Dellers is on the naughty step again, as reported at Climate Feedback.
Apparently,
Five scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘very low’. A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Cherry-picking, Derogatory, Flawed reasoning, Inaccurate, Misleading.
Ooh dear, Delingpole is not the messiah then, he’s just a very naughty boy and the angelic host that is the alarmist climate science fraternity have decided to come down heavily on him from Above, once again for committing the Unoriginal Sin of misrepresenting “research from 58 scientific papers to falsely claim that they disprove human-caused global warming”
But did he? Well, first off, he’s basing this article on another article at Pierre Gosselin’s No Tricks Zone.
The original article claims that:
…within the last 5 months, 58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
The author, Kenneth Richard, goes on to say:
Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years. Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time. And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
In fact, many (but not all) of the papers discuss regional trends. Some discuss global trends. So it’s fair to say that they talk about regional climate trends across the globe as well as the harder to pin down concept of a global change in climate. Many of the papers reveal that past climate changes have been driven by natural variability and that the magnitude (and in some cases, the rate) of current global warming (as measured by the instrumental record) is not unprecedented or unusual in the context of this past (natural) variability. Indeed, some papers point out that current climate change cannot easily be distinguished from natural variability.
Delingpole’s headline says:
‘Global Warming’ Is a Myth, Say 58 Scientific Papers in 2017′
OK, fair enough, this is stretching it a bit. Read on though and what James says later is:
By “global warming” these papers don’t, of course, mean the mild warming of around 0.8 degrees Celsius that the planet has experienced since the middle of the 19th century as the world crawled out of the Little Ice Age. Pretty much everyone, alarmists and skeptics alike, is agreed on that.
The ‘myth’ he identifies then is hypothesised catastrophic future warming as projected by climate models, the reality of which is thrown into doubt by the fact that warming so far appears to be not unprecedented or unusual with regard to that which has occurred in the past centuries and millennia.
Hence Peter Neff, Postdoctoral research associate, University of Rochester says:
Despite initially getting the amount of warming the planet has experienced correct, the article goes on to trivialize this global temperature increase and proceeds to provide a 101 course in logical fallacies. This article grossly misinterprets open-access scientific papers by simply looking at graphs and entirely ignoring their meaning as explained by authors in the text.
Delingpole does not trivialize the increase; he merely states that the 0.8C-1.0C increase from 1850 to present is not unusual as revealed by past changes in regional and global climate estimated using proxies – the 58 scientific papers and accompanying 80 graphs demonstrate this. He also points out that none of the papers concern themselves with CO2 perhaps causing the present warming, but several indicate that solar variability is strongly associated with past warming (and cooling). He doesn’t ‘simply look at graphs’ providing, in fact, only four graphs as examples of NTZ’s 80. Nowhere does Delingpole rely exclusively on these graphs to prove the point he is making. Lastly, not all of the papers are open access, so the main text is not easily accessible, only the Abstract.
Another reviewer, Patrick Brown, in response to Delingpole’s quote:
collaborating on studies which all corroborate, independently and rigorously, the increasingly respectable view that ‘man-made global warming’ just isn’t a thing.
says,
These studies do not make this claim. Most of them are about regional (not global) temperature variations of the distant past. They generally make no claims regarding the causes of global warming over the most recent several decades nor do they make any claims about the amount of warming expected as we continue to increase greenhouse gas concentrations.
He rather misses the point here. James actually makes a point of saying that the papers voice no opinion about the supposed causes of modern global warming and he also says:
That is, all these different experts from around the world — China, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Italy, etc. — have been looking closely at different aspects of the global warming puzzle in various regions and on different timescales and come to the conclusion in irreproachable, peer-reviewed scientific ways that there is no evidence to support the global warming scare story.
Late 20th century and early 21st century global warming, they show, is neither dramatic, nor unusual, nor scary.
So there is the acknowledgement that much of the research is on regional trends. Man-made global warming “just isn’t a thing”, according to Delingpole, because these papers, by showing that past natural variability across the globe (pieces of the “global warming puzzle”) is comparable to modern climate change, suggest rather strongly that, up until now, supposed man-made global warming isn’t a thing to be particularly worried about because, in many regions, it cannot be reliably distinguished from past natural variability. Of course, the authors of these papers, even supposing that some of them doubt the ‘reality’ of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, don’t directly say global warming isn’t a thing because: 1/their paper would not be published, and, 2/it is not directly related to their actual research.
