[Vision2020] 324 Responses to “Forbes’ rich list of nonsense” Re: Climate Science Reporting

[Ted Moffett]

Excellent scientific analysis of a prominent recent (12-27-10) example
of junk science reporting (from "Forbes"
http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/23/media-climate-change-warming-opinions-contributors-larry-bell_print.html
) on anthropogenic climate warming, of the sort that is far too common
and effective in hookwinking the public on this issue:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/forbes-rich-list-of-nonsense/#more-5984

Forbes’ rich list of nonsense

Filed under: Climate Science Reporting on climate— group @ 6 January 2011
Guest commentary from Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia with input from
Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Kevin Trenberth

While it is no longer surprising, it remains disheartening to see a
blistering attack on climate science in the business press where
thoughtful reviews of climate policy ought to be appearing. Of course,
the underlying strategy is to pretend that no evidence that the
climate is changing exists, so any effort to address climate change is
a waste of resources.

A recent piece by Larry Bell in Forbes, entitled “Hot Sensations Vs.
Cold Facts”, is a classic example.

Bell uses the key technique that denialists use in debates, dubbed by
Eugenie Scott the “Gish gallop”, named after a master of the style,
anti-evolutionist Duane Gish. The Gish gallop raises a barrage of
obscure and marginal facts and fabrications that appear at first
glance to cast doubt on the entire edifice under attack, but which on
closer examination do no such thing. In real-time debates the number
of particularities raised is sure to catch the opponent off guard;
this is why challenges to such debates are often raised by enemies of
science. Little or no knowledge of a holistic view of any given
science is needed to construct such scattershot attacks.

The approach also works somewhat in print, if the references are
sufficiently obscure and numerous. Ideally, someone will take the time
to answer such an attack, but there is a fundamental asymmetry of
forces at work. It is, in fact, easier to form an allegation than to
track down a reasonable explanation of what it means and how it really
fits in to the balance of evidence. Also, the skills required to
reflect the science are deeper than the ones required to attack it;
hence the defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Still, sometimes an
article is prominent enough that it merits a detailed response.

The slightly out of the ordinary thing about Bell’s piece is that he
casts his attack not as an attack on science (his usual method) but on
the media:

As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from
the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming
‘Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming
Theorists Perplexed’? Or ‘NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New
Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril’?” he
begins.

But the remainder of the article is true to the form. Bell gallops
through all the purported “good news” that the media ignored. The
implication is that the media is complicit in overstating the climate
change story.

But these aren’t the sorts of observations that most people generally
receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements
and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving
glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused
climate calamities.

Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big
hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a
children’s book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York
Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be
“easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer.” Imagine such
images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that
pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it’s mostly
their parents’ fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving
them to school in SUVs.

Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don’t we
all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of
alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections
established on theoretical thin ice?

Whether the enemy is the “mercenary” scientific community, the “power
hungry” liberal politicians or the “sensationalist” press matters
little. What matters is to suggest the public has been manipulated,
before starting the manipulation in earnest. The strategic point is to
divert attention from what most scientifically informed people
consider the key facts: the climate is changing as a result of human
intervention. The longer we delay taking policy action, the more
damage we will take and the more an effective policy will cost. It is
conceivable and increasingly foreseeable that we will delay long
enough that useful policy becomes infeasible and both human
civilization and the biosphere will be permanently damaged.

The near-silence of the media on these matters is considered by many
to be a key part of the problem. Yet, in this context, Bell suggests
we are ignoring “the good news”.

Does he have a point? Is there really much of substance that qualifies
as good news justifying his conclusion? The value of his piece depends
crucially on how newsworthy his good news was, and how these items fit
into the big picture.

We counted eleven assertions of fact in his gallop. Let’s look at each
of them and place them in context. Bell especially emphasizes his
first two points, so we examine them in detail (quotes from the
article are bolded).

Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported

Bell’s first claim is not a confidence builder.

It’s possible that Bell is referencing a specific metric of hurricane
activity (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), but that does not give a full
story, nor does it show ‘record lows’. According to NOAA the 2010
Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Dec 31, was one of the busiest
on record. In the Atlantic Basin a total of 19 named storms formed –
tied with 1887 and 1995 for third highest on record. Of those, 12
became hurricanes – tied with 1969 for second highest on record. Five
of those reached major hurricane status of Category 3 or higher. 2010
was just behind 2004 and 2005 for earliest occurrence of a third
category 4 hurricane.

It is true that none of the 12 hurricanes made landfall in the US
(though tropical storm Hermine made landfall in US and hurricane Karl
made land fall in Mexico but caused major flooding in Texas. But the
climate system cares nothing for national borders. This may be just a
lucky break . Looking in detail it is attributable to some other
features of the prevailing winds last year.

