Peter Rhodes - the sequel

I got a prompt response from my email to Peter Rhodes – see the previous post – Peter Rhodes column in the JEP.

Here it is in its entirety:

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention

PR”

If one was naive, one might imagine that this was a thank-you-I-now-realise-I-was-wrong message. Others might see a brush off.

Peter Rhodes, according to one of his email addresses (p.rhodes@expressandstar.co.uk) appears to actually have a connection with the Express and Star newspapers which is not too surprising as they have a bit of a history of publishing wildly misleading “sceptical” climate science articles, frequently using massively debunked denialist rhetoric in those articles to push the newspaper’s political line. I used to like the Express when I was growing up – it was our family newspaper – now I don’t.

Peter Rhodes column in the JEP

Peter Rhodes writes a column published in the JEP. The  persona we see is that of a grizzled old cynical hack who has seen everything, got the T- shirt and is sceptical of it. He is a borderline climate change denialist as he sometimes writes scoffing about  the dangers. He eventually got on my nerves so I just fired off this response to his latest assault on the clever men of science - who actually know what they are talking about.

_______________________________________________________________

Dear Mr. Rhodes,

                       My attention has been drawn to one of your JEP columns, published on Thursday 29th December.

You wrote:

"Over the yule period, some parts of the United Kingdom were 30° C warmer than they were this time last year. Tell me again. Why exactly will an average rise of 2° C be a global catastrophe?"

Well, with a nod to Ronald Searle, as any fule kno, averages can be deceptive. Indeed, they are often used to deceive. Perhaps a reductio ad absurdum would illustrate this?

For example, the average annual temperature in the South of England is around 11 degees C. Imagine though if one day there was an extreme solar flare which pushed the temperature up for one day only to 100 C - boiling point. Hot enough to cook eggs on the pavement, and everything else, everywhere in Britain, including us.

The change in average temperature for the year? 0.24 degrees C. 11 deg C -> 11.24 deg C. By your "logic" nothing bad could have happened and there would be nothing to worry about.

The average rise of 2 degrees C by 2050 is a globally averaged figure. It does not mean that winters will be 2 deg warmer than normal, similarly summers won't just be a bit warmer either. It will not be smooth gentle and consistent. The 2 degrees C figure actually relates to the increase in temperature that satellites would see for the whole Earth, if it was measured from sufficient distance to iron out all the variations over the surface.

The true danger of global warming is in the increased variation and severity of temperature swings outside normally expected levels. Take a look at this recent article

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Summary-of-Hansen-Nov-2011.html to see the horrendous probabilities, then remember also that the 2 degrees figure you quote does not stop in 2050 but will continue to increase for centuries, although not at the same rate - unless the methane clathrate "gun" is "fired", in which case it's sayonara civilisation and also to most species on Earth. Worth gambling with? Is there a dangerous bullet in the climate gun or a blank? Do you feel lucky, punk?

The IPCC indicate that during the 21st century the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 1.1 to 2.9 °C (2 to 5.2 °F) for their lowest emissions scenario and 2.4 to 6.4 °C (4.3 to 11.5 °F) for their highest, so the figure of 2 degrees you quote, and that, for the sake of the argument, I have used, is a gross simplification of the full risks we face.

Before you print any more "sceptical" climate related stuff, please reflect that we only have one Earth, that we are experimenting with the gaseous composition of its atmosphere in an unprecedented way and that we are unable to do "test tube" science to establish beyond all doubt what the outcome will be. The only test tube big enough is the Earth, unfortunately we are stuck in that test tube so we can't escape any consequences and we can't go back in time to try another path. Real life is not like a video game. We can only try to predict what might happen based on the best available knowledge and risk assessment and take action to avoid it. Predicting risks and avoiding them is actually one of the better uses of intelligence. Cheap scoffing is probably the opposite.

Nick Palmer

Media spokesman for J-CAN - Jersey Climate Action Network

Member of Planning and Environment's J.E.F. - Jersey Environment Forum

On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it

Blogspot - Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer
http://nickpalmer.blogspot.com

Denialism Tango and something else and SOMETHING ELSE

Not "Men at Work" these are another Australian band called "Men with Day Jobs", socking it to the pathological sceptics.

