The climate change misinformation at a top museum is not a conservative conspiracy
A sign at the American Museum of Natural History has outdated information about climate change
By Alessandra Potenza@ale_potenza Jan 8, 2018
Over the weekend, Twitter users — including some climate scientists — were upset by a plaque at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, which seems to be spreading misinformation about climate change. The panel, titled “Recent Climatic Changes and Extinctions,” misstates the role that human emissions of greenhouse gases play in causing global warming. It also says that, although we’re currently living in one of Earth’s warm periods, “there is no reason to believe that another Ice Age won’t come.” But it turns out, the panel was put up 25 years ago, according to the museum, so it contains outdated information that reads very differently today.
Images of the sign were first tweeted by environmental economist Jonah Busch, and were shared over 2,000 times. Busch tweeted that the panel is at the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing, which was funded by right-wing philanthropist and fossil fuel magnate David H. Koch, and asked the museum to “separate this panel from its donor’s interest.” The tweet sparked outrage among scientists and the general public: “Dear @AMNH I bring my young kids to visit regularly because science & natural history is fascinating, inspiring and fun,” one tweet read. “Please do not misguide their curious minds. If we can’t even trust the AMNH to give us the facts who can we? Very sad.”
I am shocked and saddened to see the American Museum of Natural History @amnh promoting misinformation on climate change in its David M. Koch-funded Dinosaur Wing 1/
Here is one of the Tweets from a “climate scientist”…
My friends at @AMNH: I do think this requires both explanation and action. It suggests a breach of the firewall that is supposed to stand between the agenda of the donor and the objectivity of scientific content.
So… David Koch funded the Dinosaur Wing (really good with Buffalo sauce), the Ice Age exhibit has a plaque which says, “there is no reason to believe that another Ice Age won’t come”… And this is some sort of climate denier “misinformation on climate change” and a “breach of the firewall that is supposed to stand between the agenda of the donor and the objectivity of scientific content”???
Do these people not understand that the Dinosaur Wing and Ice Age exhibit are two different exhibits, separated by over 60 million years of geologic time? Setting aside the fact that we are living in an interglacial stage of an ice age… How is it misinformation to state that “there is no reason to believe that another Ice Age (glacial stage) won’t come”? Maybe we’ll get lucky and anthropogenic CO2 will forestall or mitigate the onset of the next Quaternary glacial stage… But I wouldn’t bet on it.
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.
Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Even though the plaque is supposedly 25 years old, it clearly says that “human pollutants may also have an effect on Earth’s climatic cycles”… Well, they might have an effect.
Is their issue the phrase “recent climatic changes and extinctions”? In a layman’s sense, there is very little evidence that recent climatic changes have caused any extinctions. In a geological sense, “recent” generally refers to the Holocene. Although, more strictly, the “Cen” in Cenozoic means recent.
It really boggles the mind that so many people frequenting the geological exhibits of the AMNH could be so ignorant of basic Quaternary geology, particularly the alleged climate scientists who chimed in on this Twitter-storm.
Addendum: Cenozoic Temperatures and CO2
The Earth’s climate rapidly cooled about 34 million years ago. This cooling marks the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene…
Cenozoic temperature anomaly. Older is to the right, x-axis is millions of years before present (1950 AD). Earth’s climate rapidly cooled about 34 million years ago.
Whereas atmospheric CO2 appears to have remained elevated for about 2 million years after the sudden drop in temperature…
Cenozoic atmospheric CO2. Older is to the left, x-axis is in millions of calendar years AD (BC). The Mauna Loa instrumental record is depicted by the solid black line at year 0. Oligocene CO2 levels drop from about 800-1,000 ppmv to about 600 ppmv from 32.5 to 30 MYA.
My apologies for the different x-axes. I made these graphs several years ago and don’t recall where I saved the Excel files.
Ashworth, A. C., 2001, Chapter 8: Perspectives on Quaternary Beetles and Climate Change. In (L. C. Gerhard,
W. E. Harrison, and B. M. Hanson, eds.), 153- 168, Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists Studies in Geology #47, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This episode is another reason to ignore twitter except for Trump. The placque in question is over 25 years old, is factually correct, and is not part of the separate dinosaur exhibit funded by Koch. Snowflakes melted on the disinformation.
Brian McCandliss
January 9, 2018 11:04 am
I think we’re putting the cart before the horse by even dignifying agw with a response, rather than pointing out the “elephant in the room” that it does not followed the scientific method… and therefore cannot be properly called science.
