George Monbiot: John Tomlinson beats his own record for climate denial nonsense

John Tomlinson beats his own record for climate denial nonsense

John Tomlinson, the Michigan Mauler, has now written a column with a cracking 38 howlers in his denial of global warming

 
by George Monbiot, The Guardian, May 1, 2009

I'm really annoyed with Michigan columnist John Tomlinson. First, the Michigan Mauler has walked all over the competition for the prestigious Christopher Booker Prize, just a couple of months into the contest to find the world's most misguided comments on climate change. He set a high bar with his first article about global warming, which contained 18 magnificent errors. I feared that this would be impossible to beat.
How wrong I was! He has now seen off all possible contenders (except perhaps a repeat performance by his good self), with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal. Ironically he made these errors in response to my exposure of his previous claims.

Amazingly, this even beats his own provisional world record for density: the ratio of falsehoods to words. His first column averaged one misleading statement for every 26 words. This one delivers one per 21 words. I intend to submit his second column to the Guinness Book of Records as the most inaccurate article ever published in a newspaper.

Secondly, this astonishing wealth of disinformation means it has probably taken me 100 times longer to respond to his article than he took to write it. This is why there's been such a long delay in my response, and a general hold-up in all further entries for the Christopher Booker Prize. The amount of time I've wasted on his nonsense means I'm beginning to regret launching this prize. And beginning to lose the will to live. I warn you now: this is a very long blog post.

Like most climate change deniers, the Michigan Mauler makes no attempt to answer his critics. He does not seek to defend his previous claims; he simply abandons them and switches to another set of falsehoods. For example, in the first column he maintains that "The Earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since". In the second column he claims that "Temperatures plunged until 1850, then rose, peaking in 1934." He makes no attempt to justify this switch. He really doesn't care, does he?

There is no attempt to argue here, just to machine-gun his readers with so much nonsense that only people daft enough to devote several days to investigating his claims - as I have just done - can answer them all. I was not entirely surprised to discover that the Mauler makes his living by practising hypnosis. Something of the hypnotic method appears to be at work in his articles: if you say it loudly and confidently enough, people will fall under your spell. As Tomlinson says in promoting his practice, "Hypnosis is easy … intelligence and will, aspects of the conscious mind, are irrelevant. Only imagination matters. Almost everyone can be hypnotized, if they so choose."

I have decided to accept no further entries from the Michigan Mauler. He's just too good at this stuff. He's almost certain to win the prize, though I'll be looking high and low for another contender. The problem is that in order to win they'll have to produce at least 39 howlers, and the thought of documenting them all is just too much to bear. Is it worth it, or should I just give up and award this prize to Tomlinson now?

Anyway, here, in all their glory, are his falsehoods:

Claim 1. For most of the last 10,000 years, Earth was much warmer than today.

Fact: This is bunkum. Tomlinson, as usual, gives no source for this claim, but it's probably a new variant on
the mid-Holocene canard, which he has somehow extrapolated to the entire period. NOAA has this to say about it:

In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today, but only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere. More over, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and know without doubt that this proven "astronomical" climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years

Claim 2. Even 1,000 years ago it was much warmer.

Fact: Rubbish again. As you can see from the graphs of past temperature reconstructions (page 467 in this chapter by the IPCC), none of the curves suggest that temperatures 1,000 years ago matched those of today, let alone were much warmer.

Claim 3. Temperatures plunged until 1850, then rose, peaking in 1934.

Fact: No - only in 48 states of the US, comprising 2% of the world's surface.

Claim 4. According to Nasa, the 1930s was our warmest decade in the 20th century.

Fact: This appears to be a double extrapolation. First Tomlinson extends the US 1934 data to the whole planet. Then he extends it to the whole decade. The 1930s weren't the warmest decade by any stretch of the imagination, even in the US.

Claim 5. We're still below that temperature.

Fact: Nonsense again, as you can see from the Met Office series.

