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
Let me guess Anna, you attended a fourth-rate bible college in some nowheresville. feeling a bit touchy?
+++
No, Anna’s got degrees in chemical engineering, history, and a J.D in law, all from very decent universities, thank you very much. Anna’s a member of the D.C. bar, as well.
But Anna hates pretentiousness and the kind of social SNOT and PHLEGM the Learned Lord is coughing up. Any first-year law student who began his brief with that kind of crap during a law class recitation would get slapped down mightily by the prof. Everyone learns not to do that twice.
It’s just chickenbleep. It is no different than calling someone a “denialist”. It is the “argument ad hominem” writ large. In Monckton’s case, extra large.
Everyone at WUWT approves of, indeed demands, arguments “on the merits”. As I said, I applaud Monckton’s smiting his AGW opponents hip and thigh, on the merits, but he should not stoop to bashing them for their (perceived) lack of intellectual and cultural/social deficiencies.
Just make the damn case!
per Wendy:
Anna….it’s not spelled FRACK, it’s spelled FRAC. My, my, wouldn’t your mother be so proud of you….such language and in public!!
Frankly, real class shows here and it’s not on your part, Anna.
——
In addition to not addressing my argument, Wendy is apparently unaware of the TV series “Battlestar Galactica, where “frack” was a substitute for that…. other word.
I recognize that, for some ,a certain amount of….cognitive dissonance… will apply when using one term to allude to another, but that used to be called…punning.
As for Frack being used to describe a process for extracting petroleum, I invite her to google the term. She will see it being used as a verb and a gerund.
Peace.
“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.”
Extract from “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes
Who benefits?
Joel Shore says:
January 12, 2012 at 7:26 pm
Monckton of Brenchley says:
=============================
lmao @ur momisugly Joel…… sorry man. You’re usually a bit more clever than this. You can fight this all you want, but, in the end, you’ll lose. Here is why…….. there is not technical definition as to what is “peer reviewed”. From there, you should see the folly, but I’ll expand for just a moment.
For as long as you dwell there, you cause people to look. And from there you really should see the fallacy. But, in case you do not, I’ll spell it out. Monckton submitted a paper. The physicist editor reviewed it. He caused it to be published. (All of this was out of Monckton’s control.)
In the mean time, e-mails have surfaced that show like minded climatologists were reviewing their friends’ papers. Now this isn’t subjective. What I’ve stated is objective. Do you really want to dwell in the peer-review process? More specifically, do you really want to attach any standards to such? If you do, any standards contrived, invalidates most of the climatology presented in the last 20 years. Unless, you believe known colleagues, reviewing papers of said colleagues, with the same perspective represents valid science. If you do believe such, people will laugh at you.
Joel, you should try more than this. Don’t worry about published/peer reviewed/accepted. If you can argue against the science and math, go for it. Believe it or not, there are some who watch, read, think, and test your assertions. WUWT recently went over 100 million hits! And all you have is to worry about what you believe is “peer reviewed” or not? That’s vapid. There are two possibilities. Either Christopher is correct, or he is not. If he is correct, does it matter how many or in what manner he was judged? If he is incorrect, if he was reviewed by 1000 scientists, would it matter? Joel, you’ve been here long enough to know, “peer reviewed” means jack. Peer review brought us the bats were dying, the bats were thriving, the trees were dying, the trees were thriving., the floods were increasing and the droughts were increasing all at the same time! Even the paleo brought us different MWP and LIA! And you’re worried about Christopher’s claim? That’s less than stupid.
Anthony, why not invite both Hadfield and Monckton to a online debate right here on WUWT?
Of course, without sound, we’d be missing out a terrific battle of the Queen’s English.
@ur momisugly Anna, what bothers you so much, may, or may not be Christopher’s natural demeanor. But, it is effective. Yes, there is a way about him. Some will liken him to fingernails on the chalkboard. Others, it is soft violin music.
You, more than most here, should understand the subtle differences between being correct and effective, and how much more it means to be both. Likability doesn’t fall into the equation. I know you must understand this. I think you also understand the difference between respect and adulation. I don’t mean to irk you in any manner, but we’re not here because people like us. Most of us are skeptics. And, most of us are right. ………. from there, you can see that most of us will never win popularity contests. Some of us just go with it……. 🙂
Peace.
James Sexton
Steve Metzler says:
January 12, 2012 at 3:48 pm
phlogiston says:
Yawn – the actual “figure” for CO2, as shown in this figure:
http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/289/logwarmingpaleoclimate.png
is of course zero – except at the low end when it starts killing plants.
Oh, yeah. Silly me. For a moment there I forgot that the physical properties of CO2, as demonstrated over the past 200 years, do not matter at WUWT. Here instead CO2 behaves, somewhat mysteriously, in the exact fashion that your ideology wants it to behave.
