Why did the New York Times lose the argument on manmade global warming?
THE Climate Change war is over. The New York Times has closed its climate change desk and Green Blog. Why?
Kevin Drum wonders:
Obviously the Times editors are going to come in for plenty of criticism over this, and that’s fine. They deserve it. But let’s face it: the reason they did this is almost certainly that the blog wasn’t getting much traffic (and, therefore, not generating much advertising revenue). So a more constructive question is: Why do readers—even the well-educated, left-leaning readers of the Times—find environmental news so boring? Is it because we all write about it badly? Is it something inherent in the subject itself? Is it because most people think we don’t really have any big environmental problems anymore aside from climate change? Or is it because it’s just such a damn bummer to read endlessly about all the stuff we should stop doing because, somehow, it will end up destroying a rain forest somewhere?
Or maybe it’s because the science is not settled. In SEptember 2011, the NYT asked its readers:
88. Which statement comes closest to your view about global warming? 1. Global warming is caused mostly by human activity such as burning fossil fuels or 2. Global warming is caused mostly by natural patterns in the earth’s environment. or 3. Global warming does not exist.
Answer:
Or maybe, New Yorkers see too much lush greenery?
Common oaks get a boost in New York’s Central Park
City streets can be mean, but somewhere near Brooklyn, a tree grows far better than its country cousins, due to chronically elevated city heat levels, says a new study. The study, just published in the journal Tree Physiology, shows that common native red oak seedlings grow as much as eight times faster in New York’s Central Park than in more rural, cooler settings in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Red oaks and their close relatives dominate areas ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England, so the study may have implications for changing climate and forest composition over a wide region.
Maybe they just lost the argument..?
Posted: 7th, March 2013 | In: Global Warming Comments (10) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
March 30th, 2013 at 10:59 am
Why, oh why do people who believe in anthropogenic global warming ‘believe’?
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This is just classic: “The Met Office has admitted issuing advice to government that was “not helpful” during last year’s remarkable switch in weather patterns.
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Between March and April 2012, the UK experienced an extraordinary shift from high pressure and drought to low pressure and downpours.
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But the Met Office said the forecast for average rainfall “slightly” favoured drier than average conditions.
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It is sent to contingency planners but has been withheld from the public since the Met Office was pilloried for its “barbecue summer” forecast in 2009.
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Last spring’s forecast has been obtained by BBC News under Freedom of Information.
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The Met Office three-monthly outlook at the end of March stated: “The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June, and slightly favours April being the driest of the three months.”
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A soul-searching Met Office analysis later confessed: “Given that April was the wettest since detailed records began in 1910 and the April-May-June quarter was also the wettest, this advice was not helpful.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21967190
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The Met office has consistently proven a lack of ability to do long range climate forecasts. That doesn’t bother me, because the task is so complex and difficult I don’t expect them to be able to. What does bother me is that despite this, they give the public the impression they can.
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So given they can’t predict 3 months out, why do they issue, with the ring of absolute certainty, decade scale dire predictions for Global warming? The Met office Hadley research centre is one of the worst and most vocally hysteric promulgators of climate hysteria, when they really should keep quiet.
March 8th, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Bimmerman: You are confusing the quality of the messenger with that of the message, and appear to have failed to read the article. The data being commented on was that released by the MET office, one of the biggest proponents of AGW and authors of one of the most pessimistic and discredited climate models around. The data supported that of the graph I mentioned which was compiled from numerous data sets.
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As for your posts not showing up – that will happen anytime you quote more than one link per post – which is why I pruned the header from my second link.
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That forum isn’t my cup of tea, looks like an encampment of unwashed greenies. I prefer wattsupwiththat.
March 8th, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Thanks Dairy. It seems to take the comments in small pieces and very slowly, but not as a whole. Probably going to find the original comment arriving soon, making my postings look even more random and out of sequence. Slightly less paranoid now.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
erm… I can see 2 of your comments for a start…?
the server sometimes has a mind of its own and either doesn’t relay the comment or duplicates it – leave it a while and try again, you’re not the only one it has happened to…
March 8th, 2013 at 2:28 pm
I give up. This site won’t allow any of my comments. Is it because you can’t handle substantiated criticism, rather than unsubstantiated rumour that happens to agree with your political stance?
March 8th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
Quoting the Daily Fail won’t give you much credibility. If you want a proper discussion on the science of AGW, try the Badscience website (e.g. http://badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31318&sid=2f42848ea9666e8c4fc8ecdf6a6fa400 and http://badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32218&p=950052&hilit=global+warming#p950014), but don’t expect politeness if you haven’t got facts and figures to back up your stance.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:20 pm
The science is settled. From our own government advisers e.g. the Government Office for Science (http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience/world-is-warming and http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience/human-activities) and Defra (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climate/mitigating/), which makes you wonder how we still have a “climate change denialist” government – maybe they just don’t like to listen to their own advisers if it impacts on the commercial activities of their party sponsors. Maybe that’s why the NYT closed it’s climate change desk, Americans don’t like AGW so it can’t be happening, so no interest.
March 8th, 2013 at 2:19 pm
Why won’t my comments on this topic appear?
March 8th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
The science is settled. From our own government advisers e.g. the Government Office for Science (http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience/world-is-warming and http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience/human-activities) and Defra (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climate/mitigating/), which makes you wonder how we still have a “climate change denialist” government – maybe they just don’t like to listen to their own advisers if it impacts on the commercial activities of their party sponsors. Maybe that’s why the NYT closed it’s climate change desk, Americans don’t like AGW so it can’t be happening, so no interest.
There is no division among climate scientists, only porkies told to the media by lobbyists like Monkton and Lawson with no climate research credentials and a financial agenda to promote. If you’re going to spout unsupported rubbish, at least take the trouble to check your facts and figures from the original sources and not from agenda driven comics like the Daily Fail. If you really want a debate on the science of AGW you could start here: Bad Science web site (e.g. http://badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31318&sid=2f42848ea9666e8c4fc8ecdf6a6fa400 and http://badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32218&p=950052&hilit=global+warming#p950014), but don’t expect politeness if you haven’t got facts and figures to back up your stance.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:45 am
Maybe they closed the desk because someone looked at the actual figures and realised there hasn’t been any warming for the last 16 years so they risked the danger of looking like idiots?
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Anyone noticed a near complete dearth of histrionic reports in the media about figures showing or confirming unprecedented warming? Not ‘climate change’ – there plenty of those – but ‘warming’.
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Maybe that is because the (undoctored) figures don’t exist to show any warming since 1997.
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I came across this rather telling graph: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/offset-034.gif?w=640&h=480
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The rising wiggly blue line is the CO2 level, the near horizontal lines are the period for which a global temperature data set has shown a flat trend.
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Even the Met office admits it – very quietly:
“The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
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The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.” dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html