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Jul062012
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Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill A letter to the Economist
Jul 6, 2012 Climate: other Matt Ridley, Benny Peiser and I have a letter in the Economist. You can read it here.
Jul 6, 2012 Climate: other 
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Reader Comments (27)
Even now, I can hear the sound of Bob Ward hammering away at his keyboard....
You see, the numbers don’t matter any more and the science is irrelevant; it’s all about propaganda. While you may be arguing the science, the big green killing machine just concentrates on creating an impression in the public consciousness, even if the impression is totally contradicted by the facts. Facts are irrelevant too.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/polar-bears-going-extinct-yawn/
Pointman
Have they edited the "nonsense" bit out of the original article? I can't see it in the online version.
They have dropped another propaganda poo, while your sifting through the peanuts picking out the bad ones they are crouching further down the road dropping two more piles.
A whole special report on the melting north and you criticize a single word. Pretty much the definition of nit picking wouldn't you say?
For those interested, the PBSG reports are here: http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html
So, Frank, precisely which of the (I counted) 13 points that Montford, Peiser and Ridley made to make their case that polar bear numbers, far from declining, are actually on the increase over the period during which "global warming" is supposed to have decimated them are you disagreeing with?
Can I suggest that instead of just looking at the raw figures on the PBSG site you also look at the individual comments which paint a different picture?
But, hey, we wouldn't want facts to get in the way of a good whinge, Frank, now would we?
[D]amage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard, all prima facie evidence of “thriving”.
Not according to John Bruno, who had this to say on WUWT:
His message didn't go down well. See his further remarks.
TW: The special report had several articles. In one of them, called "Pity the Copepod", was this: "How badly the bears will be hit by global warming is unclear. There is little evidence to support claims of bears drowning as the ice melts, but assertions that they are thriving are also nonsense."
see http://www.economist.com/node/21556804
Mark S: Svalbard is quite different from Hudson Bay. The west coast has always been largely ice free for much of the year.
And Frank, our original letter touched upon more than a few words, but was edited for space. Here it is, together with a further reply I sent to the author after he emailed me. He did not want his email reply published.
James Astill’s special report on the Arctic (http://www.economist.com/node/21556798) appeared in The Economist on June 16th. Together with Andrew Montford and Benny Peiser, I wrote the following letter to the editor.
Your survey of the Arctic exaggerated the bad effects of climate change in a number of ways. Here are three. It reproduced Kaufman et al’s “Arctic hockey stick” graph purporting to show that recent Arctic temperatures are higher than for 2,000 years. Yet this graph has been shown (http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/18/is-kaufman-robust/) to be highly influenced by the use of small samples of tree ring widths from Siberia, where larger samples from the same region show a recent decline in ring widths. Add these larger samples to the graph and the current temperatures become lower than those of the Middle Ages.
You make much of the fact that Greenland might be losing 200 gigatonnes of ice a year yet never mention that this is about 0.7% per century.
As for your statements that polar bears are “struggling” and it is “nonsense” that they are thriving, the data shows no such thing. According to IUCN estimates, polar bear numbers are at least twice as high as in the 1960s (http://www.animalinfo.org/species/carnivor/ursumari.htm). Of the eight populations said to be decreasing, the official data table (http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html) and map (http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/population-map.html#detail) produced by the Polar Bear Specialist Group shows that two are only “thought” or “believed” to be declining entirely due to hunting (Chukchi sea and Lancaster Sound); four are in decline only according to computer models, despite some claims by “traditional ecological knowledge” - locals - that they are thriving (Southern Beaufort, Kane Basin, Norwegian Bay, Baffin Bay); one has more than doubled but is now said be “currently declining” because of “density dependence” - ie, crowding (Davis Strait); and one showed a real decline that has recently been reversed (western Hudson Bay). Meanwhile, the four populations you describe as stable are actually “stable or increasing” and the seven described as unknown include the huge Barents Sea population, which has seen a dramatic increase in sightings, damage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard, all prima facie evidence of "thriving". There is a strong smell of
“policy-based evidence making” here.
Around Svalbard since one of us first visited in the 1970s the population of white whales has increased, walrus numbers have gone up from 100 to 2,600 and barnacle geese from 5,000 to 25,000. Protection from hunting has had and is likely to have a much bigger impact on Arctic wildlife than climate trends. Arctic climate has never been stable anyway.
Matt Ridley
Andrew Montford
Benny Peiser
In response to a further email from the author of the article (which he did not want published), I replied as follows:
Our "fundamental problem" with the report was that we thought it did not give a fair picture, despite my efforts in emails to point you at alternative evidence.
The key point about natural variation in the Arctic climate is not what you say but that it needs to be taken into account in order to distinguish it from man-made change. You say that today's warming is fast by historic standards, but you do not show evidence for that. Yet recent papers show much faster climate change in Greenland in medieval times (4C of cooling in 80 years http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2011/05/vikings) and the temperature data show equally fast warming in the 1930s. Neither of those was caused by CO2.
I am not arguing that current warming is all natural; I strongly suspect not. But I am arguing that seen in its proper context it's not yet drastic or unprecedented, and best fits the no-net-feedback CO2 physics, rather than the treble amplification favoured by the IPCC.
Greenland's ice loss is another example of context. Here are 4 quotes showing that the "quadrupling" you emphasise, though still tiny in percentage terms (what's misleading about pointing this out?), could prove to be temporary and not unprecedented: noise more than signal. Sceptics get castigated for citing 15 years of no temperature change, yet this is a lot shorter.
From Geophysical Research Letters, Kobashi et al 2011 (http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL049444.pdf):
"Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years"
From the Journal of Geophysical Research, Frauenfeld et al 2011 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JD014918.shtml):
"We find that the recent period of high-melt extent is similar in magnitude but, thus far, shorter in duration, than a period of high melt lasting from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The greatest melt extent over the last 2 1/4 centuries occurred in 2007; however, this value is not statistically significantly different from the reconstructed melt extent during 20 other melt seasons, primarily during 19231961"
From Science, Kerr 2009 (http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/01/23/glacier-slowdown-in-greenland-how-inconvenient/):
"So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon. “It has come to an end,” glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off” of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000. An increasingly warmer climate will no doubt eat away at the Greenland ice sheet for centuries, glaciologists say, but no one should be
extrapolating the ice’s recent wild behavior into the future."
From Nature Geoscience Nick et al 2009 (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n2/abs/ngeo394.html):
“Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”
As for the tree-ring study, the study itself is highly controversial, as well as the critiques of it. You could have chosen a less controversial graph like Kobashi's (attached). But it's less alarming.
By the way, it IS the WEST coast of Spitsbergen where the bears are wiping out the island barnacle goose colonies these days and making the hut I used to use uninhabitable. (http://cees.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/Animal_Ecology/Articles/2008/DrentRH-Barnacle/pdf1Drent08.pdf )Why? Because there's now less ice in summer on the west coast? No. There never was much sea ice in summer on the west coast, or at least not since 1596. It's almost certainly because there's more bears and bear food, thanks to the cessation of hunting. Getting stranded on land is indeed a stressful, though common, problem for bears throughout the Arctic and must have been much more common in the likely totally-ice-free Arctic summers of the Holocene Optimum of 5,000 BC. A thriving population can spill into even a marginal habitat.
Mark, you wouldn't be trying to conflate two arguments to prove a point, would you? ;¬) Nah! Course not!
A leap like that could break the logical long-jump record. He's comparing apples with pears. It's not ice graphs that Amstrup, Derocher and Thiemann were modelling; it's polar bears.How far back does your data go on when the Hudson Bay freeze is "supposed" to start? 20 years? 40 years? As far back as the 1930s?
The statement that "the winter freeze-up on Hudson Bay is getting later" may well be correct but so what? The criticism of the Economist article was that it tried to claim that polar bear numbers were in decline and "damage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard ..." are at the very least prima facie evidence that there is no shortage of polar bears in the area! (Which, in case you hadn't noticed is not Hudson's Bay!)
The attempt to link dubious evidence of a decline in the polar bear population with global warming has surely been well and truly debunked by now though the activists still cling desperately to this canard.
Bruno himself admits he does not work on polar bears and — prior to your quote above — he says
As for his assumption that the Inuit are lying in order to avoid further hunting restrictions, that assertion may (or may not) be correct but it is only an assertion.
Is it any wonder that "his message didn't go down well"?
