A question for Dr Karl, the warmist

Doctor Karl Kruszelnicki presents science on the ABC. In 2007 he ran as a Senate candidate for the Climate Change Coalition.

So you expect him to know the very basic data about global warming. You expect him to make it his duty to at least know whether the planet is indeed warming, and if so by how much.

Right?

Then explain this exchange of tweets, which I am told Kruszelnicki deleted from his Twitter account. (They certainly aren’t there now.)

Yes, I did write about these tweets in an update to my column yesterday, but the more I reflect on this the more I consider this a particularly egregious example of warmist know-nothingness. It is also a symbol of the giddy and irresponsible ignorance of so many of the noisier global warming prophets.

Dr Karl, debating the figures of Britain’s Met, asserts the world has warmed 0.3 degrees in 16 years - which still isn’t that much, actually.

But the Met’s figures, as tweeter Bill correctly informs him, actually show a warming just one-sixth of what Dr Karl claimed. That is so small that scientists say it’s statistically significant. It’s indistinguishable from background noise. Essentially zero.

Just in case there is any doubt about what the Met figures show, here is the Met in its own words, excuses and all:

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period...

Or put it this way: if this rate of warming is real and was maintained for the rest of the century, the world by 2100 would be hotter by about 0.27 of a degree. You’d struggle to even measure it. You certainly wouldn’t notice a change in the climate, other than the natural ones that have always been with us.

Conclusions. First, I’m astonished Dr Karl didn’t know about this pause in the warming, and didn’t check it out even after I alerted him to it.

Second, I’m even more astonished that after finally (apparently?) learning of his mistake, Dr Karl did not apologise to me, issue a public correction or give any indication he would reassess his global warming catastrophism. He’s given no sign he will change his mind about anything even after learning the planet has not warmed 0.3 degrees in 16 years, as he thought, but just 0.05.

His only response, it seems, is to remove from his Twitter site any tweets on this topic that may be held against him.

I don’t think that’s good enough.

After all, had I exaggerated a temperature trend by a factor of six, what would have been said of me by warmists? How many activists would have rushed to denounce me to the Press Council?  And, of course, there’s some basic questions about intellectual integrity and being straight with your audience, in this case Dr Karl’s 177,000 followers on Twitter.

So I ask Dr Karl, ABC science presenter, to at least tell us this: when the facts change, sir, does your opinion?

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