Bishop Hill Reading climate articles backwards
Aug 12, 2014 Climate: WG2 It's often said that canny users of financial accounts read them from back to front. Disreputable managers hide the problems away in the last few notes to the balance sheet, out of the view of anyone who chooses merely to glance at the profit and loss account.
This is probably a good approach to newspaper articles about climate change too, Steve Connor's latest offering in the Independent being a case in point. Were you to read only the headline you would come away with the impression that:
Rapid rise in Arctic temperatures to blame for world’s extreme weather
If you chose to delve a little further, however, you would perhaps get a slightly more nuanced impression:
Scientists have linked the rapid rise in Arctic temperatures over the past two decades to weather extremes in the northern hemisphere such as heatwaves in the US and flooding in Europe.
Whereas if you read to the end, you would discover one of the scientists involved putting his cards on the table:
...we have only found a correlation, not a causality and we’d need to do further work to establish this as a cause...
It's fun seeing how far Twitterati got with the paper. I think Leo Hickman only read the headline. He needs to learn to read climate articles backwards.
Bishop Hill
The Independent have changed the title in response to my comments.
Reader Comments (24)
Present Arctic Ice extent looks likely to be higher than 2013 which was much higher than 2012. The reason is that new ice has very little dust, the iron being nutrient for phytoplankton. Few phytoplankton means new ice has little dimethyl sulphide, precursor of cloud condensation nuclei; clouds above the melting ice have high albedo so the ice melts more slowly.
After 30 years or so the dust content of the ice builds up sufficiently to reverse the process. The same happens at the Antarctica and leads to the end of ice ages. There is little or no CO2-AGW.
If I was an author I'd demand a correction as the headline is quite simply wrong. Blame is causality and the specifically said they had not found evidence of causality. Journalist hold themselves and their profession in such high regard - I wonder why that is!
And of course the Arctic temps are not actual but based on nearby temps so DOH
In other words - All the metrics the scientists liked to point at and predict man made catastrophe have dried up except Arctic sea ice depletion. Therefore all weather events of a serious nature have to be linked to the one remaining changing metric. What do they do if the Arctic stabilises and/or grows?
In other news on WUWT, scientists claim the reason their 10,000 year models do not match data is because reality isn't working properly.
When are climate scientists going to admit they don't understand climate?
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim365d.gif
Arctic ice looks a bit thicker than last year.
So a cooling Arctic would be jolly good news then? Pure opportunist bunkum! When the ice age scare of the 70's (from fossil fuels of course) was the trendy cause-celebre they said wiilder weather was more likely with a colder planet, which at least had the virtue of agreeing with both the textbooks and with history.
Bish I read this article backwards. Made no sense at all. Have you thought of changing sides?
Steve Connor isn't interested in balanced reporting. He's a propagandist. Check his back-stories in the Indy and prepare to be astonished. His 'reporting' is a disgrace.
It is also useful to look at who commissioned the paper. All papers reflect the biases of the writers and publishers.
The word 'blame' has been expunged. 'Linked' is used instead. No one will ever know he was being misleading. Do you have a screenshot or cache of the original?
I hope a knuckle rapping was issued too.
That is the same for all headlines in all newspapers
What data shows a rapid rise in Arctic temperatures in the last 2 decades? Show me the data. I have looked e.g.
http://clivebest.com/world/Map-data.html
and apart from a few mild years in the late 90s in a few Arctic stations there is no unusual or unprecedented rapid temperature rise. And that is despite Hansen's best efforts to cool the past and warm the present in Iceland and other Arctic areas, and despite UHI which is highly significant in Arctic settlements - e.g. Barrow, Alaska - http://www.cas.umt.edu/geography/documents/Hinkel_etal_2003_winter_UHI.pdf
If there has been a rapid rise in temperatures, show me the data, and preferably raw data for specific stations, and not from extrapolated grids or adjusted datasets.
For example the evidence suggests that Alaska has actually been cooling for the last 10 years:
The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska
http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toascj/articles/V006/111TOASCJ.pdf and http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3C4045%3ATETWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Steve O'Conner is not a journalist, like Geoffrey Lean, Rob Edwards, Richard Black etc, he is just another an environmental activist, who for some reason is allowed to masquerade as a journalist and spin his alarmist agenda.
Found the cached article here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcache.nevkontakte.com%2Fproxy.html#!go/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fenvironment%2Frapid-rise-in-arctic-temperatures-to-blame-for-worlds-extreme-weather-9662364.html
Not really an improvement to preface the Independent's new headline with "Global warming: ....".
Not having worked in the industry, I'm always curious about who gets paid more: The journalist who writes an article full of exaggerated claims, or the headline writer who takes those claims and doubles them?
Excellent advice. While Arctic ice may or may not be getting thicker, environmental journalists definitely are.
Interesting that the diagram in that article about warming the Jet Stream and standing waves was, according to reports linked by Steve Goddard, in 1975 linked to global cooling.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/1975-deep-dips-in-the-jet-stream-were-blamed-on-global-cooling/
".....read them from back to front. ...... articles about climate change too ...."
Mandatory for BBC Sci/Env 'reports', especially by Mat McDoom:
"'Weedy thing' thrives as Antarctic shores warm." Buried in para6 is the acknowledgement that the event was monitored in one bay, on an island off the mainland. That bay had a shoreline of approx 23 miles, compared with Antarctica’s 11,165 mi or so of coastline.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27831958
I thought the more shallow the temperature gradient between tropics and poles the less extreme weather we could expect.
Or are we in Humpty-Dumpty ("when I use words ...") land here? Alice in Wonderland, almost certainly.
As usual, one has to read the actual paper rather than the press coverage to find out what the authors have really concluded. But even the actual paper is playing fast and loose to increase the apparent significance of the findings.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/08/06/1412797111.full.pdf+html
They have not found a correlation between arctic warming and extreme events - at least not in any statistical sense. They note that "Since the onset of rapid Arctic amplification around 2000, a cluster of resonance circulation regimes is observed" and this is the sole basis for the "correlation". This is shown in Figure 2. However they could equally well have concluded that the increase since 2000 was correlated with the change-over in the PDO at that time. As the PDO is a multi-decadal phenomenon it would seem to me to be a much better explanation. In the Discussion in the paper they admit the weakness of their subsequent conclusions!
"Much more detailed analysis would be needed, including numerical modeling experiments, to unravel the direction of causality: Is Arctic amplification really the driver behind dynamic changes or do dynamical changes have a strong effect on Arctic warming? This will be challenging since current general circulation models appear to be deficient in reproducing aspects of the summer jet climatology..."
Once again, climate scientists and journalists are colluding to amplify the "message" whether they are aware of the collusion or not.
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I'm reminded of the old joke that corporate financial reports are like bikinis:
What the reveal is interesting; what they conceal is vital!
"...we have only found a correlation, not a causality"
per this website ...www.tylervigen.com... the correlation between per capita consumption of margarine in the USA and the divorce rate in Maine is 0.9925. I guess we need to get some mathematical modellers on that right away.
As for recent heatwaves in the US, apart from regional ENSO effects where were these alleged heat waves? Here in central VA we've been having noticeably cooler summers for the past decade or so..
To properly assess the use of "consistent with", try it out substituting "only consistent with". That is a falsifiable assertion with some teeth.