A Change in the Wind at Dot Earth?

Wind's in the east,
Mist coming in,
Like somethin' is brewin'
And 'bout to begin.

Doubtless you remember that quote from watching Mary Poppins over and over in the 60s. Of course you do; don't try to deny it. What Bert has noticed brewin', you will recall, is the impending arrival of practically perfect M.P. herself to put things right with the Banks family.

If you're a follower of Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog over at the Times, maybe you've noticed a change in the wind there, too.

There's no shortage of fact-challenged climate change "skeptics" commenting at Dot Earth, but in the past Revkin has rarely engaged directly. This seems to have suddenly changed. A few examples:

To a poster who stated bluntly that Mann's hockey stick has been proven to be fraudulent:

Fraud is a serious charge and there's no evidence to support such a charge.

To a poster who ranted about the IPCCs "unequivocal" embrace of human-induced global wrming:

I'm pretty sure you understand that the only thing described as "unequivocal" by the IPCC was that there has been warming. All the statements attributing that to human activities or other influences have caveats. Are you saying you dispute that it's warmer now than it was a century ago? Or are you trying to build a challenge to something the IPCC hasn't concluded? (That human-driven warming is unequivocal?)

To a poster who states that the IPCC always overstates and never understates AGW's consequences:

Actually the folks at Realclimate.org have made a decent case that, on sea level, the IPCC did precisely that (knowingly downplay a risk)....

To a poster who seems to think that scientific judgments on AGW are worthless because there have been no controlled experiments:

So what would you propose given a situation where there is no way to run a case-controlled study (we're in the one test tube where the experiment is under way)?

If the traditional method is not available, do we just sit on our hands and conclude, well, that can't be tested, therefore we don't consider it a risk?

You get the idea.

In the past, such posts would rarely have merited a Revkin response. Suddenly they're everywhere. What's going on?

Well, surely the fact that he's no longer a Times reporter has something to do with it. It has to be somewhat liberating to be freed of the responsibility to provide "balanced" coverage, right?

But...there has to be more to it than just that. After all, it's been three months since he left the Times. Why does he just start now? What is it? Time will tell, I suppose.

WSJ Utters an Oath

The Wall Street Journal seems to be a bit confused about what a loyalty oath is. According to a December 11 post, scientists at the UK Met Office have been pressured to sign a "government loyalty oath."

Now, here's what the statement actually says:

We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method. The science of climate change draws on fundamental research from an increasing number of disciplines, many of which are represented here. As professional scientists, from students to senior professors, we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which concludes that "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations".

So, I've read this several times, and I'm having a spot of trouble finding the part where the scientists pledge government loyalty. It was easier in this one:

I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.

The Times of London, an actual newspaper, is fooled by the loyalty oath and headlines it this way:

Suprisingly, the WSJ manages to get one thing right.

The concept of scientists--or journalists, or artists ... signing a petition is ludicrous. The idea is that they are lending their authority to whatever cause the petition represents--but in fact they are undermining that authority, which is based on the presumption that they think for themselves.

Oh. Interesting. Scientists signing petitions is "ludicrous." I'll have to remember this next time someone mentions the scam OISM petition signed by 31,000 "scientists."

The Antipetition Project

I've gotten pretty tired of responding in various places to comments like this:

Over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition that completely debunks the global warming conspiracy!!!! So much for your manufactured "consensus"!!!!

Now, you know what "petition" they're talking about: the OISM's "Petition Project." I'm not going to bother debunking the petition here since this has been done over and over etc..

But here's what I'd love to see: The Antipetition Project. It works exactly like the OISM's Petition Project, only backwards. It's a don't-worry-we-won't-actually-check-your-credentials-and-anyway-you-don't-have-to-really-be-a-scientist-to-sign petition, just like OISM's. The only difference is that says, in essence, the opposite of what OISM's petition says: "I believe that the basic concepts of significant anthropogenic global warming are scientifically valid."

We'll follow the same "rules" they do:

1. Pretty much anyone with at least B.S. in pretty much anything is considered to be a scientist.
2. Don't even have a B.S.? Don't worry, we're not going to actually check any credentials anyway.
3. Pretty much any field is considered to be a "relevant field" to climate science. Are you, say, a veterinary surgeon specializing in large animals? No worries, that's absolutely relevant to climate science! Who would even question that?
4. Anyone can print out the form and mail it in.
5. We won't show the institutional affiliations of anyone who signs. (Oh, and feel free to use an untraceable name, just as "Jerry Green" and "R. Payne" did for OISM.)
6. Are you dead? Not a problem. You can still sign.

