Porky Pearce

I suppose I could have made him a tosser, but I decided the the traditional rhyming slang was better.

Fred Pearce seems to have made a bit of a career out of being rubbish recently, but has now stooped to just making things up (or, just possibly, that good old journo standby, being so clueless as to what you’re talking about that your paraphrases are so inaccurate as to descend into lies).

Anyway, Pearce’s current lies [Update: as DC notes, the Newt updated its page on 2011/02/07, but without apology. Whether that means Pearce accepts his error or has been bludgeoned by the Editors, we don’t know at this stage] are in the Newt Scientist where he says the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss. Gavin, of course, said no such thing. In fact, what he said was:

My decision not to accept the invitation to this meeting was based entirely on the organiser’s initial diagnosis of the cause of the ‘conflict’ in the climate change debate. I quote from their introductory letter: At this stage we are planning to have a workshop where the main scientific issues can be discussed, so that some clarity on points of agreement and disagreement might be reached. We would try to stay off the policy issues, and will also exclude personal arguments. The issues we have in mind are Medieval Warm Period, ice, climate sensitivity, and temperature data. We would hope to have smaller groups discussing these in some detail, hopefully with scientists who are very familiar with the technical issues to lead the discussion. Since, in my opinion, the causes of conflict in the climate change debate relate almost entirely to politics and not the MWP, climate sensitivity or ‘ice’, dismissing this from any discussion did not seem likely to be to help foster any reconciliation.

(ref Eli I think). This is, of course, yet more fall-out from the silly workshop that Werner Kraus made such a prat of himself over.

If Pearce wasn’t entirely and utterly clueless, he’d have read RC, viz Unsettled Science.

And… if you haven’t been part of the climate wars, you might wonder why exactly any of this matters. But “the science is settled” has been one of the mantras used almost exclusively by climate denialists as a term of insult for those actually doing science (Pearce is fully aware of all this back story, of course. He isn’t using the phrase accidentally or carelessly). It is a feeble attempt at a double bind: is the science settled? ha ha, then you can’t be a scientist because real science is never settled. Is the science not settled? Oh great, then we don’t need to do anything until it is. The answer, of course, is that we know now (and indeed have for years) enough about the science to know that the world is warming now due to human activity, and will be warming more into the future from more anthro stuff.

A number of people (hello folks!) have pointed this out in the Newt comments, but as far as I can see there is no correction to the original article. In fact, this feels like one of those things that may get vanished, so I’d better go take a copy.

Not strictly relevant here, but yet another candidate for the tosser list is Lord Carlise, one more booster of the terrorism threat. Well, its his job. Monckton isn’t much better but Gareth has fun with him.

Refs

* That Ol’ Devil Rabett
* Things Break too.
* Deltoid has a nice round-up
* Bart quotes me, which is always a good way to get a link in return.
* Post Normal Meltdown in Lisbon, part 1 – highly recommended.

Focus lies are selling poorly

Or so says KLIMARETTER.INFO. Here is the google auto-trans from the German:

Provocative it is, but apparently it is not enough: the issue of the conservative magazine, Focus on the benefits of global warming is only a little German kiosks have been sold to the. The booklet, entitled “Great atmosphere!” is , according to the Hamburger Abendblatt 84 000 times over the counter moved only – that is the worst result in the entire year 2010.

Just in time for the world climate summit in Cancun, Mexico made the Focus a frontispiece with, the polar bear with sunglasses showing a. For this, the headline: “New thinking: Global warming is good for us.” In the summary, the claim into perspective: Climate change conferred no damage, but it is in many regions a blessing for man and nature. The The article itself is “new studies” spoken of, which showed that heating also) ADVANTAGE (! – but actually it is a truism, which is known since years.

In retrospect, the high density of a notorious facts not worth it for the Focus: The kiosk was selling about 25 percent below the average for the previous year.

So, denialist lies aren’t selling well – though you’d need to compare it to other GW issues to see if it isn’t just because people are bored with the whole topic.

Curry jumps the shark

[Originally posted 27/7; updated a few times and now again (see end) so re-publishing with current date to push it to the top]

It looks like it is finally time to announce Judith Curry’s departure for the dark side, prompted by her comments at RC. I still think she has good intentions, at heart, but has been “captured by the septic narrative” or somesuch. In some respects this intervention is fairly typical of her previous stuff – which is to say, she mouths off without having done her homework, then tries to back off. But the direction she mouths off in is very revealing.

