Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Judith Curry (one of the guests): The ABC, Australia’s government owned media outlet, has dedicated an entire Science Show program, including a star cast of climate skeptics, to exploring why some politicians and academics dispute the alleged climate consensus.
Has ‘denying’ won?
Saturday 24 June 2017 12:05PM (view full episode)
The science is 150 years old and growing each day, yet it is still being rejected by politicians and some academics. We shall talk to a few of those who remain unconvinced by climate research and its conclusions: a former vice-chancellor, a renowned Princeton mathematician, a space scientist from WA who worked on the Apollo program, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a climate researcher in America. Have they ever changed their minds on the topic? Do they perceive any risk at all? What do they think of President Trump’s policies? How can critics remain unmoved as the evidence mounts? Sharon Carleton reports.
…
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/has-‘denying’-won/8618656
My favourite exchange from the transcript;
…
Judith Curry: Say 10 or 12 years ago, I was working on a few narrow problems that were related to climate change, but I wasn’t looking at the whole picture. And since I wasn’t looking at the whole picture I thought it made sense to accept the consensus conclusions from other scientists who were looking at the whole picture, namely the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. I bought into their meme ‘don’t listen to what one scientist says, listen to what this group of hundreds of scientists have concluded after years of deliberation’.
I changed my mind in 2009 after the climategate emails, if you are familiar with this, it was the unauthorised release of emails from the University of East Anglia, included email exchanges by a number of the authors of the IPCC reports.
Sharon Carleton: No less than eight top-level, independent committees investigated and published reports on this so called ‘climategate’ affair. The reports found there was no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct and the scientists were completely exonerated.
Judith Curry: From what? Basically what I saw from those emails, and I read pretty much all of them, was that I really did not like the sausage-making that went into this consensus. It was a lot of skulduggery and bullying going on, and trying to hide uncertainties and thwart people from getting papers published and trying to keep data out of the hands of people who wanted to question it. I realised that there was a lot of circular reasoning, a lot of uncertainties, a lot of tuning, just a lot of things that made me not have any confidence at all in what they had done. So I started speaking out. This basically turned me into an outcast amongst the establishment climate scientists.
…
Read more: Same Link as above (Click Transcript)
The guests on the show were;
- Don Aitkin
Former Vice-Chancellor
University of Canberra
- Brian O’Brien
Adjunct Professor of Physics
University of Western Australia
Perth WA
- Judith Curry
Former Professor and Chair
School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta Georgia USA
- Freeman Dyson
Former Professor of Physics
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University
Princeton New Jersey USA
- Garth Paltridge
Retired Atmospheric Physicist
Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University
Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow
Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies
University of Tasmania
Hobart Tasmania
- Andy Pitman
Professor and Director
ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW
- Steven Sherwood
Climate Change Research Centre
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW
In my opinion, the Australian ABC frequently mistreats climate skeptics. Last year Aussie climate skeptic Senator Malcolm Roberts faced a hostile reception to his views during an ABC appearance. In my opinion the Roberts appearance last year amounted to an attempt to set Roberts up, to deride his views without giving him a fair chance to answer criticism.
The ABC Science show Has ‘denying’ won? starts with a reference to the Roberts appearance – but this time things are very different.
This latest crack in the facade of solid media support for “settled science” will be noticed by Australia’s climate community.
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Be afraid
Be very afraid
They are up to something and it won’t end well.
The ABC is a hive of socialists and greens hell bent on pushing the left agenda, a change such as this needs to be treated with caution.
They may just be trying to “appear” balanced for once but it never seemed important to them in the past
Don’t trust anything the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) does or says. They are as expert in the field of Propaganda as were the East German Stasi.
Andy Pitman and Steven Sherwood are leading warmists. Caution needed. Steven Sherwood was the one who produced the egregious paper purporting to show the “hotspot” by colouring it red – where red represented zero!!
