RUTHFULLY YOURS

Comfortably settled climate scientists (room service eases jet lag) jetted into New Zealand last week to discuss how modern life, which presumably includes air travel, is riling Gaia ever which way. It was there, at this gathering of great minds and grants, that Mr Climategate explained all.

Few stars in the frothy firmament of academic climate science shine more controversially than Dr Michael E. Mann, creator of the notorious “hockey stick” curve, gloomy prognosticator, conspiracy theorist, co-author of The Madhouse Effect: How climate change denial is threatening our planet, destroying our politics and driving us crazy, anti-Trump activist and fan of climate toothpaste, the only anti-apathy oral hygiene product with UH-OH formula.

The Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, USA, was in New Zealand last week, where he gave a keynote lecture at the Second Pacific Climate Change Conference.

Radio NZ’s Kim Hill caught up with him for a 32-minute interview.

Hill: Can you attribute recent weather events to [dangerous anthropogenic] climate change? (1.40min.)

Mann: You can. In fact, there are droughts, wildfires and floods occurring without any precedent in the historical record where we can now show [the reality of anthropogenic climate change] using computer model simulations.

You can run two parallel simulations; one where carbon dioxide is left at pre-industrial levels, and a parallel simulation where you increase these levels in response to the burning of fossil fuels. You can look at how often a particular event happens in both counterfactual worlds.

What on Earth is a “counterfactual world”? Struggling to prove an anthropogenic influence in the “actual” world, members of the so-called climate detection and attribution (D&A) community were forced to create virtual “worlds” to run their computer games, an opaque process known as in silico experimentation.

It’s reasonable, and even expected, for educated people to disagree with one another on this issue in the way described above. I think this back-and-forth exchange is common historically, and often occurs when science is operating as it should.

Where many AGW believers abandon the scientific method is when they revert to various logical fallacies to manipulate the average person’s emotions in order to gain support for AGW and its associated anti-fossil-fuel political program. AGW advocates commit the fallacy of ad hominem when they call researchers who disagree with their assessment of the strength of the case for AGW “deniers” — an obvious attempt to link them in the public’s mind with despicable Holocaust deniers. That is not science, it’s rhetoric. I know of no one who denies the fact that climate changes, but there are legitimate disagreements concerning the extent of humanity’s role in present climate change and whether it will be disastrous. Scientists who refuse to admit that highly regarded scientists disagree with AGW are the ones who should be labeled “deniers,” and thus suffer the opprobrium rightfully attached to that label.

AGW proponents also commit the fallacy of appeal to numbers, when they say the case for dangerous human-caused climate change is settled because some high percentage of a subset of scholars agrees humans are causing dangerous climate change. Consensus is a political, not a scientific, term. The world once thought Earth was flat. Galileo said he disagreed and that he believed it was round (and he suffered for saying so). And you know what? He was right and the consensus of the time was wrong. At one time, the people, including the intellectual elite, believed Earth was the center of the universe and the Sun revolved around it. Copernicus said just the opposite. He was right, and everyone else was wrong.

Yes, we know: there are no polar bears in Antarctica, but if climateers can make stuff up, so can we — albeit without the benefit of lots of lovely grants and taxpayer-funded expeditions.

You have to give it to the catastropharians: their oh-so-comfortably settled scientists are maintaining a perfectly imperfect record of dud predictions. The latest entry in the ledger of grant-funded error comes out of Antarctica, where the Ross Ice Shelf has been the subject of any number of dire predictions. If it collapses, we have been told, it will be global warming’s fault for sending an “upwelling” of warm waters that are melting the Spain-size expanse of ice from below. This doom-laden article at The Conversation is typical.

Not true, reports National Geographic in an article on the findings of a scientific survey which has drilled all the way through the ice to see what is going on beneath. The result was nothing like what catastropharians would have us believe:

The surprises began almost as soon as a camera was lowered into the first borehole, around December 1. The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it.

Scientists have peered into one of the least-explored swaths of ocean on Earth, a vast region located off the coast of West Antarctica. It is locked beneath a crust of ice larger than Spain and more than 1,000 feet thick, making its waters perpetually dark—and extremely difficult for humans to access. Now, a team of researchers has bored a hole through the ice and sampled the ocean beneath it. Their work could shed light on a poorly understood, but ominous episode in Antarctica’s recent past.

A team of scientists from New Zealand began this two-month expedition in November. A ski-mounted Twin Otter aircraft ferried them 220 miles from the nearest base, landing near the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf—the massive slab of ice and snow, as flat and empty as a prairie, that hangs off the coastline of West Antarctica and floats on the ocean. Amid the glow of 24-hour summer sunlight filtering down through fog, they assembled an automobile-sized contraption of pipes, hoses, and boilers. (See more of the world below Antarctic ice.)

This machine generated a powerful jet of hot water, which they used to melt two narrow holes, each a few inches across, more than 1,100 feet down to the bottom of the ice. They then lowered cameras and other instruments through the holes, into the waters below. In doing so, they hoped to answer a question of worldwide importance: just how secure is the ice of West Antarctica?

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is up to 10,000 feet thick in some places. It sits in a broad, low bowl that dips thousands of feet below sea level—making it vulnerable to deep, warm ocean currents that are already nipping at its outer edges. It is stabilized, at least for the time being, by a phalanx of floating ice shelves, that hang off its outer edges—of which the Ross Ice Shelf is by far the largest. Those floating shelves provide a buttress; they “are holding back a very big amount of ice,” says Craig Stevens, an oceanographer from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, who participated in the expedition.

