The Uphill Battle of Climate Truthers

In the last two months, Richard Muller has published two op-eds in the NYTimes

• A pause, not an end, to warming. 
• The truth about tornadoes

Re tornadoes, he finds that U.S. tornadoes have been decreasing.

Michael Mann is upset, esp since the pause op-ed contains a dig at the hockey stick.  So Michael Mann has an op-ed published in the Huffington Post: Something is rotten at the New York Times.  The gist of Mann’s critique of Muller’s hurricane argument is this:

Muller, who lacks any training or expertise in atmospheric science, is more than happy to promote with great confidence the unsupportable claim that global warming will actually decrease tornado activity. His evidence for this? The false claim that the historical data demonstrate a decreasing trend in past decades.

Actual atmospheric scientists know that the historical observations are too sketchy and unreliable to decide one way or another as to whether tornadoes are increasing or not (see this excellent discussion by weather expert Jeff Masters of The Weather Underground).

So one is essentially left with the physical reasoning I outlined above. You would think that a physicist would know how to do some physical reasoning. And sadly, in Muller’s case, you would apparently be wrong…

Mann loses this argument.  The undercounting of tornadoes is a problem prior to 1990 (worse undercounting as you go back in time); hence a decrease in recent hurricanes relative to historical values cannot be attributed to undercounting.

Since Mann should be rightly concerned that his scientific arguments are weak, he then tries to convince the reader that Muller is wrong by doing a hatchet job on Muller.  This is an extensive hatchet job, you have to read it in full to appreciate it, here is the punchline:

1. Smear and misrepresent other scientists. 
2. Misrepresent key details of climate science, inevitably to downplay the seriousness of climate change, whether it is the impacts on extreme weather and heat, drought, Arctic melting, or the threat to Polar Bears.
3. Shill for fossil fuel energy, arguing that the true solution to global warming isn’t renewable or clean energy. No, not at all! Muller is bullish on fracking and natural gas as the true solution.

To (a) pretend to accept the science, but attack the scientists and misrepresent so many important aspect of the science, downplaying the impacts and threat of climate change, while (b) acting as a spokesman for natural gas, one imagines that the petrochemical tycoon Koch Brothers indeed were probably quite pleased with their investment. As I put it in an interview last year:

It would seem that Richard Muller has served as a useful foil for the Koch Brothers, allowing them to claim they have funded a real scientist looking into the basic science, while that scientist– Muller—props himself up by using the “Berkeley” imprimatur (UC Berkeley has not in any way sanctioned this effort) and appearing to accept the basic science, and goes out on the talk circuit, writing op-eds, etc. systematically downplaying the actual state of the science, dismissing key climate change impacts and denying the degree of risk that climate change actually represents. I would suspect that the Koch Brothers are quite happy with Muller right now, and I would have been very surprised had he stepped even lightly on their toes during his various interviews, which he of course has not. He has instead heaped great praise on them, as in this latest interview.

The New York Times does a disservice to its readers when it buys into the contrived narrative of the “honest broker”–Muller as the self-styled white knight who must ride in to rescue scientific truth from a corrupt and misguided community of scientists. Especially when that white knight is in fact sitting atop a Trojan Horse–a vehicle for the delivery of disinformation, denial, and systematic downplaying of what might very well be the greatest threat we have yet faced as a civilization, the threat of human-caused climate change.

I bow to Richard Muller: not only does he have access to the NYTimes, but  he has been the subject of numerous lengthy hatchet jobs by Mann, whereas I can only claim a few tweets and the ‘serial climate misinformer’ thing.  While I don’t agree with everything he says, clearly Muller is ‘da man’ in terms of of a scientist trying to put some rationality into the climate change debate, and as such is perceived to be a major threat by the wacko alarmist wing of climate science.

Next up on the Mann hit list might be Roger Pielke Jr, as indicated by Mann’s twitter feed and also by his post (Daniel Greenberg meets the climate scientists).  Although von Storch might be in contention; that was some pretty serious trash talking about the Hockey Stick (although since it was in german, maybe it doesn’t ‘count’).

The most amusing thing to me was that in the midst of trashing Muller as not being an atmospheric scientist or understanding climate science, that Mann touts the foreword for the paperback edition of his book The Hockey Stick Wars by Bill Nye – Science Guy (recently seen on Dancing with the Stars)

JC message to Michael Mann:  Up the level of your scientific game when discussing climate change with the public.  Most importantly, stop trashing other scientists that disagree with you.  It reminds the public of Climategate and all of the irresponsible and unethical practices that are the root source of why they don’t trust climate scientists.  You continue to damage the credibility of climate science in ways that you apparently can’t imagine.

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The Scottish Sceptic has two very interesting posts:

• Why do skeptics put up with cyber-bulling
• The police visited today