GWPF | 13 Jan 2016
Distorted Universities Need A Reality Check
Universities have become havens for intolerance, orthodoxy and unscholarly distortion. –Paul Sheehan, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2015
The American Academy has become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution. When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down. –Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2015
1) ‘No Extinctions’: Polar Bears Survived Periods When The Arctic Had No Ice – Daily Caller News Foundation, 11 January 2016
2) “Nothing In This Paper Is Correct” – Bishop Hill, 12 January 2016
3) Paul Sheehan: Distorted Universities Need A Reality Check – The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2015
4) Met Office’s ‘Wettest Ever’ Claim Fails Again – The Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2016
5) Met Office Hype Vs Reality: 2015 Was Not Unusually Wet – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 8 January 2016
Former Vice President Al Gore shocked Americans in “An Inconvenient Truth” when he said polar bears were drowning because global warming was melting Arctic sea ice, but now a new study shows that polar bears did just fine even when there was no ice covering the Arctic. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks released a study claiming the “stratigraphic record of the last 1.5 [million years] indicates that no marine species’ extinction events occurred despite major climate oscillations,” including periods where the Arctic was completely ice-free in summertime. “Some species thought to be dependent on summer sea ice (e.g., polar bears) survived through these periods,” write Thomas Cronin of the USGS and Matthew Cronin of the University of Alaska in their new study. –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller News Foundation, 11 January 2016
The authors are all at Stanford University, one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions. Rajaratnam is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science. Romano is a Professor of Statistics and of Economics. Diffenbaugh is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science. Tsiang is a PhD student. Climatic Change appears to be a reputable refereed journal, which is published by Springer, and which is cited in the latest IPCC report. The paper was touted in popular accounts as showing that the whole hiatus thing was mistaken — for instance, by Stanford University itself. You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect. —Radford Neal, 10 January 2016
As soon as the Met Office rushed to proclaim that 230mm of rain (9in) had made it “the wettest December on record” (and the “wettest calendar month”) – predictably echoed by the BBC and the Prime Minister – we knew it might be wise to examine the small print behind its claims. We know how eager these people are to seize on any “extreme weather event” as a sign of unprecedented “climate change.” Sure enough, the Met Office’s longest rainfall record, covering England and Wales (thus including two of the areas most affected) showed, with its 145.1mm (5.7in), that December ranked as only the 20th wettest since 1766. –Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2016
Contrary to various misleading claims, last year was not “one of the wettest” on record. In fact it only ranked 84th wettest since 1766, according to the England & Wales Precipitation Series, with 969mm, only marginally above the average of 918mm. As the 10-Year average shows, there have been wetter periods than the last 10 years in the past. The wettest such period was 1874-83. The 1770’s and 1920’s were also exceptionally wet. The Met Office often likes to claim that most of the wettest years have occurred in the last decade or two, but again the facts show this not to be true. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 8 January 2016
1) ‘No Extinctions’: Polar Bears Survived Periods When The Arctic Had No Ice
Daily Caller News Foundation, 11 January 2016
Michael Bastasch
Former Vice President Al Gore shocked Americans in “An Inconvenient Truth” when he said polar bears were drowning because global warming was melting Arctic sea ice, but now a new study shows that polar bears did just fine even when there was no ice covering the Arctic.
Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks released a study claiming the “stratigraphic record of the last 1.5 [million years] indicates that no marine species’ extinction events occurred despite major climate oscillations,” including periods where the Arctic was completely ice-free in summertime.
“Some species thought to be dependent on summer sea ice (e.g., polar bears) survived through these periods,” write Thomas Cronin of the USGS and Matthew Cronin of the University of Alaska in their new study.
“In the case of summer sea-ice-free interglacial periods, the presence of winter sea ice habitat, polar bears’ ability to fast during summer, seals ability to use land areas in the absence of sea ice, and the availability of new prey species shifting ranges into the Arctic may have allowed survival during warm periods,” Cronin and Cronin write.
The scientists found that contrary to claims made by Gore in his 2006 film, polar bears have adapted to past warm periods. This is in line with Cronin’s work which has found that polar bears have been a genetically-distinct species long enough to have survived past periods where the Arctic had little to no ice.
The new study not only finds polar bears survived ice-free periods in the Arctic, but there’s no evidence of any other marine species going extinct over the last 1.5 million years. That even goes for walruses, which have made news lately for massive beachings in the Arctic some say are being driven by global warming.
What’s most interesting is that they also claim species were likely worse off during periods when the Arctic and neighboring continents were covered by massive ice sheets.
