Eugene Robinson reads Sgt. Crowley's mind

Bob Somerby has caught another pundit exercising his psychic powers in the Henry Louis Gates affair. Following in Judith Warner's footsteps, the Washington Post's columnist Eugene Robinson has published a column in which he purports to read Crowley's mind (my emphasis):

[F]or the sake of argument, let's assume that Crowley's version of the incident is true -- that Gates, from the outset, was accusatory, aggressive and even obnoxious, addressing the officer with an air of highhanded superiority. Let's assume he really recited the Big Cheese mantra: "You have no idea who you're messing with."

I lived in Cambridge for a year, and I can attest that meeting a famous Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a famous basketball player who happens to be tall. It's not exactly a surprise. Crowley wouldn't have lasted a week on the force, much less made sergeant, if he had tried to arrest every member of the Harvard community who treated him as if he belonged to an inferior species. Yet instead of walking away, Crowley arrested Gates as he stepped onto the front porch of his own house.

Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved -- uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop -- that Crowley couldn't abide.

As Somerby points out, Robinson uses the weasel word "[a]pparently" to justify his projection of thoughts into Crowley's head, then uses the word "uppity" to insinuate that the police officer's actions were racially motivated. Unfortunately, he can't possibly know any of this to be true. It's a journalistic act as inexcusable as George Will's distortions of climate data, but one that's likely to draw far less attention.

Comments

[Jinchi]

It's a journalistic act as inexcusable as George Will's distortions of climate data, but one that's likely to draw far less attention.

Actually, George Will's distortions are worse because he misrepresents facts that we do know (e.g. he claims that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." despite the fact that they say nothing of the sort and would disagree completely with his statement.)

In short, Will's columns can be directly refuted and could be caught by a fact checker or editor. But the truth of Somerby's claim about Crowley is only really known to Crowley himself.

[MrTimbo]

Almost all journalistic opinion is less rigorous than I, personally, would like. I recall always feeling myself conflicted when instructed to take words like "I think" and "It seems to me that" out of reports and whatnot when I was in grade school because it was impossible to talk about almost anything with the level of scientific rigor or felt authority I would have needed in order to feel comfortable stating conclusions bluntly. They suggested that this was just good writing.

It's almost as if my teachers were, regardless of the strict validity of the approach, trying to help my classmates and I survive in a world where something like utter conviction about everything is a necessary component of basic social functioning.

[David]

There are many things wrong wrong wChris Mooney's article. E.g., Will wrote:"according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." What did Will mean by, "there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade"? He obviously meant that the average global temperature is lower today than it was ten years ago. This is true. Further, I presume Will's point is indeed shown by temperature charts compiled by the UNWMO.

Go back to Mooney's article. He never actually refutes Will's statement. Rather, he uses double-talk to dance around it. Brendan Nyhan has been so good at discerning spin that I'm surprised he didn't notice.

Another howler is Mooney's contention that climate research has moved beyond a fledgling state. Predictions of long-term climate patterns and their causitive factors remain in great doubt. The inadequacy of climate research science is demonstrated by its utter failure to predict the drop in global temperatures that has taken place over the last 10 years.

What causes scientists to support anthropogenic global warming is the punishment meted out to those who dare to dissent. This punishment, among other things, comes in the form of widespread ridicule.

Brendan has no expertise in weather science. He has no professional basis to decide which experts to believe. Nor does the topic relate to his post. Why did he throw in that Will reference? Sadly, it seems that he chose to be part of a mob figuratively stoning a heretic.

[Howard Craft]

I don't see that Mooney used "double talk" at all.

It seemed to me more the case that Will had misrepresented several points and Mooney illustrated (explained) where and why.

Apparently Will has no expertise in weather science. Could he simply be part of a mob?

[David]

IMHO it was Mooney who misrepresented points. He misinterpreted Will's point about global temperature being lower today than it was 10 or 11 years ago. That way he had something to quibble with. Then he argued that long-term global warming is taking place despite the cooling of the last 10 years, thereby refuting a point Will didn't make. Unfortunately people sometimes confuse belief in global warming with belief in anthropogenic global warming. Mooney takes advantage of this confusion in his effort to refute Will.

Aside from the errors I pointed out above, note how Mooney attempts to refute Will's accurate observation about sea ice with the comment, "Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system." There's some truth to Mooney's comment, but there are two problems with it.

1. Believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming often use comparisons of sea ice at two different points in time as proof of their theory. Why shouldn't that same technique be valid evidence for disbelievers when the results go in the opposite direction?

2. Long term trends are indeed what's important for the purpose of concluding that global warming is taking place. However, short-term and medium-term movements are important when one is trying to validate a theory of causation ina model. The reversal in reduction of sea ice during a period when CO2 was increasing shows at the least that factors other than CO2 affect global temperature. And, the models haven't figured out what these factors are. That is, the models haven't succeeded in forecasting sea ice, or average global temperature, for that matter.

Put another way, the primary evidence for AGW is the allegedly close fit of CO2 growth and temperature growth (along with glacier and sea ice melting.) The last 10 or 11 years show that the fit isn't so good. CO2 is increasing, but temperature is decreasing. The bad fit for this period casts doubt on the cause-and-effect relationship.

Actually the fit wasn't never that good, even before the global temperature drop of the last decade. According to the models of AGW believers, CO2 levels only became a factor around 30 years ago or so. Yet, the global temperature has been rising for about 100 years.

So the first 70 or so years of increase were caused by something other than man-made CO2. These other factors have not been figured out well enough
so as to produce reliable medium term predictions of global temperature.

[Howard Caft]

Will said "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

But the World Meteorological Organization never made such a statement.

Mooney should have just made that case, as opposed to trying to determine where Will had gone wrong in his thinking (or what his sources were). It seems Will was simply parroting other commentators and blogs who misrepresented specific "data points" as "trends" and who miss attributed comments to others.

*****

Statistical analysis shows that warming has continued for an extensive period of time and there is no evidence that the trend has reversed.

"Year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements. In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C, so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record." - NASA

The ten years ending 2008 were warmer than any prior ten year period going back to 1880. Successively warmer decades have occurred over the past forty years.

The last five years of the decade ending in 2008 were warmer than the first five years (again using the annual averages as presented by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies).

It would be statistically inaccurate to say that the last decade represents a period of cooling.

It would also be wrong to say that sea ice levels have increased or that they indicate global cooling. A review of the studies shows a decline at the arctic and an increase at the antarctic but the net change has been a decline (with areas of decrease exceeding areas of increase).

*****

That's why people responded to Will's column. It was his inaccuracies.

[David]

Howard, I haven't read the UNWMO report, but if it included average yearly temperatures then it's fair to say that the WMO Report showed that the average temperature is lower today than if was 10 years ago.

I fully agree with you that the drop in temperature during the last 10 years does not show the end of the long-term global warming trend that has been going on for 100 years. Nor did Will make that claim.

Will did imply that the recent drop in tempertures was reason to doubt the accuracy of the doomsday models. I fully agree with him. None of these models correctly forcasted the drop. They all projected big increases in worldwide temperature. Models that cannot make an accurate 10-year projection are not so likely to be able to make a correct 20, 30 or 40 year projection.

It's a question of semantics as to whether "period of cooling" is a correct phrase. I'd rather look at the actual numbers. As you can see, the most recent temperature is shown as 0.0, meaning that it happens to be the average of the 30-year period shown. It's quite a bit lower than 1997 - 99, but those were El Nino years with unusually high temperatures, according to the chart. The point about El Nino supports your contention that the drop over the last 10 years is somewhat artificial.

OTOH the 2009 figure of 0.0 is lower than all but a handful of the monthly readings since 2001. That fact can't be argued away as an artificial, one-time exception.

I've done work fitting trend lines to certain weather data involving the magnitude of hurricanes. One thing I learned is that it's very difficult to be confident of a trend unless one has a great many years or a very stable pattern. In my link, if one looks at 1997 - 2009, one sees global cooling. If one looks at 1992 - 2007, one sees frightening global warming. If one looks at the entire 30-year period, one sees neither an increase nor a decrease. Which of these is correct?

I tend to believe that there is a gradual increase because that's what the 100-year pattern shows. However, as I said earlier, the models used by anthropogenic global warming believers haven't been able to forecast 1 year, 2 years or 10 years. They haven't been in use long enough to prove that they can forecast longer periods.

