The illogic of deniers: David Legates on the 971 vs 20 in a thousand abstracts

David Legates is a Professor at the University of Delaware who somewhere along the way managed to get a tenured position. I don't know what he teaches or if he's allowed to get anywhere near students - his profile gives not a clue. However he spends some of his time writing articles for climate conspiracy blogs. Today he's written an article for WUWT (archived here) where he's making wild and wrong claims about consensus studies. That is, about studies that show that almost all scientific papers that attribute a cause to global warming attribute it to human activity. David tells outright lies and also builds a few men of straw along the way.

971 in a thousand vs 20 in a thousand

Let's get the numbers from the Cook13 study. Did you know that Cook13 found that since 1991, there were less than 7 abstracts out of every thousand, that disputed humans are the main cause of global warming? That's not how it's presented in Cook13 though. In that paper they properly looked at the numbers only in the context of abstracts in which a position was expressed. In Cook13 the researchers categorised 4,014 papers that expressed a position on the cause of the current global warming.

Double standards at WUWT. When is a witch hunt a witch hunt?

Anthony Watts' blog WUWT is known for inconsistency, its collation of pseudo-science claptrap from around the climate deniosphere, attacks on climate scientists and double standards. I've not posted much from there the past few days because I've been busy. Also because many of the recent WUWT articles are bemoaning a witch hunt, or what passes for a witch hunt at WUWT.

Are climate contrarians witches?

So what is the WUWT definition of a witch hunt? Is it the endless requests for personal emails by right wing lobby groups that Anthony Watts frequently hails on his blog? Is it court cases to push for release of personal emails from climate scientists, like of Michael Mann here and here and here and lots more. Is it harassment of James Hansen to list all his payments from speaking engagements - like here?

"Expert" David Legates tells US Senate Committee that CO2 is animal food

This'll tickle your funny bone. Anthony Watts has been privileged with an advance copy of testimony to a US Senate Committee (archived here, with the pdf file of the testimony copied here). It probably makes him feel so important to have a copy before it's presented. (Surely that's frowned upon.) Some members of the US Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works obviously wanted to have a little fun at the expense of the US taxpayers, so they called up a chap by the name of David Legates to testify.

David has impressive credentials. He says:

I am a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and I served as the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011. I also am an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Statistics and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering Program. I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Geography, a M.S. in Geography, and a Ph.D. in Climatology, all from the University of Delaware

I checked because I found it almost impossible to credit that a university would employ a ratbag like David Legates. It does - but he doesn't have any profile there :(

CO2 is animal food!

I started reading his testimony but had to stop on page two when I got to this bit:

Considering that CO2 is food for plants and animals...

Yep, you read that right. Here it is in black and white and grey - see page two:

David Legates isn't just running the normal denier spiel that "CO2 is plant food". Now it's animal food, too. Do you reckon he feeds his livestock CO2? Would he feed it to them frozen, you know, slabs of dry ice which would look just like salt licks? Surely not. Do their tongues stick to the CO2 when they try to lick it?

David Legates might call himself a climatologist, but he's a science denying climatologist. He has graced this blog before - here and here. Oh, and he's a member of the Cornwall Alliance cult.

Pity David's animals. Pity the poor Delawarians :(

The Evangelical Science Denier and the Alarmist Fundamentalist Religious Cult: The Cornwall Alliance

I wrote an article on David Legates' denial of science a few hours ago.  I've been told that David rejects science on quasi-religious grounds.  He is a member of a cult called the Cornwall Alliance.

David Legates apparently rejects even more aspects of climate science than does Roy Spencer.  Based on his article from yesterday, David rejects the greenhouse effect.  The things they have in common are that they are both employed as climate scientists and are both members of an evangelical quasi-religious cult in the USA called the Cornwall Alliance.  Based on their published material, this cult is a mixture of fundamentalist christianity, alarmist economics, pseudo-science, opposition to mainstream climate science and more than a hint of sexism (and suggestive of more deviant thinking).  It assumes male supremacy and that men were put on earth to plunder as they please.  Only in the USA, home of the weird and wacky.

A Mission to Reject Science

These chaps on their evangelical mission are not shy about using their "god" to distort and misrepresent the science.  It appears to be the very reason they formed their cult.  To promote disinformation about climate science and oppose any attempts to mitigate global warming. They are up front in their rejection of climate science.  They have an Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming which states in part:

We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. 

Now I've got no beef with anyone who wants to go to their temple or church or mosque or synagogue or wherever on whatever day of the week.  I do have a beef with people who create a false god so they can hide behind "him" (their image of god has to be male) and use that false image of a god to spread lies about important matters of science and  economics.  I also have a real beef with people who fake concern for "poor" people in less developed countries as an excuse for their evangelism.

The "holier than thou" attitude expressed in the cult's writings comes across to me as a sickening perversion.  Their quasi-religion smacks of "world view" and christian fundamentalism of the worst kind.  It's not about charity or hope.  It's about preserving their own personal status quo.  It is raw hypocrisy.

Alarmists of the Cornwall Alliance

Here are some examples of the alarmist ideas that these guys (and they are all men) promote.  They "believe" that progressively shifting to a clean energy economy over the next few decades will:

• destroy millions of jobs.
• cost trillions of dollars in lost economic production.
• slow, stop, or reverse economic growth.
• reduce the standard of living for all but the elite few who are well positioned to benefit from laws that unfairly advantage them at the expense of most businesses and all consumers.
• endanger liberty by putting vast new powers over private, social, and market life in the hands of national and international governments.
• condemn the world’s poor to generations of continued misery characterized by rampant disease and premature death.

How's that for alarmism.  Not only do they provide no evidence but they hold on fast to these convictions in the face of evidence to the contrary. 

World view drives their rejection of science and alarmist economics

These evangelists are up front that they reject science and promote alarmist economics because of their world view and religion.  It's got nothing to do with scientific facts or real world economics.  They state quite openly that:

Our examination of theology, worldview, and ethics (Chapter One) finds that global warming alarmism wrongly views the Earth and its ecosystems as the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining. 

They reckon they can do whatever they like and their god will save them.  Fundamentalism in its pure form.

The fact that they refer to mainstream science, such as the greenhouse effect, as "global warming alarmism" puts them in the 8% Dismissives category of the Yale Project.  On the other hand, the fact that some of this motley lot of evangelicals have managed to wangle their way into positions where they have some influence, where they can chew the ear of politicians of dubious character, makes them not far removed from the description of "scumbucket" authority figures of Robert Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarians. ("Scumbuckets" take on the role of authority figures that Right Wing Authoritarians follow for support against their perceived persecution by formal authority, such as government.)

Anthony Watts is one of the people who promotes disinformation from these evangelical religious science deniers.  The Auditor, Steve McIntyre, who obsesses about things of which he has little understanding and no experience, has partnered with Ross McKitrick, a member of the Cornwall Alliance.  (One of Anthony Watts' attack dogs, Rev Richard S Courtney aka richardscourtney, is also a member of the Cornwall Alliance.)

The type of evangelism practiced by this crowd is typical US-style christian fundamentalism.  It places man (not woman) as second only to their god in the order of things and talks of subduing everything to "man's" desires.  It is sybaritic in nature.  The world is there for "man" to plunder.  In case any one of them feels a twinge of remorse for their greed and selfishness, they hide behind their god, telling themselves that's why their god created them.  They wrote their own rules to justify their crusade of disinformation.  The words peppered throughout their quasi-religious texts are highly suggestive, like "subdue" and "rule".  For example:

Human beings have the divine mandate to multiply and to fill, subdue, and rule the Earth, transforming it from wilderness into garden. They act as stewards under God to cultivate and guard what they subdue and rule. 

Yes, it's hard to believe this is the twenty first century.  It sounds like something from one of the less enlightened ages in the distant past.  One can imagine them burning witches and riding off to the crusades.  Actually, while I can imagine them burning witches I think they'd be the ones sending foot soldiers to battle rather than going off to fight in the trenches themselves.  Their writing smacks of elitism and a sense of righteous authority.  It's right up there with the McCarthyism of the 1950s and more recently, Inhofe and Cuccinelli wanting to prosecute scientists, viewing them as criminals.

I'm tolerant of people having their own religious beliefs and practicing whatever rituals makes them feel good.  I prefer they do it privately but I'm not intolerant of public displays or missions, provided they stick to their god thing and spirituality or peering into crystals or tarot cards or whatever.

What I'm much less tolerant of is people using their religion to mess with politics, education and science.

What I have no tolerance for is people who make up a false image of a god as an excuse for their crusade to spread disinformation.  Who hide behind their made-up god and make emotive appeals to the worst side of human nature (greed, selfishness, envy) or prey on the innate good in people (think of the starving millions) to promote their lies about straightforward mainstream science and economics.

Climatology Professor, David Legates, fails Climatology 101 at WUWT

It's odd how fake sceptics complain when research shows that conspiracy ideation is a predictor of science denial, albeit not as strong a predictor as more extreme free market ideology.  Anthony Watts protests quite loudly and at the same time posts articles that are rife with conspiracy ideation and right wing alarmism.

Today it's an article at WUWT by Dennis M. Mitchell and David R. Legates (archived here).  Their protest at climate science comprises the following:

Constructing a conspiracy theory of deception and incompetence

...climate alarmists are now scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate chaos are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception. The alarmist scientists have put themselves in a climate cataclysm box, and are desperate to protect their reputations, predictions and funding.

It's not uncommon for fake sceptics when faced with the evidence to say the evidence must be wrong.  Thing is though, it presupposes that all the scientists throughout the world who research anything relating to climate and earth systems are conspiring.  Otherwise how could all the evidence point to the same thing:-  that CO2 is increasing and the world is warming.  Never mind the fact that shipping companies must be involved in the conspiracy, pretending that they've been cutting across the Arctic in summer.  Photographers and news outlets must be in on the scam, too. Not to mention the birds and the bees who've shifted their domain, the glaciers and ice sheets and fish in the oceans.

The world is heating up

This dubious pair, we shall see, are knowingly engaged in disinformation.  Or at least one of them is doing it knowingly.

Disinformation

Despite the absence of warming in actual measured temperature records over the last 16 years, and near-record lows in hurricane and tornado activity, they still cry “wolf” repeatedly and try to connect every unusual or “extreme” weather event to human emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide. (Actually, people account for only 4% of all the CO2 that enters Earth’s atmosphere each year.)

There is no "absence of warming" over the last 16 years.  Take a look for yourself:

And that's just the surface temperature.  93% of heat is accumulating in the oceans.  Fake sceptics deny this fact, with this pair claiming:

Year after year, alarmists have changed their protective shells for more absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped. For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least down two kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, “We are puzzled at the results.” We are not puzzled.

They are wrong of course as this chart illustrates:

Fig 3.21 Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

 The only way that seas can rise is by ocean warming and/or melting ice, both of which means the oceans are getting warmer.  The above chart from Chapter 3 of the IPCC report shows that sea levels are rising and the oceans are getting warmer.

As for the bit about the four per cent.  I presume they are talking about the carbon cycle and the annual exchange with the biosphere, land surface and oceans. I don't know if that's accurate or not.  But you'd have thought that even if Professor David Legates isn't crash hot at arithmetic, Dennis Mitchell, being a CPA, would be familiar with the notion of compound interest.  What we add to the air stays there for a very long time.  So far we've increased the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 40%. Not only that, but half of the waste CO2 that we're tossing into the air ends up in the ocean.  And now the ocean pH is dropping at an alarming rate.

Oceans are heating up

Of course most fake sceptics don't have a clue about science.  This pair, for example, write this sort of nonsense, knowing that many WUWT readers will fall for it, being science illiterate:

The “puzzling” facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean. Ignoring the physics of the problem – how the asserted heat was transferred from atmospheric carbon dioxide, through the sea surface, and beyond the first mile of ocean waters, without being detected – they expect us to believe that fluid thermodynamics is akin to magic.

First, I don't know what David and Dennis mean by "really deep ocean".  They couldn't be more wrong about the oceans heating up.  The heat is accumulating in the top two kilometres as the chart below shows.  I don't know if it's getting warmer at lower depths or not.

Source: NOAA/NODC

It doesn't get "beyond the first mile" without being detected.  It is indeed detected in the top 700 metres as well.  Just look at the chart below.  Do they honestly think otherwise?  I'd say not.  This is just another denier meme. Probably picked up when deniers used to claim there are a lot of undetected underwater volcanoes and people said, how come the top ocean is getting warmer but it's not as hot at depth.

Data Source: NOAA/NODC

Rhetorical strawman fallacy

It's a common tactic of disinformers to make up stuff.  For example, they write:

Have we forgotten that 1998 was to be the “tipping point,” after which Earth would warm uncontrollably? 

Who said that?  When? Where?  I've never even seen deniers try to claim that one before.  It's a load of codswallop.

Deniers reject the greenhouse effect

And this one is so worn out I'm surprised that any denier is still wearing it.

 increasing temperatures always preceded higher CO2

Fancy Anthony Watts allowing such an idiotic statement on his blog :)  Everyone knows that when CO2 is a feedback it has to come after the initial forcing.  This time it's happening as a forcing.  We're adding it to the air.  Whether CO2 rises as a forcing or a feedback doesn't matter.  It will raise the temperature of earth both times.

Now I can understand someone like Dennis Mitchell, who's just a CPA, not understanding climate science.  But I have to ask where he gets his disinformation from and why he doesn't accept science from scientists.  What makes him, a non-expert, think that he knows more than all the world's experts on the subject?  Is he a conspiracy theorist or is it extreme free market ideology that's motivating him to tell lies? I cannot accept that even extremist right wing views mean that one has to toss ethics out the window.  No, it's probably a character defect.

