Michael Graham gets climate change wrong, again.

Here we go again.

WTKK radio personality, right wing-nut and climate change denier Michael Graham has posted another poorly written hack job on climate change. Graham borrows heavily from equally poor piece from Fortune Magazine. Graham's own interpretation and spin on this make a bad article even worse. The premise is basically that John Christy,( one of less-than-half-dozen credible climate scientists who either deny anthropogenic climate change (man made global warming) or think it's not going to be as bad as we think) destroyed Jame Hansen in recent congressional testimony. Actually, Christy's own words and published commentary show that he does believe man is warming the climate and that greenhouse gases are contributing to the warming. Christy seems to put more emphasis on land use changes than most scientists and continues to make bad analysis of satellite data.

What I find interesting is the horrible spin Graham puts on this:
"Unlike most alleged journalism on climate change, this is an interview with an actual climatologist (John Christy) as opposed to some politically active biologist/geologist/etc. who is speaking outside his field."

This statement is laughable because it actually turns climate change denial on it's head. Usually it's the anti-global warming crowd that churns out unqualified "scientists" to attack the truth. I'm not sure who Graham is talking about here but most of the scientists I've seen or read about in the media are actual climate researchers. Graham continues with: "He noticed that Hansen--Al Gore's stooge--wasn't just wrong about increased temperatures, he was ridiculously wrong."
What's really interesting here is that John Christy, who is a respected climatologist but one who is at odds with about 98% of the climatologists in the world is treated with deference, Graham (and his minions who post to his blog) claims to have a "real" scientists while James Hansen, arguably the most respected climatologist in the US, winner of numerous honors and a climatologist who has been published more often than most scientists, is Al Gore's "stooge". This subjective bullshit would be laughable if it were not for the fact that Graham actually has an audience. The worst part of this is that Hansen's climate model predictions actually turned out to be quite good as a 2005 analysis pointed out. The book Censoring Science is a must read for anyone who really wants some insight into James Hansen.

Graham goes on to claim that glaciers are not a problem:

"On glaciers:

Ice melts. Glaciers are always calving. This is what ice does. If ice did not melt, we'd have an ice-covered planet. The fact is that the ice cover is growing in the southern hemisphere even as the ice cover is more or less shrinking in the northern hemisphere. As you and I are talking today, global sea ice coverage is about 400,000 square kilometers above the long-term average - which means that the surplus in the Antarctic is greater than the deficit in the Arctic.

WHAT? I don't know who's more confused. Graham or Christy. Glaciers, "ice cover" and sea ice are all different things. Christy is really talking out of his ass here and Graham is eating it all up. Glaciers are losing mass at a rate twice as fast as they normally do and that rate of loss is increasing. The long term outlook for glaciers is bad and the likely results; raising sea levels and a loss of fresh water storage are a direct threat to human life. As far as the ice cover in the south "making up" for loss in the Arctic, it would be wise to look at the Antarctic in it's entirety before making pronouncements about an entire continent.

Graham then moves into a critique of "Al Gore's" proposed solution to global warming (I thought it was President Obama's): "The problem is that the solutions being offered don't provide any detectable relief from this so-called catastrophe. Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That's basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I'm all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn't even notice it."

Excuse me but I thought we were talking about climate science, not policy decisions. This is the typical "kitchen sink" tactic at work, insist that the science is flawed AND attack to solution. Forget for a moment the utter lack of reason in this, Christy/Graham are also flat out wrong. They wrongly assume that only the US will move aggressively to curb GHG emissions, something that simply isn't going to happen. This is a favorite new argument, one that is getting more traction than it deserves. Stabilizing the climate is both possible and necessary.

Graham concludes with a link to this story, actually using it as "evidence" that global warming theory is in trouble. I wonder if he actually read the article as it points out that likely sea level rise if the West Antarctic ice shelf collapsed would be "only" 3 meters instead of the projected 6 meters though the article notes that such a massive shift would actually shift the earths rotational axis. You're right Michael, nothing to worry about.

Once again, Michael Graham has made people dumber. Why does this man still have a microphone in front of him?