Top 10 global warming myths exposed

A local NZ monthly community newspaper published an opinion piece by one "Green blogger" Thomas Everth, known to frequent this blog, on global warming. He was kind enough to take a crack at me in dispatches and a reader brought it to my attention. I'll ignore Thomas' cheap jibes and instead concentrate on his opening gambit. This is what I've asked the newspaper to consider publishing in reply.

In a blatant effort to mislead and scare your readers, Green blogger Thomas Everth makes more errors in the first 200 words of his recent global warming diatribe than I have made in my last three books totalling around 400,000 words.

Let's look at them, shall we?

1. "One would think that in the face of: visibly vanishing Arctic ice Caps…"

In fact, after hitting a record low extent in 2007 caused mainly by wind patterns blowing ice into warmer waters, Arctic sea ice has grown significantly in coverage since 2007, even exceeding the 30 year average it is measured against. "Visibly vanishing"? I don't think so.

1. "…the break up of huge Antarctic ice shelves,"
   

Actually, the "huge" ice shelves amount to less than a fraction of one percent of Antarctica's area, and they're in an area hit by warmer ocean currents than the rest of the ice continent. Furthermore, a string of recent scientific studies show the area has been even warmer in the past one thousand years than it currently is, naturally. Hardly the stuff of nightmares.  

1. "…methane bubbling melting permafrost,"
   

This is one of the favourite scare stories of Everth and some others, particularly those who frequent the local Chicken Little website Hot Topic, run by a South Island truffle grower. I was therefore amused when NIWA recently rubbished the idea of a major threat from methane hydrates. They had to rubbish it, because scientific data suggests the methane stores are actually highly stable. The permafrost was 30% warmer in the 1930s than it is now (naturally, again), but we did not all vanish in a methane explosion.

1. "…vanishing glaciers,"

As the US National Science Foundation and others have well documented, glaciers and ice sheets have much longer response times (thermal lag) to warming or cooling than you'd think. Big glaciers, for example, can take up to a thousand years to show serious effects from a warmer climate, and big ice sheets can take up to tens of thousands of years, according to the US NSF (details in the book Air Con). All of which means that the melting we are seeing now is a delayed reaction to warming that took place between a hundred and a thousand years ago. I would remind readers that the warming that took place back then was entirely natural, as the knights of old were not driving SUVs.

[Addendum: Seeing as Hot Topic keep misconstruing this, a little elaboration on response time might be useful. A recent report on the Himalayan glaciers states this:

"The report highlights that glaciers are complex and that terminus fluctuations are the result of complex processes, with a time lag in response."

And this:

" The discussion appears to assume that under the same warming rate the terminus retreat rate should be constant. This is incorrect."

And this:

"The estimates of the response time of Indian glaciers are incorrect. The response times for sub-tropical glaciers lie in the time frame of decades to a century, depending among others on the size of the glacier. (The suggested response times of 6000 and 15 000 years may have some relevance for large ice sheets such as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, but not for mountain glaciers)

And this:

"The response time is the time taken to reach a new steady state after climatic perturbation, in other words, the time taken until the snout reaches its new position in the new climatic situation. The immediate changes in snout position reflect the reaction time, the time taken to see any change in a glacier in response to a perturbation. The reaction time for small glaciers may be as short as a few years, longer for larger glaciers. The report attempts to compare the terminus fluctuation with contemporary meteorological data year-for-year over a period of ten years. This contradicts both the assumption in the report that response times are of the order of millennia, and also fails to take into account any lag time at all.

"The report also attempts to use average glacial speed as a measure of glacial response time. The time taken by ice deposited in the accumulation area to reach the snout indicates the average speed. For the Gara glacier, as an example, this is suggested to be 300 years, giving an average speed of 10 m per year. But this is not a direct indicator of response time and even less of reaction time."

The point I was making in Air Con and here is that glaciers do not melt on a dime, they take a long time in many cases. Renowden has tried to claim that NZ's Tasman has reacted rapidly in the last couple of decades to AGW, whereas in his ignorance he overlooks the long response time the Tasman has to 150 or more years of warming. The rapid change of the last two decades was built on the slower change already eating away at the glacier.

