Quit Unsettling That Science!

The House Committee on Un-American Activities, that is, the "Forecast the Facts" website, is on a mission to purge the TV weatherman community of dirty denialists and present the viewing public with pure and approved scientific views on Global Climate Whatever. I was surprised to learn that a solid majority of TV weathermen privately harbor heretical skepticism about the role of humankind and/or CO2 in harming Gaia. Almost a quarter of them now are prepared to come right out and call AGW a "scam" in off-the-air polls. This must be stopped! As the creepy blog ThinkProgress puts it:
These climate denier meteorologists are betraying the public’s trust and distorting America’s airwaves with ideological science denial.
The chief meterologist for a Houston TV station explains that more humility is in order:
Operational meteorologists and forecasters are not climatologists. The background education is somewhat similar, but our area of expertise is different. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop some TV weather forecasters from spouting off on the subject.
But hey, if you believe in AGW, go ahead and spout off. You owe it to your viewers to get the truth out! Activists point out that "when a region is in the midst of a drought or heat wave, it is important to discuss the role climate change plays in amplifying such an event." When a region in in the midst of wet or cold weather, though, apparently it is important to stress that climate is not the same as weather, or to explain that anthropogenic CO2 levels can lead to climate disruption of every conceivable variety, by an undiscovered mechanism that nevertheless is completely settled.

Well, our confidence in the information we get from the TV weatherman could hardly be affected one way or another by the amount of nonsense they spout about the "science" of long-term climate trend analysis. Just the website title "Forecast the Facts" should alert the reader of the odd confusion in the mainstream climate community over the difference between facts and predictive models. Last Friday's document dump included a painful admission from the UK's national weather service, dubbed the "Met Office," that the latest warming trend stopped cold in 1997, apparently as a result of changes in sunspot activity. The Met Office didn't sit still for this politically incorrect interpretation of the stubborn facts, though. It explained that right-thinking scientists understand that a predicted severe drop in the Sun's activity, perhaps rivaling the "Maunder minimum" of 300 years ago, might indeed cause the Thames to freeze over again, but for some reason would likely prove to be a strictly local effect, leaving the rest of the globe to endure continued warming. Remember, don't try to do this scientific thinking at home. Leave it to the experts.

9 comments:

  1. This just keeps getting stupider and stupider. "Cold weather is evidence of warming." Well then, how the hell would you even be able to tell if your economy crippling carbon reduction programs are helping? The answer? YOU CAN'T. Seriously, this is as transparent to me as one of those "I'm a foreign prince trying to get my money into the US. Give me your bank account number, and I'll share it with you."

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  2. Operational meteorologists and forecasters are not climatologists.

    A meteorologist studies the atmosphere and makes prognostications based on his observations and through analysis of past trends -- a climatologist studies *statistics* and makes prognostications based on the political agenda of whomever is funding his computer time...

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  3. When did the HUAC ever do such a deed? That said - here is a little more on the subject. (Anthony Watts is a meteorologist himself and writes a little about the realities of TV news and weather reports.)

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  4. Anonymous3:01 PM

    The theory that the temperature of the earth is significantly affected by human activity has been opposed from the get-go by experimental scientists, chemists, physicists and engineers.

    Those are the people who recognized immediately that the climate "scientists" were trying to read meaning into experimental noise.

    This theory was bolstered by calculation, and admission, that no change in human activity would be capable of heading off the coming overheating disaster.

    At the time, nobody thought the climate "scientists" were dishonest.

    Then they said they lost their original data AND the computations they made to normalize the data. That information is normally embedded in any published paper. It is not characteristic of a scientist to lose either class of information, ever.

    Then we found out that they plumped the data by duplicating temperature readings from other sites.

    And, the calculations they used (once they were finally disclosed) would yield that infamous hockey stick INDEPENDENT of the data used.

    Any scientist in industry would have been fired long ago for malfeasance.

    Valerie

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  5. Eric Blair9:01 PM

    Valerie's comment above I think, is the Reason the Met went and recompiled the statistics--I remember reading that they said they were going to after all those emails got released.

    I was wondering when they were going finish. Heh.

    A big Emily Latella moment...

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  6. Want to have some fun? Ask an adherent of the Church of AGW how the cyclical periods of cooling and warming over the past umpty million years isn't the result of natural variation. He'll look very uncomfortable, then mumble that somehow -- magically, maybe? -- this time it's *different*.

    Then ask him exactly which scientific experiments have validated that, all other variables being equal, an increase of cee-owe-two in free circulation will result in an increase in temperature.

    Deer-in-the-headlights.

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  7. Anonymous1:01 PM

    I was not, repeat NOT happy when the national Climate Data Center announced last summer that they were reprocessing the older climate data that is sold to the public (researchers such as moi). Now I have to add a note in my publications that my results were obtained with pre-June 2011 data sets and that subsequent recalculations from the NCDC data sets may show different results. And I'm only working with precipitation records - I shudder to think what I'd have to do if I used temperature data.

    As you can imagine, those of us who are a touch skeptical about the extent of human influences on the global climate are wondering what had to be "reworked" by the NCDC.

    LittleRed1

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  8. Given that evidence of super-luminal neutrinos is calling into question the supremacy of the speed of light as the universal speed limit - a constant that pretty much all of modern physics rests on - there's no such thing as "settled science".

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  9. I'd thought we'd realized that when it was discovered that Newtonian physics were flawed. At least Newtonian physics is practical, though- an important distinction.

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