Now, wouldn't that be fun? I'd pay good money to watch the "skeptics" try to simultaneously trash our petition and tout OISM's.

I only wish I had the time and resources to do it myself.

Climategate and reality

There's a scene in the 1967 film "A Guide for the Married Man" that I remember well. Our protaganist, wolf Ed Stander (Robert Morse), counsels his friend, family man Paul Manning (Walter Matthau), on how to cheat on his wife without repercussions. In an imagined scene, Morse is surprised by his wife while in bed with another woman. He deals with the situation by just pretending that it didn't happen: He calmly gets out of bed, gets dressed, and ushers the mistress out of the house. To his wife's cries ("How could you?"), he simply replies, "How could I what? What are you talking about?" In the face of his persistent denials, his wife eventually becomes disoriented and thinks that perhaps she has imagined the whole thing. In Standers's words, the best strategy is "Deny, deny, deny."

Millions of words have now been written about "Climategate". There's not much I can add, and nothing I say is going to change anyone's mind. But the right's pounding on one of Phil Jones's emails reminds me very much of Ed Standers's strategy: If something's inconvenient, just ignore it. Many have explained what Jones is actually saying in this particular email, and they've done so accurately (see, for example, the seventh paragraph of this RealClimate post), but there's one thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere: That pesky four-letter word, real.

In this email, Jones talks about a paper he's working on and says that

I've just completed Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith [Briffa]'s to hide the decline.

Obviously Jones is manipulating the data, hiding an actual decline in temperatures. Right?

Well, there's an inconvenient word in there that the right is, Standers-like, simply ignoring. Pretending that it's not there ("How could I what?"). That word is real, as in "real temps". Jones clearly says that he has used the real temperatures to hide the decline.

Now, the "skeptics'" assumption is that the "decline" being hidden is a decline in global temperatures. A real decline. So, how do you hide a real decline using real temperatures?

Well, you can't. Obviously. It's not possible to hide a real decline in temperatures using real temperatures. That doesn't make any sense. The only thing you can possibly hide with real temperatures is a false decline in temperatures. So, what decline is Jones talking about? It can't be a real decline in global average temperatures, as the "skeptics" assume, since (a) not even "skeptics" argue that temperatures actually declined between 1961 and 1998, which is the time frame in question, and (b) even if there were such a decline, you couldn't hide it using real temperatures.

In fact, the decline he's referring to is a false decline in temperatures shown by some tree rings. The particular set of tree rings used in this paper suffers from what's known as the divergence problem: After about 1960, they no longer accurately reflect what we know the actual temperatures were. They show a decline in temperatures that we know did not actually occur. So, there's a word missing from Jones's email: What he actually "hid" was a false decline. (And, just to be clear on how bad Jones is at hiding things, he clearly disclosed exactly what he had done in the published paper.)

How does the "skeptical" camp deal with this little problem? They don't. They simply ignore it. They pretend the word real isn't there. They don't say anything about it at all.

"How could I what?"

The Beeb's "Own Goal"

Well, the BBC is at it again. Last year, it published a poorly-written and widely-misquoted piece claiming that temperatures had not risen globally since 1998. Now, in a blog post, the Beeb's Tom Feilders makes the above claim. Unfortunately, in order to do so, he has to twist what climate scientist Mojib Latif actually says into something totally unrecognizable.

Professor Latif has been looking into the North Atlantic Oscillation and thinks that we're going to see a period of cooling before it starts getting warm again. Not everyone agrees with him, but fine. Such disagreements are part of how science works. The key is that even Latif thinks it's strictly temporary.

But the BBC's Feilden grabs the ball and kicks it into the wrong goal:

The global warming narrative - that mankind's addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate - may be about to go seriously off message.
...
With apologies to Al Gore, professor Latif's finding is something of an "inconvenient truth" for the global warming debate.

Not only is this a completely wrong interpretation of the science, it's flatly contradicted by what Latif himself says in the same blog post. Feilden quotes Latif:

"The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some years, and thereafter will pickup again and continue to warm".

That's pretty clear, right? AGW hasn't gone away, and it isn't wrong; it's just being temporarily overwhelmed, in Latif's opinion, by natural factors. This isn't going to surprise any climate scientist.

