Over the weekend, two
amazingly
bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with
mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are
simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.
Just so we’re clear here.
The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called
No Need to Panic About Global Warming,
is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with
factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper:
"Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for
well over 10 years now."
What the
what?
That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on
blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and
only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical
Science website
destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that
nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.
The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it,
but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. And that bragging
right is crushed to dust when you find out that the WSJ
turned down an article about the reality of global warming that was signed by 255 actual climate scientists. In fact,
as Media Matters reports, more of the signers of the WSJ OpEd have ties to oil interests than actually publish peer-reviewed climate research.
Shame on the WSJ for publishing that nonsense.
When I read it, I thought that OpEd was really scraping the bottom of
the barrel. But then the Daily Mail chimed in and I discovered that
barrel gets a lot deeper. They printed an article by David Rose called
Forget
global warming — it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA
scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again).
By "Cycle 25" he’s referring to the solar activity cycle — which I’ll
get to in a moment. But first, the most egregiously awful thing about
the Mail article is the angle it takes on
new results released by The Met Office,
the National Weather Service for the UK. The subheadline for the Mail
article is "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15
years", which is a bit odd given that
the very first two paragraphs of the Met’s press release say:
2012 is expected to be around 0.48 °C warmer than the
long-term (1961-1990) global average of 14.0 °C, with a predicted
likely range of between 0.34 °C and 0.62 °C, according to the Met Office
annual global temperature forecast.
The middle of this range would place 2012 within the top 10 warmest years in a series which goes back to 1850.
[Emphasis mine, but done for obvious reasons.]
If you can square that with "new figures… show no warming" then congrats! You can write for the Mail.
The article is so fallacious that the Met offices decided
to publish another release
stating clearly that the Mail article "includes numerous errors", is
"misleading", and that the author chose "… to not fully include the
answers we gave him".
And we’re not done. A big part of Rose’s Mail article talks about the
Sun’s influence on climate. However, the solar activity cycle is
something
which has been shown over and again to have very little to do with climate, and
is certainly not anywhere near the main driver of climate change.
The Mail article bases its argument on some research that may
indicate the Sun will enter a quiet period after this next peak, and
that will cool the Earth. First, the research is by no means anywhere
near verified, and in fact
at least one well-respected solar physicist doesn’t agree with the findings
(I think he’s right; the work is interesting but very, very
preliminary). Second, even if it’s true, there’s no reason to think it
will cause an ice age as the Mail article attests; that takes many
factors occurring all at once. Also, the Little Ice Age — a cold period
during the 17th and 18th centuries — was not a global effect; it only
affected Europe. It also coincided with several large volcanic events
that helped drive it. I explain all that in the link above.
So where does Rose get this idea that the Sun will cool us down? From
another Met Office release. And guess what? Again, that release states in the first paragraph
the exact opposite of what Rose claims:
New research has found that solar output is likely to
reduce over the next 90 years but that will not substantially delay
expected increases in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Happily, the cavalry has ridden in; the reality-based community has come out swinging against these two articles:
-
Andrew Revkin at The New York Times
-
The Intersection
-
Get Energy Smart Now
-
DeSmogBlog
-
Planet3.0
-
Anti climate change extremism in Utah
-
Greg Laden
- Climate scientist Michael Mann
has been tweeting furiously about it, too.
[Update: more for you:
-
The Environmental Defense Fund
-
Scholars and Rogues (specifically taking on Burt Rutan, one of the 16 signers of the WSJ OpEd; Rutan replies in the comments)]
In the head-asplodey irony department, how do you think the editors at the WSJ feel that their OpEd was reprinted in
The Tehran Times?
It’s rare to be 100% certain of something in science, but I have no
doubt at all that the comments to this post will be filled with noise
from
denialists.
It happens every single time I post about this, and they almost always
use long-debunked arguments. But as these attacks on reality get more
brazen, we have to be ever more alert.
Related posts:
- 2011: The 9th hottest year on record
- New independent climate study confirms global warming is real
- Climategate 2: More ado about nothing. Again.
- Arctic ice at second-lowest extent since 1979
- As arctic ice shrinks, so does a denier claim
There are so many barking up the same tree. Too bad it's the wrong tree.
ReplyDeleteThe right tree is demonstrated at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a single external forcing, a proxy that is the time-integral of sunspot numbers. A graph is included which shows the calculated temperature anomaly trajectory overlaid on measurements.
All factors not explicitly considered must find room in the unexplained 10%.