A temporary end to bliss

With a rare exception or two, I've been blissfully ignoring Roger Pielke Jr's recent stuff for the last year or so as he slid into irrelevance. As long as I didn't read his stuff, I could keep open the possibility that he was doing something useful.

Or not, regarding the Marcott paper. The Oglaf comic is great though, but highly inappropriate.

Others have handled it, (Eli shows up in the comments at the link), but I'll just add the parallel I see between this and how James Annan spotted the Pielkean confusion between detection and estimation of climate change effect on disasters, way back when in 2006.* Back then, people were trying to estimate what aspect of disasters were climate change-related, which Pielke denounced as failing to scientifically detect climate change in disasters. They weren't doing detection until more recently, as the science improved and disaster dice started rolling 13s.

IOW:

RPJr: You say X (percent of disaster damages) proves Y (climate change)
Rest of humanity:  No, I said assuming Y, here's our estimate of X.
RPJr.: You're wrong to say X proves Y!

(paraphrasing, not actual quotes)

It's the same issue or even less valid with RPJr and the post-1850 hockey stick/wheelchair component in Marcott. The paper is very clear in that they're not attempting to prove the current rise in temps via proxies. They even warn you not to consider their estimate robust, and they indicate the modern record they add is not theirs.

I agree that the press release could be clearer, but also agree with Stoat that it doesn't matter. It's like a paper examining Mars' orbit around the sun, where a press release might confuse a reader to think it also was about the fact that earth orbits the sun. There's no controversy about whether the earth orbits the sun. And the paper's clear.

So, just more of the same from RPJr.


*I think I spotted it too but could never find where I wrote it, thus reducing my own claim to a bitter, bitter footnote.

Add lead-bullet poisoning denialism to the crank magnetism list

This one was new to me:

Fresh off a wave of success in the state Capitol last year, animal welfare groups are taking aim at a new target this year: hunting with lead ammunition.

The Humane Society, Audubon California and Defenders of Wildlife are behind a major push to make California the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting....

....environmentalists say a statewide ban is needed because overwhelming scientific evidence shows condors, bald eagles and other birds are still dying from lead poisoning when they eat dead deer and other animals shot by hunters.... 

"These people want to ban hunting. Go to their cocktail parties and snuggle up to them, and that's what they'll tell you," said Don Saba, a member of the NRA board of directors.... 

Saba, a Tuscon, Ariz., resident who has a doctorate in toxicology from UC Berkeley, appeared last August at a state Fish and Game Commission meeting to question the science linking condor poisoning to bullets.... 

Scientists say it's clear bullets are to blame for the lead poisoning. They have published studies that match isotope ratios of lead in condors' feathers to isotope ratios in lead bullets.

Saba says that lead paint and other substances, like lead from batteries, also can have the same ratios, and that condors may be eating paint from old fire lookout towers, eating lead in dumps or finding it other ways. But researchers dispute those claims.

"What is lacking is any evidence -- and certainly no published evidence -- to substantiate their claims," said Don Smith, a professor of microbiology and toxicology at UC Santa Cruz.

Biologists track the birds with GPS and observe them closely, Smith noted. "They are not going to lots of fire towers to eat paint. They are not eating wheel weights off wheels," he said. "There isn't one shred of evidence they have to support any of that."

Evidence that they don't like, doesn't exist. One more for crank magnetism.

Adding to the war on science: gun research, pregnancy-rape connection....

Keith Kloor is tired of people talking about the war on science. I'd think that he would have a point if other people stopped committing a war on science. It took the news events from the last year to let me know about several fronts in the war on science that I hadn't known:  limits on health research funding that might show gun control as reducing violence (something Obama is trying to get around but is still in the law) and the claim that women couldn't or rarely became pregnant from rape.

Another recent attack, although more of a war on math, is the claim that dividing up the electoral vote from states with a slight Democratic lean by congressional district instead of awarding all the votes to the victor will result in more attention to rural conservative districts. The reality is that attention only goes to electoral votes that are truly in play - you ignore the areas that are certain wins or certain losses. Conservative districts in battleground states have a at least a shot at attention - their votes now make a difference, but not when their effect could be taken for granted.  As has been noted, this issue is just an attempt to skew the national election at the expense of the local interest.

To be fair, the question remains of when a stupid claim by some people on one side, like the pregnancy-rape thing, can be considered a joint responsibility for that side of the spectrum.  I think when it rises to the level of being made repeatedly by the political elite, Congressmen and senatorial candidates, then I'd say they at least have a problem.

Shutting down funding as in gun research takes the attacks on science to another level, from denial to an active refusal to let other people understand the issue (UPDATE:  corrected from "shutting down funding entirely", per a comment request below). Climate denialists must be jealous, although I do recall Republican attempts to shut down earth-monitoring satellites.

Threats to science providers such as bogus referrals for criminal prosecution by powerful senators are the near-worst, though.

Stop making war on science, and I'll stop talking about it.  Calling them out on it is the small good thing that can be done in response.  I think it shows in the general intellectual dissatisfaction with the Republican Party elite, and someday the Republicans will have to come around.


UPDATE:  one missing aspect of the gun research discussion is the political signalling that goes beyond the letter of the prohibition on certain results from research.  The original prohibition is/was a signal of political strength by gun nuts and a warning to government-funded researchers to stay away.  If you fund studying of drunk driving and effect on public health safety, then you get a pat on the head no matter how good or bad the work is.  Fund a study on whether more guns result in more accidental shootings/suicides/illegal guns, and expect to see your work analyzed with great bias, and expect the agency to face funding cuts in the next cycle.  Obama's action is a bit of contrary signalling.

Key the extremes to their context

(via Climate Central.)

I'm not sure yet what I think of Mark Kleiman's post about how people always accept their side's arguments on a position and assume a contrary argument means the arguer is on the other team.  I'm no fan of centrism-worship, or of contrarianism-for-its-own-sake.  OTOH, a critical eye on the arguments used for our own side has some moral value.

In that sense, the 2012 record warmth in the lower 48 states, a record for 1.58% of the planet's surface for a single year, is getting overplayed.  At least, the key front and center should be context, that year after year, record highs generally exceed record lows, and that generally consistent result is significant additional support to the mountain of evidence for climate change.  What's important about 2012 in the lower 48, outside of bringing the American public mainstream a little a closer to the scientific mainstream, is how it reminds us of that context.*

Lose the context and you get big pronouncements like this from Watts Up:  "Low temperature records overwhelm highs in the USA this past week" (emphasis added).  Context may not cure foolishness, but it might help a little bit.


*One exception is if the 2012 record highs are so unprecedentedly big that natural variability couldn't ever explain them, equivalent to rolling two dice and having them come up 13.  That would be important, but I've missed any in-depth discussion of that possibility.

How dare Nate Silver suggest that someone put his money where his mouth is

The public editor at the NY Times is aghast that Nate Silver proposed a $1000 bet for charity against Joe Scarborough over the election outcome.  Silver thinks the math and data shows a high likelihood of Obama victory, while Scarborough doesn't like math and think people that use it should be told to shut up.  Perhaps sensing that her pearl-clutching isn't too convincing, the editor suggests people think he's a journalist when he's clearly a columnist discussing his own view of things, and gets a news editor to suggest discomfort with a journalistic slippery slope.

I honestly don't get why people have problems with other people proposing bets.  My guess is they don't like betting themselves and therefore think nobody else should be allowed to bet, so they make statements like it's "classless" to bet with money going to charity.  I kind of like incentives, myself, but maybe I'm classless.

As for that scary slippery slope, I would gladly give a push and would love to see other columnists put their money where their mouths are, because it might rein them in a little bit, or their critics.  Kind of harder to do that on the straight news side where it's an institution that's reporting out, not just the names on the byline, but if the institution can figure out a way to do that, then more power to them.  What a wonderful world it would be.

A better critique, also noted by people in Silver's Twitter feed, is that if Scarborough believes the odds are 50-50, and all Silver is offering is an even odds bet, then there's no advantage to Scarborough in taking the bet.  No disadvantage either, but there's no incentive from Scarborough's perspective.  Silver should put up $1250 against $1000 to fix that.  Also the money shouldn't go to the same charity but ideally to different ones that the two sides rank differently in preference.  Part of betting is to make people think carefully about their claims, and if the same charity gets the money then you lose some of that incentive.

And while I'm on the subject - there are many many reasons why Mitt Romney would be terrible for the country, especially on climate change, but I don't think his $10,000 bet offer was one of them.  As a gotcha line in the debate it might have been kind of lame, the outcome might have been deceptive, and the cavalier attitude towards that kind of money is unfortunate, but the simple concept of betting someone over a false statement isn't wrong.  Bloomberg has much better reasons for voting for Obama instead of Romney.

Schnare on screen, Captain.

I'm annoyed that Eli beat me to the punch, but I did get the above spy-cam video showing David Schnare's latest work.  More GIFs of Schnare here.

You think that is a Scharescapade, Brian?  This is the real Schnarey thing - Eli

  

Strained Silver and strange predictions on climate

It's not the usual lopsided intellectual battle we discuss here at Eli's.  This is Michael Mann criticizing Nate Silver's somewhat skeptical take of climate prediction capability in Silver's new book:

It's not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier; he accepts that human-caused climate change is real, and that it represents a challenge and potential threat. But he falls victim to a fallacy that has become all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science. Nate conflates problems of prediction in the realm of human behavior -- where there are no fundamental governing 'laws' and any "predictions" are potentially laden with subjective and untestable assumptions -- with problems such as climate change, which are governed by laws of physics, like the greenhouse effect, that are true whether or not you choose to believe them.

As usual, I'll leave the heavy lifting to someone else, Mann in this case.  Also as usual, I haven't read Silver's book, so maybe there's more to it.  What I can add, however, is that it's helpful to look at climate predictions by Silver himself and by a denialist he credulously supports.

Three years ago, Nate offered to bet climate denialists on a monthly basis over whether the temperature in their hometown was one degree above or below the historical average.  As I said at the link, this was a somewhat aggressive bet offer that could've been vulnerable to letting his opponents rely on a short-term seasonal prediction of colder temps to game the system against him.  It would be interesting to see if he discusses his past bet offer and why he's critical of predictions that are much less affected by random noise.

Second is Silver's enthusiasm for the discredited Scott Armstrong, a crackpot climate denier.  In that case, there was a prediction and a betting market created by Armstrong's fans at InTrade, a skewed and unfair prediction that they still managed to lose spectacularly (link goes to a series of posts on Armstrong and the bet).

Like Mann, I'm a Fan of Nate, but he whiffed on this one.

One more thing:  Nate apparently wrote something about Gavin Schmidt (no relation) and his unwillingness to get involved in betting over climate models.  As someone who is willing to bet over climate, here's my response about climate denialists who won't bet over their predictions:

Of course any particular skeptic might honestly not be interested in betting, but the widespread lack of interest tells you something.

There's a difference between an individual's disinterest in betting versus the widespread disinterest among denialists as a community (with honorable skeptic exceptions) in putting their money where their mouths are.

Your Joe Bastardi entertainment moment

In 2010, predicting a big recovery in sea ice nearing historical levels in 2011, and slow progress over 20-30 years to above normal levels:


Apparently he now claims it's all just cycles that will turn around.  Funny how cyclical effects are producing new records, and they just happen to tend to be records you'd see from humans changing the climate....

I'd seriously like to make a Wall Street Journal Daily LaughAlong App

This information on environmental stupidity in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages since 1976 should be expanded into a smartphone app.  Each day you could find out what obvious reality was denied on that day of the month in the WSJ in the past, as a balance to whatever new nonsense will be showing up.

LaughAlong at the Journal, though, not with the Journal.  Beats crying, anyway.

Hi Mom

Hi Mom (and thanks for letting me post this reply),

Yes, I am familiar with the term "watermelon" as applied to environmentalists (green on the outside, red communist on the inside), and have even used it myself.  Sarcastically.  I'm also familiar with James Delingpole, conservative blogger at the Telegraph.  I'm not directly familiar with Delingpole's book, "Watermelons:  the Green Movement's True Colors",* but I think I know what I need to know at this point.

Their watermelon "analysis" just proves the intellectual bankruptcy on the anti-environment right.  They can't think of anything relevant to say, so they fight dead battles of the past.  Communism, really?  And in the Western world?  If the right hasn't realized as the rest of the political spectrum has that the foreseeable future is a market economy with varying levels of government intervention,  then they're showing they haven't had an original thought since the 1980s.  No wonder they haven't liked a Republican president in a quarter-century.

As for Delingpole himself, I thought I'd written about him but can only find a comment I wrote about his self-introduction on his blog, "James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything."  It reminded me of something:

Al Franken coined the term “kidding on the square” for statements that a speaker knows he actually believes more than is publicly acceptable, so the speaker makes the statement in a jocular fashion.

I’ve never been able to read Dellingpole’s blog because I can’t get past the introductory statement that he’s “right about everything.” Just by reflex, my fingers hit the browser’s back button. 

That statement and other stuff by Dellingpole I’ve seen quoted are classic kidding on the square, and give a good idea of the uselessness of the writer.

My coblogger Eli has been able to push his way through Delingpole's work, though, and has a few thoughts about this video:



Eli also provides links to other analyses of Mr. Right About Everything.

I wish I could point you to a honest and scientific conservative who disagrees with action on climate change, but they're thin on the ground.  Even my betting opponent thinks we should take reasonable actions to reduce CO2 emissions.

The best I can do is this Point of Inquiry podcast by science writer Chris Mooney with the politically conservative climatologist Kerry Emanuel.  He doesn't deny the need for action, but just disagrees on the best form of action.  Unfortunately, the conservatives who understand climate seem to be active scientifically but not so much politically.  The famous climatologist Jim Hansen is supposed to be a Republican, maybe that explains his preference for a revenue-neutral carbon tax over more complicated solutions that may have (or at least, used to have) better political prospects.

One last thought - the "watermelon" insult is vacuous and wrong, but it's only 99% wrong.  People will fit potential solutions into their own political framework.  I think some on the left may resist carbon sequestration, large scale solar power plants, and even last-ditch ocean iron fertilization, not only because of the not-unreasonable arguments against those solutions but also because they do not help the left's political "side".  I just wouldn't forget the converse is equally true about the corporate right, and I think that side has a heck of a lot more power.


*Interesting that a Brit would spell "colors" that way.  I guess he knows which country he's targeting.

My second tiny Godwin violation: Romney's Downfall

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo asks:

Can someone tell me when the Mitt/Bain Downfall video gets posted on Youtube? 

Well, okay then.

I did this once before, three years ago, and forgot everything. But it came back:



(UPDATE:  per the comments, you need to turn on the captions, using the box on the lower right in the Youtube video.)

For more info, see this TPM post.  I wrote a while back on the evidence in Romney's 2010 tax form suggesting that he paid even less or no taxes in prior years, so yet another reason to wonder what he's hiding. The disposal of fetuses comes from this Mother Jones article.

And just in case anyone's interested in my first Godwin violation regarding climate denialists, here's Singer's Downfall:

 

More info on that one at the old blog.

UPDATE 2: just thought I'd mention that I slammed the Romney's Downfall piece together pretty fast, so if anyone has suggestions for subtitle improvements, I could decide to upgrade the captions.  Or you can also use the link right above this update; it has tips for how to make a Downfall video yourself.

Doing their best to prove me wrong

I've argued at times that climate adaptation will be easier to push through denialist resistance than climate mitigation, because:

1. It's not asking denialists to give up the bad things they do.
2. It doesn't blame the denialists for bad things that are happening, except in an indirect way.  At least it doesn't focus primarily on whether their/our lifestyle is causing problems for other people.
3. It's saving their own bacon (or maybe their community's bacon) rather than helping/not harming other people far away.  Folks that would confidently deny climate change might be much less confident in arguing against preparing for climate change.

I've also argued that preparing for the possibility of climate change will encourage people to accept its reality, a kind of backwards way of reasoning but one that still gets to the best policy outcome.  Hopefully people will then realize that mitigation reduces the need for adaptation.  None of this works though unless climate adaptation is an easier sell than climate reality overall.

North Carolina and Virginia legislatures are testing my hope that adaptation is an easier sell.  People in both states have noticed that coastlines sure seem flooded a lot, and both states have lots of low-elevation land.  Legislatures want to plan how to respond to this but have come down with hives at the mention of, or express adaptation for, climate change.

Still, North Carolina has backed away somewhat from its widely-mocked effort to limit projecting sea level rise to no more than the historical record.  Now they say accelerated sea level rise could be considered if derived from good science, kind of.  It has problems but it doesn't stop planning for some level of climate adaptation.

Virginia also has problems, with the city of Norfolk spending $6m annually to keep roads and homes clear of coastal flooding.  Their bill dances around the issue of climate change, dropping the words entirely in favor of "recurrent flooding".

On one level this is equal parts laughable and sad.  It reminds me of the controversy over BBC America's Frozen Planet series and the initial effort to drop the discussion of climate change that was shown in the original British version (they did show it in the end).  No surprise that Americans are in climate denial when their leaders and media hide the truth from them.

