The Perfect Cherry Picking Example from Climate Change

This is just gold. Cherry picking is taking on small bits of data that prove your case and ignoring other data that does not. Climate change denialists love to do this. Here's Monkton 'proving' that the ice at the Arctic is not melting...



It's a slam dunk, yes? Lets plot those data points in Monkton's pretty pictures into a graph..



And now fill in the missing bits of data Monkton decided not to show us...



Ooops. Just goes to show that there are lies, damn lies and statistics Monkton.

Climate Science in a Nutshell

There is a great post - it's about boiling down complex answers to typical denial schpeel into easy to digest introductions. For example:

Denial: “It’s the sun”
Answer: The sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 and is irrelevant to recent global warming.

Denial: “Climate’s changed before”
Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time, which now is dominated by humans.

Denial:“There is no consensus”
Answer: 97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.

Denial:“It’s cooling”
The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record.

I've posted a few suggestions too...

Denial:“Other planets are warming”
Answer: The other planets in our solar system do not support life. Lets focus on planets that do.

Denial:“Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy”
Answer: Then the Pacific oyster must be part of the conspiracy as it’s breeding in now warmer waters that only a few years ago it could not survive in.

Denial:“Polar bear numbers are increasing”
Answer: Polar bear encounters are increasing around human settlements as widen the search for food due to ice loss, but sadly overall numbers are on the decline.

Denial:“Pluto is warming”
Answer: That idea is based on 2 measurements 14 years apart whereas Pluto’s orbit is takes 248 Earth years; it proves nothing about nothing.

Lots more here...

This is the way the Iraq War ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.

I've been blogging about Iraq for a loooong, loooong time. So as the last of the US troops heads home, the utter cluster-fuck that was the Iraq War, moves from the occupation phase into a fully fledged low-intensity civil war phase. From start to now this was a massive cock-up that will forever be the albatross around the necks of Bu$h and co, Bliar and his sycophants in Neo-Labour. A pox on all their houses. Juan Cole sums it up well:

T.S. Eliot wrote in “Hollow Men,” that “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” And so too does the US combat mission in Iraq, initiated by George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney in March, 2003 to promises that US troops would be garlanded and greeted as liberators by exultant Iraqis. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US troop strength would be down to about a division, some 25,000 men, by fall of 2003. Even in September of 2010, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, over 3000 dead US troops, over 30,000 seriously wounded ones and over a trillion dollars later, there are still going to be twice that number.

The US did not ‘win’ the Iraq War. It simply outlasted it. It was strong enough to remain, during the Sunni guerrilla war and the Sunni-Shiite Civil War, until the Iraqis exhausted themselves with fighting. But the massive violence provoked by the US occupation so weakened the Bush administration that it was forced to accept a withdrawal timetable dictated by the Iraqi parliament, in part at the insistence of deputies loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and others connected to Iran.

...

The main thing to remember is that the US military, all the time it was in Iraq, was never really in control at a neighborhood level and that tens of thousands of US troops could not prevent the Civil War from killing so many Iraqis. So there is no reason to think that keeping a large US combat force in Iraq could eliminate political violence. In fact, since the guerrillas used to lay roadside bombs for US convoys, and often missed and killed civilians, the end of active US patrols in the cities actually contributed to a fall in violence.

Moreover, US combat troops cannot help anyone form a government and are irrelevant to Iraq’s stalled political process. ...

The Climate Models Were Right!

I've heard the deniers go on and on about how the models used in climate prediction are wrong, or can't be right or are just models and don't mean anything in the real world. Problem is, they are right:

Last January, the Met Office announced that it believed this year would, indeed, be a record scorcher. Given that Britain was then coated in thick snow, the prediction was brave.

It was accurate nevertheless. Western Europe and eastern America may then have been going through a grim, cold winter but other areas – including Asia and western America – were experiencing unexpectedly hot weather. The overall trend was a warming one. Few took notice, however, and the Little Englander's myopic view of the world – that only local events matter – continued to dominate newspaper columns and blogs. Global warming was nonsense, they insisted.

Thus the deniers got it wrong while climate scientists got it spectacularly right. Indeed, we should note just how prescient the latter have been. In 1999, the Met Office's head of climate modelling Peter Stott – working with Oxford University's Myles Allen and other meteorologists – published a paper in Nature on the likely impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, the paper estimated future global temperatures and included a graph of a range of predicted outcomes for 2000 to 2040 with a dotted line indicating the most likely path. Crucially, for the year 2010, that dotted line showed there would be a rise of 0.8C since the Second World War– which is exactly what we are experiencing today.

So scientists not only predicted how hot this year was likely to be six months ago, they forecast a decade ago just how much the world would heat up 10 years later. Bear this in mind when deniers tell you climate science is a conspiracy or the work of charlatans. They are talking rubbish.

Climate Change Denier has been wrong again and again...

The climate change lobby loves to roll out S. Fred Singer to mount an argument form authority. He's a scientist and he says it all wrong, so it must be wrong. Except look at the issues he's been wrong on? All of 'em. He's a paid shill;

One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld episodes is the one where George Costanza tells Jerry that every decision he has ever made has turned out to be wrong. Jerry suggest that George should then “do the opposite” and maybe his luck would change. When George does the opposite, he begins dating a beautiful woman and lands a job with the New York Yankees.

S. Fred Singer is a lot like George Costanza.

S. Fred Singer is one of the notorious Merchants of Doubt described by Oreskes and Conway in their new critically acclaimed book titled Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. S. Fred Singer has been on the wrong side of the scientific consensus on important issues such as:

1) Smoking and cancer
2) DDT
3) Acid rain
4) Ozone depletion
5) Manmade climate change

It is truly absurd that ANYBODY listens to this guy because his position is usually wrong. He is the George Costanza of science.