So, Tony Heller pores through almost 50 years of press clippings, finds the most outrageous snippets he can find, and posts them. It's just another example of what he does best -- cherry picking. And this is from a guy who has a proven track record of making "smoking gun" claims that are spectacularly wrong, retracting some, but clinging obsessively to others. This is a guy who was featured as a guest writer on the world's most popular denier blog -- Watts up with That -- and then was later banned after the site owner started taking a skeptical look at what Heller was doing.
With Tony, you always have to ask "what isn't he showing me?" What he's not showing us, in this case, is the actual science. You see, Faqs is dead wrong that there is a single group of monolithic AGW proponents. Individual climate scientists disagree -- sometimes forcefully -- on all kinds of issues. And they all have their own personal opinions on issues like when the arctic ice will disappear. But what the science says isn't what individual scientists tell a newspaper reporter (even if quoted or summarized accurately). The science is found in the published reports of the IPCC. The IPCC AR reports are literature reviews of the state of the science, as shown by the published scientific literature. There have been five. You can find them online. If FAQs or anyone else can find a prediction like "the icecap will melt five years" or "there won't be any snow in 20 years" in those reports, please provide me the cite.
The other thing, of course, that Tony isn't showing us is anything like a representative sample of what the press has written over the course of 50 years. He shows us a handful of examples of extreme statements and pretends that represents the opinions of all climate scientists.. It doesn't.
Tony also doesn't show us the context in which many of these articles appeared. I've written at length about this before. In the late '60s and early '70s, research from different scientific disciplines showed several trends with potential consequences for the climate. The Milankovitch Cycles would result in cooling of the atmosphere, eventually leading to any ice age; increasing aerosol pollution, which could lead to much more rapid cooling; and increasing CO2 production. which would warm the atmosphere. In a real sense, these scientists were like the blind man and the elephant when it came to the climate as a whole -- each was looking at a piece and drawing conclusions. In the late '70s, the President asked the National Academy of Science to figure all this out. This led to a series of papers, and a recommendation that an international science organization new formed to investigate and assess the effects of climate change. That led to the formation of the IPCC. I've linked to one of the early NAS papers. It is not the shrieking "we're all gonna die tomorrow" caricature that global warming deniers try to use for anyone who accepts the actual climate science. No sea ice melting in five years. No snow disappearing in 20 years. But it does contain lots of more general predictions that are surprisingly accurate, given that climate modeling was in its infancy.
https://www.nap.edu/read/18714/chapter/1 The reasoned and measured approach to investigating the effects of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is what Tony won't show you.
Some of these cherry picks are ludicrous on their face. Al Gore has talked more about climate than most scientists. If he took the position that the polar ice cap would melt in five years, he'd be saying it and it wouldn't be hard to find. But Tony had to pour through Gore's writing and interviews in order to find one speech in Germany to find this statement? But wait -- does anyone actually believe that Gore "predicted" in 2008 that the ice cap would be gone in five years? Nope. He discussed recent findings of a scientist working for the Navy who was combining satellite data with submarine observations. Gore said that the scientist told him that "some" of the models showed a 75% chance of an ice free polar cap during some part of the summer. He also referenced a previous speaker, who had talked about 2030. And he ended with saying that we'll have to see."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzIMisrepresenting what folks actually say by stripping the qualifications and nuance out of their statements is a regular practice of Tony's. (Watts, too.)
What else doesn't Tony tell you about? Well, he shows you only snippets of articles, again leaving out context. For example, here is a quote from an article he quotes:
A new paper in the journal Nature argues that the release of a 50 Gigatonne (Gt) methane pulse from thawing Arctic permafrost could destabilise the climate system and trigger costs as high as the value of the entire world's GDP. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf's (ESAS) reservoir of methane gas hydrates could be released slowly over 50 years or "catastrophically fast" in a matter of decades – if not even one decade – the researchers said.
Not everyone agrees that the paper's scenario of a catastrophic and imminent methane release is plausible. Nasa's Gavin Schmidt has previously argued that the danger of such a methane release is low, whereas scientists like Prof Tim Lenton from Exeter University who specialises in climate tipping points, says the process would take thousands if not tens of thousands of years, let alone a decade.
But do most models underestimate the problem? A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) projects that the Arctic will be ice free in September by around 2054-58. This, however, departs significantly from empirical observations of the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice which is heading for disappearance within two or three years according to Nature co-author and renowned Arctic expert Prof Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar ocean physics group at Cambridge University.
He showed you only the first paragraph. He didn't show you the next two, which make it clear that the new paper is out of line with mainstream climate science.
What else doesn't Tony tell you about? Well, he uses an infamous graph from John Christy that is both highly misleading in the way it's presented and the data it uses for comparison.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-problemsRealClimate, a blog by climate scientists, tracks the performance of several models, updating them yearly, in this post:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/cl ... ervations/And Carbon Brief did a similar comparison with the IPCC projections.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ho ... al-warmingWhat else does Tony fail to show you? He doesn't tell you when the graphs he posts are his graphs, as opposed to graphs published elsewhere. For example, his DC hot days graph is based on a single weather station 50 miles from D.C. Why that one? What he does is pore over large amounts of data, trying to find some subset that will show what he wants to believe. He also doesn't disclose whether his graph is based on "raw" station data or data that has been corrected to remove the bias resulting from station moves, changes in time of day for reporting, changes of instruments used to measure the temperature, etc. I'd spend some time looking at this, but the guy's been caught so often cherry picking to create misleading graphs, I see no reason to.
His most egregious cherry pick is his arctic ice graph. At first glance, it looks like there has been a dramatic recovery of sea ice. Until, of course, you notice that the graph is only for part of the year -- the part when the ice freezes during fall and winter. Why doesn't he show the whole year? I don't know. Toony's abuse of data and graphs is pathological.
Finally, Tony plays games with the concept of "tipping points." When people make statements like, we have only X years to prevent Y, they aren't saying that Y will happen in X years. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time and we have no way at present to remove significant amounts of it from the air. We also don't have a control knob that will let us shut off CO2 production in a short time frame. So, whatever climactic regimen we end up with, we're going to be stuck with it for a long time. There is a temperature threshold at which all the ice in Greenland will melt if we cross it. That doesn't mean it melts instantly, but it means that if we want to avoid melting that icecap, we have to keep the temperature below that threshold. Same with the West Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Right now, folks are talking about keeping the temperature increase below certain levels. If that is our goal, we can look at how much more carbon we can burn before we should expect to reach that level. Right now, the figure the IPCC is talking about is 1.5 C. The problem is, to meet that goal, extreme decreases in greenhouse gas emissions need to start next year. Because, if we don't, we simply burn through the carbon budget for staying below that temperature. Personally, I think the odds of keeping the temperature below 1.5C are, as a practical matter, zero. All indications are that the warming is going to top out at 3-6C over pre-industrial, and we're just going to have to pay the piper. And by us, I mean mostly your kids and grandkids.
TL/DR Another cherry picking exercise from the king of cherry pickers.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
