(Read the original story on this issue if you haven’t already.)
The DeSmogBlog Youtube channel has uploaded the original video. I’m not sure if Peter Sinclair is aware of this, but somehow I think he won’t mind much. Mr Watts, however, will probably throw another fit.
I will consider the issue a true victory for Sinclair when he re-uploads the video on his account. But for now, at least people will be able to watch the video behind all this controversy.
Many of you probably are familiar with Peter Sinclair’s Climate Denial Crock of the Week channel, which dispels popular climate myths.
Many of you are probably also familiar with Anthony Watts and his blog Watt’s Up With That.
Several weeks ago, Sinclair created a video called “What’s Up With Watts?” in which he debunked the idea that the urban heat island effect is skewing the temperature records – the very premise of Watt’s Surface Stations project. He discussed how the temperature readings in urban centers are calibrated with nearby rural stations so that any heat bias is removed. Most impressive was a graph of the temperature readings from stations Watts deemed satisfactory; they showed the same upward trend as all of the stations together. NASA’s obviously doing a pretty good job of correcting that GISS data.
However, just a few days ago, Watts complained to YouTube and got the video removed on basis of a “copyright claim”. It is my knowledge (although I might be wrong) that YouTube will remove any video as soon as anyone complains about copyright.
The only mention on Watt’s blog of the incident was a comment from a reader:
“Sorry to post off topic (although the comments are all backslapping anyway) but is there a reason you (Anthony) filed a DMCA complaint against Greenman3610’s youtube video “Watts up with Watts”?
From Youtube:
“This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org”Surely his video falls under fair use. Relying on the nanny state to attack critics or am I missing something?
REPLY: I don’t care to discuss my reasons here as they are private and unrelated to this discussion. Google agreed that complaint was valid and removed the video. – Anthony”
But as Kevin Grandia from DeSmogBlog writes,
“Quite frankly I don’t know what part of the video Watts would have a problem with. There’s nothing I saw in the video that appears to break any copyright as it relates to Watts.
Now maybe he took issue with the short (credited) clip at the beginning from Will Ferrell’s Anchorman movie…. but I think this is more about a video that thoroughly shreds Watts and his argument that the world is wrong about climate change and he is right.”
If the copyright claim was indeed about the Anchorman clip (most likely to conceal other motives, however – you could spend your whole life filing complaints about YouTube videos that had clips from movies) it will be all too easy for Sinclair to edit that out of the video and repost it.
Otherwise, Watts hasn’t got a leg to stand on. It really exposes a person’s motives when they don’t even write a logical rebuttal when they take issue to their arguments being challenged – they simply censor those challenges instead.
Throughout most of central Canada, where I live, as well as the north-central US (west of the Great Lakes), we’ve had a very cool spring and summer. It feels like we’ve only had a few days of actual summer. My shorts are sitting at the bottom of my closet wondering why I’ve rejected them.
The media has been all over this. Skeptical websites are thrilled. I’ve heard way too many “So much for global warming!” comments for my comfort and sanity. There are only so many times that I can patiently explain the difference between weather and climate, regional and global change before I go a little nuts.
I made an uneducated assumption that the world was still around 2008 temperatures. Perhaps it was due to a solar minimum, the last dregs of La Nina, or just statistical noise. I didn’t think too much about it.
It was a bit of surprise yesterday, then, when I read a blog post that suggested that the southern US was experiencing above-average summer temperatures. I was quite intrigued. I went on a search for a global temperate anomaly map for this spring and/or summer. Here is a map from the National Climatic Data Center (part of NOAA).
As you can see, north-central North America did have below average June temperatures (not too surprising to me – the jet stream almost reached Chicago the other day). So did parts of Asia, Europe, and South America. But it’s clear that these cooler areas are the minority. Almost everywhere else on our planet (including the southern US) had a warmer than average June.
The NCDC states that the global land-and-ocean temperature for June 2009 (basically the map you see above) “was the second warmest on record”. They also note that, during June, an El Niño began. As the global temperature increases during an El Niño event, due to a change in heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, the NCDC predicts that “global temperatures are likely to continue to threaten previous record highs”.
There’s a good chance that it won’t be long before we stop hearing that global warming stopped in 1998. In a way, that makes me happy – no other claim annoys me quite so much, can you say statistical misrepresentation – but it also makes me worry about the state of the world.
I wish I was wrong about this. I wish that global warming had really stopped in 1998.
To conclude
June 2009 alone can’t prove a warming trend – it doesn’t even come close to the classical 30-year climate period. But it really makes the “so much for global warming” hypothesis in my area fall apart. That claim was unscientific even before we knew the stats for the whole world. How can you possibly discern an idea of global climate from a few months in a single area?
There’s a reason it’s called global warming, not regional warming.
There’s a reason it’s called climate change, not weather change.
And hooray for scientific data that is readily available to the public, so we don’t have to rely on personal experience of our own little corner of the world to try to figure out the whole planet.
389.42 ppm
(From CO2 Now, an advocacy group, but they appear to get their data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, so we can establish sufficient credibility.)
Worse than even I expected. Remember the good old days when An Inconvenient Truth had just been released and CO2 was still at 380 ppm?
Nothing in science changes quite as fast as climatology data these days. My school chemistry handouts are outdated only in that sense; they keep saying that CO2 is at 350 ppm.
A recent comment by a long-time reader brought a new piece of information to my attention. “What about the JSER?” they asked. “[Someone claimed] that it was a Japanese scientific society that endorsed the falsity of global warming…..What do you think?”
Did this bring the absense of disagreement among professional scientific organizations, at the top of our credibility spectrum, to a close?
I mulled it over and decided to do what seemed to be the most honest course of action. I would research this claim as thoroughly as my resources allowed, and if it turned out to be true, I would publish a retraction of my former statement regarding organizations.
First, however, I needed to get more information. I researched with the following questions in mind:
1) Is the JSER a professional scientific organization? This part of the claim appeared to be true – according to the English section of their website, they published a scientific journal, held conferences and seminars, and boasted over 1500 members.
However, the JSER – the Japan Society of Energy and Resources – likely has a high chance of bias. Its goal is “to promote the science and technology concerning energy and resources and thus to facilitate cooperation among industry academia and governmental sectors for coping with the problems in this field.” With today’s fossil-fuel dependent economy, the JSER likely has a lot of members representing the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas officials can easily fall prey to confirmation bias – their jobs depend on a resource which is causing dire problems for our planet. In their situation, it’s often easiest to deny such problems. In fact, the final scientific organization to change its statement from “humans aren’t affecting the climate” to “oops, yes they are” was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
2) Did the JSER officially state that humans aren’t affecting the climate? I found no evidence for an official statement.
3) So where did the claim come from? It started with a written discussion between five JSER representatives. One, the only climatologist of the five, defended the mainstream opinion that humans are causing climate change. One was undecided. The remaining three rejected the theory.
However, this discussion was mistakenly perceived as a “report” by The Register, a British media news source. I found no evidence that this so-called “report” was peer-reviewed (and how could it possibly have passed peer-review – it claimed that global warming stopped in 1998!). For example, the Register article noted, “Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.” One of the authors is alleged to have compared climatology to ancient astrology.
I think we can safely leave this source as an email debate between colleagues. I cannot imagine how it could be a peer-reviewed document worthy of consideration.
However, as always, I could be wrong. There is little on the Internet regarding the JSER and its report. If any readers have additional information, please comment.
Update: Thanks to John for pointing me to the website of James Annan, a climatologist living in Japan. He knows the authors of the document personally and says, “The “report” is simply the collation of one of these popular-but-pointless sceptic-vs-scientist debates, and has no official status.”
Many of you have probably heard of Ron Paul’s recent statement in Congress regarding a petition signed by thousands of scientists claiming that there was no scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, no evidence that burning hydrocarbons was harmful, and, in fact, evidence that burning hydrocarbons would be beneficial for the Earth. The purpose of this statement was to persuade the American people to reject the cap-and-trade bill being negotiated in Congress.
I was skeptical of this petition. I did a little research to find out its legitimacy. Before long I discovered that it was an updated edition of the Oregon Petition, which was created to persaude America to reject Kyoto.
The Oregon Petition has some major problems. Firstly, attached to the petition was an article supporting its claims. The article was designed to look just like an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a reputable peer-reviewed journal. However, the article was created by three skeptics and was not peer-reviewed at all. The NAS was subject to a lot of inquiries and controversy following the publication of this petition. It eventually had to publish a statement saying that the NAS had nothing to do with the article.
Secondly, the petition could be signed by scientists from any discipline, even if they had no experience studying climatology. As British physics student Michael Ashcroft writes,
“The problem is that, as science is such a vast field, you can spend your entire life studying one branch of science and still know absolutely nothing about another. For example, I am a physics student, and I can honestly say that I know nothing about medicine. I also wouldn’t expect an ecologist to understand the processes behind the formation of stars, for example.This is precisely what the Petition Project does assume, though. If we look at the qualifications of the signers, we see that even medical doctors are eligible to sign. Take a look. Some of the more amusing backgrounds, that supposedly give these people enough special knowledge about global warming to deny its existence, include:
Mathematics – without a special interest in the climate, this is worthless in the field.
Physics – I have almost finished a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and there has been only one, optional course about “Environmental Physics”, so I can argue from experience that a degree in Physics does not necessarily equip someone with the information they may need to decry global warming.
Biology – unless there’s a large degree of specialisation of the effects of climate change on some biological variable (growth, change of ecosystems etc), this has no bearing on the subject.
Medicine – What?!
Aerospace Engineering – I happen to live with an Aeronautical Engineering student, who has had no training in any environmental subjects whatsoever.
Computer Science – see Aerospace Engineering
It is like asking celebrities what they think of the economy of Chad. They may be famous, and therefore carry some weight, but their opinions are nothing more than opinion. Asking “Dr X” what he thinks of the manufacture of steel may be all well and good, except that “Dr X” has a PhD in ancient history. He may be qualified in something, but it is misleading to assume that because he is a doctor of something, he must know everything about everything.”
Thirdly, the scientists who did sign may have been misrepresented. An article in Scientific American conducted a study regarding the participants.
“Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers; a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.”
The Seattle Times also investigated the Orgeon Petition, and found that some questionable people had signed.
“Several environmental groups questioned dozens of the names: “Perry S. Mason” (the fictitious lawyer?), “Michael J. Fox” (the actor?), “Robert C. Byrd” (the senator?), “John C. Grisham” (the lawyer-author?). And then there’s the Spice Girl, a k a. Geraldine Halliwell: The petition listed “Dr. Geri Halliwell” and “Dr. Halliwell.”
Asked about the pop singer, Robinson said he was duped. The returned petition, one of thousands of mailings he sent out, identified her as having a degree in microbiology and living in Boston. “It’s fake,” he said.
“When we’re getting thousands of signatures there’s no way of filtering out a fake,” Robinson, 56, said in a telephone interview from Oregon.”
Finally, for a more thorough and visually appealing analysis of the Oregon Petition, including the motives and credibility of its creators, I’d encourage you all to watch this video by Peter Sinclair.
We should all assess the credibility of the Petition Project. Its first revision has some major problems. Should we trust it a second time? Can it compare with the G8 Statement, the Joint Academies’ Statments versions I and II, the survey of individual climatologists by Doran and Zimmerman, and the dozens of other organizations that have made indepent statements?
Which statements truly reflect the opinion of the scientific community?
All right, here it is. A list of professional scientific organizations that have issued statements saying that humans are causing the Earth to warm. Thanks to Logical Science for helping in the creation of this list. Keep in mind that, since the list is several years old, it is probably longer today.
As of 2007, no professional scientific organization in the world publicly disputes that humans are causing the Earth to warm. (No, the Heartland Institute is not a professional scientific organization.)
As we discussed in Making Up Your Own Science, whatever objections an individual holds to the theory of anthropogenic climate change have almost certainly been addressed by the folks metioned above. They know that the climate has changed in the past. They know that the urban heat island effect can cause regional warming. They know that volcanoes emit carbon dioxide. And yet they are still saying that humans are causing the Earth to warm. What does this tell you?
1) They could be right. They could have satisfactory explanations for all of these objections.
2) They could be ignorant. You, the average individual who thinks global warming stopped in 1998, might be smarter and more thorough than 97.4% of climatologists and all of the aforementioned organizations put together.
3) They could be lying. The entire scientific community might be composed of liberal extremists who are plotting to destroy capitalism and free trade.
Which of these outcomes seems most likely?
How sure are you? What if you were wrong?
Are you willing to gamble that the entire scientific community is incompetent or lying?
Are you willing to bet your life, your civilization, and your species on it?
Has anyone ever referred you to the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle for “the other side of the story”?
As we can see from our credibility spectrum, documentaries shouldn’t be taken too seriously – their directors are, at best, professional individuals. A documentary should never be treated like a scientific report. Just because you saw it on TV, doesn’t mean it’s true, or even the prevailing scientific view.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is an example of why documentaries should not be blindly trusted. Take a look at this video, by the ever-more-popular Peter Sinclair, to see why.
You hear the term “scientific consensus” thrown around all the time in climate change. Al Gore claims absolute consensus. Many skeptics claim none at all. Earlier this year, Peter Doran and his student Maggie Zimmerman, from the University of Illinois, published the results of a poll aimed at quantifying the degree of scientific agreement on climate change.
Peter Doran is a publishing climatologist, so he falls into the most credible category of individuals on our credibility spectrum. The poll was published in EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. EOS is a peer-reviewed journal, which falls even higher on our credibility spectrum than a publishing climatologist. I think we can establish strong credibility for this poll.
Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (click on the link for the most complete summary you can get without an EOS account) polled 3146 Earth scientists on their opinion on climate change. The summary describes the details of how the poll was carried out, for anyone who is questioning objectivity.
First, the poll asked, “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” Overall, 90% of participants answered “risen”, as did 96.2% of actively publishing climatologists, the highest level of specialization categorized in the study.
The second question asked, “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” As seen below, 82% of participants answered “yes”, as did 97.4% of actively publishing climatologists. Note that the darkest blue bar represents the general public, as seen in a recent Gallup poll.
Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
The poll noted that the level of agreement on anthropogenic global warming increased with the level of specialization. They also noted that the public perception of debate was, obviously, largely unfounded. We’ll be talking a lot more about perceived debate in the weeks to come here at ClimateSight.
The results of this poll are not surprising to me. In a way they make me happy, as they confirm that my previous perception of scientific agreement was well founded. But they also make me sad. 97% of the world’s most qualified individuals on this topic agree that we’re affecting the climate – something which is generally very negative as, with climate, stability is best. As David Suzuki said, “We are playing a crap game with the only home we have.”
ClimateSight 