Paul Burtwistle writes:
Last night I watched an item on Channel 9’s 60 minutes here in Australia which covered Dr Stefan Harrison of Exeter University in the UK and his work studying the Exploradores glacier in Patagonia, Argentina.
The story contained an alarmist view regarding the sudden increase in the rate at which the glacier is receding over the last 10-20 years. The documentary does explain that the glacier has retreated a lot over the last 20,000 years but that the rate of decrease is up to 50 times greater in the last 10-20 years that it was 500 years ago and this is all due to AGW (at 5 mins 26 seconds in to “Wild Patagonia part 2″).
At 5 minutes 40 seconds in to the item Dr Harrison asked about climate skeptics and he goes on to say that they are not worth debating their viewpoint as it’s “like mud wrestling with pigs. Firstly you get covered in mud and secondly, the pig loves it” he then goes on to say he won’t debate skeptics because geographers don’t debate with people who think the world is flat and biologists don’t debate with people who think evolution isn’t happening or that the world is only 6000 years old.
You can view the whole article here (2 x 8 minute items) – http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stories/8834229/wild-patagonia-the-glaciers-that-hold-a-dire-warning-for-earths-future .
The two articles are Wild Patagonia 1 & 2. I think some attention should be drawn to this appalling piece and I’ve already written to Channel 9 to voice my disapproval.
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Huh, I don’t know of ANY climate skeptic who thinks the world is flat or that the Earth is only 6000 years old. I wonder where he gets his information…The Daily Kos perhaps?
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Having played the part of that pig on many occasions, I can say it was both enjoyable and rewarding. Credit to the man for having spotted that much.
Even better is the reaction of my wrestling partners when they realise they are covered in the mud of their own bad arguments. Some blame me for the mud. Others pretend it is chocolate.
Actually, Dr Stefan Harrison is on the side of the REAL flat earthers:
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/flat_earth_society_believes_in_climate_change/
Re: dbstealey says: April 28, 2014 at 8:58 am
I don’t know if this counts as “mud wrestling with pigs” but here at WUWT seems to be no place to “engage in a fair public debate”. By way of example see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/09/study-wuwt-near-the-center-of-the-climate-blogosphere/#comment-1611483
et seq.
He is just afraid of losing the debate. I understand him. I never won a mud-wrestling against a pig. Not once, I promise.
Dr Stefan Harrison is correct. There is something really wrong with the climate. It used to be much warmer.
http://www.icenews.is/2014/04/28/green-landscape-discovered-beneath-greenland-ice-sheet/
The perfesser had desecrated the Hockey Stick noticing that glaciers existed in Scotland ca. the 18th century on the Beeb. Maybe he is conflicted.
In Tennessee we wrestle pigs until they submit then cook them and eat them.
The problem with discussing/debating the science of ‘climate’ change is that observations and analysis unequivocally supports the assertion that roughly 75% of the warming in the last 70 years was due to a natural cycle (solar magnetic cycle changes) as opposed to the increase in atmospheric CO2. The warmists scientists that have skin in the game need to start looking for a way out. Due to incorrect/manipulated science we have wasted trillions of dollars on green scams, that do not work. It appears the planet was started to cool. Do you think there will be a backlash?
P.S. Nice try to switch topics with an appeal to flat earth, young earth, belief in aliens, Holocaust belief, and so on as opposed to a scientific argument. Name calling in a ‘scientific’ debate is pathetic.
In support of Alan Robertson’s comment:
Alan Robertson says:
April 28, 2014 at 5:25 am
Meanwhile, poleward South from Patagonia. Antarctic sea ice anomaly is >1.4 Million Km2 above 30 yr. avg.
