Bishop Hill Political science
Jun 20, 2011 Climate: MWP One academic who is untroubled by yesterday's call for adherents to the AGW hypothesis to stop calling their opponents "deniers" is Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian academic who has a somewhat offensive piece in The Conversation, the chat site for university people.
At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second — all of which contributes to sea level rises – it is time to hold accountable those who invert common standards of science, decency, and ethics in pursuit of their agenda to delay action on climate change.
It's an interesting piece, covering a range of areas of interest to readers here, including the Hockey Stick (without mentioning McIntyre and McKitrick!), the travails of Prof Wegman, and the peer review of the Soon and Baliunas paper.
Reader Comments (41)
As he believes in Mann's Hockey Stick, we'll have to wait until Hell freezes over.
He was banging the same drum in The Grauniad last week. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jun/15/climate-change-skeptic-australia)
The Conversation is the latest effort to disseminate agit-prop under the guise of science in Australia, as the bed-wetters are becoming terrified at how public approval for their alarmist stance is going down faster than a shark shot full of s**t.
"At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second"
Pretty soon the vikings will be able to return and continue what they started!
The term denier is commonly used to make a distinction between the open minded approach that is the mark of honest scepticism and the practice of advocating a contrarian position to AGW theory without putting forward a coherent single explanation to observations. I suggest Lewandowsky is using denier in that vein.
Incidentally Richard Lindzen told the BBC he prefers the term denier.
Professor Lewandowsky says:
“Very occasionally a contrarian paper does appear in a peer-reviewed journal, which segments of the internet and the media immediately hail as evidence against global warming or its human causes, as if a single paper somehow nullifies thousands of previous scientific findings”.
I’m getting so fed up with pointing out, from the authoritative heights of my physics and chemistry A-levels, to Professors, Presidents of the Royal Society, etc, that they haven’t the foggiest idea about what science is.
Lewandowsky features frquently on Jo Nova's and Jennifer Marohasy's exxcellent Australian blogs and seems to be, from my reading of their comments, a fantasist and alarmist of the first order. His nasty rhetoric is a sure sign that he is clueless about evidential and observable phenomena and he passes on fairy stories such as 'rising seas swamping Sydney harbouside suburbs' as if they are going to happen next week. I would not assign the man any credibility whatsoever.
As Mark Lynas said "if the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’."
Indeed.
So Greenland is at risk of turning green? How dreadful.
Great posts on Lewandowsky's thread, Bish.
Re: Hengist McStone
How about..... natural variation with a soupçon of warming due to increased CO2.
It is up to those who espouse catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to prove their case.
The plain nastiness of many in the CAWG camp really amazes me. I cannot remember any past scientific disagreements, during my professional lifetime generating so much venom. For example, I am old enough to remember the intellectual battle of Big Bang versus Continuous Creation. Strong views were held on both sides and arguments were robust. But they were without the shear malice we are experiencing with this subject. Perhaps the difference is that 'real science' is more likely to be free of politics.
@ Peter
The nastiness is surely because it's politics, not science.
UK climate psyentists appear to be thickoes who got a few Ds and Es in their A Levels in the 1970s, and ended up at third-rate ratholes like UEA because they weren't intelligent enough to get places or jobs studying anything harder anywhere better.
There are perhaps one or two exceptions, in the form of brightish people who need to be the smartest person in the room and who therefore seek out rooms full of climate psyentists. But in general the above seems to be true. CAGW is a scare got up by the bottom half of the geography A Level class of 1975, cynically exploited by a bunch of ecofascist nutters who will only be happy when almost everyone is dead and whoever's left is poor. The thickoes get to feel clever for once, and the ecofascists get a new excuse to lecture and impoverish everyone else.
The west has always an elite that spent its time lecturing, hectoring and oppressing its own people and - especially - benighted brown foreigners about their moral bankrupty. In the sixteenth century we had the Catholic Church burning south Americans at the stake for being heathen, and in the twenty-first we have its natural successor in the form of the IPCC.
The comparison with organised religion has often been made, but one made less often is that despite Galileo's excellent work debunking its claims, the Catholic Church still exists - and in fact has more adherents now than it did then. Something of the kind can be expected with CAGW, I reckon. Like with those loony millenarian cults, the disaster will always be just about to happen.
As Matthew 26:11 almost says, Ye have the pisspoor always with you.
of interest this post featuring comments from a related post on the same site...
http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com/2011/06/ove-hoegh-guldberg-secrets-of-my.html
In other words, he doesn't know the difference between a linear trend and exponential growth.
9,000 tonnes of ice per second. Wow, is that the yearly average, or peak flow? or Bull?
Denier? Isn't that something to do with stockings and tights? Sexy!
