Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Climate Denial Industry?
George Monbiot, a Warmie apologist/journalist of the first order, seemed recently to have his religious faith in anthropogenic global warming rocked by the huge scientific scandal in this very field, as evidenced by the e-mails and other documents released from Hadley CRU before Thanksgiving. He still sees clearly the damage those documents have done and what the climate "scientists" need to do to begin to regain their credibility (and take the challenge quotes off their job description). Yet he seems not to have lost his religion and indeed now sees and rails against things that do not exist.
Don't believe me? Read this. Money quote:
Clear thinking Monbiot has just stated that what the climate scientists were doing, as revealed by the leaked documents, was anathema to science, but it is the deniers who don't give a fig about science. I see. I get the picture. But if we really loved science and hated, as Monbiot claims to hate, what the bad climate "scientists" did, would our opinions be any different?
Then there is the bombshell that a denial industry exists. Monbiot later gives some examples, which I will discuss in detail over the rest of the week. An industry! And it is a corrupt industry which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming. Wow! An evil, corrupt industry which is interested in lying about the climate for money. The swifter of my readers will be thinking projection as the psychological malady from which Mr. Monbiot suffers.
Let's look at his strawmen arguments. He writes that even if you discounted all the things the leaked documents call into question, "the evidence for man-made global warming would be unequivocal." And what is his evidence of man-made global warming? "You can see it in the measured temperature record which goes back to 1850" (which is being reassessed because of the non science at the CRU revealed in the released documents) and in the real world evidence of warming (shrinking glaciers, thinning sea ice, wild animal and plant reaction (what?) and rapidly changing crop zones).
Of course these things are only evidence of global warming are not evidence of what caused it. Of course it has warmed and cooled since we entered, about 12,000 years ago, perhaps the 25th interglacial (which means it warmed and cooled a lot 24 times before, over the past few million years). But we know, from hundreds of peer reviewed articles in paleoclimatology over the past 35 years or so, that even recently, there have been warm periods, the latest of which, the Medieval Warm Period, lasted between around 850 to 1250 AD. The IPCC in 1990 published a graph which showed the overwhelming scientific consensus then that the Medieval Warm Period was WARMER than it is now.
If over the past few milennia it has been warmer than it is now, and those were at times when there was no industrialization nor any wholesale burning of fossil fuels, then why should be believe that this most recent warming is the result of industrialization and the wholesale burning of fossil fuels? Where's the evidence that this most recent warming is special, different...man-made? That's the central question for us deniers.
George Monbiot has an answer: No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Oh well, case closed then. No, I kid, there's more--Monbiot says that solar cycles can't explain it as they are out of sync with the recent warming (I don't believe that--the sunspot numbers appear to be reaching a minimum of some sort just now and minimum sunspot numbers in the past have been associated with global cooling periods and indeed, over the past decade, despite a rise of 5.4% in global CO2 atmospheric concentration, it has, in fact, cooled).
Monbiot says that the performance of greenhouse gasses has been measured in the laboratories but we deniers assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere. (I am aware of no serious denier making that claim, rather we hold them to their laboratory measurements (see graph) which say that for the doubling of atmospheric CO2, from the agreed upon pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm to 560 ppm (which we have not achieved and will not for at least another 140 years) the temperature will rise between .4 and 1.6 degrees C by 2150 or so). Yet the Warmies claim a catastrophic temperature rise of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees C by the end of this century. And their proof is? Well, they have no proof, as that term doesn't apply to projections about the future. Why should we trust their projections then? Monbiot's ability to provide support, apparently, ran dry.
More later.
Don't believe me? Read this. Money quote:
The second observation is the tendency of those who don't give a fig about science to maximize their [the leaked documents'] importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.
Clear thinking Monbiot has just stated that what the climate scientists were doing, as revealed by the leaked documents, was anathema to science, but it is the deniers who don't give a fig about science. I see. I get the picture. But if we really loved science and hated, as Monbiot claims to hate, what the bad climate "scientists" did, would our opinions be any different?
Then there is the bombshell that a denial industry exists. Monbiot later gives some examples, which I will discuss in detail over the rest of the week. An industry! And it is a corrupt industry which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming. Wow! An evil, corrupt industry which is interested in lying about the climate for money. The swifter of my readers will be thinking projection as the psychological malady from which Mr. Monbiot suffers.
Let's look at his strawmen arguments. He writes that even if you discounted all the things the leaked documents call into question, "the evidence for man-made global warming would be unequivocal." And what is his evidence of man-made global warming? "You can see it in the measured temperature record which goes back to 1850" (which is being reassessed because of the non science at the CRU revealed in the released documents) and in the real world evidence of warming (shrinking glaciers, thinning sea ice, wild animal and plant reaction (what?) and rapidly changing crop zones).
Of course these things are only evidence of global warming are not evidence of what caused it. Of course it has warmed and cooled since we entered, about 12,000 years ago, perhaps the 25th interglacial (which means it warmed and cooled a lot 24 times before, over the past few million years). But we know, from hundreds of peer reviewed articles in paleoclimatology over the past 35 years or so, that even recently, there have been warm periods, the latest of which, the Medieval Warm Period, lasted between around 850 to 1250 AD. The IPCC in 1990 published a graph which showed the overwhelming scientific consensus then that the Medieval Warm Period was WARMER than it is now.
If over the past few milennia it has been warmer than it is now, and those were at times when there was no industrialization nor any wholesale burning of fossil fuels, then why should be believe that this most recent warming is the result of industrialization and the wholesale burning of fossil fuels? Where's the evidence that this most recent warming is special, different...man-made? That's the central question for us deniers.
George Monbiot has an answer: No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Oh well, case closed then. No, I kid, there's more--Monbiot says that solar cycles can't explain it as they are out of sync with the recent warming (I don't believe that--the sunspot numbers appear to be reaching a minimum of some sort just now and minimum sunspot numbers in the past have been associated with global cooling periods and indeed, over the past decade, despite a rise of 5.4% in global CO2 atmospheric concentration, it has, in fact, cooled).
Monbiot says that the performance of greenhouse gasses has been measured in the laboratories but we deniers assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere. (I am aware of no serious denier making that claim, rather we hold them to their laboratory measurements (see graph) which say that for the doubling of atmospheric CO2, from the agreed upon pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm to 560 ppm (which we have not achieved and will not for at least another 140 years) the temperature will rise between .4 and 1.6 degrees C by 2150 or so). Yet the Warmies claim a catastrophic temperature rise of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees C by the end of this century. And their proof is? Well, they have no proof, as that term doesn't apply to projections about the future. Why should we trust their projections then? Monbiot's ability to provide support, apparently, ran dry.
More later.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Monbiot Keeps the Faith