William:
Antarctic sea ice is now above the one or two sigma 30 year average for every month of the year. It appears based on what has happened before and my understanding of the mechanisms a significant cooling climate change event is underway. I am curious what will be the response from the different warmist factions/scientific community, the media, and the public to significant unequivocal planetary cooling.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
There are 342 warming events in the paleo climatic record (Antarctic peninsula ice core data, the Antarctic peninsula is outside of the Antarctic polar vortex and hence correlates with Southern Sea temperature rather than Antarctic ice sheet temperature, during the warming events the Southern sea warms and the Antarctic ice sheet cools which is exactly the same as was observed in the last 70 years) in the last 250,000 years with a mean time between warming events of 1400 years and 400 years (the period between events in the Southern hemisphere is the same as the period between warming events in the Northern hemisphere which provides support for the assertion that the cause of the cycle is solar magnetic cycle changes as that mechanism can affect both hemispheres simultaneously as opposed to internal climate mechanisms that are chaotic rather than periodic and that do not affect both hemispheres simultaneously.)
In every case, the warming periods were followed by cooling periods, some of them abrupt cooling periods.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
Davis and Taylor: “Does the current global warming signal reflect a natural cycle”
…We found 342 natural warming events (NWEs) corresponding to this definition, distributed over the past 250,000 years …. …. The 342 NWEs contained in the Vostok ice core record are divided into low-rate warming events (LRWEs; < 0.74oC/century) and high rate warming events (HRWEs; ≥ 0.74oC /century) (Figure). … …. "Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice – shelf history" and authored by Robert Mulvaney and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey ( Nature , 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11391),reports two recent natural warming cycles, one around 1500 AD and another around 400 AD, measured from isotope (deuterium) concentrations in ice cores bored adjacent to recent breaks in the ice shelf in northeast Antarctica. ….
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper shows that have been 9 warming and cooling periods in the last 11,000 years.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
@ur momisugly Truth Deciple
“Mud wrestle with pigs–he must have been looking in the mirror.”
I’ve heard that thing men do called many things – preening the pope, pumping the python, manipulating the mango – now we have “mud-wrestling the pig.” Mirror is optional.
seems ‘crying wolf’ comes into everything some people say?
The good professor is making a nice little bundle helping insurance actuaries sell justifications for over priced reinsurance premiums for non-existant storm claims.
Stop with the scary photos already. I’ll take an alarmist graph over this any day.
“……..and argued for the identification of emergent properties in landscapes as an alternative to the reductionist model-building paradigm.”
Seems he is eager to demolish the “model-building paradigm” as a reductionist approach – I wonder if that includes in the climate change field where of course reductionist models reign supreme still.
Despite the 17 year surface temperature standstill, despite climate sensitivity being dialed down recently by the IPCC. If ever there was a time for debate it is now.
Flat Earthers can be shown a photo of the globe from space.
Creationists can be shown fossils which are millions of years old.
What can you show a sceptic? A graph of rising co2 and temperature? I could show you a graph showing rising temperature and an ice age.
Here is the profile page of the good Dr. Harrison. Check out the insurance links and activism. No wonder he doesn’t want to debate.
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Dr Stephan Harrison
Associate Professor of Quaternary Science
Profile
• An invited member of the Environmental Research Group and the Climate Research Group of the Institute of Actuaries.
• An invited member of the Carbon Counting Group, an international group of economists, scientists, architects, politicians and environmental activists working in the field of mitigation and adaption for climate change.
• An invited member of the Climate Justice Programme
• An expert witness for the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide looking at the impact of mining on mountain glaciers in the Chilean Andes, and specifically the Pascua Lama mine.
• An invited member of the Science Media Centre
• An invited member of the Environmental Research Group of the Emergency Planning Society.
Since 2005 he has given 19 invited papers and 4 keynote speeches at international and national conferences and workshops.
• He has given invited keynote talks at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC; the 2005 Lloyd’s Risk Lecture and invited talks at the universities of Trondheim and Vienna.
• He has reviewed manuscripts for 26 journals and grant applications for NERC and NSF.
“……….Since 2001 Dr Harrison has helped businesses and governmental organisations understand and respond to climate change and he has worked with Lloyd’s Insurance Market…..”
https://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Stephan_Harrison
He has a verbally expressed hockey stick for the contribution of Patagonian glacier melt to sea level rise with a blade of about 30 years, and yet the simple average of world tide gauges (Church & White 2011) shows no upturn from a 150 year long linear trend whatsoever. After all, if Patagonia is suddenly melting faster then this is the case for most all other glaciers and it should show *up* in sea level rise, but the rise is evidently slowing a bit instead. Perhaps Antarctica really is growing much more than the IPCC admits, since I saw one article with about fifty authors that claimed it was actually shrinking despite it being so terribly below zero in a more humid world to feed it more snow.
