Deltoid

Michael Duffy has followed up his radio show that misrepresented the science of global warming with more of the same. He had Bob Carter on this time and Carter trotted out all the favourite falsehoods of the global warming sceptics. Actually, Carter complains about being called a sceptic:

Such persons, and myself as you introduced me, are often termed ’sceptics’ and that’s meant to be a term of denigration, but I’m a scientist…it’s my job to be a sceptic, Michael, and those who are not sceptical towards human-caused global warming or, indeed, towards any other fashionable environmental concern, are acting in unscientific manner…religious, even.

If “global warming sceptic” has become a term of denigration, it’s because of the way they have conducted themselves, dismissing real science on the flimsiest of grounds. I guess I’ll use the more accurate “global warming denialist” to describe Carter.

Carter offers up the usual misrepresentations of the science: urban heat islands contaminate the surface record (no they don’t), equivocation about the word “consensus”, the “hockey stick” is broken (no), ice cores show that warming precedes increases in C02 (only partly), the IPCC summary does not reflect the body of the report (yes it does).

One particular misrepresentation is particularly troubling. Carter claims:

[the surface record] conflicts with independent estimates or measurements that we have of changing temperature made in the atmosphere by satellites and weather balloons. They show very little net change over the last 30 or 40 years.

But the satellite data shows significant warming over the past 30 years. The only discrepancy is that some analyses find only half as much warming as the surface record, while others show a similar amount of warming. It is wrong to pretend that disagreement somehow proves that there hasn’t been any warming.

I remonstrated with Carter when he made similar claims in a Tech Central Station article last year. Here is what he wrote in reply:

There is no conflict between the two following statements, and I stand by both of them.

“There is indeed a small, statistically significant trend.(in the MSU data as analyzed by e.g. Christy et al., 2003)”

and

“The (MSU data) show virtually no long-term trend of temperature increase despite the increased carbon dioxide levels over the last 25 years”

The first is a statistical statement. The second is a statement of scientific judgement which takes into account, amongst other factors, the statistical result.

The sort of technical detail in which you are seeking to discuss the MSU data is most usefully conducted in the relevant professional journals. For reasons of length as much as any other, it is in general not possible to go into such details in an editorial piece written for the general public. That accepted, of course it becomes even more important that the writers of such pieces take particular care with their words. That I have tried to do, and I am sorry if it has not been to your satisfaction.

By coincidence, an interesting new article on MSU results has just come out in Nature (attached). It adds some weight to your evident belief that atmospheric temperatures are rising. On the other hand, many will be concerned that it has proved necessary to selectively manipulate the data to achieve the result. Earlier attempts to make such corrections are acknowledged to have failed.

I shall be interested to see what the expert atmospheric scientists make of Qiang’s study, whilst rather doubting that it will prove to be the last word on the subject.

As I said last time, what one makes of the MSU results (i) depends upon the date and authorship of the paper one chooses to trust; (ii) requires that allowance be made for exceptional events such as the 1998 El Nino; and (ii) will be much clearer when we have another 20 years of data.

So Carter is well aware that the satellite data shows warming but did not mention this on the radio show.

John Quiggin has more on the Duffy and Carter show.

Last year, global warming denialist Bob Carter wrote a Tech Central Station article where he claimed that satellite measurements

show little or no long-term trend of temperature change.

I emailed him to point that the satellites actually showed significant warming. He replied that this didn’t count because:

this trend is most likely produced by the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.

This year, he has written a paper where he asserts (my emphasis):

Four alternative predictions of near-future climate, based on empirical models drawn from the palaeoclimatological record, are described. Three agree that the likely trend the 21st century is one of cooling, and the fourth (based on Milankovitch predictions) predicts cooling over the longer term. In keeping with the generality of these predictions, averaged global surface temperature has been falling for the last 6 years.

That is, of course, only true if you include the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.

This story on Bob Carter in the Age is a good one for playing Global Warming Skeptic Bingo. Though I think I should add a rule to the effect that if a numerical claim is wrong by more than an order of magnitude you get a free square on the bingo board. Look at what Carter claims:

Carbon dioxide was a minor greenhouse gas, responsible for 3.6 per cent of the total greenhouse effect, [Carter] said. Of this, only 0.12 per cent, or 0.036 degrees Celsius, could be attributed to human activity.

Actually, calculations show that without CO₂ the Greenhouse effect would be about 91% as strong. Further, he implies that only 0.12/3.6=3% of the CO₂ in the atmosphere is due to human activity. But the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased from 280 ppm to 380 ppm and this increase is all due to human activity. So, correcting Carter’s numbers we have that 100/380=25% of the CO₂ in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, so 25% of 9%=2.4% of the greenhouse effect or 0.7 degrees Celsius is man-made. Carter is wrong by a factor of 20. Actually he’s wrong by more than a factor of 20 since his calculation assumes that the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere is fixed and this isn’t true. As the globe warms there is more water vapour in the atmosphere and this further strengthens the greenhouse effect.

