More Anti-Science At The Trib

In this editorial.

And it was only yesterday when we posted this story about how one climate science skeptic has concluded that   "Global warming is real."

But what does Scaife's braintrust have to say today?

First, I think I found a mistake - no really.  A simple sourcing mistake rather than an anti-science mistake.  Take a look at this:

Since the meltdown two years ago in Copenhagen on carbon curbs that would clobber developed nations, the Church of Global Warming has been unable to draft a credible creed. Chief EU climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger says he doubts one will materialize at the U.N. climate conference scheduled Nov. 28 in Durban.

But Mr. Runge-Metzger tells the International Business Times that conference delegates should "formulate a road map that points to a global legal framework" because the Kyoto Protocol -- a case study in climate extremism -- runs out next year.

Except I wasn't able to find any mention of it at International Business Times.  If you load "Runge-Metzger" into IBT's search engine, you get this recent article.  It tells roughly the same story, but you'll note the quotation above ("formulate a road map...") isn't found within it.

What I think they meant was this article in the Bloomberg Business Week:

A failure by climate envoys worldwide to extend emissions-reduction goals under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 may lead to a “complete meltdown” of global talks, Europe’s negotiator said.

More than 190 nations will discuss climate-protection rules for when the current greenhouse-gas targets for developed nations expire in 2012 when they meet at a summit in Durban, South Africa, starting Nov. 28. The European Union is open to the so-called second commitment period under Kyoto under certain conditions, said Artur Runge-Metzger, the bloc’s envoy to the talks.

“If there’s no continuation of the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period I think it’s a deal breaker,” Runge- Metzger said in an interview in Brussels today. “Then we would see a collapse of the negotiations in Durban,” he said. “You start from scratch then probably.”

The quote is even here - in the 7th paragraph:

“What we need to have is a roadmap for negotiations, a work plan for the coming years on when do we want to decide about a new legal framework, what could be the elements in there,” Runge-Metzger said. “In the meantime, you’ll need to have the implementation of the Cancun agreements plus probably the second commitment period of Kyoto, which is then kind of transitional arrangement.”

Yea, I think that's right. It's a minor point, to be sure. But if you're going to be sitting at the big-boy table and you want your braintrust to be taken seriously, the least you can do is to make sure all the simple facts (like where you're taking your info from) are verified.

Makes you look less silly when a blogger looks to deconstruct your editorial, you know?

Now onto the big stuff.  Here's what the braintrust says:

In other words, forget all the mounting evidence that disputes man-made climate change and its unrealized predictions.

What "mounting evidence"? They don't say.

Aside from yesterday's Berkeley study, hows this for mounting evidence?

A new method of crunching climate data could make it possible to put a figure on climate change’s contribution to freak weather events, something that’s been difficult to do with empirical precision.

The debut subject: the Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and was unprecedented since record keeping began in the 19th century. According to the analysis, there’s an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible.

Here's what they did:

The new method, described by Rahmstorf and Potsdam geophysicist Dim Coumou in an Oct. 25 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, relies on a computational approach called Monte Carlo modeling. Named for that city’s famous casinos, it’s a tool for investigating tricky, probabilistic processes involving both defined and random influences: Make a model, run it enough times, and trends emerge.

“If you roll dice only once, it doesn’t tell you anything about probabilities,” said Rahmstorf. “Roll them 100,000 times, and afterwards I can say, on average, how many times I’ll roll a six.”

Rahmstorf and Comou’s “dice” were a simulation made from a century of average July temperatures in Moscow. These provided a baseline temperature trend. Parameters for random variability came from the extent to which each individual July was warmer or cooler than usual.

'After running the simulation 100,000 times, “we could see how many times we got an extreme temperature like the one in 2010,” said Rahmstorf. After that, the researchers ran a simulation that didn’t include the warming trend, then compared the results.

“For every five new records observed in the last few years, one would happen without climate change. An additional four happen with climate change,” said Rahmstorf. “There’s an 80 percent probability” that climate change produced the Russian heat wave.

There's still the problem of NOAA.  From the 2010 State of the Climate report:

The year 2010 was among the two warmest years globally since the start of the surface instrumental record in the late 19th century, although the range makes it impossible to call the ranking definitively. It was also the second warmest year in tropospheric records since the mid-20th century. Glaciers very likely experienced the 20th consecutive year of negative mass balance.

NOAA's on record as saying that climate change is "undeniable."  This was more than a year ago.

To date, as far as I can tell, the Trib has yet to even mention the report.  Not even a peep.

Tell me again about this "mounting evidence"?

Scaife's braintrust continues to embarrass itself and all the hard working rational people who get a paid for working at the Tribune-Review.