Democracy Has Prevailed.

July 9, 2007

A Trib Editorial: What Happens When Science is Misquoted

The Pittsburgh Tribue-Review's Editorial Board chimes in on Kilimanjaro and global warming this morning.

The board uses (misuses is a better word) this article in the journal "The American Scientist" to support this hypothesis about climate change:
The only thing settled about global warming is that it's unsettled science.
They point out:
Kilimanjaro is a poster child for those who believe man-made global warming is causing Mother Nature's meltdown. However, air temperatures measured at the altitude of the glaciers and ice cap on Kilimanjaro are almost always substantially below freezing. Thus, the air by itself cannot warm ice to melting, the magazine reported in its latest edition.
And:
If human-induced global warming has played any role in the shrinkage of Kilimanjaro's ice, it could only have joined the game quite late after the result already was clearly decided, say the authors.
Which leads to the last paragragh:
So, what's happening? Deforestation, the Earth's cycles or other factors could affect the snows of Kilimanjaro, scientists suggest. Which also suggests the hysterical green Chicken Littles should consider all scientific possibilities before making unsettling squawks that the sky is falling.[emphasis in original]
In fact, the article makes a more complicated case than what the Trib editors want you to think it makes. A glacier is always in flux based on how much mass it accumulates, via new snow and how much it looses, via melting (when the ice turns to water) or sublimation (when the ice turns to water vapor).
The observations described above point to a combination of factors other than warming air—chiefly a drying of the surrounding air that reduced accumulation and increased ablation—as responsible for the decline of the ice on Kilimanjaro since the first observations in the 1880s. The mass balance is dominated by sublimation, which requires much more energy per unit mass than melting; this energy is supplied by solar radiation.

They're hoping you think that since the situation on Kilimanjaro is more complicated than previously thought, you'd drink the kool-aid and conclude that the global warming sky isn't falling.

But take a look at the stuff they don't mention from the American Science article.
The fact that the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro cannot be used as proof of global warming does not mean that the Earth is not warming. There is ample and conclusive evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased in the past 100 years, and the decline of mid- and high-latitude glaciers is a major piece of evidence. But the special conditions on Kilimanjaro make it unlike the higher-latitude mountains, whose glaciers are shrinking because of rising atmospheric temperatures. Mass- and energy-balance considerations and the shapes of features all point in the same direction, suggesting an insignificant role for atmospheric temperature in the fluctuations of Kilimanjaro's ice. [emphasis added]
What was the word the "scientists" at the Trib used? Unsettled?

Too bad they're just not being honest about things. Furthermore, it's unsettling when a newspaper's editorial board decides that it's perfectly OK to misuse science to manipulate its readers.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE REVIEW Editorial.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would this "Trib" thing be Richard Mellon Scaife's rag by any chance? And would RMS be the guy who claimed that Clinton was personally responsible for about 100 murders? And would we expect rationality from such a person or such a "journal."

Yeah, you bet.

Dayvoe said...

Crap!

I forgot to link to the editorial!

My bad.

Richmond K. Turner said...

Gravitational attraction between objects, proportional to their mass and their distance from one another, is just a theory and "unsettled science". Ditto for the the need for mammals to have oxygen in order to survive.

Anonymous said...

What I find particularly amazing with the Right's disinformation campaign about global warming is this; despite how large or small the man-made effects might be, there is no way in hell that burning fossil fuels and polluting the way we are is GOOD for the environment.

Pilt

Rob Carr said...

Global warming is only "unsettled science" in the Trib's dreams.

But people are no longer looking at evidence. They only want to confirm what they think they already know.

Maybe the human race deserves to die, clearing out the way for parrots to take over the world and build a galactic civilization.

No wonder Cirrus the African grey keeps asking "What does that birdie want?" in such a sarcastic voice...

Sherry Pasquarello said...

cirrus is a lot smarter than some people.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

you'd drink the kool-aid and conclude that the global warming sky isn't falling
Oh the irony
I love when liberals use the "drink the kool-aid" metaphor for the right.
They forget that Jim Jones was a progressive.

