The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley just can’t catch a break. Not only does TVMOB have to deal with well-deserved mockery for his un-peer-reviewed paper. He also has to deal with factual debunking from real climate scientists, in this case, the scientists at RealClimate. Here is a taste:
Wetlands are an essential ecosystem that promote biodiversity and flood control. They are also essential to maintaining a livable climate — since wetland destruction potentially accelerates global warming.
As reported in Science Daily, leading scientists are now meeting in Brazil at the 8th International Wetlands Conference, discussing actions to better understand, protect, and manage this key global resource.
How big a deal are the wetlands?
The country’s largest organization of physicists is working fast to restore its good name, which was damaged by one ignorant editor of a non-peer-reviewed newsletter. That editor, Jeff Marque, published a previously-debunked analysis by failed conservative politician and non-scientist Lord Monckton.
The Council of the American Physical Society quickly responded to the uproar over this disinformation by adding a new disclaimer to the Monckton article:
There is no need to waste any further time here debunking Monckton’s “sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary,” as RealClimate put it. As the APS makes clear, just because somebody uses a lot of numbers and formulas, that doesn’t make their analysis either scientific or credible.
Thanks to all those who wrote in and helped push the APS to clean up this mess.
For a humorous take on this, see “Irony-gate: Viscount Monckton, a British peer, says his paper was peer-reviewed by a scientist.“
[I am asking all Climate Progress readers to start an email campaign. Please feel free to post your emails as comments.]
The Drudge headline blared “Group Repping 50,000 Physicists Opens Global Warming Debate…” The link was to a story “Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate.” Since it was a denier website, I ignored it. Then I got forwarded an e-mail from one of the top journalists in the country titled “This may be important” with the same opening paragraph as the denier article:
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”
Now you can be just as sure that any denier talk point is wrong without studying it in detail as you can be sure that a perpetual motion machine is not, in fact, perpetual without studying it in detail. But as a former American Physical Society Congressional science fellow, I feel obliged to point out that the obvious way to figure out what the American Physical Society believes is to go to their website, www.aps.org, and see what they say:
APS Climate Change Statement
APS Position Remains Unchanged
The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”
An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.
Read: APS Climate Change Statement [which states, “The evidence is incontrovertible” and “We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”
I really don’t like the word “consensus” (see Deniers say there’s no consensus about global warming. Well, there’s not. There’s well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome].” But in any case, one ignorant editor at one unpeer-reviewed newsletter does not explode it.
So this editor who single-handedly smeared the good name of the American Physical Society and the 50,000 physicists it represents is one “Jeff Marque, Senior Staff Physicist at Beckman Coulter Corporation, 1050 Page Mill Rd., MSY-14, Palo Alto, CA 94304, jjmarque@sbcglobal.net.” Please do email him and his bosses (whose names and e-mails I will provide below) to let them know your thoughts.
What Marque has does is so beyond the realm of real scientific debate that he should be fired from his editorial position. In the July issue of the newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, Marque wrote:
A major new study by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) finds
[P]renatal exposure to coal-burning emissions was associated with significantly lower average developmental scores and reduced motor development at age two. In the second unexposed group, these adverse effects were no longer observed; and the frequency of delayed motor developmental was significantly reduced.
The full study in the July 14th Environmental Health Perspectives is available online: “Benefits of Reducing Prenatal Exposure to Coal Burning Pollutants to Children’s Neurodevelopment in China.” The study provides yet more evidence — if any were needed — to ban traditional coal plants: “elimination of prenatal exposure to coalburning emissions resulted in measurable benefits to children’s development.” This is a very sophisticated study, which used molecular markers to directly track exposure to coal plant emissions:
In a world of complete knowledge, we could measure annual temperatures around the globe and then factor out all of the short-term changes not driven by human emissions. What’s left would be the anthropogenic or human-caused global warming trend.
