Respected climate scientist refutes false claim that tree died due to climate change, and the pressure to not do so
Toby Nixon writes:
The Seattle Times ran a hysterical story about how climate change killed a large tree at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle. Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington and no climate change skeptic, demolished the Times story in a strongly-worded blog post.
But perhaps more importantly, he goes on to describe the kind of pressure to which he is subjected to not post such corrections because of the ammunition it gives to “deniers”. It is an excellent exposition on the corruption of the scientific method that is rampant in climate science — not just the suppression of dissent, but the suppression of every small corrections of the most exaggerated claims.
Mass writes:
So what about temperature? Let’s examine the maximum temperature trend at the same Seattle Urban location for summer (June through August). There is a slight upward trend since 1895 by .05F per decade. Virtually nothing.
What about the period in which the poor lived (it was planted in 1948)? As shown below, temperatures actually COOLED during that period.
You get the message, the claim that warming summer temperatures produced by “climate change” somehow killed this pine is simply without support by the facts.
So the bottom line of all this is that the climate record disproves the Seattle Times claim that warming and drying killed that pine tree in the UW arboretum. There is no factual evidence that climate change ended the 72-year life of that tree. The fact that a non-native species was planted in a dry location and was not watered in the summer is a more probably explanation.
Why is an important media outlet not checking its facts before publishing such a front page story? Linda Mapes is an excellent writer, who has done great service describing the natural environment of our region. Why was she compelled to put a climate change spin on a story about the death of a non-native tree?
Now something personal. Every time I correct misinformation in the media like this, I get savaged by some “environmentalists” and media. I am accused of being a denier, a skeptic, an instrument of the oil companies, and stuff I could not repeat in this family friendly blog. Sometimes it is really hurtful. Charles Mudede of the Stranger is one of worst of the crowd, calling me “dangerous” and out of my mind (see example below).
I believe scientists must provide society with the straight truth, without hype or exaggeration, and that we must correct false or misleading information in the media. It is not our role to provide inaccurate information so that society will “do the right thing.”
Read the whole thing: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/05/seattle-times-climate-change-article-is.html
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http://programm.ard.de/TV/tagesschau24/das-offshore-hotel/eid_28721114677687
From the nearest port, the boat transfer to the offshore wind park DanTysk takes about 70 kilometers west of Sylt up to three hours. In order to be as permanent as possible on site, the operator has come up with something unique in Germany: the so-called offshore accommodation platform OAP, a kind of “hotel on stilts”. The Kameramam was allowed to experience exclusively the construction and everyday life 20 meters above the North Sea – a stormy matter.
DETAILS
REPEATS
SIMILAR SENDINGS
Your workplace is in the middle of the rough North Sea, 70 kilometers west of Sylt. For Christof Huss from Ahrensburg and Odila Gaertner from the island of Fehmarn, the boat transfer to the offshore wind park DanTysk from the nearest port in Esbjerg in Denmark takes up to three hours.
What to do so that the boss of two wind parks, DanTysk’s Servicechefin and the other offshore workers are on the spot as long and as often as possible? Their employer has come up with something unique in Germany: the so-called offshore accommodation platform OAP, a kind of “hotel on stilts”.
The NDR was allowed exclusively to experience the daily life 20 meters above the North Sea. In the summer of 2016 until the first winter storms, the camera team saw the life and work of the 100 million euro offshore hotel. In shift operation, up to 50 workers are accommodated on the housing platform for two weeks. On six floors, Stahlkoloss offers accommodation, offices, workshops, canteen, a small cinema, a gym and an on-board hospital. “Youth hostel standard for the price of the Berlin Adlon Hotel”, the offshore workers joke.
They love the wind but hate it at the same time. Because Christof Huss, Odila Gaertner and the others know that too little wind giant losses means to their employer. And when they are too windy, they do not come out to work. Service and repair of the wind turbines must fail. But the expectation of their employer is great, also because of the total investment of 1.3 billion euros. The harsh weather outside is, however, an extreme burden for sensitive technology. Especially in the case of the cranes and trans- ship ships, there are always problems or even total losses. The top goal, the maximum utilization of the wind park, is hardly achievable.
