Following the Canada Free Press in what is becoming a tradition of having to clear up the mess left after Tim Ball speaks, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy has scrubbed the offending interview from their website. 

Desmogblog has more on the story.

The suit claims Tim Ball libeled Weaver in his article “Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years”, published on the Canada Free Press website between January 10th – 19th, 2011. The suit can be read in its entirety at DeSmogBlog, which also reports that Canada Free Press has “stripped from its publicly available pages pretty much everything that Ball has ever written.”

Perhaps they shouldn’t have printed his nonsense in the first place.

Read more here.

He is “a former journalist and television researcher. He studied Energy and Environment while at University in Newcastle and is based in the North East Of England.”

That’s the author description for his 2009 book “2025: Ice Bound Britain.”

Meet Gavin Cooke a year later, on the publication of his new book “Frozen Britain: How the Big Freeze of 2010 is the Beginning of Britain’s New Mini Ice Age”:

“Climatologist Gavin Cooke takes a comprehensive and detailed look at global warming and the ‘Big Freeze’ of 2010 to explain how Britain will freeze before it fries.”

From journalist to climatologist in just one year. Here’s the secret, as explained in an interview with The Sun:

“He is quick to admit that he hasn’t got the scientific background of those who have spent a lifetime studying climate change. What he has brought to the table is his enthusiasm for the subject, his tracking of the arguments and a desire to make sense of a blizzard of information, so to speak.”

He thinks its sunspots.

It isn’t sunspots.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

-‘Aliens Cause Global Warming’. Michael Crichton, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. January 17, 2003

Here are two flowcharts to help anyone apply Crichton’s methodology.

1. Crichton’s simplified science/not science methodology

Explanation: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”

2. Crichton’s science/not science methodology, with particular regard to reproducibility

Explanation: “Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.” Given that, as Crichton established, consensus = not science, and whereas the dictionary definition of consensus is a general agreement, then when a result is repeated (and agreed upon) by others, it will become the consensus and therefore cease to be science.

Further reading:

On evaluating claims of scientific consensus [link]

Coming to a consensus based on data, experimentation, and evidence [link]

1. Fred Seitz

Frederick Seitz had a stellar career as a scientist, working in solid state physics and becoming president of the United States National Academy of Sciences from 1962-1969, and the president of Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1978.

In 1979, Seitz went to work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company as a paid permanent consultant. In the 1970’s and 80’s, Seitz helped the company disburse 45 million dollars to fund medical research, carefully avoiding spending any of it on research on the actual health effects of cigarette smoking.  R.J Reynolds frequently ran ads touting their research investments as part of their commitment to science.

Later, Seitz went on to vocally dispute the science of global warming, and in 1998, began gathering signatures for a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol. Most egregiously, ‘In addition to the petition, the mailing included what appeared to be a reprint of a scientific paper from Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), and a letter from Seitz identifying himself as past president of the National Academy of Sciences.’

Now, if Seitz wasn’t the inspiration for Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt in the movie Thank You For Smoking, then I don’t know who was.

Meet ‘the man they rely on’:

2. Richard Lindzen, or Senator Inhofe, or…

…anyone else that says there is “no consensus” on global warming. Hint: there can still be a consensus, even if you, personally, disagree with it.

This is what consensus looks like:

The Science of Climate Change
A joint statement issued by the Australian Academy of Sciences, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Royal Irish Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Academy of Sciences Malaysia, Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Turkish Academy of Sciences, and Royal Society (UK).

The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the consensus of the international scientific community on climate change science. We recognize the IPCC as the world’s most reliable source of information on climate change and its causes, and we endorse its method of achieving this consensus.

Given that ringing endorsement, does it really make much sense to give equal weight to viewpoints that dissent from mainstream scientific consensus?

Captain Rum would say yes. Here he is schooling Edmund Blackadder on the equal validity of all opinions:

3. Climate Audit’s climate ‘auditors’

One aspect of the CRU email thefts has been the insight into how climate scientists have had to deal with a barrage of Freedom of Information requests. What to make of them: were they an earnest request for information, or just plain vexatious behaviour?

