Dessler, Andrew A&M

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~ DENIAL HACKS

see CWG RED TEAM BS

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CURRY BLOG CITES PIELKE

...Pielke Jr’s analysis

Good substack article from Roger Pielke Jr. Excerpts:

Dessler, who calls the DOE report “bullshit,” pulls no punches in asserting that there is absolutely nothing that is scientifically accurate in the DOE CWG report:

To be clear, the DOE report raises no “interesting questions” overlooked by the scientific community, highlights no ignored research gaps, and brings no fresh perspective. Instead, it’s a rats’ nest of bad arguments.

To the extent that there are legitimate scientific arguments in there, those have already been rejected by the scientific community. But scientific arguments are rare in the DOE report; rather, it’s mainly selective misquoting of the scientific literature (cherry picking), omission of contrary results from the scientific literature, and simple errors due to a lack of understanding of the science.

This framing has been adopted by the media, as you can see in the headlines below characterizing the critique upon its release this morning.

I took a look at the DK25 report in my areas of expertise, as I did with the DOE CWG, and I found numerous statements that were simply false — among them that World Weather Attribution was not created with litigation in mind, that NOAA”s “billion dollar disasters” (RIP) tabulation was scientifically valid, that SRES had 6 not 40 scenarios, and that RCP8.5 has not been the most commonly used scenario in research and assessment. DK25 ignored all of our research that was accurately cited by DOE CWG.

DK25 also includes a bizarre claim regarding the detection of changes in extreme weather events:²

“the absence of statistically significant trends in the historical records does not mean that changes are not occurring”³

Actually, that is exactly what the absence of detection means — don’t take it from me, take it from the IPCC, which defines a*change*in climate as follows:

A change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.

This line of argument seems not to be against the DOE CWG report — which relies heavily on the IPCC — but against the IPCC’s framework for detection and attribution, which is already under siege for not producing strong indications of change in most measures of weather extremes.

Extreme event attribution, RCP8.5, and “billion dollar disasters” are not the hills I’d choose to die on, but apparently the authors of DK25 were so intent in asserting that every claim of DOE CWG is false, that they could not admit the many places where DOE CWG got things right.

My view is that there are stronger and weaker claims in both DOE CWG and DK25. In my areas of expertise — notably scenarios and extreme weather — the DOE CWG is pretty strong (but could be better) and DK25 is pretty weak. In other areas, the balance will surely be different. But the Manichean nature of climate debates is that no territory can be given to the enemy.

Dessler makes very clear that he believes that this exercise is all about politics:

If you don’t follow climate policy closely, you may not know that the Trump administration is launching an effort to overturn one of the most fundamental pillars of American climate policy: the scientific finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare (the so-called “Endangerment Finding”). If successful, this move could unravel virtually every U.S. climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.

To support this effort, the Department of Energy hand-selected five climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science to write a report, which ended up saying exactly what you would expect it to say: climate science is too uncertain to justify policies to limit warming. . .

The history of cigarettes shows that such tactics can delay policy action for decades, but they cannot indefinitely postpone scientific reality from emerging. The only real question is how much damage the delay causes.

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pielke bs 10 25

Over at The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler and Zeke Hausfather have taken on the role of self-appointed sheriffs of climate science, at times in highly partisan and personal terms. Recently, Dessler, along with another scientist, Robert Kopp, and dozens of others, prepared a lengthy response to the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) report.

Today, Dessler posted a further critique of the DOE CWG —Is this the most embarrassing error in the DOE Climate Working Group Report? Dessler’s post is remarkable for the simple fact that he reveals in great detail that he does not understand the science he is policing.

The focus of Dessler’s post is his claim that the DOE CWG authors fail to appreciate the distinction between the concepts detection and attribution and time of emergence — and this represents “the central flaw” in the DOE CWG report.

In fact, as I show undeniably below, Dessler’s post reveals that he actually does not understand IPCC terminology or its application. Irony abounds. Someone should be embarrassed, and it’s not the DOE CWG authors.

Let’s dive into the details.

Dessler presents a definition of the time of emergence of a climate signal that is completely at odds with the definition used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dessler then uses his bespoke definition to argue that the DOE CWG authors made an “embarrassing error” by not employing his bespoke definition, rather than instead relying on the IPCC.

Here is Dessler’s bespoke definition (emphases in original):

Emergence is all about the size of the influence. It means that the climate has shifted so much that the average value of some parameter is larger than the largest value in a pre-industrial climate. In other words, you’ve emerged into a new climate.

