Sometimes writing stinks enough to burn the nose hairs: S. Fred Singer shows how.

Humans have adapted to natural climate changes in the past; we should have no problem doing so in the future.

The weight bearing down on that “should” is enough to make me cringe. Fast forward to a not so cheery future: “Ooops, we should’ve!” says Singer/

Compare Singer and The Economist on melting Arctic ice.

Singer: Glaciers are melting and Arctic sea ice is disappearing. But this is a necessary consequence of warming and says nothing about its cause. Any warming—whether man-made or natural—will melt ice. Confusing cause and effect is faulty logic.

And,

The Economist:

The sea mammals and their hunters would have even fewer problems if fears of climatic feedback in the Arctic proved unfounded. The paper in Nature claims that they are. A group led by Steven Amstrup of the US Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Centre ran CCSM3 with several assumptions about reducing greenhouse gases. Dr Amstrup concluded that although the sea ice does shrink, it does so gradually and in proportion to the temperature rises that result. Sudden disappearances of ice do occur, but the Arctic seems able to recover from them. This is important, as it will give humanity more time to reduce its emissions and it improves, among many other things, the chance that polar bears will survive as a species.

Or, take Singer’s crappy reporting skills, this time about the Cancun Climate Change Conference.

International climate negotiations collapsed in December 2009 in Copenhagen (soon dubbed “Flopnhagen”)—and the just-completed round in Cancun, Mexico, achieved little.

Here’s what a real newspaper said:

Nations endorsed compromise texts drawn up by the Mexican hosts, despite objections from Bolivia.

The draft documents say deeper cuts in carbon emissions are needed, but do not establish a mechanism for achieving the pledges countries have made.

Some countries’ resistance to the Kyoto Protocol had been a stumbling block during the final week of negotiations.

However, diplomats were able to find a compromise.

Delegates cheered speeches from governments that had caused the most friction during negotiations – Japan, China, even the US – as one by one they endorsed the draft.

BBC environment correspondent Richard Black said the meeting did not achieve the comprehensive, all-encompassing deal that many activists and governments want.

But he said it was being “touted as a platform on which that comprehensive agreement can be built”.

Finally, there’s the attack on modeling.

What about some 20 greenhouse climate models, all predicting warming—from as low as 1.4 Celsius all the way to 11.5 Celsius, for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Yet no one can tell us which of these answers is correct—if any. And, none of these models can explain why the climate cooled from 1940 to 1975 without using special ad-hoc assumptions. In any case, model results are never evidence; only actual observations count.

Crucially, greenhouse models cannot explain the observed patterns of warming—temperature trends at different latitudes and altitudes. These data, published in a U.S. government scientific report in May 2006, lead me to conclude that the human contribution is not significant. Most of current warming therefore must stem from natural causes; it may well be part of a solar-driven 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling that’s been documented in ice cores, ocean sediments, etc., going back a million years.

SkepticalScience explains how modeling works.

Climate models have to be tested to find out if they work. We can’t wait for 30 years to see if a model is any good or not; models are tested against the past, against what we know happened. If a model can correctly predict trends from a starting point somewhere in the past, we could expect it to predict with reasonable certainty what might happen in the future.

So all models are first tested in a process called Hindcasting. The models used to predict future global warming can accurately map past climate changes. If they get the past right, there is no reason to think their predictions would be wrong. Testing models against the existing instrumental record suggested CO2 must cause global warming, because the models could not simulate what had already happened unless the extra CO2 was added to the model. Nothing else could account for the rise in temperatures over the last century.

Some pundits like Singer are just disingenuous, or cowardly in the face of contention.

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