Speaking of polar bears, arctic ice and alarmism ... there's a recent guest post on my blog by Dr. Susan Crockford. She reviews a book by the "grand-daddy" of polar bear research, Ian Stirling's Polar Bears: The Natural History of a Threatened Species, and she concludes:
Of polar bears, polemics and … “climate warming”
Hmm ... I used to read The Economist.
Like the song says, 'In olden days ...(sigh)
Now anything goes ...
I used to subscribe to the Economist too, but no longer do so for reasons like this confirmation bias:
"There is little evidence to support claims of bears drowning as the ice melts, but assertions that they are thriving are also nonsense"
On one side the bears drowning is an evidence-based assessment (later stated to be nonsense) whereas the other argument is adressed as nonsense without reference to evidence.
This could have been written in so many ways, but the choice was clearly to bias towards the warmist story... It is subtle, but sometimes that is the very nature of propaganda.
The problem I have found with the economist is that when I know a lot about a subject that the economist decides to opine on, it is often wrong. Makes me worry about the other 90% on which I used to use the economist for obtaining a view. Now I take the whole magazine with a large pinch of salt.
Never let the facts get in the way of good tear-jerking propaganda. Polar bears are closely related to brown bears and can easily adapt to a slight rise in average temperature, as already shown by their wide distribution.
Gets back to what I keep saying about the big-end-of-towners. These venal people will say they believe anything that looks like contributing to the main chance, which the renewable energy scene illustrates par excellence. There needs to be a middle class revolution to restore decency, honesty and a genuine work ethic to society, values which have been struggling to hold their own against the dominance of the self-serving elites since the 1980s. The obscene senior executive salaries are just one example of Western societies progressively unravelling.
Whatever Margaret Thatcher's undeniable faults, at least her general philosophy was solidly middle-class. Nowadays "a nation of shopkeepers" has become a nation dominated by carpetbaggers, to Britain's great cost. The same malaise of course permeates the entire West.
The letter is spot on. Journalists who promulgate falsehoods to prop up the elitists' status quo need to be called to account.
Hilary, as I posted on your blog, Dr. Crockford suggests dishonesty because one of the graphs in the book extends only to 2007; the book was published in 2011. Dr. C suggests that the author should have plotted recent data too, as that might have shown a different slope in the break-up dates of sea ice. Dr. C suggests extending the curve to 2009 (although the original study from which the graph was plotted was perhaps not done by the book's author, so extending it might be difficult) because she thinks that the break-up date for 2009 will be above the curve and make the situation seem less bad. But she doesn’t actually know or mention the break-up dates for 2008, 2010, 2011 or 2012 and so is indulging in the same data-selection bias of which she accuses the book’s author.
If we look at the Hudson Bay sea ice area (not the same as break-up dates, but surely related) in the following link, we see that 2009 was perhaps different from surrounding years; winter 2010/11 sea ice area was particularly low.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
Accusing someone of lying in order to destroy his reputation in the minds of the public is a well practised ‘sceptic’ attack. The accusation demeans the accuser, Dr. Susan Crockford (although her alleged acceptance of $750 monthly from the Heartland Institute would do that even more).
BitBucket,
Who is lying? Who has written that someone "lies"?
Dr. Crockford says, “Ian Stirling has broken my trust in him as a scientist”. That looks very much like an accusation of dishonesty. How do you interpret it?
Bitbucket, easily, there are many interpretative approaches to that critical book review possible... You think you can break down your cited parts justifiably into: "accusing someone of lying" or "of dishonesty"?
The pseudonymous BB entity fails to note that in response to his comment on my blog, I had pointed out to him:
And I see that the BB entity has now chosen to compound his smears by recycling the smearblog's and Greenpeace's completely irrelevant accusation - which they were able to make courtesy of Peter Gleick's disgusting and disgraceful February Follies and Fabrications which he so kindly and conveniently dropped into their laps.
Yes, Hilary. You also accused me of being illiterate after misreading my posting and, elsewhere, of lying.
So let's see. The good Heartland-sponsored doctor accuses Stirling of:
- deliberately omitting data to strengthen his case;
- biased presentation;
- contortions of fact;
- breaking the reviewer's trust in him;
- attempting to dupe naive readers;
and she also questions "...can Stirling’s professional opinion be trusted as scientifically unbiased...".
And yet somehow you see no accusation of dishonesty?
