On July 1st, I published a blog entry here about climate distortions and misrepresentations at Forbes, which regularly publishes biased and misleading opinion pieces on climate issues. That entry described a remarkable piece by serial climate science conjurer Patrick Michaels and showed his clear misrepresentation of data on food production and climate risks. This falls well into the category of climate B.S. (bad science).
While I have no misconceptions about the likelihood of Forbes trying to apply any error-checking or fact checking to these opinion pieces, I was somewhat astounded to read today another piece by Michaels on the Forbes site, in which he makes even more egregious and outrageous claims and errors.
In this new piece, Michaels poses and then tries to answer a rhetorical question: "Why Hasn't The Earth Warmed In Nearly 15 Years?"
I am not going to go into the detail of why his specific arguments in his opinion piece are wrong, self-serving, or serious misinterpretations of good, peer-reviewed science.
Why? Because his fundamental premise -- his initial rhetorical question -- is wrong. Very simply, the Earth has warmed over the past 15 years. Significantly.
Michaels' essay is like trying to prove why the sun goes around the Earth. Or why gravity doesn't work. Or how the U.S. faked the moon landing. It doesn't matter what his arguments are: his initial premise is wrong.
There are really only two simple pieces to this: the actual temperature record; and all of the other ways the planet is screaming to us that the heat balance of the planet is out of whack. On both of these accounts, Michaels is simply wrong.
First and most simply: the temperature of the Earth has risen substantially over the past 15 years. As reported by the BBC, data and observations show that global temperatures have warmed by around 0.19ËšC between 1995 and 2010. This warming has a statistical confidence level of 95 percent, which means that there are one in twenty odds that the trend came about by chance.
Second: scientists also know that "warming" is only one of many indicators of a screwed up planetary heat balance. We know that an important part of the energy imbalance of the Earth caused by humans doesn't go toward raising global temperatures. Substantial excess energy is going into the oceans and unprecedented Arctic ice melt. Additional energy is going into raising the sea level relentlessly at over 3 millimeters per year. Added energy is going into intensifying precipitation patterns and storm intensity. And there is new evidence that some of the imbalance is being temporarily masked by new pollution from China's coal plants.
We also know that periods of slower or faster warming will occur, simply because of natural variations in temperature, and that these periods say nothing about the growing influence of humans on climate.
Michaels has been around the climate debate long enough to know all of these things. Or he should, if he really cared about understanding the science. What does this imply about his continued misrepresentation of the science, and increasingly desperate efforts to explain away the facts? I can't speculate. As for Forbes, they've seemingly decided that ignoring or misrepresenting climate science is in their political or economic best interest, even if it isn't in the planet's.
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I'm purplexed how magazines like the Economist or Forbes could simply throw away their hard earned credibility.
The argument presented here fails to sober unless there is a huge acceleration factor not cited - the rise in temp of .19 degree over 15 years yields only 1.2 degrees increase, with a sea level rise of roughly 1 foot. We will have long since devastated the planet (and ourselves) in other ways before this threat takes us down, as presented.
The pace of acceleration should be made clear.
Don't frame it as saving the planet....the planet will be fine and will continue. It has experienced 5 extinction events in the past and life will survive and re-evolve with new species.
The risk is not to the planet, but to humanity.
The answers are, alas, too long for this format, but quickly: the "significance" refers to the increases being /different/ from "no trend" -- so the first response is this is additional evidence of changes in climate. The "reason" is addressed in other science that eliminates natural factors that also play a role in climate processes -- this strongly supports the human influence component. The issue of "catastrophic" is, of course, also a different question, with a completely different set of science and analysis (and I'm not claiming "catastrophe..." here).
But perhaps most important, the *real* issue is that we don't have just a "15-year" trend; we have a 150-year trend. The effort of some climate skeptics and deniers to "cherry pick" data by looking at a few years, or a decade, or 15-years is hiding the total data record, where the trend is undeniable.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1996/trend
The above is the trend is the average of 4 datasets (2 satellite and 2 surface) over roughly 15 years.
Michaels plays a bit of a shell game as well, starting with the inaccurate title and then moving goalposts. For example, he cherry-picks datasets and starting year of 1998 (a big el nino) to minimize the positive trend. He also obfuscates with "statistically significant". If a trend fails to reach statistical significance, it's not the same as saying there is no warming. If, for example, a trend only reaches the 90% confidence level, there's a 10% chance (5% on each side assuming a normal distribution) that the trend could be zero or less or at least double the observed trend (of course he never mentions the latter). The reason that such scenarios on either end are even less likely than the small percentages would imply is that there are many independent corroborating data indicating a warming world - unlikely that they would be way off in the same direction.
Someone like Patrick Michaels should know better, but he takes money from fossil fuel interests to spread misinformation on climate science. Forbes may get more readers publishing his opinions but their credibility among analytical science-minded individuals sinks as a result.
I heard Pat Michaels speak at the Heartland Institute SICCC and he claims that human ingenuity is going to be our salvation from extreme, lethal heat waves and unsustainable resource extraction. As evidence of this he offered Walmart air-conditioners, and "two words - SHALE GAS."
That's right - even more polluting appliances not nearly affordable for most people in the world, and a hideously destructive, desperate attempt to extract more fossil fuels from the ground leading to tainted water and flaming kitchen sink faucets, are the solutions to climate change and peak oil.
Woo-hoo.
It is this potential scientific threat to the status quo that Forbes fears so much.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/modern_day_climate_change.html
One cannot view the entire body of warming signals and say what Michaels says with a straight face.
Ya really think that won't change the climate?
good rebuttal, thanks.
Are you trying to argue that the Earth is not warming; that the ice is not melting; that the seas are not rising; that the oceans are not absorbing massive heat imbalances? Or just quibbling?
In any case, it is intolerable to use the last 15 years to make any judgments, UNLESS one knows exactly the cause and can make an appropriate correction to the data. We can suspect, for example, that the 1945-165 hiatus in warming has a similar cause as the 1998-2010 hiatus, but because we do not know of a real reason to exclude or correct that data they must be included in the trend analysis. It is known that a strong El Nino was responsible for the 1998 anomaly so in principal one could reject some of that data, but one would still have to analyzed to whole trend series not just a portion.
FYI - the cooling/non warming period ran from mid 40's to late 70's, closer to a 35 year time frame - but lets not quibble. The larger point which you made is that we dont know what caused the cooling trend, Yet the "climate experts" have concluded with a high degree of confidence that CO2 has caused the increase, all the while having a very weak understanding of all the other variables that affect global temperatures.
The "expert climate scientists" have reached a conclusion of man-made global warming with a high confidence level yet have very low level of confidence in the underlying variables.
* Failure to rigorously test hypotheses using physical observations.
* Assuming results are evidence of cause.
* Assuming a poor correlation is evidence of cause.
* Assuming a thorough knowledge of the climate system.
* Assuming that calculations involving variables with a low level of understanding can produce results embodying a high level of understanding.
A second point to mention is the cooling/non-warming period ran from the mid 1940's through the late 1970's -closer to the 35 year period, all the while that CO2 increased in the atmosphere. Another point were the empirical evidence did not match the theory.
considering how we have reached tipping points in our climate, it makes me wonder how much longer Michaels and others will continue with this bogus story at Forbes.
I responded at the Forbes story with a link to the NSIDC with the latest data on ice in the arctic. Sea ice may melt to 2007 lows- or surpass it- which would certainly be important news.
Peter