Den ultimate klimadebattoversikt (Del I): Motl knuser Cook i 104 punkter

[Telehiv]

John Cook er som en del vet, en fyr som har viet sitt varme alarmisthode til å angripe IPCC-skeptikere. Til dette har han opprettet nettsiden Skeptical Science. Etterhvert har det blitt en lang tirade med angrep på skeptikernes innsigelser.

Den tsjekkiske teoretiske fysikeren Lubos Motl har tatt tak i disse forholdene på Cooks nettside, og kommentert ham faglig i 104 punkter. Jeg har artikkelen hans bare i pdf-format og klarer ikke å linke den opp, så jeg legger ut hele teksten her.

GÅ IKKE GLIPP AV DENNE OVERSIKTEN: Den har en overveldende mengde informasjon for den som orker å lese seg gjennom....det er faktisk et utrolig omfattende kommentararbeid her, jeg kan nesten ikke se noe som har vært tatt opp her på forumet som ikke diskuteres også i dette oversiktsarbeidet!


JOHN COOK: SKEPTICAL SCIENCE
by Luboš Motl | March 29, 2010

The original posting with responses to the top 60 talking points was released on March 25th. Now, you can think about all the 104 observations.
Several people asked me to remove John Cook's photograph because they think it's unfair for it to appear. In some sense, I do agree that it can lead some readers to react irrationally, so I did remove it. (Revkin kept it.)

John Cook, a former student of physics in Australia, has constructed an interesting website trying to attack the opinions of climate skeptics.
Skeptical Science: Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.

It's been in my climate bookmarks for quite some time but no one really cared about it so I didn't want to respond. However, his talking counter-points were recently adopted by an iPhone application. Moreover, Andrew Revkin promoted the website, too. So let us look at his points and counter-points.
On his website, you can currently see 102 observations by the skeptics (or some skeptics); of them were added by March 29th and I can't constantly update this web page so that he's likely to surpass his 104 points sometime in the future. Each of the "slogans" is accompanied by a short attempted rebuttal by John Cook. And if you click it, you get to a long rebuttal. So let's look at them:

1. It's the sun:
I agree with Richard Lindzen that it's silly to try to find "one reason behind all climate change", because the climate is pretty complex and clearly has lots of drivers, and this applies to the opinion that "everything is in the Sun", too. Cook shows that the solar irradiance is too small and largely uncorrelated to the observed changes of temperatures. I agree with that: a typical 0.1% change of the output is enough for a 0.025% change of the temperature in Kelvins which is less than 0.1 °C and unlikely to matter much. But I find it embarrassing for a student of solar physics such as himself to be so narrow-minded. The Sun influences the Earth's atmosphere not only directly by the output but also indirectly, by its magnetic field and its impact on the cosmic rays (via solar wind etc.) and other things. He has completely ignored all these things. Of course, I am actually not certain that these effects are very important for the climate but the evidence - including peer-reviewed articles - is as diverse as the evidence supporting CO2 as an important driver.

2. Climate's changed before:
Cook says that the previous history of the climate shows that the climate is sensitive to imbalances. Indeed, it is and it has always been. And he says that the past history provides evidence for sensitivity to CO2. Well, it virtually doesn't. CO2, much like other effects, adds imbalances and pushes the temperature around. But there exists no way to disentangle CO2 from many other effects or argue that it has become the most important driver. So the climate continues to change in the same way as it did in the past, by the typical changes per year, decade, and century, and Cook has offered no evidence whatsoever that something has changed about the very fact that the climate is changing.

