Hannity, oblivious to "scientific nuances," takes NY Times out of context on global warming
On his September 23 show, Sean Hannity claimed that a New York Times article reporting that "global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years" is in conflict with President Obama's comments at the United Nations that "[i]f we continue down our current course, every member of this assembly will see irreversible changes within their borders." But Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin, in the article Hannity misconstrued, also reported that the recent temperatures have "been seized upon by skeptics" but that scientists say short-term climate variability "has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases" and that "trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public -- and to policy makers -- can be frustrating."
From the September 23 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
HANNITY: And tonight's "Meltdown" is brought to you by The New York Obama Times. Now, readers of that newspaper were in for a big surprise this week. They opened their newspaper to read the following quote: "Global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years."
What? This from one of the chief promoters of climate hysteria. I guess the president hasn't been reading the newspaper too closely. Take a look at the doomsday scenario that he laid out earlier today.
OBAMA [video clip]: If we continue down our current course, every member of this assembly will see irreversible changes within their borders. Our efforts to end conflicts will be eclipsed by wars over refugees and resources. Development will be devastated by drought and famine. Land that human beings have lived on for millennia will disappear.
HANNITY: But then again, we never actually thought that facts form the basis of any of the president's decisions or speeches.
NY Times was not suggesting that global warming is not occurring
Revkin: Scientists say short-term climate variability "has no bearing" on global warming, but that conveying that to the "public -- and to policy makers -- can be frustrating." From Revkin's September 21 Times article:
The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.
The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
Scientists say the pattern of the last decade -- after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s -- is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.
But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public -- and to policy makers -- can be frustrating, they say.
Hannity makes a habit of distorting quotes in order to smear progressives
Hannity has a long record of distorting quotes. As Media Matters for America has noted, this is not the first time Hannity has distorted a quote or article in order to smear Obama. He has distorted or taken Obama's comments out of context several times before and after Obama's inauguration and has similarly distorted remarks of other progressive figures.
That's an UNDERSTATEMENT if I ever heard one.
LOL. Good one.
Here's a closer look at recent global temps...one that shows the IPCC estimates and actual reported temps. From 1995 to present...the IPCC estimated a best case scenario of +2.4C...and a worst case scenario of +5.3C. The actual results show +0.9C.
Having said that...I find relevance in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition's position on accurately recording global surface temps:
-- It is quite impossible to obtain a statistically or scientifically acceptable estimate of mean
global temperature or its variability over time, from readings on the earth's surface, for the
following reasons:
There is no quality control system for weather station and ship measurements. Hardly
anything is standardized, even within a single country. Instruments, shelter, location,
distance from buildings and vegetation, personnel, and administration, vary widely. Some
instruments are even on top of buildings.
Measurement sites suffer from discontinuity of location and variability in numbers (100
weather stations in 1850, 8000 in 1980, 3000 today) as well as gaps in records. --
Concerning your Brohan chart...It is admitted by Brohan et al that this record omits a number of "unknown unknowns".
I reject the premise of man-made global warming for a host of reasons...the first being I have little confidence in the accuracy of the temp. records...and because of that I find little reason to support the predictions by the IPCC and their woefully inadequate computer modeling.
As always, consider the source. Your first link is to GlobalWarming.org, a site run by the Cooler Heads Coalition, a concoction of right-wing and industry groups formed by the Competetive Enterprise Institute.
The graph to which you refer is grossly misleading to the point of outright falsehood on two accounts: One, it treats the IPCC predictions as if they were for straight-line, year-by-year increases, which is so patently nonsensical that I have to regard it as deliberate distortion: No outfit even pretending to scientific understanding could be so ignorant. Two, it is based on less than 15 years data when it is a basic, first-grade level concept of long standing among climatologists that predicting long-term changes to climate requires at least 30 years of data to smooth out natural variations. That is, they have less than half the data they need to claim what they are claiming.
Even with that, and even with restricting their time line to a period of natural cooling (which is thought to have begun about 1995), their own data still shows a 0.9C (1.6F) per century increase. Let me repeat that to make sure it's clear: Even when they restricted the data to a period of natural cooling, it still showed a long-term increase.
