Errors At Bishop Hill: A letter to Paul Nurse

Every now and then we get treated to a letter from some hither-unknown skeptic to some famous politician or scientist. The letters are typically predictable - the author does not work in the field of climate research nor has published anything in that field. But they would like the recipient - and everyone else - to know just how awful this man-made global warming science is and for that reason they will be resigning from some not-particularly important position or other.

Even though the arguments in the letter are often riddled with errors, the letter is inevitably spread with huge fanfare among skeptic blogs who praise it and jump up the author's credentials and standing to near scientific "sainthood" level and proceed to sensationalize the letter as some kind of international news event. Skeptic blog readers then proceed to bombard media comment sections everywhere with outraged comments that such an important letter is being ignored.

A recent example of such a letter was posted on Bishop Hill
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/2/12/a-letter-to-paul-nurse.html

Bishop Hill: I am reproducing this letter with the permission of Professor Brice Bosnich, a retired chemist and a fellow of the Royal Society. He sent it to Paul Nurse on his election as president of the society in 2010. Nurse did not reply.

The letter didn't ask for a reply and it's questionable whether it deserves a response even if it did.

Letter: "Although I am not a climate scientist, I am sufficiently conversant with the climate science literature to be able to assess the issues accurately."
Letter: "Cautious, balanced and informed scientific arguments should be presented"

So lets check out some of the arguments in the letter. Lets see if Bosnich meets the high standards he demands of others and whether he is "sufficiently conversant with the climate science literature to be able to assess the issues accurately"

Letter: "There is also a highly speculative report on ocean acidification by CO2, [3], which seems to be based on a single paper, [4], that purports to calculate the change in ocean pH from 1750 to present! A change of 0.1 pH change was calculated! On this basis the report goes on to describe all imaginable catastrophes."
The report referred to is here: "Ocean acidification due to increasingatmospheric carbon dioxide"

Lets just break down this little part about ocean acidification. The letter starts by describing the report "highly speculative". Hypocritically it then accuses the report of being based on a single paper, when the letter's own claim of the report being "highly speculative" is based on nothing. Even that second accusation is incorrect however. The report contains 7 pages of references, it isn't based on a single paper. Finally the letter appeals to the fallacy of "small number = small effect". Even though the Royal Society report addressed that very fallacy on page 1 as follows:

"This dissolution of CO2 has lowered the average pH of the oceans by about 0.1 units from pre-industrial levels (Caldeira & Wickett 2003). Such a value may seem small but because of the way pH is measured, as we explain in Section 2, this change represents about a 30% increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions, which is a considerable acidification of the oceans. Increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 will lead to further acidification of the oceans."

And that's it. So in total I count the letter as making: one baseless assertion, one incorrect and hypocritical claim and one logical fallacy. Lets compare that to the letter's insistence that "Cautious, balanced and informed scientific arguments should be presented". 

Yes skeptics like to insist this kind of thing, but in practice they have no qualms about utilizing shoddy and poorly thought out arguments. Bishop Hill found this kind of argument sufficient to bother publishing the letter, and skeptics in general thought well of it too. The 3rd comment on Bishop Hill for example starts:

"An excellent letter that I will show to my two teenage girls who are forced to wade through the CAWG "evidence" presented in their course work at school in Scotland."

Yes why not miseducate your own daughters by exposing them to material that dismisses ocean acidification without just cause. And this is only one of the supposedly  "Cautious, balanced and informed scientific arguments"  made in the letter.

At the end of the letter Bosnich addresses the joint statement on climate change issued by the Royal Society. The most startling part for me is how he managed to find problems in the first two sentences of the statement.  In green is the joint statement and in orange are  Bosnich's comments.
There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate (Correct, climate science is in its infancy). However there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring (Is about 0.7 degrees C increase in 150 years evidence?). The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures (No warming has occurred for the last 12 years and the recent rate of warming is about the same as the rate of rise for the period 1920 to 1940 when greenhouse gases were increasing more slowly, [12]),

The letter was written in 2010, so his claim about no warming for 12 years is nothing more than old old tired "no warming since 1998" argument. Worse, the reference [12] he cites for his second argument is a CRU global temperature graph which contradicts his first argument.

