Video of Fred Singer's Talk at Portland State Univ

Someone has posted videos of the Q&A section of Fred Singer's May 23rd talk at Portland State University. The first one starts with with the issue of the UAH temperature trend that I wrote about here. Note that Singer's chart does say he's using v5.4 of the UAH data (I've also posted this chart below, courtesy of a commenter), though an audience member claims Singer's presentation is the 5.0 reconstruction of this data (viz. not adjusted for orbital decay). In any case, Singer's claim that it shows zero trend (see the 1:33 mark in the first video) wasn't correct. My comment is at the 3:37 mark in the first video.









Here's the slide I mentioned:




Today's someecard

Via: Someecards (Motto: "When You Care Enough to Hit Send")

World CO2 Emissions See Record Jump

Somehow The Guardian got ahold of some unpublished IEA data that shows CO2 emissions set a record in 2010, up to 30.6 gigatons. The Chief Economist of the IEA is concerned:

"I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions," Birol told the Guardian. "It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say."

At 1.6 Gt, last year's increase is also the biggest yearly increase since the IEA began keeping records in 1971. That's perhaps understandable coming out of a serious global recession, but what is worrisome is that carbon intensity, after decades of steadily decreasing, has continued to be flat at 0.73 mt/$1000 (in 2000 dollars):

I suppose this is mostly because world oil production/usage has plateaued in recent years and the world is turning to coal instead, and coal is more CO2 intensive than oil. But I'm not really sure.

UPDATE: So I guess this doesn't look like such good news after all....

Cmdr Data's First Role

Here is the first film role of Brent Spiner, who played the android Commander Data on Star Trek The Next Generation. It's from Woody Allen's 1980 movie "Stardust Memories." Spiner is the young man with a camera.

Tall Bikes

I never saw these tall bikes before I came to Oregon, but here you occasionally see them zipping around. I've seen bikes significantly taller even than these:


Freak Bikes from wweek.vimeo on Vimeo.

Scientists Who Convinced Christie

Seems the two scientists most responsible for convincing Christie were Tony Broccoli and Ken Miller of Rutgers....

A Republican Admits Scientific Reality

Chris Christie, Republican Governor of New Jersey, has changed his mind on climate change; he now accepts the overwhelming scientific view that man is in part responsible for recent climate change and it is beginning to influence our weather systems:



How did Christie come to this change? He talked to scientists and accepted their expertise. This seems to shock some people -- Marc Morano is deliciously apoplectic, and is trying to throw Christie under the same bus he tried to throw Newt Gingrich under. I don't think that's going to be as easy -- Christie has some integrity and seems much less interested in pandering than does Gingrich (or almost any other Republican).

ClimateDepot.com screen capture, 5/27/11

Who Said It?

John Fleck has a climate quote quiz. It begins "Mankind has a record of reacting after a disaster strikes.... If we ignore the present warning signs and wait for an ecological disaster to strike, it will probably be too late."

You might be surprised who said this.

Singer's Folksy Schtick

William Connolly writes that Fred Singer gave a talk at his former institute about 5 years ago, and Singer used the same folksy manner in an attempt to cover up glaring errors:

He used junk data, and anytime anyone pointed this out, he put on the folksy-old-man persona and pretended he knew nothing about it. As a rhetorical trick, I don't think it works well: rather than a poor old man being assailed by nasty young men pointing out his errors, he comes across as a senile old chap who doesn't really know what he is talking about.

Fred Singer's Fact-free Lecture in Portland

 

Fred Singer spoke at Portland State University yesterday, the token "skeptic" in a series of five lectures that included speakers like Phil Mote and Aslam Kahlil.

Singer is 87 years old, and I genuinely hope I'm as healthy and cognizant as he is when I'm that age.

Unfortunately, this is the nicest thing I can say about the talk, and I've been trying. Almost everything he said was either wrong, deceptive, or both.

As one member of the audience noted, Singer has a very folksy, relaxed style. He made repeated claims to simply be following the methods of science, but there was little evidence of this.

