Guest essay by Brandon Shollenberger
We can pack up our bags and go home. The global warming debate is, except maybe as an academic curiosity. I know this to be true because Skeptical Science says so. And if they say so, it must be true.
Don’t believe me? I understand. It’s hard to believe. But it’s true. You may remember a post I wrote a couple days ago. In it, I called Skeptical Science dishonest for repeatedly promoting a tweet from (not quite) Barack Obama that said:
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp
As Cook et al’s study said absolutely nothing about whether or not climate change is dangerous. Barry Woods followed up on this point at Skeptical Science in a few comments. That’s when the Skeptical Science crowd said concerns about dangerous global warming are unimportant.
“Sphaerica”, who I believe is a moderator, said:
So your particular nit is that the paper’s authors didn’t correct the President of the United States (or, rather, those who manage his twitter feed) for the exact wording of a tweet?
An official moderator’s response from PW, whose initials I don’t recognize, says:
[PW] Cease the back-n-forth on this silly nitpick of a single tweet. Return to the topic and further nonsense about a single tweet will be deleted.
“Dikran Marsupial”, a major player at SkS, says:
Life is too short for pedantry and nit-picking, especially if it is only a means to avoid acceptance of what the TCP does actually show, i.e. that there is a broad consensus amongst scientists working on climate-related science that the majority of climate change is anthropogenic.
Let’s not focus on the fact Dikran Marsupial misrepresents Cook et al’s results. Let’s not focus on the fact nobody corrects him about him. Let’s not focus on the fact that is almost exactly the behavior described in my previous post.
Let’s just focus on the fact Skeptical Science tells us it doesn’t matter whether or not Cook et al’s work proves there is a consensus that global warming is dangerous. They say that issue is a just a nit – an unimportant detail. They say there is no relevant difference between a paper saying, “Global warming is mad-made” and saying, “Global warming is man-made and dangerous.”
That settles it. They don’t care. Why should we?
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it’s all understandable by assuming they’re only half as mad as their screen names suggest
“The global warming debate is”. Yes, it is. How zen.
I assume you intended to say “the global warming debate is over”?
As for the rest? Nothing surprises me over there. It’s an advocacy group of monkeys with their hands obscuring varying parts of their sensory capabilities.
a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus– appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.
http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf
[PW] Cease the back-n-forth on this silly nitpick of a [Presidential Proclamation]. Return to the topic and further nonsense about [truth and evidence] will be deleted.
F.I.F.Y.
Here’s another Latitude
“There is no possibility of such runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth.”
Sir John Houghton – IPCC Author & atmospheric scientist
————
Congrats to NTZ on reaching 5 million hits.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/07/31/fulfilling-the-global-need-for-climate-science-information-notrickszone-reaches-5-million-hits/
Looks to me as though SkS were just dancing around the details. Hardly a retraction on their stance, which is a pity. A bit like the alarmist crowd will say, “Look, global warming is causing weird weather,” but in the next breath say, “Look, over there! It’s deep in the ocean!” and therefore cannot be causing weird weather.
The alarmists often say things that contradict other things they’ve said – in Australia (just yesterday), we’re still hearing that “if it continues like this, we’ll have the warmest decade in history” – yet that heat is supposed to be hiding in the ocean and even the IPCC acknowledges no warming for 16 years.
I think what many alarmists suffer from is Runaway Mouth and say things they don’t actually mean.
Oops! A word is missing in the second sentence. Thanks for catching that guys.
Could someone with this site fix that for me?
Dangerous warming is making itself felt in the Arctic. Prepare to man the lifeboats.
Temperature
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
[Daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel, plotted with daily climate values calculated from the period 1958-2002.]
Sea ice extent
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Well, if it is on SkS, that should be enough to say “who should care”. Chicken little is the only one that comes to mind.
Skeptical Science is anything but, they have their agenda and do a good job of pushing it. Quite a few people quote from it as if it’s gospel, and I guess to many the religion is.
“Let’s just focus on the fact Skeptical Science tells us it doesn’t matter whether or not Cook et al’s work proves there is a consensus that global warming is dangerous. They say that issue is a just a nit – an unimportant detail. They say there is no relevant difference between a paper saying, “Global warming is mad-made” and saying, “Global warming is man-made and dangerous.”
