Another Intertel "Genius" Exposed As A Global Warming Denier Fool

Global warmin' just a ploy for socialists to take over!

In a recent essay appearing in 'Port of Call' (Intertel Region VII's NL) Jeffry R. Fisher  devoted considerable space to ideas for enhancing our nation's economic growth and efficiency.   For example, in one segment he proposed moving the current capital (in Washington, D.C.)  to "a more central location" - say "on the border between Nebraska and Colorado." This is his alternative "better solution", instead of giving the citizens of the District of Columbia two Senators and a House rep.  Besides, the new central location would then have:  "adequate highways, more interstate access, airport, commuter and distant rail locations".

Yeah, right,  Fisher's going to go for a more central geography at the expense of the very identity of the nation's capital.  Or....maybe down the line he will also propose moving the capital's historic landmarks, including Capitol Bldg., Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial etc. to the Nebraska - Colorado border?  Methinks just giving D.C. representation would be a far easier - and much more practical - solution!

Having read this nonsense one can imagine what his solution for better policy on global warming would be.  According to Fisher:  "We need to rethink the way we research 'Global Warming' (climate change)".   WHY?  The way we research it currently (thousands of peer-reviewed papers in professional journals)  is just fine and has brought us to a much better grasp of how the climate is changing. This is from Prof. Gunter Weller's work on the rapidly thawing Arctic, to the enhanced role of methane as the permafrost melts, to the acidification of the oceans  - and the increasing moisture content of the atmosphere. (See my previous post).

But this isn't good enough for Fisher because well, "there are so many political axes to grind, there's no way a collegial system of peer review can function correctly."  

Says WHO?   In fact, the existing system of peer review functions just fine for  dozens of professional journals and thousands of climate scientists - real ones, not paid hacks or frauds.  These journals  still dictate the highest professional standards and adherence to empirical data and consistent models, as opposed to wishful thinking and pseudo-scientific, quasi-political bull crap.

To Fisher and his suspicious cohort in the "HI-Q" societies - who fancy themselves critical thinkers and debunkers - peer review is all about giving global warming proponents a leg up over their contrarian colleagues. Of course this is total rubbish, and in fact shows a serious lack of critical thinking. Scientists - from fields as diverse as anthropology to astronomy  - like professionals in other fields (e.g. finance, economics, history etc.), actually compete for scarce resources.  They are not about to help a competitor - say with a competing model or theory - be published merely because they propose global warming models.  Thus, if anything,  peer review is likely to be even more brutal than for deniers.

What Fisher is really saying here is:

"There are so many political and economical axes to grind by my skeptic side that we can't get our stuff published in the current system!"

I concede Fisher has good reason to think or believe this given virtually no denier  papers are published in peer-reviewed professional climate science journals. They are generally dismissed precisely because they lack the basics of scientific authority - including: proper data selection, bias-free  analysis, consistent interpretation of data, and appropriate mathematical techniques. Hence, their papers are tagged as the opposite of  authoritative science.

Fisher's objection is really that  the peer review process poses too formidable an impediment for denier ("skeptic")  codswallop.  He instead wants any old trash to see publication to further bamboozle the masses who may never have taken a thermal physics course. By contrast, those without any ulterior political or economic agenda are willing to subject their research to rigorous peer review. They  don't cry and whine about "bias" or "propaganda" when a paper is rejected. They act like adults are supposed to and carefully go through the referee's criticisms and seek to correct the errors.

So what does this genius want to do instead? Well, he wants to ditch the peer review process entirely.  What does he want to replace it with?  Well, he wants to have basically two  teams go at it in an "adversarial system" - say like two teams of lawyers would in court.

The dope doesn't even grasp that such a stupid system is not based on scientific data or its merits at all, but subjective arguments. Still he claims the opposite,  as when he writes:

"Each side has a no-pretense partisan advocate backed up by staff doing research.  All sides meet periodically in a battle royal - preceded by a discovery phase in which each side published its claims, its methods, its data, its methods, its models' source code etc.  All sides cross examine each other's witnesses."

Can others also see why this is fulsome twaddle, and science - properly done- cannot be carried out like in a court room?    Why not? Well, because we base physical science (of which climate science is a sub-discipline) on existing well- accepted principles that best describe the objective phenomena under investigation,  as well as models that comport with those phenomena.  We also adopt the models and analytical methods that best reflect the principles.  This is not a matter for courtroom grandstanding, debate - even in "a battle royal."  There can be no "battle royal" if all parties agree on what the objective phenomena are and how they are measured from the outset. The problem is that the denier brigade doesn't agree because they know that to do so undermines their true premise: that it is the capitalist economy which trumps all.

What Fisher is really proposing is a kind of academic cage match as when he writes:

"At the end the battered sides retreat to their respective labs to lick their wounds, improve their models and methods and prep for the next meeting."

To what end? Just to go round and round with deniers and real scientists (weighted the same by Fisher's false equivalence)  going back and forth with no ultimate resolution?   Fisher likely can't even see this is the very essence of the agnotology that the denier side has been invoking since day one.  To refresh people's memories -  agnotology,- derived from the Greek 'agnosis', is a PR category to promote culturally constructed ignorance. It is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made.

It shouldn't take a near genius I.Q. to see the ideal way to achieve this is to set up a fictitious, straw man ("skeptic") side to oppose the genuinely scientific side - and have them go head to head in endless debates.   After all, there's just so much "uncertainty"!  How can you not go to the fabled adversarial model?  Let each side try the other's case and the one that does the best prosecution wins. (Interestingly there is no 'judge' to adjudicate the "battle royal".)  What could be wrong?  

Well, everything, because that's not how science works! Science progresses by incremental steps, which we call successive approximations. Basically then, each new datum is integrated into the existing model(s)  to enhance them in order to predict new data - which are then compared to what we actually observe. This has led us to the present understanding of our warming planet and that includes insights such as:  the current CO2 concentration is 403 ppm, every increase in CO2 concentration by 2 ppm increases the radiative heating effect by 2 W/ m^2, and, the planet's heat balance currently being out of kilter by  0.6 W/ m².

Opposed to this is Fisher's prescription for  adversarial agnosis but now in the guise of court room proceedings with each side engaged with the other in a series of "battle royals".  No, you can't make this stuff up.  (But neither could one make up the notion of moving the nation's capital to the Nebraska-Colorado border!)

