Bishop Hill Team letter writing
Feb 18, 2012 Climate: Mann Climate: fakegate The Hockey Team have also been writing to the Heartland Institute - their contribution can be seen here.
We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.
These are the facts: Climate change is occurring. Human activity is the primary cause of recent climate change. Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems. The more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that go into the atmosphere, the more severe those disruptions will become. Major scientific assessments from the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, United States Global Change Research Program and other authoritative sources agree on these points.
Reader Comments (92)
They just don't get it, do they? Continually repeating the same old tired remarks has NOT been working. Why would it now?
sHx
Well, maybe not zebras, but maybe Striped Rice Rats, which are on the endangered species list.
Here are the facts: someone unnamed on our side of things slipped in the bit about dissuading teachers from teaching science - because we are afraid that K12 students may become more accurately educated in science than we are and therefore question our junk.
Seven! You are all right! There was the comp sci man hidden in the listings. A metaphor perhaps, but it is too late of an evening to explore that one.
It's a FAKE! Surely six supposedly adult males could not write this kind of junk.
SHX, So you've spotted another zebra. Can we now claim that we know how the zebra got his spots?
From the team's latest exercise in creative writing:
Hmmm ... "ideological considerations", eh? And will these "experts" soon be telling the world which - or whose - "ideology" is the more "scientific"?!
But that aside ... I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the names of two different groups of "authors": those of this creative writing exercise and the gang of 38 who signed onto the infamous WSJ patchwork quilt of Feb. 1/2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577193270727472662.html
In this latest "team" effort, we have the luminaries:
Ray Bradley
David Karoly
Michael Mann
Jonathan Overpeck
Ben Santer
Kevin Trenberth
The bolded names signed both. OTOH, considering the subject matter at the heart of this letter, there is one name from the Feb. 1 WSJ "team" that I find to be conspicuously absent from this smaller "team" of authors.
This individual was also a "victim" of the CG emails; his most notable contribution to matters pertaining to full "disclosure" - that I have found in the CG emails so far! - is the addition of "Yuck" to the lexicon of noble climate scientists. [pls. see http://hro001.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/phil-jones-keeps-peer-review-process-humming-by-using-intuition/ for details]
And his name is ... drum-roll, please ... Peter Gleick.
Coincidence, oversight - or distraction? Who knows, eh?!
[links above are not hyperlinked - in the hope of bypassing apparently random acts of captcha-->moderation]
Trenberth should take note
When you have to call your self 'Distinguished' than your not in anyone's eyes but your own .
Thanks to Josh's brilliant "letter", I noticed an error of omission on my part in a comment that got sent to moderation a few minutes ago. So this is a "dual purpose" post: to amend my comment, and to test the ability of a comment to pass moderation with un-hyperlinked links excluded.
=====
From the team's latest exercise in creative writing:
Hmmm ... "ideological considerations", eh?! And will these "experts" soon be telling the world which "ideology" is the more "scientific"?!
But that aside ... I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the names of two different groups of "authors": those of this creative writing exercise and the gang of 38 who signed onto the infamous WSJ patchwork quilt of Feb. 1/2012.
[link to WSJ page deleted]
In this latest "team" effort, we have the luminaries:
Ray Bradley
David Karoly
Michael Mann
Jonathan Overpeck
Ben Santer
Gavin Schmidt*
Kevin Trenberth
*Omitted in original comment
The bolded names signed both. OTOH, considering the subject matter at the heart of this letter, there is one name from the Feb. 1 WSJ "team" that I find to be conspicuously absent from this smaller "team" of authors.
This individual was also a "victim" of the CG emails; his most notable contribution to matters pertaining to full "disclosure" - that I have found in the CG emails so far! - is the addition of "Yuck" to the lexicon of noble climate scientists. [pls. see [link deleted] for details]
And his name is ... drum-roll, please ... Peter Gleick.