Having had a chuckle, set your computer to full screen view, crank up the volume and prepare to get emotional.

NO COMMENT

by Gioacchino Petronicce

 

 

 

And finally, from a time when video wasn’t flashy, comes Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot”. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the solar system (9 years after passing Saturn), was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space – 3.7 billion miles - at the request of Carl Sagan

Climate Crock versus Gerard B.

Sorry to keep harping on about local matters but it looks like Gerard Baudains will be standing for Deputy of St Clement again. Notwithstanding that he has got some good ideas in other areas, he unfortunately cannot see past his misguided views on climate change. Casting an eye over three of his recent letters to the JEP, he warmly promotes the hackneyed old denialist argument that, in the ice core records of past atmospheric concentrations, CO2 is clearly seen to increase only (I’m simplifying reality a bit here) after the temperature goes up which he, and legions of others who think too simplistically, claim is evidence that CO2 cannot therefore cause warming.

Over to the latest Climate Crock of the Week from Peter Sinclair. I like the fact that Peter is using the analogy of magic tricks to illustrate how the deniers use simple trickery and fallacious logic to fool people.

My favourite lines are in the bit where Peter ruthlessly and sardonically destroys the “Temperature leads CO2” meme which featured in “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. That execrable piece of deceit used a graph showing the 800 year lag of CO2 behind historical temperature rises:

“those who’ve watched this series for a while know that I always like to go to the source of any claim that climate deniers make – in this case a study by Nicolas Caillon, published in Science… which, of course, we’ll actually read.”

The "Temp Leads Carbon" Crock: Updated

 

Ooh Missus! Rap science - more swearing on Nick’s blog!

Before you all get shocked by the robust rap language in the video that this post is about (the second one below), you ought to first watch the LHC rap to get broken in gently to the sight of real scientists speaking out. In 2008, Kate McAlpine (A.K.A Alpinekat) released the Large Hadron Rap about the LHC at Cern, Switzerland. She is a science communicator (click for her website). Her rap music inspired video went viral and has had at least 6 million views so far.

Large Hadron Rap

 

Real climate scientists are a bit sick of the numbers of people in the media who talk disparagingly about climate science as if their views were worth anything (mostly, they’re not…). This video is a fun but serious rap by real working climate scientists from Australia. Here’s a link to an article about the making of the rap video

Be warned, the following video contains the “M-F bomb” - words that are often found in rap music - but get past that (or, if you’re too delicate, I’ve included the “clean” version afterwards – which seems a bit silly by comparison) and this is a shrewd comment on the huge numbers of people expressing opinions about subjects they don’t know enough about – such as those who pick up a few deceptive ideas from climate change denialist propaganda and think their “new understanding” gives their fond beliefs the edge over peer reviewed science. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. This particular manifestation of human stupidity just might be the death of many of us and untold future generations before the climate settles down again. Alarmism (I hear the deniers cry)? Why not? The potential of climate change is actually terrifying and it should scare people. Remember those multiple AGU (American Geophysical Union) delegates who have already made survival retreat plans? If you read that and don’t get alarmed, you’ve got more than one screw loose… Click for link to post.

The problem is the Dunning-Krugers then go on with such confidence in their own judgement that they pontificate about their ridiculously (and dangerously) warped understanding as if they had discovered some smoking gun holes in the science that the whole of science had somehow missed and this implausible idea seems to be unfortunately received rather well by too many people. No doubt some would like the smartest scientists to fall flat on their faces but, realistically, that’s not going to happen.

It’s all rather like those early stage X-Factor contestants who tell Simon Cowell that he’s a fool not to recognise their fantastic talent. This widespread misplaced confidence (A.K.A. unjustified arrogance) seems to be a bit of an epidemic these days. Unfortunately, most of these people can vote which is why the deceitful forces of denialism are trying so hard to spread their disinformation.

Favourite lines?

