Saturday, July 30th, 2011
Stephan: Several of my conservative readers -- yes it seems about 12 per cent of SR readers are on the right, some the far right, and I welcome them all -- sent me a report written by University of Alabama researcher Roy Spencer and published in the peer reviewed journal Remote Sensing.
The paper argued that global warming was a hoax. To a person my correspondent's all said some variant of: see, Stephan you just won't acknowledge that there is strong countervailing evidence against your point of view. Naturally, I took this all very seriously and I spent some time over the past couple of days digging into it. You may well have seen references to this paper, since the media has given it a big play.
The first thing about it that made me suspicious was that it was funded by Heartland Institute a front organization of the petroleum industry, particularly ExxonMobil. It didn't take long to discover that Spencer has a long relationship with this organization and is part of the denier movement. The Forbes columnist who gave this story legs, James Taylor, similarly has an association with Heartland.
I soon found a number of critiques of the Spencer's work, and have come to the conclusion the paper can only be described, charitably, as profoundly flawed.
Tuesday I go out of town for a week, and I just don't have time to write the whole thing up, but I found this exegetic essay which I think gets the story pretty straight.
July has been marked by an abundance of new evidence and arguments that point to the adverse effect of man-made climate change. But, surprisingly, it’s been a controversial study from a controversial scientist that has generated the most buzz. Unsurprisingly, a slew of prominent right-leaning websites are pointing to it as proof that global warming is a hoax.
The report, by University of Alabama scientist Roy Spencer and published in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing, argues that heat is actually escaping from Earth much more quickly than current climate models predicted. This assessment, if accurate, could mean that the dramatically rising temperatures that scientists currently anticipate would not ultimately occur. The hypothesis hinges, as LiveScience points out, on the idea that clouds trap heat in our atmosphere, not carbon dioxide, and there’s nothing we could, or should, do to affect that.
Of course, in the highly charged arena of global-warming politics, a study like this is catnip for climate-change deniers. Forbes columnist James Taylor sparked a furor on Wednesday when he published a piece that claimed: ‘New NASA data blow gaping hole in global-warming alarmism.’ From there, the usual suspects (e.g., Fox News, the Daily Caller, NewsMax) piled on, along with the […]