As for the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, a group which appears to exists only as a website (the site offers no mail address or phone number and there is no way to contact the group except through a form at the site), for all we know it may not even be in New Zealand: The web sites of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, the Australian Climate Science Coalition (created by a right-wing, corporate-funded Australian think tank called the Institute for Public Affairs), and the International Climate Science Coalition are all hosted at the same IP address: a single Internet service provider in Arizona. All three dip heavily into various conspiracy theories on climate change popular among the nanny-nanny naysayers, such as that the whole purpose of the Kyoto agreement had nothing to do with global warming but was actually about undermining "big, successful capitalist economies like America."
Finally, there is the recent grasping-at-straws argument of those nanny-nanny naysayers, that of measurement bias. Now, it is true that there hasn't been a lot of standardization of measuring devices and locations. But one, such standardization has been increasing. Two, it really doesn't matter. For scientific accuracy it does, but for generalized predictions of global warming it doesn't: Models and predictions are not based on data from one or a few such measurements, but from hundreds, thousands, of measurements from a variety of sources, the range of data being sufficient to generate a good deal of confidence that any measurement biases are smoothed out. (I also find it amusing that our knowledge of short-term climate variations is based on exactly the same sort of measurements they question - which means to question the measurements also means to question the existence of those short-term variations that they claim are what we're actually experiencing! Accepting their argument here means rejecting their other argument over there. Then again, intellectual consistency was never very high on their list of concerns.)
In fact, potential measurement bias matters even less than that and the whole business is a red herring. The issue is not what the temperature of the Earth is at any given moment or even whether you can meaningfully assign a single number to it. The issue is the average temperature of the Earth and how that average is changing over time. Even if there was a persistent, non-smoothed-out measurement bias, if that average is going up over time, there still is global warming. And if over time it's going up to an extent that cannot be accounted for by natural variations - which is exactly what it is doing - then there is anthropogenic global warming, the nanny-nanny naysayers and their self-interested corporate backers nitpicking and spewing bogus comparisons notwithstanding.
Speaking of potential measurement bias, how about actual measurement bias? Hot off the presses for your review, taking cherry picking to a new high. For the sake of "intellectual consistency" please explain how this revelation meshes with the dire predictions of the AGW fan club. To borrow a phrase, considering the weight given to Mann to get this massive nasty AGW ball rolling, this news is "a bit late but relevant."
Another card falls.
Remember, the topic is that Hannity took the NY Times out of context to smear manmade global warming realities.
For those who won't follow the link, this has to do with a claim that a reexamination of tree ring data undermines, indeed "kills," the so-called "hockey stick," the graph that shows a dramatic increase in temperatures over the last few decades. The name comes from the fact that the data shows relatively stable temperatures over the last millennium (the "shaft"), punctuated by a rapid rise (the "blade") in recent times. The writer at the link charges two researchers whose work supported the "hockey stick," Fritz Hans Schweingruber and Keith Briffa, with deliberate falsification of results by cherry-picking of data.
That is an extremely serious charge and we will see how serious the accuser is - and how confident he is in his position - if he has the guts to pursue the matter beyond a blog post trying to find some means of attacking the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Frankly, I doubt he will, because while a colleague of the original author implies the same charge, the author himself does not make it, suggesting instead either unintentional bias or that using rings from live trees as opposed to dead ones might affect the results.
In either event, it's also worth noting that the original author in question is Steve McIntyre of the blog Climate Audit, which he founded with the avowed intent of disproving the "hockey stick." Not to examining it, not to considering the science, but to disproving it. As someone flippantly but pretty accurately put it, the "end of Climate Audit is to show that the vast majority of Climate Scientists are Socialists engaged in hoaxing All Of Mankind." Which seems to put his own reliability as a source under a cloud.
