Deltoid

December 2011 Open Thread

Category: Open Thread

Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:00 AM • 202 Comments

McKitrick's quote mining

Category: McKitrick

Deep Climate dissects Ross McKitrick's deceptive quoting from the emails stolen from CRU in 2009:

In one particularly outrageous and error-filled passage, McKitrick accuses IPCC AR4 co-ordinating lead authors Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth of selecting their team of contributing authors solely on the basis of whether they agree with the pair's scientific views. He even goes so far as to accuse Jones of "dismissing" (i.e. rejecting as a contributing author) one qualified expert who, supposedly in Jones's own words, "has done a lot, but I don't trust him."

But the record clearly shows that it was Trenberth who made that last comment, and that he was expressing misgivings about the quality of the researcher's work, not whether he was on the "right side" of scientific issues. And the expert in question, climatologist Joel Norris, was in fact selected by Trenberth as a contributing author. Even worse, McKitrick has reversed the order of the Jones quotes, taken them out of context, and then juxtaposed them to make it appear as if they were part of the same exchange. Meanwhile, an examination of the two separate email discussions show chapter co-ordinators trying to fill out their team with authors who will be able to contribute effectively, in complete contradiction to McKitrick's central thesis.

Notice how much more work it takes to put the quotes in context than for McKitrick to misrepresent them.

Read on »

Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:21 AM • 30 Comments

On the trick to hide the context

Category: Global Warming

Peter Hadfield (potholer54) talks on the deceitful quoting of the emails stolen from CRU in 2009

Juliette Jowit in The Guardian puts some more of them in context.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 2:02 AM • 160 Comments

The Australian's War on Science 74: Spinning the IPCC Extreme Weather report

Category: The War on Science

The IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) found:

Regarding the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that on a global scale hot days become even hotter and occur more often. "For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world", said Thomas Stocker the other Co-chair of Working Group I. "Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease". "Nevertheless, there are many options for decreasing risk."

Or, according to the two news stories in The Australian: "Review fails to support climate change link" and "Climate change effects unknown: IPCC report".

Roger Jones examines The Australian's misrepresentations and concludes:

On climate change, The Australian is behaving like the media equivalent of a fog machine. Its unreliable reporting should be avoided by those with an interest in factual scientific information.

He also has some comments on the way The Australian is relying on Benny Peiser.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:07 AM • 13 Comments

Stolen CRU emails: the rejects

Category: Global Warming

Some more of the emails stolen from the Climate Research Centre in 2009 have been released. This time they are accompanied by a readme with out-of-context quotes that asserts the purpose of the release is information transparency, but that's an obvious lie, since they've sat on them for two years and released them just before Durban conference. The timing suggests that the people behind the theft and release have a financial interest in preventing mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is most unlikely that there is anything incriminating in these emails -- if there was, it would have been released two years ago.

Gavin Schmidt is providing context for the emails, Brendan DeMelle has an extensive roundup and Stephan Lewandowsky writes about the real scandal.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:43 PM • 206 Comments

The Australian's War on Science 73: Blainey's false history

Category: The War on Science

In an interview in The Australian (behind The Australian's paywall, search for "Gadfly Geoffrey Blainey") historian Geoffrey Blainey gets his history wrong:

In 1970 the overwhelming majority of scientists believed that there was not going to be global warming over the next 40 years.

That's not true, as Ian Musgrave explains.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:05 AM • 155 Comments

Australia passes carbon tax

Category:

Australia's carbon tax has been passed by the Senate. Be entertained as Piers Akerman goes barking mad:

This is the day the Western tradition of science-backed advancement of the human condition was rejected in favour of paganism. ...

We are witnessing the beginning of the end game for Australia as we know it. ...

The rest of the globe's population is wondering why we ever permitted ourselves to be lied and deceived back into the Dark Ages.

Oddly enough, despite Australia's return to the Dark Ages, New Limited's server was still able to serve up Akerman's rant.

Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:23 AM • 93 Comments

Men With Day Jobs - Denial Tango

Category: Global Warming

by Men With Day Jobs

Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:32 PM • 9 Comments

The Australian's War on Science 72: George Pell learns nothing

Category: The War on Science

In a piece ironically titled "Be prudent with climate claims" (behind The Australian's paywall, search for the title if you want to read it) George Pell declares that, unlike him,

"many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence."

However, if you look at the sources he cites, you'll find that by "primary evidence" he means claims made by Monckton and Plimer, not peer-reviewed work by climate scientists. He only manages one cite to the IPCC reports and that is just to quote an out of context sentence to make it look like the IPCC as saying that climate is no more predictable than weather. That's not what they say at all. It's unclear whether Pell misrepresented the IPCC by stripping that sentence from its context or whether he just copied from someone like Monckton.

It is unfortunate that Pell has failed to learn from The Bureau of Meteorology Greg Ayer and repeated claims already shown to be false.

The Australian, of course, simply does not care whether the material it prints is true or not.

Tim Stephens in the Jesuit's Eureka Street comments:

Climate science is complex and not explainable in sound-bites. Of necessity the layperson must defer to the experts. If Pell had offered views on neuroscience, quantum computing, immunology, the geology of Mars or any of the other topics covered in the latest issue of Nature we would rightly be scratching our heads at his intervention, unless he truly were a polymath of Galilean standing.

But the discourse of climate change has become so debased and post-modern that any views, however bizarre, can be given an airing. Like homeopathy and astrology, Pell's pseudo-science should be ignored, and the scientific method allowed to continue, however unpalatable the conclusions may be.

Read on »

Posted by Tim Lambert at 12:14 PM • 38 Comments

Rosegate: Rose hides the incline

Category: Rosegate

David Rose is notorious for fabricating data to claim that global warming isn't happening as well as for fabricating quotes, so this story in the Daily Mail comes as no surprise. Rose presents a graph of temperatures from BEST that purports to prove that global warming has stopped and then quotes Judith Curry

"As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: 'This is "hide the decline" stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

Read on »

Posted by Tim Lambert at 2:22 PM • 53 Comments