When the requests look like the following, I’d go with the latter option:

FOI_09-97
I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries: [insert 5 or so countries that are different from ones already requested1]
1. the date of any applicable confidentiality agreements;
2. the parties to such confidentiality agreement, including the full name of any organization;
3. a copy of the section of the confidentiality agreement that "prevents further transmission to non-academics".
4. a copy of the entire confidentiality agreement,

This pointlessly trolling climate scientists for data and information and doing sod all useful with it when they get it, and the constant, constant, whining for attention, totally reminds me of Stewie Griffin.

So take it away, Stewie.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI), affiliated with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), took a look at the ‘United States Senate Minority Report on Global Warming’. This Senate report came out in January 2009 with the tagline “More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims”.

CFI’s Office of Public Policy examined the report in what they called the Credibility Project. The results:

• Slightly fewer than 10 percent could be identified as climate scientists.
• Approximately 15 percent published in the recognizable refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
• Approximately 80 percent clearly had no refereed publication record on climate science at all.
• Approximately 4 percent appeared to favor the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not have been on the list.

…After painstakingly taking the time to vet many of the scientists now serving as “consensus busters” Jordan says that it is difficult for him and his colleagues not to conclude that “this is one more effort of a contrarian community to block corrective action to address a major—in this case global—problem fraught with harmful consequences for human welfare and the environment.”

It isn’t enough to simply don the mantle of “skeptic”, as so many of the climate science deniers have done. One should also try to adhere to the principles of skepticism, and it wouldn’t hurt to have at least a passing familiarity with the epistemic virtues.

So what happens when the skeptics at CFI apply scientific skepticism to climate science? They find that it is, in fact, good science.

Dr. Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Center for Inquiry, stressed that “It is essential that the government base its policies on the best scientific information we have and it is a preponderance of scientific judgment that global warming poses a dire threat to the future of humanity on the planet.”

And what happens when CFI applies skepticism to the claims of the climate skeptics in the Senate report? They find what I would call pseudoskepticism.

After painstakingly taking the time to vet many of the scientists now serving as “consensus busters” Jordan says that it is difficult for him and his colleagues not to conclude that “this is one more effort of a contrarian community to block corrective action to address a major—in this case global—problem fraught with harmful consequences for human welfare and the environment.”

CFI’s efforts here speak to a particular difficulty that many people have, including in the skeptical community, with identifying credible expertise and sources of information (for some of the best writing on the web on this I recommend readers visit climatesight.org, and peruse the credibility spectrum). What looked like a credible and important list – no less than 700 scientists dissenting on global warming claims – was nothing of the sort. Now if it were 700 peer reviewed papers that together presented evidence of a coherent and credible alternative to global warming theories, that would be something else, but these lists of names serve only to obfuscate. And it works. Even James Randi, a leading light in the skeptical movement, fell for one such list, writing: “…some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous,” later adding, “I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.”

The Petition Project is of course irrelevant to the science. Anyone can sign a petition, and having a PhD does not confer upon one any expertise in climate change; especially if that PhD is in an entirely unrelated discipline to climate change, as was true for the vast majority of the signatories. The scientific research is what matters. Yet the petition appeared more credible to James Randi than the science.

It is gratifying, therefore, to see CFI taking strides in reclaiming the mantle of skepticism from climate science deniers. Scientific skepticism has proven to be a valuable tool for identifying pseudoscience, through its demand that fringe ideas meet exacting standards of proof. Still, the skeptical community needs to do a better job at identifying pseudoskepticism and the tactics of denial, and CFI’s Credibility Project is a very good step in that direction.

“The science is settled” is a slogan attributed by opponents of the Kyoto Protocol and global warming theory to supporters notably in the Clinton administration. There are no known examples of its use outside the skeptic press, though some of the statements that were made have similar implications. The slogan itself has therefore become a detail in the political debate [wp].

