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Posts Tagged Bob Carter

Prat Watch #8: Monckton’s folly, Carterist crap Gareth Renowden Jan 31

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I do — sometimes — enjoy a trip over to the other side, those dark corners of the web where people pretend that climate change isn’t a real and pressing problem. I looked in at µWatts this morning, and passed a most amusing breakfast perusing the latest offerings there from potty peer Christopher, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, and Robert, “Bob” Carter. When I say amusing, I mean that I found it almost impossible to get past the first paragraph of Monckton’s extended paean to Greek architecture without collapsing into my toast laughing.

It appears the good Lord is planning to build what he describes as a cottage orné, and the rest of us might think of as a folly, on his Scottish estate. This cottage will be a Greek-style pavilion, as the little image above shows. Quite why Anthony Watts thinks his blog is an appropriate place for this folie du grandeur remains obscure until very late in the piece, but Monckton never fails his loyal climate crank fans:

To make matters worse, there is now overwhelming evidence that climatologists all over the world have been tampering with temperature data, sea-level data, paleoclimate data, etc., etc.. The tampering always seems to be in the direction of making it appear, artificially, that there is more of a problem than there is.

Remember this when he turns up in Australia and New Zealand this year. Monckton expects to be able to libel every climate scientist in the world, and still be taken seriously. I hope he brings a model of his cottage, and displays it at every opportunity.

Not to be outshone by the verbose viscount, Bob Carter, Australia’s master of pompous prose, offers µWatts a classic example of his normal nonsense…

Carter begins by claiming comparable credibility to real climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe1, and therefore falls at the first hurdle. Carter is a well-published and somewhat respected geologist, but when it comes to climate science his credibility has been shot by twenty years of daft denial on behalf of US and Australian fossil fuel interests, not to mention by taking money from the Heartland Institute.

Carter attempts to show that a self-posed hypothesis — that CO2 induced warming is dangerous — doesn’t stand up to the evidence. Here’s his last “test”:

(v) The same computer models predict that a fingerprint of greenhouse-gas-induced warming will be the creation of an atmospheric hot spot at heights of 8-10 km in equatorial regions, and enhanced warming also near both poles.

Given that we already know that the models are faulty, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover that direct measurements by both weather balloon radiosondes and satellite sensors show the absence of surface warming in Antarctica, and a complete absence of the predicted low latitude atmospheric hot spot. Hypothesis fails, twice.

Nope. Because that’s a false test. If you were a credible climate scientist, Bob, you would know that a tropospheric “hot spot” is a “fingerprint” that would result from warming from all sources, not just greenhouse gases. And I wonder why you fail to mention the remarkable warming in the Arctic or the Antarctic Peninsula? Rhetorical question. We all know why Carter is misrepresenting the facts. It’s because he’s happy to misrepresent the truth on behalf of his paymasters.

More interesting than Carter’s arguments are where his piece first appeared — the web site of the “American Institute for Technology and Science Education“, a creationist lobby group based in California. Monckton is a birther and supporter of all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories (see above). Now we have Carter making common cause with creationists. How are the mighty fallen. Tell it not in µWatts, publish it not in the pages of Morano; lest the daughters of the warmists rejoice…

  1. The piece appears to be an attempt at a rebuttal of an earlier article by Hayhoe.

Signing up to nonsense: denialists plot letter to UN secretary general Gareth Renowden Nov 29

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People send me stuff. Imagine my surprise when this morning’s mail included the text of a round robin email from Tom Harris — the Canadian PR man who heads the Heartland-funded denialist lobby group the International Climate Science Coalition [full text here]. It gives an interesting insight to how these groups work behind the scenes. Here’s Harris appealing for signatures to a letter to UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon:

Time is short if we are to mount a significant counterpoint to the scientifically invalid assertions already being broadcast by the 1,500 journalists and 7,000 environmentalists attending the UN climate conference now underway in Qatar.

Please find below our “Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations” to which we are inviting your endorsement. We have 61 qualified endorsers as of 9 pm EST, about 19 hours after we started to ask people.

Because we have an agreement with a major media outlet to publish the open letter on Thursday, I will need to know of your support within the next day if possible, please.