In the real world, however, we don’t measure temperatures everywhere — we interpolate between temperature stations. And we don’t know the exact magnitude of all the short-term natural variability. That leaves plenty of room for global warming deniers and delayers to intermittently push their siren song of “global cooling” (see “Media enable denier spin: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming“). And siren song it is (see “Hadley Center to delayers: We’re warming, not cooling” and “Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim” and “Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!“).
In this post, I will examine some of the factors that have affected recent temperature records (including changes in solar irradiation) to understand what is really going on. First, RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt has extracted the the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal from the global temperature data (both NASA’s and Hadley’s):
Gosh, it’s warming. Who would have thunk it?
[For more on the ENSO factor, time series smoothing, and global warming, read “Has the world cooled since 1998?” (pp. 141-148).]
You may wonder why NASA shows more warming in recent years than the Hadley Center. The answer is quite important to this discussion. As Schmidt explains, the Arctic Ocean has no temperature station coverage:
[Hadley] does not extrapolate past the coast, while [NASA] extrapolates from the circum-Arctic stations — the former implies that the Arctic is warming at the same rate as the rest of the globe, while the latter assumes that the Arctic is warming as fast as the highest measured latitudes.
Since the Arctic appears to be warming up at an alarming rate — far faster than the rest of the globe, as the literature had predicted — I find the NASA data more compelling. Indeed, if anything, even the NASA dataset probably underestimates the recent warming, since the temperature above an ice-covered Arctic Ocean can get very, very low (many tens of degrees below 0ºC), whereas the temperature above open ocean (or thin ice) is close to 0ºC).
Significantly, The ENSO is not the only ocean-based source of temperature fluctuation:
[Another post by Ken Levenson.]
I’ve always known from a young age that watching TV wasn’t good for me - I can hear my mother now - but this is getting completely out of hand.
As reported by Ian Sample in The Guardian:
The rising demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world’s largest coal-fired power stations, a leading environmental scientist warned yesterday.
Nitrogen trifluoride or NF3 is a greenhouse gas, and it’s used in the manufacture of our flat screen televisions - 4,000 tons of it now annually and projected to double in the next year. Granted the amounts are relatively minuscule but NF3 is not to be trifled with:
Funny you should ask. That is the title of an analysis published this month in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) by four scientists from the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle. What did they conclude?
A model study has been conducted of the unprecedented retreat of arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007. It is found that preconditioning, anomalous winds, and ice-albedo feedback are mainly responsible for the retreat. Arctic sea ice in 2007 was preconditioned to radical changes after years of shrinking and thinning in a warm climate. During summer 2007 atmospheric changes strengthened the transpolar drift of sea ice, causing more ice to move out of the Pacific sector and the central Arctic Ocean where the reduction in ice thickness due to ice advection is up to 1.5 m more than usual. Some of the ice exited Fram Strait and some piled up in part of the Canada Basin and along the coast of northern Greenland, leaving behind an unusually large area of thin ice and open water. Thin ice and open water allow more surface solar heating because of a much reduced surface albedo, leading to amplified ice melting. The Arctic Ocean lost additional 10% of its total ice mass in which 70% is due directly to the amplified melting and 30% to the unusual ice advection, causing the unprecedented ice retreat. Arctic sea ice has entered a state of being particularly vulnerable to anomalous atmospheric forcing.
In short, Santa Claus and Superman need to find a new home. Next stop for them — East Antarctica, which is probably good for another century or two.
Related Posts:
… on the prospects for and impact of an ice-free North Pole. Or at least that is the plan!
Too bad Shepard Smith wasn’t hosting — he wouldn’t have wasted time on the global cooling nonsense!
Remember, Shepard thinks global warming deniers are a “little crazy” like some guy who got stuck in the toilet (see QUIZ: Who said, “People who deny the whole global warming thing. They’re just a little crazy.”)
I have previously debunked this absurd claim we have somehow cooled in the last year back to levels of a century ago (or even two decades ago), see Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming and Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!
For another perspective, News Hounds wrote up this encounter here, “To This Day, Fox is Feeding its Audience “Proof” That Global Warming Doesn’t Exist.” I may blog on this again.
Someone sent me the link (here)
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