Fisher's arguments in defense of this "adversarial"  system are even loopier, e.g.

"If my strategy is sound then each cycle of research and confrontation will force the sides to converge on something approaching "truth". In addition, all of us on the sidelines can gain confidence that what we eventually get is in fact the truth and not somebody's dogmatic propaganda."

But clearly the two sides can never ever "converge in something approaching truth" because genuine science can make no compromises with pseudo-science. We don't see Darwinian biologists allowing for theologic creation in certain species, any more than astronomers allow some planets - like Earth - to be flat and others spherical. It is total bollocks, so Fisher is wallowing in self-delusion.

 He then claims it's important we (e.g. in the US of A) do this because "the rest of the world is committed to climate alarm propaganda".  In other words they embrace at least some lowering of carbon emissions, as prescribed by the Paris Climate Treaty.

Which is total nonsense.

Of course, Fisher's adversarial strategy has already been shown not to work given his skeptic, actually pseudo -skeptic side- have been consistent losers. It is, after all, HIS side that has failed to get their papers published in respected journals because they have not met even minimal standards as I have described earlier.  For example, Willie Soon's bunkum, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

Ignoring clowns like Willie Soon, there are few others with whom Fisher can stack his pseudo-skeptic side, so why even waste the time? The matter for all intents has been settled whether Fisher and his clique of HI Q deniers like it or not  As noted by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman(Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, ,p. 24) :

“The debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

The problem, as we know, is that those like Fisher have no clue concerning the underlying physical principles - even basic thermal physics.  Hell, I defy Fisher or any one of his "climate alarm" conspiracy compadres to get even 50 % in this basic thermal physics test:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2009/12/thermal-physics-test-for-skeptics.html

To be sure, this denier lot hurl up science smokescreens because they are averse to embracing real climate science. This is because they are all about ideology!   We now know, thanks to the research of Yale prof Dan Kahan,  that "strategies" like the one espoused by Fisher are determined by deep-seated political values and cultural identities. Thus, a white libertarian member of  Intertel, for example, will see REAL global warming science  (as validated by peer review) as a dire threat against his precious conservative economic values and capitalist system.

This threat is then attributed to "global warming alarmism" which is tied to "dogmatic propaganda". Fisher proves my point that he'd never accept the real climate side anyway when he babbles at the end:

"So eliminate all funding for any and all orthodox view climate scare mongering and give all that money to iconoclasts and skeptics"

In other words, give it to the fraud side. Note before this he even acknowledges the need to stack his mock climate court, i.e. "even if the truth is close to the orthodox view" etc.  Yeah, even if the truth is close we will "eliminate any funding for the orthodox view".  (By which he really means the consensus view - since these climate change dolts....errrr....deniers,  are unable to accept there can be such agreement on real climate science and real climate change. Why not? Because they don't know anything!)

 In fact, according to Dan Kahan's theory, these high IQ skeptics don't really have the time (or inclination) to evaluate the global warming evidence that comes before them (say ice cores containing CO2) so they basically punt.  Instead of rationally and objectively evaluating the existing evidence they imbibe specious and spurious refuse  -generated by fakes like Willie Soon. They use their arguments to try to trash the climate science consensus - which they mislabel the "orthodox view" - that human induced warming is real, e.g.

http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-Climate-Change-Position-Statement_August-2013.pdf

At a deeper level, the pseudo skeptics like Fisher understand that stopping actual climate science is the highest priority for their warped economic system to prevail. Otherwise, it must be discarded for a system with emphasis on collective action and welfare. Nowhere has this been better articulated than by Naomi Klein in her recent book, 'NO Is Not Enough - Resisting Trump's Shock Politics'.   She writes (p. 81):

"Climate change, especially at this late date, can only be dealt with by collective action that sharply curtails the behavior of corporations such as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. It demands investments in the public sphere - in new energy grids, public transit, light rail, and more energy efficiency....and that can only happen by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests."

I believe Fisher and his misguided ilk are smart enough to grasp that Naomi Klein has distilled their position to a tee. It is not about science so all this balderdash about pairing adversaries against each other - with opposing "data, methods, models, code"  etc. - is total bullshit.  It's bullshit because there is only ONE set of data, of models, etc. that matters.  The other side's is as phony as a 3 dollar bill, and I suspect Fisher already knows that.

In effect, Fisher's lot grasps that the issue really is about "detonating the ideological scaffolding" of modern day economic conservatism to which they are committed and they can't have it. They can't tolerate it.  Fair enough, then at least be honest!  Drop the pseudo-scientific baloney and admit once and for all that this is about protecting the capitalist economic system. Then, instead of wasting their time and ours by creating fabulist versions of climate science,  talk straight about the real concerns, and how we might work together to ameliorate them. 

But don't hold your breath.

Climate Obfuscator Roger Pielke Jr. Strikes Again With Misleading WSJ Piece

Hurricane Harvey - merely an "overdue big One"?  So claims Roger Pielke Jr.

"Renowned Climate obfuscator" Roger Pielke Jr. (in the words of the science check website Skeptic Science), is at it again with his latest piece appearing in the WSJ :'The Hurricane Lull Couldn't Last', (Sept. 1, p. A15).  In it he merely used a probability argument to account for a hurricane like Harvey being "overdue" similar to one that I have myself applied to asteroid collisions, i.e..

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/10/asteroids-celestial-swords-of-damocles.html

Or, transferred to Pielke Jr.'s case (ibid.):

"Because the world has experienced a remarkable period of good fortune when it comes to catastrophes, we are due".

In other words Harvey's arrival was a statistical probability "after a remarkable 12 years without being hit by a hurricane of category 3 strength or stronger."

Pielke Jr. also dismissed more frequent  flood disasters in the U.S.,  e.g.

"Neither has there been an increase in floods, droughts and tornadoes...."

Despite the fact SAME WSJ  noted this morning (p. A14):

"The U.S. has seen 20 storms causing a billion dollars or more in damage since 2010, not including Harvey, compared with nine billion-dollar floods in the full decade of the 1980s."

Earlier (Aug. 30, p. A1) noting that "seven major storms have hit just since 2016 including October's Hurricane Matthew and February's California flooding."

