Caleb Rossiter is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition, where longtime industry-paid denier Patrick Michaels is a senior fellow. They published an op-ed together in the Washington Examiner yesterday, and are very clearly trying to gin up interest in their denial by playing the censorship card.
They’re eager to remind you that their opinions are dumb, opening the piece with a reminder that an article they wrote casting doubt on climate models, published by the Examiner a year ago, was fact-checked and labled as “highly misleading” by ClimateFeedback, then un-fact-checked by Facebook.
Well they’re back, with the same message (that we can’t trust climate models), and apparently the same promotion strategy: making people curious about what they have to say by pretending to be persecuted for holding such brave opinions.
So buried in all that nonsense are two actual paragraphs of real scientific content they’re using as the basis for this attack on climate models. The first relies on a forthcoming Ross McKitrick and John Christy study. The second relies on misrepresentation of a legitimate science.
For those that don’t know, these guys are not exactly top notch scientists. Canadian economist Ross McKitrick’s work is so subpar he has been described as “shameless bullshit” and either “dumb or dishonest,” and has proven incapable of properly reading charts. He also once, in a study co-authored with Pat Michaels, made the elementary mistake of confusing radians and degrees (in such a way that, just like all his other supposed mistakes, led to him claiming that he’d debunked some aspect of climate science).
Meanwhile, University of Alabama-Hunstville’s John Christy has long been responsible for some of the field’s shoddiest satellite science, including an infamous graph purporting to show models drastically overestimating warming, that he’s paraded in front of Congress multiple times, but has somehow never gotten published in the actual peer-reviewed literature. (Because it’s wrong.)
Together, they’re not exactly much better than the sum of their parts. For example, after reading a study of theirs last year, blogger Tamino wrote that it “demonstrates to those who know what they’re doing, that McKitrick and Christy don’t. If you really don’t know what you’re doing you might think this paper is impressive. If you do know what you’re doing, this paper is a supreme embarrassment to its authors.”
So there’s probably a very good reason that Rossiter and Michaels are promoting the study now, in the space of time when it’s been accepted by the relatively new journal Earth and Space Science, but has yet to actually be published for anyone to see. That reason is that as soon as real scientists get a hold of it, they’re going to find the sort of rudimentary mistakes and obvious biases that are necessary for its authors to make the point their denial compels them to make.
The second piece of evidence they cite is actually a legitimate one — they just misrepresent it. They point to a lengthy literature review of Earth’s climate sensitivity published by AGU and co-authored by a large team of consensus scientists, to argue that models aren’t trustworthy. But they cherrypick just a few sentences from the nearly 200 page article, which is very clear in the abstract that climate sensitivity is “near the middle or upper part” of the range of warming we’ve long expected. It found that it is “extremely unlikely that the climate sensitivity could be low enough to avoid” 2C of warming if fossil fuel use is not constrained. So it very clearly does not support their argument that models are too unreliable to be useful.
So to sum it all up, two people whose job it is to concoct defenses of carbon pollution, no matter how misleading, are citing their own work with someone who’s either “dumb or dishonest” (or both!), and misrepresenting the work of other scientists, to argue that climate models are unreliable. Then, they're claiming they're being persecuted while cheekily wondering “how Facebook’s climate squad is going to come down on us for merely opining” on the issues.
Well we don’t know for sure, but we’ll opine that their jobs at the CO2 Coalition exist solely to produce disinformation to protect CO2 polluters at the expense of public health. And with the wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, and other extreme weather events that are amplified by climate change, it’s our opinion that there’s blood on the hands of those cutting and cashing their paychecks.