Ferenc Miklosczi demonstrated from a thorough analysis of the CO2 photon absorption physics and atmospheric data, why the greenhouse effect of CO2 interacts with the greater greenhouse effect of water in a feedback system that results in zero sensitivity to additional inputs of CO2.
Ferenc Miklosczi was mugged and silenced in a despicable manner by the climate science mafia. Ask yourself – why was this political lynching necessary, if his science was wrong?
A description of his findings and theory can be read at: http://climateclash.com/2011/02/15/g8-co2-cannot-cause-any-more-%E2%80%9Cglobal-warming%E2%80%9D/
This can be downloaded in pdf form from:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9p_cojT-pflN2MyMzk3YzQtN2U2OS00ODgwLTlhZmQtMmJhNWZjZmQzYjE3
Or from this link: http://wtrns.fr/AAigZs4Q1FsCKhq
Just to start with the IR absorption physics of CO2 and go from there to an understanding of atmospheric-solar thermal dynamics is a grossly complacent oversimplification. It is a monumental failure of reductionism and will serve future generations as a textbook example of such.
I’m a little confused. I read this, then rewatched the “Monckton Responds” videos on Potholer54’s channel. The videos accuse him of responding to someone else’s summary of the claims rather than his exact claims, but this newest response seems to be exactly what is happening again. For example, “Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” At this point, Potholer54 is telling him that he claimed to be her “Science Advisor” and saying perhaps he did, but that doesn’t make him her science advisor. Is this a repost of an old rebuttal?
Plus, there’s this above: “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.”
The video shows Monckton saying “…no particular change in the last 200 years. The only glacier that’s declined a little is Gangotri…”
A response to a couple of commenters who question whether there is any evidence that a couple of dozen pages of meaningless symbols, each containing the words “Monckton video” en clair, appeared on the Web shortly after my speech in Minnesota in October 2009.
The pages certainly existed. When the Texas A&M professor reported them to me, I entered the words “Monckton video” into Google and found that, notwithstanding that my Minnesota speech had been seen by more than a million people at that time, its page ranking was below at least two dozen pages of gibberish which Google displayed first. One had to wade through more than two screenfuls of these nonsense pages before the true video appeared. That is how the viral chain was broken by those who did not want my message heard.
One commenter says that creating these pages would have cost only a few hundred dollars. Quite right. But the really high-ticket item, so the Professor told me, was getting the search-engines to give all two dozen of these rubbish pages – which no one would actually want to read, because there was nothing that made any sense in them except the words “Monckton video” – a page-ranking higher than that of the page containing my speech.
Once I had seen that the Professor was right about the nonsense pages, I saw to it that they were taken down within 24 hours. However, those who had put up the pages had succeeded by then in breaking the viral chain. Even a brief interruption is enough. But their costly and wicked strategy failed because by then so many other websites had posted up the video, so several more millions saw it before the pages of nonsense were removed.
And Joel Shore cites the American Physical Society as printing a statement in Physics and Society that my paper there was not peer-reviewed because the journal did not print peer-reviewed articles. I had of course already addressed that point: up to and including the edition in which my paper appeared, every edition stated that the journal printed “reviewed articles”. Thereafter, every edition carried a statement that the journal printed “non-peer-reviewed articles”. The Professor of Physics who reviewed my paper was more than competent to do so, because his intention was to make sure that a non-climatological readership would be able to understand the concepts I was discussing. To this end, he asked me to define various specialist terms, and also to make the derivation of each of my 30 equations specific. If he had thought it necessary to pass the paper on to a climatologist for further review, no doubt he would have done so; and, if he did not do so, the fault does not lie with me. I was requested to write a paper (it later transpired that the editors had had a recommendation that I should do so from a distinguished member of the faculty at the Argonne National Laboratory); I wrote one; it was reviewed in accordance with the journal’s usual procedures; and it was published, together with a strongly supportive editorial.
From this background, it is surely self-evident that the journal did have a peer-review procedure in place; that it applied that procedure to my paper; that the usual suspects then screamed and threw all of their toys out of the stroller; and the American Physical Society thereupon lied to the effect that papers in its journal were not peer-reviewed – a lie which it then maintained by its new statement to the effect that its custom was to publish “non-peer-reviewed” articles.
Finally, as one commenter has rightly pointed out, the Climategate emails present evidence for a series of systematic and far more damaging interferences with the normal process of peer review by the climate crooks who have been co-ordinating and driving this now-collapsed scare. One victim of their malevolent campaign of disruption and denial contacted me in tears as soon as the first batch of Climategate emails were published. He was upset not only at the outrageous way in which these wretches had furtively delayed publication of an important paper by him so that they could cobble together their own laughable attempt at a rebuttal and publish it simultaneously, but also at the manner in which the purity and rationality of science had been brought low.
