Bishop Hill Same old New Scientist
Dec 5, 2013 Climate: Sceptics 
Same old New Scientist. Their editorial today is desperately poor stuff, at best demonstrating a comical lack of understanding of the lukewarmer case and at worst deliberately mispresenting it.
[Sceptics] have been emboldened by scientists' acknowledgment that temperatures on the planet's surface have risen less sharply than expected in recent years. The scientists say that's down to natural variability; the doubters say it is a sign that climate change amounts to little more than ignorable, or even beneficial, "lukewarming".
...
But it is misguided to focus only on the temperature of the thin layer of air that we live in. That is just one of many important indicators. In particular, the oceans are warming too: recent research suggests that in the last 60 years the Pacific's depths have warmed 15 times as fast as at any time in the previous 10,000 years.
Leave aside the fact that for years, upholders of the global warming consensus and their supporters in New Scientist focused relentlessly on surface temperatures. Leave aside the fact that people like Pielke Sr who called for a focus on ocean heat content were damned as heretics or the paid mouthpieces of oil companies. Consider instead the fact that the basis of the lukewarmer case is not based on the hiatus in surface temperature rises, it is that climate sensitivity is low. And climate sensitivity calculations take ocean heat content changes into account.
One wonders if the author took the trouble to actually find out what the lukewarmer argument is before criticising it.
Reader Comments (40)
And will this wind be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the earth?
It is revealed as religion. The thin veneer of 'science' has peeled away and all that remains is belief and heresy.
Once more, “climate change”! I could repeat my post from the previous wotsit (thread?) – Green jobs: £1 million each – but won’t. Call it what it is, NS!
Another thing (I’m on a roll!): where are the measurements of the Pacific depths from 60 years ago to make such claims of warming 15 times as fast? Where is the evidence of the historic warming figure that the last 60 years is “15 times as fast as”?
And what evidence do you have for that, NS? “…may have been... is NOT a scientific argument.Well, if even I, a non-scientist with forlorn aspirations for scientific thinking, can find such gaping holes in their argument, why cannot the “scientists” they purport to write for?
Perhaps they do, but fear for their posts should they rock the boat. One can only hope that that is the predominant thinking in the scientific world, and hope that it is a situation that can only be improved.
mmm...we do not even have 10 years of consistent measurements from a statistically reasonable sample of the oceans....so any statements about ocean heat from 60 years ago are just alarmist wank food
I did not get past the idiocy of the first few words.
"Climate sceptics are finding it more difficult..."
On the same day that a new Pew opinion poll shows concern about climate change sinking even lower.
Only 37% think CC is a priority issue, steadily down from 50% a few years ago.
So that's why they're the New Scientist?
Not like the Old Scientist, who depended upon facts.
New Scientist and Scientific American long ago lost all credibility as serious science magazines. Their AGW propaganda
undermines belief in the accuracy of the rest of their content and they both need new Editors in Chief to restore their standing.as objective reporters on scientific matters.
But not the same old New Scientist when Nigel Calder was editor.
Transcript of an old interview
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/inconversation/nigel-calder/3244676#transcript
Noticed the latest New Scientist this lunchtime, when I was in Tesco; it has an article, by features editor Michael Le Page, which is an expanded version of the online editorial. "Climate Slowdown: Is it time to stop worrying over global warming?" The answer came as a complete surprise (not...)
As per the editorial, it mentions the "hiatus", and how sceptics have "seized on it" (oh, how we sceptics love to "seize on" things, by the way - we're just like big puppies!)
In the final paragraph, the article says that although the world "has not warmed as fast as previously" over the last decade, all this talk of a pause is "misleading". It ends:
"I'll be baaack"...
I call New Scientist 'Green News'. It's been like that for many years and gets thinner with every passing year. They're now trying out deceptive headlines on the cover to fool you into looking inside to find it's the same old 'Green News'.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Cover: Climate slowdown: is it time to stop worrying about global warming?
Article: Climate slowdown: the world won't stop warming
One shouldn't. The reaffirming of the narrative is all that counts, reassuring the faithful that everything is all right in their permanently infantilised world.
Examination of facts would only lead us to start being discriminatory between "Correct" and "Incorrect".
Mindless indiscrimination is the thing to aim for.
NS is a crock of s**t, has been for decades. Endless articles on various hypothesised biological bases for altruism, interspersed with even more flimsy - and even less welcome - guff from the likes of Susan Greenfield.
In short, a shabby, ramshackle carnival of innumerate, careerist blaggers.
Much like the catastrophist movement proper, then.
"suggests that in the last 60 years the Pacific's depths have warmed 15 times as fast as at any time in the previous 10,000 years>
60 years worth of data, most of it really, really sparse before 2,000. And all it shows is 1C warming in 600 years.
In other words, the predictions were wrong. I would also prefer it if they changed it from the general "scientists" to something like "IPCC catastrophists".
I used to be a regular reader many years ago.
Picked up a copy 4 years ago - not "a few" that scientific measurement that NS now uses - and couldn't believe my eyes.
