Cliff writes to me to tell me about this essay: Climate Distortion. I’m happy to draw attention to it.
He writes:
This week, with great fanfare, NASA scientist James Hansen and associates released a paper “The Perception of Climate Change” in the journal PNAS that claims that recent heat waves and droughts were caused by human-induced climate change. To quote their abstract:
” It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”
This paper (found here) has been quoted in hundreds, if not thousands, of media outlets and newspapers and has garnered the praise of many environmental advocacy groups.
The problem? Their conclusions are demonstrably false and their characterization of the science and statistics are deceptive at best.
And the problem goes beyond this unfortunate paper. It extends to the way the media has misunderstood and miscommunicated our current state of knowledge of climate change. No wonder the public is confused, skeptic/denier groups hold on to wacky/unscientific theories, and our leaders dither on climate change. And let me repeat something I have said several times….I believe that human-induced global warming is both observed, real, and a serious problem for mankind. So if anyone wants to call me a denier or some other ad hominem name, please refrain from such remarks.
Well worth your time to read the full post: Climate Distortion.
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Cliff Mass is a first rate, honest and ethical scientist at the U of WA. That he copes with the modelers and climate kooks there is amazing. Dr Mass represents the gold standard as applied to meteorology.
Does it really matter who pans it if the mainstream media has already picked it up? He can just keep writing drivel and as long as it gets out in the open those who don’t really on others critique of his work will just mindlessly believe and/or make references to it as fact
This is complete bull. Here they go off on tangents and argue that the trumped up media-overhyped extreme weather is caused by global warmed, when over the last decade the whole global warming er climate change hypothesis has been shown to be absolutely baseless. My Real Science comment:
I got two words for the climate clowns: the leftist (Berkeley grad Michael Mann) fabricated hockey stick has been debunked as trumped up baloney, and the corrected record shows that there is nothing unusual about current temperatures, which means that there is nothing wrong with the climate (huge point: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE CLIMATE, yell that from the mountain top), and also, the ipcc founded their whole deceptive (lying) AGW pitch on a causal CO2 – temperature correlation, and now, even after that also has been shown to be a specious falsehood, the theory just cruises along as if all is fine in doom and gloom land. Lets see, the bs AGW theory had 2 foundations: one was the hockey stick indicating we are in a period of accelerating temperature increases, and the other was the ipcc posited causal CO2 – temp correlation. Both of those foundation are gone. Repeat: the very foundations of the theory have rotted out. When is this AGW house of cards going to fall?
Dr. Mass provides a convincing argument without even exploring the post-hoc fallacies committed by Dr. Hansen. Here in the Northwest US (home turf for Dr. Mass as well), amidst all this talk of Midwest heat, the glaciers will advance for a second straight year and snow melt is a full month behind schedule.
PNAS= Post-Normal Anti-Science.
With all due respect to Dr. Mass, he makes the same error that climatologists (on both sides) are making. There are multiple simultaneous causes for changing temperature readings – natural and artificial – and without a duplicate but independent atmosphere in which to conduct controlled measurements and experiments, it is nearly impossible to deconvolute the contributions of the separate causes.
Given the demonstrated errors and biases in the numerical records, especially the secular variations due to population-density-related site effects (UHI), it becomes almost impossible to even be sure of *what* is being measured.
The entire historical temperature record is in question, and it’s value for evaluating possible trends cannot be decided without establishing a measurement network of properly sited and secured instruments.
The most reliable temperature records we have (and it truly pains me as an empiricist to admit this) are proxies from uninhabited areas. This is especially painful because temperature was one of the first environmental variables to be measured using scientific instruments.
Re: Gaussian distribution
Vukcevic:
Daily distribution is a ‘bit top heavy’ which I would interpret that occurrences are not entirely random.
L.Svalgaard:
Random rare events do not show a Gaussian distribution, but a Poisson distribution which is actually a bit top-heavy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution.
Eric Simpson says:
August 9, 2012 at 11:06 am
When is this AGW house of cards going to fall?