Dayvoe said...

HTTT;

Of course, you missed the metaphor.

"Drink the kool-aid" here meant "accept without question a point of view even though the facts say otherwise."

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

"Drink the kool-aid" here meant "accept without question a point of view even though the facts say otherwise."
How did "Drink the kool-aid" get this alternative meaning?
The Jonestown Massacre perhaps?

Anonymous said...

What's the matter, Mein Heir? You couldn't think of a way to change the subject by saying something ridiculous about Clinton?

Actually, I do believe that the first time I heard the expression -- used exactly the way Dayvoe describes, BTW -- it was from that other left-wing radical, George Will.

The Wingnuttians seem to be increasingly desperate on this blog. Master Lie just keeps whining his same irrelevancies, lies, and insults; Mein Heir repeatedly attempts to move the conversation further and further from the point with more and more bizarre assertions; and XRanger seems to have Xited, tacitly admitting he can't respond.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Here you go Schmuck a little patriotic dissent on global warming/climate change.
More on Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

Hockey Sticks

The Hockey Stick graph was first published by Mann, Bradley and Hughes in 1998 in Nature (vol. 392: 779-787). It is now generally referred to as “MBH98”. Two Canadian statistical experts, McIntyre and McKitrick set out to audit the Hockey Stick. They had great trouble getting the necessary information from Michael Mann. He put many obstacles in their path and even refused to release his computer code, saying that “giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in” and that “if we allowed that sort of thing to stop us from progressing in science, that would be a very frightening world”. He apparently was not willing to accept that one of the litmus tests of a scientific theory is its reproducibility. Anyhow, McIntyre and McKitrick found serious flaws and deliberate manipulation of data in the methods used by MBH98 to obtain their Hockey Stick. They even found that that the statistical methods used by MBH98 always produces a hockey stick shaped graph, even when random numbers are used.
BTW, Kilimanjaro was used in The Inconvenient Truth as proof of man-make global warming. But then the film does have some other whoppers.
"We can’t sell our cars in China today because we don’t meet the Chinese emissions standards."
CARS SOLD

Anonymous said...

Wait a minute, Mein Heir. You can't be actually addressing the topic at hand, can you? Isn't there a left-wing blowjob or mass murder to prattle about?

Yes, climate models are by their very nature unreliable. The situation may, in fact, be much worse than we know. But what we know for sure is that the temperature is going up.

Of course, inasmuch as the Bush Administration agrees now that the warming trend is affected by human action, so maybe the VAST majority of scientists are wrong. This administration hasn't been right about anything so far.

Still, I'll go with the VAST majority of scientists on both this topic and evolution. You go ahead and cast your lot with the profit-driven right-wing fringe.

Never mind. You already have. Stay cool!

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Isn't there a left-wing blowjob or mass murder to prattle about?
I also enjoy prattling about the Duke Lacrosse Rape hoax.
Still, I'll go with the VAST majority of scientists on both this topic and evolution.
Global Warming Consensus? What Consensus?
Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.
--
You go ahead and cast your lot with the profit-driven right-wing fringe.
Stop believing in Doom and Gloom scenarios when the population bomb and Y2K turned out to be a bust.

Anonymous said...

I also enjoy prattling about the Duke Lacrosse Rape hoax.

Me too. Your point?


Stop believing in Doom and Gloom scenarios when the population bomb and Y2K turned out to be a bust.

I make it a point not to believe in anything, but I do respect scientific findings, especially when they jibe with my own experience.

The population "bomb" has already fallen and you are living with its consequences even as you prate. We can talk more about this if you wish, although I rather doubt you'll want to go there unless you care to lose another argument.

The Y2K crisis turned out to be a "bust" because the entire world started doing something about it years ahead of time. Yet you and your fellow travellers want to ignore a manifest problem that threatens life as we know it.