Yesterday I published a long response to the comments I received from Marcel Crok. In it I expanded on what I said and referenced, and dealt with his points towards me.
Not long after the release of my blog post Crok responded to me with a short comment. It won’t take me long to give my final take on this exchange.
So without further ado here’s his response to the blog post I wrote:
After I published the response I received from the KNMI I did a few pokes on Twitter towards Anthony Watts and Marcel Crok to see if they were willing to respond to it.
I also left a comment about it on Crok’s website where I quote what the KNMI said (I couldn’t do this on Watts’ website as the comment section was already closed).
So far I haven’t received a response from Watts, but Marcel Crok was kind enough to engage me in his comment section. I’ll be going through his responses to me in this post and my take on them.
Before I do that though I have to compliment Crok for being respectful and civil towards me, despite me being quite critical towards him. It’s something that’s often severely lacking from any public exchanges that take place. Being able to engage someone while being quite critical and at the same time having a civil exchange was a breath of fresh air. It’s just sad that this is the exception.
Now lets start with his first response towards me, which I found a bit strange:
To be short: yes, the KNMI had some criticism towards the IPCC and how they operate. However, it wasn’t the type of criticism the so-called sceptics thought.
What the KNMI did was provide recommendations to the IPCC to improve its procedures. This included recommendations for improving their reports and how results are communicated. Something that the IPCC asked for and the resulting recommendations from the KNMI aren’t shocking.
However, the so-called sceptics seemed to think differently. Marcel Crok, one of the more known Dutch so-called sceptics, wrote an article about it and Anthony Watts published the following snippet from it on WUWT (emphasis added by Crok):
On my “Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckton” videos this claim was popping up a lot. The reasoning is that because global surface temperatures haven’t risen for over 15 years this means that global warming has stopped and that the projections are wrong.
Unfortunately this ignores a lot of evidence that the planet is still accumulating heat. As I had to explain this constantly in my comment sections on YouTube it prompted me to push the script I was writing about this to the top of the queue:
As usual you can find a full transcript, source listing, and used media resources in the video transcript section.
Just a little heads-up for my readers that I’ve written a guest post for Climate Crocks. The following is a snippet from the beginning of the guest post: One of the things I do is to keep an ear out to what the so-called sceptics are saying in their corner on the internet. I do this on for example Twitter…
Once every one or two months I do a little Google search to see where I, or anything I’m associated with, is mentioned on the internet. It’s a good way to find anything you haven’t noticed or wasn’t sent to you.
This time I stumbled on the slightly disjointed blog post “Science is not a Political Debate, The Science” where my video “Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckton” is mentioned. What drew my attention was the following passage:
When initially investigating the climate change debate I found myself extremely disappointed and unconvinced by the most touted popular work on the subject, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I felt his repeated use of emotional pleas (pathos) severely undermined his argument. Instead of sticking to the science he generally referenced it in passing between anecdotes. This blog post will be a review and analysis of the first part of the video Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckato (YouTube link) by Collin Maessen. I found it to be extremely compelling because in contrast to An Inconvenient Truth, Mr. Maessen immediately supports all his assertions with demonstrated evidence from scientific studies (and references those studies with quotations from them.) [sic]
For one of the SkepticTV shows we had the opportunity to have Dr. Michael Mann as a guest. As I’m the person who is most familiar with environmental subjects among the SkepticTV crew I had the honour of interviewing Dr. Mann during the show (no pressure there…). During this broadcast Dr. Mann and I talked about the legal attacks against…
Anthony Watts often pokes fun at campaigns, or any public messaging, about global warming. This time he did it with the video in which president Obama states he’s going to announce his climate plans:
AP: Obama says he’ll unveil climate plan in Tuesday speech ‘for the sake of our children’.
It seems though, that the world is making a collective yawn (consensus?) so far given the views. The video has been up for several hours and has only a few hundred views and has 437 “likes” as of this writing.
As someone who releases most of his science content on YouTube, let me explain something about how YouTube counts views. If you see a 301+ view count it means that you went above 300 views and now YouTube is going to verify if the views you’re getting are legit. This has as a consequence that the view count isn’t updated anymore in real-time and you will have to wait several hours before they update (this can take up to a day before it’s updated).
According to their about page their “mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.” And they’ve had their fair share of successes in politics and the media on these matters.
Recently they uploaded their 25 year anniversary video – called What Is The Heartland Institute? – to YouTube (they are now 29 years old) and in it they get congratulated for their excellent work:
However, anyone familiar with me will know I do not think they have done excellent work. Far from it, a lot of their work has actually harmed people.
Today is the 6th time Earth Hour will be held to raise awareness about the need for action on global warming. Considering this event started in just one city the current number of participants is a testament to how effective this awareness campaign is:
Earth Hour is the single, largest, symbolic mass participation event in the world. Born out of a hope that we could mobilize people to take action on climate change, Earth Hour now inspires a global community of millions of people in 7,001 cities and towns across 152 countries and territories to switch lights off for an hour as a massive show of concern for the environment.
A campaign so effective that it has become the focus of a lot of the so-called sceptics, who are currently attempting to reframe the message of Earth Hour.
