Here’s the story/transcript from Spencer Michels, along with video that follows. I have not seen the piece that will be airing nationally yet, and I don’t know how much of me they use, but this just appeared on the PBS website.
One note: when they talk about “heat sync” they really meant to say heat sink. – Anthony
Conversation with global warming skeptic Anthony Watts – Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message
From PBS:
It was about 105 degrees in Chico, Calif., about three hours north of Sacramento, when we arrived at the offices of one of the nation’s most read climate skeptics. Actually, Anthony Watts calls himself a pragmatic skeptic when it comes to global warming. Watts is a former television meteorologist, who has been studying climate change for years. He doesn’t claim to be a scientist; he attended Purdue. He’s the author of a blog, Watts Up with That?, which he calls the world’s most viewed site on global warming. For a story I was working on for the PBS NewsHour, Watts was recommended by the Heartland Institute, a conservative, Chicago-based non-profit that is one of the leading groups that doubt that climate change — if it exists — is attributable to human activities.
Watts doesn’t come across as a true believer or a fanatic. For one thing, he has built a business that caters to television stations and individuals who want accurate weather information and need displays to show their viewers. He has developed an array of high tech devices to disseminate weather data and put it on screens. He has several TV stations around the country as clients.
But Watts’ reputation doesn’t come from his business — IntelliWeather — but rather from his outspoken views on climate change. He says he’s been gathering data for years, and he’s analyzed it along with some academics. He used to think somewhat along the same lines as Richard Muller, the University of California physicist who recently declared he was no longer a skeptic on climate change. Muller had analyzed two centuries worth of temperature data and decided his former skepticism was misplaced: yes, the earth has been warming, and the reason is that humans are producing carbon dioxide that is hastening the warming the planet.
Watts doesn’t buy Muller’s analysis, since, he believes, it is based on faulty data. The big problem, as Watts sees it, is that the stations where temperatures are gathered are too close to urban developments where heat is soaked up and distorts the readings. So it looks like the earth is warming though it may not be, he says.
Read a transcript below.
SPENCER MICHELS: So let’s start out with the basic idea that there’s this debate in this country over global warming. There’s some people who call it a complete hoax and there are some people who completely embrace it and so forth. Where do you stand in that spectrum?
ANTHONY WATTS: Well, I at one time was very much embracing the whole concept that we had a real problem, we had to do something about it. Back in 1988 James Hanson actually was the impetus for that for me in his presentation before Congress. But as I learned more and more about the issue, I discovered that maybe it’s not as bad as it’s made out to be. Some of it is hype, but there’s also some data that has not been explored and there’s been some investigations that need to be done that haven’t been done. And so now I’m in the camp of we have some global warming. No doubt about it, but it may not be as bad as we originally thought because there are other contributing factors.
SPENCER MICHELS: What’s the thing that bothers you the most about people who say there’s lots of global warming?
ANTHONY WATTS: They want to change policy. They want to apply taxes and these kinds of things may not be the actual solution for making a change to our society.
SPENCER MICHELS: What are you saying? That they’re biased essentially or motivated by something else? What?
ANTHONY WATTS: [T]here’s a term that was used to describe this. It’s called noble cause corruption. And actually I was a victim of that at one time, where you’re so fervent you’re in your belief that you have to do something. You’re saving the planet, you’re making a difference, you’re making things better that you’re so focused on this goal of fixing it or changing it that you kind of forget to look along the path to make sure that you haven’t missed some things.
I started looking into the idea that weather stations have been slowly encroached upon by urbanization and sighting issues over the last century. Meaning that our urbanization affected the temperature. And this was something that was very clear if you looked at the temperature records. But what wasn’t clear is how it affected the trend of temperatures. And so that’s been something that I’ve been investigating. Anyone who’s ever stood next to a building in the summertime at night, a brick building that’s been out in the summer sun, you stand next to it at night you can feel the heat radiating off of it. That’s a heat sync effect. And over the last 100 years our country, in fact the world, has changed. We’ve gone from having mostly a rural agrarian society to one that is more urban and city based and as a result the infrastructure has increased. We’ve got more freeways, you know more airports, we’ve got more buildings. Got more streets, all these things. Those are all heat syncs. During the day, solar insulation hits these objects and these surfaces and it stores heat in these objects. At night it releases that heat. Now if you are measuring temperature in a city that went from having uh maybe 10% of um, non-permeable surface to you know maybe 90% over 100 years, that’s a heat sync effect and that should show up in the record. The problem is, is that it’s been such a slow subtle change over the last 100 years. It’s not easy to detect and that’s been the challenge and that’s what I’ve been working on.
