So, the former editor of New Science magazine has written an Op-Ed in a London paper claiming that cosmic rays are responsible for global warming. He has other arguments, but they are the standard and generally well refuted “arguments” against the notion of human-driven global warming. The new bit is the section dealing with cosmic rays:

More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world.

… In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Wow. That’s an amazing claim. Note a few things here, though. First, start off with the fact that the theory posits that cosmic rays create clouds. Yet the team in question did not produce clouds, they produced the “building blocks” of clouds. If you aren’t reading very closely, you will miss that distinction. The author of the op-ed tries to aid your confusion. Let me add in the paragraph right before the ellipses in the above quote:

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation.

See what he did there? He claimed that the scientist had “hit the jackpot” in their search for evidence that cosmic rays produce clouds when, in fact, the experiment had produced no actual clouds. Nor, for that matter, does the op-ed explain why these “building blocks” are guaranteed to produce actual clouds. It is an interesting first step, but it is not the proof that the author of this op-ed claims it is.

In other words, he lied.

The author lies by implication as well. At no point does the op-ed deal with important questions about the theory. First, we already have a theory of cloud formation: why is that theory and the evidence that supports it inferior to the new theory? How does this new theory interact with the old theory? Even assuming the cosmic ray theory of cloud formation is entirely correct — evidence for which, I stress, the author has already lied about — the fact that cosmic rays cause clouds does not, by itself, mean that the cosmic rays affect global warming. To make that claim, you would have to prove that the cosmic rays produce significant amounts of clouds, amounts large enough to affect the amount of cloud cover on the earth. You then have to show that cosmic rays have been decreasing in recent decades. The author, with his talk of “politically incorrect” experiments and “jackpot[s]” and “a new theory of climate change” implies, despite never bringing those points up for discussion, that all those questions have been answered by the work of the scientists he is touting. Would it surprise you to find out that the paper the author cites does not, in fact, answer those questions?

It shouldn’t, not if you have been paying attention to global warming “skeptics” Recently, I went round and round on this topic with Number 9, from Say Uncle’s place, about global warming. The discussion thread is interesting for two things: how quickly number 9 backed off his initial claims and eventually fell into blaming — and I am not making this up — Jane Fonda and just how disingenuous much of the material he linked to was. I don’t blame Number 9 for that; the fault belongs to those who wrote what he linked. But if you follow all the links, you can see that in many cases, the global warming skeptics did shoddy work, cherry picked their data, or ignored contrary data. They lied, in other words, to make their case.

Take, for example, Number 9s first “debunking link“. Here is what I wrote with regards to some of its claims:

“MYTH 2: The “hockey stick”, a poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well.”

This is a lie:

This is patently false. Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context (see Figures 1 and 2 in “Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called ‘Hockey Stick’”).
….The “Hockey Stick” studies claim that the 20th century on the whole is the warmest period of the past 1000 years.

This is a mis-characterization of the actual scientific conclusions. Numerous studies suggest that hemispheric mean warmth for the late 20th century (that is, the past few decades) appears to exceed the warmth of any comparable length period over the past thousand years or longer, taking into account the uncertainties in the estimates (see Figure 1 in “Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called ‘Hockey Stick’”). On the other hand, in the context of the long-term reconstructions, the early 20th century appears to have been a relatively cold period while the mid 20th century was comparable in warmth, by most estimates, to peak Medieval warmth (i.e., the so-called “Medieval Warm Period”). It is not the average 20th century warmth, but the magnitude of warming during the 20th century, and the level of warmth observed during the past few decades, which appear to be anomalous in a long-term context.
…Errors in the “Hockey Stick” undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.

This statement embraces at least two distinct falsehoods. The first falsehood holds that the “Hockey Stick” is the result of one analysis or the analysis of one group of researchers (i.e., that of Mann et al, 1998 and Mann et al, 1999). However, as discussed in the response to Myth #1 above, the basic conclusions of Mann et al (1998,1999) are affirmed in multiple independent studies. Thus, even if there were errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, numerous other studies independently support the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth.

The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the “hockey stick” shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.

Oh, and the data? Confirmed.

… .. anyway, Myth 3: wrong
(this last link also deals with the ice core “evidence”. More on that nonsense here.

… Myth 5: Again, hard to tell what his point is. He starts off scoffing at computer models (as the computer model work isn’t backed up by empirical evidence) and the devolves into the sun spot theory. Both are bullshit.

… Myth 8: Umm, putting aside the idea that media coverage drives up the costs of storm damage (wtf???) this is, again, wrong. Yes, population density and unrestrained costal grwoth does make the dammage worse, but so does increasing strength of storms, which is apparently made worse by global warming. This, by the way, is one area still uncertain: the effect appears to be real, but its power is not yet settled, not among hurricanes at any rate.

Myth 9: Again, huh? The question is not whether or not glacier retreat or advance, the question is whether or not global warming is making them retreat more or advance less than they normally would. He is building arguments out of straw.

… Myth 10: Here he lies by implication “Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.” The question of this is still unsettled (certian kinds of storm damage can mimic sea level rise in localized areas) but the seal level worldwide is rising:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Right from the start, the best evidence that Number 9 could find was filled with what appeared to be deliberate distortions and attempts to confuse the actual issues of the debate. This continued through the discussion. Number 9, at this point in the debate obsessed with the hockey stick graph, quoted someone using the work of Wegman to attack global warming science. Unfortunately, as I point out, Wegman’s work is not very good:

The committee subsequently provided followup opportunities to participants to clarify issues that were discussed at the hearings. Mike Mann (Penn State Professor and RealClimate blogger) participated in the second (July 27 2006) of the two hearings, “Questions Surrounding the ‘Hockey Stick’ Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments”. He has posted his responses to five follow-up questions, along with supporting documents. Among the more interesting of these documents are a letter and a series of email requests from emeritus Stanford Physics Professor David Ritson who has identified significant apparent problems with the calculations contained in the Wegman report, but curiously has been unable to obtain any clarification from Dr. Wegman or his co-authors in response to his inquiries. We hope that Dr. Wegman and his co-authors will soon display a willingness to practice the principle of ‘openness’ that they so recommend in their report….

Again, while Number 9 should have done his research more carefully, the fault is primarily with the people to whom he links. I want to be charitable and just say they are bad writers who haven’t done their research. But when you see the pattern over and over again, when you see so many global warming “skeptics” lie directly, lie by implication, or lie by omission, I am afraid that charity is exhausted. Far too often, global warming skeptics have been shown to have something less than reverence for the truth. The op-ed that started this post is just one more example of the kind of dishonesty that passes for “argument” in a much too large section of the global warming skeptic community.

I often hear global warming skeptics whine that they are not taken seriously. Perhaps, just perhaps, if those people either started be honest about the science and issues around global warming or policed their own ranks so that dishonest hacks weren’t so prominent people would start taking them seriously again.