That letter signed by 16 scientists saying there’s “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” to the Wall Street Journal has caused a great disturbance in the farce. At last count there were no less than 19 blog rebuttals plus one new WSJ op ed piece trying to convince the alliance that all is well. It didn’t work.
But, they know the AGW Alliance Death Star has been compromised before its mission can be completed, the Rebellion has seen the plans and the Alliance knows it is only a matter of time before “the consensus” blows apart. Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously“, but the reinforcements he’s bringing in may not be able to stop the Rebellion as its ranks swell with ordinary people.
Here at WUWT, we had our best day ever on January 31st with 229,000 views from ordinary people, exceeding the heady days just after Climategate 1 and Copenhagen. People are coming in out of the cold to embrace the warmth and declare it good, while laughing at the folly of the alliance.
Meanwhile, the Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait er, not Jim Hansen) has been spinning in low orbit trying tell alliance forces that the past 10-15 years of stalled temperature rise are just a statistical illusion.
William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, schools Plait on what statistics really is and writes:
Remember when I said how you shouldn’t draw straight lines in time series and then speak of the line as if the line was the data itself? About how the starting point made a big difference in the slope of the line, and how not accounting for uncertainty in the starting date translates into over-certainty in the results?
If you can’t recall, refresh your memory: How To Cheat, Or Fool Yourself, With Time Series: Climate Example.
Well, not everybody read those warnings. As an example of somebody who didn’t do his homework, I give you Phil Plait, a fellow who prides himself on exposing bad astronomy and blogs at Discover magazine. Well, Phil, old boy, I am the Statistician to the Stars—get it? get it?1—and I’m here to set you right.
The Wall Street Journal on 27 January 2012 published a letter from sixteen scientists entitled, No Need to Panic About Global Warming, the punchline of which was:
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of “incontrovertible” evidence.
Plait in response to these seemingly ho-hum words took the approach apoplectic, and fretted that “denialists” were reaching lower. Reaching where he never said. He never did say what a “denialist” was, either; but we can guess it is defined as “Whoever disagrees with Phil Plait.”
The WSJ‘s crew said, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.” This allowed Plait to break out the italics and respond, “What the what?” I would’ve guessed that the scientists’ statement was fairly clear and even true. But Plait said, “That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong.” Was it?
Plait then slipped in a picture, one which he thought was a devastating touché. He was so exercised by his effort that he broke out into triumphal clichés like “crushed to dust” and “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” You know what they say about astronomers. Anyway, here’s the picture:
See that red line? It’s drawn on a time series—wait! No it isn’t. Those dots are not what Plait thinks they are. They are not—they most certainly are not—global temperatures.
Read the whole rebuttal here, well worth your time.
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As shub noticed at BH, the graph is from skepticalscience.com, IMNSHO the last refuge of the scientifically incompetent.
“Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously”,”
What a desperate bunch of fools in a fools dream. Why all the fuss if the science is settled? Proof it is not the science but the gold coming from ignorance while ignorance lasts.
“Somewhat amusingly, Plait ends his semi-random venting by telling us that Michael Mann has been “tweeting furiously” about this. Good grief! This isn’t helping his case. Mann’s understanding of statistics may be likened to an overly enthusiastic undergraduate who left the lecture early.”
Ouch. Love it.
One of the more obvious places for an astronomer to fix his focus in the AGW debate is the atmospheres of the planets beyond earth (Venus is a special case and Mercury has no stable atmosphere, having to be constantly replenished). All have demonstrated warming and cooling, much more enhanced than that of Earth, corresponding with the solar cycles. This leads the vast majority of them to conclude…….?
It’s the Sun.
Now, who on this website, with a high profile as an expert, has continuously stated, “it’s not the Sun”?
Shub also noticed what Briggs failed to mention which is the graph is labeled Global LAND Temperature Anomaly. Naughty Astronomer.
The Bad Astronomer is horribly annoying and it is so funny that he has messed this up because that is a guy that can’t handle being wrong, which wouldn’t make him a scientist and goes against everything he preaches.
Yep … Drudge sure pulled ’em in. You’ve got a real hockey stick at Quantcast:
http://www.quantcast.com/wattsupwiththat.com
The results from Alexa ought to be in tomorrow … it looks like they run their figures on GMT, while Quantcast seems to run on Pacific time. Hope some of those first time visitors stick aroundand get their eyes opened.
Regarding Phil Plait: He is a corporate hack, who makes his bread keeping the cattle in line (That’s how the Elite view the average folks — as cattle.) I kept up with his website for a while and he is a big self-promoter, self-important hack (I’ve rarely seen a website operator who boasts about his personal activities on a supposedly science oriented website as Plait does). After I came to that conclusion, it was no longer necessary to keep up with his website.
Sadly, his readers (or accurately, his commenters) swallow the bilge he constantly trots out.
No wonder. astronomy as a science is fixated on “pink unicorns”.
“Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously”.
“Plait in response to these seemingly ho-hum words took the approach apoplectic, and fretted that “denialists” were reaching lower.”
Methinks they doth protest too much.
It is a good sign that the alarmists depend more and more upon the meme that ‘the last decade was the hottest on record. Increasingly, they are counting on ignorance to carry the day, and as people wise up they will simply marginalize themselves further.
