Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2007, 07:51:13 PM
-
Having read today in an ever so earnest piece the global warming has caused a declining rate of circumcision in an area of Africa, I figured it was time to start a topic where rank foolishness cloaked in the gauze of pseudo "science" is exposed. This piece inaugurates the topic.
November 02, 2007
'Global Warming' as Pathological Science
By James Lewis
Trofimko Lysenko is not a household name; but it should be, because he was the model for all the Politically Correct "science" in the last hundred years. Lysenko was Stalin's favorite agricultural "scientist," peddling the myth that crops could be just trained into growing bigger and better. You didn't have to breed better plants over generations, as farmers have been doing for ages. It was a fantasy of the all-powerful Soviet State. Lysenko sold Stalin on that fraud in plant genetics, and Stalin told Soviet scientists to fall into line --- in spite of the fact that nobody really believed it. Hundreds of thousands of peasants starved during Stalin's famines, in good part because of fraudulent science.
There is such a thing as pathological science. Science becomes unhealthy when its only real question --- "what is true?" --- is sabotaged by vested interests, by ideological Commissars, or even by grant-swinging scientists. Today's Global Warming campaign is endangering real, honest science. Global Warming superstition has become an international power grab, and good science suffers as a result.
Freeman Dyson, one of the great physicists alive today, put it plainly enough in his autobiography:
"...all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. ... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. ... They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
When the scientific establishment starts to peddle fraud, we get corrupt science. The Boomer Left came to power in the 1970s harboring a real hatred toward science. They called it "post-modernism," and "deconstructionism" --- and we saw all kinds of damage as a result. Scientific American magazine went so far as to hire a post-modern "journalist" to write for it. John Horgan became famous for writing a book called The End of Science, but never seemed to learn much about real science. It was a shameful episode.
The explosive spread of AIDS occurred when the known evidence about HIV transmission among Gay men was suppressed by the media. The medical science establishment did not speak up. HIV is most easily transmitted through anal intercourse, because the anus bleeds far more easily than the vagina. So one Gay man simply passes blood products straight on to the next. Sexually transmitted plagues have been studied scientifically ever since syphilis arose several centuries ago. We know how to limit their spread, but many Gay men have died as a result of political suppression of scientific medicine. The spread of AIDS was partly a self-inflicted wound.
Pathological science kills people and ruins lives. Such fake science is still peddled by the PC establishment in Europe and America. Global Warming is only the most recent case. Rachel Carson's screed against DDT caused malaria to re-emerge in Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings. Those human-caused disasters have never been discussed honestly in the media, and rarely if ever in science journals. The DDT scandal is still suppressed.
In Britain, much of the alarmism about Mad Cow disease was never justified scientifically. It was pure, math-model-driven science fiction, just like Global Warming. But it was pushed very vigorously by the British science establishment, which has never confessed to its errors, and is therefore likely to make the same ones again. In politicized science, public hysteria actually builds careers; in real science, it tends to ruin careers. Years after the Brits realized that Mad Cow was a false alarm, the French admitted that Oui, Messieurs, we had ze Mad Cow, naturally, but we are not hysterique, comprenez vous? Besides, cow brains are a great delicacy, and one only lives once. Vive la France! Right across the Channel in Britain, farmers were required by law to destroy and bury hundreds of thousands of sheep and cows. It was an economic disaster, and all because of wildly alarmist science.
Britain is even more vulnerable to politicized science than we are, because medicine is controlled by the Left. That is a huge chunk of all science in the age of biomedicine. But the British Medical Journal and even the venerable Lancet are no longer reliable sources. Their political agenda sticks out like a sore thumb. It was The Lancet that published a plainly fraudulent "survey" of Iraqi civilian casualties a few years ago --- the only "survey" ever taken in the middle of a shooting war. As if you can go around shell-shocked neighborhoods with your little clipboard and expect people to tell the truth about their dead and wounded: Saddam taught Iraqis to lie about such things, just to survive, and the internecine fighting of the last several years did not help. The whole farce was just unbelievable, but the prestigious Lancet put the fake survey into the public domain, just as if it were real science. It was a classic agitprop move, worthy of Stalin and Lysenko. But it was not worthy of one the great scientific journals. Many scientists will never trust it again.
Pathological science has erupted most often in the last hundred years in the field of education, where "whole-word reading" fraud undermined the reading abilities of whole generations of American kids. Young adults can no longer tell the difference between "it's" and "its," even though their grandparents learned it in grammar school. The field of education is gullible and fad-prone, and is very unhealthy as a result. That's why new teachers are taught to peddle PC --- ideology is all they have.
Pathological science has erupted in fields like psychology and medicine, but not often in the hard sciences. In physics, Cold Fusion claims were discredited very quickly. Now, Global Warming is a fraud simply because climatology is not a hard science. That's what Freeman Dyson, who knows what physics can do, meant by saying that the models "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
The climate is not "just basic physics," as some people claim. Basic physics is great for understanding CO2 in lab jars and planets in space, but it has no complete accounting for a wooden kitchen chair, because wood is far too complex a material. Nobody has a complete physical understanding of wood --- there are too many different cellular layers, molecules, and unknown interactions, all produced by a genetic code that is just beginning to be understood. We only know the genomes for a few plants, and we don't know how their genes are expressed in cells and proteins. So forget about applying basic physics and chemistry to kitchen chairs. Plants and trees are hypercomplex, like the climate.
Modern science fraud seems to come from the Left, which makes it especially weird because the Left claims to be all in favor of science. Marxism itself was a scientific fraud, of course. In 1848 Marx and Engels claimed to have a "scientific" (wissenschaftlich) theory of history. They predicted that communism would first arise in England, because it was the most advanced capitalist nation. (Not) They predicted that centralized planning would work. (Not) They predicted that the peasants and workers would dedicate their lives to the Socialist State, and stop caring about themselves and their families. (Not). They predicted that sovietization would lead to greater economic performance. (Not). And then, when seventy years of Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, and North Korean history showed Marx's predictions to be wrong, wrong and wrong again, they still claimed to be "scientific." That's pathological science --- fraud masquerading as science.
(Current Marxists are more anti-scientific, because they've finally figured out that the facts don't support them, but they still haven't given up their fantasy life. Millenarian cults never give up, even when the facts go against them.)
Scientists love to cite the historic "martyrs of science" --- like Galileo Galilei, a great genius who was forced late in life to recant his views on the solar system by Pope Leo X. Or Giordano Bruno, who was actually burned at the stake. But the scientific establishment itself can be easily seduced by power, just like the Church was in Galileo's time. Science is just done by human beings. So we get plainly political editorials in magazines like Scientific American and Science. They jumped on Global Warming superstition before the facts were in.
Last year MIT Professor Richard Lindzen published an amazing expose in the Wall Street Journal editorial Page. It is called "Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence." Why are real scientists not speaking up enough against the Global Warming fraud? Well, some have been fired from their jobs, and others are keeping their heads down:
"In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."
If scientists were totally honest, they would memorialize Trofimko Lysenko just like they celebrate Galileo. In some ways, Lysenko's name should be as well-known as Galileo, as a stern warning of what can so easily go wrong. There are wonderful scientists, who must be honest, or they will fail. And then there are some corrupt scientists who are not honest. It's really that simple. Scientists can be demagogues, too. We should not pretend that all are what they should be. They're not. Fortunately, healthy science has all kinds of built-in checks and balances. Pathological science circumvents those.
Some scientists rationalize this corruption of their vocation by saying that people can lie for a good cause. The record shows otherwise. Fraudulent science and science journalism has led to AIDS going out of control; to DDT being banned and malaria gaining a new lease on life in Africa; to decades of famines in Russia; to children being badly mis-educated on such basics as reading and arithmetic; to end endless slew of unjustified health scares, like Mad Cow; and to a worldwide Leftist campaign cynically aiming to gain international power and enormous sums of money, based on a simple, unscientific fraud.
When the truth-tellers in society begin to sell out and tell lies for some ideological goal, people end up dying.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/global_warming_as_pathological.html at November 03, 2007
-
The starving children in Asia, Africa, Europe etc. who were used to goad me to clean my plate when a child appear to have been replaced:
Spurning leftovers may hurt climate
Published: Nov. 3, 2007 at 5:45 PM
LONDON, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- British Environment Minister Joan Ruddock has warned citizens that by not eating leftover food, they are effectively causing climate change.
Ruddock said that through food waste and excessive shopping, British citizens were paying a significant cost in both environmental and financial terms, The Independent reported Friday.
"At this rate we will not have a place to live which is habitable if we don't address climate change globally and the U.K. has to make its contribution," she said of such social problems.
The minister for climate change said that by eating leftovers and shopping more efficiently, British citizens could begin to help in the global fight against climate change.
Ruddock's comments come in the wake of a study by the Waste & Resources Action Program that found that one in every three bags of purchased food was essentially wasted by citizens.
To help citizens reach the lofty goal, Ruddock and the group launched the "Love Food Hate Waste" campaign Friday for more effective shopping and cooking tips.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/11/03/spurning_leftovers_may_hurt_climate/3835/
-
“Al Gore seems to have found a home at the peacock network. Both he and the network’s symbol like to strut a lot and frequently have their feathers ruffled. This week the peacock’s feathers are a solid green as NBC, among other activities, sends its ‘Today’ show stars, as the promo puts it, to ‘the ends of the earth’ to promote Gore’s agenda of saving the planet and repealing the Industrial Revolution... NBC began its Green Week with Sunday night’s Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles football game. Bob Costas solemnly intoned: ‘As part of NBC Universal’s Green is Universal initiative, we have turned out the lights in the studio to kick off a week that will include more than 150 hours of programming designed to raise awareness about environmental issues.’ Actually, the studio lights were off for about a minute, during which time you could see the giant stadium screen over his right shoulder and glowing video monitors all over the set. At halftime, Costas tossed it to Matt Lauer standing before some sled dogs in the Arctic, bathed in bright lighting flown in for the occasion. The folks at Newsbusters.org have calculated that flying Lauer and two crew to the Arctic Circle in Greenland—from New York to Thule AFB, a 2,487-mile distance—produced six tons of carbon emissions. That’s one ton each way per person. They used the carbon calculator found on Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Web site. [Al] Roker’s journey from New York to Quito, Ecuador... produced another six tons of carbon emissions. Ann Curry’s trip to Antarctica—11,686 miles in all—produced a total of 12.9 tons of carbon. That’s a grand total of 24.9 tons of CO2 produced for a momentary photo-op while most people were up getting a beer or making a pit stop. According to Gore’s Web site, the average person produces 7.5 tons of CO2 in a year.” —Investor’s Business Daily
-
Undermining Scientific Credibility
Scientists Need to Step Up and Defend Their Turf—Now
Alan McHughen
Science is the knowledge of Nature and the pursuit of such knowledge. Scientists are generally held in high regard by laypeople. It is, after all, a noble and rewarding calling. Scientists span the political spectrum, come from every nation and race, and subscribe to any religious creed (or none).
The nonpartisan nature of the study of Nature has engendered the support of people worldwide, with scientists accumulating considerable political capital due to this broad spectrum of high regard. Unfortunately, most scientists, particularly those in academia, are politically naïve and unaware of the power of the wealth amassed. It is thus not surprising that others with less noble motives are arrogating the political capital rightly belonging to science and scientists.
Pseudoscientists come with various agendas—political, religious, and industrial are common examples. On the extreme left wing, when the overt political agenda fails to convince sufficient voters in the usual democratic exercise of elections, science is presented to gain support for the now-covert political agenda.
The typical guise here is any number of popular but scientifically questionable green or sustainable environmental initiatives. While there are certainly plenty of scientifically legitimate environmental issues, the left-wing pseudoscientists infiltrate easily, and readily convince the masses of the scientific credibility of their cause.
When the burning issue turns out to be wrong or grossly overstated, the credibility thieves slink back into the shadows, while science and legitimate scientists suffer the loss of credibility and respect. Meanwhile, legitimate environmental threats are pushed aside, and the thieves plan their next steps, financed again by inappropriate withdrawal of scientists’ political capital.
On the extreme right wing we find the religious pseudoscientists, who also illegitimately withdraw from the bank of scientists’ political capital in asserting what they call science to support what should be left to faith. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contentious debate of biblical creationism under the pseudoscientific guise of intelligent design.
The mere fact that this issue is under popular debate and even litigation proves that at least some people are convinced by the scientific content argued by the pseudoscientists representing a covert religious view. Of course many people hold beliefs in the absence of supporting evidence and even in the face of compelling counterevidence—that is, after all, the basis for religious faith.
Even many legitimate scientists hold religious beliefs, delegating and limiting their scientific beliefs to the natural world and their religious faith to the supernatural. But that is different from, and does not legitimize, the deceiving of people seeking scientific evidence before adopting beliefs.
For example, when family theme parks present “scientific evidence” purporting to support the notion that people walked the Earth with dinosaurs nearby, people are tricked into believing something that should be taken on religious faith as true scientific evidence contradicts the notion. This dishonesty undermines science, certainly, but also faith, as religious faith should stand on its own; it does not require the support of purloined and manipulated scientific evidence.
The industrialists also arrogate science when they present pseudoscience to sell questionable products. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healthfood market where organic foods are marketed and sold to naïve consumers based on the claimed superiority of the products. Food supplements and herbal remedies in reality are, at best, benign placebos or, at worst, malignant uncontrolled drugs of unknown purity and batch-varied potency.
Healthfood purveyors have convinced consumers that “science is on our side,” manipulating public support while shilling sales. Again, the price—loss of public credibility—is eventually paid when the scam becomes apparent, and not by the thieves responsible, but by the legitimate scientists who develop products with attributes backed by real and meaningful scientifically sound data.
In all these cases, thieves are squandering the political capital that properly belongs to the community of legitimate scientists. So far, the thieves have become wealthy, advanced their political agendas, and now enjoy an unearned status. Real scientists, the ones who have earned the social status and political capital, are too naïve to recognize that they are being robbed. The common assets are being stolen, eroded, and polluted from various sources claiming science as their own. When will real scientists start defending their property?
Alan McHughen is a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Email: www.alanmc@ucr.edu.
-
Scientists, few of whom are trained statisticians, often start rummaging around the statisticians' tool boxes for gee whiz methods to beat spurious data into shape. Statistician William Briggs has a site (http://wmbriggs.com/) devoted to examining mis-applied statistical method. Below is a recent piece.
Do not smooth times series, you hockey puck!
Published by Briggs at 7:47 am under Bad statistics, Global warming
The advice which forms the title of this post would be how Don Rickles, if he were a statistician, would explain how not to conduct times series analysis. Judging by the methods I regularly see applied to data of this sort, Don’s rebuke is sorely needed.
The advice particularly relevant now because there is a new hockey stick controversy brewing. Mann and others have published a new study melding together lots of data and they claim to have again shown that the here and now is hotter than the then and there. Go to climateaudit.org and read all about it. I can’t do a better job than Steve, so I won’t try. What I can do is to show you what not to do. I’m going to shout it, too, because I want to be sure you hear.
Mann includes at this site a large number of temperature proxy data series. Here is one of them called wy026.ppd (I just grabbed one out of the bunch). Here is the picture of this data:
(http://wmbriggs.com/pics/mann_wy026.jpg)
The various black lines are the actual data! The red-line is a 10-year running mean smoother! I will call the black data the real data, and I will call the smoothed data the fictional data. Mann used a “low pass filter” different than the running mean to produce his fictional data, but a smoother is a smoother and what I’m about to say changes not one whit depending on what smoother you use.
Now I’m going to tell you the great truth of time series analysis. Ready? Unless the data is measured with error, you never, ever, for no reason, under no threat, SMOOTH the series! And if for some bizarre reason you do smooth it, you absolutely on pain of death do NOT use the smoothed series as input for other analyses! If the data is measured with error, you might attempt to model it (which means smooth it) in an attempt to estimate the measurement error, but even in these rare cases you have to have an outside (the learned word is “exogenous”) estimate of that error, that is, one not based on your current data.
If, in a moment of insanity, you do smooth time series data and you do use it as input to other analyses, you dramatically increase the probability of fooling yourself! This is because smoothing induces spurious signals—signals that look real to other analytical methods. No matter what you will be too certain of your final results! Mann et al. first dramatically smoothed their series, then analyzed them separately. Regardless of whether their thesis is true—whether there really is a dramatic increase in temperature lately—it is guaranteed that they are now too certain of their conclusion.
There. Sorry for shouting, but I just had to get this off my chest.
Now for some specifics, in no particular order.
A probability model should be used for only one thing: to quantify the uncertainty of data not yet seen. I go on and on and on about this because this simple fact, for reasons God only knows, is difficult to remember.
The corollary to this truth is the data in a time series analysis is the data. This tautology is there to make you think. The data is the data! The data is not some model of it. The real, actual data is the real, actual data. There is no secret, hidden “underlying process” that you can tease out with some statistical method, and which will show you the “genuine data”. We already know the data and there it is. We do not smooth it to tell us what it “really is” because we already know what it “really is.”
Thus, there are only two reasons (excepting measurement error) to ever model time series data:
To associate the time series with external factors. This is the standard paradigm for 99% of all statistical analysis. Take several variables and try to quantify their correlation, etc.
To predict future data. We do no need to predict the data we already have. Let me repeat that for ease of memorization: Notice that we do no need to predict the data we already have. We can only predict what we do not know, which is future data. Thus, we do not need to predict the tree ring proxy data because we already know it.
The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy. It is a perfect proxy? Was that last question a rhetorical one? Was that one, too? Because it is a proxy, the uncertainty of its ability to predict temperature must be taken into account in the final results. Did Mann do this? And just what is a rhetorical question?
There are hundreds of time series analysis methods, most with the purpose of trying to understand the uncertainty of the process so that future data can be predicted, and the uncertainty of those predictions can be quantified (this is a huge area of study in, for example, financial markets, for good reason). This is a legitimate use of smoothing and modeling.
We certainly should model the relationship of the proxy and temperature, taking into account the changing nature of proxy through time, the differing physical processes that will cause the proxy to change regardless of temperature or how temperature exacerbates or quashes them, and on and on. But we should not stop, as everybody has stopped, with saying something about the parameters of the probability models used to quantify these relationships. Doing so makes use, once again, far too certain of the final results. We do not care how the proxy predicts the mean temperature, we do care how the proxy predicts temperature.
We do not need a statistical test to say whether a particular time series has increased since some time point. Why? If you do not know, go back and read these points from the beginning. It’s because all we have to do is look at the data: if it has increased, we are allowed to say “It increased.” If it did not increase or it decreased, then we are not allowed to say “It increased.” It really is as simple as that.
You will now say to me “OK Mr Smarty Pants. What if we had several different time series from different locations? How can we tell if there is a general increase across all of them? We certainly need statistics and p-values and Monte Carol routines to tell us that they increased or that the ‘null hypothesis’ of no increase is true.” First, nobody has called me “Mr Smarty Pants” for a long time, so you’d better watch your language. Second, weren’t you paying attention? If you want to say that 52 out 413 times series increased since some time point, then just go and look at the time series and count! If 52 out of 413 times series increased then you can say “52 out of 413 time series increased.” If more or less than 52 out of 413 times series increased, then you cannot say that “52 out of 413 time series increased.” Well, you can say it, but you would be lying. There is absolutely no need whatsoever to chatter about null hypotheses etc.
If the points—it really is just one point—I am making seem tedious to you, then I will have succeeded. The only fair way to talk about past, known data in statistics is just by looking at it. It is true that looking at massive data sets is difficult and still somewhat of an art. But looking is looking and it’s utterly evenhanded. If you want to say how your data was related with other data, then again, all you have to do is look.
The only reason to create a statistical model is to predict data you have not seen. In the case of the proxy/temperature data, we have the proxies but we do not have temperature, so we can certainly use a probability model to quantify our uncertainty in the unseen temperatures. But we can only create these models when we have simultaneous measures of the proxies and temperature. After these models are created, we then go back to where we do not have temperature and we can predict it (remembering to predict not its mean but the actual values; you also have to take into account how the temperature/proxy relationship might have been different in the past, and how the other conditions extant would have modified this relationship, and on and on).
What you can not, or should not, do is to first model/smooth the proxy data to produce fictional data and then try to model the fictional data and temperature. This trick will always—simply always—make you too certain of yourself and will lead you astray. Notice how the read fictional data looks a hell of a lot more structured than the real data and you’ll get the idea.
Next step is to start playing with the proxy data itself and see what is to see. As soon as I am granted my wish to have each day filled with 48 hours, I’ll be able to do it.
Thanks to Gabe Thornhill of Thornhill Securities for reminding me to write about this.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/09/06/do-not-smooth-times-series-you-hockey-puck/
-
BBG:
That was very interesting. I think I sensed the gist of it, but quite a bit of it went right over my head with nary a look back :oops: :lol:
Changing subjects abruptly, a couple of days ago I saw a seemingly serious piece about sun spots and their relation to temperatures here on earth. I would have posted it here, but I was on the road at a computer which wasn't mine and didn't have the time at the moment.
Anyway, I have been keeping an eye out for the sunspot hypothesis for a while now. I have seen articles which stated that Mars's temperatures have increased proportionately to earth's temperatures, which suggests a non-terrestrial cause of earth's variations i.e. the sun. The article the other day said that something very unusual had happened with the sun spots-- there were none for a certain amount of time and said that data seems to correlate this with prior cooling periods on the earth. Of all the people I know you are amongst the few likely to be aware of or able to track this down. If your readings bring it to your attention, would you be so kind as to bring it here and offer your comments?
TIA,
Marc
-
Sure thing, Crafty. Click the link at the end to eyeball related graphs.
Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century
Michael Asher (Blog) - September 1, 2008 8:11 AM
The record-setting surface of the sun. A full month has gone by without a single spot (Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO))
Sunspot activity of the past decade. Over the past year, SIDC has continually revised its predictions downward (Source: Solar Influences Data Center)
Geomagnetic solar activity for the past two decades. The recent drop corresponds to the decline in sunspots. (Source: Anthony Watts)
A chart of sunspot activity showing two prior solar minima, along with heightened activity during the 20th century (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
The paper's lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass.
But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the "sun's dynamo" is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.
This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark's "SKY" experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays -- which the sun's magnetic field partially shields the Earth from -- increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.
Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.
Other researchers have proposed solar effects on other terrestrial processes besides cloud formation. The sunspot cycle has strong effects on irradiance in certain wavelengths such as the far ultraviolet, which affects ozone production. Natural production of isotopes such as C-14 is also tied to solar activity. The overall effects on climate are still poorly understood.
What is incontrovertible, though, is that ice ages have occurred before. And no scientist, even the most skeptical, is prepared to say it won't happen again.
Article Update, Sep 1 2008. After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point. Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month. So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.
http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/article12823.htm
-
Guinness, Thanks for the excellent post from Wm Briggs. I wasn't aware of his work. Just looking at the graph it is easy to see how any (crooked) statistician could measure temperature from a trough in the late 1800s or a peak in the early 1600s and (falsely) declare significant amounts of warming or cooling over an extended period. They not only filter the data statistically, but they also tweak the actual temp data collected with secret algorithms that are written and changed by mortals with biases.
---
By my calculation, the sea level at the beach in Florida or southern California goes up and down more in a day than it does in a century. I'm glad that scientists study it all and offer their judgments, but not on my dime.
-
The 'consensus' on climate change is a catastrophe in itself
By Christopher Brooker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 31/08/2008
As the estimated cost of measures proposed by politicians to "combat global warming" soars ever higher – such as the International Energy Council's $45 trillion – "fighting climate change" has become the single most expensive item on the world's political agenda.
As Senators Obama and McCain vie with the leaders of the European Union to promise 50, 60, even 80 per cent cuts in "carbon emissions", it is clear that to realise even half their imaginary targets would necessitate a dramatic change in how we all live, and a drastic reduction in living standards.
All this makes it rather important to know just why our politicians have come to believe that global warming is the most serious challenge confronting mankind, and just how reliable is the evidence for the theory on which their policies are based.
By far the most influential player in putting climate change at the top of the global agenda has been the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988, not least on the initiative of the Thatcher government. (This was why the first chairman of its scientific working group was Sir John Houghton, then the head of the UK's Meteorological Office.)
Through a succession of reports and international conferences, it was the IPCC which led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, soon to have an even more ambitious successor, to be agreed in Copenhagen next year.
The common view of the IPCC is that it consists of 2,500 of the world's leading scientists who, after carefully weighing all the evidence, have arrived at a "consensus" that world temperatures are rising disastrously, and that the only plausible cause has been rising levels of CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases.
In fact, as has become ever more apparent over the past 20 years –not least thanks to the evidence of a succession of scientists who have participated in the IPCC itself – the reality of this curious body could scarcely be more different.
It is not so much a scientific as a political organisation. Its brief has never been to look dispassionately at all the evidence for man-made global warming: it has always taken this as an accepted fact.
Indeed only a comparatively small part of its reports are concerned with the science of climate change at all. The greater part must start by accepting the official line, and are concerned only with assessing the impact of warming and what should be done about it.
In reality the IPCC's agenda has always been tightly controlled by the small group of officials at its head. As one recent study has shown, of the 53 contributors to the key Chapter 9 of the latest report dealing with the basic science (most of them British and American, and 10 of them associated with the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office), 37 belong to a closely related network of academics who are all active promoters of the official warming thesis.
It is on the projections of their computer models that all the IPCC's predictions of future warming are based.
The final step in the process is that, before each report is published, a "Summary for Policymakers" is drafted by those at the top of the IPCC, to which governments can make input.
It is this which makes headlines in the media, and which all too frequently eliminates the more carefully qualified findings of contributors to the report itself.
The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete fiction. A
gain and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey stick".
Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today.
This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.
The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.
Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before.
Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.
This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record.
When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.
But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.
When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it.
Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.
By the time of its latest report, last year, the IPCC had an even greater problem. Far from continuing to rise in line with rising CO2, as its computer models predicted they should, global temperatures since the abnormally hot year of 1998 had flattened out at a lower level and were even falling – a trend confirmed by Nasa's satellite readings over the past 18 months.
So pronounced has this been that even scientists supporting the warmist thesis now concede that, due to changes in ocean currents, we can expect a decade or more of "cooling", before the "underlying warming trend" reappears.
The point is that none of this was predicted by the computer models on which the IPCC relies.
Among the ever-growing mountain of informed criticism of the IPCC's methods, a detailed study by an Australian analyst John McLean (to find it, Google "Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings") shows just how incestuously linked are most of the core group of academics whose models underpin everything the IPCC wishes us to believe about global warming.
The significance of the past year is not just that the vaunted "consensus" on the forces driving our climate has been blown apart as never before, but that a new "counter-consensus" has been emerging among thousands of scientists across the world, given expression in last March's Manhattan Declaration by the so-called Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.
This wholly repudiates the IPCC process, showing how its computer models are hopelessly biased, based on unreliable data and programmed to ignore many of the genuine drivers of climate change, from variations in solar activity to those cyclical shifts in ocean currents.
As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.
"In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defence of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself."
Yet it is at just this moment, when the IPCC's house of cards is crumbling, that the politicians of the Western world are using it to propose steps that can only damage our way of life beyond recognition.
It really is time for that "counter-consensus" to be taken seriously.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/31/eaclimate131.xml
-
Thank you BBG.
-
There is so much wrong with this picture I don't know where to start:
Published online 5 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1086
News: Q&A
All fired up
American climate scientist James Hansen explains why he's testifying against coal.
Geoff Brumfiel
James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, is well known for rattling his nation's political establishment. This week, the climate scientist was in London, UK, to testify on behalf of activists who defaced a coal-fired power station in Kent. Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen at a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered.
Why did you come to testify?
Nothing could be more central to the problem we face with global climate change. If you look at the size of the oil, gas and coal reservoirs you'll see that the oil and gas have enough CO2 to bring us up to a dangerous level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
There's a potential to solve that problem if we phase out coal. If we were to have a moratorium on coal-fired power plants within the next few years, and then phase out the existing ones between 2010 and 2030, then CO2 would peak at something between 400 and 425 parts per million. That leaves a difficult problem, but one that you can solve.
Do you think that leaders like UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown have lived up to their promises on climate change?
It depends on whether they will have a moratorium on coal-fired power. I think that the greenest leaders, like German chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Brown, are saying the right words. But if you look at their actions, emissions are continuing to increase. All of these countries and the United States are planning to build more coal-fired power plants. And if you build more coal-fired power plants, then it is not possible to achieve the goals that they say they are committed to. It's a really simple argument and yet they won't face up to it.
So do you think that these activists were justified in doing what they did?
The activists drawing attention to the issue seems to me as justified. You should try to do things through the democratic process, but we really are getting to an emergency situation. We can't continue to build more coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2 if we hope to solve the problem.
We need to get energy from somewhere. So if we're not getting it from coal, then where?
The first thing we should do is focus on energy efficiency. The fact that utilities make more money by selling more energy is a big problem. We have to change those rules. Then there is renewable energy — in order to be able to fully exploit renewable energy, we need better electric grids. So those should be the first things, but I think that we also need to look at next-generation nuclear power.
Some have said you are hypocritical for flying all the way from the US to the UK just to testify. How do you respond?
I like to travel as little as possible, not only because it uses less CO2 but because I prefer to do science. But sometimes there are things which are sufficiently important that I think it makes sense.
What do you think the roll of the scientist should be in the broader societal debate on climate change?
I think it would be irresponsible not to speak out. There is a clear gap between what is understood by the relevant scientific community and what is known by the public, and we have to try and close that gap. If we don't do something in the very near future, we're going to create a situation for our children and grandchildren that is out of control.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080905/full/news.2008.1086.html
-
Great post BBG. Dr. Hansen may be a scientist, but mainly serves as a politician and a bureaucrat. He represents the Bush administration and abhors it. He should have been fired for his politics. Problem was that the administration could not have removed him without looking like they are the ones being political. So instead we let warming over-hype run its course at taxpayer expense. These scientists can't remove agenda and funding from data IMO.
I'm curious, what does he mean specifically by: "I think that we also need to look at next-generation nuclear power". His wording indicates that he prefers wait over build. If he needs "to look" there, why hasn't he been looking there and reporting his conclusions - today! The sooner we expand our power grid, the sooner other uses can be plugged in, such as transportation or heating.
Nuclear is fairly unique for having zero CO2 emissions and such a large scale capacityl. No new plants approved since 1978? That's before Al Gore's first book. From what I can find, next generation nuclear means building smaller, safer, lower power intensity, gas cooled reactors. That's fine with me. Let's go. But what does it have to do with opposing clean coal?
-
Problems with the Climate Models
By Michael R.Fox Ph.D., 9/12/2008 8:59:42 AM
Recalling that people such as Robert F. Kennedy have called climate skeptics “traitors”, David Suzuki calls for their jailing, the Grist website called for Nuremburg trials for them, NASA’s Dr. Jim Hansen calling for their trials for treason, along with the habitual insults from Al Gore, its been difficult for anyone to respectfully dissent. It’s been difficult to stick to the rules of hard science, by demanding evidence and replication, both of which require questioning but are often followed by insults and threats.
The world owes a lot to many climate scientists who are closely studying and reviewing the claims of the global warming lobby. They are also attempting to replicate some of these findings without the traditional support of the originating authors. Ordinarily, in the world of hard nosed science, such scrutiny and replication has been historically welcomed. No longer. The well-known name calling, the dismissiveness, the ad hominem attacks, is regrettably now the standard level of discourse. Additionally, these include many laboratory directors, media editors, and Ph.D.s who for whatever reasons adopt the same low roads of discourse and the abandonment of science.
These are difficult times for traditional climate scientists who do practice good science, serious peer review, welcome scrutiny, replication, and the sharing of data. Thanks to the whole world of the global warm-mongers and indentured PhDs, the integrity of the entire world of science is being diminished, followed by a loss of trust and respect.
Among the giants challenging the global warming dogma has been Christopher Monckton. He has been a strong international leader, spokesman, and expert in unraveling the complexities of the man-made warming hypothesis.
The greatest drivers behind the hypothesis have not been the actual evidence, but computer models. Relative to the largely unknown climate complexities, these are still known to be primitive and incapable of replicating climate data as measured from observations. If a hypothesis can’t explain actual evidence and climate observations, it is wrong, and needs to be modified or abandoned.
In a recent exchange with an expert modeler and believer of global warming, Monckton responded in incredible detail by identifying many of the problems found with the computer models themselves. Monckton is impressively expert in the minutiae of computer modeling, a skill which applies directly to the analyses of the computer climate models. Monckton has performed a detailed analysis of the IPCC’s hypothesis of global warming and identified a long list of failings. They deserved much wider distribution, with an understanding of the serious implications. They and literature references can be found here (http://tinyurl.com/6edjzo).
Monckton is not alone in his concerns with computer modeling. Tens of thousands of scientists and engineers who have taken basic mathematics know of the problems and complexities with modeling even simple situations. This author has met a fellow scientist (a bit nerdy admittedly) who carried a long multi-variable multi-term equation on a paper kept in his wallet, which was the equation of the outline of his wife’s face. The modeling problem is delightfully defined by atmospheric physicist Dr. James Peden, who recently said Climate Modeling is not science, it is computerized Tinkertoys, with which one can construct any outcome he chooses.. And for my nerdy modeler above, it’s easy to change his wallet equation if he gets a new wife!
Monckton’s analyses are summarized in a number of points below, which are devastating to the hypothesis and computer modeling. These have profound implications for policy makers and the energy and economic future of our country. We’d better learn these: Point 1: There are… serial, serious failures of the computer models of climate
….the computer models upon which the UN’s climate panel unwisely founds its entire case have failed and failed and failed again to predict major events in the real climate.
a. The models have not projected the current multidecadal stasis in “global warming”:
b. no rise in temperatures since 1998; falling temperatures since late 2001; temperatures not expected to set a new record until 2015 (Keenlyside et al., 2008).
c. nor (until trained ex post facto) did they predict the fall in TS from 1940-1975;
d. nor 50 years’ cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al., 2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005);
e. nor the absence of ocean warming since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski & Koltermann, 2007);
f. nor the behavior of the great ocean oscillations (Lindzen, 2007),
g. nor the magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age;
h. nor the decline since 2000 in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC, 2007);
i. nor the active 2004 hurricane season;
j. nor the inactive subsequent seasons;
k. nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously);
l. nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005);
m. nor the consequent surface “global warming” on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and even distant Pluto;
n. nor the eerily-continuing 2006 solar minimum;
o. nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in surface temperature from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of the observed warming of the 20th century.
As Monckton states, the computer models are demonstrable failures.
Point 2: The IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity is inadequate and error-laden Monckton showed that the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity can be reproduced by nothing more complicated than a few equations which, if the IPCC’s values for certain key parameters are input to them, generate the IPCC’s central estimate of climate sensitivity to a high precision. Nowhere else has this method been so clearly or concisely expounded before.
And, once the IPCC’s method is clearly seen for what it is, it is at once apparent that their method suffers from a series of major defects that render it useless for its purpose. The laboratory experiments that form the basis for estimates of forcings do not translate easily to the real atmosphere, so that the IPCC’s claimed “Levels of Scientific Understanding” for the forcings are exaggerated; its estimates of the feedbacks that account for two-thirds of total forcing are subject to enormous uncertainties not fairly reflected in the tight error-bars it assigns to them; the feedback-sum is unreasonably close to the point of instability in the Bode feedback equation (important in the study of circuit [and climate] feedbacks), which has in any event been incorrectly used for amplification in a chaotic system, when it was designed only for systems whose initial state was linear; the IPCC’s value for the no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter is the highest in the mainstream literature, and is inconsistent with the value derivable from the 2001 report; the value of this and other parameters are not explicitly stated; etc., etc.
Point 3: The IPCC’s value for climate sensitivity depends upon only four scientific papers Climate sensitivity is the central – properly speaking, the only – question in the debate about the extent to which “global warming” will happen. Monckton’s presentation of the IPCC’s method of calculating how much the world will warm in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration shows that the IPCC’s values for the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are taken not from 2,500 papers in the literature but from just four papers. Had a wider, more representative selection of papers been relied upon, a far lower climate sensitivity would have resulted.
Point 4: Uncertainty in evaluating climate sensitivity is far greater than the IPCC admits The IPCC baselessly states that it is 90% sure we (humans) caused most of the observed warming of the past half-century (or, more particularly, the warming in the 23 years between 1975 and 1998: the remaining 27 years were in periods of cooling). However, the uncertainties in the evaluation of climate sensitivity are so great that any conclusion of this kind is meaningless. None of the three key parameters whose product is climate sensitivity can be directly measured; attempts to infer their values by observation are thwarted by the inadequacies and uncertainties of the observations depended upon; and, in short, the IPCC’s conclusions as to climate sensitivity are little better than guesswork.
Point 5: The published literature can be used to demonstrate lower climate sensitivity The second part of Monckton’s paper examines the literature on climate sensitivity. A surprisingly small proportion of all papers on climate change consider this central question. The vast majority concentrate on assuming that the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimate is right and then using it to predict consequences (though, as Schulte, 2008, has shown, none find that the consequences are likely to be catastrophic). Monckton demonstrates, using papers from the literature, that it is at least as plausible to find a climate sensitivity of <0.6 C as it is to find the IPCC’s 3.3C ( a factor of 5--- such a large uncertainty does not inspire confidence).
Point 6: Even if climate sensitivity is high, adaptation is more cost-effective than mitigation Monckton concluded as follows: “Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming.
Monckton’s analysis here is a major contribution to understanding a difficult subject. He has broken through the dense modeling processes, not to mention the ad hominem attacks, in such a way that many more can understand its weaknesses.
It is time to break the relationship between energy policy and computer forecasting. The models are not sources of climate information so badly needed to formulate rational energy policy without the threats of economic suicide. The economic and energy future of our nation should not rest so completely on such primitive modeling.
It is well beyond the time when the policy makers, the educators, and the media, demand evidence instead of scare stories. Glossy documentaries won’t do.
As Dennis Avery said recently, co-author of the book “Unstoppable Global Warming”, “We look forward to a full-scale exploration of the science. We have heard quite enough from the computers”.
Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a science and energy reporter for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyist for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?bcb0b0a8-86dc-4f0d-acce-dec9605c9b7a
-
Meat must be rationed to four portions a week, says report on climate change
• Study looks at food impact on greenhouse gases
• Return to old-fashioned cooking habits urged
All comments (33)
Juliette Jowit
The Guardian, Tuesday September 30 2008
Article history
People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.
The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.
It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.
The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.
Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. "Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences," the report says. "Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes."
The report's findings are in line with an investigation by the October edition of the Ecologist magazine, which found that arguments for people to go vegetarian or vegan to stop climate change and reduce pressure on rising food prices were exaggerated and would damage the developing world in particular, where many people depend on animals for essential food, other products such as leather and wool, and for manure and help in tilling fields to grow other crops.
Instead, it recommended cutting meat consumption by at least half and making sure animals were fed as much as possible on grass and food waste which could not be eaten by humans.
"The notion that cows and sheep are four-legged weapons of mass destruction has become something of a distraction from the real issues in both climate change and food production," said Pat Thomas, the Ecologist's editor.
The head of the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, also sparked global debate this month when he urged people to have at least one meat-free day a week.
The Food Climate Research Network found that measured by production, the UK food sector produces greenhouse gases equivalent to 33m tonnes of carbon. Measured by consumption - including imports - the total rises to 43.3m tonnes. Both figures work out at under one fifth of UK emissions, but they exclude the indirect impacts of actions such as clearing rainforest for cattle and crops, which other studies estimate would add up to 5% to 20% of global emissions.
The report found the meat and dairy sectors together accounted for just over half of those emissions; potatoes, fruit and vegetables for 15%; drinks and other products with sugar for another 15%; and bread, pastry and flour for 13%.
It also revealed which parts of the food chain were the most polluting. Although packaging has had a lot of media and political attention, it only ranked fifth in importance behind agriculture - especially the methane produced by livestock burping - manufacturing, transport, and cooking and refrigeration at home.
The report calls for meat and dairy consumption to be cut in developed countries so that global production remains stable as the population grows to an estimated 9bn by 2050.
At the same time emissions from farms, transport, manufacturing and retail could be cut, with improvements including more efficient use of fertilisers, feed and energy, changed diets for livestock, and more renewable fuels - leading to a total reduction in emissions from the sector of 50% to 67%, it says.
The UN and other bodies recommend that developed countries should reduce total emissions by 80% by 2050.
However, the National Farmers' Union warned that its own study, with other industry players, published last year, found net emissions from agriculture could only be cut by up to 50% if the carbon savings from building renewable energy sources on farms were taken into account.
The NFU also called for government incentives to help farmers make the changes. "Farmers aren't going to do this out of the goodness of their hearts, because farmers don't have that luxury; many of our members are very hard pressed at the moment," said Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU's chief adviser on renewable energy and climate change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving
-
Publish and be wrong
Oct 9th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Adrian Johnson
One group of researchers thinks headline-grabbing scientific reports are the most likely to turn out to be wrong
IN ECONOMIC theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.
The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.
In Public Library of Science (PloS) Medicine, an online journal, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and his colleagues, suggest that a variety of economic conditions, such as oligopolies, artificial scarcities and the winner’s curse, may have analogies in scientific publishing.
Dr Ioannidis made a splash three years ago by arguing, quite convincingly, that most published scientific research is wrong. Now, along with Neal Young of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and Omar Al-Ubaydli, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, he suggests why.
It starts with the nuts and bolts of scientific publishing. Hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers are hired, promoted and funded according not only to how much work they produce, but also to where it gets published. For many, the ultimate accolade is to appear in a journal like Nature or Science. Such publications boast that they are very selective, turning down the vast majority of papers that are submitted to them.
Picking winners
The assumption is that, as a result, such journals publish only the best scientific work. But Dr Ioannidis and his colleagues argue that the reputations of the journals are pumped up by an artificial scarcity of the kind that keeps diamonds expensive. And such a scarcity, they suggest, can make it more likely that the leading journals will publish dramatic, but what may ultimately turn out to be incorrect, research.
Dr Ioannidis based his earlier argument about incorrect research partly on a study of 49 papers in leading journals that had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists. They were, in other words, well-regarded research. But he found that, within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies. For the idea of the winner’s curse to hold, papers published in less-well-known journals should be more reliable; but that has not yet been established.
The group’s more general argument is that scientific research is so difficult—the sample sizes must be big and the analysis rigorous—that most research may end up being wrong. And the “hotter” the field, the greater the competition is and the more likely it is that published research in top journals could be wrong.
There also seems to be a bias towards publishing positive results. For instance, a study earlier this year found that among the studies submitted to America’s Food and Drug Administration about the effectiveness of antidepressants, almost all of those with positive results were published, whereas very few of those with negative results were. But negative results are potentially just as informative as positive results, if not as exciting.
The researchers are not suggesting fraud, just that the way scientific publishing works makes it more likely that incorrect findings end up in print. They suggest that, as the marginal cost of publishing a lot more material is minimal on the internet, all research that meets a certain quality threshold should be published online. Preference might even be given to studies that show negative results or those with the highest quality of study methods and interpretation, regardless of the results.
It seems likely that the danger of a winner’s curse does exist in scientific publishing. Yet it may also be that editors and referees are aware of this risk, and succeed in counteracting it. Even if they do not, with a world awash in new science the prestigious journals provide an informed filter. The question for Dr Ioannidis is that now his latest work has been accepted by a journal, is that reason to doubt it?
http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=12376658&CFID=24889653&CFTOKEN=41379331
-
Long piece with a lot of formatting I'm too lazy to replicate. What follows are the first several paragraphs:
The Futile Quest for Climate Control
Robert M. Carter
The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels—the essence of the Greens’ theory of global warming—has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. Global warming, like Marxism, is a political theory of actions, demanding compliance with its rules.
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof—of which history offers so many examples—that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. If people are in need of religion, why don’t they just turn to the genuine article?
—Paul Johnson
Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.
The science reality is that climate is a complex, dynamic, natural system that no one wholly comprehends, though many scientists understand different small parts. So far, science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous or even measurable human-caused global warming is occurring.
The virtual reality is that computer models predict future climate according to the assumptions that are programmed into them. There is no established Theory of Climate, and therefore the potential output of all realistic computer general circulation models (GCMs) encompasses a range of both future warmings and coolings, the outcome depending upon the way in which they are constructed. Different results can be produced at will simply by adjusting such poorly known parameters as the effects of cloud cover.
The public reality in 2008 is that, driven by strong environmental lobby groups and evangelistic scientists and journalists, there is a widespread but erroneous belief in our society that dangerous global warming is occurring and that it has human causation.
William Kininmonth (“Illusions of Climate Science”, Quadrant, October) has summarised well the nature of the main scientific arguments that relate to human-caused climate change. Therefore, I shall concentrate here a little less on the science, except as background information that relates to how we got to where we are today. My main aim is to explain the need for a proper national climate change policy that relates to real rather than imaginary risk, a policy position that neither the previous nor the present Australian government has achieved. Instead—in response to strong pressure from lobby groups whose main commonality is financial or other self-interest, and a baying media—our present national climate policy is to try to prevent human-caused global warming. This will be a costly, ineffectual and hence futile exercise.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/451/the-futile-quest-for-climate-control
-
I just looked over the article mentioned "Illusions of Climate Science”, Quadrant, October. Thanks that is good info! If you anybody wants to see it it is located here. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Illusions+of+climate+science.-a0188275359 I just googled the title.
-
Thanks for chasing down that link, Freki. I meant to track it back, too.
More comment on the "hottest October" double data entry problem Goddard has confessed to. Think the author gets it right: the scary part about this error is not that an error occurred, but that a major anomaly went unnoticed because it fit so neatly into what global warming evangelists sought to find.
Lorne Gunter: Global warming numbers get a little help from their friends
Posted: November 17, 2008, 9:13 AM by Kelly McParland
Lorne Gunter,
Last week, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies – one of four agencies responsible for monitoring the global temperatures used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – released its statistics for October. According to the GISS figures, last month was the warmest October on record around the world.
This struck some observers as odd. There had been no reports of autumn heat waves in the international press and there is almost always blanket coverage of any unusually warm weather since it fits into the widespread media bias that climate catastrophe lies just ahead. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred; there had been plenty of stories about unseasonably cool weather.
London had experienced its first October snow in 70 years. Chicago and the Great Plains states had broken several lowest-temperature records, some of which had stood for 120 years. Tibet had broken snowfall records. Glaciers in Alaska, the Alps and New Zealand had begun advancing. Sea ice expanded so rapidly it covered 30% more of Arctic than at the end of October 2007. (Of course, you saw few stories about that, too, since interest in the Arctic ice cover is reserved only for when its melting reinforces hysteria over global warming and polar bear extinction).
So the GISS claim that October was the warmest ever seemed counterintuitive, to say the least.
Thanks, though, to Steve McIntyre, the Toronto computer analyst who maintains the blog climateaudit.org, and Anthony Watts, the American meteorologist who runs wattsupwiththat.com, we did not have to wait long to find out the cause of the GISS’s startling statistics: Data-entry error.
October wasn’t the warmest October ever, it was only the 70th warmest in the past 114 years – in the bottom half of all Octobers, not at the top of the list. So why the massive discrepancy between the published GISS numbers and the correct ones?
Um, some guy – not at Goddard, a GISS spokesman was quick to point out as he toed the ground and gazed downward sheepishly – had supplied the NASA branch with September figures for much of the globe, rather than October ones. September being typically a much warmer month than October (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), when the September temps had been entered into the October report they produced – heh, heh – an unprecedented spike upwards in last month’s temperature.
Yeah, no kidding, like when Santa’s bathroom scale readings are inadvertently entered into Paris Hilton’s weight diary and they produce an unprecedented upward tonnage.
I truly think there was simply a case of garbage in, garbage out.
There have been some in the blogosphere who have charged that GISS’s actions were deliberate; that the institute lied to cover up the fact that through most of 2008 global temperatures have been on a downward plunge. Since that’s bad news for an group that has been at the forefront of promoting climate-change hysteria, GISS manipulated the data to support its campaign.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s that nefarious. Still, I think a bigger problem – unscientific bias at GISS and elsewhere in the global-warming community – has been exposed by this incident.
September figures from scores of weather stations around the world seem merely to have been copied into the GISS October database. Temperatures from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, most of Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, Finland, the U.K., Ireland and elsewhere seem to have been incorrectly duplicated.
The problem isn’t that this mistake occurred, but rather that no one at Goddard seemed to think a one-month temperature jump of nearly a full degree worldwide warranted a double-check. The keepers of one of the U.N.’s four primary temperature records are sure the globe is warming dangerously, so sure it never even occurred to them to check why or how October’s figures were so anomalous.
It took bloggers using little more than desktop PCs and Internet connections only a few hours to find the errors. The difference is, they were prepared to look. Their minds were not so clouded by bias in favour of the warming theory that they have stopped asking obvious questions.
Scientists and activists who support the warming theory often insist the science is settled and this incident proves it is settled – in their own minds. For too many, scientific inquiry has ceased.
lgunter@shaw.ca
-
Some of the most witless gibberish I've read in a while.
Hollywood ponders global warming
By DERRIK J. LANG, AP Entertainment Writer
Wed Nov 19, 8:38 am ET
LOS ANGELES – Hollywood insiders and climate change experts agree that they can't shove messages about global warming down audiences' throats.
They met at the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday to discuss how storytelling in film and TV can translate broad issues about climate change to everyday audiences.
"The storytelling has to trump everything," said "West Wing" actor Bradley Whitford.
During the Population Media Center's Climate Change Summit, Whitford, Bruce Davison and Scott Wolf performed "Shuddering to Think," a one-act play by Jon Robin Baitz about a playwright bemoaning an Earth Day play. Baitz and Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, joined the actors by webcam.
"I think this play is a good template for how to communicate these types of issues to people," said Wolf, who starred in Fox's "Party of Five." "If we render an audience a school assembly, they shut off. The way that this issue is so beautifully incidental in this story is exactly how to get big giant messages across in such a small way."
Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed that viewers are turned off by accusations and hectoring. He said dispensing incorrect information about climate change can also elicit depression and a "sticking-your-head-in-the-sand" attitude from the public.
"One thing we've learned is that apocalyptic stories don't work very well," said Frumkin.
David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," pointed to the eighth-season episode "The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp," which explores the issue of water treatment contamination, as an example of how an environmental topic can be woven into a compelling story — and not offend advertisers or public officials.
"It is a challenge," said Rambo. "A lot of the industries that we point the finger at when we talk about climate change are the very ones that make our livelihoods possible, but there's so much pressure on the corporations that advertise to be responsible world citizens, at this point, they pretty much make their own case for the things they're doing."
Many attendees said the major studios have successfully gone green in recent years. They cited e-mailing scripts and call sheets instead of printing them on paper, employing reusable cups instead of plastic water bottles and using hybrid production vehicles for transportation on set instead of gas guzzlers.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081119/ap_en_tv/celeb_climate_change_summit_2
-
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Slouching Toward Fanaticism
Passionate intensity, but little rationality, in the anti-immunization movement
14 November 2008
Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, by Paul A. Offit (Columbia University Press, 328 pp., $24.95)
For some reason, the immunization of children has always aroused opposition of almost religious fervor. For example, a mass movement led resistance to smallpox vaccination in Britain for 70 years and was supported by intellectuals of the stature of George Bernard Shaw, who never believed in the germ theory of disease and thought that Pasteur and Lister were charlatans. Politicians have won or lost elections on their attitude to vaccination. And the extensive literature produced by the antivaccination movement attributed virtually every human ill, from general failure to thrive to the recrudescence of leprosy, to the practice. The movement also imputed the worst possible motives to vaccinators, including Edward Jenner himself, the developer of the smallpox vaccine.
Fears about immunization have reappeared with monotonous regularity. Perhaps it is the medical and social pressure to immunize that stirs up such opposition, especially in countries that pride themselves on their sturdy individualism. And while everyone agrees that prevention is better than cure, a single case of a complication wrought by immunization has more emotional impact than a million cases prevented. The former, after all, is a definite presence, the latter a ghostly absence.
The combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is the latest to act as a lightning conductor for parental discontent. Paul Offit’s new book, as readable as a good detective novel, tells the story of how autism, a disorder of psychological development, came falsely to be blamed first on the MMR vaccine and then on thimerosal, a preservative found in several vaccines. It is a tale about bad science, worse journalism, unscrupulous political populism, and profiteering litigation lawyers.
In 1998, a young British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet suggesting an association between the measles component of the triple vaccine and the development of childhood autism. Though the paper stressed that no causative relationship had been proved, Wakefield took the most unusual (and self-promoting) step of calling a press conference, in which he suggested that the vaccine should be withdrawn. Panic ensued, immunization rates declined, and measles made a comeback in Britain. The panic spread across the Atlantic.
Wakefield’s paper, though, was a very bad one, and the editor of The Lancet—one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world—should never have countenanced publication of such rotten science. The ensuing uproar made necessary expensive and time-consuming epidemiological research that repeatedly failed to find any connection between the vaccine and autism. It seems likely, moreover, that Wakefield knowingly falsified some of his results. Those that he did not falsify were based on grossly deficient laboratory technique. An investigative journalist discovered a few years later that Wakefield had received payments from a serial litigation lawyer who hoped to mount a class-action suit against the vaccine’s manufacturers. Despite all this, Wakefield still has faithful followers, as do all false messiahs who survive their own predictions of the end of the world.
Closely allied with the MMR theory is the contention that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. There is not the slightest evidence in favor of this conclusion, but it, too, has devoted believers. Parents who first notice their children’s autistic traits soon after immunization with MMR are understandably difficult to persuade that their experience is of almost no value in deciding the question of causation. Where two events, such as MMR vaccination and the development of autistic traits, are common, it is inevitable that people will mistakenly associate them with each other. But it is shameful that politicians and journalists should fail to understand this fairly simple point. I cannot make up my mind whether it would be worse if the politicians were merely cynical or actually ineducable.
False theories of causation are apt to call forth absurd or even dangerous methods of cure, and so it was in this instance. Children have been assaulted—often at great expense—with a host of special diets and medicaments in the hope of cure. One can only sympathize with the desperate parents, eager to clutch at any straw to find a satisfying explanation for the misfortune that has befallen them. But for the false messiahs, at best self-deceived and at worst outright fraudulent (and sometimes, I suspect, a little of both), one can feel nothing but outrage.
Offit’s book raises questions much broader than his ostensibly limited subject matter would suggest. What is the place of scientific and scholarly authority in the modern world, and how is it to be institutionalized in a democracy? Is it inevitable that the best should now lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity? What is the relation between information, on the one hand, and knowledge and wisdom, on the other? Cranks are often oversupplied with the former and deficient in the latter, not realizing that there is a difference between the two. Autism’s False Prophets gives no easy answers, but it does provide a rich source of material for political philosophers and even epistemologists, who ought to assign it to their students.
A final note on the question of passionate intensity: Offit, a prominent public defender of child immunization (who recognizes that, as with any medical treatment, it can sometimes have harmful effects), has been persecuted and threatened by activists who disagree with him. He begins his book with the startling statement, “I get a lot of hate mail.” He has been branded on some websites as a terrorist, and he has sometimes needed police protection. I found out firsthand how deep the passions against him run when I published a positive review of one of his previous books and received abusive e-mails in reply. Readers accused me not merely of error, but of complicity in corruption and depravity. This is surely extraordinary.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/bc1114td.html
-
BHO take note: the claimed economic boon to be caused by green technologies isn't surviving scrutiny.
LAO to the rescue
It shreds claims climate policy will spur boom
November 27, 2008
For more than two years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, leading California Democrats and environmentalists have insisted that AB 32 – a 2006 law requiring California businesses and residents to use cleaner but far more costly sources of energy by 2020 – would actually prove to be an economic bonanza. They asserted it would position the state to lead the world in green technology and reduce societal costs stemming from air pollution.
This claim falls apart under the slightest inspection. Sure, some well-positioned industries might thrive. But how could sharply increasing the operating costs of most businesses and reducing the disposable income of most individuals help the overall economy? Despite its illogic, Schwarzenegger's argument has largely gone unchallenged.
Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Last week, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office released a study of the California Air Resources Board's “scoping plan” for implementing AB 32 and related measures. In low-key fashion, the study demolished the happy talk of the governor and his allies.
The LAO said the air board's report showing the “purported net economic benefit” of emission-reduction laws used “inconsistent and incomplete” methodology in which researchers ignored or downplayed evidence that countered the economic bonanza thesis.
Here's the most egregious example: Any measure that reduced a company's greenhouse gases in any way was deemed “cost-effective.” By this standard, it's cost-effective for a company to go out of business.
We asked the governor's staff to respond. What we got was a boilerplate statement repeating Schwarzenegger's happy talk and ignoring the LAO's conclusions.
This is unacceptable. In the governor's own words, the LAO has an “impeccable reputation” and has set a “high standard” with its analysis of state issues. When the LAO raises profound questions about the wisdom of a major state policy, state leaders are obligated to take these questions seriously.
We have no doubt Schwarzenegger sincerely believes that it is essential for California, the nation and the world to tackle global warming. But the rhetoric the governor employs to push his cause is devoid of candor.
This was underscored by recent news reports about the European Union, China and India – three of America's biggest trade rivals. All are rethinking recent commitments to cleaner fuels because of the likelihood that the added cost could make it more difficult for their already-reeling economics to rebound. In Europe and Asia, you see, there is a matter-of-fact acceptance that a shift toward cleaner energy has a downside.
The contrast with Schwarzenegger's pretend world could not be more striking. Perhaps we can import some honesty from Beijing, New Delhi or Brussels. On climate change, there's little to be found in Sacramento.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20081127/news_lz1ed27bottom.html
-
All we need to do is open the US continental shelf to drilling. That will give us more time to develop green technology that is actually affordable. That will get us off the dependency of our enemies.
This will create jobs, bring in taxes.
-
I'm not sure drilling in the outer continental shelf is the quick panacea that everyone would like it to be;
According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil production from drilling offshore in the outer continental shelf wouldn't begin until around the year 2017. Once begun, it wouldn't reach peak production until about 2030 when it would produce only 200,000 barrels of oil per day. This would supply a meager 1.2% of total US annual oil consumption (just 0.6% of total US energy consumption). And, the offshore oil would be sold back to the US at the international rate, which today is $106 a barrel. So, the oil produced by offshore drilling would not only be a "drop in the bucket", it would be expensive, which translates to "no relief at the pump".
-
And, the offshore oil would be sold back to the US at the international rate, which today is $106 a barrel.
Not sure what the "international rate" means, but all the price quotes I can find today have oil listed at $55/bbl more or less. I know there are some very perverse incentives in US tax code etc. that make convoluted oil shipment schemes profitable, but hadn't heard the doubled the price.
Be that as it may, solving problems in their entirety is a fairly rare thing; are we not to take what steps we can as we wait for the comprehensive solution to burst on to the scene?
-
At the UN climate obfuscation conference currently being held in Germany, Al sez we'll be without a polar ice cap in 5 years. And in five years he'll say. . . .
Perhaps it's just jaundiced little me, but is Al making a last desperate stab at panic mongering before BHO learns the hard way that benefits and costs have to be scrutinized closely?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrPCUWWjh0c[/youtube]
Guess no one has told him global temperatures have been holding steady or falling, depending on what dataset you read.
-
Editorial: Much pain for little gain
State air-quality regulators approve hugely expensive, intrusive anti-emissions plan
An Orange County Register editorial
The California Air Resources Board approval last week of top-down micromanagement of industries and commerce, ostensibly to rid California of global warming, is a broad intrusion into the private sector that not only will be costly, but ultimately a solution for a problem whose dimensions have been defined more by politics than science and probably doesn't even exist.
The ARB's "scoping plan" details the regulations and costs to be imposed on nearly every facet of California economic life to implement 2006's presumptuously named "Global Warming Solutions Act." It's the last thing a struggling economy needs, and the last thing a nearly bankrupt state government should be undertaking.
Not only have the Earth's temperatures subsided and even reversed in recent years, but state officials disingenuously claim their mandates and regulations will boost California's economy. They base their rosy projections on their own self-serving studies, which have been widely and authoritatively criticized.
"I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the (state's) economic analysis is terribly deficient in critical ways and should not be used by the state government or the public for the purpose of assessing the likely costs of CARB's plans," commented Robert Stavins of Harvard, one of six highly regarded reviewers commissioned by the state to critique the economic projections. All six experts were harshly critical.
The state's own independent Legislative Analyst's Office came to similar negative conclusions about the Air Resources Board's hyped economic outlook.
What is certain is the $23 billion in taxes and fees even the state concedes the plan will cost the private sector.
The mountain of rules and regulations approved by the ARB now will go through more public hearings and workshops to fine tune the details of each mandate, all of which must be in place by 2012. Some measures, such as developing a requirement for "cool" vehicle paint to lessen interior heat and thus the need for auto air-conditioning, already are under way. Others, like creation of the complex "cap-and-trade" artificial market to allow greenhouse gas emitters to pay to continue emitting, and reward companies that cut back, will take longer to finalize.
Ultimate implementation may depend on how much pain the Schwarzenegger administration is willing to inflict on the economy. Costly environmental mandates are more accepted by the private sector when times are good. Times are tough today, which means added expenses and new costs will be felt sooner and more acutely. We hope the governor shows restraint in implementing these far-reaching mandates, which he can delay up to one year at a time if he finds they would inflict economic harm. Otherwise, the consequences could be severe, and felt soon.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/state-economic-california-2257553-last-air#
-
Richard Lindzen is one of the folks most vilified by the anthropomorphic global warming crowd, mostly because he has the habit of going where the research leads rather than bending his findings to conform to the political dictates du jour. In this piece, the first two sections excerpted here, Lindzen explore the processes that lie behind the current AGW crusade.
Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?1
Richard S. Lindzen
Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
November 29, 2008
Abstract
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate
science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower
rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the
heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural
factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition
between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The
latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former. Whereas the former had the
potential for convergence, the latter is much less effective. The institutional factor has many
components. One is the inordinate growth of administration in universities and the consequent
increase in importance of grant overhead. This leads to an emphasis on large programs that
never end. Another is the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small
executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the
distribution of ‘carrots and sticks’ whereby reputations are made and broken. The above factors
are all amplified by the need for government funding. When an issue becomes a vital part of a
political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal
rather than a consequence of scientific research. This paper will deal with the origin of the
cultural changes and with specific examples of the operation and interaction of these factors. In
particular, we will show how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists
adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how
opposition to these positions is disposed of.
1. Introduction.
Although the focus of this paper is on climate science, some of the problems pertain to science
more generally. Science has traditionally been held to involve the creative opposition of theory
and observation wherein each tests the other in such a manner as to converge on a better
understanding of the natural world. Success was rewarded by recognition, though the degree of
recognition was weighted according to both the practical consequences of the success and the
philosophical and aesthetic power of the success. As science undertook more ambitious
problems, and the cost and scale of operations increased, the need for funds undoubtedly shifted
emphasis to practical relevance though numerous examples from the past assured a strong base
level of confidence in the utility of science. Moreover, the many success stories established
‘science’ as a source of authority and integrity. Thus, almost all modern movements claimed
scientific foundations for their aims. Early on, this fostered a profound misuse of science, since
science is primarily a successful mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority.
Until the post World War II period, little in the way of structure existed for the formal support of
science by government (at least in the US which is where my own observations are most
relevant). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the major contributions of science to the
war effort (radar, the A-bomb), to health (penicillin), etc. were evident. Vannevar Bush (in his
report, Science: The Endless Frontier, 1945) noted the many practical roles that validated the
importance of science to the nation, and argued that the government need only adequately
support basic science in order for further benefits to emerge. The scientific community felt this
paradigm to be an entirely appropriate response by a grateful nation. The next 20 years
witnessed truly impressive scientific productivity which firmly established the United States as
the creative center of the scientific world. The Bush paradigm seemed amply justified. (This
period and its follow-up are also discussed by Miller, 2007, with special but not total emphasis
on the NIH (National Institutes of Health).) However, something changed in the late 60’s. In a
variety of fields it has been suggested that the rate of new discoveries and achievements slowed
appreciably (despite increasing publications)2, and it is being suggested that either the Bush
paradigm ceased to be valid or that it may never have been valid in the first place. I believe that
the former is correct. What then happened in the 1960’s to produce this change?
It is my impression that by the end of the 60’s scientists, themselves, came to feel that the real
basis for support was not gratitude (and the associated trust that support would bring further
benefit) but fear: fear of the Soviet Union, fear of cancer, etc. Many will conclude that this was
merely an awakening of a naive scientific community to reality, and they may well be right.
However, between the perceptions of gratitude and fear as the basis for support lies a world of
difference in incentive structure. If one thinks the basis is gratitude, then one obviously will
respond by contributions that will elicit more gratitude. The perpetuation of fear, on the other
hand, militates against solving problems. This change in perception proceeded largely without
comment. However, the end of the cold war, by eliminating a large part of the fear-base forced a
reassessment of the situation. Most thinking has been devoted to the emphasis of other sources
of fear: competitiveness, health, resource depletion and the environment.
What may have caused this change in perception is unclear, because so many separate but
potentially relevant things occurred almost simultaneously. The space race reinstituted the
model of large scale focused efforts such as the moon landing program. For another, the 60’s
saw the first major postwar funding cuts for science in the US. The budgetary pressures of the
Vietnam War may have demanded savings someplace, but the fact that science was regarded as,
to some extent, dispensable, came as a shock to many scientists. So did the massive increase in
management structures and bureaucracy which took control of science out of the hands of
working scientists. All of this may be related to the demographic pressures resulting from the
baby boomers entering the workforce and the post-sputnik emphasis on science. Sorting this out
goes well beyond my present aim which is merely to consider the consequences of fear as a
perceived basis of support.
Fear has several advantages over gratitude. Gratitude is intrinsically limited, if only by the finite
creative capacity of the scientific community. Moreover, as pointed out by a colleague at MIT,
appealing to people’s gratitude and trust is usually less effective than pulling a gun. In other
words, fear can motivate greater generosity. Sputnik provided a notable example in this regard;
though it did not immediately alter the perceptions of most scientists, it did lead to a great
increase in the number of scientists, which contributed to the previously mentioned demographic
pressure. Science since the sixties has been characterized by the large programs that this
generosity encourages. Moreover, the fact that fear provides little incentive for scientists to do
anything more than perpetuate problems, significantly reduces the dependence of the scientific
enterprise on unique skills and talents. The combination of increased scale and diminished
emphasis on unique talent is, from a certain point of view, a devastating combination which
greatly increases the potential for the political direction of science, and the creation of dependent
constituencies. With these new constituencies, such obvious controls as peer review and detailed
accountability, begin to fail and even serve to perpetuate the defects of the system. Miller (2007)
specifically addresses how the system especially favors dogmatism and conformity.
The creation of the government bureaucracy, and the increasing body of regulations
accompanying government funding, called, in turn, for a massive increase in the administrative
staff at universities and research centers. The support for this staff comes from the overhead on
government grants, and, in turn, produces an active pressure for the solicitation of more and
larger grants3.
One result of the above appears to have been the deemphasis of theory because of its intrinsic
difficulty and small scale, the encouragement of simulation instead (with its call for large capital
investment in computation), and the encouragement of large programs unconstrained by specific
goals4. In brief, we have the new paradigm where simulation and programs have replaced theory
and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and
where the primary role of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special
advantage.
This new paradigm for science and its dependence on fear based support may not constitute
corruption per se, but it does serve to make the system particularly vulnerable to corruption.
Much of the remainder of this paper will illustrate the exploitation of this vulnerability in the
area of climate research. The situation is particularly acute for a small weak field like
climatology. As a field, it has traditionally been a subfield within such disciplines as
meteorology, oceanography, geography, geochemistry, etc. These fields, themselves are small
and immature. At the same time, these fields can be trivially associated with natural disasters.
Finally, climate science has been targeted by a major political movement, environmentalism, as
the focus of their efforts, wherein the natural disasters of the earth system, have come to be
identified with man’s activities – engendering fear as well as an agenda for societal reform and
control. The remainder of this paper will briefly describe how this has been playing out with
respect to the climate issue.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.3762v3
-
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Cooling is 'not evidence that global warming is slowing'
My relatives in New England are fighting their way out from under a giant ice storm. Here in Las Vegas it's been snowing all week, several weeks earlier than our usual one-day-a-year photo op of snow and icicles sparkling one of our palm-bedecked golf courses before melting away by afternoon. The National Weather Service calls it "a rare snow event."
Why? It's getting colder. 2008 was the coolest year in a decade.
The American mainstream press seem to know "team players" don't mention such inconvenient developments, but in the U.K., the esteemed Guardian reports, "This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07."
How stupid does this make politicians such as Barack Obama and the other suckers who have fallen for the "global warming" hoax as they race to say, "Never mind"?
Actually, they haven't missed a beat. These guys are so "scientific" that the evidence of their own eyes and overcoats has become irrelevant. They now contend global cooling is just further proof of global warming. Honest.
So-called "climate scientists" insist "The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing," The Guardian reports.
Um ... Earth's cooling doesn't mean the Earth is cooling?
"Absolutely not," responds Dr. Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office's Hadley Centre. "If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends."
You might want to pause and savor that for a moment. This is the gang who keep telling us, "The Debate is over! Dissent no longer allowed! Man-made global warming is going to ruin the Earth!"
Yet they now say cooling "is not evidence that global warming is slowing," and that, "If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends."
If we are "going" to understand climate change? Like ... in the future?
Sure, the mean temperature may still go up for a few more years before it plummets. So? None of the great climate cycles of the past needed us to burn coal in our power plants to make them happen, and there's neither evidence nor any intuitive reason to believe the tiny percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide we now generate makes any substantial difference, either.
When will the "Let us take over and wreck your economy so we can save you from the climate boogey-man" gang admit the earth is cooling again, and when will they admit, "OK, since cooling is worse than warming, and our own theory is that mankind can impact global temperature by what we burn, it's now your duty to hold back the Big Freeze by going out there and burning all the fossil fuels you possibly can, as fast as you can"?
(Don't even get me started on "carbon trading," a weird scam in which the buyer acquires an invisible commodity of no earthly use to him, and both buyer and seller can benefit if they overestimate the amount being "transferred.")
Instead, on Monday, President-Elect Obama ("Delay is no longer an option; denial is no longer an acceptable response") appointed as Secretary of Energy (a position and an office not authorized in the Constitution) Steven Chu, the confirmed global warming lunatic from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who says coal -- the stuff that powered the industrial revolution, cheap coal which will last for centuries and which can be burned more cleanly now than ever before -- "is my worst nightmare."
This gang still intends to effectively ban both coal-fired and nuclear power generation. Do they believe they can meet our current demand with famously costly, unreliable, and toxic wind, solar and geothermal? (Look up the by-products of geothermal energy, some time. Then look up "battery farms.") Of course not. The gap can only be closed by "conservation," they'll admit when you take a pencil and start to work the numbers.
And what does "conservation" mean, precisely?
They'd like us to think they mean just turning out the lights in our empty rooms, that kind of thing. But they don't.
Mr. Obama has said it, straight out. He, the Chosen One, has had it Revealed to Him that we can no longer use 25 percent of the world's energy when we have only 5 percent of the world's population.
This is nonsense. All mankind uses less than 1 percent of the solar energy that streams past us every hour. Is it "unfair" that the Japanese eat "more than their fair per capita share" of the world's fish?
Are we now to be ruled by a depraved schoolchild obsessed with sharing the toys, granted the ability to carry forward that Ding-Dong School philosophy with powers reminiscent of the kid in the old "Twilight Zone" episode who could "wish people into the cornfield"?
We should be proud that we've learned how to capture and harness the lion's share of the available energy in this system. It's not like we refused to share with others "the secret of coal" or "the secret of oil," is it? They saw how good it was; they've been racing to catch up to us ever since; that's the main reason the world has escaped the life expectancies of the Stone Age.
There's a real world out there. Purposely, artificially impoverish the nation, force us to give up our competitive economic advantages, and we'll eventually go the way of the Carthaginians.
The Obama gang mean for us to learn to survive at 55 degrees in the winter; and to hope the tourists will still come to Vegas when our air conditioning only lowers the temperature to 87 in the summer (assuming we can afford even that.) They plan to unionize and thus close down most of our remaining factories -- the Chinese will make us everything we need, you see; we'll pay for it with the endless bales of green coupons printed by Ben Bernanke and the Elves in the Big Hollow Tree.
To see Mr. Obama admit "Under my plan, electricity costs will necessarily skyrocket" visit http://www.climatechangefraud.com/.
In a Zogby exit poll, 88.4 percent of Obama voters expressed ignorance of the fact Obama said on the campaign trail that his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket. See the sample interviews at http://howobamagotelected.com/.
Why did voters not know this? Because the mainstream press covered Wasilla, Alaska, like a glove, trying to dig up something on Sarah Palin's overdue library books. Meantime, when it turns out Barack Obama's Senate seat is for sale for a million bucks in Chicago, the press corps slaps their foreheads and exclaims in amazement: "More corruption in Chicago than there was in Wasilla?! Who would have thought to look there?! By the way, where is Obama from, anyway?"
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/ and http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/.
Find this article at:
http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/36525244.html
-
S.F. fliers may pay their way in carbon usage
Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
(12-23) 20:33 PST --
Environmentally conscious travelers flying out of San Francisco International Airport will soon be able to assuage their guilt and minimize the impact of their air travel by buying certified carbon offsets at airport kiosks.
The experimental program, scheduled to start this spring, would make SFO the first airport in the nation - possibly the world - to offer fliers the opportunity to purchase carbon offsets.
"We'd like people to stop and consider the impacts of flying," said Steve McDougal, executive vice president for 3Degrees, a San Francisco firm that sells renewable-energy and carbon-reduction investments and is teaming up with the airport and the city on the project. "Obviously, people need to fly sometimes. No one expects them to stop, but they should consider taking steps to reduce their impacts."
San Francisco's Airport Commission has authorized the program, which will involve a $163,000 investment from SFO, but is still working out the details with 3Degrees. Because of that, McDougal said, he can't yet discuss specifics, such as the cost to purchase carbon offsets and what programs would benefit from travelers' purchases.
But the general idea, officials said, is that a traveler would approach a kiosk resembling the self-service check-in stations used by airlines, then punch in his or her destination. The computer would calculate the carbon footprint and the cost of an investment to offset the damage. The traveler could then swipe a credit card to help save the planet. Travelers would receive a printed receipt listing the projects benefiting from their environmental largesse.
The carbon offsets are not tax deductible, said Krista Canellakis, a 3Degrees spokeswoman.
"While the carbon offsets purchased at kiosks can't be seen or touched, they are an actual product with a specific environmental claim whose ownership is transferred at the time of purchase," she said.
Mike McCarron, airport spokesman, said the projects offered will be chosen by the mayor's office, in conjunction with 3Degrees, from a list certified by the city's Environment Department. Airport Director John Martin told the commission that projects could include renewable energy ventures in developing countries, agriculture and organic waste capture, coal mine methane capture, and sustainable forestry.
Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, said a portion of each offset purchase would go to the San Francisco Carbon Fund, which supports local projects such as energy-efficiency programs and solar panel installations for low-income housing, as well as efforts to convert waste oils into biodiesel fuels.
The cost of offsets for SFO travelers is still being negotiated, McDougal said, but figures on the company's Web-based "carbon calculator" suggest that a two-hour trip uses about 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per person, and the cost to offset that would be about $4. Offsetting a trip to Europe would cost $36.
"It's definitely not going to double your ticket or anything," he said. "It's going to end up being a small percentage of your total airfare."
Under the agreement, the airport will provide the kiosks and 3Degrees will supply the software and the certified carbon offsets being sold and will operate the program. Kiosks will be placed throughout the airport, with locations at the customer service desk in Terminal 3 and two wings of the International Terminal. 3Degrees will get 30 percent of each purchase, with the rest going to carbon-reduction projects. The agreement calls for a one-year program, with a possible extension.
"The carbon kiosks will not only reduce global warming," Ballard said, "they will serve an educational function. It's something interesting to do while you're killing time at the airport."
Given the innovative nature of the venture, airport officials said they don't expect 3Degrees will turn a profit - at least not at the outset. McDougal said it's impossible to predict how many passengers will want to make what is essentially a voluntary contribution to compensate for the impacts of their air travel. But he hopes the program takes off.
"Hopefully, it will be successful," he said. "But if we just have a lot of people stop and read the information and think about it, that's something we've accomplished."
E-mail Michael Cabanatuan at mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/24/MNIR14PSQF.DTL
-
Climate Report Downgrades Ice Loss; Media Reports Opposite
Michael Asher (Blog) - December 29, 2008 3:30 AM
Varying sea levels since the last ice age (Source: Global Warming Art Project)
Environmental reporting adheres to adage: "bad news sells better than good"
A new scientific report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program has sharply reduced earlier estimates of global ice loss. The CCSP, which coordinates the efforts of 13 different federal climate agencies, has released updated figures estimating combined ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland at 48 cubic miles per year, a figure the Washington Post dolefully reports as "accelerated" ice loss.
But is it?
(http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/9941_Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png)
In 2006, a widely-reported study estimated ice loss from Greenland alone to be over 57 cubic miles per year. Another the same year reported Antarctic ice loss of 36 cubic miles -- a combined annual total of over 93 cubic miles. The new estimate, however, is only about half as high. In most rational circles, this would be cause for celebration.
Not for the Washington Post, however. Ignoring earlier estimates, it casts the figure in a threatening light by noting it's twice the amount of ice locked in the Alps. It fails to mention, though, that those 48 cubic miles, when spread out over the planet's 139 million square miles of ocean, works out to a sea level rise of only 2.1 inches per century. For you metric types, that's about half a millimeter a year. Even factoring in an additional increase for thermal expansion, the value is far too small for concern.
Glossing over all this, the Washington Post instead reports a potential rise of four feet by the year 2100. The figure is based on the assumption of unforeseen positive feedback effects which might accelerate ice loss, despite the fact that no evidence exists that this is happening, and even the report's own authors considered such a scenario "unlikely".
When one considers sea level has been rising for the last 18,000 years, at an average of about 25 inches a century, one sees even less cause for alarm. The rate of increase has actually slowed in past 4,000 years; before this, it often rose by as much as several meters per century.
The Post article also fails to point out the report doesn't include data for 2008, a colder year in which sea ice increased sharply, and preliminary estimates indicate that land-based ice sheets may have as well.
Some positive notes in the report are that "no clear evidence" for global-warming induced hydrologic changes (drought or floods) are being seen in the US, and that catastrophic events such as a shutdown of sea ocean currents ("thermohaline circulatory shutdown" ) or dramatic releases of methane (the "clathrate gun" hypothesis) seem increasingly unlikely.
To be fair to the Washington Post, 48 cubic miles/year is indeed larger than some estimates from the 1990s. But those figures were arrived at before the launch of advanced systems such as NASA's GRACE satellite. It's unclear how much of the difference in estimates is due simply to today's more accurate monitoring.
The report also indicates that current IPCC modeling doesn't accurately capture lubrication effects that may increase ice thinning and loss. However, a model prediction is not the same thing as actual measurements and observations.
The new figures obviously don't prove whether or not CO2 is warming the planet. However, they do strongly indicate that sea level rise isn't something that we -- or even our great-grandchildren -- need to worry about.
http://www.dailytech.com/Climate+Report+Downgrades+Ice+Loss+Media+Reports+Opposite/article13797.htm
-
Anyone care to wager if this warming causes cooling bon mot is associated with the recent unfortunate cooling that's been occurring?
Greenhouse gases could have caused an ice age, claim scientists
Richard Alleyne
Telegraph
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:14 UTC
Filling the atmosphere with Greenhouse gases associated with global warming could push the planet into a new ice age, scientists have warned.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that 630 million years ago the earth had a warm atmosphere full of carbon dioxide but was completely covered with ice.
The scientists studied limestone rocks and found evidence that large amounts of greenhouse gas coincided with a prolonged period of freezing temperatures.
Such glaciation could happen again if global warming is not curbed, the university's school of geography, earth and environmental sciences warned.
While pollution in the air is thought to trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up, this new research suggests it could also have the opposite effect reflecting rays back into space.
This effect would be magnified by other forms of pollution in the earth's atmosphere such as particles of sulphate pumped into the air through industrial pollution or volcanic activity and could create ice age conditions once more, the scientists said.
Dr Ian Fairchild, lead investigator, said: "We came up with an independent test of a theory that the earth, like a baked Alaska pudding, was once hot on the outside, surrounding a cold, icy surface.
"It happened naturally in the past, but the wrong use of technology could make it happen again."
The limestones studied were collected in Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, which is covered in ice and snow.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/172015-Greenhouse-gases-could-have-caused-an-ice-age-claim-scientists
-
"If it gets warmer, it's climate change." "If it gets colder, it's climate change". :roll:
-
Wow, more fodder here than I can wrap my head around at the moment, but AGW High Priest James Hansen lets slip his desire for massive income redistribution amon other bon mots. The single minded zeal herein is pretty darn scary. I've included only the letter to BHO, but there is other info that helps demonstrate the scope of his obsession here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081229_DearMichelleAndBarack.pdf
29 December 2008
Michelle and Barack Obama
Chicago and Washington, D.C.
United States of America
Dear Michelle and Barack,
We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the Earth that will be inherited by our
children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born.
Barack has spoken of ‘a planet in peril’ and noted that actions needed to stem climate change
have other merits. However, the nature of the chosen actions will be of crucial importance.
We apologize for the length of this letter. But your personal attention to these ‘details’ could
make all the difference in what surely will be the most important matter of our times.
Jim has advised governments previously through regular channels. But urgency now dictates
a personal appeal. Scientists at the forefront of climate research have seen a stream of new
data in the past few years with startling implications for humanity and all life on Earth.
Yet the information that most needs to be communicated to you concerns the failure of policy
approaches employed by nations most sincere and concerned about stabilizing climate.
Policies being discussed in national and international circles now, which focus on ‘goals’ for
emission reduction and ‘cap and trade’, have the same basic approach as the Kyoto Protocol.
This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste
another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity.
The enclosure, “Tell Barack Obama the Truth – the Whole Truth” was sent to colleagues for
comments as we left for a trip to Europe. Their main suggestion was to add a summary of the
specific recommendations, preferably in a cover letter sent to both of you.
There is a profound disconnect between actions that policy circles are considering and what
the science demands for preservation of the planet. A stark scientific conclusion, that we
must reduce greenhouse gases below present amounts to preserve nature and humanity, has
become clear to the relevant experts. The validity of this statement could be verified by the
National Academy of Sciences, which can deliver prompt authoritative reports in response to
a Presidential requesti. NAS was set up by President Lincoln for just such advisory purposes.
Science and policy cannot be divorced. It is still feasible to avert climate disasters, but only if
policies are consistent with what science indicates to be required. Our three recommendations
derive from the science, including logical inferences based on empirical information about
the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of specific past policy approaches.
(1) Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2.
This is the sine qua non for solving the climate problem. Coal emissions must be phased
out rapidly. Yes, it is a great challenge, but one with enormous side benefits.
Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as the other fossil fuels
combined, and its reserves make coal even more important for the long run. Oil, the second
greatest contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide, is already substantially depleted, and it is
impractical to capture carbon dioxide emitted by vehicles. But if coal emissions are phased
out promptly, a range of actions including improved agricultural and forestry practices could
bring the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide back down, out of the dangerous range.
As an example of coal’s impact consider this: continued construction of coal-fired power
plants will raise atmospheric carbon dioxide to a level at least approaching 500 ppm (parts
per million). At that level, a conservative estimate for the number of species that would be
exterminated (committed to extinction) is one million. The proportionate contribution of a
single power plant operating 50 years and burning ~100 rail cars of coal per day (100 tons of
coal per rail car) would be about 400 species! Coal plants are factories of death. It is no
wonder that young people (and some not so young) are beginning to block new construction.
(2) Rising price on carbon emissions via a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”.
A rising price on carbon emissions is the essential underlying support needed to make all
other climate policies work. For example, improved building codes are essential, but full
enforcement at all construction and operations is impractical. A rising carbon price is the one
practical way to obtain compliance with codes designed to increase energy efficiency.
A rising carbon price is essential to “decarbonize” the economy, i.e., to move the nation
toward the era beyond fossil fuels. The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on
oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry. The tax will then appropriately affect all
products and activities that use fossil fuels. The public’s near-term, mid-term, and long-term
lifestyle choices will be affected by knowledge that the carbon tax rate will be rising.
The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis
(half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly
in bank accounts. No large bureaucracy is needed. A person reducing his carbon footprint
more than average makes money. A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax
much higher than the dividend. Not one cent goes to Washington. No lobbyists will be
supported. Unlike cap-and-trade, no millionaires would be made at the expense of the public.
The tax will spur innovation as entrepreneurs compete to develop and market low-carbon
and no-carbon energies and products. The dividend puts money in the pockets of consumers,
stimulating the economy, and providing the public a means to purchase the products.
A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective. It will increase energy prices, but low and
middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come
out ahead. The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated
by how fast the carbon tax rate increases. Effects will permeate society. Food requiring lots
of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa,
encouraging support of nearby farms as opposed to imports from half way around the world.
The carbon tax has social benefits. It is progressive. It is useful to those most in need in
hard times, providing them an opportunity for larger dividend than tax. It will encourage
illegal immigrants to become legal, thus to obtain the dividend, and it will discourage illegal
immigration because everybody pays the tax, but only legal citizens collect the dividend.
“Cap and trade” generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non
productive millionaires, all at public expense. The public is fed up with such business. Tax
with 100% dividend, in contrast, would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged,
the climate, and our national security.
(3) Urgent R&D on 4th generation nuclear power with international cooperation.
Energy efficiency, renewable energies, and a “smart grid” deserve first priority in our
effort to reduce carbon emissions. With a rising carbon price, renewable energy can perhaps
handle all of our needs. However, most experts believe that making such presumption
probably would leave us in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants
worldwide. Such a result would be disastrous for the planet, humanity, and nature.
4th generation nuclear power (4th GNP) and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture
and sequestration (CCS) at present are the best candidates to provide large baseload nearly
carbon-free power (in case renewable energies cannot do the entire job). Predictable criticism
of 4th GNP (and CCS) is: “it cannot be ready before 2030.” However, the time needed could
be much abbreviated with a Presidential initiative and Congressional support. Moreover,
improved (3rd generation) light water reactors are available for near-term needs.
In our opinion, 4th GNPii deserves your strong support, because it has the potential to
help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, the need to mine for nuclear
fuel, and release of radioactive materialiii. Potential proliferation of nuclear material will
always demand vigilance, but that will be true in any case, and our safety is best secured if
the United States is involved in the technologies and helps define standards.
Existing nuclear reactors use less than 1% of the energy in uranium, leaving more than
99% in long-lived nuclear waste. 4th GNP can “burn” that waste, leaving a small volume of
waste with a half-life of decades rather than thousands of years. Thus 4th GNP could help
solve the nuclear waste problem, which must be dealt with in any case. Because of this, a
portion of the $25B that has been collected from utilities to deal with nuclear waste justifiably
could be used to develop 4th generation reactors.
The principal issue with nuclear power, and other energy sources, is cost. Thus an R&D
objective must be a modularized reactor design that is cost competitive with coal. Without
such capability, it may be difficult to wean China and India from coal. But all developing
countries have great incentives for clean energy and stable climate, and they will welcome
technical cooperation aimed at rapid development of a reproducible safe nuclear reactor.
Potential for cooperation with developing countries is implied by interest South Korea
has expressed in General Electric’s design for a small scale 4th GNP reactor. I do not have
the expertise to advocate any specific project, and there are alternative approaches for 4th
GNP (see enclosure). I am only suggesting that the assertion that 4th GNP technology cannot
be ready until 2030 is not necessarily valid. Indeed, with a Presidential directive for the
Nuclear Regulator Commission to give priority to the review process, it is possible that a
prototype reactor could be constructed rapidly in the United States.
CCS also deserves R&D support. There is no such thing as clean coal at this time, and it
is doubtful that we will ever be able to fully eliminate emissions of mercury, other heavy
metals, and radioactive material in the mining and burning of coal. However, because of the
enormous number of dirty coal-fired power plants in existence, the abundance of the fuel, and
the fact that CCS technology could be used at biofuel-fired power plants to draw down
atmospheric carbon dioxide, the technology deserves strong R&D support.
Summary
An urgentiv geophysical fact has become clear. Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the
planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.
Of course it is unfair that everyone is looking to Barack to solve this problem (and other
problems!), but they are. He alone has a fleeting opportunity to instigate fundamental
change, and the ability to explain the need for it to the public.
Geophysical limits dictate the outline for what must be donev. Because of the long lifetime of
carbon dioxide in the air, slowing the emissions cannot solve the problem. Instead a large
part of the total fossil fuels must be left in the ground. In practice, that means coal.
The physics of the matter, together with empirical data, also define the need for a carbon tax.
Alternatives such as emission reduction targets, cap and trade, cap and dividend, do not work,
as proven by honest efforts of the ‘greenest’ countries to comply with the Kyoto Protocol:
(1) Japan: accepted the strongest emission reduction targets, appropriately prides itself on having the most
energy-efficient industry, and yet its use of coal has sharply increased, as have its total CO2 emissions. Japan
offset its increases with purchases of credits through the clean development mechanism in China, intended to
reduce emissions there, but Chinese emissions increased rapidly.
(2) Germany: subsidizes renewable energies heavily and accepts strong emission reduction targets, yet plans to
build a large number of coal-fired power plants. They assert that they will have cap-and-trade, with a cap that
reduces emissions by whatever amount is needed. But the physics tells us that if they continue to burn coal, no
cap can solve the problem, because of the long carbon dioxide lifetime.
(3) Other cases are described on my Columbia University web site, e.g., Switzerland finances construction of
coal plants, Sweden builds them, and Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large
as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet.
Indeed, ‘goals’ and ‘caps’ on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions
continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air. Nobody
realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the
ground. Caps will not cause that to happen – caps only slow the rate at which the oil and gas
are used. The only solution is to cut off the coal source (and unconventional fossil fuels).
Coal phase-out and transition to the post-fossil fuel era requires an increasing carbon price. A
carbon tax at the wellhead or port of entry reduces all uses of a fuel. In contrast, a less
comprehensive cap has the perverse effect of lowering the price of the fuel for other uses,
undercutting clean energy sources.vi In contrast to the impracticality of all nations agreeing
to caps, and the impossibility of enforcement, a carbon tax can readily be made near-global.vii
A Presidential directive for prompt investigation and proto-typing of advanced safe nuclear
power is needed to cover the possibility that renewable energies cannot satisfy global energy
needs. One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of
anti-nuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.
The challenges today, including climate change, are great and urgent. Barack’s leadership is
essential to explain to the world what is needed. The public, young and old, recognize the
difficulties and will support the actions needed for a fundamental change of direction.
James and Anniek Hansen
Pennsylvania
United States of America
-
Wow, if stuff like this is showing up in the Huffington Post then perhaps the days of AWG scare mongering are indeed numbered.
Harold Ambler
Posted January 3, 2009 | 11:36 AM (EST)
Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted
You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.
Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that "the science is in." Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.
What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:
1. First, the expression "climate change" itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots -- and even revolutions, including the French Revolution -- were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).
So, no one needs to say the words "climate" and "change" in the same breath -- it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the "Mann Hockey Stick," created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression "climate change": It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, "manmade global warming," which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore's camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of "climate change," which is absurd, obscene, even.
2. Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as "flat-Earthers." This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Indeed, it is Mr. Gore and his brethren who are flat-Earthers. Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. "Their relationship is actually very complicated," he says, "but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer." The word "complicated" here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore's graph. You are probably wondering by now -- and if you are not, you should be -- which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not "complicated." When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998.
3. What the alarmists now state is that past episodes of warming were not caused by C02 but amplified by it, which is debatable, for many reasons, but, more important, is a far cry from the version of events sold to the public by Mr. Gore.
Meanwhile, the theory that carbon dioxide "drives" climate in any meaningful way is simply wrong and, again, evidence of a "flat-Earth" mentality. Carbon dioxide cannot absorb an unlimited amount of infrared radiation. Why not? Because it only absorbs heat along limited bandwidths, and is already absorbing just about everything it can. That is why plotted on a graph, C02's ability to capture heat follows a logarithmic curve. We are already very near the maximum absorption level. Further, the IPCC Fourth Assessment, like all the ones before it, is based on computer models that presume a positive feedback of atmospheric warming via increased water vapor.
4. This mechanism has never been shown to exist. Indeed, increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of the oceans, which leads to increased cloud cover (one cooling effect) and increased precipitation (a bigger cooling effect). Within certain bounds, in other words, the ocean-atmosphere system has a very effective self-regulating tendency. By the way, water vapor is far more prevalent, and relevant, in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide -- a trace gas. Water vapor's absorption spectrum also overlays that of carbon dioxide. They cannot both absorb the same energy! The relative might of water vapor and relative weakness of carbon dioxide is exemplified by the extraordinary cooling experienced each night in desert regions, where water in the atmosphere is nearly non-existent.
If not carbon dioxide, what does "drive" climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the "super cycle" of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.
Since that time, already, a number of interesting things have taken place. One La Niña lowered temperatures around the globe for about half of the year just ended, and another La Niña shows evidence of beginning in the equatorial Pacific waters. During the last twelve months, many interesting cold-weather events happened to occur: record snow in the European Alps, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Rockies, the upper Midwest, Las Vegas, Houston, and New Orleans. There was also, for the first time in at least 100 years, snow in Baghdad.
Concurrent with the switchover of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its cool phase the Sun has entered a period of deep slumber. The number of sunspots for 2008 was the second lowest of any year since 1901. That matters less because of fluctuations in the amount of heat generated by the massive star in our near proximity (although there are some fluctuations that may have some measurable effect on global temperatures) and more because of a process best described by the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark in his complex, but elegant, work The Chilling Stars. In the book, the modern Galileo, for he is nothing less, establishes that cosmic rays from deep space seed clouds over Earth's oceans. Regulating the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth's atmosphere is the solar wind; when it is strong, we get fewer cosmic rays. When it is weak, we get more. As NASA has corroborated, the number of cosmic rays passing through our atmosphere is at the maximum level since measurements have been taken, and show no signs of diminishing. The result: the seeding of what some have taken to calling "Svensmark clouds," low dense clouds, principally over the oceans, that reflect sunlight back to space before it can have its warming effect on whatever is below.
Svensmark has proven, in the minds of most who have given his work a full hearing, that it is this very process that produced the episodes of cooling (and, inversely, warming) of our own era and past eras. The clearest instance of the process, by far, is that of the Maunder Minimum, which refers to a period from 1650 to 1700, during which the Sun had not a single spot on its face. Temperatures around the globe plummeted, with quite adverse effects: crop failures (remember the witch burnings in Europe and Massachusetts?), famine, and societal stress.
Many solar physicists anticipate that the slumbering Sun of early 2009 is likely to continue for at least two solar cycles, or about the next 25 years. Whether the Grand Solar Minimum, if it comes to pass, is as serious as the Maunder Minimum is not knowable, at present. Major solar minima (and maxima, such as the one during the second half of the 20th century) have also been shown to correlate with significant volcanic eruptions. These are likely the result of solar magnetic flux affecting geomagnetic flux, which affects the distribution of magma in Earth's molten iron core and under its thin mantle. So, let us say, just for the sake of argument, that such an eruption takes place over the course of the next two decades. Like all major eruptions, this one will have a temporary cooling effect on global temperatures, perhaps a large one. The larger the eruption, the greater the effect. History shows that periods of cold are far more stressful to humanity than periods of warm. Would the eruption and consequent cooling be a climate-modifier that exists outside of nature, somehow? Who is the "flat-Earther" now?
What about heat escaping from volcanic vents in the ocean floor? What about the destruction of warming, upper-atmosphere ozone by cosmic rays? I could go on, but space is short. Again, who is the "flat-Earther" here?
The ocean-atmosphere system is not a simple one that can be "ruled" by a trace atmospheric gas. It is a complex, chaotic system, largely modulated by solar effects (both direct and indirect), as shown by the Little Ice Age.
To be told, as I have been, by Mr. Gore, again and again, that carbon dioxide is a grave threat to humankind is not just annoying, by the way, although it is that! To re-tool our economies in an effort to suppress carbon dioxide and its imaginary effect on climate, when other, graver problems exist is, simply put, wrong. Particulate pollution, such as that causing the Asian brown cloud, is a real problem. Two billion people on Earth living without electricity, in darkened huts and hovels polluted by charcoal smoke, is a real problem.
So, let us indeed start a Manhattan Project-like mission to create alternative sources of energy. And, in the meantime, let us neither cripple our own economy by mislabeling carbon dioxide a pollutant nor discourage development in the Third World, where suffering continues unabated, day after day.
Again, Mr. Gore, I accept your apology.
And, Mr. Obama, though I voted for you for a thousand times a thousand reasons, I hope never to need one from you.
P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007, they say. Well, the ice in the Arctic basin has always melted and refrozen, and always will. Any researcher who wants to find a single molecule of ice that has been there longer than 30 years is going to have a hard job, because the ice has always been melted from above (by the midnight Sun of summer) and below (by relatively warm ocean currents, possibly amplified by volcanic venting) -- and on the sides, again by warm currents. Scientists in the alarmist camp have taken to referring to "old ice," but, again, this is a misrepresentation of what takes place in the Arctic.
More to the point, 2007 happened also to be the time of maximum historic sea ice in Antarctica. (There are many credible sources of this information, such as the following website maintained by the University of Illinois-Urbana: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg). Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.
For failing to mention the 2007 Antarctic maximum sea ice record a single time, I also accept your apology, Mr. Gore. By the way, your contention that the Arctic basin will be "ice free" in summer within five years (which you said last month in Germany), is one of the most demonstrably false comments you have dared to make. Thank you for that!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-ambler/mr-gore-apology-accepted_b_154982.html
-
Thanks BBG. Each study and each story that questions the myth that humans have played the central role in climate change seems like it should be categorized a media issue more than a scientific breakthrough, always begging the question: why won't NY Times etc. cover this? Now the Huffington Post actually prints it and my reaction again is to wonder about the site - are they in search of honesty and balance or did this slide through on a weekend by accident?
The reaction of course should be that this is further evidence of great news. The planet is alive and well. There is no warming where I live and no warming on Antarctica. Everytime we find alarming temperature data we also find that someone with an agenda has tweaked the data.
As the author indicates, when propogandists alarm at ice melting in one place, they neglect to mention record ice masses at another. It's refreshing to read a straight story.
-
Falsifying the Global Warming Hypothesis
By Michael R. Fox Ph.D., 1/6/2009 2:01:57 AM
Consider the working hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). It states "man-made CO2 causes global warming". The question now is does this hypothesis work? Is it true? Is it valid? Does it explain the climate observations and the data that are found in the real world?
First we need some crucial evidence. The Earth’s climate has always been warming and cooling. Singer and Avery discuss this in their book “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years”. Over the past one million years there have been a nominal 600 periods of warming. We can surmise that there also have been 600 periods of cooling in between them. Why wouldn’t we expect these obviously natural cycles to continue? Obviously these warming periods result from variations in natural forces having little to do with human activities.
Atmospheric CO2 has varied as well during these times. The periods between the many ice ages were “interglacial periods”, when natural warming took place. We are currently in one of those interglacial periods and should expect slight warming. We also know that humans are currently putting about 8 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. What is not widely known is that there are a nominal 40,000 billion tons of CO2 dissolved in sea water and captured in the biomass. The human contribution is negligible relative to what is available from natural sources.
We also know that as the sea water is warmed, it releases billion ton quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere. As it cools it absorbs tonnage quantities of CO2. During the warmer interglacial periods CO2 releases from the oceans would dominate. Warmer water can’t hold as much CO2 as cold water, a fact well known from Henry’s Law that we learned in basic chemistry. During those interglacial periods, as the warming progressed, more CO2 was released. It seems clear from Henry’s Law, that the warming sea water causes the CO2 increases, not the reverse, as is currently claimed.
A crucial part of serious science is the proposing and testing (by observations from the real world) of given hypotheses. The initial stage of the science includes the formulation of a hypothesis, then making observations and collecting data to determine if the hypothesis can explain the observations. This is a simple step, and is crucial. It is essential in the validation of any hypothesis, yet it is easily forgotten and sometimes deliberately overlooked.
This process was explained by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman who said this about the basis of science:
”In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. It’s that simple statement that is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is---if it disagrees with experiment (observation) it is wrong." - Dr. Richard Feynman, “The Character of Natural Law”, the MIT Press, 1965, p. 156.
Notice that Feynman points out that if the hypothesis cannot explain real world observations, then the hypothesis is wrong. There are many examples of where the AGW hypothesis cannot explain the real world observations. The hypothesis clearly is wrong since it fail to explain real world observations, and needs to be modified or abandoned. So let’s test the AGW hypothesis, and ask “Is the Hypothesis True?”
First we must recognize the total atmospheric inventory of all greenhouse gases. Of the greenhouse gases, water vapor represents about 95% of the total. This is usually ignored for unexplained reasons. This also presents a major problem for the AGW people. If water vapor is 95% of the total greenhouse gas inventory, why isn't it involved with the hypothesis as stated above. It occurs in many forms from water vapor, rain, snow, and clouds. These all involve changes of state, transfers of huge amounts of energy, great reflectivity of huge sums of solar energy from the white tops of clouds. Why is this ignored? Does it make sense to ignore 95% of the greenhouse gases?
CO2 makes up most, but not all, of the rest of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventory. We also notice that of the total CO2 inventory, about 97% of this comes from natural sources (volcanoes, oceans, decaying biomass, changes in land use, and others), and about 3% is man-made. This is rarely pointed out, and is another major problem for the AGW people. If 97% of the total CO2 inventory is from natural sources, why choose to focus on just the man-made fraction of 3%? On what basis can we ignore 97% of the CO2 that is natural, and claim catastrophe is imminent based upon only the 3% that is man-made? Could politics be involved?
Examine the actual surface temperature data, and see there are many other serious problems. One of these is the impressively low quality of data, mainly caused by poor station placements and management, little or no data quality control, poor maintenance, poor data collection practices of the temperatures collection stations, and the measuring devices themselves. If one is looking for temperature changes of 0.5 deg C per century, one had better have some very good temperature measuring devices, well maintained temperature stations, high quality devices, and wide use of temperature standards, such as from NIST (National Institute for Science and Technology). We have seen little of this in the stations involved with collecting the surface T (temperature) data.
Consider some of the observed data from these stations. We find that many surface stations around the world have shown no actual warming for decades. Interestingly, and more importantly, many stations have shown cooling for decades. The global warming hypothesis does not predict either constant temperatures or cooling for decades. In other words man-made CO2 warming that is claimed to be global is not global at all. A hypothesis which predicts that man-made CO2 causes global warming, and we yet either no warming or actual cooling is observed, forces us to conclude that the hypothesis is wrong and needs to be modified.
For an example for some cooling locations, see the temp. data below from the Amundson base at the South Pole showing cooling since 1957. There are many other such stations, which show cooling as well.
(http://www.hawaiireporter.com/file.aspx?guid=b3511d7c-e3fe-4de8-92da-603aaeb38f00)
Notice that the CO2 increases while the temperatures have slowly declined. The data are from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Below is the temperature chart from Spokane, Washington where cooling has been observed for more than 60 years.
(http://www.hawaiireporter.com/file.aspx?guid=5916bad4-3554-45ad-9441-65b9c1f0b4f5)
We also know that atmospheric CO2 has increased during this time. In fact during the period between 1940 to about 1975, a famous period of observed cooling (where we also observed hysterical global cooling scientists), the use of fossil fuels (and CO2 production) increased more than 4-fold. But we observed cooling, the hypothesis was proven wrong again.
(http://www.hawaiireporter.com/file.aspx?guid=e22f5c31-6370-415a-a67c-900dbed561eb)
In the chart above there are a number of observations. You will see that:
1. There is little correlation between fossil energy use and global temperatures.
2. The chart shows that for nearly the past 120 years there has been a stunning correlation between Arctic air temperatures and solar activity, yet until now the global warming lobby has ignored the sun, the oceans, and the many other natural cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillations.
3. The chart shows that global temperature increases (from 1880 to 1940) PRECEDE the use of fossil fuels and the related increases in global CO2 (from 1940 to 1975). CO2 increases, manmade or otherwise, could have little to do with such earlier temperature increases. The excellent research paper by Oerlemans (http://tinyurl.com/5eeya5) who studied glacier growth and shrinkage showed that the current warming period is simply a continuation of the warming which began at the end of the Little Ice Age 2 centuries ago.
4. While some apparently believe that man-made CO2 is a source of warming (which the temperature evidence does not consistently support), the actual temperature data in many parts of the world show either cooling or no change at all. We can conclude that other natural and variable forces must dominate such man-made-warming forces, relegating man-made CO2 to a very minor role.
There has been no warming over the past 10 years and a slight cooling for the last 6 or 7 years. In the meantime the CO2 emissions have continued to increase. The hypothesis predicted warming over the last 10 years, while no warming and even cooling has been observed. The AGW hypothesis again is falsified.
1. If one is to believe that man-made CO2 is a major source of warming, he is also obligated to prove that the natural sources of CO2 (97% of the total), are NOT involved.
2. If one is to believe that man-made CO2 is a major source of global warming, he is also obligated to show why water vapor (95% of the total inventory of greenhouse gases) is not involved.
3. There is general agreement that the earth is slightly warmer than the grim famine-filled centuries of the Little Ice Age. There are no longer Frost Fairs held on the frozen Thames River in London. Armies can no longer be marched across the frozen Baltic Sea for purposes of invasion. The Delaware River rarely freezes anymore as it was during Washington’s Crossing in the Revolutionary war. These climatic warming and cooling processes are natural, not man-made, and most likely involve variations in the Sun’s energy and magnetic variations.
4. If one is to believe that man-made CO2 is a major source of global warming, he is also obligated to show why the sun is NOT involved with the warming cycles, (this is not limited to considerations of solar irradiance, but to the additional solar forces such as solar winds, solar magnetic fields, and sunspots). These forces in turn can impact the cosmic radiation flow entering the atmosphere as well, with climatic effects likely.
5. The ice caps are also receding on Mars and other “uninhabited” planetary objects in our solar system, indicating warming there as well. The current warming trends on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Neptune's moon Triton, and Pluto may result, in part, from similar relations to the sun and its activity – just like those that are naturally and slowly warming the Earth.
Our climate is so complex and chaotic that it may never be fully understood. At the current level of understanding it is beyond human capabilities to describe such complexities in computer models. It is also very dangerous to our nation, our freedom, and our prosperity to formulate restrictive government energy policies based upon such a flimsy understanding of global climate and the causes of its long history of climate variations.
Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a nuclear scientist and a science and energy resource for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?1ad63198-0a1f-4b5b-8fb8-96df07d70d41
-
While we wait for Al Gore's apology and while my email fills with cold weather warnings for my daughter's ski race this weekend- must take note that the dog sled races are canceled due to too much snow, lol. Not just that it's too much snow, but it has been so cold that the snow is too cold, too light, and too fluffy to pack on the trails. I don't remember that prediction in the movie...
http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/articles/index.cfm?id=20594§ion=News
How's this for odd? Minnesota sled dog race canceled because of too much snow
Patrick Springer, Forum Communications, Bemidji Pioneer
Published Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Here’s another entry for the annals of noteworthy winter weather: The dogsled race near Frazee, Minn., has been canceled because there’s too much snow.
Too much fluffy snow that keeps drifting and therefore made it impossible to maintain a groomed trail.
That poses a safety risk to the dogs, supercharged canines whose mushers need a groomed trail to drop a hook to stop when necessary.
“We can’t pack it,” race organizer Eddy Streeper said Monday. “We just can’t get it packed. We had to speak up on behalf of the dogs.”
The Third Crossing Sled Dog Rendezvous, slated for Jan. 23-24, would have been the ninth annual running of the sprint races, which twice were canceled for lack of snow.
This winter, as anyone with a driveway knows, has been a season of prodigious snows.
The Frazee area has received about 3 feet of snow, but winds keep creating drifts of 4 feet or more over the course, which was to host races of four to 14 miles.
“The drifting aspect is just unbelievable,” said Streeper, a native of Canada who has been involved with dogsled racing for 25 years. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The National Weather Service doesn’t tally snow accumulations and moisture content for Frazee. But snowfalls in Fargo, 54 miles to the northwest, have totaled 39.3 inches since October, with 2.37 liquid inches. That translates into a moisture content of 6 percent – snow is considered wet at around 30 percent to 35 percent. That dry, fluffy snow is just too deep.
Cancellation of the dog races is a blow to Frazee, population 1,374. Last year’s two-day event drew 2,000 to 3,000 spectators, and contestants come from as far as Alaska, five Canadian provinces and five or six states. “This is the NASCAR of sled-dogging, the sprint ones,” said Gale Kaas, Frazee Sled Dog Club secretary.
-
Even greenies are beginning to notice the damnfoolishness that is corn to ethanol production.
Published on Environmental Working Group (http://www.ewg.org)
Ethanol’s Federal Subsidy Grab Leaves Little For Solar, Wind And Geothermal Energy
Published January 8, 2009
As Congress and the incoming Obama administration plan the nation’s next major investments in green energy, they need to take a hard, clear-eyed look at Department of Energy data documenting corn-based ethanol’s stranglehold on federal renewable energy tax credits and subsidies.
Solar, wind and other renewable energy sources have struggled to gain significant market share with modest federal support. Meanwhile, corn-based ethanol has accounted for fully three-quarters of the tax benefits and two-thirds of all federal subsidies allotted for renewable energy sources in 2007.
A little noticed analysis buried in an April 2008 report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA)1 shows that the corn-based ethanol industry received $3 billion in tax credits in 2007, more than four times the $690 million in credits available to companies trying to expand all other forms of renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal power.
Ethanol Got 76% ($3 Billion) of All Federal Renewable Energy Tax Credits in 2007
(http://www.ewg.org/files/09ethanol_chart1.gif)
The federal bill for ethanol subsidies grows with every gallon of ethanol produced. By 2010, ethanol will cost taxpayers more than $5 billion a year -- more than is spent on all U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs to protect soil, water and wildlife habitat.
Now the ethanol industry wants even more. In recent weeks, the corn ethanol lobby has pushed for billions in new federal subsidies as part of the economic stimulus package. Corn growers and ethanol companies are also pressing for dramatic increases in the amount of ethanol Americans will be required to put into their gas tanks—even if it results in worse fuel economy and more engine repairs. Once touted as the energy equivalent of a free lunch, corn ethanol has proved to be an over-hyped and dubious renewable energy option. Ethanol made from corn has extremely limited potential to reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil, and current production systems likely worsen greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, despite billions in federal subsidies on top of a government mandate that forces motorists to buy ethanol, the industry’s financial outlook remains highly unstable. A fleeting few years of windfall profits and breakneck construction of ethanol plants gave rise to talk of “sheikdoms” springing up in the Midwest to rival those in the Middle East and a “rural renaissance" featuring hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
But that was last year. Today, a glut of ethanol, abruptly lower gasoline prices and wild swings in the corn market have caused the ethanol industry's profit margins to evaporate, hammered its stock values, triggered major bankruptcies and shredded ambitious plans to construct dozens of new plants.
Hence the latest burst of special pleadings from the ethanol lobby. Its spokesmen have floated a proposal for billions more in taxpayer handouts via the economic stimulus bill, and they want an expanded government fiat that would require drivers to use as much as twice the ethanol that Washington currently dictates.
Even if Washington rejects the industry’s latest wish list out of hand, the nation will still be saddled with a lopsided incentive structure that has rewarded politically powerful, subsidy-dependent ethanol producers at the expense of a diversified and sustainable energy future. America can do better.
The changes we need to make sustainable energy a reality:
Phase out tax credits for corn ethanol and subsidize other biofuels only if they show clear promise to meet strict climate and environmental protection standards.
Rebalance the U.S. renewable energy and energy conservation portfolio to favor options that do the most to reduce fossil fuel use, safeguard the environment, spur more widely-shared economic development and increase energy security.
1 Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy. Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007. SR/CNEAF/2008-01. April 2008.
Source URL:
http://www.ewg.org/node/27498
-
What of ethanol not made of subsidized corn?
-
What of ethanol not made of subsidized corn?
Not sure the two can be separated out. Companies like ADM have their tendrils so deeply involved with federal farm policy that I don't think all the perverse incentives can be ID'd, much less taken out of the equation.
-
With humorous pieces showing up in the MSM wherein AGW zealots and their panic mongering is made fun of, I am cautiously optimistic that the days of AWG teeth gnashing are numbered.
Peter Foster: Climate rains on Aussie drought
Posted: January 08, 2009, 7:11 PM by NP Editor
Peter Foster, climate changeTim Flannery’s apocalyptic global warming projections have proved way off
By Peter Foster
There are signs that some climate change skepticism — or at least greater objectivity — is at last stirring within the CBC, although the corporation still has a long way to go.
On Monday and Tuesday, as part of its “Watershed” series, CBC Radio’s The Current aired two documentaries, one on the decade-long Australian drought, “the Big Dry,” and the other on the alleged plight of the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, which might be dubbed “the Big Wet.”
The Australian segment gave a good deal of airtime to Down Under’s foremost alarmist, Tim Flannery, author of the best-selling Weather Makers and 2008 “Australian of the Year.” It suggested that the current drought, unlike many previous ones, “doesn’t seem to be ending.” Professor Flannery indicted government inertia and even suggested analogies with Alberta, where the locals were allegedly proving slow to realize they shouldn’t be digging up the tar sands.
All depressingly typical so far. But then, yesterday, The Current returned to the issue after a correspondent informed them that many parts of Australia had recently, and joyfully, been inundated with rain! Meanwhile, the program also acknowledged a recent column titled “Top 10 dud predictions,” by an Australian journalist, Andrew Bolt, which pointed out that Professor Flannery’s apocalyptic projections had proved way, way, off.
Last March, Mr. Flannery pronounced that “The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.” Last month, Adelaide’s reservoirs were up to 75% full. In June, Professor Flannery opined that Brisbane might need desalinated water within 18 months. Brisbane has in fact just had its wettest spring in 27 years. Professor Flannery had previously made similarly off-base doomsterish forecasts for reservoirs in Sydney and Perth.
The Current’s host, Anna Maria Tremonti, got Mr. Bolt on the line to repeat his indictments of Mr. Flannery, whom Mr. Bolt described as a “professional panic merchant.” Deliciously, Mr. Bolt also suggested that Mr. Flannery equated to Canada’s David Suzuki.
It was not a compliment.
Ms. Tremonti then asked Mr. Flannery to respond.
Mr. Flannery, although Mr. Bolt had done nothing but quote Mr. Flannery’s own words, called the journalist a liar and proceeded to waffle mightily round the swelling billabong. He said that cities had spent money on dealing with the situation. But then didn’t that mean that adaptation works?
The fact that northern Australia wasn’t as drought-ridden as models predicted was due, he said, to “brown cloud pollution” in Asia that was cooling the ground and causing monsoons to shift south. But then didn’t this undermine climate change theory, asked Ms. Tremonti? Ah, declared Mr. Flannery, that theory is “complex.” We shouldn’t look at particular weather incidences.
But then isn’t that exactly what Mr. Flannery and his ilk constantly do, quoting Hurricane Katrina or the 2007-08 loss of Arctic sea ice (since reversed) as “conclusive proof” of their beliefs?
Mr. Flannery warned Ms. Tremonti against “any simplistic view.” After all, Australian industry was trying to mislead the public because it had just been lumbered with an emissions trading scheme. So they were “stirring the pot” when, presumably, it was only alarmists who should be allowed spoons.
One’s faith in the CBC’s objectivity was somewhat restored by this display of skepticism. But that, unfortunately, still left Tuesday’s segment on Vanuatu, in which Mother Corp returned to form.
Vanuatu, according to alarmists, is threatened by rising sea levels, but the actual threat was — strangely — never clearly indicated. The only figure given was in the Australian segment by Mr. Flannery, who suggested a Biblical four meters.
But what does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the alleged fount of scientific knowledge, have to say on the issue? According to the latest IPCC estimates, the rise over the next century will be between 18 and 59 centimetres. So Mr. Flannery’s projection, like that of Al Gore, apparently gratuitously increased the official estimate by 10, echoing a famous Monty Python skit.
Moreover, sea levels have dropped over the past two years. All this has to leave you wondering about the CBC’s claims of Vanuatu culture being swept away, based on interviews with the islands’ one climate change bureaucrat, a toothless wood carver and a guy who had built a bungalow too close to the sea, thus making him a “victim of climate change.”
Why — as claimed by the documentary — fishermen might be forced into the highlands to become farmers rather than moving their facilities and homes up a few inches, or building sea walls, was never explained.
The disappearance of local fish was brought up, although this was clearly due to overfishing, which has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change. Still, it’s another problem, so throw it in the pot of worry.
The answer to Vanuatu’s problem, if problem there be, is surely obvious: adapt, and at least the bureaucrat admitted that he wanted “adaptation assistance” rather than holding out for a post-Kyoto agreement to turn back the waters.
The CBC reporter described the island as “once idyllic.” But why was it less idyllic now? Was it because the local populace had been corrupted by the thought of UN-laundered cash?
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/01/08/peter-foster-climate-rains-on-aussie-drought.aspx
-
It never ceases to amaze me that global warming zealots can take a system as incredibly complex as the planet's environment, isolate a single variable, namely carbon dioxide, and ascribe numerous catastrophes to it's (slight) increase despite numerous examples of greater increases in the geologic record when anthropomorphic causes are ruled out, and then, armed with that single variable and insanely linear theory, propose to take over the world economy lest their boogieman broil us.
In this instance environmental scientists take a much smaller system and eliminate a minor, introduced variable, and manage to screw things up royally. And Al Gore can't understand why we don't want to hand the world economy to his tender ministrations?
January 14, 2009
Was there a 'scientific consensus' on this?
Thomas Lifson
Nature is a lot more complex than many supposed scientists realize. Even in relatively simple systems like the ecology of an island, not to mention the global climate system. The latest example comes from Macquarie Island, declared a "world heritage island" between Australia and Antarctica. The must-not-be-quoted AP reports that brilliant scientists decided to "save" native sea birds by eliminating the population of feral cats which were devouring the avian population.
Sounds great, except that removing the cats allowed rabbits to multiply, devastating the local vegetation. Now the island is described as an environmental catasptrophe, requiring an expensive rescue. An untested model yielded an 'unintended consequences' disaster.
Modeling the ecosystem of an isolated island is child's play compared to modeling the global climate. And the scope of the catastrophe possible when intervening to wreck the world economy based on questionable, unverified models dwarfs the damage done to Macquarie Island.
"Nature bats last," as the old bumper stickers used to read. When Al Gore or an editorial writer claim they understand the world's climate future well enough to tank the world economy to prevent a hypothetical disaster, remind them of this incident.
Rachel Nowak of The New Scientist writes:
... the newly rampant rabbits have devastated vegetation over 40% of the island. Clearing up the mess is expected to cost at least $16 million, and it remains unclear whether the island will ever fully recover. (See a live webcam of Macquarie Island.) A landslip in 2006 that badly damaged a penguin colony has been blamed on rabbit destruction of the vegetation.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/01/was_there_a_scientific_consens.html
-
Woman, 91, dies 'after becoming stressed over £16,000 council bill to make her home eco-friendly'
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:00 PM on 14th January 2009
Bed-ridden grandmother Dorothy Hacking had to pay £16,000 to meet government regulations to reduce CO2 emissions
A family have expressed their fury after the death of their disabled 91-year-old mother who 'was forced to take out a second mortgage to foot an unnecessary £16,000 council bill' .
The family of bed-ridden grandmother Dorothy Hacking blame Thanet Council for 'disgusting treatment' after the pensioner became overstretched trying to pay for work to meet government regulations to reduce CO2 emissions.
They say she was beset by stress and health problems after being left with no option but to take out a second mortgage for the stone-cladding repairs to make her home compliant with the Home Energy Conservation Act in Ramsgate, Kent.
The law requires councils to reduce their CO2 emissions by almost a third within the next decade.
Her local paper took up Mrs Hacking's case but sadly she died last Friday - the day the story was published.
Daughter Rosemary, 53, said: 'I think it is disgusting that a disabled 91-year-old should be faced with the fear of negative equity when the council insists on doing work over which she has no control.
'She was financially stretched to the limit, worried about putting the heating on in case she couldn't pay the bills and had no idea what to do if another big bill arrived from the council.
'The council maintained the work was essential to comply with the Home Energy Conservation Act which requires it to reduce its CO2 emission by 30 per cent within 10 years.
'As Mum was no longer a tenant, she had to find the money - under their agreement with Thanet council, leaseholders are responsible for a variable annual service charge which can include larger sums for major works.'
Age Concern said: 'If only we had known we could have tried to help.
'It's such a shame - pensioners 30 years ago never had all these pressures.
'There's no care now, no heart.'
Problems started last year when council inspectors sent the £16,000 bill - and an appeal to benefits agency the Department for Work and Pensions failed.
In the week of her death, Mrs Hacking had told how she was left 'petrified' by the spiralling costs - after having to find an extra £112 a month for her mortgage to cover the cost of the bill.
And Mrs Brown said her mother had been 'financially stretched to the limits'.
The deaf and half-blind grandmonther - who relied on pensions credits to survive - had bought her flat from local authority Thanet District Council under a 'buy your council flat' scheme.
Thanet Council has defended its decision to charge Mrs Hacking the £16,000.
Councillor Zita Wiltshire, the local housing chief, said leaseholders were consulted on charges in 2006 and made aware of how much they would have to pay.
Cllr Wiltshire said: 'We are sympathetic to the concerns of our leaseholders but the council does spell out the detail of the financial obligations imposed upon a lessee in the terms of each right-to-buy lease.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1116088/Woman-91-dies-stressed-16-000-council-make-home-eco-friendly.html#
-
Most AGW zealots are prone to claiming that anyone who doesn't walk in lockstep with them are in the pocket of big oil and then quickly roll out 6 degrees of separation arguments to prove their claim. I've been reading lately that BP and other oil companies have been contributing to various ecological groups with with strong AGW ties and this piece documents how all parties are pulling for cap and trade schemes. Does this mean that AGW zealots are all in the pocket of of big oil and we no longer have to listen to their mewlings?
Climate Change Baptist & Bootlegger Coalition Tells Congress Today They Want Free Money
Ronald Bailey | January 15, 2009, 10:33am
As economist Bruce Yandle explained more than 25 years ago, sometimes Baptists and bootleggers find it their mutual interests to cooperate in advocating regulations, e.g., Blue Laws banning the sale of liquor on Sundays. Baptists want to outlaw booze because its from the devil and promotes sinful activities. Bootleggers favor them too because they cut out their legal competitors and enhance their profits.
The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) is just such a Baptist and bootlegger coalition and its representatives are going up to Capitol Hill today to testify in favor of a cap-and-trade proposal to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Its 31 members include such leading producers and users of energy (bootleggers) as General Motors, Duke Energy, ConocoPhillips, Ford, General Electric PG&E Corporation, and Shell. The Baptists in the coalition include the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, and the World Resources Institute. Both sides claim that they want to do something about the pressing issue of man-made global warming. To that end, they are promoting a cap-and-trade system:
In a cap-and-trade system, one allowance would be created for each ton of GHG emissions allowed under the declining economy-wide emission reduction targets (the “cap”). Emitters would be required to turn in one allowance for each ton of GHG they emit. Those emitters who can reduce their emissions at the lowest cost would have to buy fewer allowances and may have extra allowances to sell to remaining emitters for whom purchasing allowances is their most cost-effective way of meeting their compliance obligation. This allows the economy-wide emission reduction target to be achieved at the lowest possible cost.
It's pretty clear what's in it for the environmental lobbyists--if the system works, the U.S. will progressively emit ever lower amounts of greenhouse gases like the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. But what's in it for the users and producers of energy? One benign interpretation is that they are just bowing to the inevitable and want a predictable, stable regulatory regime so that they can get on with their long-range energy and technology planning. Hmmm. Perhaps. But just in case that's not enough, there's a big sweetener.
As USCAP acknowledges:
Emission allowances in an economy-wide cap-and-trade system will represent trillions of dollars in value over the life of the program.
So how to divvy up these trillions of dollars? Well, USCAP wants to give away a sizeable portion for free:
USCAP recommends that a significant portion of allowances should be initially distributed free to capped entities and economic sectors particularly disadvantaged by the secondary price effects of a cap and that free distribution of allowances be phased out over time.
Make no mistake, issuing emissions allowances is like coining money. Handing them out to companies for free is adding directly to their bottom lines. How this would work was explained in a 2007 Congressional Budget Office report. It's a bit lengthy but well worth reading:
A common misconception is that freely distributing emission allowances to producers would prevent consumer prices from rising as a result of the cap. Although producers would not bear out-of-pocket costs for allowances they were given, using those allowances would create an "opportunity cost" for them because it would mean forgoing the income that they could earn by selling the allowances. Producers would pass that opportunity cost on to their customers in the same way that they would pass along actual expenses. That result was borne out in the cap-and-trade programs for sulfur dioxide in the United States and for CO2 in Europe, where consumer prices rose even though producers were given allowances for free.
Thus, giving away allowances could yield windfall profits for the producers that received them by effectively transferring income from consumers to firms' owners andshareholders. The study of the hypothetical 23 percent cut in CO2 emissions concluded, for example, that if all of the allowances were distributed for free to producers in the oil, natural gas, and coal sectors, stock values would double for oil and gas producers and increase more than sevenfold for coal producers, compared with projected values in the absence of a cap.
Stock prices doubling? Seven-fold? What climate bootlegger could resist? And consumers will just love higher utility and gas prices!
I suspect that the USCAP Baptists have agreed to this because they see it as a bribe to get the bootleggers on board with carbon rationing.
Interestingly, President-elect Barack Obama has proposed that all of the emissions permits would be auctioned off. It would function like a variable carbon tax, which would mean no profits for bootleggers. Ah, such charming political naivete!
Go here for my analysis of carbon cap-and-trade vs. carbon taxes. Hint: If we must ration carbon, carbon taxes are better, especially if they are used to offset and lower income and payroll taxes.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131077.html
-
Greens' War Against All Chemicals Will Do Little To Reduce Our Risks
By HENRY MILLER | Posted Monday, January 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT
A report from a panel appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says that California should expand pollution prevention initiatives, add "green chemistry" to public school curricula and offer public access to comprehensive information about the chemicals in consumer products.
The report, part of a plan by the California Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate many supposedly toxic materials, is more appropriate for a wish list sent to Santa Claus than an attempt at serious public policy.
It recalls H.L. Mencken's observation that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
For starters, the governor and members of his panel seem oblivious to the fact that we live in a sea of chemicals — and that, in fact, our bodies are actually comprised of them — and also to the toxicologists' credo, "the dose makes the poison."
Many of the alarms raised recently about chemicals, from those in rubber duckies and plastic bottles to pesticides used in agriculture, are completely bogus, while most of the others represent only negligible risks.
Pseudo-scares and the wrongheaded (and often very costly) responses to them — as in these latest recommendations from the governor's panel — are wasteful, if not actually harmful.
For example, the federal EPA forced General Electric to remove trace levels of chemicals called PCBs from the Hudson River, although this massive project will have prodigious costs but no benefits. The EPA's assertion that PCBs in fish pose a human cancer risk is based solely on observations that high-dose, prolonged PCB exposure causes tumors in laboratory animals.
An example of misperception of risk is acrylamide, a useful industrial compound formed naturally in high-carbohydrate-containing foods cooked at high temperatures, such as in frying or broiling. It has thus been part of the human diet since humans learned that cooked foods taste better than raw ones.
Yet because we only learned of acrylamide's existence in foods recently, and because very large amounts fed to animals cause cancer, there have been calls to require warning labels on fried foods and other products — in spite of the fact that acrylamide in food has never been shown to harm human health.
Yet another example of a poorly substantiated health threat is the current scare about bisphenol A (BPA) — a chemical used to make certain plastics clear and shatterproof.
Again, because animals fed huge doses of the chemical experienced ill effects, and because minuscule amounts can leach into the contents of plastic cups and bottles when they are heated, warnings about an effect on infants and children (guaranteed to have the most potent effect on parents) have been trumpeted in the media. ("Is your baby exposed to carcinogens with every feeding? Story at 11.")
Exaggerated Risks
Controversy over chemicals rages on the other side of the pond as well. In 2003, the European Union's Institute for Health and Consumer Protection concluded in a risk assessment of DINP, a chemical commonly used in a variety of consumer products:
"The end products containing DINP (clothes, building materials, toys and baby equipment) and the sources of exposure (car and public transport interiors, food and food packaging) are unlikely to pose a risk for consumers (adults, infants and newborns)."
In spite of the reassuring risk assessments, politicians overruled them, and the EU instituted a permanent ban on DINP and related chemicals in children's toys in 2005.
But these risks aren't real — or to be more accurate, they haven't been substantiated. If we followed through by banning all the chemicals we read about that supposedly cause (pick one) cancer, birth defects, low sperm counts, autism, Alzheimer's disease, etc., we'd have to ban most of the chemicals in the world — including "natural" ones.
Unfortunately, the scares are real attention-grabbers; they sell papers and attract our attention on TV spots and Internet blogs. And many journalists and editors — to say nothing of politicians — seem not to care whether the science supports the hype.
How can we know what we should worry about?
There is a remarkable new interactive Web source that helps consumers answer that question — to understand what poses significant health risks, and what does not.
The New York-based American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) has produced and manages what it calls a "Riskometer" (www.Riskometer.org), which allows visitors to compare health risks.
It informs us that exposure to cigarette smoking is far and away the leading cause of cancer deaths: In 2002 the odds of dying from smoking were 1 in 771. ("Odds of dying" is defined as the number of people expected to produce one death from a particular cause.) The odds of dying from obesity or from unintentional injuries (including traffic accidents, falls and others) are each about 1 in 2,800.
Far less likely is death from exposure to the dry cleaning fluid perchloroethylene (PERC) or from arsenic in water (about 1 in 6,000,000). In spite of this infinitesimal risk, laws were passed restricting the use of PERC — because "everyone knows" it's a serious health risk.
The data on the ACSH Riskometer show that many of the hyped "threats" that we hear and read about daily occur very far down on the list.
The media's "pseudo-scare mode" is a disservice to its readers and viewers because people have only so much time to pay attention to health issues, and if most stories focus attention on minor (or virtually nonexistent) threats, greater risks that individuals may be able to control get short shrift.
The bottom line: Be skeptical, be informed, consult the Riskometer.
Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was at the NIH and FDA from 1977 to 1994. His most recent book is "The Frankenfood Myth."
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=317864452504379
-
Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up
A deeply flawed new report will be cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 8:29AM GMT 27 Jan 2009
Comments 73 | Comment on this article
The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet" threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.
Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.
However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula – the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.
So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance. The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek's Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the "deniers" and "contrarians".
But then a good many experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations.
The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit.
One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."
But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig's team was Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick", the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. "We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period," as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.
This instantly became the warmists' chief icon, made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report. But Mann's selective use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn apart that it has become the most comprehensively discredited artefact in the history of science.
The fact that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that "spectre of a warming planet". So, regardless of the science, and until the politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way.
Not the least shocking news of the week was the revelation by that admirable body the Taxpayers Alliance that last year the number of "middle managers" in Britain's local authorities rose by a staggering 22 percent. Birmingham City Council alone has more than 1,000 officials earning over £50,000 a year. All over Britain senior council officials are now earning salaries which 10 years ago would have seemed unthinkable.
Future historians will doubtless find it highly significant that just when Britain's economy was about to collapse, an already hopelessly bloated public sector was expanding faster than ever. One of the more dramatic changes in British life over the past two decades has been how, aided by their counterparts in Whitehall and Brussels, the officials who run our local authorities have become separated from the communities they used to serve. Floating free of political control, they have become a new privileged class, able to dictate their own salaries and extend their own empires, paid for by a public to whom they are no longer accountable.
But if this gulf has already become wide enough, how much more glaring is it going to become now that the private sector is shrinking so fast? Already last year an astonishing 2.5 million people were in court for failing or being unable to pay ever soaring council taxes. Tellingly, the only response of the Local Government Association to these latest revelations was plaintively to point out that as many as "2,700" council jobs have already been lost in the economic downturn. But outside those walls three millon may soon be out of work. Who will then be left to pay for those salaries and pensions that our new privilegentsia have arranged for themselves?
How appropriate that Kenneth Clarke should become "shadow" to Business Secretary Peter Mandelson. As fervent "Europeans", both men know that almost all the policies of the ministry laughably renamed the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform are now decided at "European level". There is therefore hardly any job left for them to do. Mr Clarke will be free to continue advising Centaurus, one of the largest hedge funds in Europe. Lord Mandelson can carry on running the Labour Party, But the last thing either will want to admit is that all the powers they claim or seek to exercise have been handed over to Brussels.
The Government last week announced that in March it is to sell off 25 million "carbon credits". These European Union Allowances permit industry and electricity companies to continue emitting CO2, ultimately paid for by all of us through our electricity bills. Last summer, when these permits were trading at 31 euros each, this sale might have raised more than £500 million pounds, Today, however, thanks to the economic meltdown creating a surplus of credits no longer needed, their value is dropping so fast that Mr Darling will be lucky to get £100 million. That should help reduce our electricity bills – even though Mr Darling will merely have to extract the cash from us in other ways.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4332784/Despite-the-hot-air-the-Antarctic-is-not-warming-up.html
-
Interesting web site that tracks problems arising from sundry pseudoscience beliefs. URL here:
http://whatstheharm.net/
Blurb from off the site here:
What is this site?
We are all confronted with new information daily. It comes to us via newspapers, radio, television, websites, conversation, advertising and so on. Sometimes it seems like a deluge.
Not all information is created equal. Some of it is correct. Some of it is incorrect. Some of it is carefully balanced. Some of it is heavily biased. Some of it is just plain crazy.
It is vital in the midst of this deluge that each of us be able to sort through all of this, keeping the useful information and discarding the rest. This requires the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is often neglected in schools.
This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 670,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically.
We do this not to make light of their plight. Quite the opposite. We want to honor their memory and learn from their stories.
We also wish to call attention to the types of misinformation which have caused this sort of harm. On the topics page you will see a number of popular topics that that are being promoted via misinformation. Many of them have no basis in truth at all. A few are based in reality, but veer off into troublesome areas. We all need to think more critically about these topics, and take great care when we encounter them.
Many proponents of these things will claim they are harmless. We aim to show that they are decidedly not.
Please check out the list of topics and read what interests you.
-
Original piece is extensively documented via linked text.
FEBRUARY 09, 2009
Separating science and state
Government should have no role in funding scientific research. I say this as a person who not only greatly admires scientific research and its accomplishments, but as a person who believes strongly in the scientific enterprise in general—by which I mean, someone who believes that reason is the only proper means of knowledge and who has no truck with religion and tradition and authoritarianism. Just to get my bona fides out of the way, I am seriously devoted to and interested in all forms of science, particularly biology, and have written at great length in defense of science and the material and intellectual—indeed, spiritual—progress it has brought us. Of all the kinds of corporate welfare, I am least opposed to science welfare.
Nevertheless, I do not believe in corporate welfare of any sort. I believe scientific research should not be funded by government. I believe the two ought to be separate for the same reasons as I believe in the separation of church and state, and that’s an instructive analogy in many ways. Here, briefly, are my reasons for believing government should not fund scientific research:
1. It is immoral
It is morally reprehensible to use government’s coercive power—which, like it or not, means government’s power to imprison people, and to do other violent acts to them—to take away people’s earnings for projects that someone else considers worthwhile. It violates people’s right to their earnings—which is to say, their right to property—and since that property is created through the efforts of their minds and bodies, that means it violates their right to their liberty. I don’t believe in taking people’s earnings by force, for any motive, no matter how noble (and, again, I certainly do consider scientific progress a noble motive). My life and the fruits of my labor are mine, and it is wrong for others to force me to give up part of my life and the fruits of my labor to support them, whether those people happen to be slavers and robbers, or biologists and physicists.
2. It’s unconstitutional
Of course, the moral objection is obviated, sort of, maybe, by the consent of the governed. In theory, we have (tacitly) agreed through the Constitution to allow the government to tax us for certain purposes. Those purposes are set forth in Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution, which lays out all of Congress’ powers. Funding science projects (except insofar as they might serve, say, military purposes) is not among them.
Unless we are prepared to ignore constitutional scruples (something most Americans do most of the time, but are generally loath to admit), this is at least a serious concern. Of course, one can find lawyerly ways of justifying such projects, and I recognize that the courts have done just this over the years; the most common one is to torture the commerce clause for this reason. But I find this justification implausible, for reasons explained at length in other, more detailed works on the meaning of the commerce clause.
3. It ignores government's lack of qualifications and incentives
As public choice theory has so effectively demonstrated, any time government can impose burdens on, or grant benefits to, private interest groups, those groups will use their time and effort to persuade government to do that in their favor. Legislation then gets enacted for the private benefit of political insiders, rather than for the “genuine public good.” This is just as true in science as it is in public contracting, occupational licensing, or any other endeavor. I believe it corrupts scientific integrity for investments and grants to be made on the basis of personal favoritism and political influence. I do think that this happens less often in the field of science than in other fields, but it still happens; it’s inevitable, and it’s nasty. Craig Venter’s recent autobiographydetailed some pretty sickening examples of it. Whenever government is in the position to decide what scientific projects get funded, it’s going to abuse that power, and political interest groups are going to try to persuade it to abuse that power.
It’s essential to remember that government cannot create wealth. It can only distribute wealth—after taking it away from those who did create it (and after keeping a portion for itself). In other words, government can only engage in assembling and directing capital into various channels. The question, therefore, is whether we have any reason to think that government is wiser when it comes to distributing capital to scientific research than private industry would be. And to answer that question, we have to look at their expertise and their incentives.
As for qualifications, government officials have only the qualification that they got themselves elected—by saying the right things to the right people in the right way. Case in point, George W. Bush. Like other politicians, he had no particular expertise in anything whatsoever, and although he might appoint experts to advise him, the experts he chose were often not actually experts, but just people who persuaded him to think they were experts. Also, in cases where there are genuine scientific controversies, politicians will choose those whose views are politically useful to them, thereby distorting actual controversies in the eyes of the general public and making it more difficult to resolve those debates scientifically. It’s not a mistake that Leon Kass got a prominent role as Bush’s bioethics advisor.
Second, what incentives do government officials face when deciding what projects deserve to be funded? Generally speaking, a private actor making that decision faces the discipline of the marketplace: if he makes bad decisions, he pays for them, and if he makes good decisions, he enjoys the rewards. Politicians, on the other hand, do not pay for bad decisions, and are skilled at making bad decisions look like good ones. If the military, for example, devotes money to researching ridiculous claims of psychic phenomena—nobody loses his job over it. You cannot sue politicians for making bad decisions with your money. If a corporate CEO throws your money away like that, you can sell your shares, sue the company, or even have the CEO thrown in jail. You can’t do that to government officials. In some cases, you can vote them out of office, but since most of these decisions are not made by elected officials, but by unelected administrative agencies, you cannot even do that. They are insulated from every incentive except one: to make their power and their budgets grow over time.
Those who are elected face the incentive of pleasing noisy interest groups—not of making objectively good decisions about science research. Remember when Clinton created yet another commission to prove the existence of Gulf War Syndrome? What about the British National Health Service allowing patients to spend taxpayer money on homeopathy? And the politicians who today truckle to the anti-vaccination movement, just because they’re loud, even though there is no scientific basis whatsoever for their claims?
The question is not whether there is some hypothetically perfect way of deciding which research projects to fund and how; there is not. The question is whether there is any reason to believe that politicians are more skilled at making those decisions than are private individuals and private organizations. Given their expertise and their incentives, I see no reason to believe that government officials are more qualified to make those decisions, and good reason to believe they are less qualified.
4. It ignores the dispersed nature of knowledge and needs
But even aside from questions of expertise and incentives, there is a more fundamental problem: political institutions are structurally incapable of making the “right” decisions about investing money in research. When politicians distribute wealth, they will not distribute it in ways that you and I—actual people who actually face real needs—want it distributed. Instead, politicians will distribute it in ways that the politicians want to see it distributed. Those are two very different things, and the difference between them grows over time.
If a working class man needs to buy a new car to get to his job, by what standard can it ever be “the correct” decision to take his money from him and spend it on a Mars mission instead? The federal government pledged (although it later recanted) to spend $12 billion on the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas—money that could have gone instead to AIDS or cancer or heart disease research; that might have been spent to teach kids to read, or to buy up forest land and preserve it against destruction, or to clean up oil spills. By what criterion do we determine which use of this money is the “right” use? There simply is none. The only way to see what people actually value is to see what decisions they freely choose to make with the assets they own. And there is no other sense in which the word value has any meaning. Information about economic needs is inherently dispersed; it cannot be aggregated into a central planning mechanism.
You may think a person is superficial for wanting to spend his money on a new television set or a video game instead of donating it to a scientific enterprise; that is your right, (and an easy accusation to make against other people’s spending decisions). But to say that there is such a thing as a “correct” decision about how he should spend his money, other than, or without regard to, what he actually wants and is willing to pay is a senseless and dangerous undertaking. No government should ever adopt the proposition that there is a “correct” use of money other than what actual people actually want and need in their lives. As I wrote recently on Freedom Politics,
When politicians take money from people for projects that they think they nation “ought” to have, without regard to what consumers want, need, and are willing to pay for, the stage is set for the farcical tyrannies we’ve seen in other nations.
Consider the House of the People in Bucharest, Romania—the world’s second largest building. Under the direction of Nicholae Ceausescu, construction on the 696,000 square foot palace began in 1983. Today, it contains 1,100 rooms, 480 chandeliers, and over 35 million square feet of marble, and it remains unfinished. It was built by a political leader who decided to spend the nation’s money on an ornate castle—while the people suffered shortages and sat on three-year waiting lists for washing machines or televisions.
This is an extreme example, but the principles are the same as in the case of the Supercollider, or other expenditures of government funding. In each case, what (a) people actually would choose to do with their money and what (b) political leaders decide is the “better” use of their money, are two different things. And over time, (a) and (b) separate and grow farther apart. The farther they get from each other, the more you see distortions in the market, inefficiency, corruption, waste, and abuse, and eventually you have two classes: the political insiders who live well and decide what the nation “truly” needs, and the workers who do not get what they want and need, and who generate the wealth taken to fund the insider’s plans. The existence of nomenklatura is not an accident or a coincidence.
The point is that it is senseless to say money “ought” to be spent on research when the people who earned that money would have chosen to do something else with it—but have lost that money to the government through taxation instead.
-
5. It distorts science
Closely related to the corrupting effects on the economy caused by government “investments” is the corruption of science that inevitably results from government interference. Probably the most well known problem caused by government intervention in science is the effects it has on science itself. Chris Mooney’s book about the Republican War on Science made an effective argument that the Republican party was abusing and perverting scientific findings and manipulating scientists themselves for their own political ends. But, as he (quietly) admitted, the Democratic party has often done exactly the same thing. (One recent example from just this week, in the more extreme hysteria about global warming).
The bottom line is: when government writes the checks, it will make the rules, and those rules will interfere with scientific independence and scientific integrity. Political leaders will, of course, use science for their own ends—for the same public choice reasons I mentioned above. There are some very disturbing examples of where this trend leads in extreme cases—Lysenko, for example. As Jacob Bronowski wrote,
Government is an apparatus which exercises power and which is bent on retaining it, and in the twentieth century more than ever it spends its time in trying to perpetuate itself by justifying itself. This cast of mind is flatly at odds with the integrity of science, which consists of two parts. One is the free and total dissemination of knowledge: but since knowledge leads to power, no government is happy with that. The other is that science makes no distinction between means and ends: but since all governments believe that power is good in itself, they will use any means to that end…. [Lysenko] was able to falsify biology on a grand scale, to bring up his students in ignorance and deceit, and, incidentally, to do lasting damage to Russian agriculture. These are the consequences of the manipulation of science for the sake of political conformity and power. Yet to my mind Lysenko did a greater ham than all these: by being able to silence those who tried to argue with him, he destroyed the trust of other Russian intellectuals in their scientists.
The Disestablishment of Science, in A Sense of The Future 242-43 (1977).
The respectability of scientists in the United States has been earned through extremely patient hard work, and it should not be squandered. But if scientists ally themselves too closely with the state, they will squander that reputation, no matter how respectable their motives. I believe scientists must preserve their independence and respectability, and that means separating themselves as much as possible from policy making. They should advise, certainly, but when they wield power, they don’t just undermine their own personal objectivity, they threaten the public image of science, and the influence of science in general in modern society.
6. It gives government cover for its projects
Similarly, when government can wrap itself in the mantle of scientific respectability, it can get away with many abuses. Throughout the twentieth century, we saw some truly shameful actions perpetrated by government claiming (with plausibility, at the time!) to represent scientific progress. Eugenics and segregation in this country were often justified on scientific grounds, and by people who were then at the very top of their scientific professions. When government claims the allegiance of scientists, it can use that allegiance as a pretext for doing awful things to people.
7. It's not necessary
Probably the most common objection to ending government subsidies for science research is that it’s necessary because private industry won’t make the investments for pure science, or is too insistent on immediate returns on investments so that private investors will not devote money to research that lacks an obvious commercial application.
There are two problems with this objection. Terence Kealey has pointed out that scientific research is already largely funded by private industry, and that funding tends to be dramatically more efficient in making a real difference in the lives of real people. (See, for instance, his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research). Private philanthropic organizations devote a tremendous amount of private money to scientific research, and it is good quality research. The March of Dimes, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society receive boatloads of money from non-government sources. The Hughes, Keck, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into top-notch scientific research. David Packard of Hewlett Packard gave $4 billion to his research foundation. And a lot of this research is long-range research into sciences that may not have practical application for a long time. There cannot be serious doubt that private industry is very capable, and until the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex in the 1950s, was by far the leader, of investment in scientific research.
The second problem is hidden in the argument that private persons or organizations are only interested in immediate commercial applications. This is usually said in such a way as to suggest that private investors are vulgar materialists, too faithless to be patient for the long-term rewards for research or too ignoble to approve of knowledge for its own sake. But in fact it is a good thing for people who make investments—whether private industry or government—to consider the time element and avoid investments that, although they might pay off someday, are too unlikely to make a difference in the short range to make that investment worthwhile. It’s just this choice that makes the difference between wise investing and foolish investing. If I have $100 and I can choose either to invest it in research that might (or might not) increase crop yields for African farmers over the course of two decades, or in a simple device that can protect them against getting malaria tomorrow, it is not foolish or shortsighted to choose the latter over the former. Being short-range is sometimes a wise thing. And no system is more capable of weighing costs and benefits of short-term or long-term investments, than the system of private enterprise.*
What’s more, take a more skeptical look at some of the alleged payoffs of government-funded research. It’s true that government-run science projects have sometimes created great new innovations (as well as some pretty awful ones). But a lot of these discoveries would have been made by private research institutions, for less cost, and with less bureaucratic interference. And much of the time, these alleged benefits are wildly exaggerated. My favorite is NASA’s website trying to sell people on the benefits of the space program, which says that, to name just one example, cordless power tools were created for the Apollo program. But, as a different NASA website admits, that just ain’t so. (Neither were Tang, or Velcro, or Teflon, or the smoke detector, or quartz clocks…) Even if it were, was that really the cheapest, most efficient way to invent battery-powered drills? Meanwhile private industry invented everything from the airplane to the baby incubator.
What about “pure research”? To say government ought to invest taxpayer money in technologies with no obvious commercial applicability is to say that the government should force us to invest in projects that might never pay off, or might pay off too far into the future to do people much good—that is, that the government should force us to make risky investments. And to say that the government should invest in pure research with no real-world application at all means that the government ought to force a person to give up her money to projects that will do her absolutely no good whatsoever—money she might have devoted to something she actually really needed or wanted. This is indefensible morally and practically. It is not “anti-science” to say that a single mom working late in a nightclub in Houston should not be forced to give up part of her earnings to the search for the Higgs boson.
Finally, I return again to the real question. It’s not whether we can devise some perfect means of investing in research. It’s whether there’s any reason to think government is better at it than private industry. Obviously it’s true that wise investing in research requires a long-range mindset and sometimes a willingness to devote time and money to projects without an obvious payoff. But that’s true whether the investor is private industry or government—and do we have any reason to believe government has more patience or more insight, or is less subject to trivial pressures and changes of mind than is private industry? I see no reason to think so. We know all too well that government is very likely to make bad long-range plans, or no long-range plans at all, in the pursuit of short-term prestige and popularity.
Note that these seven objections are basically the same objections raised by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against the unity of church and state. Their opponents, of course, argued that private industry could not possibly support churches—that religion needed government funding, else people would not choose to donate their money to religious causes. But Jefferson and Madison rightly argued that religion would be immeasurably strengthened by separating the two: it would increase the integrity and respectability of religion, weed out religious movements that deserved to fade away, and ensure greater safety to the rights of dissenters while respecting the freedom of mainstream believers and eliminating the tendencies to abuse.
Again, I enjoy and applaud science and admire scientists more than I can say. I think nothing is more noble. But science welfare is still corporate welfare; money taken by force away from people who have earned it, and distributed by government in ways that inevitably lead to waste and corruption. For science’s sake and for the sake of individual rights, government and science should be entirely separated.