Answer: When our politicians stop giving them our money….
Perhaps all this really proves is that Hundreds if not Thousands of media outlets and newspapers look upon Mr Hansen with PNAS envy
Anthony, it is a fundamental error to keep referring to this paper as a paper by Dr Hansen. It is a paper by NASA. Unless, somewhere in the paper it states that this is the work of Dr Hansen as a private individual, then it is NASA’s paper and the taxpayers’ funded it. The same approach should be taken for ALL of Dr Hansen’s outpourings unless he actually states this is his view as a private individual. I do not believe that he has ever stated that. So it was NASA that called coal trains ‘death trains’, it was NASA that supported activists breaking into a power station, it is NASA that is producing totally unreliable ‘average atmospheric temperature’ metrics adjusted based on unvalidated assumptions, NASA inflating the numbers by using known mis-sited observation stations that do not meet WMO/ISO standards.
By always blaming the ‘buffoon in the corner office’ you give NASA plausible deniability. But as they pay him a full annual salary and the papers are written in taxpayers’ time on taxpayers’ funding then all his output is NASA’s not his.
It is just possible that pointing out all the errors in NASA’s work could make them look more carefully at who they employ.
Cliff Mass says:…”skeptic/denier groups hold on to wacky/unscientific theories,…”
Which theories would those be? That like Eric S above that nothing is wrong. Or like me that since nothing we have seen is outside the max of the Holocene we are OK. Or like others that say yes the temperature has gone up, but we are coming out of the LIA.
Oh and I see he does not mind using the term denier. Good on ya Cliff.
“I believe that human-induced global warming is both observed, real, and a serious problem for mankind.”
He completely destroyed any creditability right there.
“Believer” Steven Hayward slams the paper and PNAS too: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/the-damage-to-the-credibility-of-my-profession-is-huge.php
“Like Al Gore, reckless scientists like Hansen are the climate skeptic’s best friend.”
Yet Mann defends it:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/09/643581/mann-we-must-heed-james-hansen-on-global-warming-and-extreme-weather-since-hes-been-right-for-so-long/
I, for one don’t see why this piece is here. He believes in fictional man-made global warming and his position is weak. Next!
REPLY: It’s here because I like what he has to say, and he’s an honest scientist. If you have a problem with that, go elsewhere. – Anthony
vukcevic,
Even a poisson distribution underestimates the distribution. Extremes of ethernet traffic used to be modelled using a poisson distribution, but it was found to fail to model the behaviour of networks accurately; in fact, the true distribution is based on power-law statistical models, which have an “fat tail” that makes a poisson distribution look peaky, and also means that local estimates of statistical metrics are poor estimators of population behaviour.
(I tried to explain this to Leif once. He showed no capacity to even understand the basic statistical issues, which is a shame as I consider him to normally be thoughtful, although to be fair at the time I was being hampered by an overactive spam trap)
“Truth” has been reduced to the status of ‘modern art’….whatever you can get away with.
Spence_UK says:
August 9, 2012 at 1:01 pm
….
Either way, the Gaussian distribution (bell curve) as Hansen would have it, is not adequate to estimate randomness of extreme events as shown here .
Ahem … “Alex, under ‘proxies’ I’ll take “Wisconsin Glacier” for 100,000 to 10,000 yrs ago please.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_glaciation
“The Wisconsin glaciation radically altered the geography of North America north of the Ohio River.
At the height of the Wisconsin Episode glaciation, the ice sheet covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, and New England, as well as parts of Idaho, Montana and Washington.
On Kelleys Island in Lake Erie or in New York’s Central Park the grooves left by these glaciers can be easily observed.
In southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, a suture zone between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets formed the Cypress Hills, the northernmost point in North America that remained south of the continental ice sheets.
At the height of glaciation the Bering land bridge potentially permitted migration of mammals, including humans, to North America from Siberia.”
.
