global warming
tlambert | May 31, 2006Iain Murray, one of the masterminds who made the CEI ad that claimed that Al Gore produced as much CO2 as the state of Kentucky, discovers that Gore, on net, produces no CO2:
Al Gore justifies his enjoyment of a carbon-intensive lifestyle in a speech in the UK:
He said he was "carbon neutral" himself and he tried to offset any plane flight or car journey by "purchasing verifiable reductions in CO2 elsewhere".
Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning.
Now in…
tlambert | May 30, 2006One trouble with cherry picking is that you have to be very careful not to change anything or the whole thing falls apart.
Dennis Avery picks up Bob Carter's "Global Warming stopped in 1998" cherry but fluffs it
The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global cooling trend over the last seven years, from 1998 to 2005.
Nope, they show warming.
What went wrong? Well for the Carter cherry pick, you have to thread the needle by picking 1998 as the starting point and you have to use the CRU data. (So I'm threading a needle with cherries here.) In the…
tlambert | May 29, 2006Roy Spencer takes a break from his parody writing with a new column at Tech Central Station. He has some questions for Al Gore. I think he should have just used Google to find the answers, but what the hey, I'll do it for him.
1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up…
tlambert | May 28, 2006After everyone laughed at their first two ads, CEI have made another one. This purports to compare Gore's CO2 emissions from flying around to give his presentation on global warming with that of an average person.
This screen capture shows that Gore's CO2 meter is about 683,000,000, while the one for the average person is 177, so apparently Gore's flying around produces 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person does in their regular activities. The average person produces about 170 pounds of CO2 per day. According to the CEI video Gore only makes flights from one side of the USA to…
grrlscientist | May 26, 2006Last night, instead of writing some blog entries for you to read today, I went to the movies and saw An Inconvenient Truth.
An Inconvenient Truth is the companion film to the book with the same name by former-Vice President Al Gore. This film chronicles Gore's life as he discusses some of the science that substantiates one of the most important issues facing this, and future, generations, global warming. In the film, Gore also tells the story of his growing personal concerns with this phenomenon, beginning shortly after he first entered politics up through his loss of the White House after…
tlambert | May 26, 2006Roger Dewhurst, who is a member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, has sent a letter to NZ MPs:
"I was appalled to see a one page propaganda sheet apparently put out by the Ministry of Education which made it abundantly clear that officialdom has swallowed the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming stuff hook, line and sinker and is promoting it without a shred of balance. These small children are actually being invited to propose their own solutions to the 'problem' of global warming. This is not education, it is attempted brainwashing. Fortunately there is a teacher in the…
tlambert | May 25, 2006John Quiggin notes that Michael Shermer and Sir David Attenborough have now accepted that the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and that the skeptics now mostly consist of the deluded like Ken Ring and the shills like the CEI.
Speaking of which, here's the latest from Ken Ring.
Cameron: CO2 is all around us, its part of what makes air air. Plants take up CO2 through stomata, on the UNDERSIDE of their leaves Kenny - not a good strategy for your "falling CO2".
Ken Ring: If CO2 doesn't fall then how does it get to vegetation? I suppose you think it rises then twists in the air doing a…
cmooney | May 24, 2006Commenters here were beating up on Michael Shermer of Skeptic mag a while back, so let's acknowledge that he too is now on the record accepting anthropogenic global warming. And it seems that Al Gore helped give him a push! Now, as in the case of Easterbrook, I don't see why people like Shermer held out so long...but as we all know, there's a lot of misinformation out there that can lead earnest people astray. So perhaps we should simply applaud these rather late AGW converts, rather than presuming to judge...
cmooney | May 24, 2006I am not particularly impressed by his piece in the New York Times today. The evidence on global warming was in long ago; there was no particular reason for Easterbrook to hold out this long. But that's not what really troubles me about Easterbrook's argument. He writes:
Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions -- and this was hardly just the contention of oil executives. "There is no evidence yet" of dangerous climate change, a National Academy of Sciences report said in 1991. A 1992 survey of the American Geophysical Union and the American…
tlambert | May 23, 2006I think Exxon should be asking for their money back from some of the think tanks they are funding. I mean, these people are supposed to be slick professionals, well versed in the art of media manipulation, but they've completely lost the plot on Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. First we had CEI tell us CO2 = Life, and now NCPA tells us Gore = Goebbels. It must be a really good movie.
tlambert | May 23, 2006Pinko Punko applied for a job at the CEI.