3. There is no consensus:
This counter-point #3 is clearly obsolete: Cook tries to argue that 97% climate scientists endorse something - it sounds like a TV commercial. Most of his graphs are obsolete, too - the current support for various AGW-related statements is close to 1/2 of the figures he copied in an "optimistic" moment for his favorite political movement. The reality is that most scientists disagree with the basic tenets of the AGW orthodoxy - and even people like Phil Jones now agree that nothing unprecedented is going on with the climate right now (including no statistically significant warming in 15 years, and the existence of a medieval warm period), while Kevin Trenberth has agreed that the climate hasn't warmed and the popular models are inconsistent with this fact - what a travesty. There still exist large bodies of climate scientists who prefer to promote the panic - because they've been hired to do so or because it results from their political biases (which are mostly leftist in the Academia). The funding for climate science has increased 10-fold in the last 10-20 years - purely because of the possible threat - which means that 90% of the people (or 90% of the funding) is working on proofs of this pre-determined conclusion. At any rate, these discussions provide us with no evidence for the actual science - they're just about an attempt of the largely political movements to intimidate the scientists in the very same way in which Nazis wanted to intimidate the "Jewish science" by the consensus of the "Aryan scientists". Einstein would tell them that it's enough to find one scientist to prove Einstein wrong.
Commercial break: United Nations are losers in a new scandal, the HamburgerGate. They had to admit that their figure 18% for the percentage of the greenhouse warming coming from eating meat was due to mixing apples and oranges (which contain no meat): they included all related emissions for meat but not for other sectors.

4. It's cooling:
Again, Cook's graphs and statements are obsolete and a few years from the moment he wrote the page were enough to falsify his new predictions about the accumulating heat. The reality is that between 1998 or 2001 or other years on one side and 2009 on the other side, the global mean temperature dropped. Sometimes it's cooling, sometimes it's warming. The year 2010 is likely to be much warmer than 2009, approaching the temperatures of 1998, but when the El Nino fully switches to a La Nina, things can be very different. The fact that there's been no significant warming for 15 years has been accepted by both sides of this debate. And since 1998, it's just cooling. Cook has no counter-arguments. He just says that the heat flows influence the temperature and I agree with that. Except that he doesn't show in which way the flows are going to go e.g. in the next 10 years.

5. Models are unreliable:
Cook says that models have made predictions that were successfully compared to observations. Except that this is not enough for the models to be reliable. For them to be reliable, it would have to be the case that the models have produced no predictions that were inconsistent with the observations - because one wrong prediction is enough to falsify a model. Clearly, such falsification has taken place with all of them. In particular, all IPCC-endorsed models predicted a warming since 1998 that didn't occur. They're gone. Again, both sides agree that we can't rely on them. Kevin Trenberth agrees that the disagreement of the models and the data is a travesty. There are hundreds of recent examples showing how deeply flawed the existing IPCC-endorsed models are.

6. Temp record is unreliable:
In his counter-point, Cook talks about the urban heat island effects that are "negligible". Well, they're surely not negligible because the estimated urban warming in typical large cities exceeds the whole assumed warming caused by CO2 - something like 0.6 °C. So it matters a lot whether the urban effects are isolated. But the urban effects are far from being the only problem with the surface temperature record. The number of recently found dramatic problems with the surface record is so huge that I can't even enumerate them here.

7. It hasn't warmed since 1998:
Cook claims that the Earth continued to accumulate heat. If you check his evidence, you will see that it is a circular
reasoning because the sources also use the models in which the warming should have continued. The fact is that no warming has occurred since 1998 so it's likely that there's also no warming in the "pipeline". Cook emphasizes that 1998 was a year of a strong El Nino. Of course, it was, but it was not unprecedented or unrepeatable. The most recent El Nino episode reached more than 2/3 of the maximum of the 1997/1998 El Nino episode. So they're surely comparable, to say the least. If 2010 will match the temperatures of 1998, it still means that the "trend-like" warming per 12 years is only comparable to 1/3 of the effect of one El Nino, or 1/6 of the difference between an El Nino and La Nina peaks. It's very small.

8. Ice age predicted in the 70s:
Cook claims that these predictions were largely media-based. Well, the same is true about the current global warming alarm. It's mostly media-based and good scientists are simply not working on such conspiracy theories. It's still true that less good scientists are working on them, and they were also working in the 1970s. Sometimes it's the very same people. For example, Rasool and Schneider predicted a new ice age in 1971 - in an article in Science. The relative importance of the "scientific community" and the "media" is pretty much the same as it was in the global cooling alarm in the 1970s - the recent global warming hysteria just got far more severe than the global cooling hysteria 35 years ago.

