"The Great Global Warming Swindle"

[mmcirvin]

In case you're looking for a mainstream climate scientists' response to the UK Channel Four documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", here is one.

I haven't seen the show, but if it's true that they present the cooling from the 1940s-1970s as a mysterious flaw in the anthropogenic-global-warming hypothesis, that's remarkably dishonest. It's also remarkable that they're still pushing the supposed discrepancy between surface and tropospheric warming not long after the last major piece of evidence for that was explained away as a math error.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Wow: the documentary apparently also made the bogus claim that volcanoes emit hundreds of times as much CO2 yearly as human activity, which is not only untrue, but is probably a further distortion of an earlier bogus claim about chlorofluorocarbons and ozone that originated with the thoroughly bananas Lyndon LaRouche organization (and was spread to the world mostly by Rush Limbaugh).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Here's a good summary of the volcano nonsense from 1994 (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1895), which attributes the garbling that turned it into a carbon-dioxide story to Thomas Sowell of the New York Post.

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

More along those same lines...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/ngreen211.xml

Mainstream and even pop sci (New Scientist) coverage of science really is awful, and often the researchers themselves bear some of the blame for bogus hype. Just today Slashdot carried an article where the researcher had discovered that sports participation in kids does not correlate with total energy expenditure -- based on the assumption that an accelerometer around the waist was an accurate measure of relative activity level when comparing "bouncing around" to distance track running. There has also been coverage of an admittedly very promising method in Go game programming, MC/UCT (a variant of Monte Carlo evaluation -- random playout until end of game, score, then repeat -- enhanced to eventually converges towards the correct minimax value), in which one of the developers of the technique says that the programs were approaching pro levels, when the programs are only at the level of advanced intermediate amateurs -- which in turn reminded me how the latest chip fabrication technique is always presented as being poised to blow CMOS out of the water, which makes it hard to understand how CMOS is still around after all these years. OK, I realize the crappiness of pop science and tech coverage is not news, but the rant bears updating every few years, especially considering how the Internet makes it easier than ever for reporters to check their facts before posting nonsense.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The culprit I keep noticing is the research organization's PR office. Frequently press releases from universities, corporate labs and government agencies contain horrible distortions of what their scientists are doing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Carl Wunsch, one of the scientists interviewed, says he was quote-mined, (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled-carl-wunsch-responds/) with an explanation of a positive CO2 feedback misrepresented as implying that today's elevated levels are not manmade, and criticism of extreme climate alarmists misrepresented as criticism of the mainstream, IPCC-style consensus. Entertainingly, several AGW denialists in the comments to that post insist that he is lying now and his statements should be taken as aired.

I can sympathize with him. On this LJ, on a few occasions, I've criticized statements about climate that, based on my admittedly second- or third-hand reading of the science, seemed excessively alarmist to me (James Lovelock's scary book about the impending near-extinction of humanity, and the misleading media attention given to the high outliers in the climateprediction.net experiment, which I'm guessing may have actually been the models that Wunsch was talking about). My point was to keep unrealistically scary scenarios from driving people past the point of working for change into fatalistic depression, but I'm sure that things I said in those posts could easily be taken out of context and used as fodder for denialist arguments.