Despite Al Gore’s pronoucment that “the debate is over”, alarmist David Appell nevertheless faced off against skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball on The Victoria Taft Show on Monday night on Portland, Oregon’s KPAM AM 860.
Appell has a recent piece in Scientific American that contends even now that the Hockey Stick is alive and well.
Here’s the audio of the debate:
Update (11/6/2009):
Victoria Taft writes via e-mail to tell of her blog devoted to her collection of David Appell (who apparently is a chronic blog lurker) rants: David Explains It All.
You are exactly the kind of fool the Bush administration is counting on — hardheaded, impervious to evidence, scared ****less that some terrorist is going to blow up your mailbox, and willing to grant the government any power if they will just protect you.
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41 Responses to “Rare global warming debate: Skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball vs. alarmist science journalist David Appell”
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Appell still believes in the hockey stick theory? I thought that was debunked last year. I suppose even after something is debunked, you can still say it and make it true again.
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It’s quite obvious the hostess has her own take of the issue.
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Very nice performance from Dr. Ball, respect his deep understanding climate science, factual knowledge and his patient and polite attitude, dealing the creep calling himself a climate journalist. Love the radio talk hostess and her professional attitude, she told the creep to shut up only once.
A remarkable insight where we are up against.
Incredible how far the AGW movement has come without any scientific evidence to make their case. AGW = 100% PROPAGANDA, nothing else.
Thanks for publishing this. -
Is Appell not aware of the that the hockey stick is beyond being dead?
And, humans “control the climate” ?
What a joke.
Hey Appell, go back to school!
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2 points.
Appell is a scientific journalist, but doesn’t want to spend the time checking out the data. Says a lot. If he is held to deadlines, he may not have the time, then who does in the journalist world? Who is checking the data? That’s why the world needs people like Steve McIntyre.Ball/Victoria didn’t press Appell on CO2 saturation. Given that fact is not under dispute, i.e. the IPCC agrees with it (the degree of saturation is debatable), It would have been interesting to see how well he understands that. His words suggested he didn’t agree with it but it wasn’t explicitly stated. If he had not agreed that there was a saturation point, he would have lost any credibility.
Victoria:
I enjoy your show. I’ve got KPAM as one of my memory buttons. Whenever I go down to Portland for business, I always tune in KPAM and hope I get your time slot. -
I should actually check the web site before I make my comments. I now realize this isn’t KPAM’s web site. Too early in the morning. Sorry about that.
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Tim Ball was throwing out so many proven falsehoods that I could not reply to all of them, or even most of them.
But let’s take the hockey stick. As a journalist I’ve asked many scientists about it, and not one of them gives any credence to M&M’s analysis. There are just too many other independent analyses that give the same result (Crowley and Lowrey, etc.), and too many physical changes taking place on the Earth, to indicate otherwise.
Now Martin Tingley, using a completely new mathematical technique, gets essentially the same result. That begins to eliminate the doubt about MBH’s statistical methods.
Do you want to believe you read on blogs, or what journalists report after talking to the experts?
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Nice try David, but no prize for you half hearted attempt at damage control.
The hockey stick was put into disrepute by the Wegman report, which vindicated M&M.
There are so many other proxy’s which show the MWP, Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm period; that to suggest that the hockey stick is still valid, just shows how incomplete your background is.
Cheers,
Steve
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Steve,
Which studies that report a global MWP do you have in mind?
Really, I am interested. Please post here or send me an email.
Also, tell me why it matters, given that our present time is impacted by additional factors that were not present during the MWP or any other eras you mention.
Thanks,
David
appell@nasw.org -
David,
Here is a start: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2393
If you really wanted to know you could have easily found this site and this article.
I think you have an aversion to Climateaudit. Your bias of this site has clouded your judgement. Even if you don’t like this site and only go to Realclimate; you still need balance in life. Without balance, your biases determine your outlook.
So…the assignment is: don’t ask me for the material, go find it yourself.
Cheers,
SMS
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David:
I don’t have the statistical expertise to analyze M&M. So I asked somebody I know with a PHD in stats to take a look at it. He had no problem with what they were doing. McKitrick is a PHD at the University of Guelph so his credentials are quite good.Falsehoods? Because some of the “experts” on the pro catastrophic AGW said so? I know of lots of experts on the opposing side. He said/She said. Learned a long time ago, go to the raw numbers and make my own judgements. Strongly suggests the pro catastrophic AGW has an agenda.
Bloggers vs. journalists. Bloggers = people. Journalists = people. Nobody has a monopoly on virtue. One is answerable to him/herself. The other to his/her editor, deadlines and what drives revenue for the media they write in. Catastrophe or projects of catastrophe and telling people we have to care for the environment sells ad space. Environmental journalists have ignored so much data and stories which counter the catastrophic AGW claim, they’ve lost their integrity as far as I am concerned. You yourself said you don’t check the numbers on all the reports because you don’t have time. I understand that. The disdain for bloggers newspapers show might give them a clue as to why they are getting crushed in the market place.
I did an exercise the other day. I made 3 spread sheets. Each one was 100×100. Shrunk the cells small enough so each one fills one page. Coloured them blue and then made 3 cells white in the first one. Next one, 4 cells white. Last one 6 cells white. That represents CO2 in the atmosphere density, 150 years ago, (288 ppm), now, (388 ppm) and 150 years from now, (588 ppm – assumed a 1.1 ppm per year increase). Take at a little further and of those gains, one 3% is caused by humans. I’m not saying it disproves catastrophic AGW, but it does make one go hmmmm when we are talking about a trace gas we breath out, has gone far beyond those points in history and is critical for life on earth. Without it in the atmosphere, plants die and without plants, life on earth dies. Note, I always had a hard time getting believers to think for themselves. It has turned out to be an extremely effective tool for getting people to question the idea of catastrophic AGW and do some thinking for themselves. I always tell them if they aren’t already doing so, go to RC.
The critical eye you use on Dr. Ball, needs to be applied in the other direction. That is the roll of the press and they are ignoring it.
In all sincerity, have a great day. Love your town. I miss the days of going to the Gorge. Kids will do that to you. They aren’t old enough yet.
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> Bloggers vs. journalists. Bloggers = people. Journalists = people.
> Nobody has a monopoly on virtueThe standards of journalists are a lot higher than the standards of bloggers. The former make a concerted effort to talk to people on all sides of an issue and objectively report what they say. I see very few bloggers doing that, if any.
Bloggers are not journalists. Let’s not try to pretend they are.’
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Mr Appell seems to rely on peer reviewed articles but doesn’t seem to search out any opposing views, even if peer reviewed. First of all, the peer review process DOES NOT authenticate an article. All it does is represent that some experts in the field think it is not a waste of time to read the article. It may support or disprove a hypothesis. It may add strength to a hypothesis. The second and big issue with the UEA people is they lack integrity and ethics as they suborned the peer review process. UEA shoule be debarred from any public funded grants until they get their house in order and enforce the most basic elements of ethical behavior in their associates. The established fact that Mr Jones refused to publish his data is enough to discredit him – that act is a perversion of scientific inquiry.
To the AGW hypothesis – there is not one single piece of scientific evidence that supports it. Not one! AGW rests entirely on global circulation models that are demonstrably flawed: they have failed to predict the future for at least ten years; the observable results necessary for their hypothesis to be correct are not here; they fail to properly account for clouds.
There has been global warming and, more recently, cooling. CO2 is a “greenhouse gas”. But the circulation models add fudge factors (positive feedback on the CO2 effect) which have no basis in fact.
Finally, to claim that journalists objectively report the facts is just laughable if not tragic.
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Mr. Appell, I urge you to have an open mind. There are times you will find truth in bloggers and biases in experts. But I speak to you as one who relies neither on the bloggers nor on experts whose motivation are influenced by political agendas. I have technically examined Mann’s original paper, the follow-up papers by those associated with Mann, the Wegman report, and M&M critique. I could throw out a lot of technical jargon to explain how Mann (and his Team) went wrong – from cherry picking to questionable statistical techniques. However, instead I will offer two points that should be understandable for lay people. First, the vast majority of studies (such as over 90%) on proxies indicate the MWP and the LIA. (You should look at studies generated by experts without a political agenda!) Second, we need not rely on proxy studies; we have physical evidence such as Viking settlements in Greenland, northern advance of tropical plants in China, and retreating glaciers all over the world which reveal organics that thrived during the MWP. Sometimes advanced statistics can hide the obvious!
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What evidence is there that ANYBODY has a political agenda? I see none whatsoever. Instead I see scientists trying to do the best job possible. In all the interviews I’ve ever done, not one of them has ever expressed anything even remotely like a political thought.
So I’d like to know your evidence for this assertion.
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Klockarman wrote:
> ….it’s doubtful that Al Gore gave his stamp of approval to
> Appell’s appearance.This right here says an amazing amount about the skeptic movement.
Much of it seems rooted simply in Al Gore hatred.
What makes you think I care one iota what Al Gore thinks? Of anything? Let alone that I somehow need or crave his stamp of approval? Frankly I couldn’t care less what Al Gore thinks, nor do I think he is without his flaws, and I’ve expressed that many times. I’m a journalist — I try to objectively report the facts and the truth. I don’t root for anybody.
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> First, the vast majority of studies (such as over 90%) on proxies
> indicate the MWP and the LIA.I’m interested. Can you please give me a list of these studies, both for and against?
