{"id":2370,"date":"2010-01-13T12:58:20","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T16:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=2370"},"modified":"2010-01-13T12:03:59","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T16:03:59","slug":"a-point-by-point-fisking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/01\/13\/a-point-by-point-fisking\/","title":{"rendered":"A point-by-point fisking"},"content":{"rendered":"

The twinned arts of strawman construction and deconstruction, as illustrated by Fred Pearce (construction) and Viscount Moncton (deconstruction)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Daily Telegraph<\/em>, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the \u201cClimate Skeptic\u2019s Q&A\u201d, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece to produce balanced or scientifically-accurate answers. A reader has sent the \u201cQ&A\u201d to us and has asked us to put matters to rights. Mr. Pearce\u2019s \u201cstraw-man\u201d questions are in bold face; his answers are in italics, and my comments are in Roman face.<\/p>\n

How can scientists claim to predict climate change over 50 or more years when they can\u2019t even get next week\u2019s weather forecast right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They can\u2019t tell us in detail. But forecasting climate change is more like forecasting the seasons than the weather. We know winters are cold and summers are warm. Always. And it\u2019s like that with greenhouse gases. Physicists have known for 200 years that gases like carbon dioxide trap heat. These gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, thanks to our pollution. They will heat up the atmosphere just as certainly as the summer sun heats us.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a classic \u201cstraw-man\u201d set up and then knocked down by Pearce. It is not and has never been the contention of skeptical scientists that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect. The question that is hotly debated among climate scientists is not whether the doubling of CO2 concentration that is expected this century can in theory cause warming: the question is how much warming we can cause, and the increasingly frequent answer in the peer-reviewed journals is \u201cvery little indeed\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pearce also tries to suggest that forecasting climate change is \u201clike forecasting the seasons\u201d — i.e., easy. Unfortunately, Edward Lorenz proved that claim to be false very nearly half a century ago, in the landmark paper in a climatological journal that founded chaos theory. Lorenz demonstrated that unless we knew the values of the millions of parameters that define the climate to a precision that is not and can never be in practice attainable the long-range prediction of climatic behavior would be impossible \u201cby any method\u201d. Yet the UN\u2019s case for climate alarm is based almost exclusively on the output of models that have been demonstrated, time and again, to fail. Not one of the models on which the UN relies, for instance, had predicted that there would be 15 years without any statistically-significant \u201cglobal warming\u201d — the years 1995-2009 inclusive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The twinned arts of strawman construction and deconstruction, as illustrated by Fred Pearce (construction) and Viscount Moncton (deconstruction): The Daily Telegraph, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the \u201cClimate Skeptic\u2019s Q&A\u201d, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,16],"tags":[245,240,39],"class_list":["post-2370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-science","tag-climatechange","tag-globalwarming","tag-junkscience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2370"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2372,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2370\/revisions\/2372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}