But even if they're not using the "CC" words in Virginia and North Carolina, it's not that hard to read between the lines.  Someday people will ask why taxpayers should be paying for this out of income and sales taxes, instead of polluters paying for it along with the emissions that cause the problem.

UPDATE:  Anonymous has a great art project idea in the comments.  I'd put it at 7 meters above sea level though instead of 20 - we still have time to save the Antarctic ice sheets.

Latest update on our friends at Heartland

Guardian has a brief rundown.  I misunderstood previously what I think was John Mashey's point in the comments a while back, about the importance of a coal association showing up to support Heartland financially.  I thought that wasn't very surprising, but it seems that HI had been trying to maintain a facade of independence from that economic interest.  Not anymore, and maybe not even enough time to funnel the dollars through a masking fund.

Also interesting that Heritage Foundation, a right wing "think tank" hack job, would pitch in financial support for HI as a potential competitor.  Maybe the competition isn't all that fierce, or that Heritage prefers someone who's even more ridiculous than they are to provide a contrast.

Guardian also says HI lost board members, but no name.  Inquiring minds want to know.  UPDATE: ask and ye shall receive.

UPDATE 2:  As to Heritage being so generous, maybe they're not the ones making the call on that decision.  Page 93 of Crescendo to ClimateGate Cacophony shows lots of overlapping denialist donors.  Perhaps the donors decided the funding allocations were off due to a series of unfortunate events and prodded Heritage along.

Chance for Anthony Watts to show his worth

Anthony Watts now has two separate posts ringing with condemnation of Think Progress for a post last year that noted the terrorist Anders Breivik had accused climate science of actually being an eco-Marxist plot (that post disappeared temporarily but now it's back).

Watts to his credit condemned Heartland's revealing billboard campaign but AFAIK has stopped there.  I've already shown that HI has done this before, equating Al Gore with Ted Kaczysnki.  When I found that Heartland post, I also found another that I haven't written about until now:

Environmental Extremist Gunman Attacks Discovery Channel Headquarters 

James M. Taylor, J.D. – James M. Taylor – September 1, 2010 

An environmental extremist gunman has entered the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., and has taken a number of people hostage, according to Montgomery County Police. Police are trying to negotiate with the gunman, who may have armed himself with a bomb. Roughly 1,900 employees work at the building, which broadcasts a number of science-related programs. 

 The gunman has issued a manifesto and a list of demands, much of which reads like an environmental activist wish list....Much like the media largely ignored the environmental extremism that motivated the Unabomber, the mainstream media currently is largely ignoring the Discovery Channel gunman’s environmental motivation.

And another, also by James Taylor, J.D.:

Environmental extremist took an ugly turn Aug. 1 when activist James Lee, armed with two guns and several bombs stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., took employees hostage, and attempted to force the Discovery Channel to air environmental propaganda on global warming and other issues. The assault ended in the late afternoon when police shot and killed Lee as it appeared he was preparing to detonate a bomb and kill some or all of the hostages.... 

Gore Movie as ‘Awakening’

Lee was first arrested for engaging in disruptive environmental protesting outside Discovery Channel headquarters in 2008. At the time, he explained he had had an environmental “awakening” after seeing Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore bemoans the fact that peaceful, democratic means have not motivated people to enact his desired global warming restrictions. “I used to believe in democracy,” Gore says near the end of the film. 

History of Violent Rhetoric 

In 2006, Grist magazine staff writer David Roberts wrote, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.” The penalty imposed in Nuremberg for war crimes was death.... 

In 2008 NASA global warming activist James Hansen said CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." The penalty for high crimes against humanity is death....

According to Anthony Watts, noting these parallels is evil when Think Progress does it.  I've previously shown one other blog post where Heartland is substantially worse.  By Watts standard, that post and these two new ones also deserve condemnation.

For my part, I did not bring up these two posts when I found the first one equating Gore and Kaczynski.  I think the second of these posts is particularly stupid and inaccurate, but remember it's from James Taylor, and it's unsurprising that he doesn't understand the range of penalties available at Nuremberg and the International Criminal Court.  Still, I think these don't equate environmentalism as a whole with violent nutcases.  I don't see them as strong arguments, nor do I see the Breivik argument as that strong, but they're not innately wrong.

Watts disagrees with me on Breivik.  Presumably then he disagrees with Heartland on all three of the blog posts in addition to the billboards, and I hope he says so.