The IPCC, in stark contrast, has a very different definition of the time of emergence(emphases in original):

Time when a specific anthropogenic signal related to climate change is statistically detected to emerge from the background noise of natural climate variability in a reference period, for a specific region (Hawkins and Sutton, 2012).

Lest there be any doubt, the IPCC in its definition cites Hawkins and Sutton (2012), who explain:

The signal of anthropogenic climate change is emerging against the background of natural climate variability. Only when the signal of change is of sufficient magnitude relative to this background variability can we be confident that a significant change has been detected. Such detection is a necessary step in the process of attributing a particular change to a specific cause, such as the observed rise in greenhouse gas concentrations [Hegerl et al., 2007].

Hawkins and Sutton (2012) explain that the time of emergence is a forward looking concept, in contrast to detection, which is backwards looking (emphasis added):

A headline conclusion from the IPCC AR4 was that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”. Of greater importance for adaptation to climate change are changes on the regional and local scales that affect people, economies and ecosystems. However, on these smaller scales natural variability is larger, making detection more difficult. Some detection and attribution studies that have addressed these scales have obtained positive results [Hegerl et al., 2007; Stott et al., 2010], but for many regions and variables the signal of anthropogenic change has yet to clearly emerge from the ‘noise’ of natural climate variability.

So when will the signal emerge? And where and how?

Under the definitions of the IPCC, when looking at the past climate, detection of change (at a particular statistical level of confidence) and emergence of a signal of change (employing various possible methods) are conceptually identical, even if specific methodologies and results may vary....

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bradley retaliation:

Climate Science Is A Lot Less Than It Appears in Some Cases

Robert Bradley, Jr.

Founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research

Principal, MasterResource: A Free-Market Energy Blog

[Editor’s Note: Climate science is real but some who claim to be climate scientists appear to be less than they would have us believe, more interested in causes than learning.]

Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University, will have nothing to do with any critics of climate alarm. This activist has pure scorn toward his intellectual and scientific doubters. “Angry Andy” is certain that climate science is settled and drop-everything alarming.

Climate Science

Andrew Dessler’s profile page at Texas A&M – his choice of photo says it all.

A deep ecologist (nature is optimal and fragile; human interference cannot be good), Dessler has long concluded that we are headed for (or already in) a climate dystopia. Any fair hearing of the less extreme view of global lukewarming/CO2 benefits would be a leak in the dike, one that could expand and take down the Wall of Climate Gloom.

But, for now, the cancel culture is at work with climate science in particular. Michael Mann (Dessler’s colleague in arms) put it this way:

All of the noise right now from the climate change denial machine, the bots & trolls, the calls for fake ‘debates’, etc. Ignore it all. Deniers are desperate for oxygen in a mainstream media environment that thankfully is no longer giving it to them. Report, block. Don’t engage.

Imagine an open-minded young person considering a career in climatology. He or she wants to really wants to probe the look-the-other-way areas of uncertainty with climate-feedback physics and with climate models. Seek and expand the frontiers of knowledge under the highest standards of the scientific method. Show professionalism and respect for the views of colleagues and others. Experience politeness and social skills, given and received.

That person best not enter into a profession where an Andrew Dessler or a Michael Mann or a John Holdren would sneer and blackball. Remember what Mann said about Judith Curry in Climategate: “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” Cancel Culture 101.

Steven Koonin

Enter Steven E. Koonin, University Professor at New York University. This noted theoretical physicist is author of the best-seller: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021). Having taught theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology for most of his career, Koonin went on to work for BP (new technologies) and then as Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. In this position, Koonin oversaw climate research and energy technology work.

Climate Science

Some of Steven Koonin’s profile at NYU.

Koonin has a BS in Physics from Caltech and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT. A specialist in modelling complexity, Koonin wrote the classic 1985 textbook Computational Physics.

Koonin is author of 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science, as well as having been lead author on multiple book-length reports, including two National Academies studies.

In short, Steve Koonin is a leader in his field and well respected. And, it turns out, he is honest and of an age and tenure where he can speak truth to power.

Dessler’s Smears

Here is Dessler on Koonin:

I actually hate to weigh in on Koonin’s book …. Here are a few thoughts. First, Koonin has a track record of making dumb, over the top, exaggerated arguments. Second, his facts are carefully cherry picked to present a specific narrative. For example, he says heat waves in the U.S. were more severe in the 1930s than today. OK, but the U.S. covers 2% of the planet. Globally, heat waves are more severe today. Also, his belief in models is quite selective. We can’t trust climate models at all — the climate is too complicated!! — but we can have 100% confidence in absurd economic models of GDP growth.

And:

It is important to realize that virtually all experts in the area ARE convinced by the data that humans are ~100% responsible for modern warming. So you can believe Koonin or you can believe the 99.9% of scientists.