So your particular nit is that the paper’s authors didn’t correct the President of the United States (or, rather, those who manage his twitter feed) for the exact wording of a tweet?
1. The issue they said was a NIT was the fact that they didnt correct Obama
seriously.
I had just thought that on an article entitled:
Skeptical Science: An accurately informed public is necessary for climate policy
Which was about the Mike Hulme’s comment about Skeptical Science’s – John Cook’s 97% consensus paper at the Making Science Public project (Nottingham University)
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2013/07/23/whats-behind-the-battle-of-received-wisdoms/#comment-182401
Prof Mike Hulme: The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in Anderegg et al.’s 2010 equally poor study in PNAS: dividing publishing climate scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?” – Prof Mike Hulme (UEA, founding director Tyndall)
I thought it might be a good idea to correct Presidents Obama’s misrepresentation of John Cook’s work to the public, where Obama tweeted this paper said there was a 97% consensus man made change was dangerous. I pointed out that Prof Richard Betts (Head of Climate Impacts, Met Office, IPCC lead author) had taken a small attempt to correct the president, and that it might be a good idea for John Cook to do the same..
Anyway my Skeptical science comment in full below:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/making-science-work-ben-pile-rebuttal.html#96775
——————————————————–
I would like to thank Nottingham University’s Making science Public project for running some very interesting articles, the comments there are I think worth a read. But perhaps this is the best place to raise this question?
Lets look at the media coverage that Skeptical Science is so proud of: http://www.skepticalscience.com/republishers.php?a=tcpmedia
especially this one:
Barack Obama
@BarackObama Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp
Now whatever the paper did, it made zero reference to impact, or any consensus on impacts and there is no justification at all – based on this paper – for a 97% consensus of ‘dangerous’ to be declared a finding of it, did the authors seek to correct this in anyway, no they celebrated it by listing it on their blog, with a link to President Barack Obama.
Professor Richard Betts (Head of Climate Impacts, Met Office and IPCC lead author AR4 & AR5) sought to correct it, by tweeting back:
Richardabetts
@BarackObama Actually that paper didn’t say ‘dangerous’. NB I *do* think #climate change poses risks – I just care about accurate reporting!
Maybe John Cook was not aware of President Barack Obama misrepresenting and overstating this paper, when he said (or his official account did) 97% of scientists agree climate change is real man made and dangerous?
Sadly no. It appear that John Cook was surprised at all the attention and made no effort (nor the other authors) to correct this Barack Obama tweet (to 30 million people, or how it was widely reported else where in the media
Sydney Morning Herald: Obama gives Aussie researcher 31,541,507 reasons to celebrate
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/obama-gives-aussie-researcher-31541507-reasons-to-celebrate-20130517-2jqrh.html#ixzz2aRpr8JPX
“Australian researcher John Cook, an expert in climate change communication, was inundated with requests for interviews by US media outlets after Obama took to Twitter to endorse his project’s final report.
“It was pretty cool news,” said Mr Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com. “It was out of our expectations.”
A survey of scientific papers by a team led by Mr Cook and published by Fairfax Media this week found more than 97 per cent of researchers endorsed the view that humans are to blame for global warming. The peer-reviewed outcome flies in the face of public perception in countries such as the US or Australia that scientists are divided on the issue.
“One of the highest predictors of how important people think climate change is, is cues from political leaders,” Mr Cook said. “So if the leaders don’t seem to care, people don’t care either.
“A cue from Obama is a big step,” he said. “The fact it goes to more than 31 million followers, it just raises the awareness of consensus.”