A fim of Mario Göhring
Kudos to Prof. Cliff Mass (!) for exhibiting a high standard of integrity, in the face of savage zealotry.
As for Lynda Mapes – Seattle Slimes and Charles Mudede – The Strangler, Dragnet’s Joe Friday said it best: “Just the fact Ma’am…. Just the facts!”
Yes, I’m always pleased to see some intellectual backbone from an alma mater of mine. I used to live close by the aboretum, and pass it on my walk into the University. The floating walkways on the the lakeside are a must for any visitors.
Seems climate hysteria is… just that.
https://www.google.ca/webhp?complete=0#complete=0&q=climate+hysteria
New young gods are very demanding. The climate apocalypse God demands the integrity, critical thinking skills and rational thought processes of the sincere true believer. climate kooks seem to believe it is a small price to pay in order to save the world. They of course fail to detect the ironic circular thinking required to achieve such mindlessness.
Chronic of construction; german only – sorry
https://youtu.be/a6G_cohSE7c
While it’s silly to conclude from oone example, Mass also makes mistakes.
Read the comments to the original article.
Drier and hotter augusts and bugs.
Again, while it’s silly to say it was only climate change it’s also premature to draw any conclusions from limited data.
Time will tell
Steve M.
Have you lived in the Seattle area, as I have?
DR. Mass showed that Precipitation trends are increasingly wetter over time,that temperature trend is slight cooling since it was planted.
Pine trees gets enough moisture in the Seattle region.
Steve Mosher. “Drier and hotter augusts and bugs.
Again, while it’s silly to say it was only climate change it’s also premature to draw any conclusions from limited data.”
You still draw conclusions out of nowhere: Neither drier and hotter Augusts nor bugs are attributable to a global climate change as cause, and even less to “anthropogenic”.
Time will NOT tell, the only piece of conviction of a crime is dead.
I have lived in the Seattle-Tacoma area since 1968 and I can testify indeed that there has been no climate change. We have cold rainy winters with only occasional freezing, warm, rainy, lush springs, warm to really warm dry summers, and cool rainy-dry falls. Like clockwork, the seasons just spin by.
And we get about 50 inches of rain per year, which causes ALL plants to thrive. My property has 100-foot-tall Douglas Firs in my back yard, and I have to hire an arborist at regular intervals to inspect them for insect damage. Too much damage and they become a threat of collapse or breakage, and have to be taken down. (No point in fighting any battle against it. By the time you can see the damage, the battle is essentially over.) Marvelous firewood. No need to worry about replanting. The natural seedfall will generate seedling and saplings if you leave your back turned. I let my back yard go without attention for a few years (medical problems) and the saplings were my height when I was able to resume policing the yard. Growing out of gravel, too.
A pine tree died in Seattle? Boo, hoo. Cry me a river. If we did not vigilantly keep trees in check, they would consume the countryside. About a decade ago, some fallow property (forested) in my neighborhood was sold and then cleared for development of an apartment complex. Once the trees were removed, I was astounded to see two houses that had been completely hidden from view, nearly as fresh as when they were built, by all indications sometime in the 1950s. They had been abandoned, and the forest grew up around them. That anyone in Seattle could imagine that trees were in danger from our stable and benign climate just goes to show the down side of unlimited immigration (in this case, from California, and the Land of Nod).
I think those of us who are old enough and have lived long enough in one place should speak out strongly in refutation of the “global warming” / “climate change” nonsense, on the principle that direct observation carries more weight than bogus mathematical models.
When you plant a non-native tree, it has to adjust to a different ecosystem from what its species is best adapted for. It also has to adjust to a change in climate. But that type of climate change has nothing to do with AGW. How could it? Moving a species from one type of climate to another can adversely affect its health and longevity, but what does that prove about CO2 causing a change in global climate? Absolutely nothing.