And:

Koonin’s arguments are 1) cherry picking of factoids and 2) value judgements about his interpretation of the data and his interpretation of risk. His judgements of the data disagree with virtually all expert scientific opinion. His risk assessment is based on his values.

And:

I typically don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but the fact that Steve Koonin continues to get high-profiles endorsements of his dumb arguments suggests that some powerful media agents have decided that he’s their best bet for trying to cast doubt on climate science. Thoughts?

Dessler likes to use other words against Koonin’s views such as “idiotic complaint” and “denier shuffle.”

Andrew Dessler pretty much embarrasses himself, his department, and his university with such vitriol. Why?

Part of it is Dessler’s certainty that the science has reached certainty on what is known and not known. No shades of grey on the very pessimistic, alarmist black-and-white conclusion: humankind is on the road to doom.

So hyper-emotionally invested. Anything less than alarm–even by a scientist every bit as credentialed as himself–and Dessler must turn emotional and angry.

Second is old-fashioned envy. Koonin’s Unsettled — with sales exceeding 100,000–has outsold all of Dessler’s books put together. Koonin, moreover, has a reputation that Dessler does not. And Koonin is a go-to for a lot of organizations that are trying to cut through a lot of politicized science.

Little wonder that Andrew Dessler will not dare debate Koonin at Texas A&M.(I have offered to underwrite such a campus-wide event to no avail.) The climate alarmist, arguing a speculative position, cannot get away with a lot with the bright lights on. [1]

Appendix: Wrong Again?

Regarding Koonin’s major points against settled, alarmist climate science, Dessler states:

I don’t see that these are the kinds of arguments that get traction with the broad public anymore…. Most people, they look out their window and they can see climate change is real. Given the fact that what’s happening is exactly what was predicted by scientists decades ago. I think that people understand that climate science is real, as described by the scientific community.

Really? Is this a ‘settled’ fact, Professor Dessler?

Actually, it is panic time for climate alarmism among the political and intellectual elite. Citizens are protesting, and voters are voting against the forced energy transformation, itself the flip side of climate exaggeration.

Better yet, with the problems of wind/solar out in the open (and at an early stage of the transition!), the open-minded are looking anew at the science and false climate prognostications of years and decades past. They are not very impressed. Expect sales of Koonin’s Unsettled to grow and another edition to appear in the next years.

[1] My email exchange with Professor Dessler (11/09/2021) follows. I stated:

Let’s have a debate between you and Steven Koonin or even David Friedman with a full house at Texas A&M to put you on record–will you consider that? I’ll make a $5,000 contribution to the university to help make it happen. Put the bright lights on where the statements will be on the record. Televise it. But it has to have a fair moderator and set-up.

He answered that day:

Add a zero ($50,000, donated to the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M) and you have a deal. You can even moderate the event and handle all of the logistics. I’ll find a room on campus.

I answered (11/14/2021):

No thanks for the invitation to increase my contribution from $5,000 to $50,000. And for me to moderate, etc. I want a real debate with me in the audience or watching it on TV. It deserves prime time with physical climate science on trial. No reason to relegate a climate discussion/debate to the ‘back of the bus,’ right? That is an insult to you, your opponent, and science itself. So work on a serious budget, and let’s give it the attention it deserves. I will increase my donation appropriately…. A fair debate between the alarmists and the optimists is prime-time important. Why have it in some basement? Let’s put the lights on and have a marque event….

Professor Dessler did not respond….

Please share this post and get the word out everywhere!

This post appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

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frontline:

When did you notice a change in how climate science was perceived? Like what have you seen, as far as your students and all of that?

When I started teaching here at Texas A&M in 2006, it was really a different world. People were accepting of the science, and they wanted to know more about it. And that’s both sides, both conservatives and liberals, among the students.

And then in the 2008 election, if you’ll remember, both [Sen. John] McCain [R-Ariz.] and Obama supported action on climate change. The arguments they were having were over how much nuclear energy should we have, things like that, things that you couldn’t believe today that that’s what the argument was about.

And then after Obama was elected and probably around the time the health care debate was going full blast, there was this debate in the House and then in the Senate over legislation to control climate change. And that’s really when things changed.

So 2009, 2010, climate change went from being something that rational people could talk about to being something where if you go out and you talk to your neighbor and your neighbor is of a certain political persuasion, you offend him. I mean, you tell him, “This is what I study,” he’ll be offended. I mean, it’s really remarkable.

And why do you think that is? I mean, what’s your sense from your own experience of why that might be?

I think that there is a group of people out there whose goal it is to make the policy debate over climate change toxic, just like Social Security, just like Medicare reform; this thing that if you talk about it, you’re just going to get creamed.