“In contrast, during glacial periods the much smaller Arctic Ocean and much of the adjacent continents were covered with massive ice sheets, thick ice shelves, and sea ice making large regions virtually uninhabitable to most species that inhabit today’s Arctic,” the scientists write.
See also: Susan Crockford – Paleoclimate + genetic study confirms: Arctic species adapted to sea ice changes
A new paper that combines paleoclimatology data for the last 56 million years with molecular genetic evidence concludes there were no biological extinctions [of Arctic marine animals] over the last 1.5M years despite profound Arctic sea ice changes that included ice-free summers: polar bears, seals, walrus and other species successfully adapted to habitat changes that exceeded those predicted by USGS and US Fish and Wildlife polar bear biologists over the next 100 years.
2) “Nothing In This Paper Is Correct”
Bishop Hill, 12 January 2016
The eminent statistician (and occasional BH reader) Radford Neal has been writing a series of posts on global temperature data at his blog. There are three so far:
What can global temperature data tell us?
Has there been a pause in global warming?
and finally
Critique of “Debunking the climate hiatus”, by Rajaratnam, Romano, Tsiang and Diffenbaugh.
They are all rather technical but very well written – the clarity of thought is striking. But I particularly recommend the last one, a gloriously deadpan take on a much-trumpeted paper (one which trashes claims of a hiatus, apparently), with gems like this:
The authors are all at Stanford University, one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions. Rajaratnam is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science. Romano is a Professor of Statistics and of Economics. Diffenbaugh is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science. Tsiang is a PhD student. Climatic Change appears to be a reputable refereed journal, which is published by Springer, and which is cited in the latest IPCC report. The paper was touted in popular accounts as showing that the whole hiatus thing was mistaken — for instance, by Stanford University itself.
You might therefore be surprised that, as I will discuss below, this paper is completely wrong. Nothing in it is correct. It fails in every imaginable respect.
…and this:
Rajaratnam, et al. describe [their] data as “the NASA-GISS global mean land-ocean temperature index”, which is a commonly used data set, discussed in my first post in this series. However, the data plotted above, and which they use, is not actually the GISS land-ocean temperature data set. It is the GISS land-only data set, which is less widely used, since as GISS says, it “overestimates trends, since it disregards most of the dampening effects of the oceans”. They appear to have mistakenly downloaded the wrong data set, and not noticed that the vertical scale on their plot doesn’t match plots in other papers showing the GISS land-ocean temperature anomalies.
3) Paul Sheehan: Distorted Universities Need A Reality Check
The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2015
Universities have become havens for intolerance, orthodoxy and unscholarly distortion.
[…] The very concept of objectivity is scorned in the academy.
The victory of theory and ideology is now pervasive in the social sciences, especially sociology and social psychology. Even history is now wrapped in so much historiography, encroaching on the primacy of rigorous factual research and narrative. Communications degrees are now weighed down by useless theory when the field requires rapidly evolving technical skills.
Some fields have the theoretical and ideological as their very basis, notably gender, race and sexuality studies. Rather than concentrating on unflinching field work, data analysis and original research, they produce paper castles of theoretical rights-based obscurantism.
It is no surprise that so many people graduating with degrees in the social sciences, especially theory-based degrees, are encountering indifference in the employment market.
Numerous surveys show that social science graduates are loaded with more debt than in the past and poorer job prospects in their chosen fields. Graduates are facing longer periods finding employment, and are increasingly employed in jobs that do not even require a university degree.
Worse, universities have become havens for intolerance, orthodoxy and unscholarly distortion.
My favourite example, which encapsulates all of the above, was provided by Dr Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University in the US. He dissected a paper published by a respected journal, Psychological Science, in 2013, and found that it was rubbish, and probably published because the journal’s editors shared the ideological bias of the article’s conclusion.
The paper was entitled “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax“. The abstract of the study states: “Endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science … This provides confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.”
Note the term “conspiracist ideation”. The English language is being brutalised in the social sciences to create a false sense of rigour.
When Jussim checked the data, he found that of the 1145 participants in the study, only 10 thought the moon landing was a hoax. Of those who thought climate science was a hoax, almost all of them, 97.8 per cent, did NOT think the moon landing was a hoax.
The social psychologists who conducted the study had disguised the data and smothered it under a layer of obfuscation. No peer reviewer or journal editor took the time to check the raw data. Instead, the paper was published because it buttressed a pervasive ideological bias in the field.