You could plant a tree native to California in Greenland and blame climate change for it’s inability to survive. But that would be disingenuous. Yes, the climate changed. And yes, the change was caused by human activity. But the circumstances were artificially contrived and have nothing to do with CO2 or AGW.
“Correct Facts” in the headline. Are there any other facts other than correct ones?
I got the references to correcting factual errors but the headline did its job in drawing my attention to the article. I was amused.
Drought in Seattle? The longest period without pouring rain in my lifetime is about 90 days.
That has to be a joke. Right?
The climate in Seattle is such that during the high sun season the precipitation is low. This is called a ” Csb ” in the Köppen system because of cooler summer than the Mediterranean climate (Csa). There were a couple of dryer than average years in the Puget Sound region and trees were stressed. This was visible along I-90, east of Seattle, near Olallie State Park. Such variability is common.
This chart shows the monthly numbers for 2015 — a very dry summer.
http://www.seattleweatherblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/image00524.png
“Trees were stressed.” I shake my head. What this probably means is that they were showing signs of being dry, which is absolutely normal under the circumstances. I am a native of the region, have been for my 66 years, and a dry tree in a dry summer is par for the course. Because our soils tend to be a buffer to all this, the trees recover and thrive in the wet season. “Stressed,” indeed. The thriving of trees in this region is THE reason that our major first industry was logging. Trees are weeds. They will take over every parcel of land if you let them. They had to be logged off the land en masse in order to make any arable land at all (according to my grandparent settlers). I have a comment on this fact further above.
But I will add another comment, with all this talk about “stressed” trees. Has anyone ever taken a mountain road up into the foothills of the Cascades on a day in the middle of a summer hot spell when the fire warning level is in the “red” zone? Get up into the hills, deep into the forest, on a stretch of gravel road, shimmering under the sun, and step out. You will get the sense that you have stuck your nose over an open can of turpentine. The trees are so resinous, they exude isoprene vapor. Highly inflammable. When I experienced this for the first time, I instantly understood why summer forest fires are probably the closest thing to hell on Earth. Fighting these things are like fighting in hand-to-hand combat with a mixture of gasoline and coal. AGC: ban forest fires! Anyway, just a note from those of us who live with this all our lives.
“Drought in Seattle? The longest period without pouring rain in my lifetime is about 90 days.
That has to be a joke. Right?”
So what” Species evolve with different degrees of drought tolerance, depending on the climate in that region. Or do you think pine trees have the same drought tolerance as saguaro cactuses?
Maybe we could (trans)plant a saguaro where the pine was and blame that future death on the changing world climate as well.
Chris, the point is the insane, hyper forcing of the CAGW meme in the media. The tree died, the climate did not change, alarmist warmists claimed that climate change caused the death and intelligent people pointed out the stupidity. Take a breath and get a grip; professional alarmists are everywhere, and they lie to you.
***Why is an important media outlet not checking its facts before publishing such a front page story? Linda Mapes is an excellent writer, who has done great service describing the natural environment of our region. Why was she compelled to put a climate change spin on a story about the death of a non-native tree?***
They do not bother because they are interviewing “experts”
Last December there was an Arctic conference in Winnipeg. One of the top dogs from the Winnipeg Free Press interviewed a scientist from the University of Manitoba. This person suggested (predicted?) that in 5 to 10 years Hudson Bay would be ice free in the WINTER!
I wrote to the writer, but received no reply. I may have posted this at WUWT.
The article was entitled, “Climate fast forward and Melting sea ice could brighten” and was in the paper about Dec 7, 2016 written by Bill Redekop.
That will be a cold day in hell when Hudson Bay doesn’t freeze over in winter. Average temperature at Churchill in Jan/Feb is about -30 C, without the windchill factor and little daylight in the northern parts. University of Manitoba has a lot of rogue ‘climate scientists’ similar to Penn State, home to the infamous Dr. M@nn. How is it possible that these people who apparently graduated high school can even contemplate making such a statement. You would think these so called ‘scientists’ would be red flagged immediately and disciplined.
