Like father like son

 First the dismissive chuckle:

China promises to double CO2 emissions by 2025, climate activists happy, Lord Sterm says "This is very exciting news" independent.co.uk/environment/cl…
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) May 23, 2013

Stupid environmentalists! Getting excited over a meaningless plan that allows emissions to double.

Then somebody challenges the "double" part of the statement. And Roger flashes a degree of cognitive dissonance that may not via with Sr's climate-research-kills-kids-by-tornado, but is equally as startling because more unexpected:

@rogerpielkejr @evcricket You imply we should not be happy, b/c emissions will double, then you say the decarb is unrealistically fast (1/2)
— TheTracker (@IdiotTracker) May 24, 2013

@rogerpielkejr @evcricket Do you see how those two positions directly contradict each other? (2/2)
— TheTracker (@IdiotTracker) May 24, 2013

Strangely, no response from the illustrious Dr. Pielke Jr. And he's supposed to be the reasonable one . . .

Pielke Sr: Climate research makes children die in tornadoes

In a particularly ugly and nonsensical Idiot Comment of the Day, we have this:

Spending millions of dollar on no skill climate projections is poor policy compared with grants to communities for school tornado shelters.
— Roger A. Pielke Sr (@RogerAPielkeSr) May 22, 2013

Drink in the crazy. Yes, Roger, we should defund science and send the money to Oklahoma for tornado shelters.

Never mind that what bothers you about climate science is its success in predictions and what those predictions are, not a supposed lack of skill. Never mind that tornado deaths have plummeted in the last hundred years because scientists have learned to more effectively forecast (or "develop projections of") when and where they will strike.

Never mind that "Too much science research" is the very last reason that home-of-Senators-Coburn-and-Infoe doesn't have an adequate public safety net in the most literal sense of the word -- that if any state embodies the principle of damn-the-science, and should therefore have plenty of money for public goods like tornado shelters, if their hostility to science were not matched by an equal or greater hostility to government action to promote the general welfare.

As I say: never mind that. To come out with that crap while they are still sifting through the wreckage of their lives is just crass. Not everything is about your pet issue, fer Chrissake. Twenty in the Douchebag jar, Roger.

UPDATE: IDK, maybe I'm being too hard on the man. If only there were some form of incontrovertible and objective evidence that this little brainstorm was an ill-mannered, whiny bitch slap of weapons-grade stupidity. But there's one one way we could ever know that for sure . . .

 

. . . and there you go. That's $20 in the Jar for you, Tony. It's the one you've labelled "Retirement Fund."

Dear Andrew Revkin: Time to rethink your dismissal of Cook et al

Doubling down:

The clear message of the team conducting this fresh assessment of the climate science consensus is that it’s vital to close that gap to have a chance of breaking societal deadlock on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. On his Skeptical Science blog, John Cook, the paper’s lead author, put it this way:

Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97% consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.

Forgotten [Really? Did they say climate communication was the only thing that mattered? No, they said "to have a chance." I.e., closing the gap is necessary but not sufficient condition, not the only thing that matters] in much of this is a point made in an e-mail message sent to me and some other science communicators this morning by Dan Kahan, the Yale law professor who studies the cultural filters that influence how people perceive and react to information. Kahan linked to his fresh post reviewing how many times in recent years such studies have been promoted, then asked this:

Climate scientists aren’t the only ones whose message never gets through. The “science of science communication consensus” that deficits in knowledge & rationality are not the problem [there's more than one problem!]— 99.9999999% agree! — never does either, & to the very people it should be of value too, viz., those trying to promote constructive engagement w/ climate science.
Is there someone studying that science communication problem???!

. . . 

This doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to communicate climate science [in contrast to what you tweeted yesterday]. But it does mean that communicating the science of science communication matters, too.
For more on the wishful nature of hopes that closing such gaps will matter much, read Keith Kloor and David Appell.

Dear Andrew,

I like a lot of what you write, and I respect your ability to take a second look at your positions and well, it's time. Your own shifting justifications for why Cook et al doesn't matter should be a warning sign that something is amiss: "This study will not fundamentally alter the climate debate forever" (*) is quite a climb-down from "This is an irrelevant study that tells us nothing new and changes nothing."

The Cook study added a greater degree of rigor to the evidence that 97% of climate scientists agree global warming is happening and is human caused. Most Americans -- 70% in the 2011 Six Americas study -- do not know this. Attempting to defend the initial, rather rude and ill-thought-out, dismissal of the study reflects a natural and predictable defensiveness, but you should reconsider.

Neither the authors of the study nor anyone else claimed the study solved all the problems in communicating the science of global warming, still less that it showed a way past all the obstacles to collective political action.