9. We're heading into an ice age:
Cook claims that CO2 beats all other things. At some point in the future, this statement will of course become ridiculous. Ice ages may be 10 °C cooler than the interglacials. Because of the logarithmic character of the greenhouse warming, one can't ever compensate 10 °C of cooling by an added CO2 because the concentration would have to jump something like 256-fold. It's clear that a "big" ice age will return in a multiple of 10,000 years and the people will only be able to deal with it if they have a much stronger technology than the current ones. Also, a "little" ice age may return within a century, and a possible cooling by 2 °C, as seen historically, will be greater than the effect of the CO2.

10. Antarctica is gaining ice:
Cook claims it's not, when looked at the whole continent. Well, the graphs of the sea ice area in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres show that both of them are very near the normal levels right now, as extracted in the last 30 years or so. In the last 50 years, Antarctica was cooling, but such things are due to many coincidences. It is completely plausible that in the next 50 years, it will be the Arctic that will be cooling. It's preposterous to promote these random changes to "signals from God": the huge variability of the polar regions is a rule rather than an exception.

11. CO2 lags temperature:
Cook uses the usual talking counter-point, trying to say that the influence goes in both directions. Qualitatively speaking, it's right. Quantitatively speaking, the influence of CO2 on the temperature during the ice age cycles has been so much weaker than the opposite influence that it is pretty much undetectable and remains a theoretically justified by empirically unsupported speculation. It's clear that the outgassing etc. - the influence of temperature on the concentration of gases - explains the bulk of the correlation between the temperature and the concentrations as seen in the Vostok ice core (and others). It's a very important that the Vostok charts provide us with no evidence of the greenhouse effect and whoever is saying something else is a liar: Al Gore has been caught as one of them but there are many. More generally, it's preposterous to pretend that the greenhouse effect is "on par" with the opposite effects because it's at least one order of magnitude smaller and undetectable in practice.

12. Al Gore got it wrong:
According to Cook, despite small errors, AIT is consistent with science about the basic questions. What a complete nonsense. Courts in the U.K. enumerated 9 major errors - and there are dozens of other errors that have been admitted - and especially because of the overall misleading alarmist bias of the movie that couldn't be supported by the science, the judge allowed the movie to be screened only if the teachers also explain the kids what the errors are and why the movie is just a political propaganda. Even though the movie is just 5 years old, it's already clear that it failed the test of time. All the details predictions have been falsified - for example "new record hot years" that should follow 2005, strengthening hurricanes that should have flooded parts of Florida by now, and so on. Scientifically speaking, the movie is complete garbage and whoever doesn't realize this trivial fact shouldn't be treated as a serious party in discussions.

13. Global warming is good:
Cook claims that the negative impact on agriculture, health, economy, and environment outweighs any positives. In reality, the overall impact is positive in all four cases. The agriculture becomes more effective, is able to feed people more easily, the economy grows, the fees for heating go down (and they exceed the money paid for cooling today). Cook's statement is preposterous: if there were warming, it would be beneficial for life on Earth and the human society, too. Even 5 °C of warming would be a net positive. Cook's methodology to "prove" that the negatives win is completely absurd. He first decided how many "positives" and "negatives" he allows in each category (so that the negatives dominate), and then he randomly added a few papers supporting them. That's a completely wrong methodology. If he actually calculated the effects on agriculture in dollars rather than in "talking points" (whose number was predetermined, anyway), he would see that the positives outweigh the negatives by an order of magnitude or more.

14. It's freaking cold:
He correctly says that a few extreme local weather episodes aren't enough to calculate the global or long-term trend. However, it's exactly the alarmist movement - and the likes of Al Gore - who would be making this error all the time. I agree that the record-high/record-low ratio has dropped to one-half or so. But this change is unspectacular. In some counting, it is just a 1-sigma effect because the numbers are comparable: you can say that the overall warming that's been accumulated hasn't yet reached one times the normal noise. Clearly, the ratio can continue to grow in the future but this is what would happen given the same change of the temperature, whatever its reason is. The longer record we have, the more we deviate from the temperatures at the beginning - whether the cause is natural or man-made - and the more extreme ratio of hot or cool records (in either direction) we have to get. There's nothing to be surprised by here.

15. Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming:
Cook says that while he's uncertain about the frequency, intensity goes up. Again, this argument could have sounded OK a few years after 2005 when his article was written but in 2010, it's preposterous. The data just don't show any increase of the intensity and the most recent 4 seasons - all of them were among the quieter ones on the record. The data don't show it and the theory doesn't imply what he says, either. The hurricanes are driven by temperature gradients, and because the global warming should influence primarily the polar region, and therefore reduce the polar-tropical differences, it should reduce the storminess, too.

16. Mars is warming:
Mars temperatures are driven by dust and albedo, we learn, and there's "no evidence" of a "long-term warming". Well, the dust and albedo are arguably important on the Earth, too - among other things - and the evidence of a "long-term warming" is comparable on both planets (and other planets). Some changes of the Martian dry ice caps seem more dramatic than what we are observing here on Earth. Which of the planets is more able to preserve a constant temperature is a subtle question - and I actually think it is the Earth. But the qualitative observation that both planets show some change and follow the same laws of physics is a basic conclusion of the scientific reasoning. Only crazy people could disagree with it.
Clearly, if the trends on all planets tend to be correlated, it's some evidence for a solar or astronomic origin of the changes.

17. Cosmic rays:
I appreciate Cook's balance in this point. He agrees that it's an open question whether the cosmic rays affect the climate, but points out that certain previously working correlations broke down recently - so that the correlations in the last 30 years seem significantly weakened when looked at globally. I agree with that. But that doesn't yet rule out all conceivable variations of the theory claiming that the cosmic rays matter. I think that many of the cosmic rays climatic correlations continue to be much more convincing than the CO2-temperature ones.

18. 1934 - hottest year on record:
Cook says that the U.S. is just 2% of the globe. Well, it is just 2% of the globe but it's giving us a hugely higher percentage of reliable temperature data that go back to 1900 or so simply because the data density is proportional to the "density of advanced civilization". So there may be other regions that do show some warming from the 1930s but they're (even) much less reliable than the U.S. record. The U.S. record simply does matter, despite its mistakes. Moreover, the U.S. temperatures are what the Americans should be primarily interested in, anyway. The idea that the global temperatures are more important for the Americans than the national/regional/local ones is preposterous.

19. It's just a natural cycle:
Cook claims that the "recent global warming" is the first one in which both hemispheres change in the same direction. That's ludicrous. In the history, the "aligned" trends on both hemisphere were more frequent than the "opposite" trends. After all, the whole Earth was cold in ice ages. The idea that the heat is just moving from one hemisphere to another, as long as natural factors dominate, is scientifically naive. Most of the heat transfer is between the Earth and the outer space - vertical radiation - and changes of the local albedo, cloudiness, and perhaps even greenhouse gases matter. There are lots of natural cycles that are indisputably real and if Mr Cook believes that he can distinguish the recent changes from all of them by a 3-word argument, then he is crazy.

20. It's urban heat island effect:
He claims that it hasn't affected the trends. It's just ludicrous. As the cities go bigger, the effect is getting stronger, and because most weather stations are in cities or close to cities, we get a possible source of bias that is as large as 1 °C per century. The idea that we can neglect this effect when interpreting the surface measurements of temperature is extremely careless.

21. Sea levels don't rise:
By many methods, he "shows" that the rise has been "accelerating" in the last 100 years. However, the first graphs he includes also show that the rate has been "decelerating" since 1990 - and almost no change since 2006. He doesn't discuss these observations. He only cherry-picks "bumps" in the data that are convenient for his predetermined religious message. The fact is that the observed sea level rise is sometimes accelerating, sometimes it's decelerating, it can also go negative, but it's surely negligible. Realistic estimates of the sea level rise until 2100 go from -10 cm to +50 cm. Whatever the final answer is, they will pose no problem and they will be an order of magnitude below the rate measured when the Earth was exiting the last ice age (when the continental ice sheets could still melt).

22. Arctic icemelt is a natural cycle:
John Cook says that it's melting and it's great because that's what the models predict. Too bad for the models because the Arctic sea ice are has returned back to the normal (average in the last 30 years). But I guess that such a wrong prediction is not a problem for John Cook: he's only interested in the successful predictions and thinks that wrong predictions are not a problem for a theory.

