The Post Finally Prints a Response

Well, the Washington Post has finally printed a reasoned response to George Will's silly climate change column.

In the paper's March 21 edition, more than a month after Will's column appeared, science writer Chris Mooney says:

In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth.
...
Yet there's a bigger issue: It's misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming....

Mooney goes on to calmly debunk Will's abuse of sea ice data and his rather bizarre claim that the UN's World Meteorological Organization said that "there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." (Of course, the WMO has said no such thing.)

I have quibbles with the response. It seems to imply that AGW critics have more "facts" on their side than they actually do. And I would have stated some things more strongly; for example, rather than "Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth," I might have said something like "This has been shown to be a myth," and included a link to the relevant AMS study.

But these are indeed just quibbles. Overall it's a nice piece of work. It's reasonable, and it makes its case without hyperbole and ad hominem attacks.

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Update: I didn't notice that the same day's Post also contained this letter from WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud disputing the conclusion Will drew from WMO data:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record—as was done in a recent Post column—and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

Rush Limbaugh: Not a Moron

I have to say that because I made a promise to myself: when I started this little blog, I promised myself that I would never call anyone a moron, that staple of friendly Internet banter, no matter how thoroughly justified it might be. So here it is: I. Am. Not. Calling. Rush. Limbaugh. A. Moron.

But it is difficult, sometimes, keeping one's promises.

Listen to this audio clip, courtesy of Media Matters:

You heard it right, El-Rushbo thinks it is "rich" and "hilarious" that three climate researchers were in danger of freezing to death in the Arctic ("were" because they've been resupplied).

I'll tell you what's chilling here, and it ain't the weather at the North Pole. It's not even that Limbaugh considers the prospect of three people dying alone in 100-below-zero weather to be "hilarious". No, what's really chilling is that this idiot (that word I can use and even emphasize, since he did), the voice of American conservatism, the talking head to whom Republican leaders must apologize when he's offended, is either too ignorant or too stupid to understand that weather and climate are not the same.

What exactly is this commentary supposed to prove, Rush? It's cold in the Arctic, therefore there is no global warming? Really? Are you really that ignorant, or does this just serve some purpose of yours?

Conservative commentators, please try harder to grasp these concepts. They are difficult, I know, but you can do it if you really try. I have every confidence in you.

1. Weather is not climate.

2. It gets cold in the Arctic. Even with global warming.

Fox's Time Warp

You just have to hand it to Fox "News" for creative editing.

In its latest fox pas, the Terrorist Fist Bump Network used a clip from a Joe Biden campaign speech in a way that was just blatantly dishonest. There's really no other way to describe it.

Fox's Martha MacCallum asserted that "[A]fter weeks of economic doom and gloom, the Obama administration is now singing a slightly different tune. Take a look at what was said in recent interviews this weekend," followed by a series of sound bites from Obama administration officials, including this one from Joe Biden:

The fundamentals of the economy are strong.

MacCallum followed this with, "All right, well, the mantra for the weekend is clear, looking at what was said over the course of the shows on Sunday.”

There are just a couple of itty-bitty problems with this.

First, the Biden clip wasn't from "this weekend" at all—it was from a campaign appearance last September.

Second, Biden didn't actually say that the economy was sound, as you would know if Fox hadn't cropped the clip precisely where it did. He was quoting John McCain. Here is what Biden actually said, after asserting that McCain was not in touch with conditions outside the Beltway:

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that’s why John McCain could say with a straight face as recently as this morning, and this is a quote, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.” That’s what John said. He says that “We’ve made great progress economically in the Bush years.... Ladies and gentlemen, I could walk from here to Lansing and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought the economy was doing well—unless I ran into John McCain.”

The critical part of the speech is bold and the little bit of it that Fox used is in red. Puts a slightly different spin on the Fox clip, don't it?

I want you to imagine a clip of Biden being interviewed outside the Capitol in a howling blizzard; he says, "John McCain needs to look outside once in a while because he said, just this morning, 'What a beautiful day it is!'"

Now imagine that Fox "News" gets hold of this, crops everything except "What a beautiful day it is!", and headlines it with "Biden Says Weather Is Fine."

Because that is exactly what the fair and balanced "journalists" over there did.

See the clips for yourself at Think Progress.

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Update: Fox "News" has apologized:

Yesterday during a segment on the recent change in tone from President Obama’s economic team, we inadvertently used a piece of video of Vice President Biden saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

Inadvertent, got it. Let's recall Biden's words immediately preceding the bit Fox used:

[T]his is a quote....

