We recently wrote about how deniers used a study about climate policies and hunger in exactly the way the study’s authors warned against, and how the Trump administration is using a study to justify its rollback when the authors consider the rollback “nuts.” As we learned this week, apparently having no real science to cite means you just pretend things support your argument, even when they don’t.
For example, in response to a great fact check on wildfires from Carbon Brief’s Zeke Hausfather, Roger Pielke Jr. pointed Hausfather on Twitter this week to a study on lightning and wildfires to make the “anything but CO2” argument. In a shocking twist, turns out that the study actually suggests that climate plays an important part in wildfire science.
When Hausfather pointed out that in the study the authors contradict his interpretation, Pielke accused him of “mansplaining a paper to me that you just learned of 10 minutes ago.” This is a bizarre misuse of “mansplaining.” Pielke is also wrong: Hausfather actually interviewed the study author for his fact check, and provided a quote from the researcher pointing to climate change influencing wildfires.
Pielke’s puncturing at the hands of Hausfather wasn’t the only impressive takedown last week.
The experts at ClimateFeedback took a look at mining moron Ian Plimer’s latest Australian op-ed, and gave it the lowest possible score for having no scientific credibility. Plimer’s headline claim, that “carbon dioxide is good for us” gives an indication of just how bad it is, so we won’t bother going into the details of its content. The piece is, in the words of the various scientists who fact checked it, a “deeply ill-informed article,” that is “appalling in its misrepresentation of climate science” and “includes many outright lies.” It is, they conclude, “astonishing that this was published.”
These two takedowns are good, but there’s one that’s even better. The climate science statistician and blogger by the name of Tamino ran a post last week with an intriguing headline question: “USA Temperature: can I sucker you?” In the post, Tamino shows how the sausage is made in Steve Goddard’s recurring graphical misrepresentations. (Recall that Goddard claims on his “Deplorable Climate Science Blog” and Twitter that summer temperatures and the number of hot days are actually going down. Cool, okay.)
Goddard’s whole schtick is that real scientists cook the books, but to produce a graph like Goddard’s for analysis Tamino has to jump through a lot of hoops. A very specific series of choices are made to produce Goddard’s graphs- using seasonal highs instead of annual averages, extreme highs instead of lows or averages, very selective start date, etc. The result of all these choices? The once-inarguably rising trend line is still positive, although only barely.
But that’s not good enough for Goddard. No, he goes even further, and uses the raw data instead of the corrected record. He tosses out the changes made to account for measuring at different times of day and the different types of thermometers being used. Basically, all that scientists have learned over the past century is denied.
Then, and only then, do you get a graph showing temperature decline.
To answer Tamino’s opening question then: Yes, you can sucker people. But it doesn’t happen by accident, and it’s rarely done by those acting in good faith making legitimate mistakes. It takes effort to be this wrong. For those who want to defend these serial misinformers, this may be a bitter Plimer to swallow, but you have to Pielke between a heaven of intellectual honesty or living in denial’s Heller.
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