OC Register’s Mark Landsbaum has Global Warming Denialphrenia

Orange County Register columnist, and global warming denier in residence, Mark Landsbaum opens his most recent commentary Electric cars for an ice age? with the following:

Call it global warming schizophrenia. It’s the disconnect between what really is happening and what global warming alarmists demand must happen.

Mr. Landsbaum suffers from what I call Global Warming Denialphrenia; the disconnect between reality and what he and other global warming deniers believe isn’t happening.

Landsbaum exhibits the most common symptom of the disease—cherry picking of statistical facts to fool folks into believing that that global warming is a myth. His theory suggests that global warming is a fantasy created by “government officials and government-paid scientists [who] insist the world risks being incinerated because humans generate a little more carbon dioxide than they used to.” He contends that the purpose of this conspiratorial fantasy is “to force private carmakers to manufacture expensive, largely undesired, generally underperforming “zero-emission” electric cars.” Landsbaum claims; “The entire justification for this coercion of the private sector is based on the false contention that increasing greenhouse gases will result in dangerous, soaring temperatures worldwide. That’s so much piffle.”

To support his position he points to an op-ed letter published, in the Rupert Murdoch owned, Wall Street Journal by “16 “scientists” claiming that carbon-dioxide is not a pollutant” and that “There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.”

In short, the claims Landsbaum is making are simply B.S. (Bad Science).

Peter Gleick, CEO Pacific Institute, MacArthur Fellow, National Academy of Sciences wrote in Forbes last week about the same letter ‘Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal.’

Serious doubt has been cast on the actual expertise on climate science of the signers and on the accuracy of the content, here and elsewhere, and the strawman arguments and technical flaws of their opinion piece are evident to anyone actually versed in the scientific debate. For example, their op-ed has fundamental errors about recent actual temperatures, they use false/strawman arguments that climate scientists are saying climate change “will destroy civilization,” they launch ad hominem attack on particular climate scientists using out-of-context quotes, and so on. As pointed out here previously, and at the Union of Concerned Scientists: the authors claim there has been a “lack of warming” for 10 years. The reality? 2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.

But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay, Climate Change and the Integrity of Science, on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down.

Landsbaum writes:

…despite CO2 emissions increasing dramatically over the past 15 years, temperatures haven’t. Even the hotbed of global warming propaganda, Britain’s Climate Research Unit, and England’s Meteorological Office in a veritable whisper had to concede in recent days that not only isn’t it getting much hotter, as global warming theory says it must, it’s not getting warmer at all.

Worse yet (for the alarmists’ cause), the “Met” says we may be entering a historic solar energy lull “to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the [frozen-over] Thames in the 17th century.”

He conveniently left out the rebuttal from the “Met” posted on their blog countering the article, Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about, published in the Mail which distorted their findings, and upon which Landsbaum is clearly basing his argument. From the Met’s Blog:

Today the Mail on Sunday published a story written by David Rose entitled “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about”.

This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.

Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997.

For clarity I have included our full response to David Rose below: A spokesman for the Met Office said: “The ten year projection remains groundbreaking science. The complete period for the original projection is not over yet and these projections are regularly updated to take account of the most recent data.

“The projections are probabilistic in nature, and no individual forecast should be taken in isolation. Instead, several decades of data will be needed to assess the robustness of the projections.

“However, what is absolutely clear is that we have continued to see a trend of warming, with the decade of 2000-2009 being clearly the warmest in the instrumental record going back to 1850. Depending on which temperature records you use, 2010 was the warmest year on record for NOAA NCDC and NASA GISS, and the second warmest on record in HadCRUT3.”

Peter Gleick has a good rebuttal to the misinformation put out by global warming deniers like Landsbaum posted on Sunday, February 5, 2012 titled “Global Warming Has Stopped”? How to Fool People Using “Cherry-Picked” Climate Data.

The current favorite argument of those who argue that climate changes isn’t happening, or a problem, or worth dealing with, is that global warming has stopped. Therefore (they conclude) scientists must be wrong when they say that climate change is caused by humans, worsening, and ultimately a serious environmental problem that must be addressed by policy makers.

The problem with this argument is that it is false: global warming has not stopped and those who repeat this claim over and over are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth. Here is a tiny sample of the false claims, gleaned from various blogs, comments to my previous Forbes posts, op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, news stories, and statements from pundits who spread climate misinformation:

“The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.”

• “Current pause in global warming”
• “lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”
• “There is no credible (statistically significant) data that says global warming is occurring”
• “fifteen years of warming, then fifteen of cooling”
• “The last decades “rate of warming” is flat.”
• “Forget global warming…no warming in 15 years.”

I could find a hundred more variations, but you get the idea. These statements are scurrilous deceptions and falsehoods. The planet is warming – an observation noted by every climate research institution tracking temperatures, the US National Academy of Sciences (over and over and over), every other national academy of sciences on the planet, and every professional society in the geosciences.

Read Gleick’s complete commentary here.

There was a story on January 31st in the OCRegister—OC Science blog that probably would have made Landsbaum’s head explode if he had read it. I would never expect Landsbaum to read anything under the category of “science” because I doubt he believes in such “piffle.” He didn’t mention it so I will. The post is titled NASA: Warming driven by humans, not sun.

A new NASA study shows that even during a time of minimal energy from the sun, planet Earth continued to retain more solar radiation than it emitted back into space.

It’s a powerful addition to an already strong body of evidence pointing to human greenhouse-gas emissions as the main driver of global warming.

Some climate-change critics contend that the sharp upward trend in global average temperature over decades is due to solar activity, not to the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which help prevent heat from solar energy from escaping.

If so, some guessed, temperatures might drop during an extended solar minimum.

But in a statement released by NASA, Hansen said the new finding “provides unequivocal evidence that the sun is not the dominant driver of global warming.”

“The extended solar minimum is keeping the sun at a low level,” said UC Irvine Professor Michael Prather, a specialist in climate-modeling who was not involved in Hansen’s study. “Without having that burst of warmth, we’re still pumping heat into the ocean at the rate we were before. The temperature is not suddenly dropping.”

Bottom line, Global Warming is Real. No matter how much Mark Landsbaum and his fellow sufferers of Global Warming Denialphrenia try to manipulate and distort statistics, the facts simply will not change. Global temperatures continue to rise in almost direct proportion to the increase in carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans. Global sea levels are rising, polar ice-sheets are melting, glaciers are receding, and human activity is the greatest contributor to this reality.