23. Hockey stick is broken:
Cook claims that many newer papers have produced the same hockey stick. Papers written by Mann's allies, using the same errors and distortions, could have done this job, but serious science has definitely rejected the hockey stick as the shape of the reconstructions. Newer, better, independent reconstructions simply do not look like a hockey stick. The Medieval Warm Period is back, too - it's been agreed even by people such as Phil Jones. Mann's methodology belongs to the darkest chapters of the history of science.

24. Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas:
Cook agrees that H2O is the number one - but he interprets H2O as a slave whose goal is to amplify the warming effect of CO2. This description by Cook is a classic "tail wagging the dog". Quite generally, it is almost impossible for a "big effect" to become a "slave" to a "small effect". The water vapor concentration is affected by most other components of the climate system, too. CO2 is just a small factor influencing H2O. Moreover, H2O is also able to create clouds which, if low-lying, have a powerful cooling effect on the climate. Whether the net feedback caused by H2O is positive or negative remains to be seen but there are many "first-order" effects caused by H2O itself that don't depend on CO2 in any way.

25. Other planets are warming:
Cook offers three counter-arguments: not all of them are warming; the Sun has been cooling since 1950; explanations of the warming of some planets exist. Well, not all planets are warming - the Earth is not warming 100% of the time, either. Different celestial bodies have different "inertia" and lags etc. The Sun has been "cooling" only when we look at the total output which is unlikely to be the key method how the Sun affects the planets: as we've mentioned, there are much more significant changes linked to the solar magnetic field etc. that Cook completely neglects. Finally, explanations may exist for other planets, but whether they're correct is far from obvious. There are proposed explanations for the Earth's changes, too. Clearly, Cook wants to instantly accept hypotheses that are convenient to him while he wants to infinitely obstruct the proposed hypotheses that are inconvenient. One can't do science with a bias that is as huge as his.

26. Greenland was green:
He agrees but says it was a local phenomenon. Again, this could be true or not. It is actually unlikely for the temperature of a large region to stay anomalous warm, relatively to the surrounding regions, for centuries. Interestingly enough, similarly local observations of the Arctic today are considered
to be one of the arguments that Cook likes. Again, there are clear double standards here. All these arguments - in both ways - are vague and surely not "exact". A slight bias in the method which arguments are accepted is enough to reach completely wrong conclusions which is what Cook does.

27. Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions:
I agree with him on this point. He correctly says that while there are larger sources and sinks, they naturally cancel with a big accuracy, while the human contribution doesn't cancel, which is why the CO2 concentration is higher than in the last 800,000 years. I agree with that. It's still 10-20 times smaller than it would be half a billion years ago - when the temperature was not too different from the present one. It's also 20 times smaller than the concentration needed for people to start to feel dizzy. It's an innocent concentration of a harmless gas that has become the pillar for the life as we know it today - it's the plant food that doesn't harm animals, either.

28. Oceans are cooling:
I don't think that we have too reliable data on this point. Clearly, the oceans were sometimes observed to be cooling and sometimes they were warming, with a given methodology. Clearly, Cook endorses the methodology to eagerly look for possible errors with the sensors whenever an observation is inconsistent with his beliefs. What can I do with that? A proper scientific analysis of such things requires one to be equally active when searching for possible errors in both directions. Cook shows that he is incapable to sustain this impartiality - and it seems likely that the authors he cites suffer from the same problem.

29. We're coming from the Little Ice Age:
He agrees we have been, until 1940, when the natural factors reverted and could no longer explain the changes. This is a sloppy analysis: first, there was indeed a 30-year period of cooling after the 1940s; second, the number of large volcano eruptions recently dropped, and because the eruptions have a cooling effect, their shortage implies an extra warming; it's also untrue that the solar activity was recently lower than in half a century ago. The relatively recent cycles were strong and the decline is a very recent fact of the latest solar cycle. The added statement about the CO2 driving the changes since 1970 is unsupported. Moreover, note that the greenhouse emissions didn't start in 1970. They were almost the same in the 1960s, too. But because there was no warming in that decade, Cook tries to hide those emissions. All these "small tricks" and "distortions" belong to his propaganda toolkit, and when combined, they're obviously enough to completely mislead the reader (and himself).

