forbe
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1/16 bkup no links
forbesmag116
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goes after both? equally/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/11/05/the-ten-worst-fact-checks-of-the-2012-election/
not much:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Forbes_Magazine
Forbes Magazine is a business magazine run by Steve Forbes and owned by Forbes, Inc.; like the Wall Street Journal, it runs columns of right wing misinformation.
Contents
[hide]
1 Articles and resources
1.1 References
1.2 Related SourceWatch articles
1.3 External resources
1.4 External articles
Articles and resources
References
Related SourceWatch articles
Steve Forbes
Forbes, Inc.
External resources
External articles
Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia (with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth) (2011-01-06). Forbes’ rich list of nonsense. RealClimate. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
Steve Lambert (2006-02-20). Steve Forbes plays DDT Ban Myth Bingo. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
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I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011). I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.
Contact Peter Ferrara
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/07/08/as-the-earth-cools-obamas-still-distracted-by-a-fraudulent-warming-narrative/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-global-warming-alarmists-global-cooling-is-here/ happer
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But citizens participating in the democratic process do have a responsibility to become informed about the scientific debate over global warming. And that is my function here in focusing on the publication this week of Climate Change Reconsidered II, authored by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and published by the Heartland Institute.
Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
omg2
6/16/2014
Obama's Climate McCarthyism Demeans Presidential Office
President Barack Obama demeaned the dignity of the presidency by ridiculing tens of thousands of scientists for simply disagreeing with his lay opinions on global warming. While the political left throws shrill temper tantrums against anybody who “disrespects” the Office of the Presidency by asking Barack Obama a challenging question (something they had no qualms about during the Bush administration), Obama himself is setting the applicable ground rules for disrespectful political discourse and climate McCarthyism.
At a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine, Obama encouraged students to heap scorn on Ph.D. scientists at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific research institutions if they disagree with Obama’s global warming policies.
“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,”Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”
President Obama is correct that no Ph.D. scientists – and likely no sane individuals – seriously argued that the moon was made of cheese or was merely an illusion. Does that analogy apply to the global warming debate?
Distinguished professors and scientific researchers on the staffs of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., have published research and publicly expressed their findings that humans are not creating a global warming crisis. More than 30,000 scientists, including more than 16,000 with post-graduate science degrees and more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have taken the affirmative step of signing a petition summarizing such science. Almost certainly, tens of thousands more – and likely hundreds of thousands more – similarly agree but are unaware of the petition or haven’t taken the affirmative step to read it, review it, and submit their signatures.
As host of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I host approximately once per year, I routinely have to turn away dozens upon dozens of highly qualified university science professors who have heard of the conference and hope to secure a speaking slot. With a limitless budget and time schedule, I could easily have hundreds of university science professors and thousands more professional scientists give presentations calling attention to the flaws in President Obama’s global warming alarmism.
Indeed, multiple surveys of professional meteorologists and climate scientistsreveal that if a consensus on the issue exists at all, it is that whatever global warming is occurring is of mixed natural and human causation and does not justify the economy-killing prescriptions championed by self-serving politicians like Barack Obama.
To the limited extent global warming alarmists publicly debate the issue, their track record for success is about the same as that of China at soccer’s World Cup. For those who are skeptical, take a look at how one the global warming movement’s most visible advocates, Gavin Schmidt, fared the one time he participated in a public debate. After getting beaten so soundly that even he admitted it was a mistake to debate other scientists on the issue (and blamed his loss on one of his opponents being taller than him), is it any wonder he and his fellow alarmists avoid public debates the way John Edwards avoids National Enquirer reporters? Perhaps forgetting how badly Schmidt fared in his one-time debate, a Florida State University faculty member who was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to publicly debate me on the topic and fared just as miserably. Here is video of the debate that climate alarmists claim “is over.”
This brings us back to Obama’s attempt to vilify and ridicule scientists who disagree with his lay scientific conjecture. Perhaps it is true that ridicule and vilification are common, if regrettable, aspects of contemporary politics. Most Americans would hope that the President of the United States would not demean the office by engaging in such mean-spirited and sophomoric behavior, but we have also come to realize that politicians will be politicians, no matter how much power they have attained. But this isn’t about one ambitious politician smearing another ambitious politician. This is about the President of the United States – a non-scientist – making a grossly dishonest mischaracterization and analogy at the expense of expert scientists and then encouraging our nation’s best and brightest to shout down those scientists utilizing further dishonesty and McCarthyism to further political agendas. And the moment somebody questions the President about such reprehensible conduct – no matter how calmly the question is asked – the political left goes into conniptions about how appalling and reprehensible it is to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States in such a manner.
Sorry, Barack, but you have only yourself to blame for so pitifully demeaning the Office of the President. end?
"multiple" results: [deniers picked on] "7 Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists
328 who publish mostly on other topics, were the two groups most likely to be convinced that
329 humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their
330 concurrence. The two groups least likely to be convinced of this were the non-publishing
331 climate scientists and non-publishing meteorologists/atmospheric scientists, at 65% and 59%,
332 respectively. In the middle were the two groups of publishing meteorologists/atmospheric
333 scientists at 79% and 78%, respectively. ..."
"surveys" his spin: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/03/14/shock-poll-meteorologists-are-global-warming-skeptics/:
Scientists who have attended the Heartland Institute’s annual International Conference on Climate Change report the same disconnect throughout their various science organizations; only a minority of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis, yet the non-scientist bureaucracies publish position statements that contradict what the scientists themselves believe. Few, if any, of these organizations actually poll their members before publishing a position statement. Within this context of few actual scientist surveys, the AMS survey results are very powerful.
In contrast to the AMS survey, where all respondents are AMS meteorologists, a majority have Ph.D.s and fully 80% have a Ph.D. or Masters Degree, position statements by organizational bureaucracies carry little scientific weight. For example, a position statementrecently published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and frequently cited as the “definitive” indication of scientific consensus on global warming was authored by a mere 23 persons. Of those 23 persons, only five had Ph.D.s in a field closely related to climate science, an equal number (5) were staffers for environmental activist groups, two were politicians, one was the EPA general counsel under the Clinton administration and 19 of the 23 had already spoken out on behalf of global warming alarmism prior to being chosen for the panel. Clearly the scientific weight of the NAS statement pales in comparison to the AMS meteorologist survey.
note sure who he isreferring to, he never gives names:
bd of atmos and climate:
Antonio J. Busalacchi, Jr. (Chair)
University of Maryland
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
Gerald A. Meehl (Vice Chair)
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Lance F. Bosart
State University of New York
Mark A. Cane
Columbia University
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Shuyi S. Chen
University of Miami
Heidi Cullen
Climate Central
Leadership
Chief Climatologist
Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org
Dr. Heidi Cullen serves as Chief Climatologist for Climate Central — a non-prfit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, NJ. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins. Before joining Climate Central, where she reports on climate and energy issues, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, a weekly television series focused on issues related to climate change and the environment. Prior to that Dr. Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board and was recently elected to the AMS Council. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Publications
M. Barlow, M. Wheeler, B. Lyon, and H. Cullen, 2005: Modulation of Daily Precipitation Over Southwest Asia by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, 133, 3579-3594.
M.H. Glantz and H. Cullen, 2003: Zimbabwe's Food Crisis. Environment, 45(1), 9-11.
M. Barlow, H. Cullen, B. Lyons, 2002: Drought in Central and Southwest Asia: La Nina, the warm pool, and Indian Ocean precipitation. J. Clim., 15(7): 697-700.
M. Visbeck, J. Hurrell, L. Polvani, and H.M. Cullen, 2001: The North Atlantic Oscillation: Past, present, and future. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98: 12876-12877.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: North Atlantic Influence on Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow, Int. J. Clim., 20(8): 853-863.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: The Possible Role of Climate in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 28(4): 379-382.
H.M. Cullen, R.D. D'Arrigo, E.R. Cook and M.E. Mann, 2000: Multiproxy Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, Paleoceanography, 16(1): 27-39.
M. Visbeck, H. Cullen, G. Krahmann, and N. Naik. 1998. An ocean model's response to North Atlantic Oscillation-like wind forcing, Geophys. Res. Lett.., 25(24): 4521-4525.
G. Bond, W. Showers, M. Cheseby, R. Lotti, P. Almasi, P. deMenocal, P. Priore, H. Cullen, I. Hajdas, G. Bonani. 1997. A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates, Science, 278: 1257-1266
Pamela Emch
Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems
William B. Gail
Global Weather Corporation
Lisa Goddard
Columbia University
Terri S. Hogue
Colorado School of Mines
Anthony Janetos
Boston University
Ronald “Nick” Keener, Jr.
Duke Energy Corporation
John E. Kutzbach
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephen W. Pacala
Princeton University
Aristides A.N. Patrinos
New York University
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
The University of Chicago
Kimberly Prather
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
S.T. Rao
North Carolina State University
David A. Robinson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
John T. Snow
The University of Oklahoma
Claudia Tebaldi
Climate Central
Xubin Zeng
University of Arizona
OSB Liaison:
Daniel Rudnick
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
[sadly links can't be copies, but last one is top SUV's (fail)
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/16/obamas-climate-mccarthyism-demeans-presidential-office/print/
OMG
wiki
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is an American libertarian science writer and author and editor of books on economics, ecology and biotechnology.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Work
4 Bibliography
4.1 Authored
4.2 Edited
5 See also
6 References
Personal life[edit]
Bailey was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Washington County, Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife Pamela.[1]
Career[edit]
Bailey attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976.[2] He worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 1987 to 1990 he was a staff writer for Forbes.[1] Bailey worked as a reporter for The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica during 1990 and 1991.[3] His articles and reviews have appeared in national newspapers and magazines and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Writinganthology series.[1][4] Bailey was the founding producer of the PBS series Think Tank and has produced or co-produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News.[3][5] Since 1997 he has been a science correspondent for Reason magazine.[6] Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).[7] He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Université du Québec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute. A column he wrote in 2004, "The battle for your brain" received a Southern California Journalism award from the Los Angeles Press Club and was included in the book, The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004.[8][9] Bailey testified before a congressional sub-committee in 2004 on, “The Impact of Science on Public Policy.”[10] In 2006 he was on the shortlist of nominees of "personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotech in the last ten years" compiled by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.[11] The Greenpeace project, "exxonsecrets.org" identifies the Reason Foundation, the CEI (where Bailey is an adjunct fellow) and the Cato Institute (where he is an adjunct scholar) as receiving funding from the U.S. Petroleum industry.[2]
Work[edit]
In his 1993 book, Ecoscam, and other works, Bailey criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. This book was considered typical of the conservative movement's political defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the U.S. through the portrayal of global warming and the changes from attempts to deal with it as, "threatening to American industry, prosperity, lifestyles and the entire 'American way of life'."[12]
The position taken in his 1995 book, The True State of the Planet has been described as "growth forever" or "Promethean" arguing for unrestrained exploitation based on assumptions of unending nature, value derived exclusively from man's changes to material, and exceptional human resourcefulness.[13] His followup book Earth Report 2000 was recognized for being among the works of established authors, "who have argued that past and present widely accepted visions of environmental deterioration and disaster...have little or no basis in fact."[14] Citing these two books Holt, Pressman and Spash describe the CEI as believing, "technology will solve all environmental problems and that present environmental dilemmas are simply a necessary outcome of much needed economic growth."[15]
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." He explains this in his most recent book Liberation Biology.[16]
Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now ... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.[17]
However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."[18]
Bailey voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, a fact which he later wrote made him "disheartened and ashamed."[19] In 2008, he voted for Barack Obama because he felt that "[t]he Republicans must be punished and punished hard."[19]
Bibliography[edit]
Authored[edit]
Eco-scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin's Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-312-10971-4.
Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. Prometheus. 2005. ISBN 978-1-61592-169-0.
Edited[edit]
True State of the Planet. Free Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-02-874010-2.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. McGraw-Hill. 1999. ISBN 978-0-07-134260-5.
Global Warming and Other Eco-myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death. Forum. 2002. ISBN 978-0-7615-3660-4.
See also[edit]
Brave New World argument
Enough argument
References[edit]
^ Jump up to:a b c d "Ronald Bailey: Science Correspondent". Reason website. Reason Foundation.
^ Jump up to:a b "Factsheet: Ronald Bailey". exxonsecrets.org. Greenpeace. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
^ Jump up to:a b "About Ronald Bailey". Faith & Reason website. PBS.
