On March 5, Lord Christopher Monckton came to Union to provide a different perspective on climate change than that held by the vast majority of climate scientists. While his presentation was objectionable on several levels (see below), it did raise the level of interest in global warming to a greater degree than I could ever have hoped for. I suppose we all like a heated debate!
One of Monckton’s main arguments is that science is not done by consensus. The consensus in question here is the 97 percent of climate scientists in a 2008 Gallup Poll (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009) who agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partially responsible for that warming.
According to Doran and Zimmerman (2009, p. 22), “It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.”
Monckton, however, posits that consensus in general, and this consensus in particular, do not ensure that the underlying science is sound.
This, of course, is true, but while scientific consensus has been wrong (e.g., the dogma prior to Nicolaus Copernicus’ discovery in 1543 that the Earth was not the center of the universe), when that consensus is informed by the scientific method and by replication in peer-reviewed literature, the consensus of scientists is very rarely wrong to the extent suggested by Monckton in the case of global warming.
Few of us doubt the scientific consensus that UV light can cause skin cancer, that chlorofluorocarbons have a deleterious effect on stratospheric ozone levels, or the scientific underpinnings of most modern medical treatments.
However, a main tenet of Monckton’s presentation is that the scientific basis for our concern over global warming is fundamentally flawed. In fact, his blatant misuse and ignorance of published scientific literature, as illustrated below, should make one seriously question his credibility.
One example of Monckton’s misuse of scientific data came in his rebuttal to an op-ed piece that I wrote with Erin Delman for the Concordiensis on March 7, 2012. In this rebuttal, he noted that the Earth has not been warming for nearly 15 years. If one picks 1998 as one’s starting point and ends last year, one does indeed get a negative slope (see graph).
This is due to the fact that 1998 was an exceptionally warm year due to a strong El Nino event that year. If one considers the long-term trend, however, the slope remains positive with warming clearly continuing.
Indeed, Monckton made the point in his Union presentation that one can influence trends by carefully choosing where to start and end a time series.
Why then would Monckton choose this dubious strategy to argue that warming has not been occurring for most of the last decade and a half? That this contradiction has been pointed out by others apparently has not dissuaded him from continuing the practice of cherry picking data sets.
Monckton further mischaracterized climate science during his talk at Union. He chose a record of Beaufort Sea Ice (Melling et al., 2005) to illustrate that from 1991 to 2003, sea ice there has not been declining, and that, by inference, sea ice in the arctic is healthy. In fact, 30-year records from the (U.S.) National Snow and Ice Data Center reveal that arctic sea ice, as a whole, is declining precipitously, and even when Antarctic data are included, the global average is declining. Clearly Monckton knows of the NSIDC data sets, as he must have waded through the Melling et al. (2005) publication, so why would he choose to show what can be charitably characterized as a misleading graphic of the state of arctic sea ice?
A final example is the assertion made by Monckton during his lecture that Venezuelan glaciers are advancing to an extent not achieved at any time during the preceding 10,000 years. Having worked on deciphering the record of glacier margin fluctuations in the Andes for many years, this was news to me! My relatively recent review paper on the subject reports no evidence of recent ice front advances anywhere in the tropical Andes (Rodbell et al., 2009). Knowing the literature is a fundamental part of the scientific process!
I have illustrated but three examples of Monckton either cherry picking or mischaracterizing data sets to suit his a priori thesis. A thorough analysis of one of Monckton’s prior presentations by Professor Abraham of the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) reveals that these practices are part of Monckton’s modus operandi.
However, the main comment that I made to Monckton at Union and again in the Concordiensis op-ed, is the importance of him publishing his assessment in a scientific journal. There are many journals from which he could choose, and one need not be a scientist to publish. If he is correct, and I do hope that he is, that global warming is nothing that we should be fretting over, then his analysis needs to be spelled out carefully in the peer-reviewed literature.
It is not enough to orally cite strings of publications in his talks or paste references on his slides; we need his written word on, for example, exactly how he bases his climate sensitivity calculations, or why he thinks climate feedbacks will continue to be responsible for homeostasis on Earth. It is not enough to state that those of us interested can contact him for details, those details need to be published for all to evaluate. That is how science works.
Monckton closed his Union lecture by mocking environmentalists (as greenies “too yellow to admit they are red”) and asserting that their concern over climate change would divert billions of dollars that could be used to save those suffering in Africa. This is a false choice. If rainfall projections for tropical Africa and South America are even remotely accurate, then climate change itself may be an especially serious threat to those living on the margins in these underdeveloped regions. In my view, it is not a few degrees of warming that we need to worry most about, it is changes in the distribution of rainfall and the inability of large numbers of people to respond to these changes.
Monckton’s credibility is compromised by his propensity to misuse science, his own ignorance of paleoclimatic records and, most of all, by giving hyper-partisan lectures, the contents of which he refuses to publish and thereby expose to scrutiny.
References Cited
Doran, P. T., and Zimmerman, M. K., 2009, Examining the consensus of climate change: EOS v. 90, p. 21-22.
Melling, H., Riedel, D., and Gedalof, Z., 2005, Trends in thickness and extent of seasonal pack ice, Canadian Beaufort Sea: Geophysical Research Letters, v. 24, p. 1-5.
Rodbell, D.T., Smith, J. A., and Mark, B. G., 2009. Glaciation in the Andes during the Late Glacial and Holocene: Quaternary Science Reviews 28, 2165-2212.
Loading ...
Monckton did not go far enough back in history. The Vikings farmed Greenland during the early 1000′s as they were going through the medieval warming period. It was obviously a warmer time than we are experiencing now and they did it with fewer humans on the planet.
The evidence suggests that the medieval warm period was local, not global. Global temperatures are now warmer than it was then:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm
To see the answers to more AGW denier myths and misinformation see here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Certainly the last 15 years of stagnant temperatures isn’t terribly significant, except when evaluating the tools used to predict catastrophic warming in the next century. Even a cursory glance at the issue will lead you to the 20+ models used by the UN IPCC to show significant warming in the next century. All of these models showed increasing temperatures in the last 15 years. All of these models were wrong.
One could argue that these models will be right over 100 years, but that is quite the argument since nearly all predictions are simpler in the short term rather than the long (ie – it is much easier to predict the winner of the 2012 Presidential election than the 2020 election).
The idea that global warming exists AND is influenced by man may be a scientific consensus. But clearly the understanding of the scale of man’s input and the ability to predict the impacts is still in the very early stages of scientific understanding and discovery.
Frankly, the scientific models used to drive political scare tactics have been shown false by real world scientific observation.
Temperatures only look like they are stable or falling over the last 15 years if you cherry pick datasets which don’t include the poles (HadCRUT3) and ignore sea temperature. If you use better datasets and take out the influence of El Nino and La Nina, aerosols and the solar cycle then it becomes obvious that the planet is still warming:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/foster-and-rahmstorf-measure-global-warming-signal.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm
Also you are wrong about the accuracy of models, and climate prediction in general:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm
If it has stopped warming then why has 4.3 trillion tonnes of ice melted in the last 8 years?
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-036
The energy it takes to melt that much ice would take a 1GW power station over 45,000 years to produce.
To see the answers to more AGW denier myths and misinformation see here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Professor Rodbell’s attack on my recent lecture at Union College contains the following errors.
1. Professor Rodbell cites a Gallup poll as finding that 97% of scientists “agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partially responsible”. In fact, only 79 scientists were consulted on the question whether the world had been warming, of whom 77 (or 97%) agreed that it has been. I am with the 97% on this. However, there was less agreement on whether humans were at least partially responsible, though I made it plain in my talk that I considered it quite possible that the IPCC were right to find that at least half of the rather small warming since 1950 was manmade. So, on the single point on which the Professor cites a “consensus”, I had said I agreed with the “consensus” (statistically-insignificant though the number of those who answered the relevant questions was).