So the Pielke Jr. take that major climate-related disasters are "getting less"  in the U.S. is already exposed as blatant bollocks. These sort of shallow arguments I will go on to explode citing several sources vastly more authoritative than this fake climate guy. Pielke Jr. goes on to babble:

"For many years, those seeking to justify carbon restrictions argued that hurricanes had become more common and intense. That hasn't happened. Scientific assessments, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change and the U.S. government's latest National Climate Assessment, indicate no long term increases in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes in the U.S.."

The actual facts are somewhat more complicated than Pielke Jr. portrays.  According to SciCheck, a division of FactCheck.org:

"The most recent analysis of what’s known about the effect of climate change on hurricane activity comes from the June 28 draft of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Climate Science Special Report.  One of that report’s key findings said that human activities have “contributed to the observed increase in hurricane activity” in the North Atlantic Ocean since the 1970s. The Gulf of Mexico, where Harvey formed, is part of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The draft report echoes the findings of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2013 assessment report, which found that scientists are “virtually certain” (99 percent to 100 percent confident) that there has been an “increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s” in the North Atlantic Ocean."

Adding:

"there is some uncertainty: The projections don’t yet align with the observed data on hurricanes because the data are “not of a high enough quality” to detect human contribution to the trend, the report says."

This is not at all surprising given that assessing human contributions to such a trend is effectively a stochastic analysis, not like one in celestial mechanics.  To nail the links down more securely we need more precise data on carbon depositions - as well as from other greenhouse gases such as methane. The sheer volume of such sources alone is staggering, encompassing the natural (e.g. melting permafrost in the Arctic) as well as the directly man-made (e.g. CO2 released from oil shale fracking operations).

What we DO know lies more in the way of ancillary thermal physics effects: for example, the planet is currently  subject to a radiative heating effect equivalent to 2.5 x 10 ⁷  TJ injected each year into the atmosphere or roughly 400,000 Hiroshima size A-bombs.   This in turn conforms to the observed  addition of 2 ppm  per year  in CO2 concentrations and an associated heating increase per year of  2 W/ m².    Result?  The temperature of the planet is currently out of balance by 0.6W/ m²  and this is almost entirely due to the annual rate of CO2 concentrations increasing. This is not due to any natural phenomenon but to human injection of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the planet's climate system.  

In other words, humans have - by fossil fuel activity -engendered a world with pronounced greenhouse dynamics.  The overall effect of such a greenhouse dynamic is warmer air which can hold more moisture. In addition, the warmer atmosphere causes evaporation to happen more rapidly. However, that alone doesn't explain the full role of the greenhouse effect on Hurricane Harvey.  Another consequence of greenhouse warming is that the oceans are absorbing CO2 and also becoming warmer- which in turn raises sea surface temperatures.

In effect, a large portion of Harvey's energy was fueled by very warm Gulf temperatures which rose to between 2.7 F and 7.2 F above average. Because of these high Gulf surface temperatures the original Tropic Storm Harvey progressed to a Cat 4 hurricane in barely 48 hours.

Climate scientist Michael Mann writing in the Guardian UK, invoked the well known  Clausius-Clapeyron equation  to ascertain that for every 0.5 C increase in warming there corresponds a  roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content.  For a climate 1 to 1.5C warmer than several decades ago this translates to an enhanced atmospheric moisture content of up to 9 percent. For Harvey, specifically, the sea surface temperatures were 0.5 - 1.0 C higher than current-day average temperatures, translating to 3- 5 % higher moisture content.   That in turn created the potential for the much greater rainfall in tandem with the effect of two subtropical highs which kept the storm in position an overly long time.  But again, this should not be confused with the intensity of the storm per se - tied to global warming - which was estimated yesterday at 1.2 inches of precipitation per hour for Houston.

Rice University climate scientist Jim Blackburn confirmed this connection and asserted that, in tandem with the destruction of nearby wetlands, the destruction wrought by Harvey was almost predicable - and "what all serious climate scientists have warned about". What about Roger Pielke Jr.? It appears he isn't a serious climate scientist at all but a climate science obfuscator along the lines of Willie Soon, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

But Pielke Jr's antics precede him and have been pointed in details by Skeptic Science, one of the most useful resources - along with the site www.realclimate.org for exposing fake science and fake science news, as well as distorting, obfuscating op-eds like Roger Pielke Jr's.  

Pielke Jr. didn't come to more national prominence until cited by Nate Silver at his Five Thirty Eight blog, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/03/denver-post-hyprocrisy-on-academic.html

wherein I noted "Pielke Jr. is no more a real climate scientist than I'm the pope."

I further cited one reviewer's take on Pielke Jr's book  The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming:

Pielke Jr. is really astonishing in the way he almost completely denies the urgent need to mitigate climate change by greatly lowering global carbon emissions. He does it in a very slick way by masquerading as someone with real and different solutions, when in reality all he proposes is that society do next to nothing about burning fossil fuels.

He basically brushes aside climate change as if it were a trivial concern." 

Skeptic Science picks up on Nate Silver's Pielke attributions and notes, for example:

"Nate Silver has launched a new FiveThirtyEight blog with the intent of applying his data-driven approach to a wide variety of subjects.  The problem is that Nate Silver is himself only one man, so FiveThirtyEight has hired a variety of contributors to write about the subjects that are outside his expertise and comfort zone.  For the topic of climate change, Silver decided to hire the renowned obfuscator Roger Pielke, Jr.

This was immediately disappointing for those familiar with Pielke's work, because FiveThirtyEight is a statistics site, and frankly Pielke is not good at statistics.  Instead, Pielke is known for taking a selective view of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in order to downplay the connection between human-caused global warming and extreme weather.  Predictably, Pielke's first two posts at FiveThirtyEight did exactly that, and included a litany of errors:

• The headline and main point of his post are wrong.
• He misrepresents his own research.
• The references he provides don't say what he claims and don't support his argument.
• Research he neglects contradicts his conclusions.
• He doesn't include all available data.
• He incorrectly claims that weather-related disasters aren't becoming more frequent.
• He fails to account for the costs of improved technology and the damages they prevent.
• He considers only land-falling hurricanes whose damages are highly variable.
• His conclusions are contradicted by the increased intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes, and global warming's contribution to their storm surges and flooding"

In other words, Nate Silver blew it in terms of his information source for climate change.   Other Pielke Jr.  hijinks include:

Pielke's first FiveThirtyEight post begins by plotting global disaster economic losses, from data provided by reinsurance company Munich Re.  Except for some reason Pielke only plots the data from 1990 to 2013, when Munich Re provides data beginning in 1980.

