By Jim Lakely
A quarterly magazine called Skeptic published a cover story a few weeks back by Donald Prothero titled “How We Know Global Warming is Real and Human-Caused.” That struck us here at The Heartland Institute as rather strange.
Our work for years has been skeptical of the idea that human activity is causing catastrophic climate change, which is the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media. And we have two immense volumes of peer-reviewed literature and the videos of many conferences to prove it.
So if the very name of your magazine is Skeptic, shouldn’t readers expect you to carefully examine the spoon-fed doctrines of the likes of Al Gore, Michael Mann, the UN’s IPCC, etc., and be … well … skeptical of “doctrine” — especially in light of the Climategate scandal? Alas, no.
Skeptic magazine, as the headline of the cover story makes clear, is not skeptical of the global warming Roosters of the Apocalypse who say the sky is falling and we’re unnaturally boiling the planet. It’s hysterical, and ironic, that the Skeptic article begins with a quote from Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman:
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Yet the fact is: Reality, and scientific observation of nature, tells the truth about the climate — and man is not causing a climate catastrophe. Skeptic Magazine is the one regurgitating public-relations lies disguised as a hard-boiled look at the climate debate and grounded in real science.
Feynman has posthumously become a bit of a YouTube star for his one-minute explanation of the scientific method. The video below, from a lecture at Cornell in 1964, blows up Skeptic magazine’s idea of what science is — let alone the quote the magazine uses to led legitimacy to its article.
In one minute, Feynman lays out how the scientific method works: Theories are constantly proposed, questioned and tested. Only after a theory goes through many exhaustive rounds of scientific examination — using observational data — can a “guess” become a “law” of science. And even then, a well-founded scientific “law” laid down by the smartest people in history is temporary. Just ask Newton.
Yet we don’t seem to have a healthy scientific skepticism when it comes to Earth’s climate. Men and women who couldn’t hold Feynman’s briefcase have for years told us that the science is “settled”: Human activity is causing a catastrophic climate disaster — no matter that their computer model predictions haven’t come true, violating the scientific method and becoming the decades-later butt of Feynman’s presentation. In short, the evidence we can prove shows that the roosters’ predictions are a joke.
Yet Skeptic magazine, of all publications, dedicated a nine-page cover story to carrying water for public-relations hacks — propagandists — and not the kind of real, observable science that should be its hallmark. But let’s not completely condemn Skeptic. It still has the fact that there is no solid evidence for Bigfoot in its favor.
Christopher Monckton — Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, good friend of Heartland, advisor to Lady Thatcher, and one of the most learned “laymen” experts on climate science — gives that Skeptic article a hearty vivisection. Skeptic refused to publish it, so we share it here. There’s a short version and a long version of his reply, and they are both devastating.
Lord Monckton starts it off with his typically cheeky and refreshing in-your-face style:
By Christopher Monckton
Be skeptical, be very skeptical, of Skeptic magazine’s skepticism of climate skeptics. The latest issue has, as its cover story, a Climate Change Q&A, revealingly subtitled Climate Deniers’ Arguments & Climate Scientists’ Answers.
The article, written by Dr. Donald Prothero, a geology professor at Occidental College, opens with the bold heading How We Know Global Warming is Real and Human-Caused.
Anyone who starts out by using the hate-speech term “Climate Deniers” – laden with political overtones of Holocaust denial – cannot expect to be taken seriously as an objective scientist.
Despite this promise of “Climate Scientists’ Answers”, only four peer-reviewed papers by climate scientists are cited among the 41 references at the end of the article.
And the implicit notion that “Climate Deniers” are non-scientists while true-believers are “Climate Scientists” is also unreasonable. Many eminent climate scientists are skeptical of the more extremist claims made by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. We shall cite some of their work in this response to the Professor’s unscientific article.
Read Monckton’s full essay here
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I recommend a distinction be made between minor and major skeptics. Minor skeptics criticize minority views while major skeptics criticize majority views or views accepted by the current authorities. Once AGW became accepted by the authorities the minor skeptics see it as fair game. Ironically, the real authorities do not accept AGW even if the NCSE does. You get this minor skepticism out of Skeptical Inquirer also. In skepticism it is sometimes legitimate to criticize the person. In the case of AGW, history will show the fault lay with the proponents of AGW pseudoscience as it did with eugenics. AGW is not science.