And they’ve been very successful. Now when you bring up climate change, it’s this polarizing, incredibly divisive subject. Even the sciences, you know, science is what science is. Nature doesn’t care what your political persuasion is. The laws of physics don’t take that into account. But yet the politics have gotten to the point where people just don’t want to listen to science.

“Science is what science is. Nature doesn’t care what your political persuasion is. The laws of physics don’t take that into account.”

We’ve gotten to the point where if you’re a Republican politician, and you tell people the truth about climate change, you will not get elected. It’s really remarkable. People like [Mitt] Romney and [Newt] Gingrich, they essentially have to go out there, and what I would consider to be really tap-dancing around the truth to get elected. …

So let’s talk about what happened with this FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] that you received. How did this come about?

When Justin Gillis of The New York Times was working on an article about the cloud feedback, which is something that I know a lot about, he called me to get my point of view. And I actually had the first quote in the story. And within hours of that story coming out, the university received a FOIA request for my email for a bunch of what appeared to be random terms. …

I was actually traveling at the time. And the email came in to the Open Records person, whoever that is at the university. And it was at 8:05 a.m., I think. So it was the first thing they did in the morning. There was a pretty clear cause and effect there.

What were they asking for?

It was a fishing expedition. They were asking for tobacco; I don’t work on tobacco. They were asking for emails with the word “Hockey Stick” in them; I don’t work on Hockey Stick. They were asking for emails to and from [climate scientist] Michael Mann; I don’t collaborate with him.

People have to understand two things: First, this was a legal request, and therefore we are happy to follow the law. We fulfilled the requirements and turned over the relevant emails. So in that sense, it’s no big deal. The university gets requests like this all the time, and we fill them. So it was completely legal.

On the other hand, you have to understand the context of this. This was not done for the reasons that Open Records Requests are normally made. Normally, Open Records Requests are designed to understand how deliberations are made — you know, why was a grant awarded, why was the president of UVA [University of Virginia] fired, things like that.

This was most definitely not done for that reason. If you want to understand why I think that cloud feedback is positive, why I think that climate sensitivity is what it is, just read my papers. I lay out in great detail my reasoning here.

The goal of this was to try to find something in the emails that … would be used to embarrass climate science and to cast doubt on the certainty. It’s another way to create uncertainty in climate science. You can find an email and you can quote something out of context that looks bad; that’s what they were going to do. And that was the goal of this.

And what effect did that have on you, to receive something like that?

Well, it makes me delete my emails when I get them a lot faster and makes me not communicate via email as much. I think when I first got it, it was upsetting. Nobody wants people rummaging through things that they thought were private.

On the other hand, it was a legal request. So as an employee of the state of Texas, I satisfied the request as required by the law.

Now, I’ve gotten a lot calmer about it. There was nothing in the emails. We turned them over. It’s clear there was nothing usable in them for their purposes, because they haven’t done anything with them. So I’ve become a lot more sanguine about it. But initially it was very upsetting. …

Would you say it’s harassment? Would you say it’s intimidation?

I think the net result is sort of harassment, intimidation. But I don’t think that’s actually what the goal was. I think the goal was to try to find something in there that they could then use in the policy debate. …

As a climate scientist, I do always think now, these guys are out there, and they are willing to misrepresent anything I say. So when I put stuff online now, I have to really think, is there anything in here that can be misrepresented? Can they take a quote out of context? Can they do something like that to try to embarrass me and try to embarrass climate science? …

But, you know, I don’t let it stop me. I fully expect that after this program airs, I’ll get another FOIA request for all of my emails with you, and I’ll just deal with that.

As a climate scientist, I think a lot about the future; [it] goes with the job. And I want to make sure that in 50 years or 100 years or 200 years, nobody could ever say we didn’t warn them. …

“I want to make sure that in 50 years or 100 years or 200 years, nobody could ever say we didn’t warn them.”

Climate change is coming. If you want to know what it looks like, just look at the Midwest right now. It’s drought; it’s heat. Warmer temperatures don’t mean barbecues and tank tops. It means drought; it means fire; it means suffering. People have to know that, and people need to be warned. And, you know, I hope we do something about it. But I’m a scientist, not a politician. So I sort of stop at the warning.

… They would claim that warming is alarmist. What’s your response to that?

I think from a literal sense, the worst case scenarios are truly alarming. I’m alarmed by the upper end of the projection range, you know, 10 degrees Fahrenheit warming.

On the other hand, the implication is that we’re being unrealistically alarming, and I think that’s not the case. I think if you read what the scientists actually say, it’s really very measured. The most likely response is to something which is not really catastrophic. But the thing you have to realize is that catastrophe is a reasonable possibility.

Reasonable possibility?

Yeah, absolutely. There’s uncertainty, and people love to use uncertainty to say, “Well, climate change may not be that bad.” And that’s true. Climate change may be not that bad. But the uncertainty also means that climate change could be a lot worse. Uncertainty cuts both ways. So it may be something that we can deal with reasonably easily and may be really terrible.

… What does it say that if you have one quote in a newspaper, you get a FOIA the next day?

Here’s why I think it is. They had FOIA’d [climate scientist] Katharine Hayhoe a few months before, so they were very familiar with the Texas FOIA rules. The rules for these Open Records Requests vary strongly by state, and they know that in Texas, you can request a state employee’s emails. You don’t have to have a reason; you don’t have to pay any money; you just make the request. And they knew that. So I think the people at ATI [conservative think tank American Tradition Institute] saw that; they thought, wow, let’s go fishing, and let’s see if we can possibly find something in his emails that we can misquote and try to embarrass him and embarrass climate science. …

They were just rolling the dice. It’s completely random. They had no reason to think that there was anything improper. But they were hoping to hit the jackpot like they did in “Climategate.”

I think they wrote in there something about we’re asking for them not for commercial purposes, but because we want to see whether there are signs of activism on the part of a public employee.

Yeah, I can’t remember the exact words, but the request included some statements which they didn’t need to actually include, to the extent that they wanted to see if I was misusing public funds for political activism or something like that. …

I would argue that as a scientist, I have a responsibility to talk to these people, to (UNINTEL PHRASE). That’s my job. I get paid by the taxpayer. Both the state and federal governments pay my salary and salary of my students, so when people want to know what my research says, I feel I have to tell them; it’s a responsibility. …

One of the things you try to do when you try to cast doubt on climate science is you have to bring the scientist down a peg. Most people know that if all of the scientists in the world agree on something, it’s probably right. People kind of believe in science; they believe in how science works and things like that. So you have to go after the scientist.

So anybody who disagrees with them is an activist. Their definition of activist is anybody who doesn’t agree with them. So yeah, by that definition, I am an activist. But I think that’s not a reasonable definition of an activist.

Because what you’re really doing is?

I advocate for science. If I’m an advocate, it’s for good science.

And what do you think is the net effect on scientists getting something like that? I mean, you or other people? What message does it send, do you think?

Well, again, I think that when you get something like that, it’s a shot across the bow [a warning shot], and you have to make a decision: Am I willing to put up with this crap, or am I just going to crawl into a hole and write code?

I mean, the thing I like the most, if I could do anything in the world, it’s I would like to be sitting at my computer, writing code and looking at data. That’s what I really love to do. And I do these other things, again, because I don’t want anybody to ever say: “We weren’t warned. Why didn’t you tell us?” …

Do you think it’s working as far as impact on maybe other climate scientists, ones who speak up? Does that tactic work? Is it a successful factor?

You know, I don’t think so. I don’t know any scientist that I think has spoken out in the past but has stopped speaking because of this. In fact, if anything, it kind of makes us more determined. At least it does with me.

I do know that scientists are now organizing in ways that we haven’t organized in the past, because in the past we thought, well, we’re going to do our science, and we’ll let our science speak for itself. We realize that’s not going to happen, that we really have to be out there and organized and making sure that the message of what the correct science is gets out.

… Did you think when you first got into this that you would be involved in something that’s high stakes?

Yeah. If I had known 25 years ago [when] I was in graduate school the kind of crap I’d have to put up with every day, I think I probably would have gone back to Wall Street, which is where I worked before I went to graduate school. …

When I first talked to you, you said it’s really not about this FOIA thing; it’s about a bigger story. And what is the bigger story?

The bigger story is how there is this machine out there that’s designed to try to create uncertainty about climate science. And it goes from a very small number of legitimate climate scientists — I would number them half a dozen or a dozen skeptical climate scientists — writing a very small number of papers, maybe one or two a year, and then that gets amplified by blogs and that gets picked up by policymakers, presidential candidates.

There are lots of people out there who don’t want to believe in climate change, and what they have managed to do is create this alternative reality that if you don’t want to believe in climate change, there is all this stuff out there you can claim to support your position. You can say, “Well, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is biased; it’s a U.N. organization.”

Then you can point to, there is this scientist at MIT, and he doesn’t believe in climate change. Or there is a scientist at UAH, University of Alabama in Huntsville, and he doesn’t believe in climate change. And there are these little factoids you can quote to support what’s really an absurd position because, yeah, we’ve been working on climate for 200 years, and we really understand most of it really well.