 Most damning in terms of Pielke Jr's WSJ piece:

"The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters also has natural disaster cost estimates ranging back to the year 1900.  And ironically, when Munich Re published its report, Pielke criticized them for only including data since 1980, saying,

"Thirty years is not an appropriate length of time for a climate analysis, much less finding causal factors like climate change"

Yet Pielke has dismissed climate change as a causal factor using data from just 1990. As it turns out, the positive trend in global disaster losses in the Munich Re data is almost 30 percent larger for 1980–2013 than it is for 1990–2013.  What's more, the trend in disaster losses for 1980–2013 is statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level, whereas the trend for the 1990–2013 window cherry picked by Pielke is not statistically significant."

SO much for Roger Pielke Jr's. dishonest representations that natural disasters have not become more common and intense.   As Skeptic Science goes on to point out:

"To determine if weather disasters are becoming more frequent, you don't look at economic loss data.  Munich Re also provides data about the number of annual disasters, and the frequency of these events is indeed rising.  Pielke claims,

"When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not."

They are unequivocally increasing as illustrated in the figures above and below.

Munich Re disagrees with Pielke on the answer to this third question, concluding following a study of "Severe Weather in North America" that (emphasis added),

"Among many other risk insights the study now provides new evidence for the emerging impact of climate change. For thunderstorm-related losses the analysis reveals increasing volatility and a significant long-term upward trend in the normalized figures over the last 40 years. These figures have been adjusted to account for factors such as increasing values, population growth and inflation ... In all likelihood, we have to regard this finding as an initial climate-change footprint in our US loss data from the last four decades."

Does Pielke Jr. deserve to have his work published? Of course!  But mainly in The National Enquirer and perhaps some graphic comics.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amy-goodman-and-denis-moynihan/74892/hell-hath-no-fury-like-mother-earth-scorned

Excerpt:

"Writer and activist Naomi Klein has long made the connection between disasters and economic opportunism. A key ingredient, she says, is a compliant media. “You turn on any coverage, and you hear that word over and over again, but what you don’t hear, or you hear very, very rarely, is an explanation for why the word ‘unprecedented,’ ‘record-breaking’ — why these words have become meteorological cliches,” she said on “Democracy Now!.” “We hear them all the time, because we’re breaking heat records year after year. We’re seeing record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking droughts, record-breaking storms, because the baseline is higher.”

Klein continued: “Nobody is saying that climate change caused this storm. What we’re talking about are what are the superchargers of this storm, the accelerants that took what would have been a disaster, in any situation, and turned it into this human catastrophe.”

That is a central tenet of climate science: You can’t attribute any given weather event to climate change, but human-induced climate change is making extreme weather events stronger and more frequent, more costly, more deadly. While the people in Texas and Louisiana suffer the final days of rain and begin recovery, over 1,200 people have been killed by massive floods in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. The planet is drowning in denial. Climate change is real, and needs to be addressed."

Trump Nominates An Abomination As EPA Chief - OK AG Scott Pruitt

If climate denier libertarian fool Myron Ebell was a canker sore on the body politic after being named by Trump to staff the EPA, then Trump's actual pick of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt amounts to a full blown case of Ebola.  The guy, from any perspective, is a freaking disaster and yet one more reason state electors need to show Trump the door on December 19th.

As with other Trump picks, including Betsy DeVos at the Dept. of Education and Ben "Who Am I?" Carson for Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, we now have a clear picture that all of them are designated to destroy the agencies to which they've been appointed.  The other pick of fast food cheapskate Putz-der to run the Dept. of Labor - a guy dedicated to lowering wages not raising them- ought to be a warning shot across the bow of any working stiffs who actually thought Trump had their best interests at heart.  They are now having buyer's remorse, or should, given Trump no more cares about their lives than the dogs abandoned at the kennel waiting to be put down.

Pruitt himself redefines what it means to be an asshole. He has, for example, written that the debate on climate change is "far from settled" when, in fact, numerous surveys of actual climate scientists (not paid whores) show it's as settled as it's ever going to be. Specifically, I've referenced the scientific consensus on global warming reported in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22, by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24) :

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

The authors concluded (p. 24) :

“The challenge appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact (non-existent debate among real climate specialists) to policy makers and a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate exists among scientists”


The problem, of course, is that so long as pseudo-climate scientists (like Willie Soon)  are given large header displays and article space in the likes of The Wall Street Journal, this perception problem will continue and many people will mistake the views of these pretenders for those of actual climate scientists.

What Pruitt represents then,  is yet another rat guarding the gov't cheese stores, who will soon be devouring all of them on his own. Plus, the future planet he will leave on offer via his despicable policy decisions will have ramifications over generations.

Some of the other Pruitt "achievements" for those who might wonder why he was picked (hint: assholes are attracted to assholes):

- He joined other state AGs to sue the EPA over its Clean Power Plan

- He also joined other knuckle dragger AGs opposing EPA plans to curtail methane emissions. In case you didn't know,  methane is an even more intense greenhouse gas than CO2, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/05/methane-release-increases-because-of.html


- On his linked in page this climate assassin has boasted of "being a leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda". Transl. He is quite happy to see your grand kids choke to death on mercury pumped from coal fired utilities or burned up in the runaway greenhouse, and oceans filled with only jellyfish.

-  A self-declared ally of the Energy industry Pruitt, along with Alabama AG Luther Strange,  came to the defense of Exxon even as they were preparing documents that tried to minimize climate threats, acknowledging in their own documents the threats were real, e.g. see all 340 pages of the 'Climate Deception Dossiers'  here:

www.ucsusa.org/decadesofdeception

Pruitt's being a whore and a hack for the fossil fuel industry isn't the least bit surprising. Indeed, his outlook of "drill,  baby drill and let the world burn"  reflects the regressive zeitgeist of his home state, Oklahoma. That state - which has now recorded more fracking -generated earthquakes than any other (no surprise) - ranked fifth in the nation in onshore crude oil output in 2014. You can believe Pruitt knows what side his fracking oil is slathered on.

The semi-good news (Denver Post, p. 16A, Dec. 8th) is that "environmental groups are mobilizing and saying they'll urge senators to vote against Pruitt's nomination."  But they need to do much more: they need to bombard Dem Senators with actual letters and phone calls given the EPA stands as the last battlement to be bridged before the climate deniers and their sorry ilk hurl this planet into perdition.

There'll be no turning back. And short of enough moral electors (including D-electors in Trump "won"  states) showing Trump the door, the last fight will be for Senate confirmation and Dems must ensure it doesn't happen. Use the damned filibuster like the Repukes did when they blocked everything Obama tried. One good, obstructive turn deserves another!

We Shouldn't Dismiss People Who Deny Facts? Why The Hell NOT?

                                                         "I duz  not like facks! DOH!"

A recent irritating, short essay in TIME (Sept. 12-19, p. 26) insisted rational and fact-based people need to give all the zombies,  knuckle draggers, and ignorant buffoons among us a 'break' and not dismiss them.  So, for example, we must give a pass to those who "believe things that are factually incorrect". Say like those who believe that vaccines cause autism, or to one innominate,  self-proclaimed genius of Intertel who is 100 percent convinced that "scientific conspirators falsified their data on which they based their alarming findings."  Or -from the same genius: "these scientists manipulated the peer review process to keep valid research against global warming from being published."

But anyone who's  been involved in serious climate science research would know the latter two beliefs are pure balderdash and definitely merit no respect. Especially if they issue from people who are members of a high IQ group.  They ought to have known or found out that denier papers are rejected because they don't meet minimum publication standards, including: use of proper mathematical or statistical techniques to assess data, use of coherent and testable physical models and/or simulations and assessment of errors in each of the preceding. But it's easier for deniers simply to believe denier research papers are left out because the review process is "manipulated."

While ordinary people may be partly excused for their beliefs, a high IQ person cannot be similarly excused, and he or she merits the full hammer of criticism and opprobrium. He has effectively misused his high intelligence to 'go off the rails'  and not conducted sufficient self-checks on his claims. Nor used his intelligence - with sufficient energy - to do his own research to first seek to disprove his many superficially -based beliefs.

Why? Because by virtue of their very intelligence they ought to fucking know better!  They actually possess the necessary intellect to ferret out the truth and DO the research but are too god damned lazy to do it. They don't want to read 15 or 20 papers that thoroughly debunk their idiotic beliefs, they'd rather just go to climate denier websites, imbibe the misinformation and repeat it. Especially with the conspiracy aspect.

The authors of the TIME essay ('We Shouldn't Dismiss People Who Deny Facts') claim:

"If we really want to change how they think, we need to take an honest look at what's driving those beliefs. Because it's not ignorance, it's psychology."

Actually, in the case of the genius climate deniers (or their  soft soaping allies who aren't as denial -based but still think "the jury is out")  it's politics that's to blame. Specifically Libertarianism,  which most of them espouse, whether in Mensa or Intertel.  This leads them to collect — even invent — bad information to flesh out what they already believe to justify their economics theories.  Their aim isn't scientific pursuit but rather defending an economic system they believe will unravel if practical solutions to global warming became law.

My point? Their  interjection and invocation of politics means they can no longer be afforded special consideration, and this distinguishes them from say, the vaccine skeptics. The TIME authors, Sara and Jack Gorman, claim we are all subject to the same principles that "cause scientific denial".  They add:

"Research has shown that humans are distinctly uncomfortable with events or phenomena without clear causes - and when we don't  know something we tend to fill in the gaps ourselves. Take autism. Since we don't know why it occurs it becomes easy to misplace blame."

Fair enough, but autism is not global warming, for which we KNOW the cause is ever increasing CO2 concentrations that cause the atmosphere to retain more moisture and heat creating a thermal blanket that heats the Earth like a mammoth greenhouse. Indeed, the source of the greenhouse effect has been known for nearly 120 years, from the time of chemist Svante Arrhenius, e.g.

http://warming.sdsu.edu/

This issue also transpired in the debate Monday night when Trump tried to deny he had earlier called global warming a "hoax".  This, despite the fact an old tweet of his was dug up where in he babbled:
"the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese."

Why recite such crap? Because it served a political advantage. But sorry, you don't get any breaks nor are you spared criticism when you go that route. The same applies to Libertarians in Mensa and Intertel who have banged the denier drum until they're blue in the face. They do it precisely because they don't wish to acknowledge that - if true (which it is) - economic sacrifices will have to be made in the short and long term interest of future generations.  The upshot of their unquestioning belief in market economics leads them to craft a pseudo-scientific narrative ( in the guise of real science) to attack genuine climate science. To accomplish this trick they make use of  the data, papers of proven scientific whores and hacks, willing to sell their dubious skills for a few shekels to the highest capitalist bidders or think tanks e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

One of the best exposes of their methods and dynamics has come from Yale Law school prof and science communication researcher Dan Kahan.  He has concluded that their information processing is almost entirely determined by their deep-seated political values and cultural identities. Thus, a white libertarian member of  Intertel, for example, will see global warming science as just one more vehicle of  subversive force backed  by the "untermenschen"  to be used against his precious economic values and Eurocentric ideals. All of this is then attributed to "global warming alarmism", as an expeditious cover for his own abysmal laziness, ignorance and cynicism. At this point, his thinking is already so corrupted and contaminated it's almost impossible to break through on any rational or critical thinking level.

From Kahan's theory, these pseudo skeptics don't really have the time to evaluate every piece of evidence that comes before them (say ice cores containing CO2) so basically punt. Instead of rationally and objectively evaluating the evidence they side with the top bananas in their political group  - in this case folks like Charles Murray- and use their generic  economic arguments (i.e. against taxes as "theft" and "force")  to attack climate science or more precisely the climate science consensus that human induced warming is real, e.g.

http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-Climate-Change-Position-Statement_August-2013.pdf

One of their most used shticks is to clump all federal science agencies (like NOAA, NASA, EPA  etc.) together and "in on the scam". This makes it easy so they don't have to use their brains or  time plowing through separate specialist climate papers. Why do that when you can kill five birds with one stone?

Driven by this short cut mental modality, they then seek out those oddball contrarians (like Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Richard Lindzen) who do sound off against the climate consensus, even though they are dead wrong and have been proven so.  The stage then emerges for the next phase: cherry picking only the data which conforms to their economic or political values. By now we have  a self-reinforcing mechanism: the more the Libbie genius gets exposed to the faux science that  supports his economic and political stance the more he continues to adopt that position and related ones further out. These include such far out, paranoid ideations that one's opponents "demand that Western Industrial Civilization commit cultural suicide by adopting the crippling constraints sought by the global warming conspirators."  in the words of Kort Patterson.

Meanwhile, by extension, misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, according to a study published in Social Science Quarterly  which employed a “knowledge distortion index” and looked at two competing explanations for why this is so — one top-down, the other bottom-up.  The researchers used three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.  The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages "played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.
 

Lead author, Justin Reedy in one interview stated “Both of these theories recognize that citizens can develop distorted factual beliefs because of their political views, but they disagree about how those distortions might happen. Heuristics researchers generally think that citizens have limited attention for politics and try to process information quickly and efficiently.”

Again, this reverts to Kahan's theory of why intelligent climate deniers give short shrift to deep research that might change their minds - if they only got off their butts and put their high IQs to use for an activity other than denial. But because simple denial consumes less time (one can get denier "misinformation" quickly and efficiently from numerous websites) then their denier behavior is more likely to be reinforced. That means they will be less likely to expend time or effort on difficult independent  research that might change their mind.
 
The Gormans assert Iibid.):

"Rather than chastising people for focusing so heavily on stories, we should figure out why we are all so drawn to stories in the first place. Changing minds requires compassion and understanding, not disdain."

A sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur. And that's why I often make allowances for those like the anti-vaxxers because they aren't privy to detailed biological science nor are they likely to understand autism if they did access research. So they must confabulate "stories" and these often support their false beliefs. However, I am not about to extend the same generosity to a Mensan or Ilian - especially one who cynically uses his intelligence to spread misinformation and misbegotten conspiracy theories about "global warming alarmists".

The Intelligent Irrationalists: Why So Many High IQ Folks Deny Sound Science

A recurring problem for discussion in many professional scientific organizations is how to get out ahead of pseudo-science and in particular denial science: the denial of scientific legitimacy (or mocking it with facetious putdowns). The classic example is for human-induced global warming and what most concerns many climate scientists is a specific subset of intellectual critic referred to as "intelligent irrationalists".

These people, often in high IQ societies like Mensa and Intertel,,  fancy themselves "debunkers" but fail to perceive they are, in fact, sophisticated "bunkers" : the disseminators of bunkum and rubbish thanks to their own intellectual blind spots (especially in the critical thinking capacity) and also their irrationality.

What has often irritated and puzzled me - not necessarily in that order- is how so many of these denizens feel so confident to spout off at length about topics like global warming - despite the fact they've likely had the most passing acquaintance with thermal physics. The thread I have seen through all their assorted critiques - say like Intertel's Kort Patterson - is they lean almost entirely to Libertarianism or some entrenched and unquestioning belief in market economics. The upshot is that their adulation of the latter leads them to craft a counter narrative in the guise of real science (but more analogous to creationist "science") to attack genuine climate science.

There may be some psychological and sociological ballast to this. We've already seen, for example, the thesis of Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor who correctly ties global warming denial to the trend of pseudo-skepticism sown deliberately and for political or economic ends . In other words, the agents of agnotology - whoever they may be- are all committed to one end: extolling economic profit over human habitability of planet Earth.  Some disgusted climate scientists have even referred to this breed of economically dominated denizens as "Homo Economicus" to distinguish it from Homo Sapiens.

But a another side to this has been articulated by Yale Law school prof and science communication researcher Dan Kahan.  He has concluded that most information processing - especially by the intelligent irrationalists -is determined by their own deep-seated political values and cultural identities. Thus, a white libertarian member of  Intertel, for example, will see global warming science as just one more vehicle of  subversive force backed  by the "untermenschen"  to be used against his precious economic values and Eurocentric ideals. All of this then attributed to "global warming alarmism". At this point, his thinking is already so corrupted and contaminated it's almost impossible to break through on any rational or critical thinking level.

In general, according to Kahan's theory, these high IQ skeptics - or who fancy themselves such, don't really have the time to evaluate every piece of evidence that comes before them (say ice cores containing CO2) so basically punt. Instead of rationally and objectively evaluating the evidence they side with the top bananas in their political group  - in this case folks like Charles Murray- and use their generic  economic arguments (i.e. against taxes as "theft" and "force")  to attack climate science or more precisely the climate science consensus that human induced warming is real, e.g.

http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-Climate-Change-Position-Statement_August-2013.pdf

Driven by this short cut mental modality, they then seek out those oddball contrarians (like Willie Soon) who do sound off against the climate consensus, even though they are dead wrong, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

Thus, the stage emerges for the next phase: cherry picking only the data which conforms to the economic or political values of one's identity group, in this case, libertarianism. It is also by now become a self-reinforcing mechanism: the more one gets exposed to the faux science that  supports one's economic and political stance the more one continues to adopt that position and related ones further out. These include far out, paranoid ideations that one's opponents "demand that Western Industrial Civilization commit cultural suicide by adopting the crippling constraints sought by the global warming conspirators."  in the words of Kort Patterson.

In other words it's not that much of a jump from the irrational rationalizations underpinning one's position based on a group identity, to conjuring conspiracy theories targeting the out groups (real scientists and citizens - government officials who support them)

Related to the cherry picking of data, there is also the noisome tactic of mischaracterizing research methods and results, for example mocking the 'hockey stick" ansatz of Michael Mann.  In the words of one Intertel AGW denier Carol Dane:

"One hundred and twenty eminent scientists here, some Nobel laureates with impressive credentials, denounce Michael Mann and his hockey stick chart on which so much fraudulent global warming argument is based."

No mention that the bulk of those "eminent scientists" were economists, former NASA engineers, chemists, geologists, biologists and psychologists. Also that a number of climatologists  subsequently published their own reconstructions of global temperatures from independent lines of research that vindicated Mann's research by showing similar if not identical trends in temperature..

But again, this is the nature of the criticism from the intelligent irrationalists, who also comfort themselves (as members of Intertel, say) that few mortals will be able to take them on and dismantle their nonsense.

Another key attribute of their irrationality which especially stands out in Kort Patterson's tirades against AGW is focusing on perceived implications rather than examining the evidence itself. Thus Patterson leaps to the hysterical implication that climate scientists who've published in support of anthropogenic warming "demand that Western Industrial Civilization commit cultural suicide ".

In its irrational extremism it is really not much different from an anti-evolutionist who might assert: "well, if evolution is true and we all descended from a common primate ancestor we could as well kill ourselves because we don't have souls and life has no purpose".

Again, an unhinged,  hysterical implication. (Though I am sure Kort would disagree with the comparison)

Another  recurring irrational tactic of the economic obsessives in the high IQ societies is to make personal attacks on the scientists themselves, or their methods - say like Michael Mann and his hockey stick.  Thus, instead of focusing on the science (which admittedly most of these people are weak in) they claim the scientists have "rigged'" or "fudged" their research or data to support a scientific consensus. All it takes by this time is the slightest news or hint of subterfuge (say like the overblown climate gate brouhaha) to establish a specious confirmation bias and make them believe it's true and there really is a global conspiracy.

The most depressing aspect, as Kahan observes, is there may be little that can be done by the genuine rationalist or scientist to convince these intelligent irrationalists of their folly. That may have to await the extreme unfolding of multifold climatic disasters in real time, in whatever form - e.g.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1108763899


to finally turn this lot into believers or at least accepting the plausibility of the premise.. Even then they are just as likely to write off the effects, i.e. "That  51-day  heat wave leading to monster fires was just a meteorological disturbance".

As Kahan and others observe, all this discloses humans are hard-wired for irrational thinking. Science in its legitimate practice can certainly help to abate such tendencies but if the afflicted persons distrust even science (as "rigged") , there is little that can be done. That critique also applies to the superficial, frivolous lot of 'so what?' skeptics such as Intertel's Steve Mason - unprepared to invest mental capital in anything.. Hence, willing to believe anything even codswallop from the likes of Kort Patterson.

In the end the lack of any discrimination in the latter may pave the way for even more expressions of irrationality, based on "why accept anything when science is always changing" or to use Mason's words: "How can I believe anything when what I believe changes?"  

Those like Mason  are probably convinced they are the ultimate "rational"  AGW critics  using a meta-template to ascribe any risks of  climate change  as "inflated". But in the end they are just as irrational as the outright irrationalists - only adopting a less discernible cover to the superficial observer. But for those of us who've been fighting this lot for over 40 years in different forums, they aren't fooling anyone - at least not us!

Top Climate Scientist Advocates Nuclear Energy As A "Bridge" Energy Source

In his recent Esquire interview (May, p. 136, 'James Hansen Goes Nuclear') Hansen takes no prisoners in attempting to inject a note of reality into alternative energy discussions. For those who may not recall, Hansen was one of the climate researchers (including Michael Mann)  whose email directories were criminally hacked to attempt to expose their scientific "bias" and "cherry-picking of data."

In case folks missed it, these climate scientists were subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing or appearance of such. According to an EOS Transactions article on the outcome ('Report on Climate Change Emails Exonerates Scientists', Vol. 91, No. 29, July 20, 2010):

"The report (Commissioned by the University of East Anglia) specifically refutes a number of concerns raised about tampering with scientific data and notes that allegations about CRU (Climate Research Unit) scientists misusing the IPCC's process 'cannot be upheld'"

The main fault lodged against the scientists was the failure to share information with critics. (Somewhat understandable when the would-be sharers beheld how so much data already shared-  as appeared in a 2003 paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas -  was misrepresented. This was to either hide trends they didn't like or diminish their import, i.e. relative to "natural cycles". . (In their paper, the pair cleverly omitted the 30-year interval data that would have disclosed anthropogenic warming dominates over solar influence.)

Anyway, James Hansen - like me, has put the kibosh on the notion that the December Paris Climate Summit produced anything of significance other than feel good PR. I pointed this out in my blog post of December 13, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/12/paris-climate-summit-reaches-accord-but.html

Wherein I observed:

"what these Paris summit leaders have proposed is literally 'a day late and a dollar short'. Like the Warren Commission whitewash, it is a politically expedient charade designed to mollify global citizens and offer a PR "solution" . While the WC lulled Americans into a false political security, i.e. that no real conspiracy took out their president, this Paris summit has lulled the world's people into false security that the pitiful steps and "suggestions" in Paris will avoid a burning planet. This is because the REAL steps needed to even have a chance of limiting the increase to less than 4 C by 2100 (still less than the runaway threshold) are too much to bear. They would exact economic pain the likes of which can barely be comprehended - say a $5 carbon tax on every tank full."

As for Prof. Hansen, we learn (p. 137):

"At the international climate talks in Paris he played the role of the skunk at the garden party. Because he called the conference a lie and a sham, the most famous and distinguished climate scientist in the world couldn't even get a pass to the 'blue zone' where the bigwigs gathered."

And what reasons did Hansen have to expose this conference as s sham? As the article notes:

"Look at the data. The developing nations of the world are never going to stop using oil and coal as long as they're the cheapest forms of power. Also, the hope of the environmentalists that wind and solar will solve everything is just happy talk."

This first part ought to need no explanation. One only needs to check out recent news clips of the polluted skies over Beijing or other Chinese cities. It is abundantly clear to anyone with eyes they are using degraded forms of energy, often coal, or the fracked shale crap (kerogen) the U.S. is offloading on them.

As Hansen observes (ibid): Rising concentrations of CO2 are at the center of the greenhouse issue. The temperature of the planet is currently out of balance by 0.6W/ m²  and this is almost entirely due to the annual rate of CO2 concentrations increasing. Every increase in CO2 concentration by 2 ppm increases the radiative heating effect by 2 W/ m².

Go to climate research centers such as at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska- Fairbanks and you will find atmospheric science researchers examining ice core samples dating from nearly 600,000 yrs. ago showing rising CO2 concentrations coinciding with much warmer periods.

In addition, one has permafrost - bearing methane, as in interior Alaska. When the permafrost melts, the methane can be released. For example, the submerged East Siberian Arctic Shelf contains much of the same stored carbon as the dry tundra to the south but also at least 17 teragrams of methane. (One teragram is equal to one million tons). See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/05/methane-release-increases-because-of.html


In regard to the second aspect of environmentalist "happy talk" over alternative energy sources, Hansen is blunt (ibid.):

"If we are to avert catastrophic climate change we have to build nuclear power plants on a massive scale and crank them out fast enough to stop all fossil fuel emissions by 2050."

