Crrraazzzy Climate Crock

We’re having a rotten wet and cold summer locally. I had to lift my garlic early to stop it rotting in the ground. In the UK there are huge floods – the wettest drought they have ever had! In America, they are burning up, breaking all time heat records. The U.S. government declared more than 1,000 counties in 26 states drought disasters on Thursday.

Here below is another in the Climate Crock of the Week series that I occasionally feature here. Peter Sinclair does many more “Crocks” but, to be honest, he has now convincingly debunked just about every argument and piece of misdirection that the sceptic/denialists have ever come out with so I just feature the more noteworthy and newsworthy ones these days.

This video is called  “Welcome to the Rest of Our Lives”. It showcases this year’s extreme out-of-the-ordinary weather events in the USA.  Final proof that the very latest extreme weather events are the climate changing up a gear can only be finally shown statistically to be happening after 20-30 more years data, although people’s common sense must be beginning to let them know what their future is likely to be.

What we are seeing are already statistically unusual/unprecedented events full stop. If people didn’t believe the previous clear statistical proof that the planet has been warming, owing to the misdirecting efforts of the “sceptic” deceivers and misleaders, perhaps they’ll start to take notice when their homes are burnt or swept away in floods and food prices start to shoot up. The US has got such a severe drought now that there is likely to be an extreme failure of the corn (maize) harvest.

Was that all just climate alarmism? I think not. The weasel word “alarmism” suggests there is no real problem – that it’s just those doomsayers crying wolf again. Move along, there's nothing to see here. The actual situation we are in is very alarming. The wolf really is at the gate. Bear in mind that it is believed that there is around a thirty year lag, from any increase in greenhouse gases, before the planet responds fully by reaching its new equilibrium temperature (just taking the “fast feedbacks” into account let alone the long term slow ones…). If we stopped using all fossil fuels tomorrow morning, things will continue to get worse for at least thirty years, if the science is right. If there are positive feedbacks and tipping points that are stronger or closer than anticipated, things might not stop getting worse for a very long time.

There are those who say that people won’t respond to such dire predictions – that somehow they will turn a blind eye to the threat because they don’t like the idea of anything shaking their "glass half full" ideology. Well what WILL get through to these crazy arrogant irresponsible people? Does their wishful thinking based on ignorance of reality give them the right to vote to expose the rest of us to whatever might happen? That would be democracy gone mad and yet we still have the apparently mindless mainstream media spreading the B.S. of the denialists in a misguided attempt to regurgitate what they were taught at journalism college – that they must always show “balance”. Journalistic balance is based on the clearly fallacious idea that there are always two sides to every story;  the media present the two sides in the climate wars as if they were of equal value and give them equal prominence. Truth and science trumps lies, stupidity, deceit and ignorance and it’s about time the media woke up to their true responsibilities. Start investigating the truth and report on it. Stop taking the money until you do your jobs right!



This is a companion video about sea level rise

BEST Climate Crock of the week

One of the biggest sources of climate change misinformation on the web, deceptively disguised as “scepticism”, is Wattsupwiththat, run by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts. Watts is the person on the Internet most responsible for viciously smearing scientists and spreading disinformation on global warming, particularly disinformation on the surface temperature record. He gets huge numbers of people reading it. For some years he has been promoting the idea that the apparent rise in global temperature has a lot to do with poor siting of the thermometers used to measure temperature changes and he organised a lot of volunteers to photograph and criticise the placement of thermometers because they were located near to tarmac, concrete, air conditioners etc. His theory is that the recorded rise in global temperatures is more down to urban thermometers getting hotter due to hot air from the tarmac etc. boosting the measurements rather than the planet heating up. Like many, indeed most, of the denialist arguments one sees, it sounds quite plausible –  some of the stupid, ignorant or mendacious types who come up with the propaganda know how easy it is to lie to the public – others do the lying accidentally, because their poor judgement leads them to deceive themselves.

The real science of course went Duhhh!! The effects that Watts and his minions have been ruthlessly claiming are a big flaw in global warming science have, of course, always been known about and the science has always adjusted the raw data to take account of this. If Watts acknowledged this at all, he would then lead his readers to think that these legitimate, necessary adjustments were data fudging! How can science win against someone using paranoid arguments like that? The tragedy is that too many of the gullible public lap up this crap, as one can clearly see if one reads the comment sections of online TV or newspaper websites.