Delingpole can perhaps be admonished for giving the impression that the authors themselves concluded that man-made ‘dangerous’ global warming was not real (or at least not in evidence in the real world), but this doesn’t detract from the fact that the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from many of these papers is exactly that, even if not explicitly stated by the authors. Current global warming is observed to be unremarkable in the context of past ups and downs throughout the Holocene, in terms of both the magnitude and, arguably, the rate at which it has happened. This in turn suggests that a significant contribution to modern climate change may come from natural variability, in contrast to attribution claims made by the IPCC and climate scientists.
One of the reviewers attacks Delingpole for setting up a strawman argument, but by attacking JD purely for his not so judicious use of the English language whilst they ignore his wider argument, they in fact are the ones using the straw man.
We need only examine the text of the first paper to highlight an essential component of Delingpole’s argument:
Paleoclimatic evidence is necessary to place the current warming and drying of the western Mediterranean basin in a long term perspective of natural climate variability…
Spanning the period 1186-2014CE, the new reconstruction reveals overall warmer conditions around 1200 and 1400, and again after ~1850. Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes…
The spatially interpolated data, reaching back to 1750, show an initial
summer warming in the 1950s followed by two decades of relatively cool conditions, and increasing temperatures from the early 1980s to ~2000, with no warming afterwards. The coldest and warmest summers since 1750 occurred in 1972 and 2003, respectively…
Both time-series reveal positive temperature anomalies in the 1950s, followed by almost two decades of relatively cool summers with negative extremes in 1972 and 1984 Although temperature fluctuations since ~1990 occurred at a relatively high level, the overall warming trend until 2003 was only moderate…
[W]hen it comes to disentangling natural variability from anthropogenically affected variability the vast majority of the instrumental record may be biased…
Another reviewer giving Delingpole nil points is Dan Jones, Physical Oceanographer, British Antarctic Survey:
This piece is a logically flawed “straw man argument”. Delingpole claims to have disproven human-driven climate change, but he does not engage with how climate change actually works.
Why should Delingpole engage with how climate change actually works, natural or anthropogenic? It’s not relevant to the argument which is, that modern climate change (natural and/or man-made) is not outstanding in terms of past climate change (natural). Straw man from the man who accuses the other man of using a straw man.
Jones goes on to say:
To see the clearest fingerprints of the extra energy added to the climate system from fossil fuel burning, you have to look at the energy content of the entire climate system over the last several decades (most of the extra energy has gone into the ocean [Levitus et al. 2012]*). Trying to disprove global warming in recent decades using regional, seasonal, atmosphere-only temperature trends on centuries-long timescales is very misleading.
Does Delingpole do this? No. Many of the papers examine regional trends but some look at global trends. Not all of the papers examine atmosphere-only trends either. At least one paper looks at ocean heat content, Jones’ favoured metric.
Here we review proxy records of intermediate water temperatures from sediment cores and corals in the equatorial Pacific and northeastern Atlantic Oceans, spanning 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. These records suggests that intermediate waters were 1.5–2 °C warmer during the Holocene Thermal Maximum than in the last century. Intermediate water masses cooled by 0.9 °C from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age. These changes are significantly larger than the temperature anomalies documented in the instrumental record. The implied large perturbations in OHC and Earth’s energy budget are at odds with very small radiative forcing anomalies throughout the Holocene and Common Era.
One may argue that these changes in OHC occurred over longer periods than the instrumental record but this would ignore the fact that the instrumental record spans 160 years and the transition from MCA to LIA occurred over less than a hundred years, the greatest difference in surface temperatures happening over approximately 500 years. OHC might increase significantly in the coming century or two, but at the moment, the increase is small compared to past changes and even if it does increase significantly, it will likely still only be comparable to similar past (natural) increases/decreases over similar time scales. Scientists tell us that this will be due solely to CO2 because natural forcings apparently stopped in 1850.
Another in-house reviewer, Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science:
Many of these papers discuss the causes of temperature changes over the past several centuries or millennia. Indeed, solar activity is thought to be one of the primary drivers of the observed temperature variability over this these longer time periods. This is not the case over the past several decades. Over this recent time period we know that the Sun’s intensity has not gotten stronger because we are measuring it with satellites and we know that increasing greenhouse gasses are causing warming. We know that increasing greenhouse gasses are causing warming due to fundamental physical laws—not simply from observing that temperatures and greenhouse gas levels happen to be rising at the same time.