There is legitimate uncertainty, but the uncertainty is whether we’re going to see warming over the next century of 4 degrees Celsius, which is about 8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, which is about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It is going to get warmer, and it’s going to get a lot warmer. And the warming we’ve had over the last century is going to be dwarfed by the warming over the next century.”

That’s the debate. The debate is not over whether we’re going to see any warming. I mean, it is going to get warmer, and it’s going to get a lot warmer. And the warming we’ve had over the last century is going to be dwarfed by the warming over the next century. Yeah, we know that. The evidence supporting that is overwhelming.

The alternate reality, what is that? Explain that.

If you don’t want to believe in climate change, what these people have managed to do is create this entire alternate reality you can believe in, starting from a set of skeptical scientists. There are skeptical meetings where you can go to where the meetings are full of skeptics. There are skeptical reports written by the NIPCC [Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change], for example.

So there is this entire alternate reality that you can use if you don’t want to believe in climate change. I mean, it’s absurd and an unreal reality, but that’s what it is, and that’s what people use it for. …

It’s just this lawyerly “Let’s create some reasonable doubt.” It’s not legitimate in any actual scientific sense.

Why is it not legitimate in any scientific sense, in terms of characterizing the credentials, the publishing? …

Yeah, they will say that there are people who believe both sides, and they’ll say that, you know, “We have a credentialed writing team,” and things like that.

But that’s not right. I mean, the NIPCC is illegitimate in a couple of ways. First off, science has to be consistent. If you argue that the earth isn’t warming, you cannot then argue the warming is natural. Those two cannot both be right. And in science, you have to put together an argument that every step is right.

We’re not lawyers. We’re trying to determine actual truth here. We’re trying here. So the earth is warming; we have ascribed the warming to humans. We can predict about how much warmer it will get over the next century. And then social scientists take over and try to convert that into how bad that will be, and then the economists work on whether they can do anything about that. But that’s real science. It’s not the earth isn’t warming, and if it is warming it’s not due to humans. That’s not a consistent scientific statement.

As far as legitimacy of the writing teams, … there are a lot of people out there who claim to be credentialed and don’t believe in climate change. These are people who don’t work on climate. If you are going to look for a doctor, you would not go to a Ph.D. physicist; you wouldn’t go to someone who has a bachelor’s degree in biology. You would want an M.D., and an M.D. who studies exactly the disease that you, God forbid, don’t actually have but think you might have. You want someone who’s an exact expert. And that’s what we do. …

If you look at how many actual experts they have, it’s very few. There are very, very small numbers. … The writing team of the NIPCC has three or four, maybe five, credentialed climate scientists. And the IPCC, on the other hand, has thousands of scientists on it, and they are experts in what they’re writing on. And so, you know, it’s really when you look at the details you can see how the bizarro universe is frayed and fake. It’s like a New York soundstage where all the buildings are cardboard. They kind of look real from a distance, but they are not real. They are just these fake facades, and that’s what the alternative universe of climate skepticism is. …

Are there legitimately published [skeptic] scientists?

Yeah, the small number of legitimate climate skeptics do occasionally publish. But what I would hasten to add is that if you combine all of them, you’ll get three or four skeptical papers a year. They get published in peer-reviewed literature. The peer-reviewed literature is sort of the goal standard. I mean, it’s got out. It’s been reviewed for accuracy and has past peer review.

Over that time, you get three or four skeptical papers a year. Over that same time, you probably get 10,000 papers that aren’t skeptical, that either explicitly or implicitly endorse the mainstream view of climate science. Journal of Geophysical Research, for example, publishes 40,000 pages a year. And that’s just one journal from one organization.

So the balance, or the overwhelming balance, of stuff that gets published is completely consistent with mainstream climate science. But the very small number of skeptical papers that do get published get infinitely amplified by the uncertainty machines. Fox News will pick it up, and The Wall Street Journal will pick it up, and the presidential candidates will start talking about it. And so it sounds like, wow, there are all these skeptical scientists out there when they don’t — it’s just a mirage. …

If you had to pick one or two examples of the cherry-picking or misinformation that give people an idea of what you think is grossly inaccurate, … are there any couple that come to mind?

Yeah. So there’s a lot of debate about the surface temperature record. That’s the record that we use to know how much warming we’ve had over the last 100 years. And that has really come under, I think, really inaccurate, withering fires.

People are always claiming that they’ll show a picture of a temperature station which is next to a parking lot, and they’ll say: “Look. Look at the station. How can you possibly get accurate temperature measurements from this?”

