.
4/4/13,
"The End of an Illusion," Real Clear Politics," by
Robert Tracinski
"Many years ago, I remember thinking that it would take many years to
refute the panicked claims about global warming. Unlike most political
movements, which content themselves with making promises about, say,
what the unemployment rate will be in two years if we pass a giant
stimulus bill—claims that are proven wrong (and how!) relatively
quickly—the environmentalists had successfully managed to put their
claims so far off into the future that it would take decades to test
them against reality. But guess what? The decades are finally here.
At Forbes, Harry Binswanger dates the beginning of the campaign to 1979 and puts it in an amusing perspective.
"Remember 1979? That was the year of 'We
Are Family' by Sister Sledge, of 'The Dukes of Hazard' on TV, and of
Kramer vs. Kramer on the silver screen. It was the year the Shah was
forced out of Iran. It was before the web, before the personal computer,
before the cell phone, before voicemail and answering machines. But not
before the global warming campaign.
"In January of 1979, a New York Times article was headlined: 'Experts Tell How Antarctic Ice Could Cause Widespread Floods.'...
"So where's the warming? Where are the
gondolas pulling up to the Capitol? Where are the encroaching seas in
Florida? Or anywhere? Where is the climate change which, for 33 years,
has been just around the corner?"
He concludes that "I've grown old waiting for the promised global
warming." Literally: "I was 35 when predictions of a looming ice age
were supplanted by warmmongering. Now I'm 68, and there's still no sign
of warmer weather."
He puts the issue in terms of common-sense observation. But it can
also be measured in terms of hard data. We're reaching the point where
the predictions have been around long enough to allow for significant
comparison against the actual data, and we are now able to say
definitively that the predictions were horribly exaggerated.
Steven Hayward points to signs that even advocates of the global warming hysteria are starting to backtrack.
"The new issue of The Economist has a
long feature on the declining confidence in the high estimates of
climate sensitivity. That this appears in The Economist is significant,
because this august British news organ has been fully on board with
climate alarmism for years now. A Washington-based Economist
correspondent admitted to me privately several years ago that the senior
editors in London had mandated consistent and regular alarmist climate
coverage in its pages.
"The problem for the climateers is
increasingly dire. As The Economist shows in its first chart (Figure 1
here), the recent temperature record is now falling distinctly to the
very low end of its predicted range and may soon fall out of it, which
means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, that there's
something going on that supposedly 'settled' science hasn't been able to
settle."
See a better version of that graph here, which makes it clear that the actual predictions in the graph date only to about 2006—and they are already being proven wrong.
You know, you can really manipulate a graph to spin the data, for
example, by manipulating the scale to "zoom in" and make something look
bigger or "zoom out" to make it look smaller. We're used to seeing the
zoomed-in version of global temperature measurements, so it's nice to
see this zoomed-out version... (chart at top)
Rather than narrowing in to measure minor variations from the
long-term average, which makes annual variations of a few tenths of a
degree look enormous, this one zooms out to show us the data in terms of
absolute temperature measurements, in which the annual variations over
the past 15 years look as insignificant as they really are.
So basically, all that the global warming advocates really have, as
the evidentiary basis for their theory, is that global temperatures were
a little higher than usual in the late 1990s. That's it. Which proves
nothing. The climate varies, just as weather varies, and as far as we
can tell, this is all well within the normal range.
That has been one of my complaints about the global warming scare
since the very beginning. We only have systematic global temperature
measurements going back about 150 years, which on the relevant
timescale—a geological time-scale—is a blink of an eye. Moreover, the
measurement methods for these global temperatures have been not been
entirely consistent, making them susceptible to changes due to
everything from a different paint used on the outside of the weather
station to the "urban heat island" effect that happens when a weather
station in the middle of a field is surrounded over the years by parking
lots. And somehow, among all the billions spent on global warming
research, not much money seems to have made its way to the enormous
international effort that would be required to ensure the accurate and
consistent measurement of global temperatures.
So we have not been able to establish what ought to be the starting
point for any theory about global temperatures: a baseline for what is a
normal global temperature and what is a natural variation in
temperature.
In an effort to fill in this gap—without ever admitting what a
fundamental problem it is—the alarmists have made several attempts to
patch together a much longer record of global temperatures, going back
thousands of years. Michael Mann set the tone for this with his infamous
"hockey stick" graph purporting to show temperatures going back 1,000
years, with recent temperatures spiking up ominously like the blade on a
hockey stick.