Jump up^ Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim, eds. (2004). The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2004. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-24697-7. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ Wertheim, Margaret. "Faith & Reason: Educators Guide". New River Media and Five Continents Music.
Jump up^ "Staff". Reason website.
Jump up^ "The Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellowship". Competitive Enterprise Institute website. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ "2004 Southern California Journalism Award Winners". Los Angeles Press Club website. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2004). "The Battle for Your Brain". In Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim. The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780618246984.
Jump up^ "Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy."". US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources. 2004-02-04. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Jayaraman, KS; Louët, S; Powell, K; Ransom, J et al. (March 2006). "Who's who in biotech". Nature Biotechnology 24 (3): 298. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ McCright, Aaron M.; Dunlap, Riley E. (2003). "Defeating Kyoto: The conservative movement's impact on U.S. climate change policy". Social Problems 50 (3): 353.
Jump up^ Milne, MJ; Tregidga, H; Walton, S (2009). "Words not actions! The ideological role of sustainable development reporting". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 22 (8): 1211–1257.doi:10.1108/09513570910999292.
Jump up^ Henderson, David (2005). "Misguided Virtue". Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal.doi:10.2139/ssrn.681168.
Jump up^ Holt, RPF; Pressman, S; Spash, CL, eds. (2009). Post Keynesian and Ecological Economics: Confronting Environmental Issues. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-84980-208-6.
Jump up^ "Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution" (book review). Innovation Watch. Archived from the original on 2006-05-12.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2007-02-02). "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough".Reason.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2006-06-16). "An Inconvenient Truth". Reason.
^ Jump up to:a b "Who's Getting Your Vote? Reason's 2008 presidential poll". Reason. 2008-10-29.
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AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]
Forbes Journalist Fired After Reporting the Truth About Cliven Bundy
May 8, 2014 |
Fallout from the Cliven Bundy affair continues to reverberate in a myriad of ways: Right-wing talk shows hosts have retreated; paranoid rumors appear to be tearing apart the antigovernment militia folk still hanging out at the Bundy ranch; and a well-respected reporter has been unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped by a mainstream outlet. After writing a piece titled “Federal Grazing Program in Bundy Dispute Rips Off Taxpayers, Wild Horses,” which appeared on the Forbes website [3], journalist Vickery Eckhoff was cut loose from her writing gig with the magazine.
In a blog entry headlined “Cliven Bundy Ended My Forbes Gig [4],” Eckhoff writes that while she’s “not quite sure why” she was let go, she assumes that it was no coincidence that she was dumped some 10 hours after the piece appeared on the Forbes website.
Eckhoff notes: “A few people have suggested it may be on account of Steve Forbes keeping cattle on his New Jersey estate [5] to reduce his property taxes. Others have mentioned Forbes' partnership with Fox News.”
Why the editors at Forbes decided she was no longer wanted as a contributor is a mystery. Some of her previous articles included: “Is Your K-Y Jelly Cruelty-Free? Do You Care?”; “Racing Industry Silent About Slaughtered Thoroughbreds”; and “WSJ Serves Up Tainted Journalism On Horse Slaughter Plate.”
Eckhoff's work appears in a number of major media outlets. Some of the topics she covers are, as she describes, “the horse industry, particularly racing, breeding, responsible ownership and the political and industry forces that are working to open horse slaughterhouses again in the US.”
Eckhoff’s firing came the night before she was scheduled to speak at the American Equine Summit. (The topic of her presentation was titled “Disinformation in the Media”—it can be seen here [6].)
According to Eckhoff, the Forbes piece “got the largest audience in a single day of any article I’ve ever written. I think it’s now up to 22,000 views.” (As of Sunday, May 4, the piece had received over 33,000 views.) Her story“picks up on the Cliven Bundy story and it looks at the consequences to the federal grazing program for taxpayers and wild horses."
In announcing her firing to the audience at the American Equine Summit, Eckhoff said she’s had “a very great platform” at Forbes, and that she was able “to introduce animal industries as not just a human interest story, but as a political story, as an economic story, as a food safety story, as an environmental story.”
Eckhoff’s American Equine Summit presentation begins with her citing two of Mark Twain’s statements about the power and ownership of the media: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uniformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” and “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
Among the many interesting points she makes in her presentation is that “disinformation” is driven by a set of mainstream “media values.” She points out that “everybody loves animal stories,” and unfortunately, the media believes anyone can write them, regardless of their lack of expertise, scientific background or familiarity with the subject. Fact checking is lax, “corrections and retractions are discretionary.” The desire to get the story out first is paramount. In addition, she points out that “animal advocates [are] mistrusted as sources unless [they represent] national welfare groups”; “Industry spokespeople [are] viewed as trustworthy.”
On her blog, Eckhoff explained that her Forbes piece basically “covered some of the same territory Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, and Jon Stewart addressed for millions of viewers. The only difference is that mine exposed why the grazing program was not only a bad deal for taxpayers, but [also for] wild horses. Oh, and I got the boot while they got ratings!”
She pointed out that in her two-year experience at Forbes, she had “never been challenged on a single fact.”
Why Eckhoff was fired remains a mystery.
She pledges to “continue writing on this topic, aiming for a more mainstream news audience, to reach the kinds of readers who really care about their taxes being wasted by the federal government on wild horse roundups and a grazing program that damages public lands at the public’s expense. One would think this was right up Forbes’ alley — the story appeared in its ‘Taxes’ section — but, apparently ... no.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/forbes-fires-journalist-after-reporting-truth-about-cliven-bundy
see http://www.desmogblog.com/james-taylor heartland
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green tech blog legit?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/15/the-real-climategate-desmog-blog-outs-heartland-propaganda-machine/
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are bolstering plant life throughout the world, environmental scientists report in a newly published peer-reviewed study. The findings, published inGeophysical Research Letters, are gleaned from satellite measurements of global plant life, and contradict assertions by activists that global warming is causing deserts to expand, along with devastating droughts.
A team of scientists led by environmental physicist Randall Donohue, a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, analyzed satellite data from 1982 through 2010. The scientists documented a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth, and particularly the Earth’s arid regions, since 1982. The satellite data showed rising carbon dioxide levels caused a remarkable 11 percent increase in foliage in arid regions since 1982, versus what would be the case if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had remained at 1982 levels.
“Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what’s causing that,” said Donohue in a press release accompanying the study. “Up until this point, they’ve linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove.”
The study noted that foliage in warm, wet regions such as tropical rainforests are near their maximum capacity. In warm, arid regions there is room for greater increases in foliage and rising carbon dioxide levels are inducing more prevalent plant growth.
Carbon dioxide acts as aerial fertilizer and also helps plants thrive under arid conditions. Although global precipitation has increased during the past century as the Earth has warmed, elevated carbon dioxide levels are assisting plant life in warm, dry regions independent of – and in addition to – increases in global precipitation.
“The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration,” said Donohue. “Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect.”
Donohue focused special attention on Australia in an additional press release. Although global drought is becoming less frequent and less severe as the Earth modestly warms, activists claim global warming is causing harmful drought in Australia.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water every efficiently,” said Donohue. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilization.”
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas,” Donohue reported, while adding that scientists should still monitor secondary effects.
The satellite data show plant life in the United States has especially benefited from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and gradually warming temperatures. Satellite data show foliage has increased in the vast majority of the United States since 1982, with the western U.S. benefiting the most. Indeed, many western regions experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in foliage since 1982.
Other regions showing particularly strong increases in foliage include the Sahel region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and nearly all of Europe.
This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/07/10/global-warming-no-satellites-show-carbon-dioxide-is-causing-global-greening/
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United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the principal international body for the assessment of climate research, just published its Fifth Assessment Report concluding unequivocally that climate change is real and requires meaningful action — but the anti-science fringe is now running to the media to spread misinformation and discredit the report.
In one example on Monday, the president of the Koch-funded Heartland Institute published an op-ed in Forbes arguing that climate change would have “net benefits” – and there's many more like him being printed in newspapers across the country.
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mark hendrickson
I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College and Fellow for Social and Economic Policy for the Center for Vision & Values, for whom I've written 200+ articles in the last five years. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Famous But Nameless: Lessons and Inspiration from the Bible’s Anonymous Characters (2011).
op ed (on forbes?)
Climate Change: 'Hoax' Or Crime Of The Century?
Well, we had a warm summer here in the United States, and that brought some of the climate change alarmists out again. Looks like it’s time for another rebuttal!
John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, and various other critics have called the theory that human use of carbon-based fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic global warming or climate change a “hoax.” It is, but it’s more than that, it’s criminal.
Here are some of the scientific questions at the core of this issue:
Is the climate changing? Of course. The climate always has changed and always will.
Is the earth getting warmer? We should hope so for at least two reasons: First, the world emerged from the Little Ice Age in the 19th century, so it would be worrisome if it weren’t getting warmer. Second, all the history indicates that humans thrive more during warmer periods than colder ones. It is likely, though, that earth has warmed less than many official temperature records indicate for a variety of reasons, including: few long-term records from either the southern hemisphere or the 71 percent of the planet that is covered by water; distortions from the urban heat-island effect and other faulty siting (e.g., temperature sensors next to asphalt parking lots, etc.; the decline in weather station reports from Siberia after the fall of the Soviet government; the arbitrarily ceasing to include measurements from northern latitudes and high elevations, etc.) The most accurate measures of temperature come from satellites. Since the start of these measurements in 1979, they show minor fluctuations and an insignificant net change in global temperature.
Is the earth getting dangerously warm? Probably not, since the earth was warmer than it is now in 7000 of the last 10,000 years. By the way, does anybody know what the “right” amount of global heat is?
Are we humans causing the warming by our carbon emissions? Actually, most of the “greenhouse effect” is due to water vapor, which makes one wonder why the EPA hasn’t designated H2O a harmful pollutant that they must regulate. Meteorologist Brian Sussman’s calculations in his book “Climategate” show humanity’s share of the greenhouse effect as .9 of 1 percent.
It’s even possible that CO2 may not affect global warming at all. During many stretches of planetary history, there has been no correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature. In other long stretches, the variations of the two factors followed a significant sequence: increases in CO2 followed increases in warmth by several centuries. You don’t need to have a degree in climate science to know that, in a temporal universe, cause does not follow its effect.
Even global warming alarmists have tacitly conceded that CO2 is not the primary driver of climate change when they responded to the relative cooling in recent years by changing their story and telling us that the earth is likely to cool for a few decades in spite of still-increasing atmospheric CO2. Translation: other factors outweigh CO2 in their impact on global temperatures. Those other factors include variations in solar activity (accounting for 3/4 of the variability in earth’s temperature according to the Marshall Institute); changes in earth’s orbit and axis; albedo (reflectivity, meaning changes in cloud cover which are influenced by fluctuations in gamma ray activity); and volcanic and tectonic activity in the earth’s crust. For humans to presume that they are more than a gnat on an elephant’s rump in terms of impact on climate change is vain and delusive.
Shifting gears, let’s assume that the alarmists are right and that man-made CO2 emissions are making the world warmer. If so, what changes would they hope to accomplish and at what cost?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/09/16/climate-change-hoax-or-crime-of-the-century/
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Global Warmists Might Explain Why No Hurricanes Midway Through 2013 Season
Major hurricane strikes occurred 50 percent more often 50-100 years ago than they have during the past 50 years. read
Post 1 week ago | 2,452 views
Why Republicans (And Others) Place A Low Priority On Global Warming
The evidence is clear, warmer is better for humans and other animals and for plant life. read »
Post 3 weeks ago | 1,813 views
Global Warming Activist Michael Mann Wages War On Government Transparency
When you spend millions of taxpayer dollars, it’s only fair to account for how the money is spent. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,842 views
President Obama's Climate Plan Would Kill Hundreds Of Millions Of Birds And Bats
All this, and no detectable change in global temperatures. read »
Post 1 month ago | 12,704 views
Senator Barbara Boxer's Own Experts Contradict Obama On Global Warming
Climate activists deliver a crushing blow to Obama’s climate change narrative. read »
Post 1 month ago | 1,574 views
You Can't Deny Ezra Klein Knows Next To Nothing About The Global Warming Debate
Whether or note we’re still in the Little Ice Age is not for dispute. read »
Post 1 month ago | 4,304 views
Global Warming? No, Satellites Show Carbon Dioxide Is Causing 'Global Greening'
A carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,642 views
HBO's Global Warmed 'Vice': A Classic Case Of Climate Denial
Fortunately, HBO On Demand offers more entertaining fictional programming options. read »
Post 2 months ago | 1,442 views
Conservatives Reach Common Ground On A Carbon Tax, And That's The Problem
About such a tax, conservatives should know better. read »
Post 3 months ago | 20,896 views
Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
More evidence showing how embarrassingly feeble the alarmist theory really is. read »
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Forbes’ rich list of nonsense 2x
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
614 capt
---
Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
omg2
OPINION 6/16/2014
Obama's Climate McCarthyism Demeans Presidential Office
President Barack Obama demeaned the dignity of the presidency by ridiculing tens of thousands of scientists for simply disagreeing with his lay opinions on global warming. While the political left throws shrill temper tantrums against anybody who “disrespects” the Office of the Presidency by asking Barack Obama a challenging question (something they had no qualms about during the Bush administration), Obama himself is setting the applicable ground rules for disrespectful political discourse and climate McCarthyism.
