Bishop Hill Chutzpah of the day
Mar 12, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Tamino has written an article about Josh, criticising his Paul Nurse cartoon. He fully admits that Josh is correct, but apparently he's a bad man for mentioning it. I can only describe this argument as, well, Taminoesque.
Those who deny the reality, human cause, or danger of global warming, don’t always tell outright lies. One of their common tactics is to say what’s technically true, but is also irrelevant, misleading, or more often, both.
This is a remarkable thing to say, when one remembers Tamino's outrageous quoting out of context in his RealClimate article on the Hockey Stick Illusion. I'm not sure why it was OK for the Horizon programme to say incorrect things about the relative size of human and natural CO2 emissions while correcting these errors was blameworthy in some way. If the ratio is irrelevant and misleading when Josh puts it in a cartoon, why is it not equally irrelevant when Dr Bindschadler speaks about it?
Reader Comments (131)
Josh
Please don't draw a cartoon in reply, This Tamino guy doesn't deserve the recognition that such a work would bring.
Let him stay in the obscurity that he so richly deserves.
Tamino:
These CAGW people do really sound like out of date astronomers who believed that the universe was perfect and unchanging. No, actually, that would be too scientific of them.
Rather, they sound like religious zealots in search of a communion with nature. And they think they've finally got the word from mother nature... that she only likes CO2 concentrations of 280 ppm but is prepared to go up to only 360 ppm for sake of her human children. Anything above 500 and 600 ppm and mother nature will unleash her terror, before she too dies forever. It doesn't occur to them that mother nature may well have wished us to increase CO2 concentrations, and that recent uptick in CO2 is just the sign that she's coming out of a deep sleep.
BTW, mother nature is only 10.000 years-old, in case anyone is wondering, not 6.000 years-old as previously claimed by a rival religion.
And congrats to Josh for the check from Tamino. The sky is the limit now.
I suspect that Tamino was trained in pantomime logic prior to embarking on his career as a warmist. After 3 years of practicing the "Oh no it isn't", "Oh yes it is" argument (and achieving a B-), he was ready for his career as a tax payer funded warmist blogger.
Agnostic @ 4:31pm
No, you are dead right.
There is no evidence for significant sea level rise at Tuvalu or any other island in the BOM SEAFRAME study:
http://www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/project_info.shtml
This is a high accuracy, GPS calibrated tide gauge network (12 sites) measuring SLR in the SW Pacific.
The latest (2009) report for Tuvalu is here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO60033/IDO60033.2009.pdf
The report misrepresents the trend for Tuvalu as 4.7mm/yr. It is easy to see how it does so.
See Fig 1 Sea level anomalies at SEAFRAME sites. Note the major excursion (drop) in sea level 1997 – 1998. All the supposed upward trend quoted in Table 4 is derived from this exceptional event. Remove it, and you get no trend.
To confirm this, look at Figure 4. Evolution of relative sea level trends (mm/year) at SEAFRAME stations. You will see absolutely no trend whatsoever.
The oceans may be warming, and humans may be causing at least some of it, but there is still no trend at Tuvalu. Never mind the satellite nonsense, this is the best observational data there is.
PS: See page 22 for tsunamis:
Nice. At Tamino's I added a link to a proper blog, this one ;-)
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/2/3/emissions.html
But apparently, as you can see below, this is too much for Tamino so he edits it out.
Josh | March 12, 2011 at 3:19 pm | Reply
[edit]
[Response: I can certainly understand why you want to talk about anything but your own conduct. Answer the question. When you made your cartoon, did you or did you not know full well that the 3% figure is irrelevant and misleading to assessing the human contribution to atmospheric CO2?
Yes or No?
If you fail to answer, we will all know that not only are you either a liar or a fool or both, you're also a coward]
Latimer, wise words.
I tried to write a comment om Taminos blog:
Tamino wrote: "He’s entitled to his own opinion. But he’s not entitled to his own facts." He should have added "unless you are one of us, then you are entitled to both."
This entry was deleted.