2. Professor Rodbell says, “Few of us doubt the scientific consensus that UV light can cause skin cancer, that chlorofluorocarbons have a deleterious effect on stratospheric ozone levels, or the scientific underpinnings of most modern medical treatments.” As far as medical results are concerned, rigorous randomized, prospective, double-blind clinical trials – not consensus – establish what is so and what is not so. And it has now been established that the disruptive influence of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer is one-tenth of that published in the paper that started the ozone-hole scare.
3. Professor Rodbell says I misused scientific data by pointing out that the Earth has not been warming for 15 years – i.e., since 1997 (not, as he inaccurately says, 1998). Yet that is the conclusion of the Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. The conclusion that I correctly drew was that, although a stasis for 10 or 15 years did not indicate that global warming had ended, it raised legitimate and proper questions about the rate at which warmimg was occurring. I pointed out that the warming since 1990, a generation ago, when the IPCC made its first global warming forecasts, had been below the very lowest of the IPCC’s projections.
4. Professor Rodbell leaves readers with the impression that I only showed the temperature record for the last 15 years. In fact, I did not show the record for that period, but I did show records for the last 10 years, for the last 60 years, for the last 150 years, for 1860-1880, for 1910-1940, for 1976-2001, for 1695-1735 (Central England only), for the last 1000 years, and for the last 750,000 years. So there was no misuse of data, and I can see no basis for the Professor’s allegation that I had “cherry-picked” the data, except that in the global instrumental record I had deliberately targeted the three supra-decadal periods of most rapid warming.
5. Professor Rodbell says I concluded from a record of the growing sea-ice extent in the Beaufort Sea that sea ice in the Arctic was “healthy” (whatever that may mean). In fact, I drew no such conclusion. I showed the graph to demonstrate that Al Gore had falsely stated that polar bears were drowing in attempts to swim up to 60 miles to find ever-scarcer ice, when the paper he was citing (Monnett & Gleason, 2006) had shown that just four polar bears had died in a strong storm in the Beaufort Sea, where sea ice had if anything increased in extent over the previous 12 years. I went on to show the combined record of global (i.e. Arctic plus Antarctic) sea ice for the entire 30-year period of satellite record (Cryosphere Today, University of Illinois). It shows very little decline.
6. Professor Rodbell said my lecture had said that Venezuelan glaciers are advancing to an extent not achieved at any time during the preceding 10,000 years. I had made no mention of these glaciers in my lecture, as far as I can remember. However, at the end of the Professor’s counter-meeting, which I also attended, I responded to his suggestion that glaciers in Peru were receding rapidly and menacing local water supplies by saying that in the Cordillera de Merida, in the tropical Andes, the normal state of the range throughout the Holocene had been ice-free, except for the very highest peaks (Polissar et al., 2006). It is not clear, therefore, that the glacial recession currently evident in the tropical Andes is unprecedented or anthropogenic. Knowing the literature is a fundamental part of the scientific process.
7. Professor Rodbell mentions a previous attack on one of my talks by a non-climate-science adjunct professor at a bible college in Minnesota, yet he does not mention the very detailed refutation of that attack that I had published one month after the attack. I had given the adjunct professor every opportunity to rebut my refutation, but he had been quite unable to do so. He had made elementary scientific errors, including errors of arithmetic.
8. Professor Rodbell says I should publish my findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Why should I? I make no pretence to be a climate scientist. Does the Professor insist that Al Gore should subject his findings to peer review? When they were subjected to the scrutiny of the High Court in London in 2007 they were found to be so full of errors that the judge said he would have banned Gore’s mawkish, sci-fi comedy-horror movie unless 77 pages of corrective guidance were circulated to every school in England. The Professor does not seem to have told his students that.
9. Professor Rodbell says I did not explain my climate sensitivity calculations and should publish them. He will find them in Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, published in Physics and Society, a reviewed journal of the American Physical Society. In any event, I presented no climate sensitivity calculations of my own during my talk at Union College.