At a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine, Obama encouraged students to heap scorn on Ph.D. scientists at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific research institutions if they disagree with Obama’s global warming policies.
“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,”Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”
President Obama is correct that no Ph.D. scientists – and likely no sane individuals – seriously argued that the moon was made of cheese or was merely an illusion. Does that analogy apply to the global warming debate?
Distinguished professors and scientific researchers on the staffs of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., have published research and publicly expressed their findings that humans are not creating a global warming crisis. More than 30,000 scientists, including more than 16,000 with post-graduate science degrees and more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have taken the affirmative step of signing a petition summarizing such science. Almost certainly, tens of thousands more – and likely hundreds of thousands more – similarly agree but are unaware of the petition or haven’t taken the affirmative step to read it, review it, and submit their signatures.
As host of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I host approximately once per year, I routinely have to turn away dozens upon dozens of highly qualified university science professors who have heard of the conference and hope to secure a speaking slot. With a limitless budget and time schedule, I could easily have hundreds of university science professors and thousands more professional scientists give presentations calling attention to the flaws in President Obama’s global warming alarmism.
Indeed, multiple surveys of professional meteorologists and climate scientistsreveal that if a consensus on the issue exists at all, it is that whatever global warming is occurring is of mixed natural and human causation and does not justify the economy-killing prescriptions championed by self-serving politicians like Barack Obama.
To the limited extent global warming alarmists publicly debate the issue, their track record for success is about the same as that of China at soccer’s World Cup. For those who are skeptical, take a look at how one the global warming movement’s most visible advocates, Gavin Schmidt, fared the one time he participated in a public debate. After getting beaten so soundly that even he admitted it was a mistake to debate other scientists on the issue (and blamed his loss on one of his opponents being taller than him), is it any wonder he and his fellow alarmists avoid public debates the way John Edwards avoids National Enquirer reporters? Perhaps forgetting how badly Schmidt fared in his one-time debate, a Florida State University faculty member who was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to publicly debate me on the topic and fared just as miserably. Here is video of the debate that climate alarmists claim “is over.”
This brings us back to Obama’s attempt to vilify and ridicule scientists who disagree with his lay scientific conjecture. Perhaps it is true that ridicule and vilification are common, if regrettable, aspects of contemporary politics. Most Americans would hope that the President of the United States would not demean the office by engaging in such mean-spirited and sophomoric behavior, but we have also come to realize that politicians will be politicians, no matter how much power they have attained. But this isn’t about one ambitious politician smearing another ambitious politician. This is about the President of the United States – a non-scientist – making a grossly dishonest mischaracterization and analogy at the expense of expert scientists and then encouraging our nation’s best and brightest to shout down those scientists utilizing further dishonesty and McCarthyism to further political agendas. And the moment somebody questions the President about such reprehensible conduct – no matter how calmly the question is asked – the political left goes into conniptions about how appalling and reprehensible it is to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States in such a manner.
Sorry, Barack, but you have only yourself to blame for so pitifully demeaning the Office of the President.
"multiple" results: [deniers picked on] "7 Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists
328 who publish mostly on other topics, were the two groups most likely to be convinced that
329 humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their
330 concurrence. The two groups least likely to be convinced of this were the non-publishing
331 climate scientists and non-publishing meteorologists/atmospheric scientists, at 65% and 59%,
332 respectively. In the middle were the two groups of publishing meteorologists/atmospheric
333 scientists at 79% and 78%, respectively. ..."
"surveys" his spin: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/03/14/shock-poll-meteorologists-are-global-warming-skeptics/:
Scientists who have attended the Heartland Institute’s annual International Conference on Climate Change report the same disconnect throughout their various science organizations; only a minority of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis, yet the non-scientist bureaucracies publish position statements that contradict what the scientists themselves believe. Few, if any, of these organizations actually poll their members before publishing a position statement. Within this context of few actual scientist surveys, the AMS survey results are very powerful.
In contrast to the AMS survey, where all respondents are AMS meteorologists, a majority have Ph.D.s and fully 80% have a Ph.D. or Masters Degree, position statements by organizational bureaucracies carry little scientific weight. For example, a position statementrecently published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and frequently cited as the “definitive” indication of scientific consensus on global warming was authored by a mere 23 persons. Of those 23 persons, only five had Ph.D.s in a field closely related to climate science, an equal number (5) were staffers for environmental activist groups, two were politicians, one was the EPA general counsel under the Clinton administration and 19 of the 23 had already spoken out on behalf of global warming alarmism prior to being chosen for the panel. Clearly the scientific weight of the NAS statement pales in comparison to the AMS meteorologist survey.
note sure who he isreferring to, he never gives names:
bd of atmos and climate:
Antonio J. Busalacchi, Jr. (Chair)
University of Maryland
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
Gerald A. Meehl (Vice Chair)
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Lance F. Bosart
State University of New York
Mark A. Cane
Columbia University
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Shuyi S. Chen
University of Miami
Heidi Cullen
Climate Central
Leadership
Chief Climatologist
Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org
Dr. Heidi Cullen serves as Chief Climatologist for Climate Central — a non-prfit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, NJ. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins. Before joining Climate Central, where she reports on climate and energy issues, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, a weekly television series focused on issues related to climate change and the environment. Prior to that Dr. Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board and was recently elected to the AMS Council. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Publications
M. Barlow, M. Wheeler, B. Lyon, and H. Cullen, 2005: Modulation of Daily Precipitation Over Southwest Asia by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, 133, 3579-3594.
M.H. Glantz and H. Cullen, 2003: Zimbabwe's Food Crisis. Environment, 45(1), 9-11.
M. Barlow, H. Cullen, B. Lyons, 2002: Drought in Central and Southwest Asia: La Nina, the warm pool, and Indian Ocean precipitation. J. Clim., 15(7): 697-700.
M. Visbeck, J. Hurrell, L. Polvani, and H.M. Cullen, 2001: The North Atlantic Oscillation: Past, present, and future. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98: 12876-12877.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: North Atlantic Influence on Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow, Int. J. Clim., 20(8): 853-863.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: The Possible Role of Climate in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 28(4): 379-382.
H.M. Cullen, R.D. D'Arrigo, E.R. Cook and M.E. Mann, 2000: Multiproxy Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, Paleoceanography, 16(1): 27-39.
M. Visbeck, H. Cullen, G. Krahmann, and N. Naik. 1998. An ocean model's response to North Atlantic Oscillation-like wind forcing, Geophys. Res. Lett.., 25(24): 4521-4525.
G. Bond, W. Showers, M. Cheseby, R. Lotti, P. Almasi, P. deMenocal, P. Priore, H. Cullen, I. Hajdas, G. Bonani. 1997. A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates, Science, 278: 1257-1266
Pamela Emch
Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems
William B. Gail
Global Weather Corporation
Lisa Goddard
Columbia University
Terri S. Hogue
Colorado School of Mines
Anthony Janetos
Boston University
Ronald “Nick” Keener, Jr.
Duke Energy Corporation
John E. Kutzbach
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephen W. Pacala
Princeton University
Aristides A.N. Patrinos
New York University
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
The University of Chicago
Kimberly Prather
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
S.T. Rao
North Carolina State University
David A. Robinson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
John T. Snow
The University of Oklahoma
Claudia Tebaldi
Climate Central
Xubin Zeng
University of Arizona
OSB Liaison:
Daniel Rudnick
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
[sadly links can't be copies, but last one is top SUV's (fail)
stop global warming link yields:
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/16/obamas-climate-mccarthyism-demeans-presidential-office/print/
OMG
wiki
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is an American libertarian science writer and author and editor of books on economics, ecology and biotechnology.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Work
4 Bibliography
4.1 Authored
4.2 Edited
5 See also
6 References
Personal life[edit]
Bailey was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Washington County, Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife Pamela.[1]
Career[edit]
Bailey attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976.[2] He worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 1987 to 1990 he was a staff writer for Forbes.[1] Bailey worked as a reporter for The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica during 1990 and 1991.[3] His articles and reviews have appeared in national newspapers and magazines and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Writinganthology series.[1][4] Bailey was the founding producer of the PBS series Think Tank and has produced or co-produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News.[3][5] Since 1997 he has been a science correspondent for Reason magazine.[6] Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).[7] He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Université du Québec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute. A column he wrote in 2004, "The battle for your brain" received a Southern California Journalism award from the Los Angeles Press Club and was included in the book, The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004.[8][9] Bailey testified before a congressional sub-committee in 2004 on, “The Impact of Science on Public Policy.”[10] In 2006 he was on the shortlist of nominees of "personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotech in the last ten years" compiled by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.[11] The Greenpeace project, "exxonsecrets.org" identifies the Reason Foundation, the CEI (where Bailey is an adjunct fellow) and the Cato Institute (where he is an adjunct scholar) as receiving funding from the U.S. Petroleum industry.[2]
Work[edit]
In his 1993 book, Ecoscam, and other works, Bailey criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. This book was considered typical of the conservative movement's political defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the U.S. through the portrayal of global warming and the changes from attempts to deal with it as, "threatening to American industry, prosperity, lifestyles and the entire 'American way of life'."[12]
The position taken in his 1995 book, The True State of the Planet has been described as "growth forever" or "Promethean" arguing for unrestrained exploitation based on assumptions of unending nature, value derived exclusively from man's changes to material, and exceptional human resourcefulness.[13] His followup book Earth Report 2000 was recognized for being among the works of established authors, "who have argued that past and present widely accepted visions of environmental deterioration and disaster...have little or no basis in fact."[14] Citing these two books Holt, Pressman and Spash describe the CEI as believing, "technology will solve all environmental problems and that present environmental dilemmas are simply a necessary outcome of much needed economic growth."[15]
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." He explains this in his most recent book Liberation Biology.[16]
Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now ... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.[17]
However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."[18]
Bailey voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, a fact which he later wrote made him "disheartened and ashamed."[19] In 2008, he voted for Barack Obama because he felt that "[t]he Republicans must be punished and punished hard."[19]
Bibliography[edit]
Authored[edit]
Eco-scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin's Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-312-10971-4.
Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. Prometheus. 2005. ISBN 978-1-61592-169-0.
Edited[edit]
True State of the Planet. Free Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-02-874010-2.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. McGraw-Hill. 1999. ISBN 978-0-07-134260-5.
Global Warming and Other Eco-myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death. Forum. 2002. ISBN 978-0-7615-3660-4.
See also[edit]
Brave New World argument
Enough argument
References[edit]
^ Jump up to:a b c d "Ronald Bailey: Science Correspondent". Reason website. Reason Foundation.
^ Jump up to:a b "Factsheet: Ronald Bailey". exxonsecrets.org. Greenpeace. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
^ Jump up to:a b "About Ronald Bailey". Faith & Reason website. PBS.
Jump up^ Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim, eds. (2004). The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2004. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-24697-7. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ Wertheim, Margaret. "Faith & Reason: Educators Guide". New River Media and Five Continents Music.
Jump up^ "Staff". Reason website.
Jump up^ "The Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellowship". Competitive Enterprise Institute website. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ "2004 Southern California Journalism Award Winners". Los Angeles Press Club website. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2004). "The Battle for Your Brain". In Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim. The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780618246984.
Jump up^ "Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy."". US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources. 2004-02-04. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Jayaraman, KS; Louët, S; Powell, K; Ransom, J et al. (March 2006). "Who's who in biotech". Nature Biotechnology 24 (3): 298. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ McCright, Aaron M.; Dunlap, Riley E. (2003). "Defeating Kyoto: The conservative movement's impact on U.S. climate change policy". Social Problems 50 (3): 353.
Jump up^ Milne, MJ; Tregidga, H; Walton, S (2009). "Words not actions! The ideological role of sustainable development reporting". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 22 (8): 1211–1257.doi:10.1108/09513570910999292.
Jump up^ Henderson, David (2005). "Misguided Virtue". Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal.doi:10.2139/ssrn.681168.
Jump up^ Holt, RPF; Pressman, S; Spash, CL, eds. (2009). Post Keynesian and Ecological Economics: Confronting Environmental Issues. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-84980-208-6.
Jump up^ "Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution" (book review). Innovation Watch. Archived from the original on 2006-05-12.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2007-02-02). "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough".Reason.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2006-06-16). "An Inconvenient Truth". Reason.
^ Jump up to:a b "Who's Getting Your Vote? Reason's 2008 presidential poll". Reason. 2008-10-29.
=
AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]
Forbes Journalist Fired After Reporting the Truth About Cliven Bundy
May 8, 2014 |
Fallout from the Cliven Bundy affair continues to reverberate in a myriad of ways: Right-wing talk shows hosts have retreated; paranoid rumors appear to be tearing apart the antigovernment militia folk still hanging out at the Bundy ranch; and a well-respected reporter has been unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped by a mainstream outlet. After writing a piece titled “Federal Grazing Program in Bundy Dispute Rips Off Taxpayers, Wild Horses,” which appeared on the Forbes website [3], journalist Vickery Eckhoff was cut loose from her writing gig with the magazine.
In a blog entry headlined “Cliven Bundy Ended My Forbes Gig [4],” Eckhoff writes that while she’s “not quite sure why” she was let go, she assumes that it was no coincidence that she was dumped some 10 hours after the piece appeared on the Forbes website.
Eckhoff notes: “A few people have suggested it may be on account of Steve Forbes keeping cattle on his New Jersey estate [5] to reduce his property taxes. Others have mentioned Forbes' partnership with Fox News.”
Why the editors at Forbes decided she was no longer wanted as a contributor is a mystery. Some of her previous articles included: “Is Your K-Y Jelly Cruelty-Free? Do You Care?”; “Racing Industry Silent About Slaughtered Thoroughbreds”; and “WSJ Serves Up Tainted Journalism On Horse Slaughter Plate.”
Eckhoff's work appears in a number of major media outlets. Some of the topics she covers are, as she describes, “the horse industry, particularly racing, breeding, responsible ownership and the political and industry forces that are working to open horse slaughterhouses again in the US.”
Eckhoff’s firing came the night before she was scheduled to speak at the American Equine Summit. (The topic of her presentation was titled “Disinformation in the Media”—it can be seen here [6].)
According to Eckhoff, the Forbes piece “got the largest audience in a single day of any article I’ve ever written. I think it’s now up to 22,000 views.” (As of Sunday, May 4, the piece had received over 33,000 views.) Her story“picks up on the Cliven Bundy story and it looks at the consequences to the federal grazing program for taxpayers and wild horses."
In announcing her firing to the audience at the American Equine Summit, Eckhoff said she’s had “a very great platform” at Forbes, and that she was able “to introduce animal industries as not just a human interest story, but as a political story, as an economic story, as a food safety story, as an environmental story.”
Eckhoff’s American Equine Summit presentation begins with her citing two of Mark Twain’s statements about the power and ownership of the media: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uniformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” and “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
Among the many interesting points she makes in her presentation is that “disinformation” is driven by a set of mainstream “media values.” She points out that “everybody loves animal stories,” and unfortunately, the media believes anyone can write them, regardless of their lack of expertise, scientific background or familiarity with the subject. Fact checking is lax, “corrections and retractions are discretionary.” The desire to get the story out first is paramount. In addition, she points out that “animal advocates [are] mistrusted as sources unless [they represent] national welfare groups”; “Industry spokespeople [are] viewed as trustworthy.”
On her blog, Eckhoff explained that her Forbes piece basically “covered some of the same territory Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, and Jon Stewart addressed for millions of viewers. The only difference is that mine exposed why the grazing program was not only a bad deal for taxpayers, but [also for] wild horses. Oh, and I got the boot while they got ratings!”
She pointed out that in her two-year experience at Forbes, she had “never been challenged on a single fact.”
Why Eckhoff was fired remains a mystery.
She pledges to “continue writing on this topic, aiming for a more mainstream news audience, to reach the kinds of readers who really care about their taxes being wasted by the federal government on wild horse roundups and a grazing program that damages public lands at the public’s expense. One would think this was right up Forbes’ alley — the story appeared in its ‘Taxes’ section — but, apparently ... no.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/forbes-fires-journalist-after-reporting-truth-about-cliven-bundy
see http://www.desmogblog.com/james-taylor heartland
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green tech blog legit?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/15/the-real-climategate-desmog-blog-outs-heartland-propaganda-machine/
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are bolstering plant life throughout the world, environmental scientists report in a newly published peer-reviewed study. The findings, published inGeophysical Research Letters, are gleaned from satellite measurements of global plant life, and contradict assertions by activists that global warming is causing deserts to expand, along with devastating droughts.
A team of scientists led by environmental physicist Randall Donohue, a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, analyzed satellite data from 1982 through 2010. The scientists documented a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth, and particularly the Earth’s arid regions, since 1982. The satellite data showed rising carbon dioxide levels caused a remarkable 11 percent increase in foliage in arid regions since 1982, versus what would be the case if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had remained at 1982 levels.
“Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what’s causing that,” said Donohue in a press release accompanying the study. “Up until this point, they’ve linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove.”
The study noted that foliage in warm, wet regions such as tropical rainforests are near their maximum capacity. In warm, arid regions there is room for greater increases in foliage and rising carbon dioxide levels are inducing more prevalent plant growth.
Carbon dioxide acts as aerial fertilizer and also helps plants thrive under arid conditions. Although global precipitation has increased during the past century as the Earth has warmed, elevated carbon dioxide levels are assisting plant life in warm, dry regions independent of – and in addition to – increases in global precipitation.
“The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration,” said Donohue. “Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect.”
Donohue focused special attention on Australia in an additional press release. Although global drought is becoming less frequent and less severe as the Earth modestly warms, activists claim global warming is causing harmful drought in Australia.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water every efficiently,” said Donohue. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilization.”
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas,” Donohue reported, while adding that scientists should still monitor secondary effects.
The satellite data show plant life in the United States has especially benefited from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and gradually warming temperatures. Satellite data show foliage has increased in the vast majority of the United States since 1982, with the western U.S. benefiting the most. Indeed, many western regions experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in foliage since 1982.
Other regions showing particularly strong increases in foliage include the Sahel region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and nearly all of Europe.
This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/07/10/global-warming-no-satellites-show-carbon-dioxide-is-causing-global-greening/
=
United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the principal international body for the assessment of climate research, just published its Fifth Assessment Report concluding unequivocally that climate change is real and requires meaningful action — but the anti-science fringe is now running to the media to spread misinformation and discredit the report.
In one example on Monday, the president of the Koch-funded Heartland Institute published an op-ed in Forbes arguing that climate change would have “net benefits” – and there's many more like him being printed in newspapers across the country.
=
mark hendrickson
I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College and Fellow for Social and Economic Policy for the Center for Vision & Values, for whom I've written 200+ articles in the last five years. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Famous But Nameless: Lessons and Inspiration from the Bible’s Anonymous Characters (2011).
op ed
Climate Change: 'Hoax' Or Crime Of The Century?
Well, we had a warm summer here in the United States, and that brought some of the climate change alarmists out again. Looks like it’s time for another rebuttal!
John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, and various other critics have called the theory that human use of carbon-based fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic global warming or climate change a “hoax.” It is, but it’s more than that, it’s criminal.
Here are some of the scientific questions at the core of this issue:
Is the climate changing? Of course. The climate always has changed and always will.
Is the earth getting warmer? We should hope so for at least two reasons: First, the world emerged from the Little Ice Age in the 19th century, so it would be worrisome if it weren’t getting warmer. Second, all the history indicates that humans thrive more during warmer periods than colder ones. It is likely, though, that earth has warmed less than many official temperature records indicate for a variety of reasons, including: few long-term records from either the southern hemisphere or the 71 percent of the planet that is covered by water; distortions from the urban heat-island effect and other faulty siting (e.g., temperature sensors next to asphalt parking lots, etc.; the decline in weather station reports from Siberia after the fall of the Soviet government; the arbitrarily ceasing to include measurements from northern latitudes and high elevations, etc.) The most accurate measures of temperature come from satellites. Since the start of these measurements in 1979, they show minor fluctuations and an insignificant net change in global temperature.
Is the earth getting dangerously warm? Probably not, since the earth was warmer than it is now in 7000 of the last 10,000 years. By the way, does anybody know what the “right” amount of global heat is?
Are we humans causing the warming by our carbon emissions? Actually, most of the “greenhouse effect” is due to water vapor, which makes one wonder why the EPA hasn’t designated H2O a harmful pollutant that they must regulate. Meteorologist Brian Sussman’s calculations in his book “Climategate” show humanity’s share of the greenhouse effect as .9 of 1 percent.
It’s even possible that CO2 may not affect global warming at all. During many stretches of planetary history, there has been no correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature. In other long stretches, the variations of the two factors followed a significant sequence: increases in CO2 followed increases in warmth by several centuries. You don’t need to have a degree in climate science to know that, in a temporal universe, cause does not follow its effect.
Even global warming alarmists have tacitly conceded that CO2 is not the primary driver of climate change when they responded to the relative cooling in recent years by changing their story and telling us that the earth is likely to cool for a few decades in spite of still-increasing atmospheric CO2. Translation: other factors outweigh CO2 in their impact on global temperatures. Those other factors include variations in solar activity (accounting for 3/4 of the variability in earth’s temperature according to the Marshall Institute); changes in earth’s orbit and axis; albedo (reflectivity, meaning changes in cloud cover which are influenced by fluctuations in gamma ray activity); and volcanic and tectonic activity in the earth’s crust. For humans to presume that they are more than a gnat on an elephant’s rump in terms of impact on climate change is vain and delusive.
Shifting gears, let’s assume that the alarmists are right and that man-made CO2 emissions are making the world warmer. If so, what changes would they hope to accomplish and at what cost?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/09/16/climate-change-hoax-or-crime-of-the-century/
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Global Warmists Might Explain Why No Hurricanes Midway Through 2013 Season
Major hurricane strikes occurred 50 percent more often 50-100 years ago than they have during the past 50 years. read »
Post 1 week ago | 2,452 views
Why Republicans (And Others) Place A Low Priority On Global Warming
The evidence is clear, warmer is better for humans and other animals and for plant life. read »
Post 3 weeks ago | 1,813 views
Global Warming Activist Michael Mann Wages War On Government Transparency
When you spend millions of taxpayer dollars, it’s only fair to account for how the money is spent. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,842 views
President Obama's Climate Plan Would Kill Hundreds Of Millions Of Birds And Bats
All this, and no detectable change in global temperatures. read »
Post 1 month ago | 12,704 views
Senator Barbara Boxer's Own Experts Contradict Obama On Global Warming
Climate activists deliver a crushing blow to Obama’s climate change narrative. read »
Post 1 month ago | 1,574 views
You Can't Deny Ezra Klein Knows Next To Nothing About The Global Warming Debate
Whether or note we’re still in the Little Ice Age is not for dispute. read »
Post 1 month ago | 4,304 views
Global Warming? No, Satellites Show Carbon Dioxide Is Causing 'Global Greening'
A carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,642 views
HBO's Global Warmed 'Vice': A Classic Case Of Climate Denial
Fortunately, HBO On Demand offers more entertaining fictional programming options. read »
Post 2 months ago | 1,442 views
Conservatives Reach Common Ground On A Carbon Tax, And That's The Problem
About such a tax, conservatives should know better. read »
Post 3 months ago | 20,896 views
Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
More evidence showing how embarrassingly feeble the alarmist theory really is. read »
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Forbes_Magazine
Forbes Magazine is a business magazine run by Steve Forbes and owned by Forbes, Inc.; like the Wall Street Journal, it runs columns of right wing misinformation.
Contents
[hide]
1 Articles and resources
1.1 References
1.2 Related SourceWatch articles
1.3 External resources
1.4 External articles
Articles and resources
References
Related SourceWatch articles
Steve Forbes
Forbes, Inc.
