New York Times Manipulates NOAA’s Climate Science Scandal
If you were only to read the New York Times’ latest article on the most recent Climate Change scandal first reported by the Mail and the Daily Mail, you would never know that there was any scandal to speak of in the first place.
Headline: “No Data Manipulation in 2015 Climate Study, Researchers Say.” Well, not all researchers. The background of the data manipulation story revolves around accusations made by David Bates, a recently retired scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Among his several accusations is that NOAA “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris agreement on climate change,” a paper which would have been welcomed with open arms by the Obama administration. On February 4, Bates wrote a lengthy blog post at his website detailing the accusations. Here is a brief list of some of the charges:
1. Climate scientist, Tom Karl, failed to archive the land temperature data set and thus also failed to “follow the policy of his own Agency [and] the guidelines in Science magazine for dataset archival and documentation.”
2. The authors also chose to “use a 90% confidence threshold for evaluating the statistical significance of surface temperature trends, instead of the standard for significance of 95%,” and according to Bates, the authors failed to give a justification for this when pressed.
3. Karl routinely “had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Bates adds, “[a] NOAA NCEI supervisor remarked how it was eye-opening to watch Karl work the co-authors, mostly subtly but sometimes not, pushing choices to emphasize warming.”
4. Experimental datasets were used that were not run through operational readiness review (ORR) and were not archived.
To sum up, the “data manipulation,” as characterize by the Mail, consisted in not following proper protocols, selecting certain data sets which had not been properly analyzed, and manipulating scientific methodology with a political and not purely scientific end.…
Lessons learned from the end of California’s ‘permanent drought’
Summary: The “permanent drought” in California, like the now ended “permanent drought” in Texas, is ending. But like the panic about Texas, it is rich in lessons about our difficulty clearly seeing the world — and the futility of activists exaggerating and lying about the science. Of course, they should have learned this after 29 years of trying (starting from James Hansen’s 1988 Senate testimony).
Warnings of a permanent drought in California
Remember all those predictions of a “permanent drought” in California? Those were examples of why three decades of climate alarmism has not convinced the American people to take severe measures to fight anthropogenic climate change: alarmists exaggerate the science, and are proven wrong — repeatedly. When will the Left learn that doomster lies do not work?
Wired, May 2016: “Thanks El Niño, But California’s Drought Is Probably Forever“. “California is still in a state of drought. For now, maybe forever.” The article gives no support — none — for this clickbait claim. In January Wired attempted to weasel away from their claims by defining drought to mean needing more water than nature provides (“A Wet Year Won’t Beat California’s Never-Ending Drought“). Orwell nodded, unsurprised.
The NYT did no better in “California Braces for Unending Drought“, May 2016. The closest the article comes to supporting their headline is an odd statement by Governor Brown: “But now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence…” Drought has always been a regular occurrence in California. The governor also said that “California droughts are expected to be more frequent and persistent, as warmer winter temperatures driven by climate change reduce water held in the Sierra Nevada snowpack and result in drier soil conditions.” That is probable. But it is quite mad for the NYT to call more frequent droughts “an unending drought.”
Status of the California drought
“During the past week, a series of storms bringing widespread rain and snow showers impacted the states along the Pacific Coast and northern Rockies. In California, the cumulative effect of several months of abundant precipitation has significantly improved drought conditions across the state.”
— US Drought monitor – California, February 9.
Precipitation over California in the water year so far (October 1 to January 31) is 178% of average for this date. The snowpack is 179% of average, as of Feb 8. …
NY Times’ Gillis, Man on a Climate Mission, Mocks GOP Crazies, Demands Zero Emissions
By Clay Waters | February 7, 2017 | 2:46 PM EST
New York Times reporter Justin Gillis is a man on a mission to save the planet from the depredations of global warming (rebranded as “climate change”). The activist environmental reporter was at it again in the paper’s Tuesday Science section, “Cooling Language About a Warming Earth” (too ideological even for the news pages?).
Gillis, who under the guise of a journalist regularly pushes the idea of a looming environmental apocalypse in the Times’ news pages, has a bad habit of taking the front page to declare warming “records” which may not or do not actually exist, and then not deigning to explain the discrepancies. They apparently don’t matter to the “ordinary reader” anyway.