UPDATE Eli:  Anthony is going after Nick Stokes.  More hockey stick jumping.

UAH satellite temps being corrected by others. Knock me over with a feather

Here it is:

One popular climate record that shows a slower atmospheric warming trend than other studies contains a data calibration problem, and when the problem is corrected the results fall in line with other records and climate models, according to a new University of Washington study. 

The finding is important because it helps confirm that models that simulate global warming agree with observations, said Stephen Po-Chedley, a UW graduate student in atmospheric sciences who wrote the paper with Qiang Fu, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. They identified a problem with the satellite temperature record put together by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Researchers there were the first to release such a record, in 1989, and it has often been cited by climate change skeptics to cast doubt on models that show the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming.... 

"There's been a debate for many, many years about the different results but we didn't know which had a problem," Fu said. "This discovery reduces uncertainty, which is very important." 

When they applied their correction to the Alabama-Huntsville climate record for a UW-derived tropospheric temperature measurement, it effectively eliminated differences with the other studies.... 

Once Po-Chedley and Fu apply the correction, the Alabama-Huntsville record shows 0.21 F warming per decade in the tropics since 1979, instead of its previous finding of 0.13 F warming. Surface measurements show the temperature of Earth in the tropics has increased by about 0.21 F per decade..... 

Usual cautions apply - maybe this correction will turn out to be incorrect.  If not, this will be the second time the UAH series will turn out to have a mistake that bias it to underestimate warming.

Probably just a coincidence.

UPDATE:  post title revised per comments.

UPDATE 2:  per John Mashey, more than twice. See p.100, and especially see "Corrections made" table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_dataset showing there are 4 ups and 3 downs, not counting the latest up. Ups tend to be bigger than downs.

UPDATE 3:  thinking maybe I'm a bit too snarky here.  When's the last time I created a satellite temperature series?  Anyway, yet another case of observations falling in line with standard theory.

UPDATE: Eli:  Strictly speaking this paper is about the TMT product, the mid-trop, not the TLT, the lower trop, however since both use the same satellite, and TLT is a mix of detectors using some majic software that Roy and John have not shared, if the Fu fits, Roy can wear it.

Thoughts on blocking evolution denial comments?

I've been away spreading CO2 emissions, and comments to my last post went down the rabbit hole dealing with creationist nonsense.

This blog tackles climate denialism, so I'm not too bothered with climate denialist comments that come up and get shot down in the comments, (altho I'd prefer the silly arguments and responding to them take up less bandwidth than is the case).  We haven't the same role on fighting the good fight for the science of biology.

I'm actually interested in the creation wars but as an observer, rather than trying to wade in against arguments that are even worse than the ones made up for climate denial.

Soooo, I'm pondering a policy to delete evolution denial.  Thoughts?  

Note that follow-up commenters might post a response before I woke up from being distracted, reference a comment that's since been deleted, and look a bit strange.

For now, no policy unless I say something in a particular blog post.  And this is just Brian talking - Eli and John manage their own threads.


UPDATE:  no outpouring of demands to block the evolution denial comments, so I'm going to let them stay.

Who are these people that John Christy is refuting?

Maybe Christy is just being polite by failing to name the people he describes below:

"The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified," said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It looks like you're going to have snow for the foreseeable future."

I'm somewhat surprised that people were saying that a massive mountain range with much of the elevation exceeding 10,000 feet was not going to have snow in the foreseeable future.  As kind and fair as Christy is, I think he should gently criticize by name the people who've said that, as well as the experts who've said that we currently see a decline in the Sierra snowpack.  Of course the article has a contrary expert:

Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey, said Christy is picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.
....
Recent studies by Scripps scientists have found that over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk. Although they have predicted the overall state snowpack would decrease over time as a result of climate change, nobody has claimed that it has happened yet, Dettinger said. 

What's significant in terms of global warming, he said, is the fact that the snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States, an area that includes Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Scripps researchers, in coordination with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have concluded that 60 percent of that downward trend is due to greenhouse gases. 

"There is a popular conception that the snowpack has declined everywhere, but that is not what the science says," Dettinger said. "What we're saying broadly is that across western North America there have been declines in spring snowpack."

Might have been helpful to include this info near the beginning of the article instead of at the end.  Christy can always counter the criticism by naming names.  Go to it!


