Yesterday I reported that the newest bogus climate denial meme rocketing around the Foxis of Evil had been disavowed by Geochemist Zunli Lu. At first all I had was a short message indicating that the Daily Mail Newspaper, and reporter Ted Thornhill had deliberately decided to publish a piece that Dr. Lu told them contained the wrong ‘angle”.
Now we have Dr. Lu’s more complete statement.
Recently published climate research by Zunli Lu, a geochemist in the Department of Earth Sciences in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has gone viral across the Internet by bloggers. A number of media outlets, including theDaily Mail and The Register, which are published in the United Kingdom, claim this research supports arguments that human-induced global warming is a myth. The claims, Lu says, misrepresent his work and the conclusions in the study. The statement below is an effort to set the record straight. The original news story about the research is posted on Arts and Sciences News.
Zunli Lu:
“It is unfortunate that my research, “An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula,” recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2
emissions. We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study “throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming,” completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.”
Fake Science, Deliberate Distortions for Tea Party Yokels
In one of the clearest demonstrations in memory of the gullible and credulous nature of the the pathetic yokels that frequent such sites as Wattsupwiththat and Climatedepot, this obviously distorted meme was picked up and broadcast uncritically (remarkable, considering the source) around the world.
For more contextual information, see my post of yesterday.
If you are going to write about fiendishly difficult and involved matters of science and technology, it is not necessary to be an actual scientist, although that helps. What IS necessary is to scrupulously refer back to real science, real scientists, and primary sources. I’ve built the reputation of this blog and this video series on that premise, and that is my commitment to my readers.
Climate Crocks eviscerated a similarly bogus meme some time ago in a video entitled “Birth of a Climate Crock”. Watch that and compare to see how the technique works, and who the players are.
The Daily Mail is nicknamed the The Daily Wail in the UK. It’s the reading material of choice for retired ex-patriots and others who long for the good old days of the empire. When the only immigrants you saw were the ones checking your ticket on public transport or cleaning public buildings.
It regularly bashes immigrants, gypsies and the poor.
There is a good website with a forum called “Mailwatch” that dispels a great deal of the nonsense published in this rag.
My own favourite thread there is “the sad faces of wronged Mail readers.” Some story about a wronged consumer with a picture of said sad faced “victim”
Enjoy;
http://mailwatch.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3345
http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/
It’s got to be frustrating for climate scientists that they just can’t publish research these days without some climate denialist misrepresenting their findings to further their own agenda, whether it be the Daily Mail or Chris Monckton or Pat Michaels or any number of other individuals who specialize in distorting reality.
Glad to see Lu being proactive in debunking this particular myth though.
I just finished reading Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption. He’s confident that within the next five years everyone will finally wake up and get it and then be more than willing to go into high gear on reducing emissions to zero.
This incident confirms my belief that aggressive stupidity will unfortunately prevail. Soon it just won’t matter why the planet heated, it will just be how – how do we adapt.
Was it 5 years? I thought Gilding had said that it would take some catastrophe in order for aggressive action would take place. I may have to skim that part again.
In any case, I agree with the likes of Trenberth and your statement that adaptation and mitigation will be necessary at this point in the game.
Can’t be sure, now that the book has been passed on, but I’m not even optimistic that a catastrophe will do it. Gilding points to a food price spike and oil hoarding by China as two causes of the 2008 meltdown. That didn’t do it. Fukushima didn’t do it. A drought in the Southwest US didn’t do it. What do people need, Manhattan under three feet of water?
Doesn’t matter – what worries me is that instead of peak oil making fossil fuels too expensive, they seem to be keeping prices down where people will tolerate them while pursuing environmentally disastrous projects to get the hard-to-produce fuels. The peak oil people didn’t predict that. And all these natural gas fracking troubles have made me question carbon capture and sequestration, which Gilding relies on to lower the CO2 ppm.
Peter,
I like the piece, but am not sure about the ad hominem – “yokels” may well be an accurate description of deniers and right-wingnuts who question the validity of the science, but in any debate, personal attacks seem to only ever be used by weak or lazy minds and most often in defence of a flimsy argument or as a means of preserving misplaced pride – reasonable people would happily admit fault were sufficient evidence presented. Both the case for anthropogenic climate change and your esteemed self are too good to descend to the level of those who don’t know any better.
Have you been over there?
As of now the Mail story remains in its original form.
The difference between Watts and myself is that I would be mortified to have printed something objectively false.
For him, its a business model.
His site is Bonarroo for Boneheads –
“Yokel” is actually an honorific far too extravagant for these people, but I’m in a generous mood.
When the Daily Mail was a warmist rag a few years ago they went as far as to publish a completely invented story about drowning polar bears.
http://omnologos.com/polar-bears-has-the-daily-mail-just-pulled-a-deceiving-article/
Not sure how many of you youngsters were around 3.5 years ago to protest against such a blatant manipulation of truth.
Btw…considering the last sentence in the Abstract this seems a case of split personality for Dr Lu.
He should never write what he doesn’t want to mean.
you should tell him that you understand his paper better than he does.
Lots of interesting points here. Dana mentions the effect on publishing scientists. It should be perfectly possible for someone to publish preliminary research using novel methods that may not get fully honed and corrected for 5 years or more.
But we live in a world where any climate scientist doing this – if of course their work has any tiny squeek that can be loudhailered through the denial swarm into “global warming’s not happening / is in doubt” – can almost guarantee their work will be massively, virally misrepresented by people who will NEVER admit error. They will – as Peter points out – tell the author they’re wrong about their own work before they ever admit error. Note e.g. MikeR doing this at planet3 for Nordhaus.
How can this not stifle open research? That’s awful and dangerous. I’m just putting in a grant for a speculative method to do with modelling trade flows – no massive political lobby is likely to attack it, so I’m safe. If we get the grant, the whole thing is about trying to understand and model the uncertainties. It’s a first stab and will get a lot wrong. If I thought any results would ever be virally misinterpreted, I’m not sure what approach I’d take. I suppose it’s possible to marinade any results in caveats, but since when did caveats ever stop cherrypicking?
Maurizio, your point is what? Pointing out the Daily Mail is wrong now is invalid because people might not have pointed out they were wrong in the past? Or is it that doing so is hypocritical because the same people probably didn’t point out previous errors that fit their own biases?
Does that mean you’re only allowed to point out what you perceive as ‘warmist’ errors as long as you’ve made sure you’ve scrupulously checked for errors on the other side? Are you keeping a tally? How do we check? Tell you what: keep a record of each time you attempt to correct a ‘denier’ error and I’ll give you a ticket to come back here and make a point about warmists.
Apols for the snark but sometimes it’s the best way to make a point. Seriously: papers like the Daily Mail, and the denier swarm generally, are built to never admit error. Indeed, they rely on it. It doesn’t matter who points out the error, it matters that they will properly respond when those errors are found. As long as watchful people from all viewpoints are able to pick them up on those errors, and they turn out to be genuinely wrong, they should be publicly corrected and the offended parties apologised to. Perhaps you’d like to write to the Mail to ask them if they’re going to correct this one?