It has more in common with the Old Testament, full of prophets wigging on about apocalyptic disasters and miracles.
It reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons, where a lecturer is pointing to the middle of a long equation written on the blackboard. "Smith", he says, "The expression 'something funny happens here' may not be scientifically valid'"
I gave up subscribing to New Scientist years ago and told them at the time I wouldn't read it again until they gave up their climastrology and propaganda. The final straw was when they published a letter by the Green Party Leader, whose name fortunately eludes me (oh no, I've remembered, Caroline Lucas, that well-known English graduate).
New Scientist who have also been known to write articles about perpetual motion machines.
I don't think science is their strong point.
"[Sceptics] have been emboldened by scientists' acknowledgment that temperatures on the planet's surface have risen less sharply than expected in recent years. The scientists say that's down to natural variability"
Hang on, since when was 'natural variability' allowed a role in this drama? Bless my soul, next they'll be saying its the Sun wot done it.
One wonders if the author took the trouble to actually find out what the lukewarmer argument is before criticising it.
No one doesn't, they didn't !!
Phillip
Dr Lucas has been replaced as leader of the Green Party (funny that; I always thought they were some sort of collective and didn't have fascist things like 'leaders' or is that just the Scottish version?) by a Ms Natalie Bennett who has come all the way from Oz to tell us how to do things, as if the UK didn't have enough nutters of its own.
She at least has something that may be a science degree, in Agricultural Science from University of Sydney but it's all downhill from there with a BA in Asian Study 'through' (which implies some form of distance learning, I think) the University of New England and a Master's (wow!) in Mass Communication 'through' the University of Leicester.
Apart from those excursions into academe she has been a journalist in Oz and Bangkok and spent two years as an Australian Volunteer Abroad working in the Office of the National Commission of Women's Affairs (what a surprise!). She's also been writing for the Komment Macht Frei column in the Groanad.
What was that the other day about 'identikit lefties'?
Bish: "Consider instead the fact that the basis of the lukewarmer case is not based on the hiatus in surface temperature rises, it is that climate sensitivity is low."
Scafetta shows it to be, at most, between 1 to 2 degC and why;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5-h9wn3OQ
The myth about 15 times faster warming of the ocean stems from a press release about a recent paper (Yair Rosenthal et al., Science 342, 617 (2013)). As discussed in a post by Steve McIntyre on climateaudit, the statement has no basis in the paper. It shows that the recent 'dramatic' warming of the the deep Pacific (500-900 m) by less than 0.1 deg is dwarfed by the cooling by about 2 deg since the climate optimum early in the Holocene. The directly measured rate of the recent warming is not very different from the gradual warming by about 0.25 deg after the little ice age a few hundred years ago, estimated from the analysis of sediments reported in the paper.
Who are they trying to convince? The article reads like a scientists’ gossip mag, high on press statements but low on facts. If that was the best case I could make for AGW and against sceptics, I’d be ashamed.
I foolishly followed one of the links to the study of forams claiming the oceans were warming faster than at any point in the last 9000 years. That too was curiously short of any kind of journalistic endeavour. There was no attempt to answer the sorts of questions a reader might have. In the same way one could make a case for homeopathy.
Is the New Scientist a tabloid that just reports the salacious headlines and never digs into the truth? Does it always give its subjects an easy ride or does it reserve its indulgence for AGW?
Don’t they realise that one of the main things that make climate science look so crap is its inability to look critically at itself?
Good lord. Former New Scientist editor is a "denier"! In 2007 when it was even less politically correct then now. Everybody should read this.
" heat is still pouring into the oceans"
And bypassing the atmosphere completely! Clever.
I abandoned the New Scientist in early 2009 when it published its infamous map of the world showing the alleged effects of a 4ºC warming. It was clear from the map that the purported changes (UK moving to Mediterranean climate, parts of Antarctica becoming habitable) were consistent with a warming of at least double the 4ºC, well outside the range promulgated by the most pessimistic climate psyentists.
I wrote to complain and did not get a reply, so I cancelled my subscription, as it was clear that like many organisations from the Royal Society to Action Aid they had been hijacked by climate obsessives who cared nothing for the truth. They are clearly not yet in recovery.
Since the middle of the 1980s most writing comrades have increasingly been using the doubleplusgood idiom of Oceania. The prolefeed “New Scientist” is of course already written mostly in newspeak and from 2050 it will use newspeak exclusively. It is impossible to express in newspeak any technical articles written in oldspeak.
The New Anti-Scientist?
The Beano is by far more informative than the (comic) New Scientist
I've noticed that over the last couple of days, the 'storm surge' along the East coast has progressed in BBC- (and Sky-)speak from 'the highest for 60 years' to 'the highest since records began'...
I'm just waiting for one of their presenters to say; 'This is due to global warming'...
Come on, guys - don't disappoint me..!
I have read elsewhere that the Colorado rains were not unprecedented. Also, if I understand Bob Tisdale correctly, the ocean temperatures under the typhoon Haiyan were not unusual at all. Thus when I read the NS editorial it was obvious propaganda.
