A bunch of illegally hacked UK e-mails storm the anti-scientific side of the blogosphere at the same time as an uber-extreme weather event hits Britain.  I guess when it rains, it pours — literally:

Forecasters said the rainfall was unprecedented. Britain’s Meteorological Office said a record 12.3 inches of rain fell in 24 hours in the area — the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the U.K….

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told the BBC that flood defenses were meant to withstand a one-in-100-years flood — but could not cope with the volume of water.

“What we dealt with last night was probably more like one-in-a-1,000, so even the very best defenses, if you have such quantities of rain in such a short space of time, can be over-topped,” Benn said.

Britain’s Meteorological Office added that the amount of rain expected for all of November had fallen in one day.

Local House of Commons lawmaker Tony Cunningham said the flood was “of biblical proportions.”  That’s why CP calls it Hell and High Water.  The headline quote was from the Times Online story.  Here’s the UK Independent:

Statistics compiled by MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, show the deluge is the greatest seen since meteorologists started using instruments to record rainfall – back in 1727.

None of those stories make the climate change link, though two years ago, after flooding almost as rec0rd-breaking, PM Gordon Brown said, “Obviously like every advanced industrial country we’re coming to terms with some of the issues surrounding climate change…. This has been, if you like, a one in 150 years set of incidents that has taken place in both Yorkshire and Humberside and now in Gloucestershire and the Severn.”  Sadly, 1-in-150 year deluges — or 1-in-1000 — just aren’t what they used to be.  Environment Secretary Hilary Benn went further back then, noting that “the scientific consensus was that the climate was changing,” and adding, “The world is going to have to come to terms, so the scientists are telling us, with more extreme weather events and that’s why we need to anticipate them and try and plan for them.”

Significantly, climate science actually predicts that, increasingly, the old age is right:  When it rains, it pours.

I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of global warming science — and it’s an impact that has already been documented to have started.  For completeness’ sake on the subject, I’ll run through some of the literature.  Regular readers can skip the rest of this post.  You can find more at “Hell and High Water hits Georgia,” and there’s some terrific  technical meteorological analysis at “Weather Channel expert on Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge.”

In 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.”

They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.

In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

No surprise, then, that as a recent WWF post noted, U.S. Sees Wettest October on Record; Arkansas Records are Washed Away.

Even the Bush Administration in its must-read U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:

Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense….

It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.

In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity.

In short, get used to it.

And let’s end with a NYT quote about record-breaking extreme weather in Australia earlier this year from someone’s whose emails are now, ironically enough, in the news:

The flooding in the northeast and the combustible conditions in the south were consistent with what is forecast as a result of recent shifts in climate patterns linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research.

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AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

CALLER: Yes, I agree with the Senator on what he says about the climate change. I believe that the world is just changing like it usually does….

INHOFE: I think he’s right. I think what he’s saying is God’s still up there. We’re going through these cycles. … I really believe that a lot of people are in denial who want to hang their hat on the fact, that they believe is a fact, that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, are causing global warming. The science really isn’t there.

Thank God the Senator from Oklahoma is here to promise us that that the Almighty will override at a planetary level the laws of physics He created and simply stop human-emissions of heat-trapping gases from ravaging his Creation.  Now if we can only get Inhofe to tell God to stop all cancers and traffic accidents, too.

More seriously,  the only thing more stunning than the fact that a U.S. Senator — the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works committee, no less — would advance such a predeterministic view is that anyone in the media would treat him seriously (see for instance, “NYT’s Green Inc. blog wins worst headline of the day“).

But this fundamentalist, anti-scientific tripe, far from disqualifying Inhofe, puts him in very good company with other leading conservative politicians:

It bears repeating that the fact the climate has changed in the past, does not mean humans can’t change the climate today.  Quite the reverse.  As the famous climatologist Wallace Broecker, climate scientist, wrote in a 1995 Nature article:

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.

The point is that “natural cycles” do not mean “random cycles.”  The climate changes when it is forced to change.  Past warmings were driven by natural forcings, including massive releases of greenhouse gases.  But now humans are dwarfing the natural cycles and natural forcings by pumping out greenhouse gases at a much higher rate than ever occurred in the past — see Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks.

If the “Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small nudges,” what will happen to people foolish enough to keep punching it in the face?  The answer is biblical, but rather than divine intervention, it will, I fear, be Hell and High Water.

H/t to Think Progress, which posted the video and gives its background.

On C-Span’s Washington Journal this week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the godfather of global warming deniers, said that he will travel to the climate change summit in Copenhagen this fall to present “another view.” “I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad,” he said. Throughout the program, Inhofe went through his tattered global warming denier claims: that climate change is a “hoax,” that CO2 is not a pollutant, and — latching on to the latest false right-wing talking point — that clean energy legislation will cost American families $1,700 a year.