Committee for Scientific Inquiry (CSI), the publisher of Skeptical Inquiry, is another skeptical organization that has fallen hook, line and sinker for AGW. It’s strange how they legitimately question so much non-scientific junk but are completely opposite on this subject.
A decade ago when I saw their first articles coming out in support of AGW, I contacted one of the authors to point out the work being done by McIntyre and McKittrick. The author pooh-poohed it and said they weren’t getting any traction. I wonder what he’d say today?
What’s happening to our scientific organizations? The Planetary Society, an organization that I one considered as scientific as you could get, now has Bill Nye, a warmest, as their CEO.
The podcast Skeptics Guide to the Universe and its website are similar to Skeptic magazine–they’re pro-scientific establishment rather than pro-skepticism.
A few years ago, global warming became an extremely popular topic on its ‘Skepticism / Science talk’ website forum. AGW skeptics were scoring a lot of points. Then one day AGW posts were moved to a Global Warming subforum that only SGU members could see. It thus became invisible to search engines and out-of-sight to the typical SGU member.
http://sguforums.com/
Here we have the greatest scientific controversy in a century, and a “skeptical” website would rather run an echo chamber for Bigfoot debunkers!
I vaguely recall reading something from the magazine online about two months ago and what struck me was they referred to “deniers” and basically said the science was settled. Yet in ALL its other topics it was utterly sceptical. They twisted explanations to finally come to the conclusion that they were skeptical of global warming sceptics. 😉 If they can’t be sceptical about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Runaway Warming then they should simply leave out the topic.
What is doubly sad is that this so called skeptical group buys the orthodoxy hook line and sinker without the skepticism they claim to have. The science establishment has come up with whoppers in the past: N-Rays, lobotomy, polywater, and Rhine’s ESP (bad statistical methods). All of which they would point to as things they would have been critical of (with hindsight of course). Here we have a belief in CAGW with no ability to show repeatable experiments that can withstand scrutiny by objective observers, yet it must be true because “experts” say so. So myopic that they should be considered blind.
Check out the comments.
http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/how-we-know-global-warming-is-real/
As a side topic, are there any decent popular science magazines worth subscribing to?
Skepticism should be a personal habit of mental hygene. I rather doubt that true skepticism is ever susceptible to group practice. One of the healthy indications of the nature of skepticism toward AGW is the variety and extensively disputatious nature of the internal – among the skeptics – debate. I suspect this also a good measure of how poor our true understanding of global climate, if there really is such a beast, is.
I’ve attended a couple of Skeptics Society meetings and was uniformly unimpressed. The chief issue seemed to be religion and, while I consider organized religion a waste of time, arguing with it is equally a waste. It begins with an unprovable assumption and similarly, atheists do as well. The non-religious directed discussions proved to be just as dogmatic, with the concept of scientific law enshrined as the immutable truth of skepticism, quite literally as the Bible is used by Christians and the Koran by Muslims. This was really fine, IF you happen to adhere to some particular orthodoxy of science. Pointing out that the standard cosmological model (using the Big Bang) is not universally accepted by some very well-credentialed physicists and astronomers such as J V Narlikar lead in effect to screams of “heresy!” and ad hominem attacks not only on the scientists who did not hold to the eternal truths, but on anyone who ever read their work or bothered to mention them.
Lord Monckton gives a rate of sea level rise of 0.323mm/yr (1.3inches per century).Elsewhere I usually see values like 3.1-3.2 mm/yr. Of course there are variations around the earth,but this order of magnitude difference precludes a meaningful discussion of possible resulting perils.Can anyone clarify my dilemma? Help!
Redefine ‘science’ as ‘belief’. Redefine ‘rational’ as believers that lack the patience to debate or engage in pedagogy of the belief. Redefine ‘skeptic’ as believers that do have such patience. Redefine skeptics as ‘deniers’; people that have a belief in the wrong belief.
At least Philosophy still supposes that it engages in argument about beliefs even if it is a fatal social faux pas to call the most pig-ignorant nonsense, pig-ignorant. But at least Philosophy claims itself, honestly and outright, to be a non-empirical discipline.
