What I’m Reading, Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Climate & Climate Politics

• Climate Change And Blizzards May Be Connected, Global Warming Studies Demonstrate
• Researchers link global warming to extreme snowstorms | kare11.com
• Brian Angliss writing onClimate Progress takes a look at JamesJames Taylor who nothing more than a professional propagandist latest pile of distortion and disinformation: Heartland’s James Taylor Falsely Claims New Study Rejects Climate Consensus | ThinkProgress (While I’ve always been following his antics I  haven’t written anything about Talylor in depth since Taking a look at another piece of trash from the Global Warming Denial Bag of Tricks: Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny by James M. Taylor  back in 2007!)
  

  James Taylor, managing editor of The Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, recently wrote a Forbes blog post about a new study of professional engineers and geoscientists involved in Alberta, Canada’s petroleum industry. According to the authors of the study, however, Taylor got most of the details in his post wrong, and Taylor has not corrected or retracted the blog post even though his errors have been pointed out to him. Furthermore, Taylor republished his deceptive and dishonest post at The Heartland Institute this morning, three days after the study’s authors corrected Taylor. Taylor has a made a habit of distorting scientific studies in the past –- his new blog post is no different.

  Taylor claims in his post that a study of over a thousand professional geoscientists and engineers in Alberta is somehow representative of all scientists in the world. But the authors of the study, Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer, wrote in a response at Forbes (full comment reproduced below) that

  First and foremost, our study is not a representative survey. Although our data set is large and diverse enough for our research questions, it cannot be used for generalizations such as “respondents believe …” or “scientists don’t believe …” (emphasis added)

  Taylor’s post is based almost entirely on the incorrect claim that the study’s results are representative…

  …Furthermore, Taylor fails to mention fact that 84% of respondents were actually engineers, not scientists. Yet Taylor incorrectly claims in the title itself that the survey applies to the “majority of scientists.”…

  …Taylor generalizes “geoscientists and engineers” to just “scientists” 19 times….

  …
  

  0.17% of climate papers since1991 reject the reality of industrial climate disruption.

  The reality is that, contrary to claims made by Taylor and others at Heartland, every serious attempt to measure the degree of consensus among scientistsand climate experts has concluded that the overwhelming majority of experts agree that climate is changing rapidly, that humans are the dominant drivers of the changes, and that model projections indicate that the changes will be highly disruptive if they’re not planned for. And every attempt to disprove the reported consensus has been disprovedor shown to be based on distortions. Just like this attempt by Taylor has been….

  (read the complete article….)

  I spotted this same deception and distortion about the Lianne Lefsrud and Renate Meyer study the other day in my What I’m Reading, Saturday, February 16, 2013 post when I posted: ….And the Investors Business Daily continues it editorial attack on climate change science…

  • Global Warming Consensus Of Scientists Looking More Like A Myth – Investors.com
  • The abstract to the paper that IBD refers to in their article…Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change
• Climate Movement Overlooks People Who Live Near Tar Sands Refineries | NationofChange
• Welcome to the Politics of Climate Change: Adapt and Avert – The Daily Beast

Environment

• Environmental Economics: Can we blame this on ethanol too?

Behavioral Science

• Reconstructing the Past: How Recalling Memories Alters Them — PsyBlog