Gawd, I wish the media were as smart as they think they are.

Scott Brown, Republican candidate running to be a senator from New Hampshire, on Saturday participated in a debate during which he was asked if he believed:

“…the theory of man-made climate change has been scientifically proven”.

Now, first of all, nothing is science is “proven”. If you think it is, you don’t understand science.

Brown’s answer to the question was “no”. And that is correct. There is no way to prove that our addition of 1 molecule of CO2 to each 10,000 molecules of atmosphere over the last 100 years has had any measurable influence (there are no fingerprints of human-caused versus natural warming).

All the usual left-leaning news outlets have been having a cow over this supposed reversal of Brown’s position. The ThinkProgress site entitled their article, “Scott Brown Flips to Full-Blown Climate Denier“.

The “flip” is because Brown had previously (in 2012) said that climate change was “a combination between man-made and natural” in origin.

And that statement, too, is correct. As a climate researcher, I also believe it is some (unknown) combination. But there is no way to “prove” it.

I haven’t been following the race, and so have no opinions on the candidates. I’m just pointing out that Scott Brown’s position is entirely defensible, and the media conveniently hears what they want to hear.

If the media can’t ask a technical question correctly, they shouldn’t ask the question.

Or, don’t ask one question, then assume the resulting answer is to a different question.

O…M…G.

I suppose this was inevitable.

An adventurer who has rowed solo across oceans and jogged a total of 4 lightyears is going to bring attention to global warming (what’s that?) by living on a Greenland iceberg for up to a year starting next Spring.

As reported by TreeHugger.com, Alex Bellini, a “professional adventurer” from Italy, will chronicle the melting of the iceberg (which, of course, never happened in summer before humans began burning fossil fuels).

For those new to how high-quality science works, Mr. Bellini explains in his own words (emphasis mine):

“My objective is reporting and investigating, by means of scientific methods, the entire lifetime of an iceberg. I want to prove how the pace of ice-melting has dramatically accelerated over the last decades.”

How exactly he is going to do that by sitting on an iceberg as it melts in the summer, which is what icebergs do anyway, remains to be seen.

The sad part is the number of people who will fall for this. Probably including Mr. Bellini himself. Pure publicity stunt, no scientific value whatsoever.

I guarantee you if he does camp out on an iceberg, he will not stay there a year. Greenland winters are brutal.

That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after I noted the use of the “97% of scientists agree” meme as an example of “propaganda techniques” on Wikipedia, the example has disappeared.

But “Hope and Change” remains there as an example of Ad Nauseum propaganda. Time to scrub that one, too?

This ALS ice bucket challenge thing seems to be very successful in raising money for ALS research.

Or is it raising awareness? I�m not sure. Maybe both.

I think it�s now time to raise awareness of global warming. After all, if we didn�t tell people about it, they would never know, right? We would instead have to actually experience global warming ourselves, rather than measure alleged temperature changes of tenths of a degree over a period of 50 years.

So, you have two choices. Either (1) pour a bucket of ice water over your head, which will require the wasting of the extra energy needed to freeze the water thereby making global warming even worse, or (2) donate $100 to Greenpeace to help make sure millions of poor people can�t avoid blindness or death by having access to Golden Rice.

Oh, wait. Maybe that�s not such a good idea�

How about donate $100 to your favorite mainstream media outlet, since they are having so much trouble convincing the public that Al Gore was right about Manbearpig after all?

Or donate the $100 to Al Gore directly, since he is allegedly being cheated out of millions of dollars of Big Oil money from his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. Poor guy. 🙁

So, show everyone you care about global warming! Dump some ice water on your head!

(But don’t use any from the Arctic Ocean! There’s almost none left there anyway!)

Humanity is depending on you!

If 99 billion mouths agree, shouldn’t you?

I’ve blogged before on how global warming alarmists use all of the standard propaganda techniques to convince the not very super-sophisticated masses, and I listed Al Gore’s own statements as examples.

Well, it turns out the “97% of all scientists agree on global warming” meme is being used as an example on the Wikipedia Propaganda Techniques page:

“Bandwagon

Bandwagon and “inevitable-victory” appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that “everyone else is taking.”

Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action. (e.g., “The debate is over. 97% of scientist agree”)”

I wonder how long the example will stay there, without William Connolly to play gatekeeper. I also see “Hope and Change” is given as an example. Hmmm…sounds vaguely familiar.

Of course, Tom Steyer’s recent claim that 99.5% of the country is not “super sophisticated” when it comes to global warming beliefs is belied by the fact that research shows the more educated you are in math and science, the more likely you are to be a skeptic.

Being super sophisticated doesn’t mean being smart.

It’s still over a week away, but a tropical disturbance east of the Lesser Antilles is being forecast by the GFS model to grow into a hurricane, making landfall near New Orleans just 1 day before the 9th anniversary of Katrina’s landfall:

Nine day forecast of 850 mb circulation and temperature from the 12Z GFS model run on 19 August, 2014.

Needless to say, it IS hurricane season, so a Gulf of Mexico hurricane in late August (near the peak in the season) is not that unusual.