And the words immediately following it:

That's what John said.

So, in order to crop it, they had to hear that, right? They had to hear and intentionally remove the words "this is a quote" and "That's what John said."

Inadvertent?

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Hume-an Error

I didn't intend for this to be a climate blog. It was just supposed to be a place where I could note odd stuff that I run across and to let off steam about foolishness that I see.

But people will keep spouting the most ignorant crap about global warming, so here we go again.

The latest loony tirade comes from the mouth of the redoubtable Brit Hume (incidentally, I think this argues for an entirely new definition of redoubtable: someone you can doubt over and over again.) Talking about a recent demonstration in Washington, he said this on the March 2 edition of Fox News's Special Report:

[Y]ou have to give those global warming activists credit for pluck. Not only were they protesting warming temperatures in a city going through its coldest winter in recent memories—a city in the midst of a snow emergency and sub-freezing temperatures—they were also doing so on a planet that has seen no average warming for the past 10 years. But climate change alarmists are not easily fazed.
...
The problem with [scientists' climate models] is that when data from the past have been plugged into them, they have had trouble predicting today's temperatures. The climate alarmists certainly did not foresee the cooling trend of the past decade. No matter.

Let's skip over whether or not he should be using the loaded term "climate change alarmists" twice in something that they're calling a "report." I guess that's why Fox News's slogans are "Unfair and Unbalanced" and "We Spin, You Listen Up." (I got those right, didn't I?)

While we're at it, we can also skip the bit where he apparently just makes up the "coldest winter in recent memories" factoid: a full third of the previous nine DC winters were colder.¹ Maybe he has a really bad memory.

Nah. He just likes to make stuff up.

OK, that's enough Andy Rooney. Let's get to the serious issues.

"Coldest winter in recent memories"

Even if this were true—and it's not—this is a classic case of confusing weather and climate. Weather is something that happens day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year. There's a lot of variability—noise, if you will—in it. It's very hard to predict more than a couple of days in advance. Climate is, in essence, weather with the noise removed.

Climate information is obtained by averaging weather over a long period of time and observing trends. Suppose you were to graph annual temperatures over many years. If you observe the temperature trends and how they are changing, you are looking at climate; but if you observe the temperature spikes here and there, you are looking at weather.

This winter's average temperature is weather, not climate. (Whether or not there's a snowstorm that discourages global warming alarmists from demonstrating is really weather.)

Let's use a classic example: rolling dice. If you roll an ordinary six-sided die many times, you will find that it averages around 3.5. If you graph this, you'll find a lot of spikes for low and high rolls, but if you make a trend line, it will be more or less flat. Here's a little graph of a hundred simulated throws:



The trend line is in red. That is climate. The line is essentially flat because the dice rolls aren't trending up or down—there's no change in the average roll as we move along in time.

The actual throws are in blue. That is weather. These vary rather wildly. Some throws are near the trend line, some are way above it, and some are way below it.

Now here is another simulation. This time I've loaded the dice: as we go on, it gets progressively easier to roll higher numbers, so now the average roll is increasing as we move along in time (this simulates global warming):



The loading of the dice is clearly visible in the upward curve of the trend line. But notice where we rolled a 2 at the red arrow. It doesn't prove that the dice aren't loaded, right? In fact, we can't tell anything at all from the one data point.

If this were a graph of average DC winter temperatures instead of dice rolls, the arrow would point to our "cold winter" (and, yes, even with global warming, there will be relatively cold winters). Just as that one throw can't tell us anything about whether the dice are loaded, that one cold winter can't tell us anything about global warming.

Here's the key point: weather is, for all intents and purposes, random. Climate is not. And you can't look at that random weather for today or this month or this year and use it to say anything about climate.² You can't just look at a single point in time and say, "It's cold, therefore global warming is bunk." But that's what Brit did with his "it's cold this winter" comment. (Maybe he'll come back in August when it's 105° in DC and say, "It's really hot today. Looks like I was wrong about global warming.")


"Cooling trend of the last decade"

Brit simply asserts this, so we don't know where he got it from—but I think I can make a pretty good guess. A lot of people (including George Will, quite recently—coincidence?) have been saying the same thing, and it always seems to come down to this: it was a little cooler in 2008 than it was in 1998.

OK, let's go back to our loaded dice. Look at the green line I've added:



See that, loaded dice alarmists? The recent trend is downward!

Well, not really. I just drew a pretty line between two arbitrary rolls. It doesn't mean anything at all.