But a tremendous amount of work has gone into that. There have been multiple groups [who have] looked at this. Scientists aren’t idiots. So the really obvious sources of uncertainty people have looked at. People have done lots of analyses about the impact of urbanization versus rural stations and things like that. So there have been so many analyses that there’s really no question the earth is warming. In fact, the IPCC calls it unequivocal, meaning basically beyond doubt, and I think that’s exactly right.

And anybody who claims the earth isn’t getting warmer, you know that person is deep into denial.

[Founder and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project] Fred Singer claims the earth isn’t warming.

He does claim the earth isn’t warming. I tried to have a conversation with Fred about that and explained to him that, and he didn’t accept any of my arguments. …

Fred Singer is, I think, a professional contrarian. When I was in graduate school, I worked on stratospheric ozone depletion, and Fred would call me when I was in grad school and talk to me about how he didn’t think humans were depleting ozone. And before that, he had real questions about whether humans were causing acid rain, and he didn’t think that nuclear winter was a super-sound science. And he really criticized the work that connected secondhand smoke to health impacts.

And now he doesn’t think global warming is an issue. So at least he’s consistent. But I think in all those cases, he’s quite wrong. So I know Fred. I talked to Fred, but I don’t think he’s right.

And is he peer-reviewed? And is this his area? What’s his credential for climate science? …

He does have some credentials in climate science. He does occasionally write papers — not very many. I don’t see him at meetings. I don’t think he’d be considered a front-line climate scientist. … He does occasionally have his name on peer-reviewed papers. …

But of course, it’s funny. You talk like oh, you know, you scientists, you’re shutting down the other side or whatever. There might be some people, right, legitimately –

They have to make the claim that climate scientists are corrupt. Most people realize if all of the climate scientists in the world agree that this is happening, it’s going to be bad, most people would say, “Well, we should do something about it.” So step number one is you have to criticize the climate scientist.

And that’s where the argument is that they are in it for grant money; they’re communists; they’re socialists. That’s where those arguments come from. They are trying to say: “You can’t believe the experts, so you should believe me instead. I know nothing about this. Therefore, I’m the most believable person, because the experts can’t be believed.”

It’s an argument that at its core makes no sense at all. I mean, we live in a society where we trust experts. We go to doctors because they’re experts. We go to accountants because they’re experts. We go to architects because they are experts. And we rely on experts.

So you think, well, we should go to a climate scientist; they are the experts. But they are trying to make this argument that the experts are the last people you should believe. The less somebody knows, the more believable they should be.

[They argue there's been no warming in the last decade.]

That’s just wrong. You can, if you want, very carefully select the end points of your time series, the starting month and the ending month, and then maybe you come up with something that shows no warming. But that’s not a legitimate way to do science. You don’t pick your answer and then select the time series, select your data to fit your answer.

If you look at all of the data, it’s quite clear that the warming is continuing and that we’re not cooling. We’re not not warming. I mean, that’s very clear from the data if you look at all the data.

Is it the number of years? Is that what it is? Because they only picked 10 years?

Exactly. That’s exactly right. For climate calculations, you really have to pick a decade or two decades or hopefully three decades. That’s what the National Weather Service picks when they do climate. They pick 30-year periods. [cf riding the down escalator] So you really have to look at these longer time periods to see if the temperature is going up. And if you look at a decade, you see that this decade is much warmer than the previous decade, and that’s really the comparison you want to make.

If you look at individual years, you can get any kind of results. It’s like looking at the stock market during a day; you know, it’s 20 points higher than it was three hours ago. What does that mean? That doesn’t tell you anything about the direction of the stock market, what it does over a few hours. Similarly, what the climate does one year versus next year tells you nothing about long-term trends, zero. It’s impacted by the short-term variability, just like the stock market. The climate, sensitive things like El Niño cycles, weather variability, things like that can determine whether one year is warmer or cooler than the next. You have to look at decades. …

[What about Climategate?]

Climategate, I think, was really a public relations disaster for climate science, and I fully understand how, if you read those emails, you see people that may not be behaving quite the way you would hope they would. Nonetheless, there’s no reason in there to believe that anybody’s cooking the books on climate information. So there’s no evidence that they were making things up or that they were faking temperature data.

And in addition, what they were arguing about was essentially one surface temperature data set. But there are lots of other surface temperature data sets out there. … And if you look at all those data sets, they all agree. So if you want to argue that one of these is corrupt, then they all have to be corrupt. …

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http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/07/climate-science-attack-group-turns-sights-on-texas-professors.html

Climate science attack group turns sights on Texas professors

The American Tradition Institute, a conservative think tank with financial ties to fossil fuel interests, made headlines last year for a controversial freedom of information lawsuit against the University of Virginia targeting former UVA professor and leading climate researcher Michael Mann, who's now at Penn State.