But note the 2014 season is supposed to be relatively inactive:

Of course, this far in advance, the hurricane (even if it forms) could make landfall anywhere along the Gulf coast. I just thought the timing and location, exactly 9 years after Katrina, was interesting.

This is SO cool.

FLIR Systems now has an iPhone add-on that turns your iPhone 5 or 5s into a thermal imager, for $349. (In contrast, my FLIR i7 imager was, as I recall, $2,000.)

FLIR One thermal imager back for the iPhone 5 or 5s.

Called the “FLIR One“, I think these are going to be pretty popular, and I’m sure the price will come down over time.

There are many uses (besides the gee whiz factor). You can see in the dark with it, see small animals in the woods, identify subtle temperature changes associated with water leaks, overloaded electrical wires, find insulation voids in your walls, air leaks around windows and doors, tell when your girlfriend or wife is really mad at you, and open up a whole new world of cat photography on Facebook.

Who knows? Maybe we will even have reports from all over the world documenting the existence of the atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Contrary to the TV series 24, though, you can’t see through solid surfaces like walls and roofs with it. You can’t even see through glass windows, which are also opaque in the infrared. But anything that subtly changes the temperature of the surface of a wall, like the presence of pipes or studs, can usually be seen.

I suspect that law enforcement and the bad guys will both be using it to gain an advantage. I won’t go into the ways in which that might happen.

The specifications for the FLIR One show pretty high sensitivity (0.18 deg. F), but a fairly restricted range of temperatures it will sense (32 to 212 deg. F). On the plus side, it also has a visible light camera and offers a visible/IR blending option for photos. It comes with its own battery, which is kept separate from the iPhone battery system.

Just to be clear…this is not an “App”…it can’t be done with just software. It has a microbolometer sensor array in it which receives infrared energy through a IR lens and measures the resulting tiny changes in temperature at each element in the array, then converts those changes to a pretty accurate estimate of temperature.

Since I recently switched from iPhone to Samsung, I’ll have to stick to my FLIR i7 imager for now. Oh well.

A recent polling of Americans on their attitudes about how much scientists know (or claim to know) about global warming, as well as what should be done about it, has led to very different treatments in the press, specifically in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which commissioned the poll.

The PG’s editorial take on the poll is that it shows that most Americans aren’t really that committed to the issue one way or the other. It suggests that the new poll questions were phrased in an unbiased manner (not assuming, for example, that global warming was a problem that needed to be dealt with), unlike previous polls claiming wide support for government action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

But the Post-Gazette also ran an op-ed by the pollster himself, who made it clear that Republicans are blind to established “facts” and only resist action on climate change because conservatives don’t like big government. The title of that op-ed made his views pretty clear: “Not a mystery why Republicans are blind (to) facts on climate change“.

The poll report itself is much less partisan in its comments — despite being authored by the same pollster!

The bipolar treatment by the newspaper makes the whole issue even more confusing for the reader.

But it is an interesting observation (which is widely recognized) that conservatives tend to disbelieve the supposed “scientific consensus” on global warming, and liberals tend to embrace it. The claims of ideological bias on the part of conservatives can cut both ways, of course. I can claim that liberals only believe the science because they are in favor of big government. So there.

The point I keep trying to emphasize is that not all science is created equal. Putting a man on the moon was immensely easier than understanding what factors cause the climate system to change, and especially by how much. We know the average energy flows reasonably well; but climate change involves less than 1% changes in energy flows, and we don’t understand the system that well.

When climate models can’t even hindcast global temperature changes in the last 30-40 years — where the answer is already known — how can we rely on them for forecasts?

It isn’t rocket science…it’s actually much more difficult than that.

There seems to be continuing confusion regarding how the deep ocean can warm without an observable temperature increase at the ocean surface.

I’m not talking about a change in the geothermal heat flux at the bottom of the ocean. And I’m not claiming Kevin Trenberth is right that this has actually happened in recent years. I’m just pointing out that it is theoretically possible.

The average state of the ocean, except at the highest latitudes, is warm water over cold water. So, there is normally a vertical temperature gradient, which is strongest in the tropics. I won’t go into the various processes which maintain this gradient, but if any one of those processes changes, the vertical temperature gradient can change.

For example, if there was an increase in vertical mixing alone in the ocean, the gradient would be reduced, with surface cooling and deep ocean warming.

Now, what if this increase in vertical mixing occurred at the same time as an additional surface heat source, such as IR warming due to increasing greenhouse gases? The result (conceivably) could be deep ocean warming with no surface warming, as shown in the following cartoon:

Deep ocean warming can seemingly bypass the surface if surface heating is combined with increased vertical mixing.

As I have posted previously, there was indeed a tiny (2%) increase in global average ocean surface winds after 1997-98 super El Nino, which seems to have recently gone away. Ocean mixing is a complicated subject, and I have no idea whether this small change in ocean winds, if real, is sufficient to cause the “Trenberth effect”.

The extra Joules didn’t actually bypass the surface layer…they were matched by a decrease in Joules extracted from the increased vertical mixing. Temperature change is the net result of a variety of energy gains and losses, and those energy fluxes can change with depth.

And for those wondering how IR heat flux, which only affects the skin of the ocean surface, can affect the deep ocean: the same is true of evaporation, which we know is a major component of the ocean’s energy budget.