AP: The Berkeley global temp story. And then the really interesting news, deeper.
One wonders how many (if any) reporters will be covering the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change. It just got underway and goes for four days. It is in a scenic town with pleasant places to go and eat, or drink, or just gad about between and after sessions. It has a lot of speakers in the climate field that those who follow greenhouse warming policy will recognize: Lindzen, Curry, Monckton, von Storch, even good old, courtly Fred Singer, murmuring demurrals.
Right. Those names belong to skeptics and gadflies on the hide of mainstream climate science (that is, on the version most embraced by the world’s leading academies of science). Also there will be the mischievous and imaginative Berkeley physicist and iconoclast, Richard A. Muller. He is recently in the news for heading a review of global temperature change to see if the mainstream bunch had flunked basic statistics, a quest backed by the Koch brothers and other staunch political skeptics of global warming. The news was that Muller’s team concluded emphatically that whatever the abstract merits of seeing flaws in how most in the field measured Earth’s warming, it turns out that said warming has had exactly the pace and magnitude for the last half century or so as has been proclaimed by the likes of James Hansen and the right wing’s favorite green piñata, Al Gore.
I bring all this up because the AP‘s Seth Borenstein just now, a week and a half after Muller’s study already made a huge news splash, has filed a long featurish story on it. Borenstein is a veteran science reporter – serious, diligent, imaginative, and cheerful. But he may have buried the lede this time. The story starts off reviewing, in good style, Muller’s effort to find holes in global warming evidence and his upfront admission afterward that his team found that the evidence is just as good as the IPCC says it is. The problem is that readers who would ordinarily get through such a story would already have heard the gist of it. And perhaps not get to the end where this Santa Fe conference comes up.
The program is listed below in Grist. That this conference exists seems more newsy than a revisit to Muller’s contribution. It has the look of a real scientific forum. If my hostility is showing through that’s because I admit to a bias that I believe is justified by reality, but maybe not, but it is that for a scientist to doubt the seriousness of climate change or that we are its cause has delivered him or her into the province of cranks and fruitcakes. And the program in Santa Fe reminds me, even though I’ve never attended one as I am too much the layman to identify exactly what’s wrong hence would just stand there sputtering, but it reminds me of a conference on cold fusion where paper after paper talks of low energy nuclear reactions and darned-near-free energy as though they would be common sense if it weren’t for the coverup. That’s the science writer’s bane sometimes – while the B.S. alarm is ringing, ability to identify exactly what’s wrong is elusive. Well, all reporters have that problem sometimes, but we have to do it while confounded by people who sport statistics by the page while talking differential equations and chemical reactions.
But still. The meeting is co-sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. That is not the Heartland Institute. Again, anybody covering this from the mainstream (ie non-crank) media? Should it be? I don’t know. But it is interesting, and even refreshing evidence of human mental flexibility, to learn that it exists.
LATE ADDITION: Borenstein has anothr nugget will down in his story. He defuses a Daily Mail story (a lot of that going around today) by David Rose. That DM story asserts that climate change gadfly Judith Curry has trashed the analysis by Muller’s team. Curry is quite devoted to nitpicking at those who believe climate change is happening – but this does not mean she herself is a contrarian. Anyway, Borenstein contacted her about the story Rose wrote. It’s wrong, she says. Muller got the numbers right and did nothing untoward in the analysis.
Grist for the Mill: Santa Fe Conference ; Conference Schedule ;
Speaking of cranks and fruitcakes dept:
- Live Science – Andrea Mustain: Sticking it to Mann: Climate Science Sparks Protest ; Great job painting a picture with words, complete with little hockey sticks. Behind the sly little jabs, a quite serious bit of reporting.
- And just to engage in some false balance here at ksjtracker.. Enter Stage Right blog – Paul Driessen: it’s libel – except when Mike does it.
- Charlie Petit