Thanks.
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David:
I am interested in hearing your take on the Roman and Mideival Warm Periods, the LIA, and why they don’t seem to appear on the hockey stick.
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Mr. Appell,
I listened to the debate with Dr. Ball and if I were you, I would be embarrassed and humiliated. As a supposed scientific journalist, you have a remarkable lack of understanding of the issues. Your claim that we should listen to journalists who “talk to experts” rather than blogs is the height of arrogance. After listening to you dodge and evade legitimate questions raised by Ms. Taft and Dr. Ball, you have zero credibility as a journalist and given you apparently have written articles for Scientific American, I guess that is one rag that I will skip in the future.
WRT your claim that you have spoken with many scientists about the hockey stick and none of them agree with the M&M analysis, that further emphasizes my point. The hockey stick was thoroughly debunked, not just by M&M, but also by Wegman. It is a proven fact that if red noise is fed into Mann et al’s algorithms it will produce a hockey stick. Further to that, Mann et al did their best to withhold their data and algorithms, obviously trying to obfuscate their claims. More recently, with Briffa finally being forced to disclose his Yamal data years after the fact, we can see that he cherry picked tree cores to utilize only the ones that supported his claims. In fact, some of the proxies were inverted to further support the claim that recent temperature changes are “unprecedented”. Your claim that no one agrees with M&M’s claim leaves me frankly stunned.
Jones is on the record as having refused to release his data and now it is claimed that the data are lost. How convenient.
Hansen at GISS is widely known to take liberties with the data, again we can thank heros like Steve McIntyre who take the time to audit and attempt reproduce their work, usually uncovering gross mistakes in their methodology.
Anthony Watts has also tirelessly reviewed the surface record and proven beyond any question that it is fraught with inconsistencies that contribute to a gross overstatement of the surface temperature. Do you not think it is significant that in the early 1990s, a large percentage of the surface stations (e.g., from Siberia) were taken off-line?
I really laughed at your deflection to Dr. Ball that he should write a paper about the issues he raised. The peer-review process that underlies the IPCC report as well as the hockey stick is clearly a joke. It is widely known that of the supposed 2500 scientists who back the IPCC report, many submitted comments in disagreement that were ignored by the editors. The claim that 2500 scientists back the report is scandalous. The reality is that a small cadre of editors, many of whom are not even scientists edited out comments that did not support the desired conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made CO2. The reality is that the supposed peer-review process of papers like Mann et al is a case of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, rather than a broad support.
If you had any balls as a journalist, you would write about the peer review process, or M&M’s work or Anthony Watts’ work, or the blatant withholding of data by Mann, Briffa and Jones, yet you hide under the protective wing of the supposed consensus. All I can say is that you are in good company. You are no less a fraud than Mann, Briffa, Jones, Hansen and Al Gore, and the rest of the cowards who accepted the Nobel. You should be ashamed.
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Daryl M: When you have the balls to sign your real name to your insults, I will begin to take you seriously. You can write me at appell@nasw.org. Let me know.
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Mr. Appell, it doesn’t matter whether you take me seriously or not, but I must admit I find it to be a rather baseless claim that my counter-arguments are somehow invalid because I chose not to use my full name. What does that have to do with anything? I guess that’s just another form of deflection. Not that it’s any of your business, but I don’t use my full name on blogs because my email addresses are based on it and I don’t want to receive any more spam than I already receive. Based on the other posts, I can see that I’m not the only one on this blog who does not use their full name.
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Mr. Appell, I replied to the email address you provided above and it bounced.
What I was going to say is the following:
I guess you’ve heard the news about the files from CRU that were released to the public and which Phil Jones has publically admitted are legitimate. I have a copy of the files myself and I am shocked at what was said in the emails. This must make you feel like you’ve been used by the IPCC community.
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Medieval Warm Period Project.
760+ scientists from 450+ research institutions from 41 countries… http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Read the papers and get back to me. MWP was global.
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MD Smith: You can begin by telling me why I, as a journalist, should trust CO2science.com
They don’t publish their phone number. They don’t reveal who funds them. Their work is not peer-reviewed or published.
Why should I trust them? They have all the hallmarks of an astroturf organization. Indeed, I have in the past TRIED to contact them to ask these questions — I found it impossible to get in touch with them.
Simply put, I see no reason to trust them, scientifically. Or any of their conclusions.
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Jim:Who funds CO2science? You don’t care, but everyone else does.Isn’t it suspicious that they won’t say?
You wrote:
“And I since the man-made global warming machine is funded by Big Green I don’t really care.”Big Green? Who are they?
As far as I can tell, most scientists are funded by government agencies. Do you have evidence otherwise?
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