Stumble it!Bob Carter’s Mythology: Global Average Temperature
posted in Global Warming by themaiden |“The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change”, Bob Carter’s frontal assault on the science of global warming, is one of the more cited sources in support of the claim that human caused climate change is nonsense science. I’ve read the piece. This is part VII is a series devoted to its analysis. Part I is a fairly light introduction. Part II digs into Carter’s claim that we have no theory of climate and hence can’t deal with what climate information we do have. In Part III, I addressed Carter’s statements about carbon dioxide. Carter then takes up the issue of general circulation modeling– that is, computer modeling– of global climate, followed by “Is there a consensus?“. Part VI concerns the meaningfulness of ‘global average temperature‘.
Having argued that our measurements of global temperature are seriously flawed and ‘of little value’, Carter choses a strange course: He attempts to answer the question “Is Global Average Temperature Rising or Falling?” Frankly, if the data and methods used to determine the global average temperature are as flawed as he claims, he has no business asking this question, much less answering it. If the data is near valueless, we can’t know. We can’t with good conscience answer this question. Carter seems to want things two ways– he wants to trust the data he thinks the data useful to his point, and he wants to dismiss it when it seems harmful to his position. That hardly seems fair.
Carter begins this section by making the point that “the answer to the apparently innocent question posed in the heading depends entirely on the chosen end-points of the data being considered”. But… isn’t that cherry picking? And isn’t that precisely what you don’t want to do if you wish to be taken seriously? It is well known that picking points willy-nilly can lead to some interesting conclusions, but are those conclusions meaningful in any way? Carter appears to be employing the same technique employed earlier in the paper– that of reaching back in time to find some convenient maximum or minimum without concern for whether that max or min is meaningful, or, if meaningful, without concern for what it means. For example, he notes that according to Greenland ice cores the Earth has been cooling since 10,000 years ago, but doesn’t that through the current warming into sharp relief?
Carter has a peculiar affinity for a particular, and particularly absurd, claim. Most of this section on “Is Global Average Temperature Rising or Falling?” is based upon this claim. His claim is that global warming stopped in 1998. In this case, the phrasing is specifically that there is a “global temperature stasis between 1998 and 2006.” Consider:
If that isn’t convincing, consider:
It is difficult to read ’stasis’ into any of those charts, all of which come from NASA.
Carter makes one final point, that “human greenhouse forcing is four to five orders of magnitude less than the natural forcing agents” citing a paper by Khilyuk and Chilingar to support the point. Unfortunately, that paper appears to be fatally flawed. And again. From comments in the thread at the latter reference:
That paper has the strangest list of citations I’ve ever seen. Many of the references are to web pages, including JunkScience.com, and to broken or ill-specified links. Most of the scientific papers are in Russian. There are very few articles cited at all; most of the technical references are to books, including the the author’s own work “Gas migration” (Gulf Publishing Company, Houston, 389 pp).
The handful of English-language journal articles are:
* Imprimis (1), a right-wing journal (authors include: Victor Davis Hanson, Michelle Malkin, John Lott, Mark Steyn). For good measure, the authors also cite the Fraser Institute (an anti-regulation think tank) and the 1998 contrarian screed from the bizarre one-man “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine”
* Science (3)
* Am Assoc Petrol Geol Bulletin (2)
* Am Assoc Petrol Geol Studies in Geology (2)
* Energy Sources (1) (yet another energy-industry journal)
* Studies in Geology (1)
* Rev. Geophys. (1)
* Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (1)
* Geophys J. Int. (1)Hmm—not a single atmospheric-science journal; not a single climate journal. (Things aren’t much better if you slog through the book references and the Russian journals.) Nope, just a couple of petroleum engineers—who, I’m sure, are highly knowledgeable about sedimentary geology, seismology, and other fields—trying to parlay their engineering credentials to benefit right-wing politics.
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