The use of this slogan by deniers is pretty much the very definition of a straw man argument: a  misrepresentation of an opponent’s position in order to refute the misrepresentation, rather than the actual position. Despite the ubiquity of this statement in denialist discourse, one would be hard pressed to find a verifiable example of its use by proponents of the science of anthropogenic global warming.

But there does exist an example of its use by a ‘skeptic’. Here is S. Fred Singer, denier for hire, speaking at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York:

“For me, the science is settled. The cause is clearly, mostly natural. The human component, while it must be there, is negligible. We don’t see it.”

So who thinks – and has said – that “the science is settled”? S. Fred Singer, for one.

Resources: Real Climate

Here’s the banner image for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Nigel Lawson’s ‘think’ tank.

On the left of the image, that’s a cute data plot of 21st Century global mean temperature (2001-2008), and, plainly, it shows that the temperature is in decline over the seven year period.

But why only seven years of data, and not 130 years of data? For the forward looking chaps at the GWPF, one supposes that would be just too last millennium.  It’s 2010, after all. Why look backward?

Here’s why not:

The Global Warming Policy Foundation got it right with their banner image; that is how to cherry pick data. Don’t show, don’t even hint at, the existence of something that contradicts your message, like 130 years of temperature data with a really clear positive trend. Just ignore it or deny it.

How not to cherry pick data

With that in mind, take a look at this really quite baffling graph from the website of the Orwellian-named Canadian ‘Friends of Science’:

This series runs from 1979 to 2009. It shows data from two averaged satellite temperature records, with the CO2 concentration in green. Both birds have only been flying since the end of the 1970s, hence the data series starts in 1979. “Surface temperature data is contaminated by the effects of urban development”, the ‘Friends’ tell us, which one supposes must suffice as explanation for their only using satellite data. As an aside, one wonders if science really needs such friends as these, able to dismiss 130 years of surface temperature measurements and scientific endeavour with an imperious wave of the hand. But let us persist, and see what the satellite data shows; perhaps a best fit over the 30 years of satellite measurements will reveal some interesting information.

Well, the ‘Friends of Science’ were good enough to plot a best fit (that odd little purple line on the right), but one that started on January 2002, not 1979:

“The best fit line from January 2002 indicates a declining trend.”

Indeed it does, dear ‘Friends’, but why a best fit for that interval? 1998 to 2009 would have really made your point. Plotting a best fit from 2002, while plainly ignoring the rest of the data, just looks silly.

Where the ‘Friends of Science’ went wrong, clearly, was in revealing the existence of a  full 30 years of satellite temperature measurements. If their x-axis had started in 2002, it would have made for a much more subtle cherry pick than displaying 30 years of data and adding an orphaned best fit line that doesn’t cover even a third of the whole plot.

I don’t know, it’s as if the ‘Friends of Science’ aren’t really committed to denialism.

Take a tip from the GWPF’s playbook: if you are going to cherry pick data, don’t blatantly show the audience that is what you have done, and don’t even hint at the disconcerting existence of such findings as this:

Shhh…

Just copy and paste the following texts, remembering to delete the words you don’t want. Otherwise people might think you are a bot and your post won’t get past the spam filter! Don’t let that happen: the world needs to hear your opinion!! The internet has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of the so-called “wise elites”. You can force the Climategate scientist’s media enablers to start covering this story that they would rather ignore!!!

First, choose your personality type. You are:

…all rogue n’ mavericky:

Global warming is nothing but a [plot/conspiracy/giant lie] by [Big Government, Big Green and Big Business / the trillion dollar wind power industry / Big Energy / Al Gore] to [give all power to the UN Climatocrats / create a one world government / tax the US into bankruptcy / force you to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity / enrich Al Gore].

These emails just go to show what a [scam / con / fraud / giant Ponzi scheme] global warming really is.

We need to stop [the “cap and kill” law / mortgaging our children’s futures on pseudoscience / the Socialist Agenda] before the [eco-fascists / warlarmists / greentards] [tax us into the stone age / exploit us like the third world peasants they want us to become / destroy our liberty / force us into solar powered death camps].