But as a piece of science communication -- a subject you have written and lectured about on many occasions, and therefore seem to think is relevant in some way to the challenges we face -- it was a stunning success(**). Both your initial dismissal and the further attempts to justify it are wrongheaded and invite the label of "inactivist" which some have attached to you.


-----------------------------

* A point Appell makes in even more bizarre fashion when he crows ("Climate Candy: The Proof" (!)) that the Huffington Post is no longer leading with the study the next day (?)).

** Let us consider some of the reasons for its success:

1. A simple message.
2. Careful research that sticks to the facts.
3. A message grounded in what we know well, not in new science, extremes, or "single study syndrome."
4. Information that the disengaged (not aware it has been available for some time) have REPEATEDLY TOLD POLLSTERS would increase their concern about global warming.
5. Despite a message well-gauged to increased concern, it is not apocolyptic, not overwhelming, and not likely to make people want to "tune out" the issue.

The intolerant moderates

Skeptical Science won the internet last week with a superb original paper by Cook, Nuccitelli et al that evaluated over 12,000 sources and found 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening.

Amazingly some people managed to miss the point:

On @skepticscience study of scientists' #AGW consensus, I'm with @davidappell davidappell.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-… and @keithkloor blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/…
— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) May 16, 2013

Their names are practically a role call of the "intolerent moderates" -- journalists who have chosen to define themselves as independent-minded thinkers ready to castigate both sides. The intolerant moderates accept that climate change is happening and action is necessary, but struggle to occupy a middle ground condemning the excesses of both sides. Since the excesses in the climate debate are not at all equally distributed between science deniers and the concerned, this positioning often leads to tepid critiques of climate deniers coupled with energetic castigation of the other side for minor, or, as in this case, nonexistent sins.

Dave Appell just doesn't see the point of the study:

I'm not very keen on these kinds of numbers -- they are made for lazy journalists who don't want to examine the complexity of the science, reporters who just want a number that quickly and easily supports their position.

Or maybe reporters who want to convey to their readers a simple, rock-solid case that a majority of climate scientists believe climate change is real and is caused by humans something only 30% of Americans know to be true (Really).

Kloor is spouting the same sort of nonsense:

The latest example is this survey by John Cook et al that is getting a lot of undeserved attention in the mainstream media. I say that because, questionable methodology aside, the survey tells us nothing new and is, as science journalist David Appell noted, “a meaningless exercise.”

I enjoy their quoting one another for added support: but they are both completely, utterly, ludicrously wrong.

It's hard to say which is the more fundamental fail here: that Kloor doesn't understand that replicating results is critical to science, or that he thinks that he has somehow become a scientist, whose responsibility it is to follow and critique the bleeding edge of climate science, rather than his actual role as a science journalist helping the public grasp the critical core of the field, a job that evidently has to be done by scientists, who have pulled off a massive coup of science communication, only to be sneered at by the people who are paid to perform that function themselves.

I really expected better of Revkin than to jump on this bandwagon. This is why the survey is not a "meaningless exercise":

Source

Half of the public in this survey -- HALF -- said that if 90% of climate scientists agreed that global warming is happening, it would increase their concern. This mind-boggling result is possible, again, because SEVENTY PERCENT OF THE PUBLIC DIDN'T KNOW MOST CLIMATE SCIENTISTS THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS HAPPENING.

That three SCIENCE JOURNALISTS do not know this about their audience is scandalous. It borders on professional incompetence. These people are lecturing scientists about science communication?

UPDATE: In the comments, MikeH perceptively notes that the intolerant moderate is a subspecies of the VSP:

They are the Very Serious People (popularised by Paul Krugman in his NYT column)
(http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Very_Serious_People)

"Valuing common sense over scientific consensus when there is a conflict. When pushed far enough VSP will eventually err on the side of science but will hold a candle for pseudoscience as long as it has a veneer of respectability.
Loves the hell out of the balance fallacy. They feel uncomfortable pointing out flaws concentrated in the right-wing or left-wing without pointing to an opposite example. "Both sides do it!"

Climate scientist 2+2=4
Denier 2+2=5
VSP 2+2=4.5

So it's come to this

We passed 400ppm the other day. It occasioned some hang-wringing, but no more than that. Many were at pains to point out that the milestone is strictly symbolic, that CO2 is steadily rising and likely will continue to do so, etc.

It's hard to know what will be required to shake us out of our torpor and motive human civilization to begin aggressively cutting fossil fuels. Something will, eventually. The beauty of this problem is that is will get progressively worse until we are ready to stop ignoring it. The unfortunate thing is that it will then continue to get worse for many decades after that.