But Mann's hockey stick came under withering fire for its dodgy
statistical methods and selective use of data and has since been pretty
much abandoned.
But that hasn't kept the warmists from trying again, this time with a
new graph, named after lead study author Shaun Marcott, purporting to
show global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, this time with a
new, even bigger "blade" to the hockey stick showing the supposed upward
thrust of temperatures in the past 100 years.
Except that the whole thing is dissolving in another fiasco.
The problem with using historical reconstructions of past
temperatures is precisely the fact that we don't have direct
measurements going back more than 150 years. So scientists have to look
at "proxies"—other things that we can measure that tend to vary
with temperature, such as the sizes of tree rings in very old,
slow-growing trees, which reflect the annual growth rate of the tree
from year to year. Notice that I said these measurements tend to vary with temperature. But they are also affected by a lot of other things, from rainfall to sheep grazing on the bark.
So these proxies are not very accurate, and the usual way of
compensating for this is to "smooth" out the data to show changes only
on very long time scales, where the year-to-year noise caused by other
factors is presumably canceled out. But in the Marcott study, the data
was smoothed out over such a long term that it cannot actually say
anything about changes over the past 100 years.
Quasi-skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. reports on what happened when the paper's authors were pressed on this point.
"In a belatedly-posted FAQ to the paper,
which appeared on Real Climate earlier today, Marcott et al. make this
startling admission:
"'Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?
"'A: Our global paleotemperature
reconstruction includes a so-called "uptick" in temperatures during the
20th century. However, in the paper we make the point that this
particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in
our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few
available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th
century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically
robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature
changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.'
"Got that?
"In case you missed it, I repeat:...'the
20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically
robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature
changes....'
"What that means is that this paper
actually has nothing to do with a 'hockey stick' as it does not have the
ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is
'statistically robust.' The new 'hockey stick' is no such thing, as
Marcott et al. has no blade....
"So what the paper actually shows is the
following, after I have removed from the graph the 20th century period
that is 'not statistically robust.'"
Pielke's amended graph shows a long, steady decline in average global
temperatures over the past few thousand years, and...that's it. That's
all it shows.
But Pielke notes that the 20th-century data, the dramatic blade of
the hockey stick, was the centerpiece of the official press releases put
out by the study's sponsors, and of the media's coverage. And the
study's authors chose to put that data on a graph and publish it.
This,
by the way, is standard operating procedure
for global warming alarmists: publish a paper which is cautious and
circumspect about the facts—then pair it with a sensational press
release making exaggerated claims and an eye-catching, jerry-rigged
graph to give the journalists a juicy picture to publish.
Pielke is very circumspect about applying the term "scientific
misconduct," which is itself a circumspect way of saying, "fraud." But
he needn't be. When I saw this news item, I was explaining it to my
wife, and she said, "So they just made the numbers up." Well, no, I
tried to explain, they were using real numbers, it's just that they
weren't significant under the relevant statistical methodology and—then
she cut me off and repeated: "So they just made the numbers up." I
didn't have an answer to that. My wife has a certain impatience for the
tap-dancing abstractions of ivory tower intellectuals, and it gives her
the gift of being able to cut through their polite obfuscations and get
to the bottom line. In science, if your numbers aren't validated by a
proper method, if you can't say for sure whether they are real and
meaningful, there is only one thing to do: throw them out. If you have
invalid numbers and you use them any way, there is no moral or
epistemological difference between that and just making them up out of
thin air.
So here's the state of play of climate science a third of a century
into the global warming hysteria. They don't have a reliable baseline of
global temperature measurements that would allow them to say what is
normal and natural and what isn't. Their projections about future
warming are demonstrably failing to predict the actual data. And now
they have been caught, yet again, fudging the numbers and manipulating
the graphs to show a rapid 20th-century warming that they want to be
true but which they can't back up with actual evidence.
A theory with this many holes in it would have been thrown out
long ago, if not for the fact that it conveniently serves the political
function of indicting fossil fuels as a planet-destroying evil and
allowing radical environmentalists to put a modern, scientific face on
their primitivist crusade to shut down industrial civilization.
But can't we all just stop calling this "science" now?" via Climate Depot. chart at top via RCP, UK Met Office statistics, 1997-2012
.
No comments:
Post a Comment