The name of the blog seems to be "Open mind". Comments are not necessary.
Josh
Nurse didn't apologise, or correct his misrepresentations. He didn't even acknowledge them.
Does that make him a fool, a liar and a coward I wonder?
Tamino still fails to grasp that you are a satirical cartoonist. Literal minded as a bucket, that one.
Leave Tamino alone now. You've done enough ;-)
[BH adds: I think we should point out that it was Bindschadler who got it wrong and he has agreed that he was in error. It's an interesting question as to whether Paul Nurse should also issue a correction. The answer is not obvious to me.]
If, I understand correctly, warming oceans give out more CO2, then how much would the 0.7C rise since the LIA affect atmospheric concentrations?
How much more would have been produced from the MWP and how did our planet survive then?
RoyFOMR
I can't find the reference (annoying, sorry), but I have seen a paper examining leaf stomata which found the likely maximum atmospheric CO2 concentration during the MWP to be ~319ppmv.
Perhaps the problem he has, is that you are not a peer reviewed cartoonist...?
RoyFOMR
Here it is:
Kouwenberg et al., 2005. Atmospheric CO2 fluctuations during the last millennium reconstructed by stomatal frequency analysis of Tsuga heterophylla needles. GEOLOGY, January 2005.
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/33
Jiminy, I am definitely a peer reviewed cartoonist. See above and all over this blog for very helpful comments and reviews ;-)
Which makes you all my peers!
How can it be misleading to state something that is correct? The cartoon was referring to a specific incident in which Bindschadler and Nurse got their numbers badly wrong.
Who is Tamino to decide what facts are relevant or not?
I put forward a comment pointing out the uncertainty in CO2 levels before historic records began. The comment was moderate, scientifically sound (and only slightly controversial) and relevant. It appears that it has nit passed moderation, while some far more immoderate and scientifically dubious comments have been accepted.
It appears that the site moderates to control the debate, rather than the tone.
Re Don Pablo
Hey, we've been cartooning, lampooning and satirising for a lot longer than that!
There was Hogarth in the 17th Century, and also one of my favorites, James Gillray in the 18th. He did some nice ones satirising the bankers. If people find themselves bored in the City, the Bank of Englands museum has some examples and a bunch of other fascinating exhibits. Plus the chance to gently fondle a bar of gold and realise how heavy the things are.
Hey Bish, you cant deny that Chutzpah is a Yiddish word
@ Josh
"Which makes you all my peers!"
Surely, that subject to reform
Don Pablo, Atomic
Here's Gillray satirising the Scientists.
http://www.general-anaesthesia.com/people/caricature.html
@BBD (Mar 12, 2011 at 6:38 PM) --
The text of the article you linked is behind a paywall (to me, at least), but the abstract says "Alternating CO2 maxima of 300–320 ppmv are present at A.D. 1000, A.D. 1300, and ca. A.D. 1700. These CO2 fluctuations parallel global terrestrial air temperature changes." I then went off to look at the global temperature reconstructions [insert obligatory disclaimer re Wikipedia here], and I don't see positive global temperature fluctuations at those eras.
It appears that you've read the article. Can you elaborate on why the authors believe they see correlations between the CO2 and temperature reconstructions?
Tamino's post about cherry picking:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/wheres-the-global-warming/
Posted on March 3, 2011 by tamino
Tamino has never seen:
Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century
B. M. Vinther,1 K. K. Andersen,1 P. D. Jones,2 K. R. Briffa,2 and J. Cappelen3
Received 24 October 2005; revised 11 January 2006; accepted 28 February 2006; published 6 June 2006.
"The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades."
and
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/klima/klimaet_indtil_nu/temperaturen_i_groenland.htm
http://eklima.met.no/metno/trend/TAMA_G0_0_1000_NO.jpg
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/
http://met.no/?module=Articles;action=Article.publicShow;ID=881
http://met.no/?module=Articles;action=Article.publicShow;ID=882
http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/temperatur/1.2430
http://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/normal-period-1971-2000
http://en.vedur.is/climatology/clim/nr/1213
Either the temps in 1930 - 1950 are warmer or as warm as nowadays and for many places there has been no significant waming since 1989/1990 (and think of the influence of Pinatubo in 1991-1994).