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In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

The people who refuse to accept the reality that President Obama was born in the United States share much in common with those who refuse to accept the reality that humans are dramatically changing the climate.

5.  Both groups are impervious to the evidence. During the campaign, "Obama released a certification of live birth, which is the official document you get if you ask Hawaii for a copy of your birth certificate," as Salon explains.  Further, "state officials have repeatedly affirmed its authenticity and said they've checked it against the original record and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii."  Politico labels this "seemingly incontrovertible evidence."  Similarly, the reality of human-caused warming has been overwhelmingly demonstrated and affirmed by the peer-reviewed literature, the hundreds of scientists who review and report on that literature periodically as part of the IPCC process and the more than 100 world governments (including the Bush Administration) who approved the 2007 IPCC summary reports word for word (see "Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly" and "Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?"*).

4.  Both come from the same group of people. The NYT explained that the birther movement "first took root among some staunchly conservative elements."  As Politico notes, "A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn't born in the US (28 percent) or aren't sure (30 percent)."  And it is conservatives and Republicans who make up the overwhelming majority of those who question climate science (see "The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP").

3.  Both group get their disinformation from the same right-wing sources. The NYT wrote on June 24 that "Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the country's most popular talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, told his listeners on Tuesday that Mr. Obama "has yet to have to prove that he's a citizen." "  Similarly, Limbaugh tells his listeners things like, "Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming."

2.  Both groups have an underlying motivation - their desire to obstruct progressive government action. The birthers, of course, are trying to delegitimize Obama, to block his entire reform agenda.  NYT science reporter Andy Revkin noted about one huge conference of global warming deniers, "The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases."  As I explain at length in my book, a central reason that conservatives and libertarians reject the scientific understanding of human-caused climate change is that they simply cannot stand the solution.

1.  Both groups believe in a mammoth conspiracy theory.  The birthers not only believe that Obama's birth documents are forged and that current Hawaii state officials are lying about them.  They have to believe in a conspiracy dating back five decades, as Salon explains:  two Hawaiian newspapers carried announcements of Obama's birth in August 1961. (Read the Honolulu Advertiser's item from Aug. 13, 1961, nine days after Obama's birth, here.)....  The truth, though, is that the notices are even stronger pieces of evidence than that. Obama's family didn't place them - Hawaii did, as it does for all births. The announcements were based on official records sent to the papers by the state's Department of Health."

Deniers like Senator James Inhofe (R-OIL) or Anthony Watts proudly assert or repeat statements like "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public" or "the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind" [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].  That hoax would require complicity among thousands of climate scientists, all of the leading scientific journals, the National Academies of Science around the world (including ours) and every major U.S. scientific organization (see "Yet more scientists call for deep GHG cuts").  Such statements accuses every major government, including ours, of participating in that conspiracy, since they all sign off on every word in the Assessment Report summaries.

The differences between the birthers and the deniers, however, are bigger than the similarities.  The birthers are relatively harmless, the mainstream media has mostly debunked them and relegated them to a side show.  The deniers, however, still get regular play in the MSM and are far, far more dangerous.  If enough Americans, opinion makers, and policymakers continue to listen to the deniers message of delay, delay, delay, we will destroy a livable climate, ruining the health and well-being of the next 50 generations to walk the planet.

The birthers are stuck in the past.  The deniers want to destroy the future.

Related Links:

Climate deniers, hold your fire!

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

Sen. Inhofe and U.S. Farm Bureau chief casually chat about destroying the climate bill

The five stages of grief describes "a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss," as Wikipedia puts it:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

l have been meaning to blog on this since I heard a very brilliant physicist, Saul Griffiths, use this piece of pop psychology to describe climate science activists (CSAs), and I realized that he had it backwards.

And the timing could not be better what with the staggering number of comments over the weekend from the WattsUpWithThat crowd. I let the overwhelming majority of those comments through because every several months progressives and CSAs should see what anti-climate-science talking points are making the rounds. [For the last go round, see "The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP" with 537 comments.]

But first, let me explain why I am still using the word "denier" here, although many deniers don't like the implication - which I am certainly not making - that they are anything like Holocaust deniers. I have blogged many times on the quest for a better term (for a long discussion see Media enable denier spin 3: PLEASE stop calling them "skeptics").

I suspect future generations will call them "climate destroyers" or worse - since if we actually (continue to) listen to them, that pretty much ensures warming of 5°C or more this century, 850 to 1000 ppm concentrations, and centuries of what had been purely preventable misery (for the recent scientific literature and analysis of the multiple catastrophic consequences humanity faces on the business-as-usual emissions path, see "An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water"). But what should we call these people in the meantime, while we still have time to ignore them and save the climate?