10. Professor Rodbell says I should publish why I think climate feedbacks will continue to be responsible for homoeostasis on Earth. However, I showed a reconstruction (Scotese, 1999) of 750,000 years of global temperature change, indicating that temperature has not fluctuated by much more than 3% (or 8 Celsius degrees) either side of the mean in all that time. This formidable homoeostasis indicates the absence throughout that long period of the strongly-positive feedbacks that the IPCC posits. Why, then, should such feedbacks suddenly spring into existence today? The Professor may like to read Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), or Lindzen and Choi (2009, 2011). All of these authors, after making careful measurements by distinct methods, and after redoing the measurements in the face of screeching criticism from other scientists who found their results uncongenial (and unprofitable), found that feedbacks were likely to be somewhat net-negative, not strongly positive, and that accordingly the warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration would be likely to be less than 1 Celsius degree, not the 2-4.5 degrees imagined by the IPCC. I am pleased to find that these and a growing body of further authors (Scafetta, 2012; Shaviv, 2008, 2011; Wentz et al., 2007) are explicitly or implicitly finding climate sensitivity to be approximately one-quarter of the IPCC’s central estimate, and accordingly harmless.
11. Professor Rodbell says I mocked environmentalists as the Traffic-Light Tendency – “greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”, uselessly diverting billions that could be used to save those suffering in Africa. The Professor says he thinks that global warming will mean less rainfall in Africa, and that that will be worse than the poverty and disease we could and should alleviate today. He is entitled to his opinion, but it is not based on science. The Sahara, for instance, has shrunk to an extent noticeable from space as increasing moisture in the atmosphere has greened some 300,000 square kilometres, allowing nomadic tribes to occupy locations where they had not settled in living memory (Nicholson, 1998). In general, there is no reason to suppose that warmer weather will lead to any more drought in tropical or sub-tropical regions than is already evident. And it is certain that we should do more good for our fellow-humans by spending $8 each on curing them of trichiasis (a painful condition that causes blindness) than by spending hundreds of billions, and eventually trillions, on trying vainly to make minuscule and harmless global warming go away.
In general, I do not get the impression from the Professor’s article that his criticisms of my lecture were reasonable, or were fairly and honourably motivated by a desire to reach the scientific truth.
In this response I have not responded in kind to the numerous childishly ad-hominem personal attacks on me that the Professor makes in his regrettably unscientific, woefully inaccurate and lamentably prejudiced article. I shall, however, point out that the argumentum ad hominem – the propensity of small minds to attack the person of their opponent rather than his argument – stands alongside the arguments from consensus and from appeal to authority that Aristotle characterized 2300 years ago as logical fallacies unworthy of any who claim to be truly learned.
I think you missed the point and being that you will continue to do so, I will not highlight your scientific inaccuracies as these can easily be found with a simple search. For example, see: http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/jpabraham/global_warming/Monckton/Monckton%20Presentation%20June%2022/index.htm
I will however point out some small, but significant inaccuracies you threw in there to minimize the statements of others and maximize your own statements.
That “Adjunct professor at a bible college” is actually an Associate Professor at a Catholic college that according to their website offers “85 major fields of study and more than 45 graduate degree programs including master’s, education specialist, juris doctor and doctorates” – including Biology and Geology and is open to anyone from any religion – this is certainly not a bible school and the Ph.D. Mockton refers to is a full faculty member.
Also, I find it amusing that you state you should not publish because you “make no pretence to be a climate scientist” – then why roam foreign lands giving lectures on the subject? Don’t throw down your Gore card, because he should not be doing it either – and most scientists will agree that Gore has no business in science.
