Deltoid

Plimer calls his critics "rent-seekers"

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:11:15 -0500

Ian Plimer responds to criticism with by calling his critics names and failing to address their arguments. In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Plimer spouts his usual outrageous falsehoods:

"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes."

Not true -- even Martin Durkin's Swindle retracted this one.

And when the interviewer brought up Michael Ashley's devastating review of Heaven and Earth, we got this:

Plimer: "When you look at my critics -- they are people who are rent seekers. They have everything to gain by continuing the process of frightening people witless, by following the party line, ..."

Interviewer: "Do you say that they are deliberately fraudulent?"

Plimer: "Well I'm saying that they are taking advantage of the current situation. Now that's understandable. In previous times people have got wonderful research grants in a war against cancer and they achieved a lot of money for that. Now we have a war against climate change and there is huge number of people out there that have their careers staked on it and are beneficiaries from this process. And Michael Ashley is one of those."

Actually, Ashley is an astronomer and his career is not staked on climate change research at all. It is symptomatic of Plimer's approach that he didn't bother to check this and just made things up.

And notice how Plimer is now sounding like a cancer quack. Compare:

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Global Warming Skeptics score own goal

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:03:35 -0500

Fred Singer and co petitioned the American Physical Society to replace its statement on Climate Change. Instead, it got reaffirmed

The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society's 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming. The Council's vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members.

Eli Rabett has more details, while John Mashey has investigated the petitioner's social network.

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The Australian's War on Science 41

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:23:15 -0500

Despite her training in law, Janet Albrechtsen was not able to figure out that the Copenhagen treaty wasn't going to impose a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT, so you just know that she has no chance in hell of understanding a scientific question. Albrechtsen claims that it is a "fact" that "Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years". Study the graph below from the CSIRO to see that measurements from tide gauges and satellites contradict this claim.

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Are CSIRO scientists still being gagged?

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:45:58 -0500

Back in 2006 it was revealed that scientists at the CSIRO had been forbidden from commenting on some impacts of climate change:

JANINE COHEN: Kevin Hennessy is the coordinator of the CSIRO's Climate Impact Group. One of his jobs is to talk about the potential impacts of climate change. But there are some likely impacts of climate change that are clearly a no-go zone. Some scientists believe that there'll be more environmental refugees. Is that a possibility?

KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: I can't really comment on that.

JANINE COHEN: Why can't you comment on that?

KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: That's, that's, er... No, I can't comment on that.

JANINE COHEN: Is that part of editorial policy? You can't comment on things that affect immigration?

KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: No, I can't comment on that.

JANINE COHEN: Can I just ask you why you can't comment?

KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: Not on camera.

JANINE COHEN: Oh, OK. But is it a policy thing?

KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: I can't comment on that.

When Labor won government in 2007 they promised to improve things and introduced a CSIRO charter

it is essential that those who have expertise in the areas under debate are able to communicate new ideas and to infuse public debate with the best research and new knowledge. ... The engagement of CSIRO and its researchers with the community is a key component of an informed innovation system. ... The Government agrees not to interfere improperly in the business of conducting research or in the scholarly process and to respect the independence and integrity of CSIRO in communicating the outputs of its research activities and in managing its legal obligations, including to third parties.

That's certainly an improvement on previous policy, but this part concerned some people:

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Open Thread 35

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:16:00 -0500

Time for some more open thread.

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Tom Fuller

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:35:02 -0500

I recently left a comment on Tom Fuller's blog objecting to Fuller's claim to be on the middle ground.

If Fuller is in the middle ground, then so is Inhofe -- they both think that climate scientists are a bunch of frauds.

Fuller objected in a completely unrelated comment thread and derailed the discussion. I'm starting a new thread here for discussion with Fuller.

Here, in his own words, are Fuller's beliefs about climate scientists:

I believe that a generation of climate scientists have tried to make global warming a political football, and have exaggerated or distorted the truth to push politicians into acting more robustly, and too instill a fear-driven sense of urgency in the general public.

Inhofe shares this belief with Fuller. And like Inhofe, Fuller claims that the hockey stick graph is fraudulent:

People apparently didn't learn from the horrible example set by Michael Mann et al in fabricating a Hockey Stick chart of global temperatures that was later debunked.

You can judge for yourself whether I have fairly represented Fuller's views.

