Roy Spencer's TPPI Mishmash of Myths, Nonsense and Fraud

Here's another Repost from SkepticalScience.com and Dana Nuccitelli, it was originally written for The Guardian and concerns the latest Dr. Roy Spencer broadside against serious climate science and the learning process.  

With much appreciation I'm taking advantage of SkS CreativeCommon's license and am reposting Dana's article because I believe Roy Spencer's crimes against science and our children's future demands to be exposed for what they are, fraud.  And that this information needs to be circulated and become common knowledge, please pass it on. 
(Monday morning - I've updated this post by adding on a list of links (and quotes) to further detailed examination of Spencer's dubious science and his even more dubious writings on the topic.)

These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really.

Posted on 25 July 2016 by Dana Nuccitelli | SkepticalScience.com | The Guardian

When I give a presentation and mention the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming, I’m often asked, “what’s the deal with the other 3%?”. These are the publishing climate scientists who argue that something other than humans is responsible for the majority of global warming, although their explanations are often contradictory and don’t withstand scientific scrutiny.

A few months ago, the world’s largest private sector coal company went to court, made its best scientific case against the 97% expert consensus, and lost. One of coal’s expert witnesses was University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer - a controversial figure who once compared those with whom he disagreed to Nazis, and has expressed his love for Fox News.

Last week, Spencer wrote a white paper for the Texas Public Policy Institute (TPPI) outlining the contrarian case against climate concerns. TPPI is part of the web of denial, having received substantial funding from both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, including $65,000 from ExxonMobil and at least $911,499 from Koch-related foundations since 1998, and over $3 million from “dark money” anonymizers Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Spencer’s arguments should of course be evaluated on their own merits, regardless of who commissioned them. However, it turns out that they have little merit on which to stand. The white paper is a classic example of a Gish Gallop – producing such a large volume of nonsense arguments that refuting all of them is too time-consuming. 

A mishmash of myths

Most of Spencer’s white paper consists of repeating a variety of long-debunked myths. It’s laid out in the form of 13 basic climate questions that Spencer tries to answer. Fortunately, SkepticalScience.com has a database of over 200 climate myths, and summaries of what the peer-reviewed scientific research says about each. This makes it possible to handle Spencer’s 13-point Gish Gallop by simply referring to the relevant myth rebuttals. So here we go:

Examples of the Attack on Science and Rational Constructive Learning

I've had my response to NC-20 Burton nearly ready to post for days now.  But life is busy.  In the meantime, I want to repost an informative article from SkepticalScience.com .  Please notice that while on the one hand the Republican PR machine cries about attacks on their "Free Speech Right", on the other they are ruthlessly playing the legal system to interfere with and at times attack serious scientists who are only trying to do their job as accurately as possible and then to report back on their results.  Things that are their duty.  This Repost from SkepticalScience.com tells a story worth knowing about.  

This is what rational constructive learning built upon fact-based science is up against.  It's frightening, but it is what it is, understand it, deal with it. 

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Climate scientists are under attack from frivolous lawsuits

July 7, 2016 by Guest Poster Lauren Kurtz at SkepticalScience.com

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-under-attack-frivolous-lawsuits.html

Lauren Kurtz is the Executive Director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund(CSLDF), a non-profit that defends scientists against legal attack. CSLDF was founded to fund Dr. Mann’s defense, represented Dr. Maibach, and filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Arizona. Help protect the scientific endeavor by donating to CSLDF, where a trustee is currently matching all donations up to $50,000.

Today’s climate scientists have a lot more to worry about than peer review. Organizations with perverse financial incentives harass scientists with lawsuit after lawsuit, obstructing research and seeking to embarrass them with disclosures of private information.

On June 14th, an Arizona court ruled that thousands of emails from two prominent climate scientists must be turned over to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a group that disputes the 97% expert consensus on human-caused climate change and argues against action to confront it. E&E and its attorneys are funded by Peabody Coal, Arch Coal, and Alpha Natural Resources, coal corporations with billions of dollars in revenue. 

Formerly named the American Tradition Institute, E&E has been described as “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research.”

more

Is CO2Science.org 'criminally negligent'? Why not consider it?

Is misinformation about climate science criminally negligent?  I'm reminded of Professor Lawrence Torcello's question by the dialogue I'm having with some characters at an interesting YouTube video of Professor Stephen Schneider directly communicating with climate science contrarian types.  

In any event, this comments thread keeps getting dragged back to CO2Science.org as though it were some gold standard, rather than the personal gold mine of the Idso clan, selling a deceptive and harmful fiction to a gullible public.  

All the while these commenters ignore the many huge differences between the internal variability driven "Medieval Warm Period" and today's atmosphere with it's vastly enriched (thanks to us) insulation medium which is holding more heat within our planet's global climate system, yes that would include the oceans.  They also insist that there's been no warming in the past 18 years, go figure.  

While researching my response to a comment I came upon "More for the annals of climate misinformation" where Alicia Newton does a good job of describing the dishonest manipulation of data that website is guilty of.  It makes me wonder why this sort of deliberate deception with far reaching political and societal consequences is so casually accepted.  

I've taken the liberty of reposting the text as a public service and hopefully an invitation to consider saying enough of the crafty lies, time to come to terms with the real world.  

I follow Newton's article with long tracts of another educational write up by Höskuldur Búi Jónsson who continues this exploration into the ways in which CO2Science.org artfully reweaves and repackages serious scientific information in a way that totally distorts the actual truth within that information.  This I follow with various bits of biographical information regarding CO2Science.org.

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More for the annals of climate misinformation

19 Aug 2008 | written by Alicia Newton

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/08/more_for_the_annals_of_climate_1.html

I’m all for a website that distills climate science papers into something easily understood by the general public, especially if it avoids the hype and hysteria all too often employed by headline news.

Such is the claim of CO2 Science, a weekly newsletter published by the not for profit Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, with issues that include editorials, book and media reviews, and mini-reviews of the recent peer-reviewed literature.

But rather than its promise of “separating reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change”, on the contrary CO2 Science twists the most recent science, ever so subtly, to suggest that there is no link between carbon dioxide levels and climate change.

For a case in point, check out the feature entitled “Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week”. This showcases records of temperature or environmental changes during the Medieval Warm Period (aka the Medieval Climate Anomaly). The conclusion is that if the MWP was warmer than present – still debated – obviously CO2 isn’t driving current warming. There is even a list of 576 scientists who have found evidence for the MWP – the thinly veiled conclusion being that they agree that an increase in CO2 isn’t behind the recent climate change.

Will, this one's for you - What we knew a half century ago.

(Well that was one of the worst intros I've written in a while, let me try that again. - edited Nov 8th PM)

I read an article that fits right into my recent retrospective musings* regarding global warming and what we are willingly doing to our children's future.  

The key point:  

On 5 November, 1965, the group now known as the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) cautioned President Lyndon B. Johnson that continued accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from fossil-fuel burning would “almost certainly cause significant changes” and “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”

You see climate science contrarians I deal with continue pretending there's still substantial doubt regarding the fundamentals of what we are doing. Nonsense!  

The foundations of a clear understanding that society actually was conducting a global geophysical experiment go back over 60 years.  In fact, we recently passed one of the early big milestones of that growing recognition - which Dana Nuccitelli reports on. 

With thanks to SkepticalScience.com, here's something to think about next time some contrarian character tries telling you there's a lot of uncertainty regarding climate science and what injecting over two gigatons of greenhouse gases into our thin atmosphere month, after month, after endless month will do.  

(Will, I gotta tell you, I sit slack jawed wondering, how can people so delude themselves that they trivialize this reality in favor of demanding to know the exact speed of our rush to catastrophe. Or waste precious time arguing total trivialities while ignoring the gorilla in the room.

Re. CAGW, if you think upending our planet's climate system isn't catastrophe on every level, you're lost within your own daydreams, oblivious to this Earth and the workings of this complex society you depend on but take oh so for granted.

