Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column, Jack spews more of the right wing talking points on global climate change - making the usual non sequiturs to "prove" as a hoax something the world's scientific community actually supports. And they say the conservative movement is out of ideas.

I don't know if he's on a schedule or anything, but it turns out that Jack Kelly wrote another Climate Change article in the first week of July 2006. This one. In case you don't recall (and there's little or no reason why you should) that was the column where Fact-Free Jack missed the date of an important report - by 5 years. It was enough of an error to prompt a correction in the pages of the P-G.

Let's get back to this week's column. Goshers, this is gonna be fun! Jack begins:

An unusually cold winter (it snowed in Saudi Arabia and Iraq; temperatures fell to minus 80 degrees in Siberia) was followed by an unusually cool spring (it snowed in North Dakota in June for the first time in 60 years).

This may be why only 42 percent of respondents in a Rasmussen poll published June 18 think human activity is causing global warming, and many of those who do don't see it as a serious problem. (In a Gallup poll in March, warming ranked last among eight environmental concerns.)

"Global temperatures have declined -- extending the current downtrend to 11 years with a particularly rapid decline in 2007-2008," said a draft report written in March by an expert at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The scientific/logical error in Jack's first paragraph is an example of using localized data to disprove generalized data. So what if it snowed in Saudi Arabia? In fact, had Jack done a little digging (I know, I know, we're talking about Jack Kelly here - just go with me on this) he would have bumped into this from the BBC. It's about the weather in Saudi Arabia:

In the interior, and in the higher mountains in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, winter temperatures occasionally fall low enough for frost and snow to occur. Winter nights in the desert are distinctly chilly. [emphasis added]

So not a big surprise if it snows SOMEPLACE in Saudi Arabia at some point in the winter.

And how about Iraq? Again our friends at the BBC give up the data:

Winters are very mild in the south, but become cooler towards the north. Frost and snow occasionally occur at low levels in the north and snowfall may be heavy in Kurdistan.

Heavy? But isn't Kurdistan actually in Iraq? And they yet they sometimes get heavy snow?

And what of the temperatures in Siberia? Take a look at this table from the BBC. It shows the temperature data from a city in Siberia. It shows average highs and lows and record highs and lows. It lists the average low in January as 53 degrees below zero. Now that might be a rather large leap from 53 to 80 until you take into consideration it's -53 Celsius. -53 degrees Celsius is about -63 degrees Fahrenheit. That's only 17 degrees above Jack's "unusually cold" number. Indeed, the record low is -67 degrees Celsius. Converted to Fahrenheit, that's about -88 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tell me again how this is unusual?

Jack, did you think no one would check? No one OUTSIDE THE P-G, of course. (Why is that? I need to ask. Again.)

Let's move on with that Rasmussen poll. I have no doubt that Rasmussen found what they found, but since when is science decided by public poll numbers? I mean if that's the case then what are we to make of the Gallup poll done in late 2004 that said:

Forty-five percent of Americans agree that God created man in his present form about 10,000 years ago. (This time frame was included in the question when it was originally framed in 1982 because it roughly approximates the timeline used by biblical literalists who study the genealogy as laid out in the first books of the Old Testament.)

According to Gallup that number hasn't shifted much in the previous 22 years. Solidly held belief of a large chunk of the population - well then it must be true! Even if there's no other reason to believe it.

The lesson here is that polls can be very instructive in judging, for instance, how much support a given candidate has in a given election cycle (how deep that support is, or how it shifts and so on). But they are more or less useless in judging whether a scientific idea is correct or incorrect (ie is supported by the data).

This brings me to the next paragraph. Note how Jack labels the author of the study - "an expert at the Environmental Protection Agency." You'd think that if he's an "expert" there, he'd be an environmental scientist or something, right?

Guess again, kimo sabe. He's not a scientist. Check out his guv'ment webpage.

Let's be clear. Carlin is an expert - he's got a PhD in economics from MIT - just not an expert in climate science. But my old musicology teacher was an expert in late Renaissance bicinia - that in itself doesn't make him an expert in bebop counterpoint.

Fox "News" even points out Carlin's expertise:

An EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday that Carlin, who is an economist -- not a scientist -- included "no original research" in his report. The official said that Carlin "has not been muzzled in the agency at all," but stressed that his report was entirely "unsolicited."

"It was something that he did on his own," the official said. "Though he was not qualified, his manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up ... a set of comments." [emphasis added.]

But that, in itself, wouldn't preclude Carlin from being wrong. But what does a real climate scientist say about Carlin's report? Here's Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.com:

One can see a number of basic flaws here; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution.

But it gets worse, what solid peer reviewed science do they cite for support? A heavily-criticised blog posting showing that there are bi-decadal periods in climate data and that this proves it was the sun wot done it. The work of an award-winning astrologer (one Theodor Landscheidt, who also thought that the rise of Hitler and Stalin were due to cosmic cycles), a classic Courtillot paper we’ve discussed before, the aforementioned FoS web page, another web page run by Doug Hoyt, a paper by Garth Paltridge reporting on artifacts in the NCEP reanalysis of water vapour that are in contradiction to every other reanalysis, direct observations and satellite data, a complete reprint of another un-peer reviewed paper by William Gray, a nonsense paper by Miskolczi etc. etc. I’m not quite sure how this is supposed to compete with the four rounds of international scientific and governmental review of the IPCC or the rounds of review of the CCSP reports….

They don’t even notice the contradictions in their own cites. For instance, they show a figure that demonstrates that galactic cosmic ray and solar trends are non-existent from 1957 on, and yet cheerfully quote Scafetta and West who claim that almost all of the recent trend is solar driven! They claim that climate sensitivity is very small while failing to realise that this implies that solar variability can’t have any effect either. They claim that GCM simulations produced trends over the twentieth century of 1.6 to 3.74ºC – which is simply (and bizarrely) wrong (though with all due respect, that one seems to come directly from Mr. Gregory). Even more curious, Carlin appears to be a big fan of geo-engineering, but how this squares with his apparent belief that we know nothing about what drives climate, is puzzling. A sine qua non of geo-engineering is that we need models to be able to predict what is likely to happen, and if you think they are all wrong, how could you have any faith that you could effectively manage a geo-engineering approach?

Finally, they end up with the oddest claim in the submission: That because human welfare has increased over the twentieth century at a time when CO2 was increasing, this somehow implies that no amount of CO2 increases can ever cause a danger to human society. This is just boneheadly stupid.

So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at. Seriously, if that’s the best they can do, the EPA’s ruling is on pretty safe ground.

Gavin Schmidt, by the way, is a real climate scientist. Here's his bio:

Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and is interested in modeling past, present and future climate. He works on developing and improving coupled climate models and, in particular, is interested in how their results can be compared to paleoclimatic proxy data. He also works on assessing the climate response to multiple forcings, such as solar irradiance, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and greenhouse gases.

He received a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University College London and was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research. He serves on the CLIVAR/PAGES Intersection and the Earth System Modeling Framework Advisory Panels and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Climate. He was cited by Scientific American as one of the 50 Research Leaders of 2004, and has worked on Education and Outreach with the American Museum of Natural History, the College de France and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has over 50 peer-reviewed publications.

So I think he knows what he's talking about. Carlin's not a scientist and he wasn't writing up any original science and what he did write is scientifically untenable.

Tell me again why the EPA should be compelled to incorporate it into an official position?

You gotta do better than this, Jack. If I can dissemble the "science" you cite so easily sitting at my kitchen table on a Sunday morning, then it can't be of much value. And if the foundation of your column is so easily dissolved, what of the rest of it?