This is a setup program. It seems as though it is ‘fair and balanced’ but the program makers cherry pick statements from a ‘skeptic’ then get their chosen expert to rebut it. Of course this simple trick gives the impression the skeptics are completely wrong all the time and the chosen expert completely right. They would never structure it the other way of course. Unimpressed.
That edition of the Science (alarmist) Show was a complete negative in regards to the climate skeptic narative. It was an alarmist set up, typical of our leftist tax payer funded network.
All that occured was, interviewer Sharon Carleton, played a pre-recorded statement by the skeptics and then allowed an ABC alarmist scientist of choice, Andy Pitman, to rebuttal their arguments, with utter bullsh!+, without affording any of the skeptics a chance to reply.
Who produced this crap, scepticalscience ?
And then they had the hyde to name & list a number of people who are so called renounced skeptics.
No list of all the scientists who have changed to the sceptics side though. How convenient.
“[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
“How can critics remain unmoved as the evidence mounts? ”
Sorry, I seem to have missed the mounting evidence. Tell me what it is, please.
I can only say that the blatantly biased ABC is getting a little twitchy as the calls for its privatisation are getting much louder and stronger of late. But don’t ever think sceptics will get a fair go. This drop in the ocean of daily ABC warmest propoganda will be used by them to show they are “balanced” for any future senate privatisation enquiries because you would be hard pressed to find anything else sceptical in their 40 years of alarmist archives. But it is a glimmer of light.
In this broadcasts I heard very little about the course of history in the Holocene interglacial. It seems that, driven by the need to continually support the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming thesis climate scientists are examining the temperature record at altogether too fine a scale, month by month, year by year.
Our current, warm, congenial Holocene interglacial has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000 years, spanning from mankind’s earliest farming to recent technology.
Viewing the Holocene interglacial at a broader scale is much more fruitful, on a century by century and even on a millennial perspective.
According to ice core records, the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD has been the coldest millennium of our current Holocene interglacial.
Each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.
In the ice core record, for its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point known as the “climate optimum”, have had virtually flat temperatures, an average drop of only ~0.007 °C per millennium.
But the more recent Holocene, since a “tipping point” at around 1000BC, 3000 years ago, has seen temperature fall at about 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 °C per millennium .
The Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacial periods, the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.
But the slight beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been transmuted into the “Great Man-made Global Warming Scare”.
The recent warming since the end of the Little Ice Age has been wholly beneficial when compared to the devastating impacts arising from the relatively minor cooling of the Little Ice Age, which include:
• decolonisation of Greenland
• Black death
• French revolution promoted by crop failures and famine
• the failures of the Inca and Angkor Wat civilisations
• etc., etc.
As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling over the last nineteen years or more, the world should now fear the real and detrimental effects of cooling, rather than being hysterical about limited, beneficial or probably now non-existent further warming.
Warmer times are times of success and prosperity both for man-kind and the biosphere. For example during the Roman warm period the climate was warmer and wetter so that the Northern Sahara was the breadbasket of the Roman empire .
According to the Ice Core records, each of these successive Holocene warm periods have been cooler than the one previously and a tipping point towards accelerated global cooling occurred at about 1000BC.
The coming end of the present Holocene interglacial will in due course again result in a mile high ice sheet over much of the Northern hemisphere.
As the Holocene epoch is already about 11,000 years old, the reversion to a true ice age is almost overdue and would be the real climate catastrophe.
With the present reducing Solar activity, significantly reduced temperatures, at least to the level of another Little Ice Age are predicted quite soon later this century.
Whether the present impending cooling will really lead on to a new glacial ice age or not is still in question.
This point is more fully illustrated here:
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/the-holocene-context-for-anthropogenic-global-warming-2/
While naturally agreeing with most of your comment, I’d like to point out that interglacials vary in length greatly. The Holocene has lasted longer than some, but less time than many.
