Thursday 12 March 2009

Labohm. Again. Sigh.

Hans Labohm(start here) is fond of repeating the same meme over and over again. Long after it has been disproven. And long after there has been demonstrated that he knows and understands what he says is misleading.

August 23, 2008, on the libertarian website Vrijspreker, Labohm presented a graph showing "for the past decades, there's no correlation between CO2 and temperature"


Hans Labohm Fraud cherrypick Joe d'Aleo Icecap


As he got the remark he cherry-picked his data, Labohm wrote a follow-up article in which he still uses a graph with a misleading timescale (as earth litterally was a diifferent planet in a time there were no trees yet)

Hans Labohm fraud cherrypick misleiding CO2 temperatuur

But finally he also presents this graph which is the one we need :

CO2 temperature correlation Vostok ice

This image leaves no doubt that indeed there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature. And that because of its short time interval, the first graph Hans Labohm presented was misleading. Which of course could be undeliberately and by no means is a proof of dishonesty.


Yet, in the third edition of Jason Magazine (jg 33), Hans Labohm presents this graph

Hans Labohm fraud Joseph d'Aleo Icecap cherrypick

he 'explains' :there's no a single correlation between temperature & CO2 (...) there's not a single timescale showing a correlation between CO2-concentrations in the atmosphere and temperature.
Of course, as the third graph above (a graph he himself posted) already showed, there absolutely is a correlation.

In the next edition of the magazine, Dutch student Desi Van de Laar wrote a rebuttal to Hans' text. In which she posts a graph showing the correlation.

The graph looks a bit like this one :

Relatie CO2 en temperatuur ijskern
Clearly, this is the second time Labohm has been shown his statement is false.


Hans wrote a rebuttal (jan 6, 2009) adressing Van de Laars rebuttal. A text he concludes with :

the last decade earth has been cooling, despite a CO2 rise. This presumably leads to the conclusion that CO2 isn't such an important factor in determing earth's temperature.
He present a graph to depict his words :
Hans Labohm manipulatie cherrypick
This is the second time he ignores the proof presented to him that his statement is false.

Back then, i did blog about it (posts he read), which means he's seen the evidence he's wrong no less than three times.


February 13, 2009 : Labohm writes a post on De Dagelijkse Standaard in which he writes :

The main thing is that since ten years earth has stopped warming while CO2-levels kept rising. This suggests there's not any causuality between CO2 and global warming (which isn't there any more anyway). Better than a thousand words, this graph shows what it's all about.
The graph hidden under the hyperlink is this one :



In the comments section, someone complains the time interval Labohm presents is way too short to be meaningful.

The same day Hans Labohm wrote this follow up post to adress this comment in which he answers :

Good point ! But no time scale will ever show a correlation between CO2 and Temperature. QED. P.ex. Look here
Of course, Hans' statement is wrong. And he knows very well that it is.


March 4, 2009 :Labohm publishes a post on De Dagelijkse Standaard which begins with :

(...) the temperature trend (which - i'll repeat it once more - shows no correlation with the level of atmospheric CO2) (...)

Once again Labohm is critisized by the readers of the site for his graph the commenters call 'misleading'. Hans replies by giving a link to this graph :

and this graph

So once again, Labohm HIMSELF presents the graph which clearly shows the correlation.

Interestingly, in this post he admits a ten year period is too short to support his claim that earth stopped warming a decade ago.


March 12, 2009 : Hans mailes around an article of his - published in the March-edition of the magazine Research Review.

Hans writes (remember, on DDS he admitted that a ten year temperature trend is meaningless) :

The illustrated graph shows declines in temperatures measured by surface and satellite thermometers over the last 10 years, while the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere still rises. It indicates that over this period there has been no warming, but cooling. It also shows that CO2 is not correlated with temperatures, which suggests that it has only little impact, if at all. The graph, which is based on the measurements of the official scientific institutions, is the best-kept secret of the ‘warmoholics’.
of course there's a graph (coming from the known unreliable source icecap from Joe d'aleo) to picturise Hans' words
Hans Labohm manipulation of data


i'm wondering which graph will accompany my next post on Hans Labohm...

UPDATE 1: March 13, 2009, in the comments section of De Dagelijkse Standaard, Labohm writes :
Not one timescale -millions of years, thousands, hundreds or tenths of years- shows a correlation between CO2 and temperatures.


UPDATE 2: March 17,2009 , Hans did it again in his post on De Dagelijkse Standaard :
Not one timescale -millions of years, thousands, hundreds or tenths of years- shows a correlation between CO2 and temperatures.
The graph behind the hyperlink is ...


Do notice
he does NOT provide links for the other timescales.
Which is no surprise, as he has demonstrated himself that such graphs actually would disprove his statement.


UPDATE 3 : March 24, 2009, Hans Labohm did it again :
no timescale shows a correlation between CO2 ans temperature. The last ten years earth has been cooling while cO2-levels kept rising.
The illustration behind the hyperlink is this one :

Hans Labohm De Dagelijkse Standaard libertarisme VVD PVV


UPDATE 4 : April 21, 2009, Hans Labohm presents a familiar graph :



UPDATE 5 :
i've stopped updating this post for half a year because i got bored, but allover this period Labohm has been using the very same "argument" over and over again.
Latest attempt to fool the audience : today, November 9, 2009, in this post on De Dagelijkse Standaard, accompanied by a graph we all know by now .
Labohm writes :

This graph illustrates (...) there's no correlation between CO2 & temperature, implying one can assumle there's no causality either.

UPDATE 6 :

November 16, 2009 In a guestlog on the Dutch NOS site, Hans Labohm writes :
The average temperature has been decreasing the past ten years, while CO2-levels int he atmosphere is still rising
This words are illustrated with this graph :



UPDATE 7 :
Last weekend, Labohm publised an article in the Dutch newspaper "Trouw". A prominent place in the article went to this graph :



UPDATE 8 :
December 14 2009
This page, by far, is the most visited one on my blog and as a result more and more people start asking Labohm why he keeps on using that misleading graph again and again.

Of course Hans never answers that question. But as he did get so much opposition on the NOS-weblog, he started trying other graphs that are equally misleading.

Labohm's posts belong to a series of a debate between him and real scientists. Bart Sprengers used the opportunity to write a post asking Labohm about his use of misleading graphs.

Here's what Labohm answered :

Bart asks : why did you show a graph showing temperatures in US, while the text was suggesting it would be about global temperatures ?Answer : it was graph that was easily available on the internet. But now i found another graph, showing a different picture. No correlation between cO2 and temperature !

I have a feeling this is not the last time seeing this new graph...



UPDATE 9 :
june 6, 2010
Once again i haven't been following Labohm but i just stumpled upon his presentation at the fourth international climate conference organised by the heavily Exxon-funded Heartland Institute. In his presentation, Labohm is showing the following graph to 'proof' there's no correlation between CO2 and temperature :
Hans Labohm klimaatsceptici misleiding

Conclusion
In his posts, Hans Labohm is presenting misleading facts, and given the chronology mentioned above, there's not doubt at all he isn't fully aware of the misleading nature of the facts he presents.

Hans Labohm is not wrong, Hans Labohm is a fraud.

15 comments:

  1. Zijn laatste posting, met die sprookjes is wel heel erg. Het lijkt wel op een creationist. Voor ieder argument van Hans Labohm kun je wel een equivalent vinden bij het creationisme. Het ergste is dat het - weerlegd of niet - hij het straks weer op een andere plek gaat beweren.

    Maar blijf doorgaan, Jules.

    Ps Hans Erren is er ook zo een.

    JvdLaan

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  2. JvdLaan doesn't understand spatial correlation of long timeseries. He thinks that looking at long reliable timeseries in Europe is cherrypicking.

    The hot summer is ending for the alarmists, their voices are getting shrill.

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  3. FYI readers :

    Hans Erren seems a bit frustrated that JvdLaan on Erren's blog patiently posed a lot of good questions.

    Questions good enough to demonstrate Erren has a bad habit of answering nowhere near the question...

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  4. FYI readers

    Jules seems a bit frustrated that I debunked the alarmist story of Shishmaref:
    Storm frequency decreased since the seventies and the island even shows lateral growth.

    vdlaan is not aware that four independent time series that have a spatial correlation of 70% can be used as excellent predictors for the inbetween area. I tried to explain several times, but it simply doesn't sink in.

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  5. I freely admitted that I did not know what kriging was. But that was not the point.
    The point is, Hans Erren fails to understand what Europe actually is. He thinks 4 stations represents the whole of Europe, excluding Scandinavia, Great Britain and Ireland, the Iberian and Italian Penininsula and the Balkans and so on!!
    But no, he continues to boast he knows something his readers fail to understand.
    Moreover one of his series showed a warming trend as pointed out by one of the other readers, yet he continues to propagate that warming in Europa has stopped since 1994! But that does not sink in Hans Erren.
    Hans Erren is not a real scientist. He starts with a conclusion and searches for data that confirms his conclusion. That type of strategy was clearly shown in his postings about Shismaref. He had to look for his data after he made his statement that Shismaref was not shrinking. And it does not matter if Shismaref is shrinking or not and whether he is was right or night, the way he works is clearly an nonscientific approach!
    And in the end he calls us alarmists.

    Jvdlaan (just returned from the Cape Verde Islands, so I had not reacted earlier)

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  6. Hij doet het weer / he did it again:
    http://www.dagelijksestandaard.nl/2009/06/10/wat-te-doen-tegen-de-onophoudelijke-misleidende-klimaatinformatie/

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  7. The question arises, why the correlation between industry apologists/deniers and right-wing conservatism? Well... The folowing is an example of some of the fascinating stuff that saw me pretty much abandon my mycological studies after witnessing the bizarre responses to 9/11, and pursuing theories that combined social behavior/development and biological evolution. I may not go back! LOL

    "Conceptual Definitions of conservative ideology.
    Definitions of conservatism stress “the disposition and tendency to preserve what is established; opposition to change” (Neilson, 1958) and “the disposition in politics to maintain the existing order” (Morris,1976). Traditionalism and hostility to social innovation were central to Mannheim’s analysis of conservatism. Rossiter too defined conservatism as “an attitude of opposition to disruptive change in the social, economic, legal, religious, political, or cultural order” He added, “The distinguishing mark of conservatism is the fear of change
    which becomes transformed in the political arena into the fear of radicalism”.

    Clearly AGW poses a huge threat to the status quo of free-market capitalism. Knowing what we do about their ability to dismiss basically the whole of science simply in order to preserve their chidhood belief in a Creator, dismissing AGW should come quite easily for them.

    "This possibility is suggested by the theory of System Justification, which hypothesizes that (a) there is an ideological motivation to defend the existing social system against instability, threat, and attack and (b) this motivation is stronger among proponents of right-wing than of left-wing ideology (Jost et al., 2001).

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  8. What Labohm means is that there is no causal correlation between CO2 and temperature as in CO2 leading to higher temperatures. Rather the other way around as climate sceptics like to interpret the long timescale graph. So as he agrees with higher temperatures leading to higher CO2 levels (with a time lag) he is not frauding when he disagrees with CO2 leading to higher temperatures. There is nothing wrong with the 10 year graph showing no increase in global temperatures (there wasn't any as becomes clearer every day) while there was an increase in CO2. You can argue that that time interval is short but alarmist scientists do and did the same things. An example are the articles which try to ignore the influence of the sun at the end of the last century: see for instance "no solar hiding place for greenhouse sceptics".

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  9. Ignoring the sun at the end of the last century? The whole thing about the sun is that there has been no increase of solar intensity since about 1970, exactly where the temperature went up, up, up!

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  10. Solar activity has several components. Some of them like the CME's (coronal mass explosions) went also up up up. You can ask prof De Jager about it who is a solar physicist. But also if you take the sunspots as a measure and start at 1970 there was a solar increase. Above that all cycli after 1970 except the present one had an exceptionally high activity, highest in thousands of years. Read for instance the Volkskrant: [url=http://www.volkskrant.nl/archief_gratis/article984588.ece/De_zon_knalt_als_zelden_tevoren]link[/url]

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  11. Let's start with the sunspot number:
    http://sidc.oma.be/news/113/wolf-en.jpg
    Absolutely no correlation. Starting at 1970 is cherry picking, and even then it does not work. Cycle 20 was relatively weak, but cycles 21 and 22 were of equal magnitude, and cycle 23 only marginally smaller. And highest in thousands of years? Not according to NASA nor the Belgian observatory. Here cycle 19 was the highest, funnily enough right in the period where temperatures went somewhat down...

    Note that research has shown that the sunspot cycle (from top to bottom) may contribute up to 0.2 degrees in temperature variation. You can calculate yourself what effect to expect if the cycle gives a sunspotmaximum that varies by about 25%.

    TSI can't be the issue either, since that would contradict cooling of the stratosphere.

    CMEs up? (ejections, not explosions, BTW). Where's the evidence? And please don't point to the measurements using widely different instruments. The latest observatory instrument, in function since 1996, by its very design picks up many more CMEs than previous instruments. And it sees no increase to my knowledge.
    Note also that this paper discussed some aspects, and does not note any "up up up":
    http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FIAU%2FIAU2004_IAUS223%2FS1743921304006696a.pdf&code=fba73c556f7ebaed454f2789ffa4ab4d

    The fact that Kees de Jager still believes it's the sun indicates that he just can't accept that his preferred study object doesn't have enough influence.

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  12. Gerard,

    Labohm isn't just denying the causation, he's really denying the correlation at all.

    his exact words in Dutch (my emphasis) :

    Op geen enkele tijdschaal – miljoenen, honderdduizenden, duizenden, honderden en tientallen jaren – is er een correlatie tussen CO2 en temperaturen.

    (in english : not a single time scale will show a correlation between CO2 and temp)

    This is both incorret, and given the chronology in my post, he is perfectly aware that it is incorrect, which doesn't stop him from using both this claim, and the misleading graph.

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  13. Jules, Ik ga ervan uit dat Labohm wel de correlatie de "andere kant op" erkent(hogere temperaturen leiden tot meer CO2) maar ik ben Labohm niet. Ik vermoed dus dat hij zich ongelukkig uitgedrukt heeft. Als hij helemaal geen correlatie erkend dan heeft hij inderdaad ongelijk.

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  14. Marco, I chose to start at 1970 because you mentioned that date not because I wanted to cherrypick on a low solar cycle. In general I think one solar cycle could only affect local weather not global climate. You have to look on a longer timescale. So looking at differences within one cycle is nonsense anyway: there are far too much feedback cycles that hide the effects temporarily. That climatologists still try to model that variety and then say the sun is responsible for so and so percent is pretty ridiculous in my view and arrogant too. That the sun was at his highest activity in the last part of the last century becomes clear from looking at the C14 figures and Beryllium and is also clear from the link I provided. That high activity has stopped now with the beginning of cycle 24. In the next couple of years it will become clear what is really forcing the climate

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  15. Gerard,

    hij tracht wel degelijk echt met dat grafiekje mensen te doen geloven dat er helemaal géén correlatie is tussen CO2 en temperatuur.

    Iets waarvan hijzelf weet dat dat niet zo is.

    Ik wéét waarom ik zo onverbiddelijk ben voor die man. En slechts die man.

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