*--As Hayek said in his Nobel lecture,
Into the determination of…prices and wages there will enter the effects of particular information possessed by every one of the participants in the market process—a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain. It is indeed the source of the superiority of the market order, and the reason why, when it is not suppressed by the powers of government, it regularly displaces other types of order, that in the resulting allocation of resources more of the knowledge of particular facts will be utilized which exists only dispersed among uncounted persons, than any one person can possess. But because we, the observing scientists, can thus never know all the determinants of such an order, and in consequence also cannot know at which particular structure of prices and wages demand would everywhere equal supply, we also cannot measure the deviations from that order; nor can we statistically test our theory that it is the deviations from that ‘equilibrium’ system of prices and wages which make it impossible to sell some of the products and services at the prices at which they are offered.
Posted by Timothy Sandefur on February 09, 2009 at 08:30 AM | Permalink
TRACKBACK
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834528cde69e2011168501877
-
Climate scientists blow hot and cold
Antarctic warming isn't evidence of climate change – despite what scientists would have us believe
Comments (257)
Patrick Michaels
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 February 2009 11.00 GMT
Article history
Just about every major outlet has jumped on the news: Antarctica is warming up.
Most previous science had indicated that, despite a warming of global temperatures, readings from Antarctica were either staying the same or even going down.
The problem with Antarctic temperature measurement is that all but three longstanding weather stations are on or very near the coast. Antarctica is a big place, about one-and-a-half times the size of the US. Imagine trying to infer our national temperature only with stations along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, plus three others in the interior.
Eric Steig, from University of Washington, filled in the huge blanks by correlating satellite-measured temperatures with the largely coastal Antarctic network and then creating inland temperatures based upon the relationship between the satellite and the sparse observations. The result was a slight warming trend, but mainly at the beginning of the record in the 1950s and 1960s. One would expect greenhouse effect warming from carbon dioxide to be more pronounced in recent years, which it is not.
There's actually very little that is new here. Antarctic temperatures do show a warming trend if you begin your study between 1957, when the International Geophysical Year deployed the first network of thermometers there, and the mid-1960s. Studies that start after then find either cooling or no change.
Steig and his colleagues didn't graph the data for the continent as a whole. Instead they broke it into two pieces: the east and west Antarctic ice sheet regions. A naïve reader would give equal weight to both. In fact, in the east, which is much larger, there is clearly no significant warming in the last several decades. When the results are combined, the same old result reappears, namely that the "warming" is driven by years very early in the record, and that the net change since the early 1970s is insignificant.
The reaction to this study by Steig and his co-authors is more enlightening than its results. When Antarctica was cooling, some climate scientists said that was consistent with computer models for global warming. When a new study, such as Steig's, says it's warming, well that's just fine with the models, too. That's right: people glibly relate both warming and cooling of the frigid continent to human-induced climate change.
Perhaps the most prominent place to see how climatologists mix their science with their opinions is a blog called RealClimate.org, primarily run by Gavin Schmidt, one of the computer jockeys for Nasa's James Hansen, the world's loudest climate alarmist.
When studies were published showing a net cooling in recent decades, RealClimate had no problem. A 12 February 2008 post noted: "We often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the southern ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn't this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict … and have predicted for the past quarter century."
A co-author of Steig's paper (and frequent blogger on RealClimate), Penn State's Michael Mann, turned a 180 on Antarctic cooling. He told Associated Press: "Now we can say: No, it's not true. … [Antarctica] is not bucking the trend."
So, Antarctic cooling and warming are both now consistent with computer models of dreaded global warming caused by humans.
In reality, the warming is largely at the beginning of the record – before there should have been much human-induced climate change. New claims that both warming and cooling of the same place are consistent with forecasts isn't going to help the credibility of climate science, and, or reduce the fatigue of Americans regarding global warming.
Have climate alarmists beaten global warming to death? The Pew Research Centre recently asked over 1,500 people to rank 20 issues in order of priority. Global warming came in dead last.
We can never run the experiment to see if indeed it is the constant hyping of this issue that has sent it to the bottom of the priority ladder. But, as long as scientists blog on that both warming and cooling of the coldest place on earth is consistent with their computer models, why should anyone believe them?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/06/antarctic-warming-climate-change
-
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/na...osition=recent
Former astronaut speaks out on global warming
By Associated Press | Sunday, February 15, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Around the Nation
SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.
"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York. Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.
"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.
Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration. Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global
warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."
Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.
"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."
Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise. Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.
Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.
In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.
Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics.
Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."
-
How to Bring Real Science Into the Courtroom
A disturbing new report says our criminal courts have been relying on bad evidence.
Radley Balko | February 20, 2009
A forthcoming study from the National Academy of Sciences on the poor quality of forensic science in America’s courtrooms is expected to send shockwaves through the criminal justice system. According to The New York Times:
People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court.
Law enforcement organizations have tried to derail the report nearly every step of the way, and with good reason. Police and prosecutors have been relying on bad science to get convictions for decades. It’s only recently, as the onset of DNA testing has begun uncovering a disturbing spate of wrongful convictions, that some of the criminal justice system’s cottage industry pseudo-sciences like "bite mark analysis" have been exposed for the quackery they are.
The power of DNA to exonerate the condemned has us quickly learning that our courts have for years been corrupted by charlatans and snake-oil salesmen, such as Mississippi’s dubious “bite mark expert” Dr. Michael West and impossibly industrious medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne; Oklahoma City’s Dr. Joyce Gilchrist; or Maryland’s Joseph Kopera, to name just a few.
The report’s critique of forensic evidence is much needed, but the proposed solution doesn’t sound promising. According to The New York Times, the report "concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies."
The problems with the forensics system aren’t going to be resolved by creating a new federal bureaucracy. Lack of federal oversight isn’t the problem. According to the Times article, the NAS report is particularly critical of the FBI crime lab, long considered the gold standard in forensics, and whose technicians often advise state crime labs on best practices.
The problem with criminal forensics is the government monopoly on courtroom science in criminal trials. In too many states, forensic evidence is sent only to state-owned or state-operated crime labs. There’s no competition, no peer review, and in some cases, crime lab workers either report to or can be pressured by prosecutors when test results don’t confirm preexisting theories about how a crime may have occurred. This sort of bias can creep in unintentionally, or it can be more overt. But studies show it’s always there. The only way to compensate for it is to bring competitors into the game, other labs who gain by revealing another lab’s mistakes. Every other area of science is steered by the peer review process. It’s really unconscionable that criminal forensics—where there’s so much at stake—has existed and evolved so long without it.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to set up some sort of task force within the Department of Justice devoted to investigating and prosecuting cases of outright forensic fraud. If prosecutors are conspiring with or pressuring experts to deny criminal defendants a fair trial, that would be a due process violation and under the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government would be permitted, or even obligated, to step in. Certainly a state like Mississippi, for example, has neglected its duty to ensure that its citizens accused of violent crimes are given a fair trial.
But if we’re really serious about making a true science out of forensics, we need to fundamentally alter the way forensic evidence is generated for use in the courtroom. Roger Koppl, an economist and forensic expert at Fairleigh-Dickinson University has come up with some excellent suggestions (disclosure: Koppl outlined these suggestions in a report (pdf) for the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. Koppl and I have also co-written two articles on this issue). Among them:
• Defendants should be given access to their own forensic experts. For every prosecution expert, defendants should be issued a voucher to hire their own expert.
• Forensic evidence (autopsies, fingerprints, blood samples, and so on) should at least periodically be sent to more than one lab for testing. Even sending just every third or fourth sample to an independent lab would go a long way toward keeping state labs honest (state labs wouldn’t know when other labs would be doing the same testing).
• Forensic experts should refrain from talking with police and prosecutors before conducting their tests. Studies show that exposure to theories about how a crime may have been committed beforehand can bias an expert’s results, even unintentionally. States should hire evidence handlers to shepherd evidence between law enforcement and crime labs without conveying any contextual information about where or how the evidence was obtained.
• State forensic experts should not serve in the same state bureaucracy as police or prosecutors. Ideally, they should report to criminal court judges. Barring that, they should be independent, and not in any way be considered part of the prosecution’s “team.”
• States should conduct periodic statistical reviews of crime lab results, to see if any labs or individual lab technicians are producing statistically unlikely results.
These ideas sound radical, but in truth they amount to little more than applying basic scientific principles like peer review, blind testing, and repetition to the evidence and opinions currently presented in criminal cases as science, but isn’t subjected to the sort of scrutiny and review other sciences are. Forensic science is in bad need of reform, but it needs to be the right kind of reform. What we don’t need is another layer of government bureaucracy that imposes a series of negotiated, compromised-for standards and practices, then fails to properly enforce them
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131711.html
-
Second post.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131799.html
Battling the Threat of Famine with One Hand Tied -- Thanks Again Greenpeace and FOE
Ronald Bailey | February 20, 2009, 4:29pm
A virulent strain of stem rust identified as Ug99 is spreading rapidly through wheat crops in Africa. For decades, this devastating fungal disease has been kept in check thanks to the work of plant breeders like Peace Nobelist Norman Borlaug. As the Washington Post reported earlier this week:
Eighty percent of Asian and African wheat varieties are now susceptible, and so is barley, FAO experts said. Scientists named the new menace Ug99 for its discovery in Uganda in 1999. But they say it probably started earlier in Kenya, where more wheat is grown.
The [International Wheat and Maize] research center in Mexico published a warning of "a pending disaster in global agriculture."...
Unlike common rust infestations, which reduce but do not wipe out yields, stem rust can topple a whole field. "It can take everything," said Robert McIntosh, former director of Australia's rust-control program. "It is the most damaging of the rusts."
As Borlaug warned in a New York Times op/ed last year:
If millions of small-scale farmers see their wheat crops wiped out for want of new disease-resistant varieties, the problem will not be confined to any one country. Rust spores move long distances in the jet streams and know no political boundaries. Widespread failures in global wheat production will push the prices of all foods higher, causing new misery for the world’s poor.
Ug99 could reduce world wheat production by 60 million tons.
The good news is that wheat breeders have identified some varieties that contain genes that confer some resistance to the Ug99 strain. The bad news is that wheat breeders have to rely on slower traditional crossbreeding rather than faster modern biotech methods to get the fungus-resistant genes into productive varieties. As Nature reports:
All these approaches will probably rely on traditional breeding methods, and public reluctance about transgenic crops is likely to keep transgenic approaches off the table for some time. In 2004, Monsanto, an agricultural company headquartered in St Louis, Missouri, announced that it was halting development of transgenic herbicide-resistant strains of wheat after US farmers expressed concerns that they would not be able to export the crops to other countries. "The transgenic option is open," says [Beat] Keller [a wheat researcher from the University of Zurich in Switzerland], "but I don't think we're going to see that application very soon."
And just why is the public leery of using genetic engineering to improve crops? Because activist organizations like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Organic Consumers Association, have spent millions on unscientific campaigns (aka spreading lies) about biotech crops.
Let's hope that plant breeders constrained by politicized science will, nevertheless, succeed in developing rust-resistant varieties in time to prevent a stem rust famine.
-
February 25, 2009
'Consensus' on global warming collapsing
Thomas Lifson
Prominent Japanese scientists have made a "dramatic break" with the IPCC findings. From the Register (UK):
Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC's own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes: "[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis," he writes. [...] Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission. Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside. One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased. The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan's native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis. JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form.
Meanwhile, President Obama presses ahead with his plans to wreck the American economy on the basis of immature simulations.
Posted at 11:43 AM
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/02/consensus_on_global_warming_co.html at February 25, 2009 - 12:50:08 PM EST
-
What if there is no Man-Made Global Warming? What then?
By Tom Deweese Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Here are some questions every American should ask their elected officials – especially those supporting “climate change” legislation: If it is proven that climate change is not man-made, but natural, will you be relieved and excited to know that man is off the hook? Will you now help to remove all of the draconian regulations passed during the global warming hysteria, since it was all wrong headed and harmful to the economy and our way of life?
Their answers to these questions should be very illuminating as to the true agenda they seek to impose. Is their agenda really about helping to protect the environment, or is it about creating a new social and economic order, using the environment as the excuse?
If they are supporting climate change legislation because of a genuine concern for the environment, then they should now be greatly relieved to know that true science is showing more and more evidence that there is no man-made global warming, and in fact, a natural cooling period has begun.
Last year, 52 scientists authored a much hyped report issued by the UN’s IPCC which said global warming was man-made and getting worse. But in the past year, more than 650 scientists from around the world have now expressed their doubts about the reports findings – 12 times the number of IPCC global warming alarmists now agree it’s bunk.
“I am a skeptic…Global Warming has become a new religion,” says Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever. “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly…as a scientist I remain skeptical,” says Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, formally with NASA and called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.” Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history… When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,” said UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming,” said U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B, Glodenberg. Top these very few quotes with the fact that 34,000 scientists have now signed a petition saying global warming is probably natural and is not man-made.
Instead, they say the science shows warming actually stopped in 1999. That the brief warming period we experienced in the past decade was completely natural, caused, in part, by storms on the sun, not CO2 emissions from SUVs. The Sun storms have ended and now, a cooling period has begun. That’s it. Done. Crisis over. Man is not to blame.
Hurray! The nation should be rejoicing. No need for expensive green cars, mercury-filled light bulbs, special house building materials, alternative energy, no bird- killing windmills, no special energy taxes, no extra government oversight committees, no more global climate change conferences – and no need for a Climate Czar. Carol Browner can go back into mothballs. We can finally clean out the ten feet of fuel on the bottom of the forests and prevent the massive forest fires. And that will help us reestablish the timber industry and all the jobs that were killed. We can drill American oil and end our dependency on foreigners who hate us. In fact, that stable source of energy and its prices will help restore the Detroit auto industry and all of those jobs. Why, we don’t need a stimulus package – the economy will rebound on its own. We are free. The environment is not in crisis. Rejoice! Rejoice!
Because global warming never was about protecting the environment. It was the excuse to enforce global governance on the planet
That silence you hear is the news media, which refuses to report what any skeptic has to say. That silence you hear is the lack of effort on Capitol Hill to start to pull back from the climate change hysteria. That silence you hear is from the White House where President of Change, Barack Obama now has an EPA director, a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) director and a full blown Climate Change Czar, all working to impose huge cut backs in energy use, taxes, rules and regulations that will bring an already damaged economy to its knees – all in the name of man-made Global Warming – which doesn’t exist. That silence you hear is from global corporations which have bought into Al Gores lie and invested heavily in the promised green economy. In fact, their dollars are the only thing green about any of it. Their commercials are promoting the lie and changing our way of life. None of them are about to change any of these policies, simply to accommodate a few scientific facts.
In spite of all the facts to the contrary, in spite of literally thousands of real scientists joining the ranks of the skeptics, Gore just told Congress that the Global Warming crisis is even worse than predicted. Obama said “the science is settled.”
Why? Because global warming never was about protecting the environment. It was the excuse to enforce global governance on the planet, by creating a new global economy based on the environment rather than on goods and services. In short, it’s all about wealth redistribution. Your wealth into a green rat hole. We used to call it communism. Now we call it environmentalism. It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent. The devastation is the same.
So, go ahead. Ask your elected representatives how they would react to the fact that global warming is not real. Are they happy and relieved, or do they continue to promote the same insanity called Climate Change? Their answers will tell you their true agenda.
-
A piece debunking global warming hysteria that amusingly compares warming zealots to prohibitionists.
Global Warming and Climate Change in Perspective: Truths and Myths About Carbon Dioxide, Scientific Consensus, and Climate Models
by William Happer (February 28, 2009)
Statement to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University, made on February 25, 2009.
Madam Chairman and members, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Committee on Environment and Public Works to testify on Climate Change. My name is William Happer, and I am the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University. I am not a climatologist, but I don't think any of the other witnesses are either. I do work in the related field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. I have spent my professional life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation withgases - one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect. I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. I am a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. I have done extensive consulting work for the US Government and Industry. I also served as the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (DOE) from 1990 to 1993, where I supervised all of DOE's work on climate change. I have come here today as a concerned citizen to express my personal views, and those of many like me, about US climate-change policy. These are not official views of my main employer, Princeton University, nor of any other organization with which I am associated.
Let me state clearly where I probably agree with the other witnesses. We have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years, but there have been several periods, like the last ten years, when the warming has ceased, and there have even been periods of substantial cooling, as from 1940 to 1970. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased from about 280 to 380 parts per million over past 100 years. The combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, has contributed to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. And finally, increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the earth's surface to warm. The key question is: will the net effect of the warming, and any other effects of the CO2, be good or bad for humanity?
I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind. I predict that future historians will look back on this period much as we now view the period just before the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution to prohibit "the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors." At the time, the 18th amendment seemed to be exactly the right thing to do - who wanted to be in league with demon rum? It was the 1917 version of saving the planet. More than half the states enacted prohibition laws before the 18th amendment was ratified. Only one state, Rhode Island, voted against the 18th amendment. Two states, Illinois and Indiana, never got around to voting and all the rest voted for it. There were many thoughtful people, including a majority of Rhode Islanders, who thought that prohibition might do more harm than good. But they were completely outmatched by the temperance movement, whose motives and methods had much in common with the movement to stop climate change. Deeply sincere people thought they were saving humanity from the evils of alcohol, just as many people now sincerely think they are saving humanity from the evils of CO2. Prohibition was a mistake, and our country has probably still not fully recovered from the damage it did. Institutions like organized crime got their start in that era. Drastic limitations on CO2 are likely to damage our country in analogous ways.
But what about the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated. Let me turn now to the science and try to explain why I and many scientists like me are not alarmed by increasing levels of CO2.
The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature -- on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.
Since most of the greenhouse effect for the earth is due to water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water's contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The buzz word here is that there is "positive feedback." With each passing year, experimental observations further undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water. In fact, observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative. That is, water vapor and clouds may actually diminish the already small global warming expected from CO2, not amplify it. The evidence here comes from satellite measurements of infraredradiation escaping from the earth into outer space, from measurements of sunlight reflected from clouds and from measurements of the temperature the earth's surface or of the troposphere, the roughly 10 km thick layer of the atmosphere above the earth's surface that is filled with churning air and clouds, heated from below at the earth's surface, and cooled at the top by radiation into space.
But the climate is warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn't this prove that CO2 is causing global warming through the greenhouse effect? No, the current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.
The climate has changed many times in the past with no help by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100. People have had an urge to control the climate throughout history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the face of a glacier that was advancing "by over a musket shot" every day. The glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the glacier, and it is said to have stopped. The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible to prayer. Sometimes the obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to stop climate change. The widespread dissatisfaction of the people who were unfortunate enough to be the source of these sacrifices played an important part in the success of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The existence of climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man and that man can control it. When I was a schoolboy, my textbooks on earth science showed a prominent "medieval warm period" at the time the Vikings settled Greenland, followed by a vicious "little ice age" that drove them out. So I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated "hockey stick curve," in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I could hardly believe my eyes. Both the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick. This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis. There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval warm period that was as warm or warmer than today. I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of the facts of climate change. It is a shame, because many of the IPCC chapters are quite good. The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell's Ministry of Information in the novel "1984:" "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." The IPCC has made no serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth's temperature in the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people burning coal and oil. If you can't model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?
Many of us are aware that we are living in an ice age, where we have hundred-thousand-year intervals of big continental glaciers that cover much of the land area of the northern hemisphere, interspersed with relative short interglacial intervals like the one we are living in now. By looking at ice cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, one can estimate past temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn't this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up. There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect. For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o'clock, and by about 7 o'clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o'clock because the house got warm at 7 o'clock. Sure, temperature and gas burning are correlated, just like temperature and atmospheric levels of CO2. But the thing that changes first is the cause. In the case of the ice cores, the cause of increased CO2 is almost certainly the warming of the oceans. The oceans release dissolved CO2 when they warm up, just like a glass of beer rapidly goes flat in a warm room. If not CO2, then what really causes the warming at the end of the cold periods of ice ages? A great question and one of the reasons I strongly support research in climate.
I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about "poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration. CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth. Commercial greenhouse operators often use CO2 as a fertilizer to improve the health and growth rate of their plants. Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were about 1000 ppm, a level that we will probably not reach by burning fossil fuels, and far above our current level of about 380 ppm. We try to keep CO2 levels in our US Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels.
We are all aware that "the green revolution" has increased crop yields around the world. Part of this wonderful development is due to improved crop varieties, better use of mineral fertilizers, herbicides, etc. But no small part of the yield improvement has come from increased atmospheric levels of CO2. Plants photosynthesize more carbohydrates when they have more CO2. Plants are also more drought-tolerant with more CO2, because they need not "inhale" as much air to get the CO2 needed for photosynthesis. At the same time, the plants need not "exhale" as much water vapor when they are using air enriched in CO2. Plants decrease the number of stomata or air pores on their leaf surfaces in response to increasing atmospheric levels of CO2. They are adapted to changing CO2 levels and they prefer higher levels than those we have at present. If we really were to decrease our current level of CO2 of around 400 ppm to the 270 ppm that prevailed a few hundred years ago, we would lose some of the benefits of the green revolution. Crop yields will continue to increase as CO2 levels go up, since we are far from the optimum levels for plant growth. Commercial greenhouse operators are advised to add enough CO2 to maintain about 1000 ppm around their plants. Indeed, economic studies like those of Dr. Robert Mendelsohn at Yale University project that moderate warming is an overall benefit to mankind because of higher agricultural yields and many other reasons.
-
I remember being forced to read Voltaire's novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in "the best of all possible worlds," presumably also with the best of all CO2 concentrations. That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries for policy makers. Enormous effort and imagination have gone into showing that increasing concentrations of CO2 will be catastrophic, cities will be flooded by sea-level rises that are ten or more times bigger than even IPCC predicts, there will be mass extinctions of species, billions of people will die, tipping points will render the planet a desert. A few months ago I read that global warming will soon bring on a devastating epidemic of kidney stones. If you write down all the ills attributed to global warming you fill up a very thick book.
Much is made about tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever devastating the populations of temperate climates because of the burning of fossil fuels and the subsequent warming of the earth. Many people who actually work with tropical diseases, notably Dr. Paul Reiter, a specialist on tropical diseases, have pointed out how silly all of this is. Perhaps I can add a few bits of history to illustrate this point. One of the first military expenditures of the Continental Congress in 1775 was $300 to purchase quinine for the Continental Army and to mitigate the effects of malaria. The Continental Congress moved from the then Capital of the United States , Philadelphia, to my home town of Princeton, New Jersey, in the summer of 1783 for two reasons. The first was that the Congress had not yet paid many soldiers of the Revolutionary War their promised wages, and disgruntled veterans were wandering up and down the streets of Philadelphia. Secondly, there were outbreaks of malaria in cities as far north as Boston. The Congress knew you were less likely to catch malaria in Princeton than in Philadelphia. In 1793 there was not only malaria, but a horrendous outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Many thousands of people died in a city with a population of about 50,000. And I should point out that Philadelphia was a bit cooler then than now, since the little ice age was just coming to an end. Controlling tropical diseases and many other diseases has little to do with temperature, and everything to do with curtailing the factors that cause the spread - notably mosquitoes in the case of malaria and yellow fever.
Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative.
Modelers have been wrong before. One of the most famous modeling disputes involved the physicist William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, and the naturalist Charles Darwin. Lord Kelvin was a great believer in models and differential equations. Charles Darwin was not particularly facile with mathematics, but he took observations very seriously. For evolution to produce the variety of living and fossil species that Darwin had observed, the earth needed to have spent hundreds of millions of years with conditions not very different from now. With his mathematical models, Kelvin rather pompously demonstrated that the earth must have been a hellish ball of molten rock only a few tens of millions of years ago, and that the sun could not have been shining for more than about 30 million years. Kelvin was actually modeling what he thought was global and solar cooling. I am sorry to say that a majority of his fellow physicists supported Kelvin. Poor Darwin removed any reference to the age of the earth in later editions of the "Origin of the Species." But Darwin was right the first time, and Kelvin was wrong. Kelvin thought he knew everything but he did not know about the atomic nucleus, radioactivity and nuclear reactions, all of which invalidated his elegant modeling calculations.
This brings up the frequent assertion that there is a consensus behind the idea that there is an impending disaster from climate change, and that it may already be too late to avert this catastrophe, even if we stop burning fossil fuels now. We are told that only a few flat-earthers still have any doubt about the calamitous effects of continued CO2 emissions. There are a number of answers to this assertion.
First, what is correct in science is not determined by consensus but by experiment and observations. Historically, the consensus is often wrong, and I just mentioned the incorrect consensus of modelers about the age of the earth and the sun. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia the medical consensus was that you could cure almost anything by bleeding the patient. Benjamin Rush, George Washington's Surgeon General during the War of Independence, and a brave man, stayed in Philadelphia throughout the yellow fever epidemic. He worked tirelessly to save the stricken by bleeding them, the consensus treatment of the day. A few cautious observers noticed that you were more likely to survive the yellow fever without the services of the great man. But Dr. Rush had plenty of high level-friends and he was backed up by the self-evident consensus, so he went ahead with his ministrations. In summary, a consensus is often wrong.
Secondly, I do not think there is a consensus about an impending climate crisis. I personally certainly don't believe we are facing a crisis unless we create one for ourselves, as Benjamin Rush did by bleeding his patients. Many others, wiser than I am, share my view. The number of those with the courage to speak out is growing. There may be an illusion of consensus. Like the temperance movement one hundred years ago the climate-catastrophe movement has enlisted the mass media, the leadership of scientific societies, the trustees of charitable foundations, and many other influential people to their cause. Just as editorials used to fulminate about the slippery path to hell behind the tavern door, hysterical op-ed's lecture us today about the impending end of the planet and the need to stop climate change with bold political action. Many distinguished scientific journals now have editors who further the agenda of climate-change alarmism. Research papers with scientific findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected by reviewers, many of whom fear that their research funding will be cut if any doubt is cast on the coming climate catastrophe. Speaking of the Romans, then invading Scotland in the year 83, the great Scottish chieftain Calgacus is quoted as saying "They make a desert and call it peace." If you have the power to stifle dissent, you can indeed create the illusion of peace or consensus. The Romans have made impressive inroads into climate science. Certainly, it is a bit unnerving to read statements of Dr. James Hansen in the Congressional Record that climate skeptics are guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature."
Even elementary school teachers and writers of children's books are enlisted to terrify our children and to promote the idea of impending climate doom. Having observed the education of many children, including my own, I am not sure how effective the effort will be. Many children seem to do just the opposite of what they are taught. Nevertheless, children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science. Many of you may know that in 2007 a British Court ruled that if Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," was used in public schools, the children had to be told of eleven particularly troubling inaccuracies. You can easily find a list of the inaccuracies on the internet, but I will mention one. The court ruled that it was not possible to attribute hurricane Katrina to CO2. Indeed, had we taken a few of the many billions of dollars we have been spending on climate change research and propaganda and fixed the dykes and pumps around the New Orleans, most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided.
The sea level is indeed rising, just as it has for the past 20,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Fairly accurate measurements of sea level have been available since about 1800. These measurements show no sign of any acceleration. The rising sea level can be a serious local problem for heavily-populated, low-lying areas like New Orleans, where land subsidence compounds the problem. But to think that limiting CO2 emissions will stop sea level rise is a dangerous illusion. It is also possible that the warming seas around Antarctica will cause more snowfall over the continent and will counteract the sea-level rise. In any case, the rising sea level is a problem that needs quick local action for locations like New Orleans rather than slow action globally.
In closing, let me say again that we should provide adequate support to the many brilliant scientists, some at my own institution of Princeton University, who are trying to better understand the earth's climate, now, in the past, and what it may be in the future. I regret that the climate-change issue has become confused with serious problems like secure energy supplies, protecting our environment, and figuring out where future generations will get energy supplies after we have burned all the fossil fuel we can find. We should not confuse these laudable goals with hysterics about carbon footprints. For example, when weighing pluses and minuses of the continued or increased use of coal, the negative issue should not be increased atmospheric CO2, which is probably good for mankind. We should focus on real issues like damage to the land and waterways by strip mining, inadequate remediation, hazards to miners, the release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals, organic carcinogens, etc. Life is about making decisions and decisions are about trade-offs. The Congress can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or they can act on unreasonable fears and suppress energy use, economic growth and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.
William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University where his main areas of focus have been on atomic, molecular and optical physics. His professional work has been in studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases -- one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect.
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5441
-
James Hansen's Political Science
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, March 02, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: NASA's James Hansen leads a protest against a District of Columbia power plant in the middle of a snowstorm. Meanwhile, a scientist fired by Al Gore says we need to emit more carbon dioxide, not less.
Read More: Global Warming
Speaking before Bill Clinton's Global Initiative in New York City last Nov. 2, Gore advocated the concept of civil disobedience to fight climate change. "I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore said to loud applause.
Following Gore's lead, a group called Capitol Climate Action organized a protest that took place Monday at the 99-year-old Capitol Power Plant in southeast Washington, D.C. Its Web site invited fellow warm-mongers to "mass civil disobedience at the coal-fired" plant that heats and cools the hallowed halls of Congress.
The site features Gore's quote as well as a video by Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading global-warming activist, urging attendance at the event. The storm that hit the Northeast and dropped upwards of three inches of snow on the nation's capitol should not discourage those attending the global- warming protest, he says on the video.
Hansen has called such coal-fired facilities "factories of death" and considers climate-change skeptics guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature." In the video he says what "has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet" and that the "only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon — and that's coal."
What is clear is that Dr. Hansen has had problems with the facts. Last Nov. 10 he announced from his scientific perch that October had been the hottest on record, and we were doomed. Except that it wasn't true.
Scores of temperature records used in the computations from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running, something your high-school science teacher wouldn't allow.
Despite Dr. Hansen's hysterical animus toward carbon, the fact is that CO2 is still a mere 0.038% of the gaseous layer that surrounds the Earth, and only 3% of that thin slice is released by man. According to Dr. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University, current atmospheric CO2 levels are inadequate in historical terms and even higher levels "will be good for mankind."
Happer, who was fired by Gore at the Department of Energy in 1993 for disagreeing with the vice president on the effects of ozone to humans and plant life, disagrees with both Gore and Hansen on the issue of the impact of man-made carbon emissions. He testified before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) on Feb. 25 that CO2 levels are in fact at a historical low.
"Many people don't realize that over geological time, we're really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 . . . been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) — 280 (parts per million) — that's unheard of," said Happer. He notes the earth and humanity did just fine when CO2 levels were much higher.
"You know, we evolved as a species in those times, when CO2 levels were three to four times what they are now," Happer said. "And, the oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it's baffling to me that . . . we're so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started."
"Jim Hansen has gone off the deep end here," one of Hansen's former supervisors, Dr. John Theon, said. Theon, a former senior NASA atmospheric scientist, rebuked Hansen last month in a letter to EPW. "Why he has not been fired, I do not understand," Theon said. Neither do we.
Critics contend that Hansen's involvement in the protests is a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from engaging in partisan political activity. If he wants to agitate for policy changes, let him do it on his own time and on his own dime. The science can speak for itself.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320893446242107
-
http://www.eventsounds.com/wav/haha.wav (http://www.eventsounds.com/wav/haha.wav)
March 03, 2009
NRO Writer Predicted Yesterday's DC 'Gore Effect' last December
Marc Sheppard
It's hard not to crack a smile watching wild-eyed protesters carrying placards decrying the evils of planet-cooking coal in hands fighting the onset of frostbite. Of course, a March blizzard lends no more evidence that the planet is cooling than a May cyclone implied the antithesis. Be that as it may, the so called "Gore-Effect" has become so commonplace that when the "largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history" was announced last December, Greg Pollowitz at NRO's Planet Gore actually predicted:
"Anyone want to bet on a snowstorm hitting D.C. on March 2, 2009?"
Talk about a nice call.
Turnout for yesterday's childish gate blockades at the Capital Coal Plant was seriously stifled by the potent mid-winter storm that blanketed the Northeast with snow, effectively shutting down much of the nation's capital. Writing from my home on Long Island, I can assure you -- this storm was the hairiest in many years.
Surely, such coincidences are of virtually no statistical significance. But then again - global warming alarm-a-thons and extreme winter weather recently go together like - well, trailer parks and tornadoes. And that's making the hysterical projections of the likes of Gore and Hansen sound all the more hysterical. And speaking of the latter, perhaps, on top of recent overall cooling trends, both observed and measured, the snickering might somehow be contributing to a certain high-profile alarmist's increasingly erratic behavior of late.
The man has equated coal-fired plants to death camps and coal-carrying trains to the inmate-transporting box-cars leading to them, and called for Nuremburg-style war-crime trials for oil company executives. Now, James Hansen has certainly jeopardized his top NASA position by suggesting citizens actually join him in breaking the law [video] at yesterday's silly "climate justice" assault on Capitol Hill's power source.
Luckily, alarmists aren't wise enough to hedge their bets by scheduling these warm-mongering events exclusively in the heat of summer. That would deny us the spectacle of their leader in melt-down inciting his frenzied followers in multi-layered outerwear.
And while climate realists appreciate the preposterousness of alarmists' sophomoric closed-mindedness each and every day of the year, those during which others join in the laughter provide hope that perhaps not all are so easily duped.
Posted at 09:23 AM | Email | Permalink | | | yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = "NRO Writer Predicted Yesterday's DC 'Gore Effect' last December"; yahooBuzzArticleSummary = "It's hard not to crack a smile watching wild-eyed protesters carrying placards decrying the evils of planet-cooking coal in hands fighting the onset of frostbite. Of course, a March blizzard lends no more evidence that the planet is cooling than..."; yahooBuzzArticleCategory = "politics"; yahooBuzzArticleType = "text"; yahooBuzzArticleId = window.location.href; http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/nro_writer_predicted_yesterday.html
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/nro_writer_predicted_yesterday.html at March 03, 2009 - 11:11:26 AM EST
-
March 04, 2009
Frustrated Warmists Pull Another Cool Fast One
Marc Sheppard
Continued global cooling has forced clamoring climate alarmists to move the goal posts – again.
A study released yesterday confirms that global temperatures have remained flat since 2001 “despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations” and predicts they may cool for another 30 years. Needless to say, that won’t silence any of the blowhards attacking George Will’s February assertion that “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.”
But get this – study author and spokesman Kyle Swanson insists his findings change nothing in the AGW debate, as following this “cooling event,” which isn’t “like anything we've seen since 1950,” warming “will return and be very aggressive." Don’t be surprised by Swanson’s unmitigated gall – we heard this same brand of bet-hedging double-talk from egg-faced alarmists not once, but twice last year.
As we reported then, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed last April that an impending phase shift in a natural climate event – the Pacific Decadal Oscillation -- would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years. Aware of the IPCC blasphemy their prediction wrought, one JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, Josh Willis, was quick to explain:
“The comings and goings of El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are part of a longer, ongoing change in global climate. In fact, these natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
Uh-huh.
Just ten days later, a study by Dr. Noel Keenlyside et al, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, predicted that a pending weak cycle in the “conveyor belt” of southern warm water known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation would also decrease global surface temperatures – but over the next decade. And they too, took steps to cover their green-obliged derrières with the lead author telling Bloomberg News:
“If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us. There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term.''
Words associate Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute, translated in no uncertain terms:
“Just to make things clear, we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won't be as bad as previously thought.”
Nice try, guys.
In both yesterday’s and last year’s examples, the message from these courageous men of science is clear: Yes, of course it’s getting cooler – any fool can see that -- and it might for a generation to come. But does that mean that speculatively achievable plans to completely retool the world’s energy supply and delivery systems during a global recession -- based entirely on our speculative warnings of a manmade global warming apocalypse -- should perhaps be put on hold until we can figure this out?
Why, of course not.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/frustrated_warmists_pull_anoth_1.html
-
March 06, 2009
Gore's Gruesome New Prize (Updated)
Marc Sheppard
To celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Dr. Roger Revelle, the oceanography institute he once directed is today presenting an award in his name to his most famous disciple – Al Gore. And, while this charlatan should never seriously be considered for any scientific tribute, the specific intent of this one makes Gore a particularly unworthy maiden recipient, and he knows it.
You see, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography website: [my emphasis]
“The Roger Revelle Prize at Scripps recognizes leaders in the public or private sectors whose outstanding contributions advance or promote research in ocean, climate, and earth sciences. These international leaders, like Roger Revelle, ask the big questions, recognize the interrelationships of global systems, and think on a planetary scale. Their pioneering work and their courage in pursuing scientific questions of critical importance to our world evoke Revelle's leadership and vision.”
And it then goes on to qualify the first man to be so honored for evoking Revelle's leadership and vision:
“Former Vice President Al Gore will accept the inaugural Roger Revelle Prize for his outstanding contribution in bringing the science and issues raised by environmental and climate change research to a worldwide audience.”
But, as we pointed out years ago in Gore's Grave New World, while Revelle’s “vision” of “scientific questions of critical importance to our world” once included a world endangered by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, that vision changed shortly before Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance was published. You see, before he died in 1991, Dr. Revelle co-authored a Cosmos article entitled What to Do About Greenhouse Warming: Look Before you Leap, which concluded that “the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” And Gore has gone to great lengths to convince the world that his aging mentor was somehow coerced into being associated with a piece whose message was that our planet is, in fact, not in the balance.
As described by one of Revelle’s coauthors, Dr. S. Fred Singer, in his personal account, The Revelle-Gore Story [PDF]:
“The contradiction between what Senator Gore wrote about what he learned from Dr. Revelle and what Dr. Revelle had written in the Cosmos article embarrassed Senator Gore, who had become the leading candidate for the vice presidential slot of the Democratic Party.”
Dr. Singer recalls a July 20, 1992 phone call from Dr. Justin Lancaster, one of Dr. Revelle's former associates, demanding that Revelle’s name be removed from a forthcoming inclusion of their article in a global warming anthology to be edited by Dr. Richard Geyer:
“When I refused his request, Dr. Lancaster stepped up the pressure on me. First at a memorial symposium for Dr. Revelle at Harvard in the fall of 1992 and in a lengthy footnote to his written remarks at that event, he suggested that Dr. Revelle had not really been a coauthor and made the ludicrous claim that I had put his name on the paper as a coauthor ‘over his objections.’ “
Lancaster also suggested that Singer’s sole purpose in listing Revelle as a co-author was "to undermine the pro-Revelle stance of [then] Sen. Gore."
During the discovery phase of the libel suit that followed, it was revealed that Gore had enlisted Lancaster shortly after reading a reprint of the original article in the New Republic. But Gore didn’t stop there. As Jonathan Adler wrote in the Washington Times on July 27, 1994:
“Concurrent with Mr. Lancaster's attack on Mr. Singer, Mr. Gore himself led a similar effort to discredit the respected scientist. Mr. Gore reportedly contacted 60 Minutes and Nightline to do stories on Mr. Singer and other opponents of Mr. Gore's environmental policies. The stories were designed to undermine the opposition by suggesting that only raving ideologues and corporate mouthpieces could challenge Mr. Gore's green gospel. The strategy backfired. When Nightline did the story, it exposed the vice president's machinations and compared his activities to Lysenkoism: The Stalinist politicization of science in the former Soviet Union.”
Ted Koppel summed it up well during the February 24, 1994 Nightline edition Adler’s piece had referred to when he accused Gore of “resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis.”
Where are these sound media voices now?
Anyway, the libel suit was dropped a few months after the Nightline airing, and Lancaster "fully and unequivocally" retracted his claims against Dr. Singer. Happily, and notwithstanding Gore’s extraordinarily sleazy efforts, the Geyer volume did, indeed, contain the Revelle, Singer, and Starr piece – with all attributions happily present and accounted for.
So to award this man in the name of one he selfishly sought so hard to undermine after death is nothing short of gruesome.
Hat Tip: Noel Sheppard
Update:
Weather Channel founder John Coleman has an eye-opening video report on Roger Revelle and Al Gore.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/gores_gruesome_new_prize_updat.html at March 07, 2009 - 12:31:03 PM EST
-
Second post. The text of the video referred to above.
Revelle was a powerful man, a noteworthy scientist and a significant force in San Diego in the 1950s. There is no doubt he is largely responsible for the respect given Scripps Institute of Oceanography and for locating the University of California at San Diego, UCSD, in La Jolla.
While serving as Director of Scripps, Revelle and one of his researchers wrote the first modern scientific paper that linked carbon dioxide released into the air from the burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect and the warming of temperatures. This triggered an avalanche of research that eventually became the impetus behind the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the entire global warming movement.
In the 1960s Revelle moved to Harvard to establish a Center for Population Studies. There is where Professor Revelle encounter student Albert Gore. He involved Gore and his class mates in tabulating the data from a carbon dioxide study. Gore was so impressed he wrote about it in his 1992 book, " Earth in the Balance ". That became the story for the movie "an Inconvenient Truth". The Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize and some people say 100 million dollars came from that effort. There is no doubt Roger Revelle had a major impact on Vice President Gore's life.
But there is a twist. In 1988 Roger Revelle was having major second thoughts about whether carbon dioxide was a significant greenhouse gas. He wrote letters to two Congressmen about it. And in 1991 he co-authored a report for the new science magazine Cosmos in which he expressed his strong doubts about global warming and urged more research before any remedial action was taken.
At that point Mr. Gore pronounced Revelle as senile and refused to debate global warming. He continues to refuse to debate today. Many offers of 10s of thousands of dollars have been made such a debate. Today Gore sequestered the media at this event and set forth rules, no questions, no interviews.
I have learned that in 1991 Roger Revelle made a speech at the high powered, very private Summer enclave of powerful men and politicians at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California, where he apologized that his research sent so many people in the wrong direction on global warming.
He worried about the political fallout from the UN IPCC and Al Gore. A man named Donn Michael Schmidtman who lives in the San Francisco area was there that day and remembers the Revelle speech very well. He has told about it in some detail.
So think of the irony. Today Al Gore received the first Roger Revelle award, an honor named after the man who sent Gore on his global warming campaign.
But the truth is; Revelle realized that it was a false alarm and the science was flawed before he died.
Revelle died of a heart attack in 1991.
It would be interesting to know if Revelle had lived whether he would have approved of this award tonight or perhaps be joining me at the International conference of global warming skeptics in New York next week.
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/40867912.html
-
Second post.
JEFF JACOBY
Where's global warming?
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 8, 2009
SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:
Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.
If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?
No doubt.
But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.
The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles - an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.
None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.
But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?
There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand."
But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
-
March 09, 2009
First Dispatch from the Climate Sanity Front
Marc Sheppard
Sunday – March 8th – NYC. For the next 2 ½ days, I will be assuming the role of your humble correspondent at this year’s International Conference on Climate Change – where the only alarm I expect to hear will be waking me for breakfast. Each evening, I will attempt to homogenize my notes from both interviews and countless expert panel discussions I’ve attended that day.
There are some amazingly impressive names here at the beautiful Marriott Marquis in Times Square. And many will be presenting speeches and taking questions at the plenary meal sessions, as well as at the 6 main sessions, each comprised of four simultaneous panels discussing Paleoclimatology, Climatology, Climate Change Impacts, or Economics & Politics.
And the first thing I’d like to report is that we appear to be experiencing a “Reverse Gore Effect.” Unseasonably cold temperatures at last week’s DC global warming event have suddenly given way to an unseasonably warm metropolis for ours. Yesterday’s temps danced around in the 60’s like girls in calve-high patent leather boots. Can’t imagine the alarmists will miss the opportunity to exploit this exquisite turnabout. They’ve been bashing this – the gathering they rightly fear most -- for weeks.
Anyway, today was essentially a travel / arrival / reception day, and the only official business was the Opening Dinner in the massive Broadway Ballroom. But there’s already a feeling of excitement in the 380ppm CO2 air here
Dan Miller, Executive VP of main sponsor The Heartland Institute, welcomed the dining crowd of over 700 scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives and quickly turned the mike over to our MC, Heartland President Joseph Bast. Bast set forth some of the questions to be explored in the next few days, and highlighted one with this quote from the great Charles Krauthammer: “Other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy.”
This set the stage for the two featured speakers – President of both the Czech Republic and (currently) the European Union, Vaclav Klaus, and MIT meteorologist Dr. Richard Lindzen. (Note: I paraphrase throughout)
Klaus got an immediate laugh when he sighed and observed that “last year’s speech didn’t help much.” He then described his recent frustrating experience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he faced fellow participants who “took anthropogenic global warming for granted.” So you can imagine their response when he pointing out that Kyoto compliant nations have had ZERO effect on CO2 levels.
As the Czech president explained, WEF participants are interested in business, not temperature or CO2 or freedom. They profit from writing and speaking and carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products.
Next came the topic of educating decision makers, as most policy makers subscribe to the idea that IPCC publications represent THE climate science. In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the up and down temps of the 20th century despite the continuing rise in CO2. But enviros don’t really want to change our environment, but rather our behavior. That’s why they push preventive, not adaptive remedies.
Outstanding.
Klaus brought the house down with his closer: Environmentalists claim to be saving the planet – but from what and whom? We need to protect US from THEM.
Next, our old friend Dr. Lindzen stood up and immediately countered his podium-mate’s comment about last year’s effectiveness with “we should never stop trying,” which, of course, was also quite well received.
Lindzen said we need to remind people of “a few certain truths our side sometimes forgets.” Being skeptical doesn’t make you a good scientist. Nor does endorsing GW make you a bad one, as doing so makes their lives easier (my emphasis throughout). And the good professor gave many examples of how underfunded scientists write a single paper endorsing GW and are suddenly inundated with offers. Even ambiguous science that can be easily spun is financially beneficial to the scientist, so they don’t complain about the spin.
Ever wonder why you never stop hearing about studies finding GW responsible for everything from kidney stones to bee populations? Explains Lindzen: It’s become standard that whatever you’re studying, include global warming’s effects in your proposal and you’ll get your funding.
The professor then segued into tech talk, explaining how climate models depend entirely on positive feedback and ignore the cooling effects of negative feedback, which nature does not. And that the warming alarmists alarm us about is so miniscule that there’s no need for any external forcing to achieve it. He believes most scientists are unaware that doubling or even tripling CO2 will have only marginal impacts on temperatures. And that when they do become aware, they’ll likely alter the data. Big laughs again.
To setup his closer, Lindzen charged that sustained flat global temperatures have proven that the assumptions of the IPCC were wrong. And that denying this must represent either “gross ignorance or gross dishonesty.”
And I’ll leave you this evening with his spot on punchline:
Unfortunately, when it comes to global warming hysteria, neither has been in short supply.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/first_dispatch_from_the_climat.html at March 09, 2009 - 10:46:17 AM EDT
-
What Planetary Emergency?
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
Ronald Bailey | March 10, 2009
March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.
Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.
Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.
Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.
Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.
Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."
Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.
The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."
Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.
The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:
Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.
Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.
Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/132145.html.
-
March 15, 2009
The Clear and Cohesive Message of the International Conference on Climate Change
By Marc Sheppard
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” -- from the Oregon Petition, signed by over 31,000 scientists
United by that conviction, over 800 scientists, economists, and policy makers arrived in New York City last Sunday to attend the Heartland Institute’s 2nd Annual International Conference on Climate Change. They came to talk a wide range of subjects, from climatology to energy policy, from computer climate models to cap-and-trade, from greenhouse gas (GHG) effects to solar irradiation. But most of all they came to help spread the word that the answer to the question posed by this year’s theme -- Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis? -- is a resounding NO.
Sunday’s keynote speakers wasted no time making that point. Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus scolded those whose alarmist opinions are driven by profits from writing and speaking fees, carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products. And policy makers who blindly accept hyped Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publications as the final word in climate science. In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the wavering heat trends of the 20th century, despite the steady rise in CO2.
Next, M.I.T’s Richard Lindzen explained that many scientists toe the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) line to “make their lives easier,” as underfunded scientists can write a single paper endorsing AGW and suddenly be inundated with offers. Even ambiguous or meaningless statements that can be easily spun are financially beneficial to scientists, so why complain about the spin? Ever wonder why you never stop hearing about studies finding GW responsible for everything from kidney stones to cannibalism? Explains Lindzen: It’s become standard that whatever you’re studying, include global warming’s effects in your proposal and you’ll get your funding.
Lindzen then dismissed climate models that alarmists depend on as they themselves depend entirely on warming positive feedback but, unlike nature, ignore the cooling effects of negative feedback. And rejected the warming alarmists alarm us about as so miniscule that there’s no need for any external forcing to achieve or explain it. In reality, said the world renowned atmospheric physicist, doubling or even tripling CO2 would have only marginal impacts on temperatures.
Both speakers masterfully set the stage for the days and sessions to come. What follows is just a sampling of the brilliance I encountered.
Roy Spencer echoed Lindzen’s position that negative feedbacks ultimately bring equilibrium to the energy balance, making sustained global warming a non-issue. David Douglass assured us that ocean and atmospheric heat will always work toward such balance as per conservation of energy laws. S. Fred Singer commented that a 2005 paper by Hansen et al claiming that Earth’s energy imbalance is proof of AGW was absurd.
Geologist and former astronaut Jack Schmidt inverted the IPCC position that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric CO2, which in turn warms the planet. Slowly increasing temperatures from 1660 AD or so, said he, would increase CO2 and methane from land, land confined water, the biosphere and, mostly, the oceans. The vapor pressure of CO2 is temperature sensitive. So as a matter of established physics of gases, we’d expect atmospheric CO2 to increase as temperature increases. Therefore, he concludes, saying that CO2 causes heating is like saying “accidents cause speeding.”
Singer moderated a panel discussion thoroughly debunking a recent paper claiming that CO2 put into the atmosphere lasts thousands of years. Participant Douglass questioned the premise as “it has nothing to do with global warming as CO2 continues to rise but GW stopped after 1991.” But as Singer pointed out, alarmists will claim it proves that peak values reached in the next few years will determine climate for the next millennium.
And Christopher Essex nailed it: Their 1000 year forecast is remarkable – even groundhogs only predict 6 weeks ahead.
The Sun, The Seas and The Science
Astrophysicist Willie Soon proclaimed the sun-induced climate change theory alive and well. He believes that, while IPCC AR4 fraudulently disregarded Milankovich's theory of orbital influences on climate, the comings and goings of the ice ages may be controlled by changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes. He displayed adjacent line graphs overlaying 20th Century arctic temperature anomalies with solar irradiance levels on one and atmospheric CO2 levels on the other. Whereas the former lined up almost perfectly, the latter wasn’t even close.
Jack Schmidt pointed out that the 1400 -1900 cold period known as the Little Ice Age corresponds to a cycling sequence of 3 deep minima of sunspot activity and was at its coldest during the last of these minima, the 70 year period of exceptionally few spots we now know as the Maunder Minimum. Dennis Avery reinforced his 1,500 year climate cycle argument and its implications for the current warming period. He told us that solar variations are linked to decade-lagging sea temperatures. What’s more, diminished sunspot activity since 2000 and Pacific Sea Surface cooling since 2008 predict a 20-30 year global cooling due to short term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
Don Easterbrook neatly tied variances in the PDO and another natural climate variability, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), to that of solar activity and, ultimately, temperatures. The geologist pointed out that while the IPCC predicted 1°F warming by 2011, there’s been none since 1998, and that the 1°F drop in 2008 was the largest global temperature change ever recorded. He too believes that the current PDO cool phase assures global cooling for as long as the next three decades.
Roy Spencer blamed the PDO for 75% of twentieth century warming. He provided a line graph plotting temperatures against the PDO and the correlation was quite remarkable. Weaker PDOs yielded warmer temperatures and the onset of stronger circulations cooled things down. As one might suspect -- Spencer’s graph depicted a decided cooling trend beginning in 2003.
ICECAP’s Joe D’Aleo also made an extremely compelling argument against the greenhouse effect and for the natural climate drivers of oceans, Sol, and yet another -- volcanoes. On D’Aleo’s graphs, PDO/AMO aligned well with USHCN temperatures over last century, as did stratospheric aerosol levels from volcanic eruptions, and total solar irradiance. He remarked that “all three show a cycle where the last few years look a lot like the 1960’s,” which immediately caught my attention. You see, just hours prior, I had been discussing NY weather with a British representative and had commented that this winter reminded me of those I experienced as a child in the 60’s.
Lord Monckton of Brenchley suggested that the positive feedback factor might actually be half what IPCC claims. Citing Soon’s work, he said temperatures have been plunging at the rate of 2°C per century over the last 7 years, and the reduction of Outgoing Longwave Radiation as observed by satellites is on an order of magnitude below what models predict:
“And Dick Lindzen says that’s game, set and match.”
The True Cost of Green Meddling
California Congressman Tom McClintock offered examples of just how global warming alarmism is damaging his state --- all in the form of radical construction blocking, agriculture crippling, resource wasting legislation the warm-mongers have gotten through to fight it. Here’s a beauty -- a homeowner can be fined $1000/day for refusal to cut down his trees if they block a neighbor’s solar panels, but also faces fines if he cuts them down or clears brush for fire preventive purposes. And Gov. Schwarzenegger – who just proposed the largest tax increase in history to make up for funds lost by his failed green policies -- wants Cal-E-Fornia to be “an example to the country.”
Bennie Peiser, founder and editor of the fabulous CCNet, explained the political backlash European greenies are experiencing. And it’s pretty bad -- Labor and Green parties are seeing the amalgamation of the recession and failed Kyoto-inspired energy policies driving their core voters away. Lawrence Solomon offered more examples of overseas carbon regulation disasters, declaring Kyoto the greatest single destroyer of the environment, especially in the third world.
And speaking of bad GHG accords, Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner explained how liberals could sneak Kyoto II through the Senate by changing it from a treaty to an executive agreement. Treaties require a 2/3 Senate vote, and the Gore brigade knows damned well they’d never pull that one off. But with a little legislative sleight-of-hand, the vote required could be lowered to 3/5. And Horner warned in detail against an even slicker trick that would place it on the fast track, making it both amendment and filibuster proof – thereby requiring only 50% plus one.
Needless to say, the regressive tax increase which is Cap and Trade (CAT) was also a popular target.
-
CEI director Myron Ebell proclaimed John McCain’s loss last November to actually be good news, as McCain is the biggest supporter of CAT in the Senate and actually claims that energy rationing would be a net benefit to the economy. Ross Mckitrick blasted the idea of CAT systems with predetermined carbon caps as betraying a complete lack of faith in their design. If the goal is to force down carbon output, then a “truth-based” floating cap determined by temperature is called for. Suggesting we force down caps regardless of temperature response is a sign that they don’t believe their own rhetoric.
Dave Kreutzer warned that analytical models predict estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $4.8 trillion and job losses in the manufacturing sector of nearly 3 million by 2029 if CAT were imposed under S. 2191. That’s over and above the million manufacturing job losses economists predict will occur even if we do nothing.
On Thursday, Easterbrook responded to a NY Times piece suggesting his positions are aligned with those of Obama’s science advisor -- John Holdren:
“[Holdren] wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb ‘global warming’ that the PDO shows isn’t going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause). The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources. Holdren’s path will lead to a real global catastrophe.”
And the losses will extend beyond the monetary. Professor Arthur Robinson, author of the afore-quoted Oregon petition, revealed the true reasons we import 30% of our energy, even though “one Palo Verde Nuclear Installation in each state results in $200 billion net export of energy.” Robinson says there are those who would prefer that 30% grow much larger, encouraging higher energy prices and ultimately – rationing. And quickly advised -- once we become victims of rationing in the west we lose our all of our freedoms, but energy deprivation in third world countries will lead to the loss of tens of millions of lives.
And Monckton took on another deadly green scheme as only his Lordship can:
“Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent ‘global warming’ bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama’s stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves.”
Such, as Kreutzer so perfectly described it, is the true “cost of accomplishing nothing.”
Of Bad Scientists, Bad Data, and Bad Conclusions
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist John Theon expressed his regret that former employee, James Hansen, “didn’t receive the attention from me that he should have.” What followed was a heartfelt denunciation that included the fact that Hansen’s 1988 announcement of “unprecedented global warming” came as a surprise and embarrassment to Theon, as it was not NASA’s position. He then cried foul over Hansen’s endorsement of John Kerry for president in 2004, particularly after receiving the Heinz Environment Award, a $250,000 prize honoring the late-husband of Kerry’s wife in 2001. He pointed out that a civil servant endorsing a political cause violated the Hatch Act, and that alone should be grounds for dismissal, which he has publically called for. Says Theon: “I think the man is sincere, but he is suffering from a bad case of megalomania.”
There were a number of problems with data collection methods discussed.
Tom Segalstad gave us a lesson in the dubious integrity of ice-core samples. The Norwegian geologist cited numerous problems with retrieval, sampling, and storage, all of which may contaminate results. Remember -- the accuracy of these figures, combined with temperature proxies such as dendrochronology (tree ring growth analysis) is crucial as they are used to plot past temperature/CO2 correlations.
WUWT’s Anthony Watts favored us once again with stories and photographs of misplaced Maximum-Minimum Temperature Systems (MMTS). He and his cohorts have photographed and analyzed 75% of the 1200 plus national weather stations, and the results range from bad to hysterically bad. One slide showed a station in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota where the thermometer was placed within feet of not one, but two air conditioning outlets. The fact this town reported temperature well above those of its neighbors didn’t seem to raise any red-flags with the good folks ate NOAA. So it’s not particularly shocking that only 11% of stations surveyed met the required Class I or Class II requirement of likely measurement error under 1°C.
Joe D’Aleo believes that surface data suffer from serious issues biasing them to the warm side, this due to station dropout, missing monthly data, and inadequate or nonexistent urban heat island effect (UHI) adjustment. Half of the warming since 1880 may be attributed to these measurement contaminations. In fact, Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre said we don’t actually know that the 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium as minor variations in data version yield different results.
There was also much talk about response and adaptation.
Jack Schmidt believes that while we’re awaiting the collapse of the AGW scare, we should be preparing to deal with inevitable climate change, however unpredictable it may seem. We should recognize that production of our own domestic oil and gas, coal and nuclear resources buys us time to work these challenges and preserve our liberties and our national security. We should choose sustained R&D of potential energy sources, those with clear paths to commercialization rather than continue subsidies for premature production of flawed concepts.
Bob Carter stressed preparedness, warning that abrupt natural climate change is the dangerous hazard (both warming AND cooling) and demands a planned response, which must be assessed regionally. After all, climate hazards in the Gulf of Mexico are not the same as in Australia. Besides, says Bob, if hypothetical AGW actually materializes, well – we’re prepared for that too!
Meanwhile, Dennis Avery reminded us that history shows that warm times have been good times. During the Medieval Warm Period, world population doubled, crops flourished, there was less disease and no bubonic plague. Most of Europe’s castles and cathedrals as well as India’s most famous temples were built during that period. And that as polar bears date back 130,000 years, they’ve managed to adapt through many warming periods more severe than the current one.
So whether warmer or cooler, they’ll adapt again, as will the rest of the planet – including those self-interested homo sapiens.
The Message is Clear, Cohesive, and Catching On
Last Sunday, Klaus sparked a nervous laugh when he fretted continued alarmist mainstream acceptance with the words “last year’s speech didn’t help much.” But immediately following Klaus to the podium, Lindzen reminded the Czech and the audience at large that “we should never stop trying,” which was, of course, warmly received. And the next morning, Larry Solomon gave an inspiring example of why: Recent polls in Canada showed that those who believe in “consensus” fear global warming; those who have heard from skeptics even once do not. In fact, the dominant Canadian party that made carbon pricing a major issue just suffered a major defeat.
During Tuesday’s standing-O-rousing conference-closing speech, in which he marvelously referred to alarmists as “bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency -- those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds,” Lord Monckton added:
“Every opinion poll--even those conducted by the bed-wetters themselves – shows that global public opinion is cooling as fast as the global climate. In one recent survey, ‘global warming’ came at the very bottom of a list of political and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem and ‘Global warming’ is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.”
And then emphasized unequivocally: “There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.”
Before gaveling the momentous proceedings, Heartland’s own James Taylor offered further encouragement to those despondent over the uphill battle it’s been to promote climate realism in an environment of mass-media-driven hyper-alarmism. Public opinion is, avers Taylor, changing in our direction, and he cited specific polls and current events to support his optimism. And he credited talk radio, cable television, the internet, and blogs with providing information to the American public “whether the mass media wants them to have it or not.”
Yet I couldn’t help recalling something I heard the ever-wise John Sununu state during one of the Q&A sessions that morning, and I paraphrase: Everything we talk about here needs to be translated into something you can put on the 6 o’clock news or explain to your neighbor. He’s right, of course. Go ask a hype-victim what causes climate variations and he’ll reflexively snap “Carbon,” and that’s quite the simple concept to propagate. Now ask a climate realist, if you have the time and patience to sit through the response.
But leaving Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, I wondered whether it really mattered. After all, most believers don’t truly understand the workings of GHG theory, otherwise they’d surely question the influence of a trace gas. And our message may not be easily dumbed-down to a few words, but it is clear, nonetheless.
The very next day Gallup announced the results of a new poll finding that a record-high 41% of Americans now believe the seriousness of global warming is being exaggerated by “mainstream reporting.”
That’s up 11% in just three years -- despite our sometimes involute and ever media-mocked message.
Which lends undeniable assurance to Professor Lindzen’s keynote prediction that “we will eventually win against anthropogenic global warming alarm simply because we are right and they are wrong.”
Marc Sheppard is the editor of AT’s forthcoming Environment Thinker.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_clear_and_cohesive_message_1.html at March 15, 2009 - 03:54:19 PM EDT
-
March 17, 2009
A Tale of Two Conferences on Global Climate Change
Gregory Young
According to Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph who attended both International Climate Change Conferences this month, one in New York City and the other in Copenhagen, nobody listens to the “real climate change experts,” stating that “the minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers.”
Mr. Booker noted that “None of the government-funded scientists making the [claims of AGW Anthropogenic Global Warming] were particularly distinguished [in Copenhagen]” …whereas the New York Heartland sponsored conference “was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.” Booker continued:
Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.
The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".
What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by The Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.
Augment this report with American Thinker’s own Marc Sheppard’s detailed and precise reporting on NY conference and it’s amazingly how clear the war has become! Wouldn’t it be nice to combine these two conferences and let us debate the issues in real-time? Unfortunately, Global Warming alarmists refuse to do so. That should be enough for those still on the fence to realize what’s really going on. As Mr. Booker pointed out: The Copenhagen Conference “was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch.” As one of the organizers of the pro AGW conference put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy."
Yep, that about sums it up!
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/a_tale_of_two_conferences_on_g.html at March 17, 2009 - 09:03:08 AM EDT
-
Lights Out for Thomas Edison
Brief Analysis
No. 637
December 10, 2008
Read Article as PDF | Get Adobe Reader
by H. Sterling Burnett and Amanda Berg
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will soon ban the most
common light bulbs in the United States. New efficiency standards will
require manufacturers to produce incandescent bulbs that use less energy per
unit of light produced, starting with 100-watt incandescent bulbs in 2012,
down to 40-watt bulbs in 2014.
Under the new standards:
100-watt light bulbs are banned entirely.
70-watt light bulbs will have to be 36 percent to 136 percent more
efficient.
50-watt bulbs must be 50 percent to 112 percent more efficient.
40-watt bulbs will have to improve 50 percent to 110 percent.
Incandescent bulbs cannot meet these new standards absent a significant
technological breakthrough. Thus, the common light bulb will soon be
extinct.
Illuminating Efficiency. The alternative for most household uses will be
compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) designed to fit standard incandescent bulb
bases. CFLs currently make up only 5 percent of the light bulb market.
They have been touted for years as the smart choice for consumers interested
in reducing their energy bills, due to their extended lifespan and low
energy use vis-à-vis the equivalent light output from an incandescent. For
example, a 60-watt incandescent bulb produces 850 lumens - the same light
output as a 13-watt to 18-watt CFL. Unfortunately, except under a fairly
narrow range of circumstances, CFLs are less efficient than advertised.
Manufacturers claim the average life span of a CFL bulb is 10,000 hours.
However, in many applications the life and energy savings of a CFL are
significantly lower:
CFLs must be left on for at least 15 minutes or used for several hours per
day to achieve their full energy saving benefits, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Applications in which lighting is used only briefly (such as closets,
bathrooms, motion detectors and so forth) will cause CFL bulbs to burn out
as quickly as regular incandescent bulbs.
CFLs often become dimmer over time - a study of U.S. Department of Energy
"Energy Star" products found that after 40 percent of their rated service
life, one-fourth of tested CFLs no longer produced the full amount of light.
At about $3 per bulb, CFLs are expensive, whereas incandescent bulbs cost
only 20 cents per bulb, on average. And there are other drawbacks. For
instance:
When initially switched on, CFLs may provide as little as 50 percent to 80
percent of their rated light output and can take up to three minutes to
reach full brightness.
CFLs often don't fit existing light fixtures, such as small-base lamps and
candlelabras, so these will have to be replaced.
Standard CFLs will not operate at low temperatures, making them unsuitable
for outdoor lighting.
CFLs can emit an annoying buzz.
CFLs emit infrared light that can interfere with remote-controlled devices,
such as televisions, video games and stereo equipment.
CFLs are simply unsuited for many common uses. The new law therefore
excludes whole classes of light bulbs from the standards, including
appliance light bulbs (ovens and refrigerators), flashing and colored
lights, traffic signals, shatter-resistant bulbs, three-way adjustable bulbs
and so forth.
Hidden Dangers of CFLs. CFLs contain potentially toxic mercury. Thus,
there are health and environmental concerns regarding their proper disposal.
Shattered CFLs in municipal landfills have the potential to leach mercury
into the soil. Over time this mercury could seep into the groundwater or
nearby streams. For this reason, a number of states and localities have
outlawed disposing CFLs with normal trash - instead, consumers must take
their used CFLs to authorized hazardous waste disposal sites.
The EPA recommends recycling CFLs. However, curbside recycling is not
available everywhere and often doesn't include CFLs. Recycling facilities
that accept CFLs are not common within major metropolitan areas, much less
in rural areas where on-site incineration or trenches are often used - both
of which release mercury into the atmosphere.
Perhaps even more important is the danger of broken CFLs in the home. The
EPA has provided detailed guidelines to avoid unsafe indoor mercury levels
[see the sidebar].
Cleaning up mercury from a shattered CFL can be costly. For example, when a
CFL broke in her daughter's bedroom, Brandy Bridges of Prospect, Maine,
called on the state's Department of Environmental Protection to make sure
she cleaned up the broken glass and mercury powder safely. A specialist
found unsafe levels of mercury in the air and recommended an environmental
cleanup firm, who estimated the clean up cost of at $2,000. Beause her
mother was unable to pay the exorbitant cleaning bill, the girl's room
remained sealed off in plastic for more than a month.
Conclusion. Consumers consider many factors in addition to energy
efficiency when they purchase light bulbs. The ban on incandescent bulbs
will be costly and potentially dangerous. The public has not yet embraced
CFLs, and the government should not impose on consumers its preferences
regarding the types of lights used in the home. As the deficiencies of CFLs
become more apparent with widespread use, perhaps Congress will let
consumers decide.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba637/
-
March 19, 2009
Global Warming researchers stranded in Arctic
Ethel C. Fenig
You just gotta to love this Fox News headline and story which says all you need to know about global warming.
Explorers On Global Warming Expedition Stranded in North Pole by Cold Weather
“We’re hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice,” expedition leader Pen Hadow said in e-mailed statement. “Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we’re in the lap of the weather gods.”
Don't worry Pen Hadow. There is just one weather god, Al Gore, and now that he knows of your plight he will produce global warming and order one of his environmentally correct jets to whisk you environmentally correct food so you can continue your valiant journey to prove the existence of global nonsensical hot air.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/global_warming_researchers_str.html at March 19, 2009 - 06:36:23 PM EDT
-
Max Schulz
The Green-Jobs Engine That Can’t
Inefficient eco-friendly technologies destroy more jobs than they create.
Winter 2009
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to transform America’s energy economy by creating millions of “green jobs.” Accepting his party’s nomination at the Democratic convention in Denver, Obama proclaimed: “I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy—wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.” This new energy economy, Obama explained weeks later at the second presidential debate in Nashville, would be an “engine of economic growth” to rival the computer and one, moreover, that we could build “easily.” Though he would have quibbled with Obama over details, Republican candidate John McCain similarly praised the virtues of creating millions of these environmentally friendly jobs, both as an answer to the nation’s economic woes and as a way to reduce carbon emissions.
In a time of grave economic uncertainty, it’s surely positive news that we can agree on the benefits of green jobs, right? Not quite. If the green-jobs claim sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Holding it up to the light exposes it as economically hollow. Making matters worse, a powerful green-jobs movement has emerged, made up of left-wing antipoverty activists and union leaders, all of them clamoring for a more conventional kind of green: government dollars.
What exactly is a “green job,” anyway? The definition seems maddeningly vague. According to Time, “if you make wind turbines or solar panels, your job is reliably green.” But the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), a leading proponent of the cause, says that green employment isn’t reserved for scientists and researchers; the industry also needs “project managers, accountants, assemblers, IT professionals, customer service reps, marketing professionals and account executives.” ASES estimates that more than 8 million people already work in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and it predicts that figure to quadruple by 2030. But ASES acknowledges that no real standards exist for what constitutes a green job, so these numbers are fuzzy. Work in an energy-intensive smelting plant producing steel for a wind turbine, and you might wind up in the green-jobs column, despite the belching pollution. According to the Political Economy Research Institute, a left-wing think tank, even truck driving could be green, since long-haulers “will be in demand to transport wind turbines as well as switchgrass and woodchips for biofuels.”
Obama has yet to provide much in the way of particulars on his green-jobs agenda, though he has proposed a “renewable portfolio standard” that would require 25 percent of our electricity to come from clean sources—a move that would boost demand for windmills, solar farms, and other clean but expensive technologies (clean nuclear power, reviled by environmental groups, would be excluded). Obama has also announced a massive new national-infrastructure and public-works agenda that would foster green jobs.
The paucity of details to date isn’t surprising. For all the talk about green-job creation, there’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies and the policies that promote them: from an economic standpoint, they’re big losers. Renewables can’t produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at attractive prices. Government subsidizes renewables because—all things being equal—the free market won’t. In many cases, these subsidies amount to little more than welfare for companies and industries with political connections.
The green subsidies are considerable. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) and wind power at $23.37. Yet even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute less than one-half of 1 percent of our nation’s electricity. Compare the green energy subsidies to the energy sources reviled by environmentalists, such as natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67 cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). With relatively little government largesse, these sources (along with oil, which undergirds transportation) do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.
The alternative technologies at the heart of Obama’s plan, relying on more such government handouts and mandates, will inevitably raise energy prices—and high power prices are job killers. Industries that make physical products, whether cars or chemicals or paper cups, are energy-intensive and will gravitate to low-energy-cost locales—which is why California and New York, with some of the highest electricity prices in the country, have lost manufacturing jobs in droves. But it’s not just manufacturers that need cheap electricity: Google, the poster child of California’s information-technology economy, houses its massive server farms not in the Golden State but in places with lower electricity costs, like North Carolina and Oregon. Policies that drive up energy costs across the nation, as Obama intends, will drive many of these jobs not elsewhere in the country but overseas.
Keep in mind, too, that the traditional industries currently supplying Americans with reliable, affordable energy already employ millions of workers. The American Petroleum Institute reports that the oil and gas industry employs 1.6 million Americans. Coal mining directly and indirectly supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to the National Mining Association and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A radical plan to transform our energy economy in favor of clean, renewable energy technologies would put many of those men and women out of work.
But won’t all those new green jobs make up for whatever economic hardship results? That’s the contention of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, among the best-known and most influential evangelists for a green economy. In his most recent bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, Friedman argues that a government-directed green program would rebuild America’s national strength and bolster our economy for the twenty-first century—regardless of whether global warming turns out to be a serious problem (which he believes it is). Friedman likens his proposal to training for the Olympic triathlon. “If you make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because you’ve developed every muscle,” he writes. “If you don’t make it to the Olympics, you’re still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life.”
It’s a nice analogy, but Friedman, like Obama, sees only the upside. Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, author of books like The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, which decries climate-change alarmism, agrees that global warming is real and man-made, but he differs with Friedman’s response. “It is foolish to deny climate change,” says Lomborg. “But it’s also foolish to deny climate economics, which Friedman does.” Lomborg notes that Friedman’s argument “simply fails to address the cost of his proposed solutions, and fails to weigh those costs against the benefits.”
Obama and Friedman have become the latest proponents of a common economic fallacy. One version holds that the Second World War and its aftermath were a boon for the American and European economies, since militarizing in America and rebuilding Europe spurred much-needed economic activity. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman peddled another version when, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he suggested a possible silver lining: the destruction of the World Trade Center would require new construction and therefore reinvigorate economic activity downtown.
Such thinking was effectively debunked a century before World War II. The nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat made an invaluable contribution to modern economics by demolishing the notion that a broken window is a good thing inasmuch as it provides work for the glazier. As Bastiat observed, the money that goes to pay the glassmaker would, had the window never been broken at all, have supported some other productive enterprise. Society as a whole winds up poorer, even if the glassmaker profits.
With his promise of 5 million new green jobs, Barack Obama heaves a brick straight through Bastiat’s window. Yesterday’s glazier is tomorrow’s solar-panel installer. The green-jobs promise amounts to killing jobs in efficient industries to create jobs in inefficient ones—hardly a recipe for economic success. William Pizer, a researcher with Resources for the Future and a lead author of the most recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reinforced the point at a symposium last April: “As an economist, I am skeptical that [dealing with climate change] is going to make money. You’ll have new industries, but they’ll be doing what old industries did but [at] a higher net cost. . . . You’ll be depleting other industries.” Consumers will be hurt, too, Pizer notes. Digging deeper each month to pay for expensive renewable energy, they will have less to save or spend in other areas of the economy.
There may be legitimate arguments for taking dramatic steps to fight climate change. Boosting the economy isn’t one of them.
Higher costs and job losses aren’t the only drawbacks of the green-jobs push. We also must contend with a burgeoning activist movement that is mobilizing around the idea of a green economy. Many of these activists come from self-styled environmental organizations, but some aren’t typical environmentalists in any sense of the word. These unlikely eco-cadres—largely composed of labor union officials and inner-city community organizers—appear far less interested in protecting the environment than in agitating for “economic justice” and airing ethnic, racial, and other grievances.
That was the case with many of the participating organizations involved in the nationwide Green Jobs Now National Day of Action last September. The list of partner organizations reads like a roll call of left-wing activism. Most of the major environmental organizations were there, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many lesser-known groups. But so were numerous decidedly non-environmental outfits, including the well-known Acorn, MoveOn, and Codepink. Color of Change—an organization “dedicated to strengthening Black America’s political voice”—was on hand, as was the Hip Hop Caucus. Democracia USA sought to mobilize Hispanics, while numerous union locals boosted turnout at various sites around the country.
Inner-city Oakland may well be the heart of this new movement. Mayor Ron Dellums, formerly one of Congress’s most left-wing legislators, has pioneered the Oakland Green Jobs Corps (OGJC), which began dispersing money this fall for eligible groups to run so-called green-job-training programs. According to OGJC documents, “The program will have a special focus on providing ‘green pathways out of poverty’ by recruiting and training people with barriers to employment (e.g., lack of job skills, lack of education, language/cultural barriers, or history in juvenile/criminal justice system).”
Dellums had help from an Oakland-based community activist named Van Jones, who played a large role in persuading Congress to pass a Green Jobs Act in 2007 that will soon start funneling more than $125 million to antipoverty and environmental groups across the country. Jones is perhaps the leading proponent of harnessing the green-jobs wave to benefit low- or no-skilled candidates, many with troubled backgrounds. A relentless self-promoter, he has had a hand in starting or directing many of the best-known green-jobs advocacy groups: Green for All, the Apollo Alliance, Color for Change, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He is also a skilled quotesmith who has become a go-to guy for reporters looking to add flavor to stories about the environment. He often talks about the green economy being not just for the Ph.D., but also for the “Ph.-do.” Friedman profiles Jones in Hot, Flat, and Crowded and records this Jones aphorism for disaffected youth: “You can make more money if you put down that handgun and pick up a caulk gun.” Jones has written his own book, The Green Collar Economy, which promises both to rescue the economy and to save the environment (all for just $25.95).
Reading Jones’s book or the many interviews he has given, one gets the impression that he is passionately committed to the environment. He talks up the need for a “green New Deal,” for instance, that will “help our Rust Belt cities blossom as Silicon Valleys of green capital.” But scroll through the websites and reports of the many organizations with which he’s been connected, and one begins to suspect that this “green” commitment is less about nature than about welfare—for inner-city residents without the skills or knowledge to compete in a twenty-first-century economy, and for the professional poverty organizations that collect the money for government job-training programs.
If Jones and his compatriots in the green-jobs movement truly wanted to help poor minorities, they might start by taking a long, hard look at the history of government-run job-training programs. In terms of money wasted, skills not imparted, and opportunities lost, the history of such programs is abysmal. “Many, if not most, of the participants in federal jobs and job-training programs would be better off today if the programs had never existed,” observes journalist James Bovard, who has written extensively on the failures of job-training efforts. “The primary beneficiaries of federal jobs programs have been the legions of social workers, consultants, and ‘manpower experts’ that have made a good living off these flounderings for 25 years.” Bovard made those remarks in 1986; they are no less relevant today.
It would be comforting to think that the new Community-Organizer-in-Chief has better sense on the green economy than his Oakland counterparts. If he does, he’ll recognize that the best way to a greener, more prosperous future would be for the government simply to set goals and parameters for the private sector, and then step aside and let the market work. That might mean instituting a carbon tax or a greenhouse-gas-emissions cap-and-trade program. It might even mean banning new coal plants outright. What it emphatically does not mean is spreading around yet more taxpayer wealth to uneconomic industries and establishing make-work programs for parolees and high school dropouts.
Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment.
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-jobs.html
-
The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice
The ony problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 4:24PM GMT 21 Mar 2009
Comments 2 | Comment on this article
Explorer Pen Hadow's Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing Photo: Martin Hartley
What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he is measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is “declining”. His expedition is one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before December’s conference in Copenhagen, where the warmists hope to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on CO2 emissions.
Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing from the likes of the BBC, the WWF (it could “make a lasting difference to policy-relevant science”) and Prince Charles (“for the sake of our children and grandchildren, I pray that we will heed the results of the Catlin Arctic Survey and I can only commend this remarkably important project”).
With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.
Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started’’. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.
But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders”, including Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at “a conference on world poverty”.
The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”. The professor predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”.
“In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.”
An unhealthy moral climate
A London employment tribunal has ruled that Tim Nicholson, right, was wrongly dismissed as a property firm’s “head of sustainability” because of his fervent commitment to “climate change”. Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”. Recalling how “eco-psychologists’’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of “mental disorder”, one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share Mr Nicholson’s “philosophical belief”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5028380/The-Global-Warming-Three-are-on-thin-ice.html
-
I don't know why these folks just don't go all out and hang garlic around their neck and spout incantation meant to ward off evil warming spirits.
March 29, 2009
No Drop in Electricity Usage in NY and CA at Earth Hour (updated)
Richard Henry Lee
The Greenies did not convince the average liberal New Yorkers and Californians to turn off their lights at the appointed Earth Hour of 8:30 PM local time.
By looking at real time data in New York and California, there was no drop in electric usage.
The New York State Independent System Operator has data for electric usage here. By downloading the data and plotting it it appears that at the Earth hour of 8:30 PM, there was no discernable electric usage drop. Here is the load graph for New York in Megawatts:
(http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/NY%20Earth%20Hour%20electricity.JPG)
In California, there was also no discernable drop in load either according to the graph provided by the California ISO. This graph uses the 24 hour clock so 20.5 is 8:30 PM.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/Calif%20Earth%20Hour%20elec.JPG)
These results seems consistent with recent surveys that show that people believe that the MSM are exaggerating the effects of global warming. No doubt the MSM will also ignore the lack of Earth Hour participation by a skeptical public.
If New York and California do not voluntarily reduce demand to "save the planet", then we can safely assume that the rest of the country does not believe the global warming hype either.
Update: Don Surber mocks the airheads in Sydney, Australia (where Earth Hour was first commemorated) who turned out the lights and lit candles as they got all weepy over the assault humanity has launched against Mother Gaia. There's a great photograph of them by Kate Geraghty of the Sydney Morning Herald he uses. He writes:
So, was any carbon dioxide saved?
Noted the Christian Science Monitor: "As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year's Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.
-
Al Gore Leaves The Light On For Ya
Second post.
By Kleinheider
Posted on March 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Even during Earth Hour. President of the Tennessee Center For Policy Research Drew Johnson takes a Saturday drive by Al Gore’s during the time most environmentalists went dark:
I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.
In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)
The kicker, though, were the dozen or so floodlights grandly highlighting several trees and illuminating the driveway entrance of Gore’s mansion.
I [kid] you not, my friends, the savior of the environment couldn’t be bothered to turn off the gaudy lights that show off his goofy trees.
http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2009/03/29/al-gore-will-leave-the-lights-on-for-ya/
-
March 31, 2009
It's the Climate Warming Models, Stupid!
By Gregory Young
What's in a Model:
Mathematical Modeling is used throughout our world to help forecast the future in many arenas of life, including economics, biology, medicine, and yes, climate change. Like all modeling, one attempts to study the past through scientific observation, accurately and unbiasedly collect the data, and then fit the data to a dynamic computer model that is meant to predict, to some degree of accuracy, some measure of tomorrow. In this way scientists hope to discover trends that not only document the past, but could forecast the future.
Virtually all climate models are basically mathematical models, built upon a series of mathematical equations. Change just one equation, or the number of variables in an equation, or how they relate to one another, and the results of the model can change dramatically. Unfortunately, unlike many other forms of modeling, climate models have yet to prove their wanted accuracy.
For the most part, the reasons for their ongoing failure have everything to do with climate complexity. The climate is such an extraordinarily difficult dynamic system to be approximated by mathematical equations. There are literally thousands of components, all interacting in ways that we don't fully understand. Added to the cacophony of being terrifically circuitous, and involving reciprocating feedback loops with a multitude of leveraged factors nested within interdependent systems of energy exchange, some of these energy systems are not just confined to earth. Therefore, in changing the profile or weightiness of just one variable, the model's ability to forecast results can shift critically, and indeed, can mistakenly and regularly portend catastrophes.
As Professor Ian Clark, Department of Sciences, University of Ottawa tells it: "If you haven't understood the climate system, if you haven't understood all the components -- the cosmic rays, the solar, the CO2, the water vapor, the clouds, and put it all together -- if you haven't got all that, then your model isn't worth anything." As in most computer models, the adage of "junk in -- junk out" remains true for climate models.
Compounding the Problems of Climate Modeling:
In addition to the difficulties mentioned above, is the late arriving Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming (AGW) prejudice that has set the evolution of climate modeling back a few decades. Previously known and accepted climate components have been summarily stripped from the equation -- such as the dominant factors involving the Sun and the importance of water vapor in the atmosphere as the dominant greenhouse gas. This is because in the cause to acquire lucrative AGW-biased government grants, many scientists have opted to blatantly skew their climate models to amplify AGW-favoring evidence and amplify anthropogenic CO2 importance. In this manner, they then qualify to receive funding and ensure publication.
Describing the compounded inaccuracies of these Johnny-come-lately modelers who would rather be funded than scientifically astute, Dr. Tim Ball, a former climate scientist at the University of Winnipeg sardonically clarifies: "The analogy that I use is that my car is not running that well, so I'm going to ignore the engine (which is the sun) and I'm going to ignore the transmission (which is the water vapor) and I'm going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel (which is the Human produced CO2) ... the science is that bad!"
Dr. Balls analogy has never proved clearer than when examining the climate models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As just noted, the inaccuracy of those models cherry-picked by the IPCC revealed that the largest and most robust variables of climate change and their antecedents were intentionally dismissed and dropped from inclusion in their investigations, including the variables of solar activity, water vapor and cloud formation in the atmosphere, major ocean currents, as well as other vital components.
If you're thinking that without due consideration of the known and most weighty variables in the climate system, the forecastable conclusions should prove to be fallacious and wrong, you would be right. Yet, that hasn't stopped the UN's IPCC from driving the propaganda of AGW, emphasizing the wrong deductions while deliberately disregarding the bigger picture altogether.
Ironically, model worthiness and accuracy can be quickly assessed by simply plugging in yesterday's numbers and seeing if the model actually yields results that are aligned with the known history. Yet to date, climate models have failed miserably. Though there is hope for further improvement, there is no current climate model that can, when applied to the documented past, accurately re-forecast the known historical record, much less portend what could be happening to the weather next week, least wise the next century. Climate modeling has yet to rise to a level of sophistication that allows us to accurately predict the future.
Knowing the primitive state of climate modeling, it is at least irresponsible, even not maleficent, to use such flawed methods to intentionally affect global public policy-making. It is morally reprehensible, if not criminal, to promote the panicking of dire climate consequences and extinction scenarios authored by climate models known to be verifiably defective. This tyranny of appearance has yet to be toppled.
Further Undermining Model Accuracies:
Aside from climate models not working, how they are "applied" and "used" in order to affect public opinion offers us insight into yet another scientific infraction. For instance, AGW studies notoriously measure "short-term trends," from which they then attempt to derive long-term forecasts. This is tantamount to predicting whether a building should be built upon a piece of ground by analyzing the topsoil alone, while ignoring the absence of any underlying bedrock. Real risky!
When it comes to climate change, which has been ongoing for at least 4.5 Billion years, measuring short-term trends alone, such as 10-50 years at a time, is absolutely worthless. It's worthless because short-term trends are typically just that, "short-term." They are quick to change. Only in the long-term does the variation of many contiguous short-term trends gradually give way to the more important real climate changes noted in the historical records. From the short-term view point alone, nothing is really revealed except aberrant blips reflecting common statistical variation of the data pool.
Also, depending on what side of the short-term trend we choose to initially measure, the respective forecasts can be 180 degrees out. For example, the last ice-age persisted until 11,400 years ago when the temperatures rose dramatically some 10 degrees Centigrade in just 2-3 years. An accurate forecast depends on what side of the apex of the trend you happen to measure (for a variation on this theme, see René Tomes: Catastrophe Theory), just as one would when trading a stock on Wall Street.
Mind you, all of the climate change that ended the last ice-age happened without man's influence, and it was still a few degrees warmer then, than it is today. Further, no such exemplary temperature-rate-differentials are in evidence currently. Most agree that we are on track to add approximately 1.0 degree Centigrade of warming over the next century. Then again, recent short-term trends of cooling are now documented. The lesson: short-term analysis is generally unreliable to produce meaningful long-term forecasts.
Awkward for warming alarmists, long-term modeling does not reflect AGW. Thus, most of the predictions that account for AGW are derived solely from the short-sightedness of short-term models. Though such narrow and myopic targeting of the timeline gives little to no accurate indication as to what the long-term climate trends will be, it does allow alarmists to spin data to their own favorable conclusive ends through the finding of false-positives. Indeed, depending on where AGWers want to start and stop measuring, the results can be so contrived to be anything they want them to be. But the prejudice of a favored outcome, or an apparent coin-toss, should not be at the helm of climate modeling. This is not the kind of modeling that good science makes.
Corrections to Recent Climate Modeling Undermines the AGW Cause:
Next, let's consider the ongoing corrections made to various climate models due to error in data accumulation, data fabrication and exaggeration and the discovery of outright forgery delightfully explained in this video of Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia, who demonstrated that on the basis of published studies, the IPCC modeling notions of AGW is not only undermined, but fatally torpedoed.
From Evidence of Modeling Bias to Spinning Propaganda:
Compounding the problems of inaccuracy in climate models is their subsequent and de facto publication, virtually assured if the study is favorable to AGW. Reporting in the journal Energy and Environment, Volume 19, Number 2, March 2008, Evidence for "publication Bias" Concerning Global Warming in Science and Nature by Patrick J. Michaels has found significant evidence for the AGW penchant in his survey of the two premier magazines, namely Science and Nature. Astoundingly, he found that it's more than 99.999% probable that Climate studies' extant forecasts are biased in these two publications. In contrast the AGW party-line believes that there is an equal probability that published findings will raise or lower extant forecasts.
This is akin to believing the MSM is fair, objective and balanced. Michaels rightly warns that such bias "...has considerable implications for the popular perception of global warming science, for the nature of ‘compendia' of climate change research, such as the reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and for the political process that uses those compendia as the basis for policy."
And such bias did, does, and will continue to influence world politics. This predicament has been vigorously exposed by Lord Monckton, who previously revealed through consummate analysis that a whole bevy of proven modeling errors yet to be have been corrected, willfully resisted, and pugnaciously ignored by the IPPC continues to this day to prejudice world opinion in favor of AGW.
Monckton specifically found that errors "via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN's climate panel (IPCC) -- [models] which were purposely pre-programmed with such overstated or falsified values for the three variables whose product is ‘climate sensitivity' (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase) -- resulted in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2's effect on temperature in the IPCC's latest climate assessment report, published in 2007."
Accordingly, and in total agreement with other published opinions, Lord Monckton stated most recently that there is an "overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic ‘global warming;' that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate."
Thus, because of (1) complicit distortion and overstatement of climate related data-values, (2) repetitive denial of published corrections of exaggerated IPCC data-modeling, (3) deliberate direct and indirect fabrications of data input through falsified methods of interpolation and extrapolation, (4) willfully and overtly creating data forgeries and conclusions, and (5) other man-made errors introduced into climate warming models, from (6) faulty data collection methods from U.S. National Weather Service pedigree measuring stations to (7) the basic corruption of data analysis itself, all climate modeling to date has been woefully inaccurate, the manipulation of which has become the basis of a deliberate IPPC self-fulfilling prophecy concerning AGW.
Nevertheless, IPCC members remain unrepentant. They openly and truculently refuse to appropriately inculcate the corrected published data into their own conclusions because this would change their conclusions and dispel warming alarmism. It is "priestcraft" in its darkest form. Warming alarmists are acting as skilled magicians that can make a rabbit come out of any hat ... as long as we let them supply the hat!
The Tide is Turning:
But there is a silver lining in the clouds of despair sown by the warming alarmists. Elsewhere, in a painstaking review of the literature accessing the scientific consensus about climate change involving 539 papers published between 2004 and 2007, Schulte and Klaus-Martin in the journal Energy and Environment, published in March 2008, found no actual evidence in any of these papers regarding specific "catastrophic" climate change due to man. Nada. None. Zero.
Additionally, from this most recent study we learn that less than 50% of the papers endorsed any notion of AGW, and only 7% did so explicitly. This means that over half of these studies did not endorse AGW. This is in contrast to just a few years ago when 75% of reviewed published papers between 1995-2003 suggested that the warming of the 50 years previous was likely to have been anthropogenic, or man-made. This reversal is big news.
This study indicates that the tide is changing and the dissent from AGW markedly growing. As AGW climate models are being continually scrutinized and vetted, there appears to be diminishing evidence witnessed en masse in the learned journals to justify the current climate-change alarm.
Though we shall fight on, now the trick is to begin the even harder task of changing the politicians' minds ... politicians who are already salivating for, and grown used to the idea of, a lucrative carbon-tax, and the additional power they will likely inherit with it. Science alone will not likely defeat the rapaciousness of Washington. Any suggestions?
Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England, whilst previously completing postgraduate work at King's College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and having taught graduate-level Statistical Analysis and Mathematical Modeling. He currently chairs a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysics.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/its_the_climate_warming_models.html at March 31, 2009 - 09:29:53 AM EDT
-
Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research
Following the U.S. Senate's vote today on a global warming measure (see today's AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.
The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.
In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007. Feel free to distribute the partial list of scientists who recently converted to skeptics to your local schools and universities. The voices of rank and file scientists opposing climate doomsayers can serve as a counter to the alarmism that children are being exposed to on a daily basis. (See Washington Post April 16, 2007 article about kids fearing of a “climactic Armageddon” )
The media's climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. (See Der Spiegel May 7, 2007 article: Not the End of the World as We Know It ) It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics. (See UPI May 10, 2007 article: U.N. official says it's 'completely immoral' to doubt global warming fears )
Once Believers, Now Skeptics ( Link to pdf version )
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.” Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.” Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years." Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion” and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy. "If you funnel money into things that can't be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.” "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming" and "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist,” Shaviv noted pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature." “Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant,” Shaviv explained. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that “CO2 should have a large effect on climate” so “he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views.” Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. “I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views,” he wrote.
Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added. Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990's, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added. “Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded. (Evans bio link )
Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other side in the early 1990's when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears "poppycock." According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”
Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. “I accept there may be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute,” he added. “One could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people,” de Freitas concluded. de Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”
Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s ( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling" man-made global warming fears. Bryson, was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?” Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air,” Bryson said. “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide,” he added. “We cannot say what part of that warming was due to mankind's addition of ‘greenhouse gases’ until we consider the other possible factors, such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question -- too important to ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a scientific problem,” Bryson explained in 2005.
Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm started out as a man-made global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research. Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, “I started as a anthropogenic global warming believer, then I read the [UN’s IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of prominent skeptics.” “After that, I changed my mind,” Labohn explained. Labohn co-authored the 2004 book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,” with chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.’”
Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate,” Patterson noted. Patterson says his conversion “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not were activists want me to go.” Patterson now asserts that more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics. "When I go to a scientific meeting, there's lots of opinion out there, there's lots of discussion (about climate change). I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority,” Patterson told the Winnipeg Sun on February 13, 2007. Patterson, who believes the sun is responsible for the recent warm up of the Earth, ridiculed the environmentalists and the media for not reporting the truth. "But if you listen to [Canadian environmental activist David] Suzuki and the media, it's like a tiger chasing its tail. They try to outdo each other and all the while proclaiming that the debate is over but it isn't -- come out to a scientific meeting sometime,” Patterson said. In a separate interview on April 26, 2007 with a Canadian newspaper, Patterson explained that the scientific proof favors skeptics. “I think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is) we're about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere," he said. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it's not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles."
-
Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the form of global cooling in the 1970’s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. “At the beginning of the 1970s I believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this pollution,” Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. “With the advent of man-made warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of ice core CO2 studies,” Jaworowski added. Jaworowski, who has published many papers on climate with a focus on CO2 measurements in ice cores, also dismissed the UN IPCC summary and questioned what the actual level of C02 was in the atmosphere in a March 16, 2007 report in EIR science entitled “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time.” “We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels,” Jaworowski wrote. “For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time,” Jaworowski wrote. “The hypothesis, in vogue in the 1970s, stating that emissions of industrial dust will soon induce the new Ice Age, seem now to be a conceited anthropocentric exaggeration, bringing into discredit the science of that time. The same fate awaits the present,” he added. Jaworowski believes that cosmic rays and solar activity are major drivers of the Earth’s climate. Jaworowski was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part: "It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases."
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further examining the evidence. “I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century was due to human contribution of C02. The association seemed so clear and simple. Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe,” Clark said in a 2005 documentary "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change.” “However, a few years ago, I decided to look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes such as changes in the output of the sun. This has completely reversed my views on the Kyoto protocol,” Clark explained. “Actually, many other leading climate researchers also have serious concerns about the science underlying the [Kyoto] Protocol,” he added.
Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate history. “I simply accepted the (global warming) theory as given,” Veizer wrote on April 30, 2007 about predictions that increasing C02 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate catastrophe. “The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did the CO2 scenario,” Veizer wrote. “It was the results of my work on past records, on geological time scales, that led me to realize the discrepancies with empirical observations. Trying to understand the background issues of modeling led to realization of the assumptions and uncertainties involved,” Veizer explained. “The past record strongly favors the solar/cosmic alternative as the principal climate driver,” he added. Veizer acknowledgez the Earth has been warming and he believes in the scientific value of climate modeling. “The major point where I diverge from the IPCC scenario is my belief that it underestimates the role of natural variability by proclaiming CO2 to be the only reasonable source of additional energy in the planetary balance. Such additional energy is needed to drive the climate. The point is that most of the temperature, in both nature and models, arises from the greenhouse of water vapor (model language ‘positive water vapor feedback’,) Veizer wrote. “Thus to get more temperature, more water vapor is needed. This is achieved by speeding up the water cycle by inputting more energy into the system,” he continued. “Note that it is not CO2 that is in the models but its presumed energy equivalent (model language ‘prescribed CO2’). Yet, the models (and climate) would generate a more or less similar outcome regardless where this additional energy is coming from. This is why the solar/cosmic connection is so strongly opposed, because it can influence the global energy budget which, in turn, diminishes the need for an energy input from the CO2 greenhouse,” he wrote.
More to follow...
Related Links:
New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears
Global Warming "Consensus" Continues To Melt Away (Op-Ed By Senator Inhofe, Power Magazine)
Newsweek Editor Calls Mag's Global Warming 'Deniers' Article 'Highly Contrived'
Newsweek's Climate Editorial Screed Violates Basic Standards of Journalism
Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt
EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to ‘Destroy’ Career of Climate Skeptic
Senator Inhofe declares climate momentum shifting away from Gore (The Politico op ed)
Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC Debate
Global Warming on Mars & Cosmic Ray Research Are Shattering Media Driven "Consensus’
Global Warming: The Momentum has Shifted to Climate Skeptics
Prominent French Scientist Reverses Belief in Global Warming - Now a Skeptic
Top Israeli Astrophysicist Recants His Belief in Manmade Global Warming - Now Says Sun Biggest Factor in Warming
Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say
Panel of Broadcast Meteorologists Reject Man-Made Global Warming Fears- Claim 95% of Weathermen Skeptical
MIT Climate Scientist Calls Fears of Global Warming 'Silly' - Equates Concerns to ‘Little Kids’ Attempting to "Scare Each Other"
Weather Channel TV Host Goes 'Political'- Stars in Global Warming Film Accusing U.S. Government of ‘Criminal Neglect’
Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics
ABC-TV Meteorologist: I Don't Know A Single Weatherman Who Believes 'Man-Made Global Warming Hype'
The Weather Channel Climate Expert Refuses to Retract Call for Decertification for Global Warming Skeptics
Senator Inhofe Announces Public Release Of "Skeptic’s Guide To Debunking Global Warming"
# # #
-
I should probably file this elsewhere, but it so closely parallels other sorts of quasi-empiric panic mongering that I figured it'd be good for comparative purposes if nothing else.
Fight Moral Panics — With Beer!
Posted by Jason Kuznicki
In the UK and here at home, brewers have increasingly been producing specialty beers with the alcohol content of wine. Naturally, it’s time for a moral panic:
The new breed of bitters, with their intense flavours and alcohol contents of up to 12 per cent, are the work of young brewing entrepreneurs trying capture the attention — and cash — of lager-guzzling twentysomethings.
Beer writers and aficionados have welcomed the speciality bottles, which can contain 10 times as much hops as a traditional pint, as a necessary revitalisation of a market dominated by corporate giants turning out similar 4 per cent brown bitters.
But alcohol campaigners have complained that drinkers may be unaware of the strength of the new products, a single 330ml bottle of which is enough to make an adult exceed their daily recommended alcohol intake.
In January the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, ruled the brashest exponent of the movement, BrewDog brewery in Aberdeen, had broken its code on responsible marketing for its Speed Ball beer, named after the cocktail of cocaine and heroin which killed the actor John Belushi, star of The Blues Brothers.
Despite the group rejecting complaints against three of BrewDog’s other beers, Punk IPA, Rip Tide and Hop Rocker, its managing director, James Watt, accused Portman of being “outdated” and “out of touch”. He did, however, concede that his company had been provocative. “We thought we would give them something worth banning us for,” he said.
Good for them.
Note the comically low, and comically named, “recommended daily alcohol intake,” which would apparently forbid splitting a standard bottle of wine with another drinker. (Is there any better way to drink wine?) Incidentally, today’s 750 mL bottle derives from the “fifth,” or fifth of a gallon, which in the good old barrel-chested days of yore may well have been a single-serving portion.
It’s fascinating how the narrative of moral panic just keeps getting recycled, as if journalists only ever had this one idea in their heads. Is it their fault, or is it the watchdog groups? A question worth asking.
Either way, it works like this: Someone does something faux-provocative, often as a marketing stunt (to beer connoisseurs, brews with 12% alcohol are a fine old tradition, not a terrible new menace). But a group of Very Concerned People takes it all quite seriously and issues a worried press release. An interview is set up. The young are always invoked, as are previous moral panics. Anxious stories are written. Entirely fake concerns arise. (Hops, for example, don’t intoxicate, and strong hop flavors incline one to drink less beer, not more.)
If a moral panic keeps up for long enough, the legislators will get called in, because it’s their job to protect us naive ordinary folk from the dangers of the world. Maybe something will be done about it, or maybe not. Either way, the average member of the public goes away worried, which is just what the Very Concerned People want. They feed on worry.
They hope for a perpetual climate of worry, a feeling of unease that will carry over from this issue to the next one and to the one after that. It makes what they do — taking away freedoms — that much easier. It’s our job, as freedom-loving citizens, to deny them this perpetual undercurrent of worry. And if we can do it while drinking beer, then so much the better.
Jason Kuznicki • April 3, 2009 @ 10:19 am
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/fight-moral-panics-—-with-beer/
-
Fire And Ice
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: An ice shelf in Antarctica begins to break apart, and the global warming hysterics immediately blame human activities for the crackup. Is it possible that there is some other cause?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read More: Global Warming
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a 25-mile bridge that once covered about 6,000 square miles, has split off from the Antarctic coast. Floating untethered, the Connecticut-size ledge — a mere 0.39% of all Antarctic ice — could eventually melt as it drifts northward toward warmer waters.
Naturally, activists both in and out of the scientific community, the media and political figures on the left blame human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide for warming the Earth, particularly the Antarctic peninsula, where temperatures have increased 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years.
Before we panic, there are a few things we should remember that will help us to put this less-than-catastrophic event in perspective.
First, the melting of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, or any other ice shelf, will not raise ocean levels. Antarctica has lost seven shelves in the last two decades and there have been no disastrous effects. Ice displaces more volume than water because water expands when it freezes. There is no net gain in water when an ice shelf or iceberg melts, or, in other words, contracts.
Second, much of Antarctica, particularly near the South Pole, has been through a recent cooling trend.
According to NASA: "Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole."
Satellite images show that between 1981 and 2007, there was more warming than cooling in Antarctica. But the warming appears to have been modest.
Third, there's an active volcano beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A little more than a year ago, the British Antarctic Survey noted, "Heat from the volcano creates melt-water that lubricates the base of the ice sheet and increases the flow toward the sea."
That volcano is on the southernmost edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a chain of volcanoes that continue through the Antarctic Peninsula, which the Wilkins Shelf had been attached to, down the continent's west side. Maybe the news is the fact that more Antarctic ice hasn't melted, not that a relatively small shelf has torn away from the coast.
The mainstream media has its global warming narrative, though, and it's not going to abandon its commitment to one-sided journalism. Exploring the possibility that climate variations are beyond man's CO2 emissions is not a service they're willing to perform.
-
The mind reels on so many levels:
April 30, 2009
Global Warming Ruled a Religion by British Judge
Marc Sheppard
A fired British executive is suing his former employer on the grounds that he was unfairly dismissed due to religious views – his belief in global warming.
According to the Independent:
“In the first case of its kind, employment judge David Sneath said Tim Nicholson, a former environmental policy officer, could invoke employment law for protection from discrimination against him for his conviction that climate change was the world's most important environmental problem.”
The judge ruled that Nicholson’s extreme green views fit the definition of “a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003.” So strong were these “beliefs,” that they “put him at odds with other senior executives within the firm.” The 41-year-old told the employment tribunal that, as head of sustainability at Grainger plc, Britain's largest residential property investment company, he constantly tangled with fellow-executives over the company’s environmental policies and corporate social responsibility.
Nicholson complained that senior executives obstructed his attempts to lower the company’s “carbon footprint,” and that while Grainger advertised green policies, executives actually drove "some of the most highly polluting cars on the road". He also griped that chief executive Rupert Dickinson refused numerous requests to change the company’s policy toward employee air travel. Nicholson even included this personally upsetting example in his written complaint: "He [Mr Dickinson] showed contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions by flying out a member of the IT staff to Ireland to deliver his BlackBerry that he had left behind in London."
All of which offended Nicholson’s green beliefs, which he says dictate his very existence, "including my choice of home, how I travel, what I buy, what I eat and drink, what I do with my waste and my hopes and my fears".
Harry Trory, counsel for Grainger, argued that Nicholson’s “views on climate change and the environment were based on fact and science, and did not constitute a philosophical belief.” But the judge agreed with Nicholson, finding that “his belief goes beyond a mere opinion.”
The decision makes Nicholson the first person ever to be allowed to sue for religious discrimination with environmentalism listed as the affronted creed.
What next, Earth Day declared a religious holiday, tax-exempt status extended to recycling plants, or defacing effigies of Al Gore prosecuted as a hate crime? Not likely.
On the other hand, greenies scoffed when Michael Crichton first called environmentalism “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World” over five years ago, insisting that “settled science” was on their side. Since then it’s become increasingly evident that alarmists’ warming beliefs are based not on reason or evidence, but a trusting acceptance in the absence of either. They outright refuse to discuss it, debate it, or abide those daring to question it.
Antitheist Sam Harris once wrote:
“The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.”
If British carbo-chondriacs now choose to capitulate which better exemplifies their position in an effort to exploit victims’ status, we can only hope their American counterparts soon follow their lead.
It’d be well worth a few silly law-suits to establish precedent necessary to keep this nonsense out of our public schools on those very same grounds.
And that’s just the tip of the expanding iceberg.
Hat Tip: Larwyn
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/global_warming_ruled_a_religio.html at April 30, 2009 - 08:39:30 AM EDT
-
Hey, those pesky AGW modelers opened the door. . . .
Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges
The rise in global temperatures since 1880 closely correlates with increases in postal charges, sparking alarm that CO2 has been usurped as the main driver of climate change.
(http://joannenova.com.au//globalwarming/graphs/us_post_causes_global_warming.jpg)
Back in 1885 it cost 2 cents to post a letter. Who would have thought that as postal charges climbed by 40 cents through the next 120 years, that global temperatures would mirror that rise in timing and slope and gain almost one full degree?
Ominously, US Post is set to raise the charges 2c to 44c on May 11, 2009. Postal Action Network (PAN) has already sprung into existence this afternoon and plans to produce a boycott campaign of the new 44c Homer Simpson stamps. Overworked postal workers are enthusiastic. Homer Simpson is reported to have said “Give me the number for 911.”
Barbara Boxer, majority Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, immediately set up an inquiry, announcing that all future changes in price for US post must be approved by the EPA. “We’ll need a full environmental impact statement. We can’t just let global damage be done willy nilly on the basis of some arbitrary postal expenses committee’s need to balance the books. No other government service has to balance their budget, why should US Post?”
President Obama immediately convened a task force at the Federal Reserve to loan $450 billion to US Post to keep prices constant until 3400 A.D..
Tuvalu promptly announced they would cut their postal charges in half ‘just in case’. They are asking for donations in order to keep their postal service running, but are considering shifting to carrier pigeons.
The mechanism is far from clear. Professor Chrichton-Boots from the Chicago Schools of Economics, cautioned that US Post prices are a good proxy for inflation, and that it may be inflation that is really behind the recent change in climate. He admitted it was puzzling that there appears to have been global temperature changes for 3-5 billion years before the advent of either US Postal services, or inflation. “You would think the planetary climate would have been stable.” But Harvard social researchers are calling for funding for archaeological digs to find postage stamps from the precambrian. “It’s under-researched”. US Post said this type of finding would be very important but, if any stamps were found, they would be unable to honor them: “Since at the time, the US didn’t exist, in government, in theory, or even as a landmass”.
A spokesman from US Post pointed out that the ‘Forever’ series of stamps (which cost 41c, but are ‘good forever, regardless of price rises’) are anti-inflationary. They were issued in 2007 which “may explain the cooler weather since then”*.
Critics pointed out that correlation is not causation, and “you can produce a link between any two monotonically rising lines on a graph”. The newly formed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Postal Changes called them deniers, while Jim Hansen from NASA pronounced that executives from The Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service should be jailed henceforth and also retrospectively.
The Russians (Pochta Rossii) announced they would lift the cost of letters from 10 roubles to 100, effective from Monday. “Siberia is too cold”.
*(As a curious aside, the Forever stamps may have been the US Government’s most successful investment tool in recent times, gaining 14% in value since 2007, while the Dow and everything else, lost over 40%. Thus proving that the US Federal Reserve could better maintain US purchasing power parity if they switched the world’s Reserve Currency from US Dollars to “Forever Stamps”. )
-
May 03, 2009
'Environmentalism' Dying?
Randall Hoven
Environmentalism is suffering a crisis of both image and reality. Two news stories highlight this trend.
The first story is on the reality of electric cars.
"The German branch of the environmental group World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has conducted a study together with IZES, a German institute for future energy systems, on the environmental impact of electric vehicles in Germany."
In the "best case" scenario, "overall national carbon dioxide emissions would only be cut by 0.1 percent." In the "worst case," the electric car would be worse than gasoline-powered ones.
"An electric car with a lithium ion battery powered by electricity from an old coal power plant could emit more than 200g of carbon dioxide per km, compared with current average gasoline car of 160g of carbon dioxide per km in Europe."
So the electric car controversy will soon go the way of cloth-vs-plastic diapers, paper-or-plastic grocery bags, and disposable-cup-or-ceramic-mug controversies. All against the original environmentalist position. (Not to mention acid rain or the coming ice age.)
The second main story is about the image of environmentalism. The story comes, from all places, the New York Times . The environmental cause is getting an extreme PR makeover. Apparently, a memo got out that was not supposed to get out.
EcoAmerica has been conducting research for the last several years to find new ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation and other initiatives. A summary of the group's latest findings and recommendations was accidentally sent by e-mail to a number of news organizations...
Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about "our deteriorating atmosphere." Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up "moving away from the dirty fuels of the past." Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like "cap and cash back" or "pollution reduction refund."
Another consultant had recommended in 2002 that people call themselves "conservationists" not "environmentalists."
The two consultants agree that " ‘climate change' is an easier sell than ‘global warming.' "
Reality bites again.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/05/environmentalism_dying.html at May 03, 2009 - 12:27:29 PM EDT
-
The United Nations' Retreat From Science in Controlling Malaria
By Roger Bate
New Ledger
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
James Gathany. Mosquito, Malaria.
Image ID 7950
For two years the United Nations paid lip service to the truth that the insecticide DDT is a vital component of malaria control, but last week UN abandoned science in favor of superstition. The result is UN promotion of more dangerous and less efficient malaria control techniques.
On May 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program announced plans to reduce DDT use by 30% by 2014 and completely eliminate it by around 2020. In the mean time, the UN will roll out initiatives in 40 countries to test non-chemical methods of malaria control. In particular UN wants to scale up the programs of Central America, which have relied on "pharmacosuppression". Essentially, uninfected people in high risk locations are given the antimalarial drug chloroquine to suppress any future infection. In 2004, 3,400 malaria cases were diagnosed in Mexico, 6,897 in Nicaragua, and almost half a million in Brazil. But both Mexico and Nicaragua each distributed more anti-malaria pills (mostly chloroquine pills) than Brazil. Chloroquine is a wonderful drug at combating malaria and has saved millions of lives when used therapeutically, as in Brazil, but prophylactic use is not safe because it is quite toxic and has led to heart problems when used repeatedly. As scientists at the University of Colima in Mexico explained last year, chloroquine "can induce lethal ventricular arrhythmias."
Ironically, chloroquine is only slightly less toxic than DDT yet people have to eat chloroquine pills, they don't eat DDT. The UN does not mention this, or that the Central American policy cannot be used in most other regions because of extensive resistance to chloroquine and high cost. So even if pharmacosuppression were clinically appropriate, it couldn't be done in Africa anyway.
The UN's push for a "zero DDT world", ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century, with little to no adverse environmental impact and no harm to human health. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, spraying DDT was the mainstay of anti-mosquito campaigns responsible for successfully eradicating malaria from North America and much of Europe. Thanks to DDT, by 1970, an estimated one billion people no longer lived in malaria-endemic areas; in Southeast Asia, cases fell from a high of 110 million in 1950 to nearly zero by 1969.
But by the 1980s aid agencies lost interest in funding malaria control. When malaria re-emerged as a global priority in 1998, even the most limited use of DDT — for indoor spraying, in tiny quantities — was off the table. Deaf to appeals from Southern African public health experts who were successfully using the chemical, aid groups opted to promote less controversial bed nets and antimalarial drugs.
The UN's push for a "zero DDT world", ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century.
Bed nets save lives, especially when impregnated with insecticides, and are relatively cheap. But they must be used consistently, every night, all night. Studies suggest most people do not routinely sleep under their nets—and when bed nets are accompanied by education campaigns, their per-unit cost often becomes more expensive than spraying ‑ with DDT. Most aid groups buy nets and simply count their distribution; they rarely attempt to measure how many lives they save.
Recognizing this, and with malaria rates rising throughout the 1990s and 2000s, WHO reversed its policy in 2006. "We must take a position based on the science and the data," Dr. Arata Kochi, Director of WHO's Global Malaria Programme announced in September 2006. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." Dr. Kochi wanted all the tools available to combat malaria — bed nets and insecticides like DDT.
Still, even with this WHO endorsement, only a few national governments, all helped by US Government, such as Uganda and Tanzania tried using DDT. Most nations were reliant on governmental donors and NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and more recently, Malaria No More, which favor net distribution. The only large donor that has even tried using DDT in Africa since the 1970s has been the US President's Malaria Initiative. So only a moderate increase in DDT use occurred, none funded by the UN. And then last year Dr Kochi was sidelined along with his pro-DDT policy. The result was that WHO, UN's premier health body, which had weakly championed DDT for less than two years, was back in step with the rest of UN agencies, notably UN Environment Programme, which continued to promote DDT's demise.
In its place UN promotes the highly dubious Central American pharmacosuppression project as well as other marginal trendy techniques, such as fish which eat mosquito larvae. This can work but only in very specific circumstances, and since many mosquito species can breed in tiny amounts of water – trapped in old tires or even hoof prints, it is easy to see why they are not widely deployable. Window screens are useful, but they are expensive and are only successful in houses where mosquitoes cannot enter under the eaves, through thatch, or even brush walls, which many huts in Africa have.
So while there are many alternatives to DDT, after 65 years of use, DDT is still a key, yet largely unfunded, part of the anti-malaria arsenal. The children of Africa pay the price for the UN's political correctness.
Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow in Global Prosperity at AEI.
You can find this article online at http://www.aei.org/article/100483
-
Perhaps James Hansen should apply one of his algorithm specials.
Saturday » May 16 » 2009
Little ocean tattletales fail to find right facts
Lorne Gunter
Canwest News Service
Saturday, March 29, 2008
They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile down -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.
Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.
After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.
These 3,000 yellow sentinels -- about the size and shape of a large fencepost -- free-float the world's oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.
It's fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google "Argo Buoy Movement" or "Argo Float Animation," and you will be directed to the links.)
When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.
No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.
So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys' findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters' hypotheses, must be wrong.
In fact, "there has been a very slight cooling," according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.
Willis insisted the temperature drop was "not anything really significant." And I trust he's right. But can anyone imagine NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the UN's climate experts -- shrugging off even a "very slight" warming.
A slight drop in the oceans' temperature over a period of five or six years probably is insignificant, just as a warming over such a short period would be. Yet if there had been a rise of any kind, even of the same slightness, rest assured this would be broadcast far and wide as yet another log on the global warming fire.
Just look how tenaciously some scientists are prepared to cling to the climate change dogma. "It may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming," Willis told NPR.
Yeah, you know, like when you put your car into reverse you are causing it to enter a period of less rapid forward motion. Or when I gain a few pounds I am in a period of less rapid weight loss.
The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.
But if the oceans aren't warming, then (please whisper) perhaps the models are wrong.
The supercomputer models also can't explain the interaction of clouds and climate. They have no idea whether clouds warm the world more by trapping heat in or cool it by reflecting heat back into space.
Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.
In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.
I'm not saying for sure the models are wrong and the Argos and satellites are right, only that in a debate as critical as the one on climate it would be nice to hear some alternatives to the alarmist theory.
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=8c21e2dd-1945-43be-b04d-217c415f5a6b
-
The Climate-Industrial Complex
Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement.
By BJORN LOMBORG
Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.
The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.
This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.
The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.
Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."
The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.
Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.
American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.
U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.
The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.
The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."
The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."
Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.
There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.
The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.
Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286145192740987.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
-
NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming
Michael Andrews - June 4, 2009 9:37 AM
Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution
Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes. They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation. Skeptics, though, argue that there's little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.
Now, a new research report from a surprising source may help to lay this skepticism to rest. A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth's climate. The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.
Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles. At the cycle's peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat. According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, "Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene."
Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder concludes, "The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth's global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum. The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012."
According to the study, during periods of solar quiet, 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth's outermost atmosphere. Periods of more intense activity brought 1.4 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy.
While the NASA study acknowledged the sun's influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks. Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns. Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.
The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA's own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change in the past. And even the study's members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes.
(http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/11265_sunspot_numbers.png)
Past studies have shown that sunspot numbers correspond to warming or cooling trends. The twentieth century has featured heightened activity, indicating a warming trend. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
(http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/11266_Solar_Activity_Proxies.png)
Solar activity has shown a major spike in the twentieth century, corresponding to global warming. This cyclic variation was acknowledged by a recent NASA study, which reviewed a great deal of past climate data. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Responsible+for+Past+Warming/article15310.htm
-
The Man Who Cried Doom
NASA's James Hansen is the least-muzzled climate alarmist in America.
by Michael Goldfarb
06/15/2009, Volume 014, Issue 37
It's been more than 20 years since James Hansen first warned America of impending doom. On a hot summer day in June 1988, Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, came to Washington to announce before a Senate committee that "the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."
The greenhouse effect would have looked obvious enough to anyone watching on television. The senators conducting the hearing, including Al Gore, had turned the committee room into an oven. That day it was a balmy 98 degrees, and as former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth later revealed, the committee members "went in the night before and opened all the windows. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and [high ratings], but it was really hot."
Hansen has been a star ever since. On the 20th anniversary of his testimony to Congress and still serving in the same role at NASA, Hansen was invited back for an encore performance where he warned that time was running out. He also conducted a media tour that included calling for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, to be put on trial for "high crimes against humanity and nature."
If you hear the echo of Nuremberg in those trials, it's because Hansen doesn't shy away from Holocaust metaphors to make his point. In 2007, Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board that "if we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains--no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species."
More recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as "factories of death." This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England. The Greenpeace activists had offered climate change as a "lawful excuse" for their actions and with Hansen's helpful testimony were acquitted of all charges. Less than six months later, Hansen--a federal employee--would call for "the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in U.S. history" as part of a protest at the Capitol power plant in Washington.
Hansen, by his own count, has conducted more than 1,400 interviews in recent years. Yet Hansen would also insist, in a speech just days before the 2004 presidential election, that the Bush administration had "muzzled" him because of his global warming activism. When asked about this contradiction in 2007, Hansen told Rep. Darrell Issa that "for the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn't be required to parrot some company line."
But Hansen has never parroted the company line. As the head of NASA's Weather and Climate Research Program from 1982 to 1994, John Theon was James Hansen's supervisor. Theon says that Hansen's testimony in 1988 was "a huge embarrassment" to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen's predictions. "I don't have much faith in the models," Theon says, pointing to the "huge uncertainty in the role clouds play." Theon describes Hansen as a "nice, likeable fellow," but worries "he's been overcome by his belief--almost religious--that he's going to save the world."
William Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, also describes Hansen's belief in a man-made global-warming catastrophe as "almost religious" and says he "never understood how [Hansen] got such a strong voice" in the debate. Gray's efforts to predict hurricanes also lead him to question Hansen's computer models. "He doesn't have the clouds in right, and he doesn't have the deep ocean circulation," Gray says. "It's a giant scam in my view."
Yet Hansen has been well rewarded by the scientific community for his efforts, winning the American Meteorological Society's highest award for atmospheric science earlier this year. Gray says he was "appalled at that," particularly in light of the fact that Hansen wasn't even trained as a -meteorologist. Gray distributed a paper describing the choice as a "hijacking" of the AMS: "By presenting Hansen with its highest award, the AMS implies it agrees with his faulty global temperature projections and irresponsible alarmist rhetoric," Gray wrote.
Indeed, Roy Spencer, who served as the senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Center, puts Hansen "at the extreme end of global warming alarmism." Spencer doesn't know of anyone "who thinks it's a bigger problem than [Hansen] does." Spencer, a meteorologist by training and a skeptic of man-made global warming, was genuinely muzzled during the Clinton administration. "I would get the message down through the NASA chain [of command] of what I could and couldn't say in testimony."
Spencer left NASA with little fuss for a job at the University of Alabama in 2001, but he still seems in awe of Hansen's ability to do as he pleases. "For many years Hansen got away with going around NASA rules, and they looked the other way because it helped sell Mission to Planet Earth," the NASA research program studying human effects on climate. Spencer figures that "at some point, someone in the Bush administration said 'why don't you start enforcing your rules?' "
Gray says that Hansen's "testimony is not working out" anyway. There's been a "slight cooling since 2001. . . . They're scrambling," he says. And indeed Hansen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in 2007, when Stephen McIntyre, the man who debunked the infamous "hockey stick" graph showing stable Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures for most of the last millennia before a sharp upturn, found a flaw in Hansen's numbers. McIntyre analyzed NASA's temperature records for the last century and found that, contrary to Hansen's charts, 1998 was not the hottest year on record. That honor belongs to 1934, and five of the ten hottest years on record are now found prior to World War II.
Theon says the same kind of models that now predict runaway warming were predicting runaway cooling prior to 1975, when the popular fear was not melting ice caps but a new ice age, and "not one model predicted the cooling we've had since 1998." Spencer insists "it's all make believe--if you took one look at the assumptions that go into this, you'd laugh." But none of that seems to matter too much.
"Gore was in his corner and now the president is in his corner," Theon says. "They don't understand what the hell is going on."
Michael Goldfarb is a Phillips Foundation fellow and the online editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/591lnajh.asp?pg=2
-
Found thid interesting :evil:
Obama climate czar accused of law-breaking
June 12, 2009
House Republicans Darrell Issa and James Sensenbrenner are calling for an investigation of whether Obama climate czar Carol Browner’s secrecy in developing Obama’s CAFE standards and EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding was a “deliberate and willful violation” of the Presidential Records Act.
According to the letter,
… Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), revealed to the New York Times that the White House held a series of secret meetings with select special interests as they were crafting the new CAFE standards. Nichols was a key player in these negotiations because of California’s determined efforts to regulate fuel economy standards at the state level. Nichols admitted there was a deliberate “vow of silence“
surrounding the negotiations between the White House and California on vehicle fuel economy [standards]. According to Nichols’ interview, “[Carol] Browner [Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change] quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” Great care was taken to “put nothing in writing, ever.” This coordinated effort, led by Carol Browner, to leave no paper trail of the deliberations within the White House appears to be a deliberate and willful violation of the Presidential Records Act. This Act requires the President to take, “all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.” Clearly, Browner’s actions were intended to leave little to no documentation of the deliberations that lead to the development of stringent new CAFE standards.
So much for President Obama’s Jan. 21 committment to unprecedented openness in government.
By the way you guys in San Fran have fun being fined by the garbage police for improper recycling WTF
Boyo
-
"So much for President Obama’s Jan. 21 committment to unprecedented openness in government"
Exactly.
My guess as to the reasons he gets away with this con:
1) He has conned a majority of Americans that they will get something for nothing. Although poll data that suggest that a majority now feel Republicans can handle the economy better suggest they are starting to see past his BS.
2) An adoring media. Though it is interesting your article appears to be from the NYT though probably page 2,567 in small print. If it was W it would have been page 1.
3) Who yet is the alternative to BO?
4) People are still rightly frightened by the economy and the sense of calm the gigantic spending bills have restored have lulled them into a sense of complacency.
-
JUNE 18, 2009, 3:45 PM
U.S. Climate Report Assailed
By JOHN TIERNEY
The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters. Dr. Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, asks:
[Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the “most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive” analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of uncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?
You can check out Dr. Pielke’s blog for a detailed rebuttal of how the report presents science in his area of expertise, the study of trends in natural disasters and their relation to climate change. While the new federal report (prepared by 13 agencies and the White House) paints a dire picture of climate change’s impacts, Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report, like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits their own policy preferences. He faults all these reports for all relying on “non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer-reviewed literature” and for “featuring non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors.”
Dr. Pielke contrasts these reports’ conclusions about trends in natural disasters with the some quite different findings last year by the federal Climate Change Science Program. Dr. Pielke summarizes some of its less sensational conclusions:
1. Over the long-term, U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.
3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation . . . there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).
4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms
5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.
6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.
Do those benign trends seem surprising to you? What do you think of Dr. Pielke’s arguments? Here’s his overall conclusion about the dangers of hyping the link between natural disasters and climate change: “Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to action to criticize the climate science community.”
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us-climate-report-assailed/
-
Go Green ! Go Green ! :evil:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5zbxJg2Lcs[/youtube]
What next?
Boyo
-
And now for something totally amazing ......
Organic nags: Michelle Obama, Marian Burros
June 17, 2009
Marian Burros, the New York Times’ fossilized, elitist, organic food nag, today tried to lampoon the crop protection industry and the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) in a Politico.com article for defending conventionally produced food from Michelle Obama’s air-headed slander.
In a letter to the White House defending its products against the First Lady’s aspersions concerning their safety, the Mid-America CropLife Association referred to the pesticides and herbicides as “crop protection products” — a “euphemism,” according to Burros.
To the extent “crop protection products” is a euphemism, it’s a necessary one given that Burros and her ilk have spent the last 40 years publicly denigrating perfectly safe pesticides, feriltizers and other chemicals as dangerous. There is no evidence that any legally applied pesticide has ever harmed anyone.
Let’s keep in mind that it is only through “crop protection products,” conventional farming, and pesticides and herbicides — whatever name you want to use — that Western farmers have been able to supply the food that the burgeoning world’s population so desperately needs. In contrast, none of the food policies that Marian Burros advocates could come close to accomplishing what U.S. farmers have through the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
Next, Burros tries to lampoon ACSH’s Jeff Stier because Stier said in an interview on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show that if only organic food were produced, obesity and starvation would increase.
“Starvation and obesity simultaneously,” was Burros’ snarky comment.
Stier was right, of course, and Burros was, once again, way off base. If we only produced organic products, we’d have less and more expensive food. Organic products necessarily take up more land and require more inputs (water, fertilizer and labor) — and then run the risk of being wiped out by pests.
In the U.S., people wouldn’t starve but, to save money, their diets would shift toward less expensive, but more calorie-dense processed foods — leading to more obesity. In the rest of the world, the reduced production of food could very well lead to shortages and starvation.
Dumber/more dishonest (take your pick) than Burros is Michelle Obama, whose political gardening at the White House this blog has noted previously.
At yesterday’s Harvest Party for the politically exploited local school children, Michelle Obama continually showcased how ill-prepared she is to pontificate on diet and health (my comments in bold):
Obama: “Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high-blood pressure are all diet-related health issues that cost this country more than $120 billion each year.” [This is an absolutely made-up figure. There is no evidence that diet alone is responsible for the alleged conditions and cost.]
Obama: “Nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese…” [Wrong. CDC says the figure is about 17%]
Obama: “…and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime.” [Less than 8% of Americans have diabetes, according to the NIH.]
Obama: “In Hispanic and African American communities, those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate.” [False. The figures for minorities are generally significantly less than twice that of white children.]
Obama: “And for the first time in the history of our nation, a nation that is one of the wealthiest on the planet, medical experts have warned that our younger generation may be on track to have a shorter life span than their parents as a direct result of the obesity epidemic.” [There is no basis in fact for this dire prediction.]
Obama: “So how did we get here? How did we get in this position where we have become such an unhealthy nation, and our children are at risk?” [Ridiculous. As a whole, the U.S. is not unhealthy and neither are its children. More Americans are living longer than ever before.]
Obama: “And the fact is there are a lot of factors, but some of the more simple ones are that too many kids are consuming high-calorie food with low nutritional value…” [Obama served cupcakes to the children at the event.]
Obama: “Well, I’ve learned that if [food is] fresh and grown locally, it’s probably going to taste better. [About locally produced food, should Washington, DC children be denied, say, Florida orange juice because it’s not local? Does Obama plan to construct a White House Orange Grove?]
Obama: “But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet.” [This is typically due to their expense, especially when they’re locally grown and/or organic.]
Obama: “In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries.” [Poverty is the root problem, not fruit/vegetable availability.]
Obama: “And I want you guys to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own homes and in your own communities, because there are kids who are going to watch this. They’re going to watch this on TV, they’re going to read a report about it or maybe their parents will read a report, and they’re going to see through you just how easy it is for kids to think differently about food. And you’re going to help a lot of people.” [Yeah, you're going to help a lot of fast food, processed food, food transportation and food retail employees out of work for no good reason.]
Marian Burros should be put to an organic pasture where she can chew her crud. As for Michelle Obama, it makes you long for the days of Bess Truman when the First Lady was hardly ever seen and much less heard from.
Boyo :?
-
Each term on the source page links to stories about this or that GW claim.
A complete list of things caused by global warming
Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, Africa devastated, African aid threatened, Africa in conflict, aggressive weeds, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, Agulhas current moves, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk, anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn, Arctic warming (not), Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty, atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, Baghdad snow, Bahrain under water, bananas grow, barbarisation, beer shortage, beetle infestation, bet for $10,000, better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects, billion homeless, billions face risk, billions of deaths, bird distributions change, bird loss accelerating, bird visitors drop, birds confused, birds return early, birds driven north, bittern boom ends, blackbirds stop singing, blackbirds threatened, Black Hawk down, blue mussels return, bluetongue, brain eating amoebae, brains shrink, bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain Siberian, brothels struggle, brown Ireland, bubonic plague, budget increases, Buddhist temple threatened, building collapse, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, camel deaths, cancer deaths in England, cannibalism, caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened, childhood insomnia, Cholera, circumcision in decline, cirrus disappearance, civil unrest, cloud increase, cockroach migration, coffee threatened, cold climate creatures survive, cold spells (Australia), cold wave (India), computer models, conferences, conflict, conflict with Russia, consumers foot the bill, coral bleaching, coral fish suffer, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight, cost of trillions, cougar attacks, cradle of civilisation threatened, creatures move uphill, crime increase, crocodile sex, crops devastated, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, curriculum change, cyclones (Australia), danger to kid's health, Darfur, Dartford Warbler plague, death rate increase (US), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, depression, desert advance, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, disappearance of coastal cities, diseases move north, Dolomites collapse, drought, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early marriages, early spring, earlier pollen season, Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down, Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down, earthquakes, earthquakes redux, El Niño intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing, eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilisation, logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod, ladybirds, pikas, polar bears, walrus, toads, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species, not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, tropical insects) experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, fading fall foliage, fainting, famine, farmers benefit, farmers go under, farm output boost, fashion disaster, fever,figurehead sacked, fir cone bonanza, fish bigger, fish catches drop, fish downsize, fish catches rise, fish deaf, fish get lost, fish stocks at risk, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, flesh eating disease, flood patterns change, floods, floods of beaches and cities, flood of migrants, flood preparation for crisis, Florida economic decline, flowers in peril, food poisoning, food prices rise, food prices soar, food security threat (SA), footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frog with extra heads, frostbite, frost damage increased, frosts, fungi fruitful, fungi invasion, games change, Garden of Eden wilts, genetic diversity decline, gene pools slashed, giant oysters invade, giant pythons invade, giant squid migrate, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial earthquakes, glacial retreat, glacial growth, glacier grows (California), glacier wrapped, global cooling, global dimming, glowing clouds, golf Masters wrecked, grandstanding, grasslands wetter, Great Barrier Reef 95% dead, Great Lakes drop, great tits cope, greening of the North, Grey whales lose weight, Gulf Stream failure, habitat loss, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harmful algae, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, health affected, health of children harmed, heart disease, heart attacks and strokes (Australia), heat waves, hibernation affected, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, HIV epidemic, homeless 50 million, hornets, high court debates, human development faces unprecedented reversal, human fertility reduced, human health risk, human race oblivion, hurricanes, hurricane reduction, hurricanes fewer, hurricanes not, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice age, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, illness and death, inclement weather, India drowning, infrastructure failure (Canada), industry threatened, infectious diseases, inflation in China, insect explosion, insurance premium rises, Inuit displacement, Inuit poisoned, Inuit suing, invasion of cats, invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, invasion of midges, island disappears, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, jets fall from sky, jet stream drifts north, Kew Gardens taxed, kidney stones, killer cornflakes, killing us, kitten boom, koalas under threat, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake empties, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful, lawyers' income increased (surprise surprise!), lives saved, Loch Ness monster dead, lush growth in rain forests, Malaria, mammoth dung melt, mango harvest fails, Maple production advanced, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), Mediterranean rises, megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane emissions from plants, methane burps, methane runaway, melting permafrost, Middle Kingdom convulses, migration, migration difficult (birds), migratory birds huge losses, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, minorities hit, monkeys on the move, Mont Blanc grows, monuments imperiled, moose dying, more bad air days, more research needed, mortality increased, mountain (Everest) shrinking, mountaineers fears, mountains break up, mountains green and flowering, mountains taller, mortality lower, Myanmar cyclone, narwhals at risk, National security implications, native wildlife overwhelmed, natural disasters quadruple, new islands, next ice age, NFL threatened, Nile delta damaged, noctilucent clouds, no effect in India, Northwest Passage opened, nuclear plants bloom, oaks dying, oaks move north, ocean acidification, ocean deserts expand, ocean waves speed up, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, Pacific dead zone, penguin chicks frozen, personal carbon rationing, pest outbreaks, pests increase, phenology shifts, plankton blooms, plankton destabilised, plants march north, plants move uphill, polar bears aggressive, polar bears cannibalistic, polar bears drowning, polar tours scrapped, popcorn rise, porpoise astray, profits collapse, psychiatric illness, puffin decline, radars taken out, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rape wave, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rice threatened, rice yields crash, rift on Capitol Hill, rioting and nuclear war, river flow impacted, rivers raised, roads wear out, robins rampant, rocky peaks crack apart, roof of the world a desert, rooftop bars, Ross river disease, ruins ruined, Russia under pressure, salinity reduction, salinity increase, Salmonella, satellites accelerate, school closures, sea level rise, sea level rise faster, seals mating more, sewer bills rise, severe thunderstorms, sex change, sexual promiscuity, shark attacks, sharks booming, sharks moving north, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered, shrinking ponds, shrinking shrine, ski resorts threatened, skin cancer, slow death, smaller brains, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall heavy, soaring food prices, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, space problem, spectacular orchids, spiders invade Scotland, squid aggressive giants, squid population explosion, squirrels reproduce earlier, stingray invasion, storms wetter, stormwater drains stressed, street crime to increase, subsidence, suicide, swordfish in the Baltic, Tabasco tragedy, taxes, tectonic plate movement, teenage drinking, terrorism, threat to peace, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tomatoes rot, tornado outbreak, tourism increase, trade barriers, trade winds weakened, traffic jams, transportation threatened, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees in trouble, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, trees lush, tropics expansion, tropopause raised, truffle shortage, turtles crash, turtles lay earlier, UK coastal impact, UK Katrina, Vampire moths, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, walrus stampede, war, wars over water, wars sparked, wars threaten billions, wasps, water bills double, water scarcity (20% of increase), water stress, weather out of its mind, weather patterns awry, Western aid cancelled out, West Nile fever, whales move north, whales wiped out, wheat yields crushed in Australia, wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced, wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine - more English, wine - England too hot, wine -German boon, wine - no more French , wine passé (Napa), wine stronger, winters in Britain colder, winter in Britain dead, witchcraft executions, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World at war, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.
http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/global_warming.html
-
Well now that cap and trade has past the house I think it time that all martial artists get on board and help stop global warming via their own personal CO2 emissions. this easily translates into STOP TRAINING. When you stop training you save the planet and make America safer because you people who train regularly probally own guns and are domestic terrorists like Ron Paul supporters,Tea party attendees and the most nafarious group of all military vets.
So do your part and stop training save mother earth because if you don't the obamites will find you and you will be punished.
Boyo
-
Science is being suppressed! By Democrats, however, so quick, close your eyes and put your hands over your ears.
June 27, 2009 11:10 AM PDT
E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming
by Declan McCullagh
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.
Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."
E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.
For its part, the EPA sent an e-mailed statement saying: "Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency, and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted." (The endangerment finding is the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide endangers the public health and welfare.)
Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.
After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."
Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature.
If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives.
The EPA's possible suppression of Carlin's report, which lists the EPA's John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.
"The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it's supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way," said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming.
Kazman's group obtained the documents--both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source--and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to reopen the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.
The EPA also said in its statement: "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless, the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."
That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin: "I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." He also wrote to Carlin: "Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."
One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2--the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.
"All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible, yesterday," Carlin said. "In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment." (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members who were asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)
In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rep. Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce committee, invoked Carlin's report in a floor speech during the debate on Friday. "The science is not there to back it up," Barton said. "An EPA report that has been suppressed...raises grave doubts about the endangerment finding. If you don't have an endangerment finding, you don't need this bill. We don't need this bill. And for some reason, the EPA saw fit not to include that in its decision."
"I'm sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said in a statement. "But the EPA is supposed to reach its findings based on evidence, not on political goals. The repression of this important study casts doubts on the EPA's finding, and frankly, on other analysis the EPA has conducted on climate issues."
The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: "I will ensure the EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." Similarly, President Barack Obama claimed that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over... To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life."
"All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers--you've got a bouquet of ironies here," said Kazman, the CEI attorney.
Declan McCullagh, CBSNews.com's chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10274412-38.html
-
Suppressed EPA scientist breaks silence, speaks on Fox News
By: MARK TAPSCOTT
Editorial Page Editor
06/30/09 12:10 PM EDT
Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told "Fox & Friends" Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming.
"The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which is what they were thinking of doing and in fact have done," Carlin said.
Asked what happened to his study once it was completed, Carlin said "my supervisors decided not to forward it to the group within EPA who had the responsibility for preparing an overall report which would guide EPA on whether to find that the emission of global warming gases would be something that EPA should regulate."
You can watch entire interview with Carlin here.
Carlin has been at EPA for 38 years and until the Fox interview was telling reporters seeking interviews that he was instructed by EPA officials not to speak with them. He almost certainly risks retalitation by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and other Obama appointees within the agency.
There are federal laws designed to protect whistle blowers like Carlin from political retaliation. It will be fascinating to watch how an administration of the Left deals with a whistleblower who for whatever reason opposes their political agenda. Will they persecute him or protect him?
I've had occasion to deal with quite a few whistle blowers over the years and they generally fall into two categories: First are the sincere employees who see something they believe to be wrong, are rejected when they go through channels seeking change, and are then subjected to reprisals, big and small, which ultimately exact an incredibly high emotional, professional and financial toll. It is not uncommon for these folks to become obsessed with seeking vindication, to suffer nervous breakdowns or end up divorced.
Then there are the others who somehow manage to maintain an emotional and professional balance while maintaining the rightness of their cause and pursuing it to a conclusion. It often takes years, but eventually they sometimes win vindication, though by that time the original controversy is usually long past and the wrong they exposed has either been forgotten, papered over or, occasionally, addressed and remedied.
A great example of this second kind of whistle blower is William Clinkscales, a man I greatly admire who exposed hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud at the General Services Administration (GSA) during the Carter years, and was put through hell as his reward. He was vindicated by President Reagan who honored his service and recognized the importance of what he had done.
Bill once told me of his being reassigned to a do-nothing job as his boss in effect saying to him: "Now Bill, in this extremely important new job I am giving you, your task is to watch that flagpole out in front of the GSA headquarters and if it moves, you come tell me immediately." I still chuckle when I think of Bill telling me that, but it was indicative of the lot that too often greets whistle blowers like Alan Carlin.
Carlin told Fox that "things are a little tense, but as of last night, I still had a job." Sounds like he is expecting the worst.
My prediction in this case is that Carlin will be stripped of duties, given an office that was previously used as a broom closet and transferred to a duty location as far from EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. as possible. Or he will soon opt for retirement, which will then free him to write and speak as he pleases, secure in his receipt of a pension from the federal government's old Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS).
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) broke the story about Carlin's study being suppressed last week and has posted extensive information about the situation. It appears the story has generated so much interest that CEI's web site is overwhelmed with traffic, as it is taking a loooonnnnnggggg time to load.
UPDATE: CEI demands EPA hear public comments on suppressed study
The good folks at CEI have issued astatement today demanding that EPA reopen the comment period on the proposed rule on the agency's plans to regulate global warming emissions - CO2, the same thing every human being breathes out during the normal course of living - and to which the Carlin study was addressed.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Suppressed-EPA-scientist-breaks-silence-speaks-on-Fox-News-49513762.html
-
Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie
Even a compromised agreement to reduce emissions could devastate the economy - and all for a theory shot full of holes, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM BST 11 Jul 2009
Comments 185 | Comment on this article
The moves now being made by the world's political establishment to lock us into December's Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler's Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train.
What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn't happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.
Faced with a "consensus" view which looks increasingly implausible, a fast-growing body of reputable scientists from many countries has been coming up with a ''counter-consensus'', which holds that their fellow scientists have been looking in wholly the wrong direction to explain what is happening to the world's climate. The two factors which most plausibly explain what temperatures are actually doing are fluctuations in the radiation of the sun and the related shifting of ocean currents.
Two episodes highlight the establishment's alarm at the growing influence of this ''counter consensus''. In March, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has a key role in President Obama's plans to curb CO2 emissions, asked one of its senior policy analysts, Alan Carlin, to report on the science used to justify its policy. His 90-page paper recommended that the EPA carry out an independent review of the science, because the CO2 theory was looking indefensible, while the "counter consensus'' view – solar radiation and ocean currents – seemed to fit the data much better. Provoking a considerable stir, Carlin's report was stopped dead, on the grounds that it was too late to raise objections to what was now the EPA's official policy.
Meanwhile a remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the "consensus'' bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing "cap and trade'' scheme, which would devastate Australia's economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.
Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?
The written answers produced by the minister's own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding's team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced "Due Diligence'' paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government's reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.
The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the "counter consensus" – and the "consensus" lost hands down.
We still have a long way to go before that Copenhagen treaty is agreed in December, and with China, India and 128 other countries still demanding trillions of dollars as the price of their co-operation, the prospect of anything but a hopelessly fudged agreement looks slim. But even a compromise could inflict devastating damage on our own economic future – all for a theory now shot so full of holes that its supporters are having to suppress free speech to defend it.
Flying in the face of reason
Even now it is not widely appreciated that in 2003 the power to regulate air safety across the EU was taken over by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Several times I reported evidence that this new EU body in its shiny headquarters in Cologne would be too weak, incompetent and bureaucratic to do the job properly. Since then one of many problems reported to EASA has been a serious fault in the speed probes of some Airbus airliners, which can cause the automatic piloting system unexpectedly to shut down. EASA did nothing to ensure that the fault was corrected.
Last month, when Air France’s Airbus flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic, killing everyone on board, this fault was high on the list as a possible cause. So far, apart from hinting at 'pilot error’, the authorities have come up with no explanation. But last week Air France pilots demonstrated in Paris, writing a letter to EASA and its French subordinate agency, protesting that 'appropriate measures from either agency’, forcing the manufacturers to make the necessary changes, 'would have helped prevent the sequence of events that led to the loss of control of the aircraft’. The real problem with handing over to the EU the power to govern Europe is simply that it doesn’t work.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5804831/Climate-change-The-sun-and-the-oceans-do-not-lie.html
-
Global cooling hits Al Gore's home
Nashville, the home of leading global warming prophet Al Gore, has enjoyed the coolest July 21 on record, observes Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Published: 5:17PM BST 25 Jul 2009
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01450/algore_1450239c.jpg)
Al Gore, obscured by snow Photo: AP
It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.
His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office's £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a "barbecue summer" and that 2009 would be one of "the five warmest years ever" – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction in history.
The two official sources of satellite data on global temperatures, for instance, lately announced that June temperatures had again fallen, to their average level for the month over the 30 years since satellite data began. By contrast, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by Mr Gore's closest ally and scientific adviser, James Hansen – one of the two official sources of global temperature data from surface weather stations – announced that in that single month the world had warmed by a staggering 0.63 degrees C, more than its net warming for the entire 20th century.
In the past few years, Dr Hansen's temperature record has become ever more eccentric, often wildly at odds with the other three officially recognised data sources, all of which showed a dramatic drop in temperatures in 2007 leading to markedly cooler summers and two of the coldest and snowiest winters the world has known for decades. All this has equally made nonsense of the predictions of the computer models that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on, which are programmed to assume that temperatures should soar in line with rising levels of greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, but temperatures – apart from those revealed by Dr Hansen – have seriously parted company with them. This has not prevented the propaganda machine's media groupies continuing to peddle a daily stream of stories about how in all directions global warming is already affecting the world for the worse.
Soay sheep are shrinking in size (I am sure they've really noticed the global warming up on that bleak Scottish islet). The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, we are yet again told, is pleading for international aid, as it sinks below the rising ocean – even though an expert study in 2001 showed that sea levels around Tuvalu have in fact been falling for 50 years. Even a report on the record number of Painted Lady butterflies in Britain this summer cannot resist ending with a ritual forecast that many butterfly species will soon disappear because of "climate change".
Meanwhile even America's foremost pro-warmist scientific blog, RealClimate – run by, among others, Dr Michael Mann of "hockey stick" fame – concedes that global temperatures are not only declining but are likely to continue to do so for at least another decade – after which, of course, they will leap up again higher than ever.
None of this is proving of much assistance to the politicians still desperately hoping to reach agreement on a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. With the still-developing countries, led by China, India, Russia and Brazil, all saying that they will only co-operate if rich governments such as the US and the EU compensate them to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, the chances of any meaningful successor to the Kyoto Protocol look like zero. (India's environment minister delights these days in saying that his country has no intention of sabotaging its fast-growing economy by agreeing to curb its CO2 emissions.)
But we are already committed, in any case, to paying out barely credible sums for our blind faith in global warming (quite apart from the £100 billion Gordon Brown wants us to spend on 10,000 more useless windmills, most of which he hasn't got a hope of seeing built).
A new study by an Australian analyst, Joanne Nova, based on official figures (available at the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute), shows that since 1991 US federal spending alone on climate change has been $79 billion. The cost of international carbon trading in 2008 was a staggering $126 billion, and is soon likely to run into trillions, making buying and selling the right to emit CO2 "the largest single commodity traded" in the world. Yet for all that money (along with countless billions more spent in Britain and elsewhere), "no one is able to point to a single piece of evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on global climate".
Are we all missing something – apart from all that money, of course?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5907383/Global-cooling-hits-Al-Gores-home.html
-
Planet Bull’s-Eye
A vision of the end times.
By Jonah Goldberg
The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind’s heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.
But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers’ brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.
But there’s little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar-energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die. Dust and debris blot out the sun and will chill the planet for years. Crops fail; billions starve. The heat of impact releases torrents of nitrous- and nitric-acid rain.
So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.
Alas, there’s no time to defrost Al Gore’s frozen head to ask his opinion.
This vision of the end times came to me on hearing the news that something hit Jupiter in the breadbasket the other week and nobody saw it coming.
It left a Jovian scar as “small” as the Pacific Ocean or as big as Earth. An amateur astronomer in Australia saw it first because none of the pros were even looking. Then again, the rock was probably pretty small, between 50 and a few hundred meters wide. That is to say, about the size of John Edwards’s house.
Now, I know what you’re saying: So what? It’s not like we need an early-warning system for Jupiter, a “gassy giant.” What have the Jovians done for us? When God starts pelting rocks at Earth, or at our own gassy giants, like Chris Dodd, then we can worry.
Well, He has been, on a regular basis. In March, a meteor called 2009 DD45 came within a few inches, astronomically speaking, of smashing into Earth (about 45,000 miles). Fortunately, we spotted that one ahead of time — a mere three days ahead of time. That’s just enough warning for Keith Olbermann to knock out several top-notch diatribes on why George Bush is to blame, but not enough time to, you know, keep New York City from being liquefied.
In 1908, a DD45-sized meteor exploded over Siberia with a force 1,000 times the Hiroshima blast. It leveled 80 million trees over an area twice the size of Los Angeles. If it had arrived five hours later, St. Petersburg would have been gone.
Scientists think there are millions of such “small” near-Earth meteors out there, and more than 1,000 that are at least a kilometer wide. Those are the ones that really leave a mark. Just ask the dinosaurs. And we’re discovering more every day.
A few years ago, a book titled The Black Swan came out. No, it’s not about swans singled out by the Cambridge Police Department for breaking into their own roosts, but about sudden, unpredictable events occurring far more often than we’d like to think. There are flocks of black swans out there, but we find it discomfiting to contemplate their existence.
In 2008, science writer Gregg Easterbrook surveyed preparedness for a “space-object strike” for The Atlantic. He found that even though serious experts believe there’s as much as a one-in-ten chance of a significant Earth strike within the next century, NASA doesn’t much care.
Things are improving, but it’s still a cottage industry. A scientist quoted last month in Maclean’s noted that “there are more people working in a single McDonald’s than there are trying to save civilization from an asteroid.”
Meanwhile, the global-warming industry — and it is an industry now — could fill football stadiums.
It makes you wonder. For all the rush and panic, the truth is, climate change — if real — is a very slow-moving catastrophe. Moreover, it happens to align with an ideological and political agenda the Left has been pushing for generations: Unregulated economic growth is bad and must be reigned in by experts; nature is our master, and we must be her servants. What a convenient truth for environmentalists.