I see that the the pseudonymous BB entity continues his perpetual moving of goal-posts by accusing me of suggesting that he is "illiterate"; whereas I had made it perfectly clear that it was his reading comprehension skills that his first comment had demonstrated are inadequate.
This does not make him "illiterate" ... but it does incline one to conclude that he's simply a rather pathetic 3rd rate smearing troll, a dutiful little foot-soldier in the oh-so-dedicated army of green-growthers.
As his "comments" in this thread and elsewhere would lead any thinking being to conclude.
Readers will note that the BB entity has provided absolutely no evidence in support of his ludicrous claim that Dr. Crockford is "Heartland sponsored". And he knows it. But that doesn't seem to stop him from recycling this utterly unproven Gleick generated dishonest irrelevance.
What I do see is evidence of you moving the goal-post from your initial false accusation of "lying" and your subsequent attempts to bolster your ill-informed, unoriginal, recycled smear.
Readers will note that - notwithstanding the (presumably) very best efforts of the pseudonymous BB entity (and others of his ilk elsewhere) - Dr. Crockford's review of Stirling's choice to adopt shameless - and shameful - advocacy stands unrefuted.
Dr. Crockford says, “Ian Stirling has broken my trust in him as a scientist”. That looks very much like an accusation of dishonesty. How do you interpret it?
Jul 7, 2012 at 9:45 PM | Unregistered CommenterBitBucket
-------------------------------------------------
I interpret it as meaning that Ian Stirling has broken Dr Crockford's trust in him as a scientist, based on the quote you selected.
It is quite possible to lose your trust in someone for reasons other than dishonesty.
Seems like I hit a nerve and, appart from Johanna, you have no support. But I really don't see why you are so embarrassed. Why does my suggestion that Dr. C accuses the author of lying discomfit you so? So much of the 'sceptic' case is based upon accusations of dishonesty (against individual scientists, universities, politicians, international organisations etc), that the case falls apart without them. What is one more? Moreover, why does a connection with Heartland dismay you so? Would you have refused her guest posting if you had known of it?
Jul 9, 2012 at 3:53 AM | BitBucket
Only in the delusions afforded by your wildest dreams, little bitty-one!
Until you retract - and apologize for - your baseless claim that Dr. Crockford was "lying", you and I have absolutely nothing to talk about.
Furthermore, your utterly pathetic and robotic diversionary harping about any payments that may (or may not) have been made by Heartland says far more about the paucity of your "arguments" (for want of a better word) than it does about anyone who may (or may not) have received such payments.
Those with whom Heartland chooses to contract and those who might agree to perform services for Heartland was absolutely none of Peter Gleick's damn business (or that of the various and sundry "fences" for his stolen goods) ... and it is certainly none of yours!
The sheer ignorance inherent your assumption that for some reason I must have been unaware of those whose names were disclosed as a consequence of Peter Gleick's appallingly unethical behaviours is laughable - if not beyond belief.
As is your failure to acknowledge that such details are completely and utterly irrelevant to the validity of the post on my blog at which you have been so mindlessly and dutifully mis-firing your blanks.
So, why don't you run along, little bitty-one, and go crawl back under your bridge, eh!
But speaking of polar bears (and just so that this comment won't be a complete waste of time) ... there's an interesting piece in a recent issue of the L.A. Times [h/t an E-mail correspondent and Foxgoose via twitter]:
It's just that long experience tells us that Hilary is more than capable of swatting flies so we don't need to waste our time leaping in to help.
¿Qué? I think in your embarrassment you are misreading things. I made no such claim. The issue is the accusations by Dr. C that Stirling is lying. You seem to want to avoid addressing that by pouring insults on me and by talking about Heartland.
BTW, when you run short of new insults, you might try Shakespeare for inspiration. Get thee to a nunnery!
Bitty, you are the one who introduced 'lying' into the discussion - first by claiming that Dr Crockford was accusing Stirling of it (which she never did) and then by implying that Crockford was doing the same thing with her approach to the data (presumably 'lying').
Your pathetic attempts to drag the discussion down into the gutter say a lot more about you than about either of the people involved. You seem to have 'lying' on the brain.
Oh, and my earlier comment wasn't about supporting Hilary, who needs no support when facts are under discussion. It was directed at your absurd comment that if you lose trust in someone as a scientist, that means they are a liar.