———————-
Awareness, a false awareness (courtsey of Obama) of a 97% consensus on ‘dangerous’, misinformation that is now in the public domain about this paper by the President of the United States of America , not corrected by the authors of the paper. An irony is that Prof Lewandowsky and John Cook have a paper published on how hard it is to correct misinformation.. !!! http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/3/106.full?ijkey=FNCpLYuivUOHE&keytype=ref&siteid=sppsi
President Obama is now going after Deniers in Congress…. (thus this ishighly political, v dangerous for the public perception of scientists if ‘misinformation’ is uncorrected by scientists)
www. BarackObama.com
“Call out a climate denier
Check out our list of known climate deniers in Congress-elected officials who refuse to even acknowledge the science behind climate change—and call them out on Twitter.” http://www.barackobama.com/climate-deniers
So Dana, will you or any of your co-authors, tell the President, that your paper says nothing about a consensus on ‘dangerous’?
Actually Mosher I would think that is a pretty big NIT to be concerned about. POTUS saying that something is “dangerous” carries quite a bit of weight, don’t you think? Or at least it used to….
They also don’t correct things others say in public or in newspapers and even say misleading things themselves. So, it’s not just about not correcting a Twitter from the prez.
Its the runaway treehut-effect. Past a tipping point it cannot be reversed …
Steven Mosher, that’d make sense except the most important quote I offered, that of an official response, explicitly said “nitpick of a single tweet.” That explicitly referred to the tweet and not the shameless promotion of the tweet. The worst you can claim is the quotes I offered don’t all refer to the same thing.
Which is a pretty lame criticism. If a person offers three quotes to demonstrate something and only one of them actually does so, they’ve still demonstrated it. They’ve just offered some fluff in the process.
You should stick to criticizing my skills as poet. You might actually be right about those.
For both public policy and for the interface(s) of climate science with public awareness, the issue of what is “dangerous” or not is everything!
If there were nothing “dangerous” (never mind “catastrophic”) impending then the alarm artists would have no claim at all upon the attentions, institutions, and resources of millions and billions of people.
Fail to make the “dangerous” case and you can all vanish back into well deserved obscurity, dear CAGW Alarmists.
Can any honest person say it does not matter whether the POTUSA is operating upon misinformation??? What about all the governments, media, companies, and academics in the world?
Eric
Depends. When POTUS says Iran is ‘dangerous’ for its work on nuclear tech, that ignores decades in which they have had that tech without ‘building the bomb’. Nor do I believe his assurances on ‘dealing seriously with climate change.’ I don’t see any indication that is within the realm of possibility, let alone inclination. Then there is the matter of ‘terrorism’…when Al Qaeda is in fact in the front lines in Syria ( as it was in Libya ) doing NATO’s behest in overturning the government.
Are we sure GW Bush didn’t just get a makeover ?
Steven Mosher:
Nobody has an obligation to discuss any particular news article on any topic. The fact that Dana is an author of the paper and one of the principles at SkS does make the inaccuracy of the tweet relevant to that blog, especially given that Dana promoted an inaccurate tweet himself.
If you are the author of a paper you have a responsibility to ensure that your paper is being accurately portrayed in the media. It is grossly irresponsible to actively participate in the propagation of misleading information about your paper.
So if you are aware that someone is using your research to back a claim that you know it doesn’t your advice is, shut up and enjoy the ill gotten notoriety? Seriously?
Could this be selective policing of hyperbole? Obama’s rhetorical hyperbole — OK. Mark Steyn’s editorial hyperbole at National Review Online — sue the bastards!
To these people (extremely small minority of humanity haters) it really doesn’t matter if it’s CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming), or IAGW (Inconvenient Anthropogenic Global Warming), or even BAGW (Beneficial Anthropogenic Global Warming). Anthropogenic = BAD.
To the sane world (most people) it matters a great deal whether it’s “C”, “I”, or “B” with regard to how much we’re willing to put into researching and/or solving the so-called problem.
Kyoto wasn’t built on the fear of inconvenience or benefits. K2 DOA.
Bill:
Indeed. In an early draft of my last post, I included several quotes from articles they link to on their site that misrepresent their work. One of them was even quoted in a post about the media response to their work.
I decided it’d bog down the post too much. I think sticking with just (not quite) Obama’s tweet worked better.
According to my recent findings global warming started in 1990 (or data fiddled since) and at standstill during last 16 years, the rest can be attributed to Natural Variability associated with the geomagnetic Ap index.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Ap-LT.htm
Larger values of the Ap index are usually due to geomagnetic storms.