From Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on June 27, 2019 by curryja |
by Judith Curry
Some reflections, stimulated by yesterday’s Congressional Hearing, on the different strategies of presenting Congressional testimony.
Yesterday’s Hearing provided an ‘interesting’ contrast in approaches to presenting testimony, when comparing my testimony with Michael Mann’s.
What are the purposes of expert testimony?
There is an interesting document entitled A Guide to Expert Testimony for Climate Scientists, funded by the US National Science Foundation. Most of this is related to court room hearings, but some is relevant for Congressional Hearings. Excerpts:
<begin quote>
Experts may do one or more of the following:
- Provide the decision-maker with factual information and background to provide the decision-maker with an adequate context for the decision.
- Apply expert knowledge to the facts of a case and render an opinion about the facts, such as whether certain conditions actually caused an effect.
- Explain scientific principles and theories to the decision-maker.
- Extrapolate from the actual facts or hypothetical facts and rendering an opinion regarding the likelihood of an event or occurrence. Experts may speculate on events or occurrences because of their special knowledge or training.
- Provide an opinion that contradicts or undermines the opinions or conclusions of an expert who testified for the opposing party.
If you are assigned to cross-examine an expert, you should prepare questions that test and challenge the witness on the following subjects :
- Lack of thoroughness in investigating the facts or data;
- Insufficient testing of the facts or data;
- Lack of validity and reliability in testing of facts or data;
- Existence of other causes or explanations for conclusions or outcomes;
- Show differences of opinion among experts
<end quote>
‘Opinion’ or ‘evidence’ for Hearings?
In my own testimony, I referenced (and even quoted) the IPCC AR5 and the US National Assessment report about a dozen times. I also provided my (forthcoming) Report on Hurricanes and Climate Change, which includes about 100 references (nearly all are refereed journal publications) plus links to other review articles that provides further references.
Whatever happened to climate scientists using the IPCC and National Assessment Reports in their analyses, either to support their arguments or otherwise refuting specific statements in these Reports? It seems that only scientists of the non-alarmist persuasion are citing these Reports any more.
Congressional testimony is not the place for scientists to present new, primary research. Rather, it is an opportunity for scientists to present analyses of relevance to the topic at hand, related to their personal expertise. This may take the form of an opinion piece (op-ed) or an analysis supported by evidence.
Mann took a different approach from mine. His testimony reads like an op-ed, and he even cites his op-eds as supporting evidence. Yes, it is readable, but it is not well documented.
Mann did not provide a bibliography for his testimony or any footnotes; rather he included hyperlinks. I clicked on each of these, to see what sources he was using.
His links include 3 references to his own journal publications, plus two links to publications by other authors. One link is provided to a NOAA statement. Several links are made to the StonyBrook University blog, describing unpublished analyses. This selection was criticized by Andreas Schmittner on twitter:
All of the other links (~20) are to news articles, some of which are op-eds written by Michael Mann himself or articles that interviewed Michael Mann. The list of sources used by Mann in his written testimony:
Climate Central, PBS, Time, Slate, LiveScience, PennLive, The Guardian, Scientific American, New Observer, Washington Post, NYTimes, ScienceNews, National Geographic, RollingStone, NewsWeek.
I understand the difficulty that policy makers have in wading through peer reviewed journal articles. This is why Assessment Reports are useful for policy makers (although I am not a fan of the oversimplified, cherry picked conclusions in the Summary for Policymakers). News articles are much more easily read by policy makers, but many of them are misleading at best. And it is hard for me to imagine any of these articles being seriously considered as ‘evidence.’
Now several of these news organizations generally do a credible job in reporting on science, although they invariably suffer from single study syndrome in their individual articles. But such articles are hardly a substitute for published primary journal articles or carefully considered assessments — or better yet, national or international assessment reports.
Although Mann’s testimony extensively referred to hurricanes, there was not a single reference in Mann’s testimony to the IPCC, the U.S. National Assessment Reports or the numerous review articles on hurricanes and climate change that have been written by teams of experts.
Yes, the published literature is sufficiently broad and diverse to support numerous narratives about climate change, and there are many reasons that rational scientists disagree: insufficient data and disagreements about its quality; relative weighting of different types of evidence; and different logics for linking the evidence.
But when you open this up to include in a dominant way news articles and op-eds, then anything goes.
As summarized in the recent review by Knutson et al. on the issues of hurricanes and global warming (discussed in the Extremes blog post), there is a very substantial range of perspectives among scientists who have primary expertise in the climate dynamics of hurricanes.
Is it appropriate in Congressional testimony to present only your own perspective, without acknowledging other perspectives, disagreement, uncertainty? Including both myself and Mann in the Hearing provides ‘dueling’ perspectives, but this hardly represents the range or distribution of perspectives in the community. Unlike a court case, there is insufficient time to probe all this.
Authority
So, which of the dueling experts is the Congressional Committee to believe? Well that is almost certainly predisposed by their political party, to the extent that I have to wonder why we were even invited to this Hearing.
In the follow up to yesterdays Hearing, there has been some discussion on twitter related to Mann’s extensive emphasis on his own credentials in both his written and verbal testimony.
His verbal testimony spent almost a minute listing his own credentials, out of an alotted 5 minutes (the Chair allowed Mann’s testimony to go over the time allotment). Mann defended this by saying
I’m not interested in playing Mann’s little game re expertise. But it is a tough argument to convince anyone that he has greater expertise than I on hurricanes.
Apart from someone’s political bias, that leaves the substance of our written testimony as a basis for being convinced by one versus the other.
I continue to have this naive, idealistic view that carefully crafted and communicated analyses with credible documentation is what policy makers want and need.
So does Mann’s focus on his own credentials and publications trump my analyses, documentation and references to the US National Climate Assessment, etc.? At that Hearing and with that Committee, maybe it did.
Truth(?) in testimony
When testifying before Congress, each Witness signs a Truth in Testimony statement. At yesterday’s Hearing, the witnesses were asked to stand and verbally agree to this (first time I recall doing this in a Congressional Hearing).
What does ‘Truth in Testimony’ actually mean regarding a controversial topic in science? Yes, there is much disagreement about aspects of climate science, that is not what I am concerned about here.
In yesterday’s Hearing, Mann made a factually incorrect statement in response to a question:
90:13 “I want to correct a number of fallacies that we’ve heard here today when it comes to the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. First of all, you sometimes hear this myth about there having been a supposed hurricane drought and there’s some sleight-of-hand going there because what’s going on Superstorm Sandy was a strong category 3 and then weakened to a category 2 hurricane off the coast of the US east Coast now it did go as they say extra-tropical it was technically no longer a hurricane when it made landfall but it was spinning off the East Coast for several days as a strong hurricane building up a very large storm surge and as we know it was this storm surge that was so devastating to the Jersey coast into New York City so its extremely misleading when you hear statements like that”
Mann’s statement misled the Committee with his statements about the drought in major hurricanes, Hurricane Sandy, and about my testimony being fallacious. There was no opportunity for me to speak up in the Hearing. I was shaking my head no, this was noticed by a Republican member, who asked for an opportunity for me to reply, but the Chair gave me no opportunity to respond. Below is my response to Mann’s statement about my testimony.
My written testimony included the following statement:
“However, it was rarely mentioned that 2017 broke a drought in U.S. major hurricane landfalls since the end of 2005 — a major hurricane drought that is unprecedented in the historical record.”
This one is simple to fact check. Go to the NOAA website and count the number of major hurricanes (Cat 3+) between Hurricane Wilma (2005) and Hurricane Harvey (2017). Zilch. Here is a graph of the data from the National Hurricane Center that was included in my written testimony:
With regards to Hurricane Sandy as an alleged ‘drought buster.’ Hurricane Sandy (2012) is included in the list of U.S. landfalling hurricanes with an * since technically it wasn’t a hurricane at landfall. Sandy’s max wind speed at landfall is listed at 65 knots (Cat 1 territory). As stated in my testimony, the large storm surge associated with Sandy was caused by her transition to a horizontally large extra-tropical storm, not by her brief resurgence to a Cat 2.
I remember the details of Hurricane Sandy in excruciating detail, since my company CFAN was forecasting hurricanes (our Sandy forecast was exceptionally accurate relative to government provided forecasts).
In any event, even apart from the classification of Sandy as a hurricane or not, the terms ‘landfalling hurricane’ and ‘major hurricane’ (Cat 3+) have very clear and specific meanings, and Hurricane Sandy wasn’t a major hurricane at landfall, and only briefly reached low-end Cat 3 status near Cuba. See the NHC’s Summary Report on Hurricane Sandy
There is no question that Hurricane Sandy was catastrophic for New Jersey and New York City. Sandy illustrates how unprepared these cities were for even a Cat 1 hurricane with a significant storm surge. Sandy is not a good poster child for manmade global warming, but rather supports the arguments made in my testimony about not being prepared for current or historical hurricanes.
JC verdict on Mann’s statement: Five Pinocchios
Other rhetorically effective but misleading strategies used by Mann’s testimony were to cherry pick a single study and to imply that speculation about a linkage of some storm with global warming is actually a well accepted conclusion. I will give one example here, that arose in the questioning, which is related to the high-profile issue of whether Category 4/5 hurricanes have been increasing:
“I actually co-authored an article in the journal Nature about 10 years ago where we use geological information from sedimentary deposits left behind by ancient hurricanes so we can actually reconstruct the history of landfalling hurricanes along the U.S. East coast along the Caribbean and so we have this rich archive of information that tells us in fact the increase in intensity that we’re seeing today does appear to be without precedent as far back as we can go.”
The paper that Mann refers to is [here]. Perhaps Mann hasn’t kept up with the literature on paleotempestology, which I summarized here. Here is a summary paragraph from my Report on Hurricanes and Climate Change:
“Summary. There has not been a timeline or synthesis of the Atlantic hurricane paleotempestology results for the past five thousand years, either regionally or for the entire coastal region. However, it is clear from these analyses that significant variability of landfall probabilities occurs on century to millennial time scales. There appears to have been a broad hyperactive period from 3400 to 1000 years B.P. High activity persisted in the Gulf of Mexico until 1400 AD, with a shift to more frequent severe hurricane strikes from the Bahamas to New England occurring between 1400 and 1675 AD. Since 1760, there was a gradual decline in activity until the 1990’s.”
So, by cherry picking one paper (his own) that examines geologic data at only one location, Mann misled the committee regarding whether or not the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes has been increasing relative to the geological record.
JC verdict: two pinocchios
In Mann’s Congressional testimony two years ago [blog post], he made two statements in the questioning period that contradicted what was in his written testimony and his c.v.; for documentation of this see the links at WUWT, Warmist Michael Mann tells whopper at Congressional Science hearing.
It was much more difficult for Mann to get away with factually incorrect statements in a Hearing chaired by the Republicans than in a Hearing chaired by the Democrats.
JC reflections
I have often criticized the Congressional testimonies of other climate scientists as being normative, in the sense of advocating for specific policies related to climate change.
In hindsight, normative testimony seems pretty tame when compared with ‘assertion from authority’ testimony from scientists. This style of testimony extensively establishes the witness’ expertise, and then makes a series of assertions with little or no documentation. In short — appealing to their own authority. This strategy is often accompanied by attempts to tear down the credibility of opposing witnesses.
If such testimony by assertion was presented in a legal trial, it would receive a severe grilling on cross-examination. In a Congressional Hearing where the witness supports the majority’s perspective, the witness pretty much gets a pass, even by the opposing party. The minority members tend to focus their limited time on questioning the witnesses invited by their own party.