Lets just recap. The first two sentences of the joint statement say nothing more than:  There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate. However there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures.
Completely reasonable and factual statements that the world is warming. But Bosnich finds, or tries to imagine, problems with it anyway. That is despite elsewhere in the letter Bosnich states: "There is, however, no dispute that some near surface atmospheric warming has occurred". I wonder if the Royal Society had made that statement if Bosnich might argue it!

Skeptics often claim they are being unfairly characterized as questioning global warming, or questioning that human greenhouse gas emissions cause warming, when really they are just questioning feedbacks and how much warming there will be. If that were true, why does this letter, which has been promoted by blogs like bishop-hill, criticize the first first two sentences of the joint statement?

The Cooling File

This post will start short and grow over time as I add the countless "skeptics" who have signed away their reputations to a prediction of global cooling in coming decades. This will come in useful so the skeptics cannot conveniently forget their predictions when the world continues warming. Feel free to add examples in the comments.


mwhaha this is a nice find. They are even writing their own list:
http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/28/global-cooling-consensus-is-heating-up-cooling-over-the-next-1-to-3-decades/


Fritz Vahrenholt
Vahrenholt: Various American and British solar research groups believe that weak solar cycles are ahead. I take this seriously and expect only cooling from the sun until 2050.
SPIEGEL: And what will you do if temperatures continue to rise, after all?
Vahrenholt: Then I'll give SPIEGEL an interview in 2020 and publicly admit that I've made a mistake. But I'm convinced that it won't be necessary.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,813814-2,00.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/fritz-vahrenholt-duped-on-climate-change.html

David Archibald
"In this presentation, I will demonstrate that the Sun drives climate, and use that demonstrated relationship to predict the Earth’s climate to 2030. It is a prediction that differs from most in the public domain. It is a prediction of imminent cooling."

http://www.davidarchibald.info/papers/Warming%20or%20Cooling.pdf

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/13/archibald-climate-forecast-to-2050/
http://skepticalscience.com/david-archibald-exaggerates-solar-influence-on-future-climate-change.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/quantifying-the-solar-cycle-24-temperature-decline/

WUWT misc
"I see no significant warming for 20 years at least [2030 earliest]"

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/13/do-latest-solar-studies-confirm-upcoming-global-cooling/


Scafetta
No warming until 2030

http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/scafettas-solar-lunar-cycle-forecast-vs-global-temperature/

Bob Carter
"Thus, using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/facts-debunk-global-warming-alarmism/story-e6frg746-1111118607086
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2009/01/bob-carter-warns-of-likely-global-cooling/

Don Easterbrook
"Setting up of the PDO cold phase assures global cooling for next approx. 30 years. Global warming is over. Expect 30 years of global cooling, perhaps severe 2-5°F.”"

http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/28/global-cooling-consensus-is-heating-up-cooling-over-the-next-1-to-3-decades/


"Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over...The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/20/shifting-of-the-pacific-decadal-oscillation-from-its-warm-mode-to-cool-mode-assures-global-cooling-for-the-next-three-decades/
An email

David Rose
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html

Lawrence Solomon
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/06/16/lawrence-solomon-nasa-scientist-reverses-sunspot-prediction-bolstering-global-cooling-theory/

William Gray
"Continued global warming should not be expected. We should begin entering a weak global cooling period similar to what occurred between the mid-1940s and mid-1970s. Observations indicate that we have in fact entered a global cooling period which began in 2001. We should expect this weak cooling to continue for another couple of decades."

http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2009.pdf

Henrik Svensmark
"Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning."
link

Oleg Pokrovsky
"There isn’t going to be an ice age, but temperatures will drop to levels last seen in the 1950s and 1960s."

"Right now all components of the climate system are entering a negative phase. The cooling will reach it’s peak in 15 years. Politicians who have geared up for warming are sitting on the wrong horse. The Northeast Passage will freeze over and will be passable only with icebreakers."
http://notrickszone.com/2010/04/23/russian-scientist-expect-cooling-pols-sitting-on-the-wrong-horse/

Girma Orssengo
"The model in Figure 3 predicts global cooling until 2030."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/25/predictions-of-global-mean-temperatures-ipcc-projections/

Nicola Scafetta
"The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040."
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639

Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov
http://www.iceagenow.com/New_Little_Ice_Age_to_Begin_in_2014.htm

WUWT's Solar Omission Fraud

Disclaimer: The following post concerns the climate "skeptic" blog WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). Lengthy exposure to WUWT may induce pain in parts of the brain responsible for logical thought. Consistent exposure may result in a case of chronic denialitis. So intense is the seering, burning, ignorant shite over there that I risk my very sanity to bring you the following concerning a recent WUWT guest post by Alec "My training is in economics" Rawls.

"Omitted variable fraud: vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5" screams WUWT hysterically.

WOW is the solar climate driver being ignored?! Despite all the VAST evidence?

On further inspection there are problems...

Let me at least state I started expecting an error. So many of these fantastical (in the sense of fantasy) WUWT posts contain glaring errors. The red flag for me is that Rawls only has training in economics and he's trying to do a review of science literature hosted on WUWT of course. It doesn't bode well.

Okay actually I am going to stop picking on Rawls. WUWT published it and the commenter's celebrated it, so it's all their mess. Not one of them spotted this.

WUWT writes (bolding mine):
"The empirical evidence in favor of the solar explanation is overwhelming. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found a very high degree of correlation (.5 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature going back many thousands of years (Bond 2001, Neff 2001, Shaviv 2003, Usoskin 2005, and many others listed below). In other words, solar activity “explains,” in the statistical sense, 50 to 80% of past temperature change."

WUWT later continues:
"Excerpt from Usoskin: “The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level.”"

WOW 0.7-0.8 at the 94-98% confidence level between sunspots and northern hemisphere temperature! That surely can't be a coincidence can it? That must be another nail in the coffin of ABCGW!

There is even a link given to the paper: http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf, so you would have thought at least one of them would have read it and spotted that the paper is about a correlation between sunspots and Mann's Hockey Stick. You know that reconstruction none of them believe.

The fact it is based on Mann's hockey stick is plastered all over the paper, in figures, in captions. From the paper:
"The terrestrial climate data we use are the reconstruction of the nothern hemisphere temperature between 1000 and 1980AD by Mann et al. (1999) (MBH99) and the reconstructions of northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere and global temperatures for the period between AD 200 and AD 1980 by Mann and Jones (2003) (MJ03)."

It goes without saying that they clearly never read the paper, which is probably how they also missed this point at the end of the paper:
Note that the most recent warming, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any signfiicant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have had another source.

They base an argument on a hockey stick they don't accept and conveniently omit to mention that the paper concludes if the correlation is correct then the "most recent warming episode must have had another source".

Furthermore if these correlations are so great then doesn't this suggest the hockey stick might be right? In response to that WUWT would probably back away from the paper and claim the statistic is a fluke. That's after they were parading it around as part of their VAST evidence. 

All the resources of their readers and they did not spot this gaping and obvious hole in their consistency. You have to remember that the entire post is an accusation that the IPCC are guilty of "omission fraud" over solar science. You'd have thought anyone making such a serious charge would have taken extra care to make sure they couldn't be accused of omitting information in their own review of the solar literature. What exactly happened? Did they really just quote-mine abstracts without reading the papers?

For anyone else this would be an embarrassment. But for WUWT it's par for the course. This isn't a special case. This is the level of scientific "competence" and consistency you can expect from WUWT posts.