Judge them by their company

And you can judge a man by the company he keeps.  In this case, Dennis the Menace keeps company with known climate disinformer David Legates.  Now David has no excuse for spreading lies about climate science.  He is apparently a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware.  There is no way that he isn't aware of the greenhouse effect.  A professor.  Someone who purports to study climate. And he doesn't know the first thing about the properties of greenhouse gases?

I don't buy it.

PS You may remember that David Legates was a co-author with Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon. What did I say about judging a man by the company he keeps?  Anthony Watts, David Legates, Willie Soon, Christopher Monckton, Tim Ball - all denying science in a most ridiculous fashion.

Anthony Watts thinks it's April the first at WUWT!

This is hilarious if you're into black humour.  Anthony Watts has posted yet another article (archived here) protesting the 97% consensus.  What is it now, is anyone counting?

They didn't ask if it was dangerous!

Here is an excerpt:

The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.

Bloody hell!  What does he think?  That 97% of scientists who've attributed global warming to human activity, that warn of what will happen if we keep doing it, that already are observing Russian heatwaves and Angry Summers and acidifying oceans and signs of the sixth major extinction event and have been warning people for decades about what we can expect - and they are warning the world just for kicks?

What a bunch of utter nutters!

More seriously though, Cook et al didn't make any mention of whether or not climate change was dangerous.  What they did was assess abstracts of scientific papers and categorise them according to the extent to which the abstract attributed global warming to human activity.  Deniers got their knickers in a knot because of a tweet from President Obama to his 38 million followers saying climate change was dangerous, which of course it is.  So this bunch of deniers are complaining about something that Cook et al didn't discuss at all!  They are complaining about a tweet from the President of the USA.  And it looks as if they've published a "paper" about this. Heck.  Maybe there's something to this twitter business!

If the authors of this new paper want to know how dangerous global warming is, I suggest they read the scientific literature on the topic. They could start with the IPCC reports.  There's a new one coming out at the end of the month and I reckon it will have a few hints about how dangerous is global warming.

Peer reviewed? Seriously?

I looked into this a bit more and I have to say it's a tangled mess.  Anthony quotes a "press release" about a new "peer-reviewed paper" in a respected Science and Education journal.  The "paper" is printed as a rejoinder to an article by Daniel Bedford and John Cook in the same journal.  The Bedford and Cook paper is titled: Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change: A response to Legates, Soon and Briggs and is a response to an earlier paper by those authors that in turn was in response to an original paper by Daniel Bedford.  Apparently and unsurprisingly, Legates, Soon and Briggs misrepresented something else.

My head is spinning! So far there are four papers in this series if I've counted them all.  Bedford followed by Legates, Soon and Briggs, followed by Bedford and Cook followed by Legates, Soon, Briggs and Monckton.  They are bringing out the big guns adding the potty peer, eh what?  If the journal was respected before, it will be respected less now.
 .
In this latest "rejoinder" (which going by the press release, seems not to be a rejoinder at all but a completely new paper), Dr David Legates - a climate science denier from way back has coauthored the paper with a bunch of other deniers including the potty peer, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, professional disinformer Willie Soon and science denying statistician William Briggs (who took part in the Battle of the DuKEs recently).

Ye gods!  They are getting desperate, aren't they!  Adding Monckton to the mix?  I suppose the peer can finally say he has published a peer reviewed paper that wasn't peer reviewed by himself.  I wonder who on earth peer reviewed it?

To get to the point - in this new paper denier David and three of his mates have signed on to joining the innumerate Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.  Monckton thinks that 3,896 is not 97.1% of 4014.  Now we've got four science deniers insisting that 3896 divided by 4014 equals only 0.003.  Interestingly I mentioned Monckton's disability in this regard earlier today.

From the WUWT comments

Surely even the fake sceptics who flock to Anthony Watts' science denying blog are getting sore heads from tilting at windmills.

Bill Marsh decides to quibble over whether "most" really means "most" or whether instead it means "most" and says:

September 3, 2013 at 9:04 am
I think using the term ‘most’ or ‘more than’ was ambiguous and confusing, i.e. unscientific. The term ‘most’ as used in the paper could mean ‘at least half’ (the interpretation shown above), but, it could also mean ‘more than any other factor’, which is not necessarily ‘at least half’. ‘Most’ could mean ‘plurality’ rather than ‘majority’. That and ‘man made’ contribution to warming comprises several factors besides CO2 – land use changes, Urban Heat, etc are all ‘man made contributions’ to warming.

Steve Keohane says that if all the scientific evidence points to one inescapable conclusion, the conclusion must be wrong:

September 3, 2013 at 8:32 am
‘If it’s consensus, it isn’t science’ says it all.

I have to inform you, Steve.  As a wise man once said:

@wattsupwiththat doesn't get it.  The science isn't strong because of consensus, the consensus is strong because of science.