It’s a tired argument, this idea that because we can’t predict weather we certainly can’t predict climate. You’d expect to hear it from James Inhofe or a cranky uncle; you should never hear it from a university lecturer teaching a course on climate change. Unless you are a student at Carleton University, right here in Canada’s capital.

Heartland wants to fund the creation of K12 curricula that would teach students every long-debunked climate denial argument under, and including, the sun. They could save their anonymous funder’s money and just copy wholesale from Carleton University’s course “Climate Change: an Earth Sciences Perspective”, currently taught by Mr. Tom Harris, a former oil industry lobbyist.

The Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS, a science watchdog that more often takes an interest in pseudoscientific nonsense like homeopathy or dodgy nutrition claims in the media), part of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, has turned its attention to the teaching of science denial at Carleton University with the publication of a report fact-checking 142 separate claims made by Tom Harris in the course. It’s nothing short of a huge embarrassment for Carleton University, and for the Earth Sciences department that approved the course.

In the report, CASS provides fully quoted statements made in the course with detailed rebuttals for each one. Considering that this class is taught in one of the top 10 Canadian universities, it’s a shocking read.

I’ve gone through the document and tallied each time an argument appears, using skepticalscience.com’s list of the most common skeptic arguments as a template.

That’s not including another 41 separate arguments, including the ridiculous OISM petition project, claiming there’s no tropospheric hot spot, the oceans are cooling, Jupiter is warming, Climategate, and of course saying that scientists can’t even predict the weather.

Even a little fact-checking shows up erroneous, misleading and long-debunked claims. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could defend this course; academic freedom must at some point slam head-long into the obligation to teach things that are understood to be true. We do not accept creationism or intelligent design in our classrooms, regardless of the personal beliefs of the instructor, because we know its nonsense. We absolutely should not accept this.

Students deserve better than this cynical, distorted and mean-spirited view of the scientific enterprise. It’s tragic to see students presented with unbalanced and incomplete material. How can you tell students that tree rings do not track with temperature in the 20th century and not explain the divergence problem in full? It’s a fascinating issue, but presenting only one side short-changes inquiring minds.

It’s a review course, so students aren’t expected to have a deep understanding of the primary literature. Even so, it’s incumbent on the instructor to present the prevailing scientific opinion. It’s clear that isn’t what happens.

Harris sums up the course in the last lecture with take-away messages for the students:

* The only constant about climate is change.
* Carbon dioxide is plant food.
* There is no scientific consensus about climate change causes.
* Prepare for global cooling.
* Climate science is changing quickly.

There’s a place for discussion of controversies in climate science, and there’s an appropriate way of doing that. It isn’t in a review course for non-scientists and non-specialists who lack the domain expertise to know they are being played.

And it certainly isn’t in a course taught by an individual who doesn’t appear to even grasp the difference between weather and climate.

Read the full report here.

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…