The previous interglacial, the Eemian of MIS 5, lasted about 16,000 years (~130 to 114 Ka), some 5000 longer than the Holocene to date. It was also warmer. An even longer and hotter interglacial occurred during MIS 11, from ~424 to 374 Ka.
No one knows how much longer the Holocene is liable to last. It depends upon which Milankovitch cycle you think is most important. If axial tilt, then maybe some 3000 years. If eccentricity, then 30,000 or more.
The ABC is left of left. Very strange that realists are having a say.
No real say; more like a stitch-up.
Why didn’t Judith & Co do their research before agreeing to appear on the AU ABC?
Judith & Co GET HELP! Get management; someone to manage your appearances and the terms thereof.
DO NOT agree to appear on any such show until the broadcaster agrees to:
1. Full disclosure (weeks in advance) of the format, content and questions.
2. The right to respond immediately in brief to any criticism (minimum 30 s).
1. The right to debate (interviewees) post-broadcast in a special forum on broadcaster’s website.
2. Broadcaster to advertise link to post-broadcast debate at the beginning, middle and end of show.
The above are minimum requirements but there are many more relevant to such broadcasts.
If Hartland can’t get their act together to help our ‘experts’ present facts in a fair setting, ask for help before the next show. I’d do it for free . . . just don’t let this happen again!
There is a declining trend since 1989. The role and purpose of publicly funded big broadcasting corporations. Web competition excelling them was only a question of time. However unintentional it may be, ABC is now breaking the sacred halo in their own crowd.
“Has denying won?”
Yes. What global warming? We have fallen to the narrative of alarmists. The Holocene Optimum is over. The world has been cooling for 5,000 years. There is always warming every interglacial. The only relevant question: is this interglacial much warmer than past interglacials? No! To put it bluntly, unprecedented global warming is a hoax!
cooling in the north pole
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
cooling in the south pole
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/vostok-last-12000-years-web.gif
Hi all. I’m going to weigh in on the simulation vs models topic, and Mosh’s (and others’) comments. I actually find this a helpful discussion, because it could possibly bring clarity to why the various positions are less than compelling to so many people.
I have a bit of background on this: my father created computer simulations for GE Corporate R&D. I learned simulation development professionally as one of my first real-world projects (more than 40 years ago. Yikes!)
co2isnotevil’s example of chip design, and the example of flight simulation, are both pretty good. IMHO they go a bit over the top in requiring the simulation to account for “all influences.” Several people also give fuzzy distinctions between simulation and models.
I prefer a somewhat different and clearer definition.
* A model represents a system/process, i.e. its key / crucial attributes/characteristics, behaviors, and functions.
* A simulation represents the operation of a system/process over time, by imitating its operation based on a model.
Depending on the purpose, the fidelity of the simulation need not necessarily be all that high. For example, my dad simulated the robotic stacker cranes in an appliance factory, and proved the factory could not properly function without redesigning the entire crane system. The simulation mostly depended on accurate speeds, locations, accelerations and such. Many other attributes didn’t matter.
As has been largely noted above already by others, where the climate models go haywire, and where the “simulation” attribution is a complete fail, is that a simulation MUST be definitively accurate for the state purpose.
The climate models have huge uncertainty. Unacceptable for valid simulation.
The climate models ignore many key attributes. Unacceptable for valid simulation.
The climate models/simulations are easily proven to be INcorrect, over and over. Unacceptable for valid simulation.
I wouldn’t bet a plug nickel on climate model outputs, let alone a few trillion dollars.
My most recent pause came from examining Pat Frank’s good work on calculating from first principles the built in measurement uncertainty of the thermometry networks used to form the modern temperature record. That alone is sufficient to falsify any conclusions. (I’m quite interested in that as a relative manages the mfg floors for one of the best instrumentation companies in the world. I’ve been learning just how accurate such instruments can possibly be… which also shines a light on how INaccurate is our existing data.)