What is certainly untrue is that there was “record low” cyclonic
activity in the Atlantic!

What about elsewhere? A tie for the strongest eastern Pacific
hurricane on record (Celia). A category 5 hurricane hitting the
Philippines (Megi).

Did the press ignore this story? Even on this Bell’s leading point is
dubious. But in the context of climate change, sea surface
temperatures continue to increase and strong tropical cyclones
continue their upward trend. So Bell leads off with a real clunker.

NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase

Bell’s second point, also from the lead paragraph:

According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center,
the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic
cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool
pattern.

We traced this claim to an internet article by Justin Berk that says:

Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s
oceans have been losing heat. …

Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published
his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting
Ocean Cooling published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week
discussed his and other results. Willis used data from 1993-2003 that
showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory. In 2006, he
co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine
Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for
2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was
surprised, and called it a ‘speed bump’ on the way to global warming.

But the excellent article “Correcting Ocean Cooling” which Berk
references (and to which Bell is implicitly referring) for this
actually explains how Willis went back and found that his earlier
report of cooling was erroneous!

So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too
warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says
Willis. The February evening he discovered the mistake, he says, is
“burned into my memory.” He was supposed to fly to Colorado that
weekend to give a talk on “ocean cooling” to prominent climate
researchers. Instead, he’d be talking about how it was all a mistake.”

Berk is so happy to find the word “cooling” in an article that despite
the title “Correcting Ocean Cooling” he doesn’t bother to read or
understand the whole point of the article. It’s really a very
compelling example of how superficial this kind of journalism is; Berk
gets something backwards, Bell picks it up, and Forbes, no less, uses
it to lead off an article (albeit an op-ed column).

What’s more, the NASA article itself is from 2008, so even if the
press had reported it as news as Larry Bell suggests, it would not
have been in 2010. But in fact, the news was that the previous
evidence of cooling was erroneous. Bell’s second point is simply wrong
as well.

Now that we have some sense of the quality of Bell’s research, we’ll
go a little more quickly through most of the other points, saving for
last a case where he might have a stronger point.

A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth
announced “Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring
more outbreaks of intense activity.” Christopher Landsea, a top U.S.
expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research
had been conducted to support that claim–not in the Atlantic basin, or
in any other basin.

This famous controversy occurred in 2004 and is not 2010 news. Nor was
it ignored by the press. We doubt that Landsea went so far as to claim
that “no research had been conducted to support that claim” but if he
did he is certainly incorrect. This topic goes back at least to 1987
with a paper in Nature by Kerry Emanuel. Kevin Trenberth offers some
salient points about the controversy from his point of view:

I was not an IPCC spokesperson and I was not advertised as such.
Landsea claimed otherwise.
I did not call the press conference, it was called by Harvard
university (Paul Epstein and Jim McCarthy), I participated.
There was a ton of research including my own on changes in the
hydrological cycle that were pertinent but not specifically Tropical
Storm based, as well as Kerry’s work.
Landsea did not notify IPCC once, let alone repeatedly. He called a
press conference and resigned from IPCC but he was not even part of
IPCC. He had been asked by me to write something as a contributing
author. It was a horrible distortion of many facts.

A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that
two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and
Helheim, were melting, with water “racing to the sea.” … Only 18
months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting
rate of both glaciers Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim not only slowed down
and stopped, but actually reversed.

This again is not 2010 news since it happened in 2007. It is a fact
that after a massive retreat from 1991 to 2005 Kangderlugssuaq
regained a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of that retreat by 2007.
This may be of interest to glacier dynamicists, but its climatological
importance is nil. Glaciers worldwide are in massive retreat. Indeed,
Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier lost another 5.2 square km in 2009.

[The] ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1
inches per year

The top of the ice caps are growing slightly as expected, since warmer
air contains more moisture which will fall in those places as snow.
The issue that the public ought to pay attention to is the much larger
and accelerating melt at the edge of the ice sheet. This is not
especially 2010 news, but in any case it is sleight of hand. The real
action is the instability at the edges, which already dominates the
accumulation in the interior and looks likely to overwhelm it.

The new sea level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years.

Just wrong:

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_global.jpg

Figure showing the last 18 years of sea level rise derived from
satellites and validated against tide gauges. (Update: longer records
available here
http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#seaLevel ).

Next:

… if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is
written into the document that there ‘must’ be a focus on global
warming.

There are many grants supported by the grant agencies. Some are very
broad and some very narrow. While it is possible that some grants
specify “global warming”, it is relatively unusual. Currently open
climate calls in the US through NSF can be seen at here. The claim
simply isn’t true.

