SHATTERED CONSENSUS

Reviewed 7/10/2014

Shattered Consensus, by Patrick J. Michaels

Access to this book courtesy of the
San Jose, CA Public Library
SHATTERED CONSENSUS
The True State of Global Warming
Patrick J. Michaels (ed.)
Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005

Rating:

3.5

Fair

ISBN-13 978-0-7425-4922-?
ISBN-10 0-7425-4922-4 291pp. HC/GSI $?

Errata

Page 67: "No matter how many compounding variables are brought to the table..."
  Word choice: S/B "confounding variables".
Page 67: "Second, even if we accept that the warming is real, there is a strong argument that approximately half of the warming—the portion that took place in the early twentieth century, was anything but a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age."
  Oops! The curse of the omitted negative strikes again: probably S/B "nothing but". As written, the statement plays right into our hands. Praise the pervading power of the climate cabal, that alters even its opponents' thoughts! (There is also a mismatch between m-dash and comma.)
Page 96: "I shall normalize the earth to a single area of one m2 and utilize the approximation of 105 kg of atmosphere per m2."
  A previous reader caught this error for me (and marked it in pencil.) It should be "104 kg".
Page 112: "The greater activity is thought to have resulted from simultaneous increases in North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures and decreases in vertical wind shear that are associated with multidecadal natural circulation shifts and not necessary from long-term climate change..."
  Adverb required: S/B "not necessarily".
Page 113: "Analysis of tropical cyclone records from the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and tropical sector of the western North Atlantic over the past fifty years disclose no significant trends..."
  Number error: S/B "discloses".
Pages 200-201: "A period warming and cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean has been linked, via the ocean's interaction with the overlying atmosphere, to climate variability in many parts of the globe."
  Word choice: S/B "periodic".
Page 210: "Thus, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest assessment on climate science (Houghton et al. 2001) stated that total solar irradiance change insufficient to explain surface temperature warming of the second half of the twentieth century."
  Some odd phrasing here. In particular, the choice of "stated" seems wrong: S/B "judged". Alternatively, she ought to have written "stated that total solar irradiance change is insufficient". (Can I lay this in Patrick J. Michaels's lap?)
Pages 200-201: "A period warming and cooling of ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean has been linked, via the ocean's interaction with the overlying atmosphere, to climate variability in many parts of the globe."
  Word choice: S/B "periodic".
Page 218: "...as a result of solar magnetic variability, according to analysis of 10Be concentration in the Dye-3 Greenland coring..."
  Missing superscript formatting: S/B "10Be". (There's a D.P. just below on this page. Exercise for the reader?)
Page 219: "...the period of elevated magnetic activity about 900 years ago has been well documented directly from 14C and 10Be records..."
  Missing superscript formatting: S/B "14C and 10Be".
Page 224: "One important, associated matter deserving comment is that even such well-grounded solar models overestimate by factors of several the neutrino capture ratios..."
  Redundant: Any matter deserving comment has to be important, nicht wahr? And I wonder if this neutrino discrepancy is related to "neutrino oscillation."
Pages 224-5: "Note that the speculation occurred about a decade prior to satellite measurements of total solar irradiance that indicated a dimmer sun during the Maunder Minimum and other sustained periods of low solar magnetic activity."
  Non sequitur: How could satellite measurements of the Sun, which began in 1978, say anything about the Maunder Minimum? I don't say this is a factual error, but merely clumsy writing that the editor should have caught.
Page 226: "...at the same time, the ultraviolet irradiance changes by 10 percent, and with a smaller magnitude, ~1 percent, at wavelengths between 200 and 300 nm."
  Incomplete specification of wavelength: the wavelengths for the 10-percent change are not given.
Pages 245-6: "Most important, because of our lack of understanding on the range of climatic responses, it is premature to conclude on the basis of the magnitude of forcing alone—4 Wm-2 for a doubling of CO2 vs. 0.4 Wm-2 for July insolation changes at 60°N induced by earth's orbital variations over about 100 years, a comparison made by Houghton (1991)—that the climatic changes by human-made CO2 will overwhelm the more persistent effects of a positional change in earth's rotation axis and orbit."
  This seems a thin criticism. Simple extrapolation using the doubling time of CO2 concentration based on 2005 emission rates allows comparison of these two forcings at any future year.
Page 267: "Above the surface, the land-sea contrast weakens significantly so that no imprint of anthropogenic thermal forcing anomalies persist there."
  Number error: S/B "persists".
Page 269: "In this respect, Goody et al. (1998) have proposed the complementary scheme of interferometric measurements of spectrally resolved thermal radiance and radio occultation measurements of refractivity—with help from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites—that can achieve a global coverage with an absolute accuracy of 1 cm-1 in spectral resolution and 0.1 K in thermal brightness temperature."
  Unit of measure unspecified: S/B specified.
Page 269: "...the refraction of GPS radio signals, while sensitive to water vapor and air molecules, is not affected by clouds."
  How can it be that radio signals are affected by water molecules in vapor form but not by water in liquid or solid form?
Page 270: "If natural and largely uncontrollable factors that yield rapid climate change are common, would humans be capable of actively modifying climate for the better? Such a question has been posed and cautiously answered in the negative..." (Emphasis in original)
  At the risk of missing some subtlety in this issue, I'll answer the question without caution: uncontrollable factors cannot be controlled. Here, the authors appear to be dealing in tautology.
Page 271: "There is also the possibility that infinitesimal forcing might have the potential to cause a sudden transition to a radically different attractor (Posmentier et al. 1999)."
  <cough> Hey! I just changed the climate! (Better get Col. Jack O'Neill to borrow that football-sized weather machine.)
Page 271: "In addition, we acknowledge that the arguability of placing the burden of proof for small climate impact on those who would maintain or increase the production rate of anthropogenic CO2." (Emphasis in original)
  This is not a sentence. Probably, the "that" needs to be removed.
Page 273: Note 4: "Giardina and Ryan (2000) showed [...] that over decades the enzyme action of microbes, which ultimately releases carbon dioxide from decomposing soil, is not sensitive to temperature."
  I think it's a highly unusual enzyme if it is not sensitive to temperature.
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