This is one of the best takedowns of the carbon offset sham I’ve seen. It’s easy to see how silly this idea is when presented this way. And, it’s funny to boot. Kudos to the guys at the Cascade Policy Institute:

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has detailed graphs and charts showing the extent of Arctic sea ice. They’ve recently noted that they were suffering from a short-term problem called “sensor drift” that gave false readings on Arctic ice coverage. It happens from time to time and they try to adjust for it. This seems to be a responsible way to manage scientific data collection. The problem comes with some shifting claims made later in the article.

You see there are two major methods for measuring ice coverage. There is the SSM/I sensor and the newer AMSR-E sensor. The AMSR-E is more accurate, but has only been collecting data since 2002. The SSM/I is less accurate, but has a longer track record. This leads to a scary sentence at the end of the article:

Some people might ask why we don’t simply switch to the EOS AMSR-E sensor. AMSR-E is a newer and more accurate passive microwave sensor. However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.

This can lead to cries of “they’re using the data they like and ignoring the more accurate sources” which isn’t quite true. Actually, what they claim is that they want to continue to use the less accurate data because they have a longer history and, therefore, it is easier to determine trends. The argument is that recognizing trends is more important than the actual measurements.

I’m willing to buy that, but that’s not what they were saying last May:

Taken together, an assessment of the available evidence, detailed below, points to another extreme September sea ice minimum. Could the North Pole be ice free this melt season?  Given that this region is currently covered with first-year ice, that seems quite possible.

So, here’s a claim that the NSIDC can predict actual measurements of ice coverage (namely, a prediction of zero or near-zero levels). So, despite the fact that their recent sensor drift problem was off, at times, by over 193,000 square miles and they knew that the AMSR-E data was more accurate, they were willing to make absolute measurement predictions last May. Now, they play down any concerns with their data collection by falling back to the “trends” argument.

Sure sounds like they want to have it both ways.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

At what point in a discussion do you give up attempting to make your opinion clear because the other side has given up the logical framework necessary for debate? I may not be there, yet, but when the other side begins to make simple claims that are clearly non sequiturs, I have to think about it.

My near-exasperation is triggered by a Reuters article with the headline “Global warming seen worse than predicted”. In reading such an article, you would expect to hear some scientific claim that new evidence has shown how the planet is warming faster than originally thought. You would expect to see some charts and data that explain how recent temperature data has been wrong. The  first paragraph even leads you to this expectation.

The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.

But, it’s not until the end of the article that you realize that there is no new data about temperatures. There are no new techniques showing that we’ve calculated global averages wrong. No, what is new is a larger-than-expected amount of greenhouse gas being pumped into the atmosphere by the rapidly growing industrial sectors of China and India.

So, if there is more greenhouse gas and, yet, the temperatures haven’t changed or corrected, how exactly does that show that global warming is worse? In fact, it seems pretty clear that, over the last decade, global temperatures have cooled. Not that you’d read that widely. Therefore, I come to the following conclusion (and, maybe this is too convoluted for those scientists mentioned above): Greenhouse gas generation by human enterprise is increasing faster than we thought. Global temperatures are cooling, or at least, leveling off. Therefore, greenhouse gas generated by human activity has little or no effect on global temperatures. Did I lose you?

Greenhouse gas: I do not think it means what you think it means.