1. "…heat waves,"
   

Everth conveniently forgets to include the balancing factor for heatwaves: cold spells. As many of your readers are now aware, the Northern Hemisphere has been hit by another brutal icy winter, even bigger than last year's record breaker. In December alone nearly 900 snowfall records in US towns and cities were broken or tied, and temperatures were 15 degrees below average in some areas. As a matter of factual record, more people die from the cold than in heat waves.

1. "…record bush fires"
   

Your correspondent refers to the Australian bush fires, but readers of Air Con who've seen the chapter on those fires will recall that Australian temperatures are not fuelled by CO2 but by hot seasonal winds blown in from the central desert. (same problem in California and vulnerable parts of the US) It is a matter of factual record, again, that last summer's 'record' temperatures were no different to those measured in the great fire of 1851 – a blaze ten times larger than the 2009 killer fires in Victoria. The death toll in Victoria, incidentally, was far higher than 1851 because of a daft resource management bylaw introduced by Green councillors that prevented homeowners from cutting down vegetation close to their homes. Hence, when the blazes hit, houses burnt to the ground.

1. "…the last decade being the hottest on record ever,"
   

Sounds impressive, except that technically 'ever' means only in the past 30 years, which is how long we've had satellite coverage of the planet. So really what Thomas is saying is that the last decade was the hottest of the last three decades. But as he didn't tell you, there's been no statistically significant warming at all over the past ten years, which is why one of the world's top climate scientists, Kevin Trenberth got so hot under the collar in the Climategate emails where he wrote:

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't".

Green blogger and lobbyist Thomas Everth says one thing, climate scientist says, admittedly through gritted teeth, something quite different in implication.

1. "…new records for ocean temperatures broken in 2009,"

Well, there have been big lows in the past 24 months compared with the past couple of decades as well, so on balance, not such a big deal. As Thomas would be the first to acknowledge, short term fluctuations are not hugely meaningful. The only reason ocean temperatures were higher this year was because of the naturally occurring El Nino. Much more detail on this topic can be found in Air Con.

 

1. "…ocean acidity increasing fast"
   

Not technically true either. The oceans are alkaline. What is happening is a tiny decline in alkalinity as the result of higher CO2 levels, but there is not actually enough surplus CO2 around at present to physically turn the oceans acid. What is probably much more significant, however, is a new peer reviewed study in the journal Science which shows overfishing could be a far bigger reason for declining alkalinity in the oceans.

That's because the study found up to 45% of the alkaline substance calcium carbonate in the oceans is actually produced by fish, which was not previously known, and when we take away the fish by excess fishing, we lower the alkalinity of the oceans.

"They have discovered that fish contribute a significant fraction of the oceans' calcium carbonate production," reported the study authors, "which affects the delicate pH balance of seawater. The study gives a conservative estimate of three to 15 percent of marine calcium carbonate being produced by fish, but the researchers believe it could be up to three times higher."

In other words, like the sinking islands example above, humans may indeed be hurting the oceans, but because of overfishing, not because of rising CO2 emissions.

1. "With CO2 concentrations shooting up to pass 400ppm soon, we have entered a territory of Earth's atmospheric composition not seen for millions of years – CO2 having stayed at or below 280 ppm during those millions of years."
   

Er, not strictly true either. Recent studies have found global warming scientists 'cherry picked' only the CO2 readings from the past that suited their low 280ppm starting point. In fact, readings over the last 200 years suggest CO2 levels have averaged around 335ppm, and as high as 500ppm in some areas. Why is this significant? Because if you choose a low starting point, say 280, and you can show we've risen to 380 today, then that's a big rise in CO2 levels. But if the starting point was really 335, then the increase is nowhere near as big, and that would be "inconvenient" for the human impact on global warming argument that Thomas is running.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favour of greener technology and less harmful waste and pollution. But don't get fooled into believing CO2 is the problem. The emissions trading scheme will make multinational fat cats extremely wealthy, and Green lobbyists who are investing in those industries will benefit financially as well. But it will do nothing to change the climate, and nothing to clean up rivers and streams or the land generally.

Comments

[Rob Taylor]

Ian ya drongo. I know you'd love to change the subject, throw in some mumbo-jumbo and a vague appeal to authority - special knowledge denied we ordinary mortals - and hope to keep the rubes guessing which shell the pea is under, but here is your claim regarding glacier melt:

"the melting we are seeing now is a delayed reaction to warming that took place between a hundred and a thousand years ago."

So, we warm up some ice and, some time later, it starts to melt?