Sadly this means nothing more than that Philosophy, the official stomping grounds of the Sophists, is still more rigorous and well-grounded then modern Science.
Anthony:
Can you please put a sticky in your website which references the many articles you have published about the CO2 infrared absorption in the atmosphere? And also, the relative contributions of CO2, water vapor, methane, and so on to IR absorption? If I remember correctly, the jury is still out about the capacity of CO2 to absorb and re-radiate DOWNWARD incident infrared radiation. You have many articles on this subject; they need to be indexed.
Monckton hits it out of the park again; just the facts.
Here here.
In the words of Thomas Jefferson:
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
Jeff Clarke
Anthony Mills asks for an explanation of the difference of about an order of magnitude between the 3 cm/century sea-level rise shown by the Envisat satellite during the eight full years of its delivery of well-calibrated data and the 30 cm/century mentioned by the IPCC in its documents and evident in the post-1993 sea-level plot compiled by the University of Colorado.
The difference arises for the following reasons:
First, the Topex and Jason I sea-level monitoring satellites were of an earlier generation and were less reliable than Envisat or its recent successor, Jason II.
Secondly, sea level according to the tide-gauges rose at a rate of around 20 cm/century from 1961-1993, and it is not impossible that this rate continued from 1993-2001. However, late in 2001 the Pacific Decadal Oscillation underwent a phase-transition from the warming cycle that had begun in 1976 and the cooling phase that has held sway since. During the warming phase, surface temperatures increased at a rate equivalent to 1.6 C/century, and there may have been some temporary acceleration during this period. The satellite record of sea level began in 1993, towards the end of the warming phase of the PDO. However, the Envisat data began in January 2004, well after the onset of the cooling phase. Global temperature has not risen during the period, so one should not expect much sea level rise – and, sure enough, Envisat’s unadjusted raw data show not much sea-level rise.
Thirdly, there was a drop in sea level from 2011-2012, which the usual suspects attribute – not entirely implausibly – to a lot of rainfall in Australia and other places that have not seen it for a long time. Much of this water has now found its way back to the ocean, and the Colorado team are showing quite a sharp recent increase in sea level as a result.
Fourthly, when it became apparent to the Colorado team that, as a result of the stasis in “global warming”, their post-1993 rate of sea level rise was about to fall below the psychological threshold of 3 mm/year (or 30 cm/century), it was decided to add a so-called “global isostatic adjustment” to the sea-level rise as a way of demonstrating that, were it not for “global warming”, the natural recovery of land altitudes by isostatic rebound following the melting of the great glaciers that once covered much of the northern hemisphere would show a fall in sea level. To those obsessed with the notion that CO2 is all, this monkeying with the data may seem pardonable as an attempt to quantify the net anthropogenic effect on sea level: but most people living on sea coasts simply want to know how much the sea is actually rising, and that is the answer that Envisat’s unadjusted data provide.
The plot which I included in my reply to Dr. Prothero’s head-bangingly fatuous article in “Skeptic” magazine was taken directly from the Envisat website, and the calculation of the least-squares linear-regression trend on the eight years of sea-level data is theirs. The Envisat website does also show their data spliced on to the data from the other satellites in a manner with which we have all become familiar ever since the “hockey stick” fraud, and if the relatively short run of Envisat data is thus duct-taped on to the data from the earlier and cruder satellites it is possible to maintain that the rate of sea-level rise is 30 cm/century, rather than 3 cm/century. However, it was and is legitimate to point out that for almost a decade the rate of sea-level rise has been negligible.
Certainly, there is no longer any justification even for the IPCC’s upper-bound prediction of 59 cm (less than 2 feet) over the 21st century; still less for Al Gore’s prediction of an imminent sea-level rise of 6.1 meters (20 feet); and still less again for the increasingly barmy James Hansen’s wild prediction of 75 meters (246 feet) in one of Britain’s two Marxist daily papers. Professor Niklas Moerner, who has been studying sea-level rise for 40 years and has written several hundred papers on the subject, reckons that sea level will rise this century by 5 +/- 15 cm.
I hope that this short note will have set out some of the reasons why the dopily over-confident predictions of the climate extremists about sea level fail to capture either the unexciting reality of a rather slow rate of rise or the many complexities surrounding this highly specialist subject. Frankly, Gore, Hansen and, to some extent, the IPCC have made fools of themselves by their insistence upon CO2, CO2, CO2, and by their sedulous refusal to take proper account of the numerous and difficult-to-model natural influences on sea level.
Bottom line: given that there has been no “global warming” for a decade and a half, it is no surprise that during the eight years of Envisat’s operation it did not detect much sea-level rise. A great shame that its data have been so poorly reported by the propagandists in the news media that few are aware of just how slowly sea level has been rising for much of the past decade. On the other side of the account, if the earlier satellites were right to find 30 cm/century of sea-level rise during the warming phase of the PDO, and if Envisat (recently supported by Jason II) was right to find little sea-level rise during the cooling phase, one might expect the sea-level outturn this century to be around 15 cm – and that is at the high end of Prof. Moerner’s estimate but very much at the lower end of the IPCC’s predictions. If anyone still actually believes the gallimaufry of extremist hyperbole about sea-level rise and is worried that his coastal property will soon be inundated, I’m in the market to buy such worthless properties at $100 each (subject to contract). Here as elsewhere on the “global warming” topic, the scare is over, but the media and politicians, having bet the farm on it, can’t bring themselves to admit they got it so wildly, extravagantly wrong.
Dont trust the mainstream “Sceptics”..its all about fascist like adherence to mainstream meme`s.
They have never been interested in science..thats why they sacked one of their own astronomers..
http://cura.free.fr/xv/14starbb.html
My thanks to Lord Monckton for his prompt and very informative reply to my query.I believe it is a valuable addendum to your fine paper.
Interestingly, Randi expressed skepticism a year or two ago about CAGW, only to be shouted down by his followers: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/805-agw-revisited.html
On the contrary, it’s rarely true that scorcher-scoffers “pick on small disagreements between different labs as if scientists can’t get their story straight.” The only case where that is regularly done is in criticizing GISS for being out of line with other monitors of the global temperature. We don’t nitpick about the small differences between the findings of the various hockey-stick proponents, for example. Instead, scoffers generally pick on LARGE disagreements, such as between the hockey stick and reality. That focus on the big picture is true across the board. The article’s author just inserted that phony accusation of nit-picking to make himself look smart, smear scoffers with a parallel to Holocaust deniers, push a “Skeptic” hot button, and beguile his uncritical audience.
I dropped my subscription to Scientific American when they ran an editorial by Michael Shermer in which he said that Al Gore’s movie had convinced him that global warming was real. He lost all credibility for me right then.
Tony Windsor says:
July 23, 2012 at 3:09 am
I think I read something recently to the effect that ‘climate scientists’ are asking for immunity from prosecution in the event of the spurious science being advanced by the warmists should prove to be false. Can anyone confirm this for me? If true it does rather suggest that the Team and others might be trying to cover their backs.
————————————————-
Tony, yes this is true. Here are two articles on this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/unfccc-wants-immunity-from-prosecution-prior-to-rio20/
http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/un-climate-scientists-plead-for-immunity-from-criminal-prosecution/
I wrote a fairly extensive critique of Prothero’s article here: http://ianweiss.blogspot.com/2012/06/did-skeptic-magazine-demolish.html
It is a mystery to me why Michael Shermer would agree with global warming. At the following, he describes a ‘baloney detection kit’.
At 1:48, he says that if errors are in one direction, we should be suspicious about something. Well guess what?
“In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.”
For the rest, see
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=9940
So why does Shermer not follow his own advice and become more skeptical of CAGW?
Beware of complimentary self-labels. We know enough to avoid ” ‘Onest ‘Arry’s Experienced Cars “, and roll our eyes when a surfer labels hisself “Truth 4 All”, or a website self-tags as RealClimate or SkepticalScience. The same now applies, unsurprisingly, to Scientific American and Skeptic.
WUWT? I think we all know.
For a long time I was a subscriber to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, but their relentless insistance on the Global Warming Orthodoxy, and their repetitive use of the term “denier” raised my own level of skepticism. Like all scientists, I am a skeptic. It is, after all, the nature of Science to question everything, even the most fundamental and generally “accepted” principles. If we were not skeptics we could not be scientists. BUT. the Skeptic’s Dictionary while soundly skeptical on most subjects, ironically seems to be fundamentalist in its belief in anthropogenic and catastrophic global warming. Scientists do not “believe” – we question. We doubt. Science is doubt in practice.
I dropped my support of this journal, and no longer associate myself with them.
And yes, much the same has happened to Scientific American, a magazine to which I subscribed for nearly 50 years. I dropped that subscription a few years ago because of the Editor’s practice of politicizing science, to the detriment of the sense of the articles. That is truly a shame, because Scientific American has published some really excellent general articles on various fields.
But a senior scientist of my acquaintance, a World-recognized expert in his field, recently told me “Yes, that stuff is bogus, but I do not blame the guys who promote it, because, after all, that is where the grant money is in the Earth Sciences”. That is close to a direct quote of a conversation made while driving to a technical society meeting. I do not agree with him, but he has to make his way financially in the tough world of academic grants. Thank heavens I made my career in industry, which allows me greater financial independence, and a much greater freedom of scientific thought.
“Members of the Japanese Academy of Sciences have described the true-believers’
position as being no better than a belief in astrology;”
Anyone got a solid reference for this? I can’t find anything from the JAS.
“the Russian Academy under Dr. Illarionov, having heard both sides, rejected the alarmist position as politically motivated”
Likewise.
13 months ago there was a controversy about this readjustment. Here are links to a couple of stories about it:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/17/research-center-under-fire-for-adjusted-sea-level-data/
A quote from the article said:
To which I responded:
A WUWT thread a month earlier, with some good comments, can be found here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/05/new-sea-level-page-from-university-of-colorado-now-up/
————-
One objection I have to this readjustment is that it unjustifiably and misleadingly redefined “sea level” for propagandistic purposes (as my jibe above implied). Here are the standard definitions of “sea level”:
Mean sea level (MSL) is a measure of the average height of the ocean’s surface (such as the halfway point between the mean high tide and the mean low tide); used as a standard in reckoning land elevation.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level
“Sea level, average height of the ocean” [NB, “height,” not “volume.”]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_(disambiguation)
(My dictionaries define sea level similarly.)
From:
Glacial isostatic adjustment [GIA] and sea-level change
State of the art report – Technical Report TR-09-11
Pippa Whitehouse, Durham University, April 2009
http://www.skb.se/upload/publications/pdf/TR-09-11webb.pdf
“1.2.1:
“Relative sea-level is a height which is defined by the position of the interface between the ocean and the land (Figure 1-1). A rise in relative sea-level can occur due to an increase in the height of the ocean surface (for example, due to a change in the shape of the geoid, an increase in the volume of water in the oceans, or a decrease in the storage capacity of the oceans) and/or a drop in the height of the land (for example due to ice sheet loading, or tectonic activity).”
………………………….
“4.9.4 Sea-level change
“GIA is a major contributor to sea-level change. The geometry of ice-loading and the timing and source of melting produce a unique pattern of sea-level change following perturbations to the geoid and solid surfaces.”
The boldfaced portion above implies that the sea level changes as the ocean floors sink or rise. Steve Nerem’s interpretation is that the sea level should remain constant as the ocean floors sink or rise, by applying a correction factor to ensure that it does so on paper, regardless of what’s happening in the real world, and in defiance of what the conventions in his field prescribe.
===================
A few months ago I visited the U. Colo. site. I read some of their material, which I’ve posted below. I was amazed at this sentence in their last paragraph. “this [GIA] correction is now scientifically well-understood and is applied to GMSL estimates by nearly all research groups around the world.” Is it really true, or are they being disingenuous? I.e., do the other research groups “apply” it, but not call the result “sea level”? (Or have they all recently acted in concert to support the warmist narrative?) This question deserves critical attention from WUWTers, and a thread devoted to the topic titled “On the Level?” First, here are some links:
Home page:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
raw data (with GIA correction):
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel4/sl_ns_global.txt
chart with GIA correction
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2011_rel4/sl_ns_global.eps
Under “Similar plots” there is only a chart and data set for “Seasonal signals Retained.” There’s nothing showing one with GIA correction removed.
Chart through July without GIA (from WUWT, not available from UC itself via home page)
http://climate4you.com/images/UnivColorado%20MeanSeaLevelSince1992%20With1yrRunningAverage.gif