I also find it amusing that you tell us to see your paper “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, published in Physics and Society, a reviewed journal of the American Physical Society” when it was actually published in the Forum on Physics and Society “a place for discussion and disagreement on scientific and policy matters” and, that your “article” was preceded by the following statement clearly showing it was not reviewed by anyone:
“The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”"
See http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
Dear Lord Monckton,
If you have time to write such lengthy (yet vacuous) repostes such as this, can you spare the time to respond to potholer54? (a.k.a. Peter Hadfield)?
e.g. http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/the-monckton-files-squealing-tires/
Yours very sincerely,
Martin Lack
Good point Fred– It is indeed remarkable that whenever anyone has dug into the spewage of Mr. Monckton one finds that most of it is misleading, cherry picked, or just plain made up…. that so many of his sycophantic followers lap it up is just plain pathetic…
Gandy
I personally find Mr. Moncton’s very reasonable reply to the professor to be a devastating refutation. The preponderance of replies are entirely ad hominem attacks, which of course are anti-science.
The plain fact that as CO2 has steadily risen over the past 15 years, while global temperatures have remained flat to declining, is convincing evidence that the “carbon” scare is a false alarm.
Mogumbo
Find me one global temperature record that shows that the last 15 years has been marked by cooling! Your claim is just nonsense. And, your claim that the lack of 1 to 1 correspondence between temperature and CO2 levels over the last 15 years is a basis for refuting the concern over global warming reveals your profound ignorance of the climate system.
Deniers like you need to get educated on climate science instead of spewing forth such rubbish. Read up on feedbacks and natural climate variability due to natural oscillators in the climate system (NAO, ENSO, PDO, AO, etc). Anthropogenic global warming is superimposed on all these influences, which can either magnify or reduce net warming; but warming it is–the trend continues. It is time to start focussing how to respond to continued warming, but Monckton and his sycophantic followers like you are simply delaying any real discussion.
Learn the facts, or get off the planet!!
Gandalf
Amnesia and Cherry Picking Misrepresented Data
Mr. Monckton now is claiming amnesia over the claim he made in his lecture that Venezuelan glaciers are presently advancing, which is, of course, flat wrong. Ok, I suppose that I and more than a dozen others in the audience simply imagined him saying this! Clearly, this one of the advantages of never publishing—you just deny that you ever said something in the first place!
However, what is even more outrageous is Mr. Monckton’s claim that according to Polissar et al (2006) “in the Cordillera de Merida, in the tropical Andes, the normal state of the range throughout the Holocene had been ice-free, except for the very highest peaks” (note this is Monckton’s verbatim claim). A careful look at the Polissar et al paper in particular and the enormous volume of literature on Andean glacier variations published over the last several decades reveals that Mr. Monckton here has 1- misrepresented Polissar et al. (2006), and 2- cherry picked his misrepresented record to suggest just the opposite of what has been demonstrated by scientists for decades. Glacial geologists have shown clearly that Andean glaciers have been in several advanced positions throughout the last 10,000 years—during the neoglacial period, the Little Ice Age, and even during an early Holocene phase that is now just beginning to be recognized by the application of new dating tools. The implication, of course, is that the rapid retreat that is now occurring (despite what Mr. Monckton claims he did not say) is indeed highly significant.
So, first, let’s look at Mr. Monckton’s misrepresentation of the published literature. What did Polissar actually write? Here it is:
“During most of the past 10,000 yr, glaciers were absent from all but the highest peaks in the Cordillera de Merida (11). Evidence for recent glacier advances comes from unweathered moraines and other glacial landforms. These features have been correlated with the LIA (12); however, they have not been dated, and thus the timing of recent advances remains unknown.”
By cleverly omitting the second sentence, Mr. Monckton gives the impression that Polissar et al (2006) were claiming that there essentially have been no significant ice advances in the last 10,000 years. But the very next sentence states that, in fact, there have been recent advanced ice positions some of which are related to cooling during the Little Ice Age. So, there, were advanced ice positions in the relatively recent past, which make the dramatic retreat of ice today even more significant. This is just the opposite of how Mr. Monckton spun his story.