Meanwhile, a “deep impact” is a terribly inconvenient threat, partly because it requires making peace with the idea that nature can’t be conquered.
Better to not even think about it.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGY5ODY5Njk1NTVjNzU5NDFhOTQ0MWYxNzZhMmU5ZGM=
-
Always fun to watch the fruits of free inquiry skewer those who embrace superstitious twaddle.
Climate Revolt: World's Largest Science Group 'Startled' By Outpouring of Scientists Rejecting Man-Made Climate Fears! Clamor for Editor to Be Removed!
Scientists seek to remove climate fear promoting editor and 'trade him to New York Times or Washington Post'
Wednesday, July 29, 2009By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Climate Depot Exclusive
An outpouring of skeptical scientists who are members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) are revolting against the group's editor-in-chief -- with some demanding he be removed -- after an editorial appeared claiming “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”
The editorial claimed the "consensus" view was growing "increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers.” The editor now admits he is "startled" by the negative reaction from the group's scientific members. The American Chemical Society bills itself as the "world's largest scientific society."
The June 22, 2009 editorial in Chemical and Engineering News by editor in chief Rudy Baum, is facing widespread blowback and condemnation from American Chemical Society member scientists. Baum concluded his editorial by stating that “deniers” are attempting to “derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.”
Dozens of letters from ACS members were published on July 27, 2009 castigating Baum, with some scientists calling for his replacement as editor-in-chief.
The editorial was met with a swift, passionate and scientific rebuke from Baum's colleagues. Virtually all of the letters published on July 27 in castigated Baum's climate science views. Scientists rebuked Baum's use of the word “deniers” because of the terms “association with Holocaust deniers.” In addition, the scientists called Baum's editorial: “disgusting”; “a disgrace”; “filled with misinformation”; “unworthy of a scientific periodical” and “pap.”
One outraged ACS member wrote to Baum: "When all is said and done, and you and your kind are proven wrong (again), you will have moved on to be an unthinking urn for another rat pleading catastrophe. You will be removed. I promise."
Baum 'startled' by scientists reaction
Baum wrote on July 27, that he was "startled" and "surprised" by the "contempt" and "vehemence" of the ACS scientists to his view of the global warming "consensus."
"Some of the letters I received are not fit to print. Many of the letters we have printed are, I think it is fair to say, outraged by my position on global warming," Baum wrote.
Selected Excerpts of Skeptical Scientists:
“I think it's time to find a new editor,” ACS member Thomas E. D'Ambra wrote.
Geochemist R. Everett Langford wrote: “I am appalled at the condescending attitude of Rudy Baum, Al Gore, President Barack Obama, et al., who essentially tell us that there is no need for further research—that the matter is solved.”
ACS scientist Dennis Malpass wrote: “Your editorial was a disgrace. It was filled with misinformation, half-truths, and ad hominem attacks on those who dare disagree with you. Shameful!”
ACS member scientist Dr. Howard Hayden, a Physics Professor Emeritus from the University of Connecticut: “Baum's remarks are particularly disquieting because of his hostility toward skepticism, which is part of every scientist's soul. Let's cut to the chase with some questions for Baum: Which of the 20-odd major climate models has settled the science, such that all of the rest are now discarded? [...] Do you refer to 'climate change' instead of 'global warming' because the claim of anthropogenic global warming has become increasingly contrary to fact?"
Edward H. Gleason wrote: “Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS is certainly alarming to me...his use of 'climate-change deniers' to pillory scientists who do not believe climate change is a crisis is disingenuous and unscientific.”
Atmospheric Chemist Roger L. Tanner: "I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other 'free-market fanatics,' and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose."
William Tolley: "I take great offense that Baum would use Chemical and Engineering News, for which I pay dearly each year in membership dues, to purvey his personal views and so glibly ignore contrary information and scold those of us who honestly find these views to be a hoax."
William E. Keller wrote: “However bitter you (Baum) personally may feel about CCDs (climate change deniers), it is not your place as editor to accuse them—falsely—of nonscientific behavior by using insultingly inappropriate language. [...] The growing body of scientists, whom you abuse as sowing doubt, making up statistics, and claiming to be ignored by the media, are, in the main, highly competent professionals, experts in their fields, completely honorable, and highly versed in the scientific method—characteristics that apparently do not apply to you.”
ACS member Wallace Embry: “I would like to see the American Chemical Society Board 'cap' Baum's political pen and 'trade' him to either the New York Times or Washington Post." [To read the more reactions from scientists to Baum's editorial go here and see below.]
Physicists Dr. Lubos Motl, who publishes the Reference Frame website, weighed in on the controversy as well, calling Baum's editorial an "alarmist screed."
“Now, the chemists are thinking about replacing this editor who has hijacked the ACS bulletin to promote his idiosyncratic political views," Motl wrote on July 27, 2009.
Baum cites discredited Obama Administration Climate Report
To “prove” his assertion that the science was “becoming increasingly well established,” Baum cited the Obama Administration's U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) study as evidence that the science was settled. [Climate Depot Editor's Note: Baum's grasp of the latest “science” is embarrassing. For Baum to cite the June 2009 Obama Administration report as “evidence” that science is growing stronger exposes him as having very poor research skills. See this comprehensive report on scientists rebuking that report. See: 'Scaremongering': Scientists Pan Obama Climate Report: 'This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA'...'Misrepresents the science' - July 8, 2009 )
Baum also touted the Congressional climate bill as “legislation with real teeth to control the emission of greenhouse gases.” [Climate Depot Editor's Note: This is truly laughable that an editor-in-chief at the American Chemical Society could say the climate bill has “real teeth.” This statement should be retracted in full for lack of evidence. The Congressional climate bill has outraged environmental groups for failing to impact global temperatures and failing to even reduce emissions! See: Climate Depot Editorial: Climate bill offers (costly) non-solutions to problems that don't even exist - No detectable climate impact: 'If we actually faced a man-made 'climate crisis', we would all be doomed' June 20, 2009 ]
The American Chemical Society's scientific revolt is the latest in a series of recent eruptions against the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming.
On May 1 2009, the American Physical Society (APS) Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of 54 prominent physicists petitioned the APS revise its global warming position. The 54 physicists wrote to APS governing board: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.”
The petition signed by the prominent physicists, led by Princeton University's Dr. Will Happer, who has conducted 200 peer-reviewed scientific studies. The peer-reviewed journal Nature published a July 22, 2009 letter by the physicists persuading the APS to review its statement. In 2008, an American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists.
In addition, in April 2009, the Polish National Academy of Science reportedly “published a document that expresses skepticism over the concept of man-made global warming.” An abundance of new peer-reviewed scientific studies continue to be published challenging the UN IPCC climate views. (See: Climate Fears RIP...for 30 years!? - Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades,' peer-reviewed study finds – Discovery.com – March 2, 2009 & Peer-Reviewed Study Rocks Climate Debate! 'Nature not man responsible for recent global warming...little or none of late 20th century warming and cooling can be attributed to humans' – July 23, 2009 )
A March 2009 a 255-page U. S. Senate Report detailed "More Than 700 International Scientists Dissenting Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims." 2009's continued lack of warming, further frustrated the promoters of man-made climate fears. See: Earth's 'Fever' Breaks! Global temperatures 'have plunged .74°F since Gore released An Inconvenient Truth' – July 5, 2009
In addition, the following developments further in 2008 challenged the “consensus” of global warming. India Issued a report challenging global warming fears; a canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled”; A Japan Geoscience Union symposium survey in 2008 reportedly “showed 90 per cent of the participants do not believe the IPCC report.” Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' & see full reports here & here - Also see: UN IPCC's William Schlesinger admits in 2009 that only 20% of IPCC scientists deal with climate ]
Selected Excerpted Highlights of American Chemical Society Scientist's Reaction to Baum's Editorial: (For full letters see here.)
Instead of debate, members are constantly subjected to your arrogant self-righteousness and the left-wing practice of stifling debate by personal attacks on anyone who disagrees. I think ACS should make an effort to educate its membership about the science of climate change and let them draw their own conclusions. Although under your editorial leadership, I suspect we would be treated to a biased and skewed version of scientific debate. I think its time to find a new editor. [...] How about using your position as editor to promote a balanced scientific discussion of the theory behind the link of human activity to global warming? I am not happy that you continue to use the pulpit of your editorials to promote your left-wing opinions.
Thomas E. D'Ambra
Rexford, N.Y.
#
Baum's remarks are particularly disquieting because of his hostility toward skepticism, which is part of every scientist's soul. Let's cut to the chase with some questions for Baum: Which of the 20-odd major climate models has settled the science, such that all of the rest are now discarded?
Do you refer to "climate change" instead of "global warming" because the claim of anthropogenic global warming has become increasingly contrary to fact?
Howard Hayden
Pueblo West, Colo.
#
I was a geochemist doing research on paleoclimates early in my career. I have tried to follow the papers in the scientific literature. [...] I am appalled at the condescending attitude of Rudy Baum, Al Gore, President Barack Obama, et al., who essentially tell us that there is no need for further research—that the matter is solved.
The peer-reviewed literature is not unequivocal about causes and effects of global warming. We are still learning about properties of water, for goodness' sake. There needs to be more true scientific research without politics on both sides and with all scientists being heard. To insult and denigrate those with whom you disagree is not becoming.
R. Everett Langford
The Woodlands, Texas
#
Your editorial in the June 22 issue of C&EN was a disgrace. It was filled with misinformation, half-truths, and ad hominem attacks on those who dare disagree with you. Shameful!
Are you planning to write an editorial about the Environmental Protection Agency's recent suppression of a global warming report that goes against the gospel according to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James Hansen? Or do you only editorialize on matters in keeping with your biased views on global warming?
Trying to arrest climate change is a feeble, futile endeavor and a manifestation of human arrogance. Humankind's contribution to climate change is minuscule, and trying to eliminate even that minute effect will be enormously expensive, damaging to the poorest people on the planet, and ultimately ineffective.
Dennis Malpass
Magnolia, Texas
#
I can't accept as facts the reports of federal agencies, because they have become political and are more likely to support the regime in power than not. Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS is certainly alarming to me.
Edward H. Gleason
Ooltewah, Tenn.
#
Having worked as an atmospheric chemist for many years, I have extensive experience with environmental issues, and I usually agree with Rudy Baum's editorials. But his use of "climate-change deniers" to pillory scientists who do not believe climate change is a crisis is disingenuous and unscientific. [...] Given the climate's complexity and these and other uncertainties, are we justified in legislating major increases in our energy costs unilaterally guided only by a moral imperative to "do our part" for Earth's climate? I am among many environmentally responsible citizen-scientists who think this is stupid, both because our emissions reductions will be dwarfed by increases elsewhere (China and India, for example) and because the models have large uncertainties. [...] I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other "free-market fanatics," and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose.
Roger L. Tanner
Muscle Shoals, Ala.
#
I would like to see the ACS Board cap Baum's political pen and trade him to either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Wallace Embry
Columbia, Tenn.
#
In the interest of brevity, I can limit my response to the diatribe of the editor-in-chief in the June 22 edition of C&EN to one word: Disgusting.
Louis H. Rombach
Wilmington, Del.
#
I am particularly offended by the false analogy with creationists. It is easy to just dismiss anyone who dares disagree as being "unscientific."
Daniel B. Rego
Las Vegas
#
While Baum obviously has strong personal views on the subject, I take great offense that he would use C&EN, for which I pay dearly each year in membership dues, to purvey his personal views and so glibly ignore contrary information and scold those of us who honestly find these views to be a hoax.
William Tolley
San Diego
#
I appreciate it when C&EN presents information from qualified supporters of either, and preferably both, sides of an issue to help readers decide what is correct, rather than dispensing your conclusions and ridiculing people who disagree with you.
P. S. Lowell
Lakeway, Texas
#
I am a retired Ph.D. chemical engineer. During my working years, I was involved in many environmental issues concerning products and processes of the companies for which I worked. I am completely disgusted with the June 22 editorial. I do not consider it to be very scientific to castigate skeptics of man-made global warming. [...] [Global warming fears are] not of particular concern because "the ocean is a very large sink for carbon dioxide." [...] The overall problem here is that there is already an abundance of scientific illiteracy in the American public that will not be improved by Baum's stance in what should be a scientific magazine. Theories are not proven by consensus—but by data from repeatable experimentation that leaves no doubt of interpretation.
Charles M. Krutchen
Daphne, Ala.
#
Please do not keep writing C&EN editorials according to the liberal religion's credo—"Attack all climate-change deniers, creationists, conservatives, people who voted for George W. Bush, etc." It is a sign of weakness in your argument when you attack those who disagree. [...] Your choice of terminology referring to skeptical scientists who don't toe your line as CCD, climate-change deniers, and putting them in association with Holocaust deniers, is unworthy of an editorial in a scientific periodical. Who don't you go head-to-head with the critics? Please don't keep doing this. Find a scientific writer for the editorial page. We get plenty of this pap from the mainstream media and do not need it in C&EN.
Heinrich Brinks
Monterey, Calif.
#
Your utter disdain of CCDs and the accusations of improper tactics you ascribe to them cannot be dismissed. However bitter you personally may feel about CCDs, it is not your place as editor to accuse them—falsely—of nonscientific behavior by using insultingly inappropriate language. The growing body of scientists, whom you abuse as sowing doubt, making up statistics, and claiming to be ignored by the media, are, in the main, highly competent professionals, experts in their fields, completely honorable, and highly versed in the scientific method—characteristics that apparently do not apply to you. The results presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which you call the CCD's "favorite whipping boy," do indeed fall into the category of predictions that fail to match the data, requiring a return to the drawing board. Your flogging of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is not only infantile but beggars you to contribute facts to back up your disdain. Incidentally, why do we fund climate studies by U.S. Global Change Research Program if the problem is settled?
William E. Keller
Santa Fe, N.M.
For all of the letters send in repsone to Baum's editorial see here.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2213/Climate-Revolt-Major-Science-Group-Startled-By-Outpouring-of-Scientists-Rejecting-ManMade-Climate-Fears-Clamor-for-Editor-to-Be-Removed
-
Hammering square methodological pegs into round results you are seeking holes is not limited to climate science.
CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics
Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.
By Brad Reagan
Published in the August 2009 issue.
(Photograph by Christopher Griffith; styling by Megan Caponetto)
On Jan. 11, 1992, the jury in the murder trial of Roy Brown heard from a dentist named Edward Mofson. To establish his credentials, Dr. Mofson testified that he was certified in forensic odontology, belonged to six related professional organizations and did forensic consulting throughout New York state. He then explained that several months earlier he was called to the morgue in Cayuga County, New York, to analyze the body of 49-year-old Sabina Kulakowski.
ALSO SEE:
• PLUS: The Truth About Four Common Forensics Methods
Kulakowski’s corpse was found by a volunteer firefighter on a dirt road some 300 yards from the farmhouse where she lived, which had burned to the ground in the night. She was severely beaten and stabbed, and there were multiple bite marks on her body. Brown was a natural suspect in the grisly murder. The week before the crime, the hard-drinking 31-year-old had been released from jail on charges of threatening to “wipe everybody out” at the social services office where Kulakowski worked; the agency had put his daughter into foster care. In addition to the motive, the district attorney at trial produced other circumstantial evidence, including testimony from Brown’s two ex-wives that he had bitten them. But Mofson, now deceased, was the centerpiece of the prosecution.
Mofson testified that seven bite marks found on Kulakowski were “entirely consistent” with dental impressions taken from Brown. It was the only physical evidence tying Brown to the crime. Although a defense expert disputed Mofson’s findings, the jury convicted Brown of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
As the years ticked by, few listened as Brown proclaimed his innocence from his cell in the Elmira Correctional Facility. Then Brown got an unusual lucky break. His stepfather’s house burned down, taking with it all of his records from the trial. To replace his documents, Brown submitted an open records request to the county. The sheriff who processed Brown’s request mistakenly sent him the entire investigative file. It revealed another suspect: Barry Bench, the firefighter who discovered Kulakowski’s body. Bench’s brother had dated Kulakowski up until two months before the murder and Bench was reportedly upset that she continued to live in the family farmhouse. On the day before Christmas in 2003, Brown sent a letter to Bench letting him know he was seeking DNA testing. “Juries can make mistakes,” he wrote. But, “DNA is God’s creation, and God makes no mistakes.” Soon after receiving the message, Bench committed suicide by jumping in front of an Amtrak train. DNA tests confirmed that Bench was guilty of Kulakowski’s murder, and Brown was set free.
The faulty identification that sent Brown to prison for 15 years may seem like a rare glitch in the U.S. criminal justice system. It wasn’t. As DNA testing has made it possible to re-examine biological evidence from past trials, more than 200 people have had their convictions overturned. In approximately 50 percent of those cases, bad forensic analysis contributed to their imprisonment.
On television and in the movies, forensic examiners unravel difficult cases with a combination of scientific acumen, cutting-edge technology and dogged persistence. The gee-whiz wonder of it all has spawned its own media-age legal phenomenon known as the “CSI effect.” Jurors routinely afford confident scientific experts an almost mythic infallibility because they evoke the bold characters from crime dramas. The real world of forensic science, however, is far different. America’s forensic labs are overburdened, understaffed and under intense pressure from prosecutors to produce results. According to a 2005 study by the Department of Justice, the average lab has a backlog of 401 requests for services. Plus, several state and city forensic departments have been racked by scandals involving mishandled evidence and outright fraud.
But criminal forensics has a deeper problem of basic validity. Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations. Many well-established forms of evidence are the product of highly subjective analysis by people with minimal credentials—according to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics. And even the most experienced and respected professionals can come to inaccurate conclusions, because the body of research behind the majority of the forensic sciences is incomplete, and the established methodologies are often inexact. “There is no scientific foundation for it,” says Arizona State University law professor Michael Saks. “As you begin to unpack it you find it’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff.”
Not surprisingly, a movement to reform the way forensics is done in the U.S. is gaining momentum. The call for change has been fueled by some embarrassing failures, even at the highest levels of law enforcement. After the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain, the FBI arrested Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield and kept him in jail for two weeks. His incarceration was based on a purported fingerprint match to a print found on a bag of detonators discovered near the scene of the crime. As a later investigation by the Justice Department revealed, the FBI’s fingerprint-analysis software never actually matched Mayfield to the suspect fingerprint, but produced him as an “unusually close nonmatch.” Lacking any statistical context for how rare such similarities are, investigators quickly convinced themselves that Mayfield was the prime suspect.
The next year, 2005, Congress commissioned the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to examine the state of forensics in U.S. law enforcement. The result was a blistering report that came out this February, noting “serious deficiencies” in the nation’s forensic science system and advocating extensive reforms. It specifically noted that apart from DNA, there is not a single forensic discipline that has been proven “with a high degree of certainty” to be able to match a piece of evidence to a suspect. The obvious implication is the sobering possibility that more Roy Browns are currently locked up based on shoddy science. Then there’s the flip side: A lot of bad guys who should be in prison still roam free. A study by the Innocence Project of the prisoners exonerated by DNA found that the real perpetrators were identified in 103 cases—roughly half. In all but one, the perpetrator committed at least one serious crime after the innocent person was jailed.
CONTINUED: Forensic Science Was Not Developed By Scientists >>>
RELATED STORIES
• PLUS: The Truth About Four Common Forensics Methods
• EARLIER: DNA's Accuracy Puts Forensics on Trial
• TECH WATCH: Is Computer Forensics the New Fingerprinting?
• PLUS: 5 Eco Crimes Unmasked by DNA Sleuths
• ALSO: 6 Mods for the Ultimate High-Tech Police Car
• FOLLOW US: Popular Mechanics is Now on Twitter!
• FRIEND US: Find PM on Facebook
Because of misleading forensic evidence, Roy Brown spent nearly a third of his life in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. (Photograph by Tyler Hicks)
The scientific method is instrumental to our understanding of the physical world. To scientists, the process is sacrosanct: Research your topic, generate a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, analyze your data and then publish the results for peer review. Forensic science, however, was not developed by scientists. It was created by cops—often guided by little more than common sense—looking for reliable ways to match patterns from clues with evidence tied to suspects. What research has been done understandably focuses on finding new techniques for putting criminals in jail.
ALSO SEE:
• PLUS: The Truth About Four Common Forensics Methods
In the academic community the legal sciences get a comparative trickle of federal funding. In 2007, the National Institute of Justice awarded 21 grants for forensic research (excluding DNA) totaling $6.6 million; the National Institutes of Health awarded 37,275 grants totaling $15 billion. And without a wealth of statistically defensible research to back up their evidence, forensic examiners generally rely upon their own intuition and the experience of their colleagues. “You can’t take a few case studies and say, ‘Oh, it worked on these people; it must be reliable,’” says Karen Kafadar, an Indiana University statistics professor and a member of the NAS committee. “That is hardly a placebo-controlled, double-blind randomized trial.”
The FBI’s errors in the Madrid bombing case were particularly surprising because they called into question one of the gold standards of evidence—fingerprints. In recent years, legal experts have become deeply concerned about the accuracy of the “friction ridge analysis” central to fingerprint identification. Fingerprints are believed to be unique, but the process of matching prints has no statistically valid model. And forensic examiners are often working in an imperfect world, where prints taken in a police station on an ink pad are compared to prints left at a crime scene, which may be smudged or partially captured. Yet, as University of California–Los Angeles law professor Jennifer Mnookin has written, “fingerprint examiners typically testify in the language of absolute certainty.”
A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers’ goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results. But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first.
Ballistics has similar flaws. A subsection of tool-mark analysis, ballistics matching is predicated on the theory that when a bullet is fired, unique marks are left on the slug by the barrel of the gun. Consequently, two bullets fired from the same gun should bear the identical marks. Yet there are no accepted standards for what constitutes a match between bullets. Juries are left to trust expert witnesses. “‘I know it when I see it’ is often an acceptable response,” says Adina Schwartz, a law professor and ballistics expert with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
CONTINUED: DNA, and How to Fix the System >>>
RELATED STORIES
• PLUS: The Truth About Four Common Forensics Methods
• EARLIER: DNA's Accuracy Puts Forensics on Trial
• TECH WATCH: Is Computer Forensics the New Fingerprinting?
• PLUS: 5 Eco Crimes Unmasked by DNA Sleuths
• ALSO: 6 Mods for the Ultimate High-Tech Police Car
• FOLLOW US: Popular Mechanics is Now on Twitter!
• FRIEND US: Find PM on Facebook
(Photograph by Christopher Griffith; styling by Megan Caponetto)
Not all forensic disciplines are in dispute.
Techniques that grew out of organic chemistry and microbiology have a strong scientific foundation. For example, chromatography, a method for separating complex mixtures, enables examiners to identify chemical substances in bodily fluids—evidence vital to many drug cases. The evolution of DNA analysis, in particular, has set a new scientific standard for forensic evidence. But it also demonstrates that good science takes time.
ALSO SEE:
• PLUS: The Truth About Four Common Forensics Methods
The double-helix structure of DNA was discovered in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until 30 years later that sample analysis became sophisticated enough for positive ID. In 1987, a serial rapist by the name of Tommie Lee Andrews was the first person convicted in the U.S. using DNA. Nevertheless, for several years scientists continued to research and debate what constitutes a satisfactory match. The resulting process is broadly accepted and quantifiable (when using the most advanced analysis, there is a one in more than a quadrillion chance of a random match of two strangers’ nuclear DNA).
But DNA constitutes less than 10 percent of the case load at U.S. crime labs. The goal going forward, everyone agrees, is to make the rest of forensics more rigorous and statistically grounded. Promising work is already being done: Sargur Srihari, a pattern-recognition expert with the State University of New York at Buffalo, is developing software to help quantify the certainty of fingerprint matches. And, Nicholas Petraco, a chemist and mathematician at John Jay, is working on a database of microscopic tool marks to give statistical significance to the identification of burglars’ tools.
The NAS report recommends the establishment of an independent entity—a National Institute of Forensic Science—which would be the central authority responsible for funding research as well as creating and promulgating the standards of evidence and certification for experts. If such a system worked properly, juries would only hear from experts who are certified in their fields and examiners who work in accredited laboratories.
It’s likely that the microscope of serious scientific scrutiny will turn disciplines such as fingerprint and ballistics analysis, which have long histories and large sample sizes, into stronger standards of evidence. But many other forensic disciplines may be classified as far less sound. Bite marks, footprints, tire tracks, handwriting, bloodstain patterns and other forms of analysis that suffer from multiple confounding variables could end up being used as exclusionary evidence or as qualified supporting evidence only. Some types of evidence may be completely discredited. That’s what happened with voiceprint analysis and lead analysis of bullets, which were popular forensic techniques until studies showed significant error rates.
Within the forensic community, the reaction to the mounting criticism is mixed. Some are offended and blame the “propaganda” of defense attorneys and the snobbery of academics. Dean Gialamas, president of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, says most techniques have “a strong foundation in science” even if they have not been subject to the type of applied research needed to satisfy critics. And he notes that his organization has long advocated more standardization and stronger ethics rules, so hired guns can’t pollute courtrooms with biased testimony. At the end of the day, Gialamas and most other forensic experts say they are confident their methods will ultimately be validated by further research. Even critics of the current system say forensics should remain a critical part of law enforcement. “Let’s just give it to people as completely and honestly as we possibly can,” Saks says.
It will take years to fully reconcile the rigors of the scientific method with the needs and processes of the judicial system. But in the meantime, questionable forensic science will continue to tip the scales of justice. And when bad decisions are made in the courtroom, an innocent person’s entire life can be swept right out from under him. It happened to Steven Barnes 20 years ago. Then 23 years old, he was brought to trial for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. He had never been arrested before and was confident he’d be cleared. Yet he watched as forensics expert Elaine Pagliaro testified that two hairs found in Barnes’s pickup were microscopically similar to the victim’s. Pagliaro also noted that soil samples taken from the truck were consistent with dirt from the crime scene and even that a distinctive pattern from the victim’s jeans was similar to an imprint left on the truck.
Due largely to her testimony, Barnes was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Last year, he was cleared by DNA and released. He’d never been on the Internet or used a cellular phone, and his girlfriend, who initially stuck by him after he went to prison, had long ago married another man. Barnes told Popular Mechanics that he works hard not to be overwhelmed by bitterness, even toward the jurors. “They must have thought, ‘[Pagliaro] knows what she is talking about.’”
Pagliaro, a veteran analyst with the Connecticut State Police, has recently co-authored a book called The Real World of a Forensic Scientist. “I think this scrutiny is actually good,” she says. “It’s important for the public to have a realistic expectation of what the science can do.” As for the Barnes case, there is no suggestion of impropriety regarding her testimony, but none of the evidence she presented was based on statistically validated science. “You feel awful someone spent all that time in jail,” she says. “All you can do is look back and say, ‘Was that the best we could do?’”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4325774.html
-
To those who say "Deniers" do so for the money, how much bias do you think 79 billion will buy?
New Study Shows How Government Dollars Perpetuate The Global Warming Hoax
Sometimes money creates a "self fulfilling prophecy," especially government money. Researchers know that if they come up with the right kind of information the grants will roll over from year to year.
Such has been the case with the global warming hoax. Government dollars have encouraged scientists to get the right data, instead of getting the data right. That's one of the reasons we continue to find mistakes in the data predicting a man-made global warming crisis.
In fact new study published by Science and Public Policy shows that:
The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.
Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.
Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.
The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?
Its not necessarily some sort of back room conspiracy, leading to the bogus conclusions about climate change, it is the fact that most of the funding has been to prove that man is the cause of global warming.When all of the funding is on one side, all of the results are on that one side:
Billions in the Name of “Climate”
In total, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government will have poured in $32 billion for climate research—and another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies. These are actual dollars, obtained from government reports, and not adjusted for inflation. It does not include funding from other governments. The real total can only grow.
In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7,000 million per annum, around 50 fold higher. Tax concessions add to this. (See below for details and sources.)
..after spending $30 billion on pure science research no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence…
This tally is climbing precipitously. With enormous tax breaks and rescue funds now in play, it’s difficult to know just how far over the $7 billion mark the final total will stand for fiscal year 2009. For example, additional funding for carbon sequestration experiments alone amounted to $3.4 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (not included in the $7 billion total above).
The most telling point is that after spending $30 billion on pure science research no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the global climate.
If carbon is a minor player in the global climate as the lack of evidence suggests, the
“Climate Change Science Program” (CCSP), “Climate Change Technology Program” (CCTP), and some of the green incentives and tax breaks would have less, little, or no reason to exist. While forecasting the weather and climate is critical, and there are other good reasons to develop alternative energy sources—no one can argue that the thousands of players who received these billions of dollars have any real incentive to “announce” the discovery of the insignificance of carbon’s role.
…
“Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite. Throw 30 billion dollars at one question and how could bright, dedicated people not find 800 pages worth of connections, links, predictions, projections and scenarios? (What’s amazing is what they haven’t found: empirical evidence.)”
By setting up trading networks, tax concessions, and international bureaucracies before the evidence was in, have we ensured that our understanding of the role of carbon in climate science would be sped up, but that our knowledge of every other aspect of climate science would be slowed down to an equal and opposite extent?
Monopolistic funding creates a ratchet effect where pro-AGW findings are reported and repeated, while anti-AGW results lie unstudied and ignored.
Monopolistic funding creates a ratchet effect where even the most insignificant pro-AGW findings are reported, repeated, trumpeted and asserted, while any anti-AGW results lie unstudied, ignored and delayed. Auditing AGW research is so underfunded that for the most part it is left to unpaid bloggers who collect donations from concerned citizens online. These auditors, often retired scientists, are providing a valuable free service to society, and yet, in return they are attacked, abused, and insulted.
The truth will come out in the end, but how much damage will accrue while we wait for volunteers to audit the claims of the financially well-fed?
The stealthy mass entry of bankers and traders into the background of the scientific “debate” poses grave threats to the scientific process. The promise of “trillions of dollars” on commodity markets—with all of that potential money hinging on finding that human emissions of carbon dioxide have a significant role in the climate—surely acts like blanket of mud over open dispassionate analysis.
All of this means we must be extra diligent in only focusing on just the evidence, the science, the empirical data. Illogic and unreason cloud a debate already loaded with bias. When there are so many incentives encouraging unclarity and overcomplexity, the simple truths need help to rise to the top. But who funds the counter-PR campaign—now that even Exxon has been howled out of the theater of science. There is hardly any money promoting Natural Causes of Climate Change, while billions upon trillions promote Unnatural Forces.
In this scientific debate, one side is gagged while the other side has a government-funded media campaign.
The bottom line
Even if monopolistic funding has affected science, the total amount of money paid to each side won’t tell us whether The Planet’s climate is warming or whether that warming is due to carbon-dioxide. The point of this report is to show how the process of science can be distorted (like any human endeavor) by a massive one-sided input of money. What use would money be, if it didn’t have some impact?
The massive amounts of money involved only makes it more imperative that we look hard at the empirical evidence.
U.S. Government Funding for Climate Change Related Activities 1989-2009
(Millions of Dollars)
. Fiscal Year . Climate Science . Climate Technology . Foreign Assistance . Tax Breaks . Annual Total .
1989 134 $134
1990 659 $659
1991 954 $954
1992 1,110 $1,110
1993 1,326 845 201 $2,372
1994 1,444 1,038 186 $2,668
1995 1,760 1,283 228 $3,271
1996 1,654 1,106 192 $2,952
1997 1,656 1,056 164 $2,876
1998 1,677 1,251 186 $3,114
1999 1,657 1,694 325 $3,676
2000 1,687 1,793 177 $3,657
2001 1,728 1,675 218 $3,621
2002 1,667 1,637 224 $3,528
2003 1,766 2,533 270 580 $4,569
2004 1,975 2,870 252 500 $5,097
2005 1,865 2,808 234 369 $4,907
2006 1,691 2,789 249 1160 $4,729
2007 1,825 3,441 188 1730 $5,454
2008 1,832 3,917 212 * 1420 * $5,961
2009 2,441 * 4,400 * 579 * 1160 * $7,420
TOTAL $32,508 + $36,136 + $3,506 + $6,919 = $79,069
*Estimate or Request.………..Annual Spending totals (right hand col) do not include Tax breaks.
References:
Climate Change Science Program, Annual Report to Congress: Our Changing Planet http://downloads.climatescience.gov/ocp/ocp2009/ocpfy2009-8.pdf
Analytical Perspectives Budget of the US Government, Fiscal Year 2010. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/spec.pdf
1993-2005 GAO, Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should be Clearer and More Complete http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05461.pdf Appendix II page 34.
OMB, Fiscal Year 2008. Report to Congress on Federal Climate Change Expenditures, Table 8. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/legislative/fy08_climate_change.pdf
Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change Programs in the FY 2009 Budget, p 1. AAAS. http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/09pch15.pdf
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-study-shows-how-government-dollars.html
Full report here:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf
-
The Branch Carbonian Cult
By Jim Guirard
The Global Warming Movement (AGW) has taken on the worrisome attributes of a pseudo-religious cult, which operates far more on the basis of an apocalyptic "belief" system than on objective climate science.
Since this worldwide Movement and its strident policies of Less Energy at Higher Prices (in order to achieve reductions in everyone's "carbon footprint") are at the heart of America's enormous energy shortfall, it poses a national security threat of major proportions.
And in this context, the AGW Crusade should be understood in a "Know Thy Enemy" frame of reference -- perhaps not in terms of a fully conscious or intentional enemy of the American people at a time of war and economic crisis but as a deadly threat to our economic stability and national security, nonetheless.
Kingdom of the Cults
Here, therefore, in far more detail than any routine allegation of "cultism" conveys, are no fewer than ten of this AGW ideology's very specific characteristics, many of whose roots and lock-step influences can be found in Walter Martin's and Ravi Zacharias' definitive, award-winning 2003 book, "Kingdom of the Cults:"
1. Leadership by a self-glorifying, manipulative New Age Prophet -- in this case, former Vice-President Al Gore, though he is rapidly being supplanted by President Barack Obama.
2. Assertion of an apocalyptic threat to all mankind.
3. An absolutist definition of both the threat and the proposed solution(s).
4. Promise of a salvation from this pending apocalypse.
5. Devotion to an inspired text which (arguendo) embodies all the answers -- in this case, Prophet Gore's pseudo-scientific book "Earth in the Balance" and his more recent "An Inconvenient Truth" documentary.
6. A specific list of "truths" (see the Ten Commandments listed below) which must be embraced and proselytized by all Cult members..
7. An absolute intolerance of any deviation from any of these truths by any Cult member.
8. A strident intolerance of any outside criticism of the Cult's definition of the problem or of its proposed solutions.
9. A "Heaven-on-Earth" vision of the results of the mission's success and/or a "Hell-on-Earth" result if the cultic mission should fail.
10. An inordinate fear (and an outright rejection of the possibility) of being proven wrong in either the apocalyptic vision or the proposed salvation.
Prophet Gore's (and now Prophet Obama's) Ten Commandments
With this half of the AGW Cult's self-definition now clearly established, here is the other half -- its Ten Commandments of "Thou-Shalt" and "Thou-Shalt-Not" absolutes -- designed for keeping its devoted cultists in lockstep support and its intimidated detractors in retreat:
o Thou shalt have but one Mother Earth (Gaia) Goddess before you
o Thou shalt not worship false Prophets -- especially sun cycles, ocean cycles, volcanic influences and "Objective Science" in general
o Thou shalt never doubt catastrophic depletion of the so-called "Ozone Layer"
o Thou shalt not doubt man-made "Greenhouse Gasses" as the primary cause of GW
o Thou shalt condemn such doubters as "Extremists" and "Criminals Against Humanity"
o Thou shalt minimize, ignore and deny any and all environmental good news
o Thou shalt avoid benefit-cost evaluations of AGW solutions and never admit error or falsehood about anything
o Thou shalt continue opposing all Nuclear and new Hydro power, despite their non-GW attributes
o Thou shalt promote "zero-carbon-footprint" policies of Less Energy at Higher Prices, except for heavily subsidized ethanol
o Thou shalt engage forever in "Eeeekology" and "Eeeekonomics" (scare-tactics ecology and economics) and never, ever vote Republican
Finally, since this AGW juggernaut seems to have brainwashed a majority of Americans, most of the media and academia, a majority of the Congress and even many churches into a mind-set of support for its pseudo-religious scam, a recent Wall Street Journal's recent conclusion that this represents a "Mass Neurosis" of a cultic nature seems alarmingly accurate.
Truths to be Ignored or Denied
On the more climatically correct side, all that is needed to begin the collapse of this house-of-cards scam is yet another list of certifiable facts and truths -- one which will disprove much of the Cult's mission, tactics and alleged "solutions" -- namely,
(a) the fact that while Arctic ice may (or may not, of late) be receding, Antarctic ice has been increasing for about 40 years
(b) the fact that global temperatures have been on a slightly decreasing trend since 1998,
(c) the fact that Mars (which features no man-made factor at all) is experiencing "global warming," as well,
(d) the fact that Antarctic "ice shelves" which occasionally break off, float away and melt at sea, do not raise ocean levels at all,
(e) the fact that several of the "hottest years" on record were in the 1930s and 1940s, when CO2 levels were much lower than today's,
(f) the fact that ever more scientists assert convincingly that atmospheric CO2 is a lagging consequence, rather than a triggering cause, of alleged global warming,
(g) the fact that all earlier glacial and inter-glacial periods were clearly caused not by man but by solar, ocean and volcanic cycles and "natural" fluctuations,
(h) the fact that di-hydrogen oxide (H2O) molecules -- water vapor -- and methane molecules are 20-30 times more heat-retentive than CO2 molecules are,
(i) the fact that termites worldwide expel about as much "greenhouse gasses" into the atmosphere as does all the burning of fossil fuels by human beings,
(j) the fact that even if all Kyoto-type limits on CO2 were obeyed by all nations, the estimated net impact by 2050 would be less than half a degree F -- with a ruinous cost-to-benefit ratio of thousands to one, when the standard requirement is no more than one to one.
Conclusion: Since every such Prophet-led, scare-mongering, pseudo-religious conspiracy needs a properly descriptive name, and since this one's primary concerns over alleged depletion of the so-called "ozone layer" over Antarctica have shifted to a panic over CO2, instead, a fitting name for this cultic gaggle might be the "Branch Carbonian Cult" --
o "Branch" because it is a radical offshoot from the main body of science-based environmentalism;
o "Carbonian" because of its professed fear of carbon dioxide as a primary cause of AGW; and
o "Cult" because of its self-evident structure and practices -- which are in full accord with most elements of the typical religious cult, Branch Davidian or otherwise.
Jim Guirard is an attorney and head of truespeak.org.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/the_branch_carbonian_cult_1.html at August 24, 2009 - 08:53:29 AM EDT
-
Probability and Global Warming
By Larrey Anderson
Imagine we have gone to a movie made by a former politician (who is not a scientist). In the movie we are informed (1) the earth is warming exponentially. (2) Human beings have been and will continue to cause this warming because we release a natural gas (CO2) into the atmosphere. (3) There will be catastrophic consequences from the exponential warming that will occur as a result of this release of CO2. (According to the movie the planet's icecaps will melt, polar bears will die, and cities will disappear under water.) (4) To prevent these disasters radical changes are required to reduce the amount of man-made CO2 that is being released. (5) Draconian control of carbon dioxide output must be instituted by all governments of the world both by unilateral legislation limiting the use of fossil fuels and by tightly written treaties that further force the signatory countries to reduce their "carbon footprint."
We're in a dire situation -- or so we have been told. To review, the catastrophes, and their solutions, are composed of these five (more or less) basic steps:
(1) The planet is getting exponentially warmer; (2) this exponential warming is caused by man-made releases of CO2; (3) because of the exponential warming, man-made CO2 releases are causing and will continue to cause unprecedented worldwide calamities; (4) to prevent these cataclysms man-made CO2 emissions must be immediately and dramatically reduced; and (5) the situation is so serious that individual nations must swiftly pass strict laws controlling CO2 emissions and international treaties must be quickly signed that insure that all countries are required to reduce their CO2emissions.
There are some philosophical problems that need to be ironed out before we take such arguments, and such movies, seriously: first, all of that catastrophic world-melting logic presented in the movie is based on induction. For example, the only way to conclude that the whole world is getting generally exponentially warmer is to foster the conclusion by taking lots and lots of specific measurements of exponentially higher and higher temperatures over time. (This also means that argument number (1) -- like all the other arguments in the movie -- is an argument of probability.)
Furthermore, all five of the steps I have outlined above are based on what is known as sequential conditional logic.[ii] This means, put as simply as possible, that if any of the first four steps is false then the remainder of the arguments (or argument) that follow the first step found to be false are (or is) also false.[iii] (This may seem counterintuitive - but think it through. Go through each step, assume a step is false and then see if you can prove as true any of the others steps after the step found to be false.)
What this kind of conditional thinking means is that we jump from one "possible world" to another - but the very existence of each new "world" depends upon the existence of the "possible world" that preceded it -- otherwise we jump into a void. For example in our movie:
(1) The planet is getting exponentially warmer. This is only a possibility. So we are talking about a percentage of warming in a possible world -- not necessarily our real world. (No one knows the exact temperature of the real world. In fact, there is no such thing as an exact world temperature. Temperatures vary throughout the planet.)
(2) This warming is caused by man-made releases of CO2. This is also only a possibility. So, we are talking about an approximate amount of CO2 in a possible world -- not the actual amount in our real world. (No one knows the exact amount of CO2 being released in the real world.)
The exact same logic is true for steps 3, 4, and 5. All of the logic is inductive; all of the arguments are based on probability. If the conclusion (#5) is true, all of the previous arguments must also be true.
And, as anyone who studies induction knows: the longer the string of conditionals (steps), the lower the probability that the entire set of conditionals is true.
Let's take a look at the math and then at the probability that arguments (1) through (5) are true.[iv] First I will show how the math works. Then we will try to run some probability numbers for the five arguments we saw above. (Remember this science is admitted, by all sides involved, to be based on inductive logic, hence it is impossible that any of the five arguments are 100% true.)
Here is how the basic math works: let's look at roulette wheel -- it is an easy example to understand. If I only have one dollar and I bet that dollar (and continue to bet all my winnings if I have any winnings after each bet) on red five times in a row, what is the possibility of me having any money after my fifth bet? (Remember, we are talking about truth in terms of probability, so another way of saying this is how true is it that I will win all five of my bets (= arguments) and have some money (= truth) at the end of my five bets?)
The probability of winning by betting on red on a standard American Roulette wheel is 47.37% each time - if I bet once. If I bet five times in a row the chances of my winning all five times is: 2.38%. That is the correct number.[v] If I extend my bet five times in a row the truth of the possibility of me winning every time (expressed in terms of probability) drops to less than three percent.
We can now try to stick some numbers to those five arguments we saw above.
(1) The world is getting exponentially warmer. The key word here is exponentially. I didn't say it and I don't believe it -- but proponents of global warming do. Here is their very famous "hockey stick" graph.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/Larrey%20hockey.JPG)
But, oops, here is a NASA graph that shows that nothing remotely resembling exponential warming has been going on in at least the last ten years.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/Larrey%20ocean%20heat.JPG)
Let's be very, very generous and give argument (1) -- that the world is exponentially heating -- a 75% possibility.
Argument (2) humans cause warming by emitting CO2. We do? The fact is that we emit around 3% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year.[vi] So what is the number that expresses the possibility that we are causing global warming? I would say 3% -- but that would make a lot of Warmageddoners angry. I will be generous. Even though we only release 3% of the CO2, let's take 50% of the blame.
Argument (3) that global warming is causing worldwide calamities seems, honestly, like a bad joke to me. Hurricanes were predicted to run rampant. They haven't. Polar bears were all going to die. They are doing just fine. No cities are sinking beneath the seas. None of the gloom and doom from the movie has taken place -- at least not on the consistent and rapidly increasing level that was predicted. Sorry, Warmageddoners but sane people just can't buy this part of the argument. I give it 20% -- and that is way too indulgent.
Argument (4) to prevent the disasters CO2 must be decreased. As I said, I am not seeing any disasters. But maybe it would just be nice not to have so much CO2 in the atmosphere. So, for aesthetic reasons alone, I give argument (4) 75%.
We have come to our final argument: (5) that the governments of the world are going to lower CO2 emissions by fiat and by treaty. It is hard for me to believe that rational people even offer this argument. If the Kyoto treaty is any indication, governments have been all talk and no action when it comes to actually lowering the levels of CO2 emitted by human beings into the atmosphere. As I have written elsewhere, governments are just not good at keeping promises and at creating something from nothing.
What is the chance that all of the governments of the world will unite to significantly lower emissions of CO2? A rational person would have to put the probability at close to zero. But I am bending over backwards here -- so I give it another 50%.
Given these lavish percentages what is the probability that the scenario laid out in the global warming scare is true?[vii] Ready for the answer: 2.8%.[viii] True Warmageddoners can even raise the probability of all five arguments to 80%. The result is still only a 32.7% possibility that Al Gore is right. That is a long way from being 100% true.
If I ran America, I would not bet the future of our economy on the successful outcome the proposed cap and trade legislation. The odds are against it.
Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. He is the author of The Order of the Beloved, and the new memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market.
Inductive reasoning always involves possibility. It moves from the particular facts to a general conclusion based on the number of occurrences of the particular facts. (The greater the number of particular occurrences of particular facts, the higher the probability that the general conclusion derived from those facts is true. In inductive logic the conclusion can never be 100% certain.) I have written about the problems of the claims of an exponential increase in the earth's temperature in several different places and will not discuss them in detail in this article.
[ii] There are several types of conditional logic, e.g., material, relevance, causal, indicative, etc. Rather than get into a debate on what specific kind of logic is in each of these steps, it is important for the reader to understand that every step of these conditionals (whatever the specific conditional logic of each individual step might be) must be met for the final conclusion (that governments must intervene to save the planet from global warming) is proven to be true. And since all of these arguments are based on probability, none of them can be absolutely proven. For example, anyone who asserts that #1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the sequence of arguments is true really means (and can only mean) that #1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 is possible. The important question, and we will address it [in note viiii] below, is: How possible?
[iii] The argument can still be technically valid but it cannot be true. This is an esoteric (and somewhat contentious) point in logic and simply included here as CYA.
[iv] It should be crystal clear by now that none of the arguments numbered (1) - (5) are absolutely true or absolutely false. They can't be. Logic and science don't work that way. They are either probably true or probably false. We will try to determine how probably true as we proceed.
[v] The math is .4737 ^5 or 47.37% times itself 5 times.
[vi] This 3% is an approximation based on yet another string of inductions -- because that is how this science works.
[vii] For the record, I don't think any of these five arguments rates more than a 10% probability of being true. So my own conclusion, giving each argument a solid 10%, is that there is a 0.001% chance that Al Gore is right about man made global warming.
[viii] .75 x .50 x .20 x .75 x .50 = 2.8125%. (See David C. Stove's The Rationality of Induction, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, for technical details that support my thesis -- especially, chapters 4 and 5.)
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/probability_and_global_warming.html at August 28, 2009 - 12:53:12 PM EDT
-
An amusing piece of equivocation and double-talk suggesting that though things are cooling now, it's likely a precursor to warming later.
World's climate could cool first, warm later
17:56 04 September 2009 by Fred Pearce, Geneva
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide
Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.
"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.
"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."
Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.
Nature vs humans
This is bad timing. The UN's World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.
But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.
Cold Atlantic
Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.
Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," he said.
Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.
In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.
The world may badly want reliable forecasts of future climate. But such predictions are proving as elusive as the perfect weather forecast.
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html
-
Should contraception qualify for climate funds?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10355608-54.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=GreenTech (http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10355608-54.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=GreenTech)
The next step is not good. Government...any government has no business here, it is a slippery slope.
Freki
"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." --James Madison
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves." William Pitt in the House of Commons November 18, 1783
-
Watching AGW evangelists abandon every scientific standard in their quest to further their unreasoned belief can certainly take some mind blowing turns.
The Dog Ate Global Warming
Interpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled?
By Patrick J. Michaels
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.
Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.
Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.
It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).
Enter the dog that ate global warming.
Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.
If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=
-
:-o :-o :-o
-
Times: Inconvenient Truth About Cooling May Retard Efforts to Fight Warming
JONATHAN TOBIN - 09.23.2009 - 5:44 PM
In an article that might well have deserved publication in the Onion, the New York Times introduced a heretical notion to its readership today. Despite the fact that any skepticism about global warming and the responsibility of humanity for this rise in temperatures is now considered proof of insanity, the Times reported that it appears more than likely that “global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”
This must come as quite a shock to an American public that has been relentlessly propagandized on this issue and convinced that the end of civilization as we know it is just around the corner. But facts are stubborn things, and for all the hoopla about “saving the planet,” now even the Times is prepared to admit that far from heating up at the exponential rates Al Gore has discussed to near universal applause, it appears that the story is a bit more complicated than he may have let on. Indeed, according to researchers from the British climate-change office and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, temperatures have hardly budged since 1998 and may well continue to dip in the coming decade.
Does this explode the whole global-warming theory? I don’t know, and I’d venture to say neither do most scientists, let alone Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin, who wrote today’s story. But it is interesting to note that this not insignificant piece of intelligence is presented not as a startling challenge to the environmentalist orthodoxy on global warming but as a troubling development that will give skeptics about the threat more ammunition. As Revkin writes, “The recent stability of global temperatures makes regular appearances in blog postings disputing the reality of global warming and is frequently invoked by pundits who oppose the climate bill that passed the House this year and is pending in the Senate.”
The problem, according to Revkin’s story, is that it has been difficult to get people to “understand and respond to environmental problems” and that “the current temperature stability has created confusion and apathy.”
In other words, facts contrary to the accepted narrative about the apocalyptic threat of global warming have clouded the picture and could make it harder to enforce uniformity of belief on the subject as well as to ram through Congress legislation that has the potential to cripple our economy. Or at least they will unless discussion about this is framed solely in terms of how best to get people to ignore some truly inconvenient truths.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/102852
-
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is petitioning the EPA to review their CO2 findings in that some of the data used to arrive at the current findings has been "lost" as revealed in the piece posted a couple entries above this one. PDF of the petition can be found here:
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/Petition%20Final%20CV.pdf
Synopsis here:
Home > News Release > Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data
Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data
by Christine Hall
October 5, 2009
Govt-Funded Research Unit Destroyed Original Climate Data
CEI Petitions EPA to Reopen Global Warming Rulemaking
Washington, D.C., October 6, 2009―In the wake of a revelation by a key research institution that it destroyed its original climate data, the Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.
In mid-August the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature data set because of an alleged lack of storage space. The CRU data have been the basis for several of the major international studies that claim we face a global warming crisis. CRU’s destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies.
In a declaration filed with CEI’s petition, Cato Institute scholar and climate scientist Patrick Michaels calls CRU’s revelation “a totally new element” that “violates basic scientific principles, and “throws even more doubt” on the claims of global warming alarmists.
CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide. EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision. As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.
CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”
Among CRU’s funders are the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy – U.S. taxpayers.
> Read the CEI petition to the EPA.
> Read more about the data dump: The Dog Ate Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels.
http://cei.org/news-release/2009/10/05/govt-funded-research-unit-destroyed-original-climate-data
-
2nd Post
Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era
Filed under: Antarctic, Climate Changes, Glaciers/Sea Ice, Polar —
Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?
The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:
A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.
(http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/Antarctica_icemelt.JPG)
Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).
The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.
It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).
But not a peep.
But such is not always the case—or rather, such is not ever the case when ice melt is pushing the other end of the record scale.
For instance, below is a collection of NASA stories highlighting record high amounts of melting (or in most cases, simply higher than normal amounts in some regions) across Greenland in each of the past 3 years, as ascertained by Marco Tedesco (the lead author of the latest report on Antarctica):
NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in Greenland
“In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years, according to a new NASA-funded project using satellite observations….”
NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places
“A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than twice the surface size of the U.S…”
Melting on the Greenland Ice Cap, 2008
“The northern fringes of Greenland’s ice sheet experienced extreme melting in 2008, according to NASA scientist Marco Tedesco and his colleagues.”
And lest you think that perhaps NASA hasn’t had any data on ice melt across Antarctica in past years, we give you this one:
NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland
“On the world’s coldest continent of Antarctica, the landscape is so vast and varied that only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in the snow melting across its valleys, mountains, glaciers and ice shelves. In a new NASA study, researchers [including Marco Tedesco] using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica’s largest ice shelf.”
But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer).
So, seriously, NASA, what gives? If ice melt is an important enough topic to warrant annual updates of the goings-on across Greenland, it is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica?
(These are not meant as rhetorical questions)
Reference
Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18502, doi:10.1029/2009GL039186.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/10/06/antarctic-ice-melt-at-lowest-levels-in-satellite-era/
-
I have recently been challenged to an email debate by a socialist highschool government teacher. He challenged me to present Dr. level Climatologist presenting evidence opposing Global warming. I suspect many of the scientist opposing it are not climatologist. Who are the learned heavy hitters leading the charge refuting the global warming stampede? What are the most damming studies I could point in his direction? BBG ,and anyone else, any help would be much appreciated. This is one of those guys who is smug and flipant and if you could help take him down a notch you would make my month! If I find any good evidence Ill post it here. Compling a list of the people and evidence against in one place could be helpful.
Thanks in advance
Freki
-
BBG is the man on this topic. Prepare for a dataflood. :-D
-
Well first off, proving something doesn't exist ain't science as science involves stating a theory and then assembling the data to prove or disprove it. Proving a negative is a losing proposition, the person positing a theory has the responsibility to prove it--it's not your job to prove its antithesis--so my initial take is the challenge is framed in a manner that stacks the deck against you to begin with. As such as in any debate I'd start it by defining just what the topic is. If he's silly enough to say something like "AGW is indisputably occurring," well he's foolishnes as there is plenty of dispute.
Second, the planet might be warming, and humans may have something to do with that. The planetary proxies show the temp has been all over the map over the planet's 3 billion years, changes that clearly could not be caused by humans. So, if AGW does exist, it's likely an impact that has to be teased out of the always changing global climate. As such the question becomes "how does one tell the difference between AGW and the climate change always occurring? Make your guy spell this stuff out for you; I've seen very little beyond spurious models that have failed to predict current cooling, and single variable CO2 theories where CO2 concentrations lag behind heating trends rather than predict 'em that attempt to discern human caused v. "normal" climate change. Bottom line, don't make the mistake that the zealots do by claiming certainty that we haven't the tools or datasets to have an informed opinion about.
Indeed, third the complexity of the global environment is incredible, accurate measurements over geologically significant periods of time are scant, many of the tools used to collect data are barely out of their packing crates--satellite data has only been available since the '80s, for instance, and the quality of that data has changed significantly in those 30 years--while dataset that were foundational for much of the AGW panic are proving spurious (see above). How does one use small, spurious datasets collected by new tools that have changed greatly in their short service span to create meaningful forecasts within a system so complex major variable remain undefined when forecasts based on older proven tools focussed on problems of smaller scope and complexity regularly fail to provide accurate predictions?
Finally, there's no winning with True Believers of any stripe. AGW zealots are right up there with the god-put-the-dinosaur-bones-there-to-test-our-faith bible thumping knuckleheads. No amount of proof is gonna sway 'em, and in fact there is far more evidence supporting evolution than there is AGW, yet the anti-evos shout all comers down none the less. Moreover, a lot of these fools are not really interested in having an informed discussion and instead try to wrap you up in endless laps around the same track until you tire of the panic mongering psalms they sing. Unless you like beating your head against a wall, I'd point out this similarity early and often. Note here that taking an agnostic view on AGW puts you in a better position as you can be open to compelling argument, while your opponent is not.
Finally for resources I like quite a few such as:
http://www.climateaudit.org/
This site does a great job of looking at specific elements of the data and debunking many claims. Hockey Stick source code errors were outed here, reporting station anomalies documented, and proxy data disputed, too.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/environment/story.html?id=c6a32614-f906-4597-993d-f181196a6d71&k=
Nice 10 part series that presents quite a few scientists who "deny" AGW and then speaks to the science behind their beliefs.
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/
Speaks to how forecasts should be arrived at.
http://icecap.us/index.php
Is a nice compendium of resources.
http://www.co2science.org/
Seeks to keep the CO2 debate focussed on science instead of hyperbole.
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2007/09/table-of-conten.html
Nice overview of the issue.
http://junkscience.com/
Another good clearing house.
Be aware that any random AGW zealot will respond to any source material by stating the author is somehow a tool of big oil or somesuch. If that occurs, research how much money in dumped into AGW research; if money drives the antis, surely it impacts the prow-AGW crowd, too.
Note also that perusing discussions around here under Environment and such will lead to a lot of interesting sources.
-
Freki, please post his arguments here as long as there is nothing confidential about wanting to save the planet. BBG has it right, proving something doesn't exist is a bit tough. Your first move IMO is to draw the allegations out of him and sampling scientists isn't science. For example, in the last 60 years - that should cover most of our lifetimes - how much is he alleging that the earth has warmed? (The answer is almost zero, maybe a half degree C and certainly within the margin of measurement sampling error.) If he doesn't like the time frame compare now with the 1930s, lol. And second, draw out from him what portion of that warming is caused by human CO2 emissions - that is the part they are trying to regulate and specifically how much is cased by each of the other top 5 or 10 causes. If he says that scientists have no idea, then you have met an honest man, lol. (Last time I looked into this I came up with numbers that human caused CO2 is about 2% of total CO2 production, warming from CO2 is about 2% of total warming and that total warming isn't more than about a tenth of a degree per decade. If he concedes anything at all resembling these numbers then I would concede to him that humans caused CO2 emissions are likely a 0.0004 contributor to the tenth of a degree warming that has plagued our planet, and that we should all be more careful - but not shut down our economic system.
For a control group, I would like to know what the greenhouse gas effect would be if 7 billion people on earth owned a horse and buggy and heated their home with firewood.
-
A couple more thoughts:
Seeking a "Doctor level climatologist" who doesn't do the AGW tango is about as likely to bear fruit as seeking a Bishop level atheist. Climatology is a new science, climatologists are a new breed of scientist, most of them products of an educational system that has had an inordinate amount of money injected into it with which to chase AGW boogymen so it's not particularly surprising that most toe the party line. Rigor is rigor regardless of degree path, however, and good science cares not one whit what kind of tam you wear or what sort of filigree your robe sports. You should avoid arguments that depend on appeals to authority, and focus instead on ones that speak to hard science regardless of pedigree.
There's a polymath who embodies this point, Lord Monkton, who has some brilliant pieces about this stuff, including:
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1533290/Climate-chaos-Dont-believe-it.html
-
Wow, the MSM is taking note.
What happened to global warming?
By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.
They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.
But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.
The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.
And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.
He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.
If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.
Ocean cycles
What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.
“ In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down ”
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.
The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.
But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."
So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.
They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.
But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.
The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.
In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.
In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.
What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.
To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.
Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.
But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.
So what can we expect in the next few years?
Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.
It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).
Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.
One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
-
BbG I will post the emails as they develop. I need to go through the info you have given me and compose the first one. Stay tuned :-D
Here is the challenge:
On Global Warming.
I have done tons of research as well. Here is a challenge for you.
Lets define Global warming -- it has two major premises.
1) The average temperature of the earth is rising.
2) Man is causing/contributing greatly to this.
When Newt Gingrich debated Al Gore on this topic he shocked everyone by
saying Premise 1 and 2 are true.
Your challenge.
Go out and look up any study you want on Global warming affirming
premise #1 and #2 or Denying either premise. (For the record the deniers
used to say "its all lies" now they say #1 is true but not #2 -- they
have already flip-flopped on the first premise due to undeniable
evidence.)
Of the people writing the articles saying man is not responsible find
ONE who has:
A) A PhD in a relevant field - preferable in climate.
B) Not being paid and dependant upon an energy company (Usually coal and
oil)
You will find a few climatologists who are paid shills for the coal
industry who deny premise #2 and you will find a few independant PhD's
with degrees in math and petroleum engineering, but good luck finding an
independant climatologist with a PhD.
Ask brent about the Discover Institute -- they fund a ton of these
studies have Bachelors degrees in Chemistry!!
In all my searches I have found 3 independant qualified scientist who
say premise #2 is not true.
Guess what % of PhD climatologists say premise #2 is true? Do you
dare???
If you accidently come across the petition of scientists who think
global warming is a hoax.. you already lost. (Hint: Homer Simpson is one
of the signatories)
-
Pulling up chair and a bowl of popcorn , , ,
-
As shown elsewhere in this thread, the earth appears to be currently cooling, which kinda does damage to premise one, and makes one question premise two. How are all the studies you speak to impacted by the current cooling? I know the party line is "cooling now will lead to greater warming down the line," but seeing how all the models over which so much hay has been made failed to predict the current cooling, why should any of that be believed?
Second, I work with a group of guerilla scientists very much like those at Climate Audit who do a lot of good, leading edge, top in the field science. When I started working with this group my creds amounted to a GED, wouldn't be surprised if some of my compatriots were high school dropouts, and there aren't a lot of advanced degrees among this group. But good science is good science and you don't need an advanced degree to produce experiments with replicable outcomes. Your focus on degrees plays into a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority." Alas, authorities get things wrong on a regular basis, while amateurs have a long history of making significant contributions. In short, the advance degree in specific field fetish doesn't advance any argument, and petitions signed or percentage within a field favoring an opinion don't count for all that much. Science is not a popularity contest.
Third, if "industry shills" produce science that is tainted by money that hence should be ignored, why doesn't that apply to the pro AGW side where hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into research and careers established with said funds? When you start finding strident consensus in science, particularly in a science as young as climatology, red lights ought to be flashing. I can think of no other field where new theories are accepted with such unanimity, and that ought to be a red flag rather than a talking point. Be that as it may, financial interest is not a one way street here.
Finally, what datasets are these near unanimous pronouncements made from? Is it the hockey stick data made with the bad source code that had to be teased out as its authors would not share it (not sharing datasets and source info in science!!!)? Was it the European surface temp data which has since been declared lost (see above). Is it the US surface datasets that have been shown to be faulty? Is it the proxy data, some of which has been shown to be misinterpreted? Maybe systems as complex and uncharted in their interactions as the global climate aren't likely to be established to an incontrovertible degree in the 30 years climatology has been around, or maybe making unassailable pronouncements about narrow slices of the climate within its 3 billion year timeframe are the height of arrogance?
Bottom line, it looks to me like you've been sucked in to arguing dubious "facts" under dubious auspices. Hope you'll forgive me if I don't jump into the same.
-
I agree with all of what BBG wrote. I wrote previously that polling scientists is not science and would add that credential-checking scientists is also not science. Before all major breakthroughs in science, nearly all scientists agreed that the opposite was true.
If I were you I would ignore the side-fights of credentials and personalities, knowing that plenty of able and respected people will back you up, and as a first reply I would only ask to clarify what he is alleging.
"Man is causing/contributing greatly..." When they ask for more money at my daughter's school they say that ninety-some percent rate the school district as good or excellent. Well there is a BIG difference between good and excellent in the school business. Why do they lump those together? Obviously to skew a point and make good sound like excellent instead of like fair or mediocre or adequate. Obama's stimulus has "created or saved xx million jobs. How many did it create and how many did it save and why did they lump those together. Obviously to make an inference while making it impossible for you to refute what isn't even really alleged.
But your rival and the media of our time writes: "2) Man is causing/contributing greatly to this." What the hell does that mean?
----
I would only reply in the first inning with a clarification request:
"Lets define Global warming -- it has two major premises." - agree
"1) The average temperature of the earth is rising." - Let's clarify so we know what we are agreeing on here. What is the rise (very exact or within a specific range) since say the middle of the last century until now?
"2) Man is causing/contributing greatly to this." - Must know what you mean by cause or contributing greatly in order to answer this. Please specify what portion of the rise, precise or within a range, is directly attributable to CO2 emissions (that is the issue of the day) and what the other specific portions of the rise are attributable to each of the other factors, if any, that play a role in warming.
---
If he says that on both counts scientists don't know, then he is honest and you are done. If he sidesteps and fires back again with 'everyone who is anyone agrees...' then I would ignore him until he can put to words and numbers what it is that he is alleging.
-
Climate Myths and National Security
By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
The President of the United States recently told the United Nations that "global warming" poses a threat to national security and may engender conflicts as populations are displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms etc. etc. etc. However, it is now clear that there is no basis for the notion that the barely-detectable human influence on the climate is likely to prove a threat to climate, still less to national security.
The first principle to which any national security advisor must adhere is that of objective truth. Though he must have an understanding of politics, he is not a politician: he is a truth-bearer. Therefore, he begins by narrowing down the issue to a single, central question whose answer determines whether the suggested threat is real. He then tries to find the truthful answer to that question, and draws his conclusion from that.
Quid enim est veritas? What, then, is the truth? The single question whose answer gives us the truth about the climate question is this: By how much will any given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration warm the world? We now know the answer. The oceans, which must store 80-90% of all heat-energy accumulated in the atmosphere as a result of the radiative imbalance caused by greater greenhouse-gas concentration, have shown no net accumulation of heat for almost 70 years, implying a very small influence of CO2 on temperature (Douglass & Knox, 2009). The devastating analysis of cloud-albedo effects shortly to be published by Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama at Huntsville will show that the UN has wrongly decided that cloud changes reinforce greenhouse warming, when in fact they substantially offset it. Repeated studies of the tropical upper troposphere (e.g. Douglass et al., 2008) show that it is failing to warm at thrice the surface rate as required by all of the UN's models, again implying very low climate sensitivity. The clincher is Professor Richard Lindzen's meticulous recent paper demonstrating - by direct measurement - that the amount of radiation escaping from the Earth's atmosphere to space is many times greater than the UN's models are all told to believe. From this, the world's most formidable atmospheric physicist has calculated that a doubling of CO2 concentration, expected over the next 150 years, would cause 0.75 C (1.5 F) of warming, at most: not the 3.4 C (6 F) that the UN takes as its central estimate.
Most analysts would stop there. Yet some might ask, "Suppose that the single satellite on which Lindzen's results depend is defective. What then?" They might consider the economic cost of attempting to mitigate the "global warming" which, as our Monthly Reports demonstrate, is not actually happening. The figures turn out to be startlingly simple. To mitigate just 1 C (2 F) of warming, one must forego the emission of 2 trillion tons of CO2. The world emits just 30 billion tons a year. So the analyst, as a thought-experiment, would shut down the entire world economy, emitting no CO2 at all. Even then, and even on the incorrect assumption that the UN's exaggerated projections of the effect of CO2 on temperature are correct, it would take 67 years to mitigate 1 C warming. Preventing the 3.4 C (6 F) warming that the UN's climate panel thinks would occur in 100 years would take 225 years without any transportation, and with practically no electrical energy. The national security advisor would at that point advise his head of government that there has never been any security threat less grave, or more expensive to prevent, than the non-problem that is "global warming". It is the fearmongers that are the real national security threat.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/climate_myths_and_national_sec.html at October 12, 2009 - 09:10:05 AM EDT
-
Freki - I wanted to add the names Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and Dr. Roy Spencer, climate change research scientist for the Univ. of Alabama Huntsville to your list as sensible minds on the subject with ample qcredentials, but they are already both quoted in BBG's last post. I'm sure the alarmist is aware of their work and has left wing hate site dirt ready to smear them personally rather than address their scientific studies.
The idea that the coal industry for example, as it is directly threatened with tax and regulatory extinction, should not be funding any scientific atmospheric research regarding the result of their process is antithetical to the founding concept of freedom.
-
Doug hit the nail on the head, any scientist who does not adhere to the AGW party line is quickly branded a tool of big energy; no anecdotal association is too minor to hyperventilate about. Which ought to be a fatal move on the AGWer's part as every AGW scientist I am aware of is very beholden to research money and the peer review structure that all tend to lead a singular, panic mongering, direction.
-
This is good stuff guys, thanks. I am working up the ground rules for the debate as you suggested, life has been slowing me down but it is in motion stay tuned.
-
Another good source, Anthony Watt's blog:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
-
Excuses for Lack of Global Warming
Jonathan David Carson, PhD
"What Happened to Global Warming?" asks Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in its October 2, 2009, issue, before immediately answering, "Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit." By a "bit," AAAS means a "few years."
The "blogosphere," it seems, "has been having a field day with global warming's apparent decade-long stagnation." The world is supposed to sign a global warming agreement in a few years less than a bit, in Copenhagen in December, to be exact, but "What's the point, bloggers ask?"
So global warming skeptics are "bloggers." Here are a few of these bloggers:
· S. Fred Singer--first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service and Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia
· Dr. David Bromwich--President of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology
· Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
· Dr. Christopher Landsea--past Chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones
· Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society
· Prof. Freeman Dyson-- another of the world's foremost physicists
· Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo
· Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research Center
· Dr. Claude Allegre--member, United States National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science
· Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
· Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria Project
· Dr. Richard Tol--principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University
· Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany
· Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, Vice-President of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy
· Dr. Edward Wegman--former Chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences
For a less incomplete list of bloggers, see The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon. Another list can be found here. A list of 31,000 scientist-bloggers can be found here.
"Climate researchers" do not deign to answer back in the blogosphere, according to AAAS, preferring instead to reply "in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature": "The pause in warming is real enough, but it's just temporary, they are argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don't last forever."
After pretending that global warming skeptics are bloggers, not scientists, and that their home is the blogosphere, not the peer-reviewed literature, AAAS attributes the more-than-decade-long failure of the globe to warm to a "natural swing in climate." In other words, when the climate warms, it is as a result of anthropogenic causes, but when it cools or fails to warm, it is as a result of natural causes. Increases of temperature are human-caused. Decreases are nature-caused.
Skeptics have been saying for decades that the warming from about 1978 to 1998, which was after all only 0.40C, was probably due to natural causes; now AAAS says that the flat or downward trend since 1998 is due to natural causes, which had nothing to do with the rise between 1978 and 1998. They told us that the temperature of the earth would continue to rise, and when it did not, they said, see, our critics were wrong.
People who argue this way are not scientists, but lawyers with a bad case.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/10/excuses_for_lack_of_global_war.html at October 13, 2009 - 01:10:14 PM EDT
-
This is the email (not by me but my brother who is fronting this debate, he got me into this :-D)sent to the government teacher we'll call him GT. I will post his responses when they occur.
==========================================
Okay, when I have time over the next few days I will look into this
issue of global warming and the articles and science data that is out
there. I have not done this before and think it will be very
enlightening. I will say up front again that it makes sense to me
logically that man is having an effect on the earth's temperature, but
to what degree? Hopefully our discussion will shed some light. Brent
mentions that there is a correlation with a rise of CO2 with
temperature, but it seems to be pretty small, averaging .02 degrees a
year based on the numbers he emailed (not sure where they come from or
what they are based on) over the last 58 years. I think he will be
helpful to look at some of the data and articles I am currently
reviewing.
Before we start, we need to clarify a couple of the parameters of your
challenge.
1) The average temperature of the earth is rising." - Let's clarify so
we know what we are agreeing on here. What is the rise (very exact or
within a specific range) since say the middle of the last century until
now? How far back are you stating the rise has occurred? 58 years
above as Brent states, earlier, what?
2) Man is causing/contributing greatly to this. - I would like to know
what you mean by cause or contributing greatly in order to answer this.
Please specify what portion of the rise, precise or within a range, is
directly attributable to CO2 emissions (that is the issue of the day)
and what the other specific portions of the rise are attributable to
each of the other factors, if any, that play a role in global warming.
I assume you know this information.
Finally, you have not answered a previous request I had as to how you
determine what scientist is paid or funded by what industry if any? It
can go both ways, those that are studies funded by funds from the energy
industry as well as those from the so called green industry. This would
be helpful to know how you determined this as I review articles on the
internet.
Thanks and looking forward to an honest discussion. Hope to find some
non-biased articles and data out there.
-
GT's responce 1
The biggest global warming study on earth is
being done by the ICPP. It is comprised of hundreds if not thousands of
scientists. While some of them might have some secret agenda ( I doubt
it) to prove global warming is man made, these are scientists whose
motivation in life is to understand phenomenon. Do you believe that
evolution is driven by ideology or science? What about geology? What
about computer science? Are these ideologically driven sciences or are
people just trying to explain the physical world around us?
So in order for the ICPP report to conclude that man is responsible for
global warming, that would mean that thousands of scientists are in some
large secret conspiracy to lie to us, because they are.... what? Mad at
human beings? Mad at coal companies? Do you believe thousands of PhD
climatologists are out to destory oil companies because of some
philosophical objections to cars? Occums Razor.
A) There is a global wide conspiracy among scientists to destory energy
companies for reasons unknown.
B) The science is legit and they are just trying to get to the truth of
why the average temperature of the earth is rising.
Craig - Any time I do research I generally go online and try to find out
what I can about the author of the piece. There are many websites
dedicated to just keep track of who is paying people to do research or
lobby.
A good one is www.sourcewatch.com
Frequently I will get a "hit" on a webpage with some bio of the author.
Then from there you learn about organizations and jobs that they have
held in the past. From there I start googling these organizations or
corporations and keep following the information all the way to the
original source. Lots of the scientists have their own webpages. And it
is quite easy to see who is funding their research. Hypothetical
Example.
John doe - works for The Patriot Corporation - funded solely by Bob
McDoe - who owns Global Research Associaties - whose only client is
Exxon. Then you can go look up all the employees of Global Research
Associates and find out who they are and who pays them. And when it
comes to global warming deniers it always goes back to energy companies,
generally the coal industry followed by the oil industry.
==============================================================
Brothers email back
As to global warming discussion, thanks for the website, that should be
helpful. I don't want to get off topic with you as to the challenge you
made. So please respond to my previous email and we can get going.
As
for the discussion about agenda and bias of the scientists (especially
from coal and oil backed industry) , I think that is part of the
discussion but not everything. First I want to look at the science and
data, so answer the questions I had to you in the last email. Second,
remember, if so called "industry shills" produce science that is tainted
by money that should then be ignored, that would also apply to those
scientist funded by the pro global warming side. To think that there is
only one group out there with an agenda willing to bend statistics and
found data is naive. Again, the bias of who is funding the study is
important, but I think it is best to set the parameters of the
discussion like you said. Get back to me on that, we will look at the
data and the science and go from there.
BTW, Scott sent me a good quote yesterday from Thomas Jefferson.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who
reads nothing but newspapers."
Goes to the bias in journalism that seems to permeate all our
discussions.
=============================================================
GT's responce 2
1) If you read my last email, I am questioning the validity of assuming
of the global warming scientists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change
Here is the wiki page about the ICPP. The way they do the research is
they outsource the projects and data to a collection of thousands of PhD
researchers mostly at universities but also places like NASA, National
Science Foundation, etc. So all these individual scientists are running
off and performing scientific experiments. Then after a lenghty peer
review process, where other scientists double check your data and
actually repeat your experiment, they determine which data is legit and
which was unable to be reproduced etc. Then the ICPP complies all of
this data into reports that come out about every 3-5 years. The next one
is scheduled to be released in 2014 I believe.
So again, in order for the data to be biased it would mean that
thousands of scientists all over the globe are in on it.
There is some critique of the process and you can read about it on the
page I linked. There have been 2-3 prominant scientists felt the report
was not accurate.
2) You can pick the years. There are average global temperatures that go
back thousands of years but they are based on geological inference and
data. Once man started recording temps and recording. Man was recording
global temps fairly early on, but they were not recording temperatures
at the poles and arctic/desert regions consistantly until about the
1970's. Thus from the 1970's on we have the most accurate information.
But in terms of determining if man is responsible for global warming -
the trend is to look at temperatures from the beginning of the
industrial revolution.
So in answer to your question... you pick the years. The average temp
going up is not in debate any longer, it is 100% conclusive that it is
rising.
The most important factor is what is causing it. So I recommend you
focus on that research.
So you need to look up all the possible causes then start sorting
through the data and arrive at which explanation is the most accurate
and consistant.
-
Most of the IPCC findings have been written by UN bureaucrats rather than thousands of scientists, while scientists who object to the sweeping statements in various reports don't find their objections noted in IPCC reports. Seeing how other UN panels frequently support all manner of thugs, criminals, and dictators, this should not come as a surprise. Further, the IPCC report is not peer reviewed in any normal sense so really shouldn't have the weight of peer reviewed publications.
Some sources you can use to chase down info on this front:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/the_ipcc_should_leave_science.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/12/ipcc_we_dont_predict_we_projec.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/un_climate_reports_they_lie.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4457
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-pm-20090212.html
As for Wikipedia sources, it's well known that the editor controlling the pages examining AGW in a zealot:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjU1ZDBhOGExOWRlNzc5ZDcwOTUxZWM3MWU2Mjc5MGE=
As for claims that thousands of scientists would all have to be in someone's pocket, I'd argue that governments is in the business of governing. Nothing gives government more license to govern than a crisis. Government hence underwrites those who predict doom that requires government intervention by awarding them research funds to produce studies supporting that take, while people who point out that surrendering huge chunks of the economy to government control that will unlikely have much public benefit are less likely to get government funding to do that research with.
That's what leaps to mind at this point. . . .
-
Freki, People like that are fun to discuss science with. Besides counting scientists, I particularly like the way he condescends, as if you weren't able to google without some steering. Seriously I like the way you don't show all your cards. Just within the discussions here is enough material to rip the report to shreds, but that's not the way to begin.
He starts his IPCC point saying with hundreds if not thousands presumably support him and closes saying it's thousands. Guess that sounded bigger. But he didn't even try to quantify what the scientists are saying, even though you asked very specifically. If he thinks only one or two 'prominant' scientists have a question then you have already done more research than him.
He did say, you pick the time frame - you already did. Then he wants to steer you past the 70s because of inaccurate data but the two decades without warming coming into the 70s led to the Time Magazine headline warning us of the danger of a new ICE AGE: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html. This of course was the consensus of the best scientists and most accurate information available. He says the measurements weren't accurate then, and they aren't accurate now either, but I wouldn't go there. Just look for the data. Also he would like to steer you away from 2008-2009 because that indicates another decade, since 1998, without warming that NONE of the models of the greatest scientists in the world could explain or predict.
But since he says you pick the time frame and you did, middle of the last century until and including 2009. I would re-iterate the 2 questions already posed and if he prefers that you just do your own research, you can easily delay, read the IPCC study, note that the answers aren't in there in spite of thousands of scientists checking and double-checking each other's work and agreeing with each other - qualitatively - that man's impact is large and something must be done.
You have clearly won the debate over bias and I would accept your victory silently and drop it. If a scientist would not tilt his view or his emphasis over funding then same obviously applies for scientists with 'other' funding, or vice versa. What he doesn't see is that even if 90% agree with today's conventional wisdom and 10% don't, nothing inherent in the science tells us which group has it right. History includes plenty of examples of when the consensus was mistaken, see Time magazine 1974 regarding global cooling or anything in the last two centuries that pertains to quantum entanglement.
BTW, IPCC doesn't publish measured temperatures from anywhere. They run their analysis on data that has been adjusted by ever-changing, unpublished 'correction' algorithms. What is the margin of error? They don't say.
As soon as you can pin him down on an alarming amount of continuous and accelerating, measured warming and that human causes are the main cause, say at least a third or a half of that, then his alleged consensus of scientists will quickly disappear, I predict.
-
(note there has been a lot of back and forth but nothing worth posting till this.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GT
5. The crux of the argument so far seems to be how do you measure what
mankind's CO2 impact is versus the CO2 from natural conditions on the
planet (cow fart, calcite deposits being released, volcanic activity,
etc.) Bryan what is the response you have to this? I think it seems
perfectly logical for Newt Gingrich on the debate with Al Gore to
concede points 1 and 2 of your challenge (I have not yet) and still
stand by the statement that mankind is not CAUSING global warming. It
seems likely there is contribution by mankind (almost certainly), but
how do we know how much?
1) I have a question: I always bold your comments to which I am
responding, are they showing up as bold when you receive them?
2) Newt Gingrich said man IS causing global warming. He says the debate
should be about how to fix it, and is not debating that man is not
responsible anymore. He did a lot of research prior to his debate with
Gore and couldn't find a way to refute premise 1 and 2. (last refresher
premise 1 = earth is warming premise 2 = man is responsible)
3) Maybe brent can tell us how they measure the sources of CO2. I am not
sure how they figured it out, but I know they claim they did figure it
out and thats why they said they are 95% certain man is responsible.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Brother
1. No they are not. Email is a funny thing, I always have problems
when I try to change font color etc..
2. Okay, I have no idea what Newt said (I was not aware of the debate
and have not looked it up), but looking so far at the evidence I have
seen and listening to Brent, I stand by my point. One can concede point
1 and state that man contributes to global warming and still stand by
the statement that man does not cause global warming.
3. I will say that I don't think anyone is measuring those sources nor
can they likely easily do so. I think this is one of the major problems
with the global warming debate No good data collection to make a good
scientific conclusion. Ask Brent, but I think you lose the challenge on
this point right here. Not to mention the fact Brent mentioned about
the Carbon Cycle. 150 years for CO2. Let me know what you say to this,
I think you need to do some research on this as to what other sources on
earth do to produce CO2.
-
brother
By the way, I have comments as to the ICPP article you quoted but want
to take one thing at a time. Lets get past the point 3 below and we can
touch on that if need be. I am still waiting for Brent to respond to
the questions I posed to him yesterday as well.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Geologist
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/nocs/news.php?action=display_news&idx=628
Here is an article you might find interesting with some new CO2
production data.
If you want to check real time data and data from I think 200 to
present, NOAA has a good site for understanding how data is taken,
pre-processed and displayed. You really have to look at the ACTUAL data
and look at the simulated model data that's is extrapolated from it. I
trust only the real data, the simulated stuff can be anything someone
wants to program there and breakdown statistically. This is the site I
use for my greenhouse gas project in Earth Science meteorology section.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/co2timeseries.php
Go here and look at other links at their home site, they have good
carbon maps too, but still keep in mind simulated information.
1. the temperature is rising slowly. It does get cooler and warmer from
year to year, month to month, season to season, the increase is slope
average of all that data.
2. There are many CO2 producers, animals plants, dead animals, methane
in ice, or seabed, volcanoes degassing, etc. The rise in CO2 since the
1800's is attributed to Humans more so than anything else because we
know we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere and the math of CO2 tonnage
as it equates to rise in CO2 concentrations seems to be fairly close.
(Has there been an increase in natural sources? Don't know, not measured
or observed in the detail that industrial/fossil fuel CO2 production has
been).
3. Sometimes CO2 rise doesn't equal Temperature rise, sometimes CO2
decrease doesn't mean Temperature decrease. I think with those
measurements there are the other factors like reflection of solar
energy, conductance of land surface versus ocean surface, changes in
water currents, eruptions that block solar radiation, a dust storm that
has a nuclear winter effect, there can be lots of cases where
temperature can change regardless of what CO2 is doing. Though to be a
global factor, it would have to be far reaching and significant event to
be long term effecting.
4. This is true, we wont feel the effects of our CO2 production for 140
years. What we see now in the rise of CO2 is largely industrialization
effect of the 19th-20th century efforts. NOAA people think that if we
stop now, CO2 will get up to 550-600pm before declining (from todays
present 385 level). We are shortsighted, and not likely to feel very
successful if we cut off CO2 emissions and nothing happens, except CO2
continues to increase.
5. We definitely contribute, not even worth discussing. Measurements of
stuff we observe can be equated to fossil fuel production. We will have
to identify all the major CO2 producing natural sources and figure out a
way to extrapolate that data before we can determine what proportion of
the whole is human contribution.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Brother
As Brent just indicated, obviously we contribute to CO2 (I agree), but
to say that man is causing global warming, seems to me there are other
sources out there that contribute to it as well, have those levels been
tested, what puts out more? The challenge was that we are the #1
effect, that we greatly contribute. How does solar radiation impact
global warming? These are questions that I pose to you. I will look
through the IPCC report, I have already been looking through it.
As for the methods of collection and the analysis related thereto, check
out these articles that discuss the tactics of data collection and
analysis of the IPCC.
There are several complaints from scientist stating their reports were
edited! Several scientist disagree with the conclusions even though
they contributed data..editing again?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/the_ipcc_should_leave_science.htm
l
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/12/ipcc_we_dont_predict_we_proj
ec.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/un_climate_reports_they_lie.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4457
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-pm-20090212.html
Here is an interesting article suggesting the sun cycles contribute to
global warming.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
All this being said, I would like to know what percentage of the worlds
overall CO2 emissions and heating of the earth is related to man. There
are the cows and deer, the methane sea beds, the solar radiation, the
volcanoes, and whatever else. Bryan indicates man is no smaller than
95% of it. Show me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GT
Craig said:
3. I will say that I don't think anyone is measuring those sources nor
can they likely easily do so. I think this is one of the major problems
with the global warming debate No good data collection to make a good
scientific conclusion. Ask Brent, but I think you lose the challenge on
this point right here. Not to mention the fact Brent mentioned about
the Carbon Cycle. 150 years for CO2. Let me know what you say to this,
I think you need to do some research on this as to what other sources on
earth do to produce CO2.
Bryan replies:
The whole point of the IPCC is to get good data.
Here is a link to just the scientific methodology and observations
concerning Global warming in the last major report.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assess
ment_report_wg1_report_the_physical_science_basis.htm
It is thousands of pages long in painstaking detail to describe and
explain how exactly they gathered their data, and includes more
importantly how they are testing human created sources of CO2 versus
natural occuring production. The methodology looks at the entire
composition of the atmosphere and what chemicals and particles are
present, how they affect the temperature, and how they are changing.
In this VAST VAST report that only looks at the methodology, I stumbled
across something useful.
They have a FAQ page:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-faqs.pdf
It includes charts, graphs, and data and dumbs it all down so that we
can understand it. Then if your trying to disprove it, you can just
start making searches for claims made in the FAQ and finding criticism.
If you really want to delve into the science you might have the time to
read though the thousands of pages describing methodology and then
finding criticisms of such.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
GT
I guess Americanthinker is one of those amateur groups you were talking
about.
You realize they are an openly biased non-scientific group of
conservatives right?
Here is todays scientific headline:
Is Obama Turning Us into the Next Evil Empire?
They also were in on the "Obama is not a citizen" and did a lot of
'research' through Illuminati Productions to 'research' that Obama was
not born in the USA.
This is a website 100% dedicated to arguing against liberals and for
conservatives. Perhaps you could link their source material so we can
examine their methodology.
The Cato institute, which I read from time to time and like to see their
side of the story..
It is 100% owned and funded by Kosh Industries. I will bet you can't
guess what they do...
Kosh industries holds the record for the largest penalty ever paid for
violating environmental regulations.
Cato also got famous in the 90's for printing lots of research about
cigarettes are not harmful.. so smoke up!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother
Let me know your answer to the question I posed to you, or are you
needing to research it. You might, even though you say you have
researched this topic extensively. Also, let me know what you think of
the article on solar cycles. Thanks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gt
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/un_climate_reports_they_lie.html
This was the only link that worked other than the cato ones.
I noticed that it was an article trying to refute the hockey stick graph.
The major counter example of why it was bogus was the study by Moberg A, Sonechkin DM, Holmgren K, Datsenko NM, Karlén W
I am looking for info on them, and currently they seem to be biomedical experts.
They obtained their temperatures by looking at ice core samples from Greenland.
Maybe Brent can make more sense of their methodology.
I also noted the article was using Steven McIntyre as their main source.
He has a bachlors degree so I guess he qualifies as your Amateur scientist.
His main criticism was of the methodolgoy that produced the hockey stick graph. He has not performed any tests himself, but
seems to be good at finding problems with data he reads.
The IPCC listened to his criticism and in the 4th IPCC report addressed his concerns in chapter 6 of the Physical Science
Basis group. They said that while the methodology had some theoretical componants to it, any mistakes or guesstimations had
a very minor impact on the initial report.
Maybe Brent knows more about this as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
gt
Page 268 of
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf
addresses exactly what the Americanthinker link was saying.
The following is copied directly from the report and is a criticism of the work done in the Medieval temp theories.
Much of the evidence used by Lamb was drawn from a very diverse mixture of sources such as historical information, evidence
of treeline and vegetation changes, or records of the cultivation of cereals and vines. He also drew inferences from very
preliminary analyses of some Greenland ice core data and European tree ring records. Much of this evidence was diffi cult to
interpret in terms of accurate quantitative temperature infl uences. Much was not precisely dated, representing physical or
biological systems that involve complex lags between forcing and response, as is the case for vegetation and glacier changes.
Lamb's analyses also predate any formal statistical calibration of much of the evidence he considered. He concluded that
'High Medieval' temperatures were probably 1.0°C to 2.0°C above early 20th-century levels at various European locations
(Lamb, 1977; Bradley et al., 2003a).
-------------------------------------------------------
Brother
Good job of looking at that, I will take a look at what you have here.
I would like to know what percentage of the worlds overall CO2 emissions and heating of the earth is related to man. There
are the cows and deer, the methane sea beds, the solar radiation, the volcanoes, and whatever else. Bryan indicates man is
no smaller than 95% of it. Show me.
--------------------------------------------------------
Gt
I am not sure what your question is.
Also you misrepresented what I said. The ICPP says they are 95% certain
that man is responsible for the increased temperatures. They don't give
a % that man is responsible. So its not "man is responsible for 95%" of
the increase, its man is responsible for the increase and they are 95%
certain of that.
Still need to read the solar cycles thing, but I know it has already
been refuted so it shouldn't be hard to find again.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother
Let me reiterate the points that you started with. You said man is the
#1 cause of global warming. I am saying and Brent has indicated there
are many sources for the heating of the earth. I want to know from you
or a source you know of that shows the percentage of man compared to
these other sources of contribution and cause. Is man producing 20% of
the overall CO2 released into the earth that is causing global
temperatures to rise, is it 95%? Do CO2 emission cause 80% of the
global heating and solar cycles cause the remaining 20%. If there is no
evidence or breakdown then I think that is a big gap in the scientific
data as to how much impact man has. Do you understand the question, I
thought I was being clear. My guess is there is no way to tell and
thus there is a big gap in the data that leads us only to be able to
speculate.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Geologist
There isn't any problem with the hockey stick, you can take the data yourself and plot it up and derive the same curves from
the data. The issue that the conservative group illustrates is, again, the natural cooling and warming through history (see
the dryas_event jpg I attached).
The article didn't say it exactly, because they want you to be convinced that the data is somehow wrong. What the scientists
had a problem with was the predictive model (based on the real data). The hockey-stick predictive model has CO2 and temp.
skyrocketing, and if the predictive model parameters are flawed, then the prediction is non-sense. I would ignore all
predictive rhetoric (from either side of the argument).
He sent along some good graphs but not sure how to get them to show. I have no place to upload them to, so if you would like them message me and I will email them to you. They are on temp change over the last 2000 years and the dryes event.
From information I trust, CO2 has increased 38% since pre-industrial
times. I think that caps human involvement. Of that 38%, about 20% of it
has been in the last 30 years or so. There's no way to tell what the
natural contribution to that increase was (or maybe natural CO2 is down
and human contribution is higher?), I'd like Bryan to find it, because I
haven't found any good quantitative info. Just qualitative stuff, like
seabed methane here!, coal bed methane there!, but no numbers, volumes
%'s on a global scale.
------------------------------------------------------------------
GT
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15045637
A report about a change in our atmosphere.
They said:
The latter show that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases account for ∼80% of the simulated rise in tropopause height over 1979-1999.
It is on a more specific topic than just global warming. Brent will make sense of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Geologist
I don’t like the first charts because the group sulfates, they group CO2, they group all of these factors together and lump them as human induced factors, without separating where that CO2 comes from. It makes it appear as an assumption that all CO2 comes from humans.
The article of the troposphere is saying that that layer of the atmosphere is getting thicker and ozone layers in the stratosphere are thinning (something has to get thinner since our atmosphere isn’t growing bigger and bigger). The main reason for growth is greenhouse gases, it doesn’t say which ones, nitrous oxides, sulfates CFC's?, CO2? Some of those, like CFC's and man-made aerosols we can track and definitely say are manmade, the other gases I think they are assuming are man-made, can't really tell with out looking at the data in the actual paper.
Here is an idea, put an isotope or bond a CFC type gas to CO2 from man-made sources and then you'd be able to tell which part is natural or not. (i.e. contaminate the gas). Wonder if anyone has tried that.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Friend's comment sent to all involved in Debate. I am sure he found this somewhere but not sure where.]
The report was primarily authored by Benjamin Santer, who was accused by the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) in 1996 of purposely altering data in chapter 8 of the IPCC report that would could cast doubt to the influence of man in climate change. Similar claims were made by the Global Climate Coalition (although they are represented by the energy consortium). Santer responded by admitting alterations were made at the behest of governments and non-government organizations, of which he declined to identify by name. The conclusion of Chapter 8, he states, was the same despite purposely removing such phrases of doubt in the evidence at hand leaving only 20% of the chapter to discuss potential doubts. Santer states that the conclusion, "Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited....nevertheless, the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate," was not changed. What he did instead was remove phrases which might encourage a differing interpretation of that conclusion and thus the intended focus of the IPCC report, which shows bias.
A balance of evidence suggests there is a discernible human influence - this is hardly scientific. Allow me to break down this language - A balance means that only a majority (>50% which could be 51%) of available evidence which they admittedly cannot quantify, suggests (not proves, not shows, not makes evident) that there is discernible (again, ambiguous language with no quantification or even estimates) human influence. But somehow that gets morphed into "Humans are causing global warming" by politicians and media. It just seems like such a stretch. Besides that fact that he also freely admits to altering the document at the suggestion of outside non-scientific influences, the team purposely uses ambiguous descriptions because they know it cannot be proven.
-
Freki, I'm finding the debate very entertaining.
The 95% issue is funny to me. If you or your brother misunderstood the meaning of it, that is perfect - because it is designed to be misunderstood, to sound like scientists are alleging something quantifiable. So you confronted him with backing up the idea that a group of scientists believe that humans are causing 95% of the warming. Now the debate falls on its ear. He is trying to explain to you that they never said humans caused 95% of the warming. They just said they are 95% sure (whatever that means) that we caused a lot of it (whatever that means!)... begging the questions you opened with and repeated politely and repeatedly, still not answered - how much warming is there and how much of that did we cause, how do we know, and what is causing the rest of it, in what proportions?
He reverts to calling one site political and noting that another critic has [only a] a bachelor's degree as he leaves all relevant questions unanswered. Why? Because scientists just don't know.
I stumbled into this I think in the 1990s with an NOAA (http://www.noaa.gov/) report with similar alarmist headlines, so I actually went in and read the report. It was loaded with data. But the conclusions weren't borne out in the data; there was a disconnect. The analysis showed a possibility of something but then the conclusions made the liklihood sound stronger. And the headlines and press reports went much further still obviously not written by the scientists collecting the data and writing the analysis. As it went from data to analysis to conclusions to headlines that grab attention, it also went from imperfect science to reckless fiction.
Same goes for the IPCC. Yes they have many scientists. Yes they choose from those who already agree with the cause. Yes they publish thousands of pages. Yes there is CO2 growth. Yes there is warming, at times, though not large, continuous or predictable. Yes the chart looks steep if you choose your time frame carefully, choose and tweak your data, and work with the scale.
Here is the same data as theirs graphed more honestly, see environmental issues thread Mar-Apr 2009 (http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg27982#msg27982)
(also see: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/04/some-global-warming-qa-to-consider-in-light-of-the-epa-ruling/)
First, here is the CO2 increase, viewed honestly. Alarmists HATE this picture. Really, it is the same data they chart, but they chart without a zero base showing in order to make the slope and the increase look alarming:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/CO2mauna-loa.jpg)
Fifty years increases in Atmospheric CO2 content as measured at Mauna Loa by the NOAA
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Back to the hockey stick, now discredited. It implied that earth temps were stable and predictable until the acceleration of the industrial age and then the temps just went through the roof. Besides the data errors they made, the temperature increases look different with either a shorter or longer view. Here is the time frame he was choosing - since the 1970s:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/Atmosphericwarming.jpg)
Global warming, lower atmosphere from Satellite data, http://climate.uah.edu/dec2008.htm
Or look at a longer view. It is not particularly warm now. Earth has had wide ranges of temperatures, long cycles and wide swings - long before automobiles or coal plants:
2000 Years of Global Temperatures
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/2000-years-of-global-temperature.jpg)
Source: ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT, VOLUME 18 No. 7+8 2007
Look at the cooling cycle now, the warming cycles of the past, the variances on other planets, the resilience of the planet, and what I think is the obvious observation that we won't be hooked on fossil fuels for more than a blip in time in terms of the life of the planet - with or without government intervention. When you look at all of that objectively should we be alarmed now? We are talking about warming over a good part of a century in the tens of a degree. We are calling something a "contaminant" and a danger that we all exhale and that is the lifeblood of all plant life. We are talking about a phenomenon where we know that earth has self-correcting mechanisms, scientists call them negative feedback factors, such as the resulting increase in plant health and growth will consumes a portion of the increased CO2. We are talking about warming where we have little or no understanding about how so many other factors, wind, clouds and sun variances for example - factor in And we are talking about a temporary fuel source.
Referring back to the alarming CO2 chart with a 38% increase (worth showing again)
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/CO2mauna-loa.jpg)
I would be more 'alarmed' if the levels of this life essential molecule, that still comprises less than one half of one tenth of a percent of atmospheric content, were decreasing!
-
Carbon: Passive rider on the Earth/Space Machine
By James R. Fencil
Earth operates a network of molten upwellings from deep seams in the planet's crust which act to shove tectonic plates across the seafloors where these plates bump into continental land outcroppings. There the spreading plates subduct beneath the continental rims and simultaneously thrust mountains upward from sea level. Such crustal movements continue to alter our global topography today. Atmospheric composition is largely unaffected by these tectonic movements except during volcanic eruptions which emit gasses that are subsequently diffused about the globe by wind action.
Space operates a system of radiant inputs to the earth: both continuous cosmic rays from deep space and variable solar rays from our nearby sun. From time to time the sun produces solar winds having magnetic effects that perturb the incoming cosmic rays causing them to vary in intensity. The primary solar rays vary also but to a lesser extent than the solar-perturbed cosmic rays. Atmospheric composition is largely unaffected by these radiant inputs but one component of the atmosphere undergoes reversible change-of-state to an extent that is dependent on the intensity of the incoming cosmic rays. This component is water.
Water evaporates from the earth's surface as a clear vapor. Each water vapor molecule has a diameter of 1.5 angstroms. Incoming solar radiation contains wavelengths ranging from 1000 angstroms to 10,000,000 angstroms. Much of this incoming solar radiation passes over and through the clear water vapor, warming it in transit and continuing downward to the earth where it proceeds to warm the planet's surface. The cosmic rays, erratically constrained by the solar winds, convert some portion of the clear water vapor to liquid droplets ranging in size from 20,000 to 400,000 angstroms. Incoming solar radiation cannot pass readily through these large droplets and instead is scattered and partially redirected back into space. So incoming solar radiation can be either absorbed and transmitted (as with clear water vapor) or scattered and reflected (as with cloud droplets.) When the sun permits the cosmic rays to do their job of forming clouds then the planet will be cooled. When the solar winds withhold enough of the cosmic rays to restrain cloud formation then the planet will be warmed.
Down at the earth's surface water mediates life's processes. In watered terrestrial regions gaseous carbon feeds photosynthesis-powered carbon chain growth as life converts CO2 into solid carbonaceous plant matter, with some reoxidized to CO2 and some buried. In coastal shallows life additionally converts CO2 into the solid CaCO3 component of animal matter, with some redissolved and dissociated and some buried. These active life zones act as CO2 sinks, depleting the local atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and drawing additional CO2 from the diminishing reserves elsewhere in the atmosphere.
The accumulated solidified carbon products are then transported by tectonic movements and are either pushed upward into mountainous formations or dragged downward beneath the surface to be heated and pressure-cooked into pockets of fossil fuels. In either case the life-formed carbon-rich solid matter is carried away from the wet biologically active zones into locations where life processes are arrested and the carbon is forcibly sequestered.
Over time the earth has seen gaseous CO2 levels fall from the original 0.80% to our current 0.04%. Photosynthesis has been busily productive but the relentless tectonic conveyances have carried away and stored life's solidified carbon-containing products, leaving them in limitedly accessible locations awaiting mankind's efforts to disinter some fraction of these vast stores to use as fossil fuels and thus to regenerate CO2. The assertion that neither the mammoth tectonic mechanism nor the immense space radiant mechanism is overawed by either life's maladaptive CO2 burials or by mankind's trifling energy use is surely one of the greater understatements of all time. These primordial earth/space processes acted to warm and to cool the planet and to rearrange its surface features long before life began and they will continue to perform their accustomed activities long after life completes its self-extinguishing sojourn.
Since controversies abound in this matter you may consult: Goethe Universitat-Cloud ITN; Journal of Geophysical Research-Vol.110-Nir J Shariv; and the CERN Cloud Project. Expect to witness increasingly rational parsing of the relative importance of all the change agents intrinsic to this geophysical system. But however continuing research evolves we can already confidently state that the baseless claims of the CO2 is a pollutant crowd are insupportable on their face in light of the indisputable evidence of life having flourished throughout a 95% decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations as documented in the scientific record. Disaffected humans will just have to find something else with which to flagellate themselves and their betters. We can take comfort however in the knowledge that their need is great, their determination unabashed and their perverse imaginations sufficient to the task.
James R. Fencil is the technical director of a Midwestern corporation, and an alumni scholar at the U. of C. Graham School in Chicago.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/carbon_passive_rider_on_the_ea.html at October 17, 2009 - 11:26:27 AM EDT
-
An hour and a half of Lord Monkcton unleashing on AGW frauds:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0[/youtube]
-
I remember several science channel shows that aired before the whole Climate change/ Global warming thing became politicised. One talked about how earth had totally iced over, not Ice Age, but snowball. They figured that volcanoes releasing carbon are the mechanism that finally broke the chill. The dark volcanic ash on the ice helped some too, but the carbon was the main ticket.
Another show was talking about the Greenland Ice core project and how they were using it to map global temperature changes. The scale was in 100's of thousands of years. I remember a graph quite clearly that looked like a snake squirming all over the places, up until the end of the last Ice Age 9000?years ago, and the Lesser Dryas about 3000 years later. So the last coldness left the planet about 1000years before Egypt was beginning to organize into something more than a bunch of villages. would you believe that starting about 4000 years ago that snake settled down? about the time several human civilizations were developing across the planet. The Peru/ Chilean civilizations that were building Pyramids and UFO readable art, Egypt with its monument building, the Africans with the Benin and Zimbabwean centers. It looks like a lot of carbon from wood fires was hitting the atmosphere and starting to mellow out the freeze thaw cycle? There were still vestiges of it tho'. look at the documented harsh winters in Europe during the middle ages after a warming period. There is similar indications with the Ananzi, and may be what impacted Teotihuacan in the Americas.
I think climate change is normal, and that humanity with time may influence this change, but to take ALL the credit for it is simply arrogant. I believe that we do need to pick better- more efficient ways of generating our energy. Not because of global warming, but because we can, because oil while vast, is finite (we are using it faster that it is made, if it regenerates), and because we do not understand what the carbon and other chemicals are doing. (cattle methane, freon and others) Until we do it would be wise to go slower or be cautious about what we dump into the air, because we may have a big influence.
regardless of where exactly you wish to stand on the debate, striving for understanding is a good thing. Moderating what may be a bad thing, until knowledge is really gained, is wise.
-
Climate feedback assumptions in all the UN IPCC models are proven false by actual data.
Peer reviewed, published study by credentialed scientists from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at M.I.T. Good luck to the debate partners in refuting the data. May I predict their reaction will be to personally smear the authors...
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/lindzen.choi.grl.2009.pdf
Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the
outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth
Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data.
It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing
radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface
temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation
fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with
relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of
the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same
SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate
sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to
pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results
also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave
radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from
longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish
the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of
climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem
in climate prediction. Citation: Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S.
Choi (2009), On the determination of climate feedbacks from
ERBE data
-
Words like Implies, and Fundamental Problem show me that we are still trying to figure it out. This shows a "warming" model does not match observed data, it also indicates a lot of issues with data gathering as well. That was a lot of reading to verify "we still don't know".
The personal smears are what I hate, if you have observed/measured info that says your idea is wrong, you go figure out where your reasoning went wrong, or get more data or do new tests to find out if the data that proves you wrong. That is what I hate about the politicization of this stuff.
-
Until this, I hadn't read anything critical about China's new PR campaign and the American Obamagasm over it that China will soon lead the world in green-everything if we don't get our coercive-big-government act together right now...
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1102/opinions-china-carbon-greenhouse-gas-insights.html
The Carbon Con Game
Peter Huber, 10.15.09, 10:20 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated November 02, 2009
China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas on the planet. We burn more carbon per person, but China has more people, and both its population and economy are growing much faster than ours. For many members of Congress, a vote for strict carbon limits will be politically suicidal if constituents continue to believe--correctly--that the vote will propel a massive shift of jobs, wealth and emissions from Peoria to Beijing. So in the coming months watch out for brazenly false claims that China is blazing the green trail, and getting richer by doing so, and that to compete we must outgreen them. China is of course delighted to jigger numbers to help frame the story.
"China attaches great importance to tackling climate change," China's climate commissar recently declared. The Middle Kingdom therefore promises to lower its energy consumption per unit of GDP. Translation: "We promise to get richer." Energy consumption per unit of GDP always falls as a country gets richer. The poorest countries in Africa spend 100% of their GDP on food, the most primitive form of energy. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has the lowest energy consumption per unit of household GDP on the planet. Carbon emissions per unit of GDP follow the same trajectory. China's are about twice as high as ours, Africa's three times as high. The global climate, however, doesn't care a fig about hyphenated emissions, whether per capita, per dollar or per unit of sly political prevarication.
"China also sets an objective of increasing the proportion of renewable energy in the primary energy mix to 10% by 2010, and to 15% by 2020." Translation: "We'll keep on burning the stuff that poor people burn until we get rich." Biomass accounts for 10% of the global energy supply but less than 4% in the developed world and closer to 2% in the U.S. The poor always burn more carbohydrates, fewer hydrocarbons. Calling something "renewable" doesn't mean that it saves carbon. Agriculture, forestry and deforestation already cost the planet more than twice as much in carbon equivalents as transportation--over 30% of all emissions. Since nobody can track how many twigs, cowpats and rice husks a billion peasants burn--or alternatively, leave to fungi to convert into methane, a powerful greenhouse gas--China's carbon accountants can make its renewable numbers come out anywhere they like.
China is proud to report that it has been shutting down "small thermal power-generation units." Translation: "We're replacing diesel generators with big coal-fired power plants." Big, central power plants burn much cheaper fuel much more efficiently, and therefore generate much cheaper power, and therefore boost energy consumption, emissions and GDP even faster.
China touts its new wind, hydroelectric and nuclear capacity. Translation: "China's energy policy is--and will remain--solidly anchored in coal." The word "capacity" next to "wind" misleads by a factor of five or so, because much of the time the wind doesn't blow. China's nuclear plants and its gargantuan hydroelectric dams will indeed make a real dent in the carbon intensity of its energy supply. But mushrooming coal consumption will utterly swamp the savings for as long as anyone can possibly foresee.
China says it "has increased its carbon sinks by promoting reforestation." Translation: "Your sinks don't count." North America has been reforesting since 1920, and continues to do so. So fast, in fact, that we're currently sucking about two-thirds of our carbon emissions back into our forests and soil. Europe and Japan hate all such talk, at least when it's America that's talking, because we have lots of land to reforest and they don't. U.S. greens do their best not to talk about it too, because--well, it gets in the way of other agendas.
China says because it's poor and we're rich, we must slash our emissions--absolute emissions, not the per-GDP kind--by 25% to 40% in the next decade, and also pay China and other developing countries in both cash and technology transfers to help them curb theirs. Translation: "You're responsible for our sorry past."
Agricultural footprints shrink, forests recover and birth rates decline as people get richer. Our 19th-century birth rates were as high as China's and India's were through most of the 20th. Their huge, impoverished populations reflect economic and political choices that stifled economic growth in their countries during the century when we got rich, stabilized our populations, reforested our land and dispatched would-be global tyrants to the dustbin of history. China, not America, is responsible for the economic and demographic legacies of Puyi, Yuan, Sun, Chiang and Mao.
Peter Huber is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of The Bottomless Well
-
Sorry for the delay in the email debate. It has come to an abrupt end...not a suprise. We won! :-D at least according to his challange(95% of GW is AGW). He still is not a convert and never will be.
===============================================================Gt
GT
Ok in the FAQ I sent you already, on page 9 is a chart of Radiative
Forcing.
Its FAQ figure 2.1 Figure 2
Immediatly after it defines Radiative forcing - snipet "Radiative
forcing is a measure of how the energy balance of the Earth-atmosphere
system is influenced when factors that affect climate are altered."
The chart shows how much each factor is contributing to this. In
addition it gives a range of uncertainty "The thin black line attached
to each coloured bar represents the range of uncertainty for the
respective value. (Figure adapted from Figure 2.20 of this report.)"
Uncertainty = not deceptive... they are telling us their confidence.
I am going to delve into the actual 1000 page section and see if I can
find the source.
-----------------------------------------------------
Geologist
I get the feeling something was missed Bryan. The charts show processes
/ constituents that lead to (influence) warming / cooling. CO2 is the
dominant warming factor, there is only one bar that indicates CO2
contribution to the whole and it doesn't discriminate natural or manmade
CO2. That is what Craig wants, discrimination of natural v. manmade CO2
in the atmosphere.
A funny observation: Notice on the charts how aerosols (particles
suspended in the air, smoke, dust, ash, etc.) can have a cooling effect.
So, fossil fuels and biomass may cool the climate while CO2 emissions
warm the climate at the same time...hmmm
-----------------------------------------------------------
Gt
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter2.pdf
The answer is in there. The science level is way over my head. Its 200
pages long with the data and methodology.
I read things like...
"Annual rates of change in the global atmospheric masses of each of the
major LLGHGs expressed in common units of GtC yr-1."
...and I have no idea what I am reading.
I read about ogranic carbons, but then it gets too complicated.
I believe the answer to craigs question is somewhere in this data but I
don't have the science jargon to pick it out. I imagine Brent could do
it fairly quickly as the 200 pages are well summarized and titled.
------------------------------------------
Geologist
IPCC indicates that humans have had a substantial influence in warming
from 1750-2005 of 95% confidence (statistical probability). In the paper
they actually say +0.6 to +2.4 with a 90% confidence - seems more
reasonable.
They use radiative forcing values to associate contribution of all
anthropogenic sources and give humans a total of +1.66 (smoke, farting,
driving trucks down dirt roads, clearing forests, breathing, heating
homes, etc....)
That is broken down into anywhere from +0.27-+0.57 due to land use
changes; +0.72 for carbonaceous particulates; +0.99 for CO2.
+2.63 was the total positive RF provided. So, CO2 represents 63% of
global warming influence. The keeling reference in the IPCC indicates
that CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels and degassing from cement
industry (p. 139) represents 60% of the CO2 fraction.
*Drum roll*
The CO2 that humans contribute to global warming is 37.8%.
--------------------------------------------
GT
It might be timely to calculate, but if you could tell use of the
Increased temps - What total is due to solar, volcanic, and then break
up the CO2 sources and all their values or inputs to increased temp.
Because the way you told us CO2 = X percent... is that including mans
contribution to methane and more importantly landscape changes that
impact CO2?
Or basically... find a way to clarify and give us a better understanding
of the last statement. (We know craig has reading comprehension issues)
Also, tell us how your job/funding is in jeopardy now because of your
inquiry into this topic. I assume you have received death threats.
---------------------------------------------
Geologist
The IPCC report separates CO2 from the other individual gas compounds
and aerosols. The tables breakdown contribution of each aerosol group
and gas group by RF contribution.
The original question was CO2, not smog and smoke and everything else
that contributes to global warming, or cooling. This first page of the
summary indicates that all anthropogenic factors are 1.6 RF to the whole
of just greenhouse gases of 2.63 RF, so that caps human contribution
without looking at anything else at 60.8%, any other RF factor is just
going to make the total RF higher and lessen human % contribution.
Just for grins though:
Landscape changes have been calculated to contribute 0.20 to 0.57 RF
CO2, but at the same instance reflectance RF calculated from the same
change in landuse was -0.24 to -0.29 for +0.27 CO2, and -0.66 for +0.20
CO2, it seems to balance out reflectance cooling for CO2 increase in
landuse change. CO2 contribution is already counted in total CO2 RF
change, but accounts for 12% to almost 35% at the highest extremes of
anthropogenic CO2. It appears IPCC consider landuse at net cooling
effect on climate change.
IPCC indicates past deforestation / landuse change has changed
temperature from .01C to -.25C (p. 185), cooling tends to predominate
with this aspect.
------------------------------------------
Gt
So what % is methane to total RF and what % of methane is due to
increased agriculture (raising cows)
------------------------------------------------
Gt
A) 60% of CO2 is from the burning of fossil fuels and the construction
industry.
B) Humans are responsible for 37.8% of CO2, that influences global
warming.
I think you need to clarify what part A means. If 60% of all CO2 comes
from burning fossil fuels, how are humans only responsible for 37.8% of
the CO2 impacting RF. Do fossil fuels burn naturally?
----------------------------------------------
Geologist
Oh my god, do the math.
63% of ALL global warming is caused by CO2
60% of that CO2 is caused by burning of fossil fuels and the
construction industry (everything else is ridiculously negligible).
.6 * 63% = 37.8%
Humans are responsible for 37.8% of global warming due to their
production of CO2.
Is that better?
Methane: 10-30% estimated CH4 from living vegetation world wide. There
is an increase and a .48 RF for total nethane, but the cause of growth
and sources and sinks aren't understood, ice, coal, seabeds, animals,
all produce methane, oil, tar, etc. not enough info. For that from the
IPCC.
----------------------------------------
Brother
I love it. Says I can't comprehend...
---------------------------------------------
GT
I found an even more concise and more recent report from the IPCC.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf
Check out page 14 and 15. All of chapter 2, and it is short, explains
the causes.
"This Topic considers both natural and anthropogenic drivers of climate
change, including the chain from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to
atmospheric concentrations to radiative forcing4 to climate responses
and effects."
It also has a section describing all the climate drivers both natural
and manmade. But we have already seen this data. (Solar, volcanic, etc)
(Figure 2.3). The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4 in 2005
exceed by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years. Global
increases in CO2 concentrations are due primarily to fossil fuel use,
with land-use change providing another significant but smaller
contribution. It is very likely that the observed increase in CH4
concentration is predominantly due to agriculture and fossil fuel use.
The increase in N2O concentration is primarily due to agriculture. {WGI
2.3, 7.3, SPM}
---------------------------------------------------
Brother
Now he has a new set of data.
------------------------------------------
Geologist
It's no different from the other report, it's just prettier with some
economic and more lay aspects. Same numbers and RF values.
Read at the end about the key uncertainties, specifically the land use
and methane source sink variables.
----------------------------------------
Brother
I love it, I love it!
------------------------------------
GT
Thank you.
So you really were looking just at CO2 and not including CH4, N2O, and
Halocarbons.
So what craig is reading is:
Man is only responsible for 37.8%.
But you didn't include the 3 other GHG's that man is responsible for.
For example:
"Many halocarbons (including hydrofluorocarbons) have increased from a
near-zero pre-industrial background concentration, primarily due to
human activities"
and Halocarbons account for .34 RF CH4 accounts for .48 and it is also
most exclusively man made.
Human activities result in emissions of four long-lived GHGs:
CO2, methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and halocarbons (a group of
gases containing fluorine, chlorine or bromine). Atmospheric
concentrations of GHGs increase when emissions are larger than removal
processes.
Brent is telling us just about one of those, which happens to be the
largest. Yes his math and conclusions are correct, but he is only
telling us about the largest factor.
Analogy for Craig:
You got beat up and then try to calculate what % was caused by human
(punching, kicking, headlocks)and what % was natural (falling on the
ground, hitting head on the cement)
So brent told you 37.8% of your wounds came from punching.
What he is leaving out is that another 25% came from bites, kicks, and
hair pulling.
So you are falsely concluding that 37.8% of my wounds came from a human
and the rest were caused by natural forces.
-------------------------------------------------
Brother
You know your losing a debate when you start going to the analogies.
Wait, let me look at Wikipedia and see what that is called.
--------------------------------------------
GT
Nah analogies = your audience isn't very knowledable and your trying to
dumb something down for them.
--------------------------------------
Brother
I think the doctors your talking to can handle it Bryan. Yes, I do have
a doctorate. And I think Rick said he has a masters (pretty educated
bunch here). Go punch your numbers until you get the result you want.
I will be waiting here to discuss them when you do.
---------------------------------------------------
GT
Lets wait and see how Brent responds to my asserting that he was leaving
out 3 other GHG's.
-----------------------------------------------
That is where it all ended!
-------------------------------------
-
Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics
Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose.
By BRET STEPHENS
Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that's for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.
Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.
The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.
Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they're a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful "SuperFreakonomics"—the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller "Freakonomics"—gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.
Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is "nuts." Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of "[pushing] global cooling myths" and "sheer illogic." The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its "faulty statistics." Never to be outdone, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman scores "SuperFreakonomics" for "grossly [misrepresenting] other peoples' research, in both climate science and economics."
In fact, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming "deniers," insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.
View Full Image
Associated Press
But when it comes to the religion of global warming—the First Commandment of which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion—Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. They note that sea levels will probably not rise much more than 18 inches by 2100, "less than the twice-daily tidal variation in most coastal locations." They observe that "not only is carbon plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide levels don't necessarily mirror human activity." They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."
More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.
But perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions. Hence world hunger was largely conquered not by a massive effort at population control, but by the development of new and sturdier strains of wheat and rice. Hence infection and mortality rates in hospitals declined dramatically as doctors began to appreciate the need to wash their hands.
Hence, too, it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.
All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?
Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming, which is what makes the clear-eyed analysis in "SuperFreakonomics" so timely and important. (Now my sincere apologies to the authors for an endorsement that will surely give their critics another cartridge of ammunition.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318.html?mod=djemEditorialPage#
-
An amusing take:
Howard C. Hayden
785 S. McCoy Drive
Pueblo West, CO 81007
October 27, 2009
The Honorable Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator
Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, DC 20460
Dear Administrator Jackson:
I write in regard to the Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, Proposed Rule, 74 Fed. Reg. 18,886 (Apr. 24, 2009), the so-called "Endangerment Finding."
It has been often said that the "science is settled" on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false.
The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.
Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.
We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it.
Let me next address the horror story that we are approaching (or have passed) a "tipping point." Anybody who has worked with amplifiers knows about tipping points. The output "goes to the rail." Not only that, but it stays there. That's the official worry coming from the likes of James Hansen (of NASA GISS) and Al Gore.
But therein lies the proof that we are nowhere near a tipping point. The earth, it seems, has seen times when the CO2 concentration was up to 8,000 ppm, and that did not lead to a tipping point. If it did, we would not be here talking about it. In fact, seen on the long scale, the CO2 concentration in the present cycle of glacials (ca. 200 ppm) and interglacials (ca. 300-400 ppm) is lower than it has been for the last 300 million years.
Global-warming alarmists tell us that the rising CO2 concentration is (A) anthropogenic and (B) leading to global warming.
(A) CO2 concentration has risen and fallen in the past with no help from mankind. The present rise began in the 1700s, long before humans could have made a meaningful contribution. Alarmists have failed to ask, let alone answer, what the CO2 level would be today if we had never burned any fuels. They simply assume that it would be the "pre-industrial" value.
The solubility of CO2 in water decreases as water warms, and increases as water cools. The warming of the earth since the Little Ice Age has thus caused the oceans to emit CO2 into the atmosphere.
(B) The first principle of causality is that the cause has to come before the effect. The historical record shows that climate changes precede CO2 changes. How, then, can one conclude that CO2 is responsible for the current warming?
Nobody doubts that CO2 has some greenhouse effect, and nobody doubts that CO2 concentration is increasing. But what would we have to fear if CO2 and temperature actually increased?
A warmer world is a better world. Look at weather-related death rates in winter and in summer, and the case is overwhelming that warmer is better.
The higher the CO2 levels, the more vibrant is the biosphere, as numerous experiments in greenhouses have shown. But a quick trip to the museum can make that case in spades. Those huge dinosaurs could not exist anywhere on the earth today because the land is not productive enough. CO2 is plant food, pure and simple.
CO2 is not pollution by any reasonable definition.
A warmer world begets more precipitation.
All computer models predict a smaller temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. Necessarily, this would mean fewer and less violent storms.
The melting point of ice is 0 ºC in Antarctica, just as it is everywhere else. The highest recorded temperature at the South Pole is -14 ºC, and the lowest is -117 ºC. How, pray, will a putative few degrees of warming melt all the ice and inundate Florida, as is claimed by the warming alarmists?
Consider the change in vocabulary that has occurred. The term global warming has given way to the term climate change, because the former is not supported by the data. The latter term, climate change, admits of all kinds of illogical attributions. If it warms up, that's climate change. If it cools down, ditto. Any change whatsoever can be said by alarmists to be proof of climate change.
In a way, we have been here before. Lord Kelvin "proved" that the earth could not possibly be as old as the geologists said. He "proved" it using the conservation of energy. What he didn't know was that nuclear energy, not gravitation, provides the internal heat of the sun and the earth.
Similarly, the global-warming alarmists have "proved" that CO2 causes global warming.
Except when it doesn't.
To put it fairly but bluntly, the global-warming alarmists have relied on a pathetic version of science in which computer models take precedence over data, and numerical averages of computer outputs are believed to be able to predict the future climate. It would be a travesty if the EPA were to countenance such nonsense.
Best Regards,
Howard C. Hayden
Professor Emeritus of Physics, UConn
http://blog.mises.org/archives/010939.asp
-
First, I second the question: If the science is settled, why are there still multiple climate models? Lol.
---------
BBG, Freki, all,
The last post along with the recent debate reminds there are 2 more legs warming stool in order for fossil fuel use to destroy the planet.
Paraphrasing the first 2 false premises from the global waring debate:
Premise 1) The earth is warming, significant, consistent and accelerating warmth. (false)
Premise 2) The cause is human, primarily CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use, at least 51% causation. (false)
Even if those were true (they aren't), the next 2 must also be true to require government action to avoid our demise:
Premise 3) Net positive feedback, not net-negative feedback. (false) In other words, does the warming lead to more warming in an uncontrolled, accelerating spiral, or is there a net correction mechanism? In fact, the history of the earth and its cycles demonstrates that negative feedback mechanisms prevail. For example, increased CO2 levels cause faster and greater plant growth which in turn consumes more and more CO2 from the atmosphere, aka earth's cycles.
Premise 4) The period of time that humans will power with fossil fuels will be endless until planetary failure in a free economy (false) requiring a giant, coercive government to stop it (false). A better estimate would be that our dependency on fossil fuels is already near it's peak and would actually be shifting faster to cheaper, carbon free sources if not for the plethora of big government mechanisms preventing the buildout of carbon-free nuclear. Even if the transition to new technologies takes 50 years, it is a blip in time in the context of the history of the planet and its ecosystems.
-
BBG: That was hysterical.
Nice follow up from Doug.
-
:-D :-D :-D
-
NOAA's review of October temps. Maybe they should take a page out of the climate apocalypse monger who posted the previous month's data twice to prove we are all doomed.
National Overview:
Temperature Highlights - October
The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation's nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.
Statewide temperatures coincided with the regional values as all but six states had below normal temperatures. Oklahoma had its coolest October on record and ten other states had their top five coolest such months.
Florida was the only state to have an above normal temperature average in October. It was the sixth consecutive month that the Florida's temperature was above normal, resulting in the third warmest such period (May-October).
The three-month period (August-October) was the coolest on record for three states: Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Five other states had top five cool periods: Missouri (2nd), Iowa (3rd) , Arkansas (5th) , Illinois (5th) and South Dakota (5th) . Every climate division in Kansas (nine) and Nebraska (eight) recorded a record cool such period.
For the year-to-date (January - October) period, the contiguous U.S. temperature ranked 43rd warmest. No state had a top or bottom ten temperature value for this period.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report
-
Controversial new climate change results
(PhysOrg.com) -- New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of CO2 has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of CO2 having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.
The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.
This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.
So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.
Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.
More information: Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.
Provided by University of Bristol (news : web)
-
Hmm, which should we believe, the model or the data? Well the data doesn't allow us to stampede people into handing large chunks of the economy over to to the government, so let's got with the model.
-
Funny, James Hansen claims the Bush administration tried to quash his activism had the climate apocalypse crowd squealing, yet I expect few will mewl over this:
Environmental Agency Warns 2 Staff Lawyers Over Video Criticizing Climate Policy
By JOHN M. BRODER and LESLIE KAUFMAN
The Environmental Protection Agency has directed two of its lawyers to makes changes to a YouTube video they posted that is critical of the Obama administration’s climate change policy.
The agency, citing federal policies, told the two lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are married and based in San Francisco, that they could mention their E.P.A. affiliation only once; must remove language specifying Mr. Zabel’s expertise and their years of employment with the agency; and must remove an image of the agency’s office in San Francisco.
They have been told that if they do not edit the video to comply with the policy, they could face disciplinary action.
The video, titled “The Huge Mistake,” was produced and posted in September. But the agency did not issue its warning until The Washington Post published a widely cited opinion article by the couple on Oct. 31 that raised concerns, echoing those in the video, about cap-and-trade legislation that the Obama administration supports.
Ms. Williams and Mr. Zabel say cap and trade, in which the government sets a limit on gases that contribute to global warming and then lets companies trade permits to meet it, can be easily gamed by industry and fail to reduce the emissions linked to global warming.
On Thursday, Mr. Zabel said, regional ethics officers with the agency met with him to express concerns about the video and to demand that it be taken down by the next day. Ms. Williams was traveling and did not take part in the meeting.
E.P.A. officials said the agency did not object to the content of the video or the op-ed article or challenge the couple’s right to express their opinions. But they said that government ethics rules required them to state that the opinions were their own and not those of the agency.
“E.P.A. has nearly 18,000 employees, and all of them are free to — and many do — publicly express their views on issues of the day, including issues that are central to E.P.A.’s mission,” Scott Fulton, the agency’s general counsel, said in a statement. However, the video did say the opinions were those of Mr. Williams and Ms. Zabel and were not meant to represent the agency.
In addition, Mr. Williams and Ms. Zabel say they quickly removed the video from their Web site and YouTube. But they said that others had copied the video and put it up on separate YouTube accounts and that it is still easily found.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/politics/10epa.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper
-
heck with the discussion over the model, look at another aspect of this game. China roughly 1 billion people is installing coal plants and doubling their capacity. USA about 400 million people is installing solar plants and doubling their capacity at the same rate.
Look at the proportionality- the energy needs of the 400 million will be met by the solar capacity way before the same will happen with 1 billion. Therefore there is no way that the "industrial wealthy west" will ever be able to balance off the developing countries.
Simple High School Math put the lie to the alleged global warming fix, if global warming exists, and needs fixed at all. When the western nation were developing we did not have knowledge of this issue, but we did know that open sewers and untreated water were probably a source of disease, most of our big cities were built with this in mind, while europe had to refit. We did not ask europe to balance of a "diesease factor' did we? At the time the sanitation issue was somewhat in question, but steps were taken.
Right now we do not know for certain if we are influencing the environment, I suspect we are, bust this "Carbon" is only a small part of the picture. we have deforested vast stretches, and "greened" large areas, this has to have an effect, and not just in "carbon release". We simply do not know enough, so we can start to take steps. Part of that is encouraging the developing countries to build a green infrastructure in the first place while we refit (which is happening). the exemption under the international green intitiative- whatever it is called this time- is not the way to go.
Any computer modelling is capable of being adjusted, anyone who has played MMorpg's knows how to min/max the game they play, and even a 1% adjustment in the right place can make a disproportionately large outcome in several other places. That 1% can easily be hidden in error factor, but if you consistantly "round up" or toward the result you want, you can get numbers out of a model/simulation that do not match reality. That is why they have real life testing of stuff ranging from nukes down to popsickle sticks, to keep the simulations calibrated. I am suspect of any simulation that they cannot calibrate by repeatable experiment.
-
"China roughly 1 billion people is installing coal plants and doubling their capacity. USA about 400 million people is installing solar plants and doubling their capacity at the same rate. Look at the proportionality- the energy needs of the 400 million will be met by the solar capacity way before the same will happen with 1 billion. Therefore there is no way that the "industrial wealthy west" will ever be able to balance off the developing countries."
The conclusion is true and exemptions make no sense, we will never 'balance off' their CO2 increases no matter our effort. I didn't follow you on the part before that regarding solar. I assume you are being illustrative, but we now get roughly 0% (with rounding) of our total energy from solar. After we double that, solar production will grow to roughly 0% of total energy requirements.
If manufacturing is made to be even more prohibitive in the west, it will continue to shift to where the restrictions don't exist.
We can dabble in solar at 15 times the cost of current electricity, we can dabble with wind at 5 times the cost of unsubsidized electricity and we can pursue other hobbyist sources. But we still will need the energy to drive the economy unless we just accept economic failure as is the policy of the current leftist machine.
Ethanol steals farm land from our food supply. Natural gas at the electric plant level is a complete waste because it can be piped to location eliminating the transmission loss. Both still involve carbon release. Also gas taken for electricity drives up the cost to heat homes and makes it less available for a transportation substitute.
New carbon-free power in any real quantity will come from nuclear, and there is about a 10 year delay to get a new plant producing. Or it will come from some other method not yet invented, but it is more likely to get invented after we quit subsidizing known failures and crippling our economy. (MHO)
-
we are wandering here into Green Energy. I am starting a new thread under that title. Linky:dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1959.0
-
Wow, Sundance Channel is playing The Great Global Warming Swindle. If those granola crunchers are playing this bit of apostasy can this sky-is-falling scam be maintained much longer?
-
A couple hours poking around on the internet starting at wikipedia make one all to aware of the fact is that we do not know either way. That makes plenty of room for political causes to expliot for a living, and that is the rub.
There are other more practical reasons for pursueing "greeness" aside from global warming tho'. They range from the simple "I do not want to expend anymore of our heroes so I can fill my gas tank" to "I do not want to use more energy than any other citizen on the globe". When you think about it those are political statements too. Go Figure.
Meantime there is money being spent to prove of disprove the theory- that is a good thing because eventually we will have it figured out like we have fire figured out, and THAT could be very useful.
-
Yes, we don't know what we don't know, but only one side of the issue is trying to stampede governments world wide to commit trillions of dollars to their dubious end. We are only tugging on the corner of a incomprehensibly vast tapestry; pretending we have enough of a handle on the climate to make informed decisions is the height of arrogance. Add to that one side of the issue actively suppresses information that does not conform to their apocalyptic ends and I have a hard time pretending that side of the issue is at all interested in having an honest debate or is deserving of being treated as though there are honest brokers among them.
The whole "Green" thing also causes dyspepsia. A lot of "green" efforts embrace unmitigated stupidity, with recycling being at the top of that list. That don't keep "green" folks from copping all sorts of attitudes about their putatively noble mewling. Seem like a lot of these boneheads figure mouthing the right platitudes beats actual involvement in effective environmental science and action. Seems to me a lot of "green" foolishness is more about affect than impact.
-
Though confirmation is doubtless in order and skepticism should be embraced, climate skeptic circles are abuzz with news that many scientists who support AGW theory have had their email hacked and docs posted on an FTP server in Russia. The emails are detailed and damning, indicating that a lot of books have been cooked over the years. Most succinct story I can find is posted below; note that the story has links to the blogs mulling this info:
Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails
November 19, 9:42 PMEssex County Conservative ExaminerTerry Hurlbut
The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
The FTP link first appeared on a blog called The Air Vent. The blog's owner, identified as "Jeff Id", downloaded the file, examined it, and posted a brief summary on his blog. Another commenter, identified as "Steven Mosher," passed the information on to Steven McIntyre's Climate Audit blog and to another blog, The Blackboard, run by a blogger identified as "Lucia." Most recently, blogger Anthony Watts, who runs a blog titled "Watts Up With That?" mentioned the FTP archive in his own blog.
Commentary on all the blogs involved has been brisk, except, oddly enough, at The Air Vent, where only seven comments have been received.
The FTP server is in a Russian domain and uses the anonymous FTP protocol, which does not require a pre-registered user account or password for downloading. The file is named FOI2009.zip, an apparent reference to US Public Law 89-554, 80 Stat. 383, the Freedom of Information Act.
Several commentators have expressed skepticism as to the authenticity of the archive, pointing to its lack of clear provenance and suggesting that someone was attempting to embarrass, either directly or indirectly, the dignitaries attending the upcoming climate-change conference in Copenhagen. Other commentators who have examined the e-mails in the archive conclude that the header and other information that they contain is too detailed to be a hoax. Thus far, no commentator has found anything in the e-mail headers that appears to be mistaken.
Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous "hockey-stick" graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
The emphasis in the above quote was added.
Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:
And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre. And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia[.] And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain.. you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy. [Y]ou get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect. I don’t know that its real.. But the CRU code looks real
John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.
As embarrassing as the e-mails are, some of the documents are more embarrassing. They include a five-page PDF document titled The Rules of the Game, that appears to be a primer for propagating the AGW message to the average subject/resident of the United Kingdom. The document suggests that it is a precis of a longer document housed at the Web site of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Developing...
http://www.examiner.com/x-28973-Essex-County-Conservative-Examiner~y2009m11d19-Hadley-CRU-hacked-with-release-of-hundreds-of-docs-and-emails
-
Australian publication claims that the East Anglia Climate Research Unit's email hack has been confirmed by the hacked organization and that the materials released are authentic. Ought to be amusing to see what subtexts arise in Copenhagen over this:
Climate Centre hacked
Thousands of files leaked on internet
By Ian Wishart
The internet is on fire this morning with confirma¬tion computers at one of the world’s leading climate research centres were hacked, and the information released on the internet.
A 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents, has been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones.
In an exclusive interview with Investigate maga¬zine’s TGIF Edition, Jones confirms his organiza¬tion has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to have come from his organisation.
“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
“Have you alerted police?”
“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”
Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.
“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”
The files were first released from a Russian file¬server site by an anonymous tipster calling him or herself “FOIA”, in an apparent reference to the US Freedom of Information Act. The zip file con¬tains more than a thousand documents sitting in a “FOIA” directory, and it prompted speculation that the information may have been in the process of being compiled for consideration of an informa¬tion act request.
Jones, however, says the files were not contained in a “FOIA” directory at the Climate Research Unit.
“No. Whoever is responsible has done that them¬selves.”
“I’m not sure what we’re going to do. I’ll have to talk to other people here. In fact, we were changing all our passwords overnight and I can’t get to my email, as I’ve just changed my password. I’ve gone into the Climate Audit website because I can’t get into my own email.
“It’s completely illegal for somebody to hack into our system.”
In one email dating back to 1999, Jones appears to talk of fudging scientific data on climate change to “hide the decline”:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@ [snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers, Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing hiding “the decline”, and Jones explained he was not trying to mislead.
“No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”
Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.
“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”
The other emails are described by skeptic com¬mentators as “explosive”, one talks of stacking the peer-review process to prevent qualified skeptical scientists from getting their research papers con¬sidered.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/australia/latestissue.pdf
-
Good play by play of the hacked doc drama can be found by scrolling down to the comments here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/#more-12937
Some of the tidbits I'm culling include this tidbit to AGW panic monger in chief Michael Mann:
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
Perhaps GM can put on his LEO hat and tell us why people ask others to delete specific emails.
Another tidbit unearthed:
This is fun! There is even a connection to BIG OIL. See the “uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc”
“2. Shell’s interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to ‘real-world’ activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.”
After all the sanctimonious bits I've seen written where anyone with a fleeting association with an energy company has their research dismissed because the fail to mouth AGW orthodoxy, it is very amusing to read about AGW zealots trying to cater to selfsame.
Like the guy combing the stuff said, this is fun. . . .
-
And yet another post. These hacked documents are the gift that keeps on giving. A very sternly worded email follows taking various zealots to task back in 1997 for allowing their political desires to taint there work where Kyoto protocols are concerned. Please note all the docs are now searchable here: http://www.anelegantchaos.org.
This doc speaks to the house of cards AGW is built on:
Alleged CRU Emails - 880476729.txt
Enter keywords to search
The below is one of a series of alleged emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, released on 20 November 2009.
From: Tom Wigley To: jan.goudriaan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, grassl_h@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Klaus Hasselmann , Jill Jaeger , rector@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, oriordan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, uctpa84@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, john@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mparry@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, pier.vellinga@xxxxxxxxx.xxx Subject: Re: ATTENTION. Invitation to influence Kyoto. Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 11:52:09 -0700 (MST) Reply-to: Tom Wigley Cc: Mike Hulme , t.mitchell@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Dear Eleven,
I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the IPCC "view" when you say that "the latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions." In contrast to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting arguments in support of both "immediate control" and the spectrum of more cost-effective options. It is not IPCC's role to make "convincing cases" for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your statement.
This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.
Your approach of trying to gain scientific credibility for your personal views by asking people to endorse your letter is reprehensible. No scientist who wishes to maintain respect in the community should ever endorse any statement unless they have examined the issue fully themselves. You are asking people to prostitute themselves by doing just this! I fear that some will endorse your letter, in the mistaken belief that you are making a balanced and knowledgeable assessment of the science -- when, in fact, you are presenting a flawed view that neither accords with IPCC nor with the bulk of the scientific and economic literature on the subject.
Let me remind you of the science. The issue you address is one of the timing of emissions reductions below BAU. Note that this is not the same as the timing of action -- and note that your letter categorically addresses the former rather than the latter issue. Emissions reduction timing is epitomized by the differences between the Sxxx and WRExxx pathways towards CO2 concentration stabilization. It has been clearly demonstrated in the literature that the mitigation costs of following an Sxxx pathway are up to five times the cost of following an equivalent WRExxx pathway. It has also been shown that there is likely to be an equal or greater cost differential for non-Annex I countries, and that the economic burden in Annex I countries would fall disproportionately on poorer people.
Furthermore, since there has been no credible analysis of the benefits (averted impacts) side of the equation, it is impossible to assess fully the benefits differential between the Sxxx and WRExxx stabilization profiles. Indeed, uncertainties in predicting the regional details of future climate change that would arise from following these pathways, and the even greater uncertainties that attend any assessment of the impacts of such climate changes, preclude any credible assessment of the relative benefits. As shown in the WRE paper (Nature v. 379, pp. 240-243), the differentials at the global-mean level are so small, at most a few tenths of a degree Celsius and a few cm in sea level rise and declining to minuscule amounts as the pathways approach the SAME target, that it is unlikely that an analysis of future climate data could even distinguish between the pathways. Certainly, given the much larger noise at the regional level, and noting that even the absolute changes in many variables at the regional level remain within the noise out to 2030 or later, the two pathways would certainly be indistinguishable at the regional level until well into the 21st century.
The crux of this issue is developing policies for controlling greenhouse gas emissions where the reductions relative to BAU are neither too much, too soon (which could cause serious economic hardship to those who are most vulnerable, poor people and poor countries) nor too little, too late (which could lead to future impacts that would be bad for future generations of the same groups). Our ability to quantify the economic consequences of "too much, too soon" is far better than our ability to quantify the impacts that might arise from "too little, too late" -- to the extent that we cannot even define what this means! You appear to be putting too much weight on the highly uncertain impacts side of the equation. Worse than this, you have not even explained what the issues are. In my judgment, you are behaving in an irresponsible way that does you little credit. Furthermore, you have compounded your sin by actually putting a lie into the mouths of innocents ("after carefully examining the question of timing of emissions reductions, we find the arguments against postponement to be more compelling"). People who endorse your letter will NOT have "carefully examined" the issue.
When scientists color the science with their own PERSONAL views or make categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is, in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics, Michaels, Singer et al. I find this extremely disturbing.
Tom Wigley
On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Tim Mitchell wrote:
> Reference: Statement of European Climate Scientists on Actions to Protect > Global Climate > > Dear Colleague, > > Attached at the end of this email is a Statement, the purpose of which is > to bolster or increase governmental and public support for controls of > emissions of greenhouse gases in European and other industrialised > countries in the negotiations during the Kyoto Climate Conference in > December 1997. The Statement was drafted by a number of prominent European > scientists concerned with the climate issue, 11 of whom are listed after > the Statement and who are acting as formal sponsors of the Statement. > > ***** The 11 formal sponsors are: ***** > > Jan Goudriaan Hartmut Grassl Klaus Hasselmann Jill J�ger > Hans Opschoor Tim O'Riordan Martin Parry David Pearce > Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber Wolfgang Seiler Pier Vellinga > > After endorsements from many hundreds of other European climate-related > scientists are collected (and we hope that you agree to be one of these), the > Statement will be brought to the attention of key decision-makers (e.g. EU > Kyoto negotiaters and Environment Ministers) and other opinion-makers in > Europe (e.g. editorial boards of newspapers) during the week beginning 24th > November. The UK and other European WWF offices have agreed to assist in > this activity, although the preparation of the Statement itself has in no > way been initiated or influenced by WWF or any other body. This is an > initiative taken by us alone and supported by our 11 Statement sponsors. > > WHAT WE ASK FROM YOU > > We would very much like you to endorse this Statement. Unfortunately, at > this time we can no longer take into account any suggested modifications. > Nevertheless, we hope that it reflects your views closely enough so that > you can support it. If you agree with the Statement, then: > > 1. PLEASE IMMEDIATELY FILL OUT the form below and either reply via email > (preferably) or telefax (only if necessary) to the indicated fax number. > Replies received after Wednesday 19th November will not be included. If > replying by email please do not use the 'reply all' option. If this > invitation has been forwarded from a colleague, please make sure your reply > is directed to the originators of this invitation, namely: > t.mitchell@xxxxxxxxx.xxx (on behalf of Mike Hulme and Joe Alcamo). > > 2. We have identified about 700 climate-related scientists in Europe who > are receiving this email directly from us. If you feel it is appropriate, > PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE to up to three colleagues in your country who > are working in climate-related fields, who you think may support the > Statement and whom we have not targeted. To identify colleagues whom we > have already invited you can examine the email address list we have used > for your country in the email header (or else appended to the end of this > email). > > We realize that you are very busy, but this action may have a very positive > influence on public discussions during the critical period leading up to > Kyoto and during the Conference itself. > > With best wishes, > > Michael Hulme, Climatic Research Unit, UEA, Norwich > Joseph Alcamo, University of Kassel, Germany > > (On behalf of the other signatories of the Statement) > > > ____________________________________________________________________________ > > I agree to have my name placed on the list of scientists that endorse the > Statement of European Climate Scientists on Actions to Protect Global > Climate. > > Full Title and Name > > Affiliation Country > > Signature (for fax replies only) > > Date > > Other comments: > > ____________________________________________________________________________ > > We would prefer you to return this email message to us by email, having > duly completed the form above. You should be sending the form to: > > **************************** > ** ** > ** t.mitchell@xxxxxxxxx.xxx ** > ** ** > **************************** > > If you would rather not use the email reply function, then please print out > the form above and fax it (filled in) to: > > "Attention: European Climate Statement" > Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia > Telefax: +44 1603 507784 > > ____________________________________________________________________________ > > > Statement of European Climate Scientists on Actions to Protect Global Climate > ============================================================================= > > In 1992, the nations of the world took a significant step to protect global > climate by signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change. This year, > at the coming Climate Summit in Kyoto*, they have the chance to take > another important step. It is our belief that the nations of the world > should agree to substantive action for controlling the growth of greenhouse > gas emissions. > > Our opinion is bolstered by the latest assessment of scientific knowledge > carried out by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The > IPCC reported that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human > influence on global climate". They also gave examples of observed climate > change up to now, including: > > � Global mean surface air temperature has increased by between 0.3 to 0.6 > degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, and recent years have been the > warmest since 1860. > � Global sea level has risen between 10 and 25 centimeters over the past > 100 years. > > Based on estimates from computer models, the IPCC also maintained that > humanity will have a continuing and cumulative effect on climate in the > future. Future society may find that some climate impacts are positive, as > in the possible increase in rainfall and crop yield in some dry regions; > and society may be able to adapt to some impacts, such as by building dikes > against rising sea level. But many, if not most, climate impacts will > increase risks to society and nature, and will be irreversible on the human > time scale. Among the possible changes are further increases in sea level, > the transformation of forest and other ecosystems, modifications of crop > yield, and shifts in the geographic range of pests and pathogens. It is > also possible that infrequent but disastrous events, such as droughts and > floods, could occur more often in some regions. At particular risk are > people living on arid or semi-arid land, in low-lying coastal areas and > islands, in water-limited or flood-prone regions, or in mountainous > regions. The risk to nature will be significant in the many areas where > ecosystems cannot quickly adapt to changing climate, or where they are > already under stress from environmental pollution or other factors. > > Because of these risks, we consider it important for nations to set limits > on the increase of global temperature due to human interference with the > climate system. We recommend that European and other industrialized nations > use such long-term climate protection goals as a guide to determining > short-term emission targets. This approach has been adopted, for example, > by the European Union and the Alliance of Small Island States. > > Some may say that action to control emissions should be postponed because > of the scientific uncertainties of climate change and its impact. Our view > is that the risks and irreversibility of many climate impacts require > "precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent, or minimize the causes of > climate change", as stated in the Framework Convention on Climate Change. > > We also acknowledge that economic arguments have been put forward for > postponing the control of emissions in Europe and elsewhere. However, after > carefully examining the question of timing of emission reductions, we find > the arguments against postponement to be more compelling. First, postponing > action could shift an unfair burden for more severe reductions of emissions > onto future generations. Second, it will lead to a greater accumulation of > greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and hence make it more difficult to > prevent future climate change when action is finally taken. Third, the > latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate > control of emissions. > > Rather than delay, we strongly urge governments in Europe and other > industrialized countries to agree to control greenhouse emissions as part > of a Kyoto agreement. Some controls can be achieved by reducing fossil fuel > use at little or no net cost through accelerated improvements in the > efficiency of energy systems, the faster introduction of renewable energy > sources, and the reduction of subsidies for fossil fuel use. Moreover, > reducing the use of fossil fuels will also reduce local and regional air > pollution, and their related impacts on human health and ecosystems. > > We believe that the European Union (EU) proposal is consistent with long > term climate protection. This proposal would reduce key greenhouse gas > emissions by 15% from industrialized countries (so-called Annex I > countries) by the year 2010 (relative to year 1990). Although stronger > emission reductions will be needed in the future, we see the EU, or > similar, goal as a positive first step "to prevent dangerous anthropogenic > interference with the climate system" and to lessen risks to society and > nature. Such substantive action is needed now. > > *Third Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate > Change, Kyoto, Japan, December, 1997. > > Signed: > > Jan Goudriaan Hartmut Grassl Klaus Hasselmann > Jill J�ger Hans Opschoor Tim O'Riordan > Martin Parry David Pearce Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber > Wolfgang Seiler Pier Vellinga >
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=40
-
Yes, we don't know what we don't know, but only one side of the issue is trying to stampede governments world wide to commit trillions of dollars to their dubious end. We are only tugging on the corner of a incomprehensibly vast tapestry; pretending we have enough of a handle on the climate to make informed decisions is the height of arrogance. Add to that one side of the issue actively suppresses information that does not conform to their apocalyptic ends and I have a hard time pretending that side of the issue is at all interested in having an honest debate or is deserving of being treated as though there are honest brokers among them.
The whole "Green" thing also causes dyspepsia. A lot of "green" efforts embrace unmitigated stupidity, with recycling being at the top of that list. That don't keep "green" folks from copping all sorts of attitudes about their putatively noble mewling. Seem like a lot of these boneheads figure mouthing the right platitudes beats actual involvement in effective environmental science and action. Seems to me a lot of "green" foolishness is more about affect than impact.
Agreed! As far as I am concerned we may as well continue building lanfills, they will be "materials mines" in another couple of generations. We only need to figure out how we will separate out all of the toxic stuff that is ending up in there. The first person that figures that out will make a bundle. There is a firm out there that is currently mining old computers for their raw materials, and making a killing. I figure that your average dump has more of the minable type materials per ton than raw ore.............
-
Cue Dr, Who "This is gonna be FUN!' /cue
Oh, OH boy. I would LOVE to be doing fly on the wall work in the "poli-green" and "energy giant" offices right now! :evil:
-
Nice job following an email chain from the purloined source to demonstrate the AGW books are being cooked:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024995.php
-
This is doubtless petty and cruel, but it made me laugh and, as such likely demonstrates I'm a deeply flawed human being. With that said, one of the websites looking most at the hacked CRU data has discovered a true hockey stick graph:
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/wuwt_stats_112009.png?w=510&h=256)
Based on the number of web hits they've been receiving since the story broke, they are now the most active WordPress site, bwahahaha.
-
Found a blog that is doing a great job of summarizing the findings in the CRU emails and docs:
Bishop Hill
Climate cuttings 33
Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you. If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.
General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.
In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.
Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".
Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)
Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he's "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman's admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
Jones says he's found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
Wigley says Keenan's fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn't be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don't want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn't be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr "I'm not entirely there in the head" will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHW7KR33IQ&feature=related
-
CRU Files Betray Climate Alarmists' Funding Hypocrisy
By Marc Sheppard
It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.
Amid the thousands of files apparently misappropriated from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief PD Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S Department of Energy to NATO and worth a total of £13,718,547 or approximately 22.6 million USD. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.
But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust -- are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.
Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on-demand. And equally obvious is that Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.
And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp.