[AGW is a myth / There is no Mann-made global warming / the Greenhouse Effect is just a theory, not a fact]. Get over it.

…some twit that went to a posh school and now writes a blog {*}:

This is the end of the [IPCC-endorsed AGW scam / Al Gore’s great big AGW conspiracy].

Climategate is [the game changer that will make people listen / the end of the Al Gore-approved AGW narrative].

AGW is [about raising taxes / increasing state control / about a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their cabon-trading / about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy / little more than a scheme by bullying ecofascists to deprive us of our liberty].

We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it.

But the vested interests behind AGW are going to make darned sure that [the AGW bandwagon keeps roll roll rollin’ along / we push this utterly disastrous, economy-destroying measure through / spend vast amounts of public money on a problem that doesn’t exist].

This is our Berlin Wall moment! They can’t stop us now!

…just terribly concerned about what it all means for science:

I’m a [scientist / engineer / fully qualified blogger] and I have never seen [naughtiness / misconduct / outright lying and fraud] like this in all my years of [science / professional experience / blogging].

These so-called scientists’ exclusion of alternative views and opinions is nothing less than [Marxist state censorship / suppression of dissent / Lysenkoism] and is not what science is all about.

These [frauds / white-coated Eichmanns / con-men who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly what they say] should [be censored / resign / be fired and stripped of their titles so they never get employment again /be Rochambeau’d].

We should throw out [the hockey stick / all of their research / all ground based temperature data / all the Paleoclimate reconstructions  / the IPCC reports] and just start over on climate science from a clean slate.

Science should be open and transparent. They need to release all of their [code / emails / raw data / home address and teenage daughters' cellphone number] so we can see for ourselves before we [destroy our economy / give trillions of dollars directly to Al Gore] based on a lie.

…absolutely convinced of media bias everywhere:

ClimateGate proves that global warming is: [dead / a fraud / the greatest lie ever perpetuated on the American people], but the [liberal / left wing / eco-shill / Libtard-MSM] media are [covering it up / hiding the truth / in full panic stricken media blackout mode].

Only [Fox News / The Daily Mail / The {insert your own courageous national media outlet here}] are covering this story. Hmm.

Global warming [alarmism / hysteria] is all about [money / power / a massive UN sponsored tax grab]. Just Google [Michael Crichton / {insert name of some blogger you like here}].

…suffering from liberal guilt, probably wearing sandals right now, and have about as much backbone as roadkill weasel after a visit to a chiropractor:

It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

…President of The Maldives:

I know you are all really busy right now with some emails or whatever, but we are a tad concerned that we might be losing some height. As in, above sea level.

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{*}: 100% Recycled Internet!

Resources:

Poe’s Law

A more productive approach to discussing the CRU email thefts

Here’s hoping. And let’s hope that CRU can get back to work soon. We’ll all benefit. Except maybe the denialists, who will have to find something else to misrepresent.

Oh look, Kiwis! Okay, that was quick.

In the meantime, this happened:

“Vast ice sheets across the globe gained up to four inches just hours after it emerged experts at the University of East Anglia had been manipulating data in a bid to knock-off early.

Meanwhile in the Antarctic the 200 square mile Donnelly ice shelf changed direction and headed back towards the continent where it then reattached itself to the slightly larger McPartlin ice shelf.

Climate change sceptic and fully-qualified blogger Martin Bishop said: “As soon as these emails were released the world’s glaciers resumed their normal, icey behaviour, as long-predicted by some of London’s most important journalists.

“This is the smoking iceberg that fires a polar bear of truth between the eyes of hysteria and communism.””

Or maybe not. But The Daily Mash do quote an expert, albeit superfluously, considering they already quoted a fully-qualified blogger.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “While there will always be debate over climate data, it’s important to remember that the state of the world’s icebergs and glaciers remains wholly dependant on which group of tedious, hectoring arseholes is currently winning the argument.”

-The Daily Mash