Coincidence, oversight - or distraction? Who knows, eh?!
Hilary [hoping to bypass random acts of comment moderation]
FWIW: Result of experiment: my above comment (Feb 18, 2012 at 11:46 PM) succeeded in avoiding not only moderation, but also the cursed captchca
Moral of the story seems to be that on this server, there is no power to positive linking!
Hilary
I never post active links here 'cos I'm too stupid to remember the HTML.
Still get captcha'd tho.
Dude: Yours was always better because shorter. Accuracy is I guess in the eye of the beholder.
Snotrocket: Thanks. They've earned the mockery over many years and we've all failed to do justice to it, even Delingpole. For the detail still matters, which is where the Bish and Donna have come in - but again it's not enough, it's not adequate, not yet. Talking of which ...
Robin Guenier: I had the Royal Society's latest and much more careful - though far from perfect - 2010 statement in mind when I said 'Balderdash' as a first cut to this piffle. You've done the legwork of a comparison, thank you. But it is utter tosh. Behind all the weasel words about climate change 'already disrupting many human and natural systems' is the single most inconvenient truth in the book: deaths from extreme climate events have been coming down since the 1920s. If the ordinary voter and policy maker was confronted with that single fact - a real fact, not an imaginary one where deep uncertainty is dressed up as fact - the whole thing would be over.
Disko Troop
"It's a FAKE! Surely six supposedly adult males could not write this kind of junk."
That is nothing: you should see Trenberth's maths.
His outgoing radiation power per square meter is the same as his incoming even though incoming illuminates a disc and outgoing is from a sphere. As the area ratio between them is 1:4, outgoing has to be one quarter of incoming per square meter. He then goes on to compute the energy flow within the system on an entirely incorrect basis. And The Team don't spot it!
@Foxgoose Feb 19, 2012 at 12:04 AM
Foxgoose, the two links in my original comment - which is still in moderation - were "plaintext" i.e. not hyperlinked ("clickable" for the html-challenged), but they still landed in captcha prior to being sent to moderation.
So, on the comment that made it through, I had deleted all traces of both links!
For those who are wondering what the second link (details of Gleick's "Yuck") might be, it was actually a link to a post on my blog; topic is: "Phil Jones keeps peer-review process humming … by using 'intuition'"
Scratch my last comment - duuurgh!
Which is in moderation! Arggh.
I feel out of the loop. All this talk of the Heartland Institute in hushed 'they who must not be named' nudge-wink terms; the odd sceptic / lukewarmer adding a 'of course, I don't agree with Heartland' caveat to his or her comment, but I still don't know what it is the they have said or done that is so horrific other than disagree with the CAGW cabal. I've seen one comment from William 'Wikifiddler' Connoly accusing Heartland of the heinous crime of asserting that the natural CO2 flux dwarfs that of anthropogenic emissions with the weasel word 'net' added to ram home his tedious straw man argument, but nothing more. I fully expect however given the note of hysterical terror in warmist discussions of the Institute that the reason for the omission of any citations of their malfeasance is that it is simply too great to contemplate without going insane; that the Heartland Institute have been using their secret oil industry billions to instigate a policy of Satan appeasing baby sacrifice in order to rid the world of meddlesome earth-loving progressives. I wish someone would enlighten me though before I make them a donation and accidentally contribute to the triumph of evil over good.
@Richard Drake Feb 19, 2012 at 12:34 AM
Richard, I fully concur! One of the most convincing items that landed my feet firmly in the skeptic camp, during the course of my exercises in due diligence two years ago, was Hans Rosling's video** - in which he shows the progress that has been made in the last 200 years.
**It will be interesting to see how Rosling responds to Hansen in the AAAS webcast of panel discussion that is about to start 3 minutes from now. [Details and links on toppost at my blog!]
"These are the facts: Climate change is occurring..."
Brilliant! The earth has experienced 46 glacial-interglacial periods in the last 2.6 Mil years. And we are still recovering from the peak of the Wisconsin glaciation some 20K years ago. And the team proudly announces a fact, a fact that one learns as a 5th grader.
Thanks Hilary. I subscribe to a worldview where agreement between one or two has the power to move mountains. I feel that here. It never tells you exactly how long it's going to take but there we go :)
Has anyone else noticed what an incredibly tiny group this is? The names we see over and over again: Mann, Overpeck, Santer, Trenberth, Bradley... The only name on the list that a sceptic might not have come across a million times before might be Karoly...
Heaven forbid their air-plane crashed on the way back from some junket in French Polynesia. 80% of the sound bites journalists use to scare us about catastrophic global warming would be gone in one hit.
The only "fact" that seems to be beyond dispute is that climate change is occurring. The rest are not facts.
Please ... don't tell me, 25 years and 100's of millions of dollars have been spent and that's it ! That climate change is occurring ? What a waste of space.
Seriously, how long is it going to be until some politicians of serious standing call a spade a spade and say .... lets get over this !
Several here have mentioned psychological projection. Someone took the Peter Gleick message at Huffington Post linked to by Dude (Feb 18, 2012 at 8:15 PM) stuck it in a bottle, and threw it in the Pacific. By the time it washed up here, all I could read of the faded parchment was:
“ .. science continues to strengthen, .. data around the world continue to accumulate ... getting increasingly desperate. As evidence piles up... weaker and weaker .... the climate isn't changing... voices get more strident, ... language and vitriol get uglier... cannot make a case ...desperately manipulating, misrepresenting, or simply misunderstanding the science...”
What a horrifying prospect!
How could humanity ever recover from such a tragedy.
Clearly we need to supply each of our top rank climate soothsayers with a personalised Learjet immediately.
SSAT: your interpretation of Trenberth's maths is, unfortunately, wrong. The incoming radiation has already been divided by 4 to spread the day illumination over the whole area of the earth.
The real mistake is the perpetual motion machine implied by adding 'back radiation' to the assumed 396 W/m^2 from the earth's surface. This is what you get from a black body at 15.92°C. Yet he and Kehl also quote an extra 17 W/m^2 from thermals plus 80 W/m^2 from evapo-transpiration.
So, the fundamental mistake has been to assume that just because a body reaches a particular temperature, it must emit radiation at the rate calculated by the S-B equation for a black body in a vacuum This is then used as a fixed calibration for the rest of the heat transfer. WRONG.
In reality, the total heat transfer will be the sum of convection, evapo-transpiration and radiation. You prove this by the UHI effect- reduce convection and temperature has to rise so the sum of convection and radiation equals the SW energy input [at equilibrium].
As for the use of 'back radiation' as an energy source, these people are seriously deluded. I have explained why elsewhere, but in essence, 'Prevost Exchange Energy' aka in oxymoronic 'climate science' as 'back radiation', is a standing wave which regulates radiant heat transfer and can do no thermodynamic work.
These people are seriously lacking in basic heat transfer knowledge. This most basic aspect of IPCC 'science' is complete nonsense.
"Distinguished Senior Scientist"
Self praise is no reccomendation.
Richard Drake:
As the Royal Society doesn’t support the Teams’ “utter tosh” about current disruption, I thought I’d see if the other “authoritative sources”, the US National Academy of Sciences and the US Global Change Research Program, do. But, unlike the RS link that at least takes you to a its 2010 report, both US links take you, not to specific reports, but to the same generic “Climate Change at the National Academies” site – you are then expected to do the work of locating the detail. I couldn’t be bothered – but suspect that the Team is hiding something.
As I said before, these people are seriously hopeless.
PS: have a citation supporting your claim that “deaths from extreme climate events have been coming down since the 1920s”? Thanks.
There, I was right. It is a fake written by Aaron Huertas of the Union of concerned scientists. Is English not his first language?