30. It cooled mid-century:
He claims that the natural forcings worked until 1975 when the greenhouse effect began. That's, once again, ludicrous. The 1940-1975 cooling is unexplained by any well-known forcings, and the idea that people could explain it remains a speculation and a wishful thinking. There's no reliable, justified, testable, yet viable model here, and the problems of the models to agree with the 1910-1945, 1940-1975, or 1975-2010 periods are comparably difficult. Of course, sometimes, the models are fine-tuned to reproduce one of the intervals "roughly correctly", but then the other intervals fail. There is no asymmetry between the periods here and the cooling around the 1950s is an argument against the importance of the CO2 greenhouse effect - much like the recent cooling since 1998. It's just inconvenient but it's the same kind of an argument that the AGW advocates are using all the time whenever these arguments suit them. In a discipline where many arguments are 2-sigma if not 1-sigma signals, such a bias is lethal.

31. Climate sensitivity is low:
That's a typical headline of some of my talks. Cook says that it's 3 °C because of many reasons. The fact is that the direct calculation gives 1.2 °C and all balanced analyses of the Earth's history, including very old geological data, suggest that this is about right, i.e. the net feedbacks are small, with an unknown sign. All papers or claims going to 3 °C or higher are fabricated and cherry-pick something to "hype" this number that almost certainly can't reach 3 °C. The promoted positive feedbacks may be viewed as a quantification of the hype, exaggeration, and fraud: 70 percent of the IPCC figure for the climate sensitivity is fabricated because a higher value is favored by the "big picture" of the political process.

32. It warmed before the 1940s when CO2 emissions were low:
Cook says it was because of solar and volcanic drivers which disappeared later. But this is a pure speculation because those drivers are very hard to quantify - especially in the era 50-100 years ago. Cook only cites two papers and they really don't agree with each other. There are many other papers but there's no clear picture about the important drivers responsible for the 1900-1940 warming. We should avoid the "illusion of knowledge" here.

33. There's no empirical evidence:
Cook offers what he considers the key empirical evidence: CO2 is measured to rise; satellites show that it blocks some IR rays; oceans are apparently collecting heat. This gives a "line" of evidence, he thinks. Well, there's no doubt that we're adding CO2 to the atmosphere. But whether it matters depends on a "line" of hypotheses and several of them are only supported by a very poor evidence. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link: it's a point that Cook and others completely misunderstand. He apparently thinks that the more convoluted chain of arguments he constructs, the more likely it will become - and one vague evidence for each link is enough. However, the truth is the opposite one: the longer the chain of the relationships whose importance should be high is, the less reliable the chain becomes, and the more evidence we need for every individual link. The empirical evidence that CO2 is actually blocking the escaping IR radiation is extremely poor and the estimates of the heat accumulated by the ocean - and similar quantities - is often being changed by 100% or so. We don't really know the sign with any degree of confidence that would be worth talking about. To summarize the situation, there's no empirical evidence that CO2 actually affects the climate, and we only have theoretical reasons to think that it should have *some* effect - but we also know dozens of other things that should have an effect.

34. Mt Kilimanjaro's ice loss is due to land use:
Cook agrees that it's not due to global warming only - but misrepresents the main causes. The main causes are due to changes of precipitation patterns that don't necessarily depend on "land use". He correctly says that the observation about the unimportance of global warming for Mt Kilimanjaro doesn't mean that the "globe isn't warming". But he fails to say that it doesn't mean that the "globe is warming", either. Similar episodic evidence is often used to support the AGW orthodoxy but whenever it's shown that the arguments don't work, such findings are being ignored by the AGW proponents. Honest scientists simply can't ignore the inconvenient findings, so because Mt Kilimanjaro's ice loss has been used as an argument supporting AGW, and because this argument has been shown to be wrong, it's obvious that it has become an argument against AGW.

