Want examples on how mercenary Climate Skeptics distort the truth and use the same old lies to further their agenda? Lies that have been disproved over and over again but keep popping out of their graves like zombies. Look no further than the Chicago Tribune on June 1st:
We got another dose of settled-science baloney a couple of weeks ago when the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the science underlying the assertions of man-made global warming is “sound,” despite “Climategate” discoveries that called into question global warming’s basic conclusions. […]
In February, Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, admitted to the absence of evidence of statistically significant global warming since 1995. He said the “vast majority of climate scientists” don’t agree that the issue is settled. His climate unit was the source of the Climategate e-mails last year that disclosed serious data manipulation. And, in January, the torchbearer of global warming — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — acknowledged major errors of fact and forecasts.
Can you identify the zombie lies in this brief “opinion piece” by Dennis Byrne?* Here’s my list:
1. Phil Jones, renowned Climate scientist at East Anglia University (whose email data base was hacked leading the the ginned up scandal called Climategate) admitted “the vast majority of climate scientists” don’t agree climate change is settled science.
2. Jones also said there has been “no statistically significant evidence” of global warming since 1995.
3. Climategate disclosed serious data manipulation by climate scientists.
Let’s take on each of these “zombie lies” one at a time shall we. First, did Phil Jones really say the vast majority of climate scientists don’t agree that climate change is occurring or that human activity is a major source of that global climate change?
In fact Dr. Jones said nothing of the kind. The lack of consensus he referred to in his interview with the BBC related to the extent and scope of the so-called Medieval Warming period, and not to climate change that is occurring now. Here’s what Dr Jones really said back in February regarding the lack of consensus among the “vast majority” of climate scientists:
[BBC Question] – There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?
[Jones’ Answer] There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.
This is consistent with what the IPCC report itself says, which is that:
In order to reduce the uncertainty, further work is necessary to update existing records, many of which were assembled up to 20 years ago, and to produce many more, especially early, palaeoclimate series with much wider geographic coverage. There are far from sufficient data to make any meaningful estimates of global medieval warmth.
So Mr. Byrne, not a climate scientist, lied when he stated that Jones admitted the “vast majority of climate scientists” don’t agree that it has been settled that climate change is occurring and human activity is primarily responsible for that change. He twisted what Jones’ said and omitted to provide the actual context of the question. This was done in order for Byrne to deceitfully repeat the lie that Jones for the first time admitted that most climate scientists don’t accept that global climate change is settled science.
In fact, climate scientists have long agreed (and they agreed upon this prior to the publication of those stolen “Climategate” emails were used to confuse, discredit and obfuscate the issue of climate change by climate skeptics and denialists) that more research is needed to determine the issue of whether the Medieval warming Period was global in scale or limited to Northern Europe or the Northern Hemisphere.
That’s hardly an indictment of the current consensus regarding Anthropogenic global warming since 1850 nor is it a new admission by Jones. It’s only a statement that the records regarding the Medieval Warm Period are incomplete and inexact, and that no definitive conclusions can be reached about that period in human history at this time.
As for Jones’ own opinion, when asked by the BBC he was quite clear about the matter:
[BBC Question] How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
[Jones’ Answer] I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
One down, two to go.
Now what about Byrne’s claim that Jones’ said there has been “no statistically significant global warming since 1995?” That is a half truth which once again omits the full context of what Jones said. Here are Jones’ remarks in full in response to the BBC’s question. You tell me if Byrne accurate represents his statement or misuses it for his own slimy purposes:
[Question] Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
[Jones’ Answer] Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
So what Jones’ actually said was that (1) the warming trend from 1995 to 2009 was positive, and (2) while it was not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, it was quite close to that level of significance by his calculation. Dr. Jones’ also said that statistical significance is more likely the longer the period of time from which temperature measurements are included.
Of course, Byrne conveniently forgot to mention these additional statements by Jones because they would contradict his stated theme that the fact that global warming has occurred and continues to occur is not “settled science.” Providing the full context of Jone’s statement would expose the fact that he quoted Jones’ out of context in order to mislead his readers. Here are some other pertinent omissions he forgot to mention because they contradict his thesis:
NASA declared this year that the decade of 2000-2009 was the hottest on record. Indeed, the last decade was hotter than the 1990’s (the previous hottest decade on record) which was also hotter than the 1980’s (which until the 1990’s was the hottest decade on record)
Dr Peter Stott, climate scientist at the Met Office, said:
“If you average the temperatures up over the whole decade it shows very clearly that this most recent decade is the warmest in the instrumental record.”
He said the data showed, even once uncertainties were taken into account, that the 2000s were significantly warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer in turn than the decade before.
Instead of cooling, the rate of warming is actually increasing. Indeed the last decade was quite a bit hotter on average than the 1990’s when compared to the average for the 20th Century as a whole, as reported by The US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (i.e., NOAA):
The 2000 – 2009 decade will be the warmest on record, with its average global surface temperature about 0.96 degree F above the 20th century average. This will easily surpass the 1990s value of 0.65 degree F.
Funny that Byrne fails to mention those statistics, don’t you agree? The last decade was .31 degrees F warmer on average than the 1990’s which even the skeptics had admitted was the hottest decade in recorded history. Not to mention that 2010 has gotten off to a rather hot start as well:
The world’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made last month the warmest March on record, according to NOAA. Taken separately, average ocean temperatures were the warmest for any March and the global land surface was the fourth warmest for any March on record. Additionally, the planet has seen the fourth warmest January — March period on record.
So much for Zombie lie #2. What about Zombie lie #3? That is, Bryne’s claim that the Climategate emails “disclosed serious data manipulation” by the climatologists involved, the same scientists who have asserted that AGW is real. Is this a true statement? Well at the risk of copyright infringement, sadly no.
To date, every inquiry into the Climategate emails has concluded that they show no evidence of “serious” data manipulation (which I take to mean changes to the data sufficient to discredit the research by these scientists that global warming is occurring and that it is primarily the result of human activity).
First there were the inquiries that the British government made regarding the research by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said they had seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.
In their report released Wednesday, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”
A second independent inquiry by a “panel of eleven 11 led by the University of Oxford’s Lord Oxburgh” also cleared the British scientists at CRU of any wrongdoing:
“We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it,” says the Oxburgh report. “Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention” [Nature]. This conclusion came after interviewing people within the organization and combing through the data in 11 of the center’s peer-reviewed papers published over the span of 22 years.
Then there was the specific inquiry into the research by Professor Michael Mann, an American climate scientist and author the famous hockey stick study, by his current employer Penn State University:
The board of inquiry at Pennsylvania State University said it found no evidence that Michael Mann, a leading climatologist, had suppressed or falsified data, tried to destroy data or emails, or misused information. It will convene a second panel to investigate whether he had violated academic practices, including those governing exchanges between scholars.
The university ordered the investigation by three senior faculty members after Mann’s name appeared in more than 375 of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit. Climate change sceptics jumped on one email which describes Mann’s solution to a problem as a “trick”, a shorthand among scientists and mathematicians, as evidence of an effort to distort data.
The panel dismissed the charge. “The so-called ‘trick’ was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field,” the panel said.
It also cleared Mann of purposely hiding or destroying email relating to an IPCC climate change report.
It said it found nothing to support the charge that Mann had conspired with like-minded scholars to block competing scholars.
For the third time, Mr. Byrne has been exposed as a professional liar (professional because I’m sure someone paid him for that piece of tripe that was published by the Tribune) and not even an original liar since he is merely parroting the lies of others who came before him.
So, what if anything has has Mr. Bryne stated in his article in the Chicago Tribune that is true and accurate regarding the current state of climate science? What has he stated that is not either an out and out lie or an out of context distortion of statements made by Dr. Jones to mislead his readers?
Frankly I can’t find anything. He’s merely repeated the same falsehoods and “zombie lies” of his fellow skeptics, most of whom also have no background in climate science but all of whom are very good at “public relations” and the production of propaganda and disinformation designed to convince an ignorant public that climate change and global warming are either myths, a grand hoax or a conspiracy by Al Gore to warp their kids’ brains and turn them into mush suitable for feeding extraterrestrial aliens bent on destroying our planet.
And thanks to publications like the Chicago Tribune Byrne and others like him are given media platforms to disseminate these lies without rebuttal from legitimate scientists in the field. In short, he’s the latest version of that classic American archetype: the snake oil salesman. It just so happens the snake oil he’s selling benefits certain large multinational companies with a vested interest in our continued consumption of their toxic products.
You know, companies like British Petroleum, the corporation that single-handedly has destroyed the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem and the economy of anyone or any industry in that region not connected in some fashion with Big Oil.
As the saying goes, “Only in America.”
* Links to Mr. Byrne’s background as a climate expert: Human Events; Resume posted at his blog (please note the education section in particular); List of his clients for “editorial services” from his blog (please note most of them employ him for “public relations” related activities).
