The Great Global Warming Swindle
March 16th, 2007 by Stephen
Viewers of channel 4 have been swindled by director Martin Durkin (again), and Carl Wunsch of MIT is angry about it. He was approached by Durkin to make a supposedly balanced film about global warming issues, getting away from the hysterical propoganda from the polarised political debate (particularly in the American political arena).
What concerned scientist would object to such a thing? But Durkin misled Wunsch. For instance, Wunsch writes:
In the part of the “Swindle” film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous—because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important — diametrically opposite to the point I was making — which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.
You can read the whole of Carl Wunsch’s open letter.
So what do we make of this programme? It is the most biased an scientifically illiterate documentary I have seen in a while - but actually true to form for channel 4 and Durkin. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Natureâ€, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. The people he interviewed thought that he was making a balanced critical examination of environmentalism, but the contributors were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.
The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing†the views of the interviewees and “misled†them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.†Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology.
As formal complaints have made by this programme’s contributors too, we can but await another apology from channel 4. The question is why this channel ever agreed to use this same producer again.
Let me know what you think of this article. I think it was interesting from the mathematical angle.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm
The discussion about types of mean is fine, but it is not quite clear what they are trying to make out of it. But the big problem with this article and the paper it references is that researchers do not speak of a global temperature. They speak of global temperature anomaly.
So for each parcel of air that is measured at any location, a change in temperature is recorded as a temperature anomaly, which relates to energy lost or gained by the parcel. If you sum up the anomalies you have a figure for energy lost or gained by all parcels of air, a global temperature anomaly.
Consider the example of house prices. House prices in the UK fluctuate by region. At the moment, prices are rising sharply in London but they are static in Wales and may be falling in, say, Yorkshire. Let us say that a small family house currently costs £1 Million in London, and a similar house is £300K isn Yorkshire and in Wales. Let us also say that last year the London house 900K, that it was 300K in Wales and 350K in Yourkshire.
If we add up the numbers (using just the arithmetic mean for simplicity), we have an average house price this year of £533,333 and last year of £516,666. But that figure is not very helpful. It tells me something, but nothing about the large regional variations, and nor does it tell me what I must pay for my house. I can calculate an average rise across the nation of 3.33%, and that may well be useful as some kind of economic measure perhaps.
But if I measure the anomaly I can tell much more. The rise in London was 11%, the fall in Yorkshire was nearer -16% and Wales had 0% change. The anomaly in London was 100K. In Yorkshire it was -50K, and in Wales it was 0, so the 3.33% figure is heavily skewed by the strong London prices, even though the anomaly was much greater in Yorkshire.
You see this more clearly again if the Yorkshire prices fell by a third from 350K to 250K. Now UK prices are static on a UK wide average, but the fall in Yorkshire is far higher than the rise in London.
Are prices therefore rising or static?
Comparing or averaging the figures on this smaller scale is much more informative than just adding all the figures together and taking an average, which is exactly what happens in surface air measurement (although the maths is more complicated than I have shown it. For instance, we cannot just average the percentages - that still doesn’t tell us anything meaningful. But the point is that it is anomalies that are being measured, not absolute temperatures - which could be heavily skewed by one region, as this paper suggests).
*
Now it is said that if you heat a live frog in a pot of water very slowly, it never jumps out. I cannot confirm or deny this experiment, but consider if you put the frog in the water and argue that this is a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system (because you are applying heat, etc.) Is it correct to say that there is no such thing as a pot-wide temperature?
Perhaps. But if you measure at four positions in the pot, over the course of time, the aggregate temperature anomalies will be upwards, will they not?
It makes no sense to say that the pot is now 30 C, now it is 35C and so on, but the temperature anomaly can be 5C above normal, then 10C and so on.
If the frog argues that the pot is a non-equilibrium system, he can happily stay in there, safe in the knowledge that talk of a pot-wide average temperature is meaningless. Perhaps the temperature is being heavily biased by the region at the base of the pot, where heat is being applied.
But if the frog has any sense, given the data from the four thermometers, he will say “this pot is warming up … quick, jump for your lives!!!”
Stephen– I can’t but smile at your response and wonder which way you’re advising us to “jump” if the world is indeed getting ready to boil. Perhaps Saturn? Mars?
Pluto is lovely at this time of year… and as a year last 248 earth years on Pluto, I suppose it will stay that way for a while