Over the last few months there has been a tremendous excitement in the Wattsup end of the climate science denialism blogosphere because one of the few scientists  they listen(ed) to - Dr Richard Muller - announced that he was going to run a huge investigation into the temperature records. On his team was Professor Judith Curry – another darling of the deniers who writes a sort-of (her stated positions are very often rather muddled) sceptical blog, Climate etc. The research was even backed by, amongst others, the infamous Koch Foundation which bankrolls a fair bit of the denialist infrastructure. They were expecting this “unbiased” study to overturn the current scientific view on how much we are warming. Back in March, Anthony Watts even wrote (very unwisely, as it turned out…)

“And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise”

Well the results are in. The climate scientists were right all along and the denialists were full of ****. Is Anthony Watts accepting his Nemesis with good grace and acknowledging that his "big idea" was disastrously wrong? Sadly, no. Those who use paranoid thinking can always wriggle out somehow and Watts and his ilk are wriggling like champion eels in a world title wriggling competition.

Here’s a couple of media excerpts:

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post: “For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there. The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight”.

“Global warming is real,” Muller  wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal.

“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”

Here’s Pete Sinclair’s climate crock – Bad, Badder, BEST – that sticks the knife in to finally show up Watts as the weasel that he is.

Some like it hot – not! Climate Crock of the Week

Another masterpiece from Pete Sinclair. In it he contrasts the views and rhetoric of the usual suspects such as Rush Limbaugh, Lord Monckton, Alex Jones and Joe Bastardi, who misrepresent the truth, with actual events in the real world. He also shows just how long science has been warning the public about the dangers of altering the atmosphere  - at least 55 years. Now that the pigeons are coming home to roost climatically, and eventually climactically, it’s about time for the “we told you so”s to start. As an illustration of just how insane and incorrigible some people are, the propaganda blitz from the denialist pundits is still in top gear.

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

 

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.

Double Crock of the week. Truth, lies and the Oregon petition and warnings about global warming go further back than many think

The famous “Oregon petition” of 32,000 so called scientists is roundly debunked.

 

 

This “Climate Crock” below resurrects an old warning from 1956 (54 years ago!!). This is an old science program recording, featured in the video. It portrays a few bits of the science in  rather misleading way but it is mostly correct by today’s knowledge – mainly the bit about water vapour is a bit shaky.

I reproduce Pete Sinclair’s introduction:

“Many climate deniers still seem to think global warming was invented by Al Gore, in 2006.  As this recently uncovered recording from 1956 shows, the outlines of climate change science have been clear for many decades.

I showed this to my 25 year old son, who happened to be home from school. He watched in silence, but I knew what he was going to say. ”It makes me angry. They’ve known about this for all these years.” I don’t have a good answer for him. I hope I have an answer for his children.”

 

Climate crock time

Plants need CO2 to grow. Therefore, more CO2 must be good? Not necessarily. Very poor logic.
If you're a denialist, with limited morals or knowledge or thinking skills, spreading the idea that CO2 is "plant food", to discourage vital attempts to limit the overloading of our atmosphere with it, is one of those sound bite arguments that sound so plausible to the unwary. Like many generalisations, sooner or later it runs afoul of the real world. Here below is Pete Sinclair's "Climate Crock of the week". It features one of the most prominent of the denialists, "Lord" Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A very articulate and highly dangerous propagandist - allegedly (litigious, too). The material and "arguments" in his presentations have been repeatedly torn apart, yet he still keeps on presenting them to new cannon fodder. What should we make of someone like that?

The "CO2 is plant food" denialist argument basically ignores that one can have too much of a good thing. Rather as 2500 calories a day intake of food is good, but 10,000 a day will soon lead to big health problems. Come to think of it, Monckton’s brand of urbane poison seems to resonate very well with a lot of Americans who are no strangers to Supersize portions whether of food, oil, rapacious, “too big to fail”, international finance or whatever.

 
Extra CO2 can, in certain circumstances, increase crop yields but it depends on the other things that plants need to grow such as water, fertilising nutrients, temperature etc being optimised at the same time. If we get increased drought and floods alternately drying and saturating land then crop yields are likely to fall, not rise, due to increased atmospheric CO2. Yet denialists keep promoting this piece of misdirection regardless of the truth.

Climate Crock of the “Week” X 2

It’s been a while since I posted a “Climate crock” so here’s a BOGOF double. Most will be familar with the denialist arguments that take cherry picked graphs and time periods to “prove” that we are in cooling trends, that polar ice is growing etc. Greenman3610 gleefully cuts and pastes to show up the sheer idiocy of these dangerous “challenged” clowns




And here’s part 2 which concludes with a stunning display of the mad Goebbel’esque lies, deceit and garbage put about by American right wing talk radio/media pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and  Alex Jones. Did you think McCarthyism was just something that happened in the 50’s?

