AGW -- Ironic

So I’m poking around the ‘net yesterday and followed up on a link to a blogger named Chris Mooney who blogs for Discover. He’s written several books and there is a link to his bio on his page. He’s a science journalist but given his apparent lack of actual science credentials, my guess is he’s just a science parrot, capable of repeating back what he’s told, but not likely to understand it anymore than a parrot would. One thing for sure, he is a liberal.

Anyway, the column of his I read is this one:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/12/07/the-right-wins-the-frame-game-in-climategate/comment-page-1/

Many people weighed in with comments below the blog post, and unlike at many of the liberal climate blogs, the negative comments weren’t deleted. (Unless the comments are grossly offensive or obscene or actionable, the climate skeptic blogs do not delete negative comments at all.) Someone tagged as MartinM weighed in on a number of the skeptical comments, opposing them, he also by parroting of the party line.

One skeptical poster said this: “Most of these people can not predict the weather for next week never mind what the earth will be like in 50 years.”

MartinM came back with: “So you don’t know the difference between weather and climate. Congratulations, you’re officially too ignorant to hold an opinion on this subject.”

Here’s the irony:

Let us return to the esteemed Dr. Kevin Trenberth, who figures so prominently in the Climategate e-mails. Here is what he said in the “travesty” e-mail to Michael “hockey stick” Mann:

From: Kevin Trenberth trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
To: Michael Mann mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

To me it looks like Dr. Trenberth is confusing weather with climate. That must mean he’s too ignorant to hold an opinion on this subject, right?
***
Climategate brought out of the woodwork a great many AGW true-believers whose understanding of science is a mile wide and a millimeter deep. They look for reasons to be dismissive of skeptics because they can’t address the actual arguments. Personally, I rather like what I’ve seen of Trenberth in the e-mails—he at least realizes that his climate community has a woefully inadequate understanding of the underlying physics behind climate behavior. Did you notice where he said that the bad weather “smashed the previous records for these days by 10F”? What Trenberth understands and what MartinM does not is that, even though it is true that weather is not climate, and that an ordinary “new record low for the date” says little about climate, that word “ordinary” carries a lot of weight.

Let me bring it home. Suppose on some day in May here in Grand Rapids the record high temperature for the date is 95F. But then when the record is next broken, it isn’t that it got up to 96 or 97, but shot up to 105. That would be way above the “typical” increase in a new high temperature reading. It would be a shock, and just the sort of thing that Warmists would insist meant the climate was changing and the world was heating up, and I wouldn’t blame them.

Trenberth knows that 10F below the previous record for the date is just as shocking, and even if not a fatal blow to the AGW theory (which it isn’t), it is a wound in need of explanation.

And he doesn’t have one.