Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalists   [Chris Horner]

A quick note about the risible effort by the AP’s Seth Borenstein to push back against the traction gained among the public by the observed reality of a temperature plateau — recognized last year by none other than IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. (Remember that?) The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” is in fact an economist, of course, so surely he has had substantial training in statistics, no?

 

This piece is timed to support cap-and-trade week in the Senate. But climate scientist Chip Knappenberger has already detailed, in about as balanced a fashion as imaginable, just how silly is Borenstein claim that he could not find a statistician who agreed that warming has stopped. You can claim warming or cooling by carefully choosing your base year, but it is clear today — in at least the physical world in which Borenstein writes — that temps have indeed stopped rising, just as was clearly the case nearly two years ago when Pachauri made his admission.

 

The refereed literature, beginning with Keenlyside et al. in Nature (2008), has begun acknowledging this, and some of it is predicting the cooling to continue for decades. That is, until —  just you wait — warming resumes, at least according to the same sort of modeling that has been telling us that the warming continued. (Until some papers and Pachauri admitted it hadn’t.)

 

None of these fond memories mean much to Mr. Borenstein — though he did (mildly to his credit, if wildly in defiance of his headline thesis) quote John Christy making plain that for the past dozen years there’s been no warming and it’s been cooling for the past eight.

 

But the best part about this, I want readers to recall just as surely do those who have read Chapter One of Red Hot Lies is: when “An Inconvenient Truth” began taking water for its whoppers, it was none other than the AP’s Seth Borenstein who labored out a deathless apology for the film, the main argument of which was . . . wait for it . . . that he couldn’t find a scientist who could find anything wrong with it!

 

Oh. Wait. He found one who said Gore understated things a bit.

 

So, there’s your context.

I am tempted to excerpt the chapter, because I have to say, this was one of the most amusing items to investigate when writing RHL. As such, it went on a little longer than I’m guessing I could get away with in this space, tackling classic Borenstein ploy after classic ploy. But I’ll leave it to the adventurous.

10/27 10:30 PMShare