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 of the week vs Climategate

Somewhat more restrained in tone, Peter Sinclair’s latest Climate Crock video socks it to sniggering denialist “Climategate” idiots by comparing them to Beavis and Butthead. Now, I consider this very unfair to B&B because they were only ever going to affect a few people around them with their moronic, uber-selfish outlook, but climate denialists, if any more people give then houseroom, could do for the whole planet and all the people – no contest really is it? Denialists are WAAAY worse than Beavis and Butthead!

 

Climategate almost meets Crock of the week

Here's a masterfully sarcastic takedown by Potholer54 of the idiotically deceitful mania of the PR blitz currently being mounted by denialists, over the Climategate hacked emails. It clearly shows that these obstructive characters will say anything, or distort anything, to bolster their irrational blinkered views.

They are not "sceptics" as they like to portray themselves - sceptics look at all sides of the evidence and draw a balanced conclusion. They are deniers, plain and simple - they deny science - they deny evidence - they embrace and regurgitate fallacious logic and will only accept anything if it can be twisted to support the conclusion that they want to come to! Anything else gets ignored. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, if these astonishingly irresponsible types get their way, they will eventually be guilty of the deaths of countless millions. They hate being called deniers because they think they are being compared with Holocaust deniers - they are not - they are being compared with the type of person one may see on the Jeremy Kyle show who is in denial about their drinking or their partner's infidelity etc - a psychological state of avoiding confronting reality. However, come to think of it, climate science denial could end up killing more people than Adolf ever did...

Moments of genesis of more denier garbage pinpointed on Climate Crock

The birth of much of the climate change denial myth and misrepresentation, the straw man arguments and general dangerous silliness, is not always clear but Pete Sinclair's latest "Climate Crock of the Week" (see below or click here for Youtube link) skewers a few of the exact moments when US media talking heads in the denial camp picked up on a perfectly rational and objective scientific explanation and severely misquoted, twisted, changed and added to and subtracted from it (AKA they lied through their teeth - either that or they are breathtakingly stupid and/or cannot comprehend English).

A significant climate scientist was explaining (only one month ago) that global average temperature cannot be expected to go up smoothly in a straight line because that’s just not the way that things work. This rather obvious fact was seized upon and perverted by the US pundits who claimed it  meant exactly what they wanted it to in the same way as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass – “when I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

They tried to make out that this major climate scientist was having second thoughts about global warming but nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, just about everything that the deniers say generally couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a sad fact that over 40% of the US public have fallen victim to at least some of their propaganda. When Voltaire said he would defend to the death people’s right to say stuff he disagreed with, I don’t think in his wildest dreams that he was expecting poisonous stuff like this to crop up… perhaps, faced with it, he would have retracted his view.

This new lying piece of propaganda will now go out into the "denialosphere" of websites and blogs and will get endlessly brought up by their gullible followers, literally for years afterwards! They will in turn probably fine tune the wrongness to suit themselves as they pass it on in a giant Chinese whisper.

Wattsup demolished by Climate Crock of the Week

Wattsupwiththat.com is a major meeting place for climate deniers. Click here for Watts' blog. It superficially appears to be a scientific blog but its main raison d’etre is that the author, one Anthony Watts, runs a campaign to show that measured global warming is false because many of the USA’s temperature monitoring stations on land (that are some of those used to measure global temperature trends) are placed in poor locations or have had the temperatures they record affected by subsequent development near them.

The factors that Watts and his team of volunteer sleuths look for are areas of hot tarmac, sites near air conditioning outlets, concrete areas nearby, new commercial development, climate scientists standing nearby aiming hair dryers at the thermometers (Ok, I made that last one up!).

To be fair, there are many poorly sited weather stations that are affected by the factors that Watts trumpets triumphantly but, like so many of the straw man arguments used by climate science deniers (click here for a definition of this well known logical fallacy propaganda technique) to insinuate apparent errors in climate science, they have virtually no effect on the measured global temperature trend, which is still upwards. A difference which makes no difference is no difference.

Firstly, this “station siting problem” effect is known about by climate science and already allowed for in the analysis, so claiming it is still a problem, discovered by Watts’ fearless denier vigilantes, in order to fool the denialist suckers, is a classic straw man. Secondly, climate science does not rely on only one method of measuring global temperatures. They use balloon measurements and satellite measurements too. Also, they take into account many other less direct measurements, such as ocean temperatures etc.

EDIT: ANTHONY WATTS HAS PUT IN A SABOTAGING COPYRIGHT CLAIM TO YOUTUBE AND THEY HAVE REMOVED THE VIDEO (HOPEFULLY TEMPORARILY)

SECOND EDIT: YOUTUBE THREW OUT WATTS' COMPLAINT- THE VIDEO IS BACK

This climate denial crock of the week video devastatingly demolishes Watts’ position by showing that the temperature trend measured by the 70 odd (out of 1200’ish) stations that Watts admits are in “good” locations matches almost identically the trend from the much larger number of stations spotlighted by Wattsupwiththat, and his team of sleuths, as being in “bad” locations. If his straw man theory had any merit there would have been a marked difference in the two graphs from the two records of “good” versus “bad”. Game over Mr Watts!

P.S. The American neocon “think-tank” lobbyist organisation Heartland, as is very often the case, has a paw in this denier garbage. Click here for their website

Sex, Lies and Videotape (ok - no sex - sorry)

One of the most popular pieces of "evidence" promoted by people who jump though mind-game hoops not to believe that mankind can be messing up the climate (like a certain Jersey Senator) is "The Great Global Warming Swindle" - a so-called documentary that was made for Channel 4. The DVD of this programme is still sold, and promoted, on many climate change denier websites and this is perhaps the biggest clue that deniers are most probably lying when they claim to be "sceptics" - or to be giving balance to the arguments - or that they claim to believe it is sensible to wait until the final scientific verdict is in (at some indeterminate time in the future).

Deniers must know the truth about what the "Swindle" film really is by now because they have been told a thousand times already that it is full of deliberate lies and crafted deception. The most obvious ones were actually edited out of subsequent showings of the film because they were just too blatantly deceitful! Scientists in it have complained vociferously that their interviews were deliberately edited to make them appear to say exactly the opposite of what they really did say. This sort of black propaganda does not happen by accident. And yet it continues to be promoted as some sort of balanced, reasonable counter-argument to the overwhelmingly accepted scientific position (that climate change is real; it’s happening now; that we are mostly responsible and it ain’t going to be pretty) by people who keep trying to pass themselves off as the voice of reason.

These denier types are in reality like the mythological Greek Sirens, who lured sailors onto the rocks with the beauty of their voices. Deniers are trying to lure the whole planet and all the people on it onto the climate change rocks if people give their pernicious lies and distortions any credence. Are they mad? Are they bad? They certainly are dangerous to know!

The latest “crock of the week” video ends up with Mr Sinclair pointing out that the creators of this diabolical propaganda appear to rely upon the fact that this apparently attractive package can circulate for years, fooling a fresh bunch of naive suckers every day, because "on the Internet nobody knows you're a fraud”. This is because too often “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” (The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel). People googling around who want to have their biases confirmed will find this sort of garbage programme and they won’t bother to look into whether it is a credible source or not because it appears to be “scientific”.

It's Climate Crock time again

Climate denialists, when they're in full flood trying to mislead people, often claim that CO2 is a plant food and they encourage their gullible audience to join up what seem like the common-sense dots like this - if CO2 is a plant food then more of it will act like fertiliser and we'll get more crops and bigger trees which by themselves will suck up any excess. No problem - stupid climate scientists!

Of course, like some of the most effective, twisted propaganda, there is a fair amount of truth behind this claim - increased CO2 does indeed increase crop yield but only if the other nutrients and growing conditions are suitably balanced - if they are not, then increased CO2 is bad for plant growth. In the controlled conditions of a greenhouse, it can increase yields but, on the contrary, in the uncontrolled outside world the climate changes that increased CO2 will, and are, causing will alter growing conditions so much that global food supplies are highly likely to be very compromised.

Furthermore, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that increased acidification of sea water due to increasing levels of CO2, which is happening now, will not prove to be a major problem for plankton and thereby the entire ocean food chain, which may end up going for a Burton... Here's a link to an article from the Telegraph last week, headlined

CO2 levels may cause underwater catastrophe

Just imagine - the famous "seafood diet" joke - if I see food, I eat it - may end up meaning little in a few decades when people ask "what was sea food, Daddy?"...

Here's the latest Climate Crock of the Week video demolishing the propaganda about CO2 as plant food.

Climate Crock of the Week - party like it's 1998

Here is the weekly (almost) dose of "climate crock" which takes on a denier favourite - that global warming has stopped and that we are now cooling.