SPENCER MICHELS: Well in a way you’re saying that the records aren’t accurate, the data isn’t accurate.
ANTHONY WATTS: I’m saying that the data might be biased by these influences to a percentage. Yes, we have some global warming, it’s clear the temperature has gone up in the last 100 years. But what percentage of that is from carbon dioxide? And what percentage of that is from changes in the local and measurement environment?
SPENCER MICHELS: I want to go back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, the idea that there is, there are people who are sort of invested in promoting the fact that there is global warming. There’s money involved and grants. Is that what you were saying? Maybe explain that.
ANTHONY WATTS: Well global warming had become essentially a business in its own right. There are NGOs, there are organizations, there are whole divisions of universities that have set up to study this, this factor, and so there’s lots of money involved and then so I think that there’s a tendency to want to keep that going and not really look at what might be different.
SPENCER MICHELS: Now Dr. Muller at the University of California Berkeley had similar concerns. Went back and looked at the data, took much more data than anybody else had, and concluded, well maybe there was some problems, but basically the conclusions were right. There is global warming and it comes from carbon dioxide which is meant, made by man. Do you buy that?
ANTHONY WATTS: Unfortunately he has not succeeded in terms of how science views, you know, a successful inquiry. His papers have not passed peer review. They had some problems. Some of the problems I identified, others have identified problems as well, for example, he goes much further back, back to about 1750 in terms of temperature. Well from my own studies, I know that temperature really wasn’t validated and homogenized where everything’s measured the same way until the weather bureau came into being about in 1890. Prior to that thermometers were hung in and exposed to the atmosphere all kinds of different ways. Some were hung under the shade of trees, some were on the north side of houses, some were out in the open in the sun, and so the temperature fluctuations that we got from those readings prior to 1890 was quite broad and I don’t believe that provided representative signal because the exposure’s all wrong. And Dr. Muller did not take any of that into account.
SPENCER MICHELS: His conclusion though is that basically global warming exists and that the scientists, no matter what the problems were, were pretty much right on.
ANTHONY WATTS: I agree with him that global warming exists. However, the ability to attribute the percentage of global warming to CO2 versus other man-made influences is still an open question.
SPENCER MICHELS: I want to ask you a little bit about attitudes towards this among the public. We talked to a public opinion specialist at Stanford who says there’s been 80 percent belief in global warming and man-made global warming consistently over at least the last 15 years in this country. Do you buy his theory?
ANTHONY WATTS: Well I look at a number of opinion polls. You’ll find a lot of them on my blog and that we’ve covered. And depending on how you ask the question we’ll sometimes give you a different answer. My view is, is that the view of global warming peaked about at the time that Al Gore came out with his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But ever since then other factors have kicked in. Climate Gate for example. And it has become less of an issue, in fact you hardly see politicians talking about it anymore, or pushing it as an issue. What’s been happening now it’s just become a regulation issue. It’s gotten away from the political arena and into the bureaucratic regulation arena. And so people I believe based on the polls I’ve seen, aren’t quite as believing as they used to be. And I think the trend is downward.
SPENCER MICHELS: What do you think is the upshot of your attitude toward this? Should the Congress, should the American public say, you know nothing’s been proven yet. We should wait. Or should we go ahead with trying to solve what many people consider a really scary problem?
ANTHONY WATTS: Hmm…You mentioned a really scary problem and I think that’s part of the issues. Some people don’t respond well to scare tactics and there have been some scare tactics used by some of the proponents on the other side of the issue. And that’s where the overselling of it comes in. But this is a slow problem and it requires a slow solution I believe. For example, our infrastructure for electricity and so forth and highways didn’t happen in 5 years or 10 years. It happened over a century. We can’t just rip all that up or change it in the space off five, 10 or 15 years because it’ll be catastrophic to our economy. We need a slow change solution, one that is a solution that changes over time at about the same rate as climate change. More efficient technologies, new technologies, the use of more nuclear for example. There’s a nuclear type of a reactor that’s more safe called a, a liquid thorium reactor that China is jumping on right now. And we should be looking into things like that.
SPENCER MICHELS: Has this issue, I know you think it’s been oversold and scare tactics have been used. Do you think it’s become too politicized?
ANTHONY WATTS: Oh, it’s definitely become too politicized. In fact, some of the scientists who are the leaders in the issue have become for lack of a better word, political tools on the issue.