External resources
External articles
Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia (with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth) (2011-01-06). Forbes’ rich list of nonsense. RealClimate. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
Steve Lambert (2006-02-20). Steve Forbes plays DDT Ban Myth Bingo. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
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Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
=---
Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
=
omg
OPINION 6/16/2014
Obama's Climate McCarthyism Demeans Presidential Offic
President Barack Obama demeaned the dignity of the presidency by ridiculing tens of thousands of scientists for simply disagreeing with his lay opinions on global warming. While the political left throws shrill temper tantrums against anybody who “disrespects” the Office of the Presidency by asking Barack Obama a challenging question (something they had no qualms about during the Bush administration), Obama himself is setting the applicable ground rules for disrespectful political discourse and climate McCarthyism
At a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine, Obama encouraged students to heap scorn on Ph.D. scientists at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific research institutions if they disagree with Obama’s global warming policies
“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,”Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”
President Obama is correct that no Ph.D. scientists – and likely no sane individuals – seriously argued that the moon was made of cheese or was merely an illusion. Does that analogy apply to the global warming debate?
Distinguished professors and scientific researchers on the staffs of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., have published research and publicly expressed their findings that humans are not creating a global warming crisis. More than 30,000 scientists, including more than 16,000 with post-graduate science degrees and more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have taken the affirmative step of signing a petition summarizing such science. Almost certainly, tens of thousands more – and likely hundreds of thousands more – similarly agree but are unaware of the petition or haven’t taken the affirmative step to read it, review it, and submit their signatures
As host of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I host approximately once per year, I routinely have to turn away dozens upon dozens of highly qualified university science professors who have heard of the conference and hope to secure a speaking slot. With a limitless budget and time schedule, I could easily have hundreds of university science professors and thousands more professional scientists give presentations calling attention to the flaws in President Obama’s global warming alarmism
Indeed, multiple surveys of professional meteorologists and climate scientistsreveal that if a consensus on the issue exists at all, it is that whatever global warming is occurring is of mixed natural and human causation and does not justify the economy-killing prescriptions championed by self-serving politicians like Barack Obama
To the limited extent global warming alarmists publicly debate the issue, their track record for success is about the same as that of China at soccer’s World Cup. For those who are skeptical, take a look at how one the global warming movement’s most visible advocates, Gavin Schmidt, fared the one time he participated in a public debate. After getting beaten so soundly that even he admitted it was a mistake to debate other scientists on the issue (and blamed his loss on one of his opponents being taller than him), is it any wonder he and his fellow alarmists avoid public debates the way John Edwards avoids National Enquirer reporters? Perhaps forgetting how badly Schmidt fared in his one-time debate, a Florida State University faculty member who was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to publicly debate me on the topic and fared just as miserably. Here is video of the debate that climate alarmists claim “is over.
This brings us back to Obama’s attempt to vilify and ridicule scientists who disagree with his lay scientific conjecture. Perhaps it is true that ridicule and vilification are common, if regrettable, aspects of contemporary politics. Most Americans would hope that the President of the United States would not demean the office by engaging in such mean-spirited and sophomoric behavior, but we have also come to realize that politicians will be politicians, no matter how much power they have attained. But this isn’t about one ambitious politician smearing another ambitious politician. This is about the President of the United States – a non-scientist – making a grossly dishonest mischaracterization and analogy at the expense of expert scientists and then encouraging our nation’s best and brightest to shout down those scientists utilizing further dishonesty and McCarthyism to further political agendas. And the moment somebody questions the President about such reprehensible conduct – no matter how calmly the question is asked – the political left goes into conniptions about how appalling and reprehensible it is to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States in such a manner
Sorry, Barack, but you have only yourself to blame for so pitifully demeaning the Office of the President.
-----?
"multiple" results: [deniers picked on] "7 Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists
328 who publish mostly on other topics, were the two groups most likely to be convinced that
329 humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their
330 concurrence. The two groups least likely to be convinced of this were the non-publishing
331 climate scientists and non-publishing meteorologists/atmospheric scientists, at 65% and 59%,
332 respectively. In the middle were the two groups of publishing meteorologists/atmospheric
333 scientists at 79% and 78%, respectively. ...
"surveys" his spin: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/03/14/shock-poll-meteorologists-are-global-warming-skeptics/:
-----
Scientists who have attended the Heartland Institute’s annual International Conference on Climate Change report the same disconnect throughout their various science organizations; only a minority of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis, yet the non-scientist bureaucracies publish position statements that contradict what the scientists themselves believe. Few, if any, of these organizations actually poll their members before publishing a position statement. Within this context of few actual scientist surveys, the AMS survey results are very powerful
In contrast to the AMS survey, where all respondents are AMS meteorologists, a majority have Ph.D.s and fully 80% have a Ph.D. or Masters Degree, position statements by organizational bureaucracies carry little scientific weight. For example, a position statementrecently published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and frequently cited as the “definitive” indication of scientific consensus on global warming was authored by a mere 23 persons. Of those 23 persons, only five had Ph.D.s in a field closely related to climate science, an equal number (5) were staffers for environmental activist groups, two were politicians, one was the EPA general counsel under the Clinton administration and 19 of the 23 had already spoken out on behalf of global warming alarmism prior to being chosen for the panel. Clearly the scientific weight of the NAS statement pales in comparison to the AMS meteorologist survey.
note sure who he is referring to, he never gives names:
bd of atmos and climate:
Antonio J. Busalacchi, Jr. (Chair)
University of Maryland
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
Gerald A. Meehl (Vice Chair)
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Lance F. Bosart
State University of New York
Mark A. Cane
Columbia University
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Shuyi S. Chen
University of Miami
Heidi Cullen
Climate Central
Leadership
Chief Climatologist
Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org
Dr. Heidi Cullen serves as Chief Climatologist for Climate Central — a non-prfit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, NJ. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins. Before joining Climate Central, where she reports on climate and energy issues, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, a weekly television series focused on issues related to climate change and the environment. Prior to that Dr. Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board and was recently elected to the AMS Council. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Publications
M. Barlow, M. Wheeler, B. Lyon, and H. Cullen, 2005: Modulation of Daily Precipitation Over Southwest Asia by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, 133, 3579-3594.
M.H. Glantz and H. Cullen, 2003: Zimbabwe's Food Crisis. Environment, 45(1), 9-11.
M. Barlow, H. Cullen, B. Lyons, 2002: Drought in Central and Southwest Asia: La Nina, the warm pool, and Indian Ocean precipitation. J. Clim., 15(7): 697-700.
M. Visbeck, J. Hurrell, L. Polvani, and H.M. Cullen, 2001: The North Atlantic Oscillation: Past, present, and future. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98: 12876-12877.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: North Atlantic Influence on Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow, Int. J. Clim., 20(8): 853-863.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: The Possible Role of Climate in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 28(4): 379-382.
H.M. Cullen, R.D. D'Arrigo, E.R. Cook and M.E. Mann, 2000: Multiproxy Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, Paleoceanography, 16(1): 27-39.
M. Visbeck, H. Cullen, G. Krahmann, and N. Naik. 1998. An ocean model's response to North Atlantic Oscillation-like wind forcing, Geophys. Res. Lett.., 25(24): 4521-4525.
G. Bond, W. Showers, M. Cheseby, R. Lotti, P. Almasi, P. deMenocal, P. Priore, H. Cullen, I. Hajdas, G. Bonani. 1997. A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates, Science, 278: 1257-1266
Pamela Emch
Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems
William B. Gail
Global Weather Corporation
Lisa Goddard
Columbia University
Terri S. Hogue
Colorado School of Mines
Anthony Janetos
Boston University
Ronald “Nick” Keener, Jr.
Duke Energy Corporation
John E. Kutzbach
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephen W. Pacala
Princeton University
Aristides A.N. Patrinos
New York University
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
The University of Chicago
Kimberly Prather
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
S.T. Rao
North Carolina State University
David A. Robinson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
John T. Snow
The University of Oklahoma
Claudia Tebaldi
Climate Central
Xubin Zeng
University of Arizona
OSB Liaison:
Daniel Rudnick
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
[sadly links can't be copies, but last one is top SUV's (fail)
stop global warming link yields:
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/16/obamas-climate-mccarthyism-demeans-presidential-office/print/
OM
wik
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is an American libertarian science writer and author and editor of books on economics, ecology and biotechnology.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Work
4 Bibliography
4.1 Authored
4.2 Edited
5 See also
6 References
Personal life[edit]
Bailey was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Washington County, Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife Pamela.[1]
Career[edit]
Bailey attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976.[2] He worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 1987 to 1990 he was a staff writer for Forbes.[1] Bailey worked as a reporter for The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica during 1990 and 1991.[3] His articles and reviews have appeared in national newspapers and magazines and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Writinganthology series.[1][4] Bailey was the founding producer of the PBS series Think Tank and has produced or co-produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News.[3][5] Since 1997 he has been a science correspondent for Reason magazine.[6] Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).[7] He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Université du Québec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute. A column he wrote in 2004, "The battle for your brain" received a Southern California Journalism award from the Los Angeles Press Club and was included in the book, The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004.[8][9] Bailey testified before a congressional sub-committee in 2004 on, “The Impact of Science on Public Policy.”[10] In 2006 he was on the shortlist of nominees of "personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotech in the last ten years" compiled by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.[11] The Greenpeace project, "exxonsecrets.org" identifies the Reason Foundation, the CEI (where Bailey is an adjunct fellow) and the Cato Institute (where he is an adjunct scholar) as receiving funding from the U.S. Petroleum industry.[2]
Work[edit]
In his 1993 book, Ecoscam, and other works, Bailey criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. This book was considered typical of the conservative movement's political defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the U.S. through the portrayal of global warming and the changes from attempts to deal with it as, "threatening to American industry, prosperity, lifestyles and the entire 'American way of life'."[12]
The position taken in his 1995 book, The True State of the Planet has been described as "growth forever" or "Promethean" arguing for unrestrained exploitation based on assumptions of unending nature, value derived exclusively from man's changes to material, and exceptional human resourcefulness.[13] His followup book Earth Report 2000 was recognized for being among the works of established authors, "who have argued that past and present widely accepted visions of environmental deterioration and disaster...have little or no basis in fact."[14] Citing these two books Holt, Pressman and Spash describe the CEI as believing, "technology will solve all environmental problems and that present environmental dilemmas are simply a necessary outcome of much needed economic growth."[15]
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." He explains this in his most recent book Liberation Biology.[16]
Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now ... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.[17]
However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."[18]
Bailey voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, a fact which he later wrote made him "disheartened and ashamed."[19] In 2008, he voted for Barack Obama because he felt that "[t]he Republicans must be punished and punished hard."[19]
Bibliography[edit]
Authored[edit]
Eco-scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin's Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-312-10971-4.
Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. Prometheus. 2005. ISBN 978-1-61592-169-0.
Edited[edit]
True State of the Planet. Free Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-02-874010-2.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. McGraw-Hill. 1999. ISBN 978-0-07-134260-5.
Global Warming and Other Eco-myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death. Forum. 2002. ISBN 978-0-7615-3660-4.
See also[edit]
Brave New World argument
Enough argument
References[edit]
^ Jump up to:a b c d "Ronald Bailey: Science Correspondent". Reason website. Reason Foundation.
^ Jump up to:a b "Factsheet: Ronald Bailey". exxonsecrets.org. Greenpeace. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
^ Jump up to:a b "About Ronald Bailey". Faith & Reason website. PBS.
Jump up^ Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim, eds. (2004). The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2004. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-24697-7. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ Wertheim, Margaret. "Faith & Reason: Educators Guide". New River Media and Five Continents Music.
Jump up^ "Staff". Reason website.
Jump up^ "The Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellowship". Competitive Enterprise Institute website. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ "2004 Southern California Journalism Award Winners". Los Angeles Press Club website. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2004). "The Battle for Your Brain". In Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim. The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780618246984.
Jump up^ "Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy."". US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources. 2004-02-04. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Jayaraman, KS; Louët, S; Powell, K; Ransom, J et al. (March 2006). "Who's who in biotech". Nature Biotechnology 24 (3): 298. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ McCright, Aaron M.; Dunlap, Riley E. (2003). "Defeating Kyoto: The conservative movement's impact on U.S. climate change policy". Social Problems 50 (3): 353.
Jump up^ Milne, MJ; Tregidga, H; Walton, S (2009). "Words not actions! The ideological role of sustainable development reporting". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 22 (8): 1211–1257.doi:10.1108/09513570910999292.