We can understand why you like his deconstruction of Hansen et al., but if he’s such an honest scientist, perhaps you could ask him to produce some evidence that the CAGW speculation (“a serious problem for mankind”) has any validity. Perhaps he could propose a falsifiable hypothesis. “I believe” is not a scientific argument.
/Mr Lynn
Eric Simpson says:
August 9,2012 at 11:06 am
When is this AGW house of cards going to fall?
Answer: Whenever we stop electing people who give them our money.
Ditto, Mr. Lynn.
If he agrees that about 90% is natural warming and if he agrees that there is such a thing as UHI effect, could he please quantify the latter to a reasonable degree? Could we possibly add “manipulation of data” to the equation and add it all up to 100%? If not Dr. Mass please show where the “observed” AGW is, so I too can go and have a look?
Why, on the shift shown by his two bell curves, does Cliff Mass describe the right end as “More extreme hot weather” yet at the left end he says “Less cold weather”. What subliminal desire causes him to use the word ‘extreme’ only in relation to ‘hot weather’?
The article is a nice debunk of the paper “The perception of climate change” however I perceive a pattern aligned with Muller’s interview where the underlying takehome message is ‘There are cranks on both sides but please be assured that anthropogenic climate change is real and dangerous despite the loud noises coming from each end of the Climate wars bell curve.’
It was worth a read from the “even if you believe our best science has a great deal to reliably say about climate 88 years from now” perspective.
Still, I don’t believe, belief is required, and the “best science” is often quite inadequate to the task. With that set of conditions and absence of proof, I won’t be made to act as if I believe. If and when I should come to believe, I will have more than a few objections to the non-solutions on the table and especially if it involves setting up a global central government of junkscience. It was “best science” that gave us eugenics – strike that sort of -well any number of things that were once all the rage. In the case of climate science, best science is a guess educated just above a stab in the dark and biased by sensationalism and the illlusory desire for human control of nature.
If the US dropped its CO2 emissions back to 1990s levels without a carbon plan, exactly how can one be sure that the end of the century is going to be a problem, let alone a serious problem even if you accept all the standard CO2 climate causation and related reactions and feedback hypotheses?
Climate science seems a lot like economics but with maybe more variability? Debatable and constantly adjustable measurements, wide difference of opinion on causation, impossiblity of empirical proof of causation,/ no lab experiment possible, presence of known and unknow variables, chaotic ….? I am a “little” leery of any viewpoint that substitues philosophy or best guesses for reality and especially the ones that tend to make government the hammer and a nail out of everything else.
If there were more protagonists for AGW who were like this one regarding honesty, AND who conducted themsleves according to their belief – staying away from junkets to Rio for example – without looking for ways to first make others act according to their beliefs AND who put an equal amount of effort into ensuring that no solution overstepped basic freedoms including the right of acting according to one’s beliefs and the establishment of hard checks and balances on any global solutions to ensure that they do not become the skeleton of global government by bureaucrats and their scientific echo chambers, … well, they’d at least deserve a seat on the IPCC panel.
According to Wikipedia, my state, Maryland, ihas “A humid continental climate (Köppen prefix D and a third letter of a or b) is a climatic region typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters.”
Long droughts in places that periodically suffer long droughts is not climate change. Hot summers in places like those about which General.Philip Sheridan said 146 years ago, “I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas,” is not climate change.
If Maryland starts getting an annual monsoon, or precipitation falls to less than an inch a year, THEN we can talk “climate change.” Everything else is just variation.
DavidG says: ” .. I, for one don’t see why this piece is here. …”
Mass’ reaction here for all to see is what distinguishes the skeptic side from the AGW side. Our AGW friends’ hallmark is their propensity to marginalize skeptics from the start without even getting into scientific matters. Skeptics place everything on the table and debate the merits of the science itself, and discuss the charter of the individual when that individual brings up the topic first – .e.g. Michaal Mann and his “corrupt skeptics” accusation. In that case, questions of Mann’s ethics come into play when he cannot substantiate the accusation.