The Church of Global Warming's Changing Catechism

15 months ago, it was a sin to declare out loud that the global temperature was no longer rising. Today, the IPCC, the UK Met office, and mainstream researchers are all admitting the obvious.

click image to read full blog post

read the rest here

.
.

Who is Hans Joachim Schellnhuber?

The German government’s chief climate advisor is the furthest thing from an objective, dispassionate scientist. He thinks using fossil fuels amounts to “a lifestyle of mass destruction” – and that the UN should be put in charge of trillions of dollars.

Read the rest here.

This blog has relocated. You can sign up to receive an e-mail each time a new post is added under the "Email subscription" bar a little below the photo.

NoFrakkingConsensus has a Facebook page.

Scientists Speak Out

Two physics professors – one in America and one in the UK – are condemning the behaviour of prominent climate scientists. They say it’s a violation of scientific honesty and integrity.

Read the rest here.

This blog has relocated. You can sign up to receive an e-mail each time a new post is added under the "Email subscription" bar a little below the photo.NoFrakkingConsensus now has a Facebook page.

.

World Wildlife Fund Infiltrates UK Government

In 2006 an environmental lobby group CEO simultaneously became chairman of a UK government body. The Ministry of Defence saw no conflict between serving the public and advancing an activist cause.

Read more here.

For a limited time, this blog has a donation button. Buy me a holiday cocktail :-)

NoFrakkingConsensus has a Facebook page where comments are welcome.

The Shoddy Climategate Inquiries

A new report examines three inquiries launched after the Climategate documents surfaced in late 2009. Intended to restore public confidence, those inquiries have done nothing of the sort.

Read the full post here.

This blog has relocated. Hope you like the fresh, new look. You can sign up to receive an e-mail each time a new post is added under the "Email subscription" bar a little below the photo.

NoFrakkingConsensus now has a Facebook page.

Scientists & Science Journalists - Please Grow Up

The "screaming death spiral" scientist now admits he might have overstated the matter.

I'm fascinated by the way people talk about climate change - what words they choose, what they don't say, and whether their arguments are intellectually rigorous or emotionally manipulative. In this regard, the manner in which Arctic ice melt is presented by activist scientists and activist journalists would make a great case study. Below are a few quick observations.

In December 2007, Mark Serreze, described as a "senior scientist at the U.S. government's National Snow and Ice Data Center," gave the Associated Press an emotionally-charged quote:

The Arctic is screaming.

Yep, that's what this man who has been trained in the cautious, tentative, rigorous approach known as the scientific method told the media. The quote appeared in an article that began with this paragraph:

An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. [bold added]

The journalist, science writer Seth Borenstein, deliberately chose to use the words "relentless" and "ominous" in his first sentence. He chose to say that melting had not merely accelerated but had done so "greatly" - and to add in the "tipping point" jargon for good measure. He then made another deliberate choice when he devoted the very next sentence to rank speculation.

A few paragraphs down we're introduced to activist scientist Jay Zwally. In point of fact, he says he thinks the Arctic Ocean "could be nearly ice-free" in five years. But not to worry, he has another zinger of a quote at the ready:

The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines. [bold added]

The Associated Press article is a long one - more than 1,200 words - and readers must wade through all sorts of emotionally-laden verbiage before they arrive at the final paragraph and the observation of a more cautious scientist, Cecilia Bitz, who thinks that although ice melt is trending in one direction, what's occurring at that moment should probably be characterized as a blip.

A version of the above news story - always including the screaming but sometimes with the even-tempered remarks at the end chopped off - was reproduced in all sorts of venues around the world. Among these were the Kuwait Times, New York Sun, Boston Globe, Tehran Times, the UK Daily Mail, a Canadian television news website, CBS News, MSNBC and FOXnews.

On the National Geographic website, the story appeared under the let's-not-be-accused-of-understatement headline "Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?" Similarly, the Scotland Herald inaccurately pushed the envelope still further with the headline "Summer ice in Arctic 'will be gone in under five years'" [italics added].

Google Books and another source (see p. 63 of this 171-page PDF) both report that the screaming Arctic and dead canary parts of the article were later cited by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Thomas Friedman in his 2009 bestseller Hot, Flat and Crowded.

In August of 2008 Serreze, who provided the screaming quote, told Reuters that:

Arctic ice is in its death spiral

Fast forward a couple of years and the screaming death spiral scientist now admits he might have overstated the matter. In a piece published this week on Wired.com, Serreze acknowledges that Mother Nature is a complicated gal. "The sea ice system surprises us," he says. Here are a few paragraphs from the story:

In 2007, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic declined rapidly. The drop from the previous year was so precipitous that it garnered worldwide attention and media coverage. In the last couple of years, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic...has recovered. This series of events, which underscored the year-to-year variability of the measurement, has made researchers cautious about describing events in the Arctic. [bold added]

“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.” [bold added]

Maybe we read too much into it. The more I research the predictions that have been made by environmentalists and activist scientists in recent decades, the more these words seem to apply. Never mind that the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and that we've been recording temperatures, taking CO2 readings, and measuring ice thickness for a measly few hundred. If something happens that hasn't yet been recorded by humanity it's "record-breaking" and
"unprecedented" and therefore automatically ominous.

Never mind that geologists tell us polar ice has been present for less than 20 percent of Earth's history and that we live on a dynamic, ever-changing planet. Ice sheets and glaciers expand and contract. They've been behaving this way for millions of years. One could say it's what they do.

So why do so many scientists and science journalists - the very people who should know better - reject the dispassionate, sober perspective? Why do they remind us of emotionally volatile teenagers?

..

h/t Tom Nelson and Bishop Hill

..

>> The big picture: the Y2K lesson
>> A bogus 21-year-old climate prediction
>> 10-year snow prediction fails miserably
>> Global disaster is so 1976

How Many IPCC Scientists Say So?

YouTube video available here. Firefox users can apparently see it fine, but Explorer is having problems.

A statement is not true just because thousands of scientists say it is. Nevertheless, media coverage of climate change has frequently implied that:

1. thousands of scientists collectively produce the Intergovernental Panel on Climate Change's report and
2. those scientists all agree that humans are responsible for the warming trend recorded in the late 20th century

A good example of this sort of media coverage can be found at 5:35 to 5:45 minutes of the above video.

It has therefore been a difficult task to communicate certain facts to the general public. First, among the thousands of souls involved in the IPCC process, many are not hardcore scientists at all. They are economists, bureaucrats, industry representatives, and professional activists. (See this 8-page PDF of expert reviewers who provided feedback on the section of the report produced by Working Group 3. Notice it is their affiliation the IPCC tells us about - not their scientific credentials.)

Additionally, a large number of those who worked on the IPCC report are academics from other disciplines. Some of these people have built careers by speculating on the effect global warming could have on a variety of matters at some time in the distant future.

(See, for example, Dr. Daniel Scott, a contributing author to chapter 14 of the IPCC's Working Group 2 report and a Canadian geography professor. In recent years he has travelled to Tunisia, Germany, Greece, France, England, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Scotland, Italy, South Africa, Las Vegas, and numerous other destinations to deliver papers on the effect climate change might have on golf, ice-fishing, alpine skiing, cottagers, national parks, and tourism events in Canada's capital city. Nice work if you can get it.)

In other words, it's anybody's guess how many of the people involved in producing the IPCC report - as authors or expert reviewers - are actually equipped to evaluate firsthand the relevant science supporting the hypothesis that humans are to blame for climate change.

I don't mean to disparage anyone here, only to point out that it's an open question whether a given economist or geography prof has truly worked through the science for himself. In many cases, he's surely just accepted the judgment of others.

In any event, the large group of people who contributed to the IPCC report were never asked whether they believe humans are responsible for climate change. Nor were they asked what portion of the overall change should be assigned to human activity and what portion should be assigned to natural causes. It just didn't happen.

Rather, the conclusion that humans cause climate change was decided in one chaper out of a total of 44 in the IPCC report. Only the folks who worked on chapter nine of the Working Group 1 report got a voice.

According to John McLean, who has crunched the numbers:

Chapter 9...had 53 authors in total but more than 40 were part of a network of people who worked previously together. In direct contradiction to the IPCC's statements that the team of authors should have a wide range of views and experiences, most were climate modellers and there were many instances where several authors were associated with the same establishment...

The second draft of chapter 9...received comments from 55 people and 7 governments. Of these 62 only 5 reviewers explicitly endorsed the overall chapter...

Fifty-three authors and five reviewers are all that can be said to explicitly support the claim of a significant human influence on climate. [bold added] (p. 2)

Persistent souls like McLean have been trying, for years, to get someone to pay attention to this very serious misunderstanding. But they may as well have been banging their heads against a brick wall.

Which is why it's so important, as Bishop Hill points out today, that Mike Hulme (a high profile climate change researcher at the University of East Anglia) is now acknowledging that McLean has a point.

In a forthcoming paper (22-page PDF) Hulme writes:

Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement...is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields. [bold added] (pp. 10-11)

Got that? We the public have been misinformed, repeatedly, about the number of IPCC scientists who've explicitly endorsed the human-climate-change link.

If the planet really is in peril, we need clarity about facts such as these - not spin.

..

h/t to reader RG

..

>> We trusted too completely
>> More IPCC mischief
>> The Stern Review scandal - IPCC breaks 3 of its own rules
>> What's left if we disregard non-peer-reviewed claims?