Someone left a comment here today pointing me to the inexcusably bad Daily Mail article about climate change, and telling me I should be less “snide” in my comments about deniers. I say “someone”, because I simply deleted the comment from the moderation queue and neither know nor care who it was; I knew the Daily Fail (um, Mail) piece was junk, and frankly I didn’t need or want to spend the time giving it a full response. Luckily, with Joltin’ Joe Romm around, all I had to do was wait a little while for him to swoop in, and swoop he did…
In an exclusive interview, Latif told me: “I don’t know what to do. They just make these things up.” NSIDC Director Serreze says it is “completely false.”
Memo to media and anti-science disinformers (again): If your “global cooling” piece revolves around Dr. Latif, you probably have the entire story backwards. But, at least for the disinformers, that is the goal. And that goes double if the piece involves the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
In an interview back on October 1, Dr. Latif told me “we don’t trust our forecast beyond 2015? and “it is just as likely you’ll see accelerated warming” after then. Indeed, in his published research, rapid warming is all-but-inevitable over the next two decades. He told me, “you can’t miss the long-term warming trend” in the temperature record, which is “driven by the evolution of greenhouse gases.” Finally, he pointed out “Our work does not allow one to make any inferences about global warming.”
In an interview today, he confirmed that he accepts the IPCC’s finding that most of the warming in the past century was very likely due to human causes – “definitely,” he said.
He remains puzzled and dismayed by articles like those in the Daily Mail, “Could we be in for 30 years of global COOLING?” that purport to be based on his work, that supposedly quote him directly, but in fact just make stuff up. Of course, the Daily Mail made up a lot stuff for this article, like this whopper about the NSIDC’s work:
If true, the research challenges the science behind climate change theories, and calls into question the political measures to halt global warming.
According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, the warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to oceanic cycles, and not man-made gases.
It occurred because the world was in a ‘warm mode’, and would have happened regardless of mankind’s rising carbon dioxide production.
As NSIDC Director wrote me, “This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail. We hope that this is simply a case of very lazy journalism and nothing more.”
Now the DM has changed the story to read:
According to some scientists, the warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases.
It occurred because the world was in a ‘warm mode’, and would have happened regardless of mankind’s rising carbon dioxide production.
Except, of course, those unnamed “some scientists” don’t exist, certainly Latif isn’t one of them.
This long quote doesn’t do justice to Romm’s post. Go read it in all its table-pounding glory.
For a less “snide” response than Romm’s (or mine), see Mojib Latif slams Daily Mail.
Will this revelation of just how screwed up the original story was stop the deniers from trumpeting it endlessly as “proof” that even the NSIDC secretly knows that global warming is hoax, or similarly idiotic notions? Of course not. As I’ve said repeatedly in various places online, the deniers don’t care one iota about winning the scientific debate. All they want to do is fool enough mainstreamers into doubting the science to erode political support for meaningful action. Being proved wrong, looking foolish, even looking howling at the moon foolish, as in this case, are all just the cost of doing business.
The deniers at the top of their food chain, those motivated primarily by money, must laugh themselves hoarse over how easy it is to get the rank and file deniers, those primarily motivated by ideology, to do all this work for them for free. The extra help they get from faux balance-driven (or simply clueless) journalists is just a bonus.
And as for my “snide” comments–oh, please. What I say on this site barely jiggles the needle compared to what the deniers say about scientists or to them, including death threats. When the deniers start acting like reasonable, civil people, so will I.
Absolutely no reason not to be snide to denialists. (And despite my best intentions, I can’t help but imagine doing far worse than making pithy asides.) Really, the time for tolerating their nonsense has long since passed.