What is the basis for this? According to The Physicist's Desk Reference (Table C, p. 187, Energy Generation by Type) the projections for the most energy-intense uses  (aggressive consumption category, I) for all forms of solar, geothermal and wind add up to only 6 exajoules (EJ) by 2020. This compares to 24 EJ for oil (including kerogen), 16 for coal, 9 for natural gas and 6 for nuclear. Thus, ALL the usual "green" alternatives" are projected to barely add up to what nuclear will deliver on its own.  Hence, to phase out fossil fuels we need to not only restrict and curb their use but also enter nuclear into the "bridge" source mix - preferably enough to eventually trump natural gas as well. (Which releases methane, another greenhouse gas, into the environment).

Meanwhile, exacerbating the problem of finding and implementing adequate (aggressive consumption) fuel -energy sources is the continually increasing population. Global energy consumption rose from barely 21 EJ in 1900, to 318 EJ in 1988, to close to 400 EJ today. Solar, geothermal + wind by the end of this year, will therefore have contributed only:

(6/ 400) x 100% = 1.5% of the total global demand

But this is exactly the rate of increase in global population per year! In other words, the added total alternative energy benefit is exactly lost because we added an extra percentage of humans to consume the benefit!  This is why the economists proposing increased global population to enhance GDP are shooting themselves in the foot.

The stage is set to add 50% MORE humans by 2050, topping off at 9 billion, which will necessitate - if we still plan to retain solar in the mix - converting an area the size of Europe to solar panel arrays. In addition, to feed all those hungry mouths, we will need to add an agricultural area the size of the whole continent of South America - especially given how the eating habits of Chinese and Indians have now altered to become more "American" .

What about nuclear fusion power as our savior? Alas, there is little probability of that happening anytime soon, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/04/fusion-power-within-ten-years-basically.html

With fusion too long delayed to address pressing energy needs the only alternative is nuclear fission power plants. In Hansen's words (p. 141):

"Only nuclear can produce the quantity of clean energy the world needs. It is the rational solution."

Hansen has been joined on his pro-nuclear quest by three other distinguished climate scientists: Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Kerry Emmanuel of MIT and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. As Prof. Emmanuel puts it (ibid.):

"We're scientists, we can do the math. If we are truly sincere about solving this problem, then unless a miracle occurs, we are going to have to ramp up nuclear energy fast That's the reality."

How fast? From the EJ projections earlier, we need nuclear ramped up to at least provide a total of 11-15 EJ by 2030, and at that time the collective alternative sources should be at around 8 EJ. With natural gas likely down to 6 EJ from increasing operations costs that would total an optimum "bridge" amount of  34 EJ. But even this will be insufficient unless population growth is brought under control, and conservation dramatically increased. Else, we will surely exhaust all useful energy stores by 2050 or earlier - with Peak Oil still looming despite babble from the deniers. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/01/death-knell-for-peak-oil-not-so-fast.html

What about the safety of nuclear energy? Hansen and his three pro-nuclear power colleagues point to dramatic  new processing and safety measures already in the planning pipeline including "pyro-processing" or burning nuclear waste in safe containment enclaves.

The biggest hurdle, however,  will likely be constructing the thousand or so nuclear reactors - including with new safety features such as "pyro-processing"  that will be needed before 2030. After Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, especially,  too many nations will not want to go that route.

Which means we will surely see much worse climate catastrophes, as well as an eventual austere energy landscape.

Another Fake Climate Scientist Exposed: Willie Soon

Thanks to Chris Hayes in a segment on his  Monday might 'All In' for exposing yet another paid hack climate denier posing as a climate scientist and "astrophysicist". This would be none other than Willie Soon, whose dubious history regarding climate science precedes him.  This concerned a spurious paper in a joint 2003 effort by Soon and Sallie Baliunas with a graphic misuse of statistics. Reference to it may be found at: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A664-3534-1F03-BA6A80A84189EEDF

The methodology used by Soon and Baliunas was terrible, and any proper referee versed at all in statistics would've tossed most of their analyses out in a heartbeat. Especially their deliberate  use of 50-year data periods, increments when the IPCC scientists had already disclosed anthropogenic warming appears at 30 -year levels. In effect, Baliunas and Soon employed what we call a 'selective effects filter' to cull the data they preferred not to have to deal with. As serious climate critics pointed out in the aftermath of the paper, by using much wider 50 year periods one essentially whitewashes the signal right out of the data.

Sadly, it seems Soon hasn't learned his climate lessons. But mayhap he's being paid too much as a shill for the denial lobby to do so. Hayes led off the segment with a pie chart showing 97 percent of published climate papers agree global warming is happening and humans are the primary cause. This elicits the question: 'Who makes up the other 3 percent?'

Hayes' immediate response was that these minority climate change deniers (I disdain misuse of the word 'skeptics' as Chris does) are not all they appear That is, objective researchers in pursuit of scientific truth. Such is the case with Dr. Willie Soon, ostensibly based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, until one digs beneath the surface. (And btw, when one is praised by the most infamous climate change denier - James Inhofe - one knows he's hit new lows and is really a bottom feeder scientifically.)

Hayes then went on to cite the truth about Soon using a clip and excerpt from the New York Times. e.g.

"Though often described on conservative news programs as a 'Harvard astrophysicist', Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard."

More technically, Soon is actually a part-time employee of the Smithsonian which jointly runs  the Center along with Harvard. More to the point, Soon is only there because he brings in his own funding. What exactly this translates into wasn't known until Greenpeace submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for Soon's grant correspondence. What they found also appeared in the Times' piece on 'Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?_r=0)':

"He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers."

Can anyone say 'paid whore' for the fossil fuelers? I can!   Especially as Soon, according to the Times:

described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

So can Hayes. As he put it:

"There are now one point two million more reasons to doubt his work."

Which, let's face it, would already be doubt worthy given how he earlier played with statistics to wash out the actual global warming signal from his paper.

Maybe Soon needs to very soon click on the link below to see the more rapid melting of ice caps and glaciers, which we're actually seeing in real time, showing climate change-global warming is happening as I write:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1108763899

The preceding ought to get even the most blinkered global warming denier's attention, as well as http://www.salon.com/2015/02/26/scientists_stick_it_to_climate_deniers_study_provides_direct_evidence_that_human_activity_is_causing_global_warming/

See also:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-change-denier-willie-soon-funded-energy-industry

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/23/the-favorite-scientist-of-climate-change-deniers-is-under-fire-for-taking-oil-money/

And more documents on Soon's deplorable brand of science can be found here:

http://www.climateinvestigations.org/willie-soon-harvard-smithsonian-documents-reveal-southern-company-scandal