U of M has another polar researcher professor who claimed 9-10 years ago that the Arctic Ocean had never been ice free in 3 million years but would now be completely ice free in summer within 25-30 years. Dr. David Barber also assisted in procuring the largest single climate research grant ($30.7 million) in Canadian history retrofitting the Cdn icebreaker Sir John Franklin to a Arctic research platform now known as the Amundsen. Sometimes I wonder if these icebreakers cracking up the ice in the Arctic is part of the problem with the melting ice cap. Wouldn’t that be ironic to see a headline that Arctic Researchers Are Part Of The Problem With The Melting Arctic Ocean.
I suspect the Seattle Times has been angling for a Pulitzer with this continuing stream (for at least four years) of front-page climate change stories based on reporting as-yet-unpublished research. (Getting scoops, IOW.)
In Nov. 2011 the Seattle Times published a front-page Sunday article, “Climate Change, beetle, may doom rugged pine” (using the singular to refer to one species of pine). I responded with a series of comments starting on the middle of page 7 of its comments page and continuing through the last page, #9. Start here:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/reader_feedback/public/display.php?source_name=mbase&source_id=2016699269&offset=120&direction=ASC&column=create_date
This may have been the beginning to the Times’s Pulitzer-angling.
If you have to lie to convince people to support your cause, is your cause worth supporting?
Of course not. Next question?
For the last two decades I corrected such reports through media and seminars but the media and so-called big bosses repeat the same. It is like thousands to one. Even I countered the World Bank report [my counter was published along with the world bank report] in daily English newspaper but yet the reporting of the news paper did not change.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
The Departed.
In Soviet Union, if you don’t follow the narrative, the narrative follows you!
At Jo Nova – all is not lost!!!
Scientists discover an extra 5 million square kilometers of forest , just like that.
http://joannenova.com.au/
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” dates from 1513 but warmists haven’t learnt its lesson yet. The way to not be caught out telling lies, is to not tell them in the first place. In something trivial or short lived, you may get away with it but if CAGW is real, the timescale is great enough for lies and exaggerations to come back to bite the promoters. Having been caught lying, people start looking for lies, or just assuming that there are lies. By using the same techniques as for political campaigns, warmists have divided the populous, which is automatically a route to fail to cut CO2. Especially as warmists refuse to act if sceptics don’t.
Unfortunately, this can be read as when *first* we practise to deceive… practice makes perfect! [note the difference between the verb abd the noun!]
Having been caught lying, people start looking for lies, or just assuming that there are lies.
BINGO
It’s very simple. Eco fascism by the greenshirt extremists only accepts what it makes up as “fact”. Scientific method which questions every such assertion and demands proof by several, as many as have the expertise, and accepts clearly contrary evidence, itself tested by others, as failing the original hypothesis. That’s the science scientists should be defending. If we lose it we lose devloped society. Simple. You can’t engineer a hypothesis and expect it to work. Doesn’t work like that.
The preference for independent understanding over belief through independent test and challenge is the basis of our developed technological economies, that are themselves threatened in several ways by the mass belief in the pseudo science of populist beliefs created by extremists for their own fame and gain.
Real scientists should be saving technology from these retards. We need adequate, affordable and sustainable energy to power everything at the end of fossil, GM food, Vaccinations, gene therapy, etc. Or we must return to superstitious tribal feudalism based in the ignorant beliefs of the masses. Yet even professional institutions will not tell the truth to power. My own UK Institute of Physics and Institution of Engineering Technology (the old IEE plus Mechicals), won’t explain to government why renewable energy can’t deliver the UK’s needs at remotely the level required, very expensively, in science and economic fact, as it’s “unhelpful” to tell truth to politicians who are doing well from their fraud on the energy physics.
Real science method is anathema to all belief led cults, as it can end the frauds supported by false propaganda, why education is supposed to be secular and exclude irrational religion, and prefer the verifiable facts to unverifiable assertions. The educational system seems to have failed for the masses, who anyway prefer easy received opinion and tribalism to harder understanding.
To quote Reagan, Trust, and verify.
Americans forgot the last bit, and have the propensity to prefer irrational beliefs such as religion, Scientology anyone? – inexcusably more religious than most developed and educated countries. The USA created the bad science (BS) as religion culture, exported it through the propaganda of unknowing arts graduate led media believers like the BBC, along with their sub-prime debt and fast food,
We face a concerted attack on understanding by the forces of evil, bent on rolling back knowledge and progress for their own ends, to the days when religion controlled an ignorant world and its priests enriched themselves by creating fear of the unknown, inventing its own reality to fill the gaps, and suppressing other beliefs and real knowledge in the same way.
Such a culture must fail, Bridges, planes, buildings, cars built on hypotheses that can’t be tested and perhaps denied won’t work reliably. Why biologists don’t get physics and engineering. So we face the end of technological civilisation as we know it, built on thousands of years of scientific development, as humans demystified their natural world and removed the need for beliefs , gods and priests, be they Moche or Greenpeace. A triumph of the arrogant ignorance of the masses and their medias over the tested and proven understanding of their brightest and best.
And the knowing exploitation of this failing by the eco nazis in our society for their own profit at the actual expense of the masses. Sad, and very bad for manind, who wil have to figure out who to get through the next 80,000 year ice age, which wil require the mass migration of 10 Billion people and rebuilding of cities as the Oceans fall 100 metres, etc.. Take a look at the cyclic temperature graphs pf the last Million years and understand the MIlankovitch orbital clock that they correlate with, and relative levels of enrgy involved between these forces and a bit of atmosphere. We are past the peak of an interglacial ocean waming event, entering the next dominant state ice age now, in our almost stable circular orbit. It’s the Ocean temperatures that matter, of course. The atmosphere is simply a consequence, or symptom. The energies involved on a planetary scale more powerful than climate scientists can possibly imagine (30% varaition in the Sun’s enrgy and gravitational attaraction of the Earthe, itself 100 times the Moons(from memory – check) Yet still the tempertaure dffernces between ice age and warm states are predictable and relatively small, we can survive in both states – somewhere. But if you want a probale prediction, I would suggest ice age beats tipping point any day. One keeps happening, the other is a guess about how the atmosphere works whose numerical models are very rudimentary and ultimately unprovable. etc.
It’s all about power and money, and people who think they can understand science and draw their own conclusions without doing the work necessary. Not about real science.
And your qualifications to back up this statement are ?
[what are yours? – mod]
Physicist who also studied some meteorology, and who has been following the climate debate for 30 plus years
Also add that I am now a computer engineer working in private enterprise and my income is in no way from climate science
I am an electrical engineer, MIEE, and physicist with a physics degree, MInstP and a top UK school MBA in 1975, all well used in technology business so I have Chartered status in these disciplines so am CEng, CPhys, MBA. You can find my evidence in the parliamentary libaray. Better still you can check all this for yourself, it is very simple and just basic High School science applied to national data. No opinion required or appropriate in engineering delivery. There are only one set of facts about a particular situation. Hope that answers your question..
I love how Brianricatt couldn’t even understand his own illiterate post, and tried to simplify it for himself two minutes later.
I’m afraid Brian lost me at the second sentence: “eco fascism by the greenshirt extremists”, (who presumably include NASA, NOAA, and the Pentagon to name just a few). Mind as closed as a nuclear bomb shelter, qualifications or otherwise.
Alan, have you read any of the U.S. Assessment Reports? If so, please explain their mendacity and mindless drivel without falling back on some form of conspiracy.
U.S. agencies, like the IPCC, were given their marching orders. Please read the political history of the UN IPCC. Please read about how the scientists’ 1995 uncertainty was morphed into political certainty. Since then, all the money and mojo goes to CAGW.
Corruption, anyone?
Dave, in your first paragraph you scold me for promoting a conspiracy theory, and in your second you alledge an enormous global one.
I posit that where large amounts of money and power are at stake, wealthy individuals, companies, and industries are going to react if they feel threatened, and disinformation is sometimes a component of that reaction. This is historically beyond dispute. If that is in your mind a conspiracy theory then I am suggesting one by saying that fossil fuel interests are promoting the spread of disinformation, although I would not call it that. It assumes greed and self interest on the part on a relatively small group, and has happened many times before.
Yours by contrast appears to be massive and global, involving a huge number of individuals, more or less every peak science body, and governments of both left and right leanings, including 6 of the G7.
I leave that to speak for itself.
There are no global conspiracies, pro- or anti-CAGW, Alan. All it took was the well documented initial corruption at the UN. The political posturing and self-interested behaviors just followed naturally. Combine self-interested bureaucrats and politicians with green NGOs and, bingo, you have a global crisis!
As the counter evidence continues to build against CAGW, strident denials are manifest. The IPCC’s AR6 will be fascinating; how much misdirection can be served up to say that climate models reflect reality? How many puerile papers can be cited saying things like “the buttheaded gnat-catcher will go extinct if humans continue to have an industrial society?” I assume that AR6, like all the other IPCC documents, will be written to confuse the issues, not to elucidate facts concerning the real world.
AR6 will contain a listing of the effects of a warmer world on its ecosystems. No science about what actually caused historical temperature fluctuations and the minor warming since the Little Ice Age. I am already gearing up to survive the countless hours I will spend wading through turgid bureaucrat-speak, all to the effect of “no proof, but we assume.”
You said “U.S. agencies, like the IPCC, were given their marching orders”. Enlighten me: who gave those orders?
I hope he is a skeptic, because those who are not skeptics are not scientists.
Meanwhile outside of this little anti-science bubble of hot air chittering about a tree, huge sections of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia are bleaching due to sea temperatures. Go see it now before it dies taking a $multi-billion tourist industry with it.
[we are not anti-science here, in fact we are very pro-science. But we are anti-hype and against bad science. You should read this story before you go off and say more unfounded labeling – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/falling-sea-level-the-critical-factor-in-2016-great-barrier-reef-bleaching/ -mod]
My neighbor, the Great Barrier Reef, is fine. It’s been this way before, and it’s going to recover again.
Keep up the narrative if you like, though, those tourist dollars taste delicious!
Firstly, a large proportion of the comments on this site are not remotely rational discourse, just railing against (to paraphrase) “greenies”, “lefties”, “group think” and “deluded or greedy scentists”. A lot is just the sort of plain smug, glib, self-riteous ignorance I would expect from a doddering elderly uncle. If you are fair minded read through the comments and tell me it is not so.
This is very similar stuff to the pro cigarette posse, possibly by some of the same people, except the stakes are far, far higher. The anti-scientist flavour is very strong, and of course if you can’t defeat the science, attack the credibility of scientists instead.
I guess only a “leftard” would take out insurance against a possible global catastophe being warned of by every peak science body and a huge majority of scientists.
Secondly, as only a Physicist, I am not sufficiently qualified to completely evaluate the article in the link, but as the diagrams in the article show, there is a trend to the bleaching in which it increases towards the equator.
Also, I quote the official website of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority:
“The Great Barrier Reef has experienced mass coral bleaching events in the past.
In 1998, there was a global mass bleaching event where 50 per cent of the reefs on the Great Barrier Reef suffered bleaching. During this time, sea temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef were the highest ever recorded.
Mass bleaching also occurred in 2002, with 60 per cent of reefs were affected. This was the largest coral bleaching event on record. Two periods of hot weather resulted in sea surface temperatures a few degrees centigrade higher than long-term summer maxima.
In both events, about five per cent of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral reefs were severely damaged.”