Jump up^ Henderson, David (2005). "Misguided Virtue". Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal.doi:10.2139/ssrn.681168.
Jump up^ Holt, RPF; Pressman, S; Spash, CL, eds. (2009). Post Keynesian and Ecological Economics: Confronting Environmental Issues. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-84980-208-6.
Jump up^ "Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution" (book review). Innovation Watch. Archived from the original on 2006-05-12.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2007-02-02). "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough".Reason.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2006-06-16). "An Inconvenient Truth". Reason.
^ Jump up to:a b "Who's Getting Your Vote? Reason's 2008 presidential poll". Reason. 2008-10-29.
=
AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]
Forbes Journalist Fired After Reporting the Truth About Cliven Bundy
May 8, 2014 |
Fallout from the Cliven Bundy affair continues to reverberate in a myriad of ways: Right-wing talk shows hosts have retreated; paranoid rumors appear to be tearing apart the antigovernment militia folk still hanging out at the Bundy ranch; and a well-respected reporter has been unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped by a mainstream outlet. After writing a piece titled “Federal Grazing Program in Bundy Dispute Rips Off Taxpayers, Wild Horses,” which appeared on the Forbes website [3], journalist Vickery Eckhoff was cut loose from her writing gig with the magazine.
In a blog entry headlined “Cliven Bundy Ended My Forbes Gig [4],” Eckhoff writes that while she’s “not quite sure why” she was let go, she assumes that it was no coincidence that she was dumped some 10 hours after the piece appeared on the Forbes website.
Eckhoff notes: “A few people have suggested it may be on account of Steve Forbes keeping cattle on his New Jersey estate [5] to reduce his property taxes. Others have mentioned Forbes' partnership with Fox News.”
Why the editors at Forbes decided she was no longer wanted as a contributor is a mystery. Some of her previous articles included: “Is Your K-Y Jelly Cruelty-Free? Do You Care?”; “Racing Industry Silent About Slaughtered Thoroughbreds”; and “WSJ Serves Up Tainted Journalism On Horse Slaughter Plate.”
Eckhoff's work appears in a number of major media outlets. Some of the topics she covers are, as she describes, “the horse industry, particularly racing, breeding, responsible ownership and the political and industry forces that are working to open horse slaughterhouses again in the US.”
Eckhoff’s firing came the night before she was scheduled to speak at the American Equine Summit. (The topic of her presentation was titled “Disinformation in the Media”—it can be seen here [6].)
According to Eckhoff, the Forbes piece “got the largest audience in a single day of any article I’ve ever written. I think it’s now up to 22,000 views.” (As of Sunday, May 4, the piece had received over 33,000 views.) Her story“picks up on the Cliven Bundy story and it looks at the consequences to the federal grazing program for taxpayers and wild horses."
In announcing her firing to the audience at the American Equine Summit, Eckhoff said she’s had “a very great platform” at Forbes, and that she was able “to introduce animal industries as not just a human interest story, but as a political story, as an economic story, as a food safety story, as an environmental story.”
Eckhoff’s American Equine Summit presentation begins with her citing two of Mark Twain’s statements about the power and ownership of the media: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uniformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” and “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
Among the many interesting points she makes in her presentation is that “disinformation” is driven by a set of mainstream “media values.” She points out that “everybody loves animal stories,” and unfortunately, the media believes anyone can write them, regardless of their lack of expertise, scientific background or familiarity with the subject. Fact checking is lax, “corrections and retractions are discretionary.” The desire to get the story out first is paramount. In addition, she points out that “animal advocates [are] mistrusted as sources unless [they represent] national welfare groups”; “Industry spokespeople [are] viewed as trustworthy.”
On her blog, Eckhoff explained that her Forbes piece basically “covered some of the same territory Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, and Jon Stewart addressed for millions of viewers. The only difference is that mine exposed why the grazing program was not only a bad deal for taxpayers, but [also for] wild horses. Oh, and I got the boot while they got ratings!”
She pointed out that in her two-year experience at Forbes, she had “never been challenged on a single fact.”
Why Eckhoff was fired remains a mystery.
She pledges to “continue writing on this topic, aiming for a more mainstream news audience, to reach the kinds of readers who really care about their taxes being wasted by the federal government on wild horse roundups and a grazing program that damages public lands at the public’s expense. One would think this was right up Forbes’ alley — the story appeared in its ‘Taxes’ section — but, apparently ... no.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/forbes-fires-journalist-after-reporting-truth-about-cliven-bundy
see http://www.desmogblog.com/james-taylor heartland
=
green tech blog legit?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/15/the-real-climategate-desmog-blog-outs-heartland-propaganda-machine/
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are bolstering plant life throughout the world, environmental scientists report in a newly published peer-reviewed study. The findings, published inGeophysical Research Letters, are gleaned from satellite measurements of global plant life, and contradict assertions by activists that global warming is causing deserts to expand, along with devastating droughts.
A team of scientists led by environmental physicist Randall Donohue, a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, analyzed satellite data from 1982 through 2010. The scientists documented a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth, and particularly the Earth’s arid regions, since 1982. The satellite data showed rising carbon dioxide levels caused a remarkable 11 percent increase in foliage in arid regions since 1982, versus what would be the case if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had remained at 1982 levels.
“Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what’s causing that,” said Donohue in a press release accompanying the study. “Up until this point, they’ve linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove.”
The study noted that foliage in warm, wet regions such as tropical rainforests are near their maximum capacity. In warm, arid regions there is room for greater increases in foliage and rising carbon dioxide levels are inducing more prevalent plant growth.
Carbon dioxide acts as aerial fertilizer and also helps plants thrive under arid conditions. Although global precipitation has increased during the past century as the Earth has warmed, elevated carbon dioxide levels are assisting plant life in warm, dry regions independent of – and in addition to – increases in global precipitation.
“The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration,” said Donohue. “Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect.”
Donohue focused special attention on Australia in an additional press release. Although global drought is becoming less frequent and less severe as the Earth modestly warms, activists claim global warming is causing harmful drought in Australia.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water every efficiently,” said Donohue. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilization.”
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas,” Donohue reported, while adding that scientists should still monitor secondary effects.
The satellite data show plant life in the United States has especially benefited from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and gradually warming temperatures. Satellite data show foliage has increased in the vast majority of the United States since 1982, with the western U.S. benefiting the most. Indeed, many western regions experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in foliage since 1982.
Other regions showing particularly strong increases in foliage include the Sahel region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and nearly all of Europe.
This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/07/10/global-warming-no-satellites-show-carbon-dioxide-is-causing-global-greening/
=
United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the principal international body for the assessment of climate research, just published its Fifth Assessment Report concluding unequivocally that climate change is real and requires meaningful action — but the anti-science fringe is now running to the media to spread misinformation and discredit the report.
In one example on Monday, the president of the Koch-funded Heartland Institute published an op-ed in Forbes arguing that climate change would have “net benefits” – and there's many more like him being printed in newspapers across the country.
=
mark hendrickson
I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College and Fellow for Social and Economic Policy for the Center for Vision & Values, for whom I've written 200+ articles in the last five years. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Famous But Nameless: Lessons and Inspiration from the Bible’s Anonymous Characters (2011).
op ed
Climate Change: 'Hoax' Or Crime Of The Century?
Well, we had a warm summer here in the United States, and that brought some of the climate change alarmists out again. Looks like it’s time for another rebuttal!
John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, and various other critics have called the theory that human use of carbon-based fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic global warming or climate change a “hoax.” It is, but it’s more than that, it’s criminal.
Here are some of the scientific questions at the core of this issue:
Is the climate changing? Of course. The climate always has changed and always will.
Is the earth getting warmer? We should hope so for at least two reasons: First, the world emerged from the Little Ice Age in the 19th century, so it would be worrisome if it weren’t getting warmer. Second, all the history indicates that humans thrive more during warmer periods than colder ones. It is likely, though, that earth has warmed less than many official temperature records indicate for a variety of reasons, including: few long-term records from either the southern hemisphere or the 71 percent of the planet that is covered by water; distortions from the urban heat-island effect and other faulty siting (e.g., temperature sensors next to asphalt parking lots, etc.; the decline in weather station reports from Siberia after the fall of the Soviet government; the arbitrarily ceasing to include measurements from northern latitudes and high elevations, etc.) The most accurate measures of temperature come from satellites. Since the start of these measurements in 1979, they show minor fluctuations and an insignificant net change in global temperature.
Is the earth getting dangerously warm? Probably not, since the earth was warmer than it is now in 7000 of the last 10,000 years. By the way, does anybody know what the “right” amount of global heat is?
Are we humans causing the warming by our carbon emissions? Actually, most of the “greenhouse effect” is due to water vapor, which makes one wonder why the EPA hasn’t designated H2O a harmful pollutant that they must regulate. Meteorologist Brian Sussman’s calculations in his book “Climategate” show humanity’s share of the greenhouse effect as .9 of 1 percent.
It’s even possible that CO2 may not affect global warming at all. During many stretches of planetary history, there has been no correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature. In other long stretches, the variations of the two factors followed a significant sequence: increases in CO2 followed increases in warmth by several centuries. You don’t need to have a degree in climate science to know that, in a temporal universe, cause does not follow its effect.
Even global warming alarmists have tacitly conceded that CO2 is not the primary driver of climate change when they responded to the relative cooling in recent years by changing their story and telling us that the earth is likely to cool for a few decades in spite of still-increasing atmospheric CO2. Translation: other factors outweigh CO2 in their impact on global temperatures. Those other factors include variations in solar activity (accounting for 3/4 of the variability in earth’s temperature according to the Marshall Institute); changes in earth’s orbit and axis; albedo (reflectivity, meaning changes in cloud cover which are influenced by fluctuations in gamma ray activity); and volcanic and tectonic activity in the earth’s crust. For humans to presume that they are more than a gnat on an elephant’s rump in terms of impact on climate change is vain and delusive.
Shifting gears, let’s assume that the alarmists are right and that man-made CO2 emissions are making the world warmer. If so, what changes would they hope to accomplish and at what cost?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/09/16/climate-change-hoax-or-crime-of-the-century/
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Forbes_Magazine
Forbes Magazine is a business magazine run by Steve Forbes and owned by Forbes, Inc.; like the Wall Street Journal, it runs columns of right wing misinformation.
Contents
[hide]
1 Articles and resources
1.1 References
1.2 Related SourceWatch articles
1.3 External resources
1.4 External articles
Articles and resources
References
Related SourceWatch articles
Steve Forbes
Forbes, Inc.
External resources
External articles
Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia (with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth) (2011-01-06). Forbes’ rich list of nonsense. RealClimate. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
Steve Lambert (2006-02-20). Steve Forbes plays DDT Ban Myth Bingo. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
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Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
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614 capt
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Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
omg2
OPINION 6/16/2014
Obama's Climate McCarthyism Demeans Presidential Office
President Barack Obama demeaned the dignity of the presidency by ridiculing tens of thousands of scientists for simply disagreeing with his lay opinions on global warming. While the political left throws shrill temper tantrums against anybody who “disrespects” the Office of the Presidency by asking Barack Obama a challenging question (something they had no qualms about during the Bush administration), Obama himself is setting the applicable ground rules for disrespectful political discourse and climate McCarthyism.
At a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine, Obama encouraged students to heap scorn on Ph.D. scientists at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and scientific research institutions if they disagree with Obama’s global warming policies.
“When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it,”Obama said. “But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anyone saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”
President Obama is correct that no Ph.D. scientists – and likely no sane individuals – seriously argued that the moon was made of cheese or was merely an illusion. Does that analogy apply to the global warming debate?
Distinguished professors and scientific researchers on the staffs of Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., have published research and publicly expressed their findings that humans are not creating a global warming crisis. More than 30,000 scientists, including more than 16,000 with post-graduate science degrees and more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have taken the affirmative step of signing a petition summarizing such science. Almost certainly, tens of thousands more – and likely hundreds of thousands more – similarly agree but are unaware of the petition or haven’t taken the affirmative step to read it, review it, and submit their signatures.
As host of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, which I host approximately once per year, I routinely have to turn away dozens upon dozens of highly qualified university science professors who have heard of the conference and hope to secure a speaking slot. With a limitless budget and time schedule, I could easily have hundreds of university science professors and thousands more professional scientists give presentations calling attention to the flaws in President Obama’s global warming alarmism.
