Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Why Senator Cruz is wrong

Steve Inskeep (NPR) recently conducted a timid and respectful interview with Senator Ted Cruz on the topic of global warming. Cruz gave a predictable farrago of talking points from the deniers. Peter Gleick posted a refutation of Cruz - a transcript of the interview with comments by Gleick - here. Of course, it's NOT a bunch of honest mistakes by Senator Cruz.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sen. Cruz does not care if he is wrong. The facts of man-made climate change are irrelevant to him.

He wants to attract Koch money for his campaign, and he knows they will like his denier talking points in interviews. His climate hearing circus is happening for the same reason.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Cruz's real interest in climate policy is its promise as a Teaparty-friendly immigration policy tool .

Everett F Sargent said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Everett F Sargent said...

Peter Gleick?

"False: Inskeep is correct and Cruz is wrong. The scientific evidence unambiguously shows warming. This is the position of every single professional scientific society and every single National Academy of Sciences on the planet."

That's called a classic appeal to authority informal logical fallacy.

"False: every single method used to evaluate global, regional, and local temperatures shows warming, including satellites. See, for example, here "

Gleick then points to an SkS article last updated ...
"Last updated on 24 March 2011 by Glenn Tamblyn."

That's like s-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o FIVE years ago!

RSS and UAH use to show numbers quite similar to the SAT time series, but now? Today we are at RSS v3.3 and Woy's hoped for UAH v6.0b4 (which dumbnuts Bob Tisdale incorrectly calls UAH "Release 6.4" what a putz).

In fact, UAH v5.6 is still the time series reported at the "official" NASA website (there does not exist a v6.0b4 directory structure) ...
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/home/
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/
(likely you'll need to register or login to access the data directories)

The site that hosts the UAH v6.0b4 data is a joint venture between NASA and seven Alabama universities ...
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/nsstc/
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/

All one has to do is walk oneself up those directory structures to their respective home pages (boring stuff so whatever).

Group, Linear Trend (degrees C per century)

Cowtan & Way (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.75
BEST-1 (1979-01 thru2015-09),1.68
HadCRUT v4.4 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.62
GISTEMP (1979-01 thru LOTI 2015-09),1.61
BEST-2 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.53
NOAA v4.0 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.52
Mean SAT (BEST,Hadley,NASA,NOAA),1.59

UAH v5.6 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.39

UAH v6.0b4 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.12
RSS v3.3 (1979-01 thru 2015-09),1.21
Mean TLT,1.17

Difference SAT - TLT,0.42
Difference (SAT - TLT)/SAT,26%
Difference (SAT - TLT)/TLT,36%
Difference 2*(SAT - TLT)/(SAT + TLT),30%
(all time series adjusted (where necessary) to common 1981-2010 monthly baseline anomalies)

All I can say at this point is that the TLT measurements are most definitely not a very near surface measurements. I can also say that I've gotten past all the political theater rhetoric. I might also add that of all the SAT time series NOAA v4.0 is currently very slightly at the bottom of that SAT list. It's time to get back to the science of these two disparate types of measurements and determine the major underlying structural differences. Those differences appear to have begun circa very early in 1999 and have systematically diverged since that approximate time period (this does show up rather glaringly if all the time series are fitted with quadratic polynomials).

Fernando Leanme said...

I think Rubio is better. I need to have a chat with him to teach him about climate change and terrorism.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Are you planning to recruit him for The Project for a New Venezuelan Century ?

Jeffrey Davis said...

Ask Cruz if a picture of his father with Castro proves that his father is a Communist.
Cruz is a big fan of presenting incomplete data as proof. Maybe he will turn on his father.

Hank Roberts said...

http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2015/12/big-uah-adjustments.html
includes a redrawn chart following EFS's suggestion there

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Jeffrey, what ever can this mean for climate scientists who have posed with Fidel?

John said...

I keep hoping that Donald Trump will show how tough on Hispanic immigrants he really can be --- by
deporting Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio back to Cuba. :)

After all, some Cuban immigrants have been terrorists*. And you can't too careful the days!

*Want to know more? Look up Orlando Bosch on Wikipedia.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

John, Trump may get two shots :

Cruz was born in Canada.

John said...

C A N A D A ???

That just shows what kind of deadly menace we're facing.

Canadians are violent and aggressive.

Just look at hockey!!



THE CLIMATE WARS said...

I have a friend who tried. He lost an eye.

Hank Roberts said...

Oboy. Science Friday, 2nd hour, on now -- the Cruz hearing, and Naomi Oreskes' talk at the AGU.

(For Russell, call her The Imperfect Naomi Oreskes ...)

The theme: if you see something say something:

"The climate scientists ... are underplaying their concerns ... on the side of least drama ...."

jgnfld said...

ES...

0. Do you have a scientific problem with Gleick's science?

1. ALL science in the end is an "appeal to authority". Inductive reasoning simply works that way. Einstein isn't correct in any "real" way. Einstein's ideas are considered the best available induction by those qualified to judge. "Consensus of the qualified" is precisely how science advances and has been since at least the dawn of the Enlightenment.