Getting more to the link and the argument, an immediate problem is that the linked site treats the tree ring data that was the main foundation of the "hockey stick" graph as if it stood alone with no supporting data and so challenging the tree ring data challenges the entire idea of a recent sharp rise in observed temperatures. But that is patently false. For one thing, nine additional reconstructions of temperature changes over the past 1000 years largely agree with the "hockey stick." The "shaft" gets warped, in two or three of the cases rather dramatically, but the "blade" is still there. More to the point, ice core samples, sediment layers, glacial advance and retreat, coral samples, historical records, and more tell essentially the same story - and, for the period since measurements began about 1850, so do observed values.
(It also bears mentioning that while the "hockey stick" is surely dramatic, it's just one graph of one method and a somewhat problematic method at that: Tree rings can be very hard to interpret since they can be affected by a number of local or transient factors like rainfall - just check out the size of the error bars on the graph, linked above. If the results had not been as similar as they are to results from other methodologies, the graph never would have survived in the literature as long as it has.)
So now McIntyre, who tried in 2003 and 2005 to shoot down the "hockey stick" and failed despite the assistance of 2006 Congressional hearings by Joe Barton, the House's global warming equivalent to the Senate's James Inhofe, is hoping the third time is the charm. But quite frankly, rather than it being up to others to accept his results or even to challenge them, I'd say it's up to McIntyre to explain why his result is such an outlier and why it runs counter not only to other analyses but to actual observed values.
As for you, galileonardo, I think you're an embarrassment to your namesakes.
I'd say that was one of the best (or worst depending on perspective) @ss beatings Wesley has ever received on this or any subject. With you permission, I would like to use your stuff in debates with my local newpaper blog. Would that be o.k.?
IF an occasion for credit arises, the blog is "Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time" and the url is http://whoviating.blogspot.com.
I think a lot of the misunderstanding about this has come from alarmists who paint the situation as a current threat. This misleads the public. The evidence shows that this is likely a severe threat, but maybe not in the immediate term and that we really should not look at short term or year to year variations like you are doing.
You may not agree that Global Warming is man-made, but many of your fellow conservatives are going beyond that to say it is not even happening. I think the graph shows that definitely the latter view is not supported by the evidence.
This is a common failing from a righty. You have an idea that manmade global warming isn't real, and you go looking for info that backs up that knee-jerk reaction. When you find it, you stop looking!
It really makes you look corrupt and ignorant.
Denier Wesley claims there is no problem because temps only increased one degree centigrade in 13 years. Temperature readings are all off anyway and he does not see any ice melting or shrinking of glaciers.
Saying that a gauge is off doesn't stop that gauge from being able to measure increases in the temperature! Even if it starts off higher than it should be, it'll still show those increases!
Let's hope that Wesley isn't a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist.
Um, well, no, let's be exact here. What the linked graph claims is a rate of temperature increase of 0.9C per century. That is, 100 years from now, average world temperature would be 0.9C warmer than now. That is as compared to the IPCC range of predictions which say in 100 years the world would be somewhere between 2.4C (4.3F) and 5.3C (9.5F) warmer. (That may not seem like a lot, but that latter number would be disastrous.)
The thing is, of course, that is Wesley did think those numbers reflected temperature change over 13 years, he understands the issue even less than I thought he did.
Not surprising. Hannity assumes Obama's brain works like his, probably. Why would he think other people base decisions on FACTS, when Hannity does perfectly fine without them?
Ha! They forwarded a chain email that was easy to debunk, I did research and debunked it, and I am the one who had the knee-jerk reaction!
Hannity had a knee-jerk reaction to the news that the short-term trend is for us to not see much warming, and he assumed that meant something about the long-term trend that was new and contradictory.
Here's the money quote from the same newspaper article that Hannity cites.
Scientists say the pattern of the last decade -- after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s -- is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.
In this respect, he's like a lawyer--who is committed to zealously defending his client. But unlike a lawyer, who as an officer of the court must maintain certain standards of propriety and truthfullness, Hannity lies and distorts impunity. He hand picks weak advocates for the other side (if any) and truncates their time.
There's no judge in this game except FOX News, and as everyone knows, it's "fair and balanced."
That's no way to talk about Mr. Murdoch Sean, not if you want a big raise when your contract comes up for renewal....Oh, you meant, President Obama, well, I never thought that facts formed the basis of any of Fox's decisions or stories.