This amounts to an outright lie. Solar activity in the modern era (1950-2010) has peaked at probably the greatest it has been in several thousand years. It started declining significantly only at the turn of the 21st century.
So much for the in-house reviewers then. Climate Feedback boasts unfavourable responses from 28 authors of the actual papers but neglect to say how many of the papers this covers. This must be a small fraction of the total number of authors accredited in the 58 papers, which must run into the hundreds. Let’s just look at a few of the comments from those authors, beginning, rather aptly, with Yair Rosenthal, who co-wrote the OHC paper quoted above:
The data were taken out of context. In fact a previous article (Rosenthal et al., 2013) made the argument that the current warming, as measured by the increase in Ocean Heat Content (OHC), is a reversal of the long-term cooling trend in the preceding centuries and the rate of heat gain is substantially higher than recorded in the past. If anything, these data support global warming as manifested by the recent increase in OHC.
Sorry Yair, but we’re not talking about a 2013 paper, we’re talking about the 2017 study which, as quoted, demonstrates the rise in OHC is a lot smaller in the modern era compared to previous changes. You may indeed argue that the rate of change in the modern era is greater than previously recorded but account must be taken of the fact that the actual change over 160 years is much smaller than that measured via paleo proxies in the past and the resolution of the instrumental record (only really accurate since the introduction of Argo floats – and even then, subject to a large sampling error) is very much greater than that which can generally be achieved via the examination of paleo-proxies. So who is to say that similar large accelerations in OHC did not happen in the past or that the current large acceleration will continue indefinitely?
On Antarctica, Tyler Jones, Research Associate, University of Colorado says:
The West Antarctica temperature plot that was pulled from my 2017 paper is very low resolution, and does not resolve the most recent few 100 yrs. We know from other studies that West Antarctica is currently warming faster than almost any other place on Earth. Furthermore, my paper has nothing to do with global warming or human activities. In fact, I only focus on time periods well before the Industrial Revolution. It is clear that global warming is caused predominantly by human activity.
The problem is Tyler, according to another study released in 2017, the Antarctic is not currently warming faster than almost any other place on earth; in fact it’s cooling very rapidly. Again, natural variability swamping any signal from man-made global warming.
The Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is often described as a region with one of the largest warming trends on Earth since the 1950s, based on the temperature trend of 0.54 °C/decade during 1951–2011 recorded at Faraday/Vernadsky station. Accordingly, most works describing the evolution of the natural systems in the AP region cite this extreme trend as the underlying cause of their observed changes. However, a recent analysis (Turner et al., 2016) has shown that the regionally stacked temperature record for the last three decades has shifted from a warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of − 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014.
Oddly, it is Delingpole that is the one on trial here for misrepresenting scientific research!
Barabara Stenni is another author who makes a guest appearance to give Delingpole a dressing down. She is joint author of a 2017 paper, included in the list of 58, which says:
Within this long-term cooling trend from 0-1900CE we find that the warmest period occurs between 300 and 1000 CE, and the coldest interval from 1200 to 1900 CE. Since 1900CE, significant warming trends are identified for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Dronning Maud Land coast and the Antarctic Peninsula regions, and these trends are robust across the distribution of records that contribute to the unweighted isotopic composites and also significant in the weighted temperature reconstructions. Only for the Antarctic Peninsula is this most recent century-scale trend unusual in the context of natural variability over the last 2000-years.
Her defence of the paper she co-wrote with others as not being proof that global warming is a myth is this:
Our work agrees perfectly with the results from climate models, which show that Antarctic warming should be significantly delayed relative to the rest of the planet. Furthermore, our work confirms previous work demonstrating that West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula are among the fastest-warming regions on the planet.
Eh? Climate models predict that Antarctic warming should be delayed? But anyway, the AP is one of the fastest warming places on the planet, so the delay mechanism obviously isn’t in operation here, in addition to the fact that AP is now cooling (see above)! How exactly is this confused paragraph in any way a rebuttal of Delingpole’s article?
Wenfeng Deng, Associate Research Fellow, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry:
Our results indicate that the Current Warm Period (AD 1850-present) is similar to or even warmer than the Medieval Climate Anomaly (AD 900-1300) over the western Pacific. Therefore, the Breitbart article misunderstood and overinterpreted our results and conclusions.