There's a lovely bit of irony in the post, too:

Professor Philip Stott believes climate sceptics may seize on the research as evidence that the whole global warming hypothesis is fundamentally flawed: If natural cycles can interrupt, or even reverse climate change, maybe we don't need to take it so seriously.

Ya think, Professor? Is it possible that some yahoo will take what Latif says and write a headline like, oh, "An inconvenient truth about global warming"?

Predictably, FOX Nation takes the ball and runs with it:

But, just so we can take some comfort from knowing that not everyone is insane, here's how a real publication headlines its version of the story:

---

Update (October 2, 2001)

It turns out that in the portion of his talk that everyone is quoting ("It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two, when the temperature cools, relative to the present level"), Prof. Latif wasn't predicting cooling at all. If you listen to the audio of his presentation, this is just a hypothetical. The only actual prediction in the talk is a brief reference to earlier work by Keenlyside et al. For more, see DeepClimate's spectacular deconstruction of how Latif's presentation has been abused by the contrarian faction.

A Convenient Omission

Well, this morning Fox Nation links to a lovely bit of ClimateDepot skulduggery:

The New York Times reports that the record cold of 2009 is due to natural variations and even warned skeptics of man-made global warming not to be "buoyed" by the brutal cold. ["Brutal cold"? The temperature in NYC failed to reach 90°F in June or July. Brrr. - ed]
...
Ok. Fair enough, "natural variations" caused a record cold breaking summer in 2009, according to the Times. But the question looms, how did the paper explain record warmth nearly a decade ago? Surely, if natural variations in climate can cause a record-breaking cold summer, then it would stand to reason that record breaking warmth would have a natural cause as well?

Not exactly. The Times effortlessly attributed record warmth back in 2000 to man-made global warming, noting the warm temperatures were "consistent" with model predictions.

Wow, that does seem pretty bad. But there's this one problem: it's completely false. Let's skip over the fact that the "record cold of 2009" is strictly regional (much of the Pacific Northwest just finished a record-setting warm July) and concentrate on the literal truth of ClimateDepot's claim that the Times "effortlessly attributed record warmth back in 2000 to man-made global warming".

Unfortunately for ClimateDepot, the original Times article explicitly says otherwise:

But while the winter warming trend is consistent with the projections, [NCDC climatologist Mike Changery] added, "the jury is still out" on just what has caused the especially warm winters of the last three years.

Global warming aside, scientists said prime suspects were the natural phenomena known as El Nino and La Nina. These are sea-surface temperature oscillations in the tropical Pacific that touch off changes in wintertime atmospheric circulation.

In different ways, El Nino in 1997-98 and La Nina in the last two winters influenced circulation patterns that kept most of the United States relatively warm most of the time.

(Emphasis added)

This is "effortlessly blaming" global warming? "Prime suspects were the natural phenomena known as El Nino and La Nina"? Srsly?

Now, the ClimateDepot post did—belatedly—add this:

The New York Times article did—belatedly—add "the jury is still out" however on the complete causes of record warmth in 2000.

The difference is that the Times article had an honest headline:

U.S. Sets Another Record for Winter Warmth

ClimateDepot did not:

Media Spin: New York Times Blames 2009's Record Cold on Natural Factors -- But Blamed Record Warmth in 2000 on Man-Made Global Warming!

So Much For the Inhofe List

One of the climate change skeptics' mantras is, "A growing number of distinguished scientists dispute the whole idea of human-induced climate change." Most of the time, skeptics simply state this as fact, without evidence; but when "evidence" is offered, in most cases it will be either the thoroughly debunked "Oregon Petition" or, more recently, oil state Senator James Inhofe's Senate Minority Report, which supposedly lists 700-odd "dissenting scientists."

Those of us who believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists are right about global warming have long harbored deep suspicions regarding the actual qualifications of the scientists on Inhofe's list. These suspicions are now confirmed, in spades.

The Center for Inquiry, which published the wonderful Skeptical Inquirer magazine, has stepped in and done the dirty work. CFI has released The Credibility Project, an in-depth review of all of the list's signers (687 at the time of the report). The key finding, from CFI's press release:

After assessing 687 individuals named as “dissenting scientists” in the January 2009 version of the United States Senate Minority Report, the Center for Inquiry’s Credibility Project found that:

• Slightly fewer than 10 percent could be identified as climate scientists.
• Approximately 15 percent published in the recognizable refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
• Approximately 80 percent clearly had no refereed publication record on climate science at all.
• Approximately 4 percent appeared to favor the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not have been on the list.