Thirdly as a Physicist, I AM qualified to evaluate the basic science of planetary temperature regulation. In simple terms, greenhouse gas concentrations are the knob that regulate our planets’ temperature. If scientists from other disciplines were NOT finding a diverse myriad of evidence of rising temperatures I would wonder what they are hiding. But they ARE.
Alan Barker
The problem with your “accept the 100% guarantee of disaster (disguised as “insurance” against a 5% possibility of potential temperature increases greater than 2 degrees)” is that the disaster is ONLY based on the projections of self-serving bureaucrats and self-selected “scientists” who benefit from the trillions taken from the world based ONLY on their hyped fears and collective propaganda.
Then, you compound that error, as ordered by the propaganda of those “peers” and propagandists who review their own “papers” and accept the millions paid each year in “climate change education” by inventing “a vast right wing conspiracy” (oops, that is the other socialist conspiracy, isnt it) of oil-company funding and “cigarette company science” (science studies edited to benefit those who take the money from commercial and political groups who benefit from the final results.) Which are, as 92 billion in climate change funding proves, ARE the CAGW alarmists and extremists!
And the politicians who seek the 3.1 trillion in taxes made necessary and possible only by these “self-selected scientists” who hype their propaganda.
And the bankers and commercial suppliers who benefot from 31 trillion a year in carbon futures trading.
Aye. The black grease of corruption is on your hands. Under your nails. In your mind, not the skeptics.
Insurance? When the slight chance of minor problems 100 years in the future must be balanced against the 100% assured 100 years of continuous disasters and starvation forced upon the world BY YOUR artificial demand to control energy use and deliberately raise prices on the world’s food, clothing, shelter, lights and power? Because you “fear” that some “potential” future world “might” enjoy the benefits of slightly warmer temperatures?
As a physicist, Alan, would you agree H2O vapor is far more prevalent in our atmosphere than other actively radiative gasses, including CO2? Would you agree that H2O’s radiative properties cover a far greater band of frequencies than that of CO2?
Would you agree, Alan, that IPCC climate models fail to reflect real-world measurements of atmospheric temperatures? Would you agree that those models fail to reflect actual measurements of atmospheric H2O concentrations? Would you agree that those models are not sufficient reason to fundamentally alter our social, economic and energy systems?
Sorry, but I could find one story to say anything. This is also by a self declared sceptic. Credibility thin.
“I have discussed these issues face to face with deniers
So you equate AGW sceptics on this blog – many/most of whom are professional scientists and qualified engineers – with Holocaust deniers and probably neo-Nazis and followers of David Duke too, do you?
You have utterly destroyed your credibility with just that one single word.
And then you accuse any of the aforesaid AGW sceptics of being paid to post by BIG OIL, whatever THAT is.
You’re a remarkably unpleasant, abusive piece of work, aren’t you?
Read some the comments. Lots of concern about giving “deniers” ammunition. No sense of irony that facts are the ammunition they are yapping about. Change the world based on politics and nothing more. Happy to sling the ammunition all day lomg
I have had Cliff Mass’s blog bookmarked for years as he provides one of the best scientific weather blogs. He is good scientist who will follow the truth wherever it takes him.
Cliff, you should ask your superiors in the department how telling the truth about science could possibly hurt “climate science” if climate science was valid science? It would be impossible to hurt good science with more facts.
Then, ask how suppressing true facts and science in order to allow support of bad science is anything more than the politicization of science and the promulgation of propaganda (junk science) to achieve a political goal. Is that what they stand for as a science department?
If they have to lie about the science, then they know that what they want the people to accept in the way of rules and life style regulation is something the people would not ordinarily allow. That is simply not acceptable.
University of Washington started the Washington Ocean Acidification Center – College of the Environment that has been supported by the state government. When Dr. Mass challenged his colleagues’ as well as the Seattle Times’ attribution that low pH water had affected oyster larvae due to climate change instead of natural acidification from the upwelling of deep low pH waters, he was admonished by the university despite having all the factors correctly identified. The Washington Ocean Acidification Center is drawing in big bucks from state government that the university wants to maintain.