Optimists abound, of course. Mark Lynas is still in the mix, accusing "catastrophists" of ignoring past human impacts on the environment:

Major land-use change paper from @erleellis et al in PNAS - the long Anthropocene, rebuttal to catastrophists: ecotope.org/people/ellis/p…
— Mark Lynas (@mark_lynas) May 7, 2013

 As in his ill-considered attack on Diamond's "Collapse," however, Lynas is really rebutting a straw man: no one is arguing that humans' changing their environment is a new thing. Changing it in this way and to this extent is a new thing.

It's hard to tell from a Tweet, but Lynas seems to want to think that because changes happened in the past, and humanity survived it, that there's nothing to worry about in radically altering the climate upon which our survival depends. But of course, that is not at all what the historical record shows. The historical record is replete with mighty empires that turned fertile lands into deserts, tribes that hunted the large mammals to extinction (creatures they might have domesticated as farm animals or beasts of burden), societies that outgrew their water supplies or the available food supplies. Predictable disasters resulted.

The long history of people altering their environments is in part a history of people who carelessly or in ignorance damaged the productive capacity of the environments they inhabited. It's entirely in keeping with that history that we face similar choices today.

Has Christopher Monckton ever won a lawsuit?

My lawsuit was much better than "Cats." I'm going to file them again and again.

Christopher Monckton is an ignorant, incompetent, dishonest, delusional mess of a gibbering idiot. I've reported on this fact for years and I have yet to hear from any lawyers, which is why I was skeptical that the Nova-Monckton account of him repeatedly crushing his enemies in lawsuits was anything other than a slop bucket of narcissistic lies(*).

First claim: Monckton sued the British government over using An Inconvenient Truth in schools, and won.

We have had some good court victories. In 2007 the London High Court condemned Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy-horror movie. It found nine errors so serious that the court ordered 77 pages of corrective guidance to be circulated to every school in England. The judge said: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.”
Two days later, Gore won the Nobel Mickey Mouse Prize. But he was holed below the waterline. Now he is seen not as a prophet but as a profiteer.
The whingers of the do-nothing brigade were at work even then. The lawyers refused to file the case on the ground that there was no chance of success. They were fired.
The new lawyers said we could not possibly win on the science and refused to use any scientific testimony. The judge threw the case out. I recovered the position by instructing the lawyers to write to the judge asking if he had even seen Gore’s movie before he had reached his judgment without holding a hearing.
Tellingly, the judge did not reply. I insisted on – and got – a new judge. This time the lawyers did what they were told. I wrote 80 pages of scientific testimony. Bob Carter and Dick Lindzen– bless them both – worked from the document in crafting their evidence, and signed off as expert witnesses. As soon as the other side saw it, they collapsed and settled, paying the plaintiff $400,000.

Reality: Monckton wasn't one of the litigants in that suit, which the deniers lost. The quote from the judge, which I've bolded above, is a fabrication -- a total fiction (for a comparison with what the judge actually said, see this outstanding analysis, beginning at the two-minute mark.)

He claims to have asked one of his friends to fund Stewart Dimmock, who actually sued. Dimmock has been asked who helped fund his suit, at refused to name anyone, calling it "a private matter." Many sources, understandably, report this as fact, because who would lie about participating in a failed lawsuit? But the reality is that Monckton lies constantly, habitually, and always by way of growing the legend of Monckton.

The case, Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills, wasn't settled, and Dimmock didn't get a payment of $400,000. He did, as is routine in British legal battles, win a payment for a portion of his legal costs, leaving him 60,000 pounds poorer.

His stated objective in the lawsuit was for An Inconvenient Truth not to be shown in schools any more. The judge rejected that request.

Monckton claims to have been involved in funding this failed lawsuit, but as far as I know, no one actually involved in it has confirmed that, placing his role in the same category as his claimed discovery of the cure for AIDS.

The second win claimed by Monckton has already been exposed as another fantasy: he claimed that Mann had settled a lawsuit with Tim Ball for a million dollars. Whoops! Pure fiction, and Jo Nova was troubled to print a correction.

Monckton also trumpets a huge, simply huge, victory against the dasterdly BBC:

I sued the BBC a couple of years ago when they did a hatchet job on me. I had been told – in writing – that I should have the chance to alter any points that were inaccurate. Fat chance.

So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.

I insisted on seeing the programme before it was broadcast. It was a disgrace. I wrote to the Director-General listing two dozen factual errors and numerous other biases in the schlocumentary. No reply.
So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.
The BBC crumbled and cut the programme from 90 minutes to an hour, taking out the overwhelming majority of the vicious nonsense. There were still some objectionable points, so I went into court.
I fought the case myself. When I introduced the two barristers and three solicitors for the Beeb, the judge interrupted me and said: “Lord Monckton, I fear I must draw your attention to a potential conflict of interest. You see, I am a member of your club.”
I had no objection and invited the BBC’s expensive QC to give his opinion. He had no objection either, but added: “Er, I too have a conflict of interest. I also am a member of Lord Monckton’s club.”
The judge did not prevent the Beeb from leaving a few barbs in my side. The BBC issued a lying statement that I had lost. But the judge held that I had “substantially won” the action. A 90-minute programme had become 60 minutes. The Beeb had lost. Big-time.

