of people we’re dealing with. Rationale and context are beyond them. They are entrenched in the belief that anything which benefits mankind is an aberration and harmful to nature. They are misanthropists and they will live and die being misanthropists.
@Smokey “I don’t agree with the criticism of Monckton here. Every human being makes mistakes.”
Well while that may be true in this case it is not. In talk after talk; presentation after presentation he continues to misstate the facts and the truth. That’s not making a mistake that’s spreading propaganda.
[snip. ~dbs, mod.]
Smokey says:
February 9, 2012 at 8:00 pm
……Maybe people will forget that CO2 is beneficial, not harmful. More is better……….
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Yeah, the locals at Lake Nyos reckon its great stuff.
@Smokey and @James Baldwin Sexton: You two’s, Monckton and many more here are trying desperately to take the focus off the subject at hand. The focus and contention is about Moncton’s inability to stick to the truth. Whether it’s because of sloppyness, fabrication or something else is debateable -but that is at least on topic.
Monckton keep saying “I’m going to give it to you straight”, “we report, you decide”, “what I am striving for here is to reach the truth”, “independently verifiable”… yet he keeps feeding his audience the most bizarre maladjusted quotes. If he has an agenda, it seems to be pretty far off the mark of “truth” which he purports.
As Potholer points out -It’s not an isolated incident, Moncton has a slew of quotes, of some which he even uses a ridiculing voice to say the quote… which wasn’t so!
So, he isn’t giving it “straight”, he isn’t just “reporting” and letting you decide, if he is striving for the truth, and his sources are “independently verifiable” -why doesn’t he source check himself?
All babble about Al Gore and Mann, both which also have clear flaws in their work, are not the contention in this thread, there are multiple other threads here which are suited for those characters.
Let’s not forget that all other points raised by Potholer that Moncton calls “half baked”, will actually remain very baked, served and called delicious until he explain why he obvious blundered big time.
Don’t you guys (Smokey and James Sexton) think it’s pretty silly to call the years 2001-2009 a period of “global cooling” when the trend was just barely deviating from a stand still?
You are going to cling to the “cooling trend” like a kid to his comfort blanket.
If we “global warmers” take it away from you, you will shout and cry “it hasn’t been any global warming for a decade! so! there!” as if that would change the past 100 years of net warming.
Now, in all honesty, what do you guys think of the up and coming solar maximum and coming El Nino cycle? you think you can keep reaching for that blanket? you think it will comfort you in 2012 and 2013?