Hang Right Politics

Sure to Be an Oscar Winner…

Posted by Hailey on June 28th, 2006 in Global Warming

Well, the AP News loves Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Get a load of this ARTICLE.

AP News is so excited to mention that “the nation’s top climate scientists are giving “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy.”

Too bad we can’t give this article “five stars for accuracy.”

The former vice president’s movie - replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets - mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.

The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.

But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Notice anything funny about the AP’s sense of math? They totally gloss over the fact that “most scientists had not seen the movie.” But they did give away one interesting nugget of information. The AP contacted “more than 100 climate researchers,” but only 19 had actually seen the movie, and bothered to reply to AP News. So, according to the AP, 19% is a fair representation of how climate researchers view this movie.

Well that seems to sum up how well global warming advocates grasp math and science.

Hat tip: Big Lizards

Posted by Hailey

9 Responses to “Sure to Be an Oscar Winner…”

Mike's Noise Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Thoughts on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”

I am constantly amazed by scientists and others who place so much faith in Darwinism and natural selection — theories that predict ever-changing diversity of life while denying the necessity of an outside force to influence these changes — but who co…
davidm Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
I love to hear Kathy’s opinion on this, but that would mean she’d have to find the movie and watch it. So, Kathy: are we having global warming? Isn’t the earth constantly undergoing climate changes? Aren’t the developing/third world nations the biggest users of fossil fuels? You’re an environmental scientist, is there a rebuttal that isn’t political? Is the whole issue political?
Jeanette Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
You’ll have to wait awhile, David, as Kathy and her daughters have taken some female time off today.

And you know she’ll shoot it down faster than they can put it up again.
Kathy Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
David,
You’ve been so kind and generous to give expert legal opinions and have been a genuine friend, so I will be as candid as possible on the subject of global warming.

I believe we are currently in a warming trend. In the last century the temperature has changed one degree fahrenheit (which is a smaller increment than celcius, which is why they use it instead of a decimal measurement in celcius to make it sound like more).

There have been heating and cooling trends throughout history. The big debate centers around greenhouse gases and whether man is causing global warming.

Carbon dioxide is the main culprit - of course it is integral to human and plant respiration so the latest attempt by the Sierra Club to force the EPA to monitor CO2 will fail - it is not hazardous.

The debate has become so political it’s hard to have a discussion with a ‘true believer’ of global warming because they don’t understand the science; cherry pick the data, and usually, they quote advocates of GW while personally attacking dissenting scientists (calling them discredited, ie., Dr. Lindzer of MIT) and quote article after leftstream article about the ‘consensus’. You don’t have to search long before you discover there is no consensus.

So then you ask - why are they trying to drown out reasonable debate on the merits of the science? It’s not from a position of strength.

What is the motivation behind convincing people that we have to stem greenhouse gases? It appeals to those who blame capitalism as a system and it punishes that system. For evidence of this, the movie should have been made in Chinese and Hindi for the world’s worst polluters.

The US contributes only 5% and that is using GW proponents’ own numbers.

I also cynically think Algore is trying to find an issue that trumps national security, and what is bigger than saving the USA? saving the planet….

I have scientific problems with the theory that have to do with
*acquisition of data,
*comparing apples to oranges (using tree rings etc rather than temperatures to extrapolate data)
*and then putting both types of data on the same curve -
This introduces too many variables to justify that assumption. In the laboratory I can’t even use two different thermometers to measure something, unless both are NIST calibrated. At such small increments of change, variability can create enormous error in measurement. We are discussing one degree Fahrenheit over one hundred years… It takes 1.8 Fahrenheit/1 degree Celcius.

I don’t want to get too technical, others have already, but I believe we are in a natural trend, to what effect man has on this environment, it is limited. Combustion and pollution was far worse in the early and middle of the last century. Think Pittsburg circa 1965. If CO2 is as villainous as it is portrayed, we’d already be dead.

Watch this issue go away in November. (I hope that wasn’t too political- and was a good objective discussion.)

I’m sorry I won’t go to this movie as I find it an insult to my intelligence.

I’ve asked my husband, a licensed professional geologist, geophysical engineer to comment from his perspective on changes in the earth’s crust.
Kathy Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
david,
I found this article which explains the scientific disparities very well:

Last week’s release of a National Academies of Science (NAS) report entitled “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years” was the result of a congressional request to look into the controversy surrounding the now-famous “hockey stick” temperature curve. The media portrayed the findings of the NAS review panel as some sort of new statement about how warm the Earth is at present, and totally missed the real news: that the original claim of Mann et al. of unprecedented warmth in the last 1,000 years — based mostly upon tree ring data, especially from the southwest U.S. — was dubious at best.

For the last several years, the hockey stick has been a poster prop for manmade global warming. For instance, it figures prominently in Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the statistical and data analysis methods that Mann et al. used to arrive at their 1,000 year temperature reconstruction were strongly criticized by some. The hockey stick played down the warmth of the “Medieval Warm Period” of 1,000 years ago, as well as the later coolness of the “Little Ice Age.”

Also, the uncritical acceptance of the hockey stick for inclusion in the U.N.’s Third Assessment Report on global climate in 2001 gave many scientists the impression that the editors of that report wanted to believe the hockey stick more than they were convinced of its validity.

In their attempt to not publicly scold Mann and his coauthors for questionable data analysis methods, the authors of the new report instead chose to restate the evidence for how warm the Earth has gotten recently. What the media didn’t notice, however, is that the 1,000 year figure that was central to the whole hockey stick debate had now been replaced in the report by a figure of 400 years. Since most of the last 400 years was dominated by the “Little Ice Age,” the warming during the 20th century should be welcomed by humanity.

The report says that surface temperature reconstructions before this period (about 1600) have “less confidence” and that “uncertainties…increase substantially backward in time…” for any of these proxy estimates of ancient temperatures. One review panel member told me that the statisticians on the panel were amazed when it was revealed that the method underlying the hockey stick had essentially no statistical skill when validated.

This is pretty harsh language for an NAS report written by review panel members, several of whom are equivalent to foxes guarding the hen house. Researchers who have bought into the validity of using proxy measures for ancient climate reconstructions aren’t about to throw away the “best” method the paleoclimate research community has, even if it can not be validated with real temperature measurements (the thermometer was not even invented until the 1600’s).

One rather amazing characteristic of the hockey stick is the so-called “divergence problem”: the strong warming in the late 20th century is not even indicated in the tree ring data that were used to reconstruct the last 1,000 years of supposed temperature variations. Much of the 20th century warming (the blade of the hockey stick) represents real temperature measurements, not tree ring reconstructions, since they don’t show the warming. This raises a natural question, which the panel shrugged off: If tree rings do not show the strong warming of the late 20th century, how do we know there wasn’t a similar temperature spike 1,000 years ago?

Keeping the door open to the possibility that Mann might be right anyway, the new report says that it is at least “plausible” that we are warmer now than anytime in the last 1,000 years. But this is a much lower level of certainty than has been associated with the hockey stick by the media, bureaucrats, and movie stars (like Al Gore).

But what was the biggest news in the media coverage of the NAS report last week? The biased nature of the media coverage. It almost seems like the media covering the report looked for familiar phrases that fit their global warming paradigm (e.g., “…warmer than the previous 400 years…”), without noting the important conclusions that addressed why the report was written in the first place.

Indeed, much of the press coverage managed to connect the words “warmer than” with a report reference to “2,000 years” to come up with widespread statements (not supported by the report) that the Earth is warmer now than when Jesus Christ walked the Earth. Apparently, sound bites are still preferred over truth.

The NAS review panel report admits that it is difficult to conclude that we are warmer now than 1,000 years ago, but that we are very likely warmer than anytime in the last 400 years. Since what this really means is that we are warmer now than any time during the “Little Ice Age” (and thank goodness for that), one wonders whether we really know anything about past climate reconstructions from tree ring data.

Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Here’s the link for the article with a graph of the temperature.
In Search Of Utopia Says:
June 28th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
I guess this…

Just blows the hell out of Right Wing denials eh? But of course, Paul from Wizbang (One of the frequent denialist), knows more than these scientist. Or at least thinks he does. WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation’s top climate scientists…

{editor’s note: In Search of Utopia, you should keep guessing, your first answer was wrong. No cigar.

Try reading the article in comment 5 - for an explanation about the bias in the AP - who last I checked was not a SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION.

In fact - that which is ‘blown’ is confidence in the AP’s ability to interpret the report.}
davidm Says:
June 29th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
kathy-thank you so much. I don’t want to see this movie, and I had always believed climate changes were a natural occurence. It is believed Mesa Verde and other early, large pre-Columbian Indian communities were abandoned because of a prolonged drought.
Kathy Says:
June 29th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
Your welcome David. NM has well preserved native ruins. If I remember correctly there are some closer to you near Taos?

I think history can tell us more about climate science than the latest eco-scientists and it’s interesting that you point that out.

My husband put together some thoughts on the subject, and I’ll post that this weekend.

BTW - saw that Wallace and Grommit movie! What a hoot!
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July 2nd, 2006 at 2:14 am
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