Tag: Wishart

Savaged by a dead sheep #2

Airconcover.jpgIn a meeting last week a late arrival strode in and announced (with a big grin) “You’ve finally made it, Gareth, you’ve been attacked by Ian Wishart.” It appears that my review of Air Con rattled Wishart sufficiently to prompt him to pen an attack on me in his conspiracy magazine Investigate. Over the weekend he helpfully posted what he calls the “salient” bits at his blog under the title More idiocy from the team at Hot Topic. Saves me from having to buy a copy…

Wishart’s main claim is that the evidence I submitted to the ETS Review committee was out of date before it was given, and to prove his point he quotes extensively from his own book. That was a major tactical error on his part, because it gives me an opportunity to demonstrate (once again) that Air Con is full of misrepresentations and inaccuracies.

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Bear necessities

Polarbear.jpgScientific papers are often dull, worthy screeds, difficult to read and hard to understand without considerable effort, but sometimes they are an absolute pleasure. I can heartily recommend Amstrup et al. Rebuttal of “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit”, Interfaces (2009) pp. 1-17 [PDF, Woods Hole press release] as a fine example of clarity and concision — and a classic slap down of “researchers” who haven’t taken the trouble to understand what they’re writing about. The rebuttal is of a paper by Armstrong, Green and Soon (AGS) (Armstrong et al. Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit, Interfaces (2008) pp. 382-405 [PDF]) in the same journal last year. AGS was highly critical of two US Geological Survey papers that were instrumental in persuading the authorities to list polar bears as an endangered species. The AGS “audit” paper is extensively quoted in Ian Wishart’s Air Con, in the chapter where he explains why the bears aren’t in trouble, so by way of correction (because you won’t be getting one from him), here’s what Amstrup et al have to say…

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Missing the point by miles

I have been steering clear of Wishart-related material for the last week or two (on the “wrestling with pigs” principle), but I can’t let this post at his blog pass without comment. It begins:

In the climate debate, we can choose to listen to truffle fanciers like Gareth at Hot Topic, journalists like myself or politicians like Al Gore, or one of the leading scientists in the climate field, like Roy Spencer from University of Alabama-Huntsville. The following is a fascinating essay from his blogsite, which backs up the central thesis in Air Con – most of the CO2 increase is natural, not man-made:

He then reposts Spencer’s blog item in full, adding in the comments:

Spencer’s study suggests strong evidence that oceanic CO2 is the primary driver of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. (Looking at the graphs, very strong evidence).

Not a squeak out of Hot Topic and no one posting here challenges it.

Notice how a blog post became a “study”? Ah well, here’s a squeak…

Continue reading “Missing the point by miles”

Heaven is a place on earth

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

The Australian twin to Wishart’s Air Con is Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, published last month. According to Bob Carter (in all his oleaginous glory here) on Leighton Smith’s Newstalk ZB programme recently it’s “an excellent book”. Carter assures Smith that “the authoritative science is in Ian Plimer’s book”. Fortunately, to save Hot Topic the chore of wading through Plimer’s prose, The Australian (noted for a tendency to push crank arguments) has published a most interesting review of Plimer’s opus by Michael Ashley, a professor of astrophysics at the University of New South Wales. What does he make of Plimer’s “authoritative science”?

Perhaps we will find a stitch-by-stitch demolition of climate science in his book, as promised? No such luck. The arguments that Plimer advances in the 503 pages and 2311 footnotes in Heaven and Earth are nonsense. The book is largely a collection of contrarian ideas and conspiracy theories that are rife in the blogosphere. The writing is rambling and repetitive; the arguments flawed and illogical.

Just like Wishart then.

Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not “merely” atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer’s book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.

[Hat tip: Deltoid]
See also; Prof Barry Brooke’s review of Plimer’s book.
[Belinda Carlisle]

A very public own goal…

Airconcover.jpgIt didn’t take long for my last post to draw a reply from Ian Wishart, and — no surprises — it’s another lengthy diatribe. Unfortunately for Ian, it is also a very public own goal –demonstrating very nicely one of my central contentions: he doesn’t understand the stuff he’s writing about. Here’s the relevant passage (sorry about the lengthy quote, but it takes him a while to get his shot lined up):

…Gareth helpfully directs to a NASA feature on ocean cooling. There’s nothing in it that contradicts my usage of Willis in the book, but what it does say backs up one of my other assertions that Gareth had a problem with in our “anonymous” discussion thread on Tumeke previously about the impact of undersea volcanoes on ocean heat and GHG emissions.

When I pointed out scientists have recently discovered a massive volcanic field under the Arctic that began erupting in a catastrophic, albeit submarine, sense in 1999, Gareth, posting as “Response to Ian”, stated:

“If you are implying that they are influencing Arctic sea ice you are absolutely out in la-la land. The amount of heat released is miniscule compared to the heat capacity of the cold Arctic ocean.”

So if a large volcanic field under a relatively small area of ocean has no impact on warming the water, why does the NASA study on ocean cooling Gareth pointed us to say this:

“They are also exploring how volcanic eruptions influence ocean heating, and whether a better understanding of how volcanoes influence the energy balance of the ocean will help explain short term variability in ocean warming and cooling”

The NASA feature then quoted the CSIRO research team directly:

“One thing we found was that climate models that do not include volcanic forcing tend to overestimate the long term change, and their simulated decadal variability is not in agreement with the observations…this kind of result tells us volcanic forcing is important, but that we don’t totally understand it yet”.

Another example, then, of Trufflehunter shooting from the lip because he isn’t across the latest scientific research. 95% of the world’s active volcanic vents are underwater. I quoted other scientists in the book who thought volcanic and tectonic activity might well be significant in regard to sea levels and thermal expansion, but Gareth’s response was:

“One possibility that Wishart fails to consider is that tectonics and volcanoes weren’t ignored and their effects are trivial.”

Well, Gareth, go back and read the report you referred us to. Apparently other scientists don’t think they’re trivial at all.

And the ball’s in the back of his own net! It’s a mistake that only someone who had no real grasp of the subject could make, and Wishart makes it in a typically aggressive manner. The CSIRO team are (of course) talking about the cooling effects of large, Pinatubo-style volcanic eruptions (you know, the ones that occur above the surface of the sea) as a brief check of their paper would have told him…

Church et al. (2005) show that large volcanic eruptions cool [my emphasis] the global ocean and produce a drop in global sea levels. While this volcanic signal is clear in appropriately forced models and the global tide-gauge record, it is not as clear in the global thermosteric sea level record (the component of sea level change due to the thermal expansion of the ocean and closely related to ocean heat content), and there are several instances where global sea level is rising but steric sea level is falling…

Looks a lot like Ian’s indulging in “half-baked schoolboy science” to me. I believe the internet jargon for this situation is p*wned.

[Update 7/5: Wishart concedes and admits to “winging it”, but then proceeds to enlarge the deep hole he’s already dug for himself. Any readers care to explain for his benefit precisely why undersea volcanism has a trivial impact on oceanic heat budgets? The rest of his post is just wibble.]