So how did something this inaccurate get into the Age? Well, Carter gave a speech to the Victorian Farmers Federation so the reporter who wrote the story was their agricultural reporter rather than their science reporter who might have noticed that Carter was spouting a load of rubbish.

Hat tip: euan

Last week I wrote about how Bob Carter was out by a factor of 20 in an estimate of how much warming could be attributed to human activity. He has now posted the text of another talk where he gives a source for his bogus claim. It’s this FOXNews opinion piece by Steve Milloy. Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University, so you would have thought he would be aware that opinion columns by non-scientists aren’t the best source of scientific information, but I guess not.

Some highlights of his talk: He said:

Their assertion is a symptom of a disease called Hansenism which has gripped western media sources and political, business and public opinion in a deadly grasp. Hansenist climate hysteria is driven by relentless, ideological, pseudo-scientific drivel, most of which issues from green political activists and their supporters, and is then promulgated by compliant media commentators who are innocent of knowledge of true scientific method. Opportunistically, and sadly, some scientists, too, contribute to the Hansenist alarmism. Sir Roderick Carnegie was quite correct when he formerly identified such environmental lobbying and emotional propaganda as a greater threat to our society and way of life than, in its heyday, was communism.

James Hansen. Worse than Stalin and Mao COMBINED!!

Why Hansenism? Because James Hansen was the NASA-employed scientist who started the climate alarmism hare running on June 23, 1988, when he appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr Hansen used a misleading graph to convince his listeners that warming was taking place at an accelerated rate (which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm).

What actually happened was that Hansen presented to Congress a graph showing scenarios for high, medium and low CO₂ growth and said that the medium growth scenario was most likely. The medium growth scenario has turned out to be a good prediction of the subsequent increase in temperatures When Michaels testified before Congress ten years later he erased the medium and low curves and claimed that because the high prediction was wrong, the climate model was faulty.

And while we are on the subject of misleading graphs, Carter presents a graph that shows average temperatures falling since 1998. Oddly enough, he uses a 25 month moving average to smooth the curve instead of the conventional five year moving average. If you smooth it in the normal way the average doesn’t fall, but increases steadily.

Carter goes on to say that “Hansenism” is like Lysenkoism, only worse, cite Bray’s bogus survey and the Oregon petition and to suggest that Australia hire Bjorn Lomberg to run an Institute of Environmental Assessment because CSIRO and BOM can’t be trusted.

I dunno about the last one, maybe Philip Cooney would be a better choice?

I have rewarded Carter with his own category on my blog.

On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying:

Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth’s surface warmed by approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that the average global surface temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4 centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990 levels, by 2100.

The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.

This Australian Financial Review chose not to report anything about this unprecedented statement of the scientific consensus. Instead, on July 13 they printed an opinion piece by Bob Carter:

D-day turned out to be June 7, when Robert May, president of the Royal Society of London, issued a statement on climate change that claimed to represent the agreed views of 11 scientific academies.

World leaders, including those due to meet at Gleneagles, were urged “to take prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change”, mainly by “minimising the amount of . . . carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere”.

Containing many erroneous phrases such as “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action”, the Royal Society statement does not provide the balanced, dispassionate scientific advice that the public is entitled to expect from such an august body. As US atmospheric physicist Fred Singer succinctly put it, the statement “is a politically motivated document and scientifically flawed”.

Sensationally, within days both the Russian and United States science academies publicly dissociated themselves from the Royal Society statement. The Russians went so far as to request that their Academy president “repudiate his signature” from it. The US Academy president wrote that “we definitely did not approve the Royal Society press release” which contains “misleading and political statements”, and threatened to cut the Royal Society off from future US science ventures.

As we have come to expect from Carter, this is a misrepresentation. The US Academy did not dissociate itself from the statement. The US Academy president objected to the Royal Society’s press release which singled out the US government for criticism but stands by the joint statement. He stated (Real Player clip):

By advertising our work in this way you have in fact vitiated much of the careful effort that went into preparing the actual G8 statement.

Instead of the scientific statement, Carter gives us this:

Topping this off, on the very first day of the Gleneagles meeting, the House of Lords delivered the coup de grace to the naive theory of human-caused global warming. A report from the influential Economic Affairs Committee asserted, among other things, that the Kyoto Protocol was not worth supporting; that the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change’s advice was tainted by political interference; that the benefits of global warming were underplayed; and that the science of climate change was uncertain.

Some of you might have reservations about getting scientific information from politicians rather than scientists. Those reservations would be well founded.

Carter also claims:

Reduced to empiricism, we can only note that for the past several years, global temperatures have been falling,

No they haven’t. Look:

Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here.

Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn’t happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who writes:

The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. … The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle’s role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system. Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and the formation and dissipation of clouds has a bigger impact on the climate.

This is more than a little misleading since it implies that the “simplistic” science ignores the role of water vapour even though it does not.

Second, Bob Carter who claims that one of the symptoms of the “disease” of Hansensim is:

endless repetition of inaccuracies, or facts out of context;

And repeats, yet again, a wildly inaccurate claim:

The Earth’s comfortable (for us) average temperature of about 15C is maintained that way by the atmosphere. The presence of small amounts of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - the “greenhouse gases” which absorb Earth’s outgoing heat radiation and re-emit some of it downwards - causes warming. Most of the total warming of 33 degrees is caused by water vapour (more than 30 degrees), carbon dioxide contributing only about 1.2 degrees worth. And of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, just 3 per cent comes from human sources, which equates to a warming effect of about four-hundredths of a degree.

His calculation is out by a factor of twenty. Carbon dioxide contributes about 3 degrees towards the natural greenhouse effect. And over 25% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from human sources. 25% of 3 degrees is 3/4 of a degree Celsius, not four-hundredths as Carter claims. But he keeps repeating this false claim.

Next up is Andrew Bolt, who in this column claimed to have found many serious errors in Flannery’s work, and here complained that Flannery had not corrected the alleged errors. Not surprisingly, Bolt’s bias and ignorance of science has led him astray and Flannery sets him straight in this column.

The “errors” that Bolt supposedly discovers in my work, extracted in The Age, are in fact howlers on his part. Indeed, so egregious are some that it’s hard to believe that Bolt has not set out to mislead his readers. Let’s look at five of the biggest whoppers.

You should read Flannery’s article to find out what the five whoppers are, but fortunately for me there are plenty more misleading statements in Bolt’s column for me to chew on. Bolt writes:

Says Philip Stott, London University professor emeritus of bio-geography: “During the Medieval Warm Period, the world was warmer even than today.” It was nice.

OK, Stott says that, but he has no qualifications as a climate scientist. So what was the basis for his claim? It turns out that it was the infamous Soon and Baliunas paper,
which was so badly flawed that six editors resigned from the journal that published it because they felt that it should not have been published.

Bolt also claims:

Flannery says: By late 2004, my interest had turned to anxiety. The world’s leading science journals were full of reports that glaciers were melting 10 times faster than previously thought . . .

Fact: More booga-booga to scare you into believing. But as glacier researcher Roger Braithwaite noted in Progress in Physical Geography, some glaciers are growing and “there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years”.

However, Braithwaite’s paper, makes it clear that he is only talking about glacier melt up to 1995. Looking at more up to date information (as Flannery did), shows a dramatic increase in melting.

I’ve saved the worst for last: Christopher Pearson who spends most of his column in a dishonest attempt to paint Flannery as some kind of weird mystic because he uses the Gaia hypothesis to help focus on “the complex system that makes life possible”. But the funniest part of Pearson’s column is this:

Flannery doesn’t feel any personal need to defend himself in the public arena. Nor does he feel, as a museum director, that the prestige of the scientific institution he heads obliges him to do so.

Unfortunately for Pearson, his column came out the same day as Flannery’s demolition of Bolt’s criticism. Oops.

The Australian reported:

THE debate on climate change is over. As far as the Howard Government is concerned, Australians must accept that humans contribute to global warming and adapt their behaviour to save the planet.

Emerging from a bushwalk through the Tarkine forest in northwest Tasmania, Environment Minister Ian Campbell told The Australian that argument about the causes and impact of global warming had effectively ended.

“There is a very small handful of what we call sceptics who, in the face of seeing all of the evidence about carbon increases and all of the evidence about impacts on the climate, would still say that it’s only natural variability that is causing it,” Senator Campbell said.

“On global warming, I have spent an enormous amount of my time getting to understand the problem and getting to understand the solutions, and I think the Australian Government owes it to the public to tell it like it is - it is a very serious threat to Australia.”

Senator Campbell said he agreed broadly with the contention promoted recently in environmental scientist Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers that Australia and other industrialised nations need to take urgent action to avert environmental disaster.

The next day they had on opinion piece from Bob Carter who claimed we’ve been cooling since 1998 which

marks the apparent peak of our most recent, and seemingly entirely normal, warming cycle.

and anyway the warming we’ve seen is entirely natural:

Humans certainly have an effect on local climate. For instance, the surrounds of Melbourne are now about 1C warmer than they were before European settlement. This, the urban heat island effect, is because modern metropolises comprise extensive areas of concrete, macadam, steel, bricks and glass, all of which act to trap more solar energy than did the preceding virgin landscape.

You might think that this effect, aggregated all over the world and added to by other landscape changes associated with modern agricultural practices, would produce the human-caused global warming signature that the minister seems to be worrying about. You might think so. But truth to tell, and IPCC views notwithstanding, no global human temperature-change signal has yet been detected that stands out from the natural background vagaries of the climate system.

Carter’s claim that observed warming trends are caused by the Urban Heat Island effect is rubbish because satellites, boreholes, rural stations and marine measurements all show warming, but it also contradicts his claim in the same article that the warming is natural and we are now seeing cooling. Is Carter contending that the UHI effect stopped operating in 1998? And also, when it suits him he argues that 1998 should not count because it was exceptional.