Claim 6. Next, a sharp cooling trend began, bottoming in 1979. This produced the now infamous "ice age" scare. GW alarmists always start their numbers from this bottom because temperatures rose until 1998, before dropping once again.

Fact: Given that Tomlinson, in the same article, cites the recorded temperature series, beginning in 1850, and the palaeoclimate reconstructions of the past 2,000 years, he evidently knows that this too is bunkum. I have never seen any scientist or environmentalist use 1979 as the starting point for temperature records.

Claim 7. Because temperatures rose until 1998, before dropping once again. Now, 11 years later, that bounce is almost gone.

Fact: For the umpteenth time, 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded, but the trend shows a steady rise across the decades, with the result that eight of the 10 warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001.
In other words, Tomlinson is doing exactly what he wrongly accuses his critics of doing (see 6): starting his temperature series at a point convenient to his argument.

Claim 8. The whole GW argument hinges on which temperature source you quote.

Fact: No it doesn't. It hinges on the entire range of data, observations, reconstructions and models, spanning many thousands of scientific papers.

Claim 9. Many climatologists believe the University of Alabama-Huntsville is the world's foremost temperature monitoring source because it uses satellite scanning, as opposed to ground stations.

Fact: No, they see it as one among many useful sources, all of which contribute to the scientific understanding of climate trends and causes.

Claim 10. Its data absolutely do not support GW theory.

Fact: Oh yes they do.

Claims 11 and 12. It's the other global temperature monitoring source, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) that started the scare.

Facts: "The other" suggests that Tomlinson believes this is the only alternative data source.
Attention was first drawn to the prospect of man-made global warming in 1896, by Svante Arrhenius.

Claim 13. In 1988, testifying before Congress, Dr James Hansen, head of GISS and an expert in computer modelling, said CO2 production was destroying Earth.

Fact: He said no such thing.

Claim 14. Enlisting Al Gore and his Hollywood minions, they brought fear to the hearts and minds of women and children everywhere.

Fact: Al Gore began raising concerns about climate change soon after becoming a congressman in 1977.

Claim 15. As head of GISS, Hansen personally determines the temperature numbers they publish.
Incredibly, he refuses to say how he got them.

Fact: Yes, it is incredible, and plain wrong. Here are some of the places in which Hansen and Nasa explain their methodology:
Hansen, JE, R Ruedy, Mki Sato, M Imhoff, W Lawrence, D
Easterling, T Peterson & T Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963, doi:10.1029/2001JD000354.
Hansen, J, R Ruedy, J Glascoe, & Mki Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change, J. Geophys Res, 104, 30997-31022, doi:10.1029/1999JD900835.
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: Sources

Claim 16. Nevertheless, two Canadians, Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick, decided to check.

Fact: Stephen McIntyre has written on this issue. Ross McKitrick has not.

Claim 17. They first achieved fame in 2004 by completely discrediting Michael E Mann, famous for creating the "hockey stick"-shaped temperature graph Gore used to scare the bejesus out of people.

Fact: Yaaawn. I suppose I'll have to say it again. The first hockey-stick paper, produced by Michael Mann et al has been vindicated by subsequent studies (see the IPCC).

As a result of the controversy whipped up by climate change deniers, the hockey-stick paper was investigated by the National Academies of Science in the US. Its Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years found the following:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.

Claim 18. Mann also refused to reveal his methodology.

Fact: Blimey, this ancient meme again. Mann et al's methods and data have been picked over more comprehensively than those of just about any other scientific paper over the past 20 years, as Tomlinson must surely know. They are available for anyone to see.

Claim 19. Did you know Gore's key global warming "fact" was completely destroyed five years ago?

Fact: Er, no. It has been repeatedly upheld during that period.

Claim 20. The mainstream media won't mention it.

Fact: Apart from the hundreds of articles on this topic published in newspapers including the Sunday Telegraph, Daily Express, Australian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, etc.

