Der Spiegel uses Lomborgisms to lie about climate science to its readers

Comment by Publicola on RealClimate, concerning the brazen lies published by Der Spiegel.  In the fashion of Lomborg, Der Spiegel backs up its lies by giving references to work that in fact doesn't say what Der Spiegel claims at all -- hence, Der Spiegel has used a Lomborgism.

 

Publicola says, on RealClimate, comment #28:

7 April 2010 at 9:19 PM

Here’s an example in that Der Spiegel article of a brazen, outright lie.

Per the Der Spiegel article, in reference to Chris Landsea:

“Last month Landsea, together with top US hurricane researchers, published a study that finally disproves the supposed link between hurricanes and global warming. The study concludes with the assessment that ‘tropical cyclone frequency is likely to either decrease or remain essentially the same.’”

The article didn’t provide a reference for that quote, but it comes from a paper co-authored by Landsea and published in Nature Geoscience in February (2010) titled “Tropical cyclones and climate change”:

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/knutson-et-al-nat-geo.pdf

Here’s the quote in its proper, larger context:

“Improvements have encouraged us to raise our confidence
levels concerning several aspects of cyclone-activity projections.
These include our assessment that tropical cyclone frequency is
likely to either decrease or remain essentially the same. Despite this
lack of an increase in total storm count, we project that a future
increase in the globally averaged frequency of the strongest tropical
cyclones is more likely than not — a higher confidence level than
possible at our previous assessment.”

Which is to say, the Der Spiegel article lied by omission when it cherry-picked the frequency quote but omitted the immediately-following severity quote “Despite this … we project that a future increase in the globally averaged frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones is more likely than not.”

The authors of the Der Spiegel article moreover outright lied when they asserted:

“Last month Landsea, together with top US hurricane researchers, published a study that finally disproves the supposed link between hurricanes and global warming.”

To the contrary, that study of course supports the opposite conclusion with respect to the “supposed” link between hurricanes and global warming.

I know it probably shouldn’t at this point, but the audacity of global warming deniers like the authors of this Der Spiegel article can still amaze me.

Until now I had also been under the impression that Der Spiegel’s standards were higher – or at least that Der Spiegel had standards. Obviously, no one at Der Spiegel had bothered to fact-check this denier propaganda.

Link:  http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/climate-scientist-bashing/#comment-169648