Further examination of the backgrounds of these individuals revealed that a significant number were identified as meteorologists, and some of these people were employed to report the weather.

(Meteorologists, it should be noted, are not climate scientists—as smart and as competent as they might be, they study entirely different things and typically have little relevant expertise.)

Lest anyone think that CFI is pulling these statistics out of thin air, it has provided a detailed spreadsheet that lists each individual signer along with his or her qualifications.

This is yeoman work. Well done, CFI.

Consummate Nonsense

According to Climate Depot, a team of "prominent atmospheric scientists" has sent an open letter to Congress in anticipation of Senate debate on the Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill.. The letter is so full of what P.G. Wodehouse might have called "frightful horse-radish" that I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just pick a few particularly insane bits.

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

We'll skip over the the decidedly unscientist-like language ("alarmists"?) and simply note that this is, well, wrong. Just flat-out wrong. The earth has not been cooling for ten years:


(Source: NASA)

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore?

This is an utterly bizarre thing for "prominent atmospheric scientists" to say. Predicting weather and predicting climate have almost nothing in common--what sort of climate scientist would not understand this?

Weather is, for all practical purposes, random; climate is the average of all these events over a very long period of time. It's often the case that averages can be predicted even if the individual events that make them up can't be. For example, I can't predict what the next roll of the dice will be—but I can predict, with considerable accuracy, what the average of ten thousand rolls will be. It's the same way with predicting weather and climate. While we can't predict next week's weather with much accuracy, that doesn't mean that we can't predict average weather over a long timespan.

I also have to ask, what on Earth does Al Gore's ability to predict climate have to do with anything? Is Al Gore a climate scientist? No? Then why would he be able to predict climate? I have a follow-up question: One of the signers of the letter is Laurence I. Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford. How's he on predicting weather (since they seem to think it's the same thing)? Gore can't predict climate. Gould can't predict weather. So, why is this incompetent Gould a signer?

[C]limate alarmism pays well. Alarmists are rolling in wealth from the billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken. It is always instructive to follow the money.

Indeed. One of the authors of this letter is listed as "Roger W. Cohen, Manager, Strategic Planning and Programs, ExxonMobil Corporation (retired)." Let's follow the money. (You won't find much of it, by the way, in the hands of the tens of thousands of climate scientists around the world who agree with the basic thinking on climate change.)

Waiting for Retractions

Every time there's some unusually cold weather somewhere in the world, we see comments such as, "There was frost in East Spitwad yesterday. This is May. So much for global warming!"

Well, here's today's US forecast high temperature map from AccuWeather:

All that reddish stuff represents temperatures that are way above normal for mid-June. I wonder how many comments we'll see along the lines of, "Wow, they were right after all! Global warming is real!"

(No, these high temps don't prove global warming—just as low temps don't disprove it. It's just interesting that so many latch on to the cold temperatures to deny climate change but remain silent when it gets hot.)

A Crack in the Armor

I ran across an op-ed piece by Samuel Thernstrom in today's Washington Post titled "Could We Engineer a Cooler Planet?" A few not-so-random excerpts:

[A] growing number of climate scientists and scholars believe that [legislative efforts to reduce greenhous gas emissions] are likely to be too little, too late to stop warming.

Despite the progress we may see in the coming years, the mathematics and politics of rapid greenhouse gas reductions remain remarkably daunting.

Many climate scientists believe that a significant degree of warming is already "locked in" by past emissions and that greenhouse gas concentrations have already reached potentially dangerous levels. To avoid warming, therefore, global emissions would have to be halted immediately -- and existing emissions would have to be removed from the atmosphere as well. Not a likely prospect.

Warming seems inevitable; the only questions are its timing, distribution and severity. The effects may prove to be modest—but they could be severe or perhaps catastrophic.

The piece then goes on to discuss some geoengineering ideas, but it's what's above that caught my interest. Obviously it accepts global warming as a given; whether or not AGW is "real" isn't even dicussed. What's so interesting about that? Well, look at the information about author Thernstrom at the end of the column:

The writer is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he co-directs a project exploring the policy implications of geoengineering.