I'm always a bit dubious about these sorts of claims (the 9,000 tonnes, I mean). Environmentalists constantly trot them out, an area the size of Wales is lost to deforstation every day, that sort of stuff. Usually hysterically exaggerated.
golf charley
Mostly cherries picked to scare - GRACE measurements suggest a loss of ice volume of about 195km3 per year, which by my back of an envelope calculation would be about 2/3rds of the volume stated. Also, it is worth noting that the estimated volume of the Greenland ice sheet is in the order of 2.85 million km3, so we are talking about 0.007% (or 70 parts per million) melt per year.
GC:
It's just a soundbite to scare the uninformed.
There are peer reviewed papers telling us that the Greenland ice sheet is now thinning but, in 1995, it was getting thicker at the rate of 23cm a year.
According to the laws of climate psyience:
1) Any value measured now can be projected forward in a linear fashion to any point in the future (usually 2050) UNLESS the value has the "wrong" sign - in which case natural variability is "masking the true signal"
2) It is worse than we thought.
Using rule 1 we can see that Greenland will be ice free in x/9000 seconds (where x is the amount of ice in Greenland.
Applying rule 1 to the figure measured in 1995 shows us that at times the true global warming signal will be masked by natural variation - but this is no time for complacency because, according to rule 2, it is worse than we thought.
About the 9000 tonnes/sec for Greenland ice loss...
this comes to 284 Gt/yr, which is the more commonly used unit, and is consistent with several estimates. However, there's also Wu et al. (2010), which concludes that the glacial isostatic adjustment (where have we seen that recently?) corrects this to 104 Gt/yr, well under half of Dr Lewandowsky's value.
But more importantly, such figures are nearly always trotted out without providing any context. The author points out the significance of the melt rate lies with the resultant sea level rise. Certainly tonnes per second is an impressive figure. Even Gt/yr is an impressive unit. But when ones does the math to put it in context, even at the cited 9 tonnes per second, it comes to around 0.8 mm/yr. [Wu et al.'s estimate yields about 0.3 mm/yr equivalent sea level rise due to Greenland melting.] Over time, true, that would add up -- Lewandowsky's figure converts to over 3 inches in a century!
Context, always remember context.
Geesh, in above post, "ones"->"one" & "9 tonnes"->"9000 tonnes". Sorry about that.
Nobody knows if Greenland is loosing or gaining ice.
Accepted estimates by the consensus are -44 ± 53 * 10^12 kg/year, so from positive to negative.
But that was before a recent revision by Ettema and others, GRL 36, 2009 which raised the surface mass balance to 63% higher than previously thought.
The actual ice loss per second is much more, between calving and runoff is about 17000 tonnes per second, or 8 nanometers of surface lowering.
"as if a single paper somehow nullifies thousands of previous scientific findings”.
If he believes the opposite, he needs to go back to school.
Assuming that this 9000 tonnes per second is true, what does it really amount to as a percentage of the ice in Greenland per year.
By my quick calculations, 35 cubic feet of ice weighs about a ton. (1000kg = 1m^3 of ice). The ice sheet in Greenland extends about 666000 sq miles and on average is about 1.25 miles thick.
9000 tonnes per second amounts to roughly 300 billion tonnes of ice per year. Which certainly sounds like a lot.
However, the weight of the ice of a square mile of Greenland ice is a little more than 5 billion tonnes!Therefore, 9000 tonnes per second amounts to roughly 60 square miles per year.
60 sq miles per year is of course roughly .01% of the Greenland ice cap or 1% per hundred years!!
Immediate panic does not seem to be called for!
Corrections to my back of the envelop calculations are, of course, welcome.
Justice4Rinka
Thank goodness I was top of my geography class in 1975 and got A's at 'A' level in the 1970s (just)!
Actually, I did spend most of my University career at a 'third rate rathole'. (Perhaps second. As was the other university.) I made compromises in my academic career for the others I was pursuing at the time - motor racing and being a gypsy, mostly.
But I get where you're going, generally.
None of these qualifications are anything like what they were. So now we have 'professors' tromping around who are as thick as a brick.
I lecture and-as the boy on the beach and the bike 30 years ago-I find that amusing.
Patagon:
that must be
Rule 3) The value of anything in climate psyience is directly proportional to the number of proponents.
Rule 4) It's worse than we thought
Not UEA though! Not that bad.
That's rather good!
Jun 20, 2011 at 10:13 AM Justice4Rinka
There is an incredible amount of Idiots in Australia. I lived there and can attest to it. I think its a problem with primary and secondary schools especially the public ones.
Justice4Rinka
"UK climate psyentists appear to be thickoes who got a few Ds and Es in their A Levels in the 1970s, and ended up at third-rate ratholes like UEA because they weren't intelligent enough to get places or jobs studying anything harder anywhere better. "
Being non-graduate (Services, in fact), I have quickly gained the impression reading these blogs that this was so, but, being "out-of-the-loop", was not inclined to air my opinions. Is this (generally) fact - do we have any evidence? Just trying to confirm my opinions.
Bear with me Adalberto, I'm a descendant of felons and ne'er do wells. And the old man was broke so I had to struggle through government (public) primary and secondary schools. I would have been much brighter if I'd gone to posh ones.
@ gixxer
When I was at school there were certain subjects thickoes did for A Level. Not all who did them were thickoes, but all thickoes did them - it was non-commutative. These subjects included geography, geology, politics, business studies, biology, and economics.
Geography aside, what all these had in common was that you'd never studied them as separate subjects, or at all, previous to your A-Level years. You started from scratch in the Lower Sixth, and you got to A Level in just over 18 months.
It stands to reason that the standard of such A Levels would be poor compared to other choices. You had spent 13 years doing maths, French, English, and History of some description, for example, so all those were based on 13 years of preparation and were potentially hard. Likewise Physics and Chemistry, where arguably the foundations stage was the maths you'd done thus far.
One did therefore get a handful of people who did Geology, Physics, and Chemistry, who went off to KCL or wherever and did bl00dy hard degrees in petrochemical geology and sedimentology. Mostly, though, what you got in the Geography Sixth Form was people who did Geography, Geology and Politics and got an E and two Ds. The worst grade was usually in Geography, exactly because after 10 years or whatever, you were expected to be able to answer some hard questions in that subject at least. Geology and Politics not so much, where you were being tested on what you'd picked up in about 18 months, and that was the point - the standard was so low that in 18 months even morons couldn't screw up so badly as to fail altogether.
DEE would, I suspect, would have been more than enough to get you into UAE in 1975 to do whatever course preceded their current climate science Tripos (arf). What they want today is BBB, B or better being a grade attained by about 55% of candidates.
This would suggest that you can be in the bottom half of the class, make it to the top of climate science 30 years later, and be hailed as a genius and an expert simply because you work in a field populated almost entirely by card-carrying suggestible Huxleian epsilon semi-morons.
Look at MBH98. It takes a special kind of stupid to mistake yourself for a qualified statistician, but M, B and H appear to be three such persons and not even that unusual in their error.
It is very instructive, really, that climate pysentists perpetually assert how complex their discipline is and how us proles can't possibly critique it - and then they start applying statistical techniques in which they themselves have neither understanding nor expertise, but they go ahead anyway.
They obviously assume that other people's disciplines are as piss-easy simple as their own, at the same time as they assert that actually theirs is jolly complicatedand how dare we have a view at all without their permission.
Tsuh.
@TerryS
'natural variation with a soupçon of warming due to increased CO2' isn't so different to what cAGW theory is saying though. If we agree that there is a small amount of warming due to increased CO2 and that CO2 has come from anthropogenic sources - then we agree that man's actions are altering the climate. Of the billions of people on the planet, for some this is going to be an adverse change wouldn't you agree?
Sitting in the dark and freezing to death because of a power supply that is almost entirely dependant on wind "power" will certainly be quite an adverse change for many.
Buffy Minton:
Is this Minton’s Law? I should like to cite this and to give appropriate credit.
Deadman:
Yes but it isn't peer reviewed yet and I'm thinking of adding the following:
5) It's worse than we thought.
My corollary to Minton’s Law:
a) all climatic change is attributable to climate change
b) all climate change is self-evidently anthropogenic
J4R - thank you - you have summarized the essential basis of climatology.
No one "Down Under" takes Lewandowsky seriously , except perhaps the absolutely extreme Greens. But he somehow seems to into the media quite often with his stupid comments.
When I'm called a denier, I gently correct and suggest that the correct term is "heretic" and then explain why there's little science behind the science - if we won't approve drugs without double-blind testing (and I have to explain what these words mean in theory and in practice) then only a cult or religous movement would insist on policies that will have even greater impact on lives without insisting on the same degree of rigor, openess and review in these disciplines' use of measurements, models, and statistical methods
I've note read the piece but what exactly does Mann's hockey stick do when it hits the last ice age (say 20,000 years ago). I assume no trees lasted that long but I think we all accept it was very cold then and the seas were about 130 metres lower by consensus...
Does anyone know any strong academic objection to the wkipedia entries for time since the last ice age and the current Holocene period??
ie this wikipedia Holocene entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
(and for example sea level rising 130 metres since coming out of the ice age?? obviously this could be totally independent to CO2 catastrophe, but a useful benchmark to compare to..)
I'm most interested in the historical data we have and what it might tell us about the future.
"At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second"
That'll be Northern Hemisphere midsummer, then.
Come back in February.
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