SPENCER MICHELS: One final question, do you consider yourself a skeptic when it comes to global warming?
ANTHONY WATTS: I would call myself a pragmatic skeptic. Yes, we need to make some changes on our energy technology but more efficient technology’s a good thing. For example, I have solar power on my own, you know, I have done energy reductions in my office and in my home to make things more efficient. So I think those are good things. Those are good messages that we should be embracing. But at the same time I think that some of the issues have been oversold, may have been oversold, because they allow for more regulation to take place. And so the people that like more regulation use global warming as a tool, as a means to an end. And so as a result, we might be getting more regulation and more taxes that really aren’t rooted in science, but more in politics.
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This article appears online here
Related: I’ll be on the PBS Newshour tonight
UPDATE: If it caused this guy to be mad at PBS, then I feel like I’ve accomplished something. 😉
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@D Boehm says:
September 17, 2012 at 7:08 pm
bentrem says:
“We need good conservative thinking, not this self-congratulatory back-slapping jingoism.”
Actually, what we need is testable, measurable scientific evidence of AGW. But it seems to be in short supply. Completely missing, in fact.
If you have such evidence, by all means, post it here.
Great challenge there D Boehm but, sadly, will go unrecognised yet again!
I do believe that AGW is a finite possibillity it’s the big C that, too often, precedes it that I find politically motivated and thus disputable.
There’s plenty who’ll happily pontificate about how bad we, the Humans, are for wanting to be happy. I find that sad but clearly they don’t.
I find that alien but maybe I’m just an outlier!
Well done Anthony!
bentrem says:
September 17, 2012 at 7:00 pm:
“That there are so many academics arguing for human factors is evidence that they are in it for the money, and according to Greg House they they do not voice disagree is evidence that … that their biting their tongues. So sad that this is typical of conservative thinking: attribute motive, then read minds … what next, consult a crystal ball?”
=========================================================
You did not follow the link I gave you, did you? I draw my conclusions from the study where the claim about “97%” had been made. All you need is to look at the study carefully.
Anthony.
Well done, you made me proud, bearing in mind the interview was severely edited down from hours to minutes you did exactly what was required. I would love to hear the 2 hour interview that was edited out.
Kudos, well done Anthony! Given the expected bias, the best that could be expected was to give them no toe-hold. You gave them no toe-hold as you delivered the sane viewpoint. I haven’t seen the program yet (it’s on DVR record) but my reasonable expectation is the rest of the 55 minutes will feature wild-eyed CAGW crazies of various zoological description.
Jimbo says:
September 17, 2012 at 4:57 pm (Edit)
Was Muller ever a skeptic?
#########################
I dont know lets do a check list
Before his study
Distrusts Michael Mann: Anthony Yes; Muller yes
Believes the world is warmer: Anthony Yes; Muller yes
Questions the accuracy of the record: Anthony Yes; Muller Yes
Knows C02 warms the planet: Anthony Yes; Muller Yes.
Thought the Sun may play a large role: Anthony Yes; Muller Yes.
Thought Natural cycles May play a role: Anthony Yes; Muller Yes
So unless I’m missing something in the definition of “skeptic” it would appear that Anthony and Muller had some shared beliefs prior to the study. In fact, Muller is quite clear that his inspiration
for looking at the matter was Anthony’s work.
After the work.
Now that work is done. You may question the work, but this is clear. Muller set out to make a decision for himself, by looking at data for himself and abiding by what his study showed him.
Again, you might not like the answer, but he reported what he found and changed his mind accordingly. Does anyone expect him to hide his results? To keep looking until he finds an answer you like? or an answer that confirmed what he initially believed?.
I will say this. On the UHI work continues to try to find the effect in a scientifically defensible way. Folks who know the people working on the UHI problem might do well to hold their tongues. Rather cryptic I know.
Was hoping for a fair and balanced piece. What was I thinking. It had all the illusions of it, it had the potential, but oh no. …. They just had to bend it in all the right places, in all the right ways. They just could not do a fair and balanced piece.
The 97% just had to get thrown in there, as an obvious play, but the subtle inferences were not lost on this viewer. I hope many of the other commenters here also watched the PBS TV story and based their comments on what was actually aired.
Great job Anthony! The story definitely slants toward the position that climate change is a done deal and only your (misguided) following thinks otherwise.
Paul Coppin says:
September 17, 2012 at 4:26 pm
“He doesn’t claim to be a scientist; he attended Purdue.”