In the annual letter about the state of their philanthropic foundation released earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates answered “ten tough questions” that they get commonly asked. The Gateses are honest and cheerful in their responses, and the letter reveals more about their critics than it does about them.

“Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?” they are asked. The Gates Foundation underwrites undeniably worthwhile causes that most liberals would support. The Gateses want to end malaria and HIV, give poor kids a better chance at a good education, and empower women around the globe to provide for their families. But if you don’t tick off every liberal cause, then you are not really committed to change, apparently. Why not global warming, too? (And what about nuclear disarmament and saving the whales?) The Gateses point out that “in philanthropy, you look for problems that can’t be fixed by the market or governments. The clean-energy problem can be fixed by both.” But this is unlikely to assuage critics who believe that the market is the problem, and philanthropy is just there to help government.

“Why do you work with corporations?” others ask. Bill Gates replies: “We think poor people should benefit from the same kind of innovation in health and agriculture that has improved life in the richest parts of the world. Much of that innovation comes out of the private sector.” What does it say about the people asking these questions that they need Gates to explain that corporations make money by creating products that the rest of us find useful, and that make life better?

You know the drill because we’ve seen the same story so many times. Reports come in that scientists have discovered declining populations of a species of some sort somewhere.

Scientists study.

For quite some time, they come up with no good answer. Concern grows.

For maximum publicity and popular hand-wringing, it helps to be cuddly, cute, exotic, beautiful, or funny critters. But even if they are repulsive, sooner or later, global warming is blamed.

Conclusion: We’re doomed! Because science.

Apply this model to the following account drawn from West Hunter:

Starting in late 80s, herpetologists began noticing that various kinds of frogs were declining and/or disappearing. There was & is a geographical pattern: Wiki says “Declines have been particularly intense in the western United States, Central America, South America, eastern Australia and Fiji. …

For a few years the herpetologists were concerned yet happy. Concerned, because many frog populations were crashing and some were going extinct. Happy, because confused puppies in Washington were giving them money, something that hardly ever happens to frogmen. …

Possibly frogs were being killed by an increase in UV radiation (from CFCs). Of course you could always put out a [f‑‑‑‑‑‑] ultraviolet photometer and measure the UV anywhere and anytime you wanted, but that would be the easy way out. Why do that when you could be paying graduate students to play with frogs?

Here I must add this popularization of the issue coming from the animal popularizers at National Geographic:

Global warming may cause widespread amphibian extinctions by triggering lethal epidemics, a new study reports.

The climate of the atmospheric science field has changed dramatically over the past few decades. The “weather,” once considered a safe topic of conversation in polite company, has morphed into the subject of heated socio-political debate. Besides scientists, there are celebrities, politicians, pundits, and pontiffs all contributing to the meteorological mayhem.

Fifty years ago, when the climate was not so controversial, I recorded my first weather observation. On February 18, 1968, I noted winds from my homemade instrument perched in a tree outside my bedroom window. I recorded weather conditions several times each day almost without fail from that time on when I was in eighth grade until I went off to college, getting my undergraduate degree in meteorology from Penn State in 1976.

From my first assignment in the profession as a weather observer at a remote site in Alaska, 160 miles above the Arctic Circle, to work as an air pollution meteorologist in private consulting and government service, a lot has changed since 1968.

Increasing computer power and computational rapidity, innovative satellite and radar technology, refinement and deployment of weather sensors, and the like tremendously expanded meteorological capabilities. Understanding and concomitant forecasting of atmospheric conditions reached new heights to where confidence in our ability to accurately predict the future has quickly grown, perhaps too hastily.

Throughout the decades, experiencing the downs and ups of global temperatures and its enthusiastic publicists, I learned several important lessons.

The climate cabal is in a panic. The Trump Administration is systematically dismantling President Obama’s climate change legacy: Federal agencies are scrubbing references to climate change, President Trump announced the United States. would exit the Paris Climate Accord, and his cabinet is peddling American-made fossil fuels around the world.

Climate change barely registered a blip in the 2016 presidential election, and even members of the alleged Party of Science are increasingly uninterested in global warming. Only 19 percent of Democrats say climate change is the most important issue in the mid-term elections, and that support drops to 11 percent for independent voters. On the heels of an El Nino season where temperatures were customarily warm, most of the country is now enduring a frigid, blizzard-like winter, which the climate propagandists counterintuitively also blame on global warming.

So, as the climate cabal feels their grip on federal policy and public opinion weaken, its zealots are becoming more desperate. Michael Mann, a Penn State University climatologist and the media’s go-to-guy for any apocalyptic quote about how anthropogenic global warming will kill us all, seems more unbalanced than usual. As the “Citizen Secretary of Science and Environment” in Donald Trump’s so-called “Shadow Cabinet”—which also includes Laurence Tribe and Robert Reich—Mann appears to be taking his pretend post a bit too seriously. Mann recently called White House advisor Kellyanne Conway “evil incarnate,” said Trump is a “moron” and a “threat to the planet,” and denounced Devin Nunes as “a traitor to this country” and demanded he “be subject to appropriate sanctions.” He’s mocked the president’s son and tweeted at the First Lady. (Pretty ironic coming from a guy who filed a lawsuit because someone called him a mean name.)