Global warming and the future of New Zealand
Christchurch readers might like to know that I’m talking at the local Skeptics in the pub meet up next Tuesday evening (23 March) — working title is Sceptics, skeptics and septicsâ„¢. Should be a lively evening… 😉 Meet at The Twisted Hop from 5-30pm, talk begins at 6pm, probably over the road at CPIT before returning to the pub. Keep an eye on the Skeptics MeetUp page for final details.
[â„¢ as coined by Stoat, headline by David Byrne.]
Back at my desk, after four days on a boat in the Abel Tasman/Golden Bay area. I’m tempted to post a selection of my photographs, but I’ll settle for this one (for fellow Sciblogger Chthoniid) of a petrel, taken in Golden Bay a few kilometres off Farewell Spit on Monday morning. Oily seas, hot, lots of birds and kingfish. Click on the picture for a bigger version. Anyone know the exact species? I’d say it was a black petrel, but I’m no ornithologist. I’ll be back on the climate beat over the next few days, but meanwhile my thanks to Bryan for a series of very good posts over the last week.
Time to reconnect with New Zealand. I’m taking my summer break from blogging. Over the next few days, I’ll be on a boat (the one in the picture) tootling around the Abel Tasman, and therefore out of touch with the world. Bryan will be your host until I get back to my desk at the end of next week. Be gentle with him, please…
It must be sceptic idiot week at the Herald. Not content with allowing Garth George to make stuff up, today they unleash that mighty wit (or should that be twit?) Jim Hopkins, who has been reading the Daily Mail‘s daft coverage of a BBC interview with Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the beat-up over stolen emails:
Professor Jones discussed many things with the BBC, including the trouble he has “keeping track” of information, but the professorial concession the Daily Mail pounced upon – and our media ignored – was this: He said that for the past 15 years there has been “no statistically significant” warming. “No statistically significant warming”. None. It’s not happening. Since 1995, we ain’t got hotter. And that’s not the sceptics speaking. That’s from a man who garnered $22 million to prove we were getting warmer. Much warmer, worryingly warmer, “Lucy Lawless was right” warmer. But now he says we’re not. And haven’t been for 15 years.
I suppose we can’t expect a newspaper columnist and professional funny man to understand statistical concepts. Jones did not say that there had been no warming for 15 years. He said that the warming trend over the last 15 years just fails to meet one test for statistical significance. Here’s Jones in full:
Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. [My emphasis].
The Daily Mail misunderstood and/or misrepresented what Jones told the BBC — and that’s been extensively covered on the web. Hopkins is happy to repeat that misinformation without checking his facts. Perhaps he doesn’t understand how to use Google? More coverage of Mailgate at Deltoid, In It For The Gold, Real Climate, and for a full explanation of what statistical significance means in this context, Tamino has an excellent article here. Meanwhile, Jim should stick to his knitting instead of repeating tabloid lies from Britain.
I suppose it was inevitable that the feeding frenzy about various “gates” in the British press would attract the attention of the wise old man of Rotorua, Garth George. In today’s Herald he emerges from his sulphurous lair to add his muted sqeak to the hubbub. It’s not much different to his last few columns on the subject, though the borrowing of material is perhaps a little less obvious. He cites his source (a horrendously bad piece by Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times) and does a proper re-write rather than just quote the whole thing verbatim. But he adds some flourishes of his own:
Their concern – as it is with the data provided by our own National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) – is about the thousands of weather stations around the world which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site. This, of course, is the charge that has long been levelled at Niwa by a significant section of New Zealand’s scientific community.
Rubbish, Garth. What “significant section” would that be? The NZ CSC and Richard Treadgold’s anonymous team of “scientists”? Perhaps you counted that noted environmental scientist Rodney Hide. De Freitas and De Lange? Fringe figures of no great academic standing. You just made it up, didn’t you? Interviewed your typewriter and polled your patio pot plants, to lend false weight to a ridiculous smear campaign.
The rest of Garth’s piece repeats the main points of Leake’s article (handily debunked at Deltoid: keep an eye out for Tim’s Leakegate posts), but as he opened with some failed predictions from 1957, he closes with a prediction of his own:
So, just as Dr Kaplan’s predictions came to nought, so I believe will the scaremongering global warming predictions of today’s climate doomsayers. Perhaps 53 years from now someone will find an ancient copy of the Herald and laugh at the climate change paranoia which afflicted the world in 2010.
Of two things we can be sure: he will not be around to hear the laughter, and it will be Garth George they will be laughing at — if they’re not shedding tears of rage.
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