But what Singer said was deceptive and almost all of it entirely wrong. That's obvious if you know a little climate science, but I fear that some in the audience took him seriously.

The highlights were:

• Singer claimed that climate models predict the infamous tropical tropospheric "hot spot" that is not actually there.
• That the global temperature rise since 1975 "is not real."
• That UAH satellite data show no warming trend since 1979.
• That "part of the explanation is the Urban Heat Island Effect."
• That "there must be some human effect but it's so small we can't see it -- so it's of no consequence."
• "There's very little we can do about climate change, since it's mostly natural."
• "We don't know why models and observations disagree."
• "The warming is probably caused by the Sun, but how?" [He hypothesized it was cosmic rays.]
• "It's very possible air traffic is responsible for Northern Hemisphere warming."

About the only things he said that made any sense were (1) "CO2 is a greenhouse gas," (2) "models are chaotic," and (3) Like all results in in science, the CO2 correlation cannot be proved, it can only be falsified.

I'll first discuss the second of the highlights, because it's the most egregious, and then the first. The rest often contradict themselves (Singer claims there is no warming, and then gives possible explanations for...the warming.

Most of Singer's arguments seemed to come from his work with Douglass, Pearson and around 2004-5, and have been dissected in this RealClimate post and associated links.

Most egregious of his claims was that there has been no warming since 1975. As proof he put up a graph of UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville) satellite data, compiled by the Christy/Spencer group. Singer said he calculated that it had zero linear trend. 

One audience member down front almost jumped out of his seat while pointing out that Singer was using version 5.0 of the UAH data, which is years old and had not been properly (and famously) corrected for satellite drift. UAH did that and their new data, version 5.4, now shows warming, and they list the trend at the bottom of their data page: +0.14°C/decade for the globe, +0.17°C/decade for land. Astonishingly Singer feigned ignorance of this.

The other major falsehood was that old saw of the tropical tropospheric hot spot. Singer put up this graphic from the 2006 CCSP Report Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere:

2006 CCSP Report, Ch 1 Fig 1.3F

He then put up this figure from a later chapter in the same report:

2006 CCSP Report Ch 5 Fig 5.7E

Or, as he summarized it in his next figure:

which I have taken from RealClimate. As RC points out, the first thing you should notice about this plot of the data is that it has no error bars. That, of course, is scientifically verboten. As RC shows in excruciating detail, when you do properly adjust the radiosonde data and when one considers the errors there is no disagreement between models and observations. RC concludes:

...there is no clear model-data discrepancy in tropical tropospheric trends once you take the systematic uncertainties in data and models seriously. Funnily enough, this is exactly the conclusion reached by a much better paper by Peter Thorne and colleagues. Douglass et al’s claim to the contrary is simply unsupportable.

(Of course, this has never stopped David Evans from proclaiming there still is a discrepancy, in every venue that will have him, except the only one that really counts: a scientific journal.)

Three years later Singer and Douglass were still using the same uncertainty free-plot.

[As well, the tropical tropospheric hot spot is not a signature of GHG warming, it's a fingerprint of any warming, regardless of the source, as Tim Lambert has been pointing out for years.]

--

There were so many basic errors in Singer's talk that it's hard to believe this is the best skeptics science deniers can do. Worse of all was his continuing insistence that he was simply following the science, with the implication that others weren't. It would be sad if Singer hadn't been so dangerous all these years.

Chinese Journalists Banned from Space Shuttle Launch

This is perverse: Chinese journalists were not allowed access to cover last week's space shuttle launch because of a recent Congressional ban on interactions between NASA and the Chinese government:

A NASA spokesperson says the agency was simply following instructions in last month's 2011 spending bill that averted a government-wide shutdown. The legislation prohibits NASA from using any resources to host visits by a Chinese official to any NASA facility as well as for collaborations with any Chinese government entity....

The language was written by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), chair of a House of Representatives spending panel that oversees NASA's budget. Wolf is a vocal critic of China's human rights record and what he believes are government-sanctioned cyberattacks on U.S. institutions and businesses.