The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than
it has been since.

This is at least a current topic. It probably is based in Patterns of
Indian Ocean sea-level change in a warming climate, Han et al. Nature
Geoscience 2010. They conclude that “sea level has decreased
substantially in the south tropical Indian Ocean whereas it has
increased elsewhere. This pattern is driven by changing surface winds
associated with a combined invigoration of the Indian Ocean Hadley and
Walker cells, patterns of atmospheric overturning circulation in the
north–south and east–west direction, respectively, which is partly
attributable to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.”

So yes, there are apparently parts of the Indian Ocean where sea level
has declined. This just leaves more water to pile up elsewhere. In
fact, it shows how powerful the forces of climate change already are,
in order to be able to outweigh the generally rising ocean volume in a
limited area. It is hard to see how this rises to a general interest
topic or how it qualifies as “good news” though.

The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before.

This is untrue in recorded history. The traversals prior to 2007 were
in very specialized boats and often took years. In 2007 and 2010,
genuine shipping lanes opened up for the first time. It was possibly
open in the mid-Holocene about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and was
certainly open millions of years ago. But since the opening of the
passage itself received far too little attention (in our opinion), it
is hard to see what Bell is complaining about.

in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been
underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than
the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand)

“Previously” is grossly misleading. This was an instrumental glitch
that lasted a few weeks. And February 2009 was not in 2010 either.

… previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate
losses may have been exaggerated by double.

We’ve saved this for last because here Bell has a fraction of a point;
as far as we can tell the only thing he raises that is 1) current and
2) arguably of general interest and 3) arguably good news. The use of
the word “exaggerated” however is malicious and unjustified.

There are a number of ways of estimating the large scale mass balance
of the ice sheets. Prominent among them uses information from the
GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the earth.
By its nature, the resulting measures are very large scale. They are
complemented by precise local measures of ice altitude, for example,
which are precise but cannot give broad coverage. To estimate ice cap
melting the GRACE results also have to be combined with an estimate of
the post-glacial rebound from the last ice age (which is still
affecting the mass distribution of the Earth’s crust). Observing a
planet is tricky business.

A recent publication by Wu et al makes the claim that:

“these [previous] results were not properly corrected for glacial
isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth’s crust rebounds
as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major
Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth’s crust
have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical
movements change the Earth’s mass distribution and therefore also have
an influence on the gravitational field.”

There is some contention here. If it proves true, it is an example of
science at its best; a sequence of corrections converging on objective
truth. The original estimates would have been corrected, pretty much
by a factor of two as Bell says.

So this is current, substantially good news, and possibly salient for
a general audience. On the other hand it is only good news about bad
news; the ice retreat may have been overestimated, but we are still
talking about hundreds of billions of tons more ice melting than
accumulating every year, and this rate still shows signs of
accelerating.

In this case, it is worth noting that all the evidence is that the ice
sheets are losing mass and that the loss is accelerating. The Wu et al
paper would be simply a recalibration of the net loss. This is good
news, but not great news, and is certainly no evidence at all that
climate change is negligible.

Please notice how we are trapped in a polemical double bind here.

What the naysayers will do is celebrate every correction that makes
matters look less dangerous and criticize every correction that makes
matters look more dangerous. In the former case, the older measure
will have been “exaggerated”, and “corrected” by some noble and
courageous hero. In the latter case, the newer measure is treated as
the “exaggeration”. Thus, every single change in the estimate of any
quantity is treated as evidence of the grand conspiracy.

What should be celebrated as advances of truth are instead recast
either as the bad scary science defeated by the good non-scary science
or the other way around. This is especially evident in the clumsy way
the Willis tale is told, wherein the casting is confused because one
person takes both roles.

So what remains of the criticism Bell raises? Very little indeed! The
only unreported good news is that ice cap melting might have been
overestimated, though it is still large and probably accelerating. The
other ten of his eleven points are essentially nonsensical. I am not
being partisan or oppositional here. I examined every point with an
open mind and came up with ten points that boil down to complete
nonsense and the last one a bit heavy on the spin.

Ultimately, though, the criticism of the press is ludicrous. The
naysayers ought to be thrilled at the lack of interest in climate
change shown in the press, at least in North America. The longer we
delay, the bigger the topic gets, and the more ridiculous the refusal
of the press and policy sector to grapple with it becomes.

Yet widely respected publications like Forbes seem eager to promulgate
great clouds of rhetorical ink to make the problem seem ever more
trivial and distant. If there is good news of general interest, of
course it should be reported. But Bell seems to want, instead, to
invent it.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett