If you want a prototypical example of how climate science has ceased being true science and instead become little more than an ideological battleground, look no further than a study released yesterday showing that, contrary to earlier claims, global warming has had zero effect on the depth of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Although the study received almost no media coverage (hmmmm, wonder why?), the San Francisco Chronicle did publish an article entitled Study: Sierra snowfall consistent over 130 years. But they covered the study not to give it wider publicity, but rather to give a platform to critics trying to discredit it.
The main thing we learn from this incident is not that snow levels in California have essentially remain unchanged since 1878, but rather that the weak, fallacious and ultimately politically-driven counter-arguments from the critics reveal just how far mainstream climate science has drifted from unbiased truth-seeking.
From the article:
Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.
The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.
John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.
The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.
“The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified,” said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It looks like you’re going to have snow for the foreseeable future.”
So — what’s to criticize about the study? The Global Warming Alarmists instantly sprang into action and settled on three lines of attack.
First:
Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn’t come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.
Christy’s study used snow measurements from railroad officials, loggers, mining companies, hydroelectric utilities, water districts and government organizations going back to 1878. That’s when railroad workers began measuring the snowpack’s depth near the tracks at Echo Summit using a device similar to a yardstick.
“No one else had looked at this data in detail,” said Christy, a Fresno native who said some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s online Journal of Hydrometeorology.
Remember: in the 19th century, there were no satellites, no such thing as “climate science,” and no official list of who is or is not allowed to measure snowpack. So the data in the archives is the only data we have about snowpack back then, and thus also the best data on snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. And yet, the climate mafia dismisses a century’s worth of engineers and government officials as “a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.”
By this standard, Galileo was an amateur, Charles Darwin was an amateur, Isaac Newton was an amateur, as was basically every scientist who ever lived prior to the standardization of university professorships in the first half of the 20th century, which officially segregated the world into “amateurs” and “professionals” once and for all.
But this is not mere historical ignorance on the critics’ part. Because when you get to dictate who is and is not an “amateur,” and thus dictate whose data is or is not valid, then you get to control the outcome of any study. You can accept as “reliable” any data that confirms your pre-estabished thesis, and reject as “amateurish” any data that contradicts it.
Yet that’s not how science works. If these critics were true scientists, they would rethink their thesis, not attack the personal integrity of a century’s worth of engineers.
Also note that, until very recently, no one had any political agenda to fabricate data to support or undermine global warming, so left out of the critique is any explanation of why some railroad official would fudge his data. Are the critics seriously implying that the following thought went through someone’s mind back in 1878: “Gee, I’d better lie about how deep this snow is, because I want to trick researchers 130 years in the future into thinking that some theory about global warming that hasn’t even been developed yet isn’t really true. Bwahahahaha!”
Back to the article, where the second line of attack is to dismiss the data as meaningless because no one measured how wet the snow was:
Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey, said Christy is picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.
For one, he said, snow depth is not as good a measure of the winter weather conditions as water content and density.
The number of inches or feet of snow on the ground can mean a variety of things, he said, depending on if it is fluffy powder or compacted, wet snow.
Of course, he has no data at all about the water content and density of 19th-century California snow, and no evidence that snow a hundred years ago was drier or fluffier than it is today, but hey, they were all amateurs back then!
Finally, the critics poo-poo the study as irrelevant, since other studies of snowpack elsewhere in North America had different results:
What’s significant in terms of global warming, he said, is the fact that the snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States, an area that includes Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Scripps researchers, in coordination with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have concluded that 60 percent of that downward trend is due to greenhouse gases.
“There is a popular conception that the snowpack has declined everywhere, but that is not what the science says,” Dettinger said. “What we’re saying broadly is that across western North America there have been declines in spring snowpack.”
But those other results must have been based on very recent measurements that couldn’t reveal any long-term trends, since they’ve already determined that measurement taken by “amateurs” in the old days don’t count.
Or was 1878 Montana brimming with all sorts of “professional” snow measurers that California lacked?
This is more likely: When old data confirms your thesis of global warming, then it is accepted as valid; but when old data undermines your thesis of global warming, then it is rejected. Simple.
The take-away news here is not that snow levels in California have remained unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. That’s not surprising. What’s newsworthy is that people claiming to be scientists act like true “amateurs” with confirmation bias, who only accept the validity of data which matches their preconceived notions.
“picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.”
Actually, isn’t that what the “scientists” at East Anglia admitted in their emails that they were doing? Weren’t they advocating silencing the other side; And weren’t they hiding the decline?
So if temps go up, that’s AGW
if temps go down, that’s AGW
if temps stay the same, that’s AGW.
Along the same lines:
If it snows more, that “proves” AGW.
If it snows less, that “proves” AGW.
I’m not sure if it snowed buffalo nickels if that would prove AGW or the existence of fairy godmothers, tho.
An entire year with colder-than-normal temps is “weather.”
A single afternoon high temperature one-tenth of a degree above the record high for that date at that station is “climate.”
Glaciers are puffier nowadays. Everyone knows that. How else to account for glaciers not being smaller since twice as many people, cows, squirrels, etc. breaking wind since 1970 has certainly moved us closer to the sun. Hopefully dropping a-bombs down the throat of every volcano in the world will help us out of this mess.
People tend to believe that which will benefit them. If you want more government control of the society, then you will tend to believe any data that supports a theory that would produce more government control. Conversely, if a study contradicts the theory that advances your preferred ideology, you will try and rationalize it away.
Anomalies mount. The paradigm comes under pressure. Theory is tested and fails to predict events. Theory is twisted and elaborated to try to accommodate new data. Evidence of data manipulation begins to appear. Defenders of the old paradigm begin to depart from science and launch political attacks against reasoned skeptics. Eventually a new and more predictive model will emerge and the old one left behind. This is the way science works, and has always worked.
All the financial incentive and personal agendas and ego driven resistance will not change it in the long run. Manmade climate change at this late date is pretty much a dead letter. Hollering and name calling won’t change that.
Well, what did you think would happen? One study would make them say “Hey, we were wrong all along”? “Marry my daughter”?
Now, let a drumbeat of such studies come (I am not saying it will) and the tone of discussion is bound to change.
Dude:
There has been a DRUMBEAT of studies. Where have you been? Up in the Sierra Nevadas?
The biggest “drumbeat’ was the study from East Anglia itself that said there has been no warming since 1995; The new debate between the Solar cycle group and the greenhouse gas folks, scientists all; the cosmic ray brouhaha that CERN tried to suppress; the egregious error about the Himalaya ice pack in an IPCC “study.” The recent “BEST” (I don’t know what the acronym stands for) study that puts the “warming trend” as having started 200 years ago, thus making it a natural occurrence. The drums are beating, and have been for at least the last couple of years. Still no change in position from the AGW crowd.
“Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature” http://berkeleyearth.org/
Well Bozo that just is not true. They never said the earth has not warmed since 1995. Here is what was said:
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Of course all good scientists go to the Daily Mail to get their scientific facts.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Phil-Jones-says-no-global-warming-since-1995.htm
Bozo yes that was an error in the report in 1999. It was two sentences in a 3000 page report that was included and not peer reviewed as it should. SO what should an intelligent person draw from that? As you know the IPCC does not conduct any studies but every four years reviews all the studies to form conclusions. They take the top scientists in their fields to do these reviews.
Are these glaciers receding – well yes and even more so than in 1999 but will they disappear in 2035 – no. Is it a concern because close to 500 million depend on the Himalaya’s for their water – yup.
Since that study scientists have determined that close to half of the receding is not caused by GW but by black soot. Now guess where the black soot comes from?
No “drumbeat”?
Perhaps you missed my earlier post: The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era?
That’s not just a drumbeat — that’s an orchestra of tympanists.
Go to Climate Depot and Watts Up With That? for frequent updates in the incessant barrage of doubt-inducing studies.
And yet in the face if this they just harden their opposition. I don’t think the tone of discussion is ever likely to change — until they latch on to some new disaster scenario, at least.
So Zombie how many of these are peer reviewed studies?
The AGW crackpots claimed that GW would reduce rain in places like the Sierras (idiots – “heat” = “more evap” = “more precip”). If we had a little global warming, the snow line would move up slope and the snow pack on the peaks would be deeper. Lots of warming would mean the mountain top snow pack would be intermitant (melts several times each winter). This is not happening.
The funniest part is that much of the “science” of CAGW is based on extrapolating temperatures from the widths of tree rings — something that people who actually study how trees grow says is not possible, as there are too many other things that determine the amount of growth.
But actual — if inaccurate — measurements of snow depth is not reliable enough…
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but Los Angeles would have dried up and blown away by now (or started on massive desalination project) if the Sierra snow had declined even a few percent.
Actually getting a few showers today, but this has been one very warm and dry winter, to date. Hardly the first even in my memory, but I expected the warmists to start howling. I dunno, what does the tree ring data say about rainfall in the Sierra over the last thousand years? We have these big, fat sequoias to chop down and measure.
And yet, the climate mafia dismisses a century’s worth of engineers and government officials as “a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.”
Oops. And what about the proxy data used to prove Global Warming? It comes from the same source.
Perhaps I haven’t been paying attention, but it seems to me the chicken little proponents have become increasingly quiet concerning
AGWglobal coolingglobal climate change recently. The occasional rube still pops up now and then and is quickly laughed at and discarded, but it would appear these dupes are off to some other conspiracy theory like jobs saved under Obama and America’s growing economy.It may be my imagination, but I haven’t been hearing as much about carbon footprint, Al Gore, the “science is settled”, or carbon tax as I did a year ago.
Add Albert Einstein to the list of amateur scientists – a lowly patent clerk when he developed relativity.
The lack of change cited in this study is certainly a change from other global climate changes. Therefore, global climate change!
Zombie here is your prestigious Heartland Institute and their funding sources and budget for 2012.
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-insider-exposes-institute-s-budget-and-strategy
Heartland Insider Exposes Institute’s Budget and Strategy
An anonymous donor calling him (or her)self “Heartland Insider” has released the Heartland Institute’s budget, fundraising plan, its Climate Strategy for 2012 and sundry other documents (all attached) that prove all of the worst allegations that have been levelled against the organization.
It is clear from the documents that Heartland advocates against responsible climate mitigation and then uses that advocacy to raise money from oil companies and “other corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.” Heartland particularly celebrates the funding that it receives from the fossil fuel fortune being the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Heartland also continues to collect money from Philip Morris parent company Altria as well as from the tobacco giant Reynolds American, while maintaining ongoing advocacy against policies related to smoking and health.
Heartland’s policy positions, strategies and budget distinguish it clear as a lobby firm that is misrepresenting itself as a “think tank” – it budgets $4.1 million of its $6.4 million in projected expenditures for Editorial, Government Relations, Communications, Fundraising, and Publications, and the only activity it plans that could vaguely be considered policy development is the writing of a curriculum package for use in confusing high schoolers about climate change.
There will be more comment and analysis to follow on DeSmogBlog and elsewhere, but we wanted to make this information available so that others can also scrutinize the documents and bring their expertise to the task.
Deep Climate – Heartland Institute Budget and Strategy Revealed
Greg Laden – Anti-Science Institute’s Insider Reveals Secrets
Planet 3.0 – Is turnabout Fair Play?
Climate Crocks – How is Joe Bast like Joe Camel?
Climate Progress – Heartland Documents Reveal Fringe Denial Group Plans to Pursue Koch Money, Dupe Children and Cultivate Revkin
Gee, sounds like the mirror image of the radical ecology non-profits. Except Heartland tends to support issues that are pro-freedom and anti-socialist.
But by all means, go the ad hominem route instead of addressing the core science. It makes you seem so much more [in]credible.
But back to the snowpack study critics…seems like most of their criticisms could be equally leveled at the temperature measurement databases they rely upon to infer “warming”.
Well I don’t know enough about this study but I’m sure it will get it’s share of scientific comment. The great thing about scientists are they pull no punches when it comes to comment about science. If people publish crap they generally hear about it. Unfortunately for people like Zombie and the deniers they tend not to have to many scientists who have much credibility when it come to global warming. Don’t know of to many actual peer reviewed climate papers they have published but certainly have seen many discredited criticisms of theirs where they try to deceive and cherry pick numbers.
They truly are a pathetic bunch.
The real question that needs to be discussed is what to do about it. Heck I live in MA and normally we get a good amount of snowfall and so far the only time I have used my snow blower this year was when we got a freak snowstorm in Oct. But then weather and what is happening around me is not an argument one way or the other about climate. Heck the deniers have said 1934 was the warmest ever recorded and left out in the United States. The US is a very small piece of the planet. When one looks at all the mud and slime thrown up against the wall by the deniers one wonders their motives and when we see who funds them it becomes clearer.
The hockey stick is real and so are many other scientific measurements
The “Hockey Stick” was long ago proven false — Any random set of data put through Mann’s “model” yields the exact same profile. You don’t seem to keep up with the science as much as you keep up with the propaganda.
Believe me, I am the first to bash AGW, but I would expect snowfall on the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas to be constant because the moisture is coming directly from saturated air blowing in from the Pacific Ocean.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if the snowfall on the eastern slope is a lot more erratic.
The big unknown every year is the high pressure ridge that fors over the Four Corners. When that is strong and persistant the precip. is pushed North. This is the same function that causes the So.cal. Santa Annas and those days we get to eighty degrees in the Winter and one hundred plus in the Summer. The Pineapple Express coupled with a cold front brings spectacular rain amounts. All these are variables with no pattern as to when they will occur. Just six hundred yeas ago Death Valley was underwater from the glacier melt. No SUVs were sighted at that time. Half Dome was carved by glaciers long before any people were around.