Claim 21. Fortunately, Canadians know their hockey sticks! Riding that success, McIntyre and McKitrick took on Hansen's data to see if maybe he made any mistakes. Sure enough, he did. On August 8, 2007, NASA announced these guys had found a gaping flaw in Hansen's numbers. The error was huge:  0.8 °C annually.

Fact: No, it was not 0.8 °C, it was 0.001 °C. How's that for a "gaping flaw"?

Claim 22. To put this error into context, the entire GW scare is over a net rise of 0.6 °C in the 20th century.

Fact: No it's not. The concern about global warming arises from the knowledge that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to raise global temperatures (the rise is already 0.8 °C since the beginning of the 20th century).

Claim 23. Once NASA re-did Hansen's numbers, 1934 became our hottest year and 1998 only a secondary peak.

Fact: As NASA points out:

Contrary to some statements flying around the internet, there is no effect on the rankings of global temperature. Also our prior analysis had 1934 as the warmest year in the US (see the 2001 paper above), and it continues to be the warmest year, both before and after the correction to post-2000 temperatures. However, as we note in that paper, the 1934 and 1998 temperature are practically the same, the difference being much smaller than the uncertainty. The effect on global temperature (the left side of the figure; see larger GIF) was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.

Claim 24. McKitrick, assistant professor at Guelph University, published a study on GISS data collection in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres in 2007.

Fact: He did not use GISS data.

Claim 25. He found GISS, which relies on surface measures, overstated warming by "about half" due to a laundry list of collection errors.

Fact: Bunkum, yet again. As Gavin Schmidt has shown, McKitrick's results emerge only if you don't take proper account of the fact that nearby locations have correlations in both temperature and economic activity.

Claims 26 and 27. Interestingly, GISS lost about 50% of its stations after the USSR fell in the early 1990s. As those stations were replaced with computer simulations, Hansen's "new" numbers began to show a huge acceleration in global warming.

Facts: Gavin Schmidt of NASA comments:

"Wow. This one is really out to lunch. Spatial coverage is pretty much the same as it was in the early 1990s, and no computer modelling is involved in the GISTEMP analysis."

Claim 28. Today, the vast majority of GISS sites are in the US. Computer guestimates cover outlying areas, particularly across continents such as Africa and South America, where data collection is almost nonexistent.

Fact: Gavin Schmidt tells me:

"Again simply not true. While there are areas that are less well covered by stations, the area covered remains at about 80% of the land area."

Claim 29. Because GISS relies on surface stations, its ocean coverage is abysmal.

Fact: Oh no it doesn't. Its land-ocean index uses satellite data over the oceans.

Claims 30 and 31. NASA oceanographer John Willis found that ocean temperatures have been falling since at least 2003.

Facts: It's JOSH Willis. And, as he has shown, his findings were the result of calibration mistakes. They have since been corrected.
 
Claim 32. GISS had no idea.

Fact: Of course it didn't, because it was a data-gathering error.

Claim 33. Now, it turns out, even GISS can't find any global warming whatsoever in the southern hemisphere.

Fact: Nonsense again, as the GISS figures show.

Claim 34. Imagine, 70% of Earth's surface temperature dropping sharply, and the global warming geniuses didn't have a clue.

Fact: Yes, you'll just have to imagine it.

Claim 35. Global warming is all about confiscating wealth and power.

Fact: No, it's about scientific observation and prediction.

Claim 36. Congress passed a law making it illegal (in five years) to use incandescent lightbulbs because they cause global warming.: 

Fact: No, the act merely ensures that they will no longer be sold by 2014. It does not ban their continued use.

Claim 37. That's how we're slowly losing our freedom: chancing prison for using politically incorrect light bulbs.

Fact: And he accuses other people of scaremongering!

Claim 38. Truly, the world isn't getting warmer

Fact: Yes, it is getting warmer.

For how much longer will the Flint Journal employ John Tomlinson to produce this rubbish?

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Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/30/climate-change-scepticism-climate-change