This is what the abstract from the paper says:
The results indicate that the climate of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, AD 900–1300) was similar to that of the Current Warm Period (CWP, AD 1850-present), which contradicts previous studies. The similar warmth levels for the MCA and CWP have also been recorded in the Makassar Strait of Indonesia, which suggests that the MCA was not warmer than the CWP in the western Pacific and that this may not have been a globally uniform change…
As for the Little Ice Age (LIA, AD 1550–1850), the results from this study, together with previous data from the Makassar Strait, indicate a cold and wet period compared with the CWP and the MCA in the western Pacific. The cold LIA period agrees with the timing of the Maunder sunspot minimum and is therefore associated with low solar activity.
Personally, I don’t think there was any misunderstanding or overinterpretation; do you?
I could go on picking my way through the various comments from authors, finding inconsistencies here and there, but the few I’ve highlighted should suffice.
What I think has gone on here is that Climate Feedback have contacted the authors, told them that Dellers the Detestable Climate Denier has used their papers to illustrate that global warming just “isn’t a thing” and a minority have taken umbrage and decided to affirm their adherence to the global warming ‘consensus’ by rebutting Delingpole’s use of their research—with varying degrees of success or failure. If I were to personally review the efforts of the 5 ‘in-house’ reviewers regarding their attempts to take down Delingpole, I would have to give a C both for effort and attainment overall. But for those readers who don’t look closely at Climate Feedback’s rebuttal, it all seems rather fact-based and scientific, rigorously quality controlled and a ‘devastating’ rebuttal of yet another ‘piss poor and misleading’ Delingpole climate sceptic article. So is this how Climate Feedback get their impressive looking ‘fact-checking’ logo/accreditation?
Climate Scepticism 
It’s just so hard to take climate science seriously. Do university courses in this field include modules on clowns?
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MiaB.
“Do university courses in this field include modules on clowns?”
Not as far as I know, although environmental science courses in some California universities have ethics modules provided by clergy.
If they did I would suggest they concentrate on the heyoka – a sacred clown in the culture of the Lakota people of the Great Plains of North America. The heyoka is a contrarian, jester, and satirist, who speaks, moves and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them*. They ask difficult questions, and say things others are too afraid to say. Perfect for developing sceptical students. Unfortunately only those having visions of the thunder beings of the west (Mann and company?), can assume the ceremonial role of the heyoka.
*During a heat wave, a heyoka might shiver with cold and cover himself with a blanket. Similarly, when it is cold he might wander around naked, complaining that it is too hot. Obviously behaviour needed to massage temperature data.
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Interesting Alan. I was just reading one of Stephen Saylor’s classical Roman thrillers where one of the key characters is the scapegoat of Massilia/Marseilles. It seems that when times were hard, such as the city being besieged by Julius Caesar, the citizens would elect someone to avert the crisis. Effectively he would be supported by the other citizens for a year but would live alone, without anyone speaking to him. After a year of loneliness living as high on the hog as possible, he would be put to death. This could be the best way forward for climate science.
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It is worth comparing and contrasting what is said.
Dellers
Climate Feedback
I am sure that Dellers, who studied English Language and Literature at Oxford, can tell the difference. But it seems to be beyond the abilities of a cloud of climate scientists. To help along any real scientists who are looking in, the above is the reverse of what was put out by the Cook et al 2013. As John Cook admitted in his 2014 Bristol lecture “Dogma vs. consensus: Letting the evidence speak on climate change“, the survey was of academic papers (including by sociologists / psychologists / political scientists) of those who sort of believed in or assumed or implied that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis was valid.
Senator Bernie Sanders, in questioning Scott Pruitt in the Senate in January stated
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“As you may know, some 97% of scientists who have written articles for peer-reviewed journals have concluded that climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in the US and around the world. Do you believe that climate change is caused by carbon emissions from human activity?”
Ho hum I have three beliefs.
1.) I believe I will sleep in today.
2.) I believe I will have another beer!
3.) I believe Kitten Shadow has her earthing, (me) well trained!
Please go convince Kitten Shadow of your insane conjecture! Beware she sharpens claws rigorously!
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Will, are your beliefs 1 and 3 really compatible? Or is Kitten Shadow a model cat?
I once had two cats – Polly (as a kitten she perched on my shoulder) and Bubastis (a god). Neither would have wasted precious sleeping time upon climate porn.
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I wish I were still teaching. Delingpole’s article, the original Kenneth Richards post, and the Climate Feedback evaluation would constitute a useful package to get students to evaluate evidence and argument. I would reserve Jaime’s post to demonstrate how such an evaluation could/should be conducted.
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A masterful take down of the sloppy take down of Dellingpole’s article. Many an article has been derided, simply for the headline. The headlines work both ways, attracting detractors and supporters alike.
it’s a measure of how few arguments they’ve got that they’re scared the public will find out that current temperatures aren’t abnormal compared to the past and neither is the rate of warming. They aren’t confident enough that the ‘yes but this time it’s a different kind of warming’ message is strong enough. Our very existence says that the warming we’ve seen in the past wasn’t devastating, let alone the last 10,000 years of it. Keeping the idea going that current climates are unique is an essential string to their bow.
There has been a lot of juggery pokery over the last few years to add more warming to the global total by adding more and more obscure stations. A feat that almost certainly hasn’t been matched by the proxy reconstructions. The aim is to make the themometer records look more extreme than the proxies.
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JD has written a very amusing follow up to his article in the light of what I’ve said here.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/12/delingpole-breitbart-100-percent-correct-about-climate-change-expert-peer-reviewer-confirms/
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Good job!!!
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“Postdoctoral research associate”….oh, you mean “student”. Got it. Carry on.
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“To see the clearest fingerprints of the extra energy added to the climate system from fossil fuel burning, you have to look at the energy content of the entire climate system over the last several decades (most of the extra energy has gone into the ocean)”. Only a clown (or an alarmist climate “scientist”) could claim that the ocean is not warmed by the sun but by the burning of fossil fuels.
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Wait.. Climate Feedback *deducts* points for being ‘Derogatory’?
I thought ‘Derogatory’ was One of the Key Characteristics that Sets Legitimate Science Apart From Denial.
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“So is this how Climate Feedback get their impressive looking ‘fact-checking’ logo/accreditation?”
Looks like they got it by signing a petition. All it seems to aver is that they’re Signators to something or other. I reckon I could hack together a more credible, legitimate and reputable-looking logo in half an hour with Photoshop. In fact I think I shall. The coveted jpg will then be awarded only to those organs, outlets and mouthpieces that suck and slurp up to me crawlingly enough.
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Alan Kendall says: 12 Jun 17 at 5:10 am
“Will, are your beliefs 1 and 3 really compatible? Or is Kitten Shadow a model cat?”
Why should my beliefs, or those of any other ever be ‘compatable’? Kitten Shadow has sharp claws an never lets me forget! She greets me with only one of two expressions of intent. One is “it is now permissible for you to pet us”, so ‘get on with it’, the other is “wars my food”?
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In any fair evaluation of a piece of writing it is essential to properly judge both sides of an argument. Thus Delingpole’s title should IMO be given more negative criticism than it has been. “Global Warming’ Is a Myth, Say 58 Scientific Papers in 2017” is not substantiated by the contents of the original review. It acts as a deliberate provocation to the authors of the papers reviewed. It is a hostage to fortune, something those authors could have legitimately attacked. Perhaps Delingpole was banking upon those authors overstepping the mark and taking umbrage to the way their work was used. Similar critical overreaction by some scientists occurred after transmission of Martin Durkin’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle”
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Isn’t it sad that even authors of papers which obviously show natural variation to be significant, have to kowtow to the warming creed on being contacted (challenged / threatened) by Climate Feedback. Congratulations on an excellent take down, Jaime Jessop. It is also good that the compilation work of Kenneth Richard at Notrickszone is being highlighted by Delingpole, yourself, and inadvertently, by Climate Feedback.
To put natural variation in context, all agree that we have had glacial and interglacial periods over the last million years and more. Oxygen isotope studies show a variation of around 10 deg C glacial to interglacial, possibly reaching 15 Deg C in continental interiors, dropping to 5 – 7 Deg C in the sub-tropics and possibly 5 Deg in the tropics. Yet the 0.8 Deg C change from 1850 or so is considered beyond possible for climate models of natural variability. This, despite that change being an order of magnitude less than a glacial / interglacial variation.
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If a skeptic of the evangelical position that the bible is literally written by God and is therefore inerrant were to write an article pointing out the many holes in that position, the theologians and preachers who make that claim would write a similar faux attack on the skeptic. Their arguments would be as circular and deceptive as the sad attempt to attack Delingpole.
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That said, Alan is spot on. Delingpole should have titled the article much more mildly. The style of the article should gave been kept as reasonable and mild as possible. The devastating truth is sufficient: the consensus apocalyptic position is anti-scientific and counter factual. We have the high ground. The alarmists are the receivers. Get them to do themselves in.
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Alan/Hunter,
“It acts as a deliberate provocation to the authors of the papers reviewed.”
“Delingpole should have titled the article much more mildly.”
Rightly or wrongly, I’m guessing that Dellers’ title was written to deliberately provoke – not the authors – but the climate establishment. That’s his style. That’s the way he does things.
Keith,
Thanks. It is rather sad that some authors feel they have to come out and affirm their membership of the Climate Consensus Club, even though the results of their research clearly undermine certain fundamental aspects of that consensus. I think there must be some concern there that, if they don’t, they might damage their future career prospects.
The consensus would like us to ignore the fact that climate has changed naturally by similar amounts in the past, especially to ignore evidence that it has probably changed by as much, or more, over a comparable period. But just for good measure, assuming that sceptics don’t ignore this inconvenient science, they tell us that, 1/GHGs can theoretically account for all or most of this warming, 2/Solar variability has had an insignificant effect (unjustified conclusion) and 3/natural internal variability (since 1950, when most of the increase in temp occurred) has (conveniently) tended to cancel itself out (i.e. roughly equal warming and cooling contributions).
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Jaime. I would argue similarly to you regarding his title, yet even this speaks volumes about the audience he intended to reach and provoke – the climaterati and especially the authors of some of the papers he considers; not the main readership. But to what end? A more thoughtful and considered approach might have been even more devastating. If those authors ignore him, they yield the floor, if they still object either they will continue to overreact (even more unreasonably) or will need to use reasoned argument and everyone wins. Boxing more clever should be the aim.
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Alan Kendall says: 13 Jun 17 at 1:52 pm
“Boxing more clever should be the aim”.
Allen,
Do you really think this issue is a sport, with judges deciding on the contest? How about some political contest? Have you considered WAR between Science and Religious Fantasy/belief? The only objective is to unilaterally destroy the enemy? The fence sitters will be first to take it in the gut!
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Will. At my age I am not an active participant so sit on the ringside cheering on my champions. When I was younger, odds in the climate ring were commonly most unfavourable and so “boxing clever” was appropriate. I don’t want to destroy my enemy, better to get them to switch sides out of conviction.
I have now finished with mangling and mixing metaphors.
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Alan Kendall says:
13 Jun 17 at 3:22 pm
“I don’t want to destroy my enemy, better to get them to switch sides out of conviction.”
Talk of mixed/mangled metaphors!! 🙂
http://www.jimcarlton.com/my_favorite_mixed_metaphors.htm
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AK, I know what you mean but I’ve lost faith in what might cause them to make such a sensible move if they haven’t done it yet. There are always priests who deny the church is corrupt, even as the evidence becomes obvious.
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Sadly science and the church have both lost huge credibility through deliberate choices of those who should have known better.
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hunter says: 13 Jun 17 at 9:36 pm
“Sadly science and the church have both lost huge credibility through deliberate choices of those who should have known better.”
Can you please identify which is which? In my view the WAR between Science and Religious Fantasy/belief, science is all that practice the scientific method with utmost personal integrity. The religious fantasy\belief seems to be limited to government funded climatology or atmospheric physics, which is “meteorology in a straight-jacket furnished by eco-loons, with no science whatsoever! The luke-warmers\fence-sitters have the beer and pretzel concession. Lets see how that turns out for the local concessionaires!
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Tiny. You are too pessimistic. The majority of those with a scientific outlook who support the so-called consensus position do so with no great conviction or no great knowledge. Most I think are part of the consensus because they want a quiet life or because they are followers – they do not wish to counter authority (for various reasons). This support is potentially soft, and under the right circumstances easily shifted. When confronted by people like Will, who wish to destroy their positions, they adopt defensive positions. So don’t despair, regain your faith.
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Will. Science and Religion are not always opposed. I have met many who combine both, even a few cases where the religion is fundamentalist. I once spent an unpleasant time sitting on a bus next to a Mormon palaeontologist (we both worked for the same oil company). He was able to reconcile his beliefs and knowledge by adopting the view that God had placed fossils in strata when he created the Earth, so he was able to use them to correlate the rocks.
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The emperors have no clothes. The key point of the original article by Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone is exactly what Benoit Rittaud says in the interview transcribed on the previous thread:
“When you look at the data you realise that the climate is not changing in any extraordinary way.”
No amount of rhetorical blather about “grossly misinterprets” or “logically flawed” or “taken out of context” can deal with this crucial point which is precisely what the graphs shown in the papers confirm.
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There’ s growing kickback against the post truth era of climate alarmism and the destructive influence alarmist policies are having upon the economy and the environment. Judith Curry is mentioned in a Spectator article titled ‘It Just Ain’t So’.
“Curry has urged greater attention to the uncertainties of scientific research into global warming (aka climate change). ‘The current focus on CO2 emissions reductions risks having a massively expensive global solution that is more damaging to societies than the problem of climate change,’ she says.”
“She argues that the IPCC ‘oversimplifies the characterisation of uncertainty by substituting “expert judgment” for a thorough understanding of uncertainty. They look at “evidence for” and “evidence against” (but somehow neglect a lot of the “evidence against”), and completely neglect to acknowledge ignorance. The bottom line is that the climate system is too complex with myriad uncertainties for simple reductionist approaches to understanding and managing uncertainty to be useful.’”
“As Dr Curry points out, there is a profound lack of certainty about global warming science. It is somewhat ironic, then, that An Inconvenient Truth includes Mark Twain’s quip: ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’”
Sage Journal has an article entitled ‘Environmental Reporting in a Post Truth World’. Not open access unfortunately. From the Abstract:
“Sea levels too have not been obeying the ‘grand transnational narrative’ of catastrophic global warming . . . .
The 2015–2016 El-Niño, a natural phenomenon, drove sea levels around Indonesia to low levels such that coral reefs were bleaching. The echo chamber of news repeatedly fails to report such phenomena and yet many studies continue to contradict mainstream news discourse. . . . . .
Observational scientific analyses and their data sets continue to disagree with much of climate science modelling, and are beginning to suggest that some natural phenomena, which cause variability, may never be identified.”
Genuine climate science should be charged with the task of identifying and quantifying those natural phenomena.
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There is a kick back but climate scepticism isn’t seen as the plucky under dog trying to alert the public. Industry and energy are always the bad guys in revolution land. People are rejecting the climate dogma but mostly by pretending it’s not there.
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Advantages of green energy:
1. Alters the rotation of the earth in a detrimental and irreparable way
2. Effectively and indiscriminately kills off billions of birds annually with no end but extinction in sight
3. Deprives developing countries of the means to use techonology they already have to compete
4. Chooses starvation for millions over feeding the earth’s population without the planting of one more seed
5. Vilifies one of the two most beneficial and important gases in the atmosphere to life to falsely support a debunked AGW theory while promoting world government and the enslavement of mankind as inescapable sacrifices we must make
6. Is horribly expensive as a form of energy production, it can only compete with fossil fuels if the comparison disregards completely that fossil fuels do not have to rebuild it’s worldwide infrastructure and utilizing machinery, it only looks equivalent if both start from scratch
7. Requires across the board rebuilding of small machines to utilize environmentally toxic batteries at great expense to use in any way, shape or form, something no nation on earth can come close to affording
8. It’s by products are toxic and difficult to dispose of, like amazingly expensive, short-lived batteries, instead of the by-products of fossil fuel energy, which are a greener planet with more CO2, more CO2 manufactured building materials, like wood, easier agricultural methods with more plentiful crops…
I’m sure there are disadvantages, but I can’t think of any…
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TinyCO2 says: 14 Jun 17 at 8:38 pm
“People are rejecting the climate dogma but mostly by pretending it’s not there.”
Certainly true here at CS. Fence sitters think you can convert the dogmatists and their non-science, ‘rule the world’! They will not change! They must be destroyed, stomped to a small grease spot, then paved over!
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Will. It sounds very much as if you want to start a pogrom and would incite people to do harm. Climate worriers are people too. They have the right to their opinions and to influence others, just as you are doing.
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Perhaps a skeptic group should sign up for this impressive looking registration?
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