Now, why is it that Joel Shore spends so much time and effort on what is at best a pointless semantic quibble about what is and what is not “peer review”, when he is sullenly, culpably silent about the Hockey Team’s arguably criminal interferences in the process of peer review? What is sauce for the goose is surely sauce for the turkeys too.
juanslayton, I replied already to tell you that the video evidence I referred to is in potholer54’s videos, the very subject of this post. For some reason my comment never appeared. I try again.
““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” No, you said “So we’re not looking at a long term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic”. You appear on video saying exactly those words. Did you even watch the video you’re attempting to respond to?
‘Peer review’ has a very specific meaning in scientific publications; that the editor of APS reviewed the article is irrelevant, unless we are to start calling every editorially reviewed piece ‘peer reviewed’ too? This comment will likely undergo moderation; does that mean it has been ‘peer reviewed’? Of course not.
The right and honorable thing to do would be to accept that the newsletter is not in fact a peer reviewed article, irrespective of what was thought at the time of publication. That APS have added a disclaimer to the article specifically rebutting the notion that it was in any way peer reviewed demonstrates that regardless of what was thought, this article is NOT considered peer reviewed by the publisher, and you can’t really argue with that, can you?
Here is a link to a letter of complaint about the article: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200810/shore.cfm
APS responded: ‘Editor’s response: The newsletter of the Forum on Physics & Society is not, and never has been, peer-reviewed.’
If Monckton was misled by APS at the time of writing, fine, but you cannot in light of this evidence continue to make the claim that the article was peer reviewed. The publishers say it wasn’t, they disclaim that it wasn’t, and further more they say the newsletters NEVER HAVE BEEN.
I think the evidence is quite clear.
” I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him”
Obviously the caveman really got under your (thin) skin to attempt to belittle him so.
Your equally childish (admittedly amusing) description of Prof. John Abrahams only serves to show how paranoid you are about anyone pointing out your errors.
Monckton has been pressured to respond to mistakes proven in Potholer54’s videos before shown in the WUWT post “Monckton answers a troll, Posted on September 18, 2011 by Anthony Watts” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/18/monckton-answers-a-troll/
And Potholer54 rebuttal can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xx5h1KNMAA
Anna Lemma says:
January 12, 2012 at 9:44 pm
As for Frack being used to describe a process for extracting petroleum, I invite her to google the term. She will see it being used as a verb and a gerund.
______________________
Anna, I don’t need to google anything….the correct term /spelling is “FRAC”. We want accuracy in climate science terms, let’s make sure we are also being accurate in other areas. Media uses the term “FRACK”, industry does not.
Have an “accurate” day!
Lord Monckton writes:
“Now, why is it that Joel Shore spends so much time and effort on what is at best a pointless semantic quibble about what is and what is not “peer review”, when he is sullenly, culpably silent about the Hockey Team’s arguably criminal interferences in the process of peer review?”
Good question.
False premise. All we know is that temps have increased by about that amount since 1950. We have yet to prove the cause. indeed, the increase is not unprecedented, nor all the factors understood.
Wendy says:
January 13, 2012 at 4:06 am
Anna, I don’t need to google anything….the correct term /spelling is “FRAC”. We want accuracy in climate science terms, let’s make sure we are also being accurate in other areas. Media uses the term “FRACK”, industry does not.
Have an “accurate” day!
—–
The industry actually calls it hydraulic fracturing. Some shorten it to “fracing” but it’s not really an industry official term.
http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/what-we-do/technology/hydraulic-fracturing/
Hope you have a more accurate day than you’ve had so far!
James Sexton says:
The errors upon errors in this “paper” of Monckton’s have been well-documented by Arthur Smith: http://www.altenergyaction.org/Monckton.html Even Monckton does not use most of the arguments presented in that paper anymore, preferring to make arguments that are at least a bit more subtlely wrong. And, in fact, I have explained in detail why the argument there is wrong ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/30/feedback-about-feedbacks-and-suchlike-fooleries/#comment-848206 and http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/30/feedback-about-feedbacks-and-suchlike-fooleries/#comment-848211 .
@major9985
Thanks for linking to those videos, they really do show the rubbish that Monckton spouts out!
It seems many people on this blog really do think the sun shines out of Monckton’s posterior, this unfortunately blinds them to the BS that comes out of his mouth!
Monckton could you please tell me which of your two statements you now believe is correct please:
“There has indeed been a remarkable correlation between CO2 and temperatures over the past 500 million years” Monckton, September 18, 2011
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/18/monckton-answers-a-troll/
Or
“Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor” Monckton, January 11, 2012
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/11/monckton-responds-to-potholer54/
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Yes…It is all a big plot by the APS.