Mr Pete says: “My most recent pause came from examining Pat Frank’s good work on calculating from first principles the built in measurement uncertainty of the thermometry networks used to form the modern temperature record. That alone is sufficient to falsify any conclusions. (I’m quite interested in that as a relative manages the mfg floors for one of the best instrumentation companies in the world. I’ve been learning just how accurate such instruments can possibly be… which also shines a light on how INaccurate is our existing data.)”
This should be at the top of the list of reasons the claims of conclusion of rising global temperatures not just should be but must be discounted.
School employees have systematically stopped teaching people things that disagree with government employees’ political outlook.
Children, and even university graduates, aren’t taught the basics of thermometry as a science. This is shown very well by the educational facilities claiming Venus’ temperature is higher due to there being a CO2 atmosphere. The temperature of Venus is lower because it has a CO2 atmosphere.
To Mr. Pete (June 26 at 7:16am)
“The climate models have huge uncertainty.
Unacceptable for valid simulation.
The climate models ignore many key attributes.
Unacceptable for valid simulation.
The climate models/simulations are easily proven to be incorrect, over and over.
Unacceptable for valid simulation.”
Ha Ha — they are fine for government work !
I recommend ;listening to the entire Australian radio show, for anyone with an idle hour — such as on your tablet while commuting.
What the ABC did was to give voice to the Skeptic side — a good thing — then invite two properly Certified and Authorized Climate Consensus Enforcers to immediately refute whatever the skeptics said with simplistic near-direct quotes (lightly paraphrased) from the Authorized Climate Consensus Talking Points list – a bad thing.
Still, better than nothing.
The pragmatic truth will have spoken clearly to critical thinkers tuned in.
I take it as the news media hedging their bets now that they see that the data doesn’t’ match the theory.
In the end they’ll admit that it was all a crock but they’ll say they meant well.
as far as i’m concerned – this broadcast was a “set up” too – it gave the pre-recorded skeptics more time than poor Roberts to make a point before interrupting them with a pointed “settled science” counter by Andy Pittman – in other words – it wasn’t an interview – it was a one-sided debate – the skeptics never got to respond to Pittman
the entire presentation was a dismissal of skeptical arguments – it was so far from being fair that i can’t even sigh and say “at least it was a little air time” – it was more like parading ducks in a shooting gallery
I would not applaud the ABC they just spent 2/3rds of the program beating the ‘normal’drum of you must be stupid to question this science. Climate models underestimate the impact on the world according to Andy Pittman upping the heating to 4c mean across the globe.
This is the ABC trying to point to a balance whilst still banging the same drum.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
The discussion attempts to balance the prolific media support for climate alarmist claims, with the negligible amount of exposure to claims of opposing scientific evidence available to the public.
I suggest that it failed to achieve any measurable impact because it failed to correct errors of scientific observations and conclusions.
The comments on the WUWT blog revealed much, one of which an opinion that supports my conclusion.
““It was not an evenly balanced show. The alarmists were not corrected for their constant exaggerations and flat out lies.”
I intend to say more, but will first action the reblog and later come back with my own comments.
This is not good news for skeptics. The Commie pope had already decided not to listen to George Cardinal Pell on climate, but still, it looks bad and is bad if he’s guilty of child sex abuse. Puts him in bad SO company with disgraced ex-IPCC honcho RR engineer Pachauri.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4652452/Pope-Francis-supports-George-Pell-sex-offence-charges.html
I’m waiting to see the evidence. One of the allegedly abused boys died of a drug OD in 2014.
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/news/cardinal-george-pell-accused-sexual-abuse
It looks bad from a smoke and fire standpoint, but also must keep in mind present hardball ideological warfare in the Kremlin-like Vatican, where there has so recently been a palace coup against conservative Catholics by Communists.
see how they lie (Gabro): Pachauri was not
ever accused of child sexual abuse.
Crackers,
When did I ever say he was?
He was accused of adult sexual abuse.
no, he was not.
why do you need
to lie about it?