Well I guess that’s that then, the matter is settled. Nothing to hear here folks, move along quietly now…
/sarc…
————————————–
Funny, when I first read that Purdue comment I thought it was a compliment as in “although he is not a climate scientist he did attend Purdue”. The tone seemed polite. We are moving into a new world when a skeptic gets this kind of airtime. Congrats Anthony.
“I dont know lets do a (silly meaningless) check list”
Cause it wasn’t a serious one.
Congratulations Anthony from Oz! Hate to add a negative but one thing that grates about US media is that interviewers and interviewees imply that the US experience equates to the whole world. Eg does our minute piece of landmass in the south Pacific matter? Oh, actually just checked my geography, Oz is only a few sq. km smaller than the US.(If you hadn’t stolen California from Mexico we’d be larger.) No doubt you are aware that in the controversy over temp. records we (and NZ) have had problems extracting real records from BOMs. Cheers from sunny, and still above the high water mark, Sydney.
Anthony, you did a terrific job. Congratulations.
My favorite moment was when they called Judy Curry a “skeptic.” In the world of the “97%” apparently anyone to the right of Al Gore is a “skeptic.”
If you have the whole PBS episode it starts at 30 minutes into it. Oh look Collins is using a red and orange map to show how evil and hot things are. And yes they make a big point that Muller was a skeptic who converted something demonstrably not true. And they claim there is a vast belief in global warming and only a tiny percent who are skeptical.
Now Anthony’s segment comes across very well.
@Steve Mosher
Said in 2003:Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”
Anthony No; Muller Yes
[David Ball says:
September 17, 2012 at 3:15 pm
PBS have just had a “lead in” on your peice. “A change of heart for a GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTIC” i.e. Richard Muller. I’m going to puke. ]
Yes, as Joe Prins noted above, we should write the PBS Ombudsman, THANKing them for actually allowing ‘skeptics’ a voice for once. AND NOTE that Muller was not a skeptic and there lead-in is grossly misleading to the public.
AND that there ’97 percent’ is out of sync with the facts.
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html
Steven Mosher says:
September 17, 2012 at 7:37 pm
“Believes the world is warmer: Anthony Yes; Muller yes…Knows C02 warms the planet: Anthony Yes; Muller Yes.”
=======================================================
Very clever, Steven Mosher. “Knows”? Apparently no one has ever demonstrated experimentally that CO2 can warm the warmer surface. “Believes” would have been appropriate, but not “knows”. And that only provided you can read minds. People not always believe what they say.
Problem is, there is no “the temperature”. Some places are cooler than they were 100 years ago, some are about the same, others are warmer.
On the link someone gave above, Joe Romm has posted the link to the PBS Ombudsman and implored his groupies to write and complain. I am sure he will have much more effect on pbs than I will.
Especially with all of the Muller comparisons, the implicit theme the interviewer mostly successfully got across to the average audience was the standard black & white moronic binary thought fallacy.
Such was presented in totally different form than the Doran & Zimmerman 2009 study (the 97.4% “consensus” source trumpeted elsewhere) but with the same tactic:
Non-zero temperature rise occurred since the crippling cold of the Little Ice Age,* therefore the global warming movement is reasonable overall (despite how it in practice is based around common claims of multiple times greater temperature rise being incoming in the 21st century and of devastating net harm from CO2 rise).
* (That is aside from, of course, not mentioning the Little Ice Age by name or that looking at temperature trends from 1750 A.D. to now consists of looking at trends from within the LIA to now, since even knowing of the existence of the LIA would be unsuitable knowledge for the bulk of the general public).
While how Anthony Watts came across as illustrating one could disagree with magnitudes was good, there was too much vagueness unfortunately.
As a momentary fraction of what is not really conveyed to the audience, even if I illustrate by writing quickly as if in live time without internet access (avoiding looking up any numbers not already in memory):
Average global temperatures rose by around 0.6 to 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century according to particularly publicized sources, although other data without the same questionable revisions and adjustments would place global temperatures now not more than around a third of a degree or less higher than they were in the late 1930s. That contrasts to the tens of degrees temperature change which occurs from short-term weather. A variation literally orders of magnitude smaller, superimposed upon other variations, is thus difficult to truly pick out and exactly determine. Such a tiny average temperature change is somewhat like moving tens of miles closer to the equator, something with positive as well as negative effects. (That is aside from up to tens of percent or more increase to water efficiency, reduced stomatal conductance, and huge benefit to plant growth which can occur if CO2 were to eventually hypothetically rise by hundreds of parts per million, influenced by limiting nutrients by locale but with a substantial percentage growth increase already seen). When past global warming in the 20th century has been a matter of only tenths of a degree (despite how such is used for arguments that the 21st century will have many times higher temperature change of several degrees or more), every few hundredths of a degree matters greatly for what fraction may be attributed to natural causes versus to human causes, especially in the context of how climate has been substantially warmer in the past than now, including during the Holocene Climate Optimum a few thousand years ago which had far more vegetation near the arctic as seen in buried remains.