His editors even plucked out a professor’s quote for the article’s text box that warned Republicans not to “look too crazy” on the issue.
Gillis’s contempt was obvious from his muted mockery:
…Not long ago, many Republican officeholders had a simple answer when asked about the changing climate: What changing climate?
But the public began to notice the heat waves and the torrential rains and the tidal flooding. So then we had the “I am not a scientist” phase, with one lawmaker after another fending off climate questions with that formula.
That drew such ridicule that Republicans critical of climate science had to come up with a more nuanced answer. Several variations on the new approach were on display recently during confirmation hearings for some of President Trump’s cabinet nominees.
“Science tells us that the climate is changing and human activity in some manner impacts that change,” Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general nominated to run the Environmental Protection Agency, told a Senate committee. “The human ability to measure with precision the extent of that impact is subject to continuing debate and dialogue, as well they should be.”
Let us ponder the craftsmanship of that second sentence.
“With precision” is the key phrase, of course, and it renders the statement almost axiomatically true. Do we have trouble taking the precise temperature of an entire planet and then divining, for a given period, exactly how much of the change in that temperature is caused by human activities?
Well, yes.
Anybody who did not know better might come away thinking there is room to doubt whether humans are the main cause
Networks Ignore NOAA Whistleblower’s Claims Against ‘Pausebuster’ Study
…Warmists Lament: ‘Kids’ TV Is Ignoring Climate Change’ – Angry kids not being indoctrinated enough!
PBS Kids
Acheetah can run 70 miles per hour. Venus and Earth are about the same size. Blobfish don’t have any bones.
These are facts I’ve learned from my 5-year-old in the past several weeks courtesy of the science- and nature-themed television shows he loves: Wild Kratts, Nature Cat, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Octonauts. He is an erupting volcano of scientific trivia right now, so I was surprised the other day when I mentioned climate change and he said: “What’s that?”
After a few more questions, I discovered that he’s never heard any of his favorite science shows mention climate change or global warming. Which is strange, because according to overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change is one of the most important environmental issues of our time. It affects wildlife, natural resources, weather, and human health, all of which are regularly discussed on kids’ shows. My son can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about red pandas, except for the fact that their very existence is being threatened by the changing climate.
I know better than to trust a 5-year-old’s memory, of course, so I reached out to PBS Kids, Nickelodeon, and Disney Junior to see if there was any truth to his claim. I was told that with the exception of an episode of Disney Junior’s Doc McStuffins called “The Big Storm”—in which stuffed owl Professor Hootsburg says that “as the Earth gets warmer and warmer, big storms get bigger and bigger”—none of the three networks’ shows has ever discussed the causes, mechanisms, or impacts of climate change on our planet. (Kids’ movies don’t seem to fare much better. There is only one climate change–focused movie among Common Sense Media’s list of 47 “Movies That Inspire Kids to Change the World,” but alas, it’s rated PG-13.)
Watch: Morano on TV: NYT hottest year article ‘was bunk’ – Claim is ‘meaningless’
Media Slow to Admit California’s ‘Probably Forever’ Drought Is Now Almost Over
By Julia A. Seymour | February 2, 2017 | 8:43 AM EST
California’s “exceptional drought” isn’t exceptionally bad any more. Winter storms have been good for the state, pulling it out of the worst rating from the U.S. Drought Monitor. However, this “huge improvement” barely registered with the broadcast networks that had blamed “climate change” for the crisis.
CNN.com reported on Jan. 26, that “California’s drought is almost over.” For the first time in 36 months, no part of California was under “exceptional drought.” It also showed that only a small portion of the state still in “extreme drought,” but cautioned the drought is not “officially over” yet. But with nearly twice the normal amount of snowpack for the time of year, there were reasons for optimism.
NBC’s Today was the only network news show to mention the change in California’s drought conditions between Jan. 24, and Jan. 31, even though the three networks and many other media outlets had covered the drought often in the past. The broadcast networks had claimed it was unprecedented and “historic,” in spite of experts who refuted those claims. In 2015, the networks also totally ignored how environmental regulations worsened the California drought.…
NYT Oped by Warmist: A Scientists’ March on DC ‘is a terrible idea’ – Will ‘reinforce narrative that scientists are an interest group & politicize their data’
Climate Depot comment: “This warmist professor is spot on with many of his observations about the proposed DC climate march. Kudos to New York Times for publishing it. Michael Mann must be having fits over this.”
By Robert S. Young, a professor of coastal geology and the director of the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University.
Excepts:
A March will serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends.
There is no question that the proposed March for Science will make my job more difficult and increase polarization.
A march by scientists, while well intentioned, will serve only to trivialize and politicize the science we care so much about, turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture wars and further drive the wedge between scientists and a certain segment of the American electorate.
…
Al Gore, bless his heart (as we say in the South), was well intentioned when he made “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. But he did us no favors. So many of the conservative Southerners whom I speak to about climate change see it as a partisan issue largely because of that high-profile salvo fired by the former vice president.
Scientists marching in opposition to a newly elected Republican president will only cement the divide. The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers.…
DELINGPOLE: Trump’s Climate Plans Just Made the Media’s Heads Explode Like Watermelons
It was great – a bit like that No Pressure video that the enviro-loons made a few years ago, only better because this time the victims weren’t blameless schoolchildren but grisly, puffed-up, righteously eco, Trump-and-Brexit-hating TV and newspaper Environment Correspondents, all of whom hate my guts. (They hate yours too, so don’t get smug.)
The occasion was a press conference hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation for Myron Ebell, head of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Satan’s Emissary, as liberals prefer to think of him.
Ebell had come to tell them about Trump’s plans for the environment and energy, which I won’t repeat here because you know them already. (It’s going to be beautiful, that’s all you need to remember.)
No, the reason I went wasn’t to hear what Ebell had to say but to watch how his audience reacted.
You know that scene in The Omen when Damien’s parents try to take him into a church? It was a bit like that. Or maybe the one in The Exorcist, where Regan’s head does a 360 degree spin.
They hated it. (Especially the bit where Ebell told them that Trump would definitely be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty) They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They curled their lips. They laced their questions with the bitterest scorn. But they didn’t really tune into Ebell’s measured, silken, soft-spoken answers because, hell, they knew what he was saying just had to be wrong and they didn’t really understand what he meant anyway.
The reporter who set the tone – and if nothing else, you’ve got to admire his honesty – was the one from Channel 4 News who told Ebell: “It will occur to you that this room is full of people like myself who consider that nothing you say has any basis in fact. So what you’ve been telling us is essentially meaningless.”
Ebell replied with some painful home truths. “Elections are surprising things…” he began and went on to explain to the mystified audience why
Antarctica Larsen C Ice Shelf Crack Not Related To ‘Climate Change’ – Ice ‘More Stable Than Previously Thought’
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof Fritz Vahrenholt
(German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)
Image: visibleearth.nasa.gov
A huge crack recently formed through the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf. The German Tagesspiegel here was fair and did not attribute it to climate change:
A huge iceberg threatens to break away from Antarctica
An iceberg twice the size of Saarland threatens to break off the Larsen-C ice shelf. That’s a rare spectacle. […] ‘The crack is probably 160 kilometers long and 300 to 500 meters deep,’ the project-involved scientist Martin 0′Leary told the German Press Agency on Saturday. A direct connection to climate change cannot be ascertained.”
Read more at Tagesspiegel.
That’s a normal process: Self ice forms, but does not last forever. Time and again cracks form and chunks break off. During the Little Ice Age the shelf ice was more extensive and stable. Before that, during the Medieval Warm Period, the shelf ice melted similarly like today. If one looks at the past 150 years — the global rewarming since the Little Ice Age — then no one wonders that the Antarctic shelf ice retreated 5 meters per day between 1900 and 1930. Over the past fifty years things probably have looked different, as the Antarctic sea water has cooled over the past 50 years. According to Sinclair et al. (2014), the Ross ice shelf has expanded 5%. Apparently the Antarctic sea ice is indeed more stable than previously thought.…