“We’ve established that the rates of volume loss have increased dramatically in the last the 30 years.”
Write-up with a link to the article and its supplementary info: http://simpleclimate.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/patagonian-survey-reveals-tenfold-glacier-melt-speed-up/
I wonder how it holds up to auditing?
Here he is appearing on Australia’s edition of 60 Minutes:
http://youtu.be/QejBiuorCGA
http://youtu.be/-0VQWeA3QRo
Famous globetrotting guy now, unlike most scientists, eh?
I don’t know where these guys come from.
Everybody knows that climate changes…doh!
But, I don’t know anybody who even talks about a flat earth….
Well, except maybe the president.
cn
I have to assume Dr. Harrison knows what it’s like to mud wrestle pigs or he wouldn’t make the comparison. I can’t help but wonder what his record was, did he usually win or did the pig win?
The Little Ice Age (1450-1850 AD) was in its infancy 500 years ago, and glaciers worldwide went into an advancing mode after retreating during the Medieval Warm Period (850-1450 AD). Of course the glaciers had previously advanced during the Dark Ages cooling (400-850AD), which followed the Roman Warm Period, although glacier advance during Dark Ages cooling was not nearly as great as during the much colder Little Ice Age. By comparing a glacier now to its state during the Little Ice Age, Harrison found what he should have expected finding” it’s retreating now.
Unlike Harrison, i enjoy debating creationists, GMO opponents, anti-fraclking activists, vaccination phobics, food irradiation adversaries, and natural climate change deniers. It’s easy to challenge their beliefs with facts, although not a one has yet yielded to the voluminous evidence of science that disproves their positions. I should feel bad about beating up on unarmed opponents, but I don’t. It’s a character flaw I can live with.
To be clear Harrison is not a ‘professor’ within the UK meaning of the term. He is an ‘associate professor’ which in the overwhelming number of first class UK universities is the equivalent of the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer grade. A small number of UK universities have picked up on the US style and titles of assistant and associate professorships to represent the lower academic ranks. To carry the title of ‘professor’ in the UK you must currently hold a full chair at a university institution or having retired been granted an emeritus chair. Unless you have that, you remain plain ‘Mr’ or ‘Dr’ in the UK. The more important point is that the title ‘professor’ brings with it a responsibility to lead your subject and promote it beyond the boundaries of your chosen academic echo chamber. Exeter is a very good university and I am sure Harrison’s attitude would get short shrift from the many excellent academics who work there and who grace the public debate in so many fields. To refuse to engage with those whom you disagree is quite reprehensible and quite contrary to the open dialogue which good academics should be prepared to engage in with both students and the public at large.
But who is going to win? Chicken little or the pig of happiness? There is only one way to find out.
Another Lewandowsky ‘study’ perhaps 🙂
Exeter University Prof: ‘Debating skeptics is like mud wrestling with pigs’
Is that a prerequisite for Professors at Exeter – that they be experts on mud wrestling with pigs?
Or, is he saying that debating with someone armed with actual factual information would make him look like he was in the mud with pigs?
@climatereason says: April 28, 2014 at 9:04 am
* An invited member of the Climate Justice Programme
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When I hear the phrase “Climate Justice”, I reach for my gun.
Ralph Kramden says:
April 28, 2014 at 1:09 pm
I have to assume Dr. Harrison knows what it’s like to mud wrestle pigs or he wouldn’t make the comparison. I can’t help but wonder what his record was, did he usually win or did the pig win?
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From the look of the feller, the pig won. He’s a mess.
What exactly is wrong with the analogy? Of course, pigs would have great advantage in mud wrestling. We would expect them to win. And of course, climate science is quite muddy, rotten, and slimy. In that environment, we nevertheless have a great advantage in the facts, and similarly, we will win.
A related analogy: They love to bundle their AGW sow’s ear with silk purses (e.g. round Earth, heliocentrism, and evolution), hoping to make everyone buy their (bonus reference) pig in a poke.