Remember what environmentalists were saying back in those 'innocent' 60s: 

~ ~ ~ "You can kid yourself, but you can't fool mother nature!" ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  "No Deposit No Return Earth." ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  

What a tragedy so few were paying attention.            

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Scientists warned the US president about global warming 50 years ago today

Posted on 5 November 2015 by dana1981

Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted:

Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.

Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere

Looks like a SkepticalScience.com double-header considering the noteworthy Guardian.com article by Dana Nuccitelli that SkS shared this morning.  The reason is that I know all too well that implying a grand conspiracy, denigrating scientists and the reactionary dismissal of the significance of a "97% consensus" among actual experts regarding the causes and dangers of society's relentless injection of atmospheric insulation (read greenhouse gases) are about all we can get out of climate science contrarians these days, so I thought this was a must article to add to this collection.

It's about a new study:  "Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial"

By Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Scott Brophy, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Michael Marriott

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Climate denial linked to conspiratorial thinking in new study

Posted on 8 July 2015 by dana1981

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-denial-linked-to-conspiratorial-thinking-recurrent-fury.html

A new study has examined the comments on climate science-denying blogs and found strong evidence of widespread conspiratorial thinking. The study looks at the comments made in response to a previous paper linking science denial and conspiracy theories.

Motivated rejection of science

Three years ago, social scientists Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac published a paper in the journal Psychological Science titled NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. 

The paper detailed the evidence the scientists found that, using survey data provided by visitors to climate blogs, those exhibiting conspiratorial thinking are more likely to be skeptical of scientists’ conclusions about vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change. This result was replicated in a follow-up study using a representative U.S. sample that obtained the same resultlinking conspiratorial thinking to climate denial.

Of course science denial and conspiracies go hand in hand

This shouldn’t be a terribly shocking result. When confronted with inconvenient science, those in denial often reject the evidence by accusing the experts of fraud or conspiracies. We saw a perfect example of this behavior just a few weeks ago. When scientists at NOAA published a paper finding that there was no ‘pause’ in global warming, one of the most common responses from those in denial involved the conspiratorial accusation that the scientists had somehow fudged the data at the behest of the Obama administration.

Nevertheless, nobody likes being characterized as a conspiracy theorist, and so those in the denial blogosphere reacted negatively to the research of Lewandowsky and colleagues. Ironically, many of the attacks on the study involved conspiratorial accusations, which simply provided more data for the social scientists to analyze. For example, the authors were accused of everything from faked data to collusion between Lewandowsky and the Australian government.

Adam Corner, Announcing the "Uncertainty Handbook"

Adam Corner has written a helpful overview of a new handbook for folks who want to try their hand at communicating climate science to a broader audience.  I downloaded the "Uncertainty Handbook" this evening and found it concise, easy to read and filled with simple logical advice for anyone who want's to engage this important issue. 

I feel it belongs in this collection and thanks to SkepticalScience.com's Creative Commons license I'm able to reprint it over here:

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Announcing the Uncertainty Handbook

Posted on 6 July 2015 by Guest Author at SkepticalScience.com

by Adam Corner

Have you ever struggled with the communication of climate change uncertainties? Are you frustrated by climate sceptics using uncertainty - inherent in any area of complex science - as a justification for delaying policy responses? Then the new ‘Uncertainty Handbook’ - a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the Climate Outreach & Information Network (COIN) - is for you. The handbook was authored by Dr. Adam Corner (COIN), Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol), Dr Mary Phillips (University of Bristol) and Olga Roberts (COIN). All are experts in their fields and have expertise relating to the role of uncertainty in climate change or how best to communicate it.

The Handbook distills the most important research findings and expert advice on communicating uncertainty into a few pages of practical, easy-to-apply techniques, providing scientists, policymakers and campaigners with the tools they need to communicate more effectively around climate change. Download the report here, and check out our 12 principles for more effectively communicating climate change uncertainty

Dana at SkepticalScience.com reports on the Cornwall Alliance

Ironically, today SkepticalScience.com posted a most interesting article written by Dana Nuccitelli regarding the Cornwall Alliance and thanks to their generous Reposting policy I'm proud to add it to this little collection I'm putting together for those curious about this public relations effort called the Cornwall Alliance.