For instance, when MIT’s Richard Lindzen delivers one of his trademark brilliant presentations leading to the conclusion that climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is about 0.5°C, not the 1.5°-5°C predicted by IPCC models, all we hear from alarmists and complicit media types is that the professor once charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services and is therefore an unreliable big-oil hack.
Or when S. Fred Singer challenges the IPCC to explain whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback or stands before a graph depicted temperatures decreasing over the past 10 years while CO2 climbed and declares that “the relationship is meaningless,” his words are similarly dismissed based solely on the fact that he has received funding from ExxonMobil.
Let’s set aside the fact that Lindzen had actually accepted a total of $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from such interests on the day he ceased such activities two decades ago. And that Singer has received only $20,000 from ExxonMobil. And that climate realists are out-funded by alarmists by several orders of magnitude, which leads to the artificial expansion of the number of scientists who appear to support alarmist views. And even that monies paid to either side of the debate have zero impact on the science of whether or not 20th century warming was caused or exacerbated by manmade CO2 emissions. And don’t get me started on carbon-millionaire Al Gore.
The issue is this – Just how is it that funding from renewable energy interests evades charges of bias yet subsidies from traditional power entities scream bloody-conflict when each is equally friendly to the recipient’s cause?
As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw-canard that the science is settled but for a few outlying scientists in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had. And the scientific subterfuge surfaced last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax which has been perpetrated upon them.
In the broader scheme, the credibility blow the IPCC will likely suffer because the majority of those data manipulation revealing emails flowed from the fingertips of its senior authors and editors will weaken and perhaps ultimately break the AGW orthodoxy spine its politically-charged assessments have erected. And that can only serve to further declaw their fellow alarmists and media minions – which of course would be nothing short of stupendous.
For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March:
“There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.”
And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who have been the liers. Or the cheaters.
Or the bought-and-paid-for hypocrites.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/cru_files_betray_climate_alarm.html at November 22, 2009 - 01:47:08 AM EST
-
Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?
Posted By Charlie Martin On November 22, 2009 @ 1:40 am In . Column1 01, . Positioning, Uncategorized | 83 Comments
Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The institution is the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution for Dr Phil Jones and one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or “climate change.”
The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.
The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
The emails are incendiary.
The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots
Let’s look at the files and emails first. (For a running list of the interesting emails, see Bishop Hill’s list [1].) As I wrote earlier, you have to be really careful with this sort of thing, because it would only require salting a few really inflammatory fakes through a collection of otherwise real emails to make a convincing hoax (think Rathergate.) But since the data first came out, a number of the emails have been corroborated by recipients, and none of them have been refuted. So, at least tentatively, I think we need to accept them as authentic.
If we do accept them as authentic, though, they truly are incendiary. They appear to reveal not one, not two, but three real scandals, of increasing importance.
The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.
See for example emails 1047388489 [2], 1256765544 [3], 1255352257 [4], 1051190249 [5], 1210367056 [6], 1249503274 [7], 1054756929 [8], 1106322460 [9] and 1132094873 [10]. Also see email 1139521913 [11], in which the author discusses how the comments at RealClimate.org are moderated to prevent skeptical or critical comments from being published. RealClimate advertises itself as a scientific blog that attempts to present the “real case” for AGW.
The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.
See for example emails 0938018124 [12], 0843161829 [13], 0939154709 [14] (and the graphic here) [15], and 0942777075 [16] (and the discussion here [17]).
The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.
See for example 1106338806 [18], 1228330629 [19], 1212063122 [20], 1210367056 [20], and 1107454306 [21] (again!).
Email 1107454306 is particularly interesting. In it, Dr Jones writes:
The two MMs [McKittrick and McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
What makes this interesting is that the CRU, in later years, announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” their raw data [22] when they responded to an FOIA request from … McIntyre. Now, I’ve purposefully not included much of the text from these emails, both for reasons of space and because I want people to read them for themselves. But, at least on this first look, it appears that the three scandals are:
First, a real attempt by a small group of scientists to subvert the peer-review process and suppress dissenting voices. (For another look at this, by a respected climate scientist who was one of the targets, see these [23] posts [24] on Roger Pielke Sr. [25]’s blog.) This is at best massively unethical.
Second, a willingness to manipulate the data to make a political case. This is certainly misconduct and possibly scientific fraud. This, if it proves true, should make these scientists subject to strong disciplinary action, even termination of their tenured positions.
Third, what gives every appearance of an actual conspiracy to prevent data from being released as required by the Freedom of Information Acts in the US and UK. If this is proven true, that is a federal crime.
These emails and the data associated, taken together, raise really important questions about the whole scientific structure of AGW. Is the data really valid? Has the data been effectively peer reviewed and have attempts to falsify been fairly treated? Is CO2-forced AGW really the best hypothesis?Until these questions are answered, the various attempts to “deal with the climate change crisis” have no acceptable scientific basis.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-what-does-it-mean/
URLs in this post:
[1] Bishop Hill’s list: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html
[2] 1047388489: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=295&filename=1047388489.txt
[3] 1256765544: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1065&filename=1256765544.txt
[4] 1255352257: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt
[5] 1051190249: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=307&filename=1051190249.txt
[6] 1210367056: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=878&filename=1210367056.txt
[7] 1249503274: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1003&filename=1249503274.txt
[8] 1054756929: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=321&filename=1054756929.txt
[9] 1106322460: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt
[10] 1132094873: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=591&filename=1132094873.txt
[11] 1139521913: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=622&filename=1139521913.txt
[12] 0938018124: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
[13] 0843161829: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=12&filename=843161829.txt
[14] 0939154709: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=146&filename=939154709.txt
[15] here): http://i49.tinypic.com/mk8113.jpg
[16] 0942777075: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=154&filename=942777075.txt
[17] here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810
[18] 1106338806: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=485&filename=1106338806.txt
[19] 1228330629: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=940&filename=1228330629.txt
[20] 1212063122: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=891&filename=1212063122.txt
[21] 1107454306: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt
[22] announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” their raw data: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-lost-original-data.html
[23] these: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/comment-on-the-post-enemies-caught-in-action-on-the-blackboard/
[24] posts: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/comment-on-the-hacking-of-the-cru-website/
[25] Roger Pielke Sr.: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-what-does-it-mean/comment-page-1/#comment-450199
-
Global Warming With the Lid Off
The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science.
'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."
So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.
The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.
Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.
Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.
Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.
Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?" AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.
In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: "[T]ry and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."
When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn't work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. "The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we're all using is this," he wrote. "IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on."
It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.
For the record, when we've asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he "won't dignify that question with a response." Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he "did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way," but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn't to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann's work, much less his right to remain silent.
However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 13
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704888404574547730924988354.html#%20articleTabs=article
-
Thanks for staying on top of this.
PS: Glenn Beck had a good time with all this today.
-
Likewise, Thanks BBG for covering this. I have traveling, reading about it here, and wondering when the so-called mainstream will be forced to cover it.
There will be a response. Usual is shoot the messenger, in this case the 'hacker'.
Looks more to me like a whistleblower (hero) than a hacker.
I wonder if any of this will be followed with legal action. Against the hacker? What about charges regarding the fraud committed on the public or on the funders of the tweaked data and faulty work, for example the 'scientist' who promised to delete the data before he would release it for McIntire's request under the Freedom of Information Act...
Will these frauds be fired or have credentials and appointments pulled?
-
When it comes to what we should do in Afghanistan BO takes his time - I mean we should think this through - but when it comes to thinking through the claims of climate change - well that is defferent.
I mean why call into question the whole theory of climate change just because some of its promoters are clearly perpetuating a giant fraud on all of us? :wink:
I mean why do this when we can exponentially expand governement control and further the demise of American leadership in the world? Is not BO exposed over and over and the mainstream press still calls those who call THIS fraud on it's face value fringe of the fringe?
"Obama says 'step closer' to climate deal
Nov 24 12:25 PM US/Eastern
US President Barack Obama said Tuesday the world has moved "one step closer" to a "strong operational agreement" on climate change at next month's Copenhagen summit after his talks with Indian and Chinese leaders."
-
Another inconvienient truth on the man made global warming hoax.
Apparently NASA and the Goddard institute are about to be sued for not releasing data under the freedom of info. act .Now remember NASA is were James Hanson(sp) works. He is the climatologist that got caught falsifying data twice .The latest being, he reported sept 2008 temps for oct 2008 to show a warming trend when there wasn't one.
Boyo :evil:
PS he was one of Al Gores big sources for his movie.
-
"PS he was one of Al Gores big sources for his movie."
Boyo, You are correct; these are the lead scientists of the IPCC. These are the guys that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that doesn't diminish the accomplishments of this year's winner...
The US EPA categorized CO2 as a toxin based on their work. Anyone committed to honest and accurate science would demand immediately that ruling be revisited.
-
DougMacG, These guys also should be fired with out hesitation.I work as a chemist in an eviromental lab and if I ever got caught falsifying data or omitting data to get a result.I wouldn't even be shown the door ,I'd be thrown thru it.LOL maybe.Now these guys have been doing this apparently for the better part of 20 years.
I do wonder if this will have any effect on any policy decision coming up.You know cap and trade or the Copenhagen thing.I also hope they bring back real light bulbs.LOL :lol:
Boyo
-
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/11/iowahawk-geographic-the-secret-life-of-climate-researchers.html
Iowahawk rules! :-D
-
That was VERY funny.
Here's this:
Investors Business Daily
The Day Global Warming Stood Still
Posted 11/20/2009 07:46 PM ET
Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.
It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria.
The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill, the Senate's version of Waxman-Markey, until the spring thaw has led Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the leading Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, to declare victory over Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the triumph of observable fact over junk science.
"I proudly declare 2009 as the 'Year of the Skeptic,' the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard," Inhofe said to Boxer in a Senate speech. "Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked."
Inhofe added: "Today I have been vindicated."
The Ada (Oklahoma) Evening News quotes Inhofe: "So when Barbara Boxer, John Kerry and all the left get up there and say, 'Yes. We're going to pass a global warming bill,' I will be able to stand up and say, 'No, it's over. Get a life. You lost. I won,'" Inhofe said.
Now we have the German publication Der Spiegel, which is rapidly becoming the house organ for climate hysteria, weighing in again with the sad news that the earth does not have a fever so we really don't have to throw out the baby with the rising bath water.
In an article titled, "Climatologists Baffled By Global Warming Time-Out," author Gerald Traufetter leads off with the observation: "Climatologists are baffled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years." They better figure it out, Der Spiegel warns, because "billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations."
We are told in sad tones that "not much is happening with global warming at the moment" and that "it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year." But how can it be that the earth isn't following all those computer models? Is the earth goddess Gaia herself a climate change "denier"?
-
Tracking this a bit while out on the road in support of non-massaged science:
Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science (Updated)
Posted By Charlie Martin On November 22, 2009 @ 6:06 pm In . Column1 08, Environment, Media, Politics, Science, Science & Technology | 46 Comments
Updated: Chris Horner and CEI today announced their intent to file suit [1] if necessary to force NASA to release documents relating to the ongoing Climategate controversy.
Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.
This is especially interesting:
[CEI is requesting files] relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy group Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.
———————
On November 19, 2009, climate science was severely shaken by the release of a collection of email messages, together with a collection of data and data processing programs, that were alleged to have been stolen, or hacked, from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit [2] (CRU). (See here [3] and here [4] for previous Pajamas Media coverage.)
So what is this “climate science” of which we speak? Trimmed down to the essentials, what scientists really do comes down to these steps:
Look at something happening.
Think of a way to explain what’s happening.
Make a convincing case, based on evidence and experiment, that this is the best known explanation. Part of this “convincing case” is providing enough information so that a knowledgeable person could, if necessary, perform the same experiments and get the same results. (This should really include some weasel-wording about “within experimental error,” but that’s a technical detail. What’s important is that the knowledgeable third party can get close enough to the same results to satisfy that third part.)
Submit that convincing case to other knowledgeable people to review, in order to see if they also find it convincing. This is what is called peer review.
Publish that convincing case for the rest of the world, where the results can be seen, commented upon, and challenged.
Every so often, others perform the same experiments and confirm or question the results.
Step 4, peer review, is essential to this whole process. To be useful, a peer review should:
be done anonymously, so that reviews are uncolored by fear of retribution or expectation of reward.
be done independently, by disinterested third parties; it’s generally bad form to have close associates of the authors doing the reviews.
This is really all about trust. If Professor A. Einstein publishes E=mc2, the fact that the publication has been peer reviewed, the publication includes enough detail that you feel confident it could be replicated, and the results are then subject to challenge means that you can trust what’s in the publication. “Science” is a social contract — an agreement that allows scientists to trust what they’re told by their fellows.
So let’s look at a few of these emails. (All links are to email texts in the searchable index [5] on the website anelegantchaos.org.) Here’s an email from Phil Jones at the CRU to Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore (quoted in Santer’s reply, email # 1233249393 [6]):
With free wifi in my room, I’ve just seen that M+M have submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic — using more years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data — laughing at the directory name — FOIA? Also they make up statements saying you’ve done this following Obama’s statement about openness in government! Anyway you’ll likely get this for review, or poor Francis will. Best if both Francis and Myles did this. If I get an email from Glenn I’ll suggest this.
This appears to be Jones informing Santer of the contents of a submitted paper ahead of time, which would seem to say it’s not really an anonymous process. What’s more, the paper criticizes Santer’s own work, and this email appears to suggest that Santer will be a reviewer; this doesn’t seem very independent.
Then there is this email from Tom Wigley to Tim Carter (email # 1051190249 [7]):
PS, Re CR [the journal Climate Research] I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame — he encourages the publication of crap science “in order to stimulate debate.” One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word “perceived” here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about — it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter — 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too
Hans von Storch [8] is a well-known climate scientist who has been critical of some aspects of the global warming debate. This email appears to suggest that he was seen as too favorable to other opinions; they are discussing how to “get rid of von Storch.” Remember that the reason for independence is to ensure that there’s no fear of retribution nor expectation of reward.
It’s interesting to note that Hans von Storch actually was made editor in chief of Climate Research and then resigned soon after. The reason: he wasn’t allowed by the publisher to publish an editorial critical of the very paper this email discusses.
Von Storch has responded to the email releases on his web page [9]:
As far as I myself can judge, and according to responses by others, the files are authentic, but not complete. …. There are a number of problematic statements, which will be discussed in the media and the blogosphere. I found the style of communication revealing, speaking about other people and their ideas, joining forces to “kill” papers, exchanges of “improving” presentations without explaining.
Others have noted that the review process for climate change research seems flawed. In the Wegman report [10], prepared for the Committee on Energy and Commerce by a committee selected under the auspices of the National Academy of Science, a section is included on the connections among the reviewers of various papers, with the interesting observation that published papers are nearly always reviewed by the same small group of people, and almost all of these people are also co-authors on other papers.
The effect is that climate research is produced by a small “in group” who insist on a particular model, and apparently reviewed by the same group. Critics of the particular model, even if they agree in general with the notion of anthropogenic global warming, are then relegated to an “out group.”
Roger Pielke, Sr. of the University of Colorado is a notable climate scientist who has been relegated to the “out group.” Dr. Pielke was the lead author of part of the most recent IPCC [11] report, until the section he was writing was replaced at the last minute. At the time, Dr. Pielke wrote [12] (PDF):
The process that produced the report was highly political, with the Editor taking the lead in suppressing my perspectives, most egregiously demonstrated by the last-minute substitution of a new Chapter 6 for the one I had carefully led preparation of and on which I was close to reaching a final consensus. Anyone interested in the production of comprehensive assessments of climate science should be troubled by the process which I document below in great detail that led to the replacement of the Chapter that I was serving as Convening Lead Author.
We’re only beginning to analyze and understand the full implications of these emails and the associated data. Among other things, however, these emails suggest that a number of highly reputable climate scientists had been conniving for years to prevent other researchers from obtaining the data needed to replicate climate science results. At the same time, these scientists appear to have colluded to subvert the whole peer review process in order to prevent critical or contradictory results from being published.
This violates the whole social contract that is the basis of what we call science.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-violating-the-social-contract-of-science/
URLs in this post:
[1] announced their intent to file suit: http://spectator.org/blog/2009/11/24/climate-gate-development-cei-f
[2] University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
[3] here: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../blog/hacker-releases-data-implicating-cru-in-global-warming-fraud/
[4] here: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../blog/global-warminggate-what-does-it-mean/
[5] searchable index: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php
[6] 1233249393: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=955&filename=1233249393.txt
[7] 1051190249: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=307&filename=1051190249.txt
[8] Hans von Storch: http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/
[9] responded to the email releases on his web page: http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/storch.htm#News
[10] Wegman report: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CA8QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.climateaudit.org%2Fpdf%2Fothers%2F07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf&ei=S8cKS46BJsmXtge9w9ywCg&usg=AFQjCNHNPMvkp-jY2gyKnNtKcRw-NCgILA&sig2=W13QCAuh1tUp1rlFHI6LwQ
[11] IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[12] wrote: http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.climatesci.org%2Fpublications%2Fpdf%2FNR-143.pdf
Click here to print.
-
Second post:
November 25, 2009
CRU's Source Code: Climategate Uncovered
By Marc Sheppard
As the evidence of climate fraud at the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climactic Research Unit (CRU) continues to mount, those who’ve been caught green-handed continue to parry their due opprobrium and comeuppance, thanks primarily to a dead-silent mainstream media. But should the hubris and duplicity evident in the emails of those whose millennial temperature charts literally fuel the warming alarmism movement somehow fail to convince the world of the scam that’s been perpetrated upon it, certainly these revelations of the fraud cooked into the computer programs that create such charts will.
First -- Let’s briefly review a few pertinent details.
We reported on Saturday that among the most revealing of the “hacked” emails released last week was one dated November 1999, in which CRU chief PD Jones wrote these words to Hockey-Stick-Team leaders Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Predictably, the suggestion of a climate-related data-adjusting “trick” being employed by such alarmist bellwethers 10 years ago instantly raised more than a few eyebrows. And with similar alacrity, the Big Green Scare Machine shifted into CYA gear.
Almost immediately after the news hit on Friday, Jones told Investigative Magazine’s TGIF Edition [PDF] that he “had no idea” what he might have meant by the words “hide the decline” a decade prior:
“They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”
Baloney.
Mere hours later, Jones’s warmist soul mates at RealClimate offered an entirely different explanation:
“The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”
And later that day, Jean S at Climate Audit explained the reality of the quandary. In order to smooth a timed series, it’s necessary to pad it beyond the end-time. But it seems however hard they tried, when MBH plotted instrumental data against their tree ring reconstructions, no smoothing method would ever undo the fact that after 1960, the tree ring series pointed downward while the instrumental series pointed upward – hence the divergence:
“So Mann’s solution [Mike’s Nature Trick] was to use the instrumental record for padding [both], which changes the smoothed series to point upwards.”
So the author of the email claimed the “trick” was adding instrumental measurements for years beyond available proxy data, his co-conspirators at Real Climate admitted it was actually a replacement of proxy data due to a known yet inexplicable post-1960 “divergence” anomaly, and CA called it what it was – a cheat.
The next day, the UEA spoke out for the first time on the subject when its first related press-release was posted to its homepage. And Jones demonstrated to the world the benefits a good night’s sleep imparts to one’s memory, though not one’s integrity:
“The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”
Tick Tock.
Of course, RealClimate also avowed there was “no evidence of the falsifying of data” in the emails. But as Jones chose not to walk back his statement that the “tricks” were rarely exercised, and even assured us that he was “refer[ring] to one diagram – not a scientific paper,” his explanation remained at–odds with that of his virtual-confederates at RC.
And as Jones must have known at the time -- such would prove to be the very least of CRU’s problems.
Getting with the Green Program(s)
One can only imagine the angst suffered daily by the co-conspirators, who knew full well that the “Documents” sub-folder of the CRU FOI2009 file contained more than enough probative program source code to unmask CRU’s phantom methodology.
In fact, there are hundreds of IDL and FORTRAN source files buried in dozens of subordinate sub-folders. And many do properly analyze and chart maximum latewood density (MXD), the growth parameter commonly utilized by CRU scientists as a temperature proxy, from raw or legitimately normalized data. Ah, but many do so much more.
Skimming through the often spaghetti-like code, the number of programs which subject the data to a mixed-bag of transformative and filtering routines is simply staggering. Granted, many of these “alterations” run from benign smoothing algorithms (e.g. omitting rogue outliers) to moderate infilling mechanisms (e.g. estimating missing station data from that of those closely surrounding). But many others fall into the precarious range between highly questionable (removing MXD data which demonstrate poor correlations with local temperature) to downright fraudulent (replacing MXD data entirely with measured data to reverse a disorderly trend-line).
In fact, workarounds for the post-1960 “divergence problem”, as described by both RealClimate and Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code. So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer’s comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module “Uses ‘corrected’ MXD - but shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”
What exactly is meant by “corrected” MXD, you ask? Outstanding question -- and the answer appears amorphous from program to program. Indeed, while some employ one or two of the aforementioned “corrections,” others throw everything but the kitchen sink at the raw data prior to output.
For instance, in subfolder “osborn-tree6mannoldprog” there’s a program (Calibrate_mxd.pro) that calibrates the MXD data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911-1990, then merges that data into a new file. That file is then digested and further modified by another program (Pl_calibmxd1.pro) which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and “estimates” (infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available. The file created by that program is modified once again by Pl_Decline.pro, which “corrects it” – as described by the author -- by “identifying and “artificially” removing “the decline.”
But oddly enough – the series doesn’t begin its “decline adjustment” in 1960 -- the supposed year of the enigmatic “divergence.” In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.”
And such games are by no means unique to the folder attributed to Michael Mann.
A Clear and Present Rearranger
In 2 other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the “correction” is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the “adjustment” routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he/she wasn’t kidding. Now, IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I’m familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.
Here’s the “fudge factor” (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
These 2 lines of code establish a 20 element array (yrloc) comprised of the year 1400 (base year but not sure why needed here) and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding “fudge factor” (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960) but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU’s “divergence problem” also includes a minor false incline after 1930.
And the former apparently wasn’t a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.
Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart:
“IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this ‘decline’ has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.”
Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning:
“NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then (sic) they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).'
Care to offer another explanation, Dr. Jones?
Gotcha
Clamoring alarmists can and will spin this until they’re dizzy. The ever-clueless mainstream media can and will ignore this until it’s forced upon them as front-page news, and then most will join the alarmists on the denial merry-go-round.
But here’s what’s undeniable: If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960 then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. If it’s bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest men of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary. And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result.
And to do so without declaring as such in a footnote on every chart in every report in every study in every book in every classroom on every website that such a corrupt process is relied upon is not just a crime against science, it’s a crime against mankind.
Indeed, miners of the CRU folder have unearthed dozens of email threads and supporting documents revealing much to loathe about this cadre of hucksters and their vile intentions. This veritable goldmine has given us tales ranging from evidence destruction to spitting on the Freedom of Information Act on both sides of the Atlantic. But the now irrefutable evidence that alarmists have indeed been cooking the data for at least a decade may just be the most important strike in human history.
Advocates of the global governance/financial redistribution sought by the United Nations at Copenhagen in two weeks and the expanded domestic governance/financial redistribution sought by Liberal politicians both substantiate their drastic proposals with the pending climate emergency predicted in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Kyoto, Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Boxer, EPA regulation of the very substances of life – all bad policy concepts enabled solely by IPCC reports. And the IPCC, in turn, bases those reports largely on the data and charts provided by the research scientists at CRU – largely from tree ring data -- who just happen to be editors and lead authors of that same U.N. panel.
Bottom line: CRU’s evidence is now irrevocably tainted. As such -- all assumptions based on that evidence must now be reevaluated and readjudicated. And all policy based on those counterfeit assumptions must also be re-examined.
Gotcha. We’ve known they’ve been lying all along, and now we can prove it. It’s time to bring sanity back to this debate.
It’s time for the First IPCC Reassessment Report.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/crus_source_code_climategate_r.html at November 25, 2009 - 02:08:23 PM EST
-
Yet more climategate posts. I've enjoyed this statisticians' pieces before. Got a feeling he's gonna be driving some serious stakes through alarmist hearts:
Post 1:
The CRU “climategate” proxy code: a primer
Published by Briggs at 8:24 am under Bad Stats, Climatology
I’m just getting into the CRU code: it’s a lot of material and everything I say here about it is preliminary. Some of you will know what I’m going to say about proxies, but stick with me, it’s important. I apologize for the length: it’s necessary. Please help by linking this around to other sites which discuss the proxy data or code. I’ll make corrections as we go.
How do we know the temperature?
We have no direct observations of temperature—neither at the Earth’s surface or in the atmosphere—for the vast majority of history. So how can we know what the temperature used to be in the absence of actual measurements?
We can’t. We can only guess.
That’s right, all those squiggly-line pictures of temperature you see from before roughly 1900 are reconstructions; the lines are what is spit out of statistical models. They are therefore merely guesses. Even stronger, we have no way to know exactly how good these reconstructions are. If we did, then, obviously, we would know the actual temperatures, because the only way to know the actual model error is to compare the model’s predictions against the real data (which we don’t know).
To emphasize: the actual—as opposed to theoretical model—error is unknown. But we must try and estimate this error—it is of utmost importance—otherwise we cannot make decisions about the reconstructions.
Proxies
How do we create a reconstruction? By using proxies, which are not temperatures but are observations of physical entities thought to be related to temperature. Tree ring widths are one well known proxy; bore-hole, ice core, and coral reef measurements are others.
Focus on tree rings, because CRU does. Through various methods, we can generally guess how old a tree is; or, that is, the years the various rings were grown—but sometimes this is a guess, too, but not a bad one. When it’s warmer, trees grow better—on average—and have wider rings; when it’s colder, the don’t grow as well—on average—and have narrower rings. The idea is sound: correlate (I use this word in its plain English sense) tree ring widths with temperature, and where we only have tree rings, we can use them and the correlation to guess temps.
(Incidentally, I find this correlation amusing. Can you guess why?)
Proxy reconstruction mechanics
Here’s how proxies work. We have some actual temperature measurements, call them yt, which overlap proxy measures, call them xt, where the subscript represents time. The next step is to build a model
yt = m(β, xt) + error
which says that yt is modeled as a function m() of the proxies xt and (multi-dimensional) parameter β, plus some error.
The model m() is not given to us from On High. Its form and shapes are a guess; and different people can have different guesses, and different models will give different reconstructions.
Once a model is stated, statistical procedure (frequentist and Bayesian) then makes a guess about β and the error. The error guess allows us to say how good the guess of β is given m() is true. The parameter guess and values of xt where we do not know and values of yt are plugged back into the model, which spits out guesses of yt.
Reconstruction variability
Pay attention: we all know that these guesses of yts are not 100% accurate, so uncertainty about their values should be given. All those squiggly-line plots should (ethically) also contain an indication of the error of the lines. Some kind of plus/minus should always be there.
The huge problem with this is that the plus/minus lines around about the guess of β, which we don’t care about. We want to know the value of the temperature, not of some parameter. Technically, the uncertainty due to estimating β should be accounted for in making guesses of the temperature. If this is done, then the range of the plus/minus bands should be multiplied by from about 2 to 10! (Yes, that much.) And remember, all this is contingent on m() being true.
But if there is no plus/minus, how can we tell how confident we should be about any reconstructed trends? Answer: we cannot be confident at all. Since we typically do not see indications of uncertainty accompanying reconstructions, we have to hunt for the sources of uncertainty in the CRU code, which we can then use to figure our own plus/minus bands.
CRU document
One example from something called a “SOAP-D-15-berlin-d15-jj” document. A non-native English speaker shows a plot of various proxy reconstructions from which he wanted to “reconstruct millennial [Northern Hemisphere] temperatures.” He said, “These attempts did not show, however, converge towards a unique millennial history, as shown in Fig. 1. Note that the proxy series have already undergone a linear transformation towards a best estimate to the CRU data (which makes them look more similar, cf. Briffa and Osborn, 2002).”
In other words, direct effort was made to finagle the various reconstructions so that they agreed with preconceptions. Those efforts failed. It’s like being hit in the head with a hockey stick.
Sources of reconstruction uncertainty
Here is a list of all the sources of error, variability, and uncertainty and whether those sources—as far as I can see: which means I might be wrong, but willing to be corrected—are properly accounted for by the CRU crew, and its likely effects on the certainty we have in proxy reconstructions:
Source: The proxy relationship with temperature is assumed constant through time. Accounted: No. Effects: entirely unknown, but should boost uncertainty.
Source: The proxy relationship with temperature is assumed constant through space. Accounted: No. Effects: A tree ring from California might not have the same temperature relationship as one from Greece. Boosts uncertainty.
Source: The proxies are measured with error (the “on average” correlation mentioned above). Accounted: No. Effects: certainly boosts uncertainty.
Source: Groups of proxies are sometimes smoothed before input to models. Accounted: No. Effect: a potentially huge source of error; smoothing always increases “signal”, even when those signals aren’t truly there. Boost uncertainty by a lot.
Source: The choice of the model m(). Accounted: No. Effect: results are always stated the model is true; potentially huge source of error. Boost uncertainty by a lot.
Source: The choice of the model m() error term. Accounted: Yes. Effect: the one area where we can be confident of the statistics.
Source: The results are stated as estimates of β Accounted: No. Effects: most classical (frequentist and Bayesian) procedures state uncertainty results about parameters not about actual, physical observables. Boost uncertainty by anywhere from two to ten times.
Source: The computer code is complex. multi-part, and multi-authored. Accounted: No. Effects: many areas for error to creep in; code is unaudited. Obviously boost uncertainty.
Source: Humans with a point of view release results. Accounted: No. Effects: judging by the tone of the CRU emails, and what is as stake, certainly boost uncertainty.
There you have it: all the potential sources of uncertainty (I’ve no doubt forgotten something), only one of which is accounted for in interpreting results. Like I’ve been saying all along: too many people are too certain of too many things.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1362
Second Briggs Post:
- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
What Is — and What Isn’t — Evidence of Global Warming
Posted By William M. Briggs On November 25, 2009 @ 12:22 am In . Column1 02, Blogosphere, Media, Science, Science & Technology, US News, World News | 40 Comments
“Climategate” has everybody rethinking global warming. Many are wondering — if leading scientists were tempted to finagle their data, is the evidence for catastrophic climate change weaker than previously thought?
Actually, the evidence was never even evidence.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding — shared by nearly everybody about the nature of anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) — over exactly what constitutes evidence for that theory and what does not.
Remember when we heard that the icebergs were melting, that polar bears were decreasing in number, that some places were drier than usual and that others were wetter, that the ocean was growing saltier here and fresher there, and that hurricanes were becoming more terrifying? Remember the hundreds of reports on what happens when it gets hot outside?
All of those observations might have been true, but absolutely none of them were evidence of AGW.
Diminishing glaciers did not prove AGW; they were instead a verification that ice melts when it gets hot. Fewer polar bears did not count in favor of AGW; it instead perhaps meant that maybe adult bears prefer a chill to get in the mood. People sidling up to microphones and trumpeting “It’s bad out there, worse than we thought!” was not evidence of AGW; it was evidence of how easily certain people could work themselves into a lather.
No observation of what happened to any particular thing when the air was warm was direct evidence of AGW. None of it.
Every breathless report you heard did nothing more than state the obvious: Some creatures and some geophysical processes act or behave differently when it is hot than when it is cold. Only this, and nothing more.
Can you recall where you were when you heard that global warming was going to cause an increase in kidney stones, more suicides in Italy, larger grape harvests in France, and smaller grape harvests in France? How about when you heard that people in one country would grow apathetic, that those in another would grow belligerent, and — my favorite [1] — that prostitutes would be on the rise in the Philippines? That the world would come to a heated end, and that women and minorities would be hardest hit?
Not a single one of these predictions was ever evidence of AGW.
For years, it was as if there was a contest for the most outlandish claim of what might happen if AGW were true. But no statement of what might happen if AGW is true is evidence for AGW. Those prognostications were only evidence of the capacity for fanciful speculation. Merely this and nothing more.
So if observations of what happens when it’s hot outside don’t verify AGW, and if predictions of what might happen given AGW were true do not verify AGW, what does? Why did people get so excited?
In the late 1990s, some places on Earth were hotter than they were in the late 1980s. These observations were indirect — and not direct — evidence of AGW. The Earth’s climate has never been static; temperatures sometimes rise and sometimes fall. So just because we see rising temperatures at one point does not prove AGW is true. After all, temperatures have been falling [2] over the last decade, and AGW supporters still say their theory is true. Rising — or falling — temperatures are thus consistent with many theories of climate, not just AGW.
Climate scientists then built AGW models, incorporating the observed temperatures. They worked hard at fitting those models so that the models could reproduce the rising temperatures of the 1990s, while at the same time fitting the falling temperatures of the 1970s, etc. They had to twist and tweak — and with the CRU emails [3], it now appears they twiddled. They had to cram those observations into the models and, by God, make them fit, like a woman trying on her favorite jeans after Thanksgiving.
They then announced to the world that AGW was true — because their models said it was.
But a model fitting old data is not direct evidence that the theory behind the model is true. Many alternate models can fit that data equally well. It is a necessary requirement for any model, were it true, to fit the data, but because it happens to is not a proof that the model is valid.
For a model to be believable it must make skillful predictions of independent data. It must, that is, make accurate forecasts of the future. The AGW models have not yet done so. There is, therefore, no direct evidence for AGW.
The models predicted warmer temperatures, but it got cooler. One of the revealed CRU emails found one prominent gentlemen saying, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
It is. But only if you were concerned that the AGW theory will be nevermore.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-is-%e2%80%94-and-what-isnt-%e2%80%94-evidence-of-global-warming/
URLs in this post:
[1] my favorite: http://www.u4prez.com/Blogs/Smashey/Global-Warming-Leads-To-Prostitution.html
[2] have been falling: http://www.dennisprager.com/transcripts.aspx?id=1167
[3] CRU emails: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/
-
tree growth is affected by a bunch of stuff. so the temperature could be the same, but there was less water (rain) this year. The tree survived a forest fire and goes thru slow growth while the scorch heals. heck various levels of undergrowth might have an effect too. Krakatoa probably skewed some of the temperature results for the model too. both from dust shade, and temperature adjustment of all the plants.
do the rings on fir trees across the world vary the same amount for that particular year? If not, what is causing the variation?
How accurate were the thermometers used to read temperatures back then too?
-
'You've Taken the Words Out of My Mouth'
"Peer review," scientific corruption and the New York Times.
By JAMES TARANTO
(Editor's note: We plan to take off the Friday after Thanksgiving. See you next week.)
The massive University of East Anglia global-warmist archives are now searchable at this site, and one particular email demonstrates the nexus between the scientific shenanigans and the popular press, on which most people rely for their information on global warming. This email, dated Sept. 29, 2009, is from Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University to New York Times warm correspondent Andrew Revkin. The crucial exchange begins with this question from Revkin (quoting verbatim):
I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?
And here is Mann's response:
Re, your point at the end--you've taken the words out of my mouth. Skepticism is essential for the functioning of science. It yields an erratic path towards eventual truth. But legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. A necessary though not in general sufficient condition for taking a scientific criticism seriously is that it has passed through the legitimate scientific peer review process. those such as McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.
In principle, Revkin and Mann are quite right. But as we noted Monday, one of the most damning findings in the archives concerns the corruption of the peer-review process.
In one email, under the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL," Phil Jones of East Anglia writes to Mann: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
In another, Mann--discussing a journal that has published a paper by skeptical scientists, puts forward a plan for such a redefinition:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...
The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature" are Mann's. And it hardly needs to be said that peer review is a sham if papers that present alternative hypotheses are not even allowed into the process.
So how does Revkin, who two months ago took the words out of Mann's mouth, deal with this problem? Barely at all. In a Sunday amendment to a Friday blog post, he mentions it and quickly changes the subject:
[UPDATE, 11/22: Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post explores some email exchanges criticizing certain peer-reviewed papers and journals and focused on excluding the papers from inclusion in the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report. I'm running down tips and assertions related to the theft and hackings. It remains interesting that before they were placed on an ftp site and dispersed across the Internet, someone tried to plant them on Realclimate.org and publish a mock post linking to them. Needless to say, if anyone has information or ideas, feel free to email dotearth AT nytimes.com.]
Yesterday, he had another post, titled "Report Aims to Clarify Climate Risk for Diplomats." Here's how it begins:
A team of climate scientists, seeking to remind the negotiators who will hammer out a new climate treaty of what is at stake, has produced The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a summary of the latest peer-reviewed science on the anticipated impacts of human-driven global warming.
Revkin reports that the "latest peer-reviewed science" shows that "the case for climate change as a serious risk to human affairs" is "clear, despite recent firestorms over some data sets and scientists' actions."
What we now know about the "peer review" process in this field indicates that this is a predetermined conclusion. Revkin misleads his readers by describing it as if it were a real finding.
The Litigation Begins
Yesterday "the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies' refusal--for nearly three years--to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act," CEI fellow Christopher Horner announces at Pajamas Media:
The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding "Climategate" scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries' freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer code, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK's East Anglia University.
All of that material, and that sought for years by CEI, goes to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, "cap-and-trade" legislation, and the EPA's threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.
A lawyer writes us that "'the purloined 'global warming emails' suggest several lines of legal inquiry":
Tortious interference. For researchers and academicians, publication in peer-reviewed journals is important to advancement, raises, grant funding, etc. Wrongful interference with the ability to publish has monetary and reputational damages. If that interference is based not on editorial judgment of worthiness for publication, but rather on protecting reputations, scientific positions, political goals or "places in history" (as mentioned in one email), then it could give rise to liability in tort for the individual scientist and possibly for the university or organization for which he works.
Breach of faculty ethics standards or contracts. Most universities and research organizations have ethics clauses in their faculty/employee manuals and in their contracts with faculty/researchers. If (as suggested by the purloined emails) these individuals cooked data or manipulated assumptions to achieve preferred outcomes, or denied others access to data essential for replication of result that is essential to the scientific method, they could have violated university or organizational ethics standards.
State-chartered universities. Some of these individuals appear to work for state-chartered and state-funded institutions, and might well be classified as state employees (and thereby eligible for generous state benefits). The conduct suggested by the purloined emails might violate state ethics or funding policies. State governments and legislatures therefore might have a basis for inquiry and oversight.
Federal grants. Federal grants typically have ethics/integrity clauses to assure that the research funded by the grant is credible and reliable (and to assure that the agency can avoid accountability if it isn't). As noted, the purloined emails suggest that data might have been cooked and assumptions might have been manipulated to generate a predetermined outcome. If true, and if the work in question was funded by federal grant, the researchers in question might well have violated their federal grant contracts--for which there are legal consequences. Inspectors general of the grant agencies should be in position to make inquiry if the data/assumptions in question could be linked in time and topic to a contemporaneous federal grant to the researchers in question.
This promises be a boon for comedians as well as lawyers. Here's our first effort:
Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. There's a consensus that it's going to change, so they've decided to keep us in the dark.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574557583017194444.html
-
November 27, 2009
Politics and Greenhouse Gases
By John McLaughlin
Advocates and sympathetic politicians claiming that man-made global warming from use of carbon-based energy sources mandates international controls on economically prosperous nations were already worried that their victory is slipping. Now another blow has been struck against the basic "science" used to support their case. Following an extensive theoretical analysis, two German physicists have determined that the term greenhouse gas is a misnomer and that the greenhouse effect appears to violate basic laws of physics.
To briefly review, the entire argument for immediate political action on carbon-based emissions rests upon three premises, formulated over the last twenty years by scientists affiliated with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
1. The planet is experiencing worldwide atmospheric warming, threatening life as we know it.
2. This warming is unprecedented because average worldwide temperatures for at least a thousand years have shown no significant variation until the last seventy years, which correlates with a thirty-percent increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) gas generated by industrial activity.
3. Invoking a "greenhouse effect" model, the IPCC claims that CO2 exhibits a property involving special characteristics of long-wave energy absorption and radiation with altitude (called "radiative forcing") which accelerates near-surface warming and, as the CO2 quantity increases, spells planetary disaster unless reversed.
In an AT article posted September 27, I laid out the case for why the first two premises were flawed, if not outright fraudulent. Now, the IPCC "consensus" atmospheric physics model tying CO2 to global warming has been shown not only to be unverifiable, but to actually violate basic laws of physics.
The analysis comes from an independent theoretical study detailed in a lengthy (115 pages), mathematically complex (144 equations, 13 data tables, and 32 figures or graphs), and well-sourced (205 references) paper prepared by two German physicists, Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner, and published in several updated versions over the last couple of years. The latest version appears in the March 2009 edition of the International Journal of Modern Physics. In the paper, the two authors analyze the greenhouse gas model from its origin in the mid-19th century to the present IPCC application.
The Greenhouse Model
The paper initially tackles the concept of thermal conductivity of the atmosphere (vital for any discussion of radiative heat transfer) and how it is affected by carbon dioxide, which, they point out, is a trace gas. The current estimated concentration of CO2 is 0.04% by volume and 0.06% by mass. Gerlich and Tscheuschner show that even if CO2 concentrations double (a prospect even global warming advocates admit is decades away), the thermal conductivity of air would not change more than 0.03% -- within the margin of measuring error.
The authors then devote nearly twenty pages to a detailed theoretical and experimental model analysis of the classic glass greenhouse. This model posits that glass surrounding a large volume of air allows solar radiation to pass through to heat the greenhouse surface and then selectively blocks resulting infrared energy from escaping. However, calculations show that no property of glass can adequately explain the temperature rise. Normal glass assumed in the model just cannot selectively screen and filter sufficient radiation energy by spectral absorption or reflection. Thus, assumption of a dominant radiative heating model must be incorrect.
Gerlich and Tscheuschner rely on referenced experimental evidence to show what is really going on. The dominant heat transfer mechanism is not radiation, but convection. Experimental evidence shows a greenhouse interior warms merely because the glass physically traps interior rising air, which then becomes warmer and warmer relative to air outside the greenhouse, which conversely can rise and cool unimpeded.
If the classic glass greenhouse model is obviously wrong, then this raises suspicions about the atmospheric "greenhouse effect" itself. The authors examine definitions of "greenhouse effect" by three respected sources (the Dictionary of Geophysics, Astrophysics, and Astronomy; the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics; and Encyclopedia Britannica Online). They show how each uses ill-defined global concepts (such as "mean temperature"), confuse infrared radiation with heat (they're different), incorrectly describe the physics inside a glass greenhouse, and use other terms unsupported by the laws of physics.
Surprisingly, the authors find that the term "atmospheric greenhouse effect" does not occur in any fundamental work or text involving thermodynamics, physical kinetics, or radiation theory. They then attempt to fill that void. They first derive the generalized equations a computer would have to solve to calculate an average radiative temperature for a rotating smooth globe without oceans (half exposed to the sun and half not) and inclined relative to the sun (as is Earth). They show that for a globe the size of Earth, even this simple non-convection model would be unsolvable by the most powerful computers available today or for the foreseeable future -- not only because of the quantity of calculations required, but also because of the impossibility of setting the initial boundary conditions at every point needed to even begin the calculation process.
Relevant Atmospheric Physics
Gerlich and Tscheuschner next show that even the simplest forms of the special equations needed for a true analysis of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) relationships involved in planetary atmospheric heating cannot be solved -- even for small-space regions and small-time intervals -- because of the inhomogenities of each fluid involved and relevant solid, liquid, and gaseous phases to be considered. The real world is just too complex.
However, they are able to show that MHD-type equations offer no terms corresponding to absorption of electromagnetic radiation, do not include equations for "radiative transfer," and give no indication of the point where the concentration of carbon dioxide would even enter into the computations. Further, they go on to show that any mechanism whereby CO2 in the cooler upper atmosphere could exert any thermal enhancing or "forcing" effect on the warmer surface below violates both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
There are too many different transfer phenomena (radiative transfer, heat transfer, momentum transfer, mass transfer, energy transfer, etc.) and types of interfaces (static or moving) between solids, fluids, gases, plasmas, etc. for which no applicable scientific theory nor ability to determine boundary conditions exists. "Hence, the computer simulations of global climatology are not based on physical laws," the authors conclude (their emphasis). "Nevertheless, in their summaries for policymakers, global climatologists claim that they can compute the influence of carbon dioxide on the climate."
Dr. Roy Spencer, in his book Climate Confusion, points out how man-made global warming alarmists attempt to mislead the public by claiming that global CO2 emissions total about 50 billion tons per year while failing to acknowledge that the total weight of the atmosphere is 5 quadrillion tons. In other words, the 50 billion tons adds to 5 million billion tons, or a mere 10 parts per million -- relatively speaking, a trivial change each year.
Spencer shows how with oceans covering nearly seventy percent of Earth, water vapor and ocean currents totally dominate our global climate. He attributes oceanic and atmospheric circulation in the North Pacific as the dominant modern climate forcing mechanism. As for infrared radiation, Gerlich and Tscheuschner agree with earlier studies that water vapor is responsible for most of the IR absorption in the Earth's atmosphere. Thus, any infrared radiation absorbed by carbon dioxide represents only a tiny part of the full IR spectrum and is affected little by raising CO2 concentration.
Gerlich and Tscheuschner state without equivocation that there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect which explains the relevant physical phenomena. They call the terms greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases "deliberate misnomers" and a "myth beyond physical reality" and conclude:
The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.
Thus, scientific support for the man-made global warming hoax slowly collapses while politicians rush to lock in massive international wealth-redistribution in its name. Those pesky "greenhouse gases" just don't behave in a politically correct manner.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/politics_and_greenhouse_gasses.html at November 27, 2009 - 03:40:44 PM EST
-
This should really be in 'Media Issues' since the silence of the "Lamestream Media" on the biggest story of the decade has started to become the story and the piece has no science or substance. The Editorial has to explain about the email leak since the news department seemed to miss it, then explain that the conclusions remain the same, obviously, even though all the supporting data is now in doubt. That makes sense to them, I suppose.
I post this both to rip them and to cover what the 'other side' is saying in the absence of dissent on the forum.
Like most liberal pieces, it starts with a lie in the first sentence and throws in a name-call for good measure: "Stop hyperventilating, all you climate change deniers."
In fact, the hyperventilating is coming from the alarmists, 'we must act now or the planet will die of a fever' and the people he calls deniers of a normal cycle, climate change are climate change rationalists, not deniers. The reality deniers are the ones who see a 0.5 degree rise over a century and call it 'unprecedented'.
------------------
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/27/purloined_e-mails_dont_change_the_facts_99317.html
E-mails Don't Prove Warming is a Fraud
By Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Stop hyperventilating, all you climate change deniers. The purloined e-mail correspondence published by skeptics last week -- portraying some leading climate researchers as petty, vindictive and tremendously eager to make their data fit accepted theories -- does not prove that global warming is a fraud.
If I'm wrong, somebody ought to tell the polar ice caps that they're free to stop melting.
That said, the e-mail episode is more than a major embarrassment for the scientists involved. Most Americans are convinced that climate change is real -- a necessary prerequisite for the kinds of huge economic and behavioral adjustments we would have to make to begin seriously limiting carbon emissions. But consensus on the nature and scope of the problem will dissipate, and fast, if experts try to obscure the fact that there's much about the climate they still don't know.
Here's what happened: Someone hacked into the servers at one of the leading academic centers in the field -- the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England -- and filched a trove of e-mails and documents, which have been posted on numerous Web sites maintained by climate skeptics.
Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, released a statement Wednesday saying, "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published e-mails do not read well." That would be an example of British understatement.
In one message sent to a long list of colleagues, Jones speaks of having completed a "trick" with recent temperature data to "hide the decline." The word "trick" is hardly a smoking gun -- scientists use it to refer to clever but perfectly legitimate ways of handling data. But the "hide the decline" part refers to a real issue among climate researchers called the "divergence problem."
To plot temperatures going back hundreds or thousands of years -- long before anyone was taking measurements -- you need a set of data that can serve as an accurate proxy. The width of tree rings correlates well with observed temperature readings, and extrapolating that correlation into the past yields the familiar "hockey stick" graph -- fairly level temperatures for eons, followed by a sharp incline beginning around 1900. This is attributed to human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting increase in heat-trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide.
But beginning around 1960, tree-ring data diverges from observed temperatures. Skeptics say this calls into question whether tree-ring data is valid for earlier periods on the flat portion of the hockey stick -- say, 500 or 1,000 years ago. Jones and others acknowledge they don't know what the divergence means, but they point to actual temperatures: It's warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
Another e-mail -- from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. -- is even more heartening to the skeptics. Trenberth wrote last month of the unusually cool autumn that Colorado was experiencing, and went on: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
He appears to be conceding skeptics' claim that over the past decade there has been no observed warming. In truth, though, that wouldn't be much of a concession. At issue is the long-term trend, and one would expect anomalous blips from time to time.
From my reading, the most damning e-mails are those in which scientists seem to be trying to squelch dissent from climate change orthodoxy -- threatening to withhold papers from journals if they publish the work of naysayers, vowing to keep skeptical research out of the official U.N.-sponsored report on climate change.
In his statement, Jones noted that the e-mail hack occurred just days before the climate summit in Copenhagen. "This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change," he said. There's that understatement again.
The fact is that climate science is fiendishly hard because of the enormous number of variables that interact in ways no one fully understands. Scientists should welcome contrarian views from respected colleagues, not try to squelch them. They should admit what they don't know.
It would be great if this were all a big misunderstanding. But we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and we know the planet is hotter than it was a century ago. The skeptics might have convinced each other, but so far they haven't gotten through to the vanishing polar ice.
-
Climategate: The Travails of a Global Warming Hobbyist
Posted By Terry Hughes On November 28, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Feature 01, Computers, Environment, Internet, Politics, Science, US News | 68 Comments
In 2006, when we were being absolutely inundated by the shrill voices of global warming both pro and con, I, like a great many Americans, didn’t know exactly what to believe. I wasn’t ready to don my aluminum foil hat and go sit at the table where the voices cried out “global one world government conspiracy.” Neither was I ready for hemp clothing, joining the folks over at Al’s table to denigrate the “flat earth global warming deniers.”
So what’s the average guy to do? Geek that I am, I started downloading a hundred years worth of temperature data from the government web site, and built my own dataset, for my hometown of Phoenix.
Now bear in mind I’m not a climate researcher. I have no credentials that would lend any credence whatsoever to anything I might discover one way or the other. I simply figured I can look at numbers as well as the next guy, and go from there. And voila! I got a hockey stick [1]!
Well, sort of. The numbers went kind of flat around 1998, but then I was only looking at one city, and not the world. I had neither the climate expertise nor the statistical background to fully understand what it was I was seeing, but I figured it should pretty much parallel the famous graph. Shouldn’t it?
As a sanity check, I pulled the data for a town fifty miles west of Phoenix for a hundred years, and no hockey stick. I must have hosed something up somewhere. I double-checked both datasets, double-checked my graphing technique, and couldn’t find any errors. So I pulled the data for a town fifty miles east. It looked just like the western set. Then north and south, which looked like the east and west sets. Not a hockey stick in sight. Just meanderings, a slight climb to 1998, where again, it leveled off. I did notice that 1939 seemed to be the high point, but that wasn’t what the NASA guy was saying; he said it was 1998.
Again, I’m only looking at one little spot, so let’s look at Dallas and surrounding areas. Same results as Phoenix. More research revealed the urban heat island phenomenon [2], first explored and explained by Luke Howard [3] in 1810. A ton of work has piggybacked onto that over the years, with algorithms that correlate square miles of asphalt to the corresponding temperature rise. I didn’t know about that before. Well, as I said, I’m not a climate researcher, just a regular guy wondering what the real story is. The urban heat island data sort of gets you the hockey stick, particularly in the Sunbelt cities.
Now it’s 2007. Up to this point, I hadn’t even looked at CO2, but I figured I should since that was what seemed to be getting the lion’s share of press. Again, off to the government site, where I grabbed a bunch of numbers and started graphing. A pattern emerged, and I got all excited thinking I’d found the answer, when 1998 again raised its ugly head. For about 22 years, the rise in CO2 and the rise in temperature paralleled each other, starting in roughly 1976. But in 1998, the temperature turned right, while CO2 kept right on climbing.
I’m not doing something right, I told myself. I started searching the internet for the model data that these guys at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC [4]), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR [5]), and NASA were using, and came up empty.
Since the CRU was British, maybe they would have something posted somewhere. What I discovered was the “Maxwell Smart cone of silence” had been lowered around any information concerning how the calculations had been prepared. I was, and still am, astounded at how this is being handled to this very day. A number of these institutions are funded completely with public money, and yet they refuse to provide any data whatsoever. How is this possible?
My patient wife has given herself migraines from the extreme eye rolling she engages in while I’m fooling with this. “Why can’t you go bowling or duck hunting like the other guys?” she’ll lament.
Nobody ever said it was going to be easy for a wanna-be researcher.
I can tell you, from the years I’ve spent both modeling and 5-axis programming airfoils, that different mathematical techniques yield different results. The sum of least squares will give a slightly different result than cubic squares when analysis of surface data is the exercise. I get all that. But I just couldn’t seem to make my tiny little experiment fit the pattern I was being told was the truth, and it didn’t matter what city I used.
Now it can probably be successfully argued that a guy with a laptop searching the internet on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings isn’t really engaged in research, so I’ll call it research by proxy. The people who actually do the research tend to have their papers published online, for people like me to look at. And more than likely there will at least be references to where you can find the data if you’re so inclined. Not so with the whole global warming thing. It was glasnost lite — you simply trust, with no attached verification.
Then 2009 rolled around, and I was no closer to a definitive answer in my own mind about the anthropogenic global warming exercise than when I started. I remembered hearing on the news that the average daytime temperature of Mars was rising. Fine. I set off in search of information on the sun’s radiance and found a whole complete new can of worms to deal with. The sun guys had gobs and gobs of published data showing a correlation between sunspots and atmospheric temperatures on planet Earth.
Now the truly odd thing was they seemed for the most part to agree with each other concerning the relationship of spots to temperature. Where they seemed to differ was the causes of the spots and how to accurately forecast the coming ones. Their charts for the last one hundred years all pretty much agreed with each other. Counterintuitively — the more spots the higher the temperature, the fewer spots the lower the temps. Nowhere did I find sites voicing alternate views on sunspots. Not a tinfoil hat in sight.
So here we are in the closing months of 2009, and we’re hearing that probably a lot of the data in this whole AGW fiasco is now highly suspect, and at no point did I ever see where any of these guys ever talked to, or considered, what the sun guys were saying. For many years I’ve maintained that if there are 1,000 factors governing weather, we make all our forecasts and predictions based on the nine that we know. (Make that ten. The sun guys should be credited with spots.)
The more I’ve seen, the more convinced I’ve become that the global warming crowd latched onto the parallel rise in temperatures and CO2, and built what has essentially become a religion around it. For 22 years it appeared to have been a solid conclusion that they were indeed tied together. Then the inescapable truth of the matter made itself clear in 1998 that they are not necessarily linked in the fashion that was first thought. Entire professional careers have been built around, and on, the premise that man-caused CO2 raises temperatures, and it’s too late to turn back now for most of them.
It appears that Jones and the CRU folks didn’t simply massage the data. As other pundits have pointed out, they waterboarded it. There are several blatantly obvious conclusions to be drawn here. First, any group receiving public money for research must make their data available to all. Even to guys with laptops on Saturday afternoons. Second, it seems that peer review means next to nothing. In the whole AGW thing, collaborating researchers apparently became co-conspirators. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge has no place in honest scientific endeavors. Third, science in general has taken a huge hit, making the average guy wonder if large grants create large lies and vice-versa. Fourth, where the heck has our media been? Menus at the White House are more important than what is possibly the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the American public? Apparently, only FOX got the memo. Fifth, school children need to be re-educated that CO2 is not the same as phosgene and sarin.
As for this disenfranchised independent voter, I’m thinking about taking up bowling and duck hunting. This climate researcher gig isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-the-travails-of-a-global-warming-hobbyist/
URLs in this post:
[1] hockey stick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
[2] urban heat island phenomenon: http://www.urban-climate-energy.com/urbanHeatIsland.htm
[3] Luke Howard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Howard
[4] IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[5] NCAR: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/research/meteorology/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2008 Pajamas Media. All rights reserved.
-
Second post:
November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/29/weird-science-east-anglia-cru-threw-out-their-raw-data/
Uhhhhhh......
The dog ate my global warming evidence.
-
http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/01/the-scientific-tragedy-of-clim
Reason Magazine
The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate
Can climate change science recover from the damage done by leaked emails?
Ronald Bailey | December 1, 2009
Climategate. What a hot mess. Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and their colleagues around the globe may have fiddled with historical climate data and possibly the peer review process to ensure that publicized temperature trends fit the narrative of man-made global warming—then they emailed each other about it. Now those emails and other documents have been splashed all over the Web. Revelations contained in the leaked emails are roiling the scientific community and the researchers may be in pretty serious trouble. But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind's ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.
Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming "blip." According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid "natural" warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley's emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure.
In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world's policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available.
In the wake of the Climategate leaks, some researchers are openly decrying the scientific censorship exercised by powerful gatekeepers associated with the CRU. Climatologist Eduardo Zorita at the German Institute for Coastal Research has publicly declared that "editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed." Zorita adds, "In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'." Zorita evidently believes even after the email scandal that he will be punished by editors and reviewers for denouncing the CRU crew: "By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication."
Now under pressure, the CRU has finally agreed to publicly release all of its temperature data. Just how valuable this will be has been thrown into doubt, however, since the CRU has admitted, "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data." This raises legitimate scientific questions about how the lost original data were manipulated to produce the "value-added." The Times (London) reported that Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.
Phil Jones, the embattled head of the CRU tried to put to rest concerns about the integrity of his center’s data by issuing this statement:
Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Center in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.
It is reassuring to think that even if the CRU data are shown to be distorted (either wittingly or unwittingly) other independent sources of data are at hand. But that belief may not be entirely accurate. Besides the CRU temperature data, there are two other leading sources used by the IPCC, one created by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and the other by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
While it is true that the scientific groups are independent, as University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. (and father of Pielke Jr.) observes, the temperature data sets are not all that independent. Pielke cites the 2006 U.S. Climate Change Science Program report which noted, "Since the three chosen data sets utilize many of the same raw observations, there is a degree of interdependence." The report further observed, "While there are fundamental differences in the methodology used to create the surface data sets, the differing techniques with the same data produce almost the same results." In 2007, Pielke and his colleagues reported, "The raw surface temperature data from which all of the different global surface temperature trend analyses are derived are essentially the same. The best estimate that has been reported is that 90–95 percent of the raw data in each of the analyses is the same (P. Jones, personal communication, 2003). That the analyses produce similar trends should therefore come as no surprise."
One of the leaked emails from CRU’s Phil Jones appears to confirm this data interdependence: "Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center." Given this interdependence, Jones’ appeal to correlation with other data sets to support the validity of the CRU data is less convincing than one would hope. To the contrary, the fact that the three data sets correlate so well may instead provoke concerns about the validity of all three.
In an email to University of Alabama climatologist John Christy I asked, "Is there a possibility that the teams that compile temperature data could all be making the same set of errors which would result in them finding similar (and perhaps) spurious trends?" Christy replied that he believed this was possible and cited some recent work he had done on temperature trends in East Africa as evidence. In that article he found that using both the maximum and minimum temperature rather than the mean temperature (TMean) used by the three official data sets gives a better indication of actual temperature trends in the region.
Christy found that the maximum temperature (TMax) trend has been essentially zero since 1900 while the minimum temperature (TMin) trend has been increasing. In his email to me, Christy explained, "As it turns out, TMin warms significantly due to factors other than the greenhouse effect, so TMean, because it is affected by TMin, is a poor proxy for understanding the greenhouse effect of 'global warming'." Or as his journal article puts it, "There appears to be little change in East Africa’s TMax, and if TMax is a suitable proxy for climate changes affecting the deep atmosphere, there has been little impact in the past half-century." So if Christy’s analysis is correct, much of the global warming in East Africa reported by the three official data sets is exaggerated. Christy has found similar effects on temperature trend reporting for other regions of the world.
Roger Pielke Jr. notes, "If it turns out that the choices made by CRU, GISS, NOAA fall on the 'maximize historical trends' end of the scale that will not help their perceived credibility for obvious reasons." On the other hand, Pielke Jr. adds that Climategate could dissipate if probing by outside researchers finds that CRU, GISS, and NOAA researchers made temperature data adjustments "in the middle of the range or even low end, then this will enhance their credibility." The good news is that a truly independent set of temperature data has been produced over the past thirty years by NOAA satellites. In general, the global satellite temperature trends tend to be on the low end of the climate computer model projections.
The more benign interpretation of what has been going on in climate change science is that as the man-made global warming narrative took hold among climatologists, research that confirmed the dominant paradigm had a much easier time getting through the peer review process. Meanwhile research that contradicted the paradigm was subject to much greater scrutiny and thus had a harder time making it through the peer review sieve. Scientists are human too and not free from confirmation bias.
But for now, regardless of the motivations of the researchers, damage has been done. How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate the activities of researcher Michael Mann who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed. In Britain, Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has called for an independent investigation of the CRU. Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared, "It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow…. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign."
Another important step to recovering from the tragedy of Climategate is to institute the kind of research transparency that should have been happening in the first place. "Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented," argues Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry. "This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why."
In a BBC News article, Michael Hulme, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia and Jerome Ravetz, who is associated with an institute at Oxford University, warn that the tribalism revealed in the leaked CRU emails is damaging public trust in climate science. In addition, they believe that the usefulness of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which relied heavily on the work of CRU scientists, may have run its course. Hulme and Ravetz worry that the IPCC’s "structural tendency to politicize climate change science…has helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production—just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."
And greater transparency should not be limited to just temperature data, but to all aspects of climate science. In an email response to me, climatologist Pielke Sr., argues, "I completely support the view that the computer software [of climate models] must be available for scrutiny by independent scientists. Otherwise these models should not be used in climate assessment reports." Only through such transparency can other researchers determine whether or not climate models are adequate forecasters of future climate change or are merely prejudices made plausible.
One thing more transparency won't fix: the complications and uncertainty inherent in the policy debate about global warming. "In the end, I would hypothesize that the result of the freeing of data and code will necessarily lead to a more robust understanding of scientific uncertainties, [and] that may have the perverse effect of making the future less clear," emails Pielke Jr. "The inability to tolerate dissent has unfortunately destroyed the credibility of climate change science and I don’t know how it’s going to come back," laments climatologist and free-market Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels, who was frequently reviled in the CRU emails. "I don’t know how the public and policymakers will ever trust what climate scientists say in the future."
In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers. That’s the true tragedy of Climategate.
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books.
-
The Daily Show's take:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgPUpIBWGp8[/youtube]
Grr, can't embed this video so double click on it to watch it on YouTube.
-
Second post:
A long, authoritative examination of Climategate and it's implications by non-alarmist gadfly Lord Monckton:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf
-
well, there goes a lot of funding for green projects, which we still need since they are efficient and sustainable. Everything is going to snap back into trading blood for oil it looks like. I really really dislike these guys, they will be doing more to damage science, progress, and general reasoning than the inquisition ever did. :roll:
they would have been better to just be saying "we don't know for sure yet, but this is something that needs addressed." and then worked like every other scientist does. :x
-
Many "green projects" are boondoggles so I'm not exactly crying about this prospect. Ethanol production is an energy Ponzi scheme, recycling, as mentioned elsewhere often does more harm than good, solar and wind energy are not particularly scalable and cost a lot more per kilowatt to produce energy, and so on.
My perspective is that there are a lot of people out there who have a desperate need to tell others how to live and so have latched on to various green scams to get their busybody yayas out. The hell with them if then now have to find other forms of manipulation and amusement.
-
Ever notice how any scientist that doesn't agree the sky is falling where AGW is concerned is called a shill for big oil as a prerequisite to dismissing anything they have to say? Well note the following bon mots in the CRU emails:
Climategate: CRU looks to “big oil” for support
4
12
2009
One of the favorite put-downs from people who think they have the moral high ground in the climate debate is to accuse skeptics with this phrase: “You are nothing but a shill for Big Oil”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) from Flixter - click for details
Who amongst us hasn’t seen variants of that pointed finger repeated thousands of times? The paradigm has shifted. Now it appears CRU is the one looking for “big oil” money. See the email:
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/cru_kelly_shell.png?w=418&h=602)
See the entire email here:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=171&filename=962818260.txt
There’s more.
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/cru_hulme_shell_support2.png?w=510&h=369)
click to enlarge
But wait that’s not all!
Further down in that email, look at who else they were looking to for money. Oh, this is horrible, it just can’t be, they wouldn’t. They were looking to not only BP but, but EXXON in its Esso incarnation:
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/cru_esso_support.png?w=422&h=499)
See the entire email here:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=156&filename=947541692.txt
Now who is the shill for Big Oil again? Next time somebody brings up that ridiculous argument about skeptics, show them this.
h/t and thanks to WUWT reader “boballab”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/climategate-cru-looks-to-big-oil-for-support/
-
Scientists Behaving Badly
A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak.
by Steven F. Hayward
12/14/2009, Volume 015, Issue 13
Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment.
In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public--either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails--more than 1,000 of them--reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT's Michael Schrage, engaged in "malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings." In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, "Please write all emails as though they will be made public." Small wonder why. It's being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them "the CRUtape Letters."
As in the furor over Dan Rather's fabricated documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the "fake but accurate" defense--what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don't you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. "The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. . . . I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them. . . . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely." Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.
As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over the richly deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on dissenting scientists (NASA's James Hansen, for instance, compared MIT's Richard Lindzen to a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore and countless -others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the meaning of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU's Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails "do not read well." Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e‑missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used "Mike's Nature [magazine] trick" to "hide the decline" that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU's work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than "hide the decline," expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists--otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming--there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.
The behavior of the CRU circle has cast a long shadow over the entire climate science community, and many honest scientists will now undeservedly bear the stigma of Climategate unless a full airing of the issues is conducted. Other important climate research centers with close ties to the CRU--including NASA's Goddard Institute and the Climate Change Science Program at NOAA--should not be exempt from a full-dress investigation. Such a reevaluation must begin with an understanding of the crucial role the CRU circle has played in the global warming drama.
In the larger world of climate science, the Climate-gate story is overwhelmingly about one small but very important subfield--paleoclimatology, the effort to reconstruct the earth's climate during the vast sweep of time before humans began measuring and recording observations about the weather. That turns out to be a massively complicated exercise in statistical manipulation of huge amounts of raw data. Because the gap between observation and conclusion in this subfield is so dependent on statistical techniques rather than direct measurement, it was bound to be a matter of intense controversy and deserved the most searching review by outside scientists. It is exactly this kind of review that the CRU insiders acted to prevent or obscure.
Because the earth's climate is a complex system, the effort to understand why and how it changes is arguably the largest undertaking ever conducted by the world's scientific community. The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia is not just an important hub of climate science, but one whose work plays a prominent role in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body that every five or six years since 1992 has produced a massive report on the international "consensus" in the field of climate science. This is the body typically said to comprise 2,000 of the world's top scientists, though there are many thousands more scientists working on aspects of climate change who do not participate in the IPCC process, many of whom dissent from the rigid "consensus" the process produces. One of the things the CRU emails prove is that the oft-cited figure of 2,000 top scientists is misleading; the circle of genuinely active scientists in the work of CRU and related institutions in this country is very small. Nonetheless, Al Gore and other climate campaigners have leaned heavily on the IPCC process as proof for their assertions that human-caused global warming is a matter of "settled" science. This, even though, in the last IPCC report on the science of climate change in 2007, the terms "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appear over 1,300 times in 900 pages, and the report describes our level of scientific understanding of key aspects of climate as "low" or "very low." The IPCC chapter on the climate models that are the principal tool predicting our future doom refers to "significant uncertainties" in all the models, and admits that "models still show significant errors."
There have been rumors for years about political pressure being brought to bear on the process to deliver scarier numbers, because the effects of a 2-3 degree increase in temperatures just weren't going to be enough to justify the kind of emission reductions the greens want. And one of the largest uncertainties in the whole climate story is whether we can determine if the warming of the last 150 years (about 0.8 degrees Celsius) is outside of the long-term historical range, which would lend powerful confirmation to the computer climate models that spit out projections of unprecedented and potentially dangerous temperature increases in the decades to come, caused by the greenhouse gases produced by industrial societies.
It has long been thought that over the last thousand years the earth experienced two significant natural climate cycles: the "medieval warm period" (MWP) centered around the year 1000 and the "little ice age" (LIA) from about 1500 to 1850 or so. The first report of the IPCC in 1992 displayed a stylized thousand-year temperature record showing that the MWP was warmer than current global temperatures, but this was mostly conjecture. Yet it was a huge problem for the climate campaigners: If the medieval warm period was as warm as today, as some scientists believe, it would mean that today's temperatures are arguably within the range of normal climate variability, and that we could not yet confirm greenhouse gas emissions as the sole cause of recent increases or rely on computer climate models for predictions of future climate apocalypse. There had long been rumors that leading figures in the climate community believed they needed to make the medieval warm period go away, but until the CRU leak there was no evidence besides hearsay that scientists might be cooking the books.
The evidence for the medieval warm period and the little ice age is mostly anecdotal, since there were no thermometers in the year 1000. Is there a way we could determine what the temperature was a thousand years ago? Calculating the average temperature for the entire planet is no simple matter, even today. This is where the paleoclimatologists at the CRU enter the picture. The CRU circle set out to "reconstruct" past temperature history through the use of "proxies," such as variations in tree rings, samples of centuries-old ice drilled out of glaciers and polar ice caps, lake sediment samples, and corals from the ocean. Using a variety of ingenious techniques, it is possible for each of these proxies to yield a temperature estimate at a particular location. Tree rings are thought to be the best proxy, because we can count backwards and establish the exact year each ring formed, and by its width make temperature estimates. But tree ring data are very limited. There are only a few kinds of trees that live a thousand years or more, mostly bristlecone pines in the western United States and a few species in Siberia. The thousands of data points that emerge from these painstaking efforts are not self-explanatory. They need to be adjusted and calibrated for latitude, altitude, and a number of other factors (such as volcanic activity and rainfall during the period). Even the most rigorous statistical methodology will generate estimates with large margins of error. One of the striking features of the CRU emails is how much time the CRU circle spent discussing with each other the myriad problems with processing these data and how to display them to a wider world. On the one hand, this is typical of what one might expect of an evolving scientific enterprise. On the other hand, these are the selfsame scientists who have insisted most vehemently that there is a settled consensus adhered to by all researchers of repute and that there is nothing left to debate. Another striking thing that emerges from the emails is that the climate modelers don't have a high regard for paleoclimatology, and the paleos have a palpable inferiority complex. Judging by the length of many of the email chains kvetching about their problems, it is a wonder this small group had time to do any actual research.
In 1998 three scientists from American universities--Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes--unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology--the now notorious "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction (picture a flat "handle" extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping "blade" from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin--far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period and the little ice age both disappeared. The hockey stick chart was used prominently in the 2001 IPCC report as "smoking gun" proof of human-caused global warming. Mann and his coauthors concluded that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium."
-
Case closed? Hardly. The CRU emails reveal internal doubts about this entire enterprise both before and after the hockey stick made its debut. In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: "I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product." Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren't comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.
CRU scientist Keith Briffa, whose work on tree rings in Siberia has been subject to its own controversies, emailed Edward Cook of Columbia University: "I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series," adding that he was tired of "the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage [Mann] has produced over the last few years . . . and (better say no more)."
Cook replied: "I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon[struction], particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. . . . It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively."
In yet another revealing email, Cook told Briffa: "Of course [Bradley] and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only 'half-empty'; it is demonstrably 'broken'. I come more from the 'cup half-full' camp when it comes to the MWP, maybe yes, maybe no, but it is too early to say what it is."
In another email to Briffa, Cook complains about Bradley, too: "His air of papal infallibility is really quite nauseating at times."
Even as the IPCC was picking up Mann's hockey stick with enthusiasm, Briffa sent Mann a note of caution about "the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist. I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not 'muddy the waters' by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent consensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence." Briffa had previously dissented from the hockey stick reconstruction in a 1999 email to Mann and Phil Jones: "I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago." Even Malcolm Hughes, one of the original hockey stick coauthors, privately expressed reservations about overreliance on their invention, writing to Cook, Mann and others in 2002:
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data. As Ed [Cook] wrote, in the tree-ring records that form the backbone of most of the published estimates, the problem of poor replication near the beginnings of records is particularly acute, and ubiquitous. . . . Therefore, I accept that everything we are doing is preliminary, and should be treated with considerable caution.
Mann didn't react well to these hesitations from his colleagues. Even Ray Bradley, a coauthor of the hockey stick article, felt compelled to send a message to Briffa after one of Mann's self-serving emails with the single line: "Excuse me while I puke." One extended thread grew increasingly acrimonious as Mann lashed out at his colleagues. He wrote to Briffa, Jones, and seven others in a fury over their favorable remarks about a Science magazine article that offered a temperature history that differed from the hockey stick: "Sadly, your piece on the Esper et al paper is more flawed than even the paper itself. . . . There is a lot of damage control that needs to be done and, in my opinion, you've done a disservice to the honest discussions we had all had in the past, because you've misrepresented the evidence."
To Briffa in particular Mann wrote: "Hopefully, you know that I respect you quite a bit as a scientist! But in this case, I think you were sloppy. And the sloppiness had a real cost." Mann's bad manners prompted Bradley to reply: "I wish to disassociate myself with Mike's comments, or at least the tone of them. I do not consider myself the final arbiter of what Science should publish, nor do I consider what you did to signify the end of civilization as we know it." Tempers got so out of hand that Tom Crowley of Duke University intervened: "I am concerned about the stressed tone of some of the words being circulated lately. . . . I think you are all fine fellows and very good scientists and that it is time to smoke the peace pipe on all this and put a temporary moratorium on more email messages until tempers cool down a bit." Mann responded with his best imitation of Don Corleone: "This is ultimately about the science, it's not personal." If the CRU circle treat each other this way, it is no wonder they treat skeptics even more rudely.
One of Briffa's concerns about Mann's hockey stick is that some of the tree ring data--Briffa's specialty--didn't match up well with other records, so Mann either omitted them (in some versions of the hockey stick) or changed their statistical weighting in his overall synthesis to downplay the anomalous results of the raw data. This, by the way, is the origin of Phil Jones's "hide the decline" email; after 1960 tree ring data suggest a decline in temperatures, while other datasets show an increase. (This is one of many sources of intense controversy about temperature reconstructions.) Jones's and Mann's treatment may be defensible, but is problematic to say the least.
Starting in 2003 two mild-mannered Canadians, retired engineer Stephen McIntyre and University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, began making noises about serious problems with the by-then iconic hockey stick graph. The dispute between McIntyre, McKitrick (M/M as they became known in the shorthand of the climate science world) and the hockey team was highly technical, involving advanced methods of data selection and statistical analysis that are almost impossible for a layperson to follow. But one key point was access to the original raw data and complete computer codes that Mann and CRU had used, rather than the adjusted data reported in their final studies.
To extend the sports equipment simile, Mann and the hockey team responded with the scientific equivalent of high-sticking. It was McIntyre's requests for raw data and computer codes that prompted the numerous emails from Jones and other CRU people about "hiding" behind technicalities to refuse freedom of information requests or even destroying data, codes, and emails to stymie McIntyre. Prior to this time, most of the complaints about outsiders in the leaked emails dealt with such well known skeptics as the University of Virginia's Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, MIT's Richard Lindzen, and journal editors who didn't toe the line. After 2003 the CRU crew became obsessed with McIntyre above all others. He appears in 105 of the emails by name (in some others, he's referred to as "a certain Canadian"), usually with a tone of resentment and contempt.
McIntyre is not a climate-science insider, with peer-reviewed articles in journals that the hockey team firmly controlled. He's an amateur with mathematical chops, with a serious track record for spotting statistical funny business. McIntyre, who spent decades in mineral exploration, was involved in exposing the Bre‑X fraud in Canada several years ago. Bre‑X was a gold mining company promising fat profits on a new proprietary technology for ore deposits in Borneo; McIntyre smelled a rat and demanded the raw data. Bre‑X collapsed shortly after. And McIntyre scored a major hit against NASA's chief climate alarmist James Hansen, discovering significant errors of overestimation in Hansen's temperature reconstruction of the 20th century. (NASA's Goddard Institute website publicly thanked McIntyre, no doubt through gritted cyber teeth, for pointing out their error.) The hockey stickers' obsession with McIntyre seems out of proportion if there was nothing amiss in their work.
McIntyre and McKitrick may have made mistakes in their critique of the hockey stick--the charges and countercharges are difficult for nonspecialists to sort out--but they were sufficiently persuasive that the National Academy of Sciences appointed an expert review panel to look into the dispute. The NAS reported its findings in 2006, and the language was sufficiently hedged in diplomatic equivocations that Mann and the media claimed the hockey stick had been vindicated. But a close reading shows that the NAS report devastated the hockey stick. While the NAS said the hockey stick reconstruction was a "plausible" depiction of 20th-century warming, the report went on to state clearly that
substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium." [Emphasis added.]
One of the NAS committee members, physicist Kurt Cuffey of the University of California, was more direct in remarks to Science magazine: "The IPCC used [the hockey stick] as a visual prominently in the [2001] report. I think that sent a very misleading message about how resolved this part of the scientific research was." Mann's hockey stick, a centerpiece of the 2001 IPCC report, did not appear in the 2007 IPCC report.
The NAS report, it should be added, included an implicit rebuke of Mann and his colleagues for their reluctance to share their data with other researchers:
The committee recognizes that access to research data is a complicated, discipline-dependent issue, and that access to computer models and methods is especially challenging because intellectual property rights must be considered. Our view is that all research benefits from full and open access to published datasets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory. Peers should have access to the information needed to reproduce published results, so that increased confidence in the outcome of the study can be generated inside and outside the scientific community.
-
Despite this criticism and rebuke from the NAS, the Climate Research Unit hockey team continued refusing right up to this month to share its raw data and computer codes with McIntyre and McKitrick or anyone else. Mann continued to insist that the medieval warm period was overestimated, and he keeps on producing more new hockey sticks than the NHL (he has another one out this week in Science magazine). Some of the egregious emails in the stash include suggestions that everyone delete emails related to their work on the IPCC process to shield them from FOIA requests (possibly illegal) and, according to one of Jones's emails, actually destroying the raw data in the face of a successful FOIA requisition. Jones writes to Mann in one 2005 message: "Don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites--you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." Jones now claims no emails were deleted, but he'll need to explain his December 3, 2008, message to Ben Santer--a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--about a new FOIA request from McIntyre: "I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I've written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little--if anything at all."
Under the pressure of Climategate, the CRU has finally agreed to release its raw data and computer codes. But now we learn that some of the raw data have been lost, and while Jones should be asked blunt questions about whether he made good on his threats to delete data, it is possible that the data were lost through sheer sloppiness. The most devastating document in the CRUtape letters may be not the egregious emails that have drawn most of the public attention but the detailed notes of a CRU programmer, Ian "Harry" Harris, assigned the task of sorting out the handling of the raw data and computer files.
The HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, over 100,000 words long, paints a picture of haphazard data handling that would get almost any private sector researcher fired. Among the many damning items included in Harris's narrative are more instances of "hiding the decline" such as "Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid the decline)" and "Apply a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!" Worse are Harris's notes of improperly coded data (or data without codes at all), computer subroutines that don't work, and near complete chaos: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!! . . . " On and on goes Harris's catalogue of software bugs and data horrors. Finally, this: "OH F-- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."
No drug company could get through the FDA approval process with data handling this slapdash, yet the climate policy process contemplates trillions of dollars in costs to economies around the world based partially on this incompetent work. Worse, it suggests the possibility that the CRU circle might not be able to replicate its own findings from scratch, let alone outside reviewers. No wonder Mann keeps issuing new versions of his hockey stick.
But the frustration of the hapless Harris points to a more fundamental problem: The extreme politicization of climate science this episode reveals will discourage the best graduate students from entering the field. Judith Curry, chairman of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences--not a climate skeptic by any stretch--published online a letter she had received from a graduate student pondering whether to enter the field of climate science: "I am a young climate researcher (just received my master's degree from [redacted] University) and have been very troubled by the emails that were released from CRU. . . . The content of some of the emails literally made me stop and wonder if I should continue with my PhD applications for fall 2010, in this science." Scientists at top universities have been telling me privately for several years now that their best graduate students are avoiding climatology because they dislike how politicized it has become and consider it a dead-end field. Unfortunately this means many students who take up the field are second-raters or do so out of ideological motivation, which guarantees that the CRU scandal won't be the last.
The CRU scandal is only the tip of an unmelted iceberg of politicized science, though the "hard" sciences until recently have been generally thought immune (or at least resistant) to the leftist bias and political correctness of the universities. Some scientists are quite open about their leftward orientation. In 2004, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin wrote in the New York Review of Books: "Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time." MIT's Kerry Emanuel, as "mainstream" as they come in climate science (Al Gore references his work, and in one of his books Emanuel refers to Senator James Inhofe as a "scientific illiterate" and to climate skeptics as les refusards), nonetheless offers this warning to his field:
Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.
Perhaps the most damning email from the CRU circle is this July 2005 message from Phil Jones to climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama: "As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish." Jones's attitude may not be exactly political, but it is certainly unscientific. The denial of political bent is also hard to square with the emails revealing that several of these scientists worked closely behind the scenes with alarmist advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, which really deserves to be shunned by serious scientists.
Such is the volume of material leaked from the CRU that it may be many months before all of its implications for the underlying climate science are fully digested. But a few preliminary conclusions can be reached. First, we still don't know whether the medieval warm period was comparable to or even much warmer than current temperatures, and we probably never will know with confidence. So the validating or refining of today's climate models will have to go forward without this piece of the puzzle being filled in. Second, a close reading of the entire email archive allows some distinctions to be drawn among the CRU circle. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore seem indisputably to be the bad actors (it was Santer who said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" skeptic Pat Michaels). Others in their circle, such as Keith Briffa, Tom Wigley, and Mike Hulme, appear much more scrupulous and restrained about handling the data, uncertainties, and conclusions they put into print. Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and key IPCC contributor, comes out somewhere in the middle, writing recently, for example, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment [since 1998], and it is a travesty that we can't." But Jones also suggests in one email that he and Trenberth will help keep contrarian climate research out of the IPCC process "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA's James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about "tipping points" to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause.
Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s--as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world's energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it's closing time for the climate horror show.
Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, coauthor of AEI's Energy and Environment Outlook, and author of the forthcoming Almanac of Environmental Trends (Pacific Research Institute).
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/300ubchn.asp
-
Graphic intensive and fairly dense examination of the header and file structure of the CRU data that concludes it's release was an inside job:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/comprhensive-network-analysis-shows-climategate-likely-to-be-a-leak/
-
Climate of fear
December 6, 2009
Climate
I've had some correspondence over the last few days with a well-known writer. We've been discussing people who might want to review my book, but it has not been an easy task. I thought his comments on this problem were illuminating and I'm reproducing them here (with permission). As you will see, as well as not being able to name my correspondent, I have had to redact a name from the quote as well to protect the identity of the person named. Here's what my contact said when asked for suggestions for reviewers:
Asked for names of potential writers, I feel like an early Lutheran asked to identify his fellow readers of English bibles and knowing that Sir Thomas Gore, sorry More, is reading my letters and tightening his thumbscrews in Chelsea. In other words, like you, I know lots of people who are on side privately but daren't say so publicly. The other day I bumped into ************** at an event and said something about his global warming views (sceptical) and he froze and said `I don't do that stuff now - people would not touch me if I did'.
What can one say to that? I now live in a country where people are afraid to state their opinions on a scientific question. They will have their livelihoods taken away from them if they do.
I sometimes have to pinch myself to ensure that this really is happening and I'm not just living in a bad dream.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/6/climate-of-fear.html
-
The AGW mafia can glower and threaten all they want, but the fact that they are frauds is seeping into the public consciousness. The big loser in all of this is real science.
-
Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'
The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.
Christopher Booker
Published: 6:25PM GMT 28 Mar 2009
Comments 150 | Comment on this article
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
•For more information, see Dr Mörner on YouTube (Google Mörner, Maldives and YouTube); or read on the net his 2007 EIR interview "Claim that sea level is rising is a total fraud"; or email him – morner@pog.nu – to buy a copy of his booklet 'The Greatest Lie Ever Told
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
-
BBG:
The works you aggregate here are growing into a valuable reference for literate people looking to become informed.
-
A long piece with a lot of tables and formatting too intensive to replicate here. It follows how temp data from Australia was aggregated into various data sets, demonstrating very dubious methodology and a failure to abide by already lax standards when homogenizing disparate temp data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
ETA: Another source digging even deeper into the Australian data. This stuff is a little dense, but incredibly damning:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/smoking-guns-across-australia-wheres-the-warming/
-
Graphics heavy piece that amusingly demonstrates how meaningless hockey sticks are on a geologic time scale:
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553
-
As I continue LOOKING at this, it is increasingly looking like Climatology is on a par, or mix of Astrology/Scientology. The arguement against has no problem presenting data and facts pulled from actual thermometers. Those that argue for warming are constantly using computer models and what everybody knows.
Those that argue against are looking at several scales of data sets, that all prove that this is not a new warming trend, and that there was a Larger One during the middle age warming period, and a still larger one predating civilization. Given those factors, I would consider it arrogance on our part to believe we have had that kind of effect on the climate.
The place I would agree with the Greens would be that we do need to be more efficient and careful, because we don't know. Finding Out The Hard Waytm is usually too expensive. It would be a good ideas to continue our traditional "improvement over time" path through the Progresstm concept.
-
I agree with the improvement over time is prudent argument, but note a lot of greenies do their damnedest to make sure that the sort of wealth needed to make prudent choices isn't created in the first place. A lot of the payments to developing countries being argued for currently in Denmark make little sense as other UN transfers of wealth to kleptocracies have very little to show for themselves. This habit extends into the nuclear energy arena where greenies work diligently to make sure the costs associated with new plants is very high. Areas where the greenies hold sway like ethanol production or foisting small cars on folks are essentially boondoggles that eat wealth while returning very little. As such I'd argue future efforts have to be green not only in the feel good sense, but also in a fiscal sense.
-
"Finding Out The Hard Way (tm) is usually too expensive."
What's up with the (tm) on a common phrase?
-
Ok, I get that ethanol made from corn is possible because of gov't funding and not economically viable on it's own. What of using sawdust, other organic waste rather than food? Does this not work for Brazil?
-
I'm down with that GM, assuming it's economically feasible to retool to make it work. Lotta mechanics I know, however, claim ethanol eats gaskets and such in older cars not built to use that solvent as fuel. Think those sorts of unintended consequences ought to be kept in mind when trying gee whiz scheme.
Lotta folks in the dry county in KY where I do a lot of work know what to do with the ethanol they produce. Alas, the government isn't down with that use.
-
One of the major areas of inquiry emerging as the CRU leak data is analyzed involves the issue of "homogenization" where disparate, putatively proximate data sets are hammered into a cohesive dataset, despite the fact parts of that set weren't cohesive in the first place. I posted a couple pieces earlier that looks at a very well illustrated example of this occurring in Australia; a statistician I am growing very fond of now picks up the story and looks at the methodological implications of homogenizing this data.
Homogenization of temperature series: Part I
Published by Briggs at 11:08 am under Climatology
Introduction
Time to get technical.
First, surf over to Willis Eschenbach’s gorgeous piece of statistical detective work of how GHCN “homogenized” temperature data for Darwin, Australia. Pay particular attention to his Figures 7 & 8. Take your time reading his piece: it is essential.
There is vast confusion on data homogenization procedures. This article attempts to make these subjects clearer. I pay particular attention to the goals of homogenizations, its pitfalls, and most especially, the resulting uncertainties. The uncertainty we have in our eventual estimates of temperature is grossly underestimated. I will come to the, by now, non-shocking conclusion that too many people are too certain about too many things.
My experience has been that anything over 800 words doesn’t get read. There’s a lot of meat here, and it can’t all be squeezed into one 800-word sausage skin. So I have linked the sausage into a multi-day post with the hope that more people will get through it.
Homogenization goals
After reading Eschenbach, you now understand that, at a surrounding location—and usually not a point—there exists, through time, temperature data from different sources. At a loosely determined geographical spot over time, the data instrumentation might have changed, the locations of instruments could be different, there could be more than one source of data, or there could be other changes. The main point is that there are lots of pieces of data that some desire to stitch together to make one whole.
Why?
I mean that seriously. Why stitch the data together when it is perfectly useful if it is kept separate? By stitching, you introduce error, and if you aren’t careful to carry that error forward, the end result will be that you are far too certain of yourself. And that condition—unwarranted certainty—is where we find ourselves today.
Let’s first fix an exact location on Earth. Suppose this to be the precise center of Darwin, Australia: we’d note the specific latitude and longitude to be sure we are at just one spot. Also suppose we want to know the daily average temperature for that spot (calculated by averaging the 24 hourly values), which we use to calculate the average yearly temperature (the mean of those 365.25 daily values), which we want to track through time. All set?
Scenario 1: fixed spot, urban growth
The most difficult scenario first: our thermometer is located at our precise spot and never moves, nor does it change characteristics (always the same, say, mercury bulb), and it always works (its measurement error is trivial and ignorable). But the spot itself changes because of urban growth. Whereas once the thermometer was in an open field, later a pub opens adjacent to it, and then comes a parking lot, and then a whole city around the pub.
In this case, we would have an unbroken series of temperature measurements that would probably—probably!—show an increase starting at the time the pub construction began. Should we “correct” or “homogenize” that series to account for the possible urban heat island effect?
No.
At least, not if our goal was to determine the real average temperature at our spot. Our thermometer works fine, so the temperatures it measures are the temperatures that are experienced. Our series is the actual, genuine, God-love-you temperature at that spot. There is, therefore, nothing to correct. When you walk outside the pub to relieve yourself, you might be bathed in warmer air because you are in a city than if you were in an open field, but you aren’t in an open field, you are where you are and you must experience the actual temperature of where you live. Do I make myself clear? Good. Memorize this.
Scenario 2: fixed spot, longing for the fields
But what if our goal was to estimate what the temperature would have been if no city existed; that is, if we want to guess the temperature as if our thermometer was still in an open field? Strange goal, but one shared by many. They want to know the influence of humans on the temperature of the long-lost field—while simultaneously ignoring the influence of humans based on the new city. That is, they want to know how humans living anywhere but the spot’s city might have influenced the temperature of the long-lost field.
It’s not that this new goal is not quantifiable—it is; we can always compute probabilities for counterfactuals like this—but it’s meaning is more nuanced and difficult to grasp than our old goal. It would not do for us to forget these nuances.
One way to guess would be to go to the nearest field to our spot and measure the temperature there, while also measuring it at our spot. We could use our nearby field as a direct substitute for our spot. That is, we just relabel the nearby field as our spot. Is this cheating? Yes, unless you attach the uncertainty of this switcheroo to the newly labeled temperature. Because the nearby field is not our spot, there will be some error in using it as a replacement: that error should always accompany the resulting temperature data.
Or we could use the nearby field’s data as input to a statistical model. That model also takes as input our spot’s readings. To be clear: the nearby field and the spot’s readings are fed into a correction model that spits out an unverifiable, counterfactual guess of what the temperature would be if there were no city in our spot.
Tomorrow
Counterfactuals, a definition of what error and uncertainty means, an intermission on globally averaged temperature calculations, and Scenario 3: different spots, fixed flora and fauna.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1459
-
Homogenization of temperature series: Part II
Published under Climatology, Good Stats, Philosophy
Be sure to see Part I
Aside: counterfactuals
A counterfactual is statement saying what would be the case if its conditional were true. Like, “Germany would have won WWII if Hitler did not invade Russia.” Or, “The temperature at our spot would be X if no city existed.” Counterfactuals do not make statements about what really is, but only what might have been given something that wasn’t true was true.
They are sometimes practical. Credit card firms face counterfactuals each time they deny a loan and say, “This person will default if we issue him a card.” Since the decision to issue a card is based on some model or other decision process, the company can never directly verify whether its model is skillful, because they will never issue the card to find out whether or not its holder defaults. In short, counterfactuals can be interesting, but they cannot change what physically happened.
However, probability can handle counterfactuals, so it is not a mistake to seek their quantification. That is, we can assign easily a probability to the Hitler, credit card, or temperature question (given additional information about models, etc.).
Asking what the temperature would be at our spot had there not been a city is certainly a counterfactual. Another is to ask what the temperature of the field would have been given there was a city. This also is a strange question to ask.
Why would we want to know what the temperature of a non-existent city would have been? Usually, to ask how much more humans who don’t live in the city at this moment might have influenced the temperature in the city now. Confusing? The idea is if we had a long series in one spot, surrounded by a city that was constant in size and make up, we could tell if there were a trend in that series, a trend that was caused by factors not directly associated with our city (but was related to, say, the rest of the Earth’s population).
But since the city around our spot has changed, if we want to estimate this external influence, we have to guess what the temperature would have been if either the city was always there or always wasn’t. Either way, we are guessing a counterfactual.
The thing to take away is that the guess is complicated and surrounded by many uncertainties. It is certainly not as clear cut as we normally hear. Importantly, just as with the credit card example, we can never verify whether our temperature guess is accurate or not.
Intermission: uncertainty bounds and global average temperature
This guess would—should!—have a plus and minus attached to it, some guidance of how certain we are of the guess. Technically, we want the predictive uncertainty of the guess, and not the parametric uncertainty. The predictive uncertainty tells us the plus and minus bounds in the units of actual temperature. Parametric uncertainty states those bounds in terms of the parameters of the statistical model. Near as I can tell (which means I might be wrong), GHCN and, inter alia, Mann use parametric uncertainty to state their results: the gist being that they are, in the end, too confident of themselves.
(See this post for a distinction between the two; the predictive uncertainty is always larger than the parametric, usually by two to ten times as much. Also see this marvelous collection of class notes.)
OK. We have our guess of what the temperature might have been had the city not been there (or if the city was always there), and we have said that that guess should come attached with plus/minus bounds of its uncertainty. These bounds should be super-glued to the guess, and coated with kryptonite so that even Superman couldn’t detach them.
Alas, they are usually tied loosely with cheap string from a dollar store. The bounds fall off at the lightest touch. This is bad news.
It is bad because our guess of the temperature is then given to others who use it to compute, among other things, the global average temperature (GAT). The GAT is itself a conglomeration of measurements from sites all over (a very small—and changing—portion) of the globe. Sometimes the GAT is a straight average, sometimes not, but the resulting GAT is itself uncertain.
Even if we ignored the plus/minus bounds from our guessed temperatures, and also ignored it from all the other spots that go into the GAT, the act of calculating the GAT ensures that it must carry its own plus/minus bounds—which should always be stated (and such that they are with respect to the predictive, and not parametric uncertainty).
But if the bounds from our guessed temperature aren’t attached, then the eventual bounds of the GAT will be far, far, too narrow. The gist: we will be way too certain of ourselves.
We haven’t even started on why the GAT is such a poor estimate for the global average temperature. We’ll come to these objections another day, but for now remember two admonitions. No thing experiences GAT, physical objects can only experience the temperature of where they are. Since the GAT contains a large (but not large enough) number of stations, any individual station—as Dick Lindzen is always reminding us—is, at best, only weakly correlated with the GAT.
But enough of this, save we should remember that these admonitions hold whatever homogenization scenario we are in.
Next time
More scenarios!
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1462
-
"Finding Out The Hard Way (tm) is usually too expensive."
What's up with the (tm) on a common phrase?
over used enough it may as well be an over advertised brand name?
-
More damning deconstruction of Climategate data:
IPCC and the “Trick”
Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.
Relevant Climategate correspondence in the period (September-October 1999) leading up to the trick email is incomplete, but, in context, is highly revealing. There was a meeting of IPCC lead authors between Sept 1-3, 1999 to consider the “zero-order draft” of the Third Assessment Report. The emails provide clear evidence that IPCC had already decided to include a proxy diagram reconstructing temperature for the past 1000 years and that a version of the proxy diagram was presented at the Tanzania meeting showing the late twentieth century decline. I now have a copy of the proxy diagram presented at this meeting (see below).
The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.
The chronology in today’s posts show that the version of the Briffa reconstruction shown in the subsequent proxy diagram in the IPCC “First Order Draft” (October 27, 1999), presumably prepared under the direction of IPCC section author Mann, deleted the inconvenient portion (post-1960) of the Briffa reconstruction, together with other modifications that had the effect of not “diluting the message”. About two weeks later (Nov 16, 1999) came the now infamous Jones email reporting the use of “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in a forthcoming WMO (World Meteorological Organization) report. Jones’ methodology is different than the IPCC methodology. Jones’ trick has been described in previous posts. Today, I’ll describe both the context of the IPCC version of the “trick” and progress to date in reverse engineering the IPCC trick.
IPCC Lead Authors’ Meeting, Sept 1999
IPCC Lead Authors met in Arusha, Tanzania from September 1 to 3, 1999 (see Houghton, 929985154.txt and 0938018124.txt), at which the final version of the “zero-order” draft of the Third Assessment Report was presented and discussed. The “First-Order Draft” was sent out to reviewers two months later (end of October 1999).
By this time, IPCC was already structuring the Summary for Policy-makers and a proxy diagram showing temperature history over the past 1000 years was a “clear favourite”.
A proxy diagram of temperature change is a clear favourite for the Policy Makers summary. (Folland, Sep 22, 1999, in 0938031546.txt)
This desire already placed “pressure” on the authors to “present a nice tidy story” about “unprecedented warming in a thousand years”:
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ …(Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)
The “zero-order” draft (their Figure 2.3.3a as shown below) showed a version of the Briffa reconstruction with little variation and a noticeable decline in the late 20th century.
(http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/ipcc_tar_zero.png?w=480)
Figure 1. IPCC Third Assessment Report Zero-Order Draft Figure 2.3.3a Comparison of millennial Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstructions from different investigators (Briffa et al, 1998; Jones et al, 1998; Mann et al, 1998;1999a)… All the series were filtered with a 40 year Gaussian filter. The problematic Briffa reconstruction is the yellow series.
No minutes of this meeting are available, but Climategate correspondence on Sep 22-23, 1999 provides some contemporary information about the meeting. Mann noted that “everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that the [decline in the Briffa reconstruction] was a problem”:
Keith’s series… differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series. (Mann, Sep 22, 1999, 0938018124.txt)
IPCC Chapter Author Folland of the U.K. Hadley Center wrote to Mann, Jones and Briffa that the proxy diagram was a “clear favourite” for the Summary Policy-makers, but that the existing presentation showing the decline of the Briffa reconstruction “dilutes the message rather significantly”:
A proxy diagram of temperature change is a clear favourite for the Policy Makers summary. But the current diagram with the tree ring only data [i.e. the Briffa reconstruction] somewhat contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly… This is probably the most important issue to resolve in Chapter 2 at present.. (Folland, Sep 22, 1999, in 0938031546.txt)
After telling the section authors about the stone in his shoe, Folland added that he only “wanted the truth”.
Climategate Letters, Sep 22-23, 1999
The Climategate Letters contain a flurry of correspondence between Mann, Briffa, Jones and Folland (copy to Tom Karl of NOAA) on Sep 22-23, 1999, shedding light on how the authors responded to the stone in IPCC’s shoe. By this time, it appears that each of the three authors (Jones, Mann and Briffa) had experimented with different approaches to the “problem” of the decline.
Jones appears to have floated the idea of using two different diagrams – one without the inconvenient Briffa reconstruction (presumably in the Summary for Policy-makers) and one with the Briffa reconstruction (presumably in the relevant chapter). Jones said that this might make it “somewhat awkward for the reader trying to put them into context”, with it being unclear whether Jones viewed this as an advantage or disadvantage:
If we go as is suggested then there would be two diagrams – one simpler one with just Mann et al and Jones et al and in another section Briffa et al. This might make it somewhat awkward for the reader trying to put them into context. (Jones, Sep 22, 1999 Jones 093801949)
Another approach is perhaps evidenced in programming changes a week earlier (Sep 13-14, 1999), in which programs in the osborn-tree6/mann/oldprog directory appear to show efforts to “correct” the calibration of the Briffa reconstruction, which may or may not be relevant to the eventual methodology to “hide the decline”.
The correspondence implies (though this is at present not proven) that IPCC section author Mann’s first reaction to the “problem” was to totally delete the Briffa reconstruction from the proxy diagram, as the correspondence of September 22 seems to have been precipitated by Briffa being unhappy at an (unseen) version of the proxy diagram in which his reconstruction had been deleted.
Briffa’s length email of Sep. 22, 19990 (938031546.txt) should be read in full. Briffa was keenly aware of the pressure to present a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming”, but is worried about the proxy evidence:
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple… [There are] some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter. (Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)
He continued:
For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate. (Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)
Thus, when Mann arrived at work on Sep 22, 1999, Mann observed that he had walked into a “hornet’s nest”. (Mann Sep 22, 1999, 0938018124.txt). In an effort to resolve the dispute, Mann said that (subject to the agreement of Chapter Authors Karl and Folland) he would add back Briffa’s reconstruction, but pointed out that this would present a “conundrum”:
So if Chris[Folland] and Tom [Karl] are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s series. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate … that the major discrepancies between Phil’s and our series can be explained in terms of spatial sampling/latitudinal emphasis … But …Keith’s series… differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series. (Mann Sep 22, 0938018124.txt)
Mann went on to say that the skeptics would have a “field day” if the declining Briffa reconstruction were shown and that he’d “hate to be the one” to give them “fodder”:
So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case.…Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder! (Mann Sep 22, 0938018124.txt)
By the following day, matters seem to have settled down, with Briffa apologizing to Mann for his temporary pangs of conscience. On Oct 5, 1999, Osborn (on behalf of Briffa) sent Mann a revised version of the Briffa reconstruction with more “low-frequency” variability (Osborn, Oct 5, 1999, 0939154709.txt), a version that is identical up to 1960, this version is identical to the digital version archived at NCDC for Briffa et al (JGR 2001). (The post-1960 values of this version were not “shown” in the version archived at NCDC; they were deleted.)
As discussed below, this version had an even larger late-20th century decline than the version shown at the Tanzania Lead Authors’ meeting. Nonetheless, the First Order Draft (Oct 27, 1999) sent out a few weeks later contained a new version of the proxy diagram (Figure 2.25), a version which contains the main elements of the eventual Third Assessment Report proxy diagram (Figure 2.21). Two weeks later came Jones’ now infamous “trick” email (0942777075.txt).
The IPCC Trick
Mann’s IPCC trick is related to the Jones’ trick, but different. (The Jones trick has been explained in previous CA posts here, here and consists of replacing the tree ring data with temperature data after 1960 – thereby hiding the decline – and then showing the smoothed graph as a proxy reconstruction.) While some elements of the IPCC Trick can be identified with considerable certainty, other elements are still somewhat unclear.
The diagram below shows the IPCC version of the Briffa reconstruction (digitized from the IPCC 2001) compared to actual Briffa data from the Climategate email of October 5, 1999, smoothed using the methodology said to have been used in the caption to the IPCC figure (a 40 year Hamming filter with end-point padding with the mean of the closing 20 years).
(http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/briffa_versions.gif?w=420&h=320)
Figure 3. Versions of the Briffa Reconstruction in controversy, comparing the original data smoothed according to the reported methodology to a digitization of the IPCC version.
Clearly, there are a number of important differences between the version sent to Mann and the version that appeared in the IPCC report. The most obvious is, of course, that the decline in the Briffa reconstruction has, for the most part, been deleted from the IPCC proxy diagram. However, there are some other frustrating inconsistencies and puzzles that are all too familiar.
There are some more technical inconsistencies that I’ll record for specialist readers. It is very unlikely that that the IPCC caption is correct in stating that a 40-year Hamming filter was used. Based on comparisons of the MBH reconstruction and Jones reconstruction, as well as the Briffa reconstruction, to versions constructed from raw data, it appears that a Butterworth filter was used – a filter frequently used in Mann’s subsequent work (a detail that, in addition, bears on the authorship of the graphic itself).
Second, the IPCC caption stated that “boundary constraints imposed by padding the series with its mean values during the first and last 25 years.” Again, this doesn’t seem to reconcile with efforts to replicate the IPCC version from raw data. It appears far more likely to me that each of the temperature series has been padded with instrumental temperatures rather than the mean values of the last 25 years.
Finally, there are puzzling changes in scale. The underlying annual data for the Jones and Briffa reconstructions are expressed in deg C (basis 1961-1990) and should scale simply to the smoothed version in the IPCC version, but don’t quite. This may partly derive from errors introduced in digitization, but is a loose end in present replication efforts.
The final IPCC diagram (2.21) is shown below. In this rendering, the Briffa reconstruction is obviously no longer “a problem and a potential distraction/detraction”and does not “dilute the message”. Mann has not given any “fodder” to the skeptics, who obviously did not have a “field day” with the decline.
(http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/fig2-21.gif?w=600&h=405)
IPCC Third Assessment Report Figure 2.21: Comparison of warm-season (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean (Mann et al., 1998, 1999) multi-proxy-based and warm season tree-ring-based (Briffa, 2000) millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The recent instrumental annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison. Also shown is an extra-tropical sampling of the Mann et al. (1999) temperature pattern reconstructions more directly comparable in its latitudinal sampling to the Jones et al. series. The self-consistently estimated two standard error limits (shaded region) for the smoothed Mann et al. (1999) series are shown. The horizontal zero line denotes the 1961 to 1990 reference period mean temperature. All series were smoothed with a 40-year Hamming-weights lowpass filter, with boundary constraints imposed by padding the series with its mean values during the first and last 25 years.
Contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values. Nor did it discuss the “divergence problem”. Yes, there had been previous discussion of the problem in the peer-reviewed literature (Briffa et al 1998) – a point made over and over by Gavin Schmidt and others. But it was not made in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. Not only was the deletion of the declining values not reported or disclosed in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, the hiding of the decline was made particularly artful because the potentially dangling 1960 endpoint of the Briffa reconstruction was hidden under other lines in the spaghetti graph as shown in the following blow-up:
(http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/fig2-21-blowup.gif?w=243&h=271)
Figure. Blow-up of IPCC Third Assessment Report Fig 2-21.
To my knowledge, no one noticed or reported this truncation until my Climate Audit post in 2005 here. The deletion of the decline was repeated in the 2007 Assessment Report First Order and Second Order Drafts, once again without any disclosure. No dendrochronologist recorded any objection in the Review Comments to either draft. As a reviewer of the Second Order Draft, I asked the IPCC in the strongest possible terms to show the decline reported at CA here:
Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading. (Reviewer’s comment ID #: 309-18)]
They refused, stating that this would be “inappropriate”, though a short discussion on the divergence was added – a discussion that was itself never presented to external peer reviewers.
Returning to the original issue: climate scientists say that the “trick” is now being taken out of context. The Climategate Letters show clearly that the relevant context is the IPCC Lead Authors’ meeting in Tanzania in September 1999 at which the decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, as a “problem”, as a “potential distraction/detraction”. A stone in their shoe.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/#more-9483
-
Second post:
An amusing little graphic that tells a tale in more ways than one:
(http://i46.tinypic.com/t63qxe.jpg)
-
Video that puts hockey sticks in perspective:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbUVBYIPlI&feature=player_embedded
-
2nd post:
Iowahawk does a very detailed job of teaching all interested how they can build their own hockey stick. Anyone seeking to understand the statistical method--not to mention pitfalls and massage points--behind AGW math should check this out:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html
-
Homogenization of temperature series: Part III
Published under Statistics
Be sure to see: Part I, Part II
We still have work to do. This is not simple stuff, and if we try and opt for the easy way out, then we are guaranteed to make a mistake. Stick with me.
Scenario 3: different spots, fixed flora and fauna
We started with a fixed spot, which we’ll keep as an idealization. Let’s call our spot A: it sits at a precise latitude and longitude and never changes.
Suppose we have temperature measurements at B, a nearby location, but these stop at some time in the past. Those at A began about the time those at B stopped: a little before, or the exact time B stopped, or a little after. We’ll deal with all three of these situations, and with the word nearby.
But first a point of logic, oft forgotten: B is not A. That is, by definition, B is at a different location than A. The temperatures at B might mimic closely those at A; but still, B is not A.
Usually, of course, temperatures at two different spots are different. The closer B is to A, usually, the more correlated those temperatures are: and by that, I mean, the more they move in tandem.
Very well. Suppose that we are interested in composing a record for A since the beginning of the series at B. Is it necessary to do this?
No.
I’m sorry to be obvious once more, but we do not have a complete record at A, nor at B. This is tough luck. We can—and should—just examine the series at B and the series of A and make whatever decisions we need based on those. After all, we know the values of those series (assuming the data is measured without error: more on that later). We can tell if they went up or down or whatever.
But what if we insist on guessing the missing values of A (or B)? Why insist? Well, the old desire of quantifying a trend for an arbitrary length of time: arbitrary because we have to, ad hoc pick a starting date. Additional uncertainty is attached to this decision: and we all know how easy it is to cook numbers by picking a favorable starting point.
However, it can be done, but there are three facts which must be remembered: (1) the uncertainty with picking an arbitrary starting point; (2) any method will result in attaching uncertainty bounds to the missing values, these must remain attached to the values; and (3) the resulting trend estimate, itself the output from a model which takes as input those missing values, will have uncertainty bounds—these will necessarily be larger than if there were no missing data at A. Both uncertainty bounds must be of the predictive and not parameteric kind, as we discussed before.
Again, near as I can tell, carrying the uncertainty forward was not done in any of the major series. What that means is described in our old refrain: everybody is too certain of themselves.
How to guess A’s missing values? The easiest thing is to substitute B’s values for A, a tempting procedure if B is close to A. Because B is not A, we cannot do this without carrying forward the uncertainty that accompanies these substitutions. That means invoking a probability (statistical) model.
If B and A overlap for a period, we can model A’s values as a function of B’s. We can then use the values of B to guess the missing values of A. You’re tired of me saying this, but if this is done, we must carrying forward the predictive uncertainty of the guesses into the different model that will be used to assess if there is a trend in A.
An Objection
“But hold on a minute, Briggs! Aren’t you always telling us that we don’t need to smooth time series, and isn’t fitting a trend model to A just another form of smoothing? What are you trying to pull!?”
Amen, brother skeptic. A model to assess trend—all those straight-line regressions you see on temperature plots—is smoothing a time series, a procedure that we have learned is forbidden.
“Not always forbidden. You said that if we wanted to use the trend model to forecast, we could do that.”
And so we can: about which, more in a second.
There is no point in asking if the temperature at A has increased (since some arbitrary date). We can just look at the data and tell with certainty whether or not now is hotter than then (again, barring measurement error and assuming all the values of A are actual and not guesses).
“Hold on. What if I want to know what the size of the trend was? How many degrees per century, or whatever.”
It’s the same. Look at the temperature now, subtract the temperature then, and divide by the number of years between to get the year-by-year average increase.
“What about the uncertainty of that increase?”
There is no uncertainty, unless you have used made-up numbers for A.
“Huh?”
Look. The point is that we have a temperature series in front of us. Something caused those values. There might have existed some forcing with added a constant amount of heat per year, plus or minus a little. Or there might have existed an infinite number of other forcing mechanisms, some of which were not always present, or were only present in varying degrees of strength. We just don’t know.
The straight-line estimate implies that the constant forcing is true, the only and only certain explanation of what caused the temperature to take the values it did. We can—even with guessed values of A, as long as those guessed values have their attached uncertainties—quantify the uncertainty in the linear trend assuming it is true.
“But how do we know the linear trend is true?”
We don’t. The only way we can gather evidence for that view is to skillfully forecast new values of A; values that were in no way used to assess the model.
“In other words, even if everybody played by the book and carried with them the predictive uncertainty bounds as you suggested, they are still assuming the linear trend model is true. And there is more uncertainty in guessing that it is true. Is that right?”
You bet. And since we don’t know the linear model is true, it means—once more!—that too many people are too certain of too many things.
Still to come
Wrap up Scenario 3, Teleconnections, Scenario 4 on different instruments and measurement error, and yet more on why people are too sure of themselves.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1469
-
Compendium of contradictory AGW panic mongering:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLxicwiBQ7Q[/youtube]
-
An examination of Antarctic temp data that demonstrates some serious cherry picking. I've appended the conclusion to the post, but the piece is table heavy so I've only posted this link:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/ghcn-antarctic-warming-eight-times-actual/
Ok, so for the regulars, you know I’ve maintained my calmness quite well. However, it’s not easy. I’m sick to death of advocate scientists pretending there are only minimal problems in the temperature record. Currently the ‘homogenized’ value added version of GHCN has a trend that is EIGHT times higher than actual for the ENTIRE ANTARCTIC CONTINENT. So I wonder if we can now, spend some of the ‘BILLIONS OF DOLLARS’ on cleaning up the temperature record!!! It’s no coincidence that AGW scientists aren’t demanding this be done in my opinion either.
Which of these records is used in CRU, GISS, NOAA — hell if I know (nobody else does either because at least CRU won’t say) but it’s pretty clear none of this data should be used in this condition.
It’s time the GOOD scientists demand GOOD TEMPERATURE DATA. It’s time the world embarked on a real project for gathering the true warming data rather than this kludged mess. It’s past time that the whole thing was done in an open and transparent way. The whole experience with GHCN this weekend felt like looking through a box of old socks.
-
BBG et al:
Please break down for me in SUPER simplistic terms the case for and against the meliting glaciers line of thought:
Thank you,
Marc
-
Simplest:
Somewhere glaciers are melting. Other places they are growing. To whit:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/15/arctic-sea-ice-melt-appears-to-have-turned-the-corner-for-2009/
Most the breathless stuff is pretty anecdotal. I hear it a lot from my coworkers: I visited that glacier when I was 10 and it has receded since then. However, meaningful observations of a lot of this stuff over geologically significant periods of time are pretty hard to come by while it's a lot easier to observe stuff when it's warm and sunny--when things are at their minimum, than when its cold and snowy--when they are at their max.
Note the degree of glacier retreat since the last ice age seen here:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Last_glacial_vegetation_map.png)
Presumably whoever you are dealing with doesn't argue for a return to that glacial extent and hence is presumably smart enough to realize that not all change connotes something manmade and or bad.
ETA more links:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/a-look-at-sea-ice-compared-to-this-date-in-2007/#more-14159
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/02/oh-no-not-this-kilimanjaro-rubbish-again/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/08/antarcticas-ice-story-has-been-put-on-ice/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/10/new-study-casts-doubt-on-himalayan-glaciers-melting/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/14/alaska-glaciers-on-the-rebound/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/22/surprise-theres-an-active-volcano-under-antarctic-ice/
Et al. . . .
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/04/mount-shastas-glaciers-proxy-for-what/
-
No simple answer except to note that reports come with an agenda. They note the places and periods of ice loss. Net ice loss is expected though, with or without man, as BBG noted, because we are still coming out of an ice age and that is the trend (There was no hockey stick.). If the last decade was the warmest or second warmest in our short recorded history, even though no warming occurred during the decade, then continued ice loss is a result, with or without the puny contribution from man.
When ice masses were increasing on Antarctica, that was attributed to global warming as well. Warming caused the excess snowfalls in winter more htan could melt in summer.
We saw a similar argument for water levels in the great lakes. In fact it is amazing how stable they are considering the huge amounts of water that go in and are evaporated every minute, every year. Other factors there may tell the story, such as usage of water taken from the incoming stream sources.
After climategate it is really hard to know temps or changes etc. with any real accuracy. At best I think we see only the smallest of samples, tweaked results and desired, catastrophic conclusions. Still we are only seeing temperature variances of tens of a degree Celsius over a millenium. Those who say they can notice a difference in local weather from their childhood deceive themselves. Forecast here for tonight is -7 F (-22 C). A century ago, that would be -22. and a fraction. You won't convince me that a person or polar bear can tell the difference. A glacier may know the difference over time but it is still a sample of the planet.
As Kilimanjaro and Himalayan reports indicate, perhaps it was unique weather patterns of the past that allowed that glacier to last unusually long as the rest of the remnants of the ice age around it have disappeared.
What's missing in this though is man's tiny part in it. The melting of the glaciers argument implies that the melting is caused by us. The burden has to go back to those who make that implication. What would the temp be if not for man-made CO2? The answer is that man's contribution probably between 0.1% and 2.0% of the warming is well within the existing margin for error, so the glaciers would be melting anyway.
Also flawed are any projections forward because of the flawed assumptions in the model(s). Will the next decade be warmer or colder than the last 10 years? We don't even know that except to know that they were wrong for the last decade and roughly 5 of the last 10 decades if todays models had been used then.
-----
In my last 'debate' on this topic with a liberal friend, he posed that: the earth is warming (and man is causing it) or its not. I insisted on changing the debate to: the science is settled on this or its not. It didn't take many of the studies posted on this forum to 'prove' that the science is not settled, which leaves all other questions unanswered.
Water vapor is another emission, rarely mentioned, from burning hydrocarbons. Water Vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but cloud cover has offsetting characteristics.
And no one has proven whether CO2 causes warming of if warmer air simply holds more CO2, also true.
-----
If I ever see a comprehensive global ice mass loss chart, not selected places and periods, I would like to compare it with the chart of ice loss without man's involvement or ice loss after implementingKyoto / Copenhagen / economic collapse etc. or whatever they are proposing to do with the chart.
-
2nd post:
CRU web data has been taken down. Though it could be a server issue, speculation is that it's being removed from all the intense scrutiny it's been receiving of late. More here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/whats-going-on-cru-takes-down-briffa-tree-ring-data-and-more/
-
3rd post. For those who incessantly mewl that anyone who disputes AGW is in the pocket of big oil, here's what truly tainted associations really look like. Let's see if the whiners have the rigor and consistency to apply the standard they harp on to folks on their side of the aisle:
A busy man
Posted by Richard Monday, December 14, 2009 IPCC, Pachauri
Seek and ye will find. Our friendly part-time chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, is quite a remarkable man. As well as his onerous post with the UN's IPCC, it seems he has a considerable number of other interests.
Dr Pachauri's main day job is, of course, Director-General of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) - which he has held since April 2001, having become its Director and head in 1981 when it was the Tata Energy Research Institute.
Intriguingly, for such an upstanding public servant though, he is also a strategic advisor to the private equity investment firm Pegasus Capital Advisors LP, which he became in February of this year. However, this is by no means Dr Pachauri's only foray into the world of finance. In December 2007, be became a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian ventures based in San Francisco.
This is a venture capital business owned by the Dutch multinational business incubator and operator in sustainable technology, Tendris Holding, itself part-owned by electronics giant Philips. It acquired a minority interest in January 2009 in order to "explore new business opportunities in the area of sustainability." As a member of the Senior Advisory Board of Siderian, Dr Pachauri is expected to provide the Fund and its portfolio companies "with access, standing and industry exposure at the highest level."
In June 2008, Dr Pachauri became a member of the Board of the Nordic bank Glitnir, which that year launched the The Sustainable Future Fund, Iceland, a new savings account "designed to help the environment." Then, the fund was expected to accumulate up to €4 million within a few years, thus becoming one of the largest private funds supporting research into sustainable development. That same month of June 2008, Dr Pachauri also became Chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund. Under its CEO Rick Mayo Smith, it was looking to raise at least $100 billion from the private sector.
April 2008 was also a busy month when Dr Pachauri joined the Board of the Credit Suisse Research Institute, Zurich and became a member of the Advisory Group for the Rockefeller Foundation, USA. Then, in May he became a member of the Board of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva. This, despite its name, is primarily concerned with the promotion of bioenergy, drawing funding from electricity giants EON and EDF. He has became Chairman and Member of the Advisory Group at Asian Development Bank that May.
However, Dr Pachauri also keeps some ties with his roots. In his capacity as a former railway engineer, he is a member of the Policy Advisory Panel for the French national railway system, SNCF and has been since April 2007. Long before that, Dr Pachauri became the President of the Asian Energy Institute, a position he took on in 1992.
One of his most interesting - and possibly contentious - positions, however, is his position as "scientific advisor" to GloriOil Limited. This is a company he set up himself in late 2005 - two years after he had become chairman of the IPCC. He is described as its "founder". It was set up in Houston, Texas, to exploit patented processes developed by TERI - of which he is Director-General - known as "microbial enhanced oil recovery" (MEOR) technology, designed to improve the production of mature oilfields. When it comes to "Big Oil", Dr Pachauri is very much part of the industry.
Running with the hare and the hounds though, he also serves as Director of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan. And, crucially, he is a Member of the External Advisory Board of Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. This exchange is North America's only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide, brokering carbon credits worldwide.
Yet Dr Pachauri is also a member of FEOP (Far East Oil Price) Advisory Board, managed by the Oil Trade Associates, Singapore, from April 1997 onwards. This is part of the so-called ForwardMarketCurve - a "ground breaking, all-broker methodology for achieving robust and accurate price discovery in forward commodity markets" - especially, as the name would imply, oil and petroleum products.
Very much in an allied field, he served as a Member of the International Advisory Board of Toyota Motors until 31 March 2009. Now he is a Member of the Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG. He served as Chairman of the International Association for Energy Economics from 1989 to 1990.
He served as an Independent Director of NTPC Ltd (National Thermal Power Corp), from 30 January 2006 to January 2009. This is the largest power generation company in India. Before that, he served as non-official Part-time Director of NTPC Ltd, from August 2002 to August 2005. He was also a Director of the Indian Oil Corporation - India's largest commercial enterprise - until 28 August 2003. Dr Pachauri then served as a Director of Gail India Ltd, India's largest natural gas transportation company, from August 2003 to 26 October 2004.
Dr Pachauri serves as Member of National Environmental Council, Government of India under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister of India. He also serves as a member of the lobbying organisations, the International Solar Energy Society, the World Resources Institute and the World Energy Council. He has been member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India since July 2001 and also serves as Member of the Oil Industry Restructuring Group, for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India.
Dr Pachauri also served as Director of Consulting and Applied Research Division at the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad. He served as Visiting Professor, Resource Economics at the College of Mineral and Energy Resources, West Virginia University. He was also a Senior Visiting Fellow of Resource Systems Institute, East - West Center, USA. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at The World Bank, Washington, DC and McCluskey Fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University.
One wonders how he finds the time to save the planet. James Delingpole wonders too.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/busy-man.html
-
4th post or something. More Australian temp records that don't show gross warming until they are homogenized or otherwise aggregated:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/smoking-guns-across-australia-wheres-the-warming/
-
And a 5th post. It's not like the CRU issues were only noticed recently. Check out this missive written nearly 5 years ago:
January 17, 2005
Chris Landsea Leaves IPCC
Posted to Author: Others | Climate Change | Science Policy: General
This is an open letter to the community from Chris Landsea.
Dear colleagues,
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author - Dr. Kevin Trenberth - to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.
Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4's Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity" along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.
I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.
My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr. Trenberth and his colleagues to how he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr. Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr. Trenberth was speaking as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and that Dr. Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw nothing to be concerned with in Dr. Trenberth's unfounded pronouncements to the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.
It is certainly true that "individual scientists can do what they wish in their own rights", as one of the folks in the IPCC leadership suggested. Differing conclusions and robust debates are certainly crucial to progress in climate science. However, this case is not an honest scientific discussion conducted at a meeting of climate researchers. Instead, a scientist with an important role in the IPCC represented himself as a Lead Author for the IPCC has used that position to promulgate to the media and general public his own opinion that the busy 2004 hurricane season was caused by global warming, which is in direct opposition to research written in the field and is counter to conclusions in the TAR. This becomes problematic when I am then asked to provide the draft about observed hurricane activity variations for the AR4 with, ironically, Dr. Trenberth as the Lead Author for this chapter. Because of Dr. Trenberth's pronouncements, the IPCC process on our assessment of these crucial extreme events in our climate system has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost. While no one can "tell" scientists what to say or not say (nor am I suggesting that), the IPCC did select Dr. Trenberth as a Lead Author and entrusted to him to carry out this duty in a non-biased, neutral point of view. When scientists hold press conferences and speak with the media, much care is needed not to reflect poorly upon the IPCC. It is of more than passing interest to note that Dr. Trenberth, while eager to share his views on global warming and hurricanes with the media, declined to do so at the Climate Variability and Change Conference in January where he made several presentations. Perhaps he was concerned that such speculation - though worthy in his mind of public pronouncements – would not stand up to the scrutiny of fellow climate scientists.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr. Trenberth's actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4.
Sincerely, Chris Landsea
Attached are the correspondence between myself and key members of the IPCC FAR, Download file.
Posted on January 17, 2005 11:39 AM
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html
-
6th post. A record?
Homogenization of temperature series: Part IV
Published by Briggs at 7:16 pm under Bad Stats, Climatology
How much patience do you have left? On and on and on about the fundamentals, and not one word about whether I believe the GHCN Darwin adjustment, as revealed by Eschenbach, is right! OK, one word: no.
There is enough shouting about this around the rest of the ‘net that you don’t need to hear more from me. What is necessary, and why I am spending so much time on this, is a serious examination of the nature of climate change evidence, particularly with regard to temperature reconstructions and homogenizations. So let’s take our time.
Scenario 3: continued
We last learned that if B and A overlap for a period of time, we can model A’s values as a function of B’s. More importantly, we learned the severe limitations and high uncertainty of this approach. If you haven’t, read Part III, do so now.
If B and A do not overlap, but we have other stations C, D, E, etc., that do, even if these are far removed from A, we can use them to model A’s values. These stations will be more or less predictive depending on how correlated they are with A (I’m using the word correlated in its plain English sense).
But even if we have dozens of other stations with which to model A, the resulting predictions of A’s missing values must still come attached with healthy, predictive error bounds. These bounds must, upon the pain of ignominy, be carried forward in any application that uses A’s values. “Any”, of course includes estimates of global mean temperature (GMT) or trends at A (trends, we learned last time, are another name for assumed-to-be-true statistical models).
So far as I can tell (with the usual caveat), nobody does this: nobody, that is, carries the error bounds forward. It’s true that the older, classical statistical methods used by Mann et al. do not make carrying error simple, but when we’re talking about billions of dollars, maybe trillions, and the disruption of lives the world over, it’s a good idea not to opt for simplicity
when more ideal methods are available.
Need I say what the result of the simplistic approach is?
Yes, I do. Too much certainty!An incidental: For a while, some meteorologists/climatologists searched the world for teleconnections. They would pick an A and then search B, C, D, …, for a station with the highest correlation to A. A station in Peoria might have a high correlation with one in Tibet, for example. These statistical tea leaves were much peered over. The results were not entirely useless—some planetary-scale features will show up, well, all over the planet—but it was too easy to find something that wasn’t there.
Scenario 4: missing values, measurement error, and changes in instrumentation
Occasionally, values at A will go missing. Thermometers break, people who record temperatures go on vacation, accidents happen. These missing values can be guessed at in exactly the same way as outlined in Scenario 3. Which is to say, they are modeled. And with models comes uncertainty, etc., etc. Enough of that.
Sometimes instruments do not pop off all at once, but degrade slowly. They work fine for awhile but become miscalibrated in some manner. That is, at some locations the temperatures (and other meteorological variables) are measured with error. If we catch this error, we can quantify it, which means we can apply a model to the observed values to “correct” them.
But did you catch the word model? That’s right: more uncertainty, more error bounds, which must always, etc., etc., etc.
What’s worse, is that we suspect there are many times we do not catch the measurement error, and we glibly use the observed values as if they were 100% accurate. Like a cook with the flu using day old fish, we can’t smell the rank odor, but hope the sauce will save us. The sauces here are the data uses like GMT or trend estimates that use the mistaken observations.
(Strained metaphor, anybody? Leave me alone. You get the idea.)
A fishy smell
Now, miscalibration and measurement error are certainly less common the more recent the observations. What is bizarre is that, in the revelations so far, the “corrections” and “homogenizations” are more strongly applied to the most recent values, id est, those values in which we have the most confidence! The older, historical observations, about which we know a hell of lot less, are hardly touched, or not adjusted at all.
Why is that?
But, wait! Don’t answer yet! Because you also get this fine empirical fact, absolutely free: The instruments used in the days of yore, were many times poorer than their modern-day equivalents: they were less accurate, had slower response times, etc. Which means, of course, that they are less trustworthy. Yet, it appears, these are the most trusted in the homogenizations.
So now answer our question: why are the modern values adjusted (upwards!) more than the historical ones?
The grand finale.
If you answered “It’s the urbanization, stupid!”, then you have admitted that you did not read, or did not understand, Part I.
As others have been saying, there is evidence that some people have been diddling with the numbers, cajoling them so that they conform to certain pre-conceived views.
Maybe this is not so, and it is instead true that everybody was scrupulously honest. At the very least, then, a certain CRU has some fast talking to do.
But even if they manage to give a proper account of themselves, they must concede that there are alternate explanations for the data, such as provided in this guide. And while they might downplay the concerns outlined here, they must admit that the uncertainties are greater than what have been so far publicly stated.
Which is all we skeptics ever wanted.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1477
-
Two follow up points that I think weaken the melting ice masses argument, one is a post from 2006 via UPI, the BBC and a Dutch-British research team analyzing radar altimetry data gathered by the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite that discovered that in spite of Arctic ice mass loss, the Arctic oceans levels are falling. Not what they expected and they have no idea why. http://www.physorg.com/news69600618.html
Second is the conflicting info coming out of Antarctica. I suppose it depends on where you look and when. This report indicates that Antarctica contains 90% of the world's land based ice and at least at that writing it was gaining ice mass: http://www.ecoworld.com/climate/antarcticas-ice-mass-is-it-really-losing-ice-gaining-ice-or-both.html
“In the March 25 2008 issue of EOS, there was a News item by Marco Tedesco titled “Updated 2008 Surface snowmelt Trends in Antarctica” (subscribers only). It reports the following:
Surface snowmelt in Antarctica in 2008, as derived from spaceborne passive microwave observations at 19.35 gigahertz, was 40% below the average of the period 1987–2007. The melting index (MI, a measure of where melting occurred and for how long) in 2008 was the second-smallest value in the 1987–2008 period, with 3,465,625 square kilometers times days (km2 × days) against the average value of 8,407,531 km2 × days (Figure 1a). Melt extent (ME, the extent of the area subject to melting) in 2008 set a new minimum with 297,500 square kilometers, against an average value of approximately 861,812 square kilometers.”
This evidence suggests that Antarctica, where 90% of the land based ice in the world resides, is increasing in mass. And this fact is ignored or downplayed in virtually every mainstream report available today, and indeed the mainstream press continues to infer that Antarctica is melting at an alarming rate. But on balance, the ice mass in Antarctica is not melting, it is probably getting bigger."
Other links: http://www.physorg.com/news4180.html East Antarctic Ice Sheet Gains Mass and Slows Sea Level Rise, Study Finds
http://climatesci.org/2008/04/07/recent-data-on-surface-snowmelt-in-antarctica/ Recent Data On Surface Snowmelt In Antarctica
This site: http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm intending to debunk skeptics finds a 3 year trend of land ice decreasing and a 30 year trend of sea ice increasing.
My advice Crafty unfortunately is to not look for simple answers to climate questions.
-
Brilliant piece using Al Gore's gravity metaphor to demonstrate just how little the AGW crowd knows about budgeting error:
How Not To Create A Historic Global Temp Index
Published by AJStrata at 11:53 am under All General Discussions, CRU Climategate, Global Warming
I was having this minor debate on the fallacies of alarmists’ science in the comment section of Air Vent and decided I needed to post on this because the infant climate science (and it is in its infancy) is making some fundamental mistakes.
The momentum that built up behind the man-made global warming fad (and it is nothing more than an unproven hypothesis surrounded by a silly fan club) has not allowed the basic approach to be tested or challenged. You had a movement build up around an idea, which launched the idea into ‘established fact’ before the idea was validated. It probably will never be validated because the methodology is flawed to its core – as I will explain in painful detail.
To create a global temperature index for the past 30 years – and then project that back to the 1880’s (when global temp records were began) and then project it back centuries before that – is not trivial. And in my opinion the current approach is just plain wrong.
I take this position as someone who works ‘in space’ – where we have complex and interrelated models of all sorts of physical processes. And yet we have to keep refining the models to fit the data to do what we do. Climate science naively (and ignorantly in my mind) does just the opposite; it keeps adjusting the data (for no good reason) until they get the result they want!
For this comparative exercise Al Gore, a genius in his own mind, provides the perfect analogy – gravity. Yes Al, it’s there. But we still can’t predict how a body will travel through the atmosphere or space to an accuracy that is stable beyond a few seconds (for the atmosphere) or days (for Earth orbits). Our window of certainty is not months, seasons, years, decades, centuries or millennia. And yet gravity is very well understood and simple mathematically.
Add to that the fact our measurement systems for space systems blow away those being used by alarmists, who claim a science fiction level of accuracy in measurement and prediction. Maybe that is why they have a cult following instead of scientific proof?
In Earth’s orbit a satellite is pretty much free of atmosphere and can fly for 10-20 years. But it cannot keep its position (for GEO birds) or we cannot know its position (for GEO, MEO and LEO birds) without constantly taking measurements and correcting the models. (Sorry, geeked out there for a moment: LEO = Low Earth Orbit, MEO = Mid Earth Orbit, GEO = Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (stays above one spot on Earth, very high altitude).
While gravity is well understood, it is not the only factor working on the satellite’s flight path. After nearly half a century of exploring space we have unraveled some of the factors (sunshine pushing on the satellite, heat escaping causing a small thrust, an atmosphere which expands and contracts daily and seasonally, solar flares, etc). We cannot accurately model these beyond a few days. After about 7 days these forces build up enough change in the orbit in completely random ways that we have to remeasure the orbit and compute another prediction.
Gravity is simple, but we cannot predict out beyond a week with any accuracy.
For satellite orbits it would make no sense at all to ‘adjust’ the data to fit a curve as the alarmists do for temperature. If a data point is bad it is either consumed inside a sea of good data points or rejected because we have a sea of good data points to use. If there are sufficient data points you don’t adjust the data – bottom line. Either you have enough data to draw a conclusion or you don’t. You don’t make up data to fill your need either.
If the rocket scientists can only predict the path of an object orbiting the globe for 7 days, what sane person thinks a hodge-podge of randomly accurate and aging sensors around the globe can measure a global index, let alone predict the future or unravel the past? It cannot. But what ’scientists’ do to the data to pretend they can is downright silly.
They make adjustments or homogenizing stations or fill in grids with pretend stations. A total unscientific joke. The measurement is the measurement. It has a fixed accuracy and uncertainty. Each station has a unique accuracy and uncertainty due to its siting, technology and the accuracy with which its readings are made each day. (geeked out again: if there is a drift in time when you read the sensor, or that sensor’s reference to UTC (the world wide time reference) is unknown or dynamic, then you increase the error bars to the measurement). If the sensor is sited wrong or has problems you extend the error bars. You DON”T adjust the data!
(Sorry, geeked out again. Error bars are the range in which the real world value could be. If I measure an orbit to a accuracy of +/- 50 meters, then I know what ever number comes out of my system is not real. Reality is in that 100 meter range around the value. Statistically all I know is the satellite is in that range, the value I compute only centers the box it can be found in.)
You cannot adjust data to remove error or increase accuracy on a single sensor! If you do a regular regime of calibrating the sensor against a known source, you can remove BIAS. But that is all. What we do with sensor nets when we combine them is we can remove some error by comparing measurements that overlap in time and space. But that again something totally different than what the global scientists think they are doing.
Another example: moving stations. When a temperature station is moved it should simply become a new station at that point in time, with a new set of siting errors (and accuracy if the sensor is upgraded). It has a different time window than it previous incarnation – it is a new data set. When I see crap like this I realize these people are just not up to this kind of complex analysis.
Before:
(http://briefingroom.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c51bc53ef0120a6dc60aa970b-800wi)
After:
(http://briefingroom.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c51bc53ef0120a6dca372970b-800wi)
You don’t ‘homogenize’ neighboring stations into a mythical (and fictional) virtual station. That is just clueless! And there is no need to. When that happens start a new data set. Those stations measured real temperatures, as shown in the top graph. They are three independent data sets with fixed attributes for the locale. Whatever that mess is in the bottom graph, it is nothing more than shoddy modelng. It destroys the historic record and replaces it with someone’s poor mathematical skills or scientific understanding.
I mean think of what that graph says in my world. If I had measurements of the moon’s position in the night sky from these three points I could reproduce the Moon’s orbit. But what happens in that second ‘adjusted’ graph is silly. I would be changing the measured position of the Moon for two ‘adjusted’ stations to make it closer to the first station – while not moving the two stations physically! They would produce a lunar vector similar to the others, but did I really move the Moon? Of course not, all I did was insert a lot of error. Now my calculation on the Moon’s position over that period does not reflect reality (or the established gravitational model). The question is, does it fit someone’s half cocked new theory of gravity – yet unproven!
Basically what alarmists needed to do was not adjust data, they needed to create a thermal atmosphere model which would take into account siting characteristics both local and large. This would include distance from large bodies of water, altitude, latitude, etc. A three dimensional model that would explain why various stations have their unique siting profiles and temperature records. It would explain why temperatures near oceans fluctuate less than stations inland 100-200 miles. It would show how a global average increase of 1°C would result in a .6°C increase at high latitudes or altitudes. It would EXPLAIN the data variations in the measurements.
But we don’t have this model. Alarmists cannot explain with accuracy why stations 10 miles apart show different temperature profiles each and every day of the year. So they pretend to know how to ‘adjust’ the data and their groupies applaud them for their brilliance. Yet the result, like my Moon example, is they simply lost site of reality.
Another irresponsible gimmick is creating mythical stations in grids without measurements. As we all know the temperature for a town or city 20 miles away can be totally different than that for our home town. Just bring up a local weather map. As weather fronts move through the dynamics over a region are dramatic. These changes happen all year at any time of day. 20 miles down the road things can be totally different.
Yet the CRU and others create fictional stations 750 kilometers away from the nearest data point – as if that makes any sense at all. There is no data in these regions – don’t make up data and call it truth! No data means no measurement.
In my world we can interpolate a trend forward to fill measurement gaps. For example we don’t measure each point on the orbit, we measure a couple of times a day to get a set of points on the orbit from which we can derive an accurate orbit curve. Because gravity is so damn simple we have incredibly high confidence in those computed positions in the measurement gaps. But as I said, they decay over time (5-7 days). If we don’t remeasure, the errors increase with time.
-
Global Climate is nowhere near as simple as gravity. It decays over distance and time rapidly, just as ballistic flight through the atmosphere is unpredictable over distance and time, no matter how predictable gravity is. If they wanted to validate that 3-D model I proposed, they would predict temperatures in regions without measurements and then go measure them to see if their model was right. You don’t mix models and raw data – that is just wrong (though that is the essence of Michael Mann’s “Nature Trick”).
Another disturbing problem with climate science is identification of error and uncertainty. In the alarmists’ world there is no degradation over distance or time – which makes their results pure science fiction. If they had a reviewed, verified and defendable error budget they could move from fiction to science. They would also understand why their conclusions are standing on seriously shaky ground.
OK, going full geek here. An error budget shows how much error is added to the final computed number at each stage of its processing from the base measurement. For the global warming problem this budget covers the point of a temperature measurement at a station to the point a global annual index is derived, and it must contain the following error steps:
1. Measurement error: all the errors associated with taking the raw measurement. This includes the sensor accuracy and biases (if unknown or measured these become noise), siting induced errors, time of measurement induced errors (one must take the measurement the same time every day to within a certain tolerance to create a consistent historic or annual record).
2. Local geographic error: A sensor measurement like temperature is only good for a certain distance. The farther you move from it the more the accuracy degrades as the error increases. No one has demonstrated the distance a single station’s measurement can be considered valid. At this stage we have a raw station temperature set from specified times of day.
3. Station integration error: when you take data from two or more stations to create a regional index, you must integrate the first two error sources described above and carry that to the integrated station level for a region or grid. In some systems combining sensors can increase accuracy. Land temperature sensor nets are not one of those kinds of systems. There are too many factors due to siting and distance (the temp decay problem) to increase accuracy. To do that you would need to have sensors located geographically close (under 5 miles I would estimate) to actually remove sensor and siting errors. At this stage we have a local regional data set (more than one station).
4. Day-to-Month integration errors: Temperatures are taken daily at fixed times and then integrated to make a daytime and nigh time index. Then these daily indices are integrated into monthly indices. The error from the daily computations must then be integrated and added onto the monthly index.
5. Month-to-year integration errors: The AGW alarmists need to create a historic record, so they look at a yearly index (CRU actually looks at the 4 seasons first, then integrates). What ever the methodology, there will be additional error introduced to create an annual index for a geographic region. At this stage we have a local regional data set per for a single year.
6. Large geographic integration errors: Finally, you integrate mid sized regions from step 3 above into data sets for countries or hemispheres or the globe. Again, we are compounding the errors from the previous steps – some offset, some don’t. They all have to be accounted for – no hand waving!
Each local region going into step 3 has a very unique set of errors due to the unique nature of the errors defined in steps 1 & 2. From step 3 on you have a homogenized set of local regions, which have errors integrated in a consistent manner as we move from daily measurements to monthly and annual (steps 4 & 5). Finally we have a consistent method to capture additional errors as we integrate up to cover the globe (step 6).
A defendable error budget is an obvious requirement for any number spewed from any alarmists. Without it the numbers mean nothing. In my business we use these budgets to fly rockets (atmosphere) and spacecraft safely. We use them to understand when we need to remeasure and recompute a new predict. If space programs did not have a handle on this we could not fly through Al Gore’s gravity field and Earth’s atmosphere. The fact is, for launch and ascent and because the error in position can increase so quickly, we measure and adjust the guidance at incredible rates to make it into orbit safely.
We have to. We cannot adjust the data, we have to adjust to the data.
Now what I presented above is just the errors in making a measurement today for one year. What happens when you go back in time? Well you have to recompute the error budget for each station for each year. What you should see (if done correctly) is rapidly increasing error bars as the technological accuracy is lost as we go back in time. The errors in step 1 would start to increase by orders of magnitude.
But if you look at the silly claims of NCDC, GISS and CRU you see very small changes in uncertainty going back in time - proof positive they screwed up their error budget. One of my first posts on Climategate was on errors in climate estimates over time, and I used space exploration again as the example.
I used the accuracy know as ‘image resolution’ as the example everyone can relate to (more pixels more detail, less error or blur). I used two pictures of Mars to demonstrate the state-of-the-art capabilities of humankind separated by ~50 years. First was an image taken in 1956 from the Mt Wilson Observatory:
(http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Mars_1956_Mt_Wilson.gif)
Second was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2001.
(http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/hubblemars.gif)
We can all see the effect going back in time has on accuracy and error. In 1880, when the global temperature record began, humans were drawing Mars not photographing it.
The CRU data dump made public a very interesting document. It was an early attempt at an error budget, though it does not show the steps, just their initial estimate of a bottom line. Also interestingly enough, they computed it for 1969. The following graph is from that document and proves (per CRU) that the current temperature reconstructions are way too imprecise to confirm the warming claims of the IPCC and other alarmists (click to enlarge):
(http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/CRU%20Sampling%20Error.gif)
The title of this graph indicates this is the CRU computed sampling (measurement) error in C for 1969. It clearly shows much of the global temperatures for 1969 are +/- 1°C or more. Which means that until our current temperature rises well above 1°C over that computed for 1969 we are statistically experiencing the same temps as back then. And we know these error estimates will have to grow as we go back another 80 years to the 1880’s, let alone even farther back in time.
I don’t even think the CRU estimates are right and complete, but I do know they alone disprove the IPCC claims that there has been 0.8°C rise in temperature over the last century, mostly due to human activities. The data cannot make that determination.
Prior to 1880 there are no real global temperature records, so scientists tried to find proxies. One good proxy is ice cores, which capture the chemical composition of the snow and ice going back thousands and thousands of years. Chemical signatures are very accurately tied to temperature since these are physical processes. No surprise but the ice cores show no significant warming today. Instead, these ice cores show many warmer periods in the history of humankind. Update: WUWT has more ice core perspective. - end update
Therefore Mann and Jones and other alarmists went to a much less reliable measure of historic temperature – tree rings. Tree rings are effected by a lot of factors, the least of which is temperature (after a certain minimum has been attained to activate is growth processes). Tree growth depends on sunshine, nutrients, water and number days above the optimal temperature. A tree ring should show the same growth under 30 days of 40°F temps with plenty of moisture (afternoon showers) and nutrients as it would under 30 days of 55°F temps and the same conditions. Trees are not thermometers.
Using a living organism to measure temperature is dodgy compared to the physics of chemistry used with ice cores. The error bars on a tree ring mapped to a temperature range (and it can only be mapped to a range, not a value) are huge. But the alarmists don’t do proper science, they run statistics until they get the answer they like, then throw out the error bars as if they are meaningless. There is no way for trees rings to define any historic temperature value. Therefore claims that the MPW or Roman Period were a degree or two warmer or colder using trees is all bunk.
This post is too long and too geeky already, but I need to note that there are few people in the world capable of discerning which scientific argument is more sound. No journalist or politician can discern whether I am right or wrong. Al, give it up baby. You did not invent the internet (I know those who did) and you have a 3rd grade grasp of science (and I have two 4th graders who can prove it). I suggest you stay away from any debates outside talking to journalists. They never know when you drop one of your classic whoppers of ignorance.
The sad fact is the science behind man-made global warming is not good science. It is rather pathetic actually. I work with premier scientists and in fact review their missions for feasibility to return the results advertised. I would fail this mess without a second thought.
In addition, you cannot leave the verification of man-made global warming (AGW) in the hands of those whose careers and credibility rest on AGW being proven to be true. When you do, you get those questionable ‘adjustments’ that turn raw temp data (processed to at least step 5 in the error budget above) into something completely different. For example, here is my version of a classic graph now making its rounds on the internet (click to enlarge):
(http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/darwin_AGW.gif)
What is shows by the blue dots and lines is the raw temperature data for Northern Australia. This overlays perfectly with what the UN IPCCs Global Climate Models predict would be the temperature record for the region without AGW (the blue region in the underlying graph. The red dots and lines are what is produced from alarmists’ ‘adjustments”, and unsurprisingly these line up with the Global Climate Models predictions if there is AGW (reddish region).
Alarmists adjust temp data that magically proves alarmists’ theories, based on alarmists’ models. Impressed? I’m not. I tend more towards disgusted.
The science of global warming is a mess. They have no error budget that proves they can detect the warming they say they have detected. Their tree data is applied wrong by assuming a temp value when all you can estimate is a range (and tree ring recent divergence with current temps just proves trees are lousy indicators of temperature anyway). The alarmists have made all sorts of bogus and indefensible site adjustments, station combing while regularly making up stations from thin air to alter (or hide) the real temperature record.
Instead of explaining the data, they adjust the data to meet their explanations. The Global Climate research has not made it to a professional level of scientific endeavor as we see in more established areas of science.. If their science was so settled the supporters could answer these challenges without lifting a finger. But they cannot, instead they play PR games and smear their opponents. Houston, they have a problem.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11824
-
2nd post:
Carbon rises 800 years after temperatures
Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures change
(http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/vostok-ice-cores-150000%20med.jpg)
In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.
AGW replies: There is roughly an 800-year lag. But even if CO2 doesn’t start the warming trend, it amplifies it.
Skeptics say: If CO2 was a major driver, temperatures would rise indefinitely in a runaway greenhouse effect. This hasn’t happened in 500 million years, so either a mystery factor stops the runaway greenhouse effect, or CO2 is a minor force, and the models are missing the dominant driver.
Amplification is speculation. It’s a theory with no evidence that it matters in the real world.
Conclusion:
1. Ice cores don’t prove what caused past warming or cooling. The simplest explanation is that when temperatures rise, more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere (because as oceans warm they release more CO2).
2. Something else is causing the warming.
Al Gore’s movie was made in 2005. His words about the ice cores were, “it’s complicated.” The lag calls everything about cause and effect into question. There is no way any honest investigation could ignore something so central.
Source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center http://cdiac.ornl.gov (See references at the bottom also).
A complete set of expanded full size graphs and print quality images is available from my Vostok Page.
Extra notes, references, and discussion about this page
The media blackout on “the lag” continues
The lag in the ice cores is old news to skeptics, but most people in the public still have no idea. This is page 5 of the HTML version of The Skeptics Handbook (the first booklet). I should have posted it long ago. The graph series and data are compelling. It’s one of the most basic features of climate science evidence, and yet it is so misused. Even tonight, I did a radio interview for NewstalkZB, New Zealand, and the pro-climate scare spokesman still referred to both the fraudulent Hockey Stick Graph and the Vostok Ice Cores as if they helped his case.
Between 1999 and 2003 a series of peer reviewed papers in the highest journals came out showing that carbon rises hundreds of years after temperature, and not before. What amazes me is that fully six years after Caillon et al in 2003 published their definitive paper, people still think the ice cores are evidence supporting the scare campaign. “The climate is the most important problem we face,” yet somehow not a single government department, popular science magazine or education department thought it was worth doing a close up of the graph and explaining to the public that there was a definitive, uncontested long lag, and that carbon always followed temperature.
The Al Gore style version (of which there are hundreds on-line, see below) hides the lag by compressing 420,000 years into one picture. If the public had known that temperatures lead carbon dioxide, Al Gore would not have been able to get away with using it they way he did.
(http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/ice-cores/vostok-ice-core-petit-web.gif)
In 2008, I marveled that with billions of dollars available to agencies and education campaigns, no one had graphed the lag as a close up. Why did it take an unfunded science communicator to get the data and graph it “as a hobby project”? I wanted to see that long lag; I wanted to be able to point at a graph and explain the lag to all the people who had no idea.