So, where to start. Curry commented at RC in defence of Montford and Gavin answered her. Presumably she thought at the time she was being sane. But then Romm (ht: H) made a post out of the comment / reply which really reads very badly for her, and Curry threw her toys out of the pram: OK, I officially give up over here. Here is something I just posted over at climateaudit… She then appears to go on to argue that all the stuff she said before wasn’t her, it was merely her parroting Montford: “These were not my personal arguments.” I don’t believe that, nor do I think that you can read that from her orignal RC comment. Nor, indeed, can I see why she would want to show up at RC merely to parrot Montford – he can do that himself if he wants to.

The bit of Curry’s comments that I would pick out of RC are

The high level of confidence ascribed to the hockey stick inferences in the IPCC TAR, based upon two very recent papers (MBH) that, while provocative and innovative, used new methods and found results that were counter to the prevailing views. Plus the iconic status that the hockey stick achieved in the TAR and Al Gore’s movie.

I’ve bolded the bit that is especially significant. This is so much a part of the septic worldview: that IPCC ’90 fig 7.1.c was God’s Glorious Revealed Truth in the Age of Gold and everything since then has been downhill as the evil climate so-called scientists manipulated their data to erase the MWP and LIA etc etc. Gavin points out why her view is wrong.

There is quite enough noise in the “climate debate” already. We don’t need any more. Nor do we need people making hasty ill-thought out comments that they will later pretend not to have meant. Curry needs to back off and find time to write down a coherent position that she actually believes in.

Oops, and I missed Curry’s other embarassing comment at CP. Speaking of Craig Loehle I ought to link to Eli before he does.

[Update: DHW has a longer analysis]

[Update: it is interesting to compare her current state with comments from 2006 (ht: NEA]

[Update: Curry digs herself in deeper chez Keith]

[Update: more mixed Curry at blogs.chron.com. That combines some interesting and worthwhile stuff about Antarctic sea ice – read it (though note the minor contradiction / lack of clarity: The paradox of why the Antarctic isn’t melting and the Arctic is has gotten a lot of attention… It’s not like there’s been a big debate in the climate community, or a lot of worry about this, because observations have agreed with the models) – with outrageous lies pandering to the septics (Some people were getting their papers rejected because they disagreed with the IPCC. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Papers were getting rejected for the wrong reason). Based on her usual modus operandi, I’m sure she will later come back and explain that she didn’t actually mean that, or was just quoting someone else’s book, or something. What she won’t come back with is anything to back it up (ht: IANVS). Oh, and When I speak up about maybe there’s more uncertainty, some people regard that as heresy. is twaddle too. OTOH, with This isn’t a Merchants of Doubt, oil-company-funded effort (though that comment is badly made) she is explicitly endorsing the fact that there *is* a MoD effort elsewhere. Note also the total lack of criticism of WUWT; all in all, I think the “capture” theory still holds]

[Update: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/aug/19/climate-sceptics-mislead-public is a review of HSI which includes

Montford tries to justify this assertion in his first chapter by highlighting the “difficulty in getting into print any result that went against the idea of catastrophic global warming”. He claims that a paper by Shaopeng Huang and co-authors on proxy temperature reconstructions from borehole measurements “never appeared in print” after being rejected by the journal Nature in 1997 because it showed that the medieval warm period had higher temperatures than today. However Montford strangely neglects to tell the reader that the rejected paper was revised and published in the same year by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and that the authors published other papers in Nature in subsequent years.

so it seems entirely likely that this is the source of Curry’s lies about Some people were getting their papers rejected because they disagreed with the IPCC. In which case she is caught out yet again parroting tripe from Montford. Montford isn’t a scientist and could be dumb enough to think rejection by Nature is some sort of dissing (rather than a commonplace that happens to veryone) but Curry is a scientist and, had she bothered to investigate rather than parrot, would have known better]

Refs

* Denier weirdness: Judith Curry will not be renewing her subscription: Sou, 2015 (note JM’s comment, which probably explains it)