Wrong, glaciers respond the way your fridge responds, to the current thermal environment. Ice has no "memory" of long-ago summers, just as your car has no memory of previous trips to the supermarket!

Gareth has highlighted your intellectual errors, let me briefly address your ethical failings; IMHO, you are the epitome of the fundamentalist businessman - one who prays on his knees every Sunday, then spends the rest of the week preying on the gullible...

[Ian Wishart]

You and Chicken Little are being a trifle obtuse.

Delayed reaction is set against the context in Air Con. It is not that the ice warmed in the year 1066, held its breath for 800 years and suddenly melted. That's Gareth's caricature of the argument.

From page 209 of Air Con:

"Hard as it may be to comprehend, most glaciers don't turn on a dime, retreating or advancing depending on this year's weather. The melting we are seeing today is not related to current CO2 emissions or human induced global warming...

"The largest NZ glaciers are shrinking overall, as a direct result of the warming that pulled the planet out of the Little Ice Age. Those glaciers have however not yet retreated to their pre-LIA levels."

Wanna challenge me on that?

Read the rest of the book, read it in context, then slap yourself for being an atheist fundamentalist, and slap yourself once more for following Gareth's strawmen in the gullible way you always do.

Meh!

[Fred Dagg]

Ian, I will certainly challenge any empty assertions of fact without supporting evidence, as that is mere superstition and ideology, not science.

"The melting we are seeing today is not related to current CO2 emissions or human induced global warming...The largest NZ glaciers are shrinking overall, as a direct result of the warming that pulled the planet out of the Little Ice Age..."

You make this claim against the instrumental evidence for AGW, backed up by basic radiative and thermodynamic principles known since the 19th century, themselves arising from the science of quantum mechanics which is fundamental to our modern economy.

If you have a coherent competing body of theory and evidence to that, then you are a genius unlike any that have ever lived - except you aren't, as you have already demonstrated that simple physical concepts are beyond your grasp.

I find it amusing that you promulgate this crap via your computer and the internet, given that, in your faith-based world, such technologies could not exist.

Stick to the religious tracts, Ian - at least until you've done Physics 101 and read the IPCC report...

[Rob Taylor]

testing... testing... had some problems posting the above under my own name, hopefully now resolved

[Ian Wishart]

Paranoid, and now schizophrenic?

First step to recovery is admitting you've had problems, so that's a good sign Rob.

Now, would this be the same IPCC report described by a co-ordinating lead author, Dr Phillip Lloyd, thus:

"The summary goes out in a blaze of publicity, but there is no means of checking whether it represents what the scientists actually said, because the scientific report isn’t published for another four months or more.

"In the Fourth Assessment, the summary was quietly replaced several months after it was first published because some scientists who were involved complained of misrepresentation.

"It isn’t necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policy makers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay."

I'll deal with the rest of your rubbish when I get back from my meeting.

In the meantime, if your are indeed having name problems, you should probably stick with Dagg - you're a real comedian. :)

[Rob Taylor]

Those unfortunates who are your intended audience, Ian, probably do not realise that the science in the IPCC reports is WATERED DOWN by the "policy makers" (e.g. such governments as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).

Here is a similar quote to yours, sent to me by LaRouche conspiracist whack jobs (friends of yours?):
"The process used to produce the Summary for Policymakers is far from ideal and may be distorting the real messages from the available science. Some government delegates influencing the SPM do not understand the methodologies being used and misinterpret or contradict the lead authors.ˇ
Dr. Martin Manning, IPCC Vice Chair of IPCC Working Group II on Impacts until 2002, and currently Vice Chair of IPCC Working Group 1 on the Science of Climate Change.

[Rob Taylor]

"I'll deal with the rest of your rubbish when I get back from my meeting."

Off to confession, are we? Here's something for your fans to to read while we await your bold new theory of everything:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31633524/the_climate_killers/print

[CM]

Ian, I'd be interested in reading your response to:

http://hot-topic.co.nz/oops-he-did-it-again/

Ideally it won't involve cherry-picking (ignoring the balance of evidence in favour of some obscure study result you've managed to dig up) or simply 'Read Con-Air'.

[Let it be warm]

I'm still laughing!
Empirical observations (aka facts) have proven the models are wrong. The system stabilises itself. The oceans aren't rising nor are they acidifying.
People die from cold, stop advocating that we must make the earth colder.