Now ATI's campaign to discredit mainstream climate science is targeting professors at two Texas universities -- and it's particularly interested in their communications with journalists.

ATI recently sent requests under the Texas Public Information Act to Texas A&M University seeking all emails to or from a university account used by Andrew Dessler (photo at left), a professor in the school's Department of Atmospheric Sciences whose research focuses on climate systems and climate change policy. As the Climate Science FOI report blog observed,ATI's requests were unrelated to scientific data.

The group's initial request for Dessler's emails was made on May 1, the day after theNew York Times ran a criticalstoryquoting Dessler about MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, who is part of a small minority of climate researchers who argue that mainstream science exaggerates global warming trends. (Lindzen is also a skeptic about the well-documented link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer.) That request sought emails that mentioned Lindzen and Mann, among other things.

Then earlier this month, ATI sent asecond information requestto Texas A&M expanding the emails it sought from Dessler's account to include any exchanges with New York Times reporter Justin Gillis, who wrote the Lindzen story, as well as any communications with the PBS investigative journalism show Frontline, Frontline producer Catherine Upin, Associated Press science reporter Seth Borenstein, and Suzanne Goldenberg, U.S. environment correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian. Also covered in that request were any communications Dessler had with the watchdog groupUnion of Concerned Scientists andRichard Ades, a public affairs professional who directed the Project on Climate Science, which worked to disseminate high-quality scientific climate research to media and lawmakers.

Late last year ATI sent out a similar information request to Texas Tech seeking information on professor Katharine Hayhoe(photo on right), an atmospheric scientist who directs that school's Climate Science Center. Hayhoe wrote a chapter on climate for a book about the environment by former Georgia congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich only to have him cut it after criticism from conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who refers to Hayhoe as a "climate babe."Other scientists targeted by ATI include NASA climatologists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, co-founder of theRealClimate blogalong with Mann.

ATI's initial lawsuit targeting Mann came on the heels of a similar effort by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), a global warming skeptic who sought to investigate whether Mann defrauded taxpayers by using manipulated data to win government funding. That case went all the way to Virginia's Supreme Court, which ruled against Cuccinelli earlier this year.

In a recent opinion piece in the conservative Washington Examiner, Christopher C. Horner, ATI's director of litigation and a senior fellow at the fossil fuel-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, described ATI's efforts as part of a "transparency campaign using federal and state freedom of information laws to learn more about how taxpayer-funded academics use their positions to advance a particular agenda."

But others take a different view. Jeff Ruch, an attorney with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which has helped Mann and others with legal fees, told the Guardian that the requests represent a "new chapter" in ATI's ongoing campaign against mainstream climate scientists:

"Before they were going after interactions between individual scientists. This is basically a spying operation to see who are you talking to, but presumably the idea is the same: to find material that is potential[ly] of use in discrediting a scientist."

Originally known as the Western Tradition Institute,ATI is the 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit arm of the American Tradition Partnership, a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofit that was founded in Colorado in 2008 with backing from fossil fuel interests. ATP, which changed its named from Western Tradition Partnership, was registered by Scott Shires, a Republican operative who was fined over $7,000 for campaign finance violations in that state, pleaded guilty in aschemeto fraudulently obtain federal grants for developing alternative fuels, and wastiedto an illegal gambling ring.

ATP was the plaintiff in a recent U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned state bans on corporate and union spending in elections under the court's 2010 Citizens United decision. That case originated in the group's challenge to a Montana law that aimed to limit the influence of the state's powerful mining industry.

By Sue Sturgis on Thu, 07/19/2012 - 11:38

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Climate science attack group turns sights on Texas professors

Now ATI's campaign to discredit mainstream climate science is targeting professors at two Texas universities -- and it's particularly interested in their communications with journalists.

The group's initial request for Dessler's emails was made on May 1, the day after the New York Times ran a critical story quoting Dessler about MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, who is part of a small minority of climate researchers who argue that mainstream science exaggerates global warming trends. (Lindzen is also a skeptic about the well-documented link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer.) That request sought emails that mentioned Lindzen and Mann, among other things.

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Late last year ATI sent out a similar information request to Texas Tech seeking information on professor Katharine Hayhoe (photo on right), an atmospheric scientist who directs that school's Climate Science Center. Hayhoe wrote a chapter on climate for a book about the environment by former Georgia congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich only to have him cut it after criticism from conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who refers to Hayhoe as a "climate babe." Other scientists targeted by ATI include NASA climatologists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, co-founder of the RealClimate blog along with Mann.