Christian Strawman Monitor Jumps In The Dung Heap

In the post, climate change skeptic and blogger Steven Goddard states that Antarctic sea ice reached its highest level ever recorded for the 256th day of the calendar year on Sept. 12. He reasons that the Southern Hemisphere must be balancing the warming of the Northern Hemisphere by becoming colder (and thus, net global warming is zero).

While Arctic melts, Antarctic ice hits record. Is warming debunked? – CSMonitor.com

My post did not mention global warming or the net energy balance. They couldn’t find anything wrong with what I said, so they fabricated a straw man argument, attributed it to me,  and engaged in mental masturbation.

As far as the “warming has long been expected to hit the Arctic first” argument goes, once again it is a straw man argument to hide the fact that Antarctica is cooling and wrecking the critical polar amplification component of their failed theory. None of them expected Antarctic sea ice to hit a record high.

I did appreciate their Charmin ad though, because you need double ply to clean up the stink.

About Tony Heller

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31 Responses to Christian Strawman Monitor Jumps In The Dung Heap

  1. gator69 says:

    Didn’t you catch someone else posting the same argument? It was nearly word for word as I recall.

  2. Fred says:

    The lies from the media never cease. They must think we are insanely stupid to not notice that your post does not say what they claim it does. They even linked to your site! Fools.

    Keep up the good work.

  3. Andy says:

    Amazing how you blog post is circulating the net, there is a reference to it here to, on a UK motoring website via the Forbes article.

    http://pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=205&t=965368&mid=0&i=7060&nmt=Climate+change+%2D+the+POLITICAL+debate%2E&mid=0

    “foreverdriving
    1,797 posts
    111 months
    [report] [news] Yesterday (07:08)
    Just as the Arctic sea ice minimum is reached, the Antarctic gets ‘Highest volume of ice since records began’.
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19

    Though the writer here seems to be making up his own quotes as he refers to volume when nobody else did. It’s like Chinese whispers….

    The interesting thing is that although your post is going viral around the web and people are arguing against it, nobody arguing against it seems to notice one small fact. There is no greatest amount of ice down there as you claimed, the area is not the largest! People don’t check facts and then complain about the wrong thing about what you have written.

    And look, the Antarctic is losing 7 billion areas of New York per day since then

    http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html

    Instead of complaining about people misquoting you why not write off to them and say your entire headline was false anyway? Go on, tell that fat white overpaid git at Forbes he knows shitz and should leave it to the scientists and instead look at his share portfolio 🙂

    Andy

  4. Andy says:

    My posts are disappearing at a rate of 2.12 Manhattans per millidecade.

    Andy

    • Otter says:

      We’ll be pleased to see you vanish from the face of the Earth, also.
      And NO. Only a complete moron would see that as a threat…. oh. Too late.

  5. Scott says:

    Did Kevin O’Neill or David Appell write the article (I didn’t look it at)? They’ve always been great at modifying what I’ve said to turn it into a straw man and knock it down. Kevin is especially bad at it. When I pointed out that he was arguing against something I never said, he accused me of trying to score “debate points” and of using “weasel words”. By the end, I wasn’t sure if he was even a native English speaker because he was twisting/modifying my comments to such a degree.

    -Scott

  6. Eric Barnes says:

    The alarmist playbook keeps getting smaller and smaller. Only the truly daft can not see through the charade.

  7. Andy DC says:

    The alarmists are lousy scientists and even worse debaters. Ten years ago, none of them were saying that the Arctic would warm faster than the Antarctic. Alarmists are always having to revise their fairy tales to keep up with reality. Whatever happens (even if it is severe cold) after the fact it is always consistent with a warming planet.

  8. kirkmyers says:

    We’re seeing the desperation of the alarmists morph into a nasty smear campaign aimed at anyone who doesn’t genuflect before the Great God of Global Warming. We’re not dealing with critical thinkers. The fallacious “argument from authority” is the tenuous thread they cling to as they dream of a global meltdown that will never happen.

    President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, described today’s self-anointed AGW prophesiers. His words, unlike the silliness we’re subjected to by the warmist crowd, were quite prophetic:

    Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

    The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

    Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

  9. kirkmyers says:

    Those CO2 molecules down in the Antarctic aren’t co-operating with the global meltdown scare. Obviously, they’re not exhibiting any symptoms of being bi-polar, an affliction that seems to manifest itself routinely among certain scientists living comfortably off of taxpayers’ largess.

    • squid2112 says:

      Kirk, it won’t be long and the fear-mongers will be telling us that CO2 is NOT a well mixed gas after all, and that there is less of it in Antarctica than the Arctic and that is why the North pole is hotter than the South. … just wait for it …

  10. A couple of comments here… Don’t agree that Steve should have argued for the existence of a compensating mechanism whereby as the Arctic looses sea ice, Antarctica gains. There is something of a mild correlation here, but correlation is not causation. Steve’s critics will then (and have) pointed out that his claim for mechanism has no basis in ‘scientific fact’ which leaves him open to attack. Anyway, I made this point to Steve as soon as he originally made it…

    My second observation; note the ‘careful’ wording in this quote from Serreze:

    “Antarctic sea ice hasn’t seen these big reductions we’ve seen in the Arctic. This is not a surprise to us,” said climate scientist Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC. “Some of the skeptics say ‘Well, everything is OK because the big changes in the Arctic are essentially balanced by what’s happening in the Antarctic.’ This is simply not true.”

    Now either Serreze has been disingenuous or has been quoted out of context. Here are the errors:

    * The statement “Antarctic sea ice hasn’t seen these big reductions we’ve seen in the Arctic” is correct as far as it goes only if you cite some climate models and not others.

    * Certain models in the past have expected greater sea ice loss in the Antarctic, or relatively equal amounts of sea ice loss, and for *those* models, the opposite has happened.

    * For more current IPCC models, the average of the model runs show Antarctic loosing sea ice (but at a slower rate). Again, this hasn’t happened. The opposite has happened.

    See: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JD017765.shtml

    * Blaming the discrepancy on atmospheric circulation, ozone hole, etc., may or may not be correct. However, these are ‘ad hoc’ speculations at best used to try to explain the significant discrepancy. These are not claims that “every scientist knows”.

    * Just to clarify the above points a careful read of IPCC AR4 is worthwhile. In particular:

    http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-2-4.html

    One of the papers this section cites points out:

    “The climate change projections over the 21st century reveal that the annual mean sea ice extent decreases at similar rates in both hemispheres…”

    So a lot of BS is flying around at the moment, and it’s not coming all from sceptics.

  11. RobertvdL says:

    9/20/12 Subcommittee on Energy and Power Hearing

    http://youtu.be/w1V3QuvbuE0

    • Unfortunately this video is a good illustration of one side presenting facts, and the other side presenting speculative hope. The problem apparent here, is that the side presenting the speculative hope actually have the regulatory power.

  12. To those who are wondering how academic “experts” like Kevin Trenberth or James Hansen can be such poor debaters, or even illogical, it is because they live in a protected environment. When I lost my Research Associate position at CIRA in Fort Collins 18 years ago, it was because I found answers about remote aerosols my boss didn’t want to acknowledge (he was following the path laid out for him by his superiors, in, or intimately connected with, the EPA), so their excuse for terminating me was “cuts in funding”. It was garbage — they were hiring two others under the same funding, as they were getting rid of me — but they didn’t need a GOOD reason, and wouldn’t acknowledge that my boss was simply flexing his muscles, as he warned me HE would determine what was published out of his group, and I was informed my position was being terminated as soon as I formally submitted my papers to a peer-reviewed journal. It took two years, but I got my papers published in that journal (Atmospheric Environment Vol. 30-1, Jan 1996), probably because there were enough honest scientists who disagreed with my boss for their own reasons to keep the process honest in the end, after two whole years…and my boss got a paper published in the very next issue of the journal, no doubt “answering” me (I had already moved on and could care less about reading it), as his submissions went through in a month or two, routinely. My point is, as a research associate I had no protection, no job security, and could be terminated for no reason whatsoever. And they have no more respect for mere laymen than they do for their research associates and other “assistants”. They are the lords of their field, and peer reviewed publication is just a feudal right, in their minds and in practice, between only them and other lords, known as the Principal Investigators. It will take a mass demand to end the fraud, among the lay public, to bring them to heel. the whole academic system — the process by which a scientist “earns his stripes” with a Ph.D., and earns political cover through obtaining tenure — is thoroughly corrupt, and infested with increasingly top-heavy political power substituted for competent science. And I am no expert, I just know what I went through, and saw how the process worked over and over again. (For example, I wasn’t even allowed to talk with the Ombudsman for Colorado State University — the “mediator” simply called me up and informed me HE would “handle it”, and that was that, forget about getting to the Ombudsman with a formal complaint. Well, you can see I could go on and on. You have to humiliate them with political power applied on your behalf by a powerful constituency — either one or a few “friends” among the powerful, or a focussed, and sustained, public outcry. I never developed the survival mechanism of cosying up to power — I am just not a joiner, as anything you can join is rife with unquestioned and unsupported dogma, my enemy.

    • Eric Barnes says:

      Sorry to hear that Harry. Glad to hear you made the correct choice and didn’t go down the road of compromise and toadyism that defines climate science research.
      IMO, the top people in NASA and NOAA need to be removed. Nothing of value has come from the billions poured into climate models. Time to clean house and change direction. New blood and new ideas will at least bring new possibilities.

      Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

    • Regrettably scientific endeavours aren’t immune to self interest, pettiness, power plays or the stupidities of bureaucracies. You can take the above story and apply it to a dozen other research fields…

    • Me says:

      I hear ya Harry, they don’t want any dissentionin the clic.

  13. So nice of the to inform their readers of the web site.

  14. Chewage says:

    I just love objective journalism:)
    Those super hi IQ’s never cease to amaze me!

  15. joe from Australia says:

    Nothing to do with Antarctic but storms love eating up ice!

    http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=152489941

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