Then, not stopping there, Mr. Monckton waves this record and citation around like a flag as though it, in its now highly misrepresented state, was representative of the body of published literature from around the tropical Andes. This is Mr. Monckton’s cherry picking act, and cherry picking it is. Even if he correctly represented the Polissar et al paper, which he most certainly did not, the body of published literature tells a very clear story—that the tropical Andes experienced multiple glacial advances throughout the last 10,000 years, and that glaciers throughout this region are retreating rapidly, and dramatically today. I have written a recent review paper on this (Rodbell et al., 2009) and others have done the same before me (e.g., Clapperton and Sugden, 1988; Clapperton, 1972, 1983, 1993).
So, here we have it. Monckton’s modus operandi exposed yet again: misrepresentation and cherry picking. This time all wrapped up in the same argument!
Finally, Mr. Monckton has a habit of hiding behind his ad homenem shield whenever this sort of thing is pointed out to him. My argument with Mr. Monckton, however, has never been to say that since he is not a scientist he has no business in the global warming discussion. Quite to the contrary, I have done nothing but encourage him to bring his case into the mainstream scientific discussion by publishing it. It is now quite clear why he refuses to do so, but let’s be clear, he is certainly welcome to do so—there is no “scientist-only” requirement for publishing. I am genuinely interested in his economic arguments for doing little in response to the warming threat. That is where the debate should be right now!
References:
Clapperton, C. M. (1972). The Pleistocone moraine stages of west-central Peru. Journal of Glaciology 11, 255-263.
Clapperton, C. M. (1983). The glaciation of the Andes. Quaternary Science Reviews 2, 83-155.
Clapperton, C., M. (1993). “The Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology of South America.” Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Clapperton, C. M. and Sugden, D.E. (1988). Holocene glacier fluctuations in South America and Antarctica. Quaternary Science Reviews 7, 185-198.
Rodbell, D. T., Smith, J. A., and Mark, B. G. (2009). Glaciation in the Andes during the Late Glacial and Holocene. Quaternary Science Reviews 28, 2165-2212.
Hi Donald,
Great piece! I would love to have your permission to report it on my own space (with credit to you and a link back to this page, of course).
From taking an interest in the, rather disturbing, campaign of Monckton’s over the past few years, I’ve come to realise a few things, which may be of interest.
It’s clear he almost entirely attacks credible science in presentations. In the few instances where he has written down his claims, he’s been easily caught out and attempted to side step, hoping no-one will notice (evidence linked to below). It’s unfortunate, but without a recording of the presentation, he will flatly deny claims made about what he said, in this forum, that are easily proven wrong. Gish gallop at heart.
You’re right to urge him to present his “findings” to any credible science journal; hell, any journal, peer-reviewed or not. If the science behind climate change is in serious doubt and he has discovered something that we do not yet know, or have miscalculated, it would be of immense value to the scientific community, for sure. His continual denial to do so exposes the fact that one person he will certainly be unable to ever convince is himself.
Prof. Abraham did an excellent job, but more recently, I feel Peter Hadfield, a science communicator, went even further (and why I believe everything he says needs to be recorded) and hit him on what he actually said. See;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA&feature=plcp
Followed by Monckton’s response;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K74fzNAUq4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xx5h1KNMAA
Followed by Peter’s reply and Monckton’s subsequent disappearance (it seems to do another round for the TEA party);
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeTGBwr_6rU&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCoi94n0aJg&feature=plcp
You haven’t resorted to ad homenem attacked, true, and it is a favourite side step of his. Personally, if I had his attention when he is resorting to this mock outrage, I’d love to point out this little gem, where he compares a youth group (on of which is Jewish) of acting like Hitler youth.. He is scathing;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne-X_vFWMlw
On the plus side, he is a fading star. He looked very silly the last time he visited Australia and it’s clear that he is losing credibility within his former fans locally. While we will avoid being on record for the most part, I believe this approach will be essential to counter his wild claims.
As an alumnus of Union, I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see Lord Monckton invited to give an address at the College.
Because of its numerous deficiencies— including the lack of compelling evidence and data and the serious exaggerations by its apostles ( the former Vice-President and Michael Mann being two prominent examples) the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming conjecture deserves much more investigation and examination. It is nowhere close to being “settled science.”
