A global warming hoax meme is born – in New Zealand too!

I have said it before – these militant climate change denial/contrarian/pseudosceptics do live in a different world – or at least a different hemisphere (see Australia’s “New Normal?” and Climate contrarians/deniers are cherry picking again). But here I want to illustrate their behaviour in their denial internet echo chamber where they pass on every scrap of information supporting their conspiracy theories of the great “global warming hoax.”

The easy copy and paste key commands on computers has a lot to answer for.

Consider this latest bit of silliness at Richard Treadgold’s local blog – Climate Conversation Group. Richard Cumming, who Treadgold, or at least Richard Cumming himself, considers a very bright scientific investigator, is continually pasting links to scientific papers and other blogs in the echo chamber. Extensive quotes of abstracts and analysis.

His posting frequency is so high I sometimes think Richard Treadgold’s claim the blog receives more than 1,400,000 visits a year may be correct.*

Today he posted a link purportedly to a new paper in Nature Climate Change: Atmospheric verification of anthropogenic CO₂ emission trends by Roger J. Francey et al. It’s behind a pay wall so those without institutional access will have to make do with the abstract.

But see how Cumming presents this paper (in a comment on the ironically titled post by Treadgold “ IPCC created and controlled by activists). He implies an abstract completely different to the real abstract (see table below).

Abstract as implied by Richard Cumming at Climate Conversation Group blog

Actual abstract at Nature Climate Change, 3, 520–524, (2013)

New paper demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels, not man-made CO2. A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2, demonstrating that despite a sharp 25% increase in man-made CO2 emissions since 2003, the growth rate in atmospheric CO2 has slowed sharply since 2002/2003. The data shows that while the growth rate of man-made emissions was relatively stable from 1990-2003, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 surged up to the record El Nino of 1997-1998. Conversely, growth in man-made emissions surged ~25% from 2003-2011, but growth in atmospheric CO2 has flatlined since 1999 along with global temperatures. The data demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels due to ocean outgassing, man-made CO2 does not drive temperature, and that man is not the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels.

International efforts to limit global warming and ocean acidification aim to slow the growth of atmospheric CO2, guided primarily by national and industry estimates of production and consumption of fossil fuels. Atmospheric verification of emissions is vital but present global inversion methods are inadequate for this purpose. We demonstrate a clear response in atmospheric CO2 coinciding with a sharp 2010 increase in Asian emissions but show persisting slowing mean CO2 growth from 2002/03. Growth and inter-hemispheric concentration difference during the onset and recovery of the Global Financial Crisis support a previous speculation that the reported 2000–2008 emissions surge is an artefact, most simply explained by a cumulative underestimation (~ 9 Pg C) of 1994–2007 emissions; in this case, post-2000 emissions would track mid-range of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission scenarios. An alternative explanation requires changes in the northern terrestrial land sink that offset anthropogenic emission changes. We suggest atmospheric methods to help resolve this ambiguity.

Complete misrepresentation, or what!

Actually his implied abstract is just a blog post he has copied and pasted straight from The Hocky Shtick – a companion blog in the denial echo chamber.

A humourous aside though Richard Treadgold lapped up this brilliant bit of research copy and past by Cumming. He commented:

“A gamebreaker! The paper shows quite a different curve from the Mauna Loa graph so they must have used different data ;. . . . .this looks like dynamite.”

Poor soul. Treadgold doesn’t understand that this new paper plots atmospheric CO₂ flux – the rate of change of C – not the actual levels themselves as in the Mauna Loa graph (see below). Of course the curves will be different you fool!

So another climate change denial meme has been born – actually a double barreled one thanks to Treadgold’s little burst of joy:

1.  Francey’s paper “demonstrates temperature drives CO₂ levels, not man-made CO₂.”
2. It also proves that the classic plot for atmospheric CO₂ levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory may be a hoax!

Trouble is – both memes are completely wrong.

Let’s see if they have legs though. Which  will be the next blog in the echo chamber to pass the meme along?

As Richard Cumming commented somewhere else “The internet will do the rest.”

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* We only have his word for that – he has never allowed public access to the statcounter he used to have installed and has recently removed it. He claimed there was something faulty with it because it gave him the wrong results!

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Global climate – and your grandchildren

I am spending some time dealing with family business so am reposting some of my past book reviews over the next few day.

Another excellent book about climate change – by a climate science who has been centrally involved from the beginning. His book provides a lot of the science, but also the history of the science..

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Book Review: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity by James Hansen

Price: US$16.50*
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (December 8, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608192008
ISBN-13: 978-1608192007

Climate change contrarians and deniers love to hate James Hansen. He’s up there alongside Al Gore, Michael Mann and Phil Jones. And of course their hatred is no more justified in Hansen’s case than it is for the others.

Others criticise Hansen for his “activism.” His willingness to warn politicians and the population in general of the dangers we face if we continue with a “business as usual” approach to fossil fuel and CO₂ emissions. They suggest this could discredit his science. Scientists must always be objective and should limit their pronouncements to the scientific facts alone.

This is not an old problem for scientists – remember their activism after the first use of nuclear weapons and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Scientists often confront ethical issues arising out of their work.