August 7, 2008
Category: Global Warming
Clif at Sadly No mocks some blogger who thinks that because the draft report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States used a photoshopped picture of flood to illustrate a flood, rather than a picture of a real flood, this casts doubt on the science. Following the links I get to Anthony Watts who reckons that it was photoshopped "for better impact" -- I guess he thinks beautiful clean fake water has a better impact than the disgusting brown water you get in a real flood. Frpm Watts I find, surprise surprise, that this story originated at Climate "mountains out of molehills" Audit. Also hyperventilating is Roger Pielke Jr, who finds that this picture is the most serious example of sloppiness in the report.
Large letters at the bottom of the page spell out "First Draft - July 2008 Do not cite or quote". Do these people not understand what drafts are for?
Posted by Tim Lambert at 1:35 PM • 2 Comments
August 6, 2008
Category: Monckton
Eli Rabett has the latest: Monckton and SPPI seem to think that if you declare that it is "for educational purposes" you can ignore copyright.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 1:37 PM • 5 Comments
August 3, 2008
Category: Global Warming
Robert Grumbine writes
Since I'm an ice guy, I'm saddened that a place with ice in its name turned out to be unreliable. Still, I wandered over there and took a look at the first article ... The article was by Joseph D'Aleo ... In very short order, I found a major error, a cherry pick, and an error or at least misleading graphic. I stopped there.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:20 PM • 20 Comments
Category: Global Warming
You can now sign the "Sue Us" peition, which calls for those people who keep threatening to Sue Gore and Hansen to do so. See also Frank Bi's post on promoting the petition.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:29 AM • 12 Comments
August 2, 2008
Category: Open Thread
Time for a new open thread.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:20 PM • 13 Comments
August 1, 2008
Category: Global Warming
Tamino has written three posts explaining what is wrong with Roy Spencer's calculations of a low climate sensitivity. See Part 1, Part 2and Part 3.
Brief summary: 90 days of data is not enough to estimate climate sensitivity.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:07 PM • 0 Comments
Category: Global Warming
Global warming skeptics just keep trying to show that Hansen's projections in in his 1988 climate model were wrong. We've had Pat Michaels, who dishonestly erased scenarios B and C from Hansen's graph, Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit, who used the wrong baseline for temperature data and Steve McIntyre used some erroneous data of satellite-measured temperatures from RSS.
McIntyre is at it again, producing the graph below. I have digitally enhanced the big red dot McIntyre put on the June 2008 GISS temperature.
I think we can all agree that Hansen 1988 completely failed to project the June 2008 GISS temperature. Although this was obvious in 1988 since Hansen graphed annual temperatures, not monthly ones.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:52 AM • 16 Comments
July 31, 2008
Category: Monckton
This is the very first paragraph of Monckton's response to Gavin Schmidt's demolition of Monckton's paper on climate sensitivity.
For the second time, the FalseClimate propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of
the now-discredited "hockey-stick" graph by which the UN's climate panel tried
unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent,
scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me.
Monckton goes on to make many more ad hominem attacks on Schmidt. And what are the ad hominem attacks that Monckton alleges that Schmidt makes?
I shall replace all comments by him that are
purely ad hominem with "+++". I shall refrain from any ad-hominem remarks of my
own, and shall answer what little science there is in his blog ad rem. Schmidt's text is in bold face: my response is in Roman face.
Schmidt: "+++ ... the most egregious error is a completely arbitrary reduction by 66% of the radiative forcing due to CO2. He +++ justifies this with reference to tropical troposphere temperatures ..."
M of B: Schmidt somehow fails to point out that my division of climate sensitivity by three to take
account of the failure of observed tropical mid-troposphere temperatures to increase at thrice the
surface rate as predicted by all of the models relied upon by the UN, far from being "completely
arbitrary", was taken from a paper by Lindzen (2001), read together with the lecture-notes and drafts
that preceded the paper. Here are two quotations from Professor Lindzen, ...
... we can reasonably bound the anthropogenic contributions to surface warming since 1979 to a third of the observed warming, leading to a climate sensitivity too small to offer any significant measure of alarm ...
Read on »
Posted by Tim Lambert at 4:06 PM • 96 Comments
Category: Global Warming
Frank Bi suggests on open letter to John Coleman, Christopher Monckton, and Owen McShane, who have been threatening to sue Al Gore and James Hansen challenging them to bring it on.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:03 PM • 7 Comments
July 29, 2008
Category: The War on Science
Undaunted by the dismal failure of its war on science, the Australian presses on, with a piece by Dennis Jensen. Oops, that's not the link, this is the link:
It has been an article of faith for many years that humans are gradually destroying the environment, and are specifically responsible for global warming via man-made carbon emissions. On Monday, The Australian published results of a poll showing 96 per cent of the population believes climate change is wholly or partly caused by humans.
Actually it was 80%. It doesn't inspire confidence when the Australian can't even report their own poll correctly.
Read on »
Posted by Tim Lambert at 5:43 PM • 53 Comments
Category: Global Warming
The latest Newspoll finds that 84% of Australians accept that climate change is occurring and 96% of those that believe that climate change is occurring think that it is wholly or partly caused by humans. A 1993 ISSP survey found that 32% of Australians don't believe that humans evolved from another species -- the comparable figure in this survey is that 15% of Australians don't accept AGW.
It is a delight to note that the poll was commissioned by the Australian, so they had to, in effect, report that their own noisy campaign against the science has been a dismal failure.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 1:55 PM • 51 Comments
Category: Global Warming
David Appell showed David Evans the AGW signature from the IPCC report that Evans claimed was missing. Evans replied:
Comparing a model to observations doesn't prove the model works. It's encouraging to the model builders, but it's not proof. For instance, the model could just be lucky.
So when Evans wrote:
The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
He meant that we had found the signature, but Evans didn't think it should count.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:22 PM • 26 Comments
July 28, 2008
Category: Bolt
Back in January, Steve McIntyre used some erroneous data of satellite-measured temperatures from RSS to argue that Hansen's 1988 temperature projections were too high. A week later he posted a corrected graph, blaming RSS for not making the error clear:
The fact that users are "falling into the RSS error trap" is one more good reason why RSS should have issued a clear error notice, rather than the obscure readme. They should issue a proper notice of the error in their public webpages and wherever else appropriate.
But McIntyre did not follow his advice to RSS, and failed to make a correction to his original post, thus creating an error trap for readers of his blog. And look who has fallen right in: Andrew Bolt.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 2:18 PM • 16 Comments
July 27, 2008
Category: Monckton
Last year Christopher Monckton was threatening legal action if Naomi Oreskes did not apologize to Schulte:
By making the allegations his own and endorsing them with such lamentably unscientific enthusiasm, however, he has exposed himself to the legal action which may well follow if Oreskes does not come forward quickly with an unreserved apology to Schulte.
Now he's claiming that UCSD asked Oreskes to apologize:
Dr. Oreskes thrice publicly accused Mr. Schulte of having misrepresented her when he had not in fact done so, and when she had not read any draft of the paper she said had misrepresented her. This misconduct is severe. Her university has now invited her to apologize, and the matter of her continuing and inexplicable failure so to do is now on Governor Schwarzenneger's desk, for he is a Regent of her university ex officio.
I don't think that UCSD invited her to apologize -- they have promoted her:
Science historian Naomi Oreskes, whose work has played a critical role in establishing that there is a clear consensus about global warming among scientists, has been appointed to serve as provost of the University of California, San Diego's Sixth College. Her appointment becomes effective July 1, 2008.
Monckton has a history of fabrication. For example, he falsely claimed to be a member of the House of Lords and to have won £50,000 damages from the Guardian.
Hat tip: John Mashey.
Update: Oreskes has confirmed that UCSD did not invite her to apologize. Maybe the House of Lords should invite Monckton to apologize to Oreskes. Oh wait, he's not a member. Never mind.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:02 PM • 16 Comments
July 26, 2008
Category: Global Warming
Hey, remember when David Bellamy claimed?
Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.
And George Monbiot's heroic efforts to track down the source of this claim? Bellamy got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age could begin any day"), which got it from Larouche's 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP (presumably S Fred Singer):
The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, in a paper published in Science in 1989, noted that between 1926 and 1960 more than 70 percent of 625 mountain glaciers in the [mid-latitude] United States, Soviet Union, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy were retreating. After 1980, however, 55 percent of these same glaciers were advancing.
Read on »
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:47 PM • 30 Comments
Category: Global Warming
Tom Bozzo at Angry Bear gives us a shorter Megan McArdle:
I once heard these terms of art from the electricity industry. No quizzes!
P.S., Al Gore is fat.
Bonus McArdle on Gore:
It is a funny but irrelevant fact that freak cold snaps have occurred several times that Al Gore was giving a big speech on global warming. ... the funny bit is that they happen wherever he is speaking.
Posted by Tim Lambert at 2:51 PM • 4 Comments
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