You can see that according to CET that all winters in England have been cooler than 1989 (something Tamino didn't note in his post about the CET-series):
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/ssn_HadCET_mean.txt
B.T.W. the Canandian Station data Tamino uses are "somewhat" incomplete to go back 100 years back.
Don Pablo, political and social cartoonists go back way further than your American chap. Lampooning the corrupt and the bullies is a very, very old and honourable tradition. Cartoonists actually leave us a very accurate take on history, often more accurate than accredited historians, who tend to be apolgists for the winning side.
Thanks BBD for the Tsuga link. Much appreciated.
But that's a proxy and I'm less impressed by poxy proxies than I used to be!
(sorry 'bout the pun but I had no choice)
I was thinking more about a physics/ chemistry/ real science equation result that produced a direct answer. Do we have one?
I'd hate to think that we can calculate man's nett or gross contribution to CO2 concentrations in a natural warming environment without bringing in the hard sciences.
It would be almost as bad as believing that all the physical effects emanating from the LIA rebound were anthropogenic!
Roy FOMR
I'm sure I saw a recent comment by Paul Dennis about isotope proxies, but damned if I can find it.
RoyFOMR
Sorry; link to PDF:
http://fm1.fieldmuseum.org/aa/Files/lkouwenberg/Kouwenberg_et_al_2005_Geology.pdf
The ensemble reconstruction graphs are headache-inducing ;-)
Warming post 1000AD shows up in Moberg et al. (2005) and Esper et al. (2002). Strong warming ~1300 is also clear in Moberg, and in Briffa et al. 1998, Esper et al. (2002), MBH (1999).
Warming post 1700AD is indicated in Moberg, Jones et al. (1998), and others – you can see the ‘hump’ in amongst the spaghetti if you look carefully.
So this Tamino clown is so sure he's right he censors views he disagrees with.
What a pillock.
Re Josh (Mar 12, 2011 at 5:49 PM) Looks like ""If you fail to answer, we will all know that not only are you either a liar or a fool or both, you're also a coward"" has been edited out of Tamino's response at his website. I guess he thought he would look better taking the high road.
Eric (skeptic)
Has it? Good. It was intemperate.
RoyFOMR
This site tells you how. It's a bit complicated.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/co2rprt.html
Another proxy, but this may be of interest.
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/correlation.html
Thanks NIV but I'm on a slow connection and your first link gave me nowt.
More my issue than yours but I'll persist.
Where can we clearly see a simple physical connection between CO2 ocean out-gassing wrt Temperature?
Let's see - we are causing 3% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is 0.039% of the atmosphere or 338 parts per million (according to Wikipedia ) which is what it is. And so we have increased the CO2 levels by one or two parts per million over the last several years. WOW!
I think Josh had it just about right. Most of that increase must be coming from the hot air being blown by the Alarmists such as Tamino.
Will anyone ask Tamino
"Have you stopped drinking Stella yet, yes or no?" but being a foreigner, he'd probably not get that.
What he doesn't seem to realise is that those who advocate the human cause, or danger of global warming, don’t always tell outright lies. One of their common tactics is to say what’s technically true, but is also irrelevant, misleading, or more often, both. Strangely, ch.7 of AR4 WG1 doesn't have either Tamino or Foster listed as either an author or a contributor though, so he may not be up to speed. Or he may have missed lots of uncertainties, like why the 'missing sink' was renamed to something more politically acceptable. Or that gross fluxes generally have uncertainties of more than ±20%.
But he is not misleading when he claims "they account for ALL of the excess". The Team would never mislead, would they? What he says does seem a bit different to what it says here though
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter7.pdf
Josh-
What did you type over at Tamato's Closed Mind that got snipped out?