Therefore refuting it scientifically, likewise abrogates the scientific method by allowing it to skip those requirements before simply observing the null hypothesis remains in place, rather than having to prove it as if agw is a null hypothesis and we are trying to establish an alternative that is wrong.
Brian,
Good point re null hypothesis in danger of being morphed into treating AGW as what must be disproved. Does anyone have a concise statement of the true null hypothesis re: AGW/Climate Change?
I would go with something along the lines of “What is observed in the climate system is a result of naturally occurring drivers.” It is incumbent on those promoting the AGW hypothesis to refute this null by demonstrating conclusively, repeatably and uniquely that anthropogenic GHG’s are the only factor which can account for the observed climate behaviour. It is clear that after getting on for half a century of frantic effort and astronomically vast funding the AGW proponents have yet to even made the smallest glint in the eye of such a null refutation.
At this point, I’d be happy to see the AGW crowd identify what would falsify their ‘hypothesis’.
DCA
January 9, 2018 11:18 am
There should be a counter tweeter campaign with scientific evidence to show these clowns are wrong.
I would but I don’t tweet. Anybody care to start one? Let the museum know the real truth before any action is taken.
Ed Bo
January 9, 2018 12:41 pm
With the present eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, the top-of-atmosphere solar flux density at aphelion (currently July) is about 1320 W/m2. At perihelion (currently January) it is about 1410 W/m2. (So the average is about 1365 W/m2.)
So as the earth’s tilt precesses, the TOA change at a particular season is 90 W/m2. Even dividing this by 3 for typical daily average change at key latitudes (~65N), this 30 W/m2 change is still an order of magnitude greater than the 3 W/m2 “forcing” from anthropogenic CO2.
But we’re supposed to believe this 3 W/m2 overrides seasonal effects 10 times greater!
And the earth’s eccentricity is quite low now. During the last interglacial (Eemian), the eccentricity was 2.5 times greater, so these variations were also about 2.5 times greater.
On a related note, the last time I looked through the source code for NASA’s GISS climate model, I was surprised and appalled to realize they used a constant insolation value over the course of a year, in effect assuming a circular, not elliptical orbit. That was quite a few years ago; I don’t know if they have improved this.
I found issues with ovoid vs sphere assumptions as well, but why fix the headlights on a lemon.
Svend Ferdinandsen
January 9, 2018 1:26 pm
I wonder what they complain about. If the climateers have their will, and reduces the CO2 contend, we will sure have a glaciation sooner than else.
All the effort goes to prevent rising temperature, if it works as promised, even if they now call it to prevent climate change, but you can not have it both ways that the same effort also prevents falling temperature.
Ignorance of 97% of today’s scientists! The 135million to 65million yrs ago age of dinosaurs should even be known by an economist who considers himself educated, but I’m afraid that could be asking too much these days. But is it asking too much for the Chair of the State Penn Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Center to not know? Walk down the hall and talk to a geologist over 50 before exposing that you are an ignoramus. He’s probably also grappling with the strangeness of having a whole section dedicated to a dinosaur wing.
I think you meant 235 million to 65 million years ago reign of the dinosaurs.
Jeanparisot
January 9, 2018 3:43 pm
If the Koch Brothers are funding Climate Skeptics, where do I send my invoice?
Joe
January 9, 2018 3:54 pm
Could someone remind prof Mann that he chose to protect the proprietary nature of his hockey stick algorithm over contributing to objective science?
Joe Shaw
January 9, 2018 4:04 pm
Regarding the comment on the plaque that “Human-made pollutants may also have an effect on the Earth’s climactic cycles”, based on the time frame it is likely that the statement is not referring to CO2 at all, but rather to actual pollution such as sulfate aerosols from coal plants and other particulates.
I am both a geologist (with Quaternary instruction by Dreimanis) and an experienced hiker in the Alberta Rocky Mountaains. I can show you the LIA advance (and retreat) at several locations near Calgary and Edmonton. Incontrovirtible inner/outer lateral moraines. Significant climatic variations happen without warning all the geologic time. Only the socio-ideologue activists can (and do) deny that.
Maybe the problem we face is that ee shouldn’t expect a cat to act like a bloodhound regardless of how much we try to help him.
Dennis Sandberg
January 9, 2018 5:55 pm
25 years ago we still believed in geologic facts….seems like the climate alarmist fraudsters have been around “forever”. I worked for a Koch Company for 10 years. The plaque won’t be coming down anytime soon. Bravo for them!
Edwin
January 9, 2018 5:59 pm
Yet their point, their tactic, is far more evil. They cannot have any statements old or new that even dares question their orthodoxy. This is “1984” in real life. We have watched it on college campuses. We have watched the attempts at controlling thinking stretch into the public. Now it is fully entrenched in the scientific community. For the USA it is far more than the First Amendment be damned. Academia should be teaching critical thinking and Scientific Method, instead are teaching “total unity of speech and thought.”
Let me put the role of greenhouse gases that Busch and IPCC 1990 push. This group of pseudo-scientists maintains that imcreasing greenhouse gases in the air will increase global air temperature, Nothing can be more wrong as Dr. Ferenc Miskolzi has shown. He studied NOAA radiosonde records of atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide content that covered a sixty were preserved by BOAA for sixty one years when Miskol;czi had access to them. This is what the radiosonde record tells us. During these sixty one years the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by slightly over twenty percent. This should not greatly surprise climate workers who keep telling us about the human-caused increase of greenhouse gases. But the second observation from the microsonde work should put an end to the prevalent claim that the greenhouse effect causes global warming. The radiosonde record hows clearly that during sixty one years no atmospheric temperature incresase took place. This is completely against everv dogma about global warming by the greenhouse gases. Tjis is the current dogma of Bush and other we3arnists. The effect of the greenhouse gases on global temperature raise uis clearly sero, or nothing, justplain, non-existent. You will find this fact documented in the peer-reviewed scientific article called “The stable stationary value of the earth’s global atmospheric Planck-weighted greenhouse-gas optical thickness” that appeared in the peere=reviewed journal “Energy and Environment”, volume 21, issue 4, pp. 243-262 in 2010. Further data from his observations was also shpwn as a poster display at the EGU meeting in Vienna in April 2011. Clearly if there is no greenhouse effect the huge sums of money spent on emission control are monies stolen from the public under false premi laes. This fact also falsifies Hansen;s statement un 1988 that started the greenhouse madness, He said that “…the global warming is now laarge enough that we can describe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.”Totally unscientific.but it carried the dasy for estanlishing IPCC as it is.
Good comment…but could you (like Duster) please put some paragraphs in your comments. Otherwise they’re very hard to read and I suspect many readers just won’t bother. Thanks.
Good comment…but could you (like Duster) please put some paragraphs in your comments. Otherwise they’re very hard to read and I suspect many readers just won’t bother. Thanks.
I agree, it is a shame that all the effort is wasted by lack of paragraphs and lots of careless spelling which requires pausing and re-reading of words to try and work out what was meant. I gave up half way, I usually read the whole thread and this makes it very time consuming.
It doesn’t take long to re-read and correct errors before posting.
SteveT
I went to the Natural History Museum.
But it was closed for the Quartenary.
Keith J
January 9, 2018 10:01 pm
Does any benefactor ever get to put editorial content into museum exhibits, much less an entire wing? What does this say about the museum board of directors?
Of course finger wagging is coming from prostitutes of CAGW. “We’ve already established what you are. We are just haggling over the price”…punching from a raunchy joke that just seems fitting.
fretslider
January 10, 2018 3:13 am
Crap like that deserves a good rant
I feel like that about the BBC with every news bulletin
Pamela Gray
January 10, 2018 6:53 am
The plaques appear to be correct. Only snowflakes come up with this kind of garbage complaint. Tell them to spend time studying the subject before commenting least they prove themselves fools.
I’ve been saying repeatedly for years that the Climagesterium are shaping up to deny ice ages. Now it’s beginning.
Bill J
January 10, 2018 11:18 am
It’s actually kind of comical. All this fake outrage simply because Jonah Busch thought that the exhibit was funded by the Koch Brothers and therefore anything on the plaque that he disagreed with had to be part of a vast rightwing conspiracy of climate change denial. Only it wasn’t. Of course that didn’t stop the fake news from going viral. Did Jonah Busch apologize? Of course not! Does he even realize how silly he looks? Nope. I’m pretty sure he’s proud of his misinformation campaign.
All that outrage over nothing. That’s the left for you.
Mann calling the kettle black…. when thos is all over the oublic should demand his an gores head…
Mann’s reaction is priceless, as usual.
For someone who claimed to have won a Nobel Peace prize he sure picks a lot of fights.
Busch and Mann are artifacts belonging in the dinosaur exhibit.
You forgot the hockey shtick!
Busch and Mann should just double Mr. Koch’s donation, receive their own wing and set the record straight!
Okay, right after they take down the plaque at Rocky Mountain NP that speculates that pine beetle infestation is caused by climate change.
Well it is: if there had been no shift to warmer winters, the beetles wouldn’t be surviving the winter in such numbers
Beetles know how to handle climate change.
Ashworth, A. C., 2001, Chapter 8: Perspectives on Quaternary Beetles and Climate Change. In (L. C. Gerhard,
W. E. Harrison, and B. M. Hanson, eds.), 153- 168, Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists Studies in Geology #47, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Griff, they have been surviving Canadian winters for a long time.
if there had been no shift to warmer winters, the HUMAN RACE wouldn’t be surviving the winter in such numbers
(of course my comment relates to a long long time ago. your comment relates to the last 20 years and the term “shift” is used incorrectly-dishonestly)
Apologised yet?
This episode is another reason to ignore twitter except for Trump. The placque in question is over 25 years old, is factually correct, and is not part of the separate dinosaur exhibit funded by Koch. Snowflakes melted on the disinformation.
I think we’re putting the cart before the horse by even dignifying agw with a response, rather than pointing out the “elephant in the room” that it does not followed the scientific method… and therefore cannot be properly called science.
Therefore refuting it scientifically, likewise abrogates the scientific method by allowing it to skip those requirements before simply observing the null hypothesis remains in place, rather than having to prove it as if agw is a null hypothesis and we are trying to establish an alternative that is wrong.
Brian,
Good point re null hypothesis in danger of being morphed into treating AGW as what must be disproved. Does anyone have a concise statement of the true null hypothesis re: AGW/Climate Change?
I would go with something along the lines of “What is observed in the climate system is a result of naturally occurring drivers.” It is incumbent on those promoting the AGW hypothesis to refute this null by demonstrating conclusively, repeatably and uniquely that anthropogenic GHG’s are the only factor which can account for the observed climate behaviour. It is clear that after getting on for half a century of frantic effort and astronomically vast funding the AGW proponents have yet to even made the smallest glint in the eye of such a null refutation.
At this point, I’d be happy to see the AGW crowd identify what would falsify their ‘hypothesis’.
There should be a counter tweeter campaign with scientific evidence to show these clowns are wrong.
I would but I don’t tweet. Anybody care to start one? Let the museum know the real truth before any action is taken.
With the present eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, the top-of-atmosphere solar flux density at aphelion (currently July) is about 1320 W/m2. At perihelion (currently January) it is about 1410 W/m2. (So the average is about 1365 W/m2.)
So as the earth’s tilt precesses, the TOA change at a particular season is 90 W/m2. Even dividing this by 3 for typical daily average change at key latitudes (~65N), this 30 W/m2 change is still an order of magnitude greater than the 3 W/m2 “forcing” from anthropogenic CO2.
But we’re supposed to believe this 3 W/m2 overrides seasonal effects 10 times greater!
And the earth’s eccentricity is quite low now. During the last interglacial (Eemian), the eccentricity was 2.5 times greater, so these variations were also about 2.5 times greater.
On a related note, the last time I looked through the source code for NASA’s GISS climate model, I was surprised and appalled to realize they used a constant insolation value over the course of a year, in effect assuming a circular, not elliptical orbit. That was quite a few years ago; I don’t know if they have improved this.
I found issues with ovoid vs sphere assumptions as well, but why fix the headlights on a lemon.
I wonder what they complain about. If the climateers have their will, and reduces the CO2 contend, we will sure have a glaciation sooner than else.
All the effort goes to prevent rising temperature, if it works as promised, even if they now call it to prevent climate change, but you can not have it both ways that the same effort also prevents falling temperature.
Ignorance of 97% of today’s scientists! The 135million to 65million yrs ago age of dinosaurs should even be known by an economist who considers himself educated, but I’m afraid that could be asking too much these days. But is it asking too much for the Chair of the State Penn Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Center to not know? Walk down the hall and talk to a geologist over 50 before exposing that you are an ignoramus. He’s probably also grappling with the strangeness of having a whole section dedicated to a dinosaur wing.
I think you meant 235 million to 65 million years ago reign of the dinosaurs.
If the Koch Brothers are funding Climate Skeptics, where do I send my invoice?
Could someone remind prof Mann that he chose to protect the proprietary nature of his hockey stick algorithm over contributing to objective science?
Regarding the comment on the plaque that “Human-made pollutants may also have an effect on the Earth’s climactic cycles”, based on the time frame it is likely that the statement is not referring to CO2 at all, but rather to actual pollution such as sulfate aerosols from coal plants and other particulates.
