The next time some creationist starts talking smack about evolution being impossible and that humans aren’t animals and they’re not descended from apes, show them this picture:

I was browsing uploaded pictures in the 500px app and this came up; I added the white box and fuzzed out the other thumbnails. Sometimes, coincidence is pretty funny.

I am not exactly a fan of those companies that claim to sell stars. Given that the biggest, the International Star Registry, was issued a violation by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs for using deceptive practices^*, you might just be able to figure out why. They mislead people into thinking they were actually buying official star names, when the truth is those folks were really just throwing money down the drain. You’d be better off printing your own certificate and donating the money to a local planetarium.

Sometimes, though, debunking is better done through satirical mockery, and that’s why I’m happy comedian Brandon Muller told me about a video he made: The International Hollywood Star Registry. It’s really funny!

Ha! And if you look closely, and read Ms. Wilkerson’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll see a familiar name…

[You might do better to watch the video in HD and pause the video at this point.]

If you want to read more about the ISR’s shenanigans, you can look at their (legit) Wikipedia entry, or an article I wrote for CSICOP tearing them apart, or the chapter in my book Bad Astronomy doing the same.

^* I originally wrote that ISR was "convicted of ten counts of misleading advertising" but in fact it was issued a violation for deceptive practices.

The Heartland Institute — a self-described “think tank” that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle “Heartland Insider” has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more.

[UPDATE: Heartland has confirmed that some of the documents are real, but claims the strategy document, which I quote below about teaching strategy, is faked. This claim has not yet been confirmed or refuted. DeSmogBlog has more info.]

These documents are available over at DeSmogBlog. Several people are going over them, and so far they appear legit. You can read some relevant discussions at DeSmogBlog, Deep Climate, Planet 3, Greg Laden, ClimateCrocks, Shawn Otto, and Think Progress. John Mashey at DeSmogBlog has more info that also corroborates the leaked documents, and to call it blistering is to severely underestimate it.

One thing I want to point out right away which is very illuminating, if highly disturbing, about what Heartland allegedly wants to do: they are considering developing a curriculum for teachers to use in the classroom to sow confusion about climate change. I know, it sounds like I’m making that up, but I’m not. In this document they say:

[Dr. Wojick's] effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

That seems clear enough, doesn’t it? From that, it sure sounds like they want to dissuade teachers from teaching science. I imagine there will be a lot of spin about how this quote is out of context, or a typo, or something alone those lines. Perhaps. But I remember all the hammering real scientists took when they used jargon in their emails to each other, jargon which was gleefully misinterpreted to make it seem as if these scientists were faking data. Interesting how this is pointing right back at them. Just as I said it does.

When it comes to all this, the comparison to “Climategate” springs to mind, but there’s one enormous difference: Climategate was manufactured, a made-up controversy (what I call a manufactroversy) that had no real teeth — as was its failed sequel. The emails released weren’t damning at all, and didn’t show scientists tinkering with or faking data. As much as the media made of it, as much as climate change denial blogs played them up, it has been shown again and again that Climategate was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

These new documents, though, look different, especially given that quote above. The next few days should be very interesting as people start digging into them, especially if they prove to be authentic.

And how ironic! It was the Heartland Institute themselves who played up Climategate quite a bit. Back in 2009 when they were trumpeting Climategate, Heartland said:

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly.

That claim from them is nonsense, but it will be interesting to see how happy they are when the tables are turned, and “reporters, academics, politicians, and others” look into their documents. And around that same time they also said:

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws.

Again, none of that is true. But that claim about freezing out others sticks out, especially in light of another of these leaked Heartland internal memos which says,

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

Emphasis mine. Yes, that sounds like a group interested in promoting “sound science”.

Wow. Just, wow.

Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing.

But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it’s a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection.

Stick around for all of this. It’ll be… interesting.

Our story so far

OK, first, here’s the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK’s Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science, and another I myself wrote. Finding actual scientists destroying that claim is not hard at all; those two links have many more links therein.

In my post about the WSJ and DM, I included a graph. It pretty clearly shows temperatures rising from 1973 to the present. And this is where the fun begins.

That’s the plot. It’s from a recent, independent study done at Berkeley, and represents actual, measured, data. Just to be clear, those points are from weather stations across the globe, and the method used to collect and analyze those measurements is described by the Berkeley team themselves (PDF). With me so far?

Apparently, William Briggs is not with me. He takes very vigorous exception to the graph in an article he wrote which he titled "Bad Astronomer Does Bad Statistics: That Wall Street Journal Editorial." I encourage you to read it, so that you can assure yourself I am not misrepresenting his arguments in any way.

I found out about this article when I saw a tweet by Dr. Briggs himself. My first thought was: Uh oh. I sure hope I didn’t make a math mistake somewhere in my WSJ post! I better read Briggs’ article and see… So I read it.

My next thought after reading his arguments was then: Ho-hum. So?

The mismeasure of an argument

Basically, Briggs accuses me of not understanding statistics, of not including error bars, of misrepresenting that points in that plot, of not displaying the plot correctly, and so on ad nauseum. His biggest claim: that those points aren’t measurements at all, but estimates.

Here’s the thing: he’s wrong. Those point are in fact measurements, though they are not raw measurements right off the thermometers. They have been processed, averaged, in a scientifically rigorous way to make sure that the statistics derived from them are in fact solid. The Berkeley team describes in detail how that was done (PDF), and does actually call them estimates, but not because they are just guessing, or using some arcane computer model. They are technically estimates, in the sense that any measurement is an estimate, but they are really, really good ones. Greg Laden tears this use of words apart, as well as pretty much everything else Briggs wrote.

Oddly, Briggs then goes on to call them "predictions" for some reason, and that they came from "models", which is just weird. It’s as if he’s trying to use a word choice that raises doubt about the measurements. But again he’s wrong. They really are measurements, not model predictions. At Open Mind, Brigg’s word choice once again is ripped apart. [Note: Briggs has left a comment there, further verifying the fact that his use of words is incorrect.]

This reminds me of one of my favorite skeptic jokes. Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?

Answer: Four. It doesn’t matter what you call a tail, it’s not a leg.

There are many other places where Briggs makes mistakes that render his arguments null; for example, the error bars (what statisticians usually call "uncertainty") are in fact made available by the Berkeley team, and are small compared to the long-term rise in temperature. For another, Briggs says I should’ve shown the plot going farther into the past, because 1973 was actually a low point. However, that’s completely wrong: it’s actually a high point! As Deep Climate points out here, this actually makes the warming trend lower. So in true contrarian fashion, Briggs is contrary even to himself. It’s bizarre.

So really, there goes Briggs’ argument. His main point is wrong, so we’re done, right?

Well, no. There’s more fun to be had here.

Beside the point

If you read Briggs’ article, you certainly get the impression that because the graph I use is statistically meaningless (so he incorrectly claims), then my whole argument about global warming is wrong.

And this is where I found myself greatly amused, though in a schadenfreude sort of way.

Think of it this way: if my argument hinged on that graph, and I removed it, my argument would have no foundation, correct? It would change the tenor of the entire blog post.

Go look at my article. If you remove that graph from it, what changes? Nothing. My main point — that the WSJ and DM articles are wrong, that we have lots of evidence the Earth is warming up, that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred since the year 2000, that the DM article specifically uses scientific studies and presents them as if they say the exact opposite of what they actually say — still stands.

So even if that graph is wrong and misrepresents what I’m saying — which it does not — it doesn’t matter. In fact, I used that graph as an illustration, to show how we’re warming up. I never intended it to be the basis for the argument I was making, just a way of further showing it. If you read the actual words I wrote, including the links to many, many articles backing up my position, you’ll see that Briggs has not refuted a single actual point I made.

So even if he’s right about that graph, it doesn’t matter. And he’s not right.

But notice what he’s done. He’s taken what is clearly a minor point and blown it up as if it’s my main point. He’s used shady words (predictions, models) to cast aspersions, and to make someone (me!) look bad. Then, by "refuting" this minor issue he can then poison the well, strongly implying that all my arguments are wrong. That’s kind of a big no-no when trying to argue a point.

But it packages well. Watts Up With That, another denialist blog, has run with Briggs’ claims about me as well. He also makes the false claim that warming has stalled, and so on. Note WUWT also says the signers of the WSJ OpEd are "16 scientists", which isn’t true: not all are scientists, and only four have actually published climate science research. And don’t forget about the article the WSJ refused to print talking about the reality of global warming, signed by 255 actual scientists.

Oops.