If you want to explore the thousands of years of those famous ice cores, the Vostok page has the full set of graphs, and this page right here is the place to comment and ask questions.
References
Petit et al 1999 — as the world cools into an ice age, the delay is several thousand years.
Fischer et al 1999 — described a lag of 600 ±400 years as the world warms.
Monnin et al 2001— Dome Concordia – found a delay on warming from the recent ice age 800 ± 600 years
Mudelsee 2001— over the full 420,000 year Vostok history, Co2 lags by 1,300 ± 1000 years.
Caillon et al 2003 — analysed the Vostok data and found a lag of 800 ± 200 years
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/carbon-rises-800-years-after-temperatures/
-
This is coming out of a source that translate Russian newspapers and so should be confirmed before too much hay is made, but if true it demonstrates further, serious data massaging.
Russia affected by Climategate
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as "Climategate," continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.
ETA: Anthony Watts has more details here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/16/russian-iea-claims-cru-tampered-with-climate-data-cherrypicked-warmest-stations/
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.
Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world's land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
RIA Novosti is not responsible for the content of outside sources.
ICECAP NOTE: recall it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming. As this story implies, there was no obvious reason for these data centers to be selective about stations. It implies the stations often selected were urban and those with incomplete data, providing more opportuniuty for mischief
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/BOMBSHELL.pdf
http://icecap.us/
-
2nd post.
Climategate: Something’s Rotten in Denmark … and East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City (PJM Exclusive)
Posted By Joseph D'Aleo On December 15, 2009 @ 1:39 pm In . Column1 02, Science, Science & Technology, US News, World News | 59 Comments
The familiar phrase was spoken by Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — first performed around 1600, at the start of the Little Ice Age. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is the exact quote. It recognizes that fish rots from the head down, and it means that all is not well at the top of the political hierarchy. Shakespeare proved to be Nostradamus. Four centuries later — at the start of what could be a new Little Ice Age — the rotting fish is Copenhagen.
The smell in the air may be from the leftover caviar at the banquet tables, or perhaps from the exhaust of 140 private jets and 1200 limousines commissioned by the attendees when they discovered there was to be no global warming evident in Copenhagen. (In fact, the cold will deepen and give way to snow before they leave, an extension of the Gore Effect.)
But the metaphorical stench comes from the well-financed bad science and bad policy, promulgated by the UN, and the complicity of the so-called world leaders, thinking of themselves as modern-day King Canutes (the Viking king of Denmark, England, and Norway — who ironically ruled during the Medieval Warm Period this very group has tried to deny). His flatterers thought his powers “so great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back.”
Unlike the warmists and the compliant media, Canute knew otherwise, and indeed the tide kept rising. Nature will do what nature always did — change.
It’s the data, stupid
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase [1], Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
The Climategate whistleblower proved what those of us dealing with data for decades know to be the case — namely, data was being manipulated. The IPCC and their supported scientists have worked to remove the pesky Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the period emailer Tom Wigley referred to as the “warm 1940s blip,” and to pump up the recent warm cycle.
Attention has focused on the emails dealing with Michael Mann’s hockey stick and other proxy attempts, most notably those of Keith Briffa. Briffa was conflicted [2] in this whole process, noting he “[tried] hard to balance the needs of the IPCC with science, which were not always the same,” and that he knew “ … there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.’”
As Steve McIntyre has blogged [3]:
Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick [4]” and the effort to “hide the decline.” Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context.” In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to … the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.
In the area of data, I am more concerned about the coordinated effort to manipulate instrumental data (that was appended onto the proxy data truncated in 1960 when the trees showed a decline — the so called “divergence problem”) to produce an exaggerated warming that would point to man’s influence. I will be the first to admit that man does have some climate effect — but the effect is localized. Up to half the warming since 1900 is due to land use changes and urbanization, confirmed most recently [5] by Georgia Tech’s Brian Stone (2009), Anthony Watts (2009), Roger Pielke Sr., and many others. The rest of the warming is also man-made — but the men are at the CRU, at NOAA’s NCDC, and NASA’s GISS, the grant-fed universities and computer labs.
Programmer Ian “Harry” Harris, in the Harry_Read_Me.txt file, [6] commented about:
[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. … No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found. … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case?Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. …
This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the updateprog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections – to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?
Climategate has sparked a flurry of examinations of the global data sets — not only at CRU, but in nations worldwide and at the global data centers at NOAA and NASA. Though the Hadley Centre implied their data was in agreement with other data sets and thus trustworthy, the truth is other data centers are complicit in the data manipulation fraud.
The New Zealand Climate Coalition [7] had long solicited data from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), which is responsible for New Zealand’s National Climate Database. For years the data was not released, despite many requests to NIWA’s Dr. Jim Salinger — who came from CRU. With Dr. Salingers’ departure from NIWA, the data was released and showed quite a different story than the manipulated data. The raw data showed a warming of just 0.06C per century since records started in 1850. This compared to a warming of 0.92C per century in NIWA’s (CRU’s) adjusted data.
Willis Eschenbach, in a guest post on Anthony Watts’ blog, found a smoking gun at Darwin station in Australia. Raw data from NOAA (from their GHCN, Global Historical Climate Network, that compiled data that NASA and Hadley work with) showed a cooling of 0.7C. After NOAA “homogenized” the data for Darwin, that changed dramatically. In Willis’ words:
YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celsius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celsius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust,” they don’t mess around.
He found similar discrepancies [8] in the Nordic countries. And that same kind of unexplainable NOAA GHCN adjustment was made to U.S. stations.
In this story [9], see how Central Park data was manipulated in inconsistent ways. The original U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) data showed a cooling to adjust for urban heat island effect — but the global version of Central Park (NOAA GHCN again) inexplicably warmed Central Park by 4F. The difference between the two U.S. adjusted and global adjusted databases, both produced by NOAA NCDC, reached an unbelievable 11F for Julys and 7F annually! Gradually and without notice, NOAA began slowly backing off the urban heat island adjustment in the USHCN data in 1999 and eliminated it entirely in 2007.
Anthony Watts, in his surfacestations.org [10] volunteer project “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? [10]”, found that of the 1000-plus temperature recording stations he had surveyed (a 1221-station network), 89% rated poor to very poor – according to the government’s own criteria for siting the stations.
Perhaps one of the biggest issues with the global data is station dropout after 1990. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today. The stations that dropped out were mainly rural and at higher latitudes and altitudes — all cooler stations. This alone should account for part of the assessed warming. China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960, then only 25 by 1990. This changing distribution makes any assessment of accurate change impossible.
No urbanization adjustment is made for either NOAA or CRU’s global data, based on flawed papers by Wang (1990), Jones (1990), and Peterson (2003). The Jones and Wang papers were shown [11] to be based on fabricated China data. Ironically, in 2008 Jones found [12] that contamination by urbanization in China was a very non-trivial 1C per century — but that did not cause the data centers to begin adjusting, as that would have eliminated global warming.
Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here [13]).
Just as the Medieval Warm Period made it difficult to explain why the last century of warming could not be natural (which the hockey stick team attempted to make go away), so did the warm spike in the 1930s and 1940s. In each of the databases, the land data from that period was adjusted down. And Wigley [14] suggested that sea surface temperatures could likewise be “corrected” down by 0.15C, making the results look both warmer but still plausible.
Wigley also noted [15]:
Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
NOAA complied in July 2009 — removing the satellite input from the global sea surface temperature assessment (the most complete data in terms of coverage), which resulted in an instant jump of 0.24C in ocean temperatures.
Is NASA in the clear? No. They work with the same base GHCN data, plus data from Antarctica (SCAR). To their credit, they attempt to consider urbanization — though Steve McIntyre showed [16] they have poor population data and adjust cities warmer as often as they do colder. They also constantly fiddle with the data. John Goetz [17] showed that 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the 2 1/2 years ending in 2007.
When you hear press releases from NOAA, NASA, or Hadley claiming a month, year, or decade ranks among the warmest ever recorded, keep in mind: they have tortured the data, and it has confessed.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-somethings-rotten-in-denmark-and-east-anglia-asheville-and-new-york-city-pjm-exclusive/
URLs in this post:
[1] Ronald Coase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
[2] Briffa was conflicted: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1039&filename=0938031546.txt
[3] blogged: http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/
[4] trick: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=154
[5] confirmed most recently: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=47354
[6] Harry_Read_Me.txt file,: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategates-harry_read_me-txt-we-all-really-should/
[7] New Zealand Climate Coalition: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/global_warming_nz_pdf.pdf
[8] similar discrepancies: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/29/when-results-go-bad/
[9] this story: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Central_Park_Temperatures_Two.pdf
[10] surfacestations.org: http://www.heartland.org/books/PDFs/SurfaceStations.pdf
[11] shown: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/icing-the-hype/climate_scientists_implicated_in_research_fraud/
[12] found: http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=204
[13] here: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
[14] Wigley: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1016&filename=1254108338.txt
[15] noted: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1067&filename=1257546975.txt
[16] showed: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/US_AND_GLOBAL_TEMP_ISSUES.pdf
[17] John Goetz: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/04/08/rewriting-history-time-and-time-again/
-
Video comparing temps to "greenhouse gas" data via ice core data.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z685n4RMx6Y&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
-
Interesting blog post where a gent goes back through the CRU adjustment algorithms for extrapolating global temp data from the few stations recording info in the 1850s. Not the lack of adjustment error, keeping in my the various William Briggs posts about homogenizing data and the inappropriate confidence that process instills.
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/adjusting-for-coverage-bias-and.html
-
Telling chronology wherein AGW zealots conspire to derail, belittle, and finally publish a response to a paper they didn't like prior to the original appearing:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/a_climatology_conspiracy.html
-
Dec 17, 2009
Fact-based climate debate
By Lee C. Gerhard, IPCC Expert Reviewer
It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen.
Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:
• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.
• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.
• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.
• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.
• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.
We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:
• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.
• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.
• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.
• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.
Contrary to many public statements:
• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.
• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.
• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.
• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.
• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.
The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.
Public announcements use a great deal of hyperbole and inflammatory language. For instance, the word “ever” is misused by media and in public pronouncements alike. It does not mean “in the last 20 years,” or “the last 70 years.” “Ever” means the last 4.5 billion years.
For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, “How long is ever?” The answer is since 1979. And then ask, “Is it still warming?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word “unprecedented” cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years.
There is not an unlimited supply of liquid fuels. At some point, sooner or later, global oil production will decline, and transportation costs will become insurmountable if we do not develop alternative energy sources. However, those alternative energy sources do not now exist.
A legislated reduction in energy use or significant increase in cost will severely harm the global economy and force a reduction in the standard of living in the United States. It is time we spent the research dollars to invent an order-of-magnitude better solar converter and an order-of-magnitude better battery. Once we learn how to store electrical energy, we can electrify transportation. But these are separate issues. Energy conversion is not related to climate change science.
I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics.
If the game of Russian roulette with the environment that Adrian Melott contends is going on, is it how will we feed all the people when the cold of the inevitable Little Ice Age returns? It will return. We just don’t know when. Read more here.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/fact_based_climate_debate/
-
The Unbearable Complexity of Climate
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/man-with-feet-in-bucket2.png?w=280&h=300)
Figure 1. The Experimental Setup
I keep reading statements in various places about how it is indisputable “simple physics” that if we increase amount of atmospheric CO2, it will inevitably warm the planet. Here’s a typical example:
In the hyperbolic language that has infested the debate, researchers have been accused of everything from ditching the scientific method to participating in a vast conspiracy. But the basic concepts of the greenhouse effect is a matter of simple physics and chemistry, and have been part of the scientific dialog for roughly a century.
Here’s another:
The important thing is that we know how greenhouse gases affect climate. It has even been predicted hundred years ago by Arrhenius. It is simple physics.
Unfortunately, while the physics is simple, the climate is far from simple. It is one of the more complex systems that we have ever studied. The climate is a tera-watt scale planetary sized heat engine. It is driven by both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial forcings, a number of which are unknown, and many of which are poorly understood and/or difficult to measure. It is inherently chaotic and turbulent, two conditions for which we have few mathematical tools.
The climate is comprised of five major subsystems — atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. All of these subsystems are imperfectly understood. Each of these subsystems has its own known and unknown internal and external forcings, feedbacks, resonances, and cyclical variations. In addition, each subsystem affects all of the other subsystems through a variety of known and unknown forcings and feedbacks.
Then there is the problem of scale. Climate has crucially important processes at physical scales from the molecular to the planetary, and at temporal scales from milliseconds to millennia.
As a result of this almost unimaginable complexity, simple physics is simply inadequate to predict the effect of a change in one of the hundreds and hundreds of things that affect the climate. I will give two examples of why “simple physics” doesn’t work with the climate — a river, and a block of steel. I’ll start with a thought experiment with the block of steel.
Suppose that I want to find out about how temperature affects solids. I take a 75 kg block of steel, and I put the bottom end of it in a bucket of hot water. I duct tape a thermometer to the top end in the best experimental fashion, and I start recording how the temperature change with time. At first, nothing happens. So I wait. And soon, the temperature of the other end of the block of steel starts rising. Hey, simple physics, right?
To verify my results, I try the experiment with a block of copper. I get the same result, the end of the block that’s not in the hot water soon begins to warm up. I try it with a block of glass, same thing. My tentative conclusion is that simple physics says that if you heat one end of a solid, the other end will eventually heat up as well.
So I look around for a final test. Not seeing anything obvious, I have a flash of insight. I weigh about 75 kg. So I sit with my feet in the bucket of hot water, put the thermometer in my mouth, and wait for my head to heat up. This experimental setup is shown in Figure 1 above.
After all, simple physics is my guideline, I know what’s going to happen, I just have to wait.
And wait … and wait …
As our thought experiment shows, simple physics may simply not work when applied to a complex system. The problem is that there are feedback mechanisms that negate the effect of the hot water on my cold toes. My body has a preferential temperature which is not set by the external forcings.
For a more nuanced view of what is happening, let’s consider the second example, a river. Again, a thought experiment.
I take a sheet of plywood, and I cover it with some earth. I tilt it up so it slopes from one edge to the other. For our thought experiment, we’ll imagine that this is a hill that goes down to the ocean.
I place a steel ball at the top edge of the earth-covered plywood, and I watch what happens. It rolls, as simple physics predicts, straight down to the lower edge. I try it with a wooden ball, and get the same result. I figure maybe it’s because of the shape of the object.
So I make a small wooden sled, and put it on the plywood. Again, it slides straight down to the ocean. I try it with a miniature steel shed, same result. It goes directly downhill to the ocean as well. Simple physics, understood by Isaac Newton.
As a final test, I take a hose and I start running some water down from the top edge of my hill to make a model river. To my surprise, although the model river starts straight down the hill, it soon starts to wander. Before long, it has formed a meandering stream, which changes its course with time. Sections of the river form long loops, the channel changes, loops are cut off, new channels form, and after while we get something like this:
Figure 2. Meanders, oxbow bends, and oxbow lakes in a river system. Note the old channels where the river used to run.
The most amazing part is that the process never stops. No matter how long we run the river experiment, the channel continues to change. What’s going on here?
Well, the first thing that we can conclude is that, just as in our experiment with the steel block, simple physics simply doesn’t work in this situation. Simple physics says that things roll straight downhill, and clearly, that ain’t happening here … it is obvious we need better tools to analyze the flow of the river.
Are there mathematical tools that we can use to understand this system? Yes, but they are not simple. The breakthrough came in the 1990’s, with the discovery by Adrian Bejan of the Constructal Law. The Constructal Law applies to all flow systems which are far from equilibrium, like a river or the climate.
It turns out that these types of flow systems are not passive systems which can take up any configuration. Instead, they actively strive to maximize some aspect of the system. For the river, as for the climate, the system strives to maximize the sum of the energy moved and the energy lost through turbulence. See the discussion of these principles here, here, here, and here. There is also a website devoted to various applications of the Constructal Law here.
There are several conclusions that we can make from the application of the Constructal Law to flow systems:
1. Any flow system far from equilibrium is not free to take up any form as the climate models assume. Instead, it has a preferential state which it works actively to achieve.
2. This preferential state, however, is never achieved. Instead, the system constantly overshoots and undershoots that state, and does not settle down to one final form. The system never stops modifying its internal aspects to move towards the preferential state.
3. The results of changes in such a flow system are often counterintuitive. For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.
So that’s the problem with “simple physics” and the climate. For example, simple physics predicts a simple linear relationship between the climate forcings and the temperature. People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature. This is called the “climate sensitivity”, and is a fundamental assumption in the climate models. The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models. But the models assume this relationship, so they cannot be used to establish the relationship.
However, as rivers clearly show, there is no such simple relationship in a flow system far from equilibrium. We can’t cut through an oxbow to shorten the river, it just lengthens elsewhere to maintain the same total length. Instead of being affected by a change in the forcings, the system sets its own preferential operating conditions (e.g. length, temperature, etc.) based on the natural constraints and flow possibilities and other parameters of the system.
Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all. In any case, regardless of Arrhenius, the “simple physics” relationship between CO2 and global temperature is something that we cannot simply assume to be true.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/27/the-unbearable-complexity-of-climate-2/#more-14585
-
Attention Penn State: Top fraud attorney seeks climategate whistleblowers
JANUARY 3, 2010 · 3 COMMENTS
by John O’Sullivan
We are turning up the heat in pursuit of prosecutions against scientists involved in the recent Climategate scandal. Our dedicated group of volunteers working with Climategate.com are behind a plan to entice co-workers of discredited Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann to turn whistleblowers in return for millions of dollars in federal reward money. Mann is famous for his emails obtained from the East Anglia University server hacking, and for creating the widely disputed ‘hockey stick’ graph that is depicted in Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
An “inconvenient truth” for Mann is that an ally of ours, former CIA agent Kent Clizbe, has this weekend emailed the proxy professor’s co-workers with details of the tempting offer that could turn 2010 into quite a prosperous New Year. We hope someone at this premiere world research institution will come forward and substantiate the facts from evidence already uncovered from the government emails leaked on November 19, 2009. The emails, among other things, show correspondence between Michael Mann and British Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research, which discuss methods to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
If any of the dozens of co-workers in the US or the UK are prepared to give evidence, even if it doesn’t lead to any convictions, they could benefit from a share of tens of millions of dollars in recovered public funds. The Whistleblower idea came up in Internet discussions with top US fraud lawyer, Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates and former CIA agent, Kent Clizbe. Clizbe’s idea was to email the offer to all 27 of Mann’s co-workers at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC) this weekend.
Whether convictions are obtained or not, Mr. Hesch assures prospective whistleblowers they will receive a substantial share of any monies recovered. Federal investigators reward whistleblowers with an average payment of $1.5 million based on the sums of money recovered. The US Federal government has paid out almost $3 billion so far in such rewards. The largest rewards to date exceed $150 million, and one out of every five applicants gets a monetary reward. Estimates of the total sums invested in government climate research already exceed $50 billion. The offer put on the table to Mann’s colleagues could be the most lucrative whistleblower deal ever made.
Kent Clizbe, who authored the email to Mann’s co-workers, has extensive experience in protecting the confidentiality and security of his clients. Both as an executive recruiter, and as a former government intelligence officer, Kent specialized in protecting the confidentiality of interactions with his clients.
ESSC employees will read Kent’s offer Monday morning when the switch on their computers to check their email. In his message, Kent tells them, “the whistleblowers with inside knowledge of misused federal grant dollars will enjoy the highest level of confidentiality possible. We suggest that you contact Kent using an email account outside of your work. Details can be found at www.kentclizbe.com. Alternatively, you may also contact attorney Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates, through his website HowToReportFraud.com.
We at Climategate.com made the decision to give our scoop to the widely read climate change skeptic and journalist, James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph, for maximum dissemination of this story. Earlier today he went public with it in Climategate: Michael Mann’s very unhappy New Year at the Telegraph.
John O’Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated in government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain. Visit his website.
http://www.climategate.com/penn-state-climategate-whistleblowers#more-1415
-
I love the whistle blower enticement post. I hope all who can come forward with any true stories about public and institutional monies used to mislead the public for the purpose of this left turn to halt our economy.
-----
As the climate and weather runs through its natural cycles, zealots used to pick a warm stretch to tell us that we are deniers if we won't admit that we notice a tenth of a degree per decade change. But scare-mongering became a fully funded, year-round industry resulting in the embarrassments of being snowed and frozen out of events in NYC, DC and Copenhagen.
If we only fly to Alaska or Kilimanjaro (in summer) we are told, that we can witness global warming first hand. But those affects would be regional and cyclical just like whatever temps and changes we might experience right out our own doors across the heartland.
Those of you in sunny southern Cal might want to put on a sweater before you read the following morning temps that millions are facing here in the twin cities (and similar for most of the country), 4 Days actual, 5 days forecast, note the warmup at the end. We truly look forward to it:
Dec31: -2
Jan 1: -10
Jan 2: -18
Jan 3: -17
Jan 4: -10
Jan 5: -5
Jan 6: -9
Jan 7: -15
Jan 8: -8
Jan 9: 2 °F
Wonder what the temps these mornings would be without man caused global warming. Was it really colder when we were kids? But this is winter, what about summer? The summer update here is that my home air conditioner has been off for over ten years and my car air conditioners have all died from non-use.
I also get a heat bill for an old house high in the mountains of Colo. This winter so far has been six degrees colder than last. Not tenths of a degree, 6 degrees colder on average - morning, noon, night and everything in between, for a region over an extended period.
Maybe God knows more about these fluctuations, the scientists don't.
Meanwhile, CO2 is still an atmospheric trace element measured in parts per million. It is NOT trapping huge amounts of heat in, across the globe.
-
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/04/no-rise-in-atmospheric-carbon-over-the-last-150-years-university-of-bristol/
No rise in atmospheric carbon fraction over the last 150 years: University of Bristol
-
A prescient piece by Richard Feynman presented back in 1974:
CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman
Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such
as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a
method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try
one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it.
This method became organized, of course, into science. And it
developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It
is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in
understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when
nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of
it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me
into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of
mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and
so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to
investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my
curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I
found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by
investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences.
I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations,
so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a
hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should
go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how
much there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated
on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most
pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and
watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into
the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she
quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl
sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began
thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this
beautiful nude babe?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her,
I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a
massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of
anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel
it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's
reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I
also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the
latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able
to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his
hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both
mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that
succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key
and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it
works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing
in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and
him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was
unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And
I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have
been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So
I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have
some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading
methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice,
you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up
in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to
improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't
work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their
method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We
obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--
in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to
handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I
think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by
this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to
teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it
some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into
thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent
of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels
guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right
thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and
science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the
South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's
the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're
doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So
I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing.
But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea
Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some
wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling
them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one
feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science.
That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying
science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just
hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific
investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now
and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for
example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil
doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest;
but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being
dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another
level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement
is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain
temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--
including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been
conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what
we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other
experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you
were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll
disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some
temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation
as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind
of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to
fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the
research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of
the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the
subject. Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the
only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't
land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and
got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a
little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little
bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than
that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until
finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because
it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something
must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that
kind of a disease.
-
But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of
having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something
that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that
I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after
that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science,
but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool
the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to
tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your
girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be
a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll
leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about
a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending
over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as
scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology
and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the
applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any."
He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of
this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're
representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to
the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you
under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind
to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should
always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only
publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look
good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a
result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the
government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument
in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish
it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When
I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology
department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an
experiment that went something like this--it had been found by
others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A.
She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to
Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment
under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her
laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under
condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change
to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real
difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her
professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the
experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time.
This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general
policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but
only to change the conditions and see what happens.
Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even
in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an
experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator
Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his
heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen"
he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light
hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why,
he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because
there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the
experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there
wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs
at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money
to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are
destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves,
which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the
experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific
integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For
example, there have been many experiments running rats through all
kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937
a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long
corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and
doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if
he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from
wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the
door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was
so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door
as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was
different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very
carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly
the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats
were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell
after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the
rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement
in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the
corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded
when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his
corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible
clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to
learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions,
the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one
experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running
experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat
is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the
experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in
order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with
rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young.
They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on
sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats
in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries
of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't
discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the
things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not
paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of
cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other
people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves
have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the
techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and
smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists
are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can
do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a
million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and
get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't
get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an
irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is
science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which
he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology.
And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the
things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have
shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--
not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students
who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a
policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain
results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific
integrity.
So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere
where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have
described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain
your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on,
to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
-
Excellent point. To get funding to gather data, to find out whether this global warming thing is really true or not ther is a prty line that must be met. That is why the E-Mail relelation is so important. I do not care what conclusion is reached with the issue, as long as it is accurate and as honestly arrived at as possible. The observed data contradicts the computer model's prediction, observation is the reality and the check and should not be suppressed. The model is obviously wrong, but it is what is being pushed. That right there is what make up my mind about global warming, and any other scientific theory.
That does not change the fact that there are other reasons to "go green" ranging from national stability, to personal self reliance.
-
So long as "going green" actually accomplishes anything. There's a lot of data out there, for instance, that recycling is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Studies comparing the environmental impact of disposable v. cotton diapers show that reusing cotton diapers can be construed to harm the environment more than the disposables do. Bottom line is that a lot of "green" efforts end up being heavy on the moral posturing and light on the empiric effect.
An example that has long stuck with me involves recycling aluminum cans. Back in the day me and my buds tossed back a lot of beer and dealt with occasional lean spells by saving up our cans and taking them to be recycled when funds were otherwise lacking. We got way into it, designing various sorts of can crushers, debating which method worked best, worked out methods to store our aluminum horde, and so on. Aluminum was going for $.75 a pound or more back then, so it didn't take too many trashbags full of crushed cans before we could afford a case or three of Old Style. Alas, the sweetness and light Nazis reared their heads, recycling was made mandatory in our neck of the woods, the market became glutted, and not only did the price of aluminum drop from $.75 to under $.20 per pound, but the facility we'd recycled stuff at folded up because the local government had muscled its way into the market. Unsurprisingly, with the hop laden motive removed, me and my buds stopped recycling.
Bottom line: I wish the greenies spent more time living up to their buzzwords and creating sustainable and fiscally sound structures that supported their ends rather than ones dependent on cajoling, bandying guilt, and being so strident that their efforts prove counterproductive when benefits and costs are compared.
-
A little friendly parsing but the term 'going green' is backwards. The green plants love the increased CO2 levels, like from a Chevy Suburban, and would gasp for a breath if a Prius or a bicycle were the only CO2 sources available.
BBG, Old Style? From God's Country? Fully Krausened? That beer should be sipped and savored, not pounded down by the case. :-)
Rarick, I agree there is no reason to be wasteful or piggish with earth's resources. I know we always turn off the waterski boat between skiers. That is different than putting state control over recreational uses of gasoline for example. Recycle by choice is different than forcing me to pay for huge diesel trucks to come down our little dead end for recycling every week, then forcing me to pay for more diesel trucks to bring in more asphalt to repair the damage that the other trucks do. The key is to make reasonable choices and not have them rammed down our throats or engineered socially from government elites. Most of the tainted 'research' was aimed at justifying new legislation, restrictions, taxation and redistribution.
-
BBG, Old Style? From God's Country? Fully Krausened? That beer should be sipped and savored, not pounded down by the case.
Hell yeah, pouring a tad of wort back in made for ambrosia, at least to Midwestern teenagers with unsophisticated pallets.
Old Style taught me a lot of important lessons beyond the bounty we received for returning the sacred vessel. Budweiser was the big local brand when I started imbibing in my mid to late teens. Bud delivery drivers decided they needed a bigger piece of the action and so went on a multi-month strike, at which time old G. Heileman Brewing dropped the case price of its fine product from $7.99 a case to $5.99. Other brands like Strohs and Miller sought to capitalize on the strike by maintaining or increasing their price, but Old Style went for market share, and cleaned house. After several months the strike ended with a slight increase in driver pay, Bud tried to resume selling its product at the pre-strike price, but the entire upper Midwest had converted to Kräusened lager, and Bud hence had to lay off half its drivers. Lessons to learn all the way around.
-
Climategate and the Migrating Arctic Tree Line
By Dexter Wright
One of the more enlightening e-mails to spill out of the Climategate scandal is a report on the progress of Siberian fossilized tree ring work. The report, dated October 9, 1998, focuses on some two thousand samples of fossilized trees thirty-three nautical miles north of the present-day Arctic Circle. The report attempts to correlate the migration, north and south, of the tree line with annual tree ring dating so that an actual year can be assigned to a certain location of the Arctic Circle. The report correctly states that there has been migration of the polar tree line over the past several thousand years, but the investigators attribute this migration singularly to the cold tolerances of tree species.
Although the botanists are correct that cold tolerance does affect the northern limit of trees, they incorrectly attribute the migration solely to variation in climatic temperatures. This is only part of the answer. The other part lies in the in the geographic fact that creates the Arctic Circle in the first place.
The location of the Arctic Circle is a function of the tilt of the Earth's axis, which is approximately twenty-three and a half degrees (23.5o) from the orbital plane of our planet. This is why the Arctic Circle is at sixty-six and half degrees (66.5o) north latitude, exactly 23.5o south of the North Pole, which is at ninety degrees (90o) north latitude. But this angle of axis tilt has not always been 23.5o.
The Earth's axis has been calculated to "wobble" on a 40,000-year cycle. This "wobble" is known as "precession," and this phenomenon is well-documented by astronomical observations throughout history. As the axis wobbles, it points toward different parts of the heavens. There is even an entry in Christopher Columbus's log where he admonishes his officers that the star Polaris (the North Star) is not located due north at the center of the celestial sphere but is off by one degree. That is not the fact today, but five hundred years ago, Polaris was off by one degree. Calculations have revealed that the tilt of the Earth's axis has been as much as twenty-four degrees (24o) and little as twenty-two and a half degrees (22.5o). These variations in the tilt of the axis over time have been linked to the onset and end of ice ages simply because the size on the arctic would expand and contract correspondingly to the angle of tilt resulting in a migration of the Arctic Circle tree line.
The now-discredited Dr. Jones of East Anglia University would like us to believe that the migration of the tree line along the Arctic Circle eliminates what is known as the Medieval Optimum, a warm period one thousand years ago when the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland. Dr. Jones fails to take into account the "wobble" of the Earth's axis, which just three thousand years ago was pointing toward the star Kochab in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper) so that it was fixed at the center of the celestial sphere. The measurements of this "wobble" over the last hundred years reveal that in 1900, the tilt was 23.45229 degrees; in 1977, the tilt was 23.44229 degrees; and in the year 2000, the tilt was 23.43928 degrees.
The e-mail report does conclude that "[t]here are no evidences of moving polar timberline to the north during last century." By establishing that there has been no northern migration of the Arctic Circle tree line, this might suggest that global temperatures have remained stable over the last one hundred years. However, keep in mind that this observation is consistent with the fact that the tilt of the Earth's axis has not shifted appreciably over that last century, either. The bigger question is this: Why was this small piece of the puzzle omitted from the reports generated by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that Dr. Jones helped compile? Is it possible that it is because this fact completely contradicts the "prevailing scientific view" that Dr. Jones would have us believe?
These types of "errors" and "omissions" seem to be indicative of the entire "Global Warming" investigation conducted through, or in collaboration with, Dr. Jones. Perhaps the best conclusion to come to is that the entire body of work compiled by the IPCC is tainted and therefore unreliable for any policymaker.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_and_the_migrating.html at January 07, 2010 - 10:58:13 AM EST
-
So long as "going green" actually accomplishes anything. There's a lot of data out there, for instance, that recycling is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Studies comparing the environmental impact of disposable v. cotton diapers show that reusing cotton diapers can be construed to harm the environment more than the disposables do. Bottom line is that a lot of "green" efforts end up being heavy on the moral posturing and light on the empiric effect.
An example that has long stuck with me involves recycling aluminum cans. Back in the day me and my buds tossed back a lot of beer and dealt with occasional lean spells by saving up our cans and taking them to be recycled when funds were otherwise lacking. We got way into it, designing various sorts of can crushers, debating which method worked best, worked out methods to store our aluminum horde, and so on. Aluminum was going for $.75 a pound or more back then, so it didn't take too many trashbags full of crushed cans before we could afford a case or three of Old Style. Alas, the sweetness and light Nazis reared their heads, recycling was made mandatory in our neck of the woods, the market became glutted, and not only did the price of aluminum drop from $.75 to under $.20 per pound, but the facility we'd recycled stuff at folded up because the local government had muscled its way into the market. Unsurprisingly, with the hop laden motive removed, me and my buds stopped recycling.
Bottom line: I wish the greenies spent more time living up to their buzzwords and creating sustainable and fiscally sound structures that supported their ends rather than ones dependent on cajoling, bandying guilt, and being so strident that their efforts prove counterproductive when benefits and costs are compared.
Agreed, that's what I used the quotes for. My concept is more about self reliance and recycling where it is feasible. Most cars are pretty thoroughly recycled today, and economically too. That has been economically driven since the 1920's if I recall correctly- before politics got involved. There are some dairy farms that are selling electricity, and selling milk as a nice by product, but I suspect that that would be reversed if tax incentives were removed. Self reliance looks at it as a cool thing to have control of your own power, whatever other people may choose.
-
Interesting delineation of CRU et al obstruction of an article that didn't heed their gospel. Lotta formatting and quotes, so here be the link:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/07/team-responses-to-mm2003/
-
More smoking gun.
-
Found this interesting:
New NRDC Film is Propaganda, Says SPPI
http://news.wooeb.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=155091&ret=AccountSummary.aspx
Washington, DC 1/07/2010 08:21 PM GMT (TransWorldNews)
The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) – a DC think tank – has produced a science-based critique of a recent film produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The SPPI paper is entitled Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification – A New Propaganda Film by the National Resources Defense Council Fails the Acid Test of Real World Data
In late 2009, NRDC released a short 21-minute film entitled Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification. Featuring Sigourney Weaver as its narrator, the film highlights the views of a handful of scientists, a commercial fisherman, and two employees of the NRDC, as they discuss what they claim is a megadisaster-in-the-making for Earth's marine life.
The villain of the story is industrial man, who has "altered the course of nature" by releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide or CO2 into the air via the burning of the coal, gas and oil that has historically fueled the engines of modern society. Once emitted into the atmosphere, a portion of that CO2 dissolves into the surface of the world’s oceans, where subsequent chemical reactions, according to the NRCD, are lowering the pH status of their waters. This phenomenon, they theorize, is reducing marine calcification rates; and if left unchecked, they claim it will become so corrosive that it "will cause sea shells to dissolve" and drive coral reefs to extinction "within 20 to 30 years."
“Typically, the NRDC chose to present an extreme one-sided, propagandized view of ocean acidification in their film,” says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson. “The part of the story that they clearly don't want the public and policy makers to know was just released in our newest review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature,” added Ferguson.
Written by Dr. Craig D. Idso for the Science and Public Policy Institute, the new review reveals that an equally strong, if not more persuasive, case can be made that the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration will actually benefit calcifying marine life. As such, the NRDC's portrayal of CO2-induced ocean acidification as a megadisaster-in-the-making is seen, at best, to be a one-sided distortion of the truth or, at worst, a blatant attempt to deceive the public and their elected represenatives.
According to Dr. Idso, "Surely, the NRDC and the scientists portrayed in their film should have been aware of at least one of the numerous peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that do not support a catastrophic – or even a problematic – view of the effect of ocean acidification on calcifying marine organisms; and they should have shared that information with the public. If by some slim chance they were not aware, they should be called to task for not investing the time, energy, and resources needed to fully investigate an issue that has profound significance for the biosphere and public policy making. And if they did know the results of the studies we have discussed, no one should ever believe a single word they may utter or write in the future."
The full report can be accessed at:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/acid_test.html
Additional studies on the topic can be found here:
CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs: Prospects for the Future
Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Ecosystems
?
Boyo :-D
-
Missed this when it first came out a couple weeks back. McIntyre is one of my heros and I cite his stuff here often.
Centre of the storm
Dec 13, 2009 by Colby Cosh
The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.
In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.
The political stakes are now so high when it comes to the “Climategate” scandal, and motives are being questioned so loudly on both sides, that few are noticing the remarkable story at the heart of it all: a 62-year-old mining executive and squash enthusiast has, for better or worse, found his way into the centre of a major scientific melée—almost by accident—and been able to make legitimate contributions.
McIntyre first became notorious in 2003 for his statistical critique, co-authored with economist Ross McKitrick, of the “hockey stick graph” that showed global temperatures rocketing upward in the 20th century. The hockey stick, featured in the 2001 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had a profound influence on policy worldwide, and played a starring role in presentations like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The McIntyre-McKitrick critique called attention to uncertainties in its temperature reconstructions dating back before 1600, to certain problems with dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to estimate past temperatures), and to issues with the statistical calculations underlying the hockey stick. Some climatologists insist that the graph tells the same story when you correct for all this, but much of the critique is now accepted, and the hockey stick, whose weaknesses are better understood, has itself become a somewhat inconvenient distraction for climatologists and environmentalists.
Meanwhile, McIntyre, working alone, has gone on to score further critical points. In 2007, he caught a mistake in the reporting of U.S. surface temperatures by NASA’s Goddard Institute that was quickly acknowledged, with thanks, and corrected. (NASA’s gracious manner contrasts sharply with the attitudes displayed behind the scenes at the CRU.)
The truth is that McIntyre, 62, little resembles the caricature of a wild-eyed climate-change “denier.” He is scrupulous about focusing his criticism on statistical procedures and disclosure practices. He is polite to, and about, climate scientists. He refuses to make grand categorical statements of the “Global warming is just commie horse puckey” type, preferring to remain agnostic, and he discourages such talk on his website, Climate Audit.
When reached for an interview, he interrupts briefly to turn down a request to appear on BBC television about the exploding “Climategate” scandal. “Anything I say now would just be piling on,” he remarks, noting that he has no interest in helping the media stage a drama of personalities. Given the opportunity of a lifetime to gloat over those who referred to him as a “moron” and “Mr. I’m Not Entirely There In The Head,” he demurs.
Close observers of the climate wars recognize that the small group of scientists who first advanced the case for urgent concern over global warming were ill-prepared for the appearance of a critic like McIntyre. Spanish paleoclimatologist Eduardo Zorita of Germany’s GKSS Research Centre, who has clashed at times with both McIntyre and the climate-research elite, says that “in the realm of science, it doesn’t really matter by whom and why a study is criticized. It only counts whether or not the criticism is reasonably well-founded, is logical, and relevant for the final results.”
McIntyre’s machine-gun “auditing” of scientific results from outside the traditional structure of peer review creates practical problems for researchers, Zorita admits, but in the aftermath of the CRU email leak “we now know that a team of gatekeepers have tried to scupper studies that contradict their own previous publications.” McIntyre “has brought up interesting points from time to time,” but his most important contribution may be to the culture of climate science.
“Years ago, very few people, me included, thought to make data available to other researchers for confirmation or refutation. Such inquiries were very rare in climate research.” Now, Zorita says, reviewers are more aggressive about asking for raw data and confirming that statistical calculations can be replicated.
Until 2003, nothing in McIntyre’s life suggested that he would assume a central role in one of history’s great scientific debates—yet that life, in retrospect, seems to have been equipping him for the role. The son of a surgeon, McIntyre had an impressive record of performance in math competitions as a young student attending the University of Toronto Schools. He is still proud of having once beaten older classmate Michael Spence—“he was a bit of a hero of mine”—who would eventually snag the Nobel memorial prize in economics (2001). McIntyre went on to obtain a math degree at the University of Toronto, where his social circle overlapped with that of Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae. Graduating in 1969, he moved on to the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
In short, climatology’s ultimate outsider had the upbringing of a privileged Canadian insider. By 1971, he had been offered the proverbial keys to the kingdom—a graduate scholarship to work on mathematical economics at MIT, where Paul Samuelson, a giant of 20th-century economics, was the presiding intellect. But McIntyre’s path took an unexpected turn when his parents went through what he calls “an ugly divorce.” “I was the oldest of six kids,” he says. “The youngest was just five years old. This was back when divorce was still all but unknown.” Feeling that he was needed at home, he turned MIT down and decided to seek a career in business.
McIntyre went to work for Noranda when the mining giant was in its heyday, and went on to perform in a hodgepodge of jobs for smaller resource exploration companies: property buyer, accounting overseer, director, executive. He occasionally left the private sector to serve as a government policy analyst; in the mid-’70s, for instance, he took leave from Noranda to work for ex-classmate Edmund Clark at the federal Anti-Inflation Board. McIntyre’s association with “Red Ed” (now the CEO of the Toronto-Dominion Bank) will surprise those who assume that a climate skeptic must be a rabid Republican, but as he puts it, “I live in downtown Toronto, and I have the politics of downtown Toronto.”
The world of mining is one in which everyone is constantly aware of how engineering results can be tampered with or misrepresented to rip off investors. And in 2003, when McIntyre first saw the hockey stick graph, it reminded him uncomfortably of some stock promoter’s over-optimistic revenue projection. McIntyre asked lead “hockey stick” author Michael Mann for the underlying data and was startled when Mann had trouble remembering where he had posted the files to the Internet. “That was when the penny dropped for me,” McIntyre says. “I had the sense that Mann was pulling together the data for the first time—that nobody had ever bothered to inquire independently into the hockey stick before.”
To McIntyre, a scientist’s data and code stand in the same relationship to a finished paper that drilling cores do to a mining company press release. “If you’re offering securities to the public,” McIntyre observed in a May 2008 talk at Ohio State University, “there are complicated and expensive processes of due diligence, involving audits of financial statements, independent engineering reports, opinions from securities lawyers and so on. There are laws requiring the disclosure of adverse results.” Peer review in scientific journals is good, he suggested, but it is limited and vulnerable to compromise. “There is far more independent due diligence on the smallest prospectus offering securities to the public than on a Nature article that might end up having a tremendous impact on policy.”
His surprise and indignation seem sincere. In the CRU emails Mann speculates wildly about how McIntyre is “funded,” but his work has required little more than free time, effort, knowledge of statistics and linear algebra, and some software. Indeed, McIntyre says his climate-research activities—which quickly snowballed from an idle interest into a virtual second career—cost him the chance to ride a boom period in mining. “A lot of my friends made out very well,” he says, “but I just didn’t have any chips on the table. The opportunity cost to me has been horrendous.”
Nevertheless, it doesn’t sound as though McIntyre has many regrets. He grows positively garrulous when he talks of how his efforts let him reconnect with his youthful interest in hard-core math. He is not the sort of person whose inquisitiveness stops at the doorstep, either. In October 2007 he led an excursion into the mountains near Colorado Springs, where he was able to find many of the bristlecone pines whose rings were core-sampled in the 1980s by key paleoclimate researcher Donald Graybill. McIntyre and a few friends even took their own core samples, undermining critics who argue that dendrochronology is an esoteric, equipment-intensive activity whose results are hard to reproduce or double-check.
McIntyre does admit, however, that the expedition presented unexpected difficulties. “We had a borrowed four-wheeler, which wasn’t really the right kind of vehicle for those roads: quads or a Jeep would have been better,” he adds. “We ended up doing a bit of damage, so that cost me a couple thousand dollars.” If it wasn’t already obvious, McIntyre is the sort of fellow who will go to an awful lot of trouble to make a point.
Tags: climategate, climatic research unit, global warming, hockey stick graph, Ross McKitrick, stephen mcintyre
Posted in Canada | 271 Comments
Macleans.ca is proudly powered by WordPress
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/13/centre-of-the-storm/ printed on Jan 8, 2010
-
A hobbiest, doing his own experiments with his own skills and experience is able to find the flaws in the hockey stick. He also manages to do an independent check of the tree ring study and, apparently, find discrepancies.
Excellent BBG!
-
Its enough to give one hope!!! :lol:
-
It proves a good brain with a knowledge of scientific method and a good skill set is equivalent to some PhD's in reasoning power.
-
It was amusing, when Mc went out to recheck some tree proxie data in CA, if memory serves, he developed the Starbucks Therom or somesuch. The AGW believers who had first collected the bristlecone pine tree data had said the area was too remote to recheck; Steve found a Starbucks and theorized that perhaps the trees were too far from the nearest one for said scientists to venture out from. He established that one could get to the bristlecone site with a hot Starbucks coffee in hand. . . .
-
The first time I noticed McIntyre (likely from a BBG post) he went out and found the temperature sensors and discovered some strange circumstances, factories put up near the sensor, Pavement added by the sensors, air conditioners giving off heat installed by the sensors, etc. all destroying the integrity of any time analysis of the data, which is what the research is all about.
With just a few photos he exposed the fact that a) we don't measure global temperature; we sample it and the sampling is flawed, not done in a controlled or consistent manner, b) it's all based on adjusted data not real, measured temps, and the adjustments are subjective, matching the whim or the agenda of the adjuster, and c) worst of all, the highly touted peer review is false. It's just shocking to first see that no one before McIntyre caught these obviously problems that destroy all of the research. The peers supposedly reviewing were not even curious about the integrity of the data being adjusted and analyzed to death. They do not systematically measure or mathematically account for error throughout their phony analyses. Looking for those photos now I find this one from climateaudit 2007, unbelievable! This is the work of our nation's best scientists:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/TempsensornearAC.jpg)
-
India's newspapers are starting to pile on:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/10/un-ipcc-chief-pachauri-under-fire-in-india-for-conflicts-of-interest/
-
Interesting front in the Climategate scandal:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP6BzhZb8z0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
-
Though Judicial Watch has sometimes struck me as a bunch of cranks, I think the fact that FOIA materials are now ending up in the hands of non-scientist not previously associated with AGW skepticism suggests a dam is about to burst.
NASA Scientists Go on Attack After Climate Data Error Exposed
Contact Information:
Press Office 202-646-5172, ext 305
Washington, DC -- January 14, 2010
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.
These new documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal GISS email correspondence as NASA scientists attempted to deal with the media firestorm resulting from the controversy. In one exchange GISS head James Hansen tells a reporter from Bloomberg that NASA had not previously published rankings with 1998 atop the list as the hottest year on record in the 20th century.
Email from Demien McLean, Bloomberg to Jim Hansen, August 14, 2007: "The U.S. figures showed 1998 as the warmest year. Nevertheless, NASA has indeed newly ranked 1934 as the warmest year..."
Email Response from James Hansen to Damien McLean, August 14, 2007: "...We have not changed ranking of warmest year in the U.S. As you will see in our 2001 paper we found 1934 slightly warmer, by an insignificant hair over 1998. We still find that result. The flaw affected temperatures only after 2000, not 1998 and 1934."
Email from NASA Scientist Makiko Sato to James Hansen, August 14, 2007: "I am sure I had 1998 warmer at least once on my own temperature web page..." (Email includes temperature chart dated January 1, 2007.)
(This issue also crops up in email communications with New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin a little over a week later.)
According to the NASA email, NASA's incorrect temperature readings resulted from a "flaw" in a computer program used to update annual temperature data.
Hansen, clearly frustrated by the attention paid to the NASA error, labeled McIntyre a "pest" and suggests those who disagree with his global warming theories "should be ready to crawl under a rock by now." Hansen also suggests that those calling attention to the climate data error did not have a "light on upstairs."
"This email traffic ought to be embarrassing for NASA. Given the recent Climategate scandal, NASA has an obligation to be completely transparent with its handling of temperature data. Instead of insulting those who point out their mistakes, NASA scientists should engage the public in an open, professional and honest manner," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2010/jan/judicial-watch-uncovers-nasa-documents-related-global-warming-controversy
-
Nice, hour long overview of the case for AGW skepticism. In 5 parts; a good place to refer folks just wrapping their heads around the breadth of the AGW scam:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/14/john-colemans-hourlong-news-special-global-warming-the-other-side-now-online-all-five-parts-here/
-
2nd post.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/15/climategate-controversy-roils
Reason Magazine
Climategate Controversy Roils the Insurance Industry
Ronald Bailey | January 15, 2010
Environmentalist groups are fond of quoting insurance companies who argue that climate change is a big problem. This supposedly shows that profiteers, who are despised in other contexts, agree with the activists about the real and present danger of man-made global warming. In fact, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the lobby group for the folks that regulate insurance companies, has begun requiring insurance companies to answer a Climate Risk Disclosure Survey as a way alert investors and insureds about each company's exposure to the risks of climate change.
Now some insurance companies are pushing back. In a recent letter, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, specifically citing the Climategate affair, argues against the disclosure requirements on the grounds that the uncertainties surrounding climate science make it hard to properly assess risks. As the letter explains:
Climate Risk Disclosure Survey - Proposal For Implementation january 2010
Relevance of Recent Revelations Regarding Climate Science
In the months leading up to its adoption by the NAIC, NAMIC presented several arguments opposing the survey. One of these was that there is simply too much uncertainty about the nature of climate change—e.g., the rate at which it is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activity, its relationship to natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and droughts, and the economic trade-offs that would be entailed by various actions that might be taken to prevent further warming—for regulators to assume that all insurers have a material exposure to “climate risk” sufficient to justify mandatory “disclosure” of this purported risk to regulators and the public. Survey proponents replied that because uncertainty is inherent in any type of risk assessment, uncertainty about climate change shouldn’t prevent insurers form assessing the risks associated with climate change, nor should it prevent regulators from inquiring about the results of those assessments. At the same time, proponents suggested that there was little room for doubt that “global warming is occurring,” as a 2008 Task Force white paper unequivocally declared. The white paper disposed of the debate over the extent and consequences of anthropogenic global warming in a single sentence: “[The Task force] believe that there is ample evidence in support of this assumption in a variety of other reports and studies, so we have decided not to focus on the scientific aspects of global warming.”
That decision was certainly questionable in 2008. Today, it is untenable in our view. The unauthorized release in November 2009 of thousands of e-mails containing correspondence among scientists affiliated with the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) makes clear that insurers, regulators, and anyone else with a serious interest in climate change cannot afford the luxury of simply assuming that the “reports and studies” to which the Task Force white paper alludes present an accurate and unbiased picture of what is known about climate change.
The CRU e-mails show that a close-knit group of the world’s most influential climate scientists actively colluded to subvert the peer-review process (and thereby prevent the publication of research by scientists who disagreed with the group’s conclusions about global warming); manufactured pre-determined conclusions through the use of contrived analytic techniques; and discussed destroying data to avoid government freedom-of-information requests.
Viewed collectively, the CRU e-mails reveal a scientific community in which a group of scientists promoting what has become, through their efforts, the dominant climate-change paradigm are at war with other scientists derisively labeled as “skeptics,” “deniers,” and “contrarians.” The insularity and non-collegiality of these climate scientists had previously been noted in a 2006 report to Congress prepared by a committee of statisticians led by Dr. Eugene Wegman of George Mason University. The Wegman Report examined the body of research behind the widely-publicized “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show a dramatic and unprecedented increase in average global temperature during the twentieth century. After thoroughly discrediting the hockey stick graph, the report observed that “authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.” The report further noted “the isolation of the paleoclimate community,” concluding that “even though they rely heavily on statistical methods, they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.” When members of paleoclimate community were asked to explain and defend their work, “the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done.”
In short, because serious questions have been raised about the integrity of contemporary climate science, NAMIC believes it would be exceedingly risky for any insurance company to make important business decisions based on an uncritical acceptance of the dominant scientific paradigm on climate change. Put differently, we believe there is considerable risk involved in an approach to assessing “climate risk” that assumes the validity of any particular theory or set of beliefs about anthropogenic global warming.
Companies that share our perspective should be encouraged to do so in their responses to the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey. We fear, however, that the wording of the survey questions, together with the public pronouncements of some regulators, will inhibit the expression of what might be viewed as unwelcome “contrarian” responses. This fear was reinforced by the overall tone and substance of the Task Force-sponsored Climate Risk Summit that took place in San Francisco on December 9, 2009. Rather than thoughtfully assess the implications that the CRU e-mail scandal holds for insurers and the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey process, all but one speaker ignored the matter entirely. That speaker, in facilely dismissing the e-mail scandal as a plot hatched by malevolent “contrarians,” personified the doctrinaire partisanship and intolerance toward dissent that is so clearly displayed in the CRU e-mails.
If the CRU Climategateers and other climate change researchers had been as transparent about their science as the insurance commissioners are demanding that insurance companies be, this controversy would likely never have arisen.
-
January 17, 2010
Climategate Redux
Jane Jamison
Climate-gate part I occurred in early December when a still-unknown person posted thousands of e-mails and documents on a scientific website. The e-mails showed that scientists at the leading "global warming" research institute in the world, East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had "changed" weather data to prove their climate-warming theories, and squelched dissenting opinions from skeptical scientists to maintain credibility for their fraud.
Climate-gate part II begins now: The scientists with Icecap.us website announced findings late last week that not only was the CRU involved in producing fraudulent weather data, but two United States agencies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also been falsifying climate reports for years. NOAA, the report concludes, is actually "ground-zero" for the fraud of global warming, not the East Anglia Institute.
Climate researchers have discovered that government researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD."
In a new report supported by SPPI, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government's National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina Smith and D'Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations and then ‘adjuting the data in ways that increase the apparent warming.
The results of Smith and D'Aleo's findings were aired in a special on KUSI-TV hosted by founder of the Weather Channel and long-time meteorologist and climate "realist", John Coleman.
D'Aleo's preliminary report is HERE. Segments of the KUSI-TV report are HERE. SPPI's website will print the final report soon.
Not related directly to the investigation by the climate-gate scientists, but related nonetheless was another new report:
Polar bears are not dying or drowning due to melting icebergs caused by climate change. There are so many polars bears in Canada, they are causing problems.
This news is coming from Canadian wildlife agencies that have real live Inuit Indian hunters who count the real, live polar bears on the ground and in the water. The United States Geologic Survey (USGS), which has made the alarming findings about polar bear populations being extinct in 20 years, fly over in helicopters and make reports based on "analysis" of weather predictions.
Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc.says it is getting "beary" scary in many Canadian towns:
During the summer and fall, families enjoying outdoor activities must be on the look-out for bears. Many locals invite along other hunters for protection.
Last year, in Pelly Bay, all the bears that were captured were caught in town, Nirlungayuk says. "You now have polar bears coming into towns, getting into cabins, breaking property and just creating havoc for people up here," he says.
In the Western Hudson Bay area, where harvest quotas were reduced by 80 percent four years ago, communities are complaining about the number of polar bears. "Now people can look out the window and see as many as 20 polar bears at the ice-flow edge."
Let the scientists report further on the intricacies of the graphs, maps, and calculations of "global warming fraud," and then turn it all over to a prosecutor and make these "scientists" pay for this outrageous hoax that has continued for decades and is still having huge financial impacts on policy, commerce and the economy. "Global warming" is a crime.
Jane Jamison is publisher of the conservative news/commentary blog, UNCOVERAGE.net
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/climategate_redux.html at January 17, 2010 - 10:34:24 AM CST
-
2nd post.
UN report on glaciers melting is based on 'speculation'
An official prediction by the United Nations that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 may be withdrawn after it was found to be based on speculation rather than scientific evidence.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 3:00PM GMT 17 Jan 2010
Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the claim which it said was based on detailed research into the impact of global warming.
But the IPCC have since admitted it was based on a report written in a science journal and even the scientist who was the subject of the original story admits it was not based on fact.
The article, in the New Scientist, was not even based on a research paper - it evolved from a short telephone interview with the academic.
Dr Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.
Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped.
The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview.
Mr Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.
He said that Dr Hasnain made the assertion about 2035 but admitted it was campaigning report rather than an academic paper that was reviewed by a panel of expert peers.
Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Prof Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.
When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high".
The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90 per cent.
The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."
However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is two to three feet a year and most are far lower.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7011713/UN-report-on-glaciers-melting-is-based-on-speculation.html
-
EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding challenged today in the U.S. Senate
Excerpts from the:
Murkowski tries anew to block EPA regulators
By ERIKA BOLSTAD
WASHINGTON — Sen. Lisa Murkowski took her battle with the Environmental Protection Agency to the floor of the Senate today, saying she was left with no choice but to fight a federal agency she believes is “contemplating regulations that will destroy jobs while millions of Americans are doing everything they can just to find one.”
The Alaska Republican announced she would seek to keep the EPA from drawing up rules on greenhouse gas emissions from large emitters, such as power plants, refineries and manufacturers. Murkowski did it by filing a “disapproval resolution,” a rarely used procedural move that prohibits rules written by executive branch agencies from taking effect.
…
“If Congress allows this to happen there will be severe consequences to our economy,” Murkowski said. “Businesses will be forced to cut jobs, if not move outside our borders or close their doors for good perhaps. Domestic energy production will be severely restricted, increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers and threatening our national security. Housing will become less affordable.”
She was immediately countered by Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the committee that has done the most work on climate-change legislation: the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Murkowski’s disapproval resolution would essentially throw out the process by which the EPA found that greenhouse gases endanger public health, Boxer said.
She called Murkowski’s resolution an “unprecedented move to overturn a health finding by health experts and scientific experts in order to stand with the special interests.”
…
Murkowski has as co-sponsors 38 fellow senators, including three Democrats: Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Her move has prompted an aggressive response by environmentalists, who launched a radio and television advertising campaign in Anchorage and Washington, D.C., that focused on the role two industry lobbyists had in writing Murkowski’s original proposal last fall.
…
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also criticized Murkowski’s effort, saying recently during an event in New York sponsored by the Geothermal Energy Association that Murkowski’s proposal was “misguided.”
Video below:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrxuktlL_Cw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
-
2nd post. Long evaluation of the implication of Climategate. I've included the intro here.
CLIMATEGATE ANALYSIS
by John P. Costella | January 18, 2010
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Why Climategate is so distressing to scientists
by John P. Costella | December 10, 2009
The most difficult thing for a scientist in the era of Climategate is trying to explain to family and friends why it is so distressing to scientists. Most people don’t know how science really works: there are no popular television shows, movies, or books that really depict the everyday lives of real scientists; it just isn’t exciting enough. I’m not talking here about the major discoveries of science—which are well-described in documentaries, popular science series, and magazines—but rather how the process of science (often called the “scientific method”) actually works.
The best analogy that I have been able to come up with, in recent weeks, is the criminal justice system—which is (rightly or wrongly) abundantly depicted in the popular media. Everyone knows what happens if police obtain evidence by illegal means: the evidence is ruled inadmissible; and, if a case rests on that tainted evidence, it is thrown out of court. The justice system is not saying that the accused is necessarily innocent; rather, that determining the truth is impossible if evidence is not protected from tampering or fabrication.
The same is true in science: scientists assume that the rules of the scientific method have been followed, at least in any discipline that publishes its results for public consumption. It is that trust in the process that allows me, for example, to believe that the human genome has been mapped—despite my knowing nothing about that field of science at all. That same trust has allowed scientists at large to similarly believe in the results of climate science.
Until now.
So what are the “rules” of the scientific method? Actually, they are not all that different from those of the justice system. Just as it is a fundamental right of every affected party to be heard and fairly considered by the court, it is of crucial importance to science that all points of view be given a chance to be heard, and fairly debated. But, of course, it would be impossible to allow an “open slather” type of arrangement, like discussion forums on the Internet; so how do we admit all points of view, without descending into anarchy?
This question touches on something of a dark secret within science one which most scientists, through the need for self-preservation, are scared to admit: most disciplines of science are, to a greater or lesser extent, controlled by fashions, biases, and dogma. Why is this so? Because the mechanism by which scientific debate has been “regulated” to avoid anarchy—at least since the second half of the twentieth century—has been the “peer review” process. The career of any professional scientist lives or dies on their success in achieving publication of their papers in “peer-reviewed” journals. So what, exactly, does “peer-reviewed” mean? Simply that other professional scientists in that discipline must agree that the paper is worthy of publication. And what is the criterion that determines who these “professional scientists” should be? Their success in achieving publication of their papers in peer-reviewed journals! Catch-22.
It may seem, on the surface, that this circular process is fundamentally flawed; but, borrowing the words of Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Science is not, of course, alone in this respect; for example, in the justice system, judges are generally selected from the ranks of lawyers. So what is it that allows this form of system work, despite its evident circularity?
The justice system again provides a clue: judges are not the ones who ultimately decide what occurs in a courtroom: they simply implement the laws passed or imposed by the government—and politicians are not, in general, selected solely from the ranks of the legal profession. This is the ultimate “reality check” that prevents the legal system from spiraling into navel-gazing irrelevance.
Equivalent “escape valves” for science are not as explicitly obvious, but they exist nonetheless.
Firstly, a scientific discipline can maintain a “closed shop” mentality for a while, but eventually the institutions and funding agencies that provide the lifeblood of their work— the money that pays their wages and funds their research—will begin to question the relevance and usefulness of the discipline, particularly in relation to other disciplines that are competing for the same funds. This will generally be seen by the affected scientists as “political interference”, but it is a reflection of their descent into arrogance and delusions of self-importance for them to believe that only they themselves are worthy of judging their own merits.
Secondly, scientists who are capable and worthy, but unfairly “locked out” of a given discipline, will generally migrate to other disciplines in which the scientific process is working as it should. Dysfunctional disciplines will, in time, atrophy, in favor of those that are healthy and dynamic.
The Climategate emails show that these self-regulating mechanisms simply failed to work in the case of climate science—perhaps because “climate science” is itself an aggregation of many different and disparate scientific disciplines. Those component disciplines are extremely challenging. For example, it would be wonderful if NASA were able to invent a time machine, and go back over the past hundred thousand years and set up temperature and carbon dioxide measurement probes across the breadth of the globe. Unfortunately, we don’t have this. Instead, we need to infer these measurements, by counting tree rings, or digging up tubes of ice. The science of each of these disciplines is well-defined and rigorous, and there are many good scientists working in these fields. But the real difficulty is the “stitching together” of all of these results, in a way that allows answers to the fundamental questions: How much effect has mankind had on the temperature of the planet? And how much difference would it make if we did things differently?
It is at this “stitching together” layer of science—one could call it a “meta- discipline”— that the principles of the scientific method have broken down. Reading through the Climate-gate emails, one can see members of that community usually those with slightly different experience and wisdom than the power-brokers questioning (as they should) this “stitching together” process, particularly with regard to the extremely subtle mathematical methods that need to be used to try to extract answers. Now, these mathematical and statistical methods are completely within my own domain of expertise; and I can testify that the criticisms are sensible, carefully thought-out, and completely valid; these are good scientists, asking the right questions.
So what reception do they get? Instead of embracing this diversity of knowledge— thanking them for their experience (no one knows everything about everything) and using that knowledge to improve their own calculations—these power-brokers of climate science instead ignore, fob off, ridicule, threaten, and ultimately black- ball those who dare to question the methods that they—the power-brokers, the leaders—have used. And do not be confused: I am here talking about those scientists within their own camps, not the “skeptics” which they dismiss out of hand.
This is not “climate science”, it is climate ideology; it is the Church of Climatology.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf
It is this betrayal of the principles of science—in what is arguably the most important public application of science in our lifetime—that most distresses scientists.
-
Link to one of the reports mentioned below:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf
Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg
By Marc Sheppard
Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government’s principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.
Not only does the preliminary report [PDF] indict a broader network of conspirators, but it also challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked.
Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate -- American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, “[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue.”
And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.
As you’ll soon see, the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering.
NOAA – Data In / Garbage Out
Although satellite temperature measurements have been available since 1978, most global temperature analyses still rely on data captured from land-based thermometers, scattered more or less about the planet. It is that data which NOAA receives and disseminates – although not before performing some sleight-of-hand on it.
Smith has done much of the heavy lifting involved in analyzing the NOAA/GISS data and software, and he chronicles his often frustrating experiences at his fascinating website. There, detail-seekers will find plenty to satisfy, divided into easily-navigated sections -- some designed specifically for us “geeks,” but most readily approachable to readers of all technical strata.
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe.
Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts.
Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAA’s “selection bias” that Smith found infinitely more troubling.
It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).
For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers.
Smith also discovered that in California, only four stations remain – one in San Francisco and three in Southern L.A. near the beach – and he rightly observed that
It is certainly impossible to compare it with the past record that had thermometers in the snowy mountains. So we can have no idea if California is warming or cooling by looking at the USHCN data set or the GHCN data set.
That’s because the baseline temperatures to which current readings are compared were a true averaging of both warmer and cooler locations. And comparing these historic true averages to contemporary false averages – which have had the lower end of their numbers intentionally stripped out – will always yield a warming trend, even when temperatures have actually dropped.
Overall, U.S. online stations have dropped from a peak of 1,850 in 1963 to a low of 136 as of 2007. In his blog, Smith wittily observed that “the Thermometer Langoliers have eaten 9/10 of the thermometers in the USA[,] including all the cold ones in California.” But he was deadly serious after comparing current to previous versions of USHCN data and discovering that this “selection bias” creates a +0.6°C warming in U.S. temperature history.
And no wonder -- imagine the accuracy of campaign tracking polls were Gallup to include only the replies of Democrats in their statistics. But it gets worse.
Prior to publication, NOAA effects a number of “adjustments” to the cherry-picked stations’ data, supposedly to eliminate flagrant outliers, adjust for time of day heat variance, and “homogenize” stations with their neighbors in order to compensate for discontinuities. This last one, they state, is accomplished by essentially adjusting each to jive closely with the mean of its five closest “neighbors.” But given the plummeting number of stations, and the likely disregard for the latitude, elevation, or UHI of such neighbors, it’s no surprise that such “homogenizing” seems to always result in warmer readings.
The chart below is from Willis Eschenbach’s WUWT essay, “The smoking gun at Darwin Zero,” and it plots GHCN Raw versus homogeneity-adjusted temperature data at Darwin International Airport in Australia. The “adjustments” actually reversed the 20th-century trend from temperatures falling at 0.7°C per century to temperatures rising at 1.2°C per century. Eschenbach isolated a single station and found that it was adjusted to the positive by 6.0°C per century, and with no apparent reason, as all five stations at the airport more or less aligned for each period. His conclusion was that he had uncovered “indisputable evidence that the ‘homogenized’ data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.”
(http://www.americanthinker.com/mws-ghcn-averages.jpg)
WUWT’s editor, Anthony Watts, has calculated the overall U.S. homogeneity bias to be 0.5°F to the positive, which alone accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century. Add Smith’s selection bias to the mix and poof – actual warming completely disappears!
Yet believe it or not, the manipulation does not stop there.
GISS – Garbage In / Globaloney Out
The scientists at NASA’s GISS are widely considered to be the world’s leading researchers into atmospheric and climate changes. And their Surface Temperature (GISTemp) analysis system is undoubtedly the premiere source for global surface temperature anomaly reports.
In creating its widely disseminated maps and charts, the program merges station readings collected from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) with GHCN and USHCN data from NOAA.
It then puts the merged data through a few “adjustments” of its own.
First, it further “homogenizes” stations, supposedly adjusting for UHI by (according to NASA) changing “the long term trend of any non-rural station to match the long term trend of their rural neighbors, while retaining the short term monthly and annual variations.” Of course, the reduced number of stations will have the same effect on GISS’s UHI correction as it did on NOAA’s discontinuity homogenization – the creation of artificial warming.
Furthermore, in his communications with me, Smith cited boatloads of problems and errors he found in the Fortran code written to accomplish this task, ranging from hot airport stations being mismarked as “rural” to the “correction” having the wrong sign (+/-) and therefore increasing when it meant to decrease or vice-versa.
And according to NASA, “If no such neighbors exist or the overlap of the rural combination and the non-rural record is less than 20 years, the station is completely dropped; if the rural records are shorter, part of the non-rural record is dropped.”
However, Smith points out that a dropped record may be “from a location that has existed for 100 years.” For instance, if an aging piece of equipment gets swapped out, thereby changing its identification number, the time horizon reinitializes to zero years. Even having a large enough temporal gap (e.g., during a world war) might cause the data to “just get tossed out.”
But the real chicanery begins in the next phase, wherein the planet is flattened and stretched onto an 8,000-box grid, into which the time series are converted to a series of anomalies (degree variances from the baseline). Now, you might wonder just how one manages to fill 8,000 boxes using 1,500 stations.
Here’s NASA’s solution:
For each grid box, the stations within that grid box and also any station within 1200km of the center of that box are combined using the reference station method.
Even on paper, the design flaws inherent in such a process should be glaringly obvious.
So it’s no surprise that Smith found many examples of problems surfacing in actual practice. He offered me Hawaii for starters. It seems that all of the Aloha State’s surviving stations reside in major airports. Nonetheless, this unrepresentative hot data is what’s used to “infill” the surrounding “empty” Grid Boxes up to 1200 km out to sea. So in effect, you have “jet airport tarmacs ‘standing in’ for temperature over water 1200 km closer to the North Pole.”
An isolated problem? Hardly, reports Smith.
From KUSI’s Global Warming: The Other Side:
“There’s a wonderful baseline for Bolivia -- a very high mountainous country -- right up until 1990 when the data ends. And if you look on the [GISS] November 2009 anomaly map, you’ll see a very red rosy hot Bolivia [boxed in blue]. But how do you get a hot Bolivia when you haven’t measured the temperature for 20 years?”
(http://www.americanthinker.com/GHCN_GISS_1200km_Anom11_2009_Nov.jpg)
Of course, you already know the answer: GISS simply fills in the missing numbers – originally cool, as Bolivia contains proportionately more land above 10,000 feet than any other country in the world – with hot ones available in neighboring stations on a beach in Peru or somewhere in the Amazon jungle.
Remember that single station north of 65° latitude which they located in a warm section of northern Canada? Joe D’Aleo explained its purpose: “To estimate temperatures in the Northwest Territory [boxed in green above], they either have to rely on that location or look further south.”
Pretty slick, huh?
And those are but a few examples. In fact, throughout the entire grid, cooler station data are dropped and “filled in” by temperatures extrapolated from warmer stations in a manner obviously designed to overestimate warming...
...And convince you that it’s your fault.
Government and Intergovernmental Agencies -- Globaloney In / Green Gospel Out
Smith attributes up to 3°F (more in some places) of added “warming trend” between NOAA’s data adjustment and GIStemp processing.
That’s over twice last century’s reported warming.
And yet, not only are NOAA’s bogus data accepted as green gospel, but so are its equally bogus hysterical claims, like this one from the 2006 annual State of the Climate in 2005 [PDF]: “Globally averaged mean annual air temperature in 2005 slightly exceeded the previous record heat of 1998, making 2005 the warmest year on record.”
And as D’Aleo points out in the preliminary report, the recent NOAA proclamation that June 2009 was the second-warmest June in 130 years will go down in the history books, despite multiple satellite assessments ranking it as the 15th-coldest in 31 years.
Even when our own National Weather Service (NWS) makes its frequent announcements that a certain month or year was the hottest ever, or that five of the warmest years on record occurred last decade, they’re basing such hyperbole entirely on NOAA’s warm-biased data.
And how can anyone possibly read GISS chief James Hansen’s Sunday claim that 2009 was tied with 2007 for second-warmest year overall, and the Southern Hemisphere’s absolute warmest in 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, without laughing hysterically? It's especially laughable when one considers that NOAA had just released a statement claiming that very same year (2009) to be tied with 2006 for the fifth-warmest year on record.
So how do alarmists reconcile one government center reporting 2009 as tied for second while another had it tied for fifth? If you’re WaPo’s Andrew Freedman, you simply chalk it up to “different data analysis methods” before adjudicating both NASA and NOAA innocent of any impropriety based solely on their pointless assertions that they didn’t do it.
Earth to Andrew: “Different data analysis methods”? Try replacing “analysis” with “manipulation,” and ye shall find enlightenment. More importantly, does the explicit fact that since the drastically divergent results of both “methods” can’t be right, both are immediately suspect somehow elude you?
But by far the most significant impact of this data fraud is that it ultimately bubbles up to the pages of the climate alarmists’ bible: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report.
And wrong data begets wrong reports, which – particularly in this case – begets dreadfully wrong policy.
It’s High Time We Investigated the Investigators
The final report will be made public shortly, and it will be available at the websites of both report-supporter Science and Public Policy Institute and Joe D’Aleo’s own ICECAP. As they’ve both been tremendously helpful over the past few days, I’ll trust in the opinions I’ve received from the report’s architects to sum up.
This from the meteorologist:
The biggest gaps and greatest uncertainties are in high latitude areas where the data centers say they 'find' the greatest warming (and thus which contribute the most to their global anomalies). Add to that no adjustment for urban growth and land use changes (even as the world's population increased from 1.5 to 6.7 billion people) [in the NOAA data] and questionable methodology for computing the historical record that very often cools off the early record and you have surface based data sets so seriously flawed, they can no longer be trusted for climate trend or model forecast assessment or decision making by the administration, congress or the EPA.
Roger Pielke Sr. has suggested: “...that we move forward with an inclusive assessment of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC. We need to focus on the science issues. This necessarily should involve all research investigators who are working on this topic, with formal assessments chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.” I endorse that suggestion.
Certainly, all rational thinkers agree. Perhaps even the mainstream media, most of whom have hitherto mistakenly dismissed Climategate as a uniquely British problem, will now wake up and demand such an investigation.
And this from the computer expert:
That the bias exists is not denied. That the data are too sparse and with too many holes over time in not denied. Temperature series programs, like NASA GISS GIStemp try, but fail, to fix the holes and the bias. What is claimed is that "the anomaly will fix it." But it cannot. Comparison of a cold baseline set to a hot present set must create a biased anomaly. It is simply overwhelmed by the task of taking out that much bias. And yet there is more. A whole zoo of adjustments are made to the data. These might be valid in some cases, but the end result is to put in a warming trend of up to several degrees. We are supposed to panic over a 1/10 degree change of "anomaly" but accept 3 degrees of "adjustment" with no worries at all. To accept that GISTemp is "a perfect filter". That is, simply, "nuts". It was a good enough answer at Bastogne, and applies here too.
Smith, who had a family member attached to the 101st Airborne at the time, refers to the famous line from the 101st commander, U.S. Army General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, who replied to a German ultimatum to surrender the December, 1944 Battle of Bastogne, Belgium with a single word: “Nuts.”
And that’s exactly what we’d be were we to surrender our freedoms, our economic growth, and even our simplest comforts to duplicitous zealots before checking and double-checking the work of the prophets predicting our doom should we refuse.
Marc Sheppard is environment editor of American Thinker and editor of the forthcoming Environment Thinker.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_cru_was_but_the_ti.html at January 22, 2010 - 08:33:28 AM CST
-
Whoa! Talk about a dental exam with no drugs! Looks like the hacker has actually done some goodan forced the doors open on the base data- which appears baddly corrupted. You are going to get a lot of hits on this thread, I am gonna have to start referencing it for educational purposes. (data scamming)
-
Fascinating dissection of a Y2K bugs' impact on a "which year was warmest" debate. Though it long predates Climategate, it reveals many mechanisms revealed in that folly have been long in place:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/23/nasa-hide-this-after-jim-checks-it/#more-9903
-
IPCC scientist admits Glaciergate was about influencing governments
Rick Moran
In a stunning admission, the scientist responsible for publishing the part of the 2007 IPCC report on global warming in Asia says he knew the evidence for the disappearing Himalayan Glacier was suspect but allowed it into the report in order to put pressure on governments to take action.
This story is getting huge play in Great Britain - not so much here in America. David Rose of the Daily Mail pens this piece:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.'
It turns out that the prediction about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was based on two interviews with an obscure Indian scientist and a piece in World Wildlife Federation's magazine - that botched the math in figuring glacier shrinkage:
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres - the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Money quote from the article: "In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air."
It's not like reputable scientists didn't try to warn off the IPCC about this ridiculous assertion about Himalayan glaciers. Several scientists wrote to Lal and his group pointing out that the statement had not been peer reviewed and was based on bogus data. Lal's group ignored or dismissed all such claims.
Once again, we have clear evidence that the IPCC report from 2007 from which all recommendations on what to do about climate change flows, is seriously flawed not only in fact, but in the way it was compiled as well. The scientists went against their own guidelines time and time again to include information that was not properly vetted. Nor did they follow their own rules about including valid dissents from the majority.
IPCC Chairman Dr Pachauri - under a cloud as a result of conflict of interest charges - dismissed an Indian government study last year refuting the glacier evidence as "voodoo science." And why not? Pachauri has numerous business interests in India getting rich off the claim about Himalayan glaciers.
This is the most humiliating news yet for the IPCC. One wonders how much longer the chairman - and perhaps the organization itself - can survive given all the recent revelations.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/ipcc_scientist_admits_glacierg.html at January 24, 2010 - 09:32:19 AM CST
-
Another day, another AGW piece of conventional wisdom found to be based on folderol:
After Climategate, Pachaurigate and Glaciergate: Amazongate
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: January 25th, 2010
128 Comments Comment on this article
AGW theory is toast. So’s Dr Rajendra Pachauri. So’s the Stern Review. So’s the credibility of the IPCC. But if you think I’m cheered by this you’re very much mistaken. I’m trying to write a Climategate book but the way things are going by the time I’m finished there won’t be anything left to say: the battle will already have been won and the only people left who still believe in Man Made Global Warming will be the eco-loon equivalents of those wartime Japanese soldiers left abandoned and forgotten on remote Pacific atolls.
Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.
This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the “Glaciergate” claims are made. There, is the startling claim that:
At first sight, the reference looks kosher enough but, following it through, one sees:
This, then appears to be another WWF report, carried out in conjunction with the IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The link given is no longer active, but the report is on the IUCN website here. Furthermore, the IUCN along with WWF is another advocacy group and the report is not peer-reviewed. According to IPCC rules, it should not have been used as a primary source.
It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:
My background and experience around the world has required and developed high-level policy and analytical skills. I have a strong understanding of government administration, legislative review, analysis and inquiries generated through involvement in or management of the Australian Regional Forest Agreement process, Parliamentary and Government inquiries, Coronial inquiries and public submissions on water pricing, access and use rights and native vegetation legislation in Australia and fire and natural resources laws, regulations and policies in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia.
And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist:
Andy Rowell is a freelance writer and Investigative journalist with over 12 years’ experience on environmental, food, health and globalization issues. Rowell has undertaken cutting-edge investigations for, amongst others, Action on Smoking and Health, The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, IFAW, the Pan American Health Organization, Project Underground, the World Health Organization, World in Action and WWF.
But the IPCC’s shamelessness did not end there. Dr North has searched the WWF’s reports high and low but can find no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change. (Logging and farm expansion are a much more plausible threat).
Watts Up With That provides a further, worryingly long list of the non-peer-reviewed papers from the World Wildlife Fund cited as evidence in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report. Time, it asks, for the IPCC to be stripped of its Nobel Peace Prize?
We can but dream.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100023598/after-climategate-pachaurigate-and-glaciergate-amazongate/
-
2nd post.
Peer review, peer review, the AGW zealots cry. Alas, a deeper look at IPCC reports reveal a litany of cited papers produced by advocacy groups that have not been peer reviewed. These fools are circling around the drain.
The scandal deepens – IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers
All the years I’ve been in TV news, I’ve observed that every story has a tipping point. In news, we know when it has reached that point when we say it “has legs” and the story takes on a life of its own. The story may have been ignored or glossed over for weeks, months, or years until some new piece of information is posted and starts to galvanize people. The IPCC glacier melt scandal was the one that galvanized the collective voice that has been saying that the IPCC report was seriously flawed and represented a political rather than scientific view. Now people are seriously looking at AR4 with a critical eye and finding things everywhere.
Remember our friends at World Wildlife Fund? Those schlockmeisters that produced the video of planes flying into New York with explicit comparisons to 9/11?
The caption in the upper right reads: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”
Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.
A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-dodgy-citations-in-nobel-winning.html
Here’s an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report:
Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp. [Accessed 03.05.07: http://www.wwf.org.uk/ filelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf]
Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.
Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey, 79 pp.
Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004: Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp. http://www.wwf.org.au/ publications/acg_solutions.pdf
Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change – agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich [may be the same document as "Allianz" above, except that one is dated 2006 and the other 2005]
Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November
Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland. Accessed 01.10.2006 at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/medreportfinal8july05.pdf.
Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246 pp.
http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/our_solutions/business_industry/climate_savers/ index.cfm
Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005: Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal
Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.
Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf
WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. http://www.wwf.org/
WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.
WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.
Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland
Finally, there are these authoritative sources cited by the IPCC – publications with names such as Leisure and Event Management:
Jones, B. and D. Scott, 2007: Implications of climate change to Ontario’s provincial parks. Leisure, (in press)
Jones, B., D. Scott and H. Abi Khaled, 2006: Implications of climate change for outdoor event planning: a case study of three special events in Canada’s National Capital region. Event Management, 10, 63-76
Not only should Pachauri resign, the Nobel committee should be deluged by world citizenry demanding they revoke the Nobel prize granted to the body that produced this document.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/24/the-scandal-deepens-ipcc-ar4-riddled-with-non-peer-reviewed-wwf-papers/
-
The Nobel prize is circling the drain too, given the number of choices the have made in recent years that seem to have way more to do with politics than science.
-
Is IPCC chief Pachauri on his way out?
Rick Moran
If not, he should be.
The former railroad engineer turned climate expert heads up a dysfunctional, scientifically corrupt organization on which the bulk of both the science and politics of global warming is based. Dr Rajendra Pachauri himself has been accused of massive conflicts of interest in promulgating policies that enrich companies in which he has a personal stake. And the list of incredible claims of catastrophe that turn out to be based entirely on political calculation is growing.
Consider:
1. Climategate - emails and other documents showing that the mecca of global warming science was cooking the books to advance a political agenda.
2. Glaciergate - where it was discovered that the claim made in the 2007 IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers melting away by 2035 was bogus, based on an erroneous report put out by the World Wildlife Federation which in turn, was based on a news report in a general interest science magagzine. Warnings by other scientists that the claim was not vetted properly were ignored.
3. Tempgate - in which it was discovered:
Canwest News Service, a Canadian agency that also owns a chain of newspapers, reported Friday, "In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.
"Worse, only one station - at Eureka on Ellesmere Island - is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
"The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada."
In a paper published on the Science and Public Policy Institute Web site, D'Aleo and Smith say the "NOAA ... systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.
4. Last weekend, we discovered that dire warnings issued in the 2007 IPCC report about more powerful hurricanes and worse flooding as a result of global warming were based on similar, spurious claims and less than questionable science. Once again, the IPCC used an unvetted report from the WWF - this one written by a policy wonk and green activist - that proved to be wildly off target and not based on any scientific research.
In making these bogus claims, the IPCC has violated its own rules and procedures. And yet Pachauri, who called the first reports that the IPCC claims about Himalayan glaciers was "voodoo science" - refuses to admit that much of anything is wrong and that it is ridiculous to accuse him of having a conflict of interest because he is such a noble, global citizen.
Now, according to Marc Morano of Climate Depot , one of the lead authors of that 2007 report has turned on his boss and is calling for Pachauri's resignation:
From a piece by Richard Foot in the Windsor Star:
A senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations' panel on global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled.
Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.
"There's been some dangerous crossing of that line," said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.
"Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates," he told Canwest News Service. "I think that is a very legitimate question."
Weaver also says the IPCC has become too large and unwieldy. He says its periodic reports, such as the 3,000 page, 2007 report that won the Nobel Prize, are eating up valuable academic resources and driving scientists to produce work on tight, artificial deadlines, at the expense of other, longer-term inquiries that are equally important to understanding climate change.
"The problem we have is that the IPCC process has taken on a life of its own," says Weaver, a climate-modelling physicist who co-authored chapters in the past three IPCC reports.
The chorus is growing among legitimate climate scientists who are scrambling to save something of their reputations as more ugliness dribbles out about the harshly politicized nature of the entire global warming movement. From Great Britain, to Canada, to the US, to Australia, New Zealand, and now Africa and Latin America - the list of phony baloney reports on which the IPCC developed their carbon trading and economy-destroying policies for governments to follow continues to grow.
Also growing are calls for disbanding the IPCC, making them return their Nobel Prize, and scrapping the entire Kyoto-Copenhagen protocols and starting from scratch. But first things first; fire the head of the IPCC and undertake a full scale review of every scrap of data used by the IPCC in their recommendations that came within a few months of bankrupting the developed world.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/is_ipcc_chief_pachauri_on_his.html at January 27, 2010 - 03:22:28 PM CST
-
Thus at least 1 3rd world "guilt ploy" comes tumbling and burning down. I am still waiting to hear this on the MSM with any kind of serious treatment.
-
Hmm, when the liberal Guardian starts publishing pieces like this one can't help but suspect the MSM is beginning to wake to the egregious nature of most AGW claims.
Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siege
In the first part of a major investigation of the so-called 'climategate' emails, one of Britain's top science writers reveals how researchers tried to hide flaws in a key study
Fred Pearce
Monday 1 February 2010 21.00 GMT
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who was at the centre of the hacked emails scandal. Photograph: University of East Anglia
It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?
But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.
The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.
Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.
That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?
It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night.
So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.
The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence … is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.
But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.
And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.
He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data.
Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.
The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university's computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. "It is all malicious … I seem to be a marked man now," he wrote in April 2007.
Another email from him said: "My problem is I don't know the best course of action … I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!"
An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: "This crowd of charlatans … look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely."
Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. "The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."
In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang's employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found "no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results" and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.
By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.
The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data – and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.
Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: "It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect."
Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: "The buck should eventually stop with me."
Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. "Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist."
This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.
Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper.
Wang's defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations.
In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.
Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.
Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: "I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would …not be surprised if he screwed up here … Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late." There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang's previous work.
Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."
The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.
This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.
It is important to keep this in perspective, however. This dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences. A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones's new data, "global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends."
Keenan accepts that his allegations do not on their own change the global picture. But he told the Guardian: "My interest in all this arises from concern about research integrity, rather than about global warming per se. Jones knew there were serious problems with the Chinese research, yet continued to rely upon the research in his work, including allowing it to be cited in the IPCC report."
The emails
From sceptic Doug Keenan to Dr Wei-Chyung Wang and Prof Phil Jones – 20 April 2007
"I ask you to retract your GRL paper, in full, and to retract the claims made in Nature about the Chinese data. If you do not do so, I intend to publicly submit an allegation of research misconduct to your university at Albany."
From Jones to Dr Kevin Trenberth
"I seem to be the marked man now !"
From Prof Michael Mann to Jones
"This is all too predictable. This crowd of charlatans is always looking for one thing they can harp on, where people w/ little knowledge of the facts might be able to be convinced that there is a controversy. They can't take on the whole of the science, so they look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised."
From Trenberth to Jones and Mann – 21 April 2007
"I am sure you know that this is not about the science. It is an attack to "undermine the science in some way. In that regard I don't think you can ignore it all … the response should try to somehow label these guys lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."
From Prof Tom Wigley to Jones – 4 May 2009
"I have always thought W-C W [Wang] was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here … Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late? I realise that Keenan is just a troublemaker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me."
• This article was amended on 2 February 2010. One sentence in the original read: "Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data." The word story has been corrected.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/dispute-weather-fraud
-
Hmmm, NNOAA changes the data set away from cooler thermometers in Canada. The China Data set is thoroughly suspect. The adjustment to more urban termometers in Australia? (did I read that right?)
Then that picture of one of the therometers sitting near the output of 3 or 4 A/C units (hot air comes out of those)........
Keystone Cop Science is more appropriate...........
-
Yep, both US and Australia had a curious shift where thermometers one would expect to be cooler were dropped, while ones used in urban areas were used and that data was then extrapolated to cover very topographically different areas, including ones that had a their own weather stations. And then the original data got "lost."
I should have titled my last post "The Dog Ate My Homework and then was Eaten Teeth and Toenails by Another Dog."
-
Who did that, was he following directions given in the e-mails?
-
It looks like it was done by committee, details are hard to come by, and it appears to have happened independently by various groups in various countries.
Anthony Watts has done a lot of work here and you can search his site for specific instances. His Surface Station effort was likely one of the catalysts that lead to these revelations.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
-
okay, I have read a bunch of stuff referencing that url. "Done by comittee locally, but acting by a global Ideaology" would be a better description?
-
You know, those clowns kept flying off to confabs in exotic locales; maybe they were bright enough not to commit some of their machinations to email.
-
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
By Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Full paper, 114 pages, 1.54MB at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
This approved non-technical summary by Hans Schreuder, 24 June 2008
“The authors express their hope that in schools around the world the fundamentals of physics will
be taught correctly, not by using shock-tactic 'Al Gore' movies and not misinforming physics
students by confusing absorption/emission with reflection, by confusing the tropopause with the
ionosphere and by confusing microwaves with shortwaves.”
Abstract
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea the authors trace back to the traditional works of
Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896, but which is still supported in global climatology,
essentially describes a fictitious mechanism by which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump
driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the
atmospheric system.
According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in widespread secondary literature it is
taken for granted that such a mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this
paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles clarified.
By showing that
(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and
the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects,
(b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet,
(c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 °C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly,
(d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately,
(e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical,
(f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero,
the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
Introduction
Recently, there have been lots of discussions regarding the economic and political implications of
climate variability, in particular global warming as a measurable effect of an anthropogenic, i.e.
human-made, climate change. Many authors assume that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel
consumption represent a serious danger to the health of our planet, since they are supposed to
influence climate, in particular the average temperatures of the surface and lower atmosphere of
the Earth. However, carbon dioxide is a rare trace gas, a very small part of the atmosphere found
in concentrations less than 0.04 volume percent.
Among climatologists, in particular those affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate
Change (IPCC), there is a “scientific consensus" that the relevant climate mechanism is an
atmospheric greenhouse effect, a mechanism heavily reliant on the presumption that radiative heat
transfer dominates over other forms of heat transfer such as thermal conductivity, convection,
condensation, et cetera. Supposedly to make things more precise, the IPCC introduced the notion
of radiative forcing, tied to an assumption of radiative equilibrium.
However, as countless examples in history have shown, “scientific consensus" bears no
resemblance whatsoever to scientific validity. “Consensus" is a political term, not a scientific one.
From the viewpoint of theoretical physics, a radiative approach to the atmosphere — using physical
laws such as Planck's and Stefan-Boltzmann's, which only have a limited range of validity —
definitely fails to intersect with atmospheric dynamics and must be questioned deeply.
In other words, applying cavity radiation formulas to the atmosphere is sheer nonsense.
Global climatologists claim that the Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps it 33°C warmer than it
would be without trace gases in the atmosphere. 80 percent of this warming is attributed to water
vapor and 20 percent to the 0.0385 volume percent of CO2. If CO2 exhibited such an extreme
effect, however, this would show up as a thermal conductivity anomaly even in an elementary
laboratory experiment. Carbon dioxide would manifest itself as a new kind of 'super-insulation,'
wildly violating the conventional heat-conductivity equation.
Such anomalous heat transport properties never have been observed in CO2, of course.
The influence of CO2 on climate was discussed thoroughly in a number of publications that
appeared between 1909 and 1980, mainly in Germany. The most influential authors were Möller,
who also wrote a textbook on meteorology, and Manabe. It seems that the combined work of Möller
and Manabe has had a significant influence on the formulation of modern atmospheric CO2
greenhouse conjectures. In a very comprehensive report from the US Department of Energy (DOE),
which appeared in 1985, the atmospheric greenhouse hypothesis was cast into its final form and
became the cornerstone in all subsequent IPCC publications.
Of course, although the oversimplified picture drawn by IPCC climatology is physically incorrect, a
thorough analysis might reveal some non-negligible influence of certain radiative effects (apart
from sunlight) on the weather and hence on its local averages, the climate, which could be dubbed
a CO2 greenhouse effect. But then, even if the effect is claimed to serve only as a genuine trigger
of a network of complex reactions, three key questions would remain:
1. Is there a fundamental CO2 greenhouse effect in physics?
2. If so, what is the fundamental physical principle behind this CO2 greenhouse effect?
3. Is it physically correct to regard radiative heat transfer as the fundamental mechanism
controlling the weather, setting thermal conductivity and friction to zero?
In the language of physics an effect is a not-necessarily evident but reproducible and measurable
phenomenon together with its theoretical explanation. Neither the warming mechanism in a glass
house nor the supposed anthropogenic warming is an "effect" in this sense of the definition:
• In the first case (a glass house) one encounters a straightforward phenomenon.
• The second case (the Earth's atmosphere) one cannot measure directly, rather, one can
only make heuristic calculations.
Explaining the warming mechanism in a real greenhouse is a standard problem in undergraduate
courses, in which optics, nuclear physics and classical radiation theory are dealt with.
The atmospheric greenhouse mechanism is a conjecture that can be proved or disproved by
concrete engineering thermodynamics. Exactly this was done many years ago by an expert in this
field, namely Alfred Schack, who wrote a classical textbook on the subject. In 1972 he showed that
the radiative component of heat transfer by CO2, though relevant in combustion chamber
temperatures, can be neglected at atmospheric temperatures.
CO2's influence on the Earth's climate is definitively immeasurable.
The warming mechanism in real greenhouses
For years, the warming mechanism in real greenhouses, designated “the greenhouse effect", has
been commonly misused to explain the conjectured atmospheric greenhouse effect. In school
books, in popular scientific articles, and even in high-level scientific debates, it has been stated that
the mechanism observed within a glass house is similar to anthropogenic global warming.
Meanwhile, even mainstream climatologists admit that the warming mechanism in real glass houses
must be strictly distinguished from the claimed CO2 greenhouse effect. Nevertheless, one should
look at the classical glass house problem to recapitulate some fundamental principles of
thermodynamics and radiation theory. In our technical paper the relevant radiation dynamics of the
atmospheric system are elaborated on and distinguished from the glass house set-up.
In section 2.1.5 many pseudo-explanations in the context of climatology are falsified by just three
fundamental observations of mathematical physics.
The Sun and radiation
A larger portion of the incoming sunlight lies in the infrared range than in the visible range. Most
papers that cover the supposed greenhouse effect completely ignore this important fact.
Especially on a hot summer’s day, every car driver knows about the greenhouse effect. One does
not need to be an expert in physics to explain immediately why the car gets so hot inside: The Sun
has heated the car's interior. However, it is a bit harder to answer the question why it is cooler
outside the car, although there the Sun shines onto the ground without obstacles. Undergraduate
students with standard physical recipes at hand can easily “explain" this kind of a greenhouse
effect.
On a hot summer afternoon, temperature measurements inside and outside a car were performed
with a standard digital thermometer. These measurements are recommended to every climatologist
who believes in the CO2-greenhouse effect, because they show that the alleged effect has nothing
to do with trapped thermal radiation. Neither the infrared absorption nor reflection coefficient of
glass is relevant in this explanation of the real greenhouse effect, only the panes of glass hindering
the movement of air.
This text is a recommended reading for all global climatologists referring to the greenhouse effect:
It is not the “trapped" infrared radiation which explains the warming phenomenon in a real
greenhouse - it is the suppression of air cooling.
The fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects
Depending on the particular school and the degree of popularization, the assumption that the
atmosphere is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared radiation supposedly leads to
• a warming of the Earth's surface and/or
• a warming of the lower atmosphere and/or
• a warming of a certain layer of the atmosphere and/or
• a slow-down of the natural cooling of the Earth's surface
•
and so forth.
Sir David King, former science advisor of the British government, stated that “global warming is a
greater threat to humanity than terrorism”. In countless contributions to newspapers and TV shows
in Germany the popular climatologist Latif continues to warn the public about the consequences of
rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet even today it is impossible to find a book on nonequilibrium
thermodynamics or radiation transfer where this presumed effect is derived from first
principles.
The main objective of our paper is not to draw the line between error and fraud, only to find out
whether the greenhouse effect appears or disappears within the frame of physics. Therefore, in
Section 3.3 several different variations of the atmospheric greenhouse hypotheses are examined
and disproved. The authors restrict themselves to statements that appeared after a publication by
Lee in the well-known Journal of Applied Meteorology 1973, see Ref. [109] and references therein.
Lee's 1973 paper is a milestone. In the beginning Lee writes:
The so-called radiation `greenhouse' effect is a misnomer. Ironically, while the concept is
useful in describing what occurs in the earth's atmosphere, it is invalid for crypto-climates
created when space is enclosed with glass, e.g. in greenhouses and solar energy
collectors. Specifically, elevated temperatures observed under glass cannot be traced to
the spectral absorptivity of glass. The misconception was demonstrated experimentally by
R. W. Wood more than 60 years ago and recently in an analytical manner by Businger.
Fleagle and Businger devoted a section of their text to the point, and suggested that
radiation trapping by the earth's atmosphere should be called `atmosphere effect' to
discourage use of the misnomer. In spite of the evidence, modern textbooks on
meteorology and climatology not only repeat the misnomer, but frequently support the
false notion that `heat-retaining behavior of the atmosphere is analogous to what
happens in a greenhouse' (Miller, 1966). The mistake obviously is subjective, based on
similarities of the atmosphere and glass, and on the `neatness' of the example in
teaching. The problem can be rectified through straightforward analysis, suitable for
classroom instruction.
Lee continues his analysis with a calculation based on radiative balance equations, which are
physically questionable. The same holds for a comment by Berry on Lee's work. Nevertheless, Lee's
paper is a milestone, marking the day after every serious scientist or science educator is no longer
allowed to compare the greenhouse with the atmosphere, even in the classroom, which Lee
explicitly refers to.
In section 3.3 of our paper, many different versions of the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture are
examined and disproved. In conclusion, the authors observe the following:
• that even today the “atmospheric greenhouse effect" does not appear
- in any fundamental work on thermodynamics
- in any fundamental work on physical kinetics
- in any fundamental work on radiation theory
• that the definitions given in the literature beyond straight physics are very different and,
partly, contradict each other.
The conclusion of the US Department of Energy
-
All fictitious greenhouse effects have in common one and only one cause: A rise in the
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere leading to higher air temperatures near the ground. Lee's
1973 result that the warming phenomenon in a glass house does not compare to the supposed
atmospheric greenhouse effect was confirmed in the 1985 report of the United States Department
of Energy “Projecting the climatic effects of increasing carbon dioxide".
In this comprehensive pre-IPCC publication MacCracken explicitly states that the terms
“greenhouse gas" and “greenhouse effect" are misnomers.
Section 3.5 discusses the concepts of absorption, emission and reflection, recommended reading for
those who wish to know the calculations behind the conclusions.
Section 3.6 the classic hypotheses of Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius are analysed in detail, followed
by modern versions of it, and it is concluded that :
• In the 70s, computer simulations of the "global climate" predicted for a doubling of the CO2
concentration a temperature rise of about 0.7 – 9.6 degrees Kelvin.
• Later computer simulations pointed towards a null effect.
• In the IPCC 1992 report, computer simulations of the “global climate" predicted a global
temperature rise of about 0.27 - 0.82K per decade.
• In the IPCC 1995 report, computer simulations of the “global climate" predicted a global
temperature rise of about 0.08 - 0.33K per decade
• In 2005, computer simulations of the “global climate" predicted for a doubling of the CO2
concentration a global temperature rise of about 2 - 12K, whereby six so-called scenarios have
been omitted that yield a global cooling.
To derive climate catastrophes from these computer games and to scare mankind to death is a
crime.
Section 3.7 discusses the fallacy of radiative balance, from which the following pertinent points are
taken:
- For instance, “average" temperatures are calculated for an Earth without an atmosphere and for
an Earth with an atmosphere. Amusingly, there seem to exist no calculations for an Earth without
oceans opposed to calculations for an Earth with oceans.
- Though there exists a huge family of generalizations, one common aspect is the assumption of a
radiative balance, which plays a central role in the publications of the IPCC and, hence, in the public
propaganda. In the following it is proved that this assumption is physically wrong.
- Unfortunately this [conservation laws (continuity equations, balance equations, budget equations)
cannot be written down for intensities] is done in most climatologic papers, the cardinal error of
global climatology, that may have been overlooked so long due to the oversimplification of the real
world problem towards a quasi one-dimensional problem. Hence the popular climatologic “radiation
balance" diagrams describing quasi-one-dimensional situations (cf. Figure 23) are scientific
misconduct since they do not properly represent the mathematical and physical fundamentals.
The reader of this non-technical summary is urged to review all of sections 3.7 and 3.8 in their
original format in order to appreciate the issues in hand and understand this further point :
“that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the
issue of global warming. While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of
local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if
physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally
valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of
computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature
field can be interpreted as both `warming' and `cooling' simultaneously, making the concept
of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed."
Section 4 discusses the foundations of climate science, whilst the limits of computer models are
also pointed out, with this pertinent quote by eminent theoretical physicist Freeman J Dyson:
“The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is
much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models,
than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps
and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own
models.”
“It cannot be overemphasized that even if the equations are simplified considerably, one cannot
determine numerical solutions, even for small space regions and even for small time intervals. This
situation will not change in the next 1000 years regardless of progress made in computer hardware.
Therefore, global climatologists may continue to write updated research grant proposals demanding
next-generation supercomputers ad infinitum. As the extremely simplified one-fluid equations are
unsolvable, the many-fluid equations would be more unsolvable, the equations that include the
averaged equations describing the turbulence would be yet more unsolvable, if “unsolvable" had a
comparative. Regardless of the chosen level of complexity, these equations are supposed to be the
backbone of climate simulations, or, in other words, the foundation of models of nature. But even
this is not true: In computer simulations heat conduction and friction are completely neglected,
since they are mathematically described by second order partial derivatives that cannot be
represented on grids with wide meshes.”
“Hence, the computer simulations of global climatology are not based on physical laws.
The same holds for the speculations about the influence of carbon dioxide.”
The reader is urged to review section 4.3 on “Science and Global Climate Modelling” in its entirety
in order to fully appreciate the closing remarks of that section :
“Modern global climatology has confused and continues to confuse fact with fantasy by introducing
the concept of a scenario replacing the concept of a model. In Ref. [29] a clear definition of what
scenarios are is given: Future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the product of very complex
dynamics systems, determined by driving forces such as demographic development, socioeconomic
development, and technological change. Their future evolution is highly uncertain. Scenarios are
alternative images of how the future might unfold and are an appropriate tool with which to analyze
how driving forces may influence future emission outcomes and to access the associated
uncertainties. They assist in climate change analysis, including climate modeling and the
assessment of impacts, adaptation and mitigation. The possibility that any single emissions path
will occur as described in scenarios is highly uncertain. Evidently, this is a description of a pseudoscientific
(i.e. non-scientific) method by the experts at the IPCC. The next meta-plane beyond
physics would be a questionnaire among scientists already performed by von Storch or, finally, a
democratic vote about the validity of a physical law.
Exact science is going to be replaced by a sociological methodology involving a statistical
field analysis and by “democratic" rules of order.
This is in harmony with the definition of science advocated by the "scientific" website
RealClimate.org that has integrated inflammatory statements, personal attacks and offenses
against authors as a part of their "scientific" workflow.”
There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity. And for climatologists to
believe they've solved them with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have to be
corrected afterwards by mystical methods — flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages
over different climate institutes today, excluding incidental global cooling data by hand — merely
perpetuates the greenhouse-inspired climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and
physically meaningless statistical applications. In short, generating statements on CO2-induced
anthropogenic global warming from computer simulations lies outside of any science.
Section 5 is the final section of the paper and contains the ‘Physicist’s Summary’, which the reader
of this non-technical summary is again urged to review in its entirety. Simply quoting these few
lines do an injustice to the entire paper, but set the tone for discrediting the fallacy the UN IPCC is
perpetuating, aided in no small measure by many a skeptical scientist who also fails to grasp the
fallacy of the so-called greenhouse effect with its double-counting of radiant energy.
“The natural greenhouse effect is a myth, not a physical reality. The CO2-greenhouse
effect, however, is a manufactured mirage.
Horrific visions of a rising sea level, melting pole caps and spreading deserts in North
America and Europe are fictitious consequences of a fictitious physical mechanism which
cannot be seen even in computer climate models.
More and more, the main tactic of CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to be to hide
behind a mountain of pseudo-explanations that are unrelated to an academic education
or even to physics training.
The points discussed here were to answer whether the supposed atmospheric effect in
question has a physical basis. It does not.
In summary, no atmospheric greenhouse effect, nor in particular a CO2-greenhouse
effect, is permissible in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics.
It is therefore illegitimate to use this fictitious phenomenon to extrapolate predictions as
consulting solutions for economics and intergovernmental policy.”
---
http://www.schmanck.de/FalsificationSchreuder.pdf
-
Anyone care to assess this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvMmPtEt8dc&feature=player_embedded
-
Well there's this that came out today. The bigger question though, is what data sets are warming (or cooling for that matter) claims based on? So much of the original data has been disappeared with only the "homogenized" data remaining, that I'm not sure a replicable claim can be made.
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 2:39 AM on 14th February 2010
Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.
Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.
Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.
Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.
That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.
According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.
But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.
Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.
‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.
He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.
But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.
Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.
‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.
Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.
Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.
He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html?ITO=1490#
-
Another piece that speaks to your question, Marc:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/13/congenital-climate-abnormalities/#more-16395
-
Evidence of Climate Fraud Grows, Media Coverage Doesn't
Marc Sheppard
Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard lets the mainstream media have it for completely ignoring this weekend’s game-changing revelations from Climategate conspirator Phil Jones while jumping all over the ejection of director Kevin Smith from a Southwest Airlines plane for being too fat.
For those who may have taken the three-day weekend off from the blogosphere (and Fox News) -- the BBC released a Q&A and corresponding interview with the embattled erstwhile CRU chief on Friday. In each, the discredited Climategate conspirator revealed a number of surprising insights into his true climate beliefs, the most shocking of which was that 20th-century global warming may not have been unprecedented. As I pointed out in Sunday’s article, Climategate's Phil Jones Confesses to Climate Fraud, as the entire anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short of earth-shattering.
Noel has dug up some statistics on the major news agencies’ coverage of this vital chapter in what history will likely deem its greatest case of scientific fraud ever:
· No mention by the New York Times
· No mention by the Washington Post
· No mention by USA Today
· No mention by ANY major U.S. newspaper EXCEPT the Washington Times
· No mention by the Associated Press
· No mention by Reuters
· No mention by UPI
· No mention by ABC News
· No mention by CBS News
· No mention by NBC News
· No mention by MSNBC
As well as their treatment of Clerks director Kevin Smith being thrown off an airplane for the alleged crime of donut overindulgence:
· The New York Times reported it
· The Washington Post reported it
· The Associated Press reported it
· UPI reported it
· ABC News reported it
· CBS News reported it
· CNN reported it -- 14 TIMES!
Noel points out that the same complicit media entities were similarly asleep-at-the-wheel when the Climategate scandal broke last November. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, it was exclusively new media outlets such as this one reporting and analyzing the facts uncovered concerning the fraud-suggesting-emails, the data-manipulating computer source code, the funding hypocrisies, and exactly which “decline” the scoundrels were hiding.
Of course, I must add that the blackout didn’t end with Britain’s Climategate. The MSM have been equally silent about the complicit conspirators on this side of the Atlantic. As we reported last month, a report by three Americans (Joe D’Aleo, Anthony Watts and E.M Smith) has uncovered intentional global temperature misrepresentations by the two premiere U.S. climate agencies: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
The ramifications of this doctoring of the temperature records used by policy-influencing agencies worldwide – including the green-guidelines-granddaddy of them all -- the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- to analyze temperature anomalies are staggering. And yet – where was the MSM?
And speaking of the Nobel Prize winning IPCC, the seemingly never-ending number of “facts” in their most recent Assessment Report found to be utterly false and/or of questionable origin -- See IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks -- should be front page news. After all, this is the green bible on which every crazy and economy destroying scheme from domestic cap-and-tax to EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s sinister carbon regulation plot to international “climate debt” reparations is based.
Yet – the complicit media continue to speak of fantasy “green jobs” and the failings of Copenhagen and big-oil-paid-for Republicans and the need to pass President Obama’s so-called climate bill rather than doing the job they signed on for and unequivocally owe the American public: Asking questions.
I think Noel’s choice of closing words and punctuation expresses it perfectly: Shame on them!!!
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/02/evidence_of_climate_fraud_grow.html at February 16, 2010 - 01:41:36 PM CST
-
The AGW Smoking Gun
By Gary Thompson
A key component of the scientific argument for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been disproven. The results are hiding in plain sight in peer-reviewed journals.
Politicians and scientists still cling to the same hypothesis: Increased emission of CO2 into the atmosphere (by humans) is causing the Earth to warm at such a rate that it threatens our survival. The reality of our global temperatures, the failure of these catastrophic predictions to materialize, and the IPCC scandals all continue to cast serious doubt on that hypothesis.
The only rebuttal given by AGW proponents is that the scandals of the IPCC don't negate the science (i.e., unscrupulous behavior by a few don't negate the rock-solid science), so it seems that the only way to disprove the AGW hypothesis is to address problems with the science. Climate science is very complex, and AGW proponents dismiss the scientific arguments unless the data are contained in journal papers that are "peer-reviewed."
Three peer-reviewed journal contain data contradicting the AGW hypothesis. But before the journal papers are reviewed, here is a little background on the science.
The Greenhouse Effect is real and necessary for life on Earth. Without it, our world would be a frozen ball that would not be hospitable for life as we know it. The harmful stuff (x-rays and gamma rays) is filtered out, but the light in the visible spectrum enters, and that light energy warms our Earth. The land and sea then respond to that warming energy by emitting light in the spectrum of the infrared (IR), and that energy takes the form of small packets of energy called photons. When those IR photons reach the atmosphere, some of them get absorbed by certain molecules, and that absorbed energy is transferred into the elements of the molecules. That energy causes the molecules to vibrate and heat the atmosphere, and finally, the atmosphere transfers some of that energy back to the Earth's surface. Again, this is necessary, because if we didn't have this blocking of IR wavelengths, our average temperatures on Earth would be about 32 degrees Celsius cooler (-18ºC instead of the current 14ºC). One of the greenhouse gases (GHG) that reflects these IR wavelengths is CO2, but there are others, such as water vapor, ozone (O3), methane (CH4), and CFCs.
The science behind the AGW hypothesis is that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere (that humans produce by burning fossil fuels) will block more outgoing long-wave IR radiation (OLR) from exiting the atmosphere and thereby warm the surface. It is well-known that IR radiation causes CO2 molecules to vibrate, but only at very specific wavelengths (wavelengths are the distances between peaks of each wave), and that wavelength is 15µm. (Fifteen µm means that each wavelength crests at a distance of 15 millionths of a meter.) As was discussed above, this vibration of the molecule causes it to heat and then radiate IR radiation back toward the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth. If the solar activity is taken to remain constant, more CO2 in the atmosphere will trap more of the OLR, and thus cause a net heating of the planet.
So what type of experiment could be performed to test this AGW hypothesis? If there were satellites in orbit monitoring the emission of OLR over time at the same location, then OLR could be measured in a very controlled manner. If, over time, the emission of OLR in the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs decreases over time, then that would prove the AGW hypothesis (i.e., that OLR is being absorbed by CO2 and heating the planet instead of being emitted from the atmosphere). But what if, over time (say, over thirty years), the emissions of OLR wavelengths that CO2 absorb remained constant? That would disprove the hypothesis and put the AGW argument to bed.
As luck would have it, that experiment has actually been performed! Three journal papers report the data from three monitoring satellites that have measured the OLR of 1997 and 2006 and compared those measurements to 1970, and they are located here, here, and here.
There were three different experiments performed in space to measure OLR emissions. The Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer (IRIS) was performed in 1970, the Interferometer Monitor of Greenhouse Gases (IMG) was performed in 1997, and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) was performed in 2006. All of these experiments were performed over the Pacific Ocean and confined to the same three-month period (April through June), and the data were limited to cloudless days. The variable measured was brightness temperature, which is given in degrees Kelvin (K). Higher brightness temperatures correlate to higher emissions (meaning that more OLR is emitted to the atmosphere and less is absorbed by GHG).
The figure below (from the first link above) shows a comparison of OLR emission in 1997 vs. 1970. (Positive values indicate that more OLR emission was measured in 1997 vs. 1970, and negative values indicate that less OLR emission was measured in 1997 vs. 1970.) The top graph is taken over the East Pacific, and the bottom graph is taken over the West Pacific. The middle line is the actual measurements, and the other lines show the upper and lower uncertainty ranges. The x-axis of the graph is given in wave numbers per centimeter (cm), and the area that relates to CO2 is at the far left of the graph (700 wave numbers per cm). After analyzing this graph, the following conclusion can be drawn: There is actually an increase of OLR emissions in 1997 as compared to 1970!
(http://www.americanthinker.com/GT%20pic1.jpg)
The next figure (from the second link above) shows the actual measurements of OLR emission in 1997 vs. 1970. The dark line is the IMG data (from 1997), and the gray line is the IRIS line (from (1970). After analyzing this graph, the following conclusion can be drawn: The 1997 OLR associated with CO2 is identical to that in 1970.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/GT%20pic2.jpg)
The next figure (from the third link above) shows the OLR emission from TES (in 2006). The black line is the actual measurement data, the red line is what the climate models show, and the blue line is the difference between the actual and model data.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/GT%20pic3.jpg)
The final figure (from the third link above) shows the OLR emission from IMG (1997). Just like the previous figure, the black line is the actual measurement data, the red line is what the climate models show, and the blue line is the difference between actual and model data.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/GT%20pic4.jpg)
The last two graphs can be placed on top of each other, and the black lines (actual measured data) are basically copies of each other. That means that there was no difference in OLR between 1970 and 2006.
All three of the links referenced here devote the latter sections of the papers to removing the impact of surface temperatures and water vapor and graphing the OLR that is associated only with trace GHGs. The authors perform this trick (there is that word again...) based on the climate models and not through actual measurements, and surprise, surprise -- these simulated results show a reduction in OLR emission with wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2. Computer-simulated results based on climate models are never a replacement for actual measured data, and they should never be used to draw conclusions when actual measured data contradicts those models.
So the results of three different peer-reviewed papers show that over a period of 36 years, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis is disproven.
It should be noted that another paper written by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (both work at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences -- Lindzen is a professor and Choi is a postdoctoral fellow) reveals the differences between the measured OLR and its impact on temperatures vs. climate models. In the paper, the data showed that OLR increased when sea surface temperatures increased, so this is in direct contradiction to the AGW hypothesis that less OLR should be emitted since more CO2 is absorbing it and warming the planet. Furthermore, in contradiction to the climate models, these results show that OLR is acting like a negative feedback (cooling the surface) instead of a positive feedback (radiative forcing). The Lindzen and Choi paper dealt in general with all OLR wavelengths and didn't show granularity with respect to specific wavelengths that were related to various GHG absorption, but the fact that the entire OLR emission spectrum didn't behave like the eleven climate models' predictions means that "the science isn't settled."
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html at February 17, 2010 - 10:57:10 AM CST
-
William M. Briggs, Statistician » Phil Jones, I accept!
The other day, I asked Phil Jones and other climate scientists to rebuke some of their foaming-at-the-mouth colleagues for their inappropriate use of language. While I’m still awaiting a response—it should come soon, surely—I cannot neglect Mr Jones’s return challenge.
He doesn’t like that people are picking on him about the data he lost, nor does he enjoy upstarts critiquing his conclusions. Rather than squabbling and nyah-nyah-nyahing, Jones asked of critics, “Why don’t they do their own [temperature] reconstructions?”
Here is an open letter to Mr Jones.
Dear Phil,
I accept!
The chance to sort out the global temperature record and accurately note its uncertainty is too important to ignore.
Here is what I shall require. Keep in mind that these requests are put forth in the name of fairness and good science. Surely you would agree that just as much effort should be taken to investigate alternate theories of climate as have been taken to prove the man-made harmful global warming theory.
My list:
Money, and lots of it. Way I figure it, you’ve been at this for twenty or so years, with a sizable staff at the institute level. I need to duplicate that structure over a relatively short period. Conferences aren’t cheap, either. It’s going to cost, and I don’t have enough personal funds to cover the tab.
Office space. I’m an independent running out of small Manhattan apartment now, and the space is inadequate to house a staff. However, given the ridiculous real estate prices in this city, I’d be willing to move anywhere in the States to set up my crew (even Ohio). If you like, I’d shift to England (I already know most of the language).
Grant pipeline. Because my views are not popular, I have no “ins” with any grant-awarding agencies. If work is going to continue, I’m going to need a steady stream of income. Just like you’ve had. I need a guarantee that work will be allowed to continue for, say, five years. If I can’t produce by then, fire me.
Sympathetic journal editors. Just one or two should do. I don’t expect them to publish drivel or papers that are obviously awful or wrong. But given the “climategate” revelations, you’ll acknowledge that the system is stacked. Plus, we all know that peer review—in many fields—is broken. Editors and reviewers insist that all papers that come their way must exactly fit their preconceptions. Speculative and non-confirmatory papers don’t float.
Although I blush when I say it, I can do this job. I have a proper understanding of uncertainty, and know the limitations of data. I’m efficient, too. Take the money you’ve spent and divide by four, and I’ll make do with that. Lastly, I have never lost any data (I’d have gone broke by now if I had).
If you’re truly serious about your challenge, and you don’t like me, there are plenty of other people out there willing and ready to take it up. Just say the word and we’re there.
This question is bound to arise: Why haven’t I, and the others, done more already? I can’t speak for everybody, of course, but I can tell you about me. Although I have an excellent record, I have no position, no connections, no home institute. Therefore, receiving grants is out. I have to pay for all my research out of my own pocket and conduct it all on my own time.
In fact, I’m still in the hole from the last time I did some work: the AMS is still after me for page charges for my last J. Climate article (where I argued hurricanes/typhoons have not increased in strength or number). I couldn’t afford to attend the last two annual meetings, either (the registration cost alone is over $400 per meeting!). My laptop works for my daily needs, but it’s not up to the task of storing a world-wide temperature and proxy database.
I’m not whining, understand. But I am showing you that it isn’t easy being an independent critic. We’re cash-strapped, itinerant Davids matched against a wealthy, full-time Goliath.
Also know that I am not unhappy in my situation. Honestly, I don’t want your job; a large portion of it must be mind-numbingly tedious. But since the task is so important to such a large chunk of humanity, and because of your recent difficulties, I would accept it out of a sense of duty.
All the best,
W.M. Briggs
Don't pass by, pass it on:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1940
-
DC has seen it's snowiest winter on record, which has put a damper on cap and trade negotiations and AGW panic mongering. This has caused the AGW zealots to start circulating snotty pieces about how us silly deniers fail to understand that warmer air carries more moisture, hence more snow, which I assume means they are preparing for a blizzard in the Sahara. Bottom line, once again the sky is falling crowd embraces a construct that isn't falsifiable: more snow means warming, as does less.
Rather than allowing this bit of cognitive dissonance cause his head to explode, the author of the graphics heavy link that follows went instead to the warmist models and discovered an inconvenient truth: the models over which so much AGW hay was made predicted less snow. One wonders what non-falsifiable sleight of hand will next follow:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/19/north-america-snow-models-miss-the-mark/#more-16539
-
Well, anyone besides me see a problem with this?
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021000009.html?waporef=obinsite
P.C.
-
I do. Creepy thought police stuff.
-
Perfectly logical: those who want an ever enlarging nanny state first need maladies only a large establishment can battle. With the list of maladies expanded, individuals have an easier time figuring out just what sort of victim they are. Having defined their precise sort of victimhood these folks can then declare what the world owes them, being careful not to ask for anything they are likely to get as that would leave them needing to find another malady to embrace. Knowing what they are owed but unlikely to get, our poor victims can then band together with fellow seething advocacy advocates to make their plight known. Those advocacy groups can then amalgamate under umbrella organizations like ACORN that demand an egalitarian ethic where one group supports the demands of spurious psychiatric ailment sufferers, for instance, if that group will support the others distribution of low income loans for pimps and prostitutes seeking to import underage South American sex slave, who gloriously then become another victim group needing to amalgamate with their brethren in support of every victimization claim du jour. The federal maw grows, and everyone is left feeling self righteous and happy. Except taxpayers.
-
Graphics intensive piece relaying a new Science Magazine article that finds via examination of speleothems that 80,000 years ago CO2 levels were lower yet sea levels were a meter higher:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/11/new-paper-in-science-sea-level-81000-years-ago-1-meter-higher-while-co2-was-lower/
-
Think this is overstated, but it sure is amusing to think about.
Al Gore Is Lying Low -- for Good Reason
By Rex McBride
Maybe Al Gore's been advised by legal counsel to lie low. He may be the leader of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement, but he's not defending it in public, not even when it's falling apart and his new fortune is based upon it.
Mr. Gore and his financial backers earned millions of dollars in start-up "green" companies and carbon trading schemes. If the scam worked, he could've become the first "carbon billionaire."
"What goes up can fall down" applies to ill-gotten gains in the stock market or "carbon trading" schemes. In such schemes, it's foreseeable that trusting investors will (a) not only get hurt when the scam collapses, but they'll also (b) pursue legal remedies and sue him for fraud.
Mr. Gore's financial gains were based on the contradictory and error-plagued assertion that man's release of the trace gas CO2 will fry the planet.
Once it becomes clear to everyone that the AGW theory is based on cleverly manipulated data twisted by rigged computer models controlled by several dozen IPCC politicians/scientists, we can expect that investors who lose millions by investing in these companies will eventually haul Mr. Gore and the insider IPCC scientists into court.
Over the years, American tax dollars were poured down the fantasyland AGW "rat hole." Sooner or later, Al Gore needs to answer some hard questions. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for lawsuits from private investors. Today, legal counsel will advise him to remain silent.
It's impossible to predict how many lawsuits, or what kind, might arise once everyone realizes that the AGW scam dwarfs Bernie Madoff's $50-billion Ponzi operation. New studies appear almost daily that further undercut AGW theory. The biggest daily newspaper in the Netherlands vindicated that country's leading AGW critic in the article "Henk Tennekes -- He was right after all."
Dr. Tennekes was fired in the 1990s from a prominent research position and blacklisted for debunking AGW theory. He upset the same IPCC scientists who control the leading "peer review" climate research journals and who blocked the publication of all contrary research in those journals for decades.
As investors learn the extent of the scam, Mr. Gore's start-up "green" companies will lose considerable value, like flaky dot-com companies lacking a real product. Investors in these "green" companies -- who reasonably relied upon Gore's alarming claims -- may pursue several possible remedies:
- derivative shareholder lawsuits, disgorging from Mr. Gore and other senior officers in these companies any illicit gains from any insider trading that could be proven; and/or
- lawsuits against brokers who did not perform the SEC's necessary "due diligence" research before peddling those shares; and/or
- civil RICO lawsuits against Mr. Gore and any IPCC scientists who participated in blocking the publication of contrary research, cooking the data, all of whose annual income skyrocketed from the public hysteria.
On the state level, it's impossible to predict if one or more state attorney generals will look back on the tobacco industry cases and decide, representing the taxpayers of his or her state, to file criminal and/or civil RICO actions against Gore and the enriched IPCC scientists.
(On the federal level, while President Obama is in office, the Justice Department will not file RICO or SEC actions against their buddy Al Gore. Remember, the president originally hoped that Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade would generate over $600 billion in new corporate taxes -- "emergency" measures justified by fantasy AGW theory.
Remember the joke about the government taxing air? In the Twilight Zone of Boxer-Kerry, say hello to cap-and-trade.)
If Mr. Gore's "green" companies do crash and significantly injure private investors, attorneys in a civil lawsuit could compel Gore to answer questions like:
(1) When you claimed that "the science is settled," did you mean that it's "settled" that you and the IPCC scientists could make quick millions by manipulating the data and fomenting public hysteria?
(2) What does "peer review" mean if none of the IPCC scientists who controlled the academic journals protested that there was no original data to support your frightening claim of accelerated temperature increases after 1995?
(3) If the very scientists that the public trusted to act as the "check and balance" against careless research -- or worse yet, to protect against research fraud -- did not catch a "tiny" problem like not having original supporting data after 1995, does "peer review" mean that IPCC's scientists would secretly work in concert to cover each other's asses and keep the grants coming?
Such questions need answers.
In "The Dog Ate Global Warming", an article at the Cato Institute, Patrick J. Michaels noted that "f there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer."
Obviously, Al Gore cannot be compelled to answer questions in a criminal court under the 5th Amendment. However, his admissible bank and stock portfolio records would prove his skyrocketing wealth, making him a "deep pocket."
Since 1970, the scope of RICO cases has grown far beyond prosecuting mafia operations. The law firm Nixon Peabody explained:
RICO was written in broad terms. To state a claim, a plaintiff must allege four elements: (1) conduct (2) of an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity... Each element of a RICO claim requires additional analysis: an "enterprise" is marked by association and control; a "pattern" requires a showing of "continuity" -- continuous and related behavior that amounts to, or poses a threat of, continued criminal violations; and "racketeering activity" involves the violation of designated federal laws ...
RICO lawsuits are now won in a wide variety of civil disputes -- e.g., insurance companies working in concert to delay/shortchange payments owed to dentists.
Other RICO cases resulted in court judgments against the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, Catholic sex crimes, and Major League Baseball.
It violates federal law to fake taxpayer-funded research and then manipulate or destroy data to enrich oneself. If an insider group secretly conspires to do so, it looks and smells like RICO.
If more AGW-destroying news rolls in, and if Gore's "green" companies lose significant value, then shareholder derivative lawsuits and/or state RICO lawsuits will follow -- more so as the losses grow.
Mr. Gore is in hiding today -- no longer the "courageous" leader of the AGW movement. Apparently, Planet Earth is "no longer in grave danger" or "needing to be saved," but Gore could lose all of his ill-gotten assets.
If the victim list grows and criminal intent is proven, Mr. Gore could do serious time. After a much smaller scam, Bernie Madoff got 150 years.
What if you want answers about the potential misuse of tax dollars that enriched AGW insiders but didn't invest in one of Al Gore's fantasies?
Call Congress and demand that the GAO audit all climate change grants. GAO has the professional audit expertise to follow the money, gather objective facts, and report on any significant fraud or abuse.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/al_gore_is_lying_low_for_good.html at February 24, 2010 - 01:02:46 PM CST
-
Second post:
A Pending American Temperaturegate
By Edward R. Long
Our study of data-massaging by the U.S. government agency charged with collecting temperature information raises uncomfortable questions.
We have been repeatedly told (perhaps "lectured" is a better word) the past twenty years that global warming is occurring. With Climategate and subsequent confessions and bailouts by scientists at the CRU, Penn State, Arizona State, IPCC, et al., we are learning that little to none of the factual content in their "peer reviewed" articles is true. The Medieval Warming Period did occur, and it was warmer than currently; the oceans are not going to flood the plains; and the Arctic Ocean may not be turning into a summer water park. Of course, the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has reported little of this news, and President Obama appears not to be well-informed. But now the global warming story grows more interesting because here in America, we may have our own little "gate." I will call it ATG, for "American Temperaturegate."
NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) informs us, based on their "Adjusted Data" for the period from the last decade of the 19th century to 2006, that the temperature for the contiguous U.S. has increased at a rate of 0.69oC/century. Click here. NCDC arrives at this conclusion by massaging raw data from a set of meteorological stations located in the contiguous U.S. which they selected on the basis of a 2.5-degree latitude- and 3.5-degree-longitude grid. For more on this, click here and here. The most-asked question, most recently by D'Aleo and Watts, is whether the NCDC's reported increase is correct. Perhaps the value is due to a dominant use (over-selection) of stations in urban locations or because of other issues, such as leaving out stations at higher altitudes for the more recent history and retaining them for the more distant past.
Here, one aspect is considered -- that of the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is tagged as UHIE.
We selected two sets of meteorological stations (48 each, with one station per each of the lower 48 states) from the NCDC master list. The stations in one set were at rural locations -- a rural set. The stations in the other set were at urban locations -- an urban set. The NCDC latitude and longitude station coordinates were used to "fly over" the locations on a computer, using a GPS map application to confirm the rural and urban characteristics. For each of the 96 stations, the NCDC's raw and adjusted temperature data were entered into a spreadsheet application and studied. The "raw" data are the annual average temperatures of the measured data. The "adjusted" data are the annual average temperatures the NCDC derived from the raw data by making a set of "corrective" assumptions for time of day, type of instrument, etc. and guessing the temperature at stations for missing data based on temperatures of other stations at the same latitude and/or region. For a more in-depth understanding of the NCDC protocols for converting raw data to adjusted data, click here. A summary of the findings is in the following table. The values in the table show that the NCDC's rate of increase of temperature, 0.69oC/century, is based on an over-selection of stations with urban locations.
Station Set
oC/Century, 11-Year Average Based on the Use of
Raw Data
Adjusted Data
Rural (48)
0.11
0.58
Urban (48)
0.72
0.72
Rural + Urban (96)
0.47
0.65
The values in the table highlight four important considerations:
1) The rate of increase for rural locations, based on as-measured (raw) values, is small
(if not, in effect, zero) at 0.11 oC/century.
2) There is definitely a UHIE in that the urban raw data has a rate of increase of 0.72oC/century. This tells us that man has caused warming in urban locations. This finding should not surprise anyone. On the other hand, because the rural value is 15% of the urban value, the UHIE has not caused warming in the rural locations, and it certainly has not caused a global sense of warming other than the aspect that the urban location values when averaged with the rural values produce an average increase which is larger than that of the rural alone.
3) The rural + urban value for the adjusted data, 0.65oC/century, is still less than the 0.69oC/century published by the NCDC. Thus, likely, there are more urban than rural sites used by the NCDC.
4) And this is the "Temperaturegate" aspect: The NCDC's massaging -- they call it "adjusting" -- has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11oC/century to an adjusted value of 0.58oC/century, and no change in the urban values. That is, the NCDC's treatment has forced the rural value to look more like that of the urban. This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the growth of the sizes of and activities within urban locations, unless deception is the goal.
The criticism this makes of the NCDC's treatment of historical data for the contiguous U.S. is the same as a recent Russian paper made of the HadCRUT treatment of historical temperature data for Russia. For a thumbnail of the points made in that paper, click here.
Edward R. Long holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is a retired NASA scientist who is a consultant on radiation physics for space flight and on energy/climate in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/a_pending_american_temperature.html at February 24, 2010 - 01:12:30 PM CST
-
Fascinating piece analyzing yet another fascinating piece comparing proximate rural and city surface stations. Rural stations don't show much in the way of warming until adjusted to match the data coming out of cities. Yet another example of homogenizing ourselves into an AGW crisis that only extreme government intervention into all aspect of our lives can fix:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/a-new-paper-comparing-ncdc-rural-and-urban-us-surface-temperature-data/#more-16726
-
Second post. Wow, few punches pulled here:
Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)
The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.
The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry, 'The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia'.
The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute's Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.
What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.
3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:
· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of 'proxies', for example, tree-rings.
4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.
5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.
6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the
e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.
8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much 'raw' data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.
9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.
Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.
11. The first of the review's terms of reference is limited to: "...manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice..." The term 'acceptable' is not defined and might better be replaced with 'objective'.
12. The second of the review's terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU's policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.
How independent are the other two international data sets?
13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm
-
Stephen McIntryre of Climate Audit does a nice job of outlining the issues with the CRU climate data here:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/disclosure_east_ang.pdf
-
The Climate Industry Wall of Money
Posted By JoNova On March 4, 2010 @ 3:44 pm In Global Warming | 26 Comments
This is the copy of the file I sent the ABC Drum Unleashed. I’m grateful they are allowing both sides of the story to get some airtime (though Bob Carter’s , and Marc Hendrickx’s posts were both rejected. Hat-tip to Louis and Marc). Unfortunately the updated version I sent late yesterday which included some empirical references near the end was not posted until 4.30pm EST. (NB: The Australian spelling of skeptic is “sceptic”)
Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.
The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.
Follow the money
Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and found $23 million dollars paid by Exxon over ten years (which has stopped). Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded, but it’s not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect “taxed”, consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits won’t actually fall that much.
But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics– even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on skeptics was even less.
Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 – to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it’s 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger.
For direct PR comparisons though, just look at “Think Climate Think Change“: the Australian Government put $13.9 million into just one quick advertising campaign. There is no question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws in the theory.
Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are devoted to UnNatural Forces.
It’s a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status (though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws. The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It’s possible that honest scientists have dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the auditors who volunteered—like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts—are retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and the expertise to do the hard work. (Anyone fancy analysing statistical techniques in dendroclimatology or thermometer siting instead of playing a round of golf?)
Money for the Finance Houses: What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of carbon trading reached $126 billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130 billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years. Money Talks. Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a paper trade. It doesn’t matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make shifting paper.
Banks want us to trade carbon…
Not surprisingly banks are doing what banks should do (for their shareholders): they’re following the promise of profits, and urging governments to adopt carbon trading.7,8 Banks are keen to be seen as good corporate citizens (look, there’s an environmental banker!), but somehow they don’t find the idea of a non-tradable carbon tax as appealing as a trading scheme where financial middlemen can take a cut. (For banks that believe in the carbon crisis, taxes may well “help the planet,” but they don’t pay dividends.)
The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders, advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2000 lobbyists in Washington in 2008.
Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change. There’s no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or power grabs.
Tony Abbot’s new policy removes the benefits for bankers. Labor and the Greens don’t appear to notice that they fight tooth and nail for a market in a “commodity” which isn’t a commodity and that guarantees profits for big bankers. The public though are figuring it out.
The largest tradeable “commodity” in the world?
Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates: “I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market.” “The largest commodity market in the world.” He ought to know.
It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat, copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than oil.
Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10 trillion a year.” That’s 10 thousand billion dollars.
Only the empirical evidence matters
Ultimately the atmosphere is what it is regardless of fiat currency movements. Some people will accuse me of smearing climate scientists and making the same ad hominem attacks I detest and protest about. So note carefully: I haven’t said that the massive amount of funding received by promoters of the Carbon Catastrophe proves that they are wrong, just as the grassroots unpaid dedication of sceptics doesn’t prove them right either. But the starkly lop-sided nature of the funding means we’d be fools not to pay very close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are from those who try to smear sceptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem arguments are worth making.
And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the planet. But few realize that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2 effect and that this amplification simply isn’t there. Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding “uncertainties” nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified. [Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]. Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous “3.5 degrees of warming” collapses to just a half a degree—most of which has happened.
Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is stone age reasoning, and the “money” insult they throw, bounces right back at them—a thousand-fold.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/the-climate-industry-wall-of-money/
-
Second post. One of these days the CRU folks are gonna figure out there is no percentage experts in a field tangential to their "research," particularly when it's clear they have no particular standing to initiate the conversation in the first place:
CRUTEM3 “…code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering”
Those of us who have looked at GISS and CRU code have been saying this for months. Now John Graham-Cumming has posted a statement with the UK Parliament about the quality and veracity of CRU code that has been posted, saying “they have not released everything”.
I found this line most interesting:
“I have never been a climate change skeptic and until the release of emails from UEA/CRU I had paid little attention to the science surrounding it.”
Here is his statement as can be seen at:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc5502.htm
=================================
Memorandum submitted by John Graham-Cumming (CRU 55)
I am writing at this late juncture regarding this matter because I have now seen that two separate pieces of written evidence to your committee mention me (without using my name) and I feel it is appropriate to provide you with some further information. I am a professional computer programmer who started programming almost 30 years ago. I have a BA in Mathematics and Computation from Oxford University and a DPhil in Computer Security also from Oxford. My entire career has been spent in computer software in the UK, US and France.
I am also a frequent blogger on science topics (my blog was recently named by The Times as one of its top 30 science blogs). Shortly after the release of emails from UEA/CRU I looked at them out of curiosity and found that there was a large amount of software along with the messages. Looking at the software itself I was surprised to see that it was of poor quality. This resulted in my appearance on BBC Newsnight criticizing the quality of the UEA/CRU code in early December 2009 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm).
That appearance and subsequent errors I have found in both the data provided by the Met Office and the code used to process that data are referenced in two submissions. I had not previously planned to submit anything to your committee, as I felt that I had nothing relevant to say, but the two submissions which reference me warrant some clarification directly from me, the source.
I have never been a climate change skeptic and until the release of emails from UEA/CRU I had paid little attention to the science surrounding it.
In the written submission by Professor Hans von Storch and Dr. Myles R. Allen there are three paragraphs that concern me:
“3.1 An allegation aired on BBC’s “Newsnight” that software used in the production of this dataset was unreliable. It emerged on investigation that the neither of the two pieces of software produced in support of this allegation was anything to do with the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record. Newsnight have declined to answer the question of whether they were aware of this at the time their allegations were made.
3.2 A problem identified by an amateur computer analyst with estimates of average climate (not climate trends) affecting less than 1% of the HadCRUT data, mostly in Australasia, and some station identifiers being incorrect. These, it appears, were genuine issues with some of the input data (not analysis software) of HadCRUT which have been acknowledged by the Met Office and corrected. They do not affect trends estimated from the data, and hence have no bearing on conclusions regarding the detection and attribution of external influence on climate.
4. It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely. The close correspondence between the HadCRUT data and the other two internationally recognised surface temperature datasets suggests that key conclusions, such as the unequivocal warming over the past century, are not sensitive to the analysis procedure.”
I am the ‘computer analyst’ mentioned in 3.2 who found the errors mentioned. I am also the person mentioned in 3.1 who looked at the code on Newsnight.
In paragraph 4 the authors write “It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely.” This has turned out to be incorrect. On February 7, 2010 I emailed the Met Office to tell them that I believed that I had found a wide ranging problem in the data (and by extension the code used to generate the data) concerning error estimates surrounding the global warming trend. On February 24, 2010 the Met Office confirmed via their press office to Newsnight that I had found a genuine problem with the generation of ’station errors’ (part of the global warming error estimate).
In the written submission by Sir Edward Acton there are two paragraphs that concern the things I have looked at:
“3.4.7 CRU has been accused of the effective, if not deliberate, falsification of findings through deployment of “substandard” computer programs and documentation. But the criticized computer programs were not used to produce CRUTEM3 data, nor were they written for third-party users. They were written for/by researchers who understand their limitations and who inspect intermediate results to identify and solve errors.
3.4.8 The different computer program used to produce the CRUTEM3 dataset has now been released by the MOHC with the support of CRU.”
My points:
1. Although the code I criticized on Newsnight was not the CRUTEM3 code the fact that the other code written at CRU was of low standard is relevant. My point on Newsnight was that it appeared that the organization writing the code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering. The code had easily identified bugs, no visible test mechanism, was not apparently under version control and was poorly documented. It would not be surprising to find that other code written at the same organization was of similar quality. And given that I subsequently found a bug in the actual CRUTEM3 code only reinforces my opinion.
2. I would urge the committee to look into whether statement 3.4.8 is accurate. The Met Office has released code for calculating CRUTEM3 but they have not released everything (for example, they have not released the code for ’station errors’ in which I identified a wide-ranging bug, or the code for generating the error range based on the station coverage), and when they released the code they did not indicate that it was the program normally used for CRUTEM3 (as implied by 3.4.8) but stated “[the code] takes the station data files and makes gridded fields in the same way as used in CRUTEM3.” Whether
3.4.8 is accurate or not probably rests on the interpretation of “in the same way as”. My reading is that this implies that the released code is not the actual code used for CRUTEM3. It would be worrying to discover that 3.4.8 is inaccurate, but I believe it should be clarified.
I rest at your disposition for further information, or to appear personally if necessary.
John Graham-Cumming
March 2010
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/04/crutem3-code-did-not-adhere-to-standards-one-might-find-in-professional-software-engineering/
-
The Ease of Cheating With Statistics
Published under Bad Stats, Statistics
Thanks to readers Ari Schwartz and Tom Pollard for suggesting this article.
Take any two sets of numbers, where the only restriction is that a reasonable chunk inside each set has to be different than one another. That is, we don’t want all the numbers inside a set to be equal to one another. We also want the sets to be, more or less, different, though it’s fine to have some matches. Make sure there is a least a dozen or two numbers in each set: for ease, each set should be the same size.
You could collect numbers like this in under two minutes. Just note the calories in an “Serving size” for a dozen different packages of food in your cupboard. That’s the first set. For the second, I don’t know, write down the total page counts from a dozen books (don’t count these! just look at the last page number and write that down).
All set? Type these into any spreadsheet in two columns. Label the first column “Outcome” and label the second column “Theory.” It doesn’t matter which is which. If you’re too lazy to go to the cupboard, just type a jumble of numbers by placing your fingers over the number keys and closing your eyes: however, this will make trouble for you later.
The next step is trickier, but painless for anybody who has had at least one course in “Applied Statistics.” You have to migrate your data from that spreadsheet so that it’s inside some statistical software. Any software will do.
OK so far? You now have to model “Outcome” as a function of “Theory.” Try linear regression first. What you’re after is a small p-value (less than the publishable 0.05) for the coefficient on “Theory.” Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense to you, or if you don’t understand regression. All software is set up to flag small p-values.
If you find one—a small p-value, that is—then begin to write your scientific paper. It will be titled “Theory is associated with Outcome.” But you have to substitute “Theory” and “Outcome” with suitable scientific-sounding names based on the numbers you observed. The advantage of going to the cupboard instead of just typing numbers is now obvious.
For our example, “Outcome” is easy: “Calorie content”, but “Theory” is harder. How about “Literary attention span”? Longer books, after all, require a longer attention span.
Thus, if you find a publishable p-value, your title will read “Literary attention span is associated with diet”. If you know more about regression and can read the coefficient on “Theory”, then you might be cleverer and entitle your piece, “Lower literary attention spans associated with high caloric diets.” (It might be “Higher” attention spans if the regression coefficient is positive.)
That sounds plausible, does it not? It’s suitably scolding, too, just as we like our medical papers to be. We don’t want to hear about how gene X’s activity is modified in the presence of protein Y, we want admonishment! And we can deliver it with my method.
If you find a small p-value, all you have to do is to think up a Just-So story based on the numbers you have collected, and academic success is guaranteed. After your article is published, write a grant to explore the “issue” more deeply. For example, we haven’t even begun to look for racial disparities (the latest fad) in literary and body heft. You’re on your way!
But that only works if you find a small p-value. What if you don’t? Do not despair! Just because you didn’t find one with regression, does not mean you can’t find one in another way. The beauty of classical statistics is that it was designed to produce success. You can find a small, publishable p-value in any set of data using ingenuity and elbow grease.
For a start, who said we had to use linear regression? Try a non-parametric test like the Mann-Whitney or Wilcoxon, or some other permutation test. Try non-linear regression like a neural net. Try MARS or some other kind of smoothing. There are dozens of tests available.
If none of those work, then try dichotomizing your data. Start with “Theory”: call all the page counts larger than some number “large”, and all those smaller “small.” Then go back and re-try all the tests you tried before. If that still doesn’t give satisfaction, un-dichotomize “Theory” and dichotomize “Outcome” in the same way. Now, a whole new world of classification methods awaits! There’s logistic regression, quadratic discrimination, and on and on and on… And I haven’t even told you about adding more numbers or adding more columns! Those tricks guarantee small p-values.
In short, if you do not find a publishable p-value with your set of data, then you just aren’t trying hard enough.
Don’t believe just me. Here’s an article over at Ars Technica called “We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong” that says the same thing. A statistician named Moolgavkar said “that two models can be fed an identical dataset, and still produce a different answer.”
The article says, “Moolgavkar also made a forceful argument that journal editors and reviewers needed to hold studies to a minimal standard of biological plausibility.” That’s a good start, but if we’re clever in our wording, we could convince an editor that a book length and calories correlation is biologically plausible.
The real solution? As always, prediction and replication. About which, we can talk another time.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2043
-
In Denial
The meltdown of the climate campaign.
BY Steven F. Hayward
March 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 25
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC—which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992—has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt—a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.
But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a “climate scientist”), initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December—in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen—but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.
The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research.
Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.
The IPCC isn’t the only important node of the climate campaign having its reputation run through the shredder. The 2006 Stern Review, a British report on the economics of climate change named for its lead author, Lord Nicholas Stern, was revealed to have quietly watered down some of its headline-grabbing claims in its final published report because, as the Telegraph put it, “the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Like rats deserting a sinking ship, scientists and economists cited in the Stern Review have disavowed the misuse of their work. Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. (Landsea, who does not consider himself a climate skeptic, resigned from the IPCC in 2005 on account of its increasingly blatant politicization.)
It was a thorough debunking, as Roger Pielke Jr.’s invaluable blog (rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com) noted in highlighting key findings in the study:
What about more intense rainfall? “[A] detectable change in tropical-cyclone-related rainfall has not been established by existing studies.” What about changes in location of storm formation, storm motion, lifetime and surge? “There is no conclusive evidence that any observed changes in tropical cyclone genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding exceed the variability expected from natural causes.” Bottom line? “[W]e cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.”
When Pielke, an expert on hurricane damage at the University of Colorado at Boulder, pointed out defects in the purported global-warming/tropical storm link in a 2005 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the lead author of the IPCC’s work on tropical storms, Kevin Trenberth, called the article “shameful,” said it should be “withdrawn,” but in typical fashion refused to debate Pielke about the substance of the article.
Finally, the original Climategate controversy over the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) (see my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009) is far from over. The British government has determined that the CRU’s prolonged refusal to release documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information requests is a potential criminal violation.
The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown. Senate Environment and Public Works chairman Barbara Boxer insisted on February 23 that she relied solely on U.S. scientific research and not the IPCC to support the EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding.” In her opening statement at a hearing, Boxer said, “I didn’t quote one international scientist or IPCC report. . . . We are quoting the American scientific community here.” The U.N. has announced that it will launch an “independent review” of the IPCC, though like the British investigation of the CRU, the U.N. review will probably be staffed by “settled science” camp followers who will obligingly produce a whitewash. But Pachauri’s days as IPCC chairman are likely numbered; there are mounting calls from within the IPCC for Pachauri to resign, amid charges of potential conflicts of interest (like Gore, Pachauri is closely involved with commercial energy schemes that benefit from greenhouse gas regulation) but also in part because Pachauri chose this delicate moment to publish a soft-core pornographic novel. (The main character is an aging environmentalist and engineer engaged in a “spiritual journey” that includes meeting Shirley MacLaine, detailed explorations of the Kama Sutra, and group sex.)
Robert Watson, Pachauri’s predecessor as chairman of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, told the BBC: “In my opinion, Dr. Pachauri has to ask himself, is he still credible, and the governments of the world have to ask themselves, is he still credible.” Not the most ringing endorsement. Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (the diplomatic contrivance that produced the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen circus), announced his surprise resignation on February 18. De Boer will join the private sector after years of saying that warming is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.
The climate campaign is a movement unable to hide its decline. Skeptics and critics of climate alarmism have long been called “deniers,” with the comparison to Holocaust denial made explicit, but the denier label now more accurately fits the climate campaigners. Their first line of defense was that the acknowledged errors amount to a few isolated and inconsequential points in the report of the IPCC’s Working Group II, which studies the effects of global warming, and not the more important report of the IPCC’s Working Group I, which is about the science of global warming. Working Group I, this argument goes, is where the real action is, as it deals with the computer models and temperature data on which the “consensus” conclusion is based that the Earth has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century, that human-generated greenhouse gases are overwhelmingly responsible for this rise, and that we may expect up to 4 degrees Celsius of further warming if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t stopped by mid-century. As Gore put it in his February 28 Times article, “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.” I note in passing that the 2007 Working Group I report uses the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” more than 1,300 times in its 987 pages, including what it identified as 54 “key uncertainties” limiting our mastery of climate prediction.
This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil (“hide the decline”) Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years—all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan:
BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over,” what exactly do they mean, and what don’t they mean?
Jones: It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well [emphasis added].
Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmos-pheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and one of the few scientists convinced of the potential for catastrophic global warming who is willing to engage skeptics seriously, wrote February 24: “No one really believes that the ‘science is settled’ or that ‘the debate is over.’ Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”
The next wave of climate revisionism is likely to reopen most of the central questions of “settled science” in the IPCC’s Working Group I, starting with the data purporting to prove how much the Earth has warmed over the last century. A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” The Climategate emails and documents revealed the disarray in the surface temperature records the IPCC relies upon to validate its claim of 0.8 degrees Celsius of human-caused warming, prompting a flood of renewed focus on the veracity and handling of surface temperature data. Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded.
-
The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. John Christy of the University of Alabama, a contributing author to the IPCC’s Working Group I chapter on surface and atmospheric climate change, tried to get the IPCC to acknowledge this anomaly in its 2007 report but was ignored. (Christy is responsible for helping to develop the satellite monitoring system that has tracked global temperatures since 1979. He received NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for this work.) Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.
Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. The models the IPCC uses for projecting a 3 to 4 degree Celsius increase in temperature all assume large positive (that is, temperature-magnifying) feedbacks from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; Schwartz, Lindzen, and Choi discern strong negative (or temperature-reducing) feedbacks in the climate system, suggesting an upper-bound of future temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius.
If the climate system is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the climate campaign believes, then what is causing plainly observable changes in the climate, such as earlier arriving springs, receding glaciers, and shrinking Arctic Ocean ice caps? There have been alternative explanations in the scientific literature for several years, ignored by the media and the IPCC alike. The IPCC downplays theories of variations in solar activity, such as sunspot activity and gamma ray bursts, and although there is robust scientific literature on the issue, even the skeptic community is divided about whether solar activity is a primary cause of recent climate variation. Several studies of Arctic warming conclude that changes in ocean currents, cloud formation, and wind patterns in the upper atmosphere may explain the retreat of glaciers and sea ice better than greenhouse gases. Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt. Above all, if the medieval warm period was indeed as warm or warmer than today, we cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the “Little Ice Age” that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century. Skeptics have known and tried to publicize all of these contrarian or confounding scientific findings, but the compliant news media routinely ignored all of them, enabling the IPCC to get away with its serial exaggeration and blatant advocacy for more than a decade.
The question going forward is whether the IPCC will allow contrarian scientists and confounding scientific research into its process, and include the opportunity for dissenting scientists to publish a minority report. Last March, John Christy sent a proposal to the 140 authors of IPCC Working Group I asking “that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than has been the IPCC’s recent message—all based on published information. . . . An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process.” Christy received no response.
In the aftermath of Climategate, Christy proposed in Nature magazine that the IPCC move to a Wikipedia-style format, in which lead authors would mediate an ongoing discussion among scientists, with the caveat that all claims would need to be based on original studies and data. Such a process would produce more timely and digestible information than the huge twice-a-decade reports the IPCC now produces. Christy told me that he does not hold out much hope for serious IPCC reform. Although he was a lead author in the IPCC’s 2001 report and a contributing author for the 2007 report, the Obama administration has not nominated Christy to participate in the next report. IPCC participants are nominated by governments (a “gatekeeping exercise,” Christy rightly notes). The nomination period closes next week.
Even a reformed IPCC that offered a more balanced account of climate science would make little difference to the fanatical climate campaigners, whose second line of defense is to double-down on demonizing skeptics and “deniers.” Greenpeace, which should be regarded as the John Birch Society of the environmental movement, is filing its own Freedom of Information Act and state public record act requests to obtain private emails and documents from university-based climate skeptics such as Christy, Pat Michaels (University of Virginia), David Legates (University of Delaware), and Willie Soon (Harvard University/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), hoping to stir up a scandal commensurate with Climategate by hyping a supposed nefarious link between such researchers and energy companies. Greenpeace has sent letters to nongovernmental skeptics and organizations requesting that they submit to polygraph examinations about their role in or knowledge of the “illegally hacked” CRU emails. “We want to do our part,” Greenpeace’s letter reads, “to help international law enforcement get to the bottom of this potentially criminal act by putting some basic questions to people whose bank accounts, propaganda efforts or influence peddling interests benefitted from the theft.” One wonders whether Greenpeace has really thought this through, as a successful FOIA request for the emails of American scientists would open the floodgates to further probing of James Hansen at NASA, Michael Mann at Penn State, and other government climate scientists who probably wrote emails as embarrassing or crude as Phil Jones and the CRU circle.
Greenpeace is hardly alone in its paranoia. Britain’s former chief government science adviser, Sir David King, popped off to the press in early February that a foreign intelligence service working with American industry lobbyists—he intimated that he had the CIA and ExxonMobil in mind—were responsible for hacking the CRU emails last year. King backed away from this claim the next day, admitting he had no information to back it up.
The climate campaign camp followers are exhausting their invective against skeptics. Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim. In the Los Angeles Times Bill McKibben compared climate skeptics to O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys able to twist incontrovertible scientific evidence. Not to be outdone, Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) compared climate skeptics to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, a comparison, to be sure, that Al Gore has been making since the early 1990s, but Sanders delivered it with his patented popping-neck-veins style that makes you worry for his health.
In addition to being a sign of desperation, these ad hominem arguments from the climate campaigners also make clear which camp is truly guilty of anti-intellectualism. Gore and the rest of the chorus simply will not discuss any of the scientific anomalies and defects in the conventional climate narrative that scientists such as Christy have pointed out to the IPCC. Perhaps the climate campaign’s most ludicrous contortion is their response to the record snowfall of the eastern United States over the last two months. The ordinary citizen, applying Occam’s Razor while shoveling feet of snow, sees global warming as a farce. The climate campaigners now insist that “weather is not climate,” and that localized weather events, even increased winter snowfall, can be consistent with climate change. They may be right about this, though even the IPCC cautions that we still have little ability to predict regional climate-related weather changes. These are the same people, however, who jumped up and down that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that talking point.
The ruckus about “weather is not climate” exposes the greatest problem of the climate campaign. Al Gore and his band of brothers have been happy to point to any weather anomaly—cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters—as proof of climate change. But the climate campaigners cannot name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory. Pretty convenient when your theory works in only one direction.
The unraveling of the climate campaign was entirely predictable, though not the dramatic swiftness with which it arrived. The long trajectory of the climate change controversy conforms exactly to the “issue-attention cycle” that political scientist Anthony Downs explained in the Public Interest almost 40 years ago. Downs laid out a five-stage cycle through which political issues of all kinds typically pass. A group of experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the problem by the news media and broader political class. This second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the dopamine stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global salvation and redemption. One of the largest debilities of the climate campaign from the beginning was their having conceived the issue not as a practical problem, like traditional air pollution, but as an expression, in Gore’s view, of deeper spiritual and even metaphysical problems arising from our “dysfunctional civilization.” Gore is still thinking about the issue in these terms, grasping for another dopamine rush. In his February 28 New York Times article, he claimed that an international climate treaty would be “an instrument of human redemption.”
The third stage is the hinge. As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” This is where we have been since the Kyoto process proposed completely implausible near-term reductions in fossil fuel energy—a fanatical monomania the climate campaign has been unable to shake. In retrospect it is now possible to grasp the irony that President George W. Bush’s open refusal to embrace the Kyoto framework kept the climate campaign alive by providing an all-purpose excuse for the lack of “progress” toward a binding treaty. With Bush gone, the intrinsic weakness of the carbon-cutting charade is impossible to hide, though Gore and the climate campaigners are now trying to blame the U.S. Senate for the lack of international agreement.
“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.” Despite the relentless media drumbeat, Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Prize twofer, and millions of dollars in paid advertising, public concern for climate change has been steadily waning for several years. In the latest Pew survey of public priorities released in January, climate change came in dead last, ranked 21st out of 21 issues of concern, with just 28 percent saying the issue should be a top priority for Congress and President Obama. That’s down 10 points over the last three years.
A separate Pew poll taken last October, before Climate-gate, reported a precipitous drop in the number of Americans who think there is “solid evidence” of global warming, from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009; the number who think humans are responsible for warming dropped in the Pew poll from 47 to 36 percent. Surveys from Rasmussen and other pollsters find similar declines in public belief in human-caused global warming; European surveys are reporting the same trend. In Gallup’s annual survey of environmental issues, taken last spring, respondents ranked global warming eighth out of eight environmental issues Gallup listed; the number of people who say they “worry a great deal” about climate change has fallen from 41 to 34 percent over the last three years. Gallup’s Lydia Saad commented: “Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.”
“In the final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” The death rattle of the climate campaign will be deafening. It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The climate campaigners have been fond of warning of catastrophic “tipping points” for years. Well, a tipping point has indeed arrived—just not the one the climate campaigners expected.
The lingering question is whether the collapse of the climate campaign is also a sign of a broader collapse in public enthusiasm for environmentalism in general. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded figures in the environmental movement, have been warning their green friends that the public has reached the point of “apocalypse fatigue.” They’ve been met with denunciations from the climate campaign enforcers for their heresy. The climate campaign has no idea that it is on the cusp of becoming as ludicrous and forlorn as the World -Esperanto Association.
Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the forthcoming Almanac of Environmental Trends (Pacific Research Institute).
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/denial
-
Climategate: Three of the Four Temperature Datasets Now Irrevocably Tainted
Posted By Christopher Horner On March 11, 2010 @ 8:49 am In Column 1, Money, Science, Science & Technology, US News, World News | 5 Comments
The warmist response to Climategate — the discovery of the thoroughly corrupt practices of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) — was that the tainted CRU dataset was just one of four [1] independent data sets. You know. So really there’s no big deal.
Thanks to a FOIA request, the document production of which I am presently plowing through — and before that, thanks to the great work of Steve McIntyre, and particularly in their recent, comprehensive work, Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts [2] — we know that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) passed no one’s test for credibility. Not even NASA’s.
In fact, CRU’s former head, Phil Jones, even told his buddies that while people may think his dataset — which required all of those “fudge factors” (their words) — is troubled, “GISS is inferior” to CRU.
Really [3].
NASA’s temperature data is so woeful that James Hansen’s colleague Reto Ruedy told the USA Today weather editor:
“My recommendation to you is to continue using … CRU data for the global mean [temperatures]. … “What we do is accurate enough” — left unspoken: for government work — “[but] we have no intention to compete with either of the other two organizations in what they do best.”
To reiterate, NASA’s temperature data is worse than the Climategate temperature data. According to NASA.
And apparently, although these points were never stressed publicly before, NASA GISS is just “basically a modeling group forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data.” But now, however, NASA GISS “happily [combines the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data] and Hadley Center’s data” for the purpose of evaluating NASA’s models.
So — Climategate’s CRU was just “one of four organizations worldwide that have independently compiled thermometer measurements of local temperatures from around the world to reconstruct the history of average global surface temperature.”
But one of the three remaining sets is not credible either, and definitely not independent.
Two down, two to go.
Reto Ruedy refers his inquiring (ok, credulous) reporter to NCDC — the third of the four data sets — as being the gold standard for U.S. temperatures.
But NCDC has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere — Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts have found NCDC completely incredible, having made a practice out of not including cooler temperature stations over time, exaggerating the warming illusion.
Three out of the four temperature datasets stink, with corroboration from the alarmists. Second-sourced, no less.
Anyone know if Japan has a FOIA?
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-three-of-the-four-temperature-datasets-now-irrevocably-tainted/
URLs in this post:
[1] just one of four: http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/east-anglia-cru-hacked-emails-12-09-09.pdf
[2] Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
[3] Really: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/giss_is_inferior.png
-
The case against the hockey stick
MATT RIDLEY 10th March 2010 — Issue 168
The "hockey stick" temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man's efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes
Messy, truncated data? Trees on the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada: one of several pieces of evidence for rising temperatures that have been called into question
Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.
I can remember when I first paid attention to the “hockey stick” graph at a conference in Cambridge. The temperature line trundled along with little change for centuries, then shot through the roof in the 20th century, like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. I had become somewhat of a sceptic about the science of climate change, but here was emphatic proof that the world was much warmer today; and warming much faster than at any time in a thousand years. I resolved to shed my doubts. I assumed that since it had been published in Nature—the Canterbury Cathedral of scientific literature—it was true.
I was not the only one who was impressed. The graph appeared six times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s third report in 2001. It was on display as a backdrop at the press conference to launch that report. James Lovelock pinned it to his wall. Al Gore used it in his film (though describing it as something else and with the Y axis upside down). Its author shot to scientific stardom. “It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been,” said the BBC. The hockey stick is to global warming what St Paul was to Christianity.
Of course, there is other evidence for global warming, but none of it proves that the recent warming is unprecedented. Indeed, quite the reverse: surface temperatures, sea levels, tree lines, glacier retreats, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic, early spring flowers, bird migration, droughts, floods, storms—they all show change that is no different in speed or magnitude from other periods, like 1910-1940, at least as far as can be measured. There may be something unprecedented going on in temperature, but the only piece of empirical evidence that actually says so—yes, the only one—is the hockey stick.
And the hockey stick is wrong. The emails that were leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year are not proof of this; they are merely the icing on the lake, proof that some of the scientists closest to the hockey stick knew all along that it was problematic. Andrew Montford’s book, despite its subtitle, is not about the emails, which are tagged on as a last chapter. It is instead built around the long, lonely struggle of one man— Stephen McIntyre—to understand how the hockey stick was made, with what data and what programs.
A retired mining entrepreneur with a mathematical bent, McIntyre asked the senior author of the hockey stick graph, Michael Mann, for the data and the programs in 2003, so he could check it himself. This was five years after the graph had been published, but Mann had never been asked for them before. McIntyre quickly found errors: mislocated series, infilled gaps, truncated records, old data extrapolated forwards where new was available, and so on.
Not all the data showed a 20th century uptick either. In fact just 20 series out of 159 did, and these were nearly all based on tree rings. In some cases, the same tree ring sets had been used in different series. In the end the entire graph got its shape from a few bristlecone and foxtail pines in the western United States; a messy tree-ring data set from the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada; another Canadian set that had been truncated 17 years too early called, splendidly, Twisted Tree Heartrot Hill; and a superseded series from Siberian larch trees. There were problems with all these series: for example, the bristlecone pines were probably growing faster in the 20th century because of more carbon dioxide in the air, or recovery after “strip bark” damage, not because of temperature change.
This was bad enough; worse was to come. Mann soon stopped cooperating, yet, after a long struggle, McIntyre found out enough about Mann’s programs to work out what he had done. The result was shocking. He had standardised the data by “short-centering” them—essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis “mined” the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.
Well, it happens. People make mistakes in science. Corrections get made. That’s how it works, is it not? Few papers get such scrutiny as this had. But that is an even more worrying thought: how much dodgy science is being published without the benefit of an audit by Mcintyre’s ilk? As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.
If this had been a drug trial done by a pharmaceutical company, the scientific journals, the learned academies and the press would have soon have rushed to discredit it—and rightly so. Instead, they did not want to know. Nature magazine, which had published the original study, went out of its way to close its ears to McIntyre’s criticisms, even though they were upheld by the reviewers it appointed. So did the National Academy of Sciences in the US, even when two reports commissioned by Congress upheld McIntyre. So, of course, did the IPCC, which tied itself in knots changing its deadlines so it could include flawed references to refutations of McIntyre while ignoring complaints that it had misquoted him.
The IPCC has taken refuge in saying that other recent studies confirm the hockey stick but, if you take those studies apart, the same old bad data sets keep popping out: bristlecone pines and all. A new Siberian data series from a place called Yamal showed a lovely hockey stick but, after ten years of asking, McIntyre finally got hold of the data last autumn and found that it relied heavily on just one of just twelve trees, when far larger samples from the same area were available showing no uptick. Another series from Finnish lake sediments also showed a gorgeous hockey stick, but only if used upside down. McIntyre just keeps on exposing scandal after scandal in the way these data were analysed and presented.
Montford’s book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.
Oh, and by the way, I have a financial interest in coal mining, though not as big as Al Gore has in carbon trading. Maybe you think it makes me biased. Read the book and judge for yourself.
The Hockey Stick Illusion is published by Stacey International, 482 pages, £10.99
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
-
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-it.s-gettin-hot-in-here-big-battle-over-climate-science (http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-it.s-gettin-hot-in-here-big-battle-over-climate-science)
I figured you might want to see something fairly mainstream. Also you get to see what one of the scientists under fire looks like. I also found the ways the article contrasts the two scientists.
-
Yeah, I read that when it came out and was mildly annoyed that the mainstream science mags still can't find a sceptic to interview, instead finding someone in the AGW camp who spouts radical concepts like scientists should be skeptical by nature. Yes, and they should tinkle rather than let their bladders burst, too. Paging Captain Obvious. At least it was nice to see McIntyre's role in things spoken about in kind terms that outlines his idealistic and pro bono role in all this.
As for Mann, when doesn't he come off as a whiny, self-obsessed, pompous, unctuous, unprincipled weasel who thinks his proprietary interest in AGW panic mongering somehow allows him to dictate the terms of debate? Like to slap his smarmy smirk right off his face.
-
Her role. But that is all you are going to get out of the mainstream. They like to be "reconciliatory" rather than have a real debate going. Maybe the should have a Pro, Con, and Counciliator- 3 view paradigm from now on so everyone can get their facts straight?
They are still trying to go green tho'. all the articles that they published on their own initiative in favor of green make it REAL hard to start moving the other way too quickly, doesn't it? Maybe a bit of better peer review would have saved them from embarassment which they are trying to avoid now. THAT is why the MSM is slinking around trying to avoid the gorilla on the buffet table. A lot of Scientists with them are suffering the same ego bubble pop.9(that stings, I suffered it too, it is part of learning)
-
Something of a bellwether here, I think. Though it speaks not at all about AGW, this piece in a mainstream science pub quite directly attacks statistical methods upon which much of the AGW panic is founded
Odds Are, It's Wrong
Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics By Tom Siegfried March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26) Text Size
ENLARGE
P VALUEA P value is the probability of an observed (or more extreme) result arising only from chance. S. Goodman, adapted by A. Nandy
For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.
During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.
Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.
Experts in the math of probability and statistics are well aware of these problems and have for decades expressed concern about them in major journals. Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.
“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
Ioannidis claimed to prove that more than half of published findings are false, but his analysis came under fire for statistical shortcomings of its own. “It may be true, but he didn’t prove it,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. On the other hand, says Goodman, the basic message stands. “There are more false claims made in the medical literature than anybody appreciates,” he says. “There’s no question about that.”
Nobody contends that all of science is wrong, or that it hasn’t compiled an impressive array of truths about the natural world. Still, any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. “A lot of scientists don’t understand statistics,” says Goodman. “And they don’t understand statistics because the statistics don’t make sense.”
Statistical insignificance
Nowhere are the problems with statistics more blatant than in studies of genetic influences on disease. In 2007, for instance, researchers combing the medical literature found numerous studies linking a total of 85 genetic variants in 70 different genes to acute coronary syndrome, a cluster of heart problems. When the researchers compared genetic tests of 811 patients that had the syndrome with a group of 650 (matched for sex and age) that didn’t, only one of the suspect gene variants turned up substantially more often in those with the syndrome — a number to be expected by chance.
“Our null results provide no support for the hypothesis that any of the 85 genetic variants tested is a susceptibility factor” for the syndrome, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
How could so many studies be wrong? Because their conclusions relied on “statistical significance,” a concept at the heart of the mathematical analysis of modern scientific experiments.
Statistical significance is a phrase that every science graduate student learns, but few comprehend. While its origins stretch back at least to the 19th century, the modern notion was pioneered by the mathematician Ronald A. Fisher in the 1920s. His original interest was agriculture. He sought a test of whether variation in crop yields was due to some specific intervention (say, fertilizer) or merely reflected random factors beyond experimental control.
Fisher first assumed that fertilizer caused no difference — the “no effect” or “null” hypothesis. He then calculated a number called the P value, the probability that an observed yield in a fertilized field would occur if fertilizer had no real effect. If P is less than .05 — meaning the chance of a fluke is less than 5 percent — the result should be declared “statistically significant,” Fisher arbitrarily declared, and the no effect hypothesis should be rejected, supposedly confirming that fertilizer works.
Fisher’s P value eventually became the ultimate arbiter of credibility for science results of all sorts — whether testing the health effects of pollutants, the curative powers of new drugs or the effect of genes on behavior. In various forms, testing for statistical significance pervades most of scientific and medical research to this day.
But in fact, there’s no logical basis for using a P value from a single study to draw any conclusion. If the chance of a fluke is less than 5 percent, two possible conclusions remain: There is a real effect, or the result is an improbable fluke. Fisher’s method offers no way to know which is which. On the other hand, if a study finds no statistically significant effect, that doesn’t prove anything, either. Perhaps the effect doesn’t exist, or maybe the statistical test wasn’t powerful enough to detect a small but real effect.
“That test itself is neither necessary nor sufficient for proving a scientific result,” asserts Stephen Ziliak, an economic historian at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Soon after Fisher established his system of statistical significance, it was attacked by other mathematicians, notably Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman. Rather than testing a null hypothesis, they argued, it made more sense to test competing hypotheses against one another. That approach also produces a P value, which is used to gauge the likelihood of a “false positive” — concluding an effect is real when it actually isn’t. What eventually emerged was a hybrid mix of the mutually inconsistent Fisher and Neyman-Pearson approaches, which has rendered interpretations of standard statistics muddled at best and simply erroneous at worst. As a result, most scientists are confused about the meaning of a P value or how to interpret it. “It’s almost never, ever, ever stated correctly, what it means,” says Goodman.
Correctly phrased, experimental data yielding a P value of .05 means that there is only a 5 percent chance of obtaining the observed (or more extreme) result if no real effect exists (that is, if the no-difference hypothesis is correct). But many explanations mangle the subtleties in that definition. A recent popular book on issues involving science, for example, states a commonly held misperception about the meaning of statistical significance at the .05 level: “This means that it is 95 percent certain that the observed difference between groups, or sets of samples, is real and could not have arisen by chance.”
That interpretation commits an egregious logical error (technical term: “transposed conditional”): confusing the odds of getting a result (if a hypothesis is true) with the odds favoring the hypothesis if you observe that result. A well-fed dog may seldom bark, but observing the rare bark does not imply that the dog is hungry. A dog may bark 5 percent of the time even if it is well-fed all of the time. (See Box 2)
Another common error equates statistical significance to “significance” in the ordinary use of the word. Because of the way statistical formulas work, a study with a very large sample can detect “statistical significance” for a small effect that is meaningless in practical terms. A new drug may be statistically better than an old drug, but for every thousand people you treat you might get just one or two additional cures — not clinically significant. Similarly, when studies claim that a chemical causes a “significantly increased risk of cancer,” they often mean that it is just statistically significant, possibly posing only a tiny absolute increase in risk.
Statisticians perpetually caution against mistaking statistical significance for practical importance, but scientific papers commit that error often. Ziliak studied journals from various fields — psychology, medicine and economics among others — and reported frequent disregard for the distinction.
“I found that eight or nine of every 10 articles published in the leading journals make the fatal substitution” of equating statistical significance to importance, he said in an interview. Ziliak’s data are documented in the 2008 book The Cult of Statistical Significance, coauthored with Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Multiplicity of mistakes
Even when “significance” is properly defined and P values are carefully calculated, statistical inference is plagued by many other problems. Chief among them is the “multiplicity” issue — the testing of many hypotheses simultaneously. When several drugs are tested at once, or a single drug is tested on several groups, chances of getting a statistically significant but false result rise rapidly. Experiments on altered gene activity in diseases may test 20,000 genes at once, for instance. Using a P value of .05, such studies could find 1,000 genes that appear to differ even if none are actually involved in the disease. Setting a higher threshold of statistical significance will eliminate some of those flukes, but only at the cost of eliminating truly changed genes from the list. In metabolic diseases such as diabetes, for example, many genes truly differ in activity, but the changes are so small that statistical tests will dismiss most as mere fluctuations. Of hundreds of genes that misbehave, standard stats might identify only one or two. Altering the threshold to nab 80 percent of the true culprits might produce a list of 13,000 genes — of which over 12,000 are actually innocent.
Recognizing these problems, some researchers now calculate a “false discovery rate” to warn of flukes disguised as real effects. And genetics researchers have begun using “genome-wide association studies” that attempt to ameliorate the multiplicity issue (SN: 6/21/08, p. 20).
Many researchers now also commonly report results with confidence intervals, similar to the margins of error reported in opinion polls. Such intervals, usually given as a range that should include the actual value with 95 percent confidence, do convey a better sense of how precise a finding is. But the 95 percent confidence calculation is based on the same math as the .05 P value and so still shares some of its problems.
Clinical trials and errors
Statistical problems also afflict the “gold standard” for medical research, the randomized, controlled clinical trials that test drugs for their ability to cure or their power to harm. Such trials assign patients at random to receive either the substance being tested or a placebo, typically a sugar pill; random selection supposedly guarantees that patients’ personal characteristics won’t bias the choice of who gets the actual treatment. But in practice, selection biases may still occur, Vance Berger and Sherri Weinstein noted in 2004 in ControlledClinical Trials. “Some of the benefits ascribed to randomization, for example that it eliminates all selection bias, can better be described as fantasy than reality,” they wrote.
Randomization also should ensure that unknown differences among individuals are mixed in roughly the same proportions in the groups being tested. But statistics do not guarantee an equal distribution any more than they prohibit 10 heads in a row when flipping a penny. With thousands of clinical trials in progress, some will not be well randomized. And DNA differs at more than a million spots in the human genetic catalog, so even in a single trial differences may not be evenly mixed. In a sufficiently large trial, unrandomized factors may balance out, if some have positive effects and some are negative. (See Box 3) Still, trial results are reported as averages that may obscure individual differences, masking beneficial or harm ful effects and possibly leading to approval of drugs that are deadly for some and denial of effective treatment to others.
“Determining the best treatment for a particular patient is fundamentally different from determining which treatment is best on average,” physicians David Kent and Rodney Hayward wrote in American Scientist in 2007. “Reporting a single number gives the misleading impression that the treatment-effect is a property of the drug rather than of the interaction between the drug and the complex risk-benefit profile of a particular group of patients.”
Another concern is the common strategy of combining results from many trials into a single “meta-analysis,” a study of studies. In a single trial with relatively few participants, statistical tests may not detect small but real and possibly important effects. In principle, combining smaller studies to create a larger sample would allow the tests to detect such small effects. But statistical techniques for doing so are valid only if certain criteria are met. For one thing, all the studies conducted on the drug must be included — published and unpublished. And all the studies should have been performed in a similar way, using the same protocols, definitions, types of patients and doses. When combining studies with differences, it is necessary first to show that those differences would not affect the analysis, Goodman notes, but that seldom happens. “That’s not a formal part of most meta-analyses,” he says.
Meta-analyses have produced many controversial conclusions. Common claims that antidepressants work no better than placebos, for example, are based on meta-analyses that do not conform to the criteria that would confer validity. Similar problems afflicted a 2007 meta-analysis, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that attributed increased heart attack risk to the diabetes drug Avandia. Raw data from the combined trials showed that only 55 people in 10,000 had heart attacks when using Avandia, compared with 59 people per 10,000 in comparison groups. But after a series of statistical manipulations, Avandia appeared to confer an increased risk.
In principle, a proper statistical analysis can suggest an actual risk even though the raw numbers show a benefit. But in this case the criteria justifying such statistical manipulations were not met. In some of the trials, Avandia was given along with other drugs. Sometimes the non-Avandia group got placebo pills, while in other trials that group received another drug. And there were no common definitions.
“Across the trials, there was no standard method for identifying or validating outcomes; events ... may have been missed or misclassified,” Bruce Psaty and Curt Furberg wrote in an editorial accompanying the New England Journal report. “A few events either way might have changed the findings.”
-
More recently, epidemiologist Charles Hennekens and biostatistician David DeMets have pointed out that combining small studies in a meta-analysis is not a good substitute for a single trial sufficiently large to test a given question. “Meta-analyses can reduce the role of chance in the interpretation but may introduce bias and confounding,” Hennekens and DeMets write in the Dec. 2 Journal of the American Medical Association. “Such results should be considered more as hypothesis formulating than as hypothesis testing.”
These concerns do not make clinical trials worthless, nor do they render science impotent. Some studies show dramatic effects that don’t require sophisticated statistics to interpret. If the P value is 0.0001 — a hundredth of a percent chance of a fluke — that is strong evidence, Goodman points out. Besides, most well-accepted science is based not on any single study, but on studies that have been confirmed by repetition. Any one result may be likely to be wrong, but confidence rises quickly if that result is independently replicated.
“Replication is vital,” says statistician Juliet Shaffer, a lecturer emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. And in medicine, she says, the need for replication is widely recognized. “But in the social sciences and behavioral sciences, replication is not common,” she noted in San Diego in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This is a sad situation.”
Bayes watch
Such sad statistical situations suggest that the marriage of science and math may be desperately in need of counseling. Perhaps it could be provided by the Rev. Thomas Bayes.
Most critics of standard statistics advocate the Bayesian approach to statistical reasoning, a methodology that derives from a theorem credited to Bayes, an 18th century English clergyman. His approach uses similar math, but requires the added twist of a “prior probability” — in essence, an informed guess about the expected probability of something in advance of the study. Often this prior probability is more than a mere guess — it could be based, for instance, on previous studies.
Bayesian math seems baffling at first, even to many scientists, but it basically just reflects the need to include previous knowledge when drawing conclusions from new observations. To infer the odds that a barking dog is hungry, for instance, it is not enough to know how often the dog barks when well-fed. You also need to know how often it eats — in order to calculate the prior probability of being hungry. Bayesian math combines a prior probability with observed data to produce an estimate of the likelihood of the hunger hypothesis. “A scientific hypothesis cannot be properly assessed solely by reference to the observational data,” but only by viewing the data in light of prior belief in the hypothesis, wrote George Diamond and Sanjay Kaul of UCLA’s School of Medicine in 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “Bayes’ theorem is ... a logically consistent, mathematically valid, and intuitive way to draw inferences about the hypothesis.” (See Box 4)
With the increasing availability of computer power to perform its complex calculations, the Bayesian approach has become more widely applied in medicine and other fields in recent years. In many real-life contexts, Bayesian methods do produce the best answers to important questions. In medical diagnoses, for instance, the likelihood that a test for a disease is correct depends on the prevalence of the disease in the population, a factor that Bayesian math would take into account.
But Bayesian methods introduce a confusion into the actual meaning of the mathematical concept of “probability” in the real world. Standard or “frequentist” statistics treat probabilities as objective realities; Bayesians treat probabilities as “degrees of belief” based in part on a personal assessment or subjective decision about what to include in the calculation. That’s a tough placebo to swallow for scientists wedded to the “objective” ideal of standard statistics. “Subjective prior beliefs are anathema to the frequentist, who relies instead on a series of ad hoc algorithms that maintain the facade of scientific objectivity,” Diamond and Kaul wrote.
Conflict between frequentists and Bayesians has been ongoing for two centuries. So science’s marriage to mathematics seems to entail some irreconcilable differences. Whether the future holds a fruitful reconciliation or an ugly separation may depend on forging a shared understanding of probability.
“What does probability mean in real life?” the statistician David Salsburg asked in his 2001 book The Lady Tasting Tea. “This problem is still unsolved, and ... if it remains un solved, the whole of the statistical approach to science may come crashing down from the weight of its own inconsistencies.”
_______________________________________________________________________
BOX 1: Statistics Can Confuse
Statistical significance is not always statistically significant.
It is common practice to test the effectiveness (or dangers) of a drug by comparing it to a placebo or sham treatment that should have no effect at all. Using statistical methods to compare the results, researchers try to judge whether the real treatment’s effect was greater than the fake treatments by an amount unlikely to occur by chance.
By convention, a result expected to occur less than 5 percent of the time is considered “statistically significant.” So if Drug X outperformed a placebo by an amount that would be expected by chance only 4 percent of the time, most researchers would conclude that Drug X really works (or at least, that there is evidence favoring the conclusion that it works).
Now suppose Drug Y also outperformed the placebo, but by an amount that would be expected by chance 6 percent of the time. In that case, conventional analysis would say that such an effect lacked statistical significance and that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Drug Y worked.
If both drugs were tested on the same disease, though, a conundrum arises. For even though Drug X appeared to work at a statistically significant level and Drug Y did not, the difference between the performance of Drug A and Drug B might very well NOT be statistically significant. Had they been tested against each other, rather than separately against placebos, there may have been no statistical evidence to suggest that one was better than the other (even if their cure rates had been precisely the same as in the separate tests).
“Comparisons of the sort, ‘X is statistically significant but Y is not,’ can be misleading,” statisticians Andrew Gelman of Columbia University and Hal Stern of the University of California, Irvine, noted in an article discussing this issue in 2006 in the American Statistician. “Students and practitioners [should] be made more aware that the difference between ‘significant’ and ‘not significant’ is not itself statistically significant.”
A similar real-life example arises in studies suggesting that children and adolescents taking antidepressants face an increased risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior. Most such studies show no statistically significant increase in such risk, but some show a small (possibly due to chance) excess of suicidal behavior in groups receiving the drug rather than a placebo. One set of such studies, for instance, found that with the antidepressant Paxil, trials recorded more than twice the rate of suicidal incidents for participants given the drug compared with those given the placebo. For another antidepressant, Prozac, trials found fewer suicidal incidents with the drug than with the placebo. So it appeared that Paxil might be more dangerous than Prozac.
But actually, the rate of suicidal incidents was higher with Prozac than with Paxil. The apparent safety advantage of Prozac was due not to the behavior of kids on the drug, but to kids on placebo — in the Paxil trials, fewer kids on placebo reported incidents than those on placebo in the Prozac trials. So the original evidence for showing a possible danger signal from Paxil but not from Prozac was based on data from people in two placebo groups, none of whom received either drug. Consequently it can be misleading to use statistical significance results alone when comparing the benefits (or dangers) of two drugs.
_______________________________________________________________________
BOX 2: The Hunger Hypothesis
A common misinterpretation of the statistician’s P value is that it measures how likely it is that a null (or “no effect”) hypothesis is correct. Actually, the P value gives the probability of observing a result if the null hypothesis is true, and there is no real effect of a treatment or difference between groups being tested. A P value of .05, for instance, means that there is only a 5 percent chance of getting the observed results if the null hypothesis is correct.
It is incorrect, however, to transpose that finding into a 95 percent probability that the null hypothesis is false. “The P value is calculated under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true,” writes biostatistician Steven Goodman. “It therefore cannot simultaneously be a probability that the null hypothesis is false.”
Consider this simplified example. Suppose a certain dog is known to bark constantly when hungry. But when well-fed, the dog barks less than 5 percent of the time. So if you assume for the null hypothesis that the dog is not hungry, the probability of observing the dog barking (given that hypothesis) is less than 5 percent. If you then actually do observe the dog barking, what is the likelihood that the null hypothesis is incorrect and the dog is in fact hungry?
Answer: That probability cannot be computed with the information given. The dog barks 100 percent of the time when hungry, and less than 5 percent of the time when not hungry. To compute the likelihood of hunger, you need to know how often the dog is fed, information not provided by the mere observation of barking.
_______________________________________________________________________
BOX 3: Randomness and Clinical Trials
Assigning patients at random to treatment and control groups is an essential feature of controlled clinical trials, but statistically that approach cannot guarantee that individual differences among patients will always be distributed equally. Experts in clinical trial analyses are aware that such incomplete randomization will leave some important differences unbalanced between experimental groups, at least some of the time.
“This is an important concern,” says biostatistician Don Berry of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
In an e-mail message, Berry points out that two patients who appear to be alike may respond differently to identical treatments. So statisticians attempt to incorporate patient variability into their mathematical models.
“There may be a googol of patient characteristics and it’s guaranteed that not all of them will be balanced by randomization,” Berry notes. “But some characteristics will be biased in favor of treatment A and others in favor of treatment B. They tend to even out. What is not evened out is regarded by statisticians to be ‘random error,’ and this we model explicitly.”
Understanding the individual differences affecting response to treatment is a major goal of scientists pursuing “personalized medicine,” in which therapies are tailored to each person’s particular biology. But the limits of statistical methods in drawing conclusions about subgroups of patients pose a challenge to achieving that goal.
“False-positive observations abound,” Berry acknowledges. “There are patients whose tumors melt away when given some of our newer treatments.… But just which one of the googol of characteristics of this particular tumor enabled such a thing? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack ... or rather, looking for one special needle in a stack of other needles.”
_______________________________________________________________________
BOX 4: Bayesian Reasoning
Bayesian methods of statistical analysis stem from a paper published posthumously in 1763 by the English clergyman Thomas Bayes. In a Bayesian analysis, probability calculations require a prior value for the likelihood of an association, which is then modified after data are collected. When the prior probability isn’t known, it must be estimated, leading to criticisms that subjective guesses must often be incorporated into what ought to be an objective scientific analysis. But without such an estimate, statistics can produce grossly inaccurate conclusions.
For a simplified example, consider the use of drug tests to detect cheaters in sports. Suppose the test for steroid use among baseball players is 95 percent accurate — that is, it correctly identifies actual steroid users 95 percent of the time, and misidentifies non-users as users 5 percent of the time.
Suppose an anonymous player tests positive. What is the probability that he really is using steroids? Since the test really is accurate 95 percent of the time, the naïve answer would be that probability of guilt is 95 percent. But a Bayesian knows that such a conclusion cannot be drawn from the test alone. You would need to know some additional facts not included in this evidence. In this case, you need to know how many baseball players use steroids to begin with — that would be what a Bayesian would call the prior probability.
Now suppose, based on previous testing, that experts have established that about 5 percent of professional baseball players use steroids. Now suppose you test 400 players. How many would test positive?
• Out of the 400 players, 20 are users (5 percent) and 380 are not users.
• Of the 20 users, 19 (95 percent) would be identified correctly as users.
• Of the 380 nonusers, 19 (5 percent) would incorrectly be indicated as users.
So if you tested 400 players, 38 would test positive. Of those, 19 would be guilty users and 19 would be innocent nonusers. So if any single player’s test is positive, the chances that he really is a user are 50 percent, since an equal number of users and nonusers test positive.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong
-
Long, well illustrated piece looking at the World Wildlife Fund's interest in carbon credit schemes. Those who endlessly snivel about oil company money funding skeptics ought to enjoy the feel of the shoe being on the other foot.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/03/amazongate-part-ii-seeing-redd.html
-
Some folks in Australia have started documenting siting issues with their weather stations. The results are amusing in a head shaking way. More here:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climate/
Including this one amid a bunch of construction trash:
(http://blogs.news.com.au/images/uploads/cunderin.jpg)
-
Two posts from Watt's Up With That where arctic and antarctic panic mongering is explored. A wee bit of a problem is discovered: a whole lot of "warming" is extrapolated from very few weather stations and hence very little data. Sundry statistical folly ensues:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/23/why-joe-bastardi-see-red-a-look-at-sea-ice-and-gistemp-and-starting-choices/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/25/gisscapades/#more-17728
-
A look at how several different models arrive at several different places all using the same initial data that then diverges significantly when extrapolated forward:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/23/loehle-on-hoffman-et-al-and-co2-trajectories/#more-17620
-
Blake Snow - FOXNews.com - March 30, 2010
NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, Space Agency Admits
NASA can put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was back then.
NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.
E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails -- and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.
The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA's data "was more accurate" than other climate-change data sets, NASA's Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said "the National Climatic Data Center's procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate," admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.
"My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means," Ruedy told the reporter.
"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC's data as well, stating plainly: "Three out of the four temperature data sets stink."
Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates' arguments that minor flaws in the "Climate-gate" data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion -- that the Earth is getting warmer. But there's a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.
"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results," says James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute.
"The different groups have cooperated in a very friendly way to try to understand different conclusions when they arise," said Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the same 2007 e-mail thread. Earlier this month, in an updated analysis of the surface temperature data, GISS restated that the separate analyses by the different agencies "are not independent, as they must use much of the same input observations."
Neither NASA nor NOAA responded to requests for comment. But Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, still believes the validity of data from NASA, NOAA and East Anglia would be in jeopardy only if the comparative analysis didn't match. "I see no reason to question the integrity of the raw data," he says. "Since the three organizations are all using mostly the same raw data, collected by the official weather agency of each individual country, the only issue here is whether the corrections done to the raw data were done correctly by CRU."
Corrections are needed, Masters says, "since there are only a few thousand surface temperature recording sites with records going back 100+ years." As such, climate agencies estimate temperatures in various ways for areas where there aren't any thermometers, to account for the overall incomplete global picture.
"It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don't have that luxury," Masters adds. "All three groups came up with very similar global temperature trends using mostly the same raw data but independent corrections. This should give us confidence that the three groups are probably doing reasonable corrections, given that the three final data sets match pretty well."
But NASA is somewhat less confident, having quietly decided to tweak its corrections to the climate data earlier this month.
In an updated analysis of the surface temperature data released on March 19, NASA adjusted the raw temperature station data to account for inaccurate readings caused by heat-absorbing paved surfaces and buildings in a slightly different way. NASA determines which stations are urban with nighttime satellite photos, looking for stations near light sources as seen from space.
Of course, this doesn't solve problems with NASA's data, as the newest paper admits: "Much higher resolution would be needed to check for local problems with the placement of thermometers relative to possible building obstructions," a problem repeatedly underscored by meteorologist Anthony Watts on his SurfaceStations.org Web site. Last month, Watts told FoxNews.com that "90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."
Still, "confidence" is not the same as scientific law, something the public obviously recognizes. According to a December survey, only 25 percent of Americans believed there was agreement within the scientific community on climate change. And unless things fundamentally change, it could remain that way, said Taylor.
"Until surface temperature data sets are truly independent of one another and are entrusted to scientists whose objectivity is beyond question, the satellite temperature record alone will not have any credibility," he said.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/30/nasa-data-worse-than-climategate-data/
-
Long Der Spiegel piece that lays into the warmist side pretty hard. As I recall Spiegel use to be quite alarmist, is so this is further indication of a sea change:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html
-
At least they are responsible nough to realize that they are reporting what they are given by the scientists, and are not ego involved with the cause. I suspect a lot of the MSM types here in the USA are........... Yeah- "a whole branch of science is under fire" is laying into them pretty good. They a decent job of summing up the situation so far.
-
I don't know. It is 93 degrees in NJ in early April. This has never happened that I know of.
-
Don't get me started about how much snow I plowed this winter in Virginia. . . .
-
I don't know. It is 93 degrees in NJ in early April. This has never happened that I know of.
:-P right back, NO TREND.
-
I missed the discussion of 93 degrees in NJ in April. As that was posted I was driving through a brutal winter storm with glare ice coming out of the I-70 Eisenhower tunnel in Colo. Skied 19 inches of fresh wintery powder at Vail the next day, not the slushy stuff you normally associate with spring skiing. This week they are closed for the season because of Forest Service rules, not because the snow is gone. Snow depth is still around 70 to 80 inches at many of the areas.
At home (MN) it was a brutally long and cold winter (even for us and that is long and cold), followed by a warm spring so far.
My take: If you are truly noticing an increase of about .0023 degrees warming per decade, then maybe it is human caused global warming. But if it is 40-50 degrees warmer than usual on a particular day, then it is weather.
Head of the IPCC after climategate admitted no statistically significant warming since 1995.
-
Linear regression trends in temperatures (deg C per century):
US, 1880-2009: +0.64 deg/century
US, 1997-2009: -2.50 deg/century
Globe, 1880-2009: +0.57 deg/century
Globe, 2002-2009: -0.40 deg/century
Data Source: NASA/GISS.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/04/graph_of_the_day_for_april_20.html
-
When the air current models fail to correctly predict short term phenomena involving relatively few variables perhaps we should question their long term veracity
The Great Phony Volcano Ash Scare and Global Warming
Thomas Lifson
The Global Warming alarmists who want to wreck the world economy over an illusory danger, have already wrecked the finances of airlines and stranded passengers over an illusory danger, based on computer models from the same UK bureaucrats.
The UK Met Office is responsible for predicting that the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano would destroy aircraft engines. They were wrong, because their computer models were wrong. Sean Poulter of the UK Daily Mail reports:
Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country.
Skies fell quiet for six days, leaving as many as 500,000 Britons stranded overseas and costing airlines hundreds of millions of pounds.
Estimates put the number of Britons still stuck abroad at 35,000.
However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk.
The Met Office and its faulty computer models should not be allowed to destroy the economies of the advanced countries. This incident should increase public skepticism over doomsday predictions of the alarmists, which are all based on computer models riddled with duvbious assumptions.
The havoc imposed on the airlines and flying public is but a pale indicator of the dispruption and ruin that would be caused by Cap and Trade, carbon credit trading, and other schemes dreamed up to prevent a disaster even more dubious than the supposed ash cloud, now discredited.
Hat tip: Lucianne.com
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/04/the_great_phony_volcano_ash_sc.html at April 26, 2010 - 09:46:16 AM CDT
-
Strike 2 the one that impacts and INCONVENIENCES the public in a major way. Maybe they will get some scrutiny that they have tried to avoid, with MSM cooperation, up to now?
The threat is from concentrated gasses and ash, usually from flying through the plume with in a couple hundred miles of the volcano, not trace concentrations that are several hundred miles removed from the volcano. Heck, discover channel can tell you that, and FAA regs developed from Mt StHelens also are a good precedent, no planes were lost then either. I have been laughing for a week at the modern idiocy of fault intolerance, rather than calculated risk that we evolved with........
-
No fear of intensifying hurricanes by warming the gulf?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-20100428,0,1038312.story
New Orleans —
Crews may set fires to burn off oil being spewed by a blown-out well that is dumping 42,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, the Coast Guard said Tuesday.
-
Interesting. I shoot at the same club as Cuccinelli and have a generally favorable opinion of him, though he's got some religious right habits I could do without. Don't think making a habit of these kinds of investigations would be good for science, but Mann has so amply demonstrated a disregard for the basic principles of scientific investigation that I think he makes a fine target indeed. As a VA taxpayer, it thrills me to think commonwealth colleges might find themselves contending with accountability.
Oh, Mann: Cuccinelli targets UVA papers in Climategate salvo
by Courteney Stuart
published 4:32pm Thursday Apr 29, 2010
Show him the papers— or else.
CUCCINELLI CAMPAIGN
No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.
“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.
Mann is one of the lead authors of the controversial “hockey stick graph,” which contends that global temperatures have experienced a sudden and unprecedented upward spike (like the shape of a hockey stick).
UVA spokesperson Carol Wood says the school will fulfill its legal obligation, noting that the scope of the documents requested mean it could take some time. Mann had not returned a reporter’s calls at posting time, but Mann— whose research remains under investigation at Penn State— recently defended his work in a front page story in USA Today saying while there could be “minor” errors in his work there’s nothing that would amount to fraud or change his ultimate conclusions that the earth is warming as a result of human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.
“Mike is an outstanding and extremely reputable climate scientist,” says UVA climate faculty member Howie Epstein. “And I don’t really know what they’re looking for or expecting to find.”
Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.
Last fall, the release of some emails by researchers caused turmoil in the climate science world and bolstered critics of the human-blaming scientific models. (Among Climategate’s embarrassing revelations was that one researcher professed an interest in punching Charlottesville-based doubting climate scientist Patrick Michaels in the nose.”)
One former UVA climate scientist now working with Michaels worries about politicizing— or, in his words, creating a “witch hunt”— what he believes should be an academic debate.
“I didn’t like it when the politicians came after Pat Michaels,” says Chip Knappenberger. “I don’t like it that the politicians are coming after Mike Mann.”
Making his comments via an online posting under an earlier version of this story, Knappenberger worries that scientists at Virginia’s public universities could become “political appointees, with whoever is in charge deciding which science is acceptable, and prosecuting the rest. Say good-bye to science in Virginia.”
The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.
http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/29/oh-mann-cuccinelli-targets-uva-papers-in-climategate-salvo/
-
Oh dear, we're all gonna die by 1890.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVOU5bfHrM[/youtube]
-
Peak oil? if everyone on the planet had a "frugal industrial" lifestyle (what is required to start the birthrate leveling off) how long would the non-renewables last? I do not think we will necessarily overpopulate in the plague of locusts sense, but maybe in a qualitative sense. I suspect a certain amount of population is a root of a lot of crime, inefficiencies in distrubution, and other issues. I suspect the push, pull between haves and have nots gets magnified where the population is massive vs. medium/small?
we can grow the food, but can the energy ratio and quality of life be maintained?
-
Can't remember if it was Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, or Larry Niven who said of space "It's raining soup out there, but we haven't learned yet how to hold out our bowls." Think we are no where near of running out of planetary energy sources, and if we get our act together essentially limitless sources are there for the having.
Indeed, I remember in the '60s doom mongering going on about how we'll soon run out of coal. Think currently it's still the largest reserve of US energy. Peak oil breast beating comes and goes while the loudest whiners try to steer us away from oil sands, off shore drilling, coal liquefaction, and so on. The doom struck spout doom and try to be its handmaiden about whatever's handy and have done so for eons. I guess stopped clocks are right twice a day, but it'd be nice if their record was reviewed for accuracy before we start doing any peak oil hair rending.
-
exactly, but the look for the soup line got cancelled by obama........ I remember some stuff (DOE summer study?) when I was just entering high school that would have had several million people in space by now, but some entitlement program or the other has been gobbling up the seed money. we many not get over populated, but I guarantee you that we are feeling crowded- eh? Things seem to be happening one way or another (like that Sci-Fi "end of eternity") that keep us from enlarging ourselves. There are no panama canals or tangible great projects anymore. just programs that shuffle bureaucracy around.........
-
It’s the Sun, stupid
Comments Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Digg Reddit Buzz Email
By Lawrence Solomon May 21, 2010 – 7:17 pm
Solar scientists are finally overcoming their fears and going public about the Sun-climate connection
Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at all, saying they feared for their funding, or they feared other recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier. Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.
No longer.
Scientists, and especially solar scientists, are becoming assertive. Maybe their newfound confidence stems from the Climategate emails, which cast doomsayer-scientists as frauds and diminished their standing within academia. Maybe their confidence stems from the avalanche of errors recently found in the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, destroying its reputation as a gold standard in climate science. Maybe the solar scientists are becoming assertive because the public no longer buys the doomsayer thesis, as seen in public opinion polls throughout the developed world. Whatever it was, solar scientists are increasingly conveying a clear message on the chief cause of climate change: It’s the Sun, Stupid.
Jeff Kuhn, a rising star at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, is one of the most recent scientists to go public, revealing in press releases this month that solar scientists worldwide are on a mission to show that the Sun drives Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data, I simply can’t accept [the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate],” he states.
Kuhn’s team, which includes solar scientists from Stanford University and Brazil as well as from his own institute, last week announced a startling breakthrough — evidence that the Sun does not change much in size, as had previously been believed. This week, in announcing the award of a ¤60,000 Humboldt Prize for Kuhn’s solar excellence, his institute issued a release stating that its research into sunspots “may ultimately help us predict how and when a changing sun affects Earth’s climate.”
Earlier this month, the link between solar activity and climate made headlines throughout Europe after space scientists from the U.K., Germany and South Korea linked the recent paucity of sunspots to the cold weather that Europe has been experiencing. This period of spotlessness, the scientists predicted in a study published in Environmental Research Letters, could augur a repeat of winters comparable to those of the Little Ice Age in the 1600s, during which the Sun was often free of sunspots. By comparing temperatures in Europe since 1659 to highs and lows in solar activity in the same years, the scientists discovered that low solar activity generally corresponded to cold winters. Could this centuries-long link between the Sun and Earth’s climate have been a matter of chance? “There is less than a 1% probability that the result was obtained by chance,” asserts Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading in the U.K., the study’s lead author.
Solar scientists widely consider the link between the Sun and Earth’s climate incontrovertible. When bodies such the IPCC dismiss solar science’s contribution to understanding Earth’s climate out of hand, solar scientists no longer sit on their hands. Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute stated that the IPCC was “probably totally wrong” to dismiss the significance of the sun, which in 2009 would likely have the most spotless days in a century. As for claims from the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers who argue that periods of extreme heat or cold were regional in scope, not global, Svensmark cites the Medieval Warm Period, a prosperous period of very high solar activity around the year 1000: “It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown — a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.”
The Medieval Warm Period, many solar scientists believe, was warmer than today, and the Roman Warm Period, around the time of Christ, was warmer still. Compelling new evidence to support his view came just in March from the Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan and Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the authors for the first time document seasonal temperature variations in the North Atlantic over a 2,000-year period, from 360 BC to about 1660 AD. Their technique — involving measurements of oxygen and carbon isotopes captured in mollusk shells — confirmed that the Roman Period was the warmest in the past two millennia.
Among solar scientists, there are a great many theories about how the Sun influences climate. Some will especially point to sunspots, others to the Sun’s magnetic field, others still to the Sun’s influence on cosmic rays which, in turn, affect cloud cover. There is as yet no answer to how the Sun affects Earth’s climate. All that now seems sure is that the Sun does play an outsized role and that the Big Chill on freedom of expression that scientists once faced when discussing global warming is becoming a Big Thaw.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/21/its-the-sun-stupid/
-
On Being the Wrong SizePosted on May 23, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
This topic is a particular peeve of mine, so I hope I will be forgiven if I wax wroth.
There is a most marvelous piece of technology called the GRACE satellites, which stands for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is composed of two satellites flying in formation. Measuring the distance between the two satellites to the nearest micron (a hundredth of the width of a hair) allows us to calculate the weight of things on the earth very accurately.
One of the things that the GRACE satellites have allowed us to calculate is the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Cap. There is a new article about the Greenland results called Weighing Greenland.
So, what’s not to like about the article?
Well, the article opens by saying:
Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global warming.
Now, that sounds pretty scary, it’s losing a third of the volume of Lake Erie every year. Can’t have that.
But what does that volume, a third of Lake Erie, really mean? We could also say that it’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools, or 400 times the volume of Sydney Harbor, or about the same volume as the known world oil reserves. Or we could say the ice loss is 550 times the weight of all humans on the Earth, or the weight of 31,000 Great Pyramids … but we’re getting no closer to understanding what that ice loss means.
To understand what it means, there is only one thing to which we should compare the ice loss, and that is the ice volume of the Greenland Ice Cap itself. So how many cubic kilometres of ice are sitting up there on Greenland?
My favorite reference for these kinds of questions is the Physics Factbook, because rather than give just one number, they give a variety of answers from different authors. In this case I went to the page on Polar Ice Caps. It gives the following answers:
Spaulding & Markowitz, Heath Earth Science. Heath, 1994: 195. says less than 5.1 million cubic kilometres (often written as “km^3″).
“Greenland.” World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, 1999: 325 says 2.8 million km^3.
Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World. US Geological Survey (USGS) says 2.6 million km^3.
Schultz, Gwen. Ice Age Lost. 1974. 232, 75. also says 2.6 million km^3.
Denmark/Greenland. Greenland Tourism. Danish Tourist Board says less than 5.5 million km^3.
Which of these should we choose? Well, the two larger figures both say “less than”, so they are upper limits. The Physics Factbook says “From my research, I have found different values for the volume of the polar ice caps. … For Greenland, it is approximately 3,000,000 km^3.” Of course, we would have to say that there is an error in that figure, likely on the order of ± 0.4 million km^3 or so.
So now we have something to which we can compare our one-third of Lake Erie or 400 Sidney Harbors or 550 times the weight of the global population. And when we do so, we find that the annual loss is around 200 km^3 lost annually out of some 3,000,000 km^3 total. This means that Greenland is losing about 0.007% of its total mass every year … seven thousandths of one percent lost annually, be still, my beating heart …
And if that terrifying rate of loss continues unabated, of course, it will all be gone in a mere 15,000 years.
That’s my pet peeve, that numbers are being presented in the most frightening way possible. The loss of 200 km^3 of ice per year is not “some of the most powerful evidence of global warming”, that’s hyperbole. It is a trivial change in a huge block of ice.
And what about the errors in the measurements? We know that the error in the Greenland Ice Cap is on the order of 0.4 million km^3. How about the error in the GRACE measurements? This reference indicates that there is about a ± 10% error in the GRACE Greenland estimates. How does that affect our numbers?
Well, if we take the small estimate of ice cap volume, and the large estimate of loss, we get 220 km^3 lost annually / 2,600,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.008%, and a time to total loss of 12,000 years.
Going the other way, we get 180 km^3 lost annually / 3,400,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.005%, and a time to total loss of 19,000 years.
It is always important to include the errors in the calculation, to see if they make a significant difference in the result. In this case they happen to not make much difference, but each case is different.
That’s what angrifies my blood mightily, meaningless numbers with no errors presented for maximum shock value. Looking at the real measure, we find that Greenland is losing around 0.005% — 0.008% of its ice annually, and if that rate continues, since this is May 23rd, 2010, the Greenland Ice Cap will disappear entirely somewhere between the year 14010 and the year 21010 … on May 23rd …
So the next time you read something that breathlessly says …
“If this activity in northwest Greenland continues and really accelerates some of the major glaciers in the area — like the Humboldt Glacier and the Peterman Glacier — Greenland’s total ice loss could easily be increased by an additional 50 to 100 cubic kilometers (12 to 24 cubic miles) within a few years”
… you can say “Well, if it does increase by the larger estimate of 100 cubic km per year, and that’s a big if since the scientists are just guessing, that would increase the loss from 0.007% per year to around 0.010% per year, meaning that the Greenland Ice Cap would only last until May 23rd, 12010.”
Finally, the original article that got my blood boiling finishes as follows:
The good news for Luthcke is that a separate team using an entirely different method has come up with measurements of Greenland’s melting ice that, he says, are almost identical to his GRACE data. The bad news, of course, is that both sets of measurements make it all the more certain that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than anyone expected.
Oh, please, spare me. As the article points out, we’ve only been measuring Greenland ice using the GRACE satellites for six years now. How could anyone have “expected” anything? What, were they expecting a loss of 0.003% or something? And how is a Greenland ice loss of seven thousandths of one percent per year “bad news”? Grrrr …
I’ll stop here, as I can feel my blood pressure rising again. And as this is a family blog, I don’t want to revert to being the un-reformed cowboy I was in my youth, because if I did I’d start needlessly but imaginatively and loudly speculating on the ancestry, personal habits, and sexual malpractices of the author of said article … instead, I’m going to go drink a Corona beer and reflect on the strange vagaries of human beings, who always seem to want to read “bad news”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/23/on-being-the-wrong-size/
-
Climategate and the Scientific Elite
Climategate starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians.
The news that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who popularized the idea of a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism, has been struck off the register of general practitioners in the United Kingdom testifies to the fact that, in many scientific fields, objectivity still reigns. Britain’s General Medical Council found that Wakefield had used unethical and dishonest research methods and that when his conclusions became common knowledge, the result was that far more children were exposed to the risk of those diseases than would have been the case otherwise. Unfortunately, in other areas, some scientists have been getting away with blatant disregard for the scientific method.
The most prominent example, “Climategate,” highlights how dangerous the politicization of science can be. The public reaction to Climategate should motivate politicians to curb such abuses in the future. Yet it was politicians who facilitated this politicization of science in the first place.
The economic historians Terence Kealey (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research) and Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena) help us understand just how science progresses. Their central insight involves the recursive nature of the scientific process. In Mokyr’s terms, propositional knowledge (what politicians term “basic” science) can inform prescriptive knowledge (“applied” science). However, the reverse happens just as often.
This understanding contradicts the linear model of scientific research, which became prevalent in America in the 1940s and ’50s, following the model of the great scientist Vannevar Bush. Under this model, we must invest in propositional knowledge as a public good, because that’s where our prescriptive knowledge comes from. Yet even as Bush’s model was taking hold, President Eisenhower warned against it. In his farewell address, just after the famous remarks about the military-industrial complex, he said:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
What Ike warned about has now come to pass. The scientific elite, with the help of its allies in Congress, increasingly dictates public policy and thereby secures the continued flow of research funding. Time and again, scientists have told me how they have to tie their work to global warming in order to obtain funding, and time and again — bar a few brave souls, who are immediately tagged as “deniers” — they tell me it would be career suicide to speak out openly about this.
Moreover, by consciously reinforcing the link between politics and science, the scientific elite is diminishing the role of private innovation, where prescriptive knowledge informed by market demand drives propositional knowledge. Thus, they are driving the market out of the marketplace of ideas.
For that reason, we must challenge the linear model of science. One way to do this is to break the link between political patronage and scientific funding. For example, we could fund basic science by awarding prizes for excellent research results instead of grants before the event. With their patronage powers curtailed, politicians might become less interested in scientific funding, allowing private money to fill the void.
That’s the good news about Climategate. It starkly revealed to the public how many global-warming scientists speak and act like politicians. To those scientists, the message trumped the science. Few members of the public have accepted the findings of the inquiries exonerating the scientists; most dismiss them as whitewashes. This is to the good, for it reinforces awareness of the scientific elite President Eisenhower warned about.
If politicians realize that the public regards them as corrupting science rather than encouraging it, they might become less inclined to continue funding the scientific-political complex. Then scientists would be free to deal with the Andrew Wakefields among them as needed, rather than worry about their funding.
— Iain Murray is vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
http://article.nationalreview.com/434861/climategate-and-the-scientific-elite/iain-murray
-
The was an article in the june 2010 (Pixar on the cover) wired about how climate science needs better PR and how plain old facts just do not speak for themselves. The article is in this month's wired, which is not on their website yet. It is a scary story, because apparently the editor and staff bought the main point hook line and sinker. Reality has nothing to do with the facts, but more to do with an appeal to the heart....... and that is the title of the article: Appeal to the Heart.
sorry I can't quote everything but here are some key lines:
"Scientists feel the facts should speak for themselves. They are not wrong; they are just unrealistic" and "the messaging up to this point has been 'here are our findings. Read it and believe' The deniers are convincing people that science is propoganda"
Wired's website is about 6 months behind the newsstand editions, so the article is not online yet.
Basically they seem to be saying "global warrming is an issue if we can spin it hard enough and get enough people to agree, facts are secondary" it sounds like an openly talked about propaganda plan to me............
-
Rebel scientists force Royal Society to accept climate change scepticism
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.
Sir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.
He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.
Sir Alan, 72, an electrical engineer, is a member of the advisory council of the climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He said: “I think the Royal Society should be more neutral and welcome credible contributions from both sceptics and alarmists alike. There is a lot of science to be done before we can be certain about climate change and before we impose upon ourselves the huge economic burden of cutting emissions.”
He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.
“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”
Only a fraction of the society’s 1,300 Fellows were approached and a third of those declined to sign the petition.
The rebels are concerned by a document entitled Climate Change Controversies, published by the society in 2007. The document attempts to refute what it describes as the misleading arguments employed by sceptics.
The document, which the society has used to influence media coverage of climate change, concludes: “The science clearly points to the need for nations to take urgent steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, as much and as fast as possible, to reduce the more severe aspects of climate change.”
Lord Rees admitted that there were differing views among Fellows but said that the new guide would be “based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence”.
Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, urged the other signatories to come forward. “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it.”
He said that the petition would fuel public doubt about climate change and that it was important to know how many of the signatories had professional knowledge of the topic.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7139407.ece
-
The Idiot’s Guide to Why Renewable Energy is Not the Answer
In the salons of the coastal elites, it is a given wisdom that renewable energy sources are “the answer” - the answer to perceived climate change, the answer to our foreign oil dependency, the answer to how to feel good about yourself…the Answer.
In Washington, politicians can’t throw tax breaks at people and businesses fast enough, prodding them to install all manner of solar, wind, and geothermal devices.
Indeed, these energy sources are seductive. The wind blows, it’s free. Harnessing it, while not free, is certainly clean. Good stuff. The sun shines on us, why not use it? And so on.
The problem isn’t that these energy sources are bad, per se. They’re not. You’re probably thinking that I’m now going to tell you that the problem is economics. Yes, there’s truth to that argument; most renewables aren’t economic without subsidies, which is to say they aren’t economic. But some of them are close, and getting closer, so let’s put this aside. Let’s assume they are all inherently economic and can compete on an equal footing with traditional energy sources.
The problem is capacity. Renewables will not – cannot – ever be more than a fairly small fraction of our energy consumption because of fairly mundane reasons like land capacity. For a great perspective on this, I highly recommend William Tucker’s book, Terrestrial Energy.
Let’s go through these one by one.
Wind Power
O-klahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain…
Yes, it does, and T. Boone Pickens wants to build lots of wind turbines there to take advantage of America’s “wind corridor.” He sure sounds compelling in those ads, and wind power is certainly growing. Right now, there is about 30,000 MW of wind capacity in the U.S., up considerably from a few years ago. This is the equivalent of about 40 power plants. That’s nice, but it’s only about 1% of our electrical needs (and, obviously, a much lower percentage of our overall power needs).
Actually, 1% overstates things quite a bit. The real contribution of wind is much lower, because wind mills generate electricity only about 30% of the time. Wind just doesn’t sweep down the plain all the time. It also doesn’t always sweep when you want it to. For instance, peak electrical demand is in the summer, but this is when the wind doesn’t blow (much).
Why not store the energy then? You can’t, because the technology isn't there. This is one of the most important things to understand about our electrical grid; electricity must be produced when it is being consumed, and it is a balancing act. Produce too much, and you get electrical surges. Too little, and you get brown outs.
You can see why wind is highly inconvenient. You simply can’t control when you get it, and as a result, it would be impossible to run an entire grid on wind. In Denmark, they get about 20% of their power from wind, but they couldn’t do it without being heavily reliant on coal as the “stabilizer.” (The Danes have the highest electrical rates in Europe, but I know, I promised to assume economics away…)
With conventional energy sources such as coal, oil, and nuclear, the output can be controlled to match demand. I can hear what you’re thinking: so what’s wrong with simply using wind to augment the power supply? Nothing, except that it will never amount to much. This is where some very simple realities get in the way.
Wind turbines are becoming gigantic. The one above is the largest in the world and produces 6 MW of power (when the wind’s blowing). It would take 125 of these to approximate just one typical power plant. So, the question for all of us is, where you going to put these babies? They completely alter the visual environment, and they make noise. Oh, and they kill birds.
Ted Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr., committed environmentalists both, bitterly fought a plan to put a wind farm of the shore of Cape Cod. Their problem? They’d have to look at them.
Do you know where wind blows the hardest? Across the tops of mountain ranges. Are you prepared to look at turbines like these along the tops of mountains?
You can see the problem, and yet even if people came to terms with the aesthetics, you could put turbines everywhere and it still wouldn’t add up to much power. It would take over six hundred thousand turbines like the one above to supplant our current power plants, assuming the wind blew constantly). Since it doesn't, it would take over two million. Never going to happen.
Solar
Solar may be closer to the heart of the environmental movement than all others, but it, too, will never amount to a hill of beans. The story is similar to wind: solar just can’t do any heavy lifting.
At the equator on a sunny day, 950 watts of power shines down on a square meter. That’s about 9 light bulbs’ worth. There is no way, short of violating the laws of physics, to enhance that number. In the U.S., the number is more like 400 watts over the course of a sunny day. We’re down to 4 light bulbs. However, we cannot convert 100% of this energy into electricity. Current technology captures about 15%. Half a light bulb, more or less.
If we covered every roof top of every home in America with solar panels we could likely power the lighting needs of our homes, but only during the day when the sun is shining. During the night, when we actually need lights, panels are useless. As with wind, electrical power can't be stored at large scale.
The basic problem here is that solar power isn’t very, well, powerful. Sure, you can construct huge arrays like this…
…but they don’t accomplish very much. For instance, let’s say you went really big, and you created a solar array somewhere in the U.S. the size of five hundred football fields (roughly a square mile). How much power would you get? The answer is roughly 150 MW, and only during the day when the sun is out. A typical power plant produces about 750 MW. So supplanting one power plant would require five square miles of panels. This is not compelling.
Supplanting our entire electrical supply with solar would require turning the entire state of South Carolina into one large solar panel. Or...maybe we should stick them out in the desert. Seems logical. Senator Feinstein has proposed paneling over 500,000 acres of the Mojave Desert. But again, we run into mundane practical problems, even before considering things like the environmental impact of covering that much land. When solar panels collect dust and grime, they lose much of their effectiveness, so they must be cleaned frequently. Where, exactly, are we going to get the water needed for cleaning in the middle of the desert? And who's going to be out there wiping down 500,000 acres of panels?
Furthermore, the more distant a source of electricity is from where it's used, the more of it you lose during transmission, as much as 50% over 115 miles. Not a lot of folks living near the Mojave. Feinstein is nuts.
Like wind, solar can be a marginally useful way to augment our power needs, but it will never be a significant contributor.
Hydro
Hydro power is really another form of capturing solar power. The sun evaporates water and redeposits it in the form of rain. Some of this rain is at higher altitudes and flows in rivers to lower altitudes. Dam a river, let the water flow through turbines, and you have hydro power.
The Hoover Dam
Hydro was once a major power source in the U.S., but it’s now down to less than 3%. It’s clean, yes, but the problem is that most of the good sites have already been used, and it is unlikely that politics will allow for any new ones. Groups like the Sierra Club want to remove ones we already have, because they say spawning patterns for fish are interfered with.
There’s also the matter of space. The Hoover Dam created Lake Mead, which is 247 square miles. Can anyone imagine that such a project could happen today? Correct answer: no. Tolerance for any significant new dam project is probably around zero. Hydro power will only decline as a percentage of our electrical needs.
Ethanol
Whose bright idea was it (Jimmy Carter) to take one third of our nation’s corn crop to create fuel? I’m not pointing fingers (Jimmy Carter), but this was a bad, bad idea. For one, it has driven food prices higher since the price of corn flows through to all kinds of other foods (think things like fructose and cow feed). Higher food prices have actually led to riots in the third world (see: Mexican Tortilla Riots).
But, that aside, food just doesn’t store much energy, so you need a lot of it to get any results. Right now, the one third of our corn crop we are allocating to ethanol offsets less than 3% of our oil consumption. Tucker estimates that if you allocated every acre in the United States to ethanol production – assuming it was all arable – you’d offset about one-sixth of our oil needs.
Thank you for playing. Next.
Biomass
There's a big popular trend towards generating electricity (and home heating) by burning wood pellets. This is another innocuous idea, seemingly. Cut a tree, and another grows in its place. Environmentalists like burning trees because the released carbon is recaptured by the new trees that grow where the old ones were cut.
The problem, though, is the same as with corn: wood just doesn't store that much energy relative to its mass. To put it into perspective, one would have to cut and burn 56 million trees per year to match the output of one typical coal-fired plant. This is about 140,000 acres. If we replaced our entire power plant system with biomass, we would need to cut roughly 750 million acres of trees per year, or approximately one third of the land mass of the United States.
Once again, the simple math of it gets in the way of the best intentions.
Geothermal
Geothermal is mostly limited to places where magma comes close to the earth’s surface. In the U.S., this means California and Hawaii. California gets about 5% of its electricity from geothermal, which is great, but unless someone figures out how to tap much deeper magma sources, this is also a highly limited source of power. Oh, and it smells really bad.
_____________________
Sorry, I know all this is a big buzz kill for many of you. Believing in renewables is so comforting. It's also fool's gold.
Right now, the U.S. is getting about 6% of its overall energy needs from renewables. Given all the practical constraints I've outlined, getting this to even 10% would seem remarkable, which leaves us with...conventional energy sources, specifically oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. They will continue to do the heavy lifting, and no amount of fairy dust will change that.
Not coincidentally, all four of these energy sources are continuously under fire from the enormously powerful environmental lobby. But frankly, until the Sierra Club, Earth First, and others come up with some solutions of their own, rather than just things they oppose, they have no credibility, at least not with me.
A large part of the answer, it would seem, would be to scale up our nuclear capacity. It's great stuff, nuclear. A few grams of matter holds as much energy as hundreds of miles of forests, sunshine, or wind. It's clean, and there's now a fifty year operating history in the U.S. without a single fatality. France gets 80% of its power from nukes. We should be more like France. (Did I just say that?)
In the 1970s, the Three Mile Island incident and the film The China Syndrome happened almost simultaneously. The combination was enough to cement public opinion for a generation. For the left, the "no nukes" movement still has a warm and fuzzy resonance. Some, though, are slowly coming around, because nukes don't produce greenhouse gasses. President Obama has even made some positive noises about nuclear power, so maybe there's hope.
Perhaps we need a movie about renewables. We could call it "The Inconvenient Math."
http://thenakeddollar.blogspot.com/2010/06/idiots-guide-to-why-renewable-energy-is.html
-
Climate Alarmism Takes Off in a New Direction
By F. Swemson
NASA has just voiced its concern over the threat that our modern technological society is now facing from "solar storms."
Now it's true of course, that our society has become quite dependent on new technology, such as satellite communications and GPS mapping, that is vulnerable to the effects of major solar storms, but NASA seems to be a bit too worried about how big the threat really is. Fortunately for us, legitimate climate scientists believe the next solar "maximum," which is due in four to five years, is not expected to be anything unusual. In any event, while major solar storms could screw things up pretty well for a while, they're not potentially fatal to mankind, as the AGW alarmists claim that global warming is.
According to my friend Dr. Ed Berry of climatephysics.com, there's a good reason why NASA is making a big deal out of it. It's called "Grantsmanship." If they can convince Congress that this is a serious threat, which they're obviously best-positioned to research and plan for, then there's a chance that they can get Congress to increase their funding. There's a good deal of exaggeration here, of course, as the "super maximum solar flare" that they're talking about, while possible, is no more likely to occur within the next few years than a hundred-year flood.
But it is possible, of course. So it doesn't seem at all unreasonable for them to want more funding so that they can enhance their forecasting capabilities, which have already come a long way, thanks to our existing satellites.
There's another aspect to this story, however, that might be more interesting for us to consider right now, as it may help us to understand how the global warming hoax arose. While NASA is talking about the issue, they're doing so in a relatively calm and reasonable manner. We can see this from the title of their latest release on the subject:
NASA: "As the Sun Awakens, NASA Keeps a Wary Eye on Space Weather"
Within 48 hours, however, as the media began to report on the story, it quickly began to morph into another pending apocalypse:
Washington Post: "Do Solar Storms Threaten Life as We Know It?"
Gawker.com: "The Newest Threat to All Human Life on Earth: Solar Storms"
It seems that Fox News isn't quite as over-the-top.
Fox News: "Solar Storms Could Be Threat in 2013"
Why does the media do this?
The simple (historical) answer, of course, is that catastrophes sell newspapers. William Randolph Hearst may have given formal birth to "yellow journalism," but he wasn't its only practitioner. I wrote about this back in January in my article "159 Years of Climate Alarmism at The New York Times."
In the last part of the 19th century, newspapers like The Times were warning us of an imminent new ice age. By 1940, they were worried about excessive warming; however, after the next 35 years of cooling, they were quick to transition to hysteria over another approaching ice age. By the late 1970s, after the earth began warming again, people like Maurice Strong, along with some other blossoming environmental extremists, politicians, and U.N. officials, began to see the huge potential for power and wealth that was built into the issue. This, along with the added fantasy of AGW, brought us to the brink of Cap & Trade and the fraudulent EPA classification of CO2 as a pollutant.
Of course, the warming stopped in 2002, and we've been cooling steadily since then. Now, as the AGW house of cards begins to crumble, we're already hearing rumblings about another ice age. It could happen, and if it does, we should be worried this time, because while warming was never any kind of threat at all, extreme cooling is. People starve when crops don't grow very well.
The obvious question is: "If they've been wrong each and every time in the past, why on earth would anyone still be listening to them today?"
H.L. Mencken answered it best when he said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
The public has a short memory, to be sure, but rather than blaming the politicians alone for the current AGW hoax, we should be aware of the media's complicity in this sordid affair. They're still not reporting the news honestly. Like Hearst, they're still making it up as they go. Just to sell "newspapers."
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/climate_alarmism_takes_off_in.html at June 09, 2010 - 07:40:25 AM CDT
-
I remember a couple of shows on the discover channel that came out a couple years before this global warming became an issue. The first show was about a correlation between greenland core samples going back several hundred thousand years showing a cooling and warming cycle. There was another scientist taking core sample from the sea bed, and found corresponding changes in Plankton/Diatoms that were lagging a bit but matched up with the greenland samples. These temperature swing matched up with Ice ages, the Diatom record also matched up. Thes swings were taking place long before humanity was any where near abundant enough to have any input. The last 15 minutes of the show explored "possibilities" as to the cause ranging from a "solar low" to shutdown of the "oceanic conveyor" the most appaerent part of that was the gulf stream.
A couple weeks later there was a show about the Oceanic Conveyor, talking about the Great Current in the oceans which slowly flowed water up and down from the arctic ocean going thru the Atlantic, Pacific and indian oceans around Africa. The Antarctic current was basically a circular current that isolated antarctic waters except at the 2 mixxing ppoints of the Mageallan and Good Hope straits........ During the ice ages this conveyor apparently was shutdown and that was caused by a period of warming that melted enough Ice to lower salinity in the oceans. Salinity is what caused the cold arctic waters to "goo deep" and make room for warm surface waters to flow in. The Gulf Current is what keeps England from freezing up, and keeps the arctic ice melted back to maneagable levels. The show then went on with speculation that all the Ice ages may have been preceeded by an extended/excessive heating period sufficient to shutdown the heat conveyor in the oceans.........
Both shows talked about how on going research was being undertaken to figure out these mechanisms. They were both fascinating and a bit alarming, in that they showed mechanisms working on the climate we had NO apparent control over, and didn't even have any real understanding about either. Both shows mentioned greenhouse gasses, but also stated that these had an input, but that it was unquantifiable without further study.
2 Years later an Inconvienient Truth came out and the hysteria statrted. Ever since then it has been politics about Deniers and Advocates and all the other labels flying around. I have never heard or seen any of the Scientists mentioned in those shows in any of the debate, and they were developing hard, long term, observed data and doing so with and attitude of what are the numbers? and what do those tell us?.
The current warming/climate change hysteria ia all about what computer model is legitimate, and what a government need to do about the threat of global warming. If a computer model cannot be agrered upon- it is not surprising they all use short term data, and they are all made with the concept of: Put in the numbers and see if they match our theory, or they do not, what is wrong with the observed numbers?
Meantime there is not a peep from the scientists that were doing the generation of the numbers by going out and freezing/ getting seasick/ or otherwise doing real observational science. Why? Is their funding pulled because their data was inconvienient to the political agenda? (there is evidence that opposing opinion and peer review were being actively suppressed in the "email outing") or has their work become a sideline now that the political balls are all rolling the way the various power broking groups want them too?
The charts on global warming in Wikipedia I remember from the greenland ice core show. and some of the other information in the wikipedia is derived from the seacore show. The larger part of the wikipedia is dedicated to the "Hockey stick" though, which we now know is due to doctored data. I await further news from the field scientists, not the lobby/computer room scientists, but the MSM seems to be disinclined to meet their duty and mandate in that regard..........
Sorry about the rant, but that sums up about 15 years of keeping a casual eye on this debate. A lot of recent talk seems to indicate it is over, but any honest thinker can see that it is still on going.
-
That point about ocean currents is very interesting. May I suggest that this subject is worthy of further attention from our resident point men for this issue?
-
Not exactly ocean current specific, but a new way of looking at the planet's energy (warming/cooling) budget:
A New And Effective Climate Model
Posted on April 6, 2010 by Anthony Watts
The problem with existing climate models:
Guest post by Stephen Wilde
From ETH, Zurich - Climate model (Ruddiman, 2001)
Even those who aver that man’s activity affects climate on a global scale rather than just locally or regionally appear to accept that the existing climate models are incomplete. It is a given that the existing models do not fully incorporate data or mechanisms involving cloudiness or global albedo (reflectivity) variations or variations in the speed of the hydrological cycle and that the variability in the temperatures of the ocean surfaces and the overall ocean energy content are barely understood and wholly inadequately quantified in the infant attempts at coupled ocean/atmosphere models. Furthermore the effect of variability in solar activity on climate is barely understood and similarly unquantified.
As they stand at present the models assume a generally static global energy budget with relatively little internal system variability so that measurable changes in the various input and output components can only occur from external forcing agents such as changes in the CO2 content of the air caused by human emissions or perhaps temporary after effects from volcanic eruptions, meteorite strikes or significant changes in solar power output.
If such simple models are to have any practical utility it is necessary to demonstrate that some predictive skill is a demonstrable outcome of the models. Unfortunately it is apparent that there is no predictive skill whatever despite huge advances in processing power and the application of millions or even billions of man hours from reputable and experienced scientists over many decades.
As I will show later on virtually all climate variability is a result of internal system variability and additionally the system not only sets up a large amount of variability internally but also provides mechanisms to limit and then reduce that internal variability. It must be so or we would not still have liquid oceans. The current models neither recognise the presence of that internal system variability nor the processes that ultimately stabilise it.
The general approach is currently to describe the climate system from ‘the bottom up’ by accumulating vast amounts of data, observing how the data has changed over time, attributing a weighting to each piece or class of data and extrapolating forward. When the real world outturn then differs from what was expected then adjustments are made to bring the models back into line with reality. This method is known as ‘hindcasting’.
Although that approach has been used for decades no predictive skill has ever emerged. Every time the models have been adjusted using guesswork (or informed judgment as some would say) to bring them back into line with ongoing real world observations a new divergence between model expectations and real world events has begun to develop.
It is now some years since the weighting attached to the influence of CO2 was adjusted to remove a developing discrepancy between the real world warming that was occurring at the time and which had not been fully accounted for in the then climate models. Since that time a new divergence began and is now becoming embarrassingly large for those who made that adjustment. At the very least the weighting given to the effect of more CO2 in the air was excessive.
The problem is directly analogous to a financial accounting system that balances but only because it contains multiple compensating errors. The fact that it balances is a mere mirage. The accounts are still incorrect and woe betide anyone who relies upon them for the purpose of making useful commercial decisions.
Correcting multiple compensating errors either in a climate model or in a financial accounting system cannot be done by guesswork because there is no way of knowing whether the guess is reducing or compounding the underlying errors that remain despite the apparent balancing of the financial (or in the case of the climate the global energy) budget.
The system being used by the entire climatological establishment is fundamentally flawed and must not be relied upon as a basis for policy decisions of any kind.
A better approach:
We know a lot about the basic laws of physics as they affect our day to day existence and we have increasingly detailed data about past and present climate behaviour.
We need a New Climate Model (from now on referred to as NCM) that is created from ‘the top down’ by looking at the climate phenomena that actually occur and using deductive reasoning to decide what mechanisms would be required for those phenomena to occur without offending the basic laws of physics.
We have to start with the broad concepts first and use the detailed data as a guide only. If a broad concept matches the reality then the detailed data will fall into place even if the broad concept needs to be refined in the process. If the broad concept does not match the reality then it must be abandoned but by adopting this process we always start with a broad concept that obviously does match the reality so by adopting a step by step process of observation, logic, elimination and refinement a serviceable NCM with some predictive skill should emerge and the more detailed the model that is built up the more predictive skill will be acquired.
That is exactly what I have been doing step by step in my articles here:
Articles by Stephen Wilde
for some two years now and I believe that I have met with a degree of success because many climate phenomena that I had not initially considered in detail seem to be falling into line with the NCM that I have been constructing.
In the process I have found it necessary to propound various novel propositions that have confused and irritated warming proponents and sceptics alike but that is inevitable if one just follows the logic without a preconceived agenda which I hope is what I have done.
I will now go on to describe the NCM as simply as I can in verbal terms, then I will elaborate on some of the novel propositions (my apologies if any of them have already been propounded elsewhere by others but I think I would still be the first to pull them all together into a plausible NCM) and I will include a discussion of some aspects of the NCM which I find encouraging.
Preliminary points:
Firstly we must abandon the idea that variations in total solar output have a significant effect over periods of time relevant to human existence. At this point I should mention the ‘faint sun paradox’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox
Despite a substantial increase in the power of the sun over billions of years the temperature of the Earth has remained remarkably stable. My proposition is that the reason for that is the existence of water in liquid form in the oceans combined with a relatively stable total atmospheric density. If the power input from the sun changes then the effect is simply to speed up or slow down the hydrological cycle.
An appropriate analogy is a pan of boiling water. However much the power input increases the boiling point remains at 100C. The speed of boiling however does change in response to the level of power input. The boiling point only changes if the density of the air above and thus the pressure on the water surface changes. In the case of the Earth’s atmosphere a change in solar input is met with a change in evaporation rates and thus the speed of the whole hydrological cycle keeping the overall temperature stable despite a change in solar power input.
A change in the speed of the entire hydrological cycle does have a climate effect but as we shall see on timescales relevant to human existence it is too small to measure in the face of internal system variability from other causes.
Unless more CO2 could increase total atmospheric density it could not have a significant effect on global tropospheric temperature. Instead the speed of the hydrological cycle changes to a minuscule and unmeasurable extent in order to maintain sea surface and surface air temperature equilibrium. As I have explained previously a change limited to the air alone short of an increase in total atmospheric density and pressure is incapable of altering that underlying equilibrium.
2. Secondly we must realise that the absolute temperature of the Earth as a whole is largely irrelevant to what we perceive as climate. In any event those changes in the temperature of the Earth as a whole are tiny as a result of the rapid modulating effect of changes in the speed of the hydrological cycle and the speed of the flow of radiated energy to space that always seeks to match the energy value of the whole spectrum of energy coming in from the sun.
The climate in the troposphere is a reflection of the current distribution of energy within the Earth system as a whole and internally the system is far more complex than any current models acknowledge.
That distribution of energy can be uneven horizontally and vertically throughout the ocean depths, the troposphere and the upper atmosphere and furthermore the distribution changes over time.
We see ocean energy content increase or decrease as tropospheric energy content decreases or increases. We see the stratosphere warm as the troposphere cools and cool as the troposphere warms. We see the upper levels of the atmosphere warm as the stratosphere cools and vice versa. We see the polar surface regions warm as the mid latitudes cool or the tropics warm as the poles cool and so on and so forth in infinite permutations of timing and scale.
As I have said elsewhere:
“It is becoming increasingly obvious that the rate of energy transfer varies all the time between ocean and air, air and space and between different layers in the oceans and air. The troposphere can best be regarded as a sandwich filling between the oceans below and the stratosphere above. The temperature of the troposphere is constantly being affected by variations in the rate of energy flow from the oceans driven by internal ocean variability, possibly caused by temperature fluctuations along the horizontal route of the thermohaline circulation and by variations in energy flow from the sun that affect the size of the atmosphere and the rate of energy loss to space.
The observed climate is just the equilibrium response to such variations with the positions of the air circulation systems and the speed of the hydrological cycle always adjusting to bring energy differentials above and below the troposphere back towards equilibrium (Wilde’s Law ?).
Additionally my propositions provide the physical mechanisms accounting for the mathematics of Dr. F. Miskolczi..”
http://www.examiner.com/x-7715-Portland-Civil-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d12-Hungarian-Physicist-Dr-Ferenc-Miskolczi-proves-CO2-emissions-irrelevant-in-Earths-Climate
He appears to have demonstrated mathematically that if greenhouse gases in the air other than water vapour increase then the amount of water vapour declines so as to maintain an optimum optical depth for the atmosphere which modulates the energy flow to maintain sea surface and surface air temperature equilibrium. In other words the hydrological cycle speeds up or slows down just as I have always proposed.
3. In my articles to date I have been unwilling to claim anything as grand as the creation of a new model of climate because until now I was unable to propose any solar mechanism that could result directly in global albedo changes without some other forcing agent or that could account for a direct solar cause of discontinuities in the temperature profile along the horizontal line of the oceanic thermohaline circulation.
I have now realised that the global albedo changes necessary and the changes in solar energy input to the oceans can be explained by the latitudinal shifts (beyond normal seasonal variation) of all the air circulation systems and in particular the net latitudinal positions of the three main cloud bands namely the two generated by the mid latitude jet streams plus the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).
The secret lies in the declining angle of incidence of solar energy input from equator to poles.
It is apparent that the same size and density of cloud mass moved, say, 1000 miles nearer to the equator will have the following effects:
It will receive more intense irradiation from the sun and so will reflect more energy to space.
It will reduce the amount of energy reaching the surface compared to what it would have let in if situated more poleward.
In the northern hemisphere due to the current land/sea distribution the more equatorward the cloud moves the more ocean surface it will cover thus reducing total solar input to the oceans and reducing the rate of accretion to ocean energy content
It will produce cooling rains over a larger area of ocean surface.
As a rule the ITCZ is usually situated north of the equator because most ocean is in the southern hemisphere and it is ocean temperatures that dictate it’s position by governing the rate of energy transfer from oceans to air. Thus if the two mid latitude jets move equatorward at the same time as the ITCZ moves closer to the equator the combined effect on global albedo and the amount of solar energy able to penetrate the oceans will be substantial and would dwarf the other proposed effects on albedo from changes in cosmic ray intensity generating changes in cloud totals as per Svensmark and from suggested changes caused in upper cloud quantities by changes in atmospheric chemistry involving ozone which various other climate sceptics propose.
Thus the following NCM will incorporate my above described positional cause of changes in albedo and rates of energy input to the oceans rather than any of the other proposals. That then leads to a rather neat solution to the other theories’ problems with the timing of the various cycles as becomes clear below.
4. I have previously described why the solar effect on climate is not as generally thought but for convenience I will summarise the issue here because it will help readers to follow the logic of the NCM.Variations in total solar power output on timescales relevant to human existence are tiny and are generally countered by a miniscule change in the speed of the hydrological cycle as described above.
However according to our satellites variations in the turbulence of the solar energy output from sunspots and solar flares appear to have significant effects.
During periods of an active solar surface our atmosphere expands and during periods of inactive sun it contracts.
When the atmosphere expands it does so in three dimensions around the entire circumference of the planet but the number of molecules in the atmosphere remains the same with the result that there is an average reduced density per unit of volume with more space between the molecules. Consequently the atmosphere presents a reduced resistance to outgoing longwave energy photons that experience a reduced frequency of being obstructed by molecules in the atmosphere.
Additionally a turbulent solar energy flow disturbs the boundaries of the layers in the upper atmosphere thus increasing their surface areas allowing more energy to be transferred from layer to layer just as wind on water causes waves, an increased sea surface area and faster evaporation.
The changes in the rate of outgoing energy flow caused by changes in solar surface turbulence may be small but they appear to be enough to affect the air circulation systems and thereby influence the overall global energy budget disproportionately to the tiny variations in solar power intensity.
Thus when the sun is more active far from warming the planet the sun is facilitating an increased rate of cooling of the planet. That is why the stratosphere cooled during the late 20th Century period of a highly active sun although the higher levels of the atmosphere warmed. The higher levels were warmed by direct solar impacts but the stratosphere cooled because energy was going up faster than it was being received from the troposphere below.
The opposite occurs for a period of inactive sun.
-
Some do say that the expansion and contraction of the atmosphere makes no difference to the speed of the outward flow of longwave energy because that outgoing energy still has to negotiate the same mass but that makes no sense to me if that mass is more widely distributed over a three dimensional rather than two dimensional space. If one has a fine fabric container holding a body of liquid the speed at which the liquid escapes will increase if the fabric is stretched to a larger size because the space between the fibres will increase.
Furthermore all that the NCM requires is for the stratosphere alone to lose or gain energy faster or slower so as to influence the tropospheric polar air pressure cells. The energy does not need to actually escape to space to have the required effect. It could just as well simply take a little longer or a little less long to traverse the expanded or contracted upper atmospheric layers.
The New Climate Model (NCM)
Solar surface turbulence increases causing an expansion of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Resistance to outgoing longwave radiation reduces, energy is lost to space faster.
The stratosphere cools. Possibly also the number of chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere increases due to the increased solar effects with faster destruction of ozone.
The tropopause rises.
There is less resistance to energy flowing up from the troposphere so the polar high pressure systems shrink and weaken accompanied by increasingly positive Arctic and Antarctic Oscillations.
The air circulation systems in both hemispheres move poleward and the ITCZ moves further north of the equator as the speed of the hydrological cycle increases due to the cooler stratosphere increasing the temperature differential between stratosphere and surface.
The main cloud bands move more poleward to regions where solar insolation is less intense so total global albedo decreases.
More solar energy reaches the surface and in particular the oceans as more ocean surfaces north of the equator are exposed to the sun by the movement of the clouds to cover more continental regions.
Less rain falls on ocean surfaces allowing them to warm more.
Ocean energy input increases but not all is returned to the air. A portion enters the thermohaline circulation to embark on a journey of 1000 to 1500 years. A pulse of slightly warmer water has entered the ocean circulation.
Solar surface turbulence passes its peak and the Earth’s atmosphere starts to contract.
Resistance to outgoing longwave radiation increases, energy is lost to space more slowly.
The stratosphere warms. Ozone levels start to recover.
The tropopause falls
There is increased resistance to energy flowing up from the troposphere so the polar high pressure systems expand and intensify producing increasingly negative Arctic and Antarctic Oscillations.
The air circulation systems in both hemispheres move back equatorward and the ITCZ moves nearer the equator as the speed of the hydrological cycle decreases due to the warming stratosphere reducing the temperature differential between stratosphere and surface.
The main cloud bands move more equatorward to regions where solar insolation is more intense so total global albedo increases once more.
Less solar energy reaches the surface and in particular the oceans as less ocean surfaces north of the equator are exposed to the sun by the movement of the clouds to cover more oceanic regions.
More rain falls on ocean surfaces further cooling them.
Ocean energy input decreases and the amount of energy entering the thermohaline circulation declines sending a pulse of slightly cooler water on that 1000 to 1500 year journey.
After 1000 to 1500 years those variations in energy flowing through the thermohaline circulation return to the surface by influencing the size and intensity of the ocean surface temperature oscillations that have now been noted around the world in all the main ocean basins and in particular the Pacific and the Atlantic. It is likely that the current powerful run of positive Pacific Decadal Oscillations is the pulse of warmth from the Mediaeval Warm Period returning to the surface with the consequent inevitable increase in atmospheric CO2 as that warmer water fails to take up as much CO2 by absorption. Cooler water absorbs more CO2, warmer water absorbs less CO2. We have the arrival of the cool pulse from the Little Ice Age to look forward to and the scale of its effect will depend upon the level of solar surface activity at the time. A quiet sun would be helpful otherwise the rate of tropospheric cooling as an active sun throws energy into space at the same time as the oceans deny energy to the air will be fearful indeed. Fortunately the level of solar activity does seem to have begun a decline from recent peaks.
The length of the thermohaline circulation is not synchronous with the length of the variations in solar surface turbulence so it is very much a lottery as to whether a returning warm or cool pulse will encounter an active or inactive sun.
A returning warm pulse will try to expand the tropical air masses as more energy is released and will try to push the air circulation systems poleward against whatever resistance is being supplied at the time by the then level of solar surface turbulence. A returning cool pulse will present less opposition to solar effects.
Climate is simply a product of the current balance in the troposphere between the solar and oceanic effects on the positions and intensities of all the global air circulation systems
The timing of the solar cycles and ocean cycles will drift relative to one another due to their asynchronicity so there will be periods when solar and ocean cycles supplement one another in transferring energy out to space and other periods when they will offset one another.
26) During the current interglacial the solar and oceanic cycles are broadly offsetting one another to reduce overall climate variability but during glacial epochs they broadly supplement one another to produce much larger climate swings. The active sun during the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Modern Warm Period and the quiet sun during the Little Ice Age reduced the size of the climate swings that would otherwise have occurred. During the former two periods the extra energy from a warm ocean pulse was ejected quickly to space by an active sun to reduce tropospheric heating. During the latter period the effect on tropospheric temperatures of reduced energy from a cool ocean pulse was mitigated by slower ejection of energy to space from a less active sun.
Discussion points:
Falsification:
Every serious hypothesis must be capable of being proved false. In the case of this NCM my narrative is replete with opportunities for falsification if the future real world observations diverge from the pattern of cause and effect that I have set out.
However that narrative is based on what we have actually observed over a period of 1000 years with the gaps filled in by deduction informed by known laws of physics.
At the moment I am not aware of any observed climate phenomena that would effect falsification. If there be any that suggest such a thing then I suspect that they will call for refinement of the NCM rather than abandonment.
For true falsification we would need to observe events such as the mid latitude jets moving poleward during a cooling oceanic phase and a period of quiet sun or the ITCZ moving northward whilst the two jets moved equatorward or the stratosphere, troposphere and upper atmosphere all warming or cooling in tandem or perhaps an unusually powerful Arctic Oscillation throughout a period of high solar turbulence and a warming ocean phase.
They say nothing is impossible so we will have to wait and see.
Predictive skill:
To be taken seriously the NCM must be seen to show more predictive skill than the current computer based models.
In theory that shouldn’t be difficult because their level of success is currently zero.
From a reading of my narrative it is readily apparent that if the NCM matches reality then lots of predictions can be made. They may not be precise in terms of scale or timing but they are nevertheless useful in identifying where we are in the overall scheme of things and the most likely direction of future trend.
For example if the mid latitude jets stay where they now are then a developing cooling trend can be expected.
If the jets move poleward for any length of time then a warming trend may be returning.
If the solar surface becomes more active then we should see a reduction in the intensity of the Arctic Oscillation.
If the current El Nino fades to a La Nina then the northern winter snows should not be as intense next winter but it will nevertheless be another cold though drier northern hemisphere winter as the La Nina denies energy to the air.
The past winter is a prime example of what the NCM suggests for a northern winter with an El Nino during a period of quiet sun. The warmth from the oceans pumps energy upwards but the quiet sun prevents the poleward movement of the jets. The result is warming of the tropics and of the highest latitudes (but the latter stay below the freezing point of water) and a flow of cold into the mid latitudes and more precipitation in the form of snow at lower latitudes than normal.
So I suggest that a degree of predictive skill is already apparent for my NCM.
Likely 21st Century climate trend:
There are 3 issues to be resolved for a judgement on this question.
i) We need to know whether the Modern Warm Period has peaked or not. It seems that the recent peak late 20th Century has passed but at a level of temperature lower than seen during the Mediaeval Warm Period. Greenland is not yet as habitable as when the Vikings first colonised it. Furthermore it is not yet 1000 years since the peak of the Mediaeval Warm Period which lasted from about 950 to 1250 AD
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/medieval-warm-period-rediscovered
so I suspect that the Mediaeval warmth now emanating from the oceans may well warm the troposphere a little more during future years of warm oceanic oscillations. I would also expect the CO2 levels to continue drifting up until a while after the Mediaeval Warm Period water surface warming peak has begun it’s decline. That may still be some time away, perhaps a century or two.
ii) We need to know where we are in the solar cycles. The highest peak of solar activity in recorded history occurred during the late 20th Century but we don’t really know how active the sun became during the Mediaeval Warm Period. There are calculations from isotope proxies but the accuracy of proxies is in the doghouse since Climategate and the hockey stick farrago. However the current solar quiescence suggests that the peak of recent solar activity is now over.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
iii) Then we need to know where we stand in relation to the other shorter term cycles of sun and oceans.
Each varies on at least two other timescales. The level of solar activity varies during each cycle and over a run of cycles. The rate of energy release from the oceans varies from each El Nino to the following La Nina and back again over several years and the entire Pacific Decadal Oscillation alters the rate of energy release to the air every 25 to 30 years or so.
All those cycles vary in timing and intensity and interact with each other and are then superimposed on the longer term cycling that forms the basis of this article.
Then we have the chaotic variability of weather superimposed on the whole caboodle.
We simply do not have the data to resolve all those issues so all I can do is hazard a guess based on my personal judgement. On that basis I think we will see cooling for a couple of decades due to the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which has just begun then at least one more 20 to 30 year phase of natural warming before we start the true decline as the cooler thermohaline waters from the Little Ice Age come back to the surface.
If we get a peak of active sun at the same time as the worst of the cooling from the Little Ice Age comes through the oceanic system then that may be the start of a more rapid ending of the current interglacial but that is 500 years hence by which time we will have solved our energy problems or will have destroyed our civilisation.
Other climate theories:
Following the implosion of the CO2 based theory there are lots of other good ideas going around and much effort being expended by many individuals on different aspects of the climate system.
All I would suggest at the moment is that there is room in my NCM for any of those theories that demonstrate a specific climate response from sources other than sun and oceans.
All I contend is that sun and oceans together with the variable speed of the hydrological cycle assisted by the latitudinal movements of the air circulation systems and the vertical movement of the tropopause overwhelmingly provide the background trend and combine to prevent changes in the air alone changing the Earth’s equilibrium temperature.
For example:
Orbital changes feed into the insolation and albedo effects caused by moveable cloud masses.
Asteroid strikes and volcanoes feed into the atmospheric density issue.
Changing length of day and external gravitational forces feed into the speed of the thermohaline circulation.
Geothermal energy feeds into temperatures along the horizontal path of the thermohaline circulation.
Cosmic ray variations and ozone chemistry feed into the albedo changes.
The NCM can account for all past climate variability, can give general guidance as to future trends and can accommodate all manner of supplementary climate theories provided their real world influence can be demonstrated.
I humbly submit that all this is an improvement on existing modelling techniques and deserves fuller and more detailed consideration and investigation.
Novel propositions:
I think it helpful to set out here some of the novel propositions that I have had to formulate in order to obtain a climate description that complies both with observations and with basic laws of physics. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. Other new propositions may be apparent from the content and/or context of my various articles
i) Earth’s temperature is determined primarily by the oceans and not by the air (The Hot Water Bottle Effect). The contribution of the Greenhouse effect is miniscule.
ii) Changes in the air alone cannot affect the global equilibrium temperature because of oceanic dominance that always seeks to maintain sea surface and surface air equilibrium whatever the air tries to do. Warm air cannot significantly affect the oceans due to the huge difference in thermal capacities and by the effect of evaporation which removes unwanted energy to latent form as necessary to maintain the said equilibrium.
iii) Counterintuitively an active sun means cooling not warming and vice versa.
iv) The net global oceanic rate of energy release to the air is what matters with regard to the oceanic effect on the latitudinal positions of the air circulation systems and the associated cloud bands. All the oceanic oscillations affecting the rates of energy release to the air operate on different timescales and different magnitudes as energy progresses through the system via surface currents (not the thermohaline circulation which is entirely separate).
v) More CO2 ought theoretically induce faster cooling of the oceans by increasing evaporation rates. Extra CO2 molecules simply send more infra red radiation back down to the surface but infra red cannot penetrate deeper than the region of ocean surface involved in evaporation and since evaporation has a net cooling effect due to the removal of energy as latent heat the net effect should be increased cooling and not warming of the oceans.
vi) The latitudinal position of the air circulation systems at any given moment indicates the current tropospheric temperature trend whether warming or cooling and their movement reveals any change in trend
vii) All the various climate phenomena in the troposphere serve to balance energy budget changes caused by atmospheric effects from solar turbulence changes on the air above which affect the rate of energy loss to space or from variable rates of energy release from the oceans below.
viii) The speed of the hydrological cycle globally is the main thermostat in the troposphere. Changes in its speed are achieved by latitudinal shifts in the air circulation systems and by changes in the height of the tropopause.
ix) The difference between ice ages and interglacials is a matter of the timing of solar and oceanic cycles. Interglacials only occur when the solar and oceanic cycles are offsetting one another to a sufficient degree to minimise the scale of climate variability thereby preventing winter snowfall on the northern continents from being sufficient to last through the following summer.
x) Landmass distribution dictates the relative lengths of glacials and interglacials. The predominance of landmasses in the northern hemisphere causes glaciations to predominate over interglacials by about 9 to 1 with a full cycle every 100, 000 years helped along by the orbital changes of the Milankovitch cycles that affect the pattern of insolation on those shifting cloud masses.
xi) Distribution of energy within the entire system is more significant for climate (which is limited to the troposphere) than the actual temperature of the entire Earth. The latter varies hardly at all.
xii) All regional climate changes are a result of movement in relation to the locally dominant air circulation systems which move cyclically poleward and equatorward.
xiii) Albedo changes are primarily a consequence of latitudinal movement of the clouds beyond normal seasonal variability.
ix) The faint sun paradox is explained by the effectiveness of changes in the speed of the hydrological cycle. Only if the oceans freeze across their entire surfaces thereby causing the hydrological cycle to cease or if the sun puts in energy faster than it can be pumped upward by the hydrological cycle will the basic temperature equilibrium derived from the properties of water and the density and pressure of the atmosphere fail to be maintained.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/06/a-new-and-effective-climate-model/
-
2nd post:
Wharton school blasts a hole in AGW
Clarice Feldman
The internet is buzzing with this report from Jason Scott Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania Law School for the ILE - Institute for Law and Economics a Joint Research Center of the Law School with the Wharton School of economics.
The report is critical of the existing climate change "studies". It's a long (110 page report) which you may freely download (PDF required). It's written clearly and its conclusions seem sound, most especially this one:
As things now stand, the advocates representing the establishment climate science story broadcast (usually with color diagrams) the predictions of climate models as if they were the results of experiments - actual evidence. Alongside these multi-colored multi-century model-simulated time series come stories, anecdotes, and photos - such as the iconic stranded polar bear - dramatically illustrating climate change today. On this rhetorical strategy, the models are to be taken on faith, and the stories and photos as evidence of the models' truth. Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models' predictions against solid observational data.
Clarice Feldman
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/06/wharton_school_blasts_a_hole_i.html at June 10, 2010 - 11:48:34 AM CDT
URL for the Wharton report:
http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf
And the piece's abstract:
GLOBAL WARMING ADVOCACY SCIENCE: A CROSS EXAMINATION
By Jason Scott Johnston* Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor and Director, Program on Law, Environment and Economy University of Pennsylvania Law School
First Draft. September, 2008 This Revision. May, 2010
Abstract
Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from potentially very high temperature increases.
This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.
Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against which existing climate models can be tested.
* I am grateful to Cary Coglianese for extensive conversations and comments on an early draft, and to the participants in the September, 2008 Penn Law Faculty Retreat for very helpful discussion about this project. Especially helpful comments from David Henderson, Julia Mahoney, Ross McKitrick, Richard Lindzen, and Roger Pielke, Sr. have allowed me to correct errors in earlier drafts, but it is important to stress that no one except myself has any responsibility for the views expressed herein.
-
Crafty,
Here's a link that speaks directly to the ocean convection questions you asked.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/06/the-deep-oceans-drive-the-atmosphere/
-
Ocean energy input increases but not all is returned to the air. A portion enters the thermohaline circulation to embark on a journey of 1000 to 1500 years. A pulse of slightly warmer water has entered the ocean circulation.
I remember that! Scientific for the conveyor I was talking about.
-
Making Hay
The Supreme Court is set to weigh in on genetically modified crops.
This month, the Supreme Court will rule on its first-ever case involving genetically modified (GM) crops. It also prepares to welcome a new member who, as solicitor general, intervened on behalf of the controversial technology, angering many liberals.
The case revolves around alfalfa hay — a nutritious, easily digestible livestock feed that at $8 billion a year is the country’s fourth-most-valuable crop — and specifically, GM alfalfa seeds produced by the company Monsanto. These seeds, as part of the company’s Roundup Ready line, are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, an herbicide that is commercially known as Roundup. When farmers use Roundup instead of other chemicals to kill weeds, they actually cut down on overall chemical use.
After an exhaustive review, the USDA gave Roundup Ready Alfalfa the green light in 2005. But the Center for Food Safety, a group opposed to agricultural biotechnology, contended that the Department of Agriculture hadn’t adequately evaluated the potential environmental consequences. In 2007, in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, a federal court agreed, prohibiting Monsanto from selling Roundup Ready Alfalfa pending another assessment.
A draft of that second evaluation, released last December, echoed the original findings. Solicitor General Elena Kagan filed a brief on the biotechnology company’s behalf, even though the government is not a defendant in the appeal.
The legal saga is unfolding on the heels of a controversial report by the National Research Council, the government’s official science advisers on agricultural genetics. In April, the scientists raised concerns about the possible emergence of so-called super weeds, but overall they strongly endorsed GM technology. The scientists detailed what they called its “long and impressive list of benefits,” including better weed control in conservation tillage and reduced erosion. With GM crops, farmers spend less on chemicals and avoid having to use carbon-belching tilling machines. The National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy estimates that GM corn seed reduces herbicide use by over 39 million pounds annually and saves farmers $250 million each year in weed-management costs.
The report encouraged governments to apply genetic engineering to a wider range of crops to help address a savage, persistent worldwide hunger crisis. It’s estimated that 12 million farmers are growing 282 million acres of GM crops — with increasing acreage in resource-poor developing countries. The authors also note that crops can be engineered to withstand harsh temperatures, providing food to areas that aren’t conducive to farming. Genetic modification also can increase nutrients in harvested crops — Vitamin A–enriched (“Golden”) rice, zinc-enhanced sorghum, and higher-protein potatoes already have been developed.
Although GM crops face tough restrictions in Europe, which regulates under the precautionary principle, the U.S. has been less responsive to advocacy campaigns. Soybeans were the first Roundup Ready crop to hit the market, in 1996. Today, more than 80 percent of the corn, soybeans, and cotton grown in the U.S. is genetically modified.
In an attempt to slow the spread of GM technology, campaigners have zeroed in on GM alfalfa, stoking concerns that modified seeds could “contaminate” conventional and organic fields and damage the alfalfa market. In its two environmental assessments, the USDA downplayed the potential of gene drift because alfalfa hay is often cut before bloom, and is almost always cut before ripe seed is formed. There have been no recorded incidents of gene flow into organic alfalfa hay in five years, which has turned around some skeptics. “There are more safeguards in place,” says Drex Gauntt, president of the Washington State Hay Growers Association, which dropped its support of the suit.
“It’s not this ‘scourge of the earth’ from a scientific standpoint, as opponents of GM alfalfa would lead you to believe,” adds Washington farmer Bob Haberman, who has 205 acres of Roundup Ready Alfalfa. (Some 5,500 growers who began planting it across 200,000 acres are exempt from the court order.) “Applying technology to agriculture is what has made the United States the greatest agricultural country in the world.”
In the government’s supporting brief, Kagan argues that no serious problems have arisen, and that restrictions in place make it highly unlikely that any would occur. “She defended Monsanto’s fight to contaminate the environment with its GM alfalfa, not the American people’s right to safe feed and a protected environment,” huffed an article that anti-biotech activists widely disseminated on the Web.
The case will be decided before Kagan, if confirmed, dons her robes. But regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, the debate over GM technology may be back before the federal courts in short order. A coalition of liberal groups is attempting to block planting of GM sugar beets.
Although all sides anxiously await the Supreme Court’s ruling, the long-term fate of GM alfalfa, sugar beets, and other crops ultimately rests with the Department of Agriculture. Protesters claim to have flooded the agency with more than 200,000 angry letters since it released the impact draft report. Although its science panel publicly concluded the crop poses no danger to human health or the environment, the USDA is reviewing the comments and awaiting the judges’ decision before making a final determination.
— Jon Entine is a columnist for Ethical Corporation magazine and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. His book Crop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution? (AEI Press) will be published this fall.
http://article.nationalreview.com/436176/making-hay/jon-entine
-
Second post.
The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider
Lawrence Solomon June 13, 2010 – 8:50 am
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/13/the-ipcc-consensus-on-climate-change-was-phoney-says-ipcc-insider/#ixzz0qsIAhBw5
The National Post is now on Facebook. Join our fan community today.
-
So the various working groups involved in the IPCC report may never have reached a conclusion, but "this may be a possibility worth investigating" that was "exagerated" to make political hay............. Love it :evil:
-
I was not sure where to put this. The point it makes for me is how far the European mind has gone down the nanny state path. This is just NUTS!!!!!
Italian scientists who failed to predict L'Aquila earthquake may face manslaughter charges
June 24, 2010 by Lisa Zyga
(PhysOrg.com) -- Six of Italy's top seismologists are being investigated for manslaughter for not warning the city of L'Aquila about an earthquake that struck on April 6, 2009. The magnitude-6.3 earthquake caused 308 deaths and 1600 injuries, and left more than 65,000 people homeless.
The L’Aquila public prosecutor’s office issued the indictments on June 3, a step that usually precedes a request for a court trial. The investigation originated when about 30 L’Aquila citizens registered an official complaint that the scientists had failed to recognize the danger of the earthquake during the days and weeks in advance.
In the six months leading up to the earthquake, a series of smaller seismic movements and tremors were recorded nearby, including a magnitude-4.0 earthquake on March 30. On March 31, six days before the large earthquake struck, Italy’s Civil Protection Agency held a meeting with the Major Risks Committee - composed of the six scientists - to assess the risk of a major earthquake. At that time, the committee concluded that there was "no reason to suppose a sequence of small earthquakes could be the prelude to a strong event" and that “a major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out."
At a press conference after the meeting, government official Bernardo De Bernardinis, deputy technical head of the Civil Protection Agency, told reporters that "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable.” In addition to the six scientists, De Bernardinis is also under investigation.
According to the group of local citizens, many of the earthquake’s victims had been planning to leave their homes, but had changed their minds after the committee’s statements.
"Those responsible are people who should have given different answers to the public,” said Alfredo Rossini, L'Aquila's public prosecutor. “We're not talking about the lack of an alarm, the alarm came with the movements of the ground. We're talking about the lack of advice telling people to leave their homes."
Minutes from the March 31 meeting show that the scientists recommended that buildings in the area should be monitored to assess their ability to handle a major shock.
Although the scientists are unable to comment due to the investigation, an article in Nature News reported that one of the scientists, Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) in Rome, wrote in a letter last September that the meeting was too short and that he had not been informed about the following press conference. Only one of the seismologists from the committee, Franco Barberi, a volcanologist at the University of Roma Tre, was at the press conference.
Susah Hough, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, who is not involved in the investigation, also disagrees with some of the remarks from the press conference. "The idea that minor earthquakes release energy and thus make things better is a common misperception,” she said. “But seismologists know it's not true. I doubt any scientist could have said that."
The article in Nature News lists the six scientists and officials under investigation for manslaughter as Boschi; Barberi; Giulio Selvaggi, director of the National Earthquake Center based at INGV; Claudio Eva, a professor of earth physics at the University of Genoa; Mauro Dolce, head of the seismic risk office in the Civil Protection Agency; and Gian Michele Calvi, director of the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering in Pavia.
Coming to the defense of the seismologists, nearly 4,000 scientists from around the world have signed a letter to Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, urging him to focus on earthquake preparation rather than holding scientists responsible for something that they cannot do - predict earthquakes.
"The proven and effective way of protecting populations is by enforcing strict building codes," said Barry Parsons of the University of Oxford, who signed the letter. "Scientists are often asked the wrong question, which is 'when will the next earthquake hit?' The right question is 'how do we make sure it won't kill so many people when it hits?'"
More information: via: Nature News and The Independent
© 2010 PhysOrg.com
-
Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done
by Sharon BegleyJune 25, 2010
Greg Rico / AP
Vindicated too late? Penn State climatologist Michael Mann
A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or “before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s climate-research group were spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.
But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.
It’s worth quoting the retraction at some length:
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.
In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure . . . was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that . . . Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.
The article also quoted criticism of the IPCC’s use of the WWF report by Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and leading specialist in tropical forest ecology. We accept that, in his quoted remarks, Dr Lewis was making the general point that both the IPCC and WWF should have cited the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific research literature. As he made clear to us at the time, including by sending us some of the research literature, Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis for both the IPCC and the WWF reports’ statements on the potential vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest to droughts caused by climate change. . . . A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.
In another retraction you never heard of, a paper in Frankfurt took back (apologies; the article is available only in German) its reporting that the IPCC had erred in its assessment of climate impacts in Africa.
The Times's criticism of the IPCC—look, its reports are full of mistakes and shoddy scholarship!—was widely picked up at the time it ran, and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion sharply against the established science of climate change. Don’t expect the recent retractions and exonerations to change that. One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, “No, we were wrong about X,” most people still believe X. As Twain and Churchill knew, sometimes the truth never catches up with the lie, let alone overtakes it. As I wrote last summer in a story about why people believe lies even when they’re later told the truth, sometimes people’s mental processes simply go off the rails.
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/06/25/newspapers-retract-climategate-claims-but-damage-still-done.html
-
What do you make of this BBG?
-
Mostly too little too late, though it it gonna make it harder for the more strident amongst the warmists to claim the sort of unanimity that use to be one of their major talking points.
-
June 30 1908, record low temperature in Nevada of 50 degrees (looking at weather channel website). Wondering why, I goggled. Tunguska happened the same day (24 hours earlier because of date line?). I would not be surprised if this data point got massaged smooth in some models since the downward spike would pull thing cooler? Something else to look at in data sets that would indicate manipulation? The data point (and several cool years after it while Tunguska particulates filtered?) could be used in isolation too "look at these 5 years in nevada, when has there ever been similar in the last century? We ARE warming!"
-
Catastrophism collapses
Lawrence Solomon July 2, 2010 – 6:43 pm
G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy
Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.
One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change — and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”
These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.
Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.
France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.
Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.
The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies — previously immune to cuts — must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs — the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewables is under review.“ Some areas of the economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea — the U.K. granted a record 356 exploration licences in its most recent round.
Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show — as in Europe — that the great majority rejects global-warming catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it.
In the lead-up to the Toronto meetings and throughout them, one country — Canada — and one leader — Prime Minister Stephen Harper — have stood out for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Dubbed the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups around the world, Canada — and especially Harper — are reviled among climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.
Not coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader played host to the meetings.
Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/07/02/lawrence-solomon-catastrophism-collapses/#ixzz0sjKsSAXr
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/07/02/lawrence-solomon-catastrophism-collapses/
-
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/bias_and_ipcc_report?source=features_box_main
Accentuate the negative
Jul 5th 2010, 10:11 by The Economist online
FOR everyone else it was the glaciers: for the Dutch it was the flooding. Last January errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the headlines. The chapter on Asia in the report by the IPCC’s second working group, charged with looking at the impact of climate change and adapting to it, mistakenly claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This contradicted some reasonably basic physics, had not been predicted by the glacier specialists in the first working group (which deals with the natural science of past and future climate change) and was unsupported by any evidence. There was a report from the 1990s which said something similar about all the world’s non-polar glaciers, but it gave the date as 2350. Then there was a crucial typo and some shoddy referencing. Nevertheless the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, had lashed out at people bringing the criticism up, accusing them of “voodoo science”. He then had to eat his words, and set up, with Ban Ki-moon, a panel to look into ways the IPCC might be improved.
Inspired by this to look for other errors, a journalist for a Dutch newspaper spotted that the chapter on Europe gave a figure for the area of the Netherlands below sea level that was much too large. The area at risk of flooding by the sea had been conflated with that at risk of flooding by the Rhine and the Meuse rivers. That the careful Dutch should have provided faulty information and not spotted it in the review process was an embarrassment to the then environment minister, Jacqueline Cramer; following a debate in parliament she called on the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), an independent body, to look at all the regional chapters in the working group II report and make sure they were up to snuff. This the PBL has now done; its report was published on July 5th.
The authors try hard to make clear that their findings do not undermine the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. And there is nothing in their report as egregious as the glaciers or as embarrassing as the Dutch sea level. But they did find a number of things to take issue with, most of which they thought minor but eight of which they classed as major; and their work seems to bring out a systemic tendency to stress negative effects over positive ones. This tendency can be defended. But a reading of the report suggests there may also be broader and potentialy more misleading bias. The PBL report chose as its main focus a table in the “Summary for Policy Makers” of the IPCC’s 2007 “Synthesis Report”, which brings together the results of working groups one, two and three (which deals with responses to climate change). Where did these bullet points actually come from, the PBL team asked, and how well supported were they?
The auditors found one new error which they deemed major: a statement about the frequency of turbulence in South African fishing waters which had been translated directly into a statement about the productivity of the fisheries. The IPCC has indicated it will produce an erratum for this, and for a number of other errors all concerned deemed minor. But the PBL also identified seven statements, which, while not errors, it thought were deserving of comment (for which read criticism).
Perhaps the most striking relates to Africa. The table in the summary for policy makers reads: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%.” The evidence on which this is based says only that yields during years in which there are droughts could be reduced by 50%. Furthermore, the relevant reference applies only for Morocco—and it cites as its source an earlier paper that the PBL says no one, including the IPCC authors, now seems able to find.
Other criticisms turn on a tendency to generalise. Research showing decreased yields of millet, groundnuts and cowpeas in Niger becomes a claim that crop yields are decreasing in the Sahel, the strip that separates the Sahara from the savannah in Africa, rather than that the yields of some crops are decreasing in some parts of the Sahel. The results of research on cattle in Argentina are applied to livestock (which would include pigs, chickens, llamas and the rest) throughout South America. The expert authors do not provide a compelling reason for their claim that fresh water availability will decline overall in south, east and southeast Asia, or that the balance of climate-related effects on the health of Europeans will be negative.
With the exception of the South African fisheries it is not clear that any of this is wrong, which is why, on these matters, the PBL does not speak of error. Martin Parry, a specialist in agriculture who was the co-chair of the second working group's report, defends his colleagues’ work. Agriculture in other parts of North Africa is very like that in Morocco, and during droughts the crop yields there already drop by more than 50%. To say that yields decline in the Sahel does not mean all crop yields in all of the Sahel. Cattle make up most of Latin America’s livestock, and much of the rest of it can be expected to do worse. The IPCC does not just assemble evidence, Parry stresses: it assesses it. When its expert authors weigh their words on things like water in Asia and health effects in Europe they do so in the context of a wide range of knowledge. And they do so in ways that cannot be reduced to ticks in the boxes of Dutch assessors going through things line by line four years later.
The authors might better document the extra insight brought to bear, and be more transparent about the application of their judgment. But at 1000 pages the Working Group II report alone is already a challenge to the book-binder’s art. Does it really need to be longer?
Another problem identified by the PBL analysis is that, in general, negative impacts are stressed over positive ones. The table in the summary for policymakers is almost unremittingly bad news; the conclusions in the chapters that fed into it, while far from cheery, were more mixed. In a similar way, when there is a range of possible impacts, the top end of the range tends to get more play in the summaries for policy makers than the bottom end does. The PBL says that this is a reasonable way to proceed in a document that is explicitly aimed at policy makers thinking about adaptation, but it is not clear how transparent this approach is to readers.
This may reflect a larger issue. Work on the impacts of climate change—the literature Working Group II assesses—tends to focus on vulnerabilities and damage for much the same reason the IPCC authors do. They seem more important, more urgent and quite possibly more fundable. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change requires countries to assess their vulnerabilities, and these assessments are fodder for Working Group II (one of them was the source for the 50% drop in rain fed agriculture yields). Thus the evidence base from which an assessment of impacts has to start is to some extent skewed.
Perhaps the most worrying thing about the PBL report, though, is a rather obvious one about which its authors say little. In all ten of the issues that the PBL categorised as major (the original errors on glaciers and Dutch sea level, and the eight others identified in the report), the impression that the reader gets from the IPCC is more strikingly negative than the impression which would have been received if the underlying evidence base had been reflected as the PBL would have wished, with more precise referencing, more narrow interpretation and less authorial judgment. A large rise in heat related deaths in Australia is mentioned without noting that most of the effect is due to population rather than climate change. A claim about forest fires in northern Asia seems to go further than the evidence referred to—in this case a speech by a politician—would warrant.
The Netherlands look more floodable, Asian glaciers more fragile. A suspicion thus gains ground that the way in which the IPCC sythesises, generalises snd checks its findings may systematically favour adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond just serving the needs of policy makers. Anecdotally, authors bemoan fights to keep caveats in place as chapters are edited, refined and summarised. The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC’s findings. But the panel set up to look at the IPCC’s workings by Dr Pachauri and Mr Ban should ask some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative.
-
DOE Funding For CRU Placed On Hold
Posted on July 18, 2010 by Anthony Watts
Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times
The American government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds of stolen emails.
The US Department of Energy (DoE) was one of the unit’s main sources of funding for its work assembling a database of global temperatures.
It has supported the CRU financially since 1990 and gives the unit about £131,000 ($200,000 USD) a year on a rolling three-year contract.
This should have been renewed automatically in April, but the department has suspended all payments since May pending a scientific peer review of the unit’s work.
The leaked emails caused a global furore. They appeared to suggest that CRU scientists were using “tricks” to strengthen the case for man-made climate change and suppressing dissent.
A spokesman for the DoE said: “The renewal application was placed on hold pending the conclusion of the inquiry into scientific misconduct by Sir Alastair Muir Russell.”
Muir Russell published his report earlier this month. It said that the rigour and honesty of the CRU scientists were not in doubt but criticised them for “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”.
The DoE peer review panel will now sift through the report and decide if American taxpayers should continue to fund the unit.
A spokesman for the university said: “We are still waiting to hear if the latest bid for funding to the US Department of Energy has been successful and would not comment or speculate in the meantime.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/18/doe-funding-for-cru-placed-on-hold/
-
I did not see that one coming!
It will be very interesting to see if DOE will get slapped down by the White House for this , , ,
-
Postmodernism and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
Published by Briggs at 10:37 am under Climatology,Philosophy,Statistics
Since I am, by nature, a compassionate individual, I had been thinking of how we might Sokal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). It is for their own good.
Alan Sokal: remember him? He’s the physicist who submitted the scam article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the oh-so-prestigious postmodern journal Social Text.
Postmodernists are intellectuals who are so jealous of the success of real scientists, that they pretend that scientists’ accomplishments are nothing special. They are the sort of people who authoritatively state, “There is no truth,” or “‘Truth’ is a social construction.” You may find postmodernists in any university English or Sociology department, the New York Times editorial desk, and in the current administration.
Anyway, Sokal typed up an article of complete gibberish larded with science words, such as:
As Althusser rightly commented, “Lacan finally gives Freud’s thinking the scientific concepts that it requires”. More recently, Lacan’s topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.
Painful, right? Stuff no serious person would ever read, and only the insane would take seriously. That Sokal was able to slip this rot though Social Text‘s five-hole demonstrated unequivocally that postmodernists are Aesopian foxes, people whose college physics classes left sour tastes in their mouths.
Humanities scholars here in the States started down their slippery slope and became postmodernists only after they opened the doors to a rabble of French and German philosophers. Men such as Heidegger, Hegel, and De Man; all of whom were mighty big fans of 1940′s-style National Socialism.
As long as postmodernists kept to themselves, churning out “literary theory” by the bucketful, they were thought to be harmless.
But some warned us that postmodernism can spread like a disease; that the chance of catching it increases as a function of the proximity of the uninfected to the carrier. And since most postmodernists reside inside universities, their hives exposed to scientists, it was only a matter of time before the infection spread.
And that is what happened. For example (thanks to reader John Moore), at the 11th Statistical Climatology Meeting, Demetris Koutsoyannis asked another scientist whether, as a rule, “original data should be available to the interested scientists or not?” That is, should raw data be shared so that people could independently verify extraordinary claims?
The answer—the only answer to this prior to the postmodernist infection—must be “Yes.” But the infected person answered, “No”, the data should not be available “because some could misuse them….[to] demonstrate a specific behaviour that they want to advocate.”
See what I mean? People cannot be trusted to come to their own judgments because those judgments might fall afoul of the party line, a line which, by definition, is socially constructed. Those in power decide “truth.” The disease rampages.
It’s always sad to witness the progression of morbidity, and worse when it happens to someone you love. Take PNAS, a journal which, prior the postmodernist pandemic, was lovely and pure. But the infection is now so strong that it has published an Enemies of Science list!
Anderegg et al., “Expert credibility in climate change.” Not one word in this article attempts to refute the theories its enemies; instead, it is one long, suppurating logical fallacy. I weep.
And then this: “Irrelevant events affect voters’ evaluations of government performance“, a piece by Healy et al. which would have been excised mercilessly by blarney-detecting white blood cells before the disease struck.
The American voters, says Healy, is irrational. Little things, like his favorite football team winning, will influence his vote. Via a goofy statistical model, they claim “that voting decisions are influenced by irrelevant events that have nothing to do with the competence or effectiveness of the incumbent government.”
This isn’t just bad statistics—a symptom common to many diseases, not just postmodernism—but bad reasoning. They emphasize their findings “have implications for understanding elite incentives and strategies to manipulate voters’ perceptions of their own well-being.” If the voter cannot decide rationally, perhaps he should not be allowed to decide at all. Keep the raw data from him!
Postmodern infections are best killed by inoculation using a dead virus, i.e. a Sokal-like spoof masquerading as genuine. I therefore say that we, dear readers, compose a scam article that, when exposed, will restore the critical senses of the editors of PNAS.
Suggestions for a topic?
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2673
-
Very persuasive IMO.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWVXarkPOAo[/youtube]
-
The Death Of The Global Warming Movement
Shikha Dalmia, 07.28.10, 4:00 PM ET
Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!
This is not just my read of the situation; it is also that of Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate-turned-Democratic-apparatchik. In his latest column for The New York Times, Krugman laments that “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010. Democrats had a brief window of opportunity before the politics of global warming changed forever in November to ram something through Congress. But the Reid bill chose not to do so for the excellent reason that Democrats want to avoid an even bigger beating than the one they already face at the polls.
Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax--oops, cap-and-trade--scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation's fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.
Krugman blames this outcome on--you'll never guess this!--greedy energy companies and cowardly Republicans who sold out. But the fault, Dear Paul, lies not in them, but in your own weakling theories.
The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute, a highly respected liberal outfit whose mission is to rejuvenate the progressive movement in this country, points out that environmental groups spent at least $100 million over the past two years executing what was arguably the best mobilization campaign in history. Despite all of this, notes Breakthrough, there is little evidence to suggest that cap-and-trade would have mustered more than 43 votes in the Senate.
This means that lucre is not the only motivating force in politics. Indeed, lobbyists are effective generally when they represent causes that coincide with the will of constituents, which is far from the case here. Voters are reluctant to accept economic pain to address remote causes with an uncertain upside. Heck, they are dubious even when the cause is not so remote and has a demonstrable upside. Take Social Security and Medicare. It is a mathematical certainty that, without reform, these programs will go bankrupt, jeopardizing the health care and retirement benefits of tens of millions Americans. Even though the cost of action is far smaller compared with the cost of inaction, persuading voters to do something is an uphill battle.
Yet even in the heyday of the consensus on global warming there was never this kind of certainty. The ClimateGate scandal--in which prominent climatologists were caught manipulating data to exaggerate the observed warming--has significantly weakened this consensus. But even if it hadn't, climate change is too complex an issue to ever be established with anything approaching iron-clad certainty. Hence, it was inevitable that it would run into a political dead-end.
This is exactly what the Reid bill represents. Indeed, if Democrats backed-off from their grand designs to cut carbon emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 with sizable majorities in Congress and a “celestial healer” in the White House there is little chance that they will ever be able to accomplish anything better at a later date. And if America--the richest country in the world and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases--won't act, there is a snowball's chance in Mumbai that India or China will.
Of course, authoritarian countries have a little bit more leeway than democracies to push unpalatable remedies. But it is not within the power of even China's autocrats to shove an energy diet down the throat of their people on the theory that the pain from it will be short-lived because it will trigger a search for better and cleaner energy alternatives--the totality of the green pitch for action.
This doesn't mean that there aren't a few more whimpers left in the global warming movement before it finally passes. On the international front, the buzz is that the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change currently in the works will be even more alarmist than the previous one. However, thanks to ClimateGate, it will give greater play to alternative voices. “Going forward, the general perception won't be one of consensus,” notes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor, an expert on energy issues, “but one of increasing appreciation of disagreement on the issue.”
Domestically, green groups will prod the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively. But this will be harder to do when Republicans inevitably make gains in Congress in November. Indeed, they will likely revive a Senate resolution floated by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, banning the EPA from regulating emissions from stationary sources, which lost by just four votes last month. Global warming warriors are also talking about fighting the battle for emission cuts state-by-state. But they will lose on that front too. California, which embraced such cuts four years ago, is already facing a ballot initiative in November to scrap the law, as it loses business and jobs to other states. Indeed, the same collective action problems that prevent global action on climate change will inevitably bedevil state-level action too.
The global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster rules, what have you.
The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly Forbes columnist. Robert Soave of University of Michigan provided valuable research assistance for this column.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/28/climate-change-movement-harry-reid-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html
-
It isn't dead yet, there are to many true believers out there..... Enlightened Self Interest and plain old ego involvement guarantee that. There is money to be madefor wealth. A crusade for the need to feel good. A good basic drek und drang roller coaster as well, which seems to satisfy a human need too.
-
This is inside baseball stuff, but it had me giggling. Real Climate is a warmist website run by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt who appears to do a lot of that running on company time. Mann is Michael man who Gavin reflexively carries water for. The other players are various warmist/skeptic personalities. I've made the mistake of trying to engage folks on RealClimate, resulting conversations do indeed unfold as follows:
Mosher on Gavin’s “Frustration”
Mosher writes in:
Gavin explained his frustration stemmed from people asking the same question over and over when it was already answered. He then reveals something new and closes the thread. We carry on here with one unknown guy trying to defend mann.
That’s the PROBLEM.
Mann: 2+2=5
McIntyre No, 2+2=4
Mann; thats bizarre
Mc: 2+2=4, just say it Mike
Mann: it doesnt matter, look over here we say 3+3=6
Mc: 2+2=4
Mann: it doesnt matter, ask gavin
Amac: ya 2+2=4
Mann: it doesnt matter
Mosher: Can anybody besides steve just say that 2+2=4
Dehog: You said Piltdown Mann once.
Mc: 2+2=4
Gavin: it doesnt matter:
Tiljander: 2+2=4
Arthur Smith: I”ll look into it.
Amac; 2+2=4
Gavin: Can we change the subject, we said it doesnt matter.
Mosher: can you say 2+2=4
Lambert: Fuller is full of it.
Bishop: Mike said 2+2=5, but 2+2=4
Tamino: Bishop said 2+2=5
Mc: Bishop was explaining Mann.
Amac: 2+2=4
Kloor: why can’t we reason together?
Gavin: we try, but they wont read our answers.
Amac: 2+2=4
Gavin: There he goes again, please shut him up.
Mc; 2+2=4
RC commenter: Do your own science Mcintyre
Mc: 2+2=4 is not publishable. Mann needs to correct this.
Mann: its all in the SI
Amac: hey mann website now says 2+2=4
Gavin: The exact value of 2+2 is uninteresting. move along
RC commenter: Hey McIntyre said 2+2=5
Mc: no I didnt
RC commenter: oops, my bad, but I’m right in spirit
Gavin: discussion over, lets talk about the black list.
Kloor: all you people who think 2+2=4, can discuss this further.
Scientist: Tiljander’s paper wasn’t perfect, lets pressure test her.
Amac: but 2+2=4
Scientist: Can you give me a reading list?
BbG Note: Many of the comments on this post are pretty funny and well worth checking out:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/06/mosher-on-gavins-frustration/#more-11683
-
Second post:
A dense piece that helps illustrate the post above. Warmists toss a lot of sand in the air:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/#more-11632
-
Global Warming, R.I.P
By Claude Sandroff
In a remarkable monograph, Roy W. Spencer presents hard evidence that 75% of the observed warming since the start of the 20th century is due to natural processes. He offers a detailed model describing how one of these processes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), operates in the real world. Most importantly, he demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a minor contributor to a global climate largely insensitive to man-made CO2.
Thanks to this highly skilled climatologist and his The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World's Top Climate Scientists, we can now taunt the often corrupt and overtly political planetary high priests with this: PDO means AGW is DOA.
Written in a style that should be attractive to both warming newcomers and scientists from other fields, the volume's appearance is not a welcome event for the world's strident purveyors of global warming orthodoxy. For in the gentlest language possible, Spencer is telling the AGW clingers that they are scientifically incompetent lemmings.
The "blunder" Dr. Spencer (a leading analyst of satellite-derived atmospheric data) refers to is a basic one: confusing cause and effect. Most would-be scientists who make this mistake once, let alone repeatedly, often go into another kind of work. It's the equivalent of the graduate student who forgets to plug in his detector and then reports a successful negative check experiment.
The effect Spencer seeks to explain is the 1.8ºC warming of the earth since 1900. He argues effectively that accepted global warming dogma and funding agency prejudices had discouraged potential heretics from seriously entertaining the idea that long-term, natural variations, rather than man-made CO2 "pollution," could be operating over the timescale of a century to warm and cool our planet.
And as the recent Climategate scandal has confirmed, the AGW church fathers will discredit, shun, and excommunicate any deviant member of the warming consensus congregation.
Indeed, it is frustration with the controlling climate hierarchy that led Spencer to communicate his findings directly with the public in book form rather than in the peer-reviewed literature. He guides the reader through the fundamental blunder that has led almost every scientist astray.
Observing increasing CO2 levels and increasing temperatures, scientists assumed that the former must have caused the latter. How did the warmers know that it wasn't the other way around, and that higher temperatures caused higher CO2 concentrations? Or how did the warmers know that there wasn't another process, a naturally occurring one, that caused the temperature rise, with increasing CO2 just along for the ride? Answer: They didn't, because they never bothered to look.
They never felt that they had to look, since emitting CO2 for the true believer is a kind of original sin, a crime committed by affluent societies that requires no corroborating evidence, let alone a scientific trial to determine guilt. But Spencer decided to look, peering into the CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) satellite data more deeply than anyone else in the field.
And ultimately, with just four parameters, keen insight into the behavior of the PDA and clouds, a simple program, and a few thousand Monte Carlo simulations, he was able to produce a model that explains our current climate system and man's role in it with unprecedented clarity.
Spencer devotes several chapters to the important role of feedback in understanding climate and the need to carefully separate it from existing forces (causes) to avoid overestimating the sensitivity of climate to external changes.
At the end of Spencer's careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth's surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Big deal.
The most prominent frauds active in promoting AGW have always tried to bury evidence of natural warming and cooling cycles. Truly, the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age are threats to their very CO2-obsessed existence. But these eras occurred centuries ago, with only proxies (like tree rings) to indicate the actual prevailing temperatures. Hence, data from these eras are easily brushed aside and forgotten. Not so with recent thermometer measurements, and temperatures from two periods in particular that have always plagued the theory of AGW.
The first is the period from 1900-1940. A full 60% of the temperature increase measured in the last century occurred during these forty years, when less industrialization existed worldwide and therefore less CO2 had been spewed into our atmosphere. The mild cooling period that ended in the mid-1970s is also baffling. But like any good theory, Spencer's PDO-focused model fits the temperature data during these decades amazingly well. Natural processes -- cloud formation and heat transfer -- dominated the temperatures during these decades, as in every other decade in the modern era.
There is no greater pleasure in a scientist's life than being able to explain phenomena more simply and comprehensively than anyone else did before him. This sense permeates Spencer's book, along with something else: moral outrage.
Some wealthy, spoiled, self-hating Westerners might in their affluence be able to afford expensive energy alternatives to power -- things like wind and solar that don't directly involve the emission of CO2. But the rest of the world cannot. Cheap, affordable energy, the kind that comes from coal, natural gas and oil, is a prerequisite for any society to rise economically. Spencer seems thrilled to be able to tell the developing world that they have a free pass to burn hydrocarbons and prosper.
Claude can be reached at csandroff@gmail.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/global_warming_rip.html at August 07, 2010 - 12:09:39 PM CDT
Link to more info about the book:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/04/the-great-global-warming-blunder-how-mother-nature-fooled-the-world’s-top-climate-scientists/
-
Study: Climate 460 MYA was like today, but thought to have CO2 levels 5-20 times as high
Posted on August 10, 2010 by Anthony Watts
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/odrovician_co2.jpg?w=640&h=416)
This image provided for timeline reference and is not from the study cited below
From the University of Leicester: An ancient Earth like ours
Geologists reconstruct the Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago
An international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France), has reconstructed the Earth’s climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago.
The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA – and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.
The researchers state: “The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher – over twenty times as high – than those of the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief, intense glaciation – something difficult to envisage in a world with high levels of greenhouse gases. “
(http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2010-2019/2010/08/npimageset.2010-08-10.5121923753/article)
A specimen of the chitinozoan species Armoricochitina nigerica (length = c. 0.3mm). Chitinozoans are microfossils of marine zooplankton in the Ordovician. Their distribution allows to track climate belts in deep time, much in a way that zooplankton has been used for climate modeling in the Cenozoic. A. nigerica is an important component of the Polar Fauna during the late Ordovician Hirnantian glaciation.
The team of scientists looked at the global distribution of common, but mysterious fossils called chitinozoans – probably the egg-cases of extinct planktonic animals – before and during this Ordovician glaciation. They found a pattern that revealed the position of ancient climate belts, including such features as the polar front, which separates cold polar waters from more temperate ones at lower latitudes. The position of these climate belts changed as the Earth entered the Ordovician glaciation – but in a pattern very similar to that which happened in oceans much more recently, as they adjusted to the glacial and interglacial phases of our current (and ongoing) Ice Age.
This ‘modern-looking’ pattern suggests that those ancient carbon dioxide levels could not have been as high as previously thought, but were more modest, at about five times current levels (they would have had to be somewhat higher than today’s, because the sun in those far-off times shone less brightly).
“These ancient, but modern-looking oceans emphasise the stability of Earth’s atmosphere and climate through deep time – and show the current man-made rise in greenhouse gas levels to be an even more striking phenomenon than was thought,” the researchers conclude.
Reference: Vandenbroucke, T.R.A., Armstrong, H.A., Williams, M., Paris, F., Zalasiewicz, J.A., Sabbe, K., Nolvak, J., Challands, T.J., Verniers, J. & Servais, T. 2010. Polar front shift and atmospheric CO2 during the glacial maximum of the Early Paleozoic Icehouse. PNAS doi/10.1073/pnas.1003220107.
Contacts: (Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz at the Department of Geology, University of Leicester: Respectively tel. 0116 252 3642 and 0116 2523928, and e-mails mri@le.ac.uk and jaz1@le.ac.uk).
-
New paper out in a well regarded statistics journal that analyzes the proxy recreations that were then converted into Mann's infamous hockey stick graph. The conclusion is reprinted below:
Conclusion.
Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with universitylevel, professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems. While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some
respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. The fundamental problem is that there is a limited amount of proxy data which dates back to 1000 AD; what is available is weakly predictive of global annual temperature. Our backcasting methods, which track quite closely the methods applied most recently in Mann (2008) to the same data, are unable to catch the sharp run up in temperatures recorded in the 1990s, even in-sample.
As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has
a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.
Our main contribution is our efforts to seriously grapple with the uncertainty involved in paleoclimatological reconstructions. Regression of high dimensional time series is always a complex problem with many traps. In our case, the particular challenges include (i) a short sequence of training data, (ii) more predictors than observations, (iii) a very weak signal, and (iv) response and predictor variables which are both strongly autocorrelated.
The final point is particularly troublesome: since the data is not easily modeled by a simple autoregressive process it follows that the number of truly independent observations (i.e., the effective sample size) may be just too small for accurate reconstruction.
Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. We have shown that time dependence in the temperature series is sufficiently strong to permit complex sequences of random numbers to forecast out-of-sample reasonably well fairly frequently (see, for example, Figure 9). Furthermore, even proxy based models with approximately the same amount of reconstructive skill (Figures 11,12, and 13), produce strikingly dissimilar historical backcasts: some of these look like hockey sticks but most do not (Figure 14).
Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate. Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.
More info here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/14/breaking-new-paper-makes-a-hockey-sticky-wicket-of-mann-et-al-99/
-
From King of the World to Chicken of the Sea: Director James Cameron challenges climate skeptics to debate and then bails out at last minute
Hide the Debate: Cameron ducks Climate Debate with Breitbart, Morano, & McElhinney
Monday, August 23, 2010By Marc Morano – Climate Depot
ASPEN COLORADO: Hollywood director James Cameron challenged three high profile global warming skeptics to a public debate at a global warming and energy conference. But Cameron backed out of the debate at the last minute after environmentalists "came out of the woodwork" to warn him not to engage in a debate with skeptics because it was not in his best interest.
Cameron challenged Andrew Breitbart, Climate Depot's Marc Morano and filmmaker Ann McElhinney of 'Not Evil Just Wrong.' The debate was already in the program for the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit. The website program described the agreed to debate as “AREDAY Climate Change Debate: Reality or Fiction?"
After setting up the public global warming debate, Cameron and his negotiator then changed formats multiple times and initially said it would be open to the media and then said he would only participate if it was private with no recording devices. The skeptics agreed to all the changes. According to AREDAY organizers, activist Joseph Romm of Climate Progress urged Cameron not to go ahead with the debate as well.
Cameron's cancellation of the agreed to debate did not happen until one debate participant (Morano) was already in mid-air, flying from DC to Aspen on Saturday August 21 to attend the debate. (AREDAY did grant Morano a 90 minute slot to speak at the summit. See: Climate Depot's Presentation at Warmists' Summit Met By Hostile Interrupting Moderator and Crowd; Call for Morano to Kill Himself!)
(Morano Note: After ducking debate, James Cameron boldly slammed global warming skeptics as "swine" on the day he was supposed to be debating them. "I think they're swine" Cameron told a friendly audience at the AREDAY summit. Also see: Cameron Morphs Into Gore, Quits AGW Debate: 'Chickened out–even after he won Gore-like concessions that there would be no media and no audio or video record kept' -- How does Cameron square ducking a climate debate he set up when just a few months ago he seemed so confident? See: Director James Cameron Unleashed: Calls for gun fight with global warming skeptics: 'I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads')
#
Below is detailed report from Ann McElhinney of www.NotEvilJustWrong.com on how Cameron ducked out of debate he set up.
James Cameron—King of Hypocrites
Written by Ann McElhinney
Sunday, 22 August 2010 17:49
Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.
The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical "solutions" being proposed.
Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.
“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads," he said in an interview.
Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.
His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.
Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.
They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.
"We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you'd like. The more the better," one of James Cameron's organizers said in an email.
It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.
Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.
But then as the debate approached James Cameron's side started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We agreed.
They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to "a roundtable". We agreed.
Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.
Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed
Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he "wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out," decided to ban the media from the shoot out.
He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.
No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.
We all agreed to that.
And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. "shoot it out " Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.
James Cameron's behavior raises some very important questions.
Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?
Or is it just a pose?
The man who called for an open and public debate at "high noon" suddenly doesn't want his policies open to serious scrutiny.
I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.
But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.
#
James Cameron's key climate quotes:
Director James Cameron Unleashed: Calls for gun fight with global warming skeptics: 'I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads'
Cameron: 'If we don't do something, we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f#cking disaster with all kinds of people dying?' March 1, 2010 – Grist Mag.
Cameron: 'Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I'm not sure they could hear me.' March 24, 2010
Director James Cameron: Climate Deniers Using 'Talk-Show Host Puppets' for 'Disinformation Campaign'
James Cameron: Climate Change 'As Great As The Threat' U.S. Faced in World War II
James Cameron boldly slammed global warming skeptics as "swine" on the day he was supposed to be debating them. "I think they're swine"
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/7772/From-King-of-the-World-to-Chicken-of-the-Sea-Director-James-Cameron-challenges-climate-skeptics-to-debate-and-then-bails-out-at-last-minute
-
Piece w/ a lot of tables I'm too lazy to reproduce showing how poorly solar irradiance and reflection are understood where planetary hearing and cooling are concerned.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26850
-
EPA rejects attempt to regulate lead in bullets after NRA protests
http://politics.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2010/08/27/epa-surrenders-to-nra-on-gun-control-issue-epa-rejects-attempt-to-regulate-lead-in-bullets-after-nra-protests.html
What? A health hazard to be shot with a lead bullet? Absolutely. I wonder if they would also require the guy who stabbed me to sterilize his knife between uses. Really, it's in everyone's best interest. We don't want anyone to get hurt.
Same/similar movement as those who want to ban all light bulbs that DON'T contain Mercury.
-
Climate Panel Faces Heat
Investigation Calls for 'Fundamental Reform' at U.N. Group on Global Warming
By JEFFREY BALL
An independent investigation called for "fundamental reform" at the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying the organization's 2007 report played down uncertainty about some aspects of global warming.
The probe of the IPCC, a preeminent climate-science body that won the Nobel Peace Price three years ago, was conducted by the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies. Leaders of the IPCC asked the council to conduct the probe following the disclosure of a few errors in its 2007 climate-science report, which concluded, among other things, that climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by human activity.
The investigation comes at a precarious time for the IPCC and for advocates of tough measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. For months, critics of such steps have cited the errors in the IPCC's 2007 report as reason to question the group's basic conclusion about climate change. As the InterAcademy Council's report notes, recent polls suggest the controversy over IPCC errors has caused public confidence in climate science to fall. Meanwhile, the recession has dimmed the enthusiasm of some politicians to push for major changes in energy production and consumption.
Some critics, in the wake of the disclosure of the errors, called for IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri to resign. But Mr. Pachauri, who has said those errors were minor, said Monday that he hopes to serve until his term ends after the publication of the panel's next major climate-science study in 2014. "I was instrumental in requesting this review, and now that we've got it, I believe my responsibility is to take it forward," he said.
Partisans on both sides of the climate debate saw Monday's report as significant. Advocates of deep emission cuts said the investigation, and the reforms it suggested, should boost public confidence in the IPCC's assertions about the dangers of allowing greenhouse-gas emissions to increase. Critics said the investigation underscored problems with the way the IPCC assesses climate science. They said the agency ignored scientific nuances and dismissed minority viewpoints in its 2007 report.
The investigation will likely factor into the next U.N. climate conference in Cancún, Mexico, in December, when governments will try to come up with a global agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. A similar conference last year in Copenhagen failed to come up with a major agreement.
Harold Shapiro, the economist and former Princeton University president who led the InterAcademy Council's review, said in a press conference announcing the report that the IPCC "has been a success and has served society well."
In addition to raising questions about the procedures the IPCC used in coming up with its conclusions, the report was critical of the organization's management. It recommended that the IPCC chairman and other top leaders each serve only one six-year term, and that the IPCC institute a conflict-of-interest policy for its top leaders. This was partly a response to criticism that during his tenure, Mr. Pachauri has served as an adviser to energy and financial companies. These companies, said critics, could be affected by energy policies that rested in part on the IPCC's scientific pronouncements.
Mr. Pachauri, in an interview, said he supports the investigation's call for a conflict-of-interest policy and for clearer explanations about areas in which climate science is uncertain. He said the IPCC already has begun work on some of those changes and would consider further action when it holds a major meeting in October in Korea. Mr. Pachauri said his work on corporate boards doesn't interfere with his position as IPCC chair, adding that he has given all proceeds from that work to an energy think tank he heads and to charity.
Mr. Pachauri stressed that neither the InterAcademy Council report nor several other climate-science investigations that have been conducted in recent months have questioned the IPCC's conclusion about the existence of climate change or its likely human cause. Claims to the contrary amount to "gross distortions and ideologically driven posturing," he said. Taken together, the investigations should "strengthen public trust so that we can move forward," Mr. Pachauri said. "Science has confirmed that climate change is real."
Critics of the IPCC said the report validated many of their concerns.
"If these recommendations are followed to the letter and spirit, I think the IPCC could indeed be improved," said John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who was consulted by the InterAcademy Council for its review. Mr. Christy participated in the writing of two IPCC reports and said his doubts about evidence of man-made global warming were largely pushed aside both times.
One U.S. company played down the investigative report's importance, saying the political debate over climate change had moved beyond the question of what's causing it to the question of what to do about it.
"We're kind of beyond the science," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., a Charlotte, N.C.-based power company that is one of the country's major greenhouse-gas emitters. "What we're after are the rules of the road," he said, explaining that Duke believes U.S. limits on greenhouse-gas emissions are inevitable and wants to shape the rules to the advantage of its customers.
The IPCC, created by the United Nations in 1988, is a sprawling organization. Thousands of scientists and other experts around the world volunteer their time to help write its massive reports approximately every six years that assess what's known and what isn't about the causes and effects of climate change. Its reports influence government policies on energy and the environment around the world.