The denialist spin machine in action. The usual suspects queuing to sign up to a letter that’s going to be published — where? My guess would be the Wall Street Journal. Even more interesting is the nonsense these luminaries are so keen to endorse…

It’s worth noting that Harris is not giving anyone the chance to change his proposed letter. The usual suspects are expected to sign up without quibbling about wording. And they’re signing up to a thoroughly modern catechism of climate crank disinformation. Here are the key claims in the letter:

UK Met Office data shows “there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years”.

This is nonsense, based on a beat-up published by the Daily Mail a few months ago. Warming continues, as the World Meteorological Organisation points out.

Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.

“Some scientists”? I suspect only the signatories to Harris’s letter expect a “near-term natural cooling” caused by the sun1.

The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed.

A remarkable (and unsupportable) assertion. I will allow that an ice age might be an inconvenience, but as our emissions have effectively postponed the next one for the foreseeable future, that’s the least of our worries.

The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in future.

The letter goes on to quote from last year’s IPCC special report on climate extremes (SREX), but ignores the key findings of that report: that increased extremes of hot weather and rainfall are being recorded, and are “virtually certain” to continue as the climate warms.

We also ask that you acknowledge that policy actions by the UN, or by the signatory nations to the UNFCCC, that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to exercise any significant influence on future climate.

Harris and his tame signatories can ask, but to expect the UN secretary general to reject the advice of his own organisation and the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists on the basis of an error-ridden screed put together as a stunt by PR flacks for fossil fuel interests is a bit of stretch, I’d have thought. Harris’s letter will be just as effective as all the other letters he’s sent to UN secretary generals at climate conferences, and that is not at all.

  1. The phrasing recalls similar pronouncements by NZ’s very own Bryan Leyland, a veteran of several climate science coalitions. I wonder if by any chance he had a hand in the letter?

A Short Introduction to Climate Change Bryan Walker Sep 30

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Tony Eggleton’s A Short Introduction to Climate Change is an excellent account of climate science for the general reader. The author is a retired geology professor from the Australian National University. Two widely read climate change deniers, Ian Plimer and Bob Carter, are also retired Australian geology professors, but Eggleton is not of their ilk. [...]

NZ Herald’s turn to offer propaganda as opinion – De Freitas’ links to cranks hidden from readers Gareth Renowden Sep 12

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The new “compact” NZ Herald has taken a downmarket tabloid approach to informing its readers by running an opinion piece about the recent courtroom defeat for NZ’s climate cranks by prominent climate sceptic and Auckland University geographer Chris de Freitas, without explaining de Freitas’ long history of association with the cranks he’s defending. In the article, de Freitas overstates the uncertainties associated with temperature records, even going so far as to imply that the warming trend over the last hundred years might be “indistinguishable from zero”1. He also overplays the importance of temperature series to policy-makers — a line straight out of crank litigant Barry Brill’s playbook, and self-evident nonsense.

Despite this transparent partiality, the opinion editors at the Herald credit him like this:

Chris de Freitas is an associate professor in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland.

But, as the Herald opinion team well know, de Freitas is much, much more than a mere associate professor in the School of Environment. He has a track record of activism against action on climate change that stretches back two decades. Here, for the poor misled readers of the new Herald‘s opinion pages is a handy, cut-out-and-keep guide to de Freitas’ long history of climate denial activism.

This long list is far from complete — not least because it doesn’t include all the sceptic nonsense he’s presented as opinion at the NZ Herald and National Business Review over the years3, but it should serve to give a flavour of the man that Herald readers might think was a humble and respectable geographer at the University of Auckland.

The Herald has no excuse for failing to explain de Freitas’ interests in this issue, and should print a clarification as soon as possible. Carrying a good piece by Brian Rudman may “balance” CdF’s effort in some eyes, but the paper really needs to do better. What next? An opinion piece criticising the Labour party by prime minister John Key, where he is described as “a retired banker”?

[Updated 13/9 to add CEI link, and CdF's publication record.]

  1. “Temperature trends detected are small, usually just a few tenths of one degree Celsius over 100 years, a rate that is exceeded by the data’s standard error. Statistically this means the trend is indistinguishable from zero.”
  2. It didn’t.
  3. A rough count suggests that since 1990 he has published around 77 opinion
    pieces about climate change – with 32 in NBR and 27 in the Herald – partial publication record here.