Here's what Wolf said last month:

"We don't want to give them the opportunity to take advantage of our technology, and we have nothing to gain from dealing with them. And frankly, it boils down to a moral issue. ... Would you have a bilateral program with Stalin?"

The human rights violations of the Chinese government government are certainly troubling, and in a way it's refreshing to see any politician speak of them (especially when recent presidents visit China and say little-to-nothing in public about the problem). But I don't think this is the way to handle the situation. Time and again scientists have been among the first to break down barriers between nations--the canonical example being Einstein and Eddington after World War I--and one of the best things about science is its international character and inclusiveness. That's what makes inroads in advancing rights. Blunt, intransigent insistence rarely works, if it ever does. We should show the Chinese the benefits of an open society so they change themselves, not slam the door in their face until they meet our standards.

Wolf says he wants to extend the ban to Chinese NGOs next year.

One Hundred Mil Wasted

The saddest thing about the entire Harold Camping saga is that he and his group spent over $100 million on an advertising campaign warning people of the Rapture he guaranteed was coming. What a waste. Wouldn't a better, more Christian response have been spending it where it might do some good--on those people whose worlds really are ending?

More Abysmal Fred Singer Predictions

In October 1967 Fred Singer wrote an article for the Washington Post, writing as if it were 2007. Among his predictions were a few that were rather obvious:

• that man-made satellites had been orbiting the earth for 50 years. 
• None of the fundamental laws of physics had been overturned. 
• increased understanding of the natural environment, and the relationships between the atmosphere, oceans, and the land. As the scale of human activity increased, so had the understanding of the subtle relationships between large-scale irrigation schemes and the climate. Weather satellites were able to indicate the trend of climate change.
• increased reliance on the electronic computer and data processor.

And a few that were far off:

• Planets had been explored but not colonized.
• the increase in human intellect by direct electronic storage of information in the brain—the coupling of the brain to an external computer, thereby gaining direct access to an information library.
• Population in the U.S. had doubled and the demand for water and energy had risen by a factor of four.

This last prediction was quite wrong on all three items:

Hardly an impressive track record.

Sources: 1967 US Population, 2007 US Population, US water usage, US energy consumption

Back When the Denialism Started

Finally, here's another article from the Jan 7, 1981 Calgary Herald, capturing the early days of the Republican Party's break with scientific reality:

30-yr Old Article About Global Warming

Here's an article covering global warming from the same 1981 AAAS meeting where Singer made his wrong prediction (click to enlarge).

Shows just how long these concerns have been around and available to the public.

Fred Singer's Lousy Prediction on Oil

Here's an article from the January 7, 1981 Calgary Herald where Fred Singer predicts a sharp decline in world oil usage:

Needless to say this was completely wrong -- world oil consumption is now over 80 million barrels a day.

Singer is giving a seminar on climate change this Monday at Portland State University. Perhaps this will come up.

Charlatans, Cranks, and Clowns

Now that the Rapture has not occurred, as predicted (though leaving cats behind is extremely unfair--they ought to be the first to go), can we expect Harold Camping to admit that he was wrong? That the Bible is not an absolute font of truth? Will his followers admit that he's a false messiah, just another in a long line of charlatans, cranks, and clowns who have previously predicted the End of the World? That their beliefs might not be serving them well and a bit more rationality and critical thinking might be in order, and that such a philosophy might help rid the world of prejudice, falsehoods, and turmoil?

Don't be ridiculous.

Chart O' The day

In other words "the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit over the next ten years."

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Via: Kevin Drum

US Emissions to Stay Below Pre-Recession Peak Until 2028

Here's an interesting chart from the recent National Academy of Sciences report America's Climate Choices. It projects that [energy-related] US CO2 emissions won't rise back to pre-recession levels until 2028, assuming business-as-usual, as a result of better energy efficiency and lower economic activity in their recession:

Lester Brown thinks US emissions are headed for a massive decline. I am skeptical.

The Cats of War

From Slate: