Wood Romances

This is part 1. My response to part 2 is here . John Stossel is at it again. He has released a new video of shoddy journalism catering to the partisan rhetoric of the Heartland Institute. In this video, Stossel claims that scientists don't actually agree about the risks climate change poses to humanity, and he promises to correct claims made by "activists and the media" by identifying seven of their myths and showing why they are wrong. He promises that that this will come in two parts, correcting three of these "myths" in this video, and presumably four in the next. In this post, I'd like to see how he did. I'll begin with looking at his rhetorical strategy, and then look at each of the three myths he covers in this video. Rhetorical Strategy: Dishonest Soundbites + Partisan "Experts" Stossel's strategy here is to show soundbites from people sharing on news stories, documentaries, comedy routines, adds, and YouTube videos that he wants us...

W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer (WH) have periodically attempted to circumvent publishing manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and have instead taken to uploading manuscripts on the arXiv. As I understand it, the intended use for the arXiv is to allow pre-published manuscripts to be read and evaluated by scientists before the peer-review process is completed. This gives scientists faster access to the newest research, but with the caveat that these manuscripts may need to be revised significantly before being published, once going through the peer review process. Some may not even be published at all, so scientists often look at these manuscripts with interest but also with a grain of salt until the final version passes peer review. WH are apparently using the arXiv to store manuscripts for which they have no intention of submitting to any peer-reviewed journal. The manuscripts are formatted to look like scientific papers, but they will never see the light of day in an ac...

Update 1/16/2025: I wrote a Part 2 for this post. As I write this, at least two reanalyses are showing what are still preliminary reports of record high temperatures, exceeding the warmest temperatures observed in the instrumental record. If these results hold up to scrutiny over the next couple weeks or so, this will be the hottest week on record. I want to say more about this in a future post, perhaps after the temperatures for these days are confirmed. But events like this sometimes bring out the worst in public debate, with some of extremists on the contrarian side going to the lengths of denying that there is even such a thing as a global average temperature. Now I've become used to reading contrarians claiming that the instrumental record is in some sense unreliable, either because of claims that the data isn't sound or that it's being deliberately corrupted in support of an alarmist narrative. But the outright denial of the concept of a global average temperature...

  This is part 2 of a series on the Hockey Stick (updated 1/8/2025 to correct statements I made about the scale of a graph). Here's part 1 . When Mann and his colleagues were constructing their proxy reconstruction for NH temperatures for their MBH98 paper, there were two significant challenges that had to be addressed. The first was calibrating proxy model to the instrumental record. They can't expect that the proxy data would match the instrumental record with absolute precision, so if they over-calibrated the model, the proxy would fit the instrumental record but would not reconstruct earlier temperatures. Random noise in the proxy and instrumental data will make the proxy data less reliable in reconstructing the past. So the challenge was to fit the overall climate trends in the proxy data to the instrumental record while allowing for variability between the two datasets. The second challenge was to address the clustering of climate proxies so that one set of proxies doesn...

In  Part 1  of this series on debaters behaving badly, we saw how some debaters behave badly by misusing short-term trends to claim that global warming has paused, leading to the proliferation of what I consider faux pause claims on the internet and social media. Here in Part 2, I'd like to consider the next most popular tactic I see used frequently in climate debates - using dishonest scales to make false claims about global temperatures or the correlation between temperatures and carbon dioxide. Misusing Scale to "Hide the Incline" of Global Temperatures One of the largest repositories of bad debate behavior on the internet is on the Watts Up With That blog. Anthony Watts recently wrote a post complaining about accurate reporting of global temperature anomalies and decided to replace them with his substitute version , which you can find on a side bar of his blog whenever you visit. It looks like this: To do this, Watts replaced the baseline temperature value of the G...