The actual truth is this: You were asked to write something for that newsletter (apparently after an APS member who is a skeptic gave the editor your name as I understand it). However, this APS newsletter editor, somewhat naive, never dreamed that when they published your paper, it would be misrepresented by this sort of press release ( http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html?Itemid=0 ) :
The APS was then forced into the position of having to clearly explain what everybody in the physics community already knew about that newsletter but the broader public did not, which it was in no way a peer-reviewed journal!
Basically, you played upon the naivety of an APS newsletter editor. They thought that you were making an honest, good-faith effort to argue your point-of-view to physicists and never dreamed that the real intention might be to use the APS to give false credibility for your ideas with the larger public.
A few more answers, just briefly:
Joel Shore cites Arthur Smith, who runs a climate-extremist campaigning website, as having “documented” the “errors upon errors” in my peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society. However, when he tried to get Physics and Society to print a 3000-word attempted rebuttal (which I was easily able to refute, point by point, in a 3000-word refutation the same day), Physics and Society, realizing that what he had written was largely without scientific foundation, declined to print it. So he posted up his “documentation” of my “errors” on his own website – without, of course, publishing my reply. Commenters on Smith’s own website said that many of the supposed “errors” were silly quibbles.
Mr Shore then says I “do not use most of the arguments” in that paper any more. Since the arguments are rooted in mainstream science, of course I continue to use nearly all of them.
Yet again, and without any acknowledgement that I have already answered his scientifically-untenable attempt to maintain that the 101[86, 125] Watts per square meter of radiative forcing from the presence of the top five greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mentioned by Kiehl and Trenberth (1997), included the forcings caused by temperature feedbacks.
I have already pointed out that Kiehl and Trenberth’s lengthy and detailed paper does not contain the word “feedback” at all, and that they denominate the forcings I mentioned in demonstrating that climate sensitivity is about one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate in Watts per square meter, the units in which forcings are measured, not in Watts per square meter per Kelvin, the units in which feedbacks are measured.
Mr. Shore, instead of answering these points, merely resorts to the intellectually-questionable device of merely repeating the links to his original incorrect assertions.
So let us provide some elementary, and definitive evidence, that Kiehl & Trenberth’s estimate of the radiative forcing caused by the presence (as opposed to the total absence) of the top five greenhouse gases is what they say it is – an estimate of the forcing – and not an estimate of the forcing plus any consequent temperature feedbacks.
Kiehl and Trenberth’s paper says, in effect, that about 27% of the total forcing from the top five greenhouse gases is attributable to CO2. And 27% of 101 Watts per square meter is around 27 Watts per square meter. What we need to do, therefore, is to find another “mainstream” way of calculating the forcing effect of all 392 ppmv of CO2 now in the atmosphere. A logarithmic function attributed by the IPCC to James Hansen allows us to determine the total CO2 forcing dF, before taking account of any feedbacks, even when the unperturbed concentration is zero, thus:
dF = 3.35 ln(1 + 1.2 x 392 + 0.005 x 392 squared + 0.0000014 x 392 cubed) = 24 W/m2
And that unquestionably pre-feedback value is pretty close to Kiehl & Trenberth’s implicit 27 Watts per square meter, from which it follows either that Kiehl and Trenberth’s value must a pre-feedback value or that feedbacks are a tiny fraction of what the IPCC tries to tell us they are. No amount of mere repetition of Mr. Shore’s error will make it anything other than an error.
Finally, a number of commenters have added some downright vulgar posts to this thread. For instance, SteveE talks about the Sun shining out of my posterior, blinding people to the “BS” that he says I “spout”. And the barely-literate “major9985” seems to be running a hate-mail campaign all of his own. I once asked the moderators why they allowed comments of that kind. Their answer – and it was a good one – was that it is important for Anthony’s readers to be able to see for themselves how the skeptics argue, usually with politeness and with patience and with science, and to see how – by painful contrast – the climate-extremists argue, all too often with illiteracy, innumeracy, vulgarity, vain repetition, wilful perversion of the truth, and outright hatred. A word to the wise: however crudely or cruelly you flog a long-dead horse, you will not bring it back to life. Move on!
Since there is no licensing board or professional test to become a peer reviewer, anyone who is a scientific peer with the requisite qualifications can review manuscripts. That is “peer review”, and no doubt Albert Einstein would fully agree.
The fact that print journals are doing a head-fake in pretending to be the sole Authority regarding who is, and who is not a peer reviewer is one reason they are rapidly losing credibility. The Climategate emails show conclusively that a small clique has hijacked and corrupted climate “peer review” beyond repair. Joel Shore is merely carrying their water for them.
Since there exists no professional standards board for who may be designated a ‘peer reviewer’, Joel Shore is merely displaying his insecurity when he tries to be a self-appointed authority on who is, and who is not, a peer reviewer. In Joel Shore’s world, only pals may be peer reviewers. But that opinion lacks credibility, and Joel should quit whining about it.
Thanks Joel Shore, major9985 and Steve E for showing how empty your minds and arguments are.