Slightly O/T, but with Josh's Romm cartoon:
Climate hawk Joe Romm: Flying high and stooping low
I was a bit hoping for a Josh double whammy starring Tamino and identical twin Bob, until Atomic poured the heavy water of sensible oblivion over their ilk. But anyway, at least Jeff Id sees the similarity between those two
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/pots-and-kettles-follow-the-money/
Most of the replies in this thread seem the same as those of children who've thrown chalk at the teacher. The kid who did that would be 'famous'...
Orkneygal, here is the comment in full. I don't think it is especially offensive, tho I don't read Tamino's blog so maybe I missed the rules for posting there.
Josh | March 12, 2011 at 3:19 pm | Reply
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Hi
Below is a link to a bit more background, noteably that Bob Bindschadler agreed, as do many here, that the claim he made in the programme was not correct. This was the main reason for the cartoon ie I am not attempting to address any other issues like the carbon cycle, tho’ that would be a good idea.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/2/3/emissions.html
Orkneygal: Tamato. I only just realised that is what you wrote, what a lovely image!
Josh
I see that Tamino has removed your post, but left his reply in, as he clearly wants everyone to read his stuff, even though they can't see what it is in reply to!
He removed my post completely - what is it with warmists and censorship?
His yes/no question assumes that you agree with his supposition (about the CO2 increase), in other words, it's a 'have you stopped beating your wife' question and you are quite right not to engage.
As a non-scientific lurker and occasional poster of this parish, I would greatly appreciate a layman's summary of this Josh v Tamino spat. At face value, I can't really see what was wrong about Josh's cartoon, but I presume Tamino has some basis for his persistent pursuit of Josh on this issue.
Anyone care to play devil's advocate?
You say Tamino, I say Tamato....
Well, well, well.
The Tamato man has "restored" Josh's prevously snipped post, but mangled it all around, it seems.
Orkneygal: Tamato. I only just realised that is what you wrote, what a lovely image!
I can hardly wait!!
@Josh (Mar 12, 2011 at 10:28 PM ) --
Perhaps Tamino, an orthographist purist, was offended by your "noteably".
Facetiousness aside, I suspect the reason is that your post is a link to a blog which Tamino does not wish to acknowledge. If readers actually went to that post, they would see that the commenters there show a grasp of the carbon cycle which apparently exceeds that of Nurse. Which, of course, isn't what Tamino would want his readers to learn.
Josh,
In case you need a model for your next cartoon.
http://www.operatunity.co.nz/classact/images/Tamino.jpg
Is Tamino a theologian?
BBD 'It was intemperate'.
Has the bulldog missed a distemper shot?
re Dougie J
I'll have a go. Much of it is the usual Team tactic of refusing to admit an error and instead going on the offensive. The cartoon is based on what was said on the Horizon show-
If you interpret that as man producing 7x more CO2 than nature, then that is clearly wrong. Annual natural emissions are, according to scepticalscience 771Gt and man-made 27Gt. So there are 27x more natural emissions than man-made, annually. Man does not produce 7x more CO2 as the Horizon show implied.
Tamino glosses over the error on the Horizon show and moves on to the attack by saying "While technically correct, the statement is both irrelevant and misleading". So he admits the figures are correct, which is important because Tamino then goes on to mislead in his own way. He says
"Until we started burning fossil fuels, the inflow to and outflow from the atmosphere was in balance. That’s why, for 10,000 years, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was reasonably stable at about 280 ppmv "
Which depends on what you think 'reasonably stable' means. Ice cores show past temperature and CO2 fluctuations, so not necessarily in balance. There is evidence that CO2 increases in response to warming, although with a long lag. The biggest element is the ocean-atmosphere flux, so warming/cooling alters that flux. If you assume all the warming over the last 300 years or so was man-made, then I guess you could claim that outgassing as man-made as well. But 'reasonably stable' overlooks this statement from AR4 WG1-
So there is identified natural variability in the CO2 fluxes. Which is where the pea starts to move faster. Tamino says:-
"Since the industrial revolution, we’ve been adding CO2 to the atmosphere which has not been balanced by outflows."
