Michael you seem to think I had welshed at the task of criticisng the Trenberth et al letter, and on re-reading I ought to have said something else, or done the work. So I have done it.
And it is such a pathetic letter!
In what follows I have taken each sentence apart, where there is anything of substance to analyse. I hope that it is straightforward. I had it all nicely arranged with italics and bold, but transferring it to here robbed my text of all that neatness.
Paragraph 1 Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?
I have dealt with this false premise above, and a dozen or so other posters have done so as well.
Paragraph 2 Sentence 1 The letter by the 16 is ‘the climate-science equivalent of dentists practising cardiology’. Since the premise is false, this conclusion has no merit.
P2 S2 ‘While accomplished in their fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science.’
Really? What is ‘climate science’? I would call it a quarry, into which miners bring the skills they have developed in their own disciplines. There were no undergraduate courses in climate science when I surveyed this field in 2008, and few at the graduate level. Virtually no one 40 years or older can have such a degree, and in any case what are the fields of expertise of the 38? This is a bogus argument that collapses as soon as it is inspected.
P2 S3 ‘The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert.’
This is an assertion that comes without evidence of any kind. It is based on the bogus claim that there is a scientific field called ‘climate science’ whose boundaries include the 38 but not most of the 16. No evidence is given.
P2 S4, 5 and 6 These three sentences serve to introduce the implication that the 16 are likely to think that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that smoking does not cause cancer; they are a smear and not worthy of discussion.
P3 S1 ‘Climate scientists know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade.’
It is wonderful that they know this, because on the evidence the long-term warming trend has levelled out if it has not stopped. Both my statement and the one in italics rely on the inspection of data averages, whose formulation is subject to a large amount of error, some of it non-random. The sentence is more a statement of belief than of fact.
P3 S2 ‘In fact, it was the warmest decade on record.’
This may be true, though I have no faith at all in averages of temperature that are expressed to three decimal places, notwithstanding that there are thousands of observations, for the reasons given above. In any case, since the world seems to have been warming in an irregular way since the Little Ice Age, this statement has little meaning.
P3 S3 ‘And computer models have recently shown that during periods where there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean.’
And what observations support these model predictions? None is mentioned.
P3 S4 ‘Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon…’
Mr Trenberth appears to be having his cake, and eating it as well.
P4 S1 and 2 ‘…what one of us, Mr Trenberth, actually meant…’
I guess most of us have read the ‘travesty’ remark. He is entitled to say what he thinks it meant. I would have to say that the ordinary reading — that it is an embarrassment to the Team that the world is not warming as it should — is clearer and more obvious.
P 5 S 1, 2 and 3 ‘The National Academy of Science (set up by President Abraham Lincoln) … and many learned academies all tell us that ‘the science is clear’.
Wow! What a wise old bird Lincoln really was. This is the argument from authority with a century and half of wisdom behind it. Trust us: we speak with all this contemporary authority, and President Lincoln’s as well.
P6 S1 ‘Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.’
Now which research would that be? What did they agree to? Who asked them? How was the question phrased? Asking people questions in surveys is one of my fields of research, and it’s a new figure to me. I understand that Lawrence Solomon, who likes to follow these things up believes (and I quote him) that it
‘stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.’
You can read the rest in his column in the Financial Post. I really love ‘research shows’ with no mention of which research we are talking about. Perhaps Solomon got it wrong, and it comes from some gold-standard PhD thesis from Yale. Be nice to be able to study it.
P6 S2, 3 and 4 Let me partly paraphrase the concluding flourish. The Republicans would be reckless to ‘ ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses’. And shifting to a low-carbon economy ‘could drive decades of economic growth’. Finally, we return to the beginning: ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’
If I compare the two letters, that of the 16 is much more measured and cool. The response is, as I said at the beginning, is pathetic, and weakens my already shaky confidence in the truth of anything the Team members say.
Of course, my own bias could affect my reading of the two. So I would welcome correction where I am in error, and debate where there is more that I could have said.