“Droppin’ facts all over this wax, while bitches are crying ‘bout a carbon tax”

“Denialists deny this in your dreams, coz climate change means greater extremes”

I'm a Climate Scientist (HUNGRY BEAST)

 

I'm A Climate Scientist - Extended Version - (CLEAN)

 

Climate Denial Crock of the Week

It's been a while since I posted a climate crock video. This one is about the way the denialists deliberately misquoted the so called Climategate emails and misrepresented the meaning of the words to suggest corrupt practices by the scientists involved. The denialists lied, misrepresented and distorted. Repeatedly. The video goes on to investigate Dr Richard Muller, who was the subject of the following quote taken from my reply on behalf of J-CAN to Gerard Baudains’ last JEP letter, which was a piece of ludicrous fantasy, mixed up thinking and deceptive assertions. I simply don’t understand how someone can be so wrong, so confidently.

(click for link to post in which the letters – Baudains’ and mine - were quoted)

“Perhaps the timing of his letter (Friday 1^st April) is explicable because of the high hopes of the “sceptics” for the preliminary findings, announced the previous day, of a large new study (B.E.S.T) from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the integrity of global temperature measurements which was led by a scientist who has been critical of aspects of the mainstream position in the past.”

Dr Muller, up until very recently, was a "darling of the denialists" because he was preparing a report into the temperature records that such luminaries of the denialosphere as Anthony Watts, who runs the execrable Wattsupwiththat anti-science site, were expecting to confirm their ridiculous and paranoid anti-science B.S. Muller's report in fact confirmed that the temperature records used by global warming scientists were valid and that Anthony Watts "big thing" that he based his whole website on - which is that the temperature records must be unreliable because some of the readings were taken near heat sources such as hot tarmac and air conditioner outlets - was wrong. Watts' belief, that poorly sited readings were significant evidence against the demonstrated warming that mainstream science accepts, was completely wrong. Muller is also caught on camera (more than once), when he was playing to receptive audiences, repeating the same very inaccurate propagandised distortion and lies, as to what was actually in the Climategate emails, as was promulgated by the denialosphere. Dr Muller (PhD) is far from being stupid so what should we think of his integrity for spreading deceit?

Forest Gump said “stupid is as stupid does”.  Not all denialists are thick or evil but it’s very hard to understand how those who are apparently intelligent people can be so confused about reality. Perhaps there is something in the idea that some people can be negatively intelligent whereby they use their intellectual abilities to fool themselves and only look at information that confirms their prejudices.

Evil works behind the scenes

In the previous post, which was about a classic piece of denialist propaganda, sent to the JEP by Gerard Baudains, Gerard’s letter insinuated that J-CAN (Jersey Climate Action Network) are dupes for

GB: “push(ing) a theory scientifically proven to be untrue” … and “surely they must fall into the category I call 'useful idiots'—ie, used by others to promote an agenda without realising they are being used.”

This was a bit Alice through the looking glass as the actual dupes being misled by powerful, deceptive forces are Mr Baudains and the rest of the legions of climate science denialists. Unfortunately they are über-confident that the whole thing is just a gigantic hoax invented so that scientists can get more research money, or it’s a Trojan horse to bring in a world government or, at the very least,  a means of scaring people so that taxes can be raised.

The certainty of denialist dupes is often unshakeable – their arguments can be, and frequently have been, shot to pieces until there is virtually nothing left and yet they carry on regardless as if nothing had happened. Seemingly unscathed in their own minds, like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Tis but a scratch

 

Frequently they will use the same destroyed arguments again at a later date proving one of several things: 1) they are incorrigible 2)  they do not understand that when their argument was destroyed, it STAYS destroyed or 3) (and this does not apply to the sincere but gullible majority) they know they are spreading untrue propaganda and don’t care because all they want to achieve is the swaying of voters’ minds to promote their own special self interests, whether those are financial, political or ideological.

The following couple of videos show the more sinister aspect of the corporate propaganda being created which masquerades as being the natural views of “grassroots” citizens groups. The videos contain extracts from, and commentary on, a documentary called Astroturf wars – how corporate America is faking a grassroots revolution. The first one shows someone from Americans for Prosperity (click link for their website). Click here for the Wiki article on AFP. The “teacher” is basically showing Tea Party activists how to spread propaganda. AFP was founded/funded by the infamous Koch brothers.

