The new adventures of Trufflehunter

Not content with taking a pasting on his knowledge of state of the art climate science, Hot Topic's Gareth Renowden is trying to have his cake and eat it too: he accuses me of using "Multiple Untruth" tactics, which is the assertion that so many untrue facts are put into play that it is impossible for someone to meaningfully respond.

Well, hello, Truffle, newsflash: Air Con is a book. At more than 100,000 words it is not insubstantial, but nor is it Winston Churchill's diary of the war years. I didn't ask you to review it. If you can't get your head around the fact that a book on global warming must, of necessity, cover a multitude of factors then frankly you shouldn't review anything more complex than a tome on truffle recipes.

If you want real multiple untruths, look no further than most titles by global warming believers, especially those relying on the UN IPCC.

However, it's particularly rich to then complain that I should be forced to answer every misleading assertion you make – isn't that just hiding behind your own multiple untruths in drag? Why should I waste my precious time knocking down your badly-researched straw men?

Anyone who really wants to see how dishonest your review was can simply pick up and read Air Con, and they'll very quickly see how Hot Topic is full of Hot Air.

However, let's illustrate that your knowledge of climate science continues to be less than cutting edge, by acceding to your demand and tackling just a couple more of your assertions. You suggested my book's rejection of CO2 as a major player in Arctic warming was wrong, and you quoted this in support:

Since publication of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment in 2005, several indicators show further and extensive climate change at rates faster than previously anticipated. Air temperatures are increasing in the Arctic. Sea ice extent has decreased sharply, with a record low in 2007 and ice-free conditions in both the Northeast and Northwest sea passages for first time in recorded history in 2008.

Assertion one, temperatures are increasing in the Arctic and CO2 is the culprit (implied, given you've quoted it in support of your position on CO2). Really, Truffle? Most of the rest of us know the Arctic is warming in some areas and cooling in others, which the GCMs have been unable to predict or explain, leading many scientists to suspect regional climate trends, not a global one caused by CO2. Lo and behold, even NASA GISS is starting to concede the point:

From Universe Today, Nancy Atkinson

Since the 1890s, surface temperatures on Earth have risen faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the world. Usually, discussions on global warming tend to focus on greenhouse gases as the culprit for the trend. But new NASA research suggests about half the atmospheric warming measured in the Arctic is due to airborne particles called aerosols.

Aerosols are emitted by both natural and human sources. They can influence climate by reflecting or absorbing sunlight. The particles also affect climate by changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity. There is one type of aerosol that, according to the study, [reduces] rather than increases in its emissions seem to have promoted warming.

The research team, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies used a computer model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.

They found that Earth's middle and high latitudes are particularly responsive to changes in aerosol levels. The model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 % or more of the warming measured in the Arctic since 1976.

Leaving aside the first hurdle, that cars and factories weren't a problem when Arctic warming began in the 1890s, once you factor this GISS study in, the warming of the Arctic becomes far less impressive vis a vis the rest of the planet. Incidentally, on pages 132 and 133 of Air Con, you would have seen the comments of leading geophysicist Syun Akasofu who noted that rising CO2 and GHGs could not produce simultaneous arctic warming alongside substantial Greenland and Siberia cooling:

"It took a week or so before we began to realize another possibility of this discrepancy: If 14 GCMs cannot reproduce prominent warming in the continental arctic, perhaps much of this warming is not caused by the greenhouse effect at all," wrote Akasofu.

"Therefore, our conclusion at the present time is that much of the prominent continental arctic warming and cooling in Greenland during the last half of the last century is due to natural changes, perhaps to multi-decadal oscillations like Arctic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the El Niño."

Of course, you read this in the book, but you didn't engage your brain before writing your "review". You cherry picked a conclusory paragraph on the subject from my book, as if that was the epitome of the evidence I offered. Again, you were being either deliberately dishonest, or stupid, or both. Either way, it's your credibility on the line now and if the rapid rise of these pages up the Google rankings is any indication people looking you up for months to come will see your ignorance laid bare.

Assertion two, sea ice extent has decreased sharply. Pathetic. According to the latest May 2009 graph from NSIDC, Arctic sea ice is fast approaching the 1979-2000 average for the first time:

 

Assertion three, the Northwest Passage opened up in 2007. Well, yes it did. And in 2000, and in 1944 when the St Roch "returned to Vancouver via the more northerly route of the Northwest Passage, making her run in 86 days." [page 58 of Air Con]. But what was it all you AGW believers were calling it in 2007? Oh, that's right, "unprecedented" [Robin McKie in the Observer, quoted at page 59 of Air Con]

Assertion four, Polar Bears. You say:

"They are very vulnerable to further loss of sea ice"

Based on the above graph I wouldn't be making any more claims about vanishing sea icea and polar bears if I were you. The wide extent of one and two year ice is good for the bears, but they can't break through thicker multiyear ice. I quote this from page 123 of Air Con, sourced from a US Fish and Wildlife Service study on polar bears (and cited in the book), where it says too much ice is bad for bears:

"In the southern Beaufort Sea heavy ice conditions in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s caused significant declines in productivity of ringed seals (Stirling 2002). Each event lasted approximately three years and caused similar declines in the natality of polar bears and survival of subadults, after which reproductive success and survival of both species increased again.

"In the Viscount Melville Sound area," notes the report, "ringed seals occurred at lower densities than in most other areas of polar bear habitat from Alaska east to West Greenland, possibly because there is greater proportion of multi-year ice in this area, which is less preferred by ringed seals."

The good news is, according to the FWS report, is that the bears can adapt to what nature throws at them:

"The fluctuating sea-ice condition in regions like the Beaufort Sea or Baffin Bay, however, may require modifications of foraging strategy from month to month or even day to day during break-up, freeze-up, or periods of strong winds (Ferguson et al. 2001). Polar bears are adaptable enough to modify their foraging patterns for the extreme range of sea-ice scenarios (Ferguson)."

Funny how you forgot to reference that inconvenient fact in your attempted slap-down of the book. Or this:

"There aren't just a few more bears, there are a hell of a lot more bears" – Dr Mitch Taylor, polar bear biologist, Canadian Arctic. [Air Con, page 124]

Gareth, words can't begin to describe how devoid of substance your review of Air Con was. With the credibility you have left by the time I've finished with you, your blog will be populated solely by tumbleweeds and die-hard Green supporters with their fingers in their ears going, "we can't hear you!"

Moving onto Antarctic warming. You selected a portion of my conclusion, and then added your own take on it:

Antarctic warming

While the North Pole has been shedding some ice, satellite measurements suggest the great southern continent has been gaining it, except for one portion — the Antarctic Peninsula and the adjacent West Antarctic ice sheet. There can be no denying that temperature readings on the peninsula show a gradual warming since the 1940s…

Some "portion"! The West Antarctic ice sheet contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 6 - 7 metres if it all melted. The satellite data (not just the single paper he cherry-picks, but the balance of all the evidence) show that Antarctica is losing ice mass overall, and suggest that the rate of loss is increasing. And that "gradual" warming on the Antarctic Peninsula is actually the fastest warming seen anywhere on the planet — a full 2.5ºC over 50 years. If that warming happened in New Zealand, it would be like moving Invercargill up to Auckland.

Now, what did I say in the book?

There's certainly enough ice there to cause some problems – at more than a mile thick the West Antarctic sheet, if it melted, could raise global sea levels between 2.5 and five metres, or 8 to 16 feet.

As for your comment on the satellite data regarding ice mass, you and I both know (well, to be fair, I know but I'm not sure about you), that until this year there hasn't been a satellite capable of mapping the coldest central areas of Antarctica. You have misled your readers by clinging to Steig's 2009 assertion of the overall warming over 50 years, when we all know, and even the Steig/Mann paper admits, that we don't have evidence of overall warming since 1980. Here's what I wrote in the book (that you omitted to mention):

But Mann's study actually shows East Antarctica cooled from the late 1970s through the 1990s, and satellite measurements over Antarctica don't reveal any warming since 1980. According to a recent University of Bristol study reported in ScienceDaily, "the ice mass in East Antarctica has been roughly stable, with neither loss nor accumulation over the past decade." [the cites for these studies are listed in the book.]

And here's what global warming believer Peter Doran (you must know him, surely?) said in 2002 in Nature:

"Antarctica overall has cooled measurably during the last 35 years – despite a global average increase in air temperature of 0.6C during the 20^th century…Our 14 year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7C per decade…"

Not, just to make it perfectly clear, a decrease of 0.7C per century, but per decade! Doran reminded Nature readers that warming in Antarctica was largely confined to "between 1958 and 1978". No wonder Steig et al chose a start date of 1957, so they could include the warm period to boost the average and try to scare the punters with the help of sock puppets like Trufflehunter.

Memo to Hot Topic, Public Address and DimPost readers: Antarctica hasn't warmed overall since 1980, it is dropping in temperature and continuing to do so.

Don't believe me? Here's another comment from Peter Doran, this time in 2006, also quoted in the book:

"Cooling…is still going on today…We also went out and looked at what's been going on continent wide. We teamed up with John Walsh, now at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who does more large scale climate measurements, and we showed that the entire continent – about 60% of it – has, over the past 30 years, been cooling." [Source, cited in Air Con]

Most of the recent Antarctic "melt" can be put down to one hot summer earlier this decade – a natural regional weather influence, not CO2 related.

West Antarctica is not melting "uncontrollably" either. It is still around 40 degrees below zero on average. Many studies attribute its glacial and ice shelf calving to regional weather systems like the oscillations and the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave, all of which deliver warmer sub-tropical currents down to lick the undersides of the ice. All of which are natural. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is a speck on the buttocks of the Antarctic that is utterly meaningless in the great scheme of things, and indeed the total loss of ice shelves from the Antarctic is an area roughly the size of Connecticut if I recall correctly.

I could go on, and on, but I don't see why I should bear the burden of disproving your half-baked schoolboy science masquerading as genuine informed comment on climate change. I've illustrated here that Gareth Renowden's credibility on climate change, based on his Air Con review, is non existent.

Go for it Truffle, crawl back to your den and think carefully before launching ad-hom attacks on me again. I have never mentioned you prior to publishing this book and you getting stuck into me. I didn't take a crack at a fellow kiwi author in Air Con for the sake of gaining brownie points, although Lord knows it would have been easy enough based on what we've now seen. But instead, someone I've never met and who's never ventured to ask a question of me starts off by publicly labelling me a "crank", implying I am either "misguided, malicious, or malignant", that I may be mentally unhinged and that I have done no research beyond looking at sceptic sites, "Sadly, the only evidence he seems to have followed is to be found on sceptic web sites around the world." By introducing allegations of "multiple untruths" into your mix, you are also branding me a liar, which is defamatory and a point on which I am still mulling over.

You failed to note that the Index compilation of peer-reviewed scientific studies quoted in the book runs to nearly three columns (somewhere in the region of a hundred specific studies from memory, and the list is not exhaustive.

All this because I dared to publish a book that challenges your perception of climate change and your blog's dislike of the public getting to hear an alternative viewpoint. (see my earlier critique regarding Quasimodo's dismay at Waikato Uni permitting a public address by a climate sceptic.) It's because of bogus claims by websites like yours that otherwise good people like John Hudson believe in human-caused global warming and fall into the terrible trap he found himself in last Sunday. For heaven's sake, you even blogged uncritically in the wake of that TVNZ debacle on the Takuu "sea level rise" and the "5C sea temperature increase" without stopping for a second to consider it might be tectonic/volcanic in origin (an area incidentally I covered in the book but which was evidently over your head).

You know, or you should know that no sea temperatures are rising 5C because of Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and you know, or should know, that the Argos project has found no warming from its 3000 robots scattered through the world's oceans. Did none of this ring any alarm bells in your head on Sunday evening as you blogged so enthusiastically about the programme?

As for everything else, if you can dish out the names and the snaky, sneering prose, you can take it. Stop complaining.

One final point: you commenced your "review" with this:

"I hardly know where to begin with this book. It appears to come from another planet; it has a view of the world so far removed from the reality that most of us operate in "

Russell Brown at Public Address was under the misapprehension that you'd given me a "disembowelling". Gareth, after what I've now shown you couldn't organise a disembowelling in a Hari-kari class, and quite frankly Air Con is closer to Planet Reality than anything you've written.

Have a nice day. :)

Comments

[AcidComments]

They don't bother to take note of the fact the Glaciers in parts of Alaska have grown for the first time in nearly 200 years recently though do they.

Plus the amazing rapid regrowth of Arctic Sea-Ice in recent years after a summer melt. From memory about 64,000 square KMs regrow back after one such melt. This was considered 'stunning' amongst members in the scientific Community. It wasn't supposed to happen!

They don't take into account for the last couple of Antarctic Seasons. They've had to bring in extra Ice-breakers because of the record levels of sea-ice down there!

Found it laughable in early March when there was a news item on TV1 about an aerial photographic survey of snow coverage on the ranges, etc in the South Island. They were prattling on about it was 'supposedly' the worst summer snow melt loss.

The very next day for the next 4 days it was snowing down to 400-500metres in Canterbury, Otago & Southland!

[ScooterL]

I'm ready to call it: Wishart wins by a knockout in the second round, Hot Topic blog down for the count, and I predict their followers will now make all sorts of excuses as to why Gareth, who picked the fight, should now run away and refuse to debate further..anyone wanna take a wager?

[Alex]

You know what scares me?

The fact that Gareth made such a bald statement about vanishing Arctic sea ice, when Ian was able to put up that NSIDC graph showing the opposite.

How can Hot Topic get away with such blatant dishonesty, or is it just that they don't research things very well, like Ian suggests?

[Ian]

Well, well well. The baying of Tim and others suggesting I'd failed to fully address Truffle's concerns appears to have abated.

Yes, Alex, I couldn't believe Gareth tried to convince people Arctic ice is vanishing.

My take on it is that Hot Topic is drawing on filtered analysis via RealClimate, ClimateProgress and other global warming belief sites, and regurgitating that material.

In contrast, Air Con draws on the latest scientific data, not just documents from lobby organisations.

And my overall point about Air Con, now proven I guess, is that it truly is the most up-to-date precis of the global warming debate available in the world at this time.

[Tim]

I do believe Gareth has already replied on his own blog.

[AcidComments]

I see TV3 finally lost it's impartiality and become a recruiter for the big fraud Al Gore, re Campbell live tonight.

MSM just love's to push sensationalist tripe!