35. CO2 effect is weak:
this is clearly the same point as 31 about climate sensitivity, and others. It doesn't even seem that John Cook realizes it's the same thing. Again, he claims that this CO2 effect is directly measured by energy flows. Lindzen and Choi recently showed that the energy flows, on the contrary, prove that the large positive feedbacks attributed to H2O etc. can't exist. But whatever the primary driver is, it hasn't been empirically determined what it is.

36. Glaciers are growing:
I agree that there are glaciers that are growing and I agree that most glaciers - if counted as "individuals" - were retreating in the last 50 years or so. I don't think that the statement that the retreat is "accelerating" is supported by anything else than a wishful thinking. It's a part of a whole fog of unsubstantiated guesses, speculations, and lies that have become a part of the standard alarmist talking points because they no longer think it is wrong to produce downright lies. The recent GlacierGate scandal - and the Indian alternative studies about the Himalayan glaciers - are just one major example showing that most of the widely spread statements about the "accelerating retreat" of the glaciers are simply lies unsupported by anything.

37. Polar bear numbers are increasing:
He says that the polar bears have to die because there will be no ice which means that there will be no seals which means that the bears can't eat anything. This is a three-story argument and each part of it is highly disputable, to say the least. First of all, it's very unlikely that the sea ice will completely disappear in any foreseeable future: also, the polar bears don't live just on sea ice but also on islands of Northern Canada etc. Also, it's untrue that the seals themselves are endangered, and it's untrue that the bears can only hunt for them in the middle of the sea. In most cases, it's actually not the case. So Cook's evidence that bears should face problems is extremely shaky - especially relatively to the direct observation of the final result which says that the polar bear population has increased by a factor of 5 in recent decades, from 5,000 to 25,000 or so.

38. Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming:
in Cook's view, there is "growing empirical evidence" that intense hurricanes, heavier rainfall etc. are here and caused by global warming. This is a two-story argument. One wrong floor would be enough for the argument to die. However, both of the steps are actually wrong. First, even if these "extreme events" would be growing, there's absolutely no reason to think that
it's caused by rising global temperatures: the case of hurricanes was discussed previously. Second, the intensity and frequency of "extreme events" is actually not increasing at all, so there's nothing to explain here.

39. IPCC does not represent consensus:
Cook says that the IPCC guys are leaders and that the reports are too conservative. That's, of course, nonsense in both cases. First, the IPCC is being elected by the governments - because it's an "inter-governmental panel" on climate change - e.g. by politicians whose vast majority has no idea about science, and not even about the question who is a good scientist and who is not. They're clearly choosing scientists according to their willingness and likelihood to produce the predetermined conclusions. Concerning the "conservative IPCC reports", it's a preposterous statement because every single problem that has been found about the IPCC report as of today was in the direction that the IPCC was more hysterical than what the science says - it was never in the other way around. Cook's statement is a downright lie.

40. Satellites show no warming in the troposphere:
He agrees but claims it's an error, due to "satellite drift". Well, again, inconvenient observations have to be doubly attacked, questioned, and an error has to be found. It's a biased treatment. The fact is that the tropical troposphere should show, if the greenhouse model of warming is correct, the fastest warming trend. In reality, it shows one of the slowest trends and it's very likely that the right interpretation is that this observation by itself rules out the greenhouse model of the recent warming. It's surely inconvenient for fanatical believers but this emotional fact doesn't make this argument less convincing from a scientific viewpoint.

41. CO2 is not a pollutant:
Cook agrees that it's not a pollutant and global warming (and ocean acidification) are the two impacts. But changes of the temperature are mostly not caused by CO2, and even if they were, they're small and harmless. Ocean acidification is at most by 0.2 in several centuries - from 8.1 in the past to 7.9 in the future. That's a negligible change relatively to the intervals that the life in the oceans tolerate. Recall that aquarium fish can live in pH between 5 and 9.

42. There's no correlation between CO2 and temperature:
He agrees it's been recently absent but says it was due to El Nino and La Nino episodes. Indeed, they're a major part of the answer because they're much more important for the temperature than CO2. But even El Nino and La Ninas are far from being the only natural factors that matter. Still, these phenomena exist and it's just wrong to imagine that there is no natural variability of this sort in the climate. Because CO2 and temperature have been largely uncorrelated in the last 50 years, they will probably remain largely uncorrelated in the next 50 years, too. And it's just irrational to imagine that small changes to the CO2 concentration will have a direct impact on the temperature. They have small enough of an impact for them not to matter.

