Tuesday 21 April 2009

Arthur Rörsch's bizarre ideas on cherry-picking


I know i've been absent from blogging for a while but my job, involving real science, still has priority.

Yet simply have to mention this post by Hans Labohm published on Theo Richels website Klimatosoof which presents a paper written by Prof. dr. ir. Arthur Rörsch (a 75 year old emeritus in biochemistry actually, but that's qualifications enough to be a prominent climate skeptic nowadays) in which he summarizes some of his objections towards climate science (my translation, my emphasis) :

Arthur Rörsch
Arthur Rörsch
Observations show that CO2-concentrations since the beginning of the century has risen some 5,5% while there was no worldwide temperature rise. There are even some indications since 2006 temperatures have been decreasing, and this trend will continue in the next decade.

The article on the Klimatosoof was written in responce to the Dutch PCCC-report.

PCCC stands for Platform, Communication on Climate Change and is a collaboration of several Dutch scientific research centres. Recently PCCC presented the brochure 'de staat van het klimaatonderzoek 2008' (Dutch only, the title means 'climate research roundup 2008')

Amusingly, given the quote above using a three year temperature trend, Rörsch (or Labohm ?) accuses PCCC of cherry-picking : he complains "PCCC presents a misleading graph" for the time period 1900-2008 which could make the people think earth has been warming as "it gives an impression of a continuous rise".

So, if i may believe the Klimatosoof article presenting the entire available data set that is available (1900-2008) is called "cherry-picking", while isolating 3 single years out of that very same dataset is called "science".

The PCCC-graph which gets attacked looks similar like this one from NASA:
Earth Temperature



Rörsch/Labohm, instead of using all those data in the graph ditch all data that doesn't fit their predesigned conclusion. Instead of using this 100 years-timescale they present a graph which looks amazingly familiar as it's Labohm's well known misleading graph of the past decade:
Arthur Rörsch carbon dioxide temperature cherrypick on El Nino La Nina



A. Rörsch has bewildering ideas on science.
Hans Labohm remains a fraud.


Actually Rörsch presents the graph in a context that CO2-levels in the atmosphere don't correlate all that much with temperature. I believe i linked to it before, but this post on More grumbine Science is a must read on the correlation between the two.

UPDATE : Do also read Rörsch' mind numbing post in the comments section of the article

1 comment:

  1. For more information on Hans Labohm and Arthur Rorsch you may have consulted www.desmogblog.com

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