I am both a geologist (with Quaternary instruction by Dreimanis) and an experienced hiker in the Alberta Rocky Mountaains. I can show you the LIA advance (and retreat) at several locations near Calgary and Edmonton. Incontrovirtible inner/outer lateral moraines. Significant climatic variations happen without warning all the geologic time. Only the socio-ideologue activists can (and do) deny that.
Maybe the problem we face is that ee shouldn’t expect a cat to act like a bloodhound regardless of how much we try to help him.
25 years ago we still believed in geologic facts….seems like the climate alarmist fraudsters have been around “forever”. I worked for a Koch Company for 10 years. The plaque won’t be coming down anytime soon. Bravo for them!
Yet their point, their tactic, is far more evil. They cannot have any statements old or new that even dares question their orthodoxy. This is “1984” in real life. We have watched it on college campuses. We have watched the attempts at controlling thinking stretch into the public. Now it is fully entrenched in the scientific community. For the USA it is far more than the First Amendment be damned. Academia should be teaching critical thinking and Scientific Method, instead are teaching “total unity of speech and thought.”
Let me put the role of greenhouse gases that Busch and IPCC 1990 push. This group of pseudo-scientists maintains that imcreasing greenhouse gases in the air will increase global air temperature, Nothing can be more wrong as Dr. Ferenc Miskolzi has shown. He studied NOAA radiosonde records of atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide content that covered a sixty were preserved by BOAA for sixty one years when Miskol;czi had access to them. This is what the radiosonde record tells us. During these sixty one years the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by slightly over twenty percent. This should not greatly surprise climate workers who keep telling us about the human-caused increase of greenhouse gases. But the second observation from the microsonde work should put an end to the prevalent claim that the greenhouse effect causes global warming. The radiosonde record hows clearly that during sixty one years no atmospheric temperature incresase took place. This is completely against everv dogma about global warming by the greenhouse gases. Tjis is the current dogma of Bush and other we3arnists. The effect of the greenhouse gases on global temperature raise uis clearly sero, or nothing, justplain, non-existent. You will find this fact documented in the peer-reviewed scientific article called “The stable stationary value of the earth’s global atmospheric Planck-weighted greenhouse-gas optical thickness” that appeared in the peere=reviewed journal “Energy and Environment”, volume 21, issue 4, pp. 243-262 in 2010. Further data from his observations was also shpwn as a poster display at the EGU meeting in Vienna in April 2011. Clearly if there is no greenhouse effect the huge sums of money spent on emission control are monies stolen from the public under false premi laes. This fact also falsifies Hansen;s statement un 1988 that started the greenhouse madness, He said that “…the global warming is now laarge enough that we can describe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.”Totally unscientific.but it carried the dasy for estanlishing IPCC as it is.
Arno Arrak
January 9, 2018 at 7:03 pm
Good comment…but could you (like Duster) please put some paragraphs in your comments. Otherwise they’re very hard to read and I suspect many readers just won’t bother. Thanks.
I agree, it is a shame that all the effort is wasted by lack of paragraphs and lots of careless spelling which requires pausing and re-reading of words to try and work out what was meant. I gave up half way, I usually read the whole thread and this makes it very time consuming.
It doesn’t take long to re-read and correct errors before posting.
SteveT
I went to the Natural History Museum.
But it was closed for the Quartenary.
Does any benefactor ever get to put editorial content into museum exhibits, much less an entire wing? What does this say about the museum board of directors?
Of course finger wagging is coming from prostitutes of CAGW. “We’ve already established what you are. We are just haggling over the price”…punching from a raunchy joke that just seems fitting.
Crap like that deserves a good rant
I feel like that about the BBC with every news bulletin
The plaques appear to be correct. Only snowflakes come up with this kind of garbage complaint. Tell them to spend time studying the subject before commenting least they prove themselves fools.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/2015RG000482/asset/rog20091.pdf;jsessionid=1208414C6224D79AADC16294B7567651.f01t03?v=1&t=jc968zwl&s=9ea17350eb4a2373819abf0826ac87ccca751097
Good point. People tend to forget that detail.
I’ve been saying repeatedly for years that the Climagesterium are shaping up to deny ice ages. Now it’s beginning.
It’s actually kind of comical. All this fake outrage simply because Jonah Busch thought that the exhibit was funded by the Koch Brothers and therefore anything on the plaque that he disagreed with had to be part of a vast rightwing conspiracy of climate change denial. Only it wasn’t. Of course that didn’t stop the fake news from going viral. Did Jonah Busch apologize? Of course not! Does he even realize how silly he looks? Nope. I’m pretty sure he’s proud of his misinformation campaign.
All that outrage over nothing. That’s the left for you.