[CM]

>>>Empirical observations (aka facts) have proven the models are wrong.<<<

Could critique this for me then please?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

Where is it fundamentally flawed?

>>>The system stabilises itself.<<<

AT which point does it 'stabilise'? The PETM alone suggests that's not right.

>>>The oceans aren't rising nor are they acidifying.<<<

Those are both nonsense, as any objective assessment of the available literature would tell you.

[Steve Netwriter]

CM,

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't.
The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_c
urrent.ppt
Kevin

It appears to have been in an email.

Do you wish to retract your reply?
Steve

[Rob Taylor]

Gosh, are you boys still hiding out in the toilets with those saucy-looking emails?

Get a life, guys - for a start, try actually reading the email (get a grown-up to help you with the big words) - once you've managed that, you could try reading the PUBLISHED PAPERS Trenberth references.

[CM]

>>>Do you wish to retract your reply?<<<

Not at all Steve. As Rob says, there are rather massive clues in the email. That will take you somewhere else where you can then determine what he's actually talking about. It's really not difficult.

This explains it in simple terms: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Understanding-Trenberths-travesty.html

But I'd advise you to investigate yourself.

[Rob Taylor]

"I'll deal with the rest of your rubbish when I get back from my meeting."

Gosh, Ian, it must have been a long meeting - or do you have to wait until it's Monday in the US?

I expect that you're waiting for someone more knowledgeable than yourself, who can stick their hand up your skirt and pretend to respond.

Be that as it may, I really look forward to your new theory of quantum physics...

[Ian Wishart]

Actually Rob, I spent some considerable time in a hospital waiting room getting my daughter's finger checked, and then had other work to catch up on.

You said:

"You make this claim against the instrumental evidence for AGW,"

Excuse me? There's evidence of a warming trend that began in the late 1700s and continues to this day. Your attempt to definitively state it is anthropogenic goes against the IPCC AR4, which said it could only detect a possible human signature post 1970.

Stop making stuff up Fred.

I'm presuming the "instrumental record" you refer to is this one, which Pachauri claims is "totally consistent with" all the other databases the UN uses:

“I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

"So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option - to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don't think people care enough to fix 'em"

Anyone who wants to see for themselves how good the world's instrumental record is need only have a read of Ian Harris' epic notes. http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt

You continue

"...backed up by basic radiative and thermodynamic principles known since the 19th century, themselves arising from the science of quantum mechanics which is fundamental to our modern economy."

You are beginning to sound like Joe 90. We've learnt a lot since the 1900s scientifically, and whilst we know the behaviour of CO2 in the lab, and the existence of a greenhouse effect around the earth naturally, we still don't know how much influence fluctuations in a trace gas have in wider climate variations. That point hasn't been established, and earth's climate is a chaotic system subject to a range of solar, galactic and earthly influences that are significantly more powerful than CO2.

As one "peer reviewed" study in Environment International last year concluded:

"Finally it is stressed that the understanding of the functioning of Earth's complex climate system (especially for water, solar radiation and so forth) is still poor and, hence, scientific knowledge is not at a level to give definite and precise answers for the causes of global warming.”

Again, stop making stuff up. You are one of the reasons Hot Topic is increasingly a laughing stock, IMHO.

"If you have a coherent competing body of theory and evidence to that, then you are a genius unlike any that have ever lived - except you aren't, as you have already demonstrated that simple physical concepts are beyond your grasp."

Actually, my thesis is out in the public domain, I put my money where my mouth is and subject myself to peer review daily.

You, on the other hand, are simply mouth.

[Rob Taylor]

Ian, I hope your daughter makes a full recovery. You, however, are probably beyond hope.

A denialist idealogue, you shamelessly cherry-pick discussions of experimental noise whilst ignoring the entirety of statistical science which extracts meaningful trends from real-world measurements.

Like religion, such dishonesty, sophistry and solipsism may provide short-term comfort to the ignorant whilst serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful, but is a sure road to a most unpleasant future for our descendants.

My grandchildren will at least know that I cared enough to fight for a decent future for them - what, I wonder, are you going to say to yours?

http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1001/full/climate.2010.134.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/04/ipcc-climate-sceptics-rajendra-pachauri

[calcium carbonate]

Your tips are remarkable. I regularly read your blog and its very helpful.