As an important aside, I very much draw a distinction between the deniers - the professionals (like Watts, Morano, and Will) who spread disinformation for a living and/or full-time - and the much larger number of people who have been misled by them into repeating their disinformation. It's much harder to know what term to use for the misled than it is for the misleaders. Let's call them delayers, for now, since that is their primary impact.

Let's first note that neither the deniers nor the delayers are skeptics, the term they (and the media) like to use.

THEY AREN'T SKEPTICAL - THEIR MINDS ARE MADE UP

The traditional or mainstream media still call them "skeptics," as in this NYT headline. As long as they do so they trivialize the problem and render the word "skeptic" devoid of meaning.

All scientists are skeptics. Hence the motto of the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest scientific academies (founded in 1660), Nullius in verba: "Take nobody's word." Indeed, as Wikipedia explains in its entry on "Skepticism":

A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation. The scientific method details the specific process by which this investigation of reality is conducted. Considering the rigor of the scientific method, science itself may simply be thought of as an organized form of skepticism. This does not mean that the scientific skeptic is necessarily a scientist who conducts live experiments (though this may be the case), but that the skeptic generally accepts claims that are in his/her view likely to be true based on testable hypotheses and critical thinking.

Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

What are these long debunked arguments and talking points that deniers keep pushing? You can find a constantly updated list - with debunking - at the excellent website Skeptical Science. Many science blogs, including CP and RealClimate, take them on regularly as a quick search would reveal.

As an aside, while I have temporarily relaxed my comments policy this weekend, CP in general does not allow people to post long-debunked denier talking points as I have said many times. Why? Either I have to waste time debunking them for the umpteenth time (and deniers are never satisfied with a couple of sentences and a link) - thus allowing deniers to achieve one of their goals which is to waste everyone else's time - or I ignore it, in which case a first-time visitor stumbling over a post might think that the disinformation had some validity because it wasn't debunked. That is a no-win situation that even Capt. Kirk or Mr. Spock in the latest Star Trek movie - which, by the way, is quite terrific (saw it last night finally) - would have trouble dealing with.

As I explained in my post, "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)," you can generally tell a denier or delayer by repeated use of the following phrases, which are connected to the long-debunked talking points:

Individually, some of these words and phrases are quite useful and indeed are commonly used by both scientists and non-scientists who are not anti-science. But when used by people claiming to be "skeptics" - especially in combination with the name "Al Gore" - you know you have a denier on your hands.

My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known "skeptics." I have debated Lomborg and he is very well versed in the science - he just chooses not to believe most of it. Indeed, if the overwhelming evidence of the last five years - if the analyses and warnings from a growing number of uncharacteristically blunt scientists - doesn't convince someone of the dire nature of the situation, then they simply aren't open to scientific reasoning, the basis of true skepticism.

The media - and everyone else - should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity's self-destruction more likely.

The deniers and delayers, as CP uses the terms, are those who aggressively embrace one or both parts of a two-fold strategy. First, they deny the strong and growing scientific understanding that the climate change we are witnessing is primarily human-caused, that the human component of the climate forcing will increasingly dominate the climate system, and that we face multiple catastrophic impacts if we don't reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon. Second, they work to delay this country from taking any serious action beyond perhaps investing in new technology (although even that is mostly lip service since the overwhelming majority of deniers and delayers are conservatives and libertarians who oppose all serious efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of low carbon technologies).

Such is the road to ruin. Those who advance such a view, including Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, deserve a strong label. No doubt many delayers (and even a few deniers) are sincere in their beliefs, but many are not. Sincere or insincere, they spread misinformation or disinformation that threatens the well-being of the next fifty generations of Americans, indeed of all humans. Deniers like Watts are also not content merely to dispute the work of climate scientists--they are actively engaged in smearing the reputation of those scientists. Such folks deserve the very strongest of labels.

That said, the term "delayer" is more accurate, I think, since so many deniers now realize how untenable their position is. As result many don't fully deny that the climate is changing and that humans are contributing, they just say the whole thing is very overblown and who knows what the perfect climate is and the actual climate sensitivity is an order of magnitude smaller than all the science (including the paleoclimate science) says, so let's just wait and see ... blah, blah, blah. So I will still try to use the term delayer here, mostly for the misled.

But "delayer" never caught on, or any of the other narrower terms, like "disinformer," that I sometimes use at CP for the people who make it their full-time job to spread disinformation. So if for no reason than for clarity's sake - as well as for the sake of people doing web searches - we seem to be stuck with denier for general usage.

I understand that some of the deniers take offense at the apparent implication that they are like Holocaust deniers. I am not trying to make that connection - since climate science deniers are nothing like Holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers are denying an established fact from the past. If the media or politicians or the public took them at all seriously, I suppose it might increase the chances of a future Holocaust. But, in fact, they are very marginalized, and are inevitably attacked and criticized widely whenever they try to spread their disinformation, so they have no significant impact on society.

The climate science deniers, however, are very different and far more worrisome. They are not marginalized, but rather very well-funded and treated quite seriously by the status quo media. They are trying to persuade people not to take action on a problem that has not yet become catastrophic, but which will certainly do so if we listen to them and delay acting much longer.

THIS IS ABOUT DENIAL

And fundamentally this is about denial - denial of climate science. The clearest evidence is that a great many climate science deniers accept the science of evolution, such as Charles Krauthammer - who wrote in ""Phony Theory, False Conflict," that "Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God." And yet he is a hard-core climate science denier (see, for instance, Krauthammer's strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton's laws were "overthrown"). Similarly, another hard core climate science denier, George Will, also believes in evolution - he actually called it "a fact."

But that raises the obvious question. Why do so many apparently intelligent conservatives and libertarians - ones who accept the science of evolution, ones who take medicines prescribed by doctors based on the scientific method, ones who rely on science and technology every day, indeed, every minute - why do they deny climate science?

My book discusses this general question at length, and offers the answer (see here):

The answer is that ideology trumps rationality. Most conservatives cannot abide the solution to global warming-strong government regulations and a government-led effort to accelerate clean energy technologies into the market. According to the late Jude Wanniski, Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker articles [on global warming], did nothing more "than write a long editorial on behalf of government intervention to stamp out carbon dioxide." His villain is not global warming, but is the threat to Americans from government itself.

George Will's review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear says: "Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data.... Various factions have interests-monetary, political, even emotional-in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives."

As the NYT's Andy Revkin explained about the recent skeptic denier conference in New York,

"The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases."

What unites these people is their desire to delay or stop action to cut GHGs, not any one particular view on the climate.

It is nearly impossible to win an argument with a conservative or libertarian who hates government-led action. Yes, you can try to point out all the great things the government has done (the Internet, anyone?) and try to point out that they invariably support government-led action for military security, and, of course, government subsidies and regulations to promote energy security, at least as it applies to oil industry and nuclear energy pork.

I have a different argument - if you hate government intrusion into people's lives, you'd better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and depravation. The catastrophic impacts the country faces on our current emissions path by 2100 - 10 to 15° F warming over much of the inland U.S., 4 to 6 feet of sea level rise, and 1 to 2 inches a year after that, a Dust Bowl over much of the area from Kansas and Oklahoma to California, and hot, acidic ocean deadzones - will lead to far more government intervention in the lives of Americans than preventing those catastrophes ever would.

But most conservatives and libertarians can't hear that argument. Again, they can't stand the cure - a government led effort to sharply sharply increase the use of clean energy and sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions - so they deny the diagnosis.

And so, for better or worse, the word "deniers" stays with us. As I've said, I will try to reserve that term for the professional disinformers and their work. And I'll try to remember to use the term delayers for those who have been misled.

THE FIVE STAGES IN REVERSE

And now let me end with what I promised - the five stages of grief in reverse.

Climate science activists begin with accepting the science. What else can one do? Science is the reason so many of us survived childbirth and childhood, science has fed the world, science is the reason computers and the blogosphere exist at all. And yes, science gave us our fossil-fueled wealth. I'm a scientist by training, but I just don't see anyone can pick and choose what science you're going to believe and what not. The scientific method may not be always be perfect in single studies - since it is used by imperfect humans - but it is the best thing we have for objectively determining what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It is testable and self-correcting, unlike all other approaches.

Once CSAs accept the science, many quite naturally get depressed - see "Dealing with climate trauma and global warming burnout." The situation is beyond dire, and we aren't doing bloody much about it, in large part because of the successful efforts of the deniers and delayers. Climate science offers a very grim prognosis if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

After depression, comes a serious effort at bargaining: CSAs try to figure out what they can do to stop the catastrophe. Taking actions and making bargains at a personal level and a political level - depending on their level of activism.

Then comes anger. Once you've been at this for a while, you get very very frustrated by how little is happening - by the status quo media, the many anti-science politicians, and especially the deniers, the professional disinformers.

Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we're going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will - see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)." The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, "The Climate of Man," which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

It is impossible to believe. I myself can't believe it.

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On “climategate”

Climate deniers, hold your fire!

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take