Wood Romances

On Facebook I recently came across a character by the name of Joseph Postma. I had come across some of his ideas on YouTube in the past and had quite a laugh at some of the nonsense that he puts in his videos, but recently Postma started participating in a group that I participate in, so I've interacted with him personally. For those of you unfamiliar with him, his ideas should best be understood as coming from the lunatic fringe of contrarian thinking. In fact, I'm seriously tempted to think that he doesn't actually believe what he says, but he's basically seeing how absurd he can be and still get people to believe him. To be sure, he has not yet convinced even the most radical of people blogging on some of the most popular contrarian sites. I mean, WUWT has posted criticisms of his views, Willis Eschenbach has publicly disagreed with him, and Roy Spencer has devoted at least one post  to responding to his claims. Even David Burton has taken issue with Postma. In othe...

Patrick Brown recently published a blogpost in which he suggested that in order to get published in highly prestigious journals, you have to follow a "not-so secret" formula. Another version of this shows up in the Free Press . According to Brown, "the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society." Now I want to be clear about a few things before I get into this. First, it appears he's not attacking peer-reviewed journals in general or even highly respected journals a tier below the top echelon of Nature and Science . It also doesn't appear that he thinks these journals are forcing a narrative that isn't true; only that they are preferentially selecting the negative aspects of AGW over others factors, and science would benefit if these journals published more useful and comprehensive analyses. And he also seems to acknowledge that the kinds of mo...

If you follow contrarian talking points on social media, you might get the impression that cold weather kills more people than hot weather, and so global warming will result in fewer deaths, and lives will be saved as the planet warms. You can see this in this graph from Bjorn Lomborg, based on a Lancet study[1] that quantifies "cold-related" and "heat-related" deaths. This kind of thinking may seem superficially convincing, but with a little investigation, much of what is being said by Lomborg (and others) is incredibly misleading. It's based on a misunderstanding of what these types of studies say, as well as some flawed logic about how deaths will be affected by warming.  Cold vs Hot Related Deaths This Lancet paper is one of many[2][3] based on a concept of "minimum mortality temperature" (MMT), which is defined as the mean temperature at which non-accidental death rates in any particular location is the lowest.  In most places the mortality rate i...

It's hard sometimes to find ways to describe the range of views expressed by those participating in public discourse on climate change without sounding pejorative.  Public discourse is frequently corrupted by various forms of name calling; those who disagree with climate science are called "deniers" and those who agree with it are called "alarmists." Perhaps even more damaging to public discourse is the heavy reliance on simple bulverism : "you believe AGW is a problem because you're a socialist or communist looking to control people's lives and raise people's taxes," or, "You reject the evidence for AGW because you're a fascist shill serving fossil fuel interests." To avoid these pejoratives in this blog, I've used "proponent" to refer to those who accept the basic positions in climate science and "contrarian" to refer to those who reject those views. But if you read the scientific literature, the actu...

Recently I came across yet another paper by Patrick Frank[1] attempting to claim that climate scientists have been underestimating uncertainties in climate-related data. In this paper, he takes aim at GMST data, and he argues that  LiG resolution limits, non-linearity, and sensor field calibrations yield GSATA mean ±2σ RMS uncertainties of, 1900–1945, ±1.7 °C; 1946–1980, ±2.1 °C; 1981–2004, ±2.0 °C; and 2005–2010, ±1.6 °C. Finally, the 20th century (1900–1999) GSATA, 0.74 ± 1.94 °C, does not convey any information about rate or magnitude of temperature change. The resulting GMST graph from his calculations is below. Essentially, he's saying that errors associated with liquid in glass thermometers are so large that we can have no confidence in the global warming trend in the major GMST datasets. Of course, the organizations producing these GMST datasets all evaluate the uncertainties associated with their anomaly values, and their estimates are invariably much smaller - about ±0.05°...

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 ...