Monckton (pt2)

Misrepresenting scientific literature

1. John Abraham pointed out a number of examples where Monckton cited scientific literature that actually refuted his points, or the authors of the papers said that Monckton had misinterpreted their results.

2. Tim Lambert caught Monckton making up stories about one Dr. Pinker, and it turns out that Dr. Pinker says Monckton misinterpreted her work.

3. Monckton cited statistics about variations in the amount of incoming solar radiation to come to exactly the opposite conclusion from the authors he cited.

4. He also repeatedly cited statistics about local temperature records and treated them as if they were global. (This is a big no-no.)

5. Lord Monckton totally botched his discussion of ocean acidification, revealing that he doesn’t understand ocean circulation, the significance of pH in aqueous systems, and so on.

6. Monckton published an article on climate sensitivity in a newsletter of the American Physical Society. He has repeatedly claimed that this constitutes a peer-reviewed scientific publication about climate change, but the fact is that society newsletters are not typically “peer-reviewed” in any normal sense, and the newsletter editor appended a notice on Monckton’s article saying it was not peer-reviewed. A single scientist associated with the journal (and not a climate specialist) giving you some comments on a draft isn’t the same thing. Almost 2 years later, Monckton was still claiming the newsletter is peer-reviewed scientific literature, however. In any case, Arthur Smith picked this article apart and found 125 errors of fact and logic. Tim Lambert provided a short explanation for why Monckton’s main argument was wrong.

7. Lord Monckton really wants the Medieval Warm Period to have been warmer than today, and will latch onto any piece of “evidence” that seems to support this. For example, he wrote that “There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.” He apparently got this claim from Gavin Menzies, but it has been shown to be complete garbage.

8. A New York Times reporter fact-checked Monckton after a debate by asking experts in the relevant fields to comment. The experts said that Monckton was in fantasyland about polar bear populations and global temperature histories. As an aside, I mentioned above that I had shown Monckton tended to erroneously use local temperature records in place of global ones, which is what he was criticized for in the Times.

9. Alden Griffith showed how Monckton has cherrypicked data when discussing trends in Arctic sea ice extent.

10. Skeptical Science has now posted Monckton Myths, a page that collects links to all of Monckton’s main pseudo-scientific arguments, and scientific rebuttals. Since Monckton recycles his arguments ad nauseum, long after they have been shown to be flatly wrong, this should be a valuable resource for many years!

Making up data

1. Monckton made up data on atmospheric CO2 concentration and global mean temperature that he claimed were IPCC predictions. (This has been addressed several times by Gavin Schmidt, John Nielsen-Gammon, Lucia Liljegren, and Barry Bickmore. And yet, Monckton still keeps publishing the same false claims.)

Abusing scientific equations

Barry Bickmore notes that it doesn’t take much effort to plug some numbers into a scientific equation and solve it. However, Scientists have to learn to plug the right numbers into equations appropriate for the problem at hand, and it usually requires considerable experience for this principle to sink into students’ brains. Before it sinks in, students often tend to use the wrong equations for a given scenario, or plug the wrong kinds of values into the right equations. Monckton does both.

1. Monckton attacked mainstream estimates of climate sensitivity by a misapplication of the Stefan-Bolzmann equation.

2. Monckton made some wild claims about climate drivers after he misinterpreted the work of Rachel Pinker and colleagues. He essentially plugged the wrong kind of numbers into an equation that converts a change in radiative forcing into change in global mean temperature.

3. He frequently uses an IPCC equation for the EQUILIBRIUM temperature response of climate models to calculate TRANSIENT temperature response. The IPCC publishes the transient responses, as well, but Monckton refuses to use that data, because he says the IPCC has monkeyed with their models to make the transient response agree better with global temperature data. In the past he has just substituted in the equilibrium values and plotted them as if they were time-series. However, in response to criticism he says he’s going to correct the equilibrium values–seemingly by multiplying them by a factor of 0.8 instead of looking at the actual model output.