Big coal coughs up for climate denial ’conference’, takes NZ sceptics along for the ride Gareth Renowden May 16

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As US corporate donors step away from the Heartland Institute following their ad campaign likening climate change believers to mass murderers and terrorists, big coal — in the shape of the Illinois Coal Association, supported by all the major US coal companies — has stepped in as a “Gold Sponsor” to support Heartland’s climate “conference” next week. In other heartwarming news for the ultra-conservative lobby group, the big guns of New Zealand’s climate denial movement, the Heartland-funded NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, have also sponsored the conference, thereby endorsing Heartland’s disgusting ad campaign.

Here’s what Heartland’s president Joe Bast says about the Unabomber billboard campaign:

’The leaders of the global warming movement have one thing in common: They are willing to use force and fraud to advance their fringe theory.’

Can we assume that Barry Brill, Bryan Leyland, “Heartland expert”1 Chris de Freitas and the other members of the NZ CSC all support Bast’s statement? Only Bob Carter has made a public statement, telling The Age that:

“the usual ‘liberal’ media sources” had been “amazing, immediate and over-the-top”, and that he would still speak at the conference.

Given that Heartland are happy to pay Carter a monthly retainer, it’s perhaps not surprising he supports their tasteless little publicity stunt. Money may not be able to buy you love, but it can certainly buy support, as Carter and the CSC crew prove.

  1. It’s worth following Big City Lib’s polling of other Heartland experts, to find out how many have asked for their names to be withdrawn following the Unabomber stunt. There’s no sign (yet) of de Freitas following suit.

How Heartland lied to me and illegally recorded the lies cindy Mar 15

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4 a.m. Bali, December 2007, the first Tuesday of the two-week UN climate talks. My phone rings, waking me up. Blearily, and a little crossly, I answer it. I was in Bali to run Greenpeace International’s media for the meeting. The caller was someone called “John” who said he was an intern for a US [...]

The Carter Controversy Gareth Renowden Mar 01

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The strange case of the cranks who think that suing scientists is the way to make warming go away — or the New Zealand Climate “Science Education Trust” versus the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere Research (NIWA) — grinds on like a modern day Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The NZCSET (being Barry Brill, Terry Dunleavy, Bryan Leyland, all leading members of the Heartland-funded NZ Climate “Science” Coalition) have helpfully put their submissions to the High Court on their web site, and I stumbled on something interesting. Bob Carter provides a sworn affidavit in support of the NZ CSET case, in which he says:

I, Robert Merlin Carter, of Townsville in Queensland, Australia, research professor, make oath and say:

2. […] I receive no research funding from special interest organisations such as environmental groups, energy companies or government departments.

The Heartland Institute’s budget document, as presented to its January board meeting and recently made public, includes the following table of payments slated for key players in Fred Singer’s Not the IPCC project:

BudgetNIPCCCarter

Bob will receive US$1,667 per month in his role as a co-editor of the next NIPCC report, due out in 2013. A cynic might ask if Bob’s sworn statement to the High Court is entirely compatible with his Heartland funding. I am sure that Professor Carter did not intend to mislead the Court by representing himself as a disinterested commentator on climate matters. But he did swear his affidavit a month before the Heartland budget document was made public…

The real Climategate: Heartland’s hypocrisy on display Gareth Renowden Feb 17

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It’s been a bad week for the Heartland Institute — the US lobby group recently shown to have funded New Zealand climate denialists. Documents leaked this week expose Heartland’s fund-raising and climate strategies to the cold light of day, and a major new piece of research by John Mashey demonstrates that Heartland has been acting outside of the rules governing the tax-exempt status it claims for itself.

Documents relating to a Heartland board meeting held in January were sent to a number of bloggers earlier this week, and have been made available by DeSmogBlog. The papers give a very full account of Heartland’s budget and plans for 2012, right down to individual staff salaries, and provide details of funding streams from players big and small. The largest — described as the “anonymous donor” — provided Heartland with $8.6 million over 2007-11 for its climate campaigns (see pps 20 and 21 of this document).

Key points from the documents:

  • Heartland plans to create a “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Schools” that “isn’t alarmist or overtly political”, and plans to pay Dr David Wojick $25,000 a quarter to develop the materials.
  • Heartland is planning to fund Fred Singer’s Not the IPCC project to the tune of $1.5 million over 2010-13, and is budgeting monthly payments of $11,600 to Craig Idso, $5,000 to Singer and $1,667 to Bob Carter during 2012.
  • Anthony Watts (of µWatts fame) is being funded to the tune of $88,000 to develop a web site featuring US temperature data.
  • Current funders include tobacco companies, fossil fuel interests, and even Microsoft.

Heartland claims the documents were stolen, and that one — relating to their strategy on climate denial — was faked, even though the main points in that “confidential memo” are corroborated by the other documents. The Heartland response includes threats of legal action against web sites and media carrying stories based on the documents, and says:

…honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

Back in 2009, when the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia first hit the web, Heartland president Joseph Bast wrote:

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly.

The hypocrisy burns…

Meanwhile, the news that Bob Carter is retained by Heartland to undermine the work of mainstream science through the NIPCC is making waves in Australia (Graham Readfearn, SMH), but hasn’t yet been picked up in New Zealand. Carter’s role as a “science advisor” to the Heartland funded NZ Climate Science Coalition and its ICSC spin-off, as well as to Nigel Lawson’s secretive Global Warming Policy Foundation raises serious questions about just how lucrative denial can be, as well as illuminating the international web of climate denial.

See also:

Richard Black at the BBC

New York Times

LA Times

And [List updated17/2 - courtesy of Adam Seigel]…

McLean’s folly 2: the reckoning Gareth Renowden Jan 12

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Ten months ago, Aussie “sceptic” John McLean predicted that 2011 would be “the coolest year since 1956″. I pointed out at the time that this was nonsense, and so it has proven to be. I’ve taken the GISS global temperature figure for Jan – Nov 2011 (+0.51ºC compared to the 1951-80 average) and added it to the graph I created to illustrate the full extent of McLean’s folly:

Maclean1956outcome

Last year was warmer than 1956 by a whopping 0.68ºC — about three standard deviations, in statistical terms — making McLean’s forecast an abysmal failure. Yes, 2011 was cooler than 2010 or 2009, but still one of the top ten warm years.

ENSO does have an effect on global temperature — that’s been understood since the 1970s, if not earlier. La Niña years tend to be cooler than the years around them, as this WMO graph illustrates.

2011LaNina

It’s clear that even cool La Niña years have been warming, with 2011 being the warmest such year in the instrumental record.

The reason McLean’s forecast failed is quite simple. He failed to take into account the warming trend that’s incredibly obvious when you look at the GISS and WMO data. Why would he do that? Well, he was lead author on a paper that “established” a link between ENSO and global temperature, but did that by filtering the global mean temp to remove any long term trend and to emphasise the ENSO time scale. Voila! The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) suddenly accounted for most of the variability in the (filtered and detrended) global mean temperature. As pointed out in the rebuttal to McLean et al, just about any time series would be “explained” by the SOI after passing through their filter.

In order to make his unphysical forecast, McLean must have forgotten what he had done in the paper he was so keen to promote. I could perhaps be forgiven for suspecting that he didn’t know what he was doing in the first place — but then that just makes his co-authors, Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter look equally daft. They certainly didn’t rush to correct McLean’s folly. As ever, in the land of the Climate Cluelessâ„¢, anything goes.

See also: McLean, de Freitas and Carter win the Friends of Gin and Tonic’s inaugural Climate Idiots of the Year award. Richly deserved.

[A glimpse of stocking.]

Prat Watch #1: columnated ruins domino Gareth Renowden Dec 12

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Being the first in an occasional series in which we monitor the wilder excesses of climate denial. Warning: reading and/or viewing the original material referenced herein may cause uncontrollable mirth. Hot Topic accepts no responsibility for any adverse effects that may result, but recommends a good micro fibre cleaning cloth for removing coffee/tea/wine from computer screens…

However gloomy I may be about the prospects for serious international action to reduce carbon emissions, I did find a few things to enjoy amongst the events in Durban, not the least of them being the fact that the only way Mark Morano and potty peer Christopher Monckton could draw attention to their CFACT-sponsored trip was by jumping out of an aeroplane in an attempt to attract the attention of the world’s press.