My favorite irony is that a lot of these global warming denialists take money from fossil fuel interests, but then routinely say to "follow the money", as if it’s the climatologists who are raking in the big bucks from shady think tanks with undisclosed bankrollers. While Briggs points out he gets no money from them, he asks where my money comes from. Think on this, Dr. Briggs; how much money would I make if I suddenly turned coat and said global warming wasn’t real? I’ll guarantee you it would be a lot more than I make now, probably with a couple of zeroes added to the end. So that argument falls a wee bit flat here.

Like all the others.

Of course, given the comments I’ve seen on my blog, on Briggs’ blog, on Watts Up With That, or in any other blog discussing global warming, I know how this will go. You can bring up the major pieces of evidence supporting reality again and again, but the denialists will ignore them and go after phantoms instead. Because if they do acknowledge the actual evidence, they lose.

A few years ago, I started doing a weekly video question-and-answer session I called "Q & BA". It was a series of short videos that were a lot of fun to make. Unfortunately, the overhead got to be too high — it took all day to edit them! — and I had to stop.

But now, Google+ has changed that: Hangouts On Air is a feature that allows me to go on camera and broadcast a live video chat session to an unlimited audience. I take questions via Twitter and G+, and it’s a lot of fun. It lasts about an hour, and I put the whole session on YouTube. But some of the answers stand alone, and it’s easy to extract them out, package ‘em up, and post ‘em by themselves.

So I’m very pleased to announce I’m starting the series again! The first Q&BA is a great question: "What’s the best way to get kids into science and skepticism?" — what better way to get the series going again? Enjoy.

I’ll be posting more of these, maybe even one per day as time allows. If you like them, please give them a thumbs-up on YouTube, and drop by the Q&BA Hangout when I do them live! I announce them on Twitter and G+, so follow me there and stay up-to-date. Also, I have an archive with links to all the videos. Thanks!

Over the weekend, two amazingly bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.

Just so we’re clear here.

The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called No Need to Panic About Global Warming, is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."

What the what?

That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical Science website destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.

The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it, but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. And that bragging right is crushed to dust when you find out that the WSJ turned down an article about the reality of global warming that was signed by 255 actual climate scientists. In fact, as Media Matters reports, more of the signers of the WSJ OpEd have ties to oil interests than actually publish peer-reviewed climate research.

Shame on the WSJ for publishing that nonsense.

When I read it, I thought that OpEd was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. But then the Daily Mail chimed in and I discovered that barrel gets a lot deeper. They printed an article by David Rose called Forget global warming — it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again).

By "Cycle 25" he’s referring to the solar activity cycle — which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, the most egregiously awful thing about the Mail article is the angle it takes on new results released by The Met Office, the National Weather Service for the UK. The subheadline for the Mail article is "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years", which is a bit odd given that the very first two paragraphs of the Met’s press release say:

(more…)

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe because there’s a threat from those dirty communists.

Don’t get me wrong: I want a Moon base. I’ve written about that many times here on the blog, and for my Geek-A-Week card I asked Len Peralta to draw me as Commander Koenig from "Space:1999", for criminy’s sake. I stand second to no one in advocating exploring space, and our own satellite in particular. But it has to be done right, and Gingrich’s plan would be the worst way to do it.

In the post for The Crux I was blunt, but held back my tongue a bit because that isn’t necessarily the venue for me to do otherwise. But here, on my blog, I’ll say this: Gingrich’s words were both transparent and hollow. I knew right away what he was claiming was simply not possible, either financially, technologically, or politically. Take your pick. And it was also clear to me that no matter how you slice it, NASA would get screwed royally if his Moon base plan were implemented, since it would mean billions of dollars moved away from NASA projects to finance this. I started digging deeper to see if my first reaction was wrong, and all I found showed I was righter than I first thought. Every way you try to do it, his plan would destroy NASA. And I’m not exaggerating; the amount of money we’re talking about taking away from NASA projects to fund a base his way would leave everything else in NASA facing cancellation. It’s really that simple.

I was actually pretty stunned that people in Florida would support this idea. Obviously, they would have a vested interest in hearing big ideas about space exploration, but with just a little thought it’s clear that while Gingrich’s idea may be big, it’s only because it’s been stretched out way larger than it can handle. Its density is zero.

On the surface, it seems like Gingrich is a friend of space and science, but don’t be fooled: he’s just as likely to pander to the antiscience base as any other candidate, and his history shows he will attack science when he gets the chance. So while you might be inclined to like the idea of a candidate talking about promoting space exploration under any circumstances, have a care. Because once you get beneath that surface, you might find there’s nothing there.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, caption added by me.