Tag Archives: David Legates

For Life on Earth, Ice is not Generally a Good Thing!?

Censorship, , , , , , ,

Or so Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley claims in answer to the question I recently put to him and his fellow authors in a comment below an article on the Watts Up With That blog entitled “The Profiteers of Climate Doom” and bylined “Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon and David R. Legates”. As I put it in my initial comment:

A “killer question” for you Christopher.

Were you previously aware that global sea ice area has recently reached its lowest ever level (since the Cryosphere Today satellite records began)?

The thing is, although Chris’s riposte to my gentle probing has just been published, my third explanatory comment has not. Here it is:

2016-02-12_2353-WUWT

and here is the good Viscount’s answer, quoted in full:

Mr Hunt, in his desperation to promote the purely political but now collapsing cause of shutting down fossil-fuel corporations that were once the major donors to his hated Republican opponents, displays a shameful disregard for, or ignorance of, elementary statistical method. He founds his case on a single data point, and one that is little different from similar data points in 2006 and 2011.

However, as he will learn when he attends his first Statistics 101 course, to place undue weight on a single data point is to err. Grown-ups determine trends on multiple data points. As Mr Hunt will learn from the graph helpfully posted by Mr Stealey, to whom he is as churlishly ungrateful as most of his sort are, the trend on the daily observations of global sea-ice extent by the satellites since 1979 is remarkably close to zero.

There has, of course, been some global warming since 1979, though only one-third of what the IPCC predicted in 1990. Naturally, one consequence of the little warming that has occurred might be a very small loss of global sea ice.

For life on Earth, of course, ice is not generally a good thing. The less of it the better.

Messrs Soon and Legates are currently keeping any thoughts they may have on the matter close to their respective chests.

[Edit – 23:30 UTC on Saturday February 13th 2016]

Intriguingly my 4th comment @WUWT is now plain for all to see, whereas despite my plaintive calls on Twitter the third shown above is not! Time for a brief flashback. On January 13th 2016 Yale Climate Connections published this video:

You will note that at around 6 minutes 30 seconds Carl Mears of Remote Sensing systems says that:

Senator Cruz focusses on one data set, mine, from one type of instrument, satellites, and he ignores all the other evidence. For example the surface temperature record, things like the Arctic sea ice declining….

On January 19th 2016 the Watts Up With That blog published an article by one “Christopher Monckton of Brenchley” entitled “20 false representations in one 10-minute video“. The 15th “false representation” read as follows:

That Arctic sea ice is declining, though Antarctic sea ice has been on a rising trend and reached a satellite-era record in early 2015, and though the decline in Arctic sea ice is chiefly only in a few late-summer weeks and is a small fraction of the seasonal variation in sea-ice extent, so that neither the extent nor the trend of global sea ice (from the University of Illinois) shows much change throughout the satellite era:

Moncktom-Global-Area

Does that graph look at all familiar?

[Edit – 16:45 UTC on Tuesday February 16th 2016]

I have posted two comments on the Watts Up With That blog today, but at present neither of them is visible. In the most recent one I endeavoured to inform Monckton et al. about the news that today the Cryosphere Today global sea ice area metric posted a new “*all time low” value. Here’s my comment:

2016-02-16_1639-WUWT

We’ll keep you posted about if and when it appears over there as well.

Willie Soon Gate at the Mail Online

Temperature, , , , , , ,

I’ve just had a long phone conversation with John Wellington of the Mail on Sunday. He assures me he is fit and well and back in his hot seat there, but that the long standing bone that I’ve been eager to pick with the Mail Online about Victoria Woollaston’s January 21st article entitled “Is climate change really that dangerous? Predictions are ‘very greatly exaggerated’, claims study” is the responsibility of Tal Gottesman. Here’s a brief extract of the article, to give you a little taste:

The paper, ‘Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model’, was written by Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware David Legates, and statistician Dr Matt Briggs.

It has been peer reviewed and is published in the journal Science Bulletin.

Mathematical equations used for large climate model typically require supercomputers that perform calculations quickly – some make more than 80 million calculations an hour.

and here’s the accompanying “infographic”:

I’ve been trying to get in touch with Vicky and/or her editor for several weeks now, so this is a big step forward! After a series of phone calls and emails that elicited no response “Willie SoonGate” broke earlier this week, so….

Us:

 

which also elicited no response, so following John’s phone call:

Hello Tal,

John was kind enough to telephone me and pass on your email address.

Further to the correspondence copied below you will note that I have had a singular lack of success directing my enquiries on the above topic to the generic MailOnline editorial address.

At the risk of repeating myself repeating myself

How do you suggest we go about starting a conversation?

Best wishes,

Jim Hunt

followed by:
 

Them:

Thank you for your email which has been passed to the Managing Editor’s office.

We understand that you would like to submit a complaint on the story below:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2920311/Is-climate-change-really-dangerous-Predictions-greatly-exaggerated-claims-study.html

If you could please outline what the issue is, we will ensure your complaint is investigated immediately.

Yours sincerely

MailOnline

 

Us:

Dear Madam,

Your understanding is (at long last) correct!

My first complaint is that I have received no previous response, not even an acknowledgement, to my emails of January 26th, February 2nd and February 23rd 2015. Can I safely assume that conversation using this email address will be more timely from now on? Do you by any chance possess a telephone number?

Moving on to the article in question, I will prepare a more substantive reply as soon as I have finished addressing similar issues with the Sunday Telegraph and the BBC. In brief the paper by Monckton, Soon, Legates & Briggs described in the article in question is scientific nonsense. As a famous scientist called Albert Einstein allegedly once put it:

“Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”

As such the article is scientifically inaccurate and/or misleading, and as I am sure you must be aware allegations have recently been made elsewhere about possible reasons for that. I have been denied any discussion about a reply or “correction” to the article for 5 weeks thus far, and counting. Did you hear back from the IPCC by the way? If so, what did they say and where did you “print” it?

Best wishes,

Jim Hunt

 

Them:

We’ll keep you posted!