This Hearing is certainly making me rethink my participation in future Hearings. I very much enjoy the challenge and opportunity of preparing written testimony and communicating my analyses of the issue at hand to policy makers. However, I am not cut out to be a politician. I have a bad habit of answering any question as accurately and honestly as I can, rather than using my 90 seconds to refute my opponent or to emphasize my own point.
This makes me wonder what the Democrats are really trying to accomplish with these hearings on climate change. If they are so convinced the science is completely settled, why do they bother with these Hearings? Do they think they are going to convince the Republicans with a witness such as Michael Mann? The politics surrounding climate change make little sense to me.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Larry Kummer for providing a transcript of the Hearing and for providing comments on earlier drafts of this post.
It is instructive to compare the written testimonies of the two presenters. In Mann’s case (10 page paper), the title page and the first page and a half record his achievements. He then walks through recent extreme weather events and credits them to AGW. In addition to Nature, his references include the venerable bastions of scientific rigor: the Guardian, The Washington Post, the NYT, the Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Slate, the PBS NewsHour, etc. His paper is devoid of any data, graphs, or charts. Curry’s paper is 18 pages long, with the first paragraphs briefly outlining her credentials. She presents graphs and charts from published sources and provides extensive footnotes to document her points. This is typical. The alarmists tell frightening stories about recent extreme weather events, declare them unprecedented and chalk them up to AGW. In stark contrast, skeptics report data using graphs and charts to show that these weather events are normal weather patterns observed in the past. They acknowledge the challenge of detecting the signal for AGW. For the alarmists, the complexity of climate science has been reduced to a trace greenhouse gas.
“It was much more difficult for Mann to get away with factually incorrect statements in a Hearing chaired by the Republicans than in a Hearing chaired by the Democrats.” This quote tells anyone all they need to know about the “Climate Change” apocalypse, if they were searching for the truth this would not be the case. Some time ago the IPCC made perhaps the only truthful statement that could be attributed to them, that is that the “Climate is a nonlinear chaotic system, the future states of which is impossible to predict”. Yet despite this statement there is no shortage of corrupt politicians and pseudo scientists who are more than willing to make false predictions (lies) of climate catastrophe to achieve their political and financial ends by instilling fear in the populace. Do not fall for it!
Mann reminds me of the character Dr Harold Hill from the “Music Man” where the mayor was always searching for his credentials. Mann boasts of his credentials but when comes down to the Mann’s presentation, it seemed rather shallow.
Thank you Dr. Curry for your excellent posting.
I would like to thank Dr Curry for her integrity and perseverance in following the objective trust as much as we can know it.
Mann, doesn’t deserve “Dr” before his name, he’s a sleazy con artist in my opinion, his ego is massive and massively fragile, which is why he uses the block button so much
What is concerning is this in my opinion, con artist Mann, recently got an award for his scammery
Judith, great stuff, but don’t even let them get away with saying that Sandy had Cat-I strength at landfall. I monitored buoys and weather stations carefully at the time, and none were at 65 knots.
By the way, an interesting study you can do to go some way to proving “hurricane inflation” is to compare NOAA wind speed estimates with central pressure (the latter being easier to measure than the former). You will find that recent (supposedly) major hurricanes have higher pressures than earlier ones, as if the laws of physics had changed. But hey, perhaps increasing CO2 affects the laws of physics…
If you wish, contact me via WUWT on this.
Judith, the most unnerving thing a politician has to face is a person who will tell the truth. They cannot be bribed, they cannot be battered into changing their view, unlike most of the people the politicians meet for whom money or something else will make them change their mind, none of the normal tools available to a politician has any effect on those who will tell the truth.
And because the truth is such a foreign land to politicians – they are clueless as to what may or may not be said by those telling the truth. Politicians much prefer those who will mould the facts to fit a very clear political object – because that is either easily support, or easily attacked – whereas the truth is not political partisan.
Mann couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it. Lying is in his DNA. His reliance on his “qualifications” is just an example of Argument From Authority (his), and is both a form of lying, and a feeble attempt at covering up the fact that he has no actual science defending his position.
“The politics surrounding climate change make little sense to me.”
Perhaps some motives in politics began in the 70’s when general pollution worldwide always showed the US as the most polluting (not per capita). A direct result of being the largest economy by far. The US economic success was in large part because we had the lowest cost, most robust (many fuels), most available and reliable energy supplies in the world. A great advantage. The idea that the US economy had to be made smaller was seen as a cure for world pollution. It wasn’t stated openly that bringing down the US economy would help the socialist, authoritarian, less free market countries that had overpromised and underdelivered to their people. Just a possibility on motives.
Recall the continuing attacks on energy utilities over the years: the fears of nuclear winter, cancer from electric lines, acid rain, mercury, and more. Blocked sitings, pipelines, and transmission lines. The target seemed to be coal and oil fired electric generation, but eventually the common denominator became CO2.
The war on coal, oil, nuclear, and now gas generation eventually became standard fare in education, media, and a certain political view.
“The politics surrounding climate change make little sense to me.”
Perhaps some motives in politics began in the 70’s when general pollution worldwide always showed the US as the most polluting (not per capita). A direct result of being the largest economy by far. The US economic success was in large part because we had the lowest cost, most robust (many fuels), most available and reliable energy supplies in the world. A great advantage. The idea that the US economy had to be made smaller was seen as a cure for world pollution. It wasn’t stated openly that bringing down the US economy would help the socialist, authoritarian, less free market countries that had overpromised and underdelivered to their people. Just a possibility on motives.
Recall the continuing attacks on energy utilities over the years: the fears of nuclear winter, cancer from electric lines, acid rain, mercury, and more. Blocked sitings, pipelines, and transmission lines. The target seemed to be coal and oil fired electric generation, but eventually the common denominator became CO2.
The war on coal, oil, nuclear, and now gas generation eventually became standard fare in education, media, and a certain political view.
As the Earth cooled, truth was be frozen in time.
Try again!
As the Earth cooled, truth was frozen in time.
Talk about truth in self-promoting politics, here is AOC’s apparent rage and grief against a child detention center. Turns out though, it was rage and grief against an empty parking lot – a fake image:
https://www.rt.com/usa/462837-aoc-parking-lot-detention-center/
Mann’s modus operandi is not surprising. The generally unimpressive intellectual (and sometimes moral) standards of promoters of panic over CO2 have been a feature of this politically-driven campaigning for decades. A bunch of examples can be found here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2101561. I think I should this one as well, although I make no claims to being able to keep up with the floods of them – I add to the list just now and then. Others are welcome to add to it as and when they can.
But three cheers for Judith Curry, for her high standards and her staying power.
Concerning Mann’s Hockey Stick graph.
“Dr Tim Ball, in 2011, famously declared Michael Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State” and has faced a six-year legal battle from Mann over this controversy.”
https://principia-scientific.org/what-michael-manns-hockey-stick-graph-gave-to-un-climate-fraud/
Michael Mann is stereotypical Greenshirt academic fanatic. While he appears poorly compared to Dr.Curry what harm is done by these inside the margins of warmist conventions disputes??
Mann’s attacks on the most moderate of skeptics is calculated to disqualify vast pools of actual hard line skeptics. It helps frame the debate on warmist terms and therefore makes Dr. Curry a tool. The limit of dissent for so many leftist activists.
It’s this particular brand of equivocation science that fails to address the wholly corrupt formation of the climate change political belief culture that should remain the central focus of every policy discussion. Dr. Curry is representing skeptics as David Brooks at The NY Times represents Republicans. Straw dissent compared to the depth climate fanaticism is plainly apparent.
It’s really a feeble posture to try to elevate Dr. Curry who largely an establishment go along without a credible explanation of entire Green cult climate history that she was in fact very much part of and remains useful to this day. All the high praise found here another confirmation that marginal and weak skeptics are as large an issue as the Mann extremist section. These frictions between extreme leftists and older establishment leftists while amusing will not frame the debate in a more accurate way. Just the opposite in fact.
When she was labeled “consensus” she was considered a useful idiot by Mann and his goals, a climate control terror state. Now she is largely considered a defector to “skepticism”. Call it progress but her views still enable Mann wing by supporting so many of the hog wash AGW presumptions.
Was it M.Mann that ran around the planet claiming he was a Nobel Laureate ? He didnt make that claim at these hearings. Was that claim a fib?
“But it is a tough argument to convince anyone that he has greater expertise than I on hurricanes.
Hardly. With the pathetically uninformed masses more interested in what someone they don’t really liking what they had for dinner? The corrupt mainstream media can and will accomplish the task faster than she can type that sentence.
“However, it was rarely mentioned that 2017 broke a drought in U.S. major hurricane landfalls since the end of 2005 — a major hurricane drought that is unprecedented in the historical record.”
The U.S. coast is in an unprecedented hurricane drought why this is terrifying –
The Washington Post August 4th 2016
Another issue with Mann’s Hurricane Sandy characterization is when evaluating things statistically, one has to have one single standard. His introduction of anecdote (“Sandy had a large surge”) for one single storm ignores the fact that throughout history other storms which were no longer hurricanes at landfall may have had similar surges. You can’t say “Yeah, but…” as Mann did, without accounting for all the other “Yeah, buts” in the historical record. I mean if the standard measured is “hurricanes at landfall”, then that’s the standard. If the standard is “hurricanes at landfall + yeah buts”, then *that’s* the standard and ALL the historical “yeah buts” must be included in the core measurement. That’s just how science is done, Mr. Mann.
Congressional hearings are not designed to find out anything. They are designed to generate video and sound bytes to be used to score political points. Facts are irrelevant, appearance is everything, and conclusions are predetermined.
Mark Steyn has quite a bit to say about the hearing he attended.
“The politics surrounding climate change make little sense to me.”
Dr. Curry, I admire your willingness to focus on the scientific method and to not become compromised by the huge pressure to accept the funding-rich assumption that man-made CO2 has a meaningful impact on climate.
In the dozens, if not hundreds, of articles and blog posts of yours I’ve read you often refer to “policy makers” and “decision makers” in way that comes across to me as having an air of respect and a belief that such people are important and have important work to do.
If I may say, you need to read and learn more about the history of government and politics. Start with the famous aphorism, “Power corrupts…” read the deep thinking the Founders of this country did in setting up our government. Their belief: a stable, free, and just society requires government… but, as little as possible. Emphasis: AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.
There were many reasons to come to this deeply considered opinions and none of the reasons they had have changed despite the very different technological world in which we live.
Bottom line, government will ALWAYS become corrupt and seek absolute power and the people in government who over time drive government in that direction are not always evil or have bad motives; quite with opposite.
I urge you to rethink any respect you may have for policy makers or decision makers. As individuals, yes; but as elements in an inevitable evolution towards undermining your freedom, no.
The politics of CO2 are simple. It gives those who think they are smarter or in a better position to “help us” a way to exercise that superior knowledge and position with force. They can force us to do things they think better, irrespective of what we may think.
Politicians are not scientists. They really don’t care about truth the way you do. They care about exercising their power because that’s who they are and that’s what they do. You are a pawn in their game.
Read “Rules for Radicals” if you haven’t. It’s a handbook for those who believe they “know better” and want to use legitimate force (i.e., government) to implement what “they know” is “better for us.” Those who resist—like those who question whether we know enough about CO2 to force people to do something (i.e., pay taxes to support government action or obey regulations to do what those others think is right, even if against our natural wishes).
“Rules for Radicals” will spell out that trashing the reputation and ruining the lives of those who “resist” is an important strategy to pursue.
But realize many truly believe they are “right,” and if “people” are allowed to do what they want that “society” will be worse off—in some cases existentially so. Therefore, they are justified in doing what they do. Since some, like Michael Mann (and many others in the thrall of CO2), believe CO2 is an existential threat to humanity, there is nothing, morally, that should constrain them in their efforts to do what is needed to ensure their view prevails.
Therefore, Mann and others work to de-legitimize you because that’s the way to win.
Politics is not about facts, it’s about winning. Facts are only useful if they are relevant to convincing the populace to support someone in power or seeking power. Sadly, too often, the populace is not as responsive to or understanding of facts as a scientist is. That’s why propaganda exists. Since the science surrounding CO2 is highly uncertain in its existential implications, the right strategy is to propagandize, not debate facts.
Mann and many others have, indeed, succumbed to. Only cause corruption.
Please become more politically savvy so you can be more effective using your command of facts to counter questionable—even dangerous—actions by those to whom we’ve entrusted with our sacred trust to exercise legitimate force; i.e., government officials.
Edit: “Mann and many others have, indeed, succumbed to noble cause corruption.”
Comment edit: “Mann and many others have, indeed, succumbed to noble cause corruption.”
“Do they think they are going to convince the Republicans with a witness such as Michael Mann?”
Excellent question. I’d wondered why they get him, of all people, to testify. He does a disservice to the side he is supposed to represent.
Mann tweets
Projection.
One can understand Dr. Curry’s frustration, with Mann being able to make scientifically unsubstantiated statements with impunity.
Go to the link below from CSPAN to see the testimony. When AOC get her turn, she give the floor to Mann at around the 57.30 mark:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?462073-1/climate-change-disaster-preparedness
Mann states that he co authored a study that appeared in the Journey of Nature that used sediment deposits and other geological information going back as far back as we can go, that showed that the intensity of recent hurricanes is unprecedented.
He is wrong about that. Hurricane history tells us that the most intense hurricane occurred in 1780. While there was no instrumentation to measure this hurricane, there is plenty of information and near universal agreement by hurricane experts that indicate this was stronger than any hurricane experienced since then.
Ironically, “The Great Hurricane of 1780” occurred during the Little Ice Age:
Little Ice Age:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Great Hurricane of 1780:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hurricane_of_1780
As hurricane expert Jeff Masters stated: “A ‘black swan’ hurricane – a storm so extreme and wholly unprecedented that no one could have expected it – hit the Lesser Antilles Islands in October 1780,” Masters wrote to open the post. “Deservedly called The Great Hurricane of 1780, no Atlantic hurricane in history has matched its death toll of 22,000. So intense were the winds of the Great Hurricane that it peeled the bark off of trees – something only EF5 tornadoes with winds in excess of 200mph have been known to do.”
Then, Mann states that based on tree ring specialists, the epic drought in California during the last decade is unprecedented going back over 1,000 years. He is wrong again based on authentic/objective data.
Even global climate models project that California will be WETTER this century from climate change, indicating that his position is anti authentic climate science:
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-california-wetter-century.html
He merely takes recent extremes in hurricanes, wild fires and droughts and uses them as evidence of human caused climate change making these events worse…………when the authentic, historical facts/science, shown above do NOT support that……….and in some cases, show the complete opposite.
Great job Dr. Curry in using authentic science to base your statements on. Please don’t let those able to manufacture a fake climate crisis and control politics using fraudulent science and self serving scientists who will use junk science and cherry picking in their testimony, effect your enthusiasm for continuing to fight for climate and scientific honesty and integrity.
Thank you for your testimony and your commitment.
Experts may do one or more of the following:
-Provide the decision-maker with factual information and background to provide the decision-maker with an adequate context for the decision.
-Apply expert knowledge to the facts of a case and render an opinion about the facts, such as whether certain conditions actually caused an effect.
-Explain scientific principles and theories to the decision-maker.
-Extrapolate from the actual facts or hypothetical facts and rendering an opinion regarding the likelihood of an event or occurrence.
-Experts may speculate on events or occurrences because of their special knowledge or training.
-Provide an opinion that contradicts or undermines the opinions or conclusions of an expert who testified for the opposing party.
Amendment:
-don’t destroy your countepart’s believe in being worthwhile.