He lost, of course. Really this story gets to the heart of why Monckton is such a memorable liar. It's full of specific details -- about the club, and the judge, and the director-general's personal assistant. Yet nothing that can be easily checked, nothing that can be readily verified. It's full of numbers -- two dozen errors, 90 minutes to an hour, two barristers and three solicitors, etc. And it has a simple story of Monckton prevailing against odds. Really the only weakness of the story, as is typical of Monckton, is that he cannot control his own narcissism long enough to sell the story. Monckton is always the least believable part of a Monckton anecdote. He demands! He sues! He belongs to a fancy club! He takes on an army of lawyers and wins!

Monckton has surely mastered the Big Lie(**), as his fictional legal career illustrates.

Monckton has also threatened legal action against George Monbiot after an article dissecting Monckton's dishonest hackery. (He claimed it was "libellous of me in my calling.") But no lawsuit ever emerged. He promised to have John Abraham brought up on charges of academic misconduct; he didn't. He made the same threat about Dr. Barry Bickmore: again, no follow-through.

So here is my question of the day: Has Monckton ever actually followed through on his profuse threats, undertaken legal action against a critic, and won a judgement against them? Or are his repeated claims to have done so -- claims that have now progressed to advocating specious lawsuits against critics as a strategy, since it's worked so well for him -- simply another of his narcissistic fantasies?

See also:

Skeptical Science's Monckton Myths.

Barry Bickmore's Lord Monckton's Rap Sheet.

Abraham debunks Monckton (1/6)

Monckton Bunkum (Parts 1-5):

--------------------------
*That, and of course the fact that their mouths were moving.

** The Big Lie is a propaganda technique described by Hitler in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Monckton, exceptionally, explicitly admits to hiding behind this cognitive glitch:

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong but that I got just about everything wrong. And how plausible is that?

WUWT denounces innumeracy, demonstrates illiteracy

Where have all the flowers gone?

Innumeracy is terrible, don't you know (and I suppose they would know):

For any rational discussion of the effects of CO2 on climate, numbers are important.

OK, so far so good, when you mention "rational discussion" in the first sentence the phrase "protesting too much" comes to mind, but numbers are indeed important, so so far, so sane.

 An average temperature increase of 1 C will be a benefit to the planet, as every past warming has been in human history.

 . . . and here comes the crazy. What?

 And the added CO2 will certainly increase agricultural yields substantially and make crops more resistant to drought.

 Evidently the author missed the part where the added CO2 causes warming, droughts, and extreme weather, leading to an estimated 200 million additional food insecure people and 24 million addition malnourished children by 2050.

 But in articles like “Scant Gains Made on CO2 Emissions, Energy Agency Says” by Sarah Kent in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2013, we see a graph with a 6 C temperature rise by 2050 – if we don’t reduce “carbon intensity.” Indeed, a 6 C temperature rise may well be cause for concern. But anyone with a little background in mathematics and physics should be able to understand how ridiculous a number like 6 C is.

The article is paywalled, but they also attribute the assertion of 6C by 2050 to Joe Romm, and that we can check:

This is one of the most enlightening calculations I’ve seen in awhile, and it is worth your time to understand it because it speaks clearly to debunk many of the claims of temperature rise in the next 100 years made by activists, such as the 6c by 2050 Joe Romm claims,

Emphasis in the original. But if we follow the link, we discover the headline is the result of a reading comprehension problem:

 “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

2050 is not mentioned. There is a rather obvious error in a Reuters article cited in the post (they've corrected it), but as Romm did not repeat the error, to attribute it to him is simply a lie, and to build a post around "refuting" the red herring is  . . . well, it's what they do. Somewhat more surprisingly, David Appeal made the same obvious mistake. Rabbit is on the case.

Grandpa's favorite climate blog

WUWT, of course, uses this flimsy excuse to launch into a bunch of cargo-cult math, embarking on a "greatest hits" of basic scientific mistakes, including:

• The warming caused by CO2 is instantaneous! (So the warming caused by 280ppm --> 400ppm is only the warming seen so far.)
• Never mind, because climate sensitivity is only 1C per doubling! (No evidence for that; it seems to have become an article of faith.)
• CO2 increases, like any other trend, are completely linear and can be extrapolated infinitely! (If CO2 is rising by 2ppm/year now, that is the rate of change expected for the next 12,000 years.)

WUWT, grandfather of the denialosphere, continues to demonstrate an effortless command of the three Is of full-spectrum ignorance: innumerate, illiterate, and ill-mannered.