Got this from WUWT, the author of this puff piece is Aaron Huertas who is the press secretary at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Wonder who funds them and also what is their Strategy, pot calling kettle back.
http://aaronhuertas.com/
Wonder why he didn't sign it ;)
Surely this letter from self-proclaimed distinguished scientist and friends has given the Heartland Institute the opportunity to call them out. HI should respond by offering to debate with the "gang who can't shoot straight" the assertions they've made in their letter with regard to climate change, it's effects, and the future. Bet they turn tail and run!
geronimo: spot on. Let's hope Heartland do exactly that.
Robin: See my blog the last day of 2011, which has all the references. I'm relying on Indur Goklany. Due diligence would be getting a second opinion from Roger Pielke Jnr. But what has struck me is that Goklany's claims have never been mentioned by the Team, let alone challenged. They don't I think want to go there. But I do.
PS: Am I right you're going to be at the Lindzen event Wednesday? I'd love to meet you or at least shake you warmly by the hand. Josh and Barry are also likely to be around I think.
Decline in deaths from extreme weather events:
http://www.csccc.info/reports/report_23.pdf
That's the earlier Goklany report on the subject, PJ, the 2011 one being:
http://reason.org/files/deaths_from_extreme_weather_1900_2010.pdf
... which inspired the blog post refered to in my comment currently in moderation here.
Looks like the letter was authored by Aaron Huertas of UCS.
See this post (update # 2) at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/18/joshs-open-letter/#more-56895
Funny the "team" can't even write their own letters.
Thanks, Richard - interesting and useful stuff.
I agree that the Team might argue that Goklany's claims cannot be taken seriously without independent verification / peer review. But they look compelling to me and seem well supported by his end notes, although I haven't time to review these. They might also say, I suppose, that disruption doesn't necessarily mean death - but I don't think that would get them very far.
Yes, I am going to be at the Lindzen event. Alex Cull and Josh have both told me they hope to attend - Josh said "Maybe time for a cup of tea afterwards? Perhaps something stronger?
8:40 AM | mydogsgotnonose
"SSAT: your interpretation of Trenberth's maths is, unfortunately, wrong."
Which is why I immediately posted after to 'scratch' it. However, don't think that I consider Trenberth right either.
The moral: don't post late at night!
So is Alan Rusbridger been summoned to the Levison Enquiry
Its called tabloaidese blagging and faking
To ask the question is to answer it. It wouldn't get them very far, as you say - and that's why they don't want to talk about deaths from extreme events. But we don't have to accept the way they frame the debate. I consider my "four numbers" framing far better but even that is highly skewed to the dangerous CO2 narrative - in order to make a connection. The primary and most important number for the policy maker with integrity is human deaths from extreme events. The shape of that graph says there's nothing even remotely resembling a crisis - compared to say malaria (and I accept The Lancet may not be scaremongering in that area, not least because there aren't the same vested interests in the background).
They'll need something very solid in the way of scientific evidence to change the minds of policy makers once the utter disregard for truth - and for human life - in this area is revealed - not least by the utter lack of candour of the Novermber IPCC SREX report. It is a disgrace.
Bishop - thanks for the link.
agree with comments above, is this the best they can do!!
remembering -
"Mann, who is on sabbatical from Penn State, is spending half his year writing a book and the other half advising Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of the DailyClimate.org and EHN.org, on climate science."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=federal-investigators-clear-climate-scientist-michael-mann
which may tie in with
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/2/18/doctors-letter.html
To save bandwidth, why didn't they just sign it : The Climategate Crooks ?
Perhaps Peter Gleick advised them on how to write this bit of rubbish?
If BS was Tar Seal the Hockey Team would be the Chicago Turnpike.
When all the Watermelon Warmers admit their Lie
We will raise a Monument into the Sky
A Monument of Solid Carbon
To commemorate their Bogus Bargain.
CO2 (Plant Food) the basis of all life on Earth.