Facts Cannot Slow Down the Runaway Climate Confusion Train

Saturday night I sent the Tweet you see below because, once again, there are people who are criticizing Dr. Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” research that shows today’s climate is warmer than at any time in the past 2000 years. The latest attempt to discredit Mann’s work comes from Dr. Judith Curry’s post titled Fraudulent(?) hockey stick where she writes “accusations of data cherry picking and flawed statistical analyses and interpretations seem to be justified. ” Dr. Curry and others should know that the hockey stick curve shows up in other research even when using different types of data and different types of data analyses. (I blogged about this in 2010 with Shooting the Messenger with Blanks.)

Enter Paul Clark (@cbfool). His three main points were:

1. Hockey sticks are based on tree rings and tree rings are unreliable
2. Ice core data from Greenland shows the past was much warmer than today
3. Greenland in the 1200s was more conducive to agriculture than today so it must have been warmer than today

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Published Rebuttal of Akasofu Paper “On the Present Halting of Global Warming”

Comment on: Akasofu, S.-I. On the Present Halting of Global Warming. Climate 2013, 1, 4–11

Dana A. Nuccitelli, John P. Abraham, Rasmus E. Benestad and Scott A. Mandia

Abstract: A recent article which has set forth new interpretations of Earth’s recent climate history has included some questions of authentic scientific inquiry, particularly related to the impact of ocean oscillations on atmospheric temperatures. In fact, this very issue is currently being investigated by multiple research groups. On the other hand, the claim that a two-century linear temperature increase is a recovery from a recent cool period is not supported by the data. Furthermore, this thermal recovery hypothesis is not connected to any physical phenomenon; rather it is a result of a simplistic and incorrect curve-fitting operation. Other errors in the article are: the claim that the heating of the Earth has halted, misunderstanding of the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and the resultant radiative forcing, and a failure to account for forcings other than carbon dioxide (such as other greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols, land use changes, etc.). Each of these errors brings serious question to the conclusions drawn in the referenced article. The simultaneous occurrence of all of these errors in a single study guarantees that its conclusions cannot be supported and, in fact, are demonstrably incorrect.

Full text available

Also see:

Nuccitelli et al. (2013) Debunks Akasofu’s Magical Thinking, Skeptical Science

Magical climate contrarian thinking debunked by real science, Guardian

Why I Resigned from the Editorial Board of Climate over its Akasofu Publication – Chris Brierley

Scientists’ Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century

The full statement has been signed by 520 global scientists from 44 countries.

Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.

We further agree that, based on the best scientific information available, human quality of life will suffer substantial degradation by the year 2050 if we continue on our current path.