The Editors award Ron Bailey the coveted Golden Winger.
Ron Bailey comments on my earlier post:
You invited me to come on down, so here I am a bit late (you really should email those invitations to me rather have me google them). Anyway, CEI's spots are not subtle and not effective and yes, they do lend themselves to parody. Sigh.
tlambert | May 21, 2006The Washington Post reveals that Roy Spencer is the man behind environmentalist parody site ecoEnquirer.com:
Somewhere in an office about 600 miles southwest of here, former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer is laughing. The 50-year-old, white-haired PhD dreamed up the spoof site -- sort of the Onion meets the Weather Channel -- because he thinks people are overreacting to the threat of climate change.
Now a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Spencer says human activities have "likely" contributed to climate change, but he argues that "since we do not…
tlambert | May 20, 2006Media Matters catches Pat Michaels in an outrageous bit of quote mining:
MICHAELS: Well, it's an exaggeration. Global warming is a very real thing. People have something to do with it in the last several decades of the 20th century. But what people do on this issue is they exaggerate it. I have a quote from [Gore], from Grist magazine recently.
He said, "I believe it's appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is."
HANNITY: Yeah.
MICHAELS: He says it's appropriate to over-represent the danger on this issue. You have to realize what he said and…
cmooney | May 20, 2006By now, everyone is having fun with the amusing Competitive Enterprise Institute ads with the following slogan : "Carbon Dioxide: They Call it Pollution. We Call It Life." I have little to add, except a few parodies:
1. Earth: They call it being buried alive. We call it life.2. Air: They call it tornadoes. We call it life.3. Fire: They call it arson. We call it life.4. Water: They call it drowning. We call it life.
Feel free to suggest others...
tlambert | May 19, 2006The reviews are in on the CEI's ads: Ha ha ha ha ha. Here's a small selection:
Andrew Sullivan: I'm not going to knock CO2. And when you watch the ad, you'll find it comes out of your lungs in short, sharp bursts of laughter.
Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: Ha! This is great. Let's apply their logic to fecal matter: We excrete it out, plants take it in as fertilizer. So why not dump it everywhere? Some call it "crap." We call it life!
nicteis: It's finally happened. Someone has actually managed to underestimate the intelligence of the American people.
Fruitbat I particularly liked the footage…
tlambert | May 18, 2006In a previous post I wrote that the "leading climate scientists" in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition only contained one actual climate scientist, Chris de Freitas. I was wrong. They have prominent links to papers by de Freitas, but he's not on their list of members.
So the Climate Science Coalition doesn't contain any actual climate scientists.
And Gareth found this example (PDF) of the top-notch climate science that NZCSC promotes, from long range weather forecaster Ken Ring:
CO2 is also nearly twice as heavy as air (molecular weight 44, that of air 29) so it cannot rise anywhere…
tlambert | May 18, 2006RealClimate informs us of two ads being put out by the Onion Competitive Enterprise Institute. Punchline: "CO2: they call it pollution, we call it Life!". If the CEI staff was locked in an airtight room, would they still call CO2 Life?
If you are unfamiliar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, let me introduce some of their people. Steve Milloy, who Cato recently let go after the various pundit payola scandals, has found a new home at CEI. When you are both working for Philip Morris, I guess it's not a conflict of interest. Paul Georgia, who told the world that average temperature…
tlambert | May 17, 2006The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition registered climatescience.org.nz for their domain. A bit cheeky, given the dearth of actual climate scientists in their "coalition". Greenpeace New Zealand has countered by registering climatescience.co.nz and climatescience.net.nz and creating a web site describing mainstream climate science. The Climate Science Coalition's Owen McShane has complained (link to radio discussion), claiming that they are "passing off" their site as the CSC's one. It's easy to see that his claim is untrue. If you look at their site you'll see that it doesn't look…
tlambert | May 15, 2006Richard Lindzen has jumped on Bob Carter's global warming stopped in 1998 bandwagon.
Here's one slide from a presentation he gave at right-wing Swedish think tank.
In the text he claims that that there has been almost no rise since 1986, but in his talk (at 38:00) he told the audience to ignore the red line (which shows the ten year mean) and pointed to the graph on the bottom right of just the last eight years. Presumably he meant to write that there had been no rise since 1998. I must give him points for brazenness by doing a blatant cherry pick right in front of his audience. They…