Indeed, multiple surveys of professional meteorologists and climate scientistsreveal that if a consensus on the issue exists at all, it is that whatever global warming is occurring is of mixed natural and human causation and does not justify the economy-killing prescriptions championed by self-serving politicians like Barack Obama.
To the limited extent global warming alarmists publicly debate the issue, their track record for success is about the same as that of China at soccer’s World Cup. For those who are skeptical, take a look at how one the global warming movement’s most visible advocates, Gavin Schmidt, fared the one time he participated in a public debate. After getting beaten so soundly that even he admitted it was a mistake to debate other scientists on the issue (and blamed his loss on one of his opponents being taller than him), is it any wonder he and his fellow alarmists avoid public debates the way John Edwards avoids National Enquirer reporters? Perhaps forgetting how badly Schmidt fared in his one-time debate, a Florida State University faculty member who was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project agreed to publicly debate me on the topic and fared just as miserably. Here is video of the debate that climate alarmists claim “is over.”
This brings us back to Obama’s attempt to vilify and ridicule scientists who disagree with his lay scientific conjecture. Perhaps it is true that ridicule and vilification are common, if regrettable, aspects of contemporary politics. Most Americans would hope that the President of the United States would not demean the office by engaging in such mean-spirited and sophomoric behavior, but we have also come to realize that politicians will be politicians, no matter how much power they have attained. But this isn’t about one ambitious politician smearing another ambitious politician. This is about the President of the United States – a non-scientist – making a grossly dishonest mischaracterization and analogy at the expense of expert scientists and then encouraging our nation’s best and brightest to shout down those scientists utilizing further dishonesty and McCarthyism to further political agendas. And the moment somebody questions the President about such reprehensible conduct – no matter how calmly the question is asked – the political left goes into conniptions about how appalling and reprehensible it is to disrespect the Office of the President of the United States in such a manner.
Sorry, Barack, but you have only yourself to blame for so pitifully demeaning the Office of the President.
"multiple" results: [deniers picked on] "7 Climate science experts who publish mostly on climate change, and climate scientists
328 who publish mostly on other topics, were the two groups most likely to be convinced that
329 humans have contributed to global warming, with 93% of each group indicating their
330 concurrence. The two groups least likely to be convinced of this were the non-publishing
331 climate scientists and non-publishing meteorologists/atmospheric scientists, at 65% and 59%,
332 respectively. In the middle were the two groups of publishing meteorologists/atmospheric
333 scientists at 79% and 78%, respectively. ..."
"surveys" his spin: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/03/14/shock-poll-meteorologists-are-global-warming-skeptics/:
Scientists who have attended the Heartland Institute’s annual International Conference on Climate Change report the same disconnect throughout their various science organizations; only a minority of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis, yet the non-scientist bureaucracies publish position statements that contradict what the scientists themselves believe. Few, if any, of these organizations actually poll their members before publishing a position statement. Within this context of few actual scientist surveys, the AMS survey results are very powerful.
In contrast to the AMS survey, where all respondents are AMS meteorologists, a majority have Ph.D.s and fully 80% have a Ph.D. or Masters Degree, position statements by organizational bureaucracies carry little scientific weight. For example, a position statementrecently published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and frequently cited as the “definitive” indication of scientific consensus on global warming was authored by a mere 23 persons. Of those 23 persons, only five had Ph.D.s in a field closely related to climate science, an equal number (5) were staffers for environmental activist groups, two were politicians, one was the EPA general counsel under the Clinton administration and 19 of the 23 had already spoken out on behalf of global warming alarmism prior to being chosen for the panel. Clearly the scientific weight of the NAS statement pales in comparison to the AMS meteorologist survey.
note sure who he isreferring to, he never gives names:
bd of atmos and climate:
Antonio J. Busalacchi, Jr. (Chair)
University of Maryland
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
Gerald A. Meehl (Vice Chair)
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Lance F. Bosart
State University of New York
Mark A. Cane
Columbia University
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Shuyi S. Chen
University of Miami
Heidi Cullen
Climate Central
Leadership
Chief Climatologist
Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org
Dr. Heidi Cullen serves as Chief Climatologist for Climate Central — a non-prfit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, NJ. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins. Before joining Climate Central, where she reports on climate and energy issues, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, a weekly television series focused on issues related to climate change and the environment. Prior to that Dr. Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board and was recently elected to the AMS Council. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Publications
M. Barlow, M. Wheeler, B. Lyon, and H. Cullen, 2005: Modulation of Daily Precipitation Over Southwest Asia by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, 133, 3579-3594.
M.H. Glantz and H. Cullen, 2003: Zimbabwe's Food Crisis. Environment, 45(1), 9-11.
M. Barlow, H. Cullen, B. Lyons, 2002: Drought in Central and Southwest Asia: La Nina, the warm pool, and Indian Ocean precipitation. J. Clim., 15(7): 697-700.
M. Visbeck, J. Hurrell, L. Polvani, and H.M. Cullen, 2001: The North Atlantic Oscillation: Past, present, and future. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98: 12876-12877.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: North Atlantic Influence on Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow, Int. J. Clim., 20(8): 853-863.
H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: The Possible Role of Climate in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 28(4): 379-382.
H.M. Cullen, R.D. D'Arrigo, E.R. Cook and M.E. Mann, 2000: Multiproxy Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, Paleoceanography, 16(1): 27-39.
M. Visbeck, H. Cullen, G. Krahmann, and N. Naik. 1998. An ocean model's response to North Atlantic Oscillation-like wind forcing, Geophys. Res. Lett.., 25(24): 4521-4525.
G. Bond, W. Showers, M. Cheseby, R. Lotti, P. Almasi, P. deMenocal, P. Priore, H. Cullen, I. Hajdas, G. Bonani. 1997. A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates, Science, 278: 1257-1266
Pamela Emch
Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems
William B. Gail
Global Weather Corporation
Lisa Goddard
Columbia University
Terri S. Hogue
Colorado School of Mines
Anthony Janetos
Boston University
Ronald “Nick” Keener, Jr.
Duke Energy Corporation
John E. Kutzbach
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stephen W. Pacala
Princeton University
Aristides A.N. Patrinos
New York University
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
The University of Chicago
Kimberly Prather
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
S.T. Rao
North Carolina State University
David A. Robinson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
John T. Snow
The University of Oklahoma
Claudia Tebaldi
Climate Central
Xubin Zeng
University of Arizona
OSB Liaison:
Daniel Rudnick
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
[sadly links can't be copies, but last one is top SUV's (fail)
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/16/obamas-climate-mccarthyism-demeans-presidential-office/print/
OMG
wiki
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is an American libertarian science writer and author and editor of books on economics, ecology and biotechnology.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Work
4 Bibliography
4.1 Authored
4.2 Edited
5 See also
6 References
Personal life[edit]
Bailey was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Washington County, Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife Pamela.[1]
Career[edit]
Bailey attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976.[2] He worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. From 1987 to 1990 he was a staff writer for Forbes.[1] Bailey worked as a reporter for The Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica during 1990 and 1991.[3] His articles and reviews have appeared in national newspapers and magazines and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Writinganthology series.[1][4] Bailey was the founding producer of the PBS series Think Tank and has produced or co-produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News.[3][5] Since 1997 he has been a science correspondent for Reason magazine.[6] Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).[7] He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Université du Québec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute. A column he wrote in 2004, "The battle for your brain" received a Southern California Journalism award from the Los Angeles Press Club and was included in the book, The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004.[8][9] Bailey testified before a congressional sub-committee in 2004 on, “The Impact of Science on Public Policy.”[10] In 2006 he was on the shortlist of nominees of "personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotech in the last ten years" compiled by the editors of Nature Biotechnology.[11] The Greenpeace project, "exxonsecrets.org" identifies the Reason Foundation, the CEI (where Bailey is an adjunct fellow) and the Cato Institute (where he is an adjunct scholar) as receiving funding from the U.S. Petroleum industry.[2]
Work[edit]
In his 1993 book, Ecoscam, and other works, Bailey criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. This book was considered typical of the conservative movement's political defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the U.S. through the portrayal of global warming and the changes from attempts to deal with it as, "threatening to American industry, prosperity, lifestyles and the entire 'American way of life'."[12]
The position taken in his 1995 book, The True State of the Planet has been described as "growth forever" or "Promethean" arguing for unrestrained exploitation based on assumptions of unending nature, value derived exclusively from man's changes to material, and exceptional human resourcefulness.[13] His followup book Earth Report 2000 was recognized for being among the works of established authors, "who have argued that past and present widely accepted visions of environmental deterioration and disaster...have little or no basis in fact."[14] Citing these two books Holt, Pressman and Spash describe the CEI as believing, "technology will solve all environmental problems and that present environmental dilemmas are simply a necessary outcome of much needed economic growth."[15]
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." He explains this in his most recent book Liberation Biology.[16]
Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now ... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.[17]
However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."[18]
Bailey voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, a fact which he later wrote made him "disheartened and ashamed."[19] In 2008, he voted for Barack Obama because he felt that "[t]he Republicans must be punished and punished hard."[19]
Bibliography[edit]
Authored[edit]
Eco-scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin's Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-312-10971-4.
Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution. Prometheus. 2005. ISBN 978-1-61592-169-0.
Edited[edit]
True State of the Planet. Free Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-02-874010-2.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. McGraw-Hill. 1999. ISBN 978-0-07-134260-5.
Global Warming and Other Eco-myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death. Forum. 2002. ISBN 978-0-7615-3660-4.
See also[edit]
Brave New World argument
Enough argument
References[edit]
^ Jump up to:a b c d "Ronald Bailey: Science Correspondent". Reason website. Reason Foundation.
^ Jump up to:a b "Factsheet: Ronald Bailey". exxonsecrets.org. Greenpeace. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
^ Jump up to:a b "About Ronald Bailey". Faith & Reason website. PBS.
Jump up^ Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim, eds. (2004). The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2004. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-24697-7. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ Wertheim, Margaret. "Faith & Reason: Educators Guide". New River Media and Five Continents Music.
Jump up^ "Staff". Reason website.
Jump up^ "The Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellowship". Competitive Enterprise Institute website. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ "2004 Southern California Journalism Award Winners". Los Angeles Press Club website. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2004). "The Battle for Your Brain". In Pinker, Steven; Folger, Tim. The Best of American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780618246984.
Jump up^ "Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy."". US House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources. 2004-02-04. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
Jump up^ Jayaraman, KS; Louët, S; Powell, K; Ransom, J et al. (March 2006). "Who's who in biotech". Nature Biotechnology 24 (3): 298. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
Jump up^ McCright, Aaron M.; Dunlap, Riley E. (2003). "Defeating Kyoto: The conservative movement's impact on U.S. climate change policy". Social Problems 50 (3): 353.
Jump up^ Milne, MJ; Tregidga, H; Walton, S (2009). "Words not actions! The ideological role of sustainable development reporting". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 22 (8): 1211–1257.doi:10.1108/09513570910999292.
Jump up^ Henderson, David (2005). "Misguided Virtue". Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal.doi:10.2139/ssrn.681168.
Jump up^ Holt, RPF; Pressman, S; Spash, CL, eds. (2009). Post Keynesian and Ecological Economics: Confronting Environmental Issues. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-84980-208-6.
Jump up^ "Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution" (book review). Innovation Watch. Archived from the original on 2006-05-12.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2007-02-02). "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough".Reason.
Jump up^ Bailey, Ronald (2006-06-16). "An Inconvenient Truth". Reason.
^ Jump up to:a b "Who's Getting Your Vote? Reason's 2008 presidential poll". Reason. 2008-10-29.
=
AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]
Forbes Journalist Fired After Reporting the Truth About Cliven Bundy
May 8, 2014 |
Fallout from the Cliven Bundy affair continues to reverberate in a myriad of ways: Right-wing talk shows hosts have retreated; paranoid rumors appear to be tearing apart the antigovernment militia folk still hanging out at the Bundy ranch; and a well-respected reporter has been unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped by a mainstream outlet. After writing a piece titled “Federal Grazing Program in Bundy Dispute Rips Off Taxpayers, Wild Horses,” which appeared on the Forbes website [3], journalist Vickery Eckhoff was cut loose from her writing gig with the magazine.
In a blog entry headlined “Cliven Bundy Ended My Forbes Gig [4],” Eckhoff writes that while she’s “not quite sure why” she was let go, she assumes that it was no coincidence that she was dumped some 10 hours after the piece appeared on the Forbes website.
Eckhoff notes: “A few people have suggested it may be on account of Steve Forbes keeping cattle on his New Jersey estate [5] to reduce his property taxes. Others have mentioned Forbes' partnership with Fox News.”
Why the editors at Forbes decided she was no longer wanted as a contributor is a mystery. Some of her previous articles included: “Is Your K-Y Jelly Cruelty-Free? Do You Care?”; “Racing Industry Silent About Slaughtered Thoroughbreds”; and “WSJ Serves Up Tainted Journalism On Horse Slaughter Plate.”
Eckhoff's work appears in a number of major media outlets. Some of the topics she covers are, as she describes, “the horse industry, particularly racing, breeding, responsible ownership and the political and industry forces that are working to open horse slaughterhouses again in the US.”
Eckhoff’s firing came the night before she was scheduled to speak at the American Equine Summit. (The topic of her presentation was titled “Disinformation in the Media”—it can be seen here [6].)
According to Eckhoff, the Forbes piece “got the largest audience in a single day of any article I’ve ever written. I think it’s now up to 22,000 views.” (As of Sunday, May 4, the piece had received over 33,000 views.) Her story“picks up on the Cliven Bundy story and it looks at the consequences to the federal grazing program for taxpayers and wild horses."
In announcing her firing to the audience at the American Equine Summit, Eckhoff said she’s had “a very great platform” at Forbes, and that she was able “to introduce animal industries as not just a human interest story, but as a political story, as an economic story, as a food safety story, as an environmental story.”
Eckhoff’s American Equine Summit presentation begins with her citing two of Mark Twain’s statements about the power and ownership of the media: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uniformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” and “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
Among the many interesting points she makes in her presentation is that “disinformation” is driven by a set of mainstream “media values.” She points out that “everybody loves animal stories,” and unfortunately, the media believes anyone can write them, regardless of their lack of expertise, scientific background or familiarity with the subject. Fact checking is lax, “corrections and retractions are discretionary.” The desire to get the story out first is paramount. In addition, she points out that “animal advocates [are] mistrusted as sources unless [they represent] national welfare groups”; “Industry spokespeople [are] viewed as trustworthy.”
On her blog, Eckhoff explained that her Forbes piece basically “covered some of the same territory Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, and Jon Stewart addressed for millions of viewers. The only difference is that mine exposed why the grazing program was not only a bad deal for taxpayers, but [also for] wild horses. Oh, and I got the boot while they got ratings!”
She pointed out that in her two-year experience at Forbes, she had “never been challenged on a single fact.”
Why Eckhoff was fired remains a mystery.
She pledges to “continue writing on this topic, aiming for a more mainstream news audience, to reach the kinds of readers who really care about their taxes being wasted by the federal government on wild horse roundups and a grazing program that damages public lands at the public’s expense. One would think this was right up Forbes’ alley — the story appeared in its ‘Taxes’ section — but, apparently ... no.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/forbes-fires-journalist-after-reporting-truth-about-cliven-bundy
see http://www.desmogblog.com/james-taylor heartland
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green tech blog legit?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/15/the-real-climategate-desmog-blog-outs-heartland-propaganda-machine/
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are bolstering plant life throughout the world, environmental scientists report in a newly published peer-reviewed study. The findings, published inGeophysical Research Letters, are gleaned from satellite measurements of global plant life, and contradict assertions by activists that global warming is causing deserts to expand, along with devastating droughts.
A team of scientists led by environmental physicist Randall Donohue, a research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, analyzed satellite data from 1982 through 2010. The scientists documented a carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth, and particularly the Earth’s arid regions, since 1982. The satellite data showed rising carbon dioxide levels caused a remarkable 11 percent increase in foliage in arid regions since 1982, versus what would be the case if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had remained at 1982 levels.
“Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what’s causing that,” said Donohue in a press release accompanying the study. “Up until this point, they’ve linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove.”
The study noted that foliage in warm, wet regions such as tropical rainforests are near their maximum capacity. In warm, arid regions there is room for greater increases in foliage and rising carbon dioxide levels are inducing more prevalent plant growth.
Carbon dioxide acts as aerial fertilizer and also helps plants thrive under arid conditions. Although global precipitation has increased during the past century as the Earth has warmed, elevated carbon dioxide levels are assisting plant life in warm, dry regions independent of – and in addition to – increases in global precipitation.
“The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration,” said Donohue. “Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect.”
Donohue focused special attention on Australia in an additional press release. Although global drought is becoming less frequent and less severe as the Earth modestly warms, activists claim global warming is causing harmful drought in Australia.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water every efficiently,” said Donohue. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilization.”
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas,” Donohue reported, while adding that scientists should still monitor secondary effects.
The satellite data show plant life in the United States has especially benefited from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and gradually warming temperatures. Satellite data show foliage has increased in the vast majority of the United States since 1982, with the western U.S. benefiting the most. Indeed, many western regions experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in foliage since 1982.
Other regions showing particularly strong increases in foliage include the Sahel region of Africa, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and nearly all of Europe.
This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/07/10/global-warming-no-satellites-show-carbon-dioxide-is-causing-global-greening/
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United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the principal international body for the assessment of climate research, just published its Fifth Assessment Report concluding unequivocally that climate change is real and requires meaningful action — but the anti-science fringe is now running to the media to spread misinformation and discredit the report.
In one example on Monday, the president of the Koch-funded Heartland Institute published an op-ed in Forbes arguing that climate change would have “net benefits” – and there's many more like him being printed in newspapers across the country.
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mark hendrickson
I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College and Fellow for Social and Economic Policy for the Center for Vision & Values, for whom I've written 200+ articles in the last five years. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Famous But Nameless: Lessons and Inspiration from the Bible’s Anonymous Characters (2011).
op ed
Climate Change: 'Hoax' Or Crime Of The Century?
Well, we had a warm summer here in the United States, and that brought some of the climate change alarmists out again. Looks like it’s time for another rebuttal!
John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, and various other critics have called the theory that human use of carbon-based fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic global warming or climate change a “hoax.” It is, but it’s more than that, it’s criminal.
Here are some of the scientific questions at the core of this issue:
Is the climate changing? Of course. The climate always has changed and always will.
Is the earth getting warmer? We should hope so for at least two reasons: First, the world emerged from the Little Ice Age in the 19th century, so it would be worrisome if it weren’t getting warmer. Second, all the history indicates that humans thrive more during warmer periods than colder ones. It is likely, though, that earth has warmed less than many official temperature records indicate for a variety of reasons, including: few long-term records from either the southern hemisphere or the 71 percent of the planet that is covered by water; distortions from the urban heat-island effect and other faulty siting (e.g., temperature sensors next to asphalt parking lots, etc.; the decline in weather station reports from Siberia after the fall of the Soviet government; the arbitrarily ceasing to include measurements from northern latitudes and high elevations, etc.) The most accurate measures of temperature come from satellites. Since the start of these measurements in 1979, they show minor fluctuations and an insignificant net change in global temperature.
Is the earth getting dangerously warm? Probably not, since the earth was warmer than it is now in 7000 of the last 10,000 years. By the way, does anybody know what the “right” amount of global heat is?
Are we humans causing the warming by our carbon emissions? Actually, most of the “greenhouse effect” is due to water vapor, which makes one wonder why the EPA hasn’t designated H2O a harmful pollutant that they must regulate. Meteorologist Brian Sussman’s calculations in his book “Climategate” show humanity’s share of the greenhouse effect as .9 of 1 percent.
It’s even possible that CO2 may not affect global warming at all. During many stretches of planetary history, there has been no correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature. In other long stretches, the variations of the two factors followed a significant sequence: increases in CO2 followed increases in warmth by several centuries. You don’t need to have a degree in climate science to know that, in a temporal universe, cause does not follow its effect.
Even global warming alarmists have tacitly conceded that CO2 is not the primary driver of climate change when they responded to the relative cooling in recent years by changing their story and telling us that the earth is likely to cool for a few decades in spite of still-increasing atmospheric CO2. Translation: other factors outweigh CO2 in their impact on global temperatures. Those other factors include variations in solar activity (accounting for 3/4 of the variability in earth’s temperature according to the Marshall Institute); changes in earth’s orbit and axis; albedo (reflectivity, meaning changes in cloud cover which are influenced by fluctuations in gamma ray activity); and volcanic and tectonic activity in the earth’s crust. For humans to presume that they are more than a gnat on an elephant’s rump in terms of impact on climate change is vain and delusive.
Shifting gears, let’s assume that the alarmists are right and that man-made CO2 emissions are making the world warmer. If so, what changes would they hope to accomplish and at what cost?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/09/16/climate-change-hoax-or-crime-of-the-century/
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Global Warmists Might Explain Why No Hurricanes Midway Through 2013 Season
Major hurricane strikes occurred 50 percent more often 50-100 years ago than they have during the past 50 years. read »
Post 1 week ago | 2,452 views
Why Republicans (And Others) Place A Low Priority On Global Warming
The evidence is clear, warmer is better for humans and other animals and for plant life. read »
Post 3 weeks ago | 1,813 views
Global Warming Activist Michael Mann Wages War On Government Transparency
When you spend millions of taxpayer dollars, it’s only fair to account for how the money is spent. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,842 views
President Obama's Climate Plan Would Kill Hundreds Of Millions Of Birds And Bats
All this, and no detectable change in global temperatures. read »
Post 1 month ago | 12,704 views
Senator Barbara Boxer's Own Experts Contradict Obama On Global Warming
Climate activists deliver a crushing blow to Obama’s climate change narrative. read »
Post 1 month ago | 1,574 views
You Can't Deny Ezra Klein Knows Next To Nothing About The Global Warming Debate
Whether or note we’re still in the Little Ice Age is not for dispute. read »
Post 1 month ago | 4,304 views
Global Warming? No, Satellites Show Carbon Dioxide Is Causing 'Global Greening'
A carbon dioxide “fertilization effect” that has caused a gradual greening of the Earth. read »
Post 1 month ago | 3,642 views
HBO's Global Warmed 'Vice': A Classic Case Of Climate Denial
Fortunately, HBO On Demand offers more entertaining fictional programming options. read »
Post 2 months ago | 1,442 views
Conservatives Reach Common Ground On A Carbon Tax, And That's The Problem
About such a tax, conservatives should know better. read »
Post 3 months ago | 20,896 views
Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
More evidence showing how embarrassingly feeble the alarmist theory really is. read »
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Forbes_Magazine
Forbes Magazine is a business magazine run by Steve Forbes and owned by Forbes, Inc.; like the Wall Street Journal, it runs columns of right wing misinformation.
Contents
[hide]
1 Articles and resources
1.1 References
1.2 Related SourceWatch articles
1.3 External resources
1.4 External articles
Articles and resources
References
Related SourceWatch articles
Steve Forbes
Forbes, Inc.
External resources
External articles
Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia (with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth) (2011-01-06). Forbes’ rich list of nonsense. RealClimate. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
Steve Lambert (2006-02-20). Steve Forbes plays DDT Ban Myth Bingo. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-01-31.
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Forbes’ rich list of nonsense
Filed under:
Climate Science
Reporting on climate
— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth
While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a blistering attack on climate science in the business press where thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course, the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is a waste of resources.
A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts”, is a classic example.
Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style, anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard; this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.
The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it; hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.
The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on the media:
As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming ‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he begins.
But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate change story.
But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.
Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be “easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.
Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?
Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated, before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to divert attention from what most scientifically informed people consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.
The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests we are ignoring “the good news”.
Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit into the big picture.
We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the article are bolded).
Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported
Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.
It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed – tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12 became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010 was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third category 4 hurricane.
It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US (though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other features of the prevailing winds last year.
What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic activity in the Atlantic!
What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the Philippines (Megi).
Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.
NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase
Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:
According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern.
We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. …
Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.
But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier report of cooling was erroneous!
So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is “burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”
Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).
What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong as well.
Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for last a case where he might have a stronger point.
A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin.
This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987 with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some salient points about the controversy from his point of view:
I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such. Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.
A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed.
This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007. This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.
[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year
The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow. The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.
The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.
Just wrong:
Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records available here).
Next:
… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global warming.
There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim simply isn’t true.
The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are, in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.
The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.
This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010, genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.
in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)
“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.
… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double.
We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point; as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and 2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.
There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth. By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example, which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a planet is tricky business.
A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:
“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.”
There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much by a factor of two as Bell says.
So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of accelerating.
In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that climate change is negligible.
Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.
What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.
What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one person takes both roles.
So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.
Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.
Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to invent it.
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