The InterAcademy Council investigation, like several other investigations into climate science in recent months, didn't question whether human activity is causing global warming. Instead, it focused on the IPCC's process for forming conclusions, including one that projected Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. The investigation noted that some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges "were not adequately considered," the InterAcademy Council's investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report.
Mr. Shapiro said the IPCC needs to tighten many of its procedures and its enforcement of the rules already on its books, given that climate change is such a hotly debated topic and that the IPCC's reports influence environmental policy world-wide.
A particular problem in the 2007 report was that it didn't consistently reflect uncertainty in some aspects of climate change, the investigation found.
Although the IPCC has guidelines in place for measuring uncertainty, those rules were "not consistently followed" in the 2007 report, "leading to unnecessary errors," the investigation said.
For instance, the investigation noted, the 2007 IPCC report said it had "high confidence" that climate change could halve the output of rain-fed agriculture in Africa by 2020.
But a fuller explanation about how the IPCC came up with that "high confidence," the investigation said, "would have made clear the weak evidentiary basis" for that statement. The InterAcademy Council panel recommended that IPCC reports assign specific probabilities to projections "only when there is sufficient evidence" to justify them.
The InterAcademy Council also faulted the IPCC for failing to stress in its 2007 report when some claims were based on literature that hadn't undergone the scientific process of peer-review. The IPCC should impose tougher guidelines to make sure non-peer-reviewed information is clearly "flagged," it said.
The investigation also said the IPCC sometimes failed to adequately reflect "properly documented" views of scientists who disagreed with the consensus conclusions.
IPCC leaders say they have already begun discussing how to better characterize uncertainty and to be more transparent about whether information has been peer-reviewed.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461452636059886.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0
-
First reference I've heard of the "gigaton gap," which strikes me as a facile ripoff of the Kennedy "missile gap" foolishness of the early '60s.
Cracks in Climate Change Onslaught Appear
John McLaughlin
For those of us who view the concept of man-made global warming as one of the greatest hoaxes in history, two events this week give some hope that the international "climate change" juggernaut may eventually be halted.
The UK Daily Express and the New York Times report that the InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of science academies assembled to produce independent analyses on major scientific, technological, and health issues, has released a 113-page critical assessment of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Serious criticisms of the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report forced the panel and its UN overseers to request an evaluation by the IAC. The criticisms centered on numerous highly suspect IPCC conclusions including an exaggerated and false claim of Himalayan glacier melting and faulty sea level change data affecting the Netherlands. Claims of faulty peer review of technical papers printed or referenced in the Report (which became known as Climategate) also added to an urgent IAC review.
The IAC report does not evaluate the merits of the science in the IPCC assessment but says the panel's management and methods for doing its work need serious overhaul. One major recommendation is that the panel should become a more professional organization with a paid top management limited to eight-year terms coinciding with publication of each new assessment report. This was viewed as a hint that Rajendra K. Pachauri, the current IPCC chairman should step down;
Other recommendations offer hope that skeptics will have a greater say in what passes for science in the global warming controversy. As the Times reports:
The committee noted that some climate panel leaders had been criticized for public statements perceived as advocating specific policies. "Straying into advocacy can only hurt I.P.C.C.'s credibility," the report said.
It also suggested that the panel revise the way it rates doubts about some of the science, that the process of choosing the scientists who write the report be more open and that the panel require that any possible conflicts of interest be revealed.
The initial reaction from skeptics has been positive. For example:
Hans von Storch, a climate researcher at the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Hamburg and a frequent critic of the climate panel who has called on Mr. Pachauri to resign, said past mistakes tended to dramatize the effects of climate change.
Carrying out the recommendations would make the climate panel much less aloof and help the climate change debate, Dr. von Storch said. He added, "I am pretty optimistic that all this will lead to a much more rational and cooled-down exchange."
If growing ranks of skeptics can have a greater say in the underlying science of climate change, that can only be beneficial to tamp down the hysteria which seeks to control debate.
In anther important development, Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor of the UK Independent attempts to spread alarm over the possibility that the upcoming international conference in Cancun this winter will be no more productive than the admitted failure of last December's climate change "summit" in Copenhagen
It is hard to exaggerate the dire effect which the failure at Copenhagen has had both on the climate change negotiating process itself, and on the belief of those involved that an effective climate deal might be possible.
A year ago, many environmentalists, scientists and politicians genuinely thought that the meeting in Denmark might produce a binding agreement to cut global CO2 by the 25-40 per cent, by 2020, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has calculated is necessary to keep the warming to below C [sic].
Today that optimism has vanished.
McCarthy holds out little hope of any real progress in spite of the latest bogeyman gripping global warming activists: the "gigaton gap."
Cancun, or "COP 16" as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world's defences against dangerously rising temperatures - the "gigatonne gap".
McCarthy claims without attribution that the world is currently emitting annually about 45 gigatons -- or 45 billion tons -- of CO2 which could grow to 51-55 gigatons by 2020 implying a potential gigaton gap catastrophe. This hyper rhetoric sounds very ominous until you consider, as Dr. Roy Spencer points out in his book Climate Confusion, that the total weight of the atmosphere is 5 quadrillion tons. In other words, 50 gigatons added to 5 million gigatons represents a mere 10 parts per million -- relatively speaking, a trivial change each year.
All of this scare-tactic hysteria comes without any credible and repeatable scientific tests showing how trivial amounts of CO2 can have any major impact on global warming and without any believable mathematical model showing minimal climate change in over 1000 years except for the last 70 years of technological progress.
For those of us wishing for a return to rigorous science in the climate change debate, failure at Cancun can only help stall progress until greater transparency of IPCC assessments makes the whole process moot.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/09/cracks_in_climate_change_onsla.html
-
"They were fallible human beings with mortgages to pay and funds to raise"
So says GW of the climate change croud:
****The environmental movement in retreat
By George Will
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since "the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held." So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.
That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, a professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that "the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson," but the environmentalists' legislation foundered because they got "on the wrong side of doubt."
Environmentalists, Mead argues, have forgotten their origins, which were in skeptical "reaction against Big Science, Big Government and Experts." Environmentalists once were intellectual cousins of economic libertarians who heed the arguments of Friedrich Hayek and other students of spontaneous order -- in society or nature. Such libertarians caution against trying to impose big, simple plans on complex systems. They warn that governmental interventions in such systems inevitably have large unintended, because unforeseeable, consequences.
In the middle of the 20th century, Americans, impressed by the government's mobilization of society for victory in World War II, were, Mead says, "intoxicated with social and environmental engineering of all kinds." They had, for example, serene confidence that "urban renewal" would produce "model cities." Back then, environmentalism was skepticism.
It was akin to the dissent of Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She argued that ambitious social engineers such as New York's Robert Moses were, by their ten-thumbed interventions in complex organisms such as cities, disrupting social ecosystems. The apotheosis of technocratic experts such as McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara gave us "nation-building" in conjunction with a war of attrition -- the crucial metric supposedly was body counts -- in a Southeast Asian peasant society. Over time, Mead says, "experts lost their mystique":
Every weekday NewsAndOpinion.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here.
"An increasingly skeptical public started to notice that 'experts' weren't angels descending immaculately from heaven bearing infallible revelations from G0d. They were fallible human beings with mortgages to pay and funds to raise. They disagreed with one another and they colluded with their friends and supporters like everyone else."
And expertise was annoyingly changeable. Experts said margarine was the healthy alternative to butter -- until they said its trans fats made it harmful.
Environmentalism began as Bambi doing battle with Godzillas, such as the Army Corps of Engineers. Then, says Mead, environmentalism became Godzilla, an advocate of "a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix." Mead continues:
"Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190-plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95 to 0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree and we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey."
The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough "experts" in that branch. Hence the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to do what the elected representatives of the rubes refuse to do in limiting greenhouse gases. Mead says of today's environmental movement:
"It proposes big economic and social interventions and denies that unintended consequences and new information could vitiate the power of its recommendations. It knows what is good for us, and its knowledge is backed up by the awesome power and majesty of the peer review process. The political, cultural, business and scientific establishments stand firmly behind global warming today -- just as they once stood firmly behind Robert Moses, urban renewal and big dams. They tell us it's a sin to question the consensus, the sign of bad moral character to doubt. Bambi, look in the mirror. You will see Godzilla looking back."
Mead, who says that he is a skeptic about climate policy rather than climate science, says that the environmental movement has "become the voice of the establishment, of the tenured, of the technocrats." This is the wrong thing to be in "Recovery Summer" while the nation wonders about the whereabouts of the robust recovery the experts forecast.****
-
Mark me down as vindictive but the people that perpetrated this fraud on the public and on our policy making should have a price to pay for their role in it. Science has been set back 50 years and so has our economy.
-
How reliable is science?
It is not difficult find instances of fraud in science:
Ranjit Chandra faked medical research results. He pocketed the money meant for running the experiments.
Woo-suk Hwang faked human cloning, among other terrible things.
Jan Hendrik Schön faked a transistor at the molecular level.
How did these people fare after being caught?
Ranjit Chandra still holds the Order of Canada, as far as I can tell. According to Scopus, his 272 research papers were cited over 3000 times. As for his University? Let me quote wikipedia: University officials claimed that the university was unable to make a case for research fraud because the raw data on which a proper evaluation could be made had gone missing. Because the accusation was that the data did not exist, this was a puzzling rationale.
According to Scopus, Woo-suk Hwang has been cited over 2000 times. Despite having faked research results and having committed major ethics violations, he has kept his job and… he is still publishing.
Despite all the retracted papers, Jan Hendrik Schön has still 1,200 citations according to Scopus. He lost his research job, but found an engineering position in Germany.
Conclusion: Scientific fraud is a low-risk, high-reward activity.
What is more critical is that we still equate peer review with correctness. The argument usually goes as follows: if it is important work, work that people rely upon, and it has been peer reviewed, then it must be correct. In sum, we think that conventional peer review + citations means validation. I think we are wrong:
Conventional peer review is shallow. Chandra, Hwang and Schön published faked results for many years in the most prestigious venues. The truth is that reviewers do not reproduce results. They usually do not have access to the raw data and software. And even if they did, they are unlikely to be motivated to redo all of the work to verify it.
Citations are not validations. Chandra, Hwang and Schön were generously cited. It is hardly surprising: impressive results are more likely to be cited. And doctored results are usually more impressive. Yet, scientists do not reproduce earlier work. Even if you do try to reproduce someone’s result, and fail, you probably won’t publish it. Indeed, publishing negative results is hard: journals are not interested. Moreover, there is a risk that it may backfire: the authors could go on the offensive. They could question your own competence.
There are many small frauds. Even without making up data, you can cheat by misleading the reader, by omission. You can present the data in creative ways, e.g. turn meaningless averages into hard facts by omitting the variance (see the fallacy of absolute numbers). These small frauds increase the likelihood that your paper will be accepted and then generously cited.
How do we solve the problem? (1) By trusting unimpressive results more than impressive ones. (2) By being suspicious of popular trends. (3) By running our own experiments.
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2010/09/06/how-reliable-is-science/
-
SEPTEMBER 15, 2010 4:00 A.M.
The Deadly War against DDT
In its two decades of widespread use, DDT saved more lives than any other man-made chemical.
A remarkable new documentary tells the story of how political and ideological forces combined to ban a widely and safely used chemical, DDT, leading to a surge of malaria deaths in developing countries like Kenya, Indonesia, and India.
3 Billion and Counting, which premieres this Friday in Manhattan, was produced by Dr. Rutledge Taylor, a California physician who specializes in preventive medicine. His film will both shock and anger you.
DDT was first synthesized in 1877, but it was not until 1940 that a Swiss chemist demonstrated that it could kill insects without any harm to humans. It was introduced into widespread use during World War II and became the single most important pesticide in maintaining human health for the next two decades. The scientist who discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT, Dr. Paul Müller, was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on DDT. (In the 1940s and 1950s the chemical was the “secret” ingredient in a popular new cocktail, the Mickey Slim: gin, with a pinch of DDT.)
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s lyrical but scientifically flawed book, Silent Spring, argued eloquently, but erroneously, that pesticides, especially DDT, were poisoning both wildlife and the environment – and also endangering human health. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the U.S. surgeon general were among those who dismissed these charges and came out in support of continuing to use DDT to fight disease and protect crops. A federal hearing was held on the safety of DDT, and in April 1972 Judge Edmund Sweeney concluded that not only was DDT safe, but it was an essential chemical. Two months later, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, William Ruckelshaus – who had never attended a single day’s session of the EPA’s hearings and admitted that he had not read the transcripts — overturned the judge’s decision, declaring, without evidence, that DDT was “a potential human carcinogen” and banned it for virtually all uses. The ban on DDT was considered to be the first major victory for the environmentalist movement in the United States, and countries around the world followed America’s lead.
In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying stopped, malaria cases rose sharply, reaching 2.5 million over the next decade.
Scientists have never found an effective substitute for DDT — and so the malaria death rate has kept on soaring.
In his dissection of the rise of the environmental movement and the fall of science, Dr. Taylor not only educates us, but he also sparks outrage about the unforeseen consequences of a scientifically ignorant chemical witchhunt, one that has caused untold human suffering and billions of deaths, primarily among children. While any man-on-the-street interview will yield an overwhelming majority of negative comments about DDT — a “highly toxic, killer chemical” – the reality is that DDT has saved more lives than any other man-made chemical.
– Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/246562/deadly-war-against-ddt-elizabeth-m-whelan
-
Jeepers, I could have swore I heard somewhere that
global warming climate change was gonna cause more catastrophic hurricanes. . . .
A New Hurricane Record?
Gary Padgett, writing to a tropical storm list-serv I am on, provides an interesting factoid, which I reproduce here with his permission (emphasis added):
We’re now at the first of October, and there’ve been no Category 3 or higher hurricanes (IH) to make landfall in the U. S. so far this season. The chances of a U. S. landfalling IH decrease significantly after 1 October. Over the past half-century, the only IHs to make landfall in the U. S. after 1 October were Hilda (1964), Opal (1995), and Wilma (2005). Hilda and Opal were already named tropical storms on the map as September ended—the only case forming in the month of October was Wilma.
If an IH does not make landfall in the U. S. during the remainder of this season, this will make five consecutive seasons without an IH landfall in the U. S. The last such instance of this (based upon the current HURDAT file) was 1910 – 1914. However, that being said, some caveats are in order.
(1) The current Saffir/Simpson classification of historical U. S. hurricanes was made by Hebert and Taylor in 1975. The parameter used to classify most of these was central pressure (CP), based on the older nominal CP ranges associated with each category. Nowadays, the S/S classification is based strictly upon the MSW at landfall.
(2) There are several cases, especially in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, for which the assigned S/S category does not match the Best Track winds, so when they are eventually re-analyzed, the landfalling category could be adjusted up or down.
(3) Hurricanes Gustav and Ike of 2008 both made their U. S. landfall with an estimated MSW of 95 kts, and with CPs of 957 and 952 mb, respectively. Had these storms occurred in the early 20th century, they would have been classified as Category 3 hurricanes, and barring any reliable wind measurements (which would have been unlikely) would have probably remained classified as such during the re-analysis. Similarly, though not within the past five years, Hurricanes Floyd and Isabel, which made landfall with an estimated MSW of 90 kts and CP around 956 mb, would have been classified as Category 3 hurricanes based on the CP.
Even with the caveats, the US has had a remarkable streak of luck with respect to hurricanes -- or maybe, it's climate change! ;-)
-
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/07/BAOF1FDMRV.DTL#ixzz11iqEfuN9
Overestimate fueled state's landmark diesel law
Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
San Francisco Chronicle October 8, 2010
(10-08) 04:00 PDT Sacramento - --
California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state's clean-air standards, and scientists have spent the past several months revising data and planning a significant weakening of the landmark regulation, The Chronicle has found.
The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with researching and adopting air quality standards. The estimate was a key part in the creation of a regulation adopted by the Air Resources Board in 2007, a rule that forces businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.
-
I don't know much about global warming (it was a pretty cool summer here in LA, we don't have hurricanes, and I'm pretty sure that while global warming is suppose to cause almost any
calamity, I don't think the list includes earthquakes. And if it warms the Pacific Ocean, well I like warm water :-) so I am not too worried) but as far as pollution
is concerned I am very grateful for the stricter laws.
I'm old enough to remember literally crying from the burning of the smog in summer here in LA. There would be constant "smog alerts" when you were not suppose to go outside.
We would all joke and call it "haze" because you couldn't see very far, but it was smog (pollution).
CA cracked down on pollution. Lot's of people objected, I'm sure it did cost money, and maybe some jobs, but I think if you took a poll and said do you like the
air quality now better than 30 years ago nearly everyone would say yes. And if you asked, "Was it worth it" again I think most would say yes. I barely remember "smog alerts" and
the air quality is no longer an excuse not to exercise outside during the day.
And if CA had not cracked down, well, I don't want to imagine how poor the air quality would be today.
-
Can you remember when California was a place people wanted to move to rather than escape from?
-
JDN, I also favor fewer poisons in the environment to a choking smog and toxic water supply. Do you then favor zero emissions - no driving, no flying, no roadbuilding, no farming etc. to some emissions? Back to the point of the story, do you favor honest, informed consent or perhaps getting a stricter standard passed with false data that exaggerates emissions by 4-fold? The latter may be cleaner and healthier...
-
No you are right absolute clean air is not practical. Yet with honest
facts I think the default vote should be on the side of protecting our health.
I'm not a scientist but when even I can tell something is terribly wrong it's time to do sonething.
However I'll repeat "honest" facts. Not falsified data. That's my whole problem with global warming.
-
Resignation letter addressed to the American Physical Society:
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence-it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind-simply to bring the subject into the open.<
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
More info here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/
-
0.006 warming per decade is the total warming, not the man-made component much less the man made portion that could be eliminated with severe new laws. 100 years and well within the margin of error, all I can conclude is how stable and resilient the nature of our planet is.
New Zealand is interesting to me. I can judge warming (or lack thereof) here with my own eyes and exposed skin, but an update from the far corner of the earth gives another perspective. I think NZ was a subject within warming scare movies (please be ready to evacuate!). Also interesting that the 'adjusted', wildly exaggerated figure is still less than one degree per century during this brief period of relying on fossil fuels. It might be more accurate to say we don't know how to measure the temperature of New Zealand now, much less the globe, or to pretend we have 100 year accuracy in any of that, and if we did that would still be too small a sample of time to conclude very much of anything.
-----------
"There’s a litany of excuses. The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) claims New Zealand has been warming at 0.92°C per 100 years. But when some independent minded chaps in New Zealand graphed the raw NZ data, they found that the thermometers show NZ has only warmed by a statistically non-significant 0.06°C. They asked for answers and got nowhere, until they managed to get the light of legal pressure onto NIWA to force it to reply honestly. Reading between the lines, it’s obvious NIWA can’t explain or defend the adjustments."
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/arewefeelingwarmeryet.pdf
-
NZ was one of the sites where gross amounts of data was extrapolated from very few measuring stations. IIRC, several "poorly performing" stations, i.e. ones that weren't showing a warming trend, were dropped. More here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/09/new-zealands-niwa-temperature-train-wreck/
-
Denying the Catastrophe: The Science of the Climate Skeptic’s Position
Oct. 15 2010 - 12:19 am | 19,771 views | 1 recommendation | 64 comments
Warren Myer
In last week’s column, I lamented the devolution of the climate debate into dueling ad hominem attacks, which has led in almost a straight line to the incredible totalitarian vision of the 10:10 climate group’s recent film showing school kids getting blown up for not adhering to the global warming alarmists’ position.
In writing that column, it struck me that it was not surprising that many average folks may be unfamiliar with the science behind the climate skeptic’s position, since it almost never appears anywhere in the press. This week I want to give a necessarily brief summary of the skeptic’s case. There is not space here to include all the charts and numbers; for those interested, this video and slide presentation provides much of the analytical backup.
It is important to begin by emphasizing that few skeptics doubt or deny that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas or that it and other greenhouse gasses (water vapor being the most important) help to warm the surface of the Earth. Further, few skeptics deny that man is probably contributing to higher CO2 levels through his burning of fossil fuels, though remember we are talking about a maximum total change in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to man of about 0.01% over the last 100 years.
What skeptics deny is the catastrophe, the notion that man’s incremental contributions to CO2 levels will create catastrophic warming and wildly adverse climate changes. To understand the skeptic’s position requires understanding something about the alarmists’ case that is seldom discussed in the press: the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually comprised of two separate, linked theories, of which only the first is frequently discussed in the media.
The first theory is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels (approximately what we might see under the more extreme emission assumptions for the next century) will lead to about a degree Celsius of warming. Though some quibble over the number – it might be a half degree, it might be a degree and a half – most skeptics, alarmists and even the UN’s IPCC are roughly in agreement on this fact.
But one degree due to the all the CO2 emissions we might see over the next century is hardly a catastrophe. The catastrophe, then, comes from the second theory, that the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks (basically acceleration factors) that multiply the warming from CO2 many fold. Thus one degree of warming from the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 might be multiplied to five or eight or even more degrees.
This second theory is the source of most of the predicted warming – not greenhouse gas theory per se but the notion that the Earth’s climate (unlike nearly every other natural system) is dominated by positive feedbacks. This is the main proposition that skeptics doubt, and it is by far the weakest part of the alarmist case. One can argue whether the one degree of warming from CO2 is “settled science” (I think that is a crazy term to apply to any science this young), but the three, five, eight degrees from feedback are not at all settled. In fact, they are not even very well supported.
Of course, in the scientific method, even an incorrect hypothesis is useful, as it gives the scientific community a starting point in organizing observational data to confirm or disprove the hypothesis. This, however, turns out to be wickedly difficult in climate science, given the outrageously complex nature of the Earth’s weather systems.
Our global temperature measurements over the last one hundred years show about 0.7C of warming since the early 1900s, though this increase has been anything but linear. Skeptics argue that, like a police department that locks on a single suspect early in a crime investigation and fails to adequately investigate any other suspects, many climate scientists locked in early on to CO2 as the primary culprit for this warming, to the exclusion of many other possible causes.
When the UN IPCC published its fourth climate report several years ago, it focused its main attention on the Earth’s warming after 1950 and in particular on the 20-year period between 1978 and 1998. The UN IPCC concluded that the warming in this 20-year period was too rapid to be due to natural causes, and almost certainly had to be due to man’s CO2. They reached this conclusion by running computer models that seemed to show that the warming in this period would have been far less without increased CO2 levels.
Skeptics, however, point out that the computer models were built by scientists who have only a fragmented, immature understanding of complex climate systems. Moreover, these scientists approached the models with the pre-conceived notion that CO2 is the main driver of temperatures, and so it is unsurprising that their models would show CO2 as the dominant factor.
In fact, the period 1978 to 1998 featured a number of other suspects that should have been considered as potentially contributing to warming. For example, the warm phase of several critical ocean cycles that have a big effect on surface temperatures, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, coincided with this period. Further, the second half of the 20th century saw far greater solar activity, as measured by sunspot numbers, than the first half of the century. Neither ocean cycles nor solar effects, nor a myriad of other factors we probably don’t even know enough to name, were built into the models. Even man’s changing land use has an effect on measured temperatures, as survey efforts have shown urban areas, which have higher temperatures than surrounding rural locations, expanding around our temperature measurement points and biasing measured temperatures upwards.
If CO2 is but one of several causes of warming over the past decades, then current climate models almost certainly have to be exaggerating future warming. Only by attributing all of the past warming to CO2 can catastrophic future warming forecasts be justified. In fact, even the 0.7C of measured historic warming is well under what the climate models should have predicted for warming based on past CO2 increases and their assumed high sensitivity of temperature to CO2 levels. In other words, to believe a forecast of, say, 5C of warming over the next 100 years, we should have seen 2C or more of warming over the past century.
This is why the IPCC actually had to make the assumption that global temperatures would have fallen naturally and due to other manmade pollutants over the past several decades. By arguing that without man’s CO2 the climate would have cooled by, for example, 0.5C, then they can claim past warming from CO2 as 1.2C (the measured 0.7C plus the imaginary 0.5C). Anyone familiar with how the Obama administration has claimed large stimulus-related jobs creation despite falling employment levels will recognize this approach immediately.
Despite these heroic efforts to try to find observational validation for their catastrophic warming forecasts, the evidence continues to accumulate that these forecasts are wildly overstated. The most famous forecast of all is perhaps NASA’s James Hansen’s forecast to Congress in 1988, a landmark in the history of global warming alarmism in this country. Despite the fact that 2010 may well turn out to be one of the couple warmest years in the past century (along with 1998, both of which are strong El Nino years), the overall trend in global temperatures has been generally flat for the last 10-15 years, and have remained well below Hansen’s forecasts. In fact, Hansen’s forecasts continue to diverge from reality more and more with each passing year.
Of course, as we all know, global warming has been rebranded by alarmist groups as “climate change” and then more recently as “climate disruption.” This is in some sense inherently disingenuous, implying to lay people that somehow climate change can result directly from CO2. In fact, no mechanism has ever been suggested wherein CO2 can cause climate change in any way except through the intermediate step of warming. CO2 causes warming, and then warming causes climate changes. So the question of warming and its degree still matters, no matter what branding is applied.
In fact, it is in the area of the knock-on effects of warming, from sea level increases to hurricanes, that some of the worst science is being pursued. Nowhere can we better see the effect of money on science than in climate change studies, as academics studying whatever natural phenomenon that interests them increasingly have the incentive to link that phenomenon to climate change to improve their chances at getting funding.
The craziness of climate scare stories is too broad and deep to deal with adequately here, as nearly every 3-sigma weather anomaly suddenly gets attributed to climate change. But let’s look at a couple of the more well-worn examples. In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned of the world being battered by more and more Katrina style category 5 storms; in fact, 2009 and 2010 have seen record low levels of global cyclonic activity, despite relatively elevated temperatures. Or take the melting ice cap: on the same exact day in 2007 when newspapers screamed that the Arctic had hit a 30-year low in sea ice extent, the Antarctic hit a 30-year high. The truth of the matter is that ice is indeed melting and sea levels are rising today – as they were in 1950, and 1900, and even 1850 (long before much man-made CO2). The world has warmed continuously since the end of the little ice age around 1820 (a worldwide cold spell generally linked to a very inactive period in the sun) and sea levels can be seen to follow an almost unbroken linear trend since that time.
Alarmists like to call climate skeptics “deniers,” usually in an attempt to equate climate skeptics with holocaust deniers. But skeptics do not deny that temperatures have warmed over the last century, or even that man (through CO2 as well as land use and other factors) has played some part in that warming. What skeptics deny, though, is the catastrophe. And even more, what skeptics deny is the need to drastically reduce fossil fuel use – a step that will likely be an expensive exercise in the developed west but an unmitigated disaster for the poor of Asia and Africa. These developing nations, who are just recently emerging from millennia of poverty, need to burn every hydrocarbon they can find to develop their economies.
Postscript: You will notice that I wrote this entire article without once mentioning either the words “hockey stick” or “Climategate.” I have never thought Michael Mann’s hockey stick to be a particularly compelling piece of evidence, even if it were correct. The analysis purports to show a rapid increase in world temperatures after centuries of stability, implying that man is likely the cause of current warming because, on Mann’s chart, recent temperature trends look so unusual. In the world of scientific proof, this is the weakest of circumstantial evidence.
As it turns out, however, there are a myriad of problems great and small with the hockey stick, from cherry-picking data to highly questionable statistical methods, which probably make the results incorrect. Studies that have avoided Mann’s mistakes have all tended to find the same thing – whether looking over a scale of a century, or millennia, or millions of years, climate changes absolutely naturally. Nothing about our current temperatures or CO2 levels is either unusual or unprecedented.
The best evidence that the problems identified with Mann’s analysis are probably real is how hard Mann and a small climate community fought to avoid releasing data and computer code that would allow outsiders to check and replicate their work. The “Climategate” emails include no smoking gun about the science, but do show how far the climate community has strayed from what is considered normal and open scientific process. No science should have to rely on an in-group saying “just trust us,” particularly one with trillions of dollars of public policy decisions on the line.
http://blogs.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/2010/10/15/denying-the-catstrophe-the-science-of-the-climate-skeptics-position/?boxes=opinionschannellatest
-
BBG, This is a great post. We have miniscule warming. We have no idea what part of that is attributable to humans, but roughly within the margin of error of our ability to measure global temperatures. We have no data we can trust. And so we publicize the wildest claims and decide to shut down our economies and declare war on each other.
Instead we should use our resources wisely and cleanly while we re-create the conditions of economic freedom that we know unleash human creativity.
-
Climatism: That Climate Change Chameleon
By Steve Goreham
Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth's climate, is a remarkably flexible ideology. Calling it "global warming" for many years, advocates then renamed the crisis "climate change" after the unexpected cooling of global surface temperatures from 2002-2009. Last month, John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urged everyone to start using the term "global climate disruption." What's next -- "catastrophic climate calamity"?
Decreasing snowfall was once claimed as an indication of man-made climate change. After years of declining snowfall in England, Dr. David Viner, senior scientist at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia, predicted that winter snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event." Others predicted that snow cover in the United Kingdom would disappear by 2020. But last winter, at the same time that much of the eastern U.S. received record snowfalls, the U.K. was entirely blanketed by snow, as shown in the following NASA satellite photograph -- a rare occurrence.
(http://www.americanthinker.com/frozenbritain.jpg)
The heavy snow in England was very embarrassing for the U.K. Meteorological Office, which had predicted a mild winter.
So what have the alarmists done? Attend almost any lecture today by an advocate of man-made global warming and you'll find that "heavy snowfall" is now included on the list of impacts from climate change. Now both heavy snow and lack of snow are evidence of man-made warming.
To anyone who studies geologic history, the 1.3oF rise in global surface temperatures over the last century is unremarkable. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations calls this rise "unprecedented" and labels it evidence of man-made climate change. This recent temperature rise is well within the +/-2.5oF range of Earth's average surface temperature over the last ten thousand years. It's a remarkably small change, given the titanic forces exerted on our world by the sun, the planets, and Earth's own terrestrial forces of weather and ocean cycles. Even though the average surface temperature of Earth has stayed in a narrow range, local temperatures vary widely. In Chicago, for example, the average annual range is from about -5oF to +95oF. Such wide local variation means that a "hundred-year weather event" is occurring somewhere on our planet at any given time.
Climatism uses these local weather variations, and increasingly the term "climate volatility," to raise alarm. A recent example is the August report from the World Bank warning that "climate volatility" is expected to "worsen poverty vulnerability in developing countries." This year, we've had drought in Russia and record floods in Pakistan. Both occurrences were seized upon by climate alarmists as evidence of increasing man-made climate volatility. Record cold temperatures in July in Bolivia, which killed millions of fish in South American rivers, were ignored. Natural local weather events, selectively amplified, provide an endless source of fodder for promoting the coercive governmental policies of Climatism.
Yet, scientific evidence shows that weather would be less extreme in a warmer world. Peer-reviewed studies on droughts, floods, hurricanes and storms show that 20th Century occurrences have been of equal or lesser severity than similar events in past centuries, when Earth's climate was in the cooler period of the Little Ice Age. The bulk of science shows that today's climate is not more volatile as alarmists claim.
The latest initiative from the climate change chameleon is to frame global warming as detrimental to the health of U.S. citizens. On September 28, a joint letter from 120 of America's health organizations was delivered to President Obama, supporting efforts by the Environmental Regulatory Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. The letter claims that man-made global warming is now a U.S. public health issue especially for "older adults." Yet senior citizens continue to retire to Florida, Texas, and Arizona rather than North Dakota and Minnesota. Don't they know that warmer temperatures are a serious health risk?
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century's Hottest Topic.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/climatism_that_climate_change.html at October 20, 2010 - 11:24:45 AM CDT
-
"Advertised as an all-electric car" - turns out it has a gas engine.
"GM addressed concerns about where you plug the thing in en route to grandma's house by adding a small gasoline engine to help maintain the charge on the battery as it starts to run down. It was still an electric car, we were told, and not a hybrid on steroids.
That's not quite true. The gasoline engine has been found to be more than a range-extender for the battery. Volt engineers are now admitting that when the vehicle's lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph, the Volt's gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors. That's not charging the battery — that's driving the car.
So it's not an all-electric car, but rather a pricey $41,000 hybrid that requires a taxpayer-funded $7,500 subsidy to get car shoppers to look at it. But gee, even despite the false advertising about the powertrain, isn't a car that gets 230 miles per gallon of gas worth it?
We heard GM's then-CEO Fritz Henderson claim the Volt would get 230 miles per gallon in city conditions. Popular Mechanics found the Volt to get about 37.5 mpg in city driving, and Motor Trend reports: "Without any plugging in, (a weeklong trip to Grandma's house) should return fuel economy in the high 30s to low 40s."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/550957/201010191855/Volt-Fraud-At-Government-Motors.htm
----------
I have an 18 year old Honda that does better than that.
-
So, when it doesn't run on gas, it runs on coal. Wonderful.
-
Yeah, let's cut off one end of a blanket, sew it to the other end, and then congratulate ourselves for making the blanket longer.
-
And, if I am not mistaken, also entering the calculus should be the enviro consequences of making the battery, generating the electiricity that charges it, etc. Yes?
-
"the enviro consequences of making the battery, generating the electricity that charges it, etc."
Also the transmission losses in the lines.
I like the CNG concept (compressed natural gas). Uses American or North American sources and burns cleaner, but requires large tank for a shorter range, depending on compression pressures.
A gallon of gas is still the most safe, stable and transportable for the energy content that you need.
-
And, if I am not mistaken, also entering the calculus should be the enviro consequences of making the battery, generating the electiricity that charges it, etc. Yes?
No fooling. I understand there are zinc mining areas in Canada--zinc is critical to battery production--that NASA uses to train Mars rover missions because that denuded, red landscape most resembles that of the fourth planet. Leaves me thinking it's more about exerting control over people than making environmentally sensible decisions.
-
Don't forget the environmental costs of rare earth elements for all the "green tech". As well the geo-political aspects, like what our Chinese friends are doing with their domination of REE exports.
-
http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/28/plastic-water-bottles-wont-hur
Reason Magazine
Plastic Water Bottles Won't Hurt You
Ignore the junk science and follow the facts.
John Stossel | October 28, 2010
Canada has announced it will ban the chemical bisphenol A—known as BPA—which is used to make plastic water and baby bottles.
The head of the Canadian environmental group Environmental Defence is thrilled:
"Kudos to the federal government. ... We look forward to seeing BPA legally designated as 'toxic' as soon as possible."
But the evidence doesn't actually show that BPA is toxic. Europe's equivalent of the FDA concluded: "(T)he data currently available do not provide convincing evidence of neurobehavioral toxicity."
Richard Sharpe of the University of Edinburgh explained:
"Some early animal studies produced results suggesting the possibility of adverse effects relevant to human health, but much larger, carefully designed studies in several laboratories have failed to confirm these initial studies."
The initial studies injected BPA into animals, rather than giving it by mouth, which is how we humans are exposed. Since BPA degrades in the gut when we consume it, very little gets to our cells.
Yet many people are sure BPA causes not only breast and prostate cancer but also obesity, diabetes, attention deficit hyperactivity, autism, liver disease, ovarian disease, disease of the uterus, low sperm count, and heart disease. When a chemical is said to cause so many disorders, that's a sure sign of unscientific hysteria. But a documentary called Tapped says it's true. It quotes experts claiming "BPA may be one of the most potent toxic chemicals known to man."
Nonsense. Not only is there no good evidence that BPA locked into plastic can hurt people, it actually saves lives by stopping botulism.
"Since BPA became commonplace in the lining of canned goods, food-borne illness from canned foods—including botulism—has virtually disappeared," says the American Council of Science and Health.
You never hear the good news about BPA in the mainstream media. Fear-mongering gets better ratings.
Tapped also asserts that other dangerous chemicals poison bottled water. In the film, toxicologist Dr. Stephen King says that we should be "horrified" at all those chemicals. But when we called King, he sent us a study saying "testing" reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed—at levels no different from those routinely found in tap water.
Tapped claims cancer rates are up because of these chemicals, but that's another myth. Cancer incidence rates are flat. They would have declined if not for new screening methods. Life spans are up, too.
Not every mom has fallen for the BPA scare. "Truth or Scare," the blog of a woman who calls herself "Junk Science Mom," recently called out one of the people behind the anti-BPA campaign: scaremonger/hustler David Fenton:
"If you believe what you see and hear in the media, those fighting an unnecessary battle against bisphenol-A (BPA) are altruistic individuals concerned about health and safety. ... But there is an ugly truth behind the scenes that you will never hear about in the media. Greed, propaganda, political agendas, profits, lies and scams. And it all can be tied to one person and one powerful PR firm. David Fenton and Fenton Communications. ...
"He is the puppet master, and we moms are his puppets. He orchestrates the scare, and we, being fearful for our children, unknowingly carry out his plan for him. He comes out a winner, and we are duped into wasting our time, money and energy fighting a battle that never needed to be fought."
Good for you, Junk Science Mom, whoever you are. "Truth or Scare" is a wonderful addition to the debate.
But if BPA isn't toxic, why will Canada ban it? And why have Connecticut and Minnesota already done so? Because scientifically illiterate legislators are quick to panic. When the media sensationalize, legislators respond. Two FDA scientists—Ronald J. Lorentzen and David G. Hattan—note the bias toward sensationalism: "The disquieting public invocations made by some ... about the perils of exposure (to BPA) ... galvanize the public debate."
When even notoriously risk-averse FDA scientists speak out against the BPA panic, the scaremongers must have gone absurdly far.
John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.
-
Note the date:
The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
www.denisdutton.com
Here is the text of Newsweek’s 1975 story on the trend toward global cooling. It may look foolish today, but in fact world temperatures had been falling since about 1940. It was around 1979 that they reversed direction and resumed the general rise that had begun in the 1880s, bringing us today back to around 1940 levels. A PDF of the original is available here. A fine short history of warming and cooling scares has recently been produced. It is available here.
We invite readers interested in finding out about both sides of the debate over global warming to visit our website: Climate Debate Daily — Denis Dutton
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports
-
And a happy Climate's Fools Day to you, too.
-
The body of the article is now there BBG.
-
It's Climate Fools Day Today
Hey, I wasn't foolin':
Thomas Lifson
Today marks the third annual observation of Climate Fools Day, which was named by protestors outside the British House of Commons on 27th October 2008 when the House was debating a Climate Bill.
In the UK this year, those marking the event plan to inaugurate an annual "Ernst-Georg Beck Award for Scientific Integrity and Competence" (BASIC). It is proposed to name this 'BASIC' award after Ernst-Georg Beck to honor a man of great scientific integrity and to bring attention to the fact that some 80,000 accurate carbon dioxide measurements were conveniently left out of the UN IPCC documentation. The presentation of the prize is timed to also celebrate that noble achievement of the CRU whistleblower who one year ago altered the course of modern climate science (and possibly of history) by bravely risking his career to leak the 'Climategate' emails to the world.
It is time for this event to spread to America.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/10/october_27_marks_climate_fools.html at October 30, 2010 - 08:45:17 AM CDT
-
The Current Wisdom
Posted by Patrick J. Michaels
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.
More Good News About Sea Level Rise
In the last (and first) installment of The Current Wisdom, I looked at how projections of catastrophic sea level rise—some as high as 20 feet this century—are falling by the wayside as more real-world data comes in. In the last month, there’s been even more hot-off-the-press studies that a) continue to beat down the notion of disastrous inundations, and b) received no media attention whatsoever.
Last month, I featured a new analysis which showed that the calibration scheme for satellite gravity measurements was out of whack, leading to an overestimation loss of glacial ice from Greenland and Antarctica by about 50%.
This time around, there are two brand-new studies which further dampen the fears of rapid sea level rise spawned by a warming climate. The one estimates that about 25% of the current sea level rise has nothing whatsoever to do with “global warming” from any cause, but instead is contributed by our increasing removal of fossil groundwater to suit our growing water demands. And the second estimates that the total sea level rise contribution of one of Antarctica’s biggest outlet glaciers—one which has been called “the weak underbelly” of the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet—is most likely only going to be about 1/2 inch by the year 2100. Neither met the press, which is why you are reading about them here.
Last month we concluded that “things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates [3 to 20 feet of sea level rise by 2100]. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.” Now, there are even more signs that the massive sea level rise candle is flaming out as rapidly as cap-and-trade in an election year.
A team of scientists from the Netherlands, headed by the appropriately surnamed Yoshihide Wada, have been investigating the magnitude and trends of groundwater usage around the world. For millennia, humans “mined” water under the surface, but the volumes were globally inconsequential.
Wada et al. found many regions, including the Midwestern and Southwestern U.S., in which groundwater extraction exceeds groundwater replenishment. Around the world, Wada et al. found that the total excess was about 30 cubic miles per year in 1960, which rose to about 68 by the year 2000.
What on earth does this have to do with sea-level rise?
Remember that, outside of nuclear reactions, matter is never destroyed. Water taken out of the ground either runs off to a creek and makes it back to the ocean, or it evaporates. Because the total water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is constant (depending upon the average temperature of the water/atmosphere interface), the additional evaporation is available for precipitation, adding to that which runs off.
68 cubic miles of added water to the ocean each year amounts to about three-hundredths of an inch of sea level. Granted, this is a small amount, but (despite the scare headlines emanating from our greener friends), the annual rate of global sea level rise during the past 20 years has only been about 0.12 inches per year. So groundwater extraction accounts for about a quarter (.03/.12) of the current rate of sea level rise.
This is a rather large bite out of the apple of sea level rise, and it means that estimates of just how much sea level rise is being caused by ongoing global warming have to be slashed.
In a much-hyped paper appearing in Science magazine back in early 2007, Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues (including NASA’s infamous Cassandra James Hansen, the Nouriel Roubini of climatology), proclaimed that sea level rise is occurring at a rate which was at the very high end of the projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—fuelling claims that the IPCC sea level rise projections from climate change were too conservative.
(Hansen is also the lonely champion of the notion that sea level will rise 20 feet in the next 89 years. Twenty years ago, he predicted that New York’s Westside Highway would be inundated by now.)[1]
If the Rahmstorf et al. analysis were updated through 2010 and the impact from groundwater depletion figured in, it would turn out that the observed rate of sea level rise from global warming would fall at or below the IPCC’s mid-range projection which ultimately results in about 15 inches of sea level rise by 2100. Such a finding of course would ignite very little hype—which is why you are reading it here.
Ah, but you say, don’t the global warming doomsayers tell us that the rate of sea level rise will accelerate rapidly as the climate warms and glaciers atop Greenland and Antarctica slip off into the seas, and so the total rise by the end of the century will be much above a value based on an extrapolation of the present?
The idea—graphically portrayed in Al Gore’s science fiction film—is that summer meltwater will flow down the, say, 10,000 feet required to get to the bottom of Greenland’s ice, and “lubricate” the flowing glaciers. (Of course, the reason glaciers flow to begin with is because the pressure is so great that the bottom water is liquid, but never mind that fact).
Last time, I noted a recent paper by Faezeh Nick and colleagues that basically pooh-poohed the idea that surface meltwater does this.
Offing the PIG
Another oft-repeated threat is that there are a plethora of glaciers in Antarctica that are grounded in the oceans, and that higher water temperatures will lead to melting from below that will ultimately “unground” them, floating them and causing rapid retreat.
Alarmist fingers are most often pointed at Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the leading candidate to unground and raise sea levels by up to 4.5 feet a relatively short amount of time. It was Terence Hughes (from University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, which—surprise—thrives on climate change) in the early 1980s that labeled the PIG as the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for, in his view, having the biggest potential to contribute a lot of sea level rise in a short amount of time. Hughes’s belief has become popular of late as the rate of retreat of the PIG increased in the early 1990s.
In 2008, University of Colorado’s Tad Pfeffer and colleagues projected that the PIG (and the nearby Thwaites glacier) would add between 4.3 and 15.4 inches of sea level rise by 2100. In early 2010, the reliably alarmist New Scientist headlined “Major Antarctic Glacier ‘Past its Tipping Point’”, inaccurately quoting Oxford’s Richard Katz who actually said “the take-home message is that we should be concerned about tipping points in West Antarctica and we should do a lot more work to investigate” (translation: can I scare you into sending me more money?).
But throwing cold water in the PIG pen are the prolific polar researcher Ian Joughin and his colleagues. In a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, Joughin et al. reported their efforts to simulate the future behavior of PIG using a “basinscale glaciological model” that they verified against a large amount of satellite observations documenting the flow rate and thinning rate of the PIG. Once they were happy that their model depicted the observations correctly, they turned to look at what the future may hold in store.
What they found came as a bit of a surprise.
Instead of an accelerating retreat, it seems that the PIG’s still-tiny decline may remain constant. Joughin et al., write:
PIG’s dramatic retreat and speedup may not indicate a trend of continued acceleration, and speeds may stabilize at their current elevated levels as thinning continues.
This result ties into another investigation of recent PIG behavior that was published this summer. In that one, Jenkins et al. concluded that the geometry of the sea floor upon which the PIG rested is what allowed for a rapid retreat when warming first commenced. In other words, the PIG was predisposed to a rapid response—initially.
When Joughin et al. plug potential future climate change into their glaciological model of PIG, they found that the initial acceleration is not maintained for very long, and instead soon stabilizes. This has large implications. Instead of PIG contributing many inches of sea level this century, they found about a single inch—and that was the worst case. Joughin and colleagues best estimate is something closer to ½ inch.
Joughin et al. conclude:
While we have not modeled the other [nearby Antarctic] glaciers, PIG is the most rapidly changing and largest contributor to the current imbalance, indicating future model-derived upper bounds on 21st century sea level for the entire region are likely to fall well below the heuristically derived 11-to-39 cm upper bound [Pfeffer et al., 2008].
Hardly catastrophic.
Sooner or later, these facts may penetrate into public consciousness… but until then I hope you’ll continue to consult The Current Wisdom.
References:
Hughes, T. J., 1981, The Weak Underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet. Journal of Glaciology, 27, 518–525.
Jenkins, A., et al., 2010. Observations Beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and Implications for its Retreat. Nature Geoscience, 3(7), 468–472, doi:10.1038/ngeo890.
Katz, R. F., and M. G. Worster, 2010. Stability of Ice-sheet Grounding Lines. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 466, 1597-1620.
Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale Changes in Greenland Outlet Glacier DynamicsTtriggered at the Terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.
Pfeffer, W. T., Harper, J. T., and S. O’Neel, 2008. Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-century Sea-level Rise. Science, 321, 1340-1343.
Rahmstorf, S., et al., 2007. Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections. Science, 316, 709.
Joughin, I., Smith, B. E., and D. M. Holland, 2010. Sensitivity of 21st Century Sea Level to Ocean-induced Thinning of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20502, doi:10.1029/2010GL044819.
Wada, Y., et al. 2010. Global Depletion of Groundwater Resources. Geophysical Research Letters, 37, L20402, doi:10.1029/2010GL044571.
[1] In 1988, author Robert Reiss asked Hansen, whose office is on Broadway, what greenhouse-effect changes would occur in the next twenty years. He said, among other things, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-current-wisdom-2/
-
The Shocking Truth: The Scientific American Poll on Climate Change
Posted by Patrick J. Michaels
November’s Scientific American features a profile of Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Judith Curry, who has committed the mortal sin of reaching out to other scientists who hypothesize that global warming isn’t the disaster it’s been cracked up to be. I have personal experience with this, as she invited me to give a research seminar in Tech’s prestigious School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2008. My lecture summarizing the reasons for doubting the apocalyptic synthesis of climate change was well-received by an overflow crowd.
Written by Michael Lemonick, who hails from the shrill blog Climate Central, the article isn’t devoid of the usual swipes, calling her a “heretic,, which is hardly at all true. She’s simply another hardworking scientist who lets the data take her wherever it must, even if that leads her to question some of our more alarmist colleagues.
But, as a make-up call for calling attention to Curry, Scientific American has run a poll of its readers on climate change. Remember that SciAm has been shilling for the climate apocalypse for years, publishing a particularly vicious series of attacks on Denmark’s Bjorn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist. The magazine also featured NASA’s James Hansen and his outlandish claims on sea-level rise. Hansen has stated, under oath in a deposition, that a twenty foot rise is quite possible within the next 89 years; oddly, he has failed to note that in 1988 he predicted that the West Side Highway in Manhattan would go permanently under water in twenty years.
SciAm probably expected a lot of people would agree with the key statement in their poll that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is “an effective group of government representatives and other experts.”
Hardly. As of this morning, only 16% of the 6655 respondents agreed. 84%—that is not a typo—described the IPCC as “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.”
The poll also asks “What should we do about climate change?” 69% say “nothing, we are powerless to stop it.” When asked about policy options, an astonishingly low 7% support cap-and-trade, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June, 2009, and cost approximately two dozen congressmen their seats.
The real killer is question “What is causing climate change?” For this one, multiple answers are allowed. 26% said greenhouse gases from human activity, 32% solar variation, and 78% “natural processes.” (In reality all three are causes of climate change.)
And finally, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?” 80% of the respondents said “nothing.”
Remember that this comes from what is hardly a random sample. Scientific American is a reliably statist publication and therefore appeals to a readership that is skewed to the left of the political center. This poll demonstrates that virtually everyone now acknowledges that the UN has corrupted climate science, that climate change is impossible to stop, and that futile attempts like cap-and-trade do nothing but waste money and burn political capital, things that Cato’s scholars have been saying for years.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-shocking-truth-the-scientific-american-poll-on-climate-change/
-
http://green.autoblog.com/2010/11/11/inside-line-our-chevy-volts-battery-miles-cost-more-than-the-g/
During its time with us, our 2011 Chevy Volt tester consumed energy at the rate of 39.0 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles when in electric-only mode and averaged 31.1 mpg in gas engine assistance mode. We paid an average of $0.31 per kilowatt-hour of electricity and $3.31 per gallon of 91 octane swill, so the magic of arithmetic tells us that each one of the Volt's miles driven on electricity cost us more money than if it'd simply consumed gasoline instead. That's due in part to our high electricity rate - had our rate dropped to $0.24 per kilowatt-hour, we'd have reached parity on a cost-per-mile basis between electrons and dinosaurs.
-
Anyone who can remember the heating and air conditioning capability of an old air-cooled VW might wonder what heat or even defrost capability you will have in your all-electric car. I also wonder how the already short range might be affected by running the AC at full blast. Don't get me wrong. I love electric vehicles, just not when I need to go fast, go far, carry a load, pull a boat or travel in foul weather.
While our progressive-in-chief and his entourage are jetting the globe, hard core liberals here in the north country are wishing they had put chains on their bicycle tires and sand and salt on their bake trails last night before the seasons changed so quickly and so drastically:
http://www.startribune.com/ (Minneapolis paper, current lead story)
SNOW EMERGENCIES DECLARED
Foot of snow; thousands without power
The largest November snowfall in two decades stormed across Minnesota on Saturday, dumping a foot of snow in parts of the Twin Cities. | Statewide warnings.
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111204494.html
George Will takes it apart.
-
Thanks GM and George Will. This whole episode turns my stomach over all that is wrong in this country. One is the lies - it is not all-electric. The govt money was not paid back. It doesn't save the earth etc. Two is the govt ownership, one of the most egregious of all the unconstitutional federal actions I have ever seen. Three is the tax credit. Where to start on that one? The govt pays you to buy from them. What ever happened to equal protection under the law. Pay me equally to not buy one. It's a $41k new car, have ordinary taxpayers pay rich ones?? Since we are already a TRILLION AND A HALF in deficit, no one is paying. We are just devaluing our standard of living to pretend we are paying someone to do something of no commercial or market value. Then they count the 7500 expense as a TAX CUT :? Four, It has absolutely no environmental value. How many Dolt buyers will have this as there only car - then refuse all air travel, home heating, air conditioning etc all the other 'sources' of carbon. It is a bunch of BS. Even the plug goes into a carbon based coal supply while drag our feet another decade with no new nuclear.
If you believe the pathological science, the tax credit should go only to people who will go 100% off the grid, which of course is illegal in most of this country.
-
Cost-effective ways to address climate change
By Bjorn Lomborg
Wednesday, November 17, 2010;
One of the scarier predictions about global warming is the suggestion that melting glaciers and ice caps could cause sea levels to rise as much as 15 to 20 feet over the next century. Set aside the fact that the best research we have - from the United Nations climate panel - says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100. Rather, let's imagine that over the next 80 or 90 years, a giant port city - say, Tokyo - found itself engulfed by a sea-level rise of about 15 feet. Millions of inhabitants would be imperiled, along with trillions of dollars' worth of infrastructure. Without a vast global effort, could we cope with such a terrifying catastrophe?
Well, we already have. In fact, we're doing it right now.
Since 1930, excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused Tokyo to subside by as much as 15 feet. Similar subsidence has occurred over the past century in numerous cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Osaka, Bangkok and Jakarta. And in each case, the city has managed to protect itself from such large relative sea-level rises without much difficulty.
The process is called adaptation, and it's something we humans are very good at. That isn't surprising, since we've been doing it for millennia. As climate economist Richard Tol notes, our ability to adapt to widely varying climates explains how people live happily at both the equator and the poles. In the debate over global warming, in which some have argued that civilization as we know it is at stake, this is an important point. Humankind is not completely at the mercy of nature. To the contrary, when it comes to dealing with the impact of climate change, we've compiled a pretty impressive track record. While this doesn't mean we can afford to ignore climate change, it provides a powerful reason not to panic about it either.
There is no better example of how human ingenuity can literally keep our heads above water than the Netherlands. Although a fifth of their country lies below sea level - and fully half is less than three feet above it - the Dutch maintain an enormously productive economy and enjoy one of the world's highest standards of living. The secret is a centuries-old system of dikes, supplemented in recent decades by an elaborate network of floodgates and other barriers. All this adaptation is not only effective but also amazingly inexpensive. Keeping Holland protected from any future sea-level rises for the next century will cost only about one-tenth of 1 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
Coping with rising sea levels is hardly the only place where low-cost, high-impact adaptation strategies can make a huge difference. One of the most pernicious impacts of global warming is the extent to which it exacerbates the phenomenon known as the urban "heat island effect" - the fact that because they lack greenery and are chockablock with heat-absorbing black surfaces such as tar roofs and asphalt roads, urban areas tend to be much warmer than the surrounding countryside. Ultimately, we're not going to solve any of these problems until we figure out a way to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
But in the meantime, there are simple adaptive measures we can employ to cool down our cities: We can paint them. Hashem Akbari, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in cost-effective methods of combating the effects of climate change in urban areas, has shown that by painting roofs white, covering asphalt roadways with concrete-colored surfaces and planting shade trees, local temperatures could be reduced by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Akbari and colleagues reported in the journal Climatic Change last year that for every 100 square feet of black rooftop converted to white surface, the effects of roughly one ton of carbon dioxide would be offset.
Painting streets and rooftops white may sound impractical, if not silly, but it's a realistic strategy - which is to say, it's effective and affordable. Indeed, for an initial expenditure of $1 billion, we could lighten enough Los Angeles streets and rooftops to reduce temperatures in the L.A. Basin more than global warming would increase them over the next 90 years.
Obviously, whether it involves dikes or buckets of white paint, adaptation is not a long-term solution to global warming. Rather, it will enable us to get by while we figure out the best way to address the root causes of man-made climate change. This may not seem like much, but at a time when fears of a supposedly imminent apocalypse threaten to swamp rational debate about climate policy, it's worth noting that coping with climate change is something we know how to do.
The writer is head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It" and the subject of the movie "Cool It."
His previous pieces for The Post include: A better way to fight global warming , Carbon cuts liable to harm more than help, A better way than cap and trade and Stop fighting over global warming - there's a better way to attack it .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/16/AR2010111604973.html
-
Grateful for no house fire while the snow drifts blocked the doors to our house. (wrong thread?) Deaths in Europe, the Eiffel Tower closed, 100 year lows in Cancun - during the global warming conference!
People I know from here who still believe in global warming spend their winters elsewhere. Thanksgiving this year was the coldest in 20 years and freezing ever since. Lead story of the local paper right now: MSP Airport closed after blizzard warning extended; metro bus service suspended http://www.startribune.com/ Forecast: more snow, more wind, 20 degrees colder.
I'm not complaining, we love the subtle change of seasons, it was near 70 in early Nov. My next door neighbor back from south Florida for the holidays has a smile on his face as he takes a great big snowblower where the snowplow can't go. I'm just saying winter is still on after a hundred and fifty years of fossil fuel use.
-
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/superwheat/
Climate change alarmists hate it when we refer to carbon dioxide as “plant food”, even though the description is accurate. And what a food it is! Earlier this year, the ABC’s Landline program reported on an experiment conducted by the Victorian Department of Primary Industry, which blasted a patch of wheat with higher CO2 levels:
[ABC reporter] CHRIS CLARKE: A series of pipes pour extra carbon dioxide over a trial plot of wheat. You can hear and feel the gas coming out. So how much are you putting over this area?
[Scientist] GLENN FITZGERALD: In the centre of the ring there is a little sensor, a little cup that maintains that centre concentration at 550 parts per million which is the concentration we expect in the atmosphere over the whole planet in the year 2050.
CHRIS CLARKE: The experiment’s in its third year.
GLENN FITZGERALD: CO2 is called a fertiliser, it’s a CO2 fertilisation effect which means that carbon dioxide is a food source for plants if you will, that’s the carbon that goes into the bulk of the biomass of the plant. So raising levels of CO2 actually increases that growth, increases the biomass and in agriculture, increases the yield. Given, of course, that there’s sufficient water and sufficient nitrogen and that is what we’re seeing here. We have a number of different varieties in this trial and we’re seeing overall on average 20 per cent yield increase due to elevated CO2.
CHRIS CLARKE: They’re not just measuring how much wheat is grown. An important part of this experiment is temperature and temperature relates to water use. More carbon dioxide should increase the plants’ water efficiency …
-
Wait a minute! You mean to tell me the climate changed due to a shift in the orbit and I have not heard one word about it from global warming advocates!!!!
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-earth-orbital-shift-sahara.html
:-o :-o
-
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
By Charles Onians
Monday, 20 March 2000
Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.
Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
-
Freki: That is fascinating.
-
From, surprise!, Pravda on the Hudson:
Bundle up, it is global warming
Judah Cohen
THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.
All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.
How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.
For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.
Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.
But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.
The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.
As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.
The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.
The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.
That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.
Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.
It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.
Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.
-
So, little or no snow=global warming
Lots of snow=global warming
Sounds very scientific to me.
-
Cold means global warming. Drought or flood means global warming. Correction, make all those climate change.
No one where I am since October has been dreaming of a white Christmas as we scramble to keep the roofs from collapsing. But don't believe your lying eyes, the world is warming out of control. (sarcasm)
CO2 is not a primary determinant of temperature.
-
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/557597/201012221907/The-Abiding-Faith-Of-Warm-ongers.aspx
The Abiding Faith Of Warm-ongers
Climate: Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age?
The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn't funny. Sadly, they've been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn't be reversed.
This is a big problem for those who see human-caused global warming as an irreversible result of the Industrial Revolution's reliance on carbon-based fuels. Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It's anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.
A cautionary tale? You bet. Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, global warming report in 2007 predicted an inevitable, century-long rise in global temperatures of two degrees or more. Only higher temperatures were foreseen. Moderate or even lower temperatures, as we're experiencing now, weren't even listed as a possibility.
Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.
Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, noted that for something to be called scientific, it must be, as he put it, "falsifiable." That is, for something to be scientifically true, you must be able to test it to see if it's false. That's what scientific experimentation and observation do. That's the essence of the scientific method.
Unfortunately, the prophets of climate doom violate this idea. No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.
Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region's strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, "In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile."
Got that? No matter what the weather, it's all due to warming. This isn't science; it's a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.
[b**]Read it all.[/b]
-
Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Was Fraud, Journal ReportsBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 5, 2011
Filed at 12:15 a.m. EST on January 06, 2011
LONDON (AP) — The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.
The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Still, the suggestion the MMR shot was connected to autism spooked parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella have never fully recovered.
A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.
The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.
Wakefield could not be reached for comment despite repeated calls and requests to the publisher of his recent book, which claims there is a connection between vaccines and autism that has been ignored by the medical establishment. Wakefield now lives in the U.S. where he enjoys a vocal following including celebrity supporters like Jenny McCarthy.
Deer's article was paid for by the Sunday Times of London and Britain's Channel 4 television network. It was published online Thursday in the medical journal, BMJ.
In an accompanying editorial, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee and colleagues called Wakefield's study "an elaborate fraud." They said Wakefield's work in other journals should be examined to see if it should be retracted.
Last May, Wakefield was stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. Many other published studies have shown no connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.
But measles has surged since Wakefield's paper was published and there are sporadic outbreaks in Europe and the U.S. In 2008, measles was deemed endemic in England and Wales.
-
We learned in the Wizard of OZ that a new snow fall has a cleansing affect on the earth and I am grateful to have another new snowfall every day so far this year. I assume the extreme cold and snow is because of greenhouse warmth and maybe CO2 is seeding the clouds.
We are slipping on this thread, where is my friend Guinness?
-
BBG emailed me about a heavy work load but says he will be back.
-
(Of course Tom Friedman is the NY Times columnist who openly envies the more efficient Chinese system that doesn't rely on checks and balances or consent of the governed. Friedman's free speech however is not at the expense or sanction of the U.S. government.)
The Tom Friedman of Climatology
January 18, 2011 John Hinderacker, Powerlineblog.com
One of the striking features of our political era is that increasing numbers of liberals are coming out of the closet as enemies of the Constitution and of democracy. The latest is James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen is, to be blunt, an awful human being and one of the worst of the global warming fraudsters. Under his guidance, NASA's data have become so unreliable as to be an embarrassment to any scientists who may still be in the picture.
Hansen was in China in November, but only recently have his public comments there received the publicity they deserve. Hansen revealed himself as the Tom Friedman of climatology: how much better things would be if we could do away with that pesky Constitution and the democracy it protects! Pat Michaels reports:
The nation's most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about [Congress's refusal to enact cap and trade], blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the "best hope" to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China's will. ...
According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are "the barbarians" with a "fossil-money- 'democracy' that now rules the roost," making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. Here's what he blogged on Nov. 24:
"I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast to the West with its short election cycles. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient."
Historically, the Communist Chinese have tended to shoot those whom they found inconvenient--as opposed to climate realists, who not only don't shoot the alarmists, but confine themselves to arguing against them with scientific evidence.
Mr. Hansen has another idea to circumvent our democracy. Because Congress is not likely to pass any legislation making carbon-based energy prohibitively expensive, he proposed, in the South China Morning Post, that China lead a boycott of our economy:
"After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.
"The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction ... or ... accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being."
And this guy has been on the payroll of the United States of America for decades! Global warming has always been about political power, not science. As public opinion turns ever more decisively against the alarmists, we can expect more naked totalitarianism from the climate left.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/
http://liten.be//GWfsZ
-
The Truth Wears Off
Is there something wrong with the scientific method?by Jonah Lehrer
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1BbJXgS5h
-
BD:
That idea in that piece is a profoundly challenging one. If correct, much of what we know, isn't so.
What do you make of it?
-
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640
Quantum physics says goodbye to reality
Apr 20, 2007
Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).
Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many hidden-variables theories would be ruled out if a certain experimental inequality were violated – known as "Bell's inequality". In his thought experiment, a source fires entangled pairs of linearly-polarized photons in opposite directions towards two polarizers, which can be changed in orientation. Quantum mechanics says that there should be a high correlation between results at the polarizers because the photons instantaneously "decide" together which polarization to assume at the moment of measurement, even though they are separated in space. Hidden variables, however, says that such instantaneous decisions are not necessary, because the same strong correlation could be achieved if the photons were somehow informed of the orientation of the polarizers beforehand.
Bell's trick, therefore, was to decide how to orient the polarizers only after the photons have left the source. If hidden variables did exist, they would be unable to know the orientation, and so the results would only be correlated half of the time. On the other hand, if quantum mechanics was right, the results would be much more correlated – in other words, Bell's inequality would be violated.
Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell's inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell's inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics.
Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.
They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."
However, Alain Aspect, a physicist who performed the first Bell-type experiment in the 1980s, thinks the team's philosophical conclusions are subjective. "There are other types of non-local models that are not addressed by either Leggett's inequalities or the experiment," he said. "But I rather share the view that such debates, and accompanying experiments such as those by [the Austrian team], allow us to look deeper into the mysteries of quantum mechanics."
About the author
Jon Cartwright is a reporter for Physics Web
-
GM:
Not sure why you put that in this thread :?
Anyway, with his permission here are some comments from Dr. Tricky Dog (PhD in Physics):
Indeed a fascinating consequence - I hadn't heard of this result previously. What is semantically challenging though is the meaning of "reality does not exist when we are not observing it". Words like "reality", "exist" and "observing" are somewhat misleading when their physics meaning is compared to our lay meaning. What do we think someone is saying when that is said? You have to have deep specialists knowledge to attach correct meaning to the words.
The problem with quantum mechanical contexts is that they are so anti-intuitive that it is difficult to talk about them at all (and still
make any sense). The implications are subtle at best. Particularly as none of these QM effects have been shown to apply at macroscopic scales - they get washed out on the way to big - observations about grains of sand don't apply to beaches.
And yet tremendously fascinating stuff. The closer we look at the fabric of reality, the more we come to the conclusion that there are no threads in the fabric. At least, not in the conventional sense.
-
Crafty,
I put it in here as a response to the seeming failures in the scientific method posted by Bigdog. Is it possible that observing things at this level causes a shift in how/if they work because of the quantum level?
No idea. This is way over my head, but reading Bigdog's post reminded me of this.
-
Hi - Tricky parachuting in for a glib follow-up or two - I don't peruse the forums too much for lack of time. But I see that Crafty et al have brought some interesting points to bear. And he just quoted me - so...
Re: quantum effects - as mentioned, the interesting nature of QM doesn't really play at the macroscopic (read "human") scales. Various attempts have been made to see QM happening at longer scales - and some interesting things have been seen - but only under very carefully crafted circumstances. It is largely wishful thinking (so far) to speculate QM has any large-scale relevance day-to-day.
And science may yet prove otherwise - that's what is really enjoyable about the endeavor.
Much more likely is that human perception and cognition are responsible. Without impugning anyone's intentions, we often find ourselves experiencing a more subjective reality than we like to admit. Unless experiments are constructed very carefully, "human effects" creep in almost inevitably. People often talk about bias - but frankly, that's not even a question in my view - we see what we want to see as matter of course. Seeing otherwise takes a tremendous amount of discipline and careful process.
A healthy amount of skepticism is warranted - and in fact required by the methodology.
Most of what is being discussed here revolves around very human processes and highly complex systems. Almost anything have to do with human process is overloaded with uncontrolled influences, many of them cognitive and complicated by socio-political views. It's pretty difficult to do "hard science" (in the sense of physics) in those circumstances. Take homeopathy and chiropractic as an example - while both have been next to impossible to prove as beneficial, there are wide-spread reports of benefit. People have positive experiences and effects that they attribute to the practices. So what is "true"?
Just try to separate out the human effects from the controllable processes. It has led to all kinds of strife and struggle - and it is largely because scientific methodology is very difficult to apply reliably in those "soft" contexts". Particularly as we are not able to isolate the influence of belief and the mind on the body's response. The placebo effect is the classic case that underscores this influence.
So if you are pointing at science pertaining to anything with a significantly human context, then I fully expect it to be pretty squishy and subject to revision. Quite likely endlessly.
Similarly, if you are talking about complex systems - such as the global climate - you had better be prepared to be frustrated and challenged. Not only are there an incredible number of different influences on the system (science often relies on reductionist methods), none of which can be easily tested for, but many of them are highly non-linear. Which is why we are so bad at predicting the weather on a day-to-day basis. Or the stock market. Which isn't to say we know nothing about them.
Thus it doesn't surprise me much to hear that things are not quite the way we thought they were - especially regarding science around soft and/or complex systems. And you don't have to resort to QM effects to explain it. Occam's razor.
Meanwhile, I don't think you'll be finding the accuracy of the measures of the speed of light in a vacuum will be slowly falling in the near future.
-
As it happened, I was reading an analysis of the role of mythology in scientific undertakings (a personal favorite of mine) and found a passage that exemplified some of what I was just referring to in the previous post:
While many myths simply try to give form to our own past, others are intended to be both descriptive and prescriptive. Like laws of nature, they must hold true everywhere and for all time. Their adherents can brook no alternative perspective. The tendency to settle prematurely on a particular outlook is exacerbated in the guild system of health care. The practitioner must not be seen as equivocating, and the field as a whole must not be seen as thoroughly divided in its core orientation. Science is unitary, and in order to appear scientific, at least provisional assent must be yielded to a unitary vision. Such a unitary vision is likely to start out as largely myth.
The aspirational social sciences have a particular problem here because it is so difficult for a proposition to rise to the level of established fact or theory. Indeed one can sympathize with political scientist Clinton Rossiter who declaimed at one point: “I believe this so strongly that it almost becomes a fact.” Instead these fields move forward by consensus. If reasonable consensus is achieved within a discipline, then provisional scientific validity is simply claimed. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of psychiatry is perhaps the best exemplar of this process at work. The science behind it is meager, but that becomes a non-issue in the face of general acquiescence to the DSM formalism. What we have here, plain and simple, is myth masquerading as science.
We actually have a ready diagnostic to distinguish myth disguised as science from actual science. If a particular proposition brings forth strong emotions in its defense, then we are dealing with myth. One can be sure that no one mounts the ramparts on behalf of Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Siegfried Othmer - from Wagner, Myth and the Brain
Active social mythology is not given significant attention in my view. But that's another post another time.
-
I hope you keep contributing here, Trickydog. Good to have someone grounded in the hard sciences around.
-
A hearty "Amen!" from me on that as well, and I am sure BBG will agree when he returns-- that was a fine meaty quote you shared there Tricky.
Concerning "consensus". A German MD internet friend of mine recently wrote that " 'Consensus' means there is no definitive proof" or something like that.
Anyway, this today from todays Pravda on the Beach/LATimes, which actually runs counter to its biases and therefor gets a hat tip of respect from me:
=====================
Predictions that climate change will drive trees and plants uphill, potentially slashing their range to perilous levels, may be wrong, suggests a new study that found vegetation in California actually crept downhill during the 20th century.
The research, published in the Jan. 21 issue of the journal Science, challenges widely held assumptions about the effect of rising temperatures on shrubs and trees that play a critical role in mountain environments.
Various studies in recent years have predicted that to survive global warming, mountain plant communities will march to higher elevations in search of cooler temperatures — and, if they are unable to do so quickly enough, could perish.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Save on daily L.A. Times deals powered by Groupon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But comparing data from the early and late 20th century, authors of the Science paper found that despite warming, many plant species in California mountain ranges are growing at lower elevations than they did 80 years ago. The scientists attributed the shift to a wetter climate in Central and Northern California, which offset the effect of higher temperatures.
The lesson, said coauthor John Abatzoglou, a University of Idaho assistant geography professor, is that "we'd be remiss if we just focus on temperature," in forecasting the influence of climate change on plant life. "This might mean species extinction rates may not be as dire as predicted."
Climate warming models have consistently indicated that California will get hotter. But modeling has been less certain about the effect on total precipitation. Some models suggest the state will grow wetter — if less snowy. Some suggest it will grow drier.
The researchers were careful to say that the rise in precipitation in much of California over the last century could be a function of natural variability and have no link to the effects of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
For whatever reason, Abatzoglou said the Sierra was 5% to 10% wetter in the final half of the 1900s than in the first half, allowing tree and shrub species to take hold at lower elevations.
Comparing historic vegetation data from 1905 to 1935 to information gathered from 1975 to 2005 by researchers and federal agencies, the study found that about five dozen species had on the whole migrated downhill an average of about 264 feet.
Researchers relied in part on a treasure trove of botanical information collected in the 1920s and '30s as part of a broad-ranging survey of California wild lands directed by U.S. Forest Service silviculturist Albert Wieslander. Partly funded by New Deal programs, it includes records from about 14,000 plots, hand-drawn maps and several thousand photographs that document timber stand conditions.
"These data sets provide us with an unprecedented view" of the large-scale changes in plant distribution that have occurred over the last 75 years in California, said coauthor Solomon Dobrowski, an assistant forest management professor at the University of Montana.
Those shifts, he said, were driven by changes in water availability rather than in average annual temperature, which rose about 1 degree across the state during that period.
Implications of the findings extend beyond California. Globally, "many locations north of the 45-degree latitude have experienced increased precipitation over the last century," Dobrowski said. "And global climate models generally predict these locations [will] become wetter over the next century."
If it turns out that California does grow drier with global warming, "We would expect things to turn a corner and start moving uphill," he said.
Even if they don't, the effect of climate change on mountain environments could be complex. Insects are more sensitive to temperature and are likely to move uphill, Dobrowski said. And if the plants they eat and pollinate are shifting downhill, that could be an issue.
"We can't oversimplify the problem in terms of biological communities," he said.
Connie Millar, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who is studying climate change's effects on alpine ecosystems, said the Science paper demonstrated that global modeling results can't just be uniformly applied. "There are surprises at regional and local scales," she said, adding that land managers needed to take that into account in planning how to deal with climate change.
For instance, if valued plant communities are moving out of public lands at higher elevations into private property downhill, they will be more vulnerable to development and more in need of open space corridors connecting them to protected areas.
Millar's research in the Eastern Sierra and the Great Basin has also found that tree lines are moving down rather than up, although for slightly different reasons. They are shifting down slope into drainages that are cooler, and coincidentally, moister.
-
http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/16/chevy-volt-ayn-rand-opinions-patrick-michaels.html
Chevy Volt: The Car From Atlas Shrugged Motors
Patrick Michaels, 03.16.11, 06:00 PM EDT
Who is going to buy all these cars?
The Chevrolet Volt is beginning to look like it was manufactured by Atlas Shrugged Motors, where the government mandates everything politically correct, rewards its cronies and produces junk steel.
This is the car that subsidies built. General Motors lobbied for a $7,500 tax refund for all buyers, under the shaky (if not false) promise that it was producing the first all-electric mass-production vehicle.
-
Reporting from my assigned weather station, the earth did not boil over. We know about the email fraud and the changing data tweaking algorithms, also what we see with our own lying eyes. 'Climate' changes more day to day and year to year than what is alleged in a century, and only a smidgen of that is man-caused.
Here I offer my own 'backyard' today (March 25) showing snowdrifts covering a wind powered watercraft awaiting a melting of the still snow covered view of Minnesota's busiest lake, still frozen with feet-thick ice. Spring so far has been 2 days of blizzard and 2 days of 15 degree sunshine. The earliest recorded ice-out was March 11, 1878, and the latest recorded date was May 8, 1856. This year looks to be around mid-April, roughly the 100 year average. - More proof of global warming (sarc.)
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/Photo_032511_001-2.jpg)
In May the water will be a sky blue reflection and the trees a beautiful shade of forest green, just like 100-150 years ago. The Pianese flowers will bloom in full color the second week of June, like clockwork.
-
Hey Doug. On a lighter note.
Nice back yard!
Is that your Cat? I don't now, but I used to have an 18' catamaran (Prindle)
and would do ocean racing most weekends. Then I changed to
a light weight 25' mono hull. Better for cocktails after the race. :-D And longer distance.
Even that I finally gave up since I couldn't find a date to either take the tiller or take
down sail when the wind picked up. Being hit by the boom and tossed overboard is not fun.
Still, I have good memories.
Have you ever sailed on the ice? I hear that's a lot of fun; very fast.
-
JDN, Thanks. Yes, that is the Prindle 18-2. Goes like a rocket - in the right conditions :-). It took your Wisc. background to know the tundra under the ice and snow isn't just wasteland. Ice boating: I've wanted to, but... a very cold sport with a winter wind, a very short season. You need ice safely frozen but limited snow on it, not the 85 inches we had this year, also today's boats are solo. In my Dad's youth, the boats handled a group of friends, more like our 'E' boat. When you fall overboard or any other crash, no soft landing.
On a different note since I know you are a racquet sports enthusiast, another outdoor winter sport we play is paddle tennis (Platform tennis). Because of the continuous flow of the game, all doubles, one serve, using the screens, long points (high speed chess), it keeps your blood flowing for a couple of hours to where zero to 20 degrees is ideal and anything much more than that is too warm to play.
-
Bombshell conclusion – new peer reviewed analysis: “worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years”
Posted on March 28, 2011 by Anthony Watts
The paper is currently in press at the Journal of Coastal Research and is provided with open access to the full publication. The results are stunning for their contradiction to AGW theories which suggest global warming would accelerate sea level rise during the last century.
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/jcoastalr_fig4.jpg?w=472&h=394)
“Our first analysis determined the acceleration, a2, for each of the 57 records with results tabulated in Table 1 and shown in Figure 4. There is almost a balance with 30 gauge records showing deceleration and 27 showing acceleration, clustering around 0.0 mm/y2.”
…
The near balance of accelerations and decelerations is mirrored in worldwidegauge records as shown in Miller and Douglas (2006)
Abstract:
Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses
J. R. Houston† and R. G. Dean‡ †Director Emeritus, Engineer Research and Development Center, Corps of Engineers, 3909 Halls Ferry Road, Vicksburg, MS 39180, U.S.A. james.r.houston@usace.army.mil
‡Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and Coastal Civil Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, U.S.A. dean@coastal.ufl.edu
Without sea-level acceleration, the 20th-century sea-level trend of 1.7 mm/y would produce a rise of only approximately 0.15 m from 2010 to 2100; therefore, sea-level acceleration is a critical component of projected sea-level rise. To determine this acceleration, we analyze monthly-averaged records for 57 U.S. tide gauges in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) data base that have lengths of 60–156 years. Least-squares quadratic analysis of each of the 57 records are performed to quantify accelerations, and 25 gauge records having data spanning from 1930 to 2010 are analyzed. In both cases we obtain small average sea-level decelerations. To compare these results with worldwide data, we extend the analysis of Douglas (1992) by an additional 25 years and analyze revised data of Church and White (2006) from 1930 to 2007 and also obtain small sea-level decelerations similar to those we obtain from U.S. gauge records.
Received: October 5, 2010; Accepted: November 26, 2010; Published Online: February 23, 2011
Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses, J. R. Houston and R. G. Dean
Discussion: (excerpt)
We analyzed the complete records of 57 U.S. tide gauges that had average record lengths of 82 years and records from1930 to 2010 for 25 gauges, and we obtained small decelerations of 20.0014 and20.0123 mm/y2, respectively. We obtained similar decelerations using worldwide-gauge records in the original data set of Church andWhite (2006) and a 2009 revision (for the periods of 1930–2001 and 1930–2007) and by extending Douglas’s (1992) analyses of worldwide gauges by 25 years.
The extension of the Douglas (1992) data from 1905 to 1985 for 25 years to 2010 included the period from 1993 to 2010 when satellite altimeters recorded a sea-level trend greater than that of the 20th century, yet the addition of the 25 years resulted in a slightly greater deceleration.
Conclusion:
Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are opposite in sign and one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 mm/y2 accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010). Bindoff et al. (2007) note an increase in worldwide temperature from 1906 to 2005 of 0.74uC.
It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.
Full paper available online here
WUWT download (faster) here: jcoastres-d-10-00157.1
h/t to John Droz and to Dr. Willem de Lange
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/28/bombshell-conclusion-new-peer-reviewed-analysis-worldwide-temperature-increase-has-not-produced-acceleration-of-global-sea-level-over-the-past-100-years/
-
2nd post.
Jeepers, I coulda swore somewhere I read that even tangential associations with deep pocket entities corrupts scientific findings. Does that sword cut both ways?
MARCH 11, 2011 4:00 A.M.
All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train
There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case.
Global-warming alarmists often portray climate scientists as poorly paid academics whose judgment is impervious to the influence of money. This seems strange given the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been invested in climate science over the past few years. And as the public-choice school of economics has clearly shown, the opportunity for reward affects even supposedly disinterested professionals.
Therefore, it is fair to ask: Just how well rewarded are climate scientists? As it turns out, by some measures they are paid as well as corporate CEOs.
When it comes to comparing the annual salaries of various professions, there is an obvious problem. Some work extremely long hours — about 2,600 a year for firefighters — while others work far fewer — 1,400 a year for teachers. To iron out this difficulty, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey converts yearly salaries into hourly pay. From that we can see that teachers, at $37.91 an hour, are actually much more highly paid than firefighters, at $21.68 an hour, despite their comparable annual salaries ($53,000 for teachers, $55,000 for firefighters).
What about climate scientists? Well, university lecturers and professors earn an average of $49.88 an hour over a 1,600-hour work year, for a total salary of about $80,000. In the public sector, “atmospheric, earth, marine, and space sciences teachers, postsecondary” earn considerably more than the average university teacher ($70.61 per hour). They also work much less (1,471 hours each year), and despite their lower workload, they pull down about $104,000 a year. Climate scientists’ hourly pay ranks them higher than business-school teachers at public universities, who earn $63.35 an hour, but not public-sector law-school professors, who earn over $100 an hour.
So climate scientists are very well compensated, out-earning all other faculty outside of law in hourly-wage terms. What about the rest of the public sector? Astonishingly, only one other public-sector profession — psychiatrist — pays better than climate science, at just over $73 an hour. In other words, climate scientists have the third-highest-paid public-sector job, ranking above judges.
What about the private sector? That’s led by airline pilots, who earn about $112 an hour, but work for only 1,100 hours a year, followed by company CEOs at an average of $91 an hour. Physicians and surgeons earn almost as much as CEOs, at $89.51 an hour. Private-sector law-school professors, interestingly enough, earn far less than their public-school counterparts, at $82 an hour. After that come professor-level jobs in engineering, at $76.11, and dentists, at $73.19. These are the only private-sector professions that pay more than climate science. Taking the public and private sectors together, by my reckoning, climate scientist is the tenth-highest-paid profession in the nation.
Bear in mind that these averages are statistical means, and are therefore inflated by extremely high salaries at the top end, particularly in the case of CEOs and physicians. If we look at median earnings — what the earner right in the middle of the pack gets — we see that climate scientists get $75.29 an hour, compared with private-sector CEOs at $75.48 and physicians at $81.73.
The story gets even more interesting when we look back at the figures from 2005, the year before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth launched the current wave of climate alarmism. Back then, university teachers were paid $43.16 an hour, while climate scientists were paid $54.65 an hour. In other words, climate-science compensation has risen by 30 percent in five years, while pay for other university instructors has increased by only 15 percent.
There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case. Not only have their earnings grown far faster than their colleagues’, but on an hourly basis they now earn as much as CEOs. When climate skeptics talk about a global-warming gravy train, the numbers back them up.
— Iain Murray heads the Center for Economic Freedom at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/261776/all-aboard-climate-gravy-train-iain-murray
-
Oh my goodness, this is great stuff. A company that forecasts weather for business purposes, some of which are high risk, has been assembling its own climate data set. Independently, Berkeley Climate Data Project is trying to clean up the mess left in the wake of various hockey sticks and email scandals, hoping to produce a clean dataset all can agree on. It looks like the two efforts are using parallel techniques, but the company selling forecasts is moving more quickly and efficiently to process data, as it has an economic interest in a clean outcome that can then be used to forecast with.
Bottom line, it looks like there will be a second dataset to contrast and compare the one Berkeley is working on, one driven by a market force need for accuracy and the second claiming a traditional scientific ethic. It will be fun to see how it all turns out.
A lot more nuanced explanation with lotsa illustrations here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/04/an-investigation-of-ushcn-station-siting-issues-using-a-cleaned-dataset/#more-37271
-
Too bad "Kindle" is already taken as a brand name.
http://www.wfsb.com/news/27586692/detail.html
BARKHAMSTED,Conn. -- A hybrid electric Chevrolet Volt believed to have sparked an overnight blaze in a garage in Barkhamsted last week, reignited again on Monday.
The state fire marshal's office is investigating how the electric car parked at a Center Hill Road home caught fire Monday morning.
Last week, homeowners Storm Connors and his wife, Dee, woke up to the sound of a smoke alarm around 4 a.m.
The couple's garage, where they parked their new Chevrolet Volt hybrid, was on fire. Firefighters were able to put out the blaze. A firewall built between the home and the garage saved their home.
Investigators with the state fire marshal's office and the couple's insurance company, at the time, suspected the hybrid car have had something to do with the blaze.
On Monday morning, firefighters were called back to the home when the car caught fire again.
The fire is under investigation.
-
Voodoo Economics? How about Voodoo Climate Science?
by Patrick J. Michaels
This article appeared on Forbes.com on April 21, 2011.
When will our greener friends at the UN learn that it's just not a good idea to make definite predictions about certain disasters?
This time they have been called out on their 2005 prediction that by now there would be 50 million "climate refugees" — people choosing to emigrate because of bad weather. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) even came up with a global map showing precisely where people would migrate from.
Pretty much every forecast about climate change or its effects should be viewed as a hypothesis rather than a fact. After all, as Firesign Theater once noted, "the future's not here yet". But the UN named a specific year (2010) which allows for an actual test of their prediction.
retty much every forecast about climate change or its effects should be viewed as a hypothesis rather than a fact.
Census takers around the world have inadvertently adjudicated the UN's forecast. It was dead wrong. Pretty much every recent census reveals that populations are growing rapidly precisely where everyone was supposed to be migrating from. (And where is the story that global warming causes babies?).
Folks were supposed to be streaming away from low-lying tropical islands because of worse and more frequent hurricanes. The population of the Bahamas, which catches about as many tropical cyclones as any place on earth, is up 14% since 2000. The Solomons, up 20%. Sychelles: 9%.
Did I mention that global hurricane activity has recently sunk to its all time measured low, despite the UN's strident statements about more frequent and terrible storms? (Note that the hurricane data is only reliable for the last fifty years or so, hence the word "measured".)
Is this exaggeration of an affect of climate change by the UN an isolated incident? Hardly. Recent history reveals the UN to be a systematic engine of climate disinformation.
In 2007, the UN famously stated that, if warming continued at present rates (whatever that means — there hasn't been any since the mid-late 1990s), the massive Himalayan glaciers would disappear 23 years from now. While the source, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims itself the consensus of climate science, there's no credentialed climatologist on earth who believes that this ice cap, which is hundreds of feet thick, could possibly disappear so soon.
When the government of India, which knows something about the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great Ganges River, challenged the UN's forecast, the head of the IPCC, Rajenda Pachauri, labeled it "voodoo science".
It turns out that the UN was the voodoo practitioner. Dr. Murari Lal, who authored the statement, eventually admitted that it was in the UN climate report to spur the governments of India and China into reducing their carbon dioxide emissions, and that it was not based on anything in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
In the same report, the IPCC claimed that even a slight variation in tropical rainfall would cause a disastrous loss of the verdant rainforest — despite incoming satellite data that showed a remarkable resilience to an ongoing sharp drought.
Then it made the absurd claims that 55% of the Netherlands was below sea level, and that there has been no change in ice coverage in the southern hemisphere, where polar ice is indeed growing significantly.
The IPCC also stated that a mere nine years from now, tropical crop yields would be cut in half by a massive decline in annual rainfall. Even computer models that assume large scale drought reduce yields by about half of this.
Is all of this due to chance?
Scientists, as humans, make judgemental errors. But what is odd about the UN is that its gaffes are all in one direction. All are exaggeration of the effects of climate change. In each case, the IPCC was relying upon scientific literature that was not peer-reviewed in the traditional sense. No one has found analogous errors in the other direction (which would be an underestimation of climate change based upon the "grey" literature), and you can bet that people have been looking very hard in an effort to exonerate the UN.
In an unbiased world there should be an equal chance of either underestimating or overestimating the climate change and its effects, which allows us to test whether this string of errors is simply scientists behaving normally or being naughty.
What's the chance of throwing a coin six times and getting all heads (or tails)? It's .015. Most scientists consider the .050 level sufficient to warrant retention of a hypothesis, which in this case, is that the UN's climate science is biased.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13048
-
Say it ain't so: scientists misconstruing data in a manner that underwrites their beliefs and supports the tenets of their discipline:
Exaggerating Species Extinction
Jonathan H. Adler • May 19, 2011 10:45 am
A new paper in Nature has sparked a firestorm of debate over species extinction rates. The paper, by two ecologists, shows how the use of the species-area curve produces inflated projections of species extinction rates. As an accompanying article in Nature explains:
The most common method of predicting extinction rates relies on the species–area curve, the mathematical relationship showing that larger areas tend to contain greater numbers of species.
Researchers typically extrapolate backwards from this curve to calculate how many extinctions can be expected from a given amount of habitat loss. But that is inaccurate, say the study authors, because the area that must be removed to cause extinction is always larger than the area needed to encounter a species for the first time.
“Extrapolating backwards makes a hidden assumption that any loss of population, regardless of how small, commits a species to extinction — which is not reasonable,” says Stephen Hubbell, a theoretical ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of the paper.
As you might expect, the paper has sparked substantial criticism and debate, as noted in Greenwire and on Dot Earth, even though there have been concerns about the reliability of the species-area curve for some time. One reason for the intense debate is the well-intentioned fear that research of this sort will dampen concerns about biodiversity loss. If, as the study suggests, expected extinction rates are far lower than conventional estimates, will this lessen the urgency of biodiversity conservation? Perhaps, but that would not justify relying upon erroneous extinction estimates. Moreover, even if projected species extinction is only half of conventional estimates, it is still a serious concern.
http://volokh.com/2011/05/19/exaggerating-species-extinction/
-
Next thing you'll tell me is that all the polar bears aren't drowning because of
global warming
-
Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy
By MATT RIDLEY
What does the word "renewable" mean?
Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass. These energy sources, said the IPCC, generate about 13.8% of our energy and, if encouraged to grow, could eventually displace most fossil fuel use.
It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world's energy comes from wind, tide, wave, solar and geothermal put together. Wood and dung are indeed renewable, in the sense that they reappear as fast as you use them. Or do they? It depends on how fast you use them.
One of the greatest threats to rain forests is the cutting of wood for fuel by impoverished people. Haiti meets about 60% of its energy needs with charcoal produced from forests. Even bakeries, laundries, sugar refineries and rum distilleries run on the stuff. Full marks to renewable Haiti, the harbinger of a sustainable future! Or maybe not: Haiti has felled 98% of its tree cover and counting; it's an ecological disaster compared with its fossil-fuel burning neighbor, the Dominican Republic, whose forest cover is 41% and stable. Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal.
You can likewise question the green and clean credentials of other renewables. The wind may never stop blowing, but the wind industry depends on steel, concrete and rare-earth metals (for the turbine magnets), none of which are renewable. Wind generates 0.2% of the world's energy at present. Assuming that energy needs double in coming decades, we would have to build 100 times as many wind farms as we have today just to get to a paltry 10% from wind. We'd run out of non-renewable places to put them.
You may think I'm splitting hairs. Iron ore for making steel is unlikely to run out any time soon. True, but you can say the same about fossil fuels. The hydrocarbons in the earth's crust amount to more than 500,000 exajoules of energy. (This includes methane clathrates—gas on the ocean floor in solid, ice-like form—which may or may not be accessible as fuel someday.) The whole planet uses about 500 exajoules a year, so there may be a millennium's worth of hydrocarbons left at current rates.
Contrast that with blue whales, cod and passenger pigeons, all of which plainly renew themselves by breeding. But exploiting them caused their populations to collapse or disappear in just a few short decades. It's a startling fact that such "renewable" resources keep running short, while no non-renewable resource has yet run out: not oil, gold, uranium or phosphate. The stone age did not end for lack of stone (a remark often attributed to the former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani).
Guano, a key contributor to 19th-century farming, was renewable fertilizer, made from seabird dung harvested off Peruvian and Namibian islands, but it soon ran out. Modern synthetic fertilizer is made from the air and returns to the air via denitrifying bacteria, yet few would call it a renewable resource. Even fossil fuels are renewable in the sense that they are still being laid down somewhere in the world—not nearly as fast as we use them, of course, but then that's true of Haiti's forests and Newfoundland's cod as well.
And then there is nuclear power. Uranium is not renewable, but plutonium is, in the sense that you can "breed" it in the right kind of reactor. Given how much we dislike plutonium and breeder reactors, it seems that the more renewable nuclear fuel is, the less we like it.
All in all, once you examine it closely, the idea that "renewable" energy is green and clean looks less like a deduction than a superstition.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576327410322365714.html
-
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Muller.pdf
-
A 600 year earthquake has had its direct nuclear radiation death toll reduced to 0 out of 20,000 total earthquake/tsunami deaths, so out go all new nuclear plans and several existing ones in favor of the much 'more safe' :? greenhouse gas based fossil fuel combustion.
That policy shift alone in one island country will add 7 TRILLION more pounds (350 billion tons)of CO2 per year into the atmosphere.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
(http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/Screen%20shot%202011-05-12%20at%204.30.11%20PM.shtml)
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/05/18/fukushima-open-thread-6/
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/05/updated_analysis_the_costs_of_canceling_japans_plans_for_nuclear_power.shtml
-------------
CCP, The Muller piece is very interesting. He covers both sides fairly well. No question there was some warming. No question there is some human component in it. And no question that there are other factors, known and unknown, and no question our ability to measure any of it is flawed. No question that previous accounts were exaggerated. If his is the first reliable data, that isn't much data. Unfortunately, for the umpteen hundredth time, I read through an entire 'scientific' climate change pdf with glorified headlines to find no answer to the two burning questions: how much was the warming and what component of it was human caused.
Cherry picking, I found this: " if we cut back and China continues to grow and India continues to grow [and they will], our cutting back will not achieve any real good."
(See the first half of the post, other countries are NOT cutting back.)
I will be more impressed when some scientist gets both the climate science and the economics of it right. Cap trade and every other artificial mechanism to get energy prices up and energy use down here will move manufacturing to India, China and all other places outside our jurisdiction. It already has. Instead of doing no measurable good, while destroying our economy, these laws do no good at all, and Muller, give him credit, admitted it.
The answer to replace fossil fuels will come, most likely, from private sector innovation, like most other major technological developments. I would argue that allowing the private sector to re-energize robustly is the solution, not the problem. When energy prices go up for real instead of artificially, an economic alternative solution will emerge, It always does. We will solve this better from a position of economic strength instead of desperation, IMO.
-
By WILLIE SOON
AND PAUL DRIESSEN
The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued 946 pages of new rules requiring that U.S. power plants sharply reduce their (already low) emissions of mercury and other air pollutants. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims that while the regulations will cost electricity producers $10.9 billion annually, they will save 17,000 lives and generate up to $140 billion in health benefits.
There is no factual basis for these assertions. To build its case against mercury, the EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its regulatory agenda, which is to punish hydrocarbon use.
Mercury has always existed naturally in Earth's environment. A 2009 study found mercury deposits in Antarctic ice across 650,000 years. Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and trees, which absorb it from the environment. This is why our bodies evolved with proteins and antioxidants that help protect us from this and other potential contaminants.
Another defense comes from selenium, which is found in fish and animals. Its strong attraction to mercury molecules protects fish and people against buildups of methylmercury, mercury's biologically active and more toxic form. Even so, the 200,000,000 tons of mercury naturally present in seawater have never posed a danger to any living being.
How do America's coal-burning power plants fit into the picture? They emit an estimated 41-48 tons of mercury per year. But U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons; Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.
VAll these emissions enter the global atmospheric system and become part of the U.S. air mass. Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.
In the face of these minuscule risks, the EPA nevertheless demands that utility companies spend billions every year retrofitting coal-fired power plants that produce half of all U.S. electricity.
According to the Centers for Disease Control's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which actively monitors mercury exposure, blood mercury counts for U.S. women and children decreased steadily from 1999-2008, placing today's counts well below the already excessively safe level established by the EPA. A 17-year evaluation of mercury risk to babies and children by the Seychelles Children Development Study found "no measurable cognitive or behavioral effects" in children who eat several servings of ocean fish every week, much more than most Americans do.
The World Health Organization and U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry assessed these findings in setting mercury-risk standards that are two to three times less restrictive than the EPA's.
The EPA ignored these findings. Instead, the agency based its "safe" mercury criteria on a study of Faroe Islanders, whose diet is far removed from our own. They eat few fruits and vegetables, but they do feast on pilot-whale meat and blubber that is laced with mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—but very low in selenium. The study has limited relevance to U.S. populations.
As a result, the EPA's actions can be counted on to achieve only one thing—which is to further advance the Obama administration's oft-stated goal of penalizing hydrocarbon use and driving a transition to unreliable renewable energy.
The proposed standards will do nothing to reduce exaggerated threats from mercury and other air pollutants. Indeed, the rules will worsen America's health and well-being—especially for young children and women of child-bearing age. Not only will they raise heating, air conditioning and food costs, but they will scare people away from eating nutritious fish that should be in everyone's diet.
America needs affordable, reliable electricity. It needs better health and nutrition. It needs an EPA that focuses on real risks, instead of wasting hard-earned taxpayer and consumer dollars fabricating dangers and evidence.
Mr. Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, is an expert on mercury and public health issues. Mr. Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.
-
http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/26/is-natural-gas-really-worse-th
Reason Magazine
Is Natural Gas Really Worse Than Coal? A Case of Activist Science Versus Real Science?
Ronald Bailey | May 26, 2011
Cornell University environmental biologist Robert Howarth led a team of researchers that put together and published an article in Climatic Change back in April that claimed natural gas produced by means of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) is worse than burning coal when it comes to man-made warming of the atmosphere. The argument turns on the fact that a molecule of methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.
Howarth and his team made some highly contestable number jiggering with methane's over-all global warming potential (GWP) and estimates about how much methane escapes from wells and pipelines into the atmosphere. Climatologists generally consider the effect of methane over a 100 year period, but Howarth's team decided to use a 20-year period. This considerably boosts methane's near-term GWP from the more usual 25 times that of carbon dioxide to more than 105 times. In addition, Howarth uses very dodgy data with regard to just how much methane escapes into the atmosphere.
Now the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory has done a life cycle analysis of gas versus coal and comes to a very different conclusion with regard to their effects on climate change:
Average natural gas baseload power generation has a life cycle GWP 50 percent lower (emphasis added) than average coal baseload power generation on a 20-year time horizon.
So even accepting Howarth's controversial 20-year time horizon, natural gas is much better than coal. This is basically the conclusion that most analysts had reached for years now. Never mind, the damage is done. Funds will be wasted on unnecessary research and regulations.
I cannot prove it, but I am beginning to get scared that Howarth's paper is an example of a growing trend in politicized sciences. When the herd of independent minds that constitutes the environmental community decides something is "bad," some activist scientist (motivated by the best of intentions I am sure) will step into the breach to cobble together a paper in support that foregone conclusion. Peer review appears to be powerless before the pressure of this kind of groupthink.
-
Great post BBG! The issue of methane escaping is separate from the issue of ground water contamination but perhaps part of the ad hominem attacks against all energy production. I don't see why methane producers would want methane to escape. If true perhaps we ne a capture technique, not a ban on production.
Following up to that post and a subject Crafty started with an NY Times series (Feb 27 2011 post over in Energy Politics) attacking the production techniques of natural gas: "Regulations Lax...Tainted Water Hits Rivers". I read that piece with skepticism. As with liberal media techniques on other topics, they find a claim with a credible sounding source, in the Ron Bailey piece it was Cornell University, get it into the NY Times and then repeat it across the country before anyone can disprove the negative. The NYT piece was loaded with question marks and "may do this" and "may do that" and very light or absent of real data or contamination samples.
I followed up with a long, hard-to-follow post March 8, same thread, discrediting the allegations. Most damning I thought and buried in my post were the specific, actual statements quoted that I copied and pasted out of a pdf and reprinted, where nearly all the state regulatory agencies of nearly all the natural gas producing states denies that this has ever happened in their state. These include all the states referenced in the NY Times hit piece. Reprinting here with state names and regulatory agencies in bold to be easier to follow and the use of italics is mine. The full letters are at the pdf link. These are regulatory agencies, not greedy producers, though a liberal source might say there is no difference if they side with business.
"After 25 years of investigating complaints of contamination, DMRM geologists have not documented a single incident involving contamination of ground water attributed to hydraulic fracturing." - Ohio Department of Natural Resources
After review of DEP's complaint database and interviews with regional staff that investigate groundwater contamination related to oil and gas activities, no groundwater pollution or disruption of underground sources of drinking water has been attributed to hydraulic fracturing of deep gas formations. - Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
"we have found no example of contamination of usable water where the cause was claimed to. be hydraulic fracturing." - New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department
"I can state with authority that there have been no documented cases of drinking water contamination caused by such hydraulic fracturing operations in our State." - STATE OIL AND GAS BOARD OF ALABAMA
"Though hydraulic fracturing has been used for over 50 years in Texas, our records do not indicate a single documented contamination case associated with hydraulic fracturing." - chief regulatory agency over oil and gas activities in Texas
"There have been no verified cases of harm to ground water in the State of Alaska as a result of hydraulic fracturing." - Commissioner Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission
"To the knowledge of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission staff, there has been no verified instance of harm to groundwater caused by hydraulic fracturing in Colorado."
"There have been no instances where the Division of Oil and Gas has verified that harm to groundwater has ever been found to be the result of hydraulic fracturing in Indiana." - Director Indiana Department of Natural Resources
"The Louisiana Office of Conservation is unaware of any instance of harm to groundwater in the State of Louisiana caused by the practice of hydraulic fracturing."
"My agency, the Office of Geological Survey (OGS) of the Department of Environmental Quality, regulates oil and gas exploration and production in Michigan. Hydraulic fracturing has been utilized extensively for many years in Michigan, in both deep formations and in the relatively shallow Antrim Shale formation. There are about 9,900 Antrim wells in Michigan producing natural gas at depths of 500 to 2000 feet. Hydraulic fracturing has been used in virtually every Antrim well.
There is no indication that hydraulic fracturing has ever caused damage to ground water or other resources in Michigan."
"No documented cases of groundwater contamination from fracture stimulations in
Wyoming."
Link again: Hydraulic Fracturing –15 Statements from Regulatory Officials
http://www.hydraulicfracturing.com/Documents/Hydraulic_Fracturing_SGEIS_comments.pdf
-
Kyoto is croaking and now the bottom is falling out of carbon trading. Snicker:
Countdown to flatline: world carbon trading market falls for first time – World Bank reports rumblings of possible failure
Posted on June 2, 2011 by Anthony Watts
I wonder how long before flatlining occurs, like last year with the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX):
Even the Guardian is covering this “failure” of carbon markets . They write:
The international market in carbon credits has suffered an almost total collapse, with only $1.5bn (£916m) of credits traded last year…
Now that the Kyoto protocol is essentially dead , the economic markets will surely pull life support for carbon trading with no political support in place for emissions reduction. With this report and news coverage, you can hear the traders already running for the exits.
Then there’s this from Reuters – The Europe Union’s carbon market could be flooded with excess pollution permits over the next decade, cutting prices in half and depriving governments of billions in budgeted revenues, EU sources say
Growth in Global Carbon Market Pauses Amid Uncertainty
Press Release No:2011/514/SDN
World Bank Releases 2011 “State and Trends of the Carbon Market” Report
Barcelona, June 1, 2011 – The World Bank’s annual review of the global carbon market shows that 2010 was a watershed year as the market ended five years of robust growth with a slight decline compared to 2009. The State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2011, released today at Carbon Expo in Barcelona, shows that the total value of the global carbon market was estimated to be US$142 billion last year.
The report’s authors noted that several reasons help to explain the decline, including the continuing lack of clarity about the market after 2012 and the loss of political momentum on setting up new cap-and-trade schemes in several developed economies. Some buyers from industrialized countries, which in previous years had reached or surpassed targets, consequently made fewer purchases in 2010. As well, lingering effects of the recession in several industrialized countries led to lower greenhouse gas emissions, easing emissions reduction compliance obligations.
Furthermore, the primary Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) market, which accounts for the bulk of project-based transactions, fell by double digits for a variety of reasons, including lower demand for credits and competition from more predictable assets (Assigned Amount Units and secondary CERs). The CDM market is now at its lowest level since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005, having dropped by 46% to an estimated US$1.5 billion in new project-based transactions. Similarly, other carbon markets also declined or stayed at their plateau. Nevertheless, cumulatively, primary offset transactions have reached almost US$30 billion since 2005 and are expected to have catalyzed much larger resources, mostly from the private sector.
“The global carbon market is at a crossroads. If we take the wrong turn we risk losing billions of lower cost private investment and new technology solutions in developing countries,” said Andrew Steer, World Bank Special Envoy for Climate Change. “This report sends a message of the need to ensure a stronger, more robust carbon market with clear signals.”
State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2011 shows that, relative to each other, EU Allowances (traded under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, ETS) remain the largest segment by far, with 84% of the total value of the carbon market. Taking secondary CDM transactions into account, the value of the market driven by the ETS reached 97% of the global market value.
The authors of the report predict that, in the next two years, the difference between gross demand for and the cumulative supply of carbon credits generated under the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms will be slightly less than US$140 million. Virtually all demand will be from European governments. Beyond 2012, although the potential demand for emission reductions could reach 3 billion tons or more, the only substantial and unconditional demand to date comes from Europe, estimated at 1.7 billion tons. The supply available between 2013 and 2020, through existing projects, is seen as sufficient to fill that demand, leaving little incentive for project developers to invest further and create a future supply of emission reductions.
The fall in market value was contrasted with what was generally seen as the successful outcomes of negotiations at the UN climate change conference in Cancun in December which resulted in relatively more positive market sentiment.
Although some opportunities for strengthening regulatory frameworks were missed in industrialized countries, national and local low-carbon initiatives gathered strength and offered hope.
“Carbon market growth halted at a particularly inopportune time: 2010 proved to be the hottest year on record, while global emission levels continued to rise relentlessly,” said Alexandre Kossoy, World Bank Senior Financial Specialist. “At the same time, other national and local low-carbon initiatives have picked up noticeably in both developed and developing economies. Collectively, they offer the possibility overcome regulatory uncertainty and signal that, one way or another, solutions that address the climate challenge will emerge.”
In the face of lagging demand, the World Bank has undertaken a number of initiatives to give confidence to a post-2012 carbon market. The Partnership for Market Readiness, launched in Cancun in December 2010, aims to support the trend of national mitigation efforts using market approaches. A number of the World Bank’s carbon funds and facilities, such as the Carbon Partnership Facility, the second tranche of the Umbrella Carbon Facility, and a new facility for low-income countries currently under development, also respond to future needs by supporting scaled up mitigation and purchasing carbon credits beyond 2012. Furthermore, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility is supporting REDD+ initiatives which, to date, have not been included under the CDM. The Bank sees carbon markets as an important and versatile tool to provide incentives for a shift to lower carbon development paths.
State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2011 was released at CARBON EXPO 2011, the largest carbon fair in the world with more than 3,000 representatives from governments, private sector and civil society organizations involved in greenhouse gas emission reduction transactions around the world.
For more information on the World Bank’s carbon finance activities and the electronic version of this report, please visit the website: www.carbonfinance.org
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/world-carbon-trading-market-falls-for-first-time-rumblings-of-possible-failure/
-
For those tracking these sorts of tempests and tea pots, the University of VA is currently fighting a FOIA request for hockey stick peddler Michael Mann's emails, while George Mason University just released skeptic Ed Wegman's emails without any fuss. An amusing deconstruction follows:
Mann’s Hockey Stick, Climategate, and FOI – in a nutshell
Posted on June 2, 2011 by Anthony Watts
On the Climate Audit thread, The Vergano FOI Request the irascible Nick Stokes provokes another commenter “mpaul”, to lay out all the history in a simple summary that even Nick might understand. I thought it was worth repeating here for readers who have not followed the twists and turns in detail, and also in the hope that Dr. Michael Mann might read it and get a clue. Obstruction doesn’t pay.
From this Climate Audit comment:
mpaul
Posted May 30, 2011 at 1:16 PM | Permalink
Nick writes:
But I don’t think snooping through people’s private emails is a dignified activity.
Nick, I’ll turn the sarcasm off for a moment. I agree with you on this point. I have been an advocate for Cuccinelli CID process. Say what you will about Cuccinelli’s motives, but the American justice system provides protections for the accused and standards of procedure that do not exist in the court of public opinion.
We have arrived at this point in history along the following path:
(1) Steve wanted to replicate MBH98 and asked for data. Mann initially complied, but then began to obstruct.
(2) Steve successfully obtained the needed data and demonstrated serious flaws in Mann’s approach.
(3) Mann defended his work by saying that other Hockey Stick reconstructions validated his method and his conclusions.
(4) Attention turned to replicating the other reconstructions. By now, the Team had become extremely defensive and a sort of bunker mentality took over. Years of obstruction followed.
(5) Those seeking the data and methods used in the HS reconstructions became more and more aggressive, eventually turning to FOIA as a tool to pry loose the information.
(6) Then “a miracle happened’. A file containing materials and emails requested under FOIA turned up on the internet. Most everyone would agree that the contents of the emails warranted an investigation. The only investigation that specifically looked into Mann’s conduct was undertaken by Penn State. Penn State cleared Mann noting that Mann stated:
(a) he had never falsified any data, nor had he had ever manipulated data to serve a given predetermined outcome;
(b) he never used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers by other scientists who disagreed with the conclusions of his science;
(c) he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; and
(d) he never engaged in activities or behaviors that were inconsistent with accepted academic practices.
(7) Critics have charged that the Penn State investigation was inadequate. Michael Mann has subsequently stated that he did, in fact, participate in an orchestrated effort to delete emails covered under FOIA, raising questions about the veracity of statements he made to the Penn State investigators. Penn State seems untroubled by this.
A real, independent investigation, subject to rules of evidence and judicial procedures, is needed. Such an investigation is the only way to put and end to Climategate and is the only way to restore the tattered reputation of climate science. I think both Virginia and Pennsylvania should conduct an investigation. However, if UVa continues to obstruct the CID, then FOIA is the only option and Mann will be afforded no protection of his privacy.
Mann and UVa are playing a losing game. Its sheer folly to attempt to frustrate a State AG in a law enforcement investigation. Cuccinelli has nuclear weapons at his disposal and UVa has water pistols. If Cuccinelli loses the CID battle, he will simply file a lawsuit and obtain the materials through discovery. Or, if UVa really pisses him off, he will convene a Grand Jury. For Mann personally, this would be catastrophic. Mann and UVa should cooperate with the CID process.
It’s sad that we have arrived at this place. But at every juncture in this journey, Mann has chosen the wrong path.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/02/manns-hockey-stick-climategate-and-foi-in-a-nutshell/
-
I came to this alarmist storyby way of this title at Real Clear Politics:
Bad Weather Is Due to CO2 Emissions - Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/06/13/110613taco_talk_kolbert
At the liberal link I found no new science or logic linking manmade CO2 to Joplin than I do linking CO2 to high of 78 and sunny here today, photo update below confirming what I posted in April that the ice and snow would be gone and the pianese in full bloom by the second week in June, like clockwork - with or without increases levels of trace element components of greenhouse gas. Tornado hitting my property aside, storms here are no worse so far than 24 years ago according to my own lying eyes.
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/Photo_060811_003-1.jpg)
-
Lengthy piece that looks at the underlying assumptions of the latest IPCC report. Serious holes are poked in its various assumptions.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/14/overconfidence-in-ipccs-detection-and-attribution-part-iv/
-
2nd post. Those in the catastrophic warmosphere are trying to wrap their heads around the fact that the current solar minimum may lead to dramatic cooling. JPL explains the possibilities below. Note how the predictions are qualified, a prudent habit warmists ought to emulate:
NASA JPL on New Insights on How Solar Minimums Affect Earth
Posted on June 14, 2011 by Anthony Watts
The Sun today, quiet, small spots - click for more
This is the first of what I’m sure will be a series of solar stories related to the stunning (at least to people who have not been following WUWT since 2008) announcement that it appears sunspots are on the wane, and we may be headed to an extended Maunder type minimum.
See: BREAKING – major AAS solar announcement: Sun’s Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity
From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab website:
Since 1611, humans have recorded the comings and goings of black spots on the sun. The number of these sunspots waxes and wanes over approximately an 11-year cycle — more sunspots generally mean more activity and eruptions on the sun and vice versa. The number of sunspots can change from cycle to cycle, and 2008 saw the longest and weakest solar minimum since scientists have been monitoring the sun with space-based instruments.
Observations have shown, however, that magnetic effects on Earth due to the sun, effects that cause the aurora to appear, did not go down in synch with the cycle of low magnetism on the sun. Now, a paper in Annales Geophysicae that appeared on May 16, 2011 reports that these effects on Earth did in fact reach a minimum — indeed they attained their lowest levels of the century — but some eight months later. The scientists believe that factors in the speed of the solar wind, and the strength and direction of the magnetic fields embedded within it, helped produce this anomalous low.
“Historically, the solar minimum is defined by sunspot number,” says space weather scientist Bruce Tsurutani at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is first author on the paper. “Based on that, 2008 was identified as the period of solar minimum. But the geomagnetic effects on Earth reached their minimum quite some time later, in 2009. So we decided to look at what caused the geomagnetic minimum.”
Small magnetometers like these measure magnetic strength on Earth and in the atmosphere to determine how much of the sun's magnetic energy has been transferred to Earth's magnetosphere. In 2009, that energy reached record lows. Images credit: Glassmeier, et al.
Geomagnetic effects basically amount to any magnetic changes on Earth due to the sun, and they’re measured by magnetometer readings on the surface of the Earth. Such effects are usually harmless, with the only obvious sign of their presence being the appearance of auroras near the poles. However, in extreme cases, they can cause power grid failures on Earth or induce dangerous currents in long pipelines, so it is valuable to know how the geomagnetic effects vary with the sun.
Three things help determine how much energy from the sun is transferred to Earth’s magnetosphere from the solar wind: the speed of the solar wind, the strength of the magnetic field outside Earth’s bounds (known as the interplanetary magnetic field) and which direction it is pointing, since a large southward component is necessary to connect successfully to Earth’s magnetosphere and transfer energy. The team — which also included Walter Gonzalez and Ezequiel Echer of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, Brazil — examined each component in turn.
First, the researchers noted that in 2008 and 2009, the interplanetary magnetic field was the lowest it had been in the history of the space age. This was an obvious contribution to the geomagnetic minimum. But since the geomagnetic effects didn’t drop in 2008, it could not be the only factor.
To examine the speed of the solar wind, they turned to NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), which is in interplanetary space outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, approximately 1 million miles toward the sun. The ACE data showed that the speed of the solar wind stayed high during the sunspot minimum. Only later did it begin a steady decline, correlating to the timing of the decline in geomagnetic effects.
The next step was to understand what caused this decrease. The team found a culprit in something called coronal holes. Coronal holes are darker, colder areas within the sun’s outer atmosphere. Fast solar wind shoots out the center of coronal holes at speeds up to 500 miles per second, but wind flowing out of the sides slows down as it expands into space.
“Usually, at solar minimum, the coronal holes are at the sun’s poles,” says Giuliana de Toma, a solar scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research whose research on this topic helped provide insight for this paper. “Therefore, Earth receives wind from only the edges of these holes, and it’s not very fast. But in 2007 and 2008, the coronal holes were not confined to the poles as normal.”
The magnetic fields from the center of coronal holes in the sun's atmosphere have large fluctuations known as Alfvén waves, while those from the sides have smaller fluctuations. The side fields do not transfer energy as well from the sun to Earth's magnetosphere. Image credit: NASA/Park
Those coronal holes lingered at low latitudes to the end of 2008. Consequently, the center of the holes stayed firmly pointed towards Earth, sending fast solar wind in Earth’s direction. Only as they finally appeared closer to the poles in 2009 did the speed of the solar wind at Earth begin to slow down. And, of course, the geomagnetic effects and sightings of the aurora along with it.
Coronal holes seem to be responsible for minimizing the southward direction of the interplanetary magnetic field as well. The solar wind’s magnetic fields oscillate on the journey from the sun to Earth. These fluctuations are known as Alfvén waves. The wind coming out of the centers of the coronal holes has large fluctuations, meaning that the southward magnetic component – like that in all the directions — is fairly large. The wind that comes from the edges, however, has smaller fluctuations, and comparably smaller southward components. So, once again, coronal holes at lower latitudes would have a better chance of connecting with Earth’s magnetosphere and causing geomagnetic effects, while mid-latitude holes would be less effective.
Working together, these three factors — low interplanetary magnetic field strength, combined with slower solar wind speed and smaller magnetic fluctuations due to coronal hole placement — create the perfect environment for a geomagnetic minimum.
Knowing what situations cause and suppress intense geomagnetic activity on Earth is a step toward better predicting when such events might happen. To do so well, Tsurutani points out, requires focusing on the tight connection between such effects and the complex physics of the sun. “It’s important to understand all of these features better,” he says. “To understand what causes low interplanetary magnetic fields and what causes coronal holes in general. This is all part of the solar cycle. And all part of what causes effects on Earth.”
Written by Karen C. Fox
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/14/nasa-jpl-on-new-insights-on-how-solar-minimums-affect-earth/
-
3rd post:
IPCC WG3 and the Greenpeace Karaoke
On May 9, 2011, the IPCC announced:
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
In accompanying interviews, IPCC officials said that the obstacles were not scientific or technological, but merely a matter of political will.
Little of the increase was due to ‘traditional’ renewables (hydro and ‘traditional’ biomass, mostly dung), but to solar, wind and non-traditional biomass.
I, for one, was keenly interested in how IPCC got to its potential 80%. Unfortunately, in keeping with execrable IPCC practices, the supporting documents for the Renewables Study were not made available at the time of the original announcement. (Only the Summary for Policy-makers was made available at the time.) This showed one worrying aspect of the announcement. The report was based on 164 ‘scenarios’ and the ‘up to 80%” scenario in the lead sentence of their press release was not representative of their scenarios, but the absolute top end. This sort of press release is not permitted in mining promotions and it remains a mystery to me why it is tolerated in academic press releases or press releases by international institutions.
The underlying report was scheduled for release on June 14 and was released today on schedule. Naturally, I was interested in the provenance of the 80% scenario and in determining precisely what due diligence had been carried out by IPCC to determine the realism of this scenario prior to endorsing it in their press release. I hoped against hope that it would be something more than an IPCC cover version of a Greenpeace study but was disappointed.
The scenarios are in chapter 10 of the Report. authors of the chapter are as follows (mainly German):
CLAs -Manfred Fischedick (Germany) and Roberto Schaeffer (Brazil). Lead Authors: Akintayo Adedoyin (Botswana), Makoto Akai (Japan), Thomas Bruckner (Germany), Leon Clarke (USA), Volker Krey (Austria/Germany), Ilkka Savolainen (Finland), Sven Teske (Germany), Diana Ürge‐Vorsatz (Hungary), Raymond Wright (Jamaica).
The 164 scenarios are referenced to a just-published and paywalled article by two of the Lead Authors (Krey and Clarke, 2011, Climate Policy). Update – Since this article has been relied upon in an IPCC report, it is liberated here.
Chapter 10 isolated four scenarios for more detailed reporting, one of which can be identified with the scenario featured in the IPCC press release. The identification is on the basis of Table 10.3 which shows 77% renewables in 2050 for the ER-2010 scenatio attributed to Teske et al., 2010. (Teske being another Chapter 10 Lead Author. This scenario is described as follows:
Low demand (e.g., due to a significant increase in energy efficiency) is combined with high RE deployment, no employment of CCS and a global nuclear phase-out by 2045 in the third mitigation scenario, Advanced Energy [R]evolution 2010 (Teske et al., 2010) (henceforth ER-2010).
Teske et al 2010 – online here – is cited as follows:
Teske, S., T[homas] Pregger, S[onja] Simon, T[obias] Naegler, W[ina] Graus, and C[hristine] Lins (2010). Energy [R]evolution 2010—a sustainable world energy outlook. Energy Efficiency, doi:10.1007/s12053-010-9098-y.
Someone interested in how the world
However, googling the title led me first to a different article with the almost the same
title ‘energy [ r]evolution:A SUSTAINABLE GLOBAL ENERGY OUTLOOK’ online here. This version is a joint publication of Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council, self-described as the ‘umbrella organisation of the European renewable energy industry’. the title page shows:
project manager & lead author – Sven Teske
EREC Oliver Schäfer, Arthouros Zervos,
Greenpeace International – Sven Teske, Jan Béranek, Stephanie Tunmore
research & co-authors
DLR, Institute of Technical Thermodynamics, Department of Systems Analysis and
Technology Assessment, Stuttgart, Germany: Dr. Wolfram Krewitt, Dr. Sonja Simon, Dr. Thomas Pregger.
DLR, Institute of Vehicle Concepts, Stuttgart, Germany: Dr. Stephan Schmid
Ecofys BV, Utrecht, The Netherlands: Wina Graus, Eliane Blomen.
The preface to the Greenpeace report is by one R.K. Pachauri, who stated:
This edition of Energy [R]evolution Scenarios provides a detailed analysis of the
energy efficiency potential and choices in the transport sector. The material presented in this publication provides a useful basis for considering specific policies and developments that would be of value not only to the world but for different countries as they attempt to meet the global challenge confronting them. The work carried out in
the following pages is comprehensive and rigorous, and even those who may not agree with the analysis presented would, perhaps, benefit from a deep study of the underlying assumptions that are linked with specific energy scenarios for the future.
Dr. R. K. Pachauri
DIRECTOR-GENERAL, THE ENERGY AND RESOURCES INSTITUTE (TERI) AND CHAIRMAN, INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC)
Returning now to the original lead to the IPCC Press Release on renewables:
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
The basis for this claim is a Greenpeace scenario. The Lead Author of the IPCC assessment of the Greenpeace scenario was the same Greenpeace employee who had prepared the Greenpeace scenarios, the introduction to which was written by IPCC chair Pachauri.
The public and policy-makers are starving for independent and authoritative analysis of precisely how much weight can be placed on renewables in the energy future. It expects more from IPCC WG3 than a karaoke version of Greenpeace scenario.
It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent ‘due diligence’, IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables.
Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/14/ipcc-wg3-and-the-greenpeace-karaoke/
-
4th post:
Reference
Goklany, I.M. 2011. Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries? Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 16: 9-13.
Partly to reduce the perceived impacts of global warming, which are expected to strike developing nations the hardest, the United States and the European Union are subsidizing and mandating production and use of biofuels in order to displace fossil fuels (Jordan et al., 2007; Searchinger et al.,2008; Robertson et al., 2008; Tyner, 2008). However, these policies have been questioned on the grounds whether (a) biofuels actually reduce net energy consumption from non-renewable sources (Patzek and Pimentel, 2005a, 2005b; Wang, 2005; Wesseler, 2007;) and net greenhouse gas emissions (Searchinger et al., 2008; Scharlemann and Laurance, 2008; Fargione et al., 2008; Hertel et al., 2020) and (b) their environmental consequences for land, water, and wildlife resources are positive (Robertson et al., 2008; Scharlemann and Laurance, 2008; Service, 2009; Fargione et al., 2009). In addition, several analyses indicate that increased production of biofuels has contributed to higher food prices, which, in turn, has increased hunger and poverty in developing countries (Pimentel and Patzek, 2006; FAO, 2008, 2009; Godfray et al., 2010; De Hoyos and Medvedev, 2009; World Bank, 2009). Since hunger and poverty are major contributors to death and disease around the world (WHO, 2002, 2009), Goklany (2011) argues that the artificially induced increase in biofuel demand would add to the global burden of death and disease. He then sets out to estimate order-of-magnitude increases in death and disease due to increased biofuel production.
Methodology
The methodology used by Goklany (2011) is as follows:
1. Obtain estimates of the increase in the current headcount for absolute poverty in the developing world due to increased biofuel production.
2. Develop the relationships (or "coefficients of proportionality") between the poverty headcount on the one hand, and the global burden of death and disease attributable to "diseases of poverty" on the other hand. The headcount and the burdens of death and disease should be for the same time period.
3. Apply the coefficients developed in step 2 to the increase in poverty from step 1 to estimate the increases in death and disease from the increase in biofuel production.
Step 1. Based on a search of the existing literature, Goklany identified only two studies-De Hoyos and Medvedev (2009) and Cororaton et al. (2010)-that provided estimates of increases in poverty induced by greater biofuel production in both rural and urban populations for a large segment of the developing world's population, while also accounting for adjustments by consumers, producers, economies and governments to reduce hunger and poverty. Both analyses covered 90% of the developing world's population. Both indicate that higher biofuel production increases global poverty, even after first order adjustments have been made.
Both studies used the same suite of World Bank models to estimate the effects of additional biofuel production on the poverty headcount. Both estimated the increases in poverty headcounts as the difference in poverty levels between pairs of scenarios, with one scenario assuming a higher level of biofuel production and the other being a baseline scenario with a lower biofuel production level.
Cororaton et al.'s baseline scenario assumed growth in global biofuel production from 2004 through 2020. Thus, they underestimate the contribution of total biofuel production to the poverty headcount. De Hoyos and Medvedev's baseline scenario assumed that biofuel production at the actual 2004 level. They calculated the increase in poverty over the baseline scenario for a scenario in which biofuel production increased after 2004 along its historical path through 2007, and then increased further through 2010 in response to then-existing biofuel mandates and production trends. Therefore, this latter study should give a more accurate estimate of the increase in poverty due to biofuel subsidies and mandates, although it too would be an underestimate since it assumes 2004 production levels as part of the baseline. Despite the latter shortcoming, Goklany used the De Hoyos and Medvedev estimate, after adjusting it upward to account for the incomplete coverage of the world's population. Based on this, Goklany estimated that the poverty headcount increased by 36 million people in 2010 due to an increase in biofuel production over the 2004 level.
Step 2. In order to estimate the coefficients of proportionality between the poverty headcount, and death and disease in developing countries due to poverty-dominated diseases, Goklany used estimates of (a) cumulative burden of deaths and disease from poverty-dominated health risks from the World Health Organization (2009) analysis of global health risks for 2004, and (b) the World Bank's poverty headcount for that year (Chen and Ravallion, 2007) adjusted to be consistent with the more recent World Bank (2009) data and estimation methodology (Chen and Ravallion, 2008).
In order to identify diseases of poverty, Goklany calculated for each risk factor, the ratio of its burden of disease per capita for low-income countries compared to that of lower-middle-income countries. In order to develop a conservative (lower bound) estimate for the effect of biofuel production on death and disease, it was assumed that if the ratio exceeded 5, then the risk factor was poverty dominated. Six risk factors met this criterion: global warming; underweight (largely synonymous with chronic hunger); zinc deficiency; Vitamin A deficiency; unsafe sex; and unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene. These six factors accounted for 7.7 million deaths and 268 million lost DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) worldwide for 2004. Of these, more than 99.3% of the deaths and lost DALYs were in developing countries.
Using a less restrictive criterion for the ratio of 2 would have added four more risk factors to the above list, namely: unmet contraceptive needs, indoor smoke from solid fuels, sub-optimal breast feeding and iron deficiency. Many consider these to be poverty-related (Brundtland, 2003). Including these in the list would increase their cumulative toll of poverty-dominated risks in 2004 to 11.3 million deaths and 384 million lost DALYs. However, to err on the side of conservatism, the more restrictive definition of "poverty-dominated" was used.
Regarding the poverty headcount in 2004, Goklany re-estimated the World Bank's headcount estimates for 2004 so that it was consistent with the data and methods used by De Hoyos and Medvedev (2009), which are also consistent with World Bank (2009), to estimate the increase in headcount due to additional biofuel production. Based on this, the 2004 headcount was estimated at 1,454 million. Thus, assuming proportionality between mortality and lost DALYs from poverty and the headcount, there are 5,270 deaths and 183,000 lost DALYs per million people living in absolute poverty in developing countries.
Step 3. Combining the estimates derived in Steps 1 and 2, Goklany (2011) estimated that the increase in the poverty headcount due to higher biofuel production between 2010 and 2004 implies 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost DALYs in 2010 alone.
Other Conclusions. 1. Biofuel policies are retarding humanity's age-old battle against poverty. 2. Since according to the World Health Organization's latest estimates, 141,000 deaths and 5.4 million lost DALYs in 2004 could be attributed to global warming (WHO 2009), biofuel policies may currently be deadlier than global warming, especially since the inertia of the climate system means little or no reduction in these numbers from any slowing of global warming due to any increase in biofuel production from 2004 to 2010.
Additional References
Brundtland, G.H. (2003). Statement by the Director-General, 111th session of the Executive Board. Geneva: WHO, 2003. Available at: www.who.int/dg/brundtland/speeches/2003/eb111_jan2003/en/index.html. Accessed Dec 11, 2010.
Chen, S, and Ravallion, M. (2007). Poverty and hunger special feature: absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981-2004. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 16757-16762.
Chen, S, and Ravallion, M. (2008). China is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty. Policy Research Working Paper No. 4621. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Cororaton, C.B., Timilsina, G., and Mevel, S. 2010. Impacts of Large Scale Expansion of Biofuels on Global Poverty and Income Distribution. IATRC Public Trade Policy Research and Analysis Symposium, Global Warming in World Agriculture: Mitigation, Adaptation, Trade and Food Security, Universit�t Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany, June 27 -29, 2010.
De Hoyos, R.E., and Medvedev, D. (2009). Poverty effects of higher food prices: a global perspective. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4887. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Fargione, J., Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., and Hawthorne, P. (2008). Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt. Science 319: 1235-1238.
Fargione, J.E, Cooper, T.R., Flaspohler, D.J., et al. (2009). Bioenergy and wildlife: threats and opportunities for grassland conservation. BioScience 59: 767-777.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). (2008). State of Food Insecurity 2008. Rome: FAO.
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). (2009). State of Food Insecurity 2009. Rome: FAO.
Godfray, H.C.J., Beddington, J.R., Crute, I.R., et al. (2010). Food Security: The challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science 327: 812-818.
Goklany, I.M. (1999). Meeting global food needs: environmental trade-offs between Increasing land conversion and land productivity. Technology 6: 107-130.
Goklany, I.M. (2009) Is climate change the "defining challenge of our age"? Energy & Environment 20: 279-302.
Hertel, T.W., Golub, A.A., Jones, A.D., et al. (2010). Effects of US maize ethanol on global land use and greenhouse gas emissions: estimating market-mediated responses. BioScience 60: 223-231.
Jordan, N., Boody, G., Broussard, W., et al. (2007). Environment: sustainable development of the agricultural bio-economy. Science 316: 1570-1571.
Patzek, T.W., and Pimentel, D. (2005). Thermodynamics of energy production from biomass. Crit Rev Plant Sciences 24: 329-364.
Pimentel, D., and Patzek, T. (2006). Green plants, fossil fuels, and now biofuels. BioScience 56: 875.
Pimentel, D., and Patzek, T.W. (2005). Ethanol production using corn, switchgrass, and wood; biodiesel production using soybean and sunflower. Natural Resources Res 14: 65-76.
Robertson, G.P., Dale, V.H., Doering, O.C., et al. (2008). Agriculture: sustainable biofuels redux. Science 322: 49-50.
Scharlemann, J.P.W., and Laurance, W.F. (2008). How green are biofuels? Science 319: 43-44.
Searchinger, T., Heimlich, R., Houghton, R.A., et al. (2008). Use of US croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change. Science 319: 1238 -1240.
Service, R.F. (2009). Another biofuels drawback: the demand for irrigation. Science 326: 516 -517.
Tyner, W.E., (2008). The US ethanol and biofuels boom: Its origins, current status, and future prospects. BioScience 58: 646-653.
Wang, M. (2005). A comparison between the new Pimentel/Patzek study and other studies. Center for Transportation Research, Argonne National Laboratory; 2005: Available at: www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/brief_comparison_pimentel_patzek.pdf. Accessed Dec 11, 2010.
Wesseler, J. (2007). Opportunities (costs) matter: a comment on Pimentel and Patzek ethanol production using corn, switchgrass, and wood; biodiesel production using soybean and sunflower. Energy Policy 35: 1414 -1416.
World Bank. (2009). Global Economic Prospects 2009. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
World Health Organization (WHO). (2002). The World Health Report 2002- Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life. Geneva: WHO.
World Health Organization (WHO). (2009). Global Health Risks: Mortality and Burden of Disease Attributable to Selected Major Risks. Geneva: WHO.
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/jun/1jun2011a4.html
-
I'm not sure that some policies from the environmental left that might result is a large loss of human lives is an unintended result.
-
Forum | Energy & Sustainability See Inside A Quick Fix to the Food Crisis
Curbing biofuels should halt price rises
By Timothy Searchinger | June 16, 2011 | 6
Share Email Print
Image: John Zoiner Getty Images
When food prices rose steeply in 2007 and climaxed in the winter of 2008, politicians and the press decried the impact on the billion or so people who were already going hungry. Excellent growing weather and good harvests provided temporary relief, but prices have once again soared to record heights. This time around people are paying less attention.
The public has a short attention span regarding problems of the world’s have-nots, but experts are partly to blame, too. Economists have made such a fuss about how complicated the food crisis is that they have created the impression that it has no ready solution, making it seem like one of those intractable problems, like poverty and disease, that are so easy to stash in the back of our minds. This view is wrong.
To be sure, reducing hunger in a world headed toward more than nine billion people by 2050 is a truly complicated challenge that calls for a broad range of solutions. But this is a long-term problem separate from the sudden rise in food prices. High oil prices and a weaker dollar have played some part by driving up production costs, but they cannot come close to explaining why wholesale food prices have doubled since 2004. The current price surge reflects a shortfall in supply to meet demand, which forces consumers to bid against one another to secure their supplies. Soaring farm profits and land values support this explanation. What explains this imbalance?
Crop production has not slowed: total world grain production last year was the third highest in history. Indeed, it has grown since 2004 at rates that, on average, exceed the long-term trend since 1980 and roughly match the trends of the past decade. Even with bad weather in Russia and northern Australia last year, global average crop yields were only 1 percent below what the trends would lead us to expect, a modest gap.
The problem is therefore one of rapidly rising demand. Conventional wisdom points to Asia as the source, but that’s not so. China has contributed somewhat to tighter markets in recent years by importing more soybeans and cutting back on grain exports to build up its stocks, which should serve as a warning to policy makers for the future. But consumption in China and India is rising no faster than it has in previous decades. In general, Asia’s higher incomes have not triggered the surge in demand for food.
That starring role belongs to biofuels. Since 2004 biofuels from crops have almost doubled the rate of growth in global demand for grain and sugar and pushed up the yearly growth in demand for vegetable oil by around 40 percent. Even cassava is edging out other crops in Thailand because China uses it to make ethanol.
Increasing demand for corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar, vegetable oil and cassava competes for limited acres of farmland, at least until farmers have had time to plow up more forest and grassland, which means that tightness in one crop market translates to tightness in others. Overall, global agriculture can keep up with growing demand if the weather is favorable, but even the mildly poor 2010 growing season was enough to force a draw down in stockpiles of grain outside China, which sent total grain stocks to very low levels. Low reserves and rising demand for both food and biofuels create the risk of greater shortfalls in supply and send prices skyward.
Although most experts recognize the important role biofuels play, they often underestimate their effects. Many of them misinterpret the economic models, which understate the degree to which biofuels drive up prices. These models are nearly all designed to estimate biofuels’ effects on prices over the long term, after farmers have ample time to plow up and plant more land, and do not speak to prices in the shorter term. Commentators also often lump all sources of crop demand together without recognizing their different moral weights and potential for control. Our primary obligation is to feed the hungry. Biofuels are undermining our ability to do so. Governments can stop the recurring pattern of food crises by backing off their demands for ever more biofuels.
-
BTW, count Fox's Bret Baier (for whom I have genuine respect, unlike many of the Barbie and Ken dolls that populate some of Fox's shows) as amongst the readers of this forum and indeed, this thread. Tonight he reported on the possibility that a decrease in Solar Flares could results in Global Cooling.
-
Interesting. Luke warmist Judith Curry has been slapped around by the warmist high priests for having an open mind, examining all evidence, dealing in data rather than demonization, and so hence has been accused of tangential relationships with big oil amongst all the standard panic monger tactics. As such when another warmist took to criticizing the IPCC/Greenpeace backscratch, Curry wrote the following, which includes warning on what he can expect:
An opening mind
Posted on June 15, 2011 by curryja| 306 Comments
by Judith Curry
I suspect that many readers of this blog have already seen Steve McIntyre’s post “IPCC and the Greenpeace Karaoke” that identified Greenpeace as the source of a key recommendation on renewable energy in the recently released IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation.
Such IPCC transgressions are becoming sufficiently regular that they barely seem like news anymore. The reaction of Mark Lynas to McIntyre’s analysis, however, is indeed news IMO.
Mark Lynas
From his Wikipedia bio:
Mark Lynas (is a British author, journalist and environmental activist who focuses on climate change. He is a contributor to New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK; he also worked on the film The Age of Stupid. He holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh.
In 2004, Lynas’ High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis was published by Macmillan Publishers. He has also contributed to a book entitled Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World, which presents before-and-after images of some of the natural changes which have happened to the world in recent years, including the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, alongside a bleak look at the effects of mankind’s actions on the planet.
In January 2007 Lynas published Gem Carbon Counter,[3] containing instruction to calculate people’s personal carbon emissions and recommendations about how to reduce their impact on the atmosphere.
In 2007 he published Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, a book detailing the progressive effect of global warming in several planetary ecosystems, from 1 degree to 6 degrees and further of average temperature rise of the planet. Special coverage is given to the positive feedback mechanisms that could dramatically accelerate the climate change, possibly putting the climate on a runaway path. As a possible end scenario the release of methane hydrate from the bottom of the oceans could replicate the end-Permian extinction event.
In 2008 National Geographic released a documentary film based on Lynas’s book, entitled Six Degrees Could Change the World.
So far, Lynas reflects stellar “warm” credentials. Circa 2010, things started to change.
In 2010, Lynas published an article in the New Statesman entitled “Why we Greens Keep Getting it Wrong”[4] and the same year was the main contributor to a UKChannel 4 Television programme called “What the Green Movement Got Wrong.”[5] In these he took a line similar to other right wing critics of environmentalism such as Patrick Moore, Bjorn Lomborg and Richard D. North, explaining that he now felt that several of his previous strongly held beliefs were wrong. For example, he suggested that opposition by environmentalists, such as himself, to the development of nuclear energy had speeded up climate change, that proscription of DDT had led to millions of deaths and that GM crops were necessary to ‘feed the world’.
This latter position was attacked as patronising and naive by some developing world commentators, including one featured in a Channel Four debate after the programme aired. A number of experts also criticised Lynas’s factual errors in contributing to the film. British environmentalist George Monbiot wrote in theGuardian that ‘Brand and Lynas present themselves as heretics. But their convenient fictions chime with the thinking of the new establishment: corporations, thinktanks, neoliberal politicians. The true heretics are those who remind us that neither social nor environmental progress are possible unless power is confronted.’
Reaction to McIntyre’s essay
Lynas has a blog, whose current post is entitled “New IPCC error: renewables report conclusion was dictated by Greenpeace.” Some excerpts:
That release of the full report happened yesterday. And a close reading of it shows that the IPCC has made an error much more serious than the so-called Himalayagate and associated non-scandals last year – it has allowed its headline conclusion to be dictated by a campaigning NGO. Moreover, the error was spotted initially by none other than Steve McIntyre, who has been a thorn in the side of the IPCC and climate science generally for a long time. Yet this time McIntyre has got it right.
So what to conclude? My view is that the IPCC renewables report has told us nothing – except that Greenpeace thinks we can solve the climate change problem entirely with renewable energy, which of course we already knew. But whilst I still hold the hard-science Working Group 1 of the IPCC in very high regard, I have lost a lot of confidence in Working Group 3. That it allowed its headline conclusion to be dictated by a campaigning NGO is an extraordinary failure, and one which cannot simply be forgotten.
The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.
One last thing: McIntyre points out that the Greenpace propaganda report which has regrettably destroyed the credibility of the IPCC’s effort on renewables contains a preface – written by none other than R. K. Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC itself. I have great respect for Dr Pachauri, as for the IPCC as an institution. I only wish he – and it – would be more careful.
The comments are even more interesting. Some of the Climate Etc. Denizens and other skeptics showed up to comment on Lynas’ blog, presumably steered there by BishopHill. Bob Ward also showed up to criticize Lynas. In the comments, Lynas recommends nofrakkingconsensus. Barry Woods recommends that he read Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion and Climate Etc.(!) Lynas responds:
I haven’t read the Hockey Stick Illusion, but I will if you send me a free copy! Same with Judith Curry – I have seen her being vilified, but I haven’t gone deeply into it.
I posted a link to my latest attribution post, Lynas replied:
Thanks Judith – it’s a long post, but I’ll have a go!
Another of Lynas’ comments:
Hmm, yes, I sort of agree with you. In principle, anyone can call anyone else they disagree with a ‘denier’ and shut down the argument, like you say. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term, though I have used it admittedly. I did side with Mike Mann on the Hockey Stick thing, without personally having the expertise to really go in and check the argument about statistical methodology. But I have to admit that McIntyre is right about this, and that I and others should have spotted the problem earlier. There should be no campaigners or anyone else with a vested interest on the ‘lead author’ team for any IPCC publication – ever.
Keith Kloor, Andy Revkin and Bishop Hill have posted reactions to Lynas’ post.
JC’s message to Mark Lynas
I’ve been engaging with skeptics since 2006 (before starting Climate Etc., I engaged mainly at ClimateAudit). People were suspicious and wondered what I was up to, but the vilification didn’t start until I recommended that people read The Hockey Stick Illusion. The book itself, plus more significantly my vilification simply for recommending that people read the book, has pushed me over the ledge and into a mode of aggressively challenging the IPCC consensus. That you are willing at this point to read the book speaks volumes to me. It is my sad conclusion that opening your mind on this subject sends you down the slippery slope of challenging many aspects of the IPCC consensus.
Shortly after I started Climate Etc., I received this email message from a colleague:
A few years ago, I started interacting with a skeptic who somehow passed through my “ignore skeptics” filter. He has an engineering degree and is quite knowledgable. My rationale that “all skeptics are troglodytes” has been tattered, and my view of the climate debate has irreversibly changed.
Opening your mind on this subject is a slippery slope into listening to what skeptics have to say. Sure there are alot of crazies out there, but there is some very serious skepticism at ClimateAudit and other technical skeptic and lukewarmer blogs. I look forward to a growing climate heretics club, where people that generally support the IPCC consensus (either currently or in the past) dare to question aspects of it.
I predict that your actually reading the Hockey Stick Illusion and mentioning it on your blog will get you removed from RealClimate’s blogroll.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/15/an-opening-mind/
-
The Paradox of Urban (and Global) Warming
by Patrick J. Michaels
Ah, summer in our cities, where the climate is woebegone and the temperature is almost always above normal.
Cities tend to get warmer, whether or not there is global or regional warming. Bricks, buildings and pavement absorb more heat during the day than a "natural" vegetated state, and urban structures impede the flow of ventilating winds. The result is that, as cities grow, temperatures rise. In Washington, there is additional warming caused by the waste heat from all the money changing hands.
The official (and silly) definition of "normal" temperature is the average for the past 30 years. In a growing urban environment (which includes suburban sprawl) that number is likely to be lower than what it is now.
Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate Coup: Global Warming's Invasion of our Government and our Lives.
As a result, cities are inadvertently testing a dear hypothesis of my greener friends: that global warming will result in increasing heat-related mortality.
Those who have read Freakonomics can see this hanging curveball. Global warming should reduce urban mortality as heat waves become more frequent.
I've done a bit of work in this area. Robert Davis, a former colleague at the University of Virginia, and I examined three decades of heat-related mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control for the 28 largest U.S. cities. We then teamed up with a UVa medical statistician, Wendy Novicoff, who made sure we adjusted for different demographics between cities; we did this because the elderly and infants are most susceptible to heat-related mortality, and we wanted to compare disproportionately old cities (like Phoenix) with disproportionally young ones (like Seattle). After all was said and done, we found that heat-related mortality is dropping like a stone in almost every major urban area in the nation.
Before you go to the "comments" and blast me with the European heat wave of 2003 or the Chicago disaster in 1995, read on.
The 2003 heat wave in Europe was devastating. In France alone, and very dependent on the way you count things, it appears there were about 35,000 excess deaths. That heat wave was a lulu, with European temperatures about three standard deviations above the average, something that has a 1-in-333 chance of occurring averaged over your state or province. Given that there are a lot of places of similar size on the planet, such an anomaly can usually be found somewhere. In 2003, that somewhere just happened to be at the epicenter of global warming angst.
Then there was the great French heat wave of 2006.
Whoops. Don't know about that one? Climatically, it was pretty comparable, but far fewer French fried.
A. Fouillet and his team of researchers wrote this up in a 2008 paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology. They started off with a simple (i.e. logical and testable) model relating temperature to mortality and found that something in addition to the heat killed a lot of people in 2003. While their model predicted about 17 deaths per 100,000, the observed rate was 21 per 100,000, or about nearly 7,000 bodies.
(There's plenty of speculation on the cause, with fingers pointed at France's August recess, when everyone — including health care workers — takes to the beach or the hills and leaves the old folks at the non-airconditioned home)
In 2006, their model showed nearly 4,500 fewer deaths than expected.
What the French did was (begrudgingly) emulate urban Americans. They adapted. The government bought air conditioning (formerly a crass Yankee invention) for retirement homes. They implemented a National Heat Wave Plan that keeps tabs on the elderly, who were left to swelter in 2003. They set up cooling shelters for those without A/C.
And, of course, adaptation is what's happening in our cities. Perhaps the most politically incorrect thing an urban administration can do is to be caught flatfooted by the weather. Chicago's Daley dynasty was (temporarily) swept away by a 1979 snowstorm when it selectively canceled rail service in southside black neighborhoods. And who can forget Washington's colorful mayor Marion Barry, cavorting at the 1987 Super Bowl during back-to-back storms. White stuff set him up.
Want proof of our adaptation to heat? Two extremely hot cities, Tampa and Phoenix, have virtually no heat-related mortality, despite sporting the oldest populations in our study. In only one city is mortality increasing. That would be young and vibrant Seattle, where summer heat is still very rare.
I am sure many consider it immoral to export heat-related mortality to the North, but that won't last for long. Seattle's latitude is about 48 degrees north. The vast majority of our hemisphere's cities are south of there, and by the time you get to 60 degrees, not very far away, you tend to run out of cities. At that point, global warming will have squeezed urban heat-related mortality off of the map.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13184
-
2nd post.
Peer Review and "Pal Review" in Climate Science
by Patrick J. Michaels
Publishing in the scientific literature is supposed to be tough. Submit a manuscript to a reputable journal and it will go through "peer review," where your equals criticize your work, send their comments to a journal editor and then the editor will decide whether to accept your submission, reject it outright, or something in between.
In order to limit any bias caused by personal or philosophical animosity, the editor should remove your name from the paper and send it to other experts who have no apparent conflict of interest in reviewing your work. You and the reviewers should not know who each other are. This is called a "double blind" peer review.
Well, this is "the way it is supposed to be." But in the intellectually inbred, filthy-rich world of climate science, where billions of dollars of government research money support trillions of dollars of government policy, peer review has become anything but that.
Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate Coup: Global Warming's Invasion of our Government and our Lives.
More by Patrick J. Michaels
There is simply no "double blindness." For reasons that remain mysterious, all the major climate journals leave the authors' names on the manuscripts sent out for review.
Economists, psychologists and historians of science all tell us (and I am inclined to believe them) that we act within our rational self-interest. Removing the double-blind restriction in such an environment is an invitation for science abuse.
What about if my professional advancement is dependent upon climate change monies (which applies to just about every academic or government climatologist)? I'm liable to really like a paper that says this is a horrible and important problem, and likely to rail against an author who says it's probably a bit overblown. May God have mercy on any manuscript that mentions the rather large elephant in the room, which is that we probably can't do much about it anyway.
Such "confirmation bias" has been noted and studied for years, but the response of science in general — and atmospheric science in particular — has only been to make things worse.
Peer review has become "pal review." Send a paper to one of the very many journals published by the American Geophysical Union — the world's largest publisher of academic climate science — and you can suggest five reviewers. The editor doesn't have to take your advice, but he's more likely to if you bought him dinner at the last AGU meeting, isn't he? That is, of course, unless journal editors are somehow different than government officials, congressmen, or you.
Or, if you get wind that someone is about to publish something threatening your gravy train, maybe you can cajole the editor to keep it out of print for a year while you prepare a counter-manuscript.
That's what the "Climategate" gang did with the International Journal of Climatology when University of Rochester's David Douglass submitted a paper. His work showed that a large warming at high altitudes in the tropics — one of the major ways in which the enhanced greenhouse effect is supposed to change the climate — isn't happening. For the gory details, click here. The story on this one is still unfolding as the journal has declined to publish a sequel to the counter-manuscript.
Or you could simply ignore manuscripts sent to you that find problems with temperature histories.
But there has to be a gold standard somewhere, right? Perhaps the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)?
Dream on. If you are a member of the National Academy, you can submit four manuscripts a year, called "contributed papers" as long as you do the "peer review" yourself! That's right: you send your manuscript to two of your friends, and then mail your paper along with their comments. Again, pal review.
The PNAS editor then rubber-stamps the results. In fact, the editor probably goes through quite a few rubber stamps a year, given that only 15 of the 800-odd contributed papers submitted in the last year were rejected. For comparative purposes, Nature would have accepted only about 50 out of that number.
A recent paper submitted to PNAS by National Academy member Richard Lindzen was afforded special treatment. The editor insisted that it be held to a different standard of review because of its "political implications." Lindzen's research found that carbon dioxide warming is likely to be much lower than what is being calculated by current climate models.
