| | | More on Dishonest Tony Heller.
A good faith article by a recovering sceptic, but needs care with sources.
There is an interesting article in Reason by Ron Bailey, titled "What Climate Science Tells Us About Temperature Trends" ( h/t Judith Curry). It is lukewarmish, but, as it's author notes, that is movement from a more sceptical view. It covers a range of issues.
His history shows up, though, in prominence given to sceptic sources that are not necessarily in such good faith. True, he seems to reach a balance balance, but needs to be more sceptical of scepticism. An example is this:
"A recent example is the June 2019 claim by geologist Tony Heller, who runs the contrarian website Real Climate Science, that he had identified "yet another round of spectacular data tampering by NASA and NOAA. Cooling the past and warming the present." Heller focused particularly on the adjustments made to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global land surface temperature trends. "
He concludes that "Adjustments that overall reduce the amount of warming seen in the past suggest that climatologists are not fiddling with temperature data in order to create or exaggerate global warming" so he wasn't convinced by Heller's case. But as I noted here, that source should be completely rejected. It compares one dataset (a land average) in 2017 with something different (Ts, a land/ocean average based on land data) in 2019 and claims the difference is due to "tampering". Although I raised that at the source, no correction or retraction was ever made, and so it still pollutes the discourse....
moyhu.blogspot.com
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"as I noted here"
Fake charge of "tampering" in GISS
...As often with Heller's posts, it isn't about what most of his audience thinks it is, but they don't seem to worry about fine points. It isn't the GISS land/ocean (LOTI) that gets widely circulated and discussed. The heading says "GISS Global Land Surface anomaly". But GISS doesn't have a Land Surface anomaly index, unlike NOAA or HADCRUT (CRUTEM). So my first thought was that he was plotting the "Met Stations Only" index, Ts. He has done that before, and the years quoted (2000 and 2017) do correspond, more or less, to what is supplied on the GISS History Page (scroll down to where "Met Stations" appears in the headings). I'll digress a little to explain this index.
..https://moyhu.blogspot.com/2019/07/fake-charge-of-tampering-in-giss.html
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What Climate Science Tells Us About Temperature TrendsIs it time to panic? RONALD BAILEY | 11.21.2019 11:50 AM
(Karaevgen/Dreamstime.com)
This article expands on claims about global temperature trends made in Ronald Bailey's article in the January 2020 issue of Reason, " Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?" for readers who are keen to dive deeper into the topic. (The print article is currently only available to subscribers.)
I began my time on the climate change beat as a skeptic. After attending the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated, I noted in a Reason article that by signing the treaty "United States is officially buying into the notion that 'global warming' is a serious environmental problem" even while "more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown." I was simply unconvinced that the available data demonstrated the need for the kind of radical intervention activists were proposing.
But I stayed on the beat, closely following the progress of scientific study and policy debate. By 2005, following significant corrections to the satellite data record, I declared in Reason that "We're All Global Warmers Now." And in 2006 I concluded that "I now believe that balance of evidence shows that global warming could well be a significant problem."
In the years since 2007, I have remained largely sanguine, joining the many who noted that global temperature at the beginning of this century rose at a considerably lower rate than that projected by computer climate models. I was generally persuaded by researchers who predicted a sedate pace of increase, with temperatures unlikely to rise much above 1.5 degrees Celsius over the 19th century average. In this scenario, the world might get a bit warmer, but people and societies have proven themselves up to the task of adapting to such changes in the past and fundamentally the process of lifting hundreds of millions of poor people out of abject poverty through technological progress and economic growth fueled by coal, gas, and oil can safely continue unabated.
But as research continued, a number of possible scenarios have emerged. For example, some people read the scientific evidence as suggesting that man-made climate change is not greatly impacting people now, but might become a bigger problem toward the end of this century. Basically current weather—droughts, rainstorms, snowfall, and hurricanes–– cannot now be distinguished from natural variations in climate. However, as the temperature increases computer climate models project that future droughts will last longer, rainstorms fiercer, snowfall less, and hurricanes stronger. In addition, coastal flooding of major cities will become more common as sea level rises. These changes in climate will put the property and lives of children and grandchildren at greater risk. Computer models combining climate and economic components calculate that endeavoring now to slow warming would cost about the same as later efforts to adapt to a somewhat hotter world. Let's call this the somewhat worried scenario.
Another set of people note that temperature increases have apparently resumed a steady march upwards after a slow-down at the beginning of this century. They parse the results of recent studies that conclude that climate change is already causing deleterious impacts, e.g., heat waves both on land and in the oceans are becoming more common, the extent of Arctic sea ice is steeply declining, and glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost are melting. The sanguine conclusion that future warming will proceed slowly and not rise much above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century appears to be too optimistic. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, average global temperature looks to be on track to reach 1.8 degrees Celsius in 50 years and continue rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. This trajectory significantly increases the risk that things could go badly wrong. This is the really worried scenario.
Spurred by current alarums, I spent the summer reading and reviewing recent findings of climate science to see if my belief that the somewhat worried scenario as the more likely outcome remains justified. Climate science is a massive enterprise involving research into a vast array of topics including atmospheric physics, ocean and atmospheric currents, solar irradiance, adjustments in temperature records, the effects of atmospheric aerosols, how forests and fields react to rising carbon dioxide, trends in cloudiness, heat storage in the deep oceans, changes in glaciers and sea ice, to name just a few. A simple Google Scholar search using the terms climate change and global warming returns more than 2.6 and 1.7 million results each. Just searching glaciers and climate change returns 124,000 results.
Researchers use complicated computer climate models to analyze all these data to make projections about what might happen to the climate in the future. My reporting strategy has been to take seriously what I believe to be the principal objections made by researchers who argue on scientific grounds that panic is unwarranted. I also assume that everyone is acting in good faith. What follows is based on what I hope is a fair reading of the recent scientific literature on climate change and communications with various well-known climate change researchers....
reason.com |
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