Also worth noting that he's combining different measurement systems over time to reach a conclusion, the exact thing that denialists criticize about temperature and sea level records used by climatologists.  So now we know it can be done, apparently.

Cuccinelli goes down, but likely escapes the ethics investigation he deserves

(A representative of The Future has an opinion about Cuccinelli's activities.)

Eli refers below to the Virginia Supreme Court shooting down the fishing expedition that the denialist VA Attorney General attempted against Mike Mann's entire history (background here, court opinion here).  The Court ruled on a narrow technical issue of whether Cucc could even go after the University of Virginia, ignoring the broader issue that the lower court found no basis was given for issuing the CID/subpoenas.  A Supreme Court dissenter disagreed on the technical issue and therefore went on to the substantive issue, and mostly agreed with the lower court.

It's that broader issue - no basis for issuing the CIDs to begin with - that constitutes Cuccinelli's ethical violation of using his state office to threaten supporters of opposing political viewpoints.  Without a definitive resolution of that issue, it becomes harder to make the claim to the state bar association that they need to discipline him.  They should anyway.

I argued earlier that they should at least try to make Cucc pay their attorney fees because his argument was frivolous. Also somewhat harder given the narrow ruling, but not impossible.


UPDATE:  per dbostrom's patient suggestion, one might consider donating to the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.  This stuff is going to be happening a lot, and we'd rather have scientists worry about the science instead of fighting frivolous lawsuits.

Also going to recopy something I wrote in the comments:

The general American legal rule, for those who don't follow this stuff, is that the party who wins a lawsuit still has to pay its own attorney fees. It's easier for the winning party to get court costs of filing lawsuits covered by losers, but those are trivial compared to attorney fees. 

Various exceptions to rules apply, one is that if one party files a frivolous claim or does something unethical, then the other party may be able to recover attorney fees expended in response to the action.

Keep your eye on the ball

Here's an aside in a post I wrote about Roger Pielke Jr. two years ago, who was mad about a study criticizing his father but didn't have much substantive to say about it:

an interesting choice of tactics here - during the whole stolen climate emails thing, some people wanted to focus on the privacy invasion and illegal theft, which I thought would be viewed as an attempt to distract people from the content when the content wasn't that bad.  Here, denialists and unhelpful types like Pielke Jr. are ignoring the PNAS study content and screaming about blacklists.  Maybe it's like the lawyer's saying that if you can't pound any arguments in your favor, pound the table instead.

I'm just trying to be consistent here.  Content is king.  Set aside the strategy document.  Heartland has now had plenty of time to review and deny the accuracy of the other documents and it hasn't.  The docs seem generally supportive of John Mashey's analysis of public records.  The outrage you're hearing from the denialists are attempts to distract people from the content when the content is bad.

Time to send the IRS and state attorney generals after these fake charities.

Steve Goddard steals Pat Michaels' trick of deleting inconvenient data

Pat Michaels got in trouble for repeatedly deleting data that is inconvenient to his denialist viewpoint.

Now Steve Goddard is trying his hand at the same "hide the incline" trick.  He puts up a post with this graph to claim sea levels aren't rising:

and adds a link to the dataset that inconveniently omits the much more extensive datasource that comes with its own graphs.  Shall we help out Mr. Goddard?  Yes!  Just click the link, click "Time serie" and away we go!

First graph:

What do you know - same data (Envisat, no inverted barometer, no seasonality removed, no isostatic adjustment), but it comes complete with nifty smoothing and an inclined trendline.  Instead of just pasting in the url for this graph, Goddard downloaded the data and recreated a graph without inconveniently trending trendlines.

Still, it's not going up quickly, so that's something.  Or is it?

Same data, except with inverted barometer:

I've poked around about whether applying the inverted barometer adjustment is a good idea.  My best guess is it's unnecessary in the long term, but this short data set makes it helpful (see Realclimate).  Goddard denies it, but in general I find him unpersuasive.

How about other data?

Maybe Jason:

Maybe Multi-mission:

Plenty more variations out there for you to try yourself, but the pattern sticks.  Goddard cherrypicked a short dataset that most favored his position and then recreated the graph to hide the incline.  It then got picked up by Watts (who tempered it slightly) and spewed everywhere (I found it first at TigerHawk and traced it back).

The one useful conclusion to this is if you do feel it necessary read Goddard, do so by reading ReallySciency who's watchdogging him, including on this issue.