But that green line is what makes Brit (or whoever he got this nonsense from) say that there's been no warming for the last ten years: he picked two arbitrary years, drew a line between them, and said, "See? No warming!" Unfortunately for Brit, it doesn't work that way. The individual data points are random, and you can't draw any conclusions by comparing two random things. Just as the green line here doesn't show that the dice aren't loaded (because they are loaded), the fact that 2008 was a little cooler than 1998 doesn't mean that there's no climate warming going on (because climate warming is going on).

(By the way, 2008 was cooler than 1998 in large part because 1998 was an El Niño year, while 2008 was a La Niña year—El Niño has a warming effect, while La Niña has a cooling effect. But despite La Niña, 2008 was still the 10th warmest year on record. There's more about this claim in the George Will response.)

"They have had trouble predicting today's temperatures"

Well, this one is real easy. "Today's temperatures" is weather. You can't predict weather from climate models. Repeat after me, Brit: for all practical purposes, weather is random. Climate models do not try to predict weather. You can't predict today's weather—or this year's weather, for that matter—from any climate model. That's not what they're for. Climate models try to predict the red line, not the blue line.

And the climate models are, in fact, rather good at doing that. Scientists have gone back to look at some of the older models and have found that longer term temperature trends have been pretty much as expected. RealClimate (a great site run by actual climate scientists) has more information.

Brit, you're supposed to be a journalist. You got some splainin' to do.

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¹ Source: Weather Underground. The mean winter (December 1-February 28) temperatures for Washington, DC. in 2000, 2002, and 2003 were all lower than 2008.

² Even a decade is a bit dicey (sorry). For global surface temperatures, according to climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, 15 years is the point at which weather "noise" averages out. What this means is that, if the climate were not changing at all, the average temperature for any 15-year span would be about the same as that for any other 15-year span because weather averages out over a period that long. That is not be true for a shorter span such as a decade—two different decades could have significantly different average temperatures even with no climate change. So, 15 years is about the shortest time span you can use to say anything really meaningful about global climate trends.

Unless you account for noise.

If you do that, you can point to a shorter time period as being anomalously warm or cool. The weather noise for a decade has been calculated, and it's less that 0.1°C. So, in the absence of climate change, we would expect the average temperature for any decade to be within 0.1°C of the long-term average. If the average for a particular decade is more than 0.1°C different from the long-term average, we can say that it's an anomaly and possible evidence of a change in the climate.

The Post Strikes Back

A previous post noted the reported non-response response of the Washington Post's new ombudsman, Andy Alexander, to the fact-challenged George Will column Dark Green Doomsayers (see the posts here and here).

Originally, Alexander didn't have much to say beyond (I'm paraphrasing here) "The Post's editors tell me that the piece went through a 'multi-layered' fact checking process."

Today, Alexander tackles the issue officially in his ombudsman's column:

Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they aren't free to distort them.

The question of whether that happened is at the core of an uproar over a recent George F. Will column and The Post's fact-checking process.

Here is what Alexander reports in regard to the actual fact-checking process on the Will piece:

It began with Will's own research assistant, Greg Reed. When the column was submitted on Feb. 12 to The Washington Post Writers Group, which edits and syndicates it, Reed sent an accompanying e-mail that provided roughly 20 Internet reference links in support of key assertions in the column. Richard Aldacushion, editorial production manager at the Writers Group, said he reviewed every link. The column was then edited by editorial director Alan Shearer and managing editor James Hill.

Next, it went to The Post's op-ed editor, Autumn Brewington, who said she also reviewed the sources.

The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will's assertion that global sea ice levels "now equal those of 1979." I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.

Here's the key: the Post's editors apparently "fact-checked" the column by looking at the links, and only the links, that Will's team provided. This is stunningly inadequate.

Suppose I submitted a column claiming that the Apollo moon landings were hoaxed. It would be trivially easy for me to provide twenty (or a hundred) links supporting this assertion. Would it be adequate fact-checking if the Post were to look at my links, and only at my links? Or should the fact checkers also look at NASA's site and other resources to get viewpoints from someone else? Maybe they could pick up the phone and get NASA's position ("Say, did y'all send some guys to the moon a while back? Got any evidence, like maybe a moon rock or something? Or a few snapshots?").

I think the answer is obvious, but the Post's editors apparently didn't do any of that. In fact, Alexander says that no attempt was made to check with the Arctic Climate Research Center until long after reaction to the column exploded:

But according to Bill Chapman, a climate scientist with the center, there was no call from Will or Post editors before the column appeared. He added that it wasn't until last Tuesday -- nine days after The Post began receiving demands for a correction -- that he heard from an editor at the newspaper. It was [op-ed editor Autumn] Brewington who finally e-mailed, offering Chapman the opportunity to write something that might help clear the air.