Which is true, although he goes on to say 50% is removed when AR4 estimates 57-60%. But that isn't really the issue, or what was claimed on Horizon. That comment was about gross emissions, and incorrect. Several of Tamino's commentors make the point that 7x is perhaps more accurate if the statement was meant to have been nett contributions, ie the CO2 left over annually and accumulates. But that isn't what was said on Horizon. But if you want to mislead, then it's useful to move attention away from the big numbers to the small ones, ie 771Gt natural vs 27Gt man-made. Which Tamino duly seems to do:-
"Although our CO2 emissions are only a small part (about 3%) of the total flow into the atmosphere, they account for all of the excess. And that excess has accumulated, so that since the start of the industrial revolution the CO2 concentration in the air has risen from about 280, to about 390, ppmv".
Which is quite a bold claim to make given the uncertainties around fluxes described in WG1 Ch7. It seems to assume no natural responses to warming or elevated CO2 affecting the carbon cycle. I wish someone would tell the weeds in my garden they're supposed to grow the same rate each year. AR4 though says:-
So a great deal of uncertainty, particularly around land fluxes where AR4 says:-
Which is something I've been curious about. If you clear old forest, or scrub, or pasture and plant crops for food or biofuels, does that remove more carbon than just leaving it idle? Or worse, not managing the land properly and letting it burn, thus releasing carbon instead of absorbing it. But quite a bold claim of Tamino to say that all the increase is man-made, and not necessarily supported by evidence.
Which is all by the by, and doesn't explain why the BBC allowed Horizon to air with such a basic error in it. Tamino's cheerleaders naturally ignore the error Horizon made and instead cheer the strawman Tamino made for them, and overlook the uncertanties. Having said that, John Mashey does make an interesting comment at Taminos regarding previous CO2 fluxes:-
"That period is actually a subject of active research, since some think that drop was partially caused by the massive die-off and reforestration in the Americas, ~1550-1625"
Where there are many theories regarding the cause. One interesting one is possibly Spanish and one side effect of clearing land in the Amazon has been to uncover previously unknown, and larger than expected remains of settlements. The largest would probably have had to clear large amounts of land to support their populations. When they died or were relocated, the forest regrew. Personally I'm not convinced that would have been large enough scale to alter climate or global CO2 levels significantly, but clearing the forests again apparently is :p
Josh's cartoon implies that human CO2 is too small to matter. But that's very wrong. The error that the cartoon pushes is far far worse than the error in the Horizon tv program.
Here are four relevant statements:
1. Humans contribute 3% of global CO2 emissions
2. Humans contribute 88% of global CO2 emissions
3. Humans are responsible for the bulk of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 levels
4. Human CO2 emissions are too small to matter
Statements 1 and 3 are true. Statements 2 and 4 are false.
Statement 3 is very important. It's a key fact people should be aware of on the issue of climate change. That makes statement 4 very very bad. Anyone who believes statement 4 is not only going to be wrong on point 3, but is going to completely write off the problem of climate change for an invalid reason. In comparison statements 1 and 2 are just not that important. The take home point is statement 3. Knowing the exact % would only be interesting to someone who wanted to understand the details more.
The crux of the issue is that when statement 1 is made, a lot of people tend to wrongly infer statement 4. Telling someone a fact is counterproductive if it leads them to disbelieve a more important fact.
So while the Horizon program made the error of saying statement 2, the effects of this were minor. Some people might have failed a question in a quiz because of it perhaps, but there's nothing to do with climate change that they've been misled over. If they think as a result of statement 2 that humans are responsible for the bulk of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 levels - well they've gone away with the right key point even if they have the details wrong. The program directly pushed statement 3 anyway if I recall correctly and the whole discussion was very much against statement 4.
On the otherhand the cartoon not only focuses on an error that was minor in consequence, but the cartoon makes statement 1, which is what makes many people end up thinking statement 4. In fact the cartoon is so strong on the matter that it could be considered to be making statement 4 directly.