Training Tea Party Activists In Guerilla Internet Tactics - BUSTED!

In the past, when I have touched on these subjects, I have attracted denialist trolls - some articulate and literate, others much less so – who have demanded that I back myself up with documentary proof of well established facts. This is one of the main tactics of denialists, and modern propagandists generally – to spread doubt and uncertainty in the minds of those reading the exchanges. It all wastes a colossal amount of time because it is rather like being told to produce proof if one had made a claim such as “don’t run around on the crumbly cliff edge or you might fall over and die” – a statement which is so blindingly obvious that video proof, or accident statistics, are not necessary to shine a light on the basic truth.

Try mentioning that the Koch brothers fund denialist/sceptic organisations and fundamentalist wing nut think tanks and you will get some troll turn up demanding proof. Here is some proof. Koch himself confirming, in his own words, what he has been accused of doing, and his company has denied he ever did. To be fair, they worded their denial in very slippery deceptive language so that they conveyed a certain meaning to the reader (to fool them) while actually stating something else.

Tea Party Astroturf Funders Caught On Tape

 

 

Dangerous people, dangerous times

The new “Climate crock of the week” shows the dangerous irrationality and ugly views that the denialosphere is now resorting to. As if lies and chicanery were not enough, have a look at Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Marc Morano in full flow (towards the end of the video). Also enjoy the Monty Python witch trial.  Remember that US Senator Inhofe has called for 17 top climate scientists to be prosecuted. Inhofe is shaping up very rapidly as a new Joseph McCarthy - infamous for witch hunt type trials in the fifties.

Here below is a more detailed look at another piece of misrepresentation by the denialosphere. They’ve been fond of claiming “it’s the sun, stupid” for ages because the idea is very plausible and misleading to the general public. A few months a move was made to change this to “it’s El Nino, stupid”. Uber-denier “scientist” Bob Carter was co-author of this (2009) paper which he and his fellows claim showed that the SOI (southern ocean oscillation index - El Nino etc) correlated very well with the variation in temperatures seen over periods of a few years. So far, so obvious so good. El Nino does have a big effect. However, by clever statistical manipulation, they had removed any temperature trends from the data used for their graphs (trends show any long term consistent warming or cooling) leaving only the variability, which then (unsurprisingly) correlated very well with the SOI. Where they went off the straight and narrow, and amazingly, the peer review process didn’t pick them up, was to go on to claim that:

According to one of its authors, Bob Carter, the paper found that the "close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions".

This is where they “jumped the shark” and where Carter ended up spouting the area of belief that he consistently does. The problem with the paper was the big fat “mistake” shown in this devastating criticism.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/peer-reviewed-response-to-McLean-El-Nino-paper.html

What the authors had done is similar to if you were examining the temperature of your house over a year and ignored the influence of spring, summer, autumn and winter on general temperatures by subtracting them from the household figures and only looked at temperature changes (variations) induced when you put the central heating on. Then they claimed that your house temperatures correlate very strongly with your central heating and there was “little room for any warming driven by” the influence of the seasons!

Climate Crock socks it to deniers - the scientific case for AGW condensed into 10 minutes

If you read the comments sections of any climate related website or blog you will see the most outrageous assertions from the denialist peanut gallery. Inadvertently demonstrating their own gullibility and irrationality and yes, I'll use the "S" word - STUPIDITY, these people just mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda which they have swallowed.  Perhaps the "smoking gun"  that most shows them up as the dangerous, suckered idiots that they are, is their frequently repeated cry to show them the science and the scientific papers that prove there is such a thing as global warming, usually ending with a phrase like "you can't because there is none LMFAO - it's all a conspiracy!!!" These mindless types have read this blatant lie on denialist websites and just parrot it because they want to believe it. How irresponsible is that?

They often hate being called deniers and usually describe themselves as sceptics or independent thinkers. The big lie here is that they do not understand what being a "sceptic" actually means. Clearly, they disbelieve anything the science says that they don't like the sound of yet they uncritically accept any old nonsense, lies or misdirection, as long as it sounds sort of "sciency", from the denialist movement, whether from the professional propagandists or their unwitting dupes and the hordes of willing amateurs who run blogs. Their idea of scepticism is nowhere near the true definition, which would look at all sides critically. It is blatant and obvious wishful thinking and closed mindedness combined with astonishing arrogance and inability to judge the credibility of those sources they fawn over so eagerly.

The video below is the latest in the "Climate Crock of the Week" series from Pete Sinclair that does exactly what the denialist hordes keep screaming for (without realising that they really don't actually want to hear it!). It lays out a very condensed version of the basic physics underlying climate science. None of this science is in dispute by any credible scientist or should be disputed by anybody else with their heads screwed on. Even those such as "darling-of-the-deniers" Richard Lindzen, frequently cited by deniers in support of their position, would not dispute it. The only way that deniers can wriggle out of this is by claiming that the whole scientific AGW case is a massive conspiracy going back over a hundred years. Many of them do! As I pointed out in a recent blog post, and Pete Sinclair does too in this video, any "conspiracy" must be so gigantic that even birds and animals and glaciers are in on it - here's a quote from my post from last month  "Global warming is a hoax"

"Tens of thousands of people have faked the scientific theories since the early 1800s, the actual measurements of reality, the historical records, the pre-historical records, the even further back than that records. This colossal hoax is so all pervasive that even animals, birds and insects are joining in by pretending to be affected by non-existent changes in ecosystems. God help us, the conspirators have even persuaded dumb ice sheets and permafrost to fake it for the cause. Nature really is a lying traitor and we should never trust her again!"

Enjoy ten minutes of concentrated anti B.S. Crash and burn, deniers...

Information just wants to be free - if it's treated right by the recipients

The denialosphere is wallowing in an ecstacy of misinforming at the moment. Ever since the hacked/stolen/leaked emails of so-called Climategate were "liberated" they have been endlessly and deliberately misinterpreted for propaganda purposes, whilst the unfortunate scientists involved have been ruthlessly traduced. A common insinuation that the propagandists make is that the scientists were refusing to share data because they had something to hide. Here's a link to a page on RealClimate which has links to more data, methodology, computer code etc than you could shake a stick at - freely available. Hopefully, the demanding screams from the denialosphere will STFU now moderate.
realclimate.org - data-sources - raw climate data

Most of the data that the denialosphere was harassing them for was already available in the public domain and what little wasn't was subject to confidentiality agreements that demanded permission be sought before it was released. The hundreds of FOIA requests that the U. of E. Anglia climate unit received were not entirely innocent requests for the data, simply to enable replication in a spirit of genuine scientific endeavour. They were crafted nuisance requests - like a "denial of service" hacker attack.

As mentioned before, one of McIntyre's little helpers involved in the massive "FOIA attack" was a senior local politician here in good ol' Jersey. The requests were to facilitate a no doubt inevitably biased attempt by such as Steve McIntyre and his merry minions to look for an angle to destroy the science. McIntyre has a bit of a record of attempting this sort of thing. He is a legitimate and talented statistician. He has made mistakes, as one would expect any analyst to do, but more significantly he tends to over-hype his assessment and presentation (and so, massively more so, do his followers) of the importance, or even relevance, of what he "discovers".

Meanwhile globally, we've had the warmest January on record and, so far, it looks like February is heading the same way...

Reductio ad Absurdum (or – pointing out the craziness)

The denialist movment has gone to new heights of absurdity and paranoid style thinking with their current propaganda blitz on Climategate, Africagate, AmazonGate, Toyota pedalgate (oops, sorry - that one isn’t down to them but is being blown up out of all proportion by the same type of journalists). Just as the problems Toyota is having with the pedals/brakes doesn’t mean that all the rest of the engineering in their cars – known as probably the most reliable cars in the world – is suspect, so too the various “gates” have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the sound physics and climatology underlying global warming science but the frankly mad insinuations that are being printed almost daily are confusing the public mightily – which, of course, is the whole point of the propaganda.

A nice “reductio ad absurdum” cartoon from Marc Roberts