Something is seriously wrong here. The Post failed miserably in its most fundamental obligation to readers: to provide accurate information.

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To compare what the Post did with what it should have done, it's instructive to look at a description of the op-ed fact-checking policy over at The New York Times. Here's an excerpt:

Here are the clear-cut things the editor will do:
...

* Fact-check the article. While it is the author's responsibility to ensure that everything written for us is accurate, we still check facts—names, dates, places, quotations.

We also check assertions. If news articles—from The Times and other publications—are at odds with a point or an example in an essay, we need to resolve whatever discrepancy exists.

For instance, an Op-Ed article critical of newly aggressive police tactics in Town X can't flatly say the police have no reason to change their strategy if there have been news reports that violence in the town is rising. This doesn't mean the writer can't still argue that there are other ways to deal with Town X's crime problem - he just can't say that the force's decision to change came out of the blue.

This is certainly not to say that the Times always gets it right. But the piece contains a pretty clear statement of what did not happen at the Post: "If news articles—from The Times and other publications—are at odds with a point or an example in an essay, we need to resolve whatever discrepancy exists."

He's Baaaaack

[Update: here's the response that Will should have written, from RealClimate.org.]

He's at it again.

In today's Washington Post, an unrepentant George Will writes a "defense" of his February 15 column, in which he tried to pass off a grab bag of myths and misconceptions as evidence for his head-in-the-sand contrarian stance on global warming.

In the February 15 column, Will made numerous easily-refuted errors of fact. These were not points of view that depend on whether or not you believe in global warming; they were, plain and simple, wrong. These "facts" were shown to be wrong by just about everyone you can think of including, modestly, me. (If you don't believe me, see a partial list here.)

And here he is today:

The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged.

Whoa there, podner! Only one of your "factual assertions" was challenged? This statement in itself is blatantly false; the column contained, when you analyze it, three basic factual assertions, and all three of them were challenged. The column was picked apart in detail and at length:

• Challenged: That there was a consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was in for a new ice age.
  
  
• Challenged: That the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center said that sea ice levels hadn't changed since 1979 (the Center found this so wrong that it published its own denial of this particular claim).
  
  
• Challenged: That the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said that there had been no global warming for the last decade.

In those three points, the entire original column is challenged, since it contained no other substantive factual claims.

So here he is today, defending the "one" factual assertion that he seems to think was disputed:

Citing data from the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September "the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began." According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were "near or slightly lower than" those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.

So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying "we do not know where George Will is getting his information." The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center's Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.

Now, if you follow the link to the Daily Tech post, you will indeed see what he says you will see (note that Will uses an "interpretation" of the ACRC data from an electronics magazine's blog rather than the ACRC's own discussion—I wonder why?). But if you follow the link to the Center, where the data came from originally, you will not find the "accurate" reporting that Will claims. Where Will uses this data to show that there is no global warming, what the Center says—in the very post that Will links to—is this:

Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N. Hemisphere reduction. [My trusty calculator says that this is a net loss of a half million sq. km, an area considerably larger than California. I wouldn't call this "near or slightly lower", but that's just me. -ed]

Global climate model projections suggest that the most significant response of the cryosphere to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be seen in Northern Hemisphere summer sea ice extent. Recent decreases of N. Hemisphere summer sea ice extent ... are consistent with such projections.

...

[T]he ice that is presently in the Arctic Ocean is younger and thinner than the ice of the 1980s and 1990s. So Arctic ice volume is now below its long-term average by an even greater amount than is ice extent or area.

So this post says that the sea ice data are consistent with global warming theories. In other words, Will actually tries to claim he's right by referencing a post from the original source of his data that says he's wrong. Well played, sir, well played!

Let's recap the essence of the dialog:

Will: "The Arctic Climate Research Center says there's no global warming."

ACRC: "No, we didn't. Our data are consistent with global warming predictions, and here's how."

Will (pauses): "The Arctic Climate Research Center says there's no global warming."

This is accurate reporting? Seriously? Would a more appropriate phrase be "grossly misleading"?

In my previous post, I posited that, based on the February 15 column, Will had to be either incompetent or a liar; I could come up with no additional explanations. I now see that there is a third possibility: is the man insane?

The Toughest Reservation in Town

I hear the food's great, though.