The American Enterprise Institute? The same Exxon-funded AEI that reportedly offered cash prizes to scientists to dispute a 2007 IPCC report? The same AEI that said this in a 2006 article?

This [crusade to fight global warming] intimidates the public and would-be dissenters with its unrelenting line that the science of global warming is settled, full stop. (Time swallowed it whole: “The debate is over. Global warming is upon us--with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing.”) The “consensus” that human activities are playing a role in the earth’s so-far mild warming trend is misrepresented as agreement that we are headed toward catastrophic results that can be prevented only by immediate and drastic action.

In fact, many scientists don’t believe the catastrophe scenarios. But those who dissent from the politicization of climate science face withering ad hominem attacks.

That American Enterprise Institute now accepts global warming as a given? Interesting.

The Question That's Never Answered

I've been involved in a whole lot of online discussions of climate change. In every case, a very significant portion of the deniers' posts will be some variant of this:

Global warming is a HOAX. It's the BIGGEST SCAM IN HISTORY. The ONLY reason for it is to line the pockets of Al Bore, George Soros, GE, and their minions. Follow the money, you MORONS.

And in every such discussion, I always ask something like this:

OK, let's assume that everything you said is true: Gore, Soros, and GE are peddling all this fake science just so they get rich. The problem is, what about the scientists? Where's their piece of the pie? Remember, these were the smartest kids in your grade school. They've loved science since they were little. They built weather stations from scratch in their back yards, won the science fair every year, and danced badly (if at all). Then they spent a decade of their lives and a couple hundred grand getting advanced degrees. For what? So that they could practice fake science and write fraudulent research papers for the US scientist's average salary of $70K? Why?

If I get a response at all—which is rare— it's like this:

Funding, duh!!!!!! How do you think these scientists get money for research?

To which I reply:

Funding for fake research? They did all this stuff so that they can get funding to practice fake science for peanuts? What is the point of that? You're saying that these thousands upon thousands of science-loving kids abandoned everything they ever believed in so that they could get funding to do fake science and lie about it for $70K/year? All of them? And they all manage to keep it a secret, too?

Crickets.

I've posted some version of that message probably a dozen times, and I've never had a single response. Not one.

Damned If You Do, Etc.

[This entry on Fox Nation has been moved to the new Fox Nation Watch blog. See ya there!]

Obama v. Cold Breakfast Cereal

[This entry on Fox Nation has been moved to the new Fox Nation Watch blog. See ya there!]

"Unbiased" FOX Nation

[This entry on Fox Nation has been moved to the new Fox Nation Watch blog. See ya there!]

9th Inning Comeback at the Post

The Washington Post has finally published its own climate-related editorial. There's no mention of the foolish George Will columns, and it's limited to a single issue, but still, it's welcome:

Make no mistake, Arctic Sea ice is melting.
...
Global warming is doing a number on Arctic Sea ice. The [NSIDC] report noted that the Arctic winter was 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average. This and other factors are causing the surface ice to melt. That ice is vital for reflecting the light and heat of the sun. Without it, the heat warms the Arctic Ocean, which then melts the ice below the surface of the water.

It remains to be seen whether or not Mr. Will will begin his next column with "Morons!", the witty and elegant retort of so many global warming critics' blog comments.

You Mean That's Not What He's Been Doing All Along?

AGW Critics: Short Term Trends Are Not Your Friends

I ran across a nice post on the excellent Open Mind blog that shows with absolute clarity why the "cooling trend" of the last decade or so has no relevance to global warming. I've posted about this before, using a similar technique, but Open Mind goes into considerably more detail.

What's nice about these analyses—Open Mind's and, humbly, my own—is that the demonstrations have nothing specifically to do with global warming. The data are not climate data, and it doesn't matter what you think about climate change. They're just common-sense math. They can't be obfuscated with charges of sensor data inaccuracy or urban heat island effects or global conspiracies of grant-happy scientists or any of that. They are what they are.

Here the Cliff's Notes version of the Open Mind post.

Open Mind's author, Tamino, programs a set of data points to have a small upward trend (simulating global warming) and then superimposes on that a bit of "noise" (random upward and downward deviations, simulating weather). If you look at the whole graph, you can see the trend clearly, despite the noise:


Then he steps into the role of Global Warming Critic and takes a subset of the data, starting with "1998" (see the blog for why Tamino labels this data point as "1998"):


Presto! An instant decade-long cooling trend! Global warming is a hoax!

