Carter does pay lip service to the idea of a trend. But he disdains the trend for the entire data set -- in fact he seems to disdain trends altogether -- instead showing these two straight lines, one ending at 1997, the other beginning at 1999:
He then tells a fable about the 1998 el Nino causing some kind of "shift" in the fundamental state of the climate system, after which it "settled in" to a different basic temperature level. There's a name for his kind of theory.
More to the point, the two lines he draws aren't trend lines. He just drew two flat lines to give the impression of no change. There's a name for that too.
Here are actual trend lines up to 1997, and after 1999:
I note that even his cherry picked horizontal lines don't fit the data as well (i.e. have a higher chi squared statistic) as the trend line through the whole data set.
that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.
Here's what John Spooner, cartoonist from The Agefelt it showed:
"Sulphide [sic] emissions from Chinese coal fired power might be causing
global cooling"
"Global cooling should make the carbon tax and ETS redundant"
"There seems to have been no increase in aerosol emissions during the
last decade's slight cooling"
Not only do none of these come from the PNAS paper, the first and third one contradict each other. So where did Spooner get them from? Certainly not from The Age's story on the paper, which states:
China's soaring coal consumption in the last decade held back global warming as sulfur emissions served as a coolant, according to a study that takes head-on a key argument of climate sceptics.
And you can't blame the doctored quotes from The Australian -- The Australian had nothing about there being no increase in aerosols. Based on past behaviour you'd guess Andrew Bolt, and sure enough, Bolt had a misleading post on the paper that linked to a post at Watt's Up With That claiming that the paper was wrong and that
data indicate that in the past decade the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere has not increased.
Yes, Spooner can't tell the difference between a scientific paper and a blog post.
Christopher Monckton was so annoying when interviewed by Adam Spencer that Spencer hung up on him before finishing the interview later on. The Australian was so impressed by Monckton's performance that they posted a partial transcript. Moth at New Anthropocene corrects many of Monckton's misrepresentations, so I'll just cover what was in the transcript posted by The Australian -- presumably they think those are his strongest points.
Spencer: Can I just clarify sir, are you a member of the House of Lords?
Monckton: Yes, but without the right to sit or vote.
Spencer: Because the House of Lords, when you've made that claim before, have repeatedly asked you to stop calling yourself as such, haven't they?
Monckton: No they haven't because they have not yet repealed the letters patent creating the peerage and until they do I am a member of the House as my passport records. It says I'm the Right Honourable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, so get used to it.
The House of Lords has stepped up its efforts to make Lord Monckton - climate sceptic and deputy leader of the UK Independence party - desist in his repeated claims that he is a member of the upper house.
The push comes as Buckingham Palace has also been drawn into the affair, over his use of a logo similar to parliament's famous portcullis emblem.
Last month Michael Pownall, clerk of the parliaments, wrote to Lord Monckton, a hereditary peer, stressing that he should not refer to himself as a member of the House of Lords, nor should he use any emblem representing the portcullis. ...
The House of Lords said today it strongly rejects Monckton's interpretation. A spokeswoman said: "Lord Monckton is not and never has been a member of the House of Lords. The clerk of the parliaments has written to Lord Monckton, confirming that he has no association with the House and advising him to stop branding himself as such."
Mashey has been, as he puts it, "trying to take the offense" against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. "You hope they make a mistake," he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have.
Yesterday Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves turned down Ward Churchill's motion to be reinstated in his professorial position. The former University of Colorado Ethnic Studies professor walks away from his celebrated trial with his jury award of one dollar, the prospect of enduring popularity on the academic left, but not much more--for now. ... Here is why I think Judge Naves decided the case correctly. ...
The jury in the Churchill trial came in with a verdict that almost perfectly captured the diffidence American feel about the matter. It recognized that Churchill's firing was in some wise connected to his provocative speech, but it didn't deny the plain evidence of Churchill's plagiarism, academic misconduct, and falsified credentials. The one-dollar award was the minimum that Judge Naves told the jury it could award in the event that it found in favor of Churchill.
For Peter Wood, whether plagiarism is grounds for dismissal or a flyspeck seems to depend on whether they are on his side or not.
The Australian's Cut and Paste column is notorious for its dishonestquotemining, but today they went one step further into quote doctoring. Here's the quote that they present as contradicting the Prime Minister's quote:
Julia Gillard at a press conference on Monday:
The science is telling us that climate change is real. The government accepts the science. We accept the science from our own CSIRO. We accept the science from our own weather bureau. The advice indicates that if we do not cut carbon pollution, average temperatures around Australia could increase by between 2.2 to over 5C by 2070.
...
From the true believers. Robert K. Kaufmann, Heikki Kauppi, Michael L. Mann, and James H. Stock in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday:
Given the widely noted increase in the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008. Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008. Furthermore, global surface temperature declined 0.2C between 2005 and 2008. This seeming disconnect may be one reason why the public is increasingly sceptical about anthropogenic climate change.
See, it's not warming and we don't know why! Trouble is, that's not an actual paragraph from the paper. It's been constructed by taking the first sentence of the abstract, the first and second sentence of the body of the paper and the fourth sentence of the body of the paper. If you look at the bits that they left out, you'll see why. First, the rest of the abstract:
We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase
in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings. Declining solar
insolation as part of a normal eleven-year cycle, and a cyclical
change from an El Nino to a La Nina dominate our measure of
anthropogenic effects because rapid growth in short-lived sulfur
emissions partially offsets rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
As such, we find that recent global temperature records are consistent
with the existing understanding of the relationship among
global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative
forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known
warming and cooling effects.
Gee, their conclusion is the opposite of what Cut and Paste implied. And here's the sentence they snipped from the body of the paper:
On the heels of his previous piece, Bob Carter has got another opinion published in a Fairfax newspaper, this time in the Sun Herald. (No link, I don't want to encourage them -- you can find it via Sou). Once again, the editor at Fairfax appears to completely indeifferent to whether Carter's claims are true or not. I guess fact checking is too much work these day. See Sou for a detailed examination of many of the falsehoods Carter presents, but I'll just pick out one of the more blatant ones.
For example, the sun recently entered a quietude unknown since the Little Ice Age. Accompanying this, planetary warming has ceased despite still increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
While it's true that the current solar is very quiet it's more active than the one that peaked in 1907. 1907 is not the Little Ice Age. And temperatures are much higher than they were at the beginning of the 20th century despite solar activity being about the same. This would suggest that the warming hwas not caused by an increase in solar activity. Not that Carter would ever admit this.
John Cook has already thoroughly demolished this Bob Carter opinion piece in The Age, but I just wanted to highlight the failure in the editing process that allowed Carter's piece to be published as it was. Amongst other false or misleading claims, Carter claimed as a "Fact" that CO2
acts as a valuable plant fertiliser. Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert,
Even someone with a little bit of common sense would notice that the difference between the Amazon and the Sahara isn't that there is a shortage of CO2 in the Sahara, but the editor at The Age didn't see any problem with publishing Carter's obvious nonsense. If you check what the science says about projected climate change rather than Carter you find:
Annual rainfall is likely to decrease in much of Mediterranean Africa and northern Sahara
Carter's piece was illustrated with a cartoon by John Spooner showing trees talking about how Gillard was taking their food. You might think that Spooner was mocking Carter, but if you look at other Spooner cartoons you'll find that he gets his science from Andrew Bolt and thinks that global warming is some sort of hoax.
Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests?
Anthony Watts: That's correct. It's an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn't the case. The vast majority of them are warm biases, and even such things as people thinking a tree might in fact keep the temperature cooler doesn't really end up that way.
Watts went to to rubbish the paper by Menne et al that analysed Watt's data and found no warming bias.
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
