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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This place is truly fantasy land…I really can’t believe it. If any of you have such a slam dunk case against AGW, why don’t you try to publish it? I guess it’s the left wing conspiracy that’s keeping all your great papers out of the journals?
flandestiny,
You have no concept of the scientific method. Skeptics have nothing to prove, and the case for AGW is not proven. It is still in the conjecture stage. If AGW ever becomes empirically testable, it will advance to being a hypothesis. But it isn’t there as of now.
flandestiny says:
February 6, 2012 at 11:06 am
This place is truly fantasy land…I really can’t believe it. If any of you have such a slam dunk case against AGW, why don’t you try to publish it? I guess it’s the left wing conspiracy that’s keeping all your great papers out of the journals?
———————————————-
No fantasy land, these are publications in the literature since 2009. None support CAGW
CONCERNING HURRICANES
A High-Intensity Hurricane Record Preserved in a Florida Sinkhole (25 January 2012)
Southern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Trends Flat to Down (10 January 2012)
Atlantic Warm Pool Influences on U.S. Land-Falling Hurricanes (28 December 2011)
Tropical Cyclones: Their Future and Our Fate (20 December 2011)
China’s Tropical Cyclone Potential Impact Index (9 November 2011)
Fifty Years of Tropical Cyclones Impacting China (1 November 2011)
Impacts of Tropical Cyclones on U.S. Forests (26 October 2011)
Tropical Cyclones Making Land-Fall Over Eastern Australia (18 October 2011)
Tropical Cyclones: The Models Project More of Them in Our Future, or is it Fewer (12 October 2011)
Tropical Cyclones and Global Climate Changes (12 October 2011)
Global Tropical Cyclone Activity (13 September 2011)
Tropical Storms in the North Atlantic: Projections and Observations (7 September 2011)
Damaging Tropical Cyclones of China (24 August 2011)
Tropical Cyclones and Super Typhoons: Their Influence on China (23 August 2011)
A Reassessment of Long-Term Atlantic Hurricane Statistics (5 July 2011)
No Long-term Trend in Atlantic Hurricane Numbers (15 June 2011)
Detecting the Footprint of Man in Tropical Cyclone Damage Data (7 June 2011)
Western North Pacific Tropical Cyclones (17 May 2011)
China-Influencing Typhoons (10 May 2011)
Tropical Cyclone Activity in the Caribbean Sea (10 May 2011)
Hurricane Activity Over the North Atlantic Ocean (10 May 2011)
Tropical Cyclones of the North Indian Ocean (13 April 2011)
Global Warming and Tropical Cyclones of the Western North Pacific (5 April 2011)
Trends in Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Characteristics (22 March 2011)
Cyclones of the Tropical South Pacific (22 February 2011)
A Brief History of Northwest Australian Tropical Cyclones (11 January 2011)
Tropical Cyclones Impacting China (22 December 2010)
Paleotempestology: A Review of the Fledgling Research Field (23 November 2010)
Tropical Cyclone Intensity Discrepancies (16 November 2010)
The Ups and Downs of Tropical Cyclone Activity in the Western Hemisphere (3 November 2010)
Tropical Cyclones Off the Northwestern Coast of Australia (27 October 2010)
Global Warming and Atlantic Hurricane Intensity (27 October 2010)
The Impact of Climate Change on Typhoon Activity (21 October 2010)
A Century and a Half of Atlantic Hurricane Activity (21 October 2010)
Tropical Cyclones of the North Atlantic (20 October 2010)
Intense Tropical Cyclones in a Warming World (6 October 2010)
Gulf of Mexico Coastal Hurricane Strikes (15 Sep 2010)
The Global Warming-Hurricane Connection: A Far-From-Settled Science (22 July 2010)
Fifteen Hundred Years of Atlantic Tropical Cyclones (7 July 2010)
Global Tropical Storm Days (25 June 2010)
Go ahead, pick another subject.
flandestiny says:
“This place is truly fantasy land…I really can’t believe it. If any of you have such a slam dunk case against AGW, why don’t you try to publish it? I guess it’s the left wing conspiracy that’s keeping all your great papers out of the journals?”
That is kind of an interesting suggestion, as this whole kerfluffle is based on interpretation of the BEST data. BEST is a draft paper that has never been published in a peer reviewed journal. Is it a right wing conspiracy that is keeping it out of journals?