43. Climategate CRU e-mails suggest conspiracy:
According to Cook, it's just a distraction to look at these e-mails. In reality, these e-mails not only "suggest" conspiracy but they "prove" that the key authors have conspired to hide or erase or suppress inconvenient evidence, either obtained by their own methods or obtained by others. While "conspiracy" should be an unlikely event, the Internet has surely made it possible - and easy - for a group of a dozen of researchers to synchronize their behavior in order to distort the conclusions of their discipline in a particular direction. As the CRU documents show, it has affected every single major source of evidence supporting the AGW line of reasoning, especially the reconstructions and the question whether the recent changes were new in any sense, as well as the verification of climate models which was not done properly.

44. Scientists can't predict weather:
And Cook says it doesn't matter because the chaos averages out. Except that e.g. in the recent Self-similarity of temperature graphs TRF article, I demonstrated that the chaotic character of the temperature changes survives from weeks to centuries or millennia. The signal-to-noise ratio remains pretty much constant even at longer timescales, and certainly decades. The actual empirical evidence shows that decades are still way too short for us to be able to "average the chaos out". After all, decades are the time scale of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and many other chaotic cycles affecting the oceans and the atmosphere. Cook's claim is wrong.

45. CO2 levels were higher in the past:
Cook claims that whenever the CO2 levels were higher, the solar output was lower. This is preposterous. There is no easy inverse correlation between the Sun and the CO2. When the concentrations were 10,000 ppm, more than 25 times higher than today, the solar output was often close to the present one. Nevertheless, the temperatures were similar to the present ones up to a few degrees of difference. This fact by itself shows that CO2 can't have a big effect on the temperature.

46. Greenland is gaining ice:
He claims that while the bulk of the Greenland is growing, the coastlines are losing ice, which is right. The overall volume is likely to be decreasing in recent years, indeed. And maybe not: the errors of these measurements are way too high. However, his usual statements about an "acceleration" are just a silly cherry-picking of bumps. The "accelerating" effect in his graph is barely visible and there are hundreds of similar patterns that would suggest "deceleration" but the likes of Cook simply ignore them because such a deceleration is not useful for them. To summarize, there's no statistically significant and attributable acceleration - that would go beyond "chance" - in the data. In fact, we know that the overall melting of ice on the Earth has surely decelerated dramatically a few thousands of years ago.

47. Neptune is warming:
It's because of summer coming on Neptune, Cook argues. Well, maybe, and maybe not. Cook uses some bizarre "Heidi" paper and on the detailed page, Dr Foukal debunks this bizarre paper.

48. Jupiter is warming:
it's due to internal turbulence, he says. Note that Cooks like oversimplified slogans that give you one reason for everything - one sentence you should memorize - and the explanations are always different. He's always satisfied with the first guess as long as it is consistent with the basic AGW religion. That's not how science works. Clearly, all the effects on Neptune may matter on Jupiter, too. And vice versa. The vastly different character of the explanations shows that these changes of the planetary temperatures haven't been understood reliably. Papertiger and others have interesting complaints about the "internal" explanations for the Jupiter. Of course, the main and only important goal of Mr Cook is to "kill" all solar or cosmic explanations because they're inconvenient. But they can be true and it remains to be seen whether they matter. Preconceptions of AGW bigots will play no role as science selects the relevant arguments.

49. There's no tropospheric hot spot:
this has been discussed in the point 40. Cook says that it has to be due to measurement errors. Probably not. It's just true that the measurements he's trying to attack are, despite their errors, still much more reliable than other measurements that Cook wants to rely upon. This selection of which evidence should be trusted and which evidence should be considered erroneous only reflects his bias, not any rational arguments.

50. Pluto is warming:
coming summer, too, like with Neptune in 47. Again, may be right, may be wrong. There's no detailed evidence over there.

Resten kommer i del II (plassshensyn)