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Dubner falsely claims that ocean acidification is addressed in Superfreakonomics

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:10:36 -0500

Thingsbreak has been documenting the way Levitt and Dubner keeping digging the hole deeper, and Dubner has kept on digging with this whopper:

we believe that anyone who reads our chapter without an agenda wouldn't even find it particularly controversial. They will see that we routinely address the concerns that critics accuse us of ignoring (the problem of ocean acidification, e.g., and the "excuse to pollute" that geoengineering solutions might afford), and that we neither "misrepresent" climate scientists nor flub the facts.

Here is everything they say in chapter 5 about ocean acidification.

[Caldeira] and a co-author coined the phrase 'ocean acidification.' the process by which the seas absorb so much carbon dioxide that corals and other shallow-water organisms are threatened.

Far from addressing it, they don't even mention that their proposed scheme will do nothing about it.

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Levitt and Dubner liken climate scientists to flat Earthers

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:28:56 -0500

Levitt and Dubner still haven't engaged with their critics' arguments and continue to respond with nothing more than name calling. Their latest piece in USA Today likens climate scientists to flat earthers:

Devoted environmentalists, meanwhile, as well as some members of the tight-knit climate-science community, find this sort of idea repugnant. Using sulfur dioxide to solve an environmental problem? It just doesn't feel right to them. Of course, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun didn't initially feel right either. Nor did the assertion that the Earth might in fact be round and not flat.

The article is even illustrated with a picture of a flat Earth. Josh at EnviroKnow details many other problems with their article.

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Superfreakonomics: Levitt missing the point

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:17:05 -0500

Steve Levitt has followed in Dubner's footsteps with a response to his critics that fails to respond to their arguments. Levitt first restates his argument and then asserts that their conclusions are different because:

We are answering a different question than our critics.

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering. ...

But that is not the question that Al Gore and the climate scientists are trying to answer. The sorts of questions they tend to ask are "What is the 'right' amount of carbon to emit?" or "Is it moral for this generation to put carbon into the air when future generations will pay the price?" or "What are the responsibilities of humankind to the planet?"

Unlike the question that we are asking -- How can we most efficiently cool the Earth fast? -- the types of questions that environmentalists are trying to answer mix together both scientific issues and moral/ethical issues. If you have any doubts about this, watch Al Gore's movie, in which he says explicitly that reducing carbon emissions is not a political issue, but a moral issue.

That is why someone like Ken Caldeira can agree with the facts presented in our chapter, say that the chapter is written in good faith, but still disagree with the conclusion that geoengineering is the answer. It is because the question Ken Caldeira is trying to answer is not the question we are trying to answer. The same is true of our critics. But instead of just making this simple point -- that we are asking different questions -- the critics have either intentionally or unintentionally confused the issues by making all sorts of extraneous arguments.

Firstly, in the book L&D say that Caldeira endorses geoengineering. It's good to see that Levitt now concede that Caldeira does not. Levitt does not link to what Caldeira or any other critic says so it isn't easy for his readers to find out that the critics aren't just answering a different question -- they are saying that Levitt is answering the wrong question. Look at what Caldeira says about this specific point:

e360: I was struck by something one of the authors said on NPR the other day -- that he got interested in geoengineering when he realized that the problem with global warming is not that there is too much carbon in the air; it's that it is too hot. Do you agree with that?

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Bidrivals is evil

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:55:08 -0500

I've noticed ads for Bidrivals appearing here. This is an auction site that is basically a Swoopo clone and seems to be just as efficient at separating bidders from their money. Read Jonah Lehrer if you haven't heard of Swoopo.

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Janet Albrechtsen warns that Copenhagen will impose a communist world government

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:52:41 -0500

Janet Albrechtsen (writing in The Australian, of course) is asked a question by her teenage daughters:

Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.

You can read a transcript of Monckton's claims here. Monckton reckons that the environmentalists "are about to impose a communist world government on the world". (As opposed to imposing a communist world government on just one country, I suppose.)

Even after Monckton's speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don't need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true.

So naturally Albrechtsen did some research and discovered that the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter judged Monckton's claims to be "pants on fire" dishonest and that Monckton's conspiracy-finding skills are better than his reading skills. Alex Koppelman writes:

Problem is, Monckton's reading of the proposed framework for negotiation -- hardly a completed treaty -- was woefully inaccurate. And that's a nice way of putting it. The document clearly does nothing whatsoever to promote any sort of world government, and indeed, it refers to the efforts of national governments repeatedly.

