Global Climate Change Science News

[Tero]

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m9SNzxJJA#t=64[/youtube]

[Seth]

Let the ad hominem attacks begin in three....two....one....

New Climate Paper Gives Global Warming Alarmists ‘One Helluva Beating’
20
AFP PHOTO/Jewel SAMAD
AFP PHOTO/Jewel SAMAD

by James Delingpole20 Mar 20150
A new scientific paper has driven yet another nail into the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. (H/T Bishop Hill)

The paper – Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing by Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, published in the American Meteorological Society journal – finds that the effects of aerosols on climate are much smaller than those in almost all the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Aerosols are the minute particles added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (as well as by non-anthropogenic sources, like volcanoes). The reason they are important is that they are so often cited by alarmists to excuse the awkward fact that the world has stubbornly failed to warm at the disastrous rate they predicted it would.

Apparently – or so the excuse goes – these aerosols are masking the true extent of runaway climate change by cancelling out the effects of man-made CO2.

Here, for example, is a NASA expert in 2009:

Using climate models, we estimate that aerosols have masked about 50 percent of the warming that would otherwise have been caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat near the surface of the Earth

Here is a report on a study from another institution – NOAA – with a long track record of ramping up the alarmist cause.

A new study led by the U.S, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that tiny particles that make their way all the way up into the stratosphere may be offsetting a global rise in temperatures due to carbon emissions.

Aerosols are often used to explain the lack of “global warming” in the cooling period between 1940 and 1970 (when the growth in industrialisation and all that extra man-made CO2 ought to have begun taking effect).

They have also been used in this 2011 paper - whose co-authors include one Michael Mann, which gives you an idea of its quality and reliability – for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). It claims that the reason there has been a “hiatus” in global warming since 1998 is because of the effect of aerosol emissions. This got one of the BBC’s resident alarmists Richard Black very excited. He wrote it up in an article entitled Global warming lull down to China’s coal growth. (Oddly he forgot to surround it with scare quotes, or finish it with a question mark.)

The new Stevens paper has been described as a “game-changer” by one expert in the field, Nic Lewis.

According to the IPCC’s models, the effect of aerosols on climate could be as much as 4.5 degrees C. But Stevens paper suggests that this is a considerable overestimate and that the reduction they effect on temperature cannot be more than 1.8 degrees C.

This pretty much kills the alarmists’ “the aerosols ate my homework” excuse stone dead. If the cooling effects of aerosols turn out to be much smaller than the IPCC thinks, then what this means is that the rise in global temperatures attributable to man-made CO2 is also much smaller than the alarmists’ computer models acknowledge.

As Andrew Montford comments here:

Jim Hansen, Bob Ward, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, your climate alarmism just took one helluva beating.

[Brian Peacock]

Let the ad hominem attacks begin in three....two....one....

Banjo sniffer.

:tehe:

[piscator]

[Animavore]

I generally don't look to journalists to get my science. I usually go to, y'know, scientists. If I got my science from journalists I'd be avoiding everything, fearing they would give me cancer.

The whole "nail in the coffin" rhetoric is cute, though, if a little over-played at this stage.

[Animavore]

In looking for actual science all I'm mostly finding are right-wing, denialist sites all reprinting the exact same above article. It doesn't seem to have lit the scientific world (or any other world) on fire yet.

There is this though...

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress. ... l-forcing/

Interesting discussion going on in the comments.

[Seth]

I generally don't look to journalists to get my science. I usually go to, y'know, scientists. If I got my science from journalists I'd be avoiding everything, fearing they would give me cancer.

The whole "nail in the coffin" rhetoric is cute, though, if a little over-played at this stage.

Journalists don't make up the research, they simply report it, so your ad hom is, as usual, lame.

[Animavore]

I generally don't look to journalists to get my science. I usually go to, y'know, scientists. If I got my science from journalists I'd be avoiding everything, fearing they would give me cancer.

The whole "nail in the coffin" rhetoric is cute, though, if a little over-played at this stage.

Journalists don't make up the research, they simply report it, so your ad hom is, as usual, lame.

There is no ad hom here. Journalists are well known for reporting science badly. It is entirely rational to seek answers off scientists.
The fact that the scientist who wrote the paper supports AGW himself makes me skeptical that the paper has the implications the author of article thinks it does. I'm actually tempted to email the scientist in question.

[Seth]

I generally don't look to journalists to get my science. I usually go to, y'know, scientists. If I got my science from journalists I'd be avoiding everything, fearing they would give me cancer.

The whole "nail in the coffin" rhetoric is cute, though, if a little over-played at this stage.

Journalists don't make up the research, they simply report it, so your ad hom is, as usual, lame.

There is no ad hom here. Journalists are well known for reporting science badly.

That's the very definition of a circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. If the reporting is faulty, then prove that the reporting is faulty.

It is entirely rational to seek answers off scientists.

Sure it is, but most people don't have ready access to "scientists" and rely on journalists to do the seeking-out. Unless the journalist is fabricating the cited evidence out of whole cloth, if you disagree with the article, then attack the claims in the article, don't try to simply hand-wave it away because it was written by a journalist.

The fact that the scientist who wrote the paper supports AGW himself makes me skeptical that the paper has the implications the author of article thinks it does. I'm actually tempted to email the scientist in question.

Please do. But then again if you "report" on what you're told, by your own lights, why should we believe you?

[Animavore]

I never said the reporting was faulty. I said I was skeptical of it so I don't have to prove shit. No ad hom.
I haven't handwaved the article simply because it was written by a journalist, I expressed doubt at his "nail in the coffin" rhetoric which doesn't seem to follow from the paper.
You don't have to believe me and I don't care if you do, but if I do I'll just report what's said by the scientist without going beyond it with my own opinion like the above journalist has.

[Seth]

I never said the reporting was faulty. I said I was skeptical of it so I don't have to prove shit. No ad hom.

Nonsense. You clearly implied that the reporting was faulty by generally bashing journalists, which is the very essence of the circumstantial ad hom fallacy.

I haven't handwaved the article simply because it was written by a journalist, I expressed doubt at his "nail in the coffin" rhetoric which doesn't seem to follow from the paper.

You quote mine the article for four words in a lede and then use it to imply that the entire article is specious.

You don't have to believe me and I don't care if you do, but if I do I'll just report what's said by the scientist without going beyond it with my own opinion like the above journalist has.

Dude, it's a lede. It's purpose and intent is to get you to continue to read the article. It's not a scientific conclusion. Scientific conclusions are boring as fuck and the average person isn't going to either understand or read them. The job of journalists is to make gist of the scientific conclusion digestible by the common man. If the gist of the scientific conclusion was not stated accurately by the writer, then attack that imprecision. Merely implying, as you did, that journalists cannot accurately report anything is the very essence of the fallacy you committed.

[Animavore]

Nonsense. You clearly implied that the reporting was faulty by generally bashing journalists, which is the very essence of the circumstantial ad hom fallacy.

Now you're calling me a liar.

You quote mine the article for four words in a lede and then use it to imply that the entire article is specious.

I did not quote mine anything. I said "nail in the coffin" rhetoric. Read it like nail-in-the-coffin rhetoric. It's a type of rhetoric I've seen before, "Darinisim is done for", "Relativity is dead". It just so happened that this journalist actually used the phrase "nail in the coffin".

[piscator]

James Delingpole was an English Lit major who now states he does not read peer-reviewed papers.

In a BBC Horizon documentary, "Science under Attack", Delingpole responded to Paul Nurse's discussion of the scientific consensus on global warming by saying that the idea of a consensus is unscientific. In response to Nurse's question as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers, he maintained that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer reviewed papers, but be "an interpreter of interpretations".

[Seth]

Nonsense. You clearly implied that the reporting was faulty by generally bashing journalists, which is the very essence of the circumstantial ad hom fallacy.

Now you're calling me a liar.

No, you are calling you a liar. I'm merely reporting my impressions of your statement.

You quote mine the article for four words in a lede and then use it to imply that the entire article is specious.

I did not quote mine anything. I said "nail in the coffin" rhetoric. Read it like nail-in-the-coffin rhetoric. It's a type of rhetoric I've seen before, "Darinisim is done for", "Relativity is dead". It just so happened that this journalist actually used the phrase "nail in the coffin".

Dude, it's not an argument, it's a lede, a rhetorical question made as a statement of opinion. Whether it's a nail in the coffin is up to the reader to decide after reading the body of the article. It's as valid as a lede saying "Polar bears are going extinct."

[Seth]

James Delingpole was an English Lit major who now states he does not read peer-reviewed papers.

In a BBC Horizon documentary, "Science under Attack", Delingpole responded to Paul Nurse's discussion of the scientific consensus on global warming by saying that the idea of a consensus is unscientific. In response to Nurse's question as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers, he maintained that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer reviewed papers, but be "an interpreter of interpretations".

He's exactly correct. The job of a journalist is to present information in a way that persuades readers to read it. His ethical duty is to correctly quote and accurately represent the statements and evidence from his sources, but (depending on the particular forum) he's also allowed to insert his own opinions and write in compelling and provocative ways to try to make a particular point, just as the Warmist propagandists do.