There are three problems with it. It completely dodges attribution, which is something important. It tries to make a point about something which is a truism, that the last decade of a warming trend will be the hottest. It fallaciously diverts from the flatness of the last decade. And, it’s not as hot as it was at the height of the Minoan, the Roman, and the Medieval Warm Periods, which are themselves a decline curve.
Hey, that’s four. There’s probably even more bad logic in the thought processes, but this will suffice. It demonstrates desperation. Who the Hell do they think they are trying to fool with this?
=========================
Readers should also visit http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/4868-the-mail-on-sunday-the-met-office-and-the-temperature-standstill.html
There is a very good breakdown by Dr David Whitehouse of HADCRUT3 in five year bits to show that actually the last five years have been cooler than the preceeding five and most of the recent warming can be found in 1996-2000. Definitely worth reading.
Well I am a new viewer brought in by Drudge and I plan on sticking around.
Kudos to you on the awesome site!
Well said James.
highflight56433 says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:05 am
“Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously”,”
What a desperate bunch of fools in a fools dream. Why all the fuss if the science is settled? Proof it is not the science but the gold coming from ignorance while ignorance lasts.
_____________________________________
I live in Eastern PA. Mike recently tweeted:
“MichaelEMann Michael E. Mann
NEWS FLASH: Groundhog Day cancelled! Phil says he’s pretty sure spring *already* arrived in western PA, preempting tomorrow’s event.
2 hours ago
It is true that it’s fabulously warm today; almost 70F. And I assure you, I can’t find anyone at lunch, at work, on the streets that is upset about it. Traffic is crazy…everyone is out and about, some with the windows down. Nobody is crying that it isn’t 14F today as usual. And the record for all this nice weather (it is weather not climate that we are experiencing this week, Mike????) was set back in 1916. So why was it so warm back in 1916? Maybe it’s the same reason it’s warm today?
How the scientists can establish any hypothesis in this domain , when they don’t know radical and right causes of these phenomena.
All what today’s science allege about this appearance isn’t right true.The magnetic fields are in question, but it needs know what and who gowerns with them.It is simple thing and therefore it didn’t interesting for big intelligence.
Who wishs a collaboration with me, can help to resolve these phenomena for all times!
Don’t get too personal against Phil. He did do good work once, and he even led the JREF for a while until the AGW problem came to a head. His refutation of the moon hoax nonsense is still the best I’ve even seen.
When I was in the service many years ago, I was stationed at a base that hosted a mock POW camp used for pilot survival training. When we went in to repair equipment, we were dressed in Badguy uniforms, and were instructed to not speak with any of the students. Doing so would ruin the illusion, which would ruin the training. Just like the WSJ letter ruining the AWG narrative. The propagandists need to maintain complete saturation.
Muller et all, originators of the dataset, do in fact display their uncertainty range here:
http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped
Poor Michael Mann, he sat on a hockey stick, and he’s on the way to the hospital for an extraction. 🙂
David L. says:
February 1, 2012 at 10:03 am
“And the record for all this nice weather (it is weather not climate that we are experiencing this week, Mike????) was set back in 1916. So why was it so warm back in 1916? Maybe its the same reason its warm today?”
I’ve made this point before – if we exceed a temperature “record” by a tiny amount, is it really a big deal?? After all, if the record was set back in 1916, as DavidL said, this current weather pattern is certainly NOT unprecedented…
I’m enjoying it!! :^)
“Reports are that “Michael Mann has been tweeting furiously”
Sorry Mr Moderator a couple of typos the above should read
“Reports are that “Michael Mann is a twit constantly”
Let the farce be with you 🙂
William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars is a treasure!
I love this quote from the “climate scientists” rebuttal in the WSJ.
“And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean.”
Where’s the missing heat? We found it in a model. Now we just need to go verify what we already know.
The reason so many people pan climate science, as has been pointed out effectively so many times on this site, is that the so-called climate scientists do everything bass-ackwards. Every climate model is a multiple regression analysis. They do a pretty good job of predicting past temperatures at the time they’re written, but not a one has been able to predict future temperature trends with anything approaching an acceptable degree of accuracy. Until they can, claims that AGW (or ACC, ACD or whatever the flavor of the month is) is “settled science” is nothing but a bunch of hooey. When it comes to climate science, I don’t even trust the “real world” data. Too often, I’ve seen the press releases for a new climate study stating what they expect to find, followed up in a few months by another press release exclaiming “It’s worse than we thought.” Confirmation bias, anyone?
Frankly, I trust analyses of climate data conducted by statisticians and economists more than I do climate scientists. They, at least, understand how to apply statistics, and understand the limitations of statistical analysis. Furthermore, they understand risk and cost-benefit analysis . . . a perspective that seems to be completely missing from climate science.
I used to read Phil’s blog until he started evangelizing about AGW, calling it settled science, naming anyone that does not agree with his beliefs and doctrine as deniers (along with the usual unnecessary name calling). Phil is truly one of the worst AGW zealots out there. He even believes he can dictate who is a real scientist and what real science is (as he does in his last BA post). He will not be swayed in his religious AGW fanatic beliefs. And because all scientists other than the ones “Phil-approved” are deniers that work for the oil industry, it will be impossible to ever prove him wrong. Convinient really, eh?. He is a sad delusional little man.