Jussim’s argument is sustained at book length in The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Dr Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Haidt’s central thesis is that the academy has gone from being a haven for heterodoxy to a centre of rigid orthodoxies that are compromising scholarship:
“The American Academy has become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution. When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down. Political orthodoxy is particularly dangerous for the social sciences, which grapple with so many controversial topics (such as race, racism, gender, poverty, immigration, politics, and climate science) … Can a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produce reliable findings?”
The problem has spread downwards, to student behaviour. In an article entitled, “The coddling of the American mind”, published in The Atlantic in September, Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue: “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. That is disastrous for education.”
4) Met Office’s ‘Wettest Ever’ Claim Fails Again
The Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 2016
Christopher Booker
Official records show that December ranked as only the 20th wettest since 1766, despite what we’ve been told
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html
We are all aware that parts of the country, including the north of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, have lately been hit, at huge cost, by abnormal amounts of rain.
But as soon as the Met Office rushed to proclaim that 230mm of rain (9in) had made it “the wettest December on record” (and the “wettest calendar month”) –
predictably echoed by the BBC and the Prime Minister – we knew it might be wise to examine the small print behind its claims.
We know how eager these people are to seize on any “extreme weather event” as a sign of unprecedented “climate change”, as they did when the Met Office trumpeted on July 1 that it had been “the hottest July day evah”, solely on the basis, it turned out, of a fleeting temperature spike probably caused by an airliner passing its temperature gauge near a runway at Heathrow.
Sure enough, the Met Office’s longest rainfall record, covering England and Wales (thus including two of the areas most affected) showed, with its 145.1mm (5.7in), that December ranked as only the 20th wettest since 1766. Even Northern Ireland didn’t break its own record from 1919 – so only Scotland’s 351mm (14in) was unprecedented. But if the Met Office had more honestly reported merely that it had been the wettest December recorded in Scotland, this would scarcely have provided the BBC and Mr Cameron with the headlines they were after.
According to the Met Office’s own data, last December in England and Wales was way behind the 193.9mm (7.6in) recorded in 1876; while the wettest calendar month was October 1903 with 218.1mm (8.6in). As for the other impression the Met Office likes to give, that extreme rainfall is becoming more frequent, graphs meticulously plotted from Met Office data by Paul Homewood on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat website show no evidence at all for this, either for December or more generally.
5) Met Office Hype Vs Reality: 2015 Was Not Unusually Wet
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 8 January 2016
Paul Homewood
Contrary to various misleading claims, last year was not “one of the wettest” on record. In fact it only ranked 84th wettest since 1766, according to the England & Wales Precipitation Series, with 969mm, only marginally above the average of 918mm.
As the 10-Year average shows, there have been wetter periods than the last 10 years in the past. The wettest such period was 1874-83. The 1770’s and 1920’s were also exceptionally wet.
The Met Office often likes to claim that most of the wettest years have occurred in the last decade or two, but again the facts show this not to be true:
Although four years since 2000 appear in the Top 20, such clustering is not unusual. What is notable though is the complete absence of the wettest years between 1960 and 2000.
It is understandable, therefore, why the public find current weather “exceptional”. However, it is inexcusable for the Met Office not to provide the longer term perspective, which would show otherwise.
This pattern of rainfall is, in any event, well known. It was the Durham University flood expert, Professor Stuart Lane, who looked at seasonal rainfall and river flow patterns dating back to 1753 and found fluctuations between very wet and very dry periods, each lasting for a few years at a time, but also very long periods of a few decades that can be particularly wet or particularly dry. In terms of river flooding, the period since the early 1960s and until the late 1990s appears to be relatively flood free, especially when compared with some periods in the late 19th century and early 20th Century.
It is important to note that the England & Wales Precipitation Series has been carefully put together since its inception in 1931. In particular, great care has been taken to ensure that historical comparisons are meaningful. When one station drops out, the homogeneity of the series is preserved by normalising stations’ precipitation relative to the correct long-term local averages and by ensuring that the variance of the series has no artificial fluctuations.
The series is currently based on about 100 stations. Some of the early data was more patchy, up to around 1800, but the mid 19thC ample data is available. (According to Wikipedia, some of the earlier rainfall data may have been underestimated, due to little recording of upland sites).
Put simply, there is absolutely no reason at all for the Met Office not to be using the series in their public pronouncements. Indeed, one of the concerns with their 1910 digital series is that it has increasingly factored in new automated MMS systems, situated in wet, mountainous and upland areas, thus adding a wet bias.