I know from my own work that it's easy as pie to create a model that fits the past. The trick is getting one that correctly predicts the future. That's a standard that the current weather models have not met.

P.S. It's a lot harder for statistics to prove a cause-and-effect relation than to predict a trend. The fact that current weather models cannot even predict a trend leads me to doubt whether they can correctly deduce the cause of the long-term global warming that has been taking place.

[Howard Craft]

If over 90 % of the days within the last ten years were above the average temperature for the last 30 years you can't say that the temperature trend has been flat.

If we use the 1961-1990 data as an average there was less of a return toward the average and that is also true if we use the 1880 to 2009 data.

If we add to the atmospheric data the land and sea temperature data then the overall graph for the entire thirty years would show a more pronounced increase over time and a temperature level for the last 12 months that is well above the average.

BTW - some researches contend that Dr. Spencer uses data from the upper atmosphere that causes an upward bias in his average temperature measure and a lowered bias in his more current year-to-year data. But I'm not going to argue that point, as I'm not a climatologist.

More information can be found here -

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-monitoring/index.php

*****

To say the issue is all about anthropogenic vs. non-anthropogenic warming is besides the point in this context (however meaningful it may be overall) because that was never the subject in the article that Will wrote, nor was that topic the basis for the criticism he received.

[David]

Howard wrote, "If over 90 % of the days within the last ten years were above the average temperature for the last 30 years you can't say that the temperature trend has been flat."

First of all, there may not even be a temperature trend. The chart Howard linked to is so jagged that the existance of any trend is far from obvious. Apparently human brains tend to see patterns. This chart shows 8 separate random walks. If you looked at any one of them, you might well think there was a trend. In fact, the construction of these graph guarantees that there is no trend at all.

Howard's argument assumes that there is a long-term trend. In that case, recent past temperatures might be more indictive of conditions today than today's actual temperature.

However, I don't think it's unreasonable to say, as Will did, that the average temperature has not risen over the past ten year. In fact, I think it's reasonable to say that the average temperature has dropped. The high values Howard alluded to are some of the high levels from which it has fallen.

To be precise, ten years ago the average temperature (in degrees F) was 80.18. It was around 80.60 eleven years ago. In the most recent measured month, it's only 79.98. There may be justification for not calling this change a "drop," but I think it's hard to fault someone who does so.

Howard, I don't mean to say that your point is necessarily without merit. But, that kind of semantic quibbling is certainly not an appropriate basis for the kind of scathing denunciations produced by Mooney and Brendan.

[Howard Craft]

I just linked to a site, not a chart. We can look at the chart that you provided -

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

to see that easily 90% of the past decade was spent at at temperatures above the recent average.

The point that if one day or one month or one full year - some time ago - was warmer than a more recent period then "warming" isn't occurring isn't really meaningful. It selects a recent very hot year and uses that as the base-line.

*****

This chart compares the first six months of this year with the first six months of every prior year going back to 1880 - based on the global land and sea temperatures.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2009/jun/glob-jan-jun-pg.gif

[David]

Howard, I believe understand your point. Your linked chart seems to show that the temperature drop of the last 10 years isn't enough to prove that the long-term temperature rise has ended. I agree with that. I expect the long-term trend to reassert itself. Of course, nobody knows what will happen in the future. Time will tell whether temperatures continue to go down or whether the long term trend comes back, or whether there's some other pattern or no pattern at all.

I agree that if one believes that there's a long-term upward trend in global temperature, then a ten-year period with no temperature increase wouldn't prove that the long-term trend had reversed itself. Nevertheless, it would still be reasonable to say that the temperature had not increased over the last 10 years. That's all Will said.

Please re-think what I said about your implicit assumption that an upward trend exists. Try an aviation example, where there's obviously no assumption of a long-term upward trend in altitude. Suppose a plane just landed in Sacramento at sea level. Suppose this plane was at at its highest altitudes during the last 30 minutes of its flight, when it had to go over Sierra Nevadas. One would still say that the plane had come down.

P.S. Howard, your link shows that the rate of temperature rise from 1880 to 1975 was roughly comparable to the rise from 1975 to today. Warming during the earlier period was not caused by CO2 according to the AGW models. Some other factors made the earth warmer during the earlier period. It's possible that the same factors continued to warm the earth during the latter period. In that case, anthropomorphic factors may be less significant than some believe.