2. Yes, the satellite data even as they presently are show warming if you don't throw away 2/3s of the values and cherrypick a preferred subset.

Fernando Leanme said...

Russel, as you know Cruz is a politician. My outfit is known as The Project for the New Cubazuelan Decade (not nearly as ambitious as the neocon original). Thus far we are batting close to zero. We got a huge election win in Venezuela, but the commies are executing a coup against the elected National Assembly. In Cuba repression is way up, and Obama keeps bending over for the Castro dictatorship. It's looking very grim for peaceful resistance advocates.

E. Swanson said...

FL,

In case you haven't noticed, the the old Soviet/Communist centrally planned economic system died more than 20 years ago, killed as much by the inability to stop the flood of ideas and consumer products from the West as by military competition. Arguably, the old Soviet Union could no longer pay for the arms race which appeared before them as Reagan's idiotic "Star Wars" program threatened to overwhelm their reliance on nukes and the Saudi's flooding of the oil market after 1985 decimated their national income from oil exports.

Socialism, especially that with a democratic foundation, continues to thrive in Europe and elsewhere. Perhaps in your reference to "communism" you are mistaking the dictatorial model of governance historically found in Central and South America for a more democratic verity. The next question or course is, does democracy actually exist in pure form or is humanity destined to continually find that the Back Room Boys are the real rulers of us all. Recall that line from the group, The Who: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"...

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Tell us another one , Mr. Swanson-

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Fearnando, one more trun of the screw , and Fidel will be running Rubik's Cuba

E. Swanson said...

Russell S.

You would rather dictators like Batista, Somoza, Noriega or Pinochet run things in Latin America? We could always send the Marines back to Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, or any of those nations which we think violate our "Monroe Doctrine". We've done it before. Heck, before the War Between the States, there were southern firebrands that wanted to make Cuba another slave state. Nothing new here, keep on moving, don't think about what's really going on.

Where's Edward Teller with his X-Ray lasers in space when we need assurance that the Ruskies wouldn't dare attack us. That those X-Ray lasers were to be "pumped" by exploding nukes was just a minor problem, I'm sure...

Fernando Leanme said...

Swanson, I have a PhD from the school of life on the nature of communism.

My take is that communist supporters range from the naive poorly educated, to young and brainwashed, to people full of social hatred and resentment, to intellectuals who simply don't get the systemic flaws in communist dogma, to reformists, and to what my mom used to call "belly thinkers" who considered communism a good vehicle to get power and get rich.

In other words, I know more about the nuances and shades than you will ever know. Your arguments are so weak I'm not going to bother with them as such, it would be like debating the weather with a mosquito.

E. Swanson said...

Fernando L.

Admittedly, my experience with "communist" governance has been limited as I've only been to Russia on one brief occasion, that after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, I think it's clear that there's a considerable difference between "socialism" and "communism", the latter requiring that government to own all the means of production, including land.

I also think it's clear that governments do things which private enterprise can't or won't, such as setting limits on socially harmful activities. Pollution in it's various forms are not something which industry willingly addresses (not to say the Soviets were any better). Indeed, the "communists" in China are finding that their rapid industrial (capitalist?) development has resulted in a massive downside in the form of highly visible local pollution and they are being forced to do something about it. We went thru that phase in the US more than 50 years ago and the latest problem is global greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, etc), a dilemma which we must now also address.

As for your lack of concern about those tiny mosquitoes, lets hope your next feeding of the local fauna isn't delivered to a new arrival into your area which happens to be a carrier of a debilitating tropical disease...

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Last time I looked , Swanson, the only surviving exmple of Caudillismo was Cuban socialism's el Maximo Lider , Ronald Wilson Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush having put Noriega in jail which is where Fidel still keeps those vociferously opposed to his brand of social democracy.

E. Swanson said...

Russell S. From Wikipedia:
Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno is a former Panamanian politician and military officer. He was military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989, when he was removed from power during the invasion of Panama.

From the 1950s until shortly before the U.S. invasion, Noriega worked closely with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Noriega was one of the CIA's most valued intelligence sources, as well as one of the primary conduits for illicit weapons, military equipment and cash destined for US-backed counterinsurgency forces throughout Central and South America. Noriega was also a major cocaine trafficker, something which his U.S. intelligence handlers were aware of for years, but allowed because of his usefulness for their covert military operations in Latin America.

In 1988, Noriega was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Miami, Florida, and shortly thereafter, in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama he was removed from power.
...
(former President) Torrijos died in a plane accident on July 31, 1981. Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera, a former associate of Noriega, claimed that the actual cause for the accident was a bomb and that Noriega was behind the incident.


Noriega was our kind of guys, until he wasn't. I don't think he could be considered a commie, just another run-of-the-mill Latin American military dictator who supported our multi-national corporations...