You don’t see anything to correct in any of these?

1) Headline: “Antarctica is Cold? Yeah, We Knew That”

2) Paragraph 1: “…we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.”

3) Final paragraph: “Bottom line: A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming. For a long time the models have predicted just that.”

I’m pretty sure Spencer Weart wrote the post to attempt to portray “skeptics” as fools, to Real Climate’s readers. (Talk about preaching to the choir!) (And the religious reference isn’t unintentional.)

I don’t think it’s credible to claim that Weart’s conflation of “cold” with “cooling” was accidental. I’m pretty sure he wrote the post as he did (frequently substituting “cold” for “cooling”) so that his readers would think that “skeptics” thought that, if global warming was actually happening, that Antarctica should not be cold.

I think my position is very solidly supported by the fact that Real Climate not only refused to post my comments pointing out that Weart conflated “cold,” with “cooling,” but they also never bothered to change the wording after getting my comment.*

*P.S. This reminds me of an similar amusing (if dishonesty is amusing)situation at Scientific American (or “Scientific” American). David Biello claimed that an operating nuclear reactor control room was over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When several commenters and I pointed out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would never allow such an event, and that it was actually the containment building (not “room”!) that got to that temperature, Biello repeatedly claimed that he was right…that it was indeed the control room.

Finally, I grew so exasperated that I offered offered him and everyone else at Scientific American a fabulous free money offer. I offered them $120 if they could point to a credible news source (not including Scientific American, obviously) that said the control room got to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

http://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2006/08/responses_to_da.html

So what did he (or they) do? He (or they) CHANGED the wording of the original post to “containment”…but didn’t acknowledge at all that it had ever been anything different!

Since Spencer Weart and Real Climate never even bothered to change the “cold” to “cooling”–let alone print my comments–I conclude that they don’t even have the integrity and commitment to the truth of “Scientific” American.

“Regarding the press releases — they were a lot worse as originally written. You’d be surprised how little control an author has over his own press releases — it is the University, Nature, NASA that put these out.”

When did PR become a part of science?

The specific comments from Mann I was referring are ones like these, which I think can’t be blamed on the press release process:

” Outside of these impacts, the study also take away “one of the standard talking points of [global warming] contrarians,” Mann said. The argument used by skeptics was “how can the globe be warming if a whole continent is cooling,” Mann explained.

Mann said that this argument was “disingenuous” to begin with because the cooling caused by ozone depletion was reproduced by climate models, but the new study soundly routs contrarian claims, he said. ”
http://www.usnews.com/mobile/articles_mobile/antarctica-is-warming-climate-picture-clears-up/index.html

Surely you recognize that this sort of triumphal chest thumping is going to get some animated responses, especially from anonymous commenters in the blogosphere.

More importantly, if you thought that Weart’s comments might get misused, then you must have read them as being imprecise (at best) or misleading (at worst). Maybe you didn’t think it mattered much at the time. Fair enough. However, I have re-read the Weart post several times, and I still see it as saying that the skeptics are wrong because Antarctica is behaving exacting as projected by the models. I am pretty sure that he did not write that post to explain to your readers that Antarctica is a cold place.

Since you are familiar with my work, you know that I have been focused on predictions, models and their evaluation for more than 15 years, and I have focused a great deal on public claims made by climate scientists about the consistency of observations and model predictions. In this context, if you think that my juxtapositioning of Weart’s comments with those by Shindell and Mann is a mistake, then you can certainly have a forum here to say so.

Like you, I think that there is a lot of value in hearing from climate scientists what observable phenomena over a period of, say, a decade would be inconsistent with model predictions. I’ve yet to hear an intelligent answer to this question. So I’ll keep pursuing it.

Stay warm, I hear Antarctica is cold!!

You know I often agree with you on your general take on how one reports science.
That’s why I continue to engage with you — in spite of what I increasingly see as your extremely misleading ways of representing things. Regarding the press releases — they were a lot worse as originally written. You’d be surprised how little control an author has over his own press releases — it is the University, Nature, NASA that put these out. It was very hard to get rid of the “cooling vs. warming” meme.

As for my correcting the not-precise-enough language in Weart’s post, let me reiterate: I didn’t see anything to correct. I cringed because I thought it might get misused by people like you. I just didn’t anticipate how much it would get misused. That’s my point. Don’t blame RC for your mis-use of what we write. You ought to know things are more complex, yet you paint them as simple to try to score points. You’re very good at that. But scoring points isn’t how one makes progress.

Spencer Weart’s article gave people the impression that Antarctica was getting colder, and that the models had predicted this for decades. The defense of Weart’s article on another thread was that he never actually said Antarctica was getting colder. Similar defenses are appearing at RC, and Weart posted something at CA.

The difficulty is that Weart’s article was structured in a way that was “accurate but not true”.

This sort of thing is done in politics all the time. An incident involving John Edwards discussed by Deborah Howell Washington Post.

From what I see from time to time, RC uses the “Accurate but not true” tactic to create a false impression about consistency between models and data. The problem is not Eric or his current findings. The problem is the “accurate but not true” Weart article.

My view is that when the author of a paper loudly calls out the “skeptics” via press release and through the media (as Michael Mann did) upon a paper’s publication, you are going to get exactly the sort of reaction that your paper has. What else did you expect?

As far as the “consistent with” chronicles, maybe next time instead of silently cringing when you read something on your own blog that is imprecise or incorrect, you’ll simply correct it and move on. The Climate Science Infallibility complex is something that this community could certainly do without.

Anyway, thanks for participating in the discussion, and I wish you a safe and productive trip!

Look at Figure 3.7, bottom panel, of the 2007 IPCC report, here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/graphics/ar4-wg1/jpg/fig-3-7.jpg

It obviously shows warming on average over Antarctic since the late 1950s. There is a relatively flat trend (not cooling) since the 1970s. This flattening is thought to be due to ozone depletion. The only difference between my paper and IPCC figure is that the IPCC summary figure includes no data from West Antarctica. What we show is that when you include West Antarctica, the flattening-out largely disappears in the continent-wide average.

Even in our results — which show more average warming than the IPCC summary does — the average trend is much less than seen in the Arctic. That is what models have always shown should happen (less warming in the Antarctic than in the Arctic).

There’s more to it of course, and if our attempts at RealClimate, to explain the more subtle aspects of this have failed, due to inadequate precision of writing, I’m sorry. Perhaps you should turn to the primary literature instead.

I’m off to Antarctica next week, so further discussion of this with me — if anyone is actually interested in a constructive conversation — will have to wait until Spring.

Eric Steig

“in accordance with”, “in agreement with”, “consistent with”, “in assent with”, “in congruence with”, “in harmony with”, “in concert with”, “in sympathy with”, “in conformity with”.

Obviously the same phraseology could be used for any other mechanism that causes warming of the atmosphere. It is not exclusively proving a man-made cause.