Here's the sole evidence in the framework for Monckton's claim:

The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.

(The COP to which that language refers is the Conference of the Parties, which the official UN Web site explains as, "the 'supreme body' of the Convention, that is, its highest decision-making authority. It is an association of all the countries that are Parties to the Convention ... [and] is responsible for keeping international efforts to address climate change on track.")

Unfortunately for Monckton and those who've fallen for what he said without doing some rudimentary checking of the document's language, there's more than one meaning of the word "government." There's the conventional definition, the one he used, and then there's this one, which is very clearly the one intended in this case: "direction; control; management; rule: the government of one's conduct."

Albrechtsen reassured her daughters and wrote a column debunking Monckton's nutty conspiracy theories. Ha ha, just kidding. Albrechtsen decided to check it out herself. She has, after all, a doctorate in law from Sydney University.

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Plimer the plagiarist

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:48:01 -0500

Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer's claim that climate scientists were cooking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote:

The raw data from Mauna Loa is 'edited' by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is "edited" leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth]

The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102 samples had no data, 1085 were not used due to up slope winds, 655 had large variability within 1 hour but were used in the official figures and 866 had large hour by hour variability and were not used.[2102] [p 418]

This drew a correction from NOAA's Pieter Tans:

To illustrate how misleading Plimer is I made a plot of 3 years of all hourly data, with 2004 in the middle because Plimer discussed 2004. ... In the plot, "selected" data means that we have used it in constructing the published monthly mean because those hours satisfy the conditions for "background" measurements. The red stripes are extremely close to the published monthly means. ... Also plotted in purple-blue are all non-background data. If one constructs monthly means from ALL data, incl. non-background, one obtains the purple-blue stripes. The differences are only slight, with the seasonal cycle becoming a bit larger due to upslope winds, esp. during the summer.

Tans concludes that Plimer is a con man, but the story doesn't end there. Plimer's reference 2102 is ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/. I analyzed the 2004 Mauna Loa data from there and found there were some minor errors in Plimer's numbers: In fact, due to instrumental error 1103 samples had no data, 1097 were not used due to up slope winds, 655 had large variability within 1 hour and were not used and 881 had large hour by hour variability and were not used.

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What Do Superfreakonomics And Senator Inhofe Have In Common?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:43:10 -0500

Well, they are shown next to each other in Dave Weigel's story Climate Change Skeptics Embrace 'Freakonomics' Sequel, but that's not the answer I'm thinking of. Weigel writes:

The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as "religious fervor," and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel that attitudes toward their stances are getting brighter.

Coming out in support of Superfreakonomics we have Myron Ebell, Senator Inhofe, Pat Michaels, Patrick Co-founder-of-GreenPeace Moore and Ross McKitrick. McKitrick even offered some helpful information that Levitt and Dubner could use to refute Joe Romm with -- apparently Romm is in the pay of George Soros.

So if their book isn't supportive of global warming denial, why does Senator "Global Warming is a Hoax" Inhofe cite it? Daniel Davies explains the game L&D are playing.

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Pielke Pity Party

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:38:21 -0500

Esteemed Pielkeologist, Eli Rabett points me to a post from Roger Pielke Jr complaining that he is being persecuted by the "liberal blogosphere".

Apparently what prompted this was a comment from Brad DeLong on why he considers Pielke Jr to be dishonest:

I do remember that what knocked my view of your work over the edge was one of your attacks on Hansen.

Ah. "[Pielke] claims that [Hanson's] scenario B was off by a factor of 2 on CO2. This sounds like a lot until you discover that means that emissions grew by 0.5% per year instead of 1% a year. And that works out to scenario B having the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere within 1% of what has actually happened. Pielke is being much more than a little unfair by calling a prediction that got within 1% of the correct answer as not being 'particularly accurate or realistic'."

Well, DeLong was quoting me so Pielke has a go at me in his post. First he complains that:

Neither [Romm nor DeLong] links to my own words on my blog, apparently afriad of what might happen if people view what I have to say directly, rather than their cartoonish caricatures.

And then we get:

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Open Thread 34

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:14:34 -0500

It's a fresh new open thread!

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