Mr. Monckton writes: “As far as medical results are concerned, rigorous randomized, prospective, double-blind clinical trials – not consensus – establish what is so and what is not so.”
Wrong. This is exactly the process that produces consensus or establishing the reliability of data. Climate science has well established reliability.
“The conclusion that I correctly drew was that, although a stasis for 10 or 15 years did not indicate that global warming had ended, it raised legitimate and proper questions about the rate at which warmimg was occurring.”
And such concerns have been addressed by the research of Foster and Rahmstorf, among others. The warming has been significant and the rate of warming over the past few decades is unprecedented.
“I went on to show the combined record of global (i.e. Arctic plus Antarctic) sea ice for the entire 30-year period of satellite record (Cryosphere Today, University of Illinois). It shows very little decline.’
Wrong. You have tried this tactic several times and have been called out on it by several scientists. The decline is significant.
“Professor Rodbell says I should publish my findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Why should I? I make no pretence to be a climate scientist.”
Actually, you do. In numerous talks you use phrases like “… we in the science community ….” Well, if you’re going to pretend you’re part of the community, then act like a scientist and publish your findings to establish their validity and reliability. Of course, you have no intention of doing so because you know your work wouldn’t survive peer review and because you have a good thing going on the lecture circuit. Happy trails!
“Professor Rodbell mentions a previous attack on one of my talks by a non-climate-science adjunct professor at a bible college in Minnesota, yet he does not mention the very detailed refutation of that attack that I had published one month after the attack. I had given the adjunct professor every opportunity to rebut my refutation, but he had been quite unable to do so. He had made elementary scientific errors, including errors of arithmetic.”
Au contraire. Your response to Dr. Abraham has been shown to be erroneous. Your many claims have been refuted by a number of climate scientists.
“Professor Rodbell says I did not explain my climate sensitivity calculations and should publish them. He will find them in Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, published in Physics and Society, a reviewed journal of the American Physical Society.”
Wrong. Not a reviewed journal. A newsletter, as was pointed out above by Fred. Your publication there was also full of errors and caused a good deal of embarrassment to the APS. Because of the ensuing controversy, the APS published the note which Fred cited.
“The Professor may like to read Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), or Lindzen and Choi (2009, 2011). All of these authors, after making careful measurements by distinct methods, and after redoing the measurements in the face of screeching criticism from other scientists who found their results uncongenial (and unprofitable) …”
Nice try. The findings of these authors were rightly criticized and are not taken by the climate science community as either having much validity or reliability. Is it “screeching” criticism when it doesn’t support your ideological perspectives?
“I am pleased to find that these and a growing body of further authors (Scafetta, 2012; Shaviv, 2008, 2011; Wentz et al., 2007) are explicitly or implicitly finding climate sensitivity to be approximately one-quarter of the IPCC’s central estimate, and accordingly harmless.”
Well, we will see where the chips fall with regard to sensitivity. I wouldn’t want to bet on your position.
“I shall, however, point out that the argumentum ad hominem – the propensity of small minds to attack the person of their opponent rather than his argument – stands alongside the arguments from consensus and from appeal to authority that Aristotle characterized 2300 years ago as logical fallacies unworthy of any who claim to be truly learned.”
This is rich! I wonder what Aristotle might think of your own work, so rich in ad hom and appeals to authority.
Monckton has it exactly right and Rodbell has it wrong. So sorry for your students. So many schools are providing misinformation to their students on climate now that environmental professors have taken over.
Even the CRU and NOAA have admitted to a 15 year lack of warming. The plots put temperatures below the lowest level of the climate models even as CO2 continues to increase. The stasis was expected as the Pacific has cooled and ocean multidecadal oscillations driven by solar cycles are the real climate drivers. When the Atlantic begins its cyclical cooling in 6 to 8 years, and cycle 25 proves to behave like the Dalton Minimum, temperatures will dive.
And anyone that uses Skepticalscience as a reliable source is totally niave. see Dr. Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/John_Cook_Skeptical_Science.pdf