Global warming: a battle for evangelical Christian hearts and minds

Posted on 2 October 2014 by dana1981

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-battle-for-evangelical-hearts-and-minds.html

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation is a conservative evangelical Christian public policy group that promotes a free-market approach to protecting the environment. The organization recently published a list of ten reasons it opposes policies to reduce carbon pollution and slow global warming, purportedly to protect the poor. As the first point on the list illustrates, the group essentially believes that the Earth’s climatewill be able to correct any damage done by humans.

1. As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting.

The group includes climate scientist Roy Spencer and professor of geography David Legates. Spencer’s research is among the 2–3% of peer-reviewed climate papersdisputing that humans are the main cause of global warming. He has often argued that climate policies will harm the poor, and has not been shy in making political and free market statements, having gone as far as to make comments about “global warming Nazis.” Legates is known for disputing the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

The Cornwall Alliance has tried to use scientific arguments to support its religious beliefs about the resiliency of the global climate, claiming,

Speaking of 2014… looks like it's show time

I spent a little time at SkepticForum this morning trying to continue my dialogue with Jim and da boyz.  It's flabbergasting the important stuff they totally refuse to acknowledge.  Their absolutist contempt for the experts who study these geophysical realities is another horror show in 'disconnect'.  As for their endlessly contrived Gish Gallops it's impossible to keep up with it all - That's why it's important to stand back once in a while and review the big picture.

What I keep struggling with is trying to comprehend how folks can allow their own personal political inclinations and personal convictions and egos - which we all possess to one degree or other - to so totally blind themselves to what's happening in front of their faces.  Like, come on already, refusing to admit mistakes and to learn from new lessons is a pretty dang crazy way to go through life.

Please review these recent reports - 
Manmade Global Warming is for real, it's here.  Actually, look around you'll find that CAGW has already arrived - 
How long will this state of denial continue?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In February the UK’s Royal Society (RS) and the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 
jointly issued a report (Climate change: Evidence & Causes) 

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),  “What We Know”

IPCC Working Group II – ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, 

IPCC Working Group III – ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’.

~ ~ ~ 

Other important recent reports:

Research Confirms Global Warming Has Accelerated

I appreciate bringing this up while much of the nation is still in the grips of the coldest Arctic Blast in memory may seem weird, but remember we are talking "global warming" and that's never meant it would warm equally over the entire planet.  

Our weather is the product of a global network of circulating patterns in oceans and well as the atmosphere.  Our climate had reached a fairly stable equilibrium over the past ten thousand years.  What has changed is that society has been injecting ever greater quantities of Greenhouse Gases into our thin atmosphere, this in turn has been the equivalent of donning ever more sweaters on a warm day.  

This in turn has added more heat to our planet's virtually closed climate system.  Add heat and energy to a closed system and it will be energized to a higher activity state.  Of course, weather patterns are complex and we don't understand all the ways this higher energy state will manifest itself - but we can be sure those changes will damage a society that has never had to contend with non-stop extreme weather events, be they deep freezes or extended heat waves and drought conditions.

The illusion of a warming slow down examined

Now that I finished my previous post, I figure it's time to bring it back to the bottom-line.

A warming planet energizes weather systems, feeding them with more moisture and heat, inevitably producing wilder, more destructive extreme weather events of a wide variety.

Although Earth has always experienced periods of dramatic climate fluctuations, those transitions have always been destructive to the systems that developed under the older climate regime.  Meaning just because the Earth will adjust to whatever humans toss at it, those adjustments will take centuries to millennia and do little for the world we have come to know and love.  

We are playing for keeps.  

In the following article {which I Repost thanks to SkepticalScience.com's generous sharing policy} Dana Nuccitelli's gives an update of the latest scientific findings:

Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 10 December 2013 by dana1981 New research by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research investigates how the warming of the Earth's climate has behaved over the past 15 years compared with the previous…

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