The NS has always been somewhat lefty in outlook even in my student days in the 60's. It was fun then because I was young and naive but also that political bias wasn't obviously in the articles, just the letters and editorials. I see that AGW® has given lift to the leftward tilt but, probably because I am a bit older, it is ridiculously transparent.
Just to say many thanks to Pharos for the link to the ABC transcript with Nigel Calder - very interesting interview, hadn't seen this one before.
hi, what's the painting called and who did it?
cheers mike
[See here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quentin_Massys_030.jpg]
Perhaps somebody realised that highest in 60 years (actually the first reports said 30 years but it's fair enough to revise as you get new info) implies that it was higher 60 years ago so there's no "getsworse" angle.
Bishop, you said, "One wonders if the author took the trouble to actually find out what the lukewarmer argument is before criticising it." Out of interest, have you or others set out the lukewarmer argument/position somewhere? Or should I just assume it is acceptance of AR5 but with the caveat of low sensitivity?
Chandra,
There has been much discussion of what "the lukewarmer position" is, at Lucia's website. Without necessarily reaching a conclusion, as there seem to be as many shades of grey among lukewarmers as among "full-blooded" warmers.
Here's my version of The Lukewarmer's Credo. I make no claims to speak for the Bishop, or for anyone else for that matter.
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. A higher concentration of CO2, all else being the same, will act to warm the planet by retarding heat loss via radiation. Hence, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real. But it is critical to understand the magnitude of the warming.
2. The sensitivity of the average temperature to a doubling of CO2, usually called climate sensitivity, is relatively modest. Climate sensitivity is often given from the results of running various computerized models. The average of 23 CMIP5 models' transient climate response (TCR) is around 1.8 K (source); a lukewarmer is more likely to believe a value such as to the 1.3 K of Otto et al. 2013. Similarly with equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) -- the multi-model mean is 3.22 K, but the observationally-based value from Otto et al. is about 2.0 K. In a nutshell, the traditional range of sensitivity (from models) is too high by perhaps 50%, and the "long tail" representing the possibility of very high sensitivity (say, > 4.5 K ECS) is a chimera.
3. The effects of global temperature rise have been systematically exaggerated. Speculation about dire increases in tornadoes, hurricanes, extinctions, wars, inundation, etc. have been presented with far more certainty and accuracy than can be justified. Extrapolations of a century or more can not be defended either in terms of the inputs -- AGW aside, how likely is it that our primary energy source will remain fossil fuels for another century, or even a millennium -- or in terms of the knowledge of long-term response of oceans, plants, etc.
4. In summary, AGW represents a cause for concern but not for alarm.
HaroldW,
That pretty much sums up my own position and I don't think it would be too far away from most of the people on this blog. The only (minor) change I would make would be to your point 4. Mine would read: In summary, AGW might represent a cause for concern but not for alarm.
Dec 6, 2013 at 3:23 PM | kellydown
This is waaay off topic but here goes ... :)
Unfortunately for the rabid scaremongers henceforward known as the warmish, the North Sea storm of 31 Jan/1 Feb 1953 was the worst for at least 250 years. It reached a lowest pressure of 966mb (that produces 0.5 metres of sea level rise just due to the inverse barometer) and the accompanying strong northerly winds pushed lots of water towards the funnel of the Dover Strait. It produced a storm surge along the east coast of around 4 metres, varying from 3.28m at Great Yarmouth to 4.67m (over 15 feet - yikes!) at Sheerness.
The recent storm produced a surge of around 2 metres, varying from 1.2m at North Shields to 3.0m at Sheerness. For maximum effect, the surge should occur at the time of year of the highest tides (February) and at the highest state of the tide. Sheerness failed on both counts and the storm surge was only about 60cm higher than a high tide on 6 Nov 2013. Lowestoft fared much worse with a 1.8m difference between the storm surge and a high tide a month previously.
Since flood defences after the 1953 surge were designed to prevent a repeat of the flooding it would have been an indictment of the Environment Agency if any serious flooding had occurred as a result of the recent storm. However much hype is applied to the after effects it was definitely not in the same class as the 1953 storm and it may be a very long time before any storm comes close.
https://support.rms.com/publications/1953_Floods_Retrospective.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_North_Sea_floods
http://www.ntslf.org/numerical-modelling/surge-forecast
PS the last link is where the surge data was obtained. Their model seems to be the bees knees.
Down here we haven't yet seen the likes of 1287
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/mar/07/weatherwatch-great-storms-1287
There was also a hilarious part where the author admitted that the models were all hopeless and tried to brush it aside by telling us all that climate prediction is "difficult - even impossible". Well quite - yet another thing skeptics were proven correct about! However a less hysterical mind might have noticed that all scary warming scenarios come from these selfsame inadequate, pessimistic models, Indeed the very notion that man-made warming can be separated out from natural variability assumed that this natural variability that the author admits caused the pause would have been dominated by manmade gases. Blindingly obviously if natural variation has been underestimated then there is less apparent danger from these manmade gases and no way of telling just how much of the warming is from mankind in the first place. There is no science whatsoever on display at the new scientist - never mind basic logic.