Wood Romances

This is Part 6 in a series on Debaters Behaving Badly . In this post, I'm considering the rampant misuse of scientific papers in public discourse, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Monckton vs Lambert 2010 In Sidney on February 12, 2010, Christopher Monckton participated in a debate with Tim Lambert  about climate change. The debate is on YouTube in 15 parts, and when referencing it, I'll link to the part of the debate that I'm referring to. In this debate, Monckton argued that satellite measurements have uncovered a global brightening from 1983 to 2001 that demonstrates natural forcings dominate climate influences, and sensitivity to CO2 must therefore be extremely small. That claim of Monckton came from some calculations made from a paper by Rachel Pinker published in 2005[1]. In the debate , he took a value for what he calls "cloud forcings" at 3.05 W/m^2 from 1983-2001 and added to it both CO2 and "other" external forcings, then came up with ...

Two things happened recently at Watts Up With That , and the combination of the two, I think is rather hilarious. Observant readers will know that contributors to WUWT regularly claim that climate models are "alarmist" because they overestimate how much warming has occurred. My favorite of these is Christopher Monckton, who provides us with a steady dose of this kind of rhetoric. There are two necessary components to his tactic: He regularly exaggerates how much warming models predict. In a recent post , he claims CMIP6 models predict 0.386° C /decade warming. He regularly cherry picks short-term trends beginning somewhere around 2014 or 2015 to claim that there has been a pause in global warming in the UAH lower troposphere dataset. I blogged about this in my first post on debaters behaving badly . UAH has a long-term warming rate of about 0.13° C /decade. From this he claims that models predict 282% too much warming. Here's how Monckton portrays this: Monckton on Models...