Well, of course not. The long-term upward trend can't possibly be wrong, because it's built in. It's literally programmed into the model. It's as real as it gets.

What does this show? It shows very, very clearly that noise can easily hide a trend if you choose the right time span. In the case of weather "noise", it takes longer than a decade to average out and give you a true picture of the climate trend.

So, the next time your friendly neighborhood GW critic trots out "It's actually been getting cooler since 1998", you have even better information on your side. Nice job, Open Mind.

---

P.S.: For yet another take on the same concept, Andy Revkin of the New York Times has a good post on his Dot Earth blog.

April's Fool

Good ol' George Will, he's back for another try. Sort of like Charlie Brown and his neverending but hopeless quest to kick that football. And, just like C.B., he's never going to get it.

In his latest Washington Post windmill tilt, he goes after, of all things, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). Turns out that "some" of them—he doesn't bother with any numbers— don't last very long. Well, George, I have had "some" incandescent bulbs that didn't last very long either. I've had "some" of them blow out the first time I turned them on. Have you considered a column about that scandal?

He's also discovered that they contain mercury and should be disposed of properly. Apparently he's very concerned about the environment, so he worries about this. Some people might not do it right. There's no word, however, on whether or not he's equally concerned about the mercury that's been in all those fluorescent tubes that have been lighting offices and—gasp!—hospitals for so many decades. Or on whether he's worried about the mercury that goes into the air when you burn all the extra coal needed to run your inefficient, power-hungry incandescent bulb (which turns about 90% of its energy into heat)—mercury that gets dispersed into the landscape and is virtually impossible to clean up.

George seems unaware, too, that CFLs represent a transitional technology, one that will save energy until LED bulbs, which have all the benefits of CFLs but none of the drawbacks, are ready for home use.

While he's at it, George simply can't resist abusing the UN World Meteorological Office's data just one mo' time. He's a little more subtle about it than in his earlier columns; maybe he read one of the hundreds of blog entries that pointed out just how utterly wrong he was. Or the letter from the the head of the WMO itself that said the same. So this time he shoots for misleading instead of wrong—and he scores! Where he used to say that the WMO's data show no global warming since 1998, this time he goes with the more clever thought that, according to the WMO, "there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998." Well done! This one is technically true, but wholly misleading. He implies rather than states something that's factually incorrect. Brilliant!

Of course, it still doesn't mean anything. As Chris Mooney notes, "It’s absurd to assume that we’ll set a new temperature record each year, and that if we don’t, there’s nothing to worry about."

---

The brilliant cartoon is by Tom Toles of the Post. It's a Web-only cartoon that unfortunately did not appear in the newspaper.

Sweet Music

And here are the words we've waited eight long, hot years to hear, from AP:

Once booed at international climate talks, the United States won sustained applause Sunday when President Barack Obama's envoy pledged to "make up for lost time" in reaching a global agreement on climate change.
...
"We are very glad to be back. We want to make up for lost time, and we are seized with the urgency of the task before us," Stern said to loud applause from the 2,600 delegates to the U.N. negotiations.

They clapped again when Stern said the U.S. recognized "our unique responsibility ... as the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases," which has created a problem threatening the entire world.
...
Stern said no one on his team doubted that climate change is real. "The science is clear, the threat is real, the facts on the ground are outstripping the worst-case scenarios. The cost of inaction or inadequate action are unacceptable," he said — a total change of tone from his predecessors.

What a difference one little election can make.

More Fodder for Climate Change Critics

You've heard about the flooding in North Dakota. Although heavy snow melt is the primary cause, portions of Bismarck had to be evacuated due to a Missouri River ice jam that was exacerbating local flooding. Demolition experts blew it up to get the water moving again.

One moment while I peer into my crystal ball, consult my tarot cards, and analyze the goat entrails.

Yes, I see it now. The future is clear to me. I see yet another bullet point for the critics who don't seem to be able to understand the difference between weather and climate (I'm talking to you, Brit and Rush):

• In 2009, demolitions experts had to blow up an ice jam in the Missouri River to save Bismarck, ND. What do the global warming alarmists have to say about that?

Yawn. Well, what we have to say is that sometimes it gets cold in North Dakota in the winter. It will still get cold, even with global warming.

Just not quite as cold, on average.