I could go on, writing more and better but don’t really see the point. This is so reminiscent of what is wrong with PBS and other media, though, and why, despite the advantage of at least reality itself being on our side, the skeptic side doesn’t convince more people in the general public who do not invest many hours into research. Be one of a fraction of 1/1000th of the total population coming to WUWT to read article after article for a few months, and that is substantially educational, something which could change someone’s mind or be likely to spur further investigation. This interview, though, is not so much.
I’ll give an analogy on another topic:
What you would see in a media article on the dire dangers to future civilizations of long-lived radioisotopes in nuclear waste, which shape policies at the national level:
pages upon pages of writing but practically only qualitative, misleading overall
What you would never, ever, ever, ever see in such:
There are more than 100 trillion tons of thorium and decay products plus other natural radioisotopes in Earth’s crust, at nominally trace parts per million levels but adding up over its 30 million trillion ton mass. In comparison, for the thousands of tons or less of radioisotopes in human nuclear waste to be even relatively significant in radiation emissions depends on them differing by vast enough orders of magnitude in half-life (for the fraction of a radioisotope’s atoms decaying per unit of time is inversely proportional to half-life) and/or in distribution — like being concentrated in surface locations rather than being as much buried underground. According, for example, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top kilometer of rock and soil in the United States by relatively next to nothing, by on the order of 1 part in 10 million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotopes in such a volume.
I’m not really surprised here, but, still, it is saddening.
The interviewer slips in the false claim about a 80% belief in man-made global warming as one of the few relatively specific numbers in the interview, knowing such will sway the herd instincts of some in the audience to go with what they think is most believed by their peers.
Even when remembering off the top of my head as if without internet access, I know the portion of the U.S. public who believe global warming to be primarily manmade, when asked in a poll question whether it is primarily from natural causes or primarily manmade, is around half or less. (Also, as a Rasmussen poll illustrated, of those who do believe in it being primarily manmade, about half of them — about a quarter of the total public — believe it is likely to destroy human civilization, which highlights how it is presented in practice in the media for impressions given).
Anthony, you don’t seem very extreme to me. Well done. It likely breaks any stereotypical impressions some may have had towards you.
I have only seen the video linked in this post. PBS Newshour has not yet shown in my area as per their schedule.
But what I would really like to see would be the pissed off Anthony Watts facing down one or more of the “team” in a venue where you could really reply in a manner commensurate with their BS. You know, a bare knuckle intellectual fight where winner takes all.
I was relieved that you didn’t look like Mann, Black, Hansen, and the other look alike. LOL
That rant that you linked to reminds me of when ethanol was being pushed on NPR (subsidiary of PBS) as the miracle to get rid of air pollution. I wrote a letter to All Things Considered (an NPR program) pointing out that doing so would be reducing food production. I lived in Hawaii at the time and when my letter was read on the air they only mentioned my name and the city I was from. Three days later during dinner I received a phone call from someone in Massachusetts to curse me out for being so selfish. I never figured out how he got that but I do know (having done the research for a paper) that some of them believe that “mankind is a cancer on the face of the Earth” and that anything to rescue mother earth is OK.
Nice. And no probing questions about polar bears or exploding kittens.
Really well done Anthony! Any way to tell if WUWT gets a bounce from this?
Anthony, I felt you came across very well indeed. The editing was also sympathetic (no fast cuts to try and make you sound desperate), nor were there any attempts that I noticed to edit what you said into a rant. Reasonable, cogent and considered. Lovely :).
And as for caerbannog666: *really*??? Your mind is made up *before* you hear what’s said? What, exactly, are you afraid of? You cannot therefore complain about anybody dismissing *your* point of view… no matter how many times you may utter the wrods “science” or “peer reviewed”. Hoist by your own petard.
A very smooth, media-savvy performance which avoided all the mines in the field. Now let’s see how they cut it to make you evil.