So what about the legion of alarmist papers from NASA firebrand James Hansen that PNAS publishes via pal review? Don't they have "political implications" too? In the mind of our National Academy, apparently some political implications are more equal than others.
There's a lot of confirmation bias working in Hansen's favor, because it's back to the back of the plane for ham-and-egger climate scientists if Lindzen is right. That's where the "political implications" get personal.
There's a lot more to this story. Lindzen eventually published his paper — which actually benefited from a real review — in an obscure journal. But the next time you think that peer review is unbiased, think of confirmation bias, pal review and Climategate, and try to figure a way out of the mess that climate science has gotten itself into.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13208
-
"BTW, count Fox's Bret Baier (for whom I have genuine respect, unlike many of the Barbie and Ken dolls that populate some of Fox's shows) as amongst the readers of this forum and indeed, this thread. Tonight he reported on the possibility that a decrease in Solar Flares could results in Global Cooling."
From the latest Economist on this issue:
***Special reports Technology quarterly Solar physics
Sun down
Several lines of evidence suggest that the sun is about to go quiet
Jun 16th 2011 | from the print edition
Spots of bother?DURING the four centuries that it has been studied in detail, the sun has usually behaved in a regular manner. The number of spots on its surface has waxed and waned in cycles that last, on average, 11 years. Such cycles begin with spots appearing in mid-solar latitudes and end with them near the equator. And the more spots there are, the more solar storms there are around.
Sometimes, though, the sun sulks and this solar cycle stops. That has happened twice since records began: during the so-called Maunder minimum of 1645 to 1715 and the Dalton minimum of 1790 to 1830. These coincided with periods when global temperatures were lower than average, though why is a matter of debate.
An absence of sunspots also means an absence of solar flares and their more violent siblings, coronal mass ejections. Such outbursts disrupt radio and satellite communications, electricity grids and a variety of electronic equipment, so the pattern of solar activity is of more than academic interest. A new solar minimum, then, would test theories about how the climate works and also make communications more reliable. And many solar physicists think such a new minimum is on the cards. A group of them, who all work for America’s National Solar Observatory (NSO), have just had a meeting in New Mexico, under the aegis of the American Astronomical Society, to announce their latest results.
Frank Hill and his team were the discoverers, 15 years ago, of an east-west jet stream in the sun. They also worked out that the latitude of this wind is related to the sunspot cycle. At the beginning of a cycle the jet stream is found, like sunspots, in mid-latitudes. As the cycle progresses, it follows the spots towards the equator.
Intriguingly, however, Dr Hill’s studies indicate that the jet stream of a new cycle starts to form years before the sunspot pattern. This time, that has not happened. History suggests a new cycle should begin in 2019. If the sun were behaving itself, Dr Hill’s team would have seen signs of a new jet stream in 2008 or 2009. They did not. Nor are there indications of one even now. If a change in the jet stream really is a leading indicator of solar activity, then no new cycle is on the horizon.
The second study which suggests something odd is happening looked at the strengths of sunspots. Matthew Penn and William Livingston have analysed 13 years of data which indicate that, independently of the number of spots around, there has been a decrease in their strength.
Sunspots are caused by irruptions into its surface of the sun’s deeper magnetism. These create local drops in temperature, which make the surface gas darker. Over the period which Dr Penn and Dr Livingston analysed, the average magnetic strength of the irruptions has declined. Below a certain threshold, they will not be strong enough to overcome the convective mixing of the gas at the surface, and spots will disappear altogether. If the present trend continues, that will happen in 2021.
The third measure of the sun’s decline is in its outer atmosphere, the corona. At each solar maximum, the corona sloughs off the magnetic fingerprint of the previous cycle by pushing it to the poles. According to Richard Altrock, the leader of another NSO team at the meeting, that does not appear to be happening in the present cycle. It looks, then, as if a new, extended solar minimum is about to begin.
That is good news for operators of communications satellites. And it is interesting news for those who worry about global warming. If the Maunder and Dalton minima actually did affect the climate, then a new one might counteract the effects of the extra greenhouse gases people are now pumping into the atmosphere—at least, until the solar cycle returns. Whether the breathing space thus granted would be used wisely or squandered is another matter. Do not expect that debate to be as placid as the spotless sun.
from the print edition | Science and Technology***
-
3rd post. Interesting. A blogger who usually finds himself on the catastrophic warming side of things is starting to realize how poorly reviewed IPCC reports are. Earlier he was commenting on the poor form involved in allowing a Greepeace employee to author a piece he then inserts into an IPCC report, for which he was also a reviewer of. Now Lynas is noting the same sort poor quality control where hydropower is involved:
New allegation of IPCC renewables report bias
20 June 2011 19 comments
Following the suggestion last week that a lead author from Greenpeace may have had undue influence over the outcome of the IPCC’s latest report on renewable energy, a new allegation has now been made regarding possible conflicts of interest amongst the lead authors of the report’s chapter on hydropower.
“The value of the IPCC report is weakened by the strongly biased treatment of hydropower,” says Peter Bosshard, policy director for International Rivers, which campaigns to raise attention of the damaging effects large dams can have on riverine ecosystems. “At least half of the lead authors of the hydropower chapter are not independent scientists, but have a vested interest in the promotion of hydropower. This creates a conflict of interest, which is reflected throughout the report.”
All Working Groups of the IPCC have strict procedures for multiple reviews of draft chapters, including with the final product being approved line-by-line by the world’s governments. That these procedures might have failed to detect – or correct – a pro-hydro bias in the draft report is worrying, given the importance for the planet’s future of getting the right mitigation options for tackling climate change. The chapter on hydropower (PDF) suggests a ‘technical potential’ of four times the current 926 GW of installed capacity – of up to 3,721 GW. This would mean significantly encroaching on the natural flows of river basins in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The IPCC report states:
“Of the total technical potential for hydropower, undeveloped capacity ranges from about 47% in Europe and North America to 92% in Africa, which indicates large opportunities for continued hydropower development worldwide, with the largest growth potential in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
There is expected to be significant pressure for new hydropower development because water stored behind dams can balance out the intermittency challenge inherent in large-scale use of strongly-fluctuating solar and wind power in modern electricity grids. However, water released from behind dams tends to be at a lower and more stable temperature than the water in undammed rivers, altering ecological signals and damaging wildlife. Flow regimes also vary widely, according to the needs of electrical consumers rather than the seasonal signals of snowmelt, drought and flood. It is partly because dams can have devastating effects on riverine ecology that freshwater biodiversity is amongst the most endangered on Earth.
As with the issue of Greenpeace’s involvement with Chapter 10 of the report, the allegations of bias in Chapter 5 do not suggest that the report is totally one-sided or should be entirely rejected. There is a section dealing with ecological issues which points out the possible negative implications of hydropower, for example. Instead, the problem lies with the tone of the report and its headline conclusion. Says Bosshard from International Rivers:
“The hydropower chapter of the new report at time reads like a marketing brochure of the hydropower industry. It ignores or misrepresents the findings of the independent World Commission on Dams, and glosses over the findings of many scientific reports which came to conclusions that are not convenient for the hydropower industry.”
This is a serious allegation, which potentially adds to the loss of prestige the IPCC has faced over the Greenpeace/renewables issue. Yet Bosshard is not attacking the IPCC per se, as he makes clear:
We have high respect for the scientific rigor and independence of the IPCC. We were surprised and dismayed to see that the preparation of the new report’s chapter on hydropower was left to a group of authors of whom a majority has a vested interest in the promotion of hydropower. The nine lead authors include representatives of two of the world’s largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.
We recognize the need to have hydropower expertise on the panel and do not question the personal integrity of the authors. Yet it is not appropriate for IPCC to commission individuals with a business or institutional interest in the subject matter to prepare a report that is supposed to be unbiased and independent. The resulting conflict of interest weakens the quality of the report’s hydropower section.
Of the two overall co-ordinating lead authors of the hydropower chapter, one – Tormod Schei – works for a large dam-building company, Norway’s Statkraft, which runs 277 hydropower plants in more than 20 countries, and is currently building the Kargi dam project in Turkey. In the wider lead author team, Jean-Michel Devernay is a senior director within the energy company EDF, and is also vice-president of the board of the International Hydropower Association, whose brief is to “advance sustainable hydropower’s role in meeting the world’s water and energy needs”, according to its mission statement.
According to the ‘planetary boundaries’ work published by Rockstrom et al in Nature, 2009 – which forms the backbone for my upcoming book – freshwater use is one of the planet’s key ecological limits which humans need to respect to protect the integrity of the Earth system. The quantified boundary proposed leaves little room for accelerated big dam development, suggesting that carbon emissions need to be reduced in ways which do not negatively affect the other proposed boundaries. Once again, this emphasises that we need to see the Earth in a more integral way, and focus on ways in which we can solve one global ecological problem without negatively affecting others.
As International Rivers’ Peter Bosshard aptly puts it:
Combating climate change must be part of a holistic effort to protect the world’s ecosystems. We cannot afford to sacrifice the planet’s arteries to save her lungs.
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/06/new-allegation-of-ipcc-renewables-report-bias/
-
A lot of doomsaying scientists have outside sources of income directly related to their doomsaying pulpit, which is often times a job paid for by taxpayers. "Deniers" are often subjected to all sorts of specious attacks due to their tangential associations, now it appears the panic mongers are contending with investigations of their direct conflicts of interest and double dipping:
NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities
Posted on June 21, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Gavin Schmidt’s time spent on editing realclimate.org during working hours apparently was the trigger for a broader investigation.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Contacts: Christopher Horner, chris.horner@atinstitute.org Paul Chesser, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org
ATI Law Center Asks Court to Force NASA to Produce Ethics-Related, Outside Employment Records of Dr. James Hansen
The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in the District of Columbia to force the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to release ethics records for taxpayer-funded global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, specifically records that pertain to his outside employment, revenue generation, and advocacy activities.
ATI seeks to learn whether NASA approved Hansen’s outside employment, which public financial disclosures and other documents reveal to have brought him at least $1.2 million in the past four years. This money comes on top of and, more troubling from an ethics and legal perspective, is all “related to” and sometimes even expressly for his taxpayer-funded employment, all of which outside employment commenced when Hansen stepped up his “global warming” activism from his perch at NASA.
On January 19, ATI filed a Freedom of Information Act request (PDF) with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which sought records detailing NASA’s and Hansen’s compliance with applicable federal ethics and financial disclosure laws and regulations and with NASA Rules of Behavior. Thus far the agency has denied ATI’s request for Hansen’s Form 17-60 “Application for permission for outside employment and other activity”, and internal discussions about same.
Arguing that release would constitute a “clearly unwarranted violation of Hansen’s privacy rights” NASA claims that ATI’s pages of explanation failed to establish that the one-page applications — if they exist, which ATI has reason to doubt — would“contribute to the public’s understanding of the activities of the Government, or how it would shed light on NASA’s performance of its statutory duties.”
This despite that whether NASA complies with ethics laws is patently of public interest, and that Hansen’s position requires him to file vastly more detailed Public Financial Disclosure filings, or Form SF 278, which are made available to the public on request. Both are for the simple reason that a senior employee’s outside revenue-generating activities are inherently in the public’s interest according to the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.
Dr. Hansen engages in high-profile public advocacy with regard to global warming and energy policy, directly trading on his platform as a NASA astronomer to gain interest and attention. This outside employment and other activities relating to his work have included consulting, highly compensated speeches, six-figure “prizes”, a commercial book, advising Al Gore on his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and, lately, advising litigants on suing states and the federal government.
Since escalating the “provocative” (in Hansen’s word) nature of his advocacy in a 2006 “60 Minutes interview”, these outside activities have become extraordinarily lucrative — yielding on average more than a quarter of a million dollars per year in extra income between 2007 and 2010 from outside sources, all relating to the work he is paid by the taxpayer to perform for NASA.
ATI’s director of litigation Christopher Horner says, “Under federal statutes and NASA rules, employees may not privately benefit from public office; outside income must be disclosed, certain activities avoided, andpermission must be applied for before engaging in permissible outside employment or activities. ATI’s Request seeks official documents which — if they in fact exist — would inform the public about NASA’s and Hansen’s adherence to all such rules which compliance, given records already obtained and the public record, is in doubt.”
Dr. Hansen has admitted that lucrative offers of “prizes” and “awards” for his public service began flowing after that “60 Minutes” interview, in which he accused the Bush Administration of “censoring” his global warming views. Records show a sudden spike in highly compensated speeches on the subject of his work, as well.
NASA has already provided Form 17-60 documents for Dr. Hansen’s subordinate Gavin Schmidt to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Schmidt writes for and edits the climate alarmism blog RealClimate.org, during normal business hours. That Hansen and NASA had not required Schmidt to file Form 17-60 seeking permission for these activities, until NASA was asked about this matter, triggered ATI’s inquiry into whether Hansen, too, was avoiding this requirement. Other records obtained by CEI and posted on ATI’s Web site indicate that Dr. Hansen has also used NASA staff for his own commercial activities.
The President and the Attorney General have made clear their commitment to transparency and a high standard of ethical behavior by government employees. NASA needs to clear the air by releasing the documents about Dr. Hansen and about whether he had permission to wear his government hat when engaging in a lucrative effort to sway government policy, said Dr. David Schnare, Director of the ATI Environmental Law Center.
See ATI Environmental Law Center’s Complaint and Prayer for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief in federal court in its Freedom of Information Act case against NASA (PDF).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/21/nasas-hansen-asked-to-account-for-outside-activities/
-
The Hanson story is disgusting. He accuses exactly what he is doing. Put Bush in a situation where he will appear to be guilty of being political, as accused, if he fired Hanson as he should have.
--------------
This is a terrible story too, fraudulent research grants. Could go under botched government programs and could go under media issues, for a deplorable lack of follow up:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029318.php
What's Missing from this Story?
June 24, 2011 Posted by Steven Hayward, PowerlineBlog.com
Nature magazine--not exactly on the top of the sales rack even at Barnes & Noble (I subscribe)--last week reported a bizarre story that is receiving no attention in the U.S. media that I've seen: The Eurocrats in Brussels have uncovered a massive organized crime effort that secured $72 million in fraudulent scientific research grants. An excerpt:
The fraud has been conducted in a "highly sophisticated manner, resembling money laundering", by means of a cross-border network of fictitious companies and subcontractors, says Pavel Bořkovec, a spokesman for OLAF. Several project coordinators stand accused of having claimed inflated costs, or expenses for non-existent research activities and services, he says.
"The projects were apparently organized with the sole intention to deceive the commission and its control mechanisms," says Boublil. To make them seem legitimate, grant applications included the names of real scientists, established research institutes and existing companies, he says. But in most cases the alleged project partners were included without their knowing.
The strange part of this story is that it offers no details about what specific areas of government research funding were pilfered, or what "results" may have come of the fraudulent research projects they supported. Could it have been in the climate science domain, where the most government research money seems to be sloshing around? We know that there has been organized fraud in the European carbon trading market. Trading had to be halted back in January when it was discovered that millions of dollars of carbon allowances had been stolen and cashed on the spot market, so this wouldn't be the first time that organized crime had fixed on the climate circus as an easy mark. And one of the overlooked e-mails in the "Climategate" scandal involving the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit two years ago was a message from one of the scientists suggesting that a particular grant be routed through a Russian organization as a means of tax evasion.
Seems like this story needs some follow up.
-
I love this story. Just a few years ago I remember Copper Mountain Colorado warning that snow skiing die as a sport because of global warming.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705375684/Snowbird-caps-longest-season-with-holiday-skiing.html
Snowbird caps longest season with Fourth of July snow skiing
Published: Monday, July 4, 2011
LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON (Utah) — A few thousand mostly red-and-blue-clad skiers celebrated the Fourth of July on the white slopes at Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort. By being open for skiing Monday Snowbird set a record for the number of days it was able to stay open in a single season with 202...
Snowbird also had a record for snowfall this season, with 783 inches...
(For those of us who appreciate skiing in fresh powder, that is over 65 feet of snow in one season!)
-
When the lying and data hiding stops, maybe we can move global warming updates over to environmental sciences...
Temps right now are very close to both the 30 year and 3000 year averages if I am reading the charts below correctly. Temps are up and down year to year more than they are in 30 years.
Dr. Fred Singer, Univ of Virginia, has a 24 page analysis of all the latest information, a must read if you care about the survival of the planet.
http://www.sepp.org/scientific%20papers/IPCC%20Booklet_2011_FINAL.pdf
A few key points pulled out by John Hinderacker: (You need to read this at the source: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/07/global-warming-a-primer.php to keep his comments and Singer's separate. Impressively, Singer called Mann on the Hide the Decline scandal long before the lies and deception were exposed in the climategate emails! (read it all - Doug)
------------------
(Hinderacker)Dr. Singer points out that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the supposed authority on which pretty much all global warming alarmism relies, has changed its approach to the topic in each of its reports:
(Singer)The IPCC has wavered on methodology. Their First Assessment Report (FAR–1990) simply pointed out that both GH gases and temperatures have increased but paid little attention to the long cooling period (from 1940 to 1975). Their Second Report (SAR–1996) tried to show that observed patterns of warming trends (“fingerprints”) agreed with calculated patterns. Their Third Report (TAR–2001) simply claimed that the 20th century was the warmest in 1000 years (as if this proves anything). The fourth report (AR4– 2007) basically said: We understand all natural forcings – so everything else must be anthropogenic.
(Hinderadker)The alarmists are consistent in only one respect. No matter what the data show, or what analyses are brought into play, the conclusion is always the same: the Earth is warming catastrophically, and the only solution is government takeover of all free economies.
Climate alarmism is based on computer models, but those models don’t correspond to observations in the real world. In the realm of science, when a computer model is contradicted by empirical observation, the model is deemed to have been refuted. Only in the field of global climate do purported scientists refuse to recognize that basic principle. The linked paper explains in summary fashion how the alarmists’ models are contradicted by observation.
Two 20th-century climate trends are undisputed: the Earth warmed from around 1910 to 1940, and cooled from around 1940 to the late 1970s. The climate alarmists base their theory on a warming that they claim took place between 1979 and 1997. Whether that latter warming actually took place is, however, highly debatable:
(Singer)The 1910 to 1940 warming is seen in the surface thermometer record; there were no balloon or satellite observations to provide independent confirmation. However, the proxy data of tree rings, ice cores, etc, all show this warming so that we can be fairly sure of its reality. Its cause is generally believed to be due to natural factors, although Wigley and Santer have claimed it to be anthropogenic (Science, 1998).
On the other hand, the reported 1979 to 1997 surface warming [Fig. 10] is not seen by atmospheric observations. [Fig. 11]. If one takes the near-zero atmospheric trends from radiosondes and (independent) satellite instruments [Fig. 5] seriously, then – because of “amplification” — the surface trend should be smaller – and therefore even closer to zero– especially in the tropical zone.
(Hinderacker)The fact that satellite observations do not verify the alleged surface warming from 1979 to 1997 is a huge problem for the alarmists. One might expect them to have a theory to explain the discrepancy, but they don’t. This graph shows satellite observations from 1979 to 2011:
(http://pl-mgroup-akamai.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2011/07/SatelliteObservations00945.jpg)
Dr. Singer’s presentation explores possible explanations for the apparent rise in surface temperatures. Suffice it to say, for now, that the surface data are less than reliable and are biased in several respects toward warming. I was shocked when I learned that the data used by the IPCC do not even try to adjust for the urban heat island effect, which is well recognized. That fact, by itself, renders those data essentially worthless.
Beyond that, Singer talks about the frauds revealed by Climategate. The surface temperature data on which climate alarmism is based are heavily politicized. This is where the famous “hockey stick” comes into play, as well as the alarmists’ attempt to “hide the decline” through “tricks.”
(Singer)One word about the relationship between Climategate and the “Hockey stick” temperature graph of Mann, Bradley, andHughes. When the graph was published [Nature 1998, GRL1999], public attention immediately focused on their claim that the 20th century was the warmest in the last 1000 years [Fig. 20]. It was then shown by McIntyre and McKitrick that some of the data had been fudged and that the statistical methodology used was faulty.
They also demonstrated that feeding random data into the Michael Mann algorithms would invariably yield a hockey stick curve. (Mann [PNAS 2008] has now quietly changed the hockey stick into a graph that shows both the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age [Fig. 21].) In any case, we know that the MWP, around 1000 to 1200 AD, was warmer than today, based on many independent investigations [Fig. 22].
But that fact (a warmer MWP) has little relevance to the question of the cause of current warming (if indeed such warming exists). Therefore, when the hockey stick was first published, my attention focused on the fact that Michael Mann’s proxy record seemed to stop in 1979 and that the continuing temperature data came entirely from the Jones analysis of surface thermometers. [I think this is the real explanation of “Mike’s Nature trick,” referred to in the Climategate e-mails that speak of “hiding the decline.”]
I immediately sent e-mails to Mann and questioned him about this point, asking him why his proxy temperature record suddenly stopped in 1979. I received back a rather brusque reply that no suitable data were available.
But I already knew that such data are indeed available [Figs23,24] and therefore surmised that his proxy data did not show the increase in temperature demanded by the surface thermometers. So he simply terminated his analysis in 1979 to hide this fact (his “Nature trick”) – in order to be “politically correct” and support the IPCC story of a temperature increase.
The Climategate e-mails make it clear why Mann terminated the Hockey stick in 1979. There is a huge irony here that should be readily apparent. As I maintain above, there was in fact no increase in surface temperatures after 1979, and therefore Mann’s (never-published) proxy temperatures are correct. He simply did not have the courage to believe in his own results. To emphasize this point, I show some of the several proxy data in the published literature [Fig. 25].
This chart shows global temperatures as reconstructed from ocean sediment data:
(http://pl-mgroup-akamai.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2011/07/TemperatureHistory00381.jpg)
(Hinderacker)It has become glaringly obvious to nearly everyone who pays attention that the alarmists’ alleged data are wrong, and their computer models are contradicted by observation. Rather than dealing with these fundamental issues as scientists, the alarmists have shifted into the political arena, smearing their critics and trying to jam major economic changes down our throats before more voters catch on to the fact that global warming alarmism is a fraud–an immensely profitable fraud for those who perpetrate it and for the crony industries that stand to profit by banning the efficient production of energy, but a fraud nevertheless.
-
Nasa satellite data shows atmosphere releases far more heat than WHO computer data:
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html
-
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20110728/9ed535ec-18a3-49c6-b0c7-45f30932bc93
-
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20110728/9ed535ec-18a3-49c6-b0c7-45f30932bc93
When does Al Gore get investigated?
-
A waste of money? From Scientific American - biofuels unable to live up to promise. A synopsis of an article from recent issue:
****Scientific American Magazine » August 2011
Feature Articles | Energy & Sustainability
The False Promise of Biofuels
The breakthroughs needed to replace oil with plant-based fuels are proving difficult to achieve
By David Biello | August 10, 2011 | 3
In BriefDespite extensive research, biofuels are still not commercially competitive. The breakthroughs needed, revealed by recent science, may be tougher to realize than previously thought.
Corn ethanol is widely produced because of subsidies, and it diverts massive tracts of farmland needed for food. Converting the cellulose in cornstalks, grasses and trees into biofuels is proving difficult and expensive. Algae that produce oils have not been grown at scale. And more advanced genetics are needed to successfully engineer synthetic microorganisms that excrete hydrocarbons.
Some start-up companies are abandoning biofuels and are instead using the same processes to make higher-margin chemicals for products such as plastics or cosmetics.
Range fuels was a risky but tantalizing bet. The high-tech start-up, begun by former Apple executive Mitch Mandich, attracted millions of dollars in private money plus commitments for up to $156 million in grants and loans from the U.S. government. The plan was to build a large biofuels plant in Soperton, Ga. Each day the facility would convert 1,000 tons of wood chips and waste from Georgia’s vast pulp and paper industry into 274,000 gallons of ethanol. “We selected Range Fuels as one of our partners in this effort,” said Samuel Bodman, then secretary of energy, at the groundbreaking ceremony in November 2007, “because we really believe that they are the cream of the crop.”
That crop has spoiled in the ground. Earlier this year Range Fuels closed its newly built biorefinery without selling a drop of ethanol. Turning biomass into a commercially viable, combustible liquid is tougher than anticipated, the company has found. As expensive equipment sits idle, the firm is searching for more funding to try to solve the problem.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-false-promise-of-biofuels
X
-
Another problem with the biofuels that gets over looked is how water intensive crops like soy and corn are. A lot of the world is facing down the big problem of running out of water. The last thing a lot of people need is for the little water that's left to be used to drive their cars.
-
****Clouds in a jar
A new experiment with old apparatus reveals a flaw in models of the climate
Aug 27th 2011 | from the print edition
CLOUD chambers have an honoured place in the history of physics. These devices, which generate vapour trails that mark the passage of high-energy subatomic particles, were the first apparatus that allowed such passage to be tracked. That was in the 1920s and led, among other things, to the discovery of cosmic rays. Science has moved on since then, of course, and cloud chambers are now largely museum pieces. But the world’s leading high-energy physics laboratory, CERN, outside Geneva, is dusting the idea off and putting it into reverse. Instead of using clouds to study cosmic rays, it is using cosmic rays to study clouds. In doing so, it may have thrown a spanner into the works of the world’s computer models of the climate.
Clouds are formed by the condensation of water vapour in the atmosphere around clusters of molecules such as ammonia and sulphuric acid. Ions created by the passage of cosmic rays can trigger the formation of such molecular seeds—a process of particular interest because the arrival of cosmic rays is regulated, in part, by the sun. The 11-year solar cycle, which governs the appearance of sunspots, also changes the sun’s magnetic field. That, in turn, affects the passage of cosmic rays (which are mostly protons released by distant supernova explosions), and thus the number of such rays that make it to Earth. Since clouds help regulate the climate, by reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling the atmosphere, some researchers think cosmic rays are a means by which changes in solar activity are translated into terrestrial climate change.
Just how much cosmic rays affect cloud formation has, however, remained elusive. A team at CERN, led by Jasper Kirkby, therefore decided to recreate both the solar cycle and the atmosphere in a lab. Their “cosmic rays” are generated by one of CERN’s particle accelerators. To simulate the atmosphere, they have built a special cloud chamber of their own, with the air manufactured from scratch, using liquid nitrogen and oxygen together with precise amounts of trace compounds, including sulphuric acid and ammonia.
A typical run at CLOUD, as the experiment is unimaginatively named, begins by tracking the growth of seeds from single molecules into clusters in the presence of ultraviolet radiation, which is known to encourage such growth. An electrical field removes any ions present, so the rate of seed growth should be equivalent to that in nature with no cosmic rays around. Next, the field is switched off, allowing actual cosmic rays to permeate the chamber for a while. Finally, a beam of artificial rays from the accelerator is added to the mix.
By comparing rates of seed formation during the different phases of the experiments, the researchers have been able to put a figure on cosmic rays’ contribution to the process. The results, reported in this week’s Nature, suggest naturally occurring rays enhance seed-formation rates by a factor of ten. That implies the rays’ varying intensity could indeed affect the climate.
Dr Kirkby and his colleagues remain cautious about the result, however, because of a second finding. To their surprise, they discovered that the seed-formation rates for sulphuric acid and ammonia are between a tenth and a thousandth of those needed to account for the cloud seeding actually seen in the atmosphere. That suggests other compounds are important, too—and this, in turn, implies that current climate models, which assume most seeds are made of ammonia or sulphuric acid, may require revision.
Atmospheric physics is, of course, notoriously complex. And it would be foolish to start reprogramming all the models on the basis of this single result. But it does suggest that a closer look is needed into what is going on in the real atmosphere. Clearly, there is life in the old cloud chamber yet.
from the print edition | Science and Technology
Subscribe to The Economist's latest article postings on Twitter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About The Economist online About The Economist Media directory Staff books Career opportunities Contact us Subscribe - Site feedback Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2011. All rights reserved. Advertising info Legal disclaimer Accessibility Privacy policy Terms of use Help
-
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/nobel-prize-winner-resigns-over-an-incontrovertible-stance-on-global-warming/
-
Has anyone heard from BBG?
-----
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203388804576612620828387968.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Five Truths About Climate Change
During the decade that Al Gore dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.
By ROBERT BRYCE
Over the past two months, environmental activists have held protests at the White House and elsewhere hoping to convince the Obama administration to deny a permit for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Some of those same activists have launched a series of demonstrations called "Moving Planet" to move "the planet away from fossil fuels towards a safer climate future." And next month, leaders from dozens of countries will meet at the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.
But for all of the sturm und drang about climate change, what has actually happened? It's time to acknowledge five obvious truths about the climate-change issue:
Related Video
Robert Bryce on why global warming alarmists are losing their crusade.
1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. Over that time period, Al Gore became a world-renowned figure for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," for which he won an Oscar. In 2007, he, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), collected a Nobel Peace Prize for "informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change." That same year, the IPCC released its fourth assessment report, which declared that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions." (Emphasis in original.)
Two years later, Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.
The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.
Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.
Those increases reflect soaring demand for electricity, up by 36%, which in turn fostered a 47% increase in coal consumption. (Natural-gas use increased by 29% while oil use grew by 13%.) Carbon-dioxide emissions are growing because people around the world understand the essentiality of electricity to modernity. And for many countries, the cheapest way to produce electrons is by burning coal.
2) Regardless of whether it's getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.
3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore. Sure, the U.S. is the world's second-largest energy consumer. But over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.
Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.
4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power. In 1882, Thomas Edison's first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan converted less than 3% of the heat energy of the coal being burned into electricity. Today's best natural-gas-fired turbines have thermal efficiencies of 60%. Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.
5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere.
Furthermore, even if we accept that carbon dioxide is bad, it's not clear exactly what we should do about it. In September, Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder published a report that determined "switching from coal to natural gas would do little for global climate." Mr. Wigley found that the particulates put into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants, "although detrimental to the environment, cool the planet by blocking incoming sunlight."
If Mr. Wigley's right, then using sources that emit no particulates, like nuclear and natural gas, will not make a major difference in averting near-term changes in the climate caused by carbon dioxide. But then—and here's the part that most media outlets failed to discuss when reporting on the Wigley study—widespread use of renewables such as wind and solar won't help much, either.
Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton and a skeptic about global climate change, recently wrote that the "contemporary 'climate crusade' has much in common with the medieval crusades." Indeed, politicians and pundits are hectored to adhere to the orthodoxy of the carbon-dioxide-is-the-only-climate-problem alarmists. And that orthodoxy prevails even though the most ardent alarmists have no credible plans to replace the hydrocarbons that now provide 87% of the world's energy.
It's time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.
Mr. Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book, "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future" (PublicAffairs, 2010), was recently issued in paperback.
-
October 6, 2011 by Steven Hayward in Climate
The New Hockey Stick?
Everyone who follows the climate change controversy even casually will know about the “hockey stick” controversy. Well, Nature magazine this week offers a new graph of interest: the rising trend of retractions of scientific research papers (see blow). Lo and behold, it looks like a hockey stick! (Heh.)
(http://pl-mgroup-akamai.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2011/10/Retractions2.jpg)
The Nature story notes:
Behind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.
There’s a lot more here to ponder, such as the essentially hollow and meaningless nature of modern peer review, and the increasingly tribal and ideological drift of much of the academic scientific establishment. Some other time perhaps I’ll get further into these matters.
Dan Sarewitz, always worth reading
Elsewhere in this week’s issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University, one of the truly honest brokers in the academic science and policy world, offers a terrific essay on what’s wrong with so-called “consensus” science reports. (Dan is a pal, but hat tip to RH for bringing Dan’s piece to my attention.) The article may be behind a subscriber firewall, so here’s a relevant excerpt:
When scientists wish to speak with one voice, they typically do so in a most unscientific way: the consensus report. The idea is to condense the knowledge of many experts into a single point of view that can settle disputes and aid policy-making. But the process of achieving such a consensus often acts against these goals, and can undermine the very authority it seeks to project. . .
The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge. Science would provide better value to politics if it articulated the broadest set of plausible interpretations, options and perspectives, imagined by the best experts, rather than forcing convergence to an allegedly unified voice.
Yet, as anyone who has served on a consensus committee knows, much of what is most interesting about a subject gets left out of the final report.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111005/full/478026a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20111006
-
'There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
(Where is BBG?)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100114292/lying-cheating-climate-scientists-caught-lying-cheating-again/
The story so far: ten days ago a self-proclaimed "sceptical" climate scientist named Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley University, California, managed to grab himself some space in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) claiming that the case for global warming scepticism was over. Thanks to research from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project, Professor Muller stated confidently, we now know that the planet has warmed by almost one degree centigrade since 1950. What's more, he told the BBC's Today programme, there is no sign that this global warming has slowed down.
Cue mass jubilation from a number of media outlets which, perhaps, ought to have known better – among them, the Independent, the Guardian, The Economist and Forbes magazine. To give you an idea of their self-righteous indignation at the supposed ignorance of climate change deniers, here is the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson in full spate:
We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.
Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.
Problem is, Eugene, almost every word of those two paragraphs is plain wrong, and your smugness embarrassingly misplaced.
As you know, I had my doubts about Muller's findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a "sceptic" when there is little evidence of him ever having been one. As for his argument that the BEST project confounds sceptics by proving global warming exists – this was never more than a straw man.
Now, though, it seems that BEST is even worse than I thought. Here is what Muller claimed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:
In our data, which is only on the land we see no evidence of [global warming] having slowed down.
But this simply isn't true. Heaven forfend that a distinguished professor from Berkeley University should actually have been caught out telling a lie direct. No, clearly what has happened here is that Professor Muller has made the kind of mistake any self-respecting climate scientist could make: gone to press with some extravagant claims without having a smidgen of evidence to support them.
Here, to help the good professor out, is a chart produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation's David Whitehouse. It was plotted from BEST's own figures.
(http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2011/10/GWPFchart.jpg)
Note how the 10 year trend from 2001 to 2010 – in flat contradiction of Muller's claims – shows no warming whatsoever.
What's odd that BEST appears to have gone to great trouble – shades of "hide the decline", anyone? – to disguise this inconvenient truth. Here is a graph released by BEST:
(http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2011/10/BESTCrap.jpg)
The GWPF's David Whitehouse is not impressed:
Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering more almost 200 years is presented with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.
Muller's colleague Professor Judith Curry – who besides being a BEST co-author chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology – is even less impressed.
There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
-
A self confessed "luke warmer" frames what is wrong with climate apocalypse orthodoxy:
I'm grateful to Matt Ridley for allowing me to post the text of his Angus Millar lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh.
It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.
I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.
My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.
Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
Are you with me so far?
A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.
Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience.
So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.
So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.
Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles*.
It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do*.
This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub.
Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.
Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.
So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.
A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up*; everybody just went on believing. They still do.
Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.
In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance*, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.
Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next.
Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.
Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall* was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.
Just this month Daniel Shechtman* won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”
That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.
What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.
Bertrand Russell* pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”
Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.
There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt”* are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.
Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.
Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.
Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972*:
“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.
Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.
Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.
Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.
I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.
I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.
Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.
This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.
For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.
It was warmer in the Middle ages* and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.
Stalagmites*, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.
Sea level* is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.
Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.
There has been no significant warming in Antarctica*, with the exception of the peninsula.
Methane* has largely stopped increasing.
Tropical storm* intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.
Your probability* of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.
Malaria* has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.
And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.
No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?” Well, if you have an X that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.
Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.
To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys.
Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s* how the IPCC put it in its latest report.
“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.
Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.
So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.
The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers* (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).
So we are on track for 1.2C*. We are on the blue line, not the red line*.
Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that.
We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990*.
Ah, says the consensus, sulphur pollution has reduced the warming, delaying the impact, or the ocean has absorbed the extra heat. Neither of these post-hoc rationalisations fit the data: the southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern* in the last 30 years, yet the majority of the sulphur emissions were in the northern hemisphere.
And ocean heat content has decelerated, if not flattened, in the past decade*.
By contrast, many heretical arguments seem to me to be paragons of science as it should be done: transparent, questioning and testable.
For instance, earlier this year, a tenacious British mathematician named Nic Lewis started looking into the question of sensitivity and found* that the only wholly empirical estimate of sensitivity cited by the IPCC had been put through an illegitimate statistical procedure which effectively fattened its tail on the upward end – it hugely increased the apparent probability of high warming at the expense of low warming.
When this is corrected, the theoretical probability of warming greater than 2.3C is very low indeed.
Like all the other errors in the IPCC report, including the infamous suggestion that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 rather than 2350, this mistake exaggerates the potential warming. It is beyond coincidence that all these errors should be in the same direction. The source for the Himalayan glacier mistake was a non-peer reviewed WWF report and it occurred in a chapter, two of whose coordinating lead authors and a review editor were on WWF’s climate witness scientific advisory panel. Remember too that the glacier error was pointed out by reviewers, who were ignored, and that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed the objectors as practitioners of “voodoo science”.
Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying*:
“we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.”
That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”
Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.
Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?
After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.
Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.
At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.
At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.
At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.
At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.
At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.
That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.
Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.
“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.
Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.
Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.
The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.
Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.
By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America*, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com;
In Canada*, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org.
Here in Britain,* Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net.
In Australia*, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.
The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.
In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.
Thank you very much for listening.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html
-
This tinkles on a climate narrative or two:
Who are the world’s worst “polluters”? According to a new high-spectral-resolution Japanese satellite — it’s developing countries.
Who knew detailed spectroscopic data on Earth’s atmosphere was available to figure out where the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are being produced and absorbed?
In January 2009, a Japanese group launched a satellite “IBUKI” to monitor CO2 and methane spectral bands around the world to establish exactly where the world’s biggest sources and sinks of greenhouse gases were. With climate change being the perilous threat to millions, this data would seem so essential you might wonder why didn’t someone do it before. As it happens, NASA tried — it launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in Feb 2009, which was designed to do exactly the same thing, but it crashed on launch. Oddly, NASA don’t seem to be prioritizing the deadly climate threat, as it will take NASA four years to figure out why the Taurus XL rocket failed and relaunch it.
The results from from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) show that Industrialized nations appear to be absorbing the carbon dioxide emissions from the Third World. (Can we get carbon credits for that?) The satellite shows that levels of CO2 are typically lower in developed countries than in air over developing countries.
(http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/05/img/20090829_ibuki_1e.gif)
If the evil modern polluters were producing more CO2 (and it mattered to the global flux), then we’d see higher levels of CO2 (more red dots) over the first world. Right? But CO2 levels are lower than average (see the blue dots). The highest emissions, at least on this graph are predominantly in China, and central Africa.)
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the US midwest earn Gold Star environment awards for their low carbon dioxide levels.
Likewise, the methane picture is remarkably similar.
(http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/co2/jaxa-global-methane.gif)
Cheifio sums up the Japanese results: “For now, I think it’s pretty clear that the “CO2 From the Evil Western Polluters” meme has a serious hole in it… “
Chiefio (E.M Smith) goes on to say:
This isn’t that much of a surprise to me. I’d figured out some time ago that trees and bamboo could consume far more CO2 than I “produce” via burning oil and gas. I’ve also pointed out that The West is largely letting trees grow, while mowing our lawns and having the clippings “sequestered” in land fills (along with an untold tonnage of phone books and junk mail…) while the 3rd world is busy burning and cutting down their forests. The simple fact is that “jungle rot” will beat out my “gallon a day” of Diesel any time. Basically, we in the west grow far more wheat, corn, soybeans, wood, lawns, shrubs, etc. than we burn oil. In the 3rd world, they burn their sequestering plants. (And it takes one heck of a lot more wood to cook a meal than it does coal via a highly efficient furnace / electric generator / microwave oven.) But it’s nice to see it documented in aggregate in the “facts in the air”.
You can see in the graph on the right (click if you want to look up close) that the Japanese satellites have got a seriously high quality spectroscope to figure out the levels of greenhouse gases.
These are the kind of results they are getting, the spectral bands over the south pacific in March 2009. Click to enlarge. Gawk at the detail. They are serious graphs. Source http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2009/tp090319.html
Chiefio has also posted a truly beautiful animated graphic. Watch as those Siberian forests, suck up CO2 in summer as they grow, thus reducing the levels to 360 ppm in August 2009 (but curiously not as much in August 2010).
Man-made emissions are only 4% of the total
Since 96% of all CO2 emissions are natural, those sinks and sources will make or break any theory based on whether man-made emissions are problematic.
This topic fits in with Murry Salby’s work — could it be that changes in the natural sources of CO2 drive the global level, rather than our emissions?
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/11/co2-emitted-by-the-poor-nations-and-absorbed-by-the-rich-oh-the-irony-and-this-truth-must-not-be-spoken/
-
VERY interesting BBG!
-
A Modest Proposal—Forget About Tomorrow
Posted on October 31, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s a lovely 2005 paper I hadn’t seen, put out by the Los Alamos National Laboratory entitled “Our Calibrated Model has No Predictive Value” (PDF).
The paper’s abstract says it much better than I could:
Abstract: It is often assumed that once a model has been calibrated to measurements then it will have some level of predictive capability, although this may be limited. If the model does not have predictive capability then the assumption is that the model needs to be improved in some way.
Using an example from the petroleum industry, we show that cases can exist where calibrated models have no predictive capability. This occurs even when there is no modelling error present. It is also shown that the introduction of a small modelling error can make it impossible to obtain any models with useful predictive capability.
We have been unable to find ways of identifying which calibrated models will have some predictive capacity and those which will not.
There are three results in there, one expected and two unexpected.
The expected result is that models that are “tuned” or “calibrated” to an existing dataset may very well have no predictive capability. On the face of it this is obvious—if we could tune a model that simply then someone would be predicting the stock market or next month’s weather with good accuracy.
The next result was totally unexpected. The model may have no predictive capabilitydespite being a perfect model. The model may represent the physics of the situation perfectly and exactly in each and every relevant detail. But if that perfect model is tuned to a dataset, even a perfect dataset, it may have no predictive capability at all.
The third unexpected result was the effect of error. The authors found that if there are even small modeling errors, it may not be possible to find any model with useful predictive capability.
To paraphrase, even if a tuned (“calibrated”) model is perfect about the physics, it may not have predictive capabilities. And if there is even a little error in the model, good luck finding anything useful.
This was a very clean experiment. There were only three tunable parameters. So it looks like John Von Neumann was right, you can fit an elephant with three parameters, and with four parameters, make him wiggle his trunk.
I leave it to the reader to consider what this means about the various climate models’ ability to simulate the future evolution of the climate, as they definitely are tuned or as the study authors call them “calibrated” models, and they definitely have more than three tunable parameters.
In this regard, a modest proposal. Could climate scientists please just stop predicting stuff for maybe say one year? In no other field of scientific endeavor is every finding surrounded by predictions that this “could” or “might” or “possibly” or “perhaps” will lead to something catastrophic in ten or thirty or a hundred years. Could I ask that for one short year, that climate scientists actually study the various climate phenomena, rather than try to forecast their future changes? We still are a long ways from understanding the climate, so could we just study the present and past climate, and leave the future alone for one year?
We have no practical reason to believe that the current crop of climate models have predictive capability. For example, none of them predicted the current 15-year or so hiatus in the warming. And as this paper shows, there is certainly no theoretical reason to think they have predictive capability.
The models, including climate models, can sometimes illustrate or provide useful information about climate. Could we use them for that for a while? Could we use them to try to understand the climate, rather than to predict the climate?
And 100 and 500 year forecasts? I don’t care if you do call them “scenarios” or whatever the current politically correct term is. Predicting anything 500 years out is a joke. Those, you could stop forever with no loss at all
I would think that after the unbroken string of totally incorrect prognostications from Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren and James Hansen and other failed serial doomcasters, the alarmists would welcome such a hiatus from having to dream up the newer, better future catastrophe. I mean, it must get tiring for them, seeing their predictions of Thermageddon™ blown out of the water by ugly reality, time after time, without interruption. I think they’d welcome a year where they could forget about tomorrow.
Regards to all,
w.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/31/a-modest-proposal—forget-about-tomorrow/
-
Global Warming: The View from China
Volume 14, Number 45: 9 November 2011
"Global climate change," in the words of Fang et al. (2011), "is one of the biggest challenges to human society in the 21st century." And noting that "carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change are considered the main factors causing global warming," plus the fact that "carbon emissions affect social and economic development," they correctly state that "climate change has been shifted from an academic topic to an international political, economic, and diplomatic issue."
The five Chinese researchers - all of whom are associated with the Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education at Peking University in Beijing, and two of whom are also associated with the Climate Change Research Center of the Academic Divisions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences - introduce their review of the climate change issue by noting that the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been the primary voice of those who support the thesis that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been responsible for a worrisome increase in global temperature that is claimed to produce "a series of negative effects on natural systems, including snow and ice melt, sea-level rising, and disturbances in the hydrological cycle," as well as "the acidification of sea water," all of which phenomena are claimed by the IPCC to directly or indirectly threaten terrestrial and marine ecosystems and social systems.
More recently, however, Fang et al. state that the claims of the last IPCC report "have been largely questioned," noting that "the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), established in 2007, has introduced a number of controversial and divisive debates," citing Singer et al. (2008) and Idso et al. (2009). They also write that "the 'Climate-gate' and 'Glacier-gate' scandals have especially questioned the public credibility of the report," citing Hefferman (2009) and Schiemeier (2010). And as a result, they state that "the IPCC report is no longer the most authoritative document on climate changes, as it is restricted by its political tendencies and some errors and flaws."
In their own review of the subject, Fang et al. come to the following conclusions. First, "global warming is an objective fact," but there is "great uncertainty in the magnitude of the temperature increase." Second, "both human activities and natural factors contribute to climate change, but it is difficult to quantify their relative contributions." Third, with regard to the IPCC claim that "the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (including CO2) is the driving force for climate warming," they note the following four problems: (1) "it remains unclear how the human and natural factors, especially the aerosols, affect the global temperature change," (2) "over the past century, the temperature change has not always been consistent with the change of CO2 concentration," since "for several periods, global temperatures decreased or were stable while the atmospheric CO2 concentration continuously increased," (3) "there is no significant correlation between the annual increment of the atmospheric CO2 concentration and the annual anomaly of annual mean temperature," and (4) "the observed significant increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration may not be totally attributable to anthropogenic emissions because there are great uncertainties in the sources of CO2 concentration in [the] atmosphere."
This is but one view of the subject, albeit an important one, simply because it comes from China, the world's most populous country. Many different groups have many different ideas about the topic; and that is the nature of the long-running controversy: there is no agreement on these and other core issues. Consequently, and contrary to what the IPCC crowd continually contends, the science of global climate change is definitely not "settled."
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Fang, J.Y., Zhu, J.L., Wang, S.P., Yue, C. and Shen, H.H. 2011. Global warming, human-induced carbon emissions, and their uncertainties. Science China Earth Sciences 54: 1458-1468.
Heffernan, O. 2009. Climate data spat intensifies. Nature 460: 787.
Idso, C.D. and Singer, S.F. 2009. Climate Change Reconsidered; 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Schiermeier, Q. 2010. IPCC flooded by criticism. Nature 463: 596-597.
Singer, S.F. 2008. Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V14/N45/EDIT.php
-
China is not going to cut it's "greenhouse gas emissions". Even if the science was actually settled. Which it isn't, of course.
-
GM: "China is not going to cut it's "greenhouse gas emissions"."
But if they do, they first have spent decades maximizing those levels in order to to set the benchmark plenty high. I think they might be burning all that coal just for the CO2 to make their crops grow faster.
--------------------------
Short term cooling on a small slice of the earth means nothing of course except to show us what we don't know: that warming is not everywhere, it is not continuous, it is not accelerating, and we don't know if it will continue.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/05/ncdc-data-shows-that-the-contiguous-usa-has-not-warmed-in-the-past-decade-summers-are-cooler-winters-are-getting-colder/
www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
NCDC data shows that the contiguous USA has not warmed in the past decade, summers are cooler, winters are getting colder
(http://pl-mgroup-akamai.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2011/11/ncdc_usa_2001-20111.png)
-
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/global_warming_we_can_all_cheer_YuaZ4rbJSEIerSIa8Ij25I
You can be forgiven if you didn’t know that we’re in the middle of an ice age right now, what with all the talk about global warming. But it’s true. We’re in what geologists call “the Quaternary glaciation,” an ice age that’s lasted for the past 2.5 million years.
Ice ages last a very long time, with periods of extreme cold punctuated by warmer periods, or interglacials. We’re in such an interglacial right now: The Holocene epoch began about 12,000 years ago. It’s best thought of as a brief respite from the most severe ravages of Quaternary ice.
So global warming actually began around 10,000 BC, when the ice sheets that had covered large portions of North America and Eurasia retreated to the poles. And what has happened since this (entirely natural) warming began? The Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of civilization and the expansion of human populations like never before.
Civilization rose during a respite from the cold: Diego, Manfred, Sid and the lost child in the animated film “Ice Age.”
Civilization rose during a respite from the cold: Diego, Manfred, Sid and the lost child in the animated film “Ice Age.”
In other words, homo sapiens, which existed in its more or less anatomically modern form for 100,000 to 200,000 years, began to flourish and thrive as a result of this most fortuitous warmth.
In short: Global warming is good for people.
If you don’t believe me, look at the temperature variations within the Holocene: The so-called Roman Warming coincided with the heights of classical civilization; then came a period of cooling which coincided with the social collapse of the Dark Ages.
Then there was the Medieval Warm Period, which coincided with the rise of monumental cathedrals in Europe and the settlement by Vikings in a lush Greenland, followed by the Little Ice Age (from roughly the 14th to the 19th centuries) — which saw widespread political upheavals, famine and disease.
Finally, there is the current warming trend of the last century and a half or so.
In each instance, the result is broadly the same: The warmer the Earth, the better it has been for people.
So let’s be thankful for the Holocene — civilization could never have arisen without it. And let’s be thankful we live in this especially warm period within the Holocene, which has seen human populations achieve measures of health and wealth unparalleled in all of history.
But let us also not be fooled — this blessed respite will someday end. The ice will return. It always has, it always will. And when it does, it will threaten all we have built, and indeed, our very existence.
-
Agenda science, the gift that keeps on giving:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/
/// The IPCC Process ///
<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]
<4755> Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out.
<3456> Overpeck:
I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about
“Subsequent evidence” [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been
an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?
(Much more at the link)
-
Sea Level Continues Its Historic Decline
http://www.real-science.com/sea-level-continues-historic-decline
(http://www.real-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/chart_118.png)
Who knew?
-
Sea Level Continues Its Historic Decline
http://www.real-science.com/sea-level-continues-historic-decline
(http://www.real-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/chart_118.png)
Who knew?
OMG! It's so hot, the sea is boiling away!
:roll:
-
All that extra moisture in the air explains the drought in Texas too!
-
OMG! It's so hot, the sea is boiling away!
All that extra moisture in the air explains the drought in Texas too!
---------------------
Global warming is even more of a joke here - we didn't have to dream of a white Thanksgiving up here this year, the snowblowers, plows and salt trucks have already been out. That is why they changed the name global warming to climate change - consistent or accelerating warming was so easy to disprove. Climate change covers hot and cold, wet and dry - as if those variances did not previously occur. If you can observe it or measure it, then it was caused by capitalism, fossil fuel use and the greediest 1%. Fit the data to the theory.
I was reading some pretty good pieces lately about the errors the climate modelers were making in the late 1990s. Because they deny the effects of phenomenon they don't understand or know about, cosmic rays, solar magnetism, cloud cover variabilities, etc. they attribute all observed warming to CO2. When temps go up more they are even more confident and determined to spread the fright, but when temps go down they switch from satellite to surface to lower tropospheric or tree rings or whatever helps the new data fit into the old, flawed theory until it is fully discredited. Critics of this say put the data first and fix your model even if that would mean the scientifically unthinkable - lower levels of government paid research funding.
Around 'The Inconvenient Truth' time I tried to make a bet with one of my outspoken liberal friends about ocean levels. The rising sea seemed to be the most dramatic of the Al Gore predictions:
"A 20 ft (6m) rise in sea level would create over 100 million refugees."
Apologies here but I am picturing Crafty and family out on a Pacific lifeboat with their survival kit waiting for CO2 levels on land to subside. I tried to bet my friend $5 that the map of Florida would not be noticeably changed by the end of this century. The Atlantic Ocean will be right about where it is now and where it was when my grandparents bought property a block from the ocean 65 years ago. It goes up and down everyday with the tide more than it changes in a century. He wouldn't take the bet because we couldn't figure out how to live long enough to verify Al Gore's claim. Maybe he thinks all that sea rise could be in the last few years...
The point in this data isn't that levels are catastrophically falling - we are looking at millimeters not feet, it is just that ocean levels go in cycles we don't understand. A small decline over 2 years and counting proves the rate of increase is neither constant nor accelerating, and not determined by one minor variable alone.
We don't need to wait until the year 2100 to know they were wrong.
-
The only "OMG" is THIS article which is a joke. A "statistical" post by an armchair blogger (any 3rd grader is a blogger now) (“Steven Goddard” is a pseudonym used by an anonymous climate denialist crank, so incredibly sloppy that he's posts often even embarrasses other climate deniers") in AU who has no qualifications and who won't even identify himself, provide scientific references, cites, or links, but merely blogs and collects aberrations supporting his position from newspaper articles around the world.
However, using this blogger's "scientific method" I bet I could "prove" that Martians have landed over 100 times in MN if I had his qualifications or if I used his scientific techniques. I mean did your read some of his other posts? Martians truly are more believable. With the internet, if I looked long enough I could prove anything to anyone as long as you don't question my source. Quacks are everyone; fun reading, amusing, entertaining, but hardly scientific.
Now I have no idea if the ocean is rising or falling. Or if the sea is boiling away. Or why there is a drought in Texas. Opinions differ.
http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/index.html
But this guy doesn't know sh#t. Nothing wrong with an armchair opinion, we all have opinions, but let's be clear, he's no more, maybe less qualified to comment than my high school neighbor taking his first semester of oceanography. References and/or their source should have at least some credibility, otherwise simply post your own opinion - it's probably equally if not more valid than this guys.
A blogger with no qualifications who collects unsubstantiated articles..... That is not a reference. That is not the search for truth....
Maybe I should post with a pseudo link "Martians land and live in St. Paul."
Wow is it really true?
-
Your link: http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/index.html proves my point just as well. Thank you for that! :wink:
-
The data I posted previously and below was sourced and linked to the same satellite based ocean measurements that NASA and NOAA use, not from a 3rd grade blogger, and your personal insults to my post were not necessary or helpful to the discussion level on the board you meanspirited internet troll. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_System The EPA site you linked with a billion times more funding posts nothing from the last two years because that data does not support their Occupy America agenda.
Dates and Ocean measurements:
ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/pub/oceano/AVISO/indicators/msl/MSL_Serie_EN_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.txt
2009.762544 4.983938e-01
2009.786452 4.986906e-01
2009.810016 4.978843e-01
2009.834542 4.964168e-01
2009.858177 4.950515e-01
2009.882085 4.943344e-01
2009.905994 4.943233e-01
2009.929902 4.946768e-01
2009.953810 4.949439e-01
2009.977719 4.947911e-01
2010.001627 4.940890e-01
2010.025536 4.929729e-01
2010.049444 4.918703e-01
2010.073352 4.913476e-01
2010.097261 4.917230e-01
2010.121169 4.927341e-01
2010.145077 4.936435e-01
2010.168986 4.937882e-01
2010.192894 4.931054e-01
2010.216803 4.921310e-01
2010.240711 4.914826e-01
2010.264619 4.913422e-01
2010.288528 4.914230e-01
2010.312436 4.913864e-01
2010.336344 4.912200e-01
2010.360253 4.911966e-01
2010.384161 4.915188e-01
2010.408070 4.920793e-01
2010.431978 4.925840e-01
2010.455886 4.928454e-01
2010.479795 4.928986e-01
2010.503703 4.928435e-01
2010.527611 4.926382e-01
2010.551520 4.921086e-01
2010.575428 4.911581e-01
2010.599337 4.899450e-01
2010.623245 4.888302e-01
2010.647153 4.881369e-01
2010.671062 4.879415e-01
2010.694970 4.880703e-01
2010.718878 4.882825e-01
2010.742787 4.884623e-01
2010.766695 4.886481e-01
2010.790426 4.889007e-01
2010.814662 4.891458e-01
2010.838322 4.892256e-01
2010.862143 4.889994e-01
2010.885965 4.885108e-01
2010.909787 4.879770e-01
2010.933608 4.876641e-01
2010.957430 4.877281e-01
2010.981252 4.881207e-01
2011.005073 4.886330e-01
2011.028895 4.890310e-01
2011.052716 4.891611e-01
2011.076538 4.889289e-01
2011.100360 4.882206e-01
2011.124181 4.869459e-01
2011.148003 4.852498e-01
2011.171824 4.836647e-01
2011.195646 4.829230e-01
2011.219467 4.834688e-01
2011.242192 4.850516e-01
2011.267372 4.868304e-01
2011.290932 4.878911e-01
2011.314753 4.878862e-01
2011.338575 4.871719e-01
2011.362396 4.864411e-01
2011.386218 4.861811e-01
2011.410039 4.864160e-01
2011.433861 4.868410e-01
2011.457682 4.871225e-01
2011.481504 4.870342e-01
2011.505325 4.864432e-01
2011.529146 4.854239e-01
2011.552968 4.844569e-01
2011.576789 4.843574e-01
2011.600611 4.854777e-01
2011.624432 4.870849e-01
2011.648254 4.882340e-01
2011.672075 4.886173e-01
2011.695896 4.883880e-01
Argos was developed under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES, the French space agency), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, USA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, USA).
The system utilizes both ground and satellite-based resources to accomplish its mission. These include:
instruments carried aboard the NOAA polar orbiting environmental satellites (POES) and the EUMETSAT MetOp satellites,
receiving stations around the world,
and major processing facilities in France and the United States.
This fully integrated system works to conveniently locate and deliver data from the most remote platforms to the user's desktop, often in near real-time.
Argos is operated by CLS/Argos, based in Toulouse, France. CLS has subsidiaries in the U.S., namely, Service Argos, Inc. and North American CLS.
http://www.cls.fr/html/cls/contacts_en.html
Headquarters:
CLS
8-10, rue Hermès,
Parc Technologique du Canal
31520 Ramonville Saint-Agne
France
Tel.: +33 (0)5 61 39 47 00
Fax: +33 (0)5 61 75 10 14
E-mail: info@cls.fr
Web: www.cls.fr
Subsidiaries:
CLS America, Inc., USA
CLS Perú, Peru
Novacom Services, France
PT CLS Argos Indonesia, Indonesia
Altamira, Spain
Offices:
Cubic-I, Japan
KL Trading, Korea
ES-PAS, Russia
Cunlogan, Chile
Satellite Information Technology Pty Ltd, Australia
CLS Bruxelles, Belgium
CLS Vietnam, Vietnam
Tianjin Haihua Technology Development Center , China
-
So the EPA doesn't post data because "that data doesn't support their Occupy America agenda"
Surely you are joking? Did Steven Goddard say that too?
Your link: http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/index.html proves my point just as well. Thank you for that! :wink:
Hmmm while as I said I have no idea if the ocean is rising or falling, or why TX is wet or dry, I think if you read the scholarly EPA report, while it does raise various issues, it does not prove Mr. Goddard's point. I'm surprised you thought so.
As for Steven Goddard, I beg to differ; he IS a 3rd grade blogger; yet that is who you specifically referenced; not some scholarly paper or expert. Further, data is data; the man who interpreted the data is what's important. In this case, he won't even give his real name nor has he published in any scientific journals. An anonymous poser. His name pops up on the "quack" list over and over if you simply Google him.
However, note, I never personally insulted you, just your occasional research techniques. While I may or may not agree, you posted an excellent article, well documented on Mexico today from The Economist.
.
In another post, you raised good points regarding an article by Lawrence Summers today.
You then posted another article on Foreign Policy quoting another qualified expert (again, I disagree, but I do respect her expert opinion and I learned from the article).
My point is that the criticism was not directed at you, but rather that you are quoting someone as "truth" yet he has no qualifications other than he owns a computer. Put it in the humor section if you want. But don't call or even imply it's science. Truly, my neighborhood high school student who is taking oceanography is probably more qualified.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110309123406AA1ne91
http://wottsupwiththat.com/tag/steven-goddard/
http://smallerfish.blogspot.com/2008/08/climate-change-skeptic-admits-he-was.html
-
I've been off in the boonies supporting cave science and so missed when this came out earlier in the week. It is, however, a treasure trove, and goes a long way towards demonstrating many on the looming climate apocalypse side of the argument have fewer scruples then the theoretical high school students JDN cites above:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/
-
Welcome back BBG.
JDN, The post of mine in question that you compare to Martians landing in St. Paul uses the best sources on the planet. The data says that sea level has dropped for 2 years. I said that proves the rise is not continuous or accelerating. Al Gore said oceans rising 20 feet displacing hundreds of millions. Your EPA link contradicts that. You impugn a guy who drew the line through the data (a two variable linear regression), but pretend to be impugning the data. Really you are attacking me personally; I am the one who brought that information to this board. Nothing you wrote or posted corrects or refutes the above. You call the EPA scholars but they are agenda driven politicians barking up the wrong tree, oblivious to the damage they inflict. They have a massive budget, a whole section on sea level and don't publish the data. WHY NOT? An internet troll is one who intentionally and repeatedly brings the conversation backwards, sideways, in circles or anywhere except forward. Don't be that guy. Don't tell me on this thread a couple other posts were good like that excuses you for saying my post was equivalent to Martians landing in St. Paul. Did they? Why don't you post this on the board: 'Doug, here are some data that contradict what you posted'? I know why not. You don't have any. You drivel that a kid on an electric scooter named Dana1961 says that guy who the pulled the data from the most reliable information known and ran the most recent 2 years in a regression analysis is using a pseudonym. That's scary, and Dana 1961 is the long name his mom gave him? You post that he has issued a correction to a past post. What the hell does that have to do with the satellite data that I posted? If nothing, then retract it.
-
Doug....
I did not question the data; just the interpretation of the data. That's the key.
My point was that your post referenced Steven Goddard - it was not focused on the data, but his ignorant and mistaken interpretation of the data.
As for your source, Steven Goddard, he is such a charlatan that EVEN the source BBG referenced (interesting site - I agree with BBG) debunked and refuted Steven Goddard.
Note I too previously (see above) referenced that site and it's "correction" of Steven Goddard's ignorance. Further that site disavowed your source, i.e. Steven Goddard as being credible and
no longer allows him to do business or publish on their site. He's a FAKE. As I said, my high school neighbor...... :-) At least I know my neighbor's name; this so called "expert" is a FAKE...
Why should I retract comments regarding a fake?
As I said I don't know really know IF or why the the ocean is rising (I'm learning), but at least post references/articles from credible sources; not jokes. BBG often brought this information to the board,
and while he and I may have disagreed and we had our differences, he has enlightened me on global warming, but he quotes credible sources to persuade me.
As for Martians landing in St. Paul, let me check on it; I'm sure someone like Steven Goddard (or maybe he posted that too) has post somewhere.....
Dana1961 or whatever does not put himself out as an expert. Steven Goddard does. My suggestion... Don't quote fakes.....
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Watts-Up-With-That-ignorance-regarding-Antarctic-sea-ice.html
Further as i said, BBG's site which I also referenced above even repudiated Steven Goddard.
http://wottsupwiththat.com/tag/steven-goddard/
You are a smart guy. You often post well. But you can't defend Steven Goddard; it's a joke. Like the Martians in St. Paul. Or are there? :-)
Maybe that's more credible than Steven Goddard. :-D
-
Uhm, JDN you cite a site set up to debunk Watt's Up With That, and then attribute the link to me. On the real Watts site I can't find criticism of Goddard, rather they cite other posts that cite his work, though I only clicked on the first half dozen links or so.
Not sure how one flubs a link so badly that it's conflated with its antithesis; either you are very sloppy or truly trolling.
-
"Sloppy" research is the appropriate criticism. Mea Culpa. The link was a mistake; I confused wAtts with wOtts.
That said, as I looked this morning, it seems an article was published by Steven Goddard and later apologized for by Anthony.
Arctic Ice Graphing Lesson Increasing By 50,000 km2 Per Year
By Steven Goddard
The real Watts site wrote "[Note: The title and conclusion are wrong due to bias in the start/end point of the graph, the mistake was noted by Steven immediately after publication, and listed below as an addendum. I had never seen the article until after the correction was applied due to time difference in AU. My apologies to readers. I'll leave it up (note altered title) as an example of what not to do when graphing trends, to illustrate that trends are very often slaves to endpoints. - Anthony]"
I also previously quoted another site questioning Steven Goddard's logic. Quite a few exist.
http://smallerfish.blogspot.com/2008/08/climate-change-skeptic-admits-he-was.html
However, as I have pointed out, I do not have an opinion, much knowledge, or for that matter an interest in "global warming". That was never my point.
I do however think credible research is important. A pseudonym used by an anonymous poster.... Someone who may have (we don't know who he is do we?) no knowledge of the subject, yet puts himself out as an "expert" is not credible.. It really could be my high school neighbor.
As I mentioned Doug posted three other times that day; each post referenced a qualified expert. One may or may not agree with each author, but each author had earned
the right to be considered an "expert". It's like a court of law; their CV determines their credibility. A reference to an "expert" (blogger) who uses a pseudonym and is anonymous would be laughed out of court.
As I have said, global warming may be real or a fiction; I don't know and frankly I don't have much interest in the subject. Others seem quite passionate about the subject; I enjoy occasionally reading about
it, but I do prefer reading posts/articles from credible sources. Why post and reference articles from a source that has no credibility?
I think I made my point the it's important to have credible references; that's research 101. So no need to pursue this subject further.
-
There isn't any interpretation of the data in any of this. No one has claimed to know what it means. If you don't like the regression analysis, ignore his line, look at the dots, draw your own line. There isn't any part of this story that is about the person you attack. He could be an armed robber or child molester, it wouldn't affect the substance of this. You already made your limp attack-the-messenger argument 7 posts back. My link to his chart links to the actual data. It is for my own integrity that I credit that post rather than pretend I found the raw data myself. It should be in a mainstream source, why don't YOU send it to the LA Times and I will link them. But it won't be published there or in my local paper or at the EPA or the NY Times. This data doesn't fit their story.
I already answered all this by posting the raw data and the original source with the link to show it is the same source used and funded by NASA and NOAA, during your witch hunt, 5 posts back. http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1454.msg57005#msg57005 Strangely you wrote that you accepted the data and then drivel on with personal attacks that hit me. That is what I mean by a circular argument - the opposite of moving a discussion forward. This had happened with you one too many times last time. That doesn't happen by accident. You could post opposing views or context or leave it alone when you have nothing, but no, it is just argue backwards, sideways and in circles. What a waste.
-
From the Economist:
****Climate change
Good news at last?
The climate may not be as sensitive to carbon dioxide as previously believed
Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition
..CLIMATE science is famously complicated, but one useful number to keep in mind is “climate sensitivity”. This measures the amount of warming that can eventually be expected to follow a doubling in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its most recent summary of the science behind its predictions, published in 2007, estimated that, in present conditions, a doubling of CO2 would cause warming of about 3°C, with uncertainty of about a degree and a half in either direction. But it also says there is a small probability that the true number is much higher. Some recent studies have suggested that it could be as high as 10°C.
If that were true, disaster beckons. But a paper published in this week’s Science, by Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University, suggests it is not. In Dr Schmittner’s analysis, the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than was feared.
Existing studies of climate sensitivity mostly rely on data gathered from weather stations, which go back to roughly 1850. Dr Schmittner takes a different approach. His data come from the peak of the most recent ice age, between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. His group is not the first to use such data (ice cores, fossils, marine sediments and the like) to probe the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. But their paper is the most thorough. Previous attempts had considered only small regions of the globe. He has compiled enough information to make a credible stab at recreating the climate of the entire planet.
The result offers that rarest of things in climate science—a bit of good news. The group’s most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C. More importantly, these results suggest an upper limit for climate sensitivity of around 3.2°C.
Before you take the SUV out for a celebratory spin, though, it is worth bearing in mind that this is only one study, and, like all such, it has its flaws. The computer model used is of only middling sophistication, Dr Schmittner admits. That may be one reason for the narrow range of his team’s results. And although the study’s geographical coverage is the most comprehensive so far for work of this type, there are still blank areas—notably in Australia, Central Asia, South America and the northern Pacific Ocean. Moreover, some sceptics complain about the way ancient data of this type were used to construct a different but related piece of climate science: the so-called hockey-stick model, which suggests that temperatures have risen suddenly since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It will be interesting to see if such sceptics are willing to be equally sceptical about ancient data when they support their point of view.
from the print edition | Science and technology
-
More coverage IBD of the story CCP already posted from the Economist.
http://news.investors.com/Article/592860/201111251803/new-study-casts-doubt-on-global-warming.htm
The study in the journal Science found that global temperatures appear to be far less sensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than originally estimated...The study's findings are simple and devastating. "This implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought," said Oregon State University's Andreas Schmittner, the study's main author.
-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203935604577066183761315576.html
...
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.
And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.
-
Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science
I’ve written before about scientific error cascades and the pernicious things that happen when junk science becomes the focus or rationale of a political crusade.
The worst example of this sort of thing in my lifetime, and arguably in the entire history of science, has been the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) panic. Now that the wheels are falling off that juggernaut, I’m starting to hear ordinary people around me wonder how I knew it was bullshit and hot air so much in advance…
Some of the answer to that is complicated and not easily replicable. I happened to have the right sort of knowledge base to know that, for example, specific AGW-panicker claims about historical climate were impossible to reconcile with primary evidence – wine grapes grown at 59 degrees north around the year 1000, that sort of thing. This motivated me to dig for other problems with their narrative well before they were really on the public’s radar.
But a lot of it was more general. I’ve seen a lot of “scientific” panics ginned up from nonexistent or scanty evidence over the last several decades. There’s a pattern to these episodes, a characteristic stench that becomes recognizable after a while. I’ll describe some of the indicia, which I’ve culled from episodes like the Alar scare, the ozone-hole brouhaha, the AIDS panic (are you old enough to remember when it was predicted to become endemic among heterosexuals in the U.S.?), acid rain, and even the great global cooling flap of 1975.
So. Here is a non-exclusive list of seven eight symptoms to watch out for:
Science by press release. It’s never, ever a good sign when ‘scientists’ announce dramatic results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. When this happens, we generally find out later that they were either self-deluded or functioning as political animals rather than scientists. This generalizes a bit; one should also be suspicious of, for example, science first broadcast by congressional testimony or talk-show circuit.
Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”, you can be pretty sure that X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to panic the herd into stampeding rather than focusing on the quality of the evidence for theory X.
Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”, you can be even more sure that theory X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to induce a state of preference falsification in which people are peer-pressured to publicly affirm a belief in theory X in spite of private doubts.
Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole. It’s a sign of sound science when advocates for theory X publicly acknowledge failed predictions and explain why they think they can now make better ones. Conversely, it’s a sign of junk science when they try to bury failed predictions and deny they ever made them.
Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified.. No, this is not unique to climatology; you see it a lot in epidemiology and economics, just to name two fields that start with ‘e’. The key point here is that simply fitting historical data is not causal justification; there are lots of ways to dishonestly make that happen, or honestly fool yourself about it. If you don’t have a generative account of why your formulas and coupling constants look the way they do (a generative account which itself makes falsifiable predictions), you’re not doing science – you’re doing numerology.
If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been. Real scientific results have a cross-grained tendency not to fit transient political categories. Accordingly, if you think theory X stinks of political construction, you’re probably right. This is one of the simplest but most difficult lessons in junk-science spotting! The most difficult case is recognizing that this is happening even when you agree with the cause.
Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots. One of the earliest indicators in many outbreaks of junk science is enthusiastic endorsements by people and advocacy organizations associated with past outbreaks. This one is particularly useful in spotting environmental junk science, because unreliable environmental-advocacy organizations tend to have long public pedigrees including frequent episodes of apocalyptic yelling. It is pardonable to be taken in by this the first time, but foolish by the fourth and fifth.
Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection. When people doing sound science are challenged to produce the observational and experimental data their theories are supposed to be based on, they do it. (There are a couple of principled exceptions here; particle physicists can’t save the unreduced data from particle collisions, there are too many terabytes per second of it.) It is a strong sign of junk science when a ‘scientist’ claims to have retained raw data sets but refuses to release them to critics.
It would be way, way too easy to list the ways these symptoms have manifested with respect to the AGW panic. It’s a more useful exercise for the reader to think back and try to recognize them in previous junk-science flaps. Go and learn. And don’t get fooled again.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3974#more-3974
-
Very polemic, well annotated b!tch slapping of panic mongers:
http://cfact.org/pdf/ClimateDepot_A-Z_ClimateRealityCheck.pdf
-
Somebody said on this forum a while ago that this is a good year for weather and climate disasters. Obviously NOT.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/07/2011-is-record-year-for-1b-disasters-in-u-s/?hpt=hp_t2
-
And this anecdote is related to pathological science how? Perhaps it instead demonstrates there are more people building in more places expecting more recompense for poor siting decision while more media is available to document the results? There was a flood in a Virginia neighborhood earlier this year that lead to residents calling for tens of millions of dollars in remediation. I remember watching one news report where a resident complained "the same thing happened here eight years ago; how many times do we have to get flooded out before somebody fixes the problem?" My response: don't buy land on a flood plain and you won't have to worry about regularly being flooded out.
As that may be, an alternate explanation from that denier bastion, University of Wisconsin, Madison:
http://www.news.wisc.edu/20095
-
Grist for the mill for those who associate disparate occurrences with doomstruck consequences:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/correlation-or-causation-12012011-gfx.html
-
Woof,
In all this discussion of global warming I fail to see any real talk about the underlying science which is where I think that people should concentrate and not on a lot of extraneous noise. The bottom line is that the law of conservation of energy hasn't changed so IN - OUT still equals ACCUMULATION. Accordingly if you change the rate at which energy leaves the planet, then you accumulate heat which we see as a temperature rise. Greenhouse gases do exist of which carbon dioxide is one. The infrared absorption spectra of water vapor and carbon dioxide, while similar, do not completely overlap which means that increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to increased absorption of infrared light.
If you add this all up, it surely means that this is something that bears careful study and not ridicule. Furthermore the facts that I just related are completely independent of such things as an odd heavy snowfall in April, climategate, or what Michelle Bachman and Exxon think about the topic.
Chuck
-
It's obviously not so simple, or the climate wouldn't have such historic extremes in either direction, Chuck.
-
Woof,
Actually what I described is absolutely that simple. That there are other forces that affect the climate and add noise to the signal is not in doubt. Saying that there are other forces at work does not invalidate what I just said. To do that, you need to address my points.
Chuck
-
Chuck,
If manmade global warming was real, why would the evidence need to be falsified? I'm pretty sure one need not fake real things.
-
Woof,
What is the false evidence? Anyway, can you address the scientific underpinnings or not? That cannot be faked which is why it should be the starting point of all such discussions.
Chuck
-
Climate is complex. Sometimes it's warmer, sometimes it's colder. As far as climategate, the fearmongers pretending to be scientists conspired to hide unfavorable data that threatened their panic for pay scheme. Pretty sure that's not part of the scientific method.
-
http://www.dailytech.com/Climatologists+Trade+Tips+on+Destroying+Evidence+Evangelizing+Warming/article23368.htm
Climatologists Trade Tips on Destroying Evidence, Evangelizing Warming
Jason Mick (Blog) - November 25, 2011 5:12 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Penn State researcher and his CRU/IPCC colleague treated AGW like a religious "cause" despite warnings from peers
Anthropogenic global warming is a fascinating hypothesis that mankind may be able to systematically increase the Earth's temperature in the long term by burning deposits of hydrocarbon fuels. But the key thing to note is that despite the intriguing premise, little definitive information has been determined in this field even as politicization runs rife. In fact, researchers are still struggling to explain why warming has stalled in the last decade even as levels of carbon dioxide -- supposedly the most important greenhouse gas have rose.
I. Climatologists "Pull an Enron", Shred the Evidence
The recent University of California, Berkley "BEST" study -- perhaps the most comprehensive climate change investigation to date -- was blasted by AGW proponents. They were upset that the study -- funded in part by the charity of a major oil entrepreneur -- highlighted the fact that temperatures had flat lined over the past decade, and were more upset still that the study suggested that other factors like sea currents could have driven the warming that occurred in the 1960s-1990s.
But newly reportedly leaked emails reveal that accusations of bias are perhaps a bit of projection. The new emails include discussions that sound as shocking or more so as the infamous "Climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The new emails revisit embattled climate researcher-cum-AGW evangelist Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In one email Professor Jones explains to researchers how to best hide their work to prevent anyone from being able to replicate it and find errors:
I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
Of course Phil Jones and his supporters will likely claim that the emails were taken out of context of some larger more appropriate discussion. But as a researcher it's pretty damning to make comments that even would seem to imply that you were engaging in trying to suppress peer review of questionable data -- academic fraud.
Particularly trouble is the phrase "cover yourself", which suggest a conspiratorial, political undertone to what is supposed to be a transparent field of research.
The emails contain outright requests for the destruction of professional communications regarding research in an effort to cover up public scrutiny of public flaws. The leaks add yet another humiliating scandal to Pennsylvania State University as they implicate prominent Penn State climatologist Michael Mann even more directly than the last release.
Writes the Professor Jones to Professor Mann:
Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]? Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Michael Mann (left) and Phil Jones (right) appear to share tips on how to best destroy damaging climate evidence. [Image Sources: (left) PSU (right) Chris Bourchier / Rex Features]
Some professors and experts even tried to reach out to Professor Mann, warning him of the danger of turning science into religion by purposefully ignoring evidence. Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office writes:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary. I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
Even Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research who was implicated in the first CRU email scandal for suggesting the removal of an editor who allowed peer-reviewed skeptical studies to be published, seemed to agree on this extreme instance:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.
The IPCC did eventually change the draft somewhat -- perhaps due to this feedback -- but critics say it still did far too much cherry picking of its sources.
II. Forget Science: You're Either For the Cause, Or You're Against It
In a later email, Professor Mann implies AGW advocacy is a political/pseudo-religious "cause" and that those who question it on scientific merits are enemies of the "cause". He writes, "I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause."
Ironically, Professor Curry appears to be the only one behaving like a true scientist. The emails neglect the forgotten truth that the distinguished Georgia Institute of Technology began as a believed in man-made global warming, publishing a notable 2005 study published in the prestigious Science journal investigating the potential correlation between hurricanes and man-made temperature increases.
The study earned scathing criticism from warming skeptics, but rather than treat her work as religious dogma, she carefully considered the criticism. Supported by her co-author, she personally met with some prominent critics and considered their claims. After all, she recalls in a Scientific American interview, "We were generally aware of these problems when we wrote the paper, but the critics argued that these issues were much more significant than we had acknowledged."
Soon she began to blog for AGW a skeptical blog run by Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and Climate Audit, run by statistician Steve McIntyre. She began blogging hoping to convince skeptics of the merits of AGW theory via an open discussion. But in time she found herself increasingly troubled by the lack of transparency and conclusive evidence on such an important topic. She singles out the IPCC as a particularly guilty party, accusing it of outright "corruption."
Given the released emails it's hard to argue with that assessment. Writes Jonathan Overpeck, lead coordinating author of the IPCC's most recent climate assessment:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.
Aside from destroying evidence and ostracizing colleagues, the emails also reveal another sign of dogma and the antithesis of science -- ignorance. In one email Phil Jones admits he has no idea how to perform the basic statistical analysis that forms the basis of one of his past claims, writing:
I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I'm not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.
What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won't be statistically significant, but the trend is up.
III. When in Doubt, Deny
Already AGW advocates are jumping to the defense of the researchers implicated in the scandal. Writes Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard:
Rather than smearing scientists, reporters might want to try some actual reporting.
The new round of hacked emails from climate scientists floating around the internet hasn't generated the same buzz as the last iteration—at least not yet. But in certain circles, it's playing out much like the first batch of emails did in 2009. In addition to the tranche of emails, the poster included a list of "greatest hits"—short quotes from the emails taken out of their context that are intended to paint scientists as scheming or lying. The entire batch was quickly posted in searchable format on another site.
But such critical reports have thus far failed to actually provide virtually any such contextual explanations, despite their suggestion that they must exist. Further, the critics of the email publication are ignoring the fact that there are certain types of things that researchers should know to never say -- such as making comments that even sound like suggesting the destruction of academic evidence.
The reports also ignore the fact that while it's easy to accuse the media, the oil industry, et al. for a mass conspiracy to silence anthropogenic global warming advocates, there's just as compelling a cause for AGW proponents to conspire to silence their critics in a dogmatic, non-scientific fashion.
Such an approach not only guarantees researchers lucrative research grants, it guarantees their political allies potential billions of dollars in windfalls in "carbon credits" and other AGW-inspired wealth redistribution schemes. Al Gore in particular has made close to a billion dollars based on his evangelizing AGW in lectures, film; via carbon credit investments; and by pushing the government to funnel money to his high-risk "green energy" investments in the name of fighting AGW.
AGW political proponents like Al Gore stand to make billions more if they can convince world governments to fully enact their wealth redistribution schemes under the auspice of "fighting warming". [Image Source: Associated Press]
-
Woof,
And here I was hoping to have a scientific discussion. Sigh. Not to be I guess.
So possible malfeasance by a couple of scientists is supposed to invalidate what sure looks like a solid scientific theory? Not really. This is like some scientist saying that there is X chance of life on the planet earth being destroyed in the next hundred years and you pulling out a telescope and saying "I don't see any asteroids, so this is bunk". Talk about the underlying science and it cuts through this sort of BS which Climategate seems to be about based on your article.
In fact, researchers are still struggling to explain why warming has stalled in the last decade even as levels of carbon dioxide -- supposedly the most important greenhouse gas have rose.
I have already stated that there are other factors at play some of which could be additive or subtractive. That is why it is instructive to look at the science itself and not get mired in BS.
Chuck
-
"So possible malfeasance by a couple of scientists is supposed to invalidate what sure looks like a solid scientific theory?"
If it's so solid, they why the need to fake/hide data?
"This is like some scientist saying that there is X chance of life on the planet earth being destroyed in the next hundred years and you pulling out a telescope and saying "I don't see any asteroids, so this is bunk"."
Bad example, as there is plenty of evidence of asteroids and of asteroid strikes on the earth. Now, if there was no such evidence and Al Gore was suddenly promoting it and he was making money off the newfound threat and then some "scientists" were caught making an asteroid out of concrete.....
-
Woof G.M.,
If it's so solid, they why the need to fake/hide data?
In spite of the possible malfeasance of these scientists the Law of Conservation of Energy is STILL on the books. The earth STILL continues to be bombarded by ultraviolet light which heats the earth and is reradiated as infrared light. Carbon dioxide STILL absorbs some wavelengths of infrared light converting it vibrational energy commonly measured as temperature. Notice how none of these natural phenomena or physical laws of the universe care the slightest about what a few scientists have done or didn't do with some data.
These scientists only claim that the temperature of the planet has increased by something like 1 degree Fahrenheit over the period in question so it isn't surprising to me that it is hard to measure and that there are competing theories as to why this is occuring. This is why I KEEP trying to go back to underlying science. I believe it is also why you have no desire to discuss the science itself.
Now, if there was no such evidence and Al Gore was suddenly promoting it and he was making money off the newfound threat
Again, this doesn't exactly change the physical properties of carbon dioxide, rewrite laws of the universe, etc. Is it relevant that many of the people who argue against manmade global warming are paid by Exxon or Koch Industries? I haven't pointed that out so far because guess what, it isn't assuming you actually want to talk about science and not PEOPLE.
Chuck
-
Chuck:
I agree you have stated a plausible sounding hypothesis.
I am not yet persuaded of it however. Possessing of a lower level of scientific education that others here, including you, I find it difficult to not reason as GM here is doing-- if the evidence is there, why the cheating? Add on to this my serious doubts as to the wisdom of putting the government in charge of the weather, particularly when Al Gore (just how did he go from being VP of the US to being worth $100 million) and others seek to finance UN giveaway programs with cap & trade, and , , , well, , , I'm gonna want to see a whole bunch of serious evidence-- not just a hypothesis that sounds plausible.
This thread is some 11 pages long now, so you are coming in on a conversation that has been going on a while. I think if you were to go back and read/skim through what is already here (the posts by BBG in particular) you would get more of a sense as to the why of the cynicism on display at the moment.
-
"I fail to see any real talk about the underlying science which is where I think that people should concentrate and not on a lot of extraneous noise. The bottom line is that the law of conservation of energy hasn't changed so IN - OUT still equals ACCUMULATION. Accordingly if you change the rate at which energy leaves the planet, then you accumulate heat which we see as a temperature rise. Greenhouse gases do exist of which carbon dioxide is one. The infrared absorption spectra of water vapor and carbon dioxide, while similar, do not completely overlap which means that increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to increased absorption of infrared light."
I'm all ears. What is the current rate of warming and what percentage of that is directly attributable to man's use of fossil fuels? Do you prefer nuclear?
-
I have read Ridley's "The Red Queen" and "Nature via Nurture" and hold him in high regard.
Here is the transcription of a talk that he gave that IMHO answers Chuck's question well.
ttp://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html
-
Woof Guro C.,
if the evidence is there, why the cheating
Perhaps the evidence is only subtle at this point in time but possibly there is still a looming threat. Let's assume that the scientists "know" that the underlying theory is correct but simply can't get their point across. As we have seen on other topics people have an excellent ability to convince themselves of the absolute veracity of something that may not be proven. If these scientists were convinced they were correct but couldn't convince other people, then to them this is no longer a science issue but rather an issue of messaging and marketing. Hopefully no one thinks that I condone what they did but in some respects it seems to me like a tempest in a teapot.
Add on to this my serious doubts as to the wisdom of putting the government in charge of the weather, particularly when Al Gore (just how did he go from being VP of the US to being worth $100 million) and others seek to finance UN giveaway programs with cap & trade, and , , , well, , , I'm gonna want to see a whole bunch of serious evidence-- not just a hypothesis that sounds plausible
.
These are important concerns but obviously don't address whether there is a looming problem. Without looking it up, I think that people currently believe that the earth's temperature has increased only 1-2 deg. F. so you are not going to see any evidence of biblical proportions at this time. I find it wholly unsurprising that people are having a hard time quantifying how much the temperature of the entire planet has changed considering the variability. If people could agree that the science is sound we could get away from (to some extent) looking at the temperature data.
What is the current rate of warming and what percentage of that is directly attributable to man's use of fossil fuels?
I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have the answer to this question. We know that there are other variables here at work. One of them may have masked the warming of the planet by CO2 giving us 10 years of flatline temps. Maybe the whole thing is bunk but the underlying science says to me that we have the potential for a crisis of some sort. The overlap between the absorption spectra of water vapor and carbon dioxide will limit the overall change because water vapor is already accounting for most of the infrared absorption. Perhaps this means that the worst case scenario isn't really that bad but I am not convinced of that.
Do you prefer nuclear?
The Japanese have recently done heroic work showing us that nuclear isn't completely user friendly. I'm not anti nuclear but I'm not the biggest fan either. There are natural sequesteration processes for carbon dioxide such that if we cut the production rate the concentration will go down. China and India will probably ensure that the rate doesn't go down any time soon. I would say that biofuels (not ethanol) have a decent bit of promise right now.
I will check out Guro C.'s article later today.
Chuck
-
"The Japanese have recently done heroic work showing us that nuclear isn't completely user friendly."
ROTFLMAO!
"Perhaps the evidence is only subtle at this point in time but possibly there is still a looming threat. Let's assume that the scientists "know" that the underlying theory is correct but simply can't get their point across. As we have seen on other topics people have an excellent ability to convince themselves of the absolute veracity of something that may not be proven. If these scientists were convinced they were correct but couldn't convince other people, then to them this is no longer a science issue but rather an issue of messaging and marketing. Hopefully no one thinks that I condone what they did but in some respects it seems to me like a tempest in a teapot."
This I find unpersuasive.
"Subtle evidence" is not what the scientific mind requires as sufficient for "knowing". It certainly is not the basis for the mobbing frenzy of a flock of crows going after a hawk of which we have seen so much aimed at those who disagree! Given the enormity of putting governments in charge of the planet's weather, a task whose enormity should provoke humility instead of the hubris we see, cheating in the name of marketing to those derided as too obtuse to "get it", seems to me a rather large deal.
-
if the evidence is there, why the cheating?
"Perhaps the evidence is only subtle at this point in time but possibly there is still a looming threat. Let's assume that the scientists "know" that the underlying theory is correct but simply can't get their point across. As we have seen on other topics people have an excellent ability to convince themselves of the absolute veracity of something that may not be proven. If these scientists were convinced they were correct but couldn't convince other people, then to them this is no longer a science issue but rather an issue of messaging and marketing. Hopefully no one thinks that I condone what they did but in some respects it seems to me like a tempest in a teapot."
The ancient Aztec priests were pretty sure that there was a looming threat of the sun going out if there wasn't a proper amount of human sacrifice. When scientists stop adhering to the scientific method, they are no longer scientists, just fearmongers in scientific drag. Anyone can claim anything, but the burden of proof is on the claimant.
-
Woof,
"Subtle evidence" is not what the scientific mind requires as sufficient for "knowing".
Many things have been substantially proven through theory or mathematics for which we at the time lacked the instrumentation or means to check. Many of Einstein's theories were demonstrated only much later once the ability to do so became available. The scientific mind should be able to look for looming threats prior to getting trounced by them.
When scientists stop adhering to the scientific method, they are no longer scientists, just fearmongers in scientific drag.
You will have to remind me how those scientists stopped adhering to the scientific method. Like I said, if they answered the question for themselves, then they did it. If someone puts out something that is incorrect, that doesn't mean that they didn't adhere to the scientific method. The scientific method is not there to ensure that no one ever puts out something that proves to be incorrect. Convincing you of the correctness of something is a different issue and one that they are obviously failing at. It has little to do with the scientific method and is more an issue of sales and marketing. I still contend that if you tried to understand the science instead of looking at the weather you might be less skeptical.
Anyone can claim anything, but the burden of proof is on the claimant.
It actually isn't. Some people don't want to look at the idea itself even though the information is out there.
Chuck
-
Chuck and others, I appreciate the thoughtful posts.
I understand the theory of CO2 and warming. Also true is that warmer air holds more CO2 than cooler air. Correct? You swerve into the answer as to why there is not a straight line warming trend, what some call negative feedback factors, along with many other poorly understood variables at work. The main negative feedback may be through waster vapor and clouds, but another is that plants accelerate growth with elevated CO2 levels and convert the CO2 back to O2. True?
"I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have the answer to this question." [What is the current rate of warming and what percentage of that is directly attributable to man's use of fossil fuels?]
That is the right answer IMO. Unfortunately it doesn't get us anywhere. I believe you started with: "I fail to see any real talk about the underlying science". The theories and models all fail to include all aspects of all variables. What we are left with is measurements which seem so difficult to get right.
My next question would have been: what amount of warming should we have had over the last say 50 years at this point coming out of the little ice age or wherever we happen to be in earth's cycles - as compared with actual warming. (also unanswerable?)
True skeptics I think believe in warming as a very small amount, and believe in the human contribution to that but in even much smaller amounts. Add to that, the timeframe that humans will be heavily dependent on decayed plants as the primary energy source is likely to be only for a very small blip in earth's history, and the planet is far more resilient (IMO) than some are saying.
"If these scientists were convinced they were correct but couldn't convince other people, then to them this is no longer a science issue but rather an issue of messaging and marketing."
As GM pointed out, at that point in their career they became messagers and marketers, no longer scientists. I believe the answer to why that happened is agenda, pressure and dollars. There is agenda based thinking IMO that found its way into how some scientists see, choose or adjust data. There is peer pressure that rises above or through peer review, and there is the fact that some level of alarmism is necessary to maintain high levels of funding, the lifeblood of the profession. There is nothing exciting or newsworthy about running a multimillion dollar study and concluding the earth is doing just fine. In my observation, the earth is doing just fine.
My introduction to skepticism goes back nearly 20 years IIRC to a press release of a study that came out of NCAR in Boulder where I had a personal connection. The statement reported by the press was quite bold so I took the time to dig read through the summary and conclusions in the study and found that the press version was a very bad exaggeration that was not actually stated in the summary or conclusions of the study. Then I dug in further to the fine print and found that the data and analysis in the study did not even support the lesser claims made in the conclusions of the various sections in the study. The conclusion was very obviously written by different people than those who conducted the study and analyzed the data and the press release was certainly not written by scientists at all. What the public was told was 2 levels removed from the truth, the actual data and analysis of the data by the scientists.
Whoever wrote those press releases seems to have won the argument in the 'science' industry and now we see from emails that the 'scientists' were scrambling to find data to fit their theory. That is not science.
There is no theory or model today that correctly predicts the past, much less the future.
-
Woof Doug,
Also true is that warmer air holds more CO2 than cooler air.
More water actually. CO2 is a gas at the temperatures here on Earth so there really isn't a limit to the max concentration from a physical standpoint.
another is that plants accelerate growth with elevated CO2 levels and convert the CO2 back to O2.
Plants only process CO2 as fast as they can utilize light so I believe that light utilization is the key factor. I don't think that the CO2 concentration is a big factor here but I haven't specifically researched it.
The theories and models all fail to include all aspects of all variables. What we are left with is measurements which seem so difficult to get right.
There is no way that the models could include all aspects of all variables. Asking them to do so is beyond our understanding and beyond our computers computational ability. If you oversimplify then you also get junk. That is why I say go back to the original science which doesn't require complex models if you are in doubt that CO2 could actually cause global warming. No one should expect calculation of changes in the average temperature of a planet to be straightfoward or within small deviations, which is what we are talking about here, obvious.
True skeptics I think believe in warming as a very small amount,
I agree the number of people that have truly looked into it and think that manmade global warming is impossible either don't understand it or don't care to understand it. The real question is whether or not we should make a big deal about it.
As GM pointed out, at that point in their career they became messagers and marketers, no longer scientists.
Just because they were trying to make the sale doesn't mean that they ceased to be scientists. Again, I think that Climategate is rather overblown by people that don't want to do anything about global warming.
In my observation, the earth is doing just fine.
We have seen that there have been changes in the amount of glacial ice mass. I have yet to see a good hypothesis for why this is occurring other than manmade global warming. If you have one, I would love to see it. It surely is possible that the changes in ice mass are a harbinger for future problems. I suspect that there are regions of the world that will have a seriously difficult time dealing with even a 4 degree fahrenheit change in the average temperature. Keep in mind that the concentration of CO2 right now is something like 400 ppm so fairly low, but rising.
Chuck
-
As GM pointed out, at that point in their career they became messagers and marketers, no longer scientists.
Just because they were trying to make the sale doesn't mean that they ceased to be scientists. Again, I think that Climategate is rather overblown by people that don't want to do anything about global warming.
I think Climategate is ignored by those who have swallowed Al Gore's kool-aid and allowed themselves to abandon rational thought.
-
Anyone can claim anything, but the burden of proof is on the claimant.
It actually isn't.
Sorry, it actually is. As an example, there are people who claim they were abducted by aliens. Ok, interesting stories, but I'd like some proof. Whitley Strieber and Al Gore have both made money off of stories they sell to true believers. Unlike Gore, I think Strieber actually believes what he is selling. UFO believers claim just as you do, Chuck that "the truth is out there". Me, I'd like some hard evidence before I buy into either thing. Now the fact that "scientists" needed to fake data to support their AGW claims are akin to a UFO believer that fakes a UFO photo.
-
Woof G.M.,
No, it isn't. There are people out there that are doing work in astrophysics right now that I lack the mental and particularly mathematical capability to understand. It is not their job to dumb their work down to a point where a layman like myself can understand it.
I have read what you have written and I don't get in the slightest that you have even attempted to understand the science behind the theory of global warming. I have given you ample opportunity to let me know what part of the scientific theory you have an issue with and you keep harping on Climategate. Come on. Throw me a bone. What part of the theory don't you believe? These climate scientists may be good scientists, bad scientists, crooks, whatever. What they are not is salesmen. Based on what you have written I don't believe that you lack the mental or mathematical capability to understand the theory. It simply looks like you haven't bothered to look at it and are rather interested in talking about the soap opera part of this issue. How could they possibly persuade you if you won't even look at the theory? And by "they" I mean the scientists that have done good work on this issue and not the ones responsible for Climategate. Do you not get that a theory can be analyzed completely independently of the empirical data or the personalities involved?
Now the fact that "scientists" needed to fake data to support their AGW claims are akin to a UFO believer that fakes a UFO photo.
So am I to believe that on the day before Climategate you were diligently researching this topic trying to determine the right or wrong of it and then Climategate convinced you that it was bunk?
I think Climategate is ignored by those who have swallowed Al Gore's kool-aid and allowed themselves to abandon rational thought.
So do you think that I am one of those people? Climategate is what made me go dig into the nuts and bolts of the scientific theory.
Chuck
-
Woof Guro C.,
I have seen that article before and I am not that impressed. Millions of people starved in the Soviet Union under Stalin's regime because of some wackjob's theories on genetics? And to think that people have thought these last 80 some years that the famines in Russia were due to the complete failure of the farm system as a result of collectivization by Stalin. You learn something new every day.
More to the point. The author agrees that manmade global warming is occurring which apparently some people still doubt for reasons that escape me. He then goes on about how the temperature changes probably won't be that great and will probably be on the order of 1.2 degrees C. He then says that there is uncertainty about whether various phenomena such as clouds, etc. will amplify or lessen the effect.
First of all, I don't think that 1.2 degrees C is necessarily as harmless as he characterizes. Anyone who has ever attempted to saute something knows that objects do not heat evenly. If the average temperature of the planet changes in temp by only 1.2 degrees C some places could be unaffected and others could see much higher changes in temperature. The peoples and species that live in those areas could seriously take it on the chin particularly if that falls on a stressed or already hot area. Obviously certain species are more temperature sensitive than others and it doesn't take a huge change to affect them. Even the small changes that have happened already are making it such that areas in California that were ideal for pinot noir grapes are now going to be better suited for grapes that can deal with higher temperatures such as Syrah or Cabernet. People whose ability to earn a living is subject to the vagaries of the weather are not worrying about the he said, she said BS of Climategate, or waiting with bated breath for the latest utterance from Senator James Imhofe and instead are considering whether they need to replant fields with different crops based on the quality of the product that they are measuring. California's loss is Oregon's gain on this one so mileage will vary.
Second of all, the author talks about the uncertainty of whether phenomena on the planet will damp or hype the affects of global warming as a reason for inaction. I say it is a reason for serious analysis of the problem which I think has been lacking on both sides of the fence. The true believers that he decries have their precise analog in the true doubters that can't imagine that humans could affect the climate one way or another. Those people on both sides can both pound sand. Hopefully reasoning people can then have a serious discussion about the topic. Does anyone really think that Senator James Imhofe is providing good insight here? Does anyone think that fair and balanced Fox News is remotely fair and balanced on this topic? Currently if there are heavy snows, the commentators on Fox News laugh at Al Gore. I used to live up north. It actually doesn't need to be cold to snow. Is this the level of scientific discussion we can expect here?
Third, the author trundles out estimated costs for implementing CO2 emissions controls and says that the cost of fuel will double to implement them. I have always found those studies to suffer from the same sorts of shenanigans that he decries yet he has no problem putting them forward. If nothing else, market forces and the ingenuity that is a result blunts this type of thing to an amazingly high level that is never accounted for in the study itself. The case in point is sulfur dioxide emissions controls from power plants. First we heard from the polluters that there was no such thing as acid rain. Then when that point became untenable these studies were put forward showing how the average homeowner couldn't afford for us to implement the controls. Then after they were forced to remove sulfur from offgases, the cost was actually quite low. Wonders never cease.
Anyway. The article is a decent read but I didn't learn anything new with the exception of how the Russian famines came about :wink: There is a little too much "what me worry?" in there without enough of a push for having a serious no BS discussion on the topic which he sort of gets at but kind of mucks up IMO trying to be clever. It is of course a transcript of a lecture so he does need to keep people entertained.
Chuck
-
No, it isn't. There are people out there that are doing work in astrophysics right now that I lack the mental and particularly mathematical capability to understand. It is not their job to dumb their work down to a point where a layman like myself can understand it.
It is when they start pushing a political agenda wanting money and power.
-
http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node6.html
What is the ``scientific method''?
The scientific method is the best way yet discovered for winnowing the truth from lies and delusion. The simple version looks something like this:
1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
3. Use the hypothesis to make predictions.
4. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no discrepancies between theory and experiment and/or observation.
When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.
(http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/img1.gif)
Figure 1.1: Flow diagram describing the scientific method.
The great advantage of the scientific method is that it is unprejudiced: one does not have to believe a given researcher, one can redo the experiment and determine whether his/her results are true or false. The conclusions will hold irrespective of the state of mind, or the religious persuasion, or the state of consciousness of the investigator and/or the subject of the investigation. Faith, defined as belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, does not determine whether a scientific theory is adopted or discarded.
A theory is accepted not based on the prestige or convincing powers of the proponent, but on the results obtained through observations and/or experiments which anyone can reproduce: the results obtained using the scientific method are repeatable. In fact, most experiments and observations are repeated many times (certain experiments are not repeated independently but are repeated as parts of other experiments). If the original claims are not verified the origin of such discrepancies is hunted down and exhaustively studied.
When studying the cosmos we cannot perform experiments; all information is obtained from observations and measurements. Theories are then devised by extracting some regularity in the observations and coding this into physical laws.
There is a very important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypothesis which differentiates it from, for example, an act of faith: a theory must be ``falsifiable''. This means that there must be some experiment or possible discovery that could prove the theory untrue. For example, Einstein's theory of Relativity made predictions about the results of experiments. These experiments could have produced results that contradicted Einstein, so the theory was (and still is) falsifiable.
In contrast, the theory that ``the moon is populated by little green men who can read our minds and will hide whenever anyone on Earth looks for them, and will flee into deep space whenever a spacecraft comes near'' is not falsifiable: these green men are designed so that no one can ever see them. On the other hand, the theory that there are no little green men on the moon is scientific: you can disprove it by catching one. Similar arguments apply to abominable snow-persons, UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster(s?).
A frequent criticism made of the scientific method is that it cannot accommodate anything that has not been proved. The argument then points out that many things thought to be impossible in the past are now everyday realities. This criticism is based on a misinterpretation of the scientific method. When a hypothesis passes the test it is adopted as a theory it correctly explains a range of phenomena it can, at any time, be falsified by new experimental evidence. When exploring a new set or phenomena scientists do use existing theories but, since this is a new area of investigation, it is always kept in mind that the old theories might fail to explain the new experiments and observations. In this case new hypotheses are devised and tested until a new theory emerges.
There are many types of ``pseudo-scientific'' theories which wrap themselves in a mantle of apparent experimental evidence but that, when examined closely, are nothing but statements of faith. The argument , cited by some creationists, that science is just another kind of faith is a philosophic stance which ignores the trans-cultural nature of science. Science's theory of gravity explains why both creationists and scientists don't float off the earth. All you have to do is jump to verify this theory - no leap of faith required.
So Chuck, remember the 50 million climate refugees by 2010? Me either. Prediction fail.
http://asiancorrespondent.com/52560/cover-up-un-tries-to-erase-failed-climate-refugee-prediction/
-
Just as clear as the theory of warming tied to CO2 increases is the evidence that earth in its history of cycles has temperature correction mechanisms. When we simplify down to warming theory without taking account of the opposing forces, we have over-simplified.
Your point about uneven warming is good. I still live in the north country, 10 degrees F. this morning, would have been 9.5? ) and I don't believe anyone's anecdotal story here that they notice a one degree difference from their childhood. We make a 120 degree adjustment every year with little problem. I saw as many kids out playing on the rinks during Christmas vacation as I would normally see on the ball fields on a summer day.
I saw Copper Mountain Colo ski resort warning their customers that global warming could end mountain skiing so they were buy wind credits to offset their lift energy use a few years back and then I saw Snowbird Utah open until 4th of July last summer. It is hard to get information that is global. The B.E.S.T study covered only land surface temps, still only a portion of the planet.
Offered in good humor, but I will be happy to make the adjustment from Pinot to Cabernet while we sort this out.
-
http://pjmedia.com/blog/wounded-warmists-attack-its-what-happens-when-prophecy-fails/?singlepage=true
Wounded Warmists Attack: It’s What Happens ‘When Prophecy Fails’
The AGW community is behaving exactly like the UFO cult studied by psychologist Leon Festinger in his classic study of cognitive dissonance.
by
Art Horn
Bio
May 16, 2010 - 12:00 am
The release of the Climategate emails has caused the world to look at the methods of leading climate scientists with much greater skepticism and concern.
The well-documented, thoroughly dissected emails revealed that data was manipulated to hide temperature trends that were not favorable to researchers’ intended outcomes. Using their positions of power in the field, leading climate scientists kept man-made global warming skeptics from publishing in scientific journals. They perverted the “peer review” process by reviewing their research papers among themselves. Emails were deleted to hide information from authorities after Freedom of Information Act requests were made (Nixonian behavior which made the “Climategate” moniker especially apt).
The list of questionable — and possibly criminal — activities goes on and on.
Emails obtained by the Washington Times reveal that climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences seem to be feeling a bit wounded: they say they are “tired of being treated like political pawns.” And just as a physically wounded creature fights back with even more aggression after an injury, instinctively knowing its very existence may be in peril, the Times emails show that climate scientists are planning “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to strike back at their “enemies.”
One of the scientists quoted in the emails is Stanford University researcher Paul Ehrlich. He writes:
Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.
This is the same Paul Ehrlich who in 1968 wrote in his book The Population Bomb:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. … In the 1970s and 1980s hundred of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
This prediction was of course wrong, but most disturbing was his fascistic advice: he advocated the use of “compulsory birth regulation (using) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food.” He was quoted in 1992 as saying: “Giving the world cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving a child a machine gun.” In 1990, he said: “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich counties like ours is a disease, not the cure.”
With his history of misanthropy and totalitarianism, it’s no wonder that Ehrlich went on to become a man-made global warming crusader.
He and many other global warming alarmists follow a pattern outlined by Leon Festinger in his book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. Festinger points out that those who believe strongly about an issue share common threads:
The belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action.
Global warming alarmists believe deeply that human burning of fossil fuels is unquestionably altering the climate and that something must be done to stop it.
Festinger also writes:
The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it, that is for the sake of his belief he must have taken some important action. The more important those actions are the greater the individuals commitment to the belief.
Global warming advocates see no other alternative to what is causing temperature to rise. They publish papers based on computer models that predict more warming and use these papers to better their professional careers. In doing so they are irrevocably committed to man-made global warming, and the more papers they publish the more committed they become.
The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
Scientific evidence reveals that global warming stopped in 1998. The data show a slight cooling since 2001. Phil Jones, former head of the Climate Research Unit, admits the Medieval Warm Period may have been warmer than today. He also states that there has been “no statistically significant global warming for 15 years.” Scientific evidence has revealed that carbon dioxide is only a bit player in global climate change.
The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified.
The disconfirming evidence is the thousands of scientists across the world in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers showing that the human component in climate change is insignificantly small.
If, however the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support each other, the belief can be maintained and the believers may attempt to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
Perhaps in the form of “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to strike back at their “enemies.”
The global warming “science” community is feeling threatened by evidence and revealing emails — their funding, and therefore their careers, may be in peril. In reaction to this, they will mount an even more alarmist campaign to convince the world — and themselves — that humans cause global warming and that it must be stopped. As global temperature fails to rise in the future, we will be bombarded by increasingly shrill cries of global warming catastrophe. All forms of weather — cold, hot, record snow, record heat, floods, droughts, or anything else — will be considered proof of global warming. A more than willing media desperate for spectacular headlines will give them the front page.
A creature or group that is damaged psychically will respond like a wounded animal. The ensuing attack will be more aggressive and prolonged — an attempt to convince their “enemies” that they are correct, just as Leon Festinger predicted long ago.
Art Horn spent 25 years working in television as a meteorologist. He now is an independent meteorologist and speaker who lives in Connecticut. He can be contacted at skychaserman@cox.net.
-
Woof G.M.,
It is when they start pushing a political agenda wanting money and power.
Well if you are only going to undetake the most superficial analysis of something that you don't want to believe in the first place, then I suppose you would never be convinced.
I guess they didn't change the scientific method after all in the 25 years since I was in college. Who knew?
Paul Ehrlich wasn't making scientific predictions there. If you can't discern that, then I think I see what the problem is here. I want to know what YOU think is wrong with the theory itself. Telling me that someone made a bad prediction that wasn't based on science doesn't tell me much of anything. What don't YOU think is correct about the theory?
@Doug,
It is well established that the Earth is subject to multiple climatic influences. I believe it has been ruled out that changes in solar output are responsible for this one. Any other hypothesis you want to throw out there?
We make a 120 degree adjustment every year with little problem.
We also have the ability to control the temperature of our buildings plus humans are one of the more adaptable creatures. Some species are extremely sensitive to high temperatures and changes in rainfall (something else that we have innoculated ourselves against) so multiple high temp days are hard on them.
I saw Copper Mountain Colo ski resort warning their customers that global warming could end mountain skiing so they were buy wind credits to offset their lift energy use a few years back and then I saw Snowbird Utah open until 4th of July last summer. It is hard to get information that is global.
You follow me that it doesn't have to be that cold to snow. It seems like a plausible hypothesis to me that warmer temperatures would lead to greater evaporation of water leading to more snowfall and a greater snowpack. Also, we expect lots of variation in the weather from year to year so that could completely account for it too.
Chuck
-
"Well if you are only going to undetake the most superficial analysis of something that you don't want to believe in the first place, then I suppose you would never be convinced."
It's not about belief, if you'll be so kind as to refer to the chart on the scientific method, you'll note the lack of the word "belief". Now, if you wish to believe in something without evidence, fine. Just don't call it science, because it's not.
-
Woof G.M.,
Actually belief is between observations and hypothesis. They just don't write it in because most people know that it is there.
Still waiting for your analysis of the underlying theory. Post number 10 or so now where I have asked for it.
And by the way, there is no theory of gravity despite the article that you posted showing the scientific method saying that there is one. I figured you would have caught that :-)
Chuck
-
Actually belief is between observations and hypothesis. They just don't write it in because most people know that it is there.
Bwahahahaha!
You ARE joking, right?
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what the word belief means?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/belief
be·lief
[bih-leef] Show IPA
noun
1.
something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat.
2.
confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief.
3.
confidence; faith; trust: a child's belief in his parents.
4.
a religious tenet or tenets; religious creed or faith: the Christian belief.
-
Woof G.M.,
Why would you put together a hypothesis if you didn't believe that something had promise in the first place? You wouldn't. I used the word "believe" in the first place. You were the one that changed it to "belief".
And coming from someone that just posted an article that talked about a theory of gravity. ROFL.
Chuck
-
"I believe it has been ruled out that changes in solar output are responsible for this one."
I have posted in this thread more than once over the last few years about the variations in solar flares/output being perhaps responsible in part or whole for what AGW folks are attributing to humans. I am unaware of anything contrary to this.
-
Woof G.M.,
Why would you put together a hypothesis if you didn't believe that something had promise in the first place? You wouldn't. I used the word "believe" in the first place. You were the one that changed it to "belief".
And coming from someone that just posted an article that talked about a theory of gravity. ROFL.
Chuck
Lots of evidence for gravity, as far as AGW, nothing but fraud thus far. If you had evidence, you'd cite it, right?.
-
Woof Guro C.,
Chart on this page titled temperature v. solar activity sure seems to suggest that the sun is not the culprit.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm
Chuck
-
Woof G.M.,
Excuse my french, but LOFL. You posted an article on the scientific method whose goal was to bash scientists that believe that global warming could have manmade causes that talked about a theory of gravity. Read this as often as necessary. THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY. Gravity is an observed phenomenon. We have a set of correlations called the Newton's Law of Gravitation that we can use to calculate gravitational forces. If you need to get medieval on the calcs, you can use the General Theory of Relativity which is still not a theory of gravity. There is no one that can explain why that mass that is YOU is attracted to the mass that is the EARTH. We simply know that it happens and we calculate the magnitude of that force. That is not a theory.
And thanks. This has to be the funniest thing I have seen in something like 300 years give or take a few. LOL.
Chuck
-
"THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY."
Better send these guys an email explaining that then.
http://www.physorg.com/news85310822.html
Alternative theory of gravity explains large structure formation -- without dark matter
December 14, 2006
The light from galaxies in the background has been warped and “arced” by the galaxy cluster Abell 1689 in the foreground, and perhaps with some help by either dark matter or a stronger type of gravity on this large scale. Image Source: NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI),G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA.
In the standard theory of gravity—general relativity—dark matter plays a vital role, explaining many observations that the standard theory cannot explain by itself. But for 70 years, cosmologists have never observed dark matter, and the lack of direct observation has created skepticism about what is really out there.
Lately, some scientists have turned the question around, from “is dark matter correct?” to “is our standard theory of gravity correct?” Most recently, Fermilab scientists Scott Dodelson and former Brinson Fellow Michele Liguori demonstrated one of the first pieces of theoretical evidence that an alternative theory of gravity can explain the large scale structure of the universe.
-
See Chuck, unlike AGW, we can measure gravity. Unlike AGW, we know it exists.
-
Woof G.M.,
Did you even read what you posted? People are discussing which theory of gravity is correct. They are postulating an "alternative" theory. Go back to your handy dandy little chart on the topic. Does that make sense that based on your chart people could be discussing that people could be discussing which theory is right?
Again. ROFL. There is no theory of gravity. There are laws of gravitation. Try to understand the difference. People are trying to put together a theory of gravity. We will know when it happens because they will get the Nobel prize.
Chuck
-
Did you even read what you posted?
Yes. Did you?
People are discussing which theory of gravity is correct.
Yes they are. which tends to undercut your assertion "THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY."
Does it not?
-
Woof G.M.,
Seriously. There is no theory of gravity. There is no accepted explanation for why the phenomenon that we call gravitation exists. There are sets of equations that we use that very precisely define what gravity does. We understand gravity. We accept that it exists. We do not know the why of it plain and simple. If you think there is some theory out there then post me a link to an article that explains why you do not float off of the earth. I want to know exactly what transpires between you and the earth that makes this happen.
Chuck
-
Chuck,
I'm the one pointing out gravity exists, you are the one asserting "THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY.". Now, there are different theories how it works, what causes it. We can measure it and make reliable predictions around it.
Now, let's contast it to AGW.....
Can we measure AGW? Can we make reliable predictions around it?
-
Woof G.M.,
I think we can safely say at this point that you don't know the scientific meaning of the word theory. When you have a theory of gravitation, there are no "different theories". You have a theory. Accordingly THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITATION. They are at best at the hypothesis point on your handy dandy chart.
We can measure it and make reliable predictions around it.
Yes. We have several ways of doing this. That's why gravity is a LAW. When you can tell me they why of it, then you will have a THEORY.
Can we measure AGW?
Pretty sure we can.
Can we make reliable predictions around it?
They haven't been the best so far. If you would prefer to call it the AGW hypothesis, you won't hurt my feelings any.
Chuck
-
I think we can safely say at this point that you don't know the scientific meaning of the word theory. When you have a theory of gravitation, there are no "different theories". You have a theory. Accordingly THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITATION. They are at best at the hypothesis point on your handy dandy chart.
I think we can safely say that anyone who can type "Theory of gravitation" into google can quickly find many scientific journals discussing the allegedly non-existant "theory of gravitation". Did AGW make your google-fu evaporate?
-
Can we measure AGW?
Pretty sure we can.
Ok, let's see it.
-
Can we make reliable predictions around it?
They haven't been the best so far.
Yeah, which is why the AGW cultists has been forced to engage in fraud.
-
Woof G.M,
So provide me with that theory that explains why you don't fall off the planet. I want the ONE accepted theory that tells me what transpires between you and the planet earth which keeps you from falling off. Gravity is a force. Tell me why that force exists. I was unable to Google-Fu that piece of information. You are suggesting that you will have better luck so go for it.
Chuck
-
Oh my! All sorts of "Theories of gravitation". Really hard to find. :roll:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalar_theories_of_gravitation
Scalar theories of gravitation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scalar theories of gravitation are field theories of gravitation in which the gravitational field is described using a scalar field, which is required to satisfy some field equation.
Note: This article focuses on relativistic classical field theories of gravitation. The best known relativistic classical field theory of gravitation, general relativity, is a tensor theory, in which the gravitational interaction is described using a tensor field.
Contents
[hide] 1 Newtonian gravity
2 Nordström's theories of gravitation
3 Einstein's scalar theory
4 Additional variations
5 See also
6 References
[edit] Newtonian gravity
The prototypical scalar theory of gravitation is Newtonian gravitation. In this theory, the gravitational interaction is completely described by the potential Φ, which is required to satisfy the Poisson equation (with the mass density acting as the source of the field). To wit:
ΔΦ = 4πGρ, where
G is the gravitational constant and
ρ is the mass density.
This field theory formulation leads directly to the familiar law of universal gravitation, F = m1m2G / r2.
[edit] Nordström's theories of gravitation
The first attempts to present a relativistic (classical) field theory of gravitation were also scalar theories. Gunnar Nordström created two such theories.
Nordström's first idea (1912) was to simply replace the divergence operator in the field equation of Newtonian gravity with the d'Alembertian operator . This gives the field equation
.
However, several theoretical difficulties with this theory quickly arose, and Nordström dropped it.
A year later, Nordström tried again, presenting the field equation
,
where T is the trace of the stress-energy tensor.
Solutions of Nordström's second theory are conformally flat Lorentzian spacetimes. That is, the metric tensor can be written as gμν = Aημν, where
ημν is the Minkowski metric, and
A is a scalar which is a function of position.
This suggestion signifies that the inertial mass should depend on the scalar field.
Nordström's second theory satisfies the weak equivalence principle. However:
The theory fails to predict any deflection of light passing near a massive body (contrary to observation)
The theory predicts an anomalous perihelion precession of Mercury, but this disagrees in both sign and magnitude with the observed anomalous precession (the part which cannot be explained using Newtonian gravitation).
Despite these disappointing results, Einstein's critiques of Nordström's second theory played an important role in his development of general relativity.
[edit] Einstein's scalar theory
In 1913, Einstein (erroneously) concluded from his hole argument that general covariance was not viable. Inspired by Nordström's work, he proposed his own scalar theory. This theory employs a massless scalar field coupled to the stress-energy tensor, which is the sum of two terms. The first,
represents the stress-momentum-energy of the scalar field itself. The second represents the stress-momentum-energy of any matter which may be present:
where uμ is the velocity vector of an observer, or tangent vector to the world line of the observer. (Einstein made no attempt, in this theory, to take account of possible gravitational effects of the field energy of the electromagnetic field.)
Unfortunately, this theory is not diffeomorphism covariant. This is an important consistency condition, so Einstein dropped this theory in late 1914. Associating the scalar field with the metric leads to Einstein's later conclusions that the theory of gravitation he sought could not be a scalar theory. Indeed, the theory he finally arrived at in 1915, general relativity, is a tensor theory, not a scalar theory, with a 2-tensor, the metric, as the potential. Unlike his 1913 scalar theory, it is generally covariant, and it does take into account the field energy-momentum-stress of the electromagnetic field (or any other nongravitational field).
[edit] Additional variations
Kaluza–Klein theory involves the use of a scalar gravitational field in addition to the electromagnetic field potential Aμ in an attempt to create a five-dimensional unification of gravity and electromagnetism. Its generalization with a 5th variable component of the metric that leads to a variable gravitational constant was first given by Pascual Jordan [1].
Brans–Dicke theory is a scalar-tensor theory, not a scalar theory, meaning that it represents the gravitational interaction using both a scalar field and a tensor field. We mention it here because one of the field equations of this theory involves only the scalar field and the trace of the stress-energy tensor, as in Nordström's theory. Moreover, the Brans-Dicke theory is equal to the independently derived theory of Jordan (hence it is often referred to as the Jordan-Brans-Dicke or JBD theory). The Brans-Dicke theory couples a scalar field with the curvature of space-time and is self-consistent and, assuming appropriate values for a tunable constant, this theory has not been ruled out by observation. The Brans-Dicke theory is generally regarded as a leading competitor of general relativity, which is a pure tensor theory. However, the Brans-Dicke theory seems to need too high a parameter, which favours general relativity).
Zee combined the idea of the BD theory with the Higgs-Mechanism of Symmetry Breakdown for mass generation, which led to a scalar-tensor theory with Higgs field as scalar field, in which the scalar field is massive (short-ranged). An example of this theory was proposed by H. Dehnen and H. Frommert 1991, parting from the nature of Higgs field interacting gravitational- and Yukawa (long-ranged)-like with the particles that get mass through it (Int. J. of Theor. Phys. 29(4): 361, 1990).
The Watt-Misner theory (1999) is a recent example of a scalar theory of gravitation. It is not intended as a viable theory of gravitation (since, as Watt and Misner point out, it is not consistent with observation), but as a toy theory which can be useful in testing numerical relativity schemes. It also has pedagogical value.
[edit] See also
Nordström's theory of gravitation
Watt–Misner theory of gravitation
[edit] References
Goenner, Hubert F. M., "On the History of Unified Field Theories"; Living Rev. Relativity 7(2), 2004, lrr-2004-2. Retrieved August 10, 2005.
Ravndal, Finn (2004). "Scalar Gravitation and Extra Dimensions". arXiv:gr-qc/0405030 [gr-qc].
Watt, Keith, and Misner, Charles W. (1999). "Relativistic Scalar Gravity: A Laboratory for Numerical Relativity". arXiv:gr-qc/9910032 [gr-qc].
P. Jordan, Schwerkraft und Weltall, Vieweg (Braunschweig) 1955.
H. Dehnen and H. Frommert, "Scalar Gravity and Higgs Potential"; Int. J. of Theor. Phys. 29(4): 361, 1990.
H. Dehnen and H. Frommert, "Higgs-Field Gravity within the Standard Model"; Int. J. of Theor. Phys.30(7): 985, 1991.
H. Dehnen et al., "Higgs-Field and a New Scalar-Tensor Theory of Gravity"; Int. J. of Theor. Phys. 31(1): 109, 1992.
Brans (2005). "The roots of scalar-tensor theory: an approximate history". arXiv:gr-qc/0506063 [gr-qc].
-
So Chuck, please show me your evidence for AGW.
-
Woof G.M.,
I'm sorry but those are not theories of gravitation despite what Wikipedia says. They are mathematical relationships that tell you what gravity does. They tell you nothing about why it exists and are simply more precise ways of dealing with gravity as defined by Newton's Law of Gravitation. I'm not really interested in explaining the difference to you.
Chuck
-
Wow. Amazing how they are all wrong and you are right.
Anyway, please show me your evidence supporting AGW.
-
Woof G.M.,
Actually I am. Try to learn something. If you have to postulate the existence of hypothetical particles that can't be detected, then perhaps your theory might need some work. Yes?
From Wikipedia, your favorite source it seems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
In physics, the graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitation in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) and must have a spin of 2. This is because the source of gravitation is the stress-energy tensor, a second-rank tensor, compared to electromagnetism, the source of which is the four-current, a first-rank tensor. Additionally, it can be shown that any massless spin-2 field would be indistinguishable from gravitation, because a massless spin-2 field must couple to (interact with) the stress-energy tensor in the same way that the gravitational field does.[4] This result suggests that if a massless spin-2 particle is discovered, it must be the graviton, so that the only experimental verification needed for the graviton may simply be the discovery of a massless spin-2 particle.[5]
Chuck
-
Chuck, please stop trying to distract from your incorrect statements about gravitational theory and please provide evidence for AGW.
-
Woof G.M.,
You mean those theories that rely on the existence of an imaginary particle? Those theories? Again. LOL. It sure sounds like AGW rests on solid bedrock to me by comparison. At least it doesn't require the existing of an imaginary particle. Distraction? Hardly. This is rich. I just love watching you hunt down things on the internet that you know ABSOLUTELY nothing about. LOLOLOLOL
Chuck
-
I know enough to see you've got nothing but fearmongering and fraud.
-
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gravitation+theory&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C6&as_sdtp=on
So I've got a quick formula for you. Chuck B=fearmongering assclown.
GM: Bad dog!-- Marc
-
Woof,
Yah. And maybe a little science too. Again, at least it doesn't require the postulate of an imaginary particle. That's right up there with "God just willed it" which is probably just as accurate. Funny that you now support theories that require the existence of an imaginary particle but can't support a theory that is based on measurable physical properties of various common compounds. The worm has turned methinks.
Hehe. And I have a theory for you. Some government at some point attempted to teach you math and science and didn't get a lot of bang for their buck.
Chuck
-
Didn't do much for you either, since you can't seem to read the link that lists the papers written on the topic of "Gravitational Theory".
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gravitation+theory&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C6&as_sdtp=on
Click on the link, if that isn't too difficult for you.
-
So Chuck, did somebody show you Al Gore's film on how global warming is going to kill all the polar bears and it made you sad? :cry:
-
Woof G.M.,
Thanks for CONTINUING to make my case. How many competing theories are there? You keep providing me with more ammo. If there was a theory of gravity that we accepted, then you would provide me with that theory. Instead you provide me with a whole smorgasbord of theories to describe the SAME phenomenon. Again thank you for your hard work. I couldn't have pulled together this exhaustive list of all the competing theories of gravitation without your help. Read this again as needed. THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY.
Chuck
-
There are different theories of gravity, meaning plural. Do you grasp the difference between saying there is no theory of gravity vs. there are no theories of gravity?
ESL student?
-
Woof,
ROFL. Imagine if I came to you with 47 different theories of AGW some of which required imaginary particles. You would laugh in my face. This might help you out.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AoOa-Fz2kw[/youtube]
When we reach this point we will have a Theory of Gravity. Until that time, THERE IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY in spite of the fact that some people and Wikipedia seem to use that nomenlature.
Chuck
-
Still trying to distract from the lack of evidence for AGW?
If you've got evidence, let's see it.
-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203935604577066183761315576.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
GLOBAL VIEW
NOVEMBER 29, 2011.
The Great Global Warming Fizzle The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom. By BRET STEPHENS
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.
And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
-
Woof G.M.,
Well let's see. This looks like the pathological science thread and not the burger king thread where you get everything your way. I know this because I asked you to tell me what you thought was incorrect about the global warming theory and you have yet to respond. I think that was 24 posts ago by my count.
Now I already indicated that the underlying science indicated that carbon dioxide contributes to global warming and where I come from that puts you a pretty long way toward having proof. The author of the article that was cited by Guro C. indicated that he firmly believed that AGW was occurring but that it wasn't going to change the temperature of the planet enough to worrry about. Obviously that man thought that the evidence was there that the planet was warming but wasn't concerned about the magnitude of the effects.
I posted a graph earlier today that indicated that by several measures the temperature of the planet has increased by approximately one degree Fahrenheit while the output of the sun dropped slightly which indicates to me that AGW is at least a decent hypothesis for the increase in temperature. AGW has a background in science. The evidence indicates that temp increased while solar output fell. That puts the ball squarely in your court to provide me with an alternate hypothesis for the temperature increase.
Chuck
-
I know this because I asked you to tell me what you thought was incorrect about the global warming theory and you have yet to respond.
No proof. No evidence. Climate changes. The planet gets hotter, then it gets cooler, then hotter, rinse, lather, repeat.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070705-antarctica-ice.html
New Ice Core Reveals 800,000 Years of Climate History
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
July 5, 2007
Earth's polar temperature has swung wildly—by as much as 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit)—over the last 800,000 years, an Antarctic ice core has revealed.
In 2004 scientists led by Jean Jouzel of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, pulled up the final chunk of ice core from a drill hole in the center of Antarctica.
At 3,260 meters (10,695 feet) long, drilling the ice core was a marathon effort in one of the most hostile and remote places on Earth. (See Antarctica map.)
Although it is not the deepest Antarctic core (the 3,263-meter [10,705-foot] Vostok core holds this record), its compressed ice does provide the longest polar climate record, going back 800,000 years.
Tracing the Temps
Measuring deuterium, a form of the element hydrogen, enabled the team to piece together the temperature record in the ancient ice.
The new climate record covers an additional cycle of glacial change, amounting to 11 cycles in total, lead author Jouzel said.
Plugging the data from the entire core into an atmospheric model, the scientists were able to reconstruct a reliable temperature record for the past 800,000 years.
In today's online journal Science, the team showed that the coldest period occurred around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets were at their peak.
It was about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than today. (Related: "Antarctica's Atmosphere Warming Dramatically, Study Finds" [March 30, 2006].)
Meanwhile, the warmest period was during the last interglacial period, which is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates ice ages. At that time, around 130,000 years ago, it was a balmy 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today.
Global Events
Many of the changes seen in the core were global climate events.
"We were able to correlate the record with changes seen in Greenland," study lead author Jouzel said. (Related: " Climate-Change Forecast? Ask the Antarctic Ice" [November 10, 2004].)
The scientists plan to drill even deeper, hoping to push the Antarctic climate record back to one million years.
"We are now turning toward other regions of Antarctica, where snow accumulation is even lower," Jouzel said.
But some are skeptical that the ancient ice will have a tale to tell.
"We're getting to a limit on how far ice cores can take us back," said Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at Edinburgh University.
"There may be ice at one million years old, but will there be a real record in it?"
Instead he suggests that sub-glacial lakes are likely to hold the key.
"The lake-floor record starts where the ice core record finishes. It is time to look beneath the ice," he said.
-
Chuck:
What do you make of these?
1) http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1206.msg33590;topicseen#msg33590
Reply #12 by BBG: Cosmic Radiation and Warming
2) http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1845.msg38004;topicseen#msg38004
Reply #24 by BBG Solar Activity very low
3) http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg30901;topicseen#msg30901
Reply #182 by BBG Solar Flucutations Drive Earth's Climate
Thanks,
Marc
-
Interesting podcast from a Walter Cronkite-type figure working for the BBC. Synonymous to Cronkite's "the Vietnam War is lost" moment, IMO:
Friday, December 16, 2011
MICHAEL BUERK ON THE CLIMATE SUMMIT
So why no debate on the assumptions behind the more apocalyptic forecasts?
Example: the UN forecast 50 million climate refugees by 2010 – where are they?
Agitator/Climate summit
The latest so-called Climate Summit, that’s been taking place in Durban, hasn’t made many waves. It could be because global warming seems less daunting if you can no longer afford heating bills. It could also be that we’re getting fed up with the bogus certainties and quasi-religious tone of the great climate change non-debate.
Now, I don’t know for certain that man’s activities are causing the planet to heat up. Nobody does. We simply cannot construct a theoretical model that can cope with all the variables.
For what it’s worth, I think anthropogenic warming is taking place, and, anyway, it would be a good thing to stop chucking so much bad stuff into the atmosphere.
What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.
You’re not necessarily a crank to point out that global temperatures change a great deal anyway. A thousand years ago we had a Mediterranean climate in this country; 200 years ago we were skating every winter on the Thames.
And actually there has been no significant rise in global temperatures for more than a decade now.
We hear a lot about how the Arctic is shrinking, but scarcely anything about how the Antarctic is spreading, and the South Pole is getting colder.
Droughts aren’t increasing. There are fewer of them, and less severe, than a hundred years ago. The number of hurricanes hasn’t changed, the number of cyclones and typhoons has actually fallen over the last 30 years.
And so on.
There may be answers, I think there probably are - to all these quibbles – I would like to hear them.
I don’t want the media to make up my mind up for me.
I don’t need to be told things by officialdom in all its forms, that are not true, or not the whole truth, for my own good.
I resent the implication that the exercise of my reason is “inappropriate”, an act of generational selfishness, a heresy.
I want a genuine debate about the assumptions behind the more apocalyptic forecasts.
As recently as 2005, for instance, the UN said there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.
That was last year.
OK – so where are they?
I would like to hear a clash of informed opinion about what would actually be better if it got warmer as well as worse.
Where do you see reported the extraordinary greening of the Sahel, and shrinking of the Sahara that’s been going on for 30 years now – the regeneration of vegetation across a huge, formerly arid swathe of dirt poor Africa. More warming means more rainfall. More CO2 means plants grow bigger, stronger, faster.
I would like a real argument over climate change policy, if only to rid myself of the nagging feeling that sometimes it’s a really good excuse for banging up taxes and public-sector job creation.
It’s not happening. It’s a secular issue but skepticism is heresy.
They talk the language of science, but it is really a post-God religion that rejects relativist materialism.
Its imperative is moral.
It looks to a society where some choices are obviously, and universally held to be, better than others.
A life where having what we want is not a right and nature puts constraints on the free play of desires.
To reinvent, in short, a life where there is good and bad, right and wrong.
As with all religions, whether the underlying narrative is true, has become beside the point.
ends
http://www.thefifthcolumn.co.uk/the-agitator/michael-buerk-on-the-climate-summit/
-
BBG, In the US, the climate refugee status is that people are still fleeing cold weather and choosing to live where it is warmer. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/21/us/census-districts.html
If warming continues at this rate, Duluth harbor of Lake Superior will soon (50,000 years?) be the new San Diego and they will all come back, but for now they are still ice fishing on the world's largest freshwater lake: http://www.visitashland.com/recreation/fishing.php
-
Yet we are supposed to spend trillions of dollars to remediate CO2 to a barely observable degree, Doug. Go figure.
I've scanned some of the recent posts here and see the debate is certainly spirited, though producing more heat than light to my mind. There has been an analogy raised, however, that I feel lends some focus to the debate, specifically the science of gravitation v. climate science.
Chuck is right that there are many theories that explain gravitation, though none that are experimentally verifiable. Whether you are a string theorist, more of a quantum kind of person, or look at things through Einstein's lens the strings, god particles, gluons, weak forces, whatever that have to be postulated to make one theory more or less fit can not be experimentally verified, much less replicated.
The same applies to AGW. Do we have a data set for deep ocean current temperature fluctuations over a geologically significant period? Nope. Do we understand the CO2 absorption cycle of the water that covers three quarters of the planet? Nope. Are the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation well understood? Nope. Do we have geologically significant data sets that correlate the sun's cycles to climate fluctuations? Perhaps in some limited sense if proxies are used, but certainly not to a degree that the issue would be called settled in any other science. Bottom line there are a huge number of variables that we've barely begun to catalog, much less understand, and much much less have clean data sets for over a geologically significant period of time, that will all have to be replicated and verified before their impact on other barely understood variables can be studied and understood. To claim a settled science comprised of a single variable is the iron clad truth is silly, particularly in view of the less than settled nature of gravitation, a phenomenon we grapple with daily but still have no experimentally verifiable theory for.
-
Woof G.M.,
No proof. No evidence.
We simply don't use these words in the same manner. Not much more I can say than that.
I'm curious. What do you think that my take on AGW is? I'm guessing that you would be wrong.
@BBG,
Chuck is right that there are many theories that explain gravitation, though none that are experimentally verifiable.
Actually many of them are experimentally verifiable but they fail to account for all instances and they fail to tell us what gravity is although they can tell us what it does. Accordingly many people do not consider them to be theories but rather are laws.
Do we understand the CO2 absorption cycle of the water that covers three quarters of the planet?
But we can easily measure atmospheric concentrations of CO2 so this unit is only related to removal mechanisms but not instantaneous estimates of the heat trapping ability of the planet's atmosphere.
Do we have geologically significant data sets that correlate the sun's cycles to climate fluctuations?
But we can measure solar energy striking the planet, we can determine the spectrum of light that strikes the planet and we can determine the spectrum of light that leaves the planet which puts us well on the way toward calculating energy accumulation.
Bottom line there are a huge number of variables that we've barely begun to catalog
Anyone that ever claimed otherwise was a fool and I have met few people that would make such claims.
To claim a settled science comprised of a single variable is the iron clad truth is silly
Perhaps it is a single variable, but the only way that energy enters or leaves this planet is as electromagnetic radiation so it seems rather important.
Reviewing Guro C's articles.
Chuck
-
Woof Guro C.,
I believe I looked at the correct articles which were talking about cosmic rays increasing cloud formation and also solar activity. I couldn't get the vid to run, but a cloud chamber radiation detector uses the same principle so I don't doubt what they are saying. Sure. Clouds will likely reflect incoming light so increasing the number of them should decrease surface temperatures. So would increasing the amount of aerasol particulates. These are the things that may keep AGW from being a big deal, but it doesn't address AGW itself.
The other article talks about solar output driving temperature changes. The chart that I have looked at shows solar output constant or decreasing over the period of the last 50 or so years as indicated by the Max Planck institute. At any rate, all discussions of AGW in my mind are overly concerned with actual temperature changes and not sufficiently concerned with the underlying science as I have indicated before. We all know that measuring temperature changes on the planet earth is difficult but the underlying science isn't. I haven't seen a good rebuttal of the underlying sciences because everyone has been too focused on temperatures themselves.
Chuck
-
The thing I was hoping to communicate with those articles was that the science is more diverse than your original post commenting on solar flares and related matters concerning sun fluctuations affecting the earth's average temperature.
"At any rate, all discussions of AGW in my mind are overly concerned with actual temperature changes and not sufficiently concerned with the underlying science as I have indicated before. We all know that measuring temperature changes on the planet earth is difficult but the underlying science isn't. I haven't seen a good rebuttal of the underlying sciences because everyone has been too focused on temperatures themselves."
I confess I'm having trouble with this. What I'm getting out of it is that the theory doesn't need confirmation with actual results :?
"These are the things that may keep AGW from being a big deal, but it doesn't address AGW itself."
Again I'm confused. IF AGW is swamped by other factors and thus is not a big deal, then why put our government, or worse yet, the UN in charge of the weather-- financed by the US taxpayer?!?
-
@BBG,
Chuck is right that there are many theories that explain gravitation, though none that are experimentally verifiable.
Actually many of them are experimentally verifiable but they fail to account for all instances and they fail to tell us what gravity is although they can tell us what it does. Accordingly many people do not consider them to be theories but rather are laws.
Hmm, that's a mishmash of qualifications. Do we have experimentally verified gravitons that I missed? Moreover, you seem to be contradicting your original point "THAT THEIR IS NO THEORY OF GRAVITY." Which is it?
Do we understand the CO2 absorption cycle of the water that covers three quarters of the planet?
But we can easily measure atmospheric concentrations of CO2 so this unit is only related to removal mechanisms but not instantaneous estimates of the heat trapping ability of the planet's atmosphere.
Easily measure the concentrations of CO2 in all bodies of water on the planet? I guess Alvin has been busy. Just when did this occur?
Do we have geologically significant data sets that correlate the sun's cycles to climate fluctuations?
But we can measure solar energy striking the planet, we can determine the spectrum of light that strikes the planet and we can determine the spectrum of light that leaves the planet which puts us well on the way toward calculating energy accumulation.
Guess you missed the "geologically significant" part of the question.
Bottom line there are a huge number of variables that we've barely begun to catalog
Anyone that ever claimed otherwise was a fool and I have met few people that would make such claims.
Well thank goodness then that whole "hockey stick" thing was some sort of grievous misunderstanding. Has Dr. Mann been informed?
To claim a settled science comprised of a single variable is the iron clad truth is silly.
Perhaps it is a single variable, but the only way that energy enters or leaves this planet is as electromagnetic radiation so it seems rather important.
And why isn't that single variable water vapor, methane, O3, volcanic sulfides, or myriad other possibilities? Methinks the doomstruck seized on a single variable, trumpeted it to the point they couldn't back away even when 50 million climate refugees failed to materialize, yet find themselves so invested in a simplistic explanation of a complex phenomena that they have little choice to double down on the bet.
-
Misfiled, perhaps, but a breath of fresh air compared to the panic mongering, non-falsifiable norm. I think if the most ardent of "environmentalists" were to get on board with this perspective they'd be far more likely to achieve their putative ends. Alas, I suspect many of them find the sky-is-falling approach more congruent with their political ends.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/04/postenvironmentalism-and-technological-a
Reason Magazine
Postenvironmentalism and Technological Abundance
A review of Love Your Monsters, a collection of essays on a new kind of environmentalism.
Ronald Bailey | January 4, 2012
Environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously proclaimed The Death of Environmentalism in 2004. Now they're back with an ambitious new collection of essays titled Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Their goal is to dismantle the neo-Malthusian environmentalism of sacrifice and collapse and replace it with a new environmentalism that celebrates human creativity and technological abundance. Hooray!
In their introductory essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus make the case that technological progress and economic growth is the road to salvation, not the highway to ruin. They acknowledge that global warming may bring worsening disasters and disruptions in rainfall, snowmelts, and agriculture. However, they add, there is little evidence it will end civilization. “Even the most catastrophic United Nations scenarios predict rising economic growth. While wealthy environmentalists claim to be especially worried about the impact of global warming on the poor, it is rapid, not retarded, development that is most likely to protect the poor against natural disasters and agricultural losses.”
As welcome as their conclusion is, it's not a novel insight. As it happens, a new report by the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website), Misled on Climate Change, [PDF] points out that the United Nations scenario in which humanity burns the most fossil fuels over the next century is also the one in which global wealth is greatest. In that scenario “by 2100 GDP per capita in poor countries will be double the U.S.’s 2006 level, even taking into account any negative impact of climate change.” For the record, current U.S. GDP per capita is $47,000. As the Reason report concludes, sustained economic growth over the next century “would not only address all of the current problems that might get worse in the future but would also enable humanity to address more effectively any other future problems it encounters, whether climate-related or otherwise.”
The title of the collection comes from French anthropologist Bruno Latour’s essay, "Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care For Our Technologies As We Do Our Children." Latour argues the story of Frankenstein has been misinterpreted by modern environmentalists as a cautionary tale about the dangers of technological hubris. In fact, Latour correctly points out that Frankenstein’s creature only became a “monster” as a result of being rejected and abandoned by his creator. In a similar manner to Frankenstein, environmentalists reject many new and old technologies out of fear of their unintended consequences. Most parents love their children despite the inconveniences posed by the noxious emissions they discharge from time to time. Latour argues that we should similarly embrace and care for our technologies despite side effects like pollution. Through love and care, both children and technologies can be civilized in ways that ameliorate and reduce noxious consequences associated with them.
The next essay, "Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility" is by three practicing conservationists, Peter Kareiva and Robert Lalasz at The Nature Conservancy, and Santa Clara University environmental scientist Michelle Marvier. Anthropocene is a proposed term to describe the current geological age in which humans are having a significant impact on the ecosphere. The essay begins by pointing out that “the worldwide number of protected areas has risen dramatically from under 10,000 in 1950 to over 100,000 by 2009.” This amounts to as much as 13 percent of the world’s land area, an area larger than all of South America. And yet deforestation and species extinction continue unabated.
The three urge environmentalists to drop “their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness—ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science—and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision.” They cite evidence that local people are better at managing natural resources and landscapes than are the centralized government bureaucracies favored by most environmentalist organizations. They ask, “If there is no wilderness, if nature is resilient rather than fragile, and if people are actually part of nature and not the original sinners who caused our banishment from Eden, then what should be the new vision for conservation?” They answer that conservation must “embrace a priority that has been anathema to us for more than a hundred years: economic development for all [emphasis added].” Among other things, economic development means more people living in cities and fewer on the landscape; more productive crops grown on fewer acres; and cleaner technologies with fewer side effects. “Nature could be a garden—not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life,” they argue.
Geographer Erle Ellis asserts in "Planet of No Return: Human Resilience on an Artificial Earth" that Malthusian environmentalism has gotten it completely wrong when it claims that there are limits to growth. Human social and technological ingenuity creates more resources over time. Ellis suggests, “As populations, consumption, and technological power advance at an exponential pace, industrial systems appear to be evolving in new directions that tend to reverse many of the environmental impacts caused by agriculture and prior human systems.” For example, more people are moving from the landscape into cities where they have better access to health care, education, incomes, housing, markets, transportation, and waste treatment. Agriculture productivity modernizes and intensifies potentially sparing more land for nature.
Next philosopher Mark Sagoff deconstructs ecological economics which asserted that the scope and scale of the human enterprise was overloading ecological systems and causing them to collapse. Ecological economists argued that there were such things as ecosystems in which organisms and physical resources were tightly bound and which evolved together as a community. Disturbing these tight linkages could result in a collapse of the whole system. Subsequent empirical research finds that plant and animal “communities” are a figment; plants and animals just show up and survive as best they can where they find themselves. There is no balance of nature to be upset. Of course, unintended consequences of technological and economic development must be dealt with, but there are no ultimate constraints on economic growth.
A devastating critique of Malthusian environmentalism is offered by Daniel Sarewitz in his essay "Liberalism’s Modest Proposal, Or the Tyranny of Scientific Rationality." He begins by citing Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical essay, "A Modest Proposal," in which Swift suggested that the problem of Irish famine might simply be dealt with by eating Irish babies. Sarewitz argues that Swift’s goal was to show that “pretty much any position, however repulsive, could be advanced on the back of rationality.” Sarewitz argues with regard to the problem of climate change modern environmentalists have adopted a form of scientific rationality in which the fact that burning fossil fuels to produce cheap energy harms the climate suggests that solution is to “make energy more expensive.” Sarewitz then points out that the access to cheap energy is, in fact, “a basic requirement for human development and dignity.” He adds, “This fact is so blindingly obvious that nearly any large developing country has treated the idea of a global agreement to raise the price of energy as a joke of Swiftean character. The difference being, of course, that it was not a joke.”
Sarewitz then identifies the political incoherence that lies at the heart of environmentalism. On the one hand, environmentalists want to avoid the risks of new technologies and on the other Malthusian hand they worry about declining stocks of natural resources. Consequently, environmentalists “find themselves, for reasons of risk, opposing new technologies that could help resolve issues of scarcity.” As an example of this political and scientific incoherence, Sarewitz cites the case of genetically enhanced crops which environmentalists oppose because of their alleged risks to human health although such crops would ameliorate environmentalist concerns about soil and water depletion, pesticide residues, and population growth. Sarewitz cuts through the current incoherence by rejecting the environmentalist scheme to raise energy prices by means of a global cap-and-trade regime on fossil fuels. Sarewitz instead argues for an intensive research effort aimed at developing cheap low-carbon energy sources.
The collection ends with an essay by engineer Siddhartha Shome, "The New India Versus the Global Greens Brahmins; The Surprising History of Tree Hugging." Shome details the history of the Chipko movement in the 1970s in which Himalayan village women literally hugged trees in forests near their homes in order to prevent outside loggers from cutting them down. This story was retold as an ecological tale in which the women were cast as protectors of nature. As Shome makes clear, the villagers intended to preserve their traditional forest rights from outsiders. The villagers wanted to maintain local control over resources, not create a nature preserve. Research shows that in fact local people tend to be better stewards of natural resources than centralized bureaucracies.
Malthusian environmentalists like to cite factoids like the average American child over the course of her lifetime will consume 35 times more resources than the average Indian child. Shome shows that villagers are now abandoning the countryside, flocking to India’s economically dynamic cities seeking a better life for themselves and their families. They have every intention that their children will catch up to American kids when it comes to material welfare. Instead of reconciling themselves to ascetic poverty as Mahatma Gandhi urged, Shome shows that India’s poor are following the lead of the father of India’s constitution, Babasaheb Ambedkar. Ambedkar argued, “Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute … The slogan of a democratic society must be machinery, and more machinery, civilization and more civilization.”
One big problem with the collection is that it fails to recognize the context that enabled the technological progress of the past two centuries to occur—the rise strong property rights and market economies. There simply has been no appreciable technological innovation in countries that do not have these institutions. In addition, Shellenberger and Nordhaus assert that many ecological problems—global warming, deforestation, and overfishing—are the unintended consequences of human technological success.
Obviously technology contributes to these predicaments, but the chief problem is that they (and nearly all other environmental problems) occur in open access commons. If there is no clear ownership of rights to a natural resource, the users of the resource will overexploit it. If they leave something behind, the next guy will simply take it. In general the best way to protect resources is to privatize them and put them into the market, but that’s a subject for another time.
It turns out that the “monsters” feared by environmentalists are largely figments of their cramped Malthusian imaginations. Sure, there are unintended consequences to technologies, but the solution is not to abandon them, but to improve them. The way to protect and preserve nature is to make humanity more prosperous. In the end, given its failure to understand both ecology and economics, one is left wondering what the purpose of environmentalism was supposed to be anyway?
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
-
2nd post:
Defund the IPCC Now
Posted on January 5, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, I woke up to some bad news this morning. It turns out that the GAO, the US General Accounting Office, says US has been secretly hiding their funding of the IPCC for the last decade.
They were already told not to do that by the GAO. In the 2005 GAO report with the swingeing title of “Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should Be Clearer and More Complete”, the GAO said … well, basically what the title said. But noooo, those sneaky bureaucrats didn’t do that at all.
The latest 2011 GAO Report says the US government has not changed their ways. They have been clandestinely providing about half the operating funds for the IPCC for the last decade. In other words, the IPCC funding arrangements are of a piece with their “scientific” claims and their other actions—secretive, shabby, with a hidden agenda, and full of disinformation.
The report says that the State Department provided $19 million dollars to the IPCC. Thanks, guys. Foolish me, I hadn’t realized that paying for bureaucrats to go party in Cancun and Durban was part of the function of the United States Department of State.
I also found out that the IPCC got $12.1 million dollars from the US Global Change Research Program. That one really angrifies my blood. The IPCC flat out states that they do not do a single scrap of scientific research … so why is the US Global Change Research Program giving them a dime, much less twelve million, that was supposed to go for research? I could use that for my research, for example …
The 2011 GAO report had some strong advice for the climate profiteers behind this secretive funding. They said:
“Congress and the public cannot consistently track federal climate change funding or spending over time,”