From the CFACT web site:

Multiple media outlets showed up to record the event, including the AP, BBC, and South Africa’s national news network. It was a huge success! Climategate 2.0 can not be ignored!

Shows, I suppose, just how desperate the denial campaign is to make mileage out of yesterday’s emails. But Monckton and Morano weren’t finished…

The vituperative viscount is well-known for his ability to misread and misrepresent UN negotiating drafts, but he outdid himself in an “analysis” that was met with glee at µWatts and Treadgold’s place. Here’s a sample of his wisdom, culled from Durban — the insanities the mainstream media conspire not to report:

Here — and, as always, you heard it here first, for the mainstream media have conspired to keep secret the Madness of King Rajendra and his entire coterie of governmental and bureaucratic lunatics worldwide — is what the dribbling, twitching thrones and dominions, principalities and powers of the world will be asked to agree to.

For the full gory details you’ll have to go and read it at the above link, but if you do, note how Monckton claims that the Central England Temperature record is “quite a good proxy for global temperatures”, and rediscovers an attempt at world government — all leavened with much Moncktonian rudery: “the mentally-challenged Durban droolers”, “the staring-eyed global-village idiots”1, and much, much more. Swallowed whole by the twitocracy he serves, of course.

[It seems unfair, at this point, to refer to (yet another) excellent Monckton debunk by potholer54 -- but I'll do it anyway.]

Meanwhile, CFACT communications director Mark Morano was issuing his own A-Z of climate denial Climate Reality Check2, which rather disappointingly turns out to be little more than an index to the many and various fevered distortions already featured at his Climate Depot blog.

Far more worthy of attention is a post-Durban press release from the International Climate Science Coalition, featuring the work of three New Zealanders — Bob Carter, Bryan Leyland and Terry Dunleavy. According to the ICSC:

International Climate Science Coalition Rejects Durban Agreement to set New Greenhouse Gas Emission Targets — No ’Climate Debt’ is owed to developing countries

Nobody is much interested in what the ICSC has to say, except perhaps Treadgold and the reader of the Rock River Times3, but you have to give them credit for trying. Here’s Carter, dissembling heroically as usual:

Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring. Consequently, any agreements–Durban, Cancun, Copenhagen or Kyoto–to reduce humanity’s greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions are utterly futile.

And here’s Bryan Leyland getting things ass backwards, as usual:

Expensive and ineffective alternative energy projects such as wind turbines and solar cells are receiving massive government support, in the belief that they will reduce GHG emissions which are wrongly blamed as a cause of dangerous global warming. Meanwhile, the conventional power sources that we rely on for our very survival, let alone the economic progress we need to create a better world, are deliberately starved of support. This is a very dangerous situation.

Fossil fuels deliberately starved of support! Sorry Bryan, the International Energy Agency‘s latest report (press release) puts subsidies for fossil fuel consumption at $409 billion, and subsidies to renewable energy (all forms) at $66 billion. A positively Moncktonian effort at spin, I will admit4…

And finally5, it will come as no surprise to aficionados of the denial choir that Christopher Booker is still bonkers. Complaining about the global warming episode in the latest BBC/Attenborough nature documentary6, he states:

Sir David’s dramatic shots of Greenland may have tried to convey that its huge ice cap is rapidly melting. But a detailed study five years ago estimated the proportion of its ice lost by melting around its periphery at only seven thousandths of 1 per cent of the total, suggesting that it could make little significant difference to sea levels for thousands of years.

Do try and keep up Chris. The latest Arctic Report Card puts last year’s Greenland melt at a loss of 430 Gigatonnes of ice mass, sufficient to increase global sea level by 1.1mm. But I suppose a five year old paper is more to your liking.

[Columnated ruins = falling peers/piers. Delphic, moi?]

  1. Which some might think involved pots being rude about kettles.
  2. Exec summary here, full pdf if you really must, but I’ve done it so you don’t have to.
  3. In which Bob Carter — in all seriousness — says the world would be better served by dropping the IPCC and instead using the NIPCC as the fount of all wisdom.
  4. Though it was trivially easy to prove you wrong. Please try harder next time.
  5. As Trevor McDonald used to say.
  6. Anybody know when it will be broadcast in NZ?

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