Articles Tagged "Reply To Article"

The old-fashioned news media is bleeding revenue, jobs, and influence, and media insiders claim they cannot figure out why. Many reasons are to blame, but one major reason is reader frustration with a lack of balanced reporting. A good illustration is a March 11 Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot article on the public showing of a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) movie on alleged ocean acidification.

The Virginian-Pilot article, “Seas’ acidity threatens life, livelihoods, film says,” presented arguments made by NRDC – an environmental activist group – in its movie, “Acid Test,” but did not mention the substantial scientific evidence that contradicts NRDC’s alarmism.

The article parroted, without any critical examination, NRDC claims that the oceans are becoming “more acidic” as a result of higher carbon dioxide content. The oceans, however, are not acidic. The pH balance of water is measured on a scale of 1 to 14. Water with a pH of 7 is neutral. Water with a pH below 7 is acidic, and above 7 is alkaline. The pH of the world’s oceans is 8.1, which is alkaline.

The article reported as fact the film’s claim that ocean acidity has increased 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution. However, a 2005 study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature reports ocean pH was between 8.1 and 8.2 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and has decreased by less than 0.1 since then.

The Virginian-Pilot article also presented NRDC claims that ocean acidification is harming marine life. However, recent studies published in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Biogeosciences, Global Change Biology, and Journal of Geophysical Research have all found that marine life is either unaffected by – or significantly benefits from – higher carbon dioxide content and lower pH.

There has been a reply to our recent article WARNING! New Site set up as an iphone app to put down "Climate Realists" from The Guardian by Leo Hickman iPhone app pitches climate change science against scepticism

Leo had this to say......and we have highlighted what we consider to be the skewed logic of a AGW supporter in bold green.

Deniers queue up to lambast Skeptical Science application developed by solar physicist John Cook. Now there's a surprisep

I'm not sure this is going to quell the climate wars raging at present, but it's an interesting development nonetheless. An Australian solar physicist called John Cook, who runs the popular Skeptical Science website, has developed an app which "lets you use an iPhone or iPod to view the entire list of skeptic arguments as well as (more importantly) what the science says on each argument". So the next time you're caught at the fag end of a wedding reception in an interminable one-way conversation with a reactionary uncle who's boring on about how "the climate's always changed", just switch on this app, hand them your iPhone, and proceed to the bar.

In reality, of course, this is hardly likely to win round any sceptic, least of all your worse-for-wear uncle who, with or without the evidence presented to him by this app, will still continue to swear blind that climate change is a fiction made up by a clandestine world government-in-waiting because he's read about it all on his favourite blog, which just so happens to be frequented by an army of other reactionary uncles. One suspects this app will only act to increase the polarisation between the two sides of this "debate". (Still think a debate's going on? When was the last time you heard someone from either side say, "Thank you for this information. Actually, I'd never thought of it like that before. I'm now prepared to change my mind on climate change.")

Roger

You write in the article

Met Office's debate over longer-term forecasts by Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst, BBC News

....And many other meteorologists mistrust Mr Corbyn himself because he refuses to publish his scientific methods. I have been asking him for several months to offer independent corroboration of his forecasting successes but none has been supplied. .....

I find that what you write is a LIE.

I have referred you to plenty of independent corroboration* of our forecast accuracy and successes - sources and documents available via the public link: Forecasts with proven skill

The link refers to published independent peer-reviewed verification of the significant skill of our gale (eg) forecasts, weather bets where we consistently won money and have as a consequence had that arrangement terminated by the bookmakers, and independent assessment by a loss-adjusters of our extreme events forecasts showing high skill around the world.

Many thanks to Lord Monckton for the reply to You Could Not Make It Up: The climate change sceptic's Q&A by Fred Pearce of the New Scientist.... I made the following comment at the time......This is what I call plain stupid, we have an AGW supporter giving answers on our behalf. No wonder the public are confused about what is going on, why not have a Climate Realists giving answers to questions for AGW!

Knocking down the extremists who set up straw men

The Daily Telegraph, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the “Climate Skeptic’s Q&A”, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece to produce balanced or scientifically-accurate answers. A reader has sent the “Q&A” to us and has asked us to put matters to rights. Mr. Pearce’s “straw-man” questions are in bold face; his answers are in italics, and my comments are in Roman face.

Click to read FULL reply from Lord Monckton

Dear Mr. Baum:

Your editorial on "Climategate" concludes: "What more is there to say?". The simple answer is "lots more", and here it is.

The last time C & E News made as big a fool of itself as it has recently with your editorials supporting the theory of human-caused global warming, was when it took seriously the claims that cold fusion had been achieved in an electrochemical cell. Every knowledgeable physicist knew that those claims were absurd, and in a short period of time, scientists all over the world showed that the electrochemists who made those claims had gotten their energy balances wrong. Out of ignorance and chauvinism, C & E News managed to morph an honest error of judgment by the electrochemists into a political turf battle between chemists and physicists. You are making the same mistake now in your totally misinformed and ignorant position supporting the theory that human emission of CO2 is causing global warming in the face of the overwhelming amount of data that proves that the theory is false. Attached are copies of my articles that summarize the available data. One of the articles also analyzes the motivations of the several groups that support the theory.

In his Dec. 18 op-ed "How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus," Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.

In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.

That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.

And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.

Back of December 18, 2009, the Washington Post ran an editorial E-mail furor doesn't alter evidence for climate change by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann, who attempted to explain why the recent release of the Climategate emails “doesn’t alter evidence for climate change.” But Dr. Mann—a central figure in the released emails—is speaking only from one side of the issue—his side. While the contents of the Climategate emails may not alter the evidence of climate change published in the scientific “peer-reviewed” literature, it is an entirely different matter when it comes to evidence of climate change that may have been kept out of the peer-reviewed literature. And the Climategate emails illuminate continual efforts from Dr. Mann and colleagues to limit the contents of the peer-reviewed scientific literature to only those types of results and conclusions that they liked. As such, the extant scientific literature of the past 5 to 10 years cannot be considered to be a fair representation of what it would have been had it not been manipulated. Thus, it is impossible to judge whether or not the evidence for climate change has been altered by the Climategate emails, contrary to Dr. Mann’s claims.

Below is a letter-to-the editor of the Washington Post that I submitted is response to Dr. Mann’s December 18th op-ed. Since it has been more than 10 days since I submitted it, I’ll assume that the Post has decided not to run it (they did not run any letter-to-the-editor on this topic, despite having received 651 comments on-line, the majority of them quite negative). My letter is reproduced here:

THE Copenhagen climate change summit closed two weeks ago in confusion, disagreement and, for some, disillusionment. When the political process shows such a lack of unanimity, it is pertinent to ask whether the science behind the politics is as settled as some participants maintain.

Earlier this month (The Australian, December 9) I commented on recently published results showing huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide, both up and down, at a time of global cooling 33.6 million years ago.

Paul Pearson and co-authors in a letter (The Weekend Australian, December 11) took exception to my use of their data and claimed I misrepresented their research, a claim I reject since I quoted their data (the veracity of which they do not contest) but offered an alternative hypothesis, namely that the present global warming theory (which was not the subject of their study) is inconsistent with the CO2-temperature variations of a past age.

Updated Below

In an effort for debate to take place between AGW supporters and Climate Realists, we will endeavour to display correspondence for articles that we have shown on this site. If any AGW supporters would like to communicate using this method please feel free to do so. The color (colour-UK) green is shown for AGW support

Dear Editor (ClimateRealists.Com)

In his opinion piece “Climate claims fail science test”, Professor Michael Asten has misrepresented our recent research by suggesting that it casts doubt on the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming.

Our study, published in the journal Nature, is a reconstruction of atmospheric CO2 levels 33-35 million years ago when the ice cap first appeared on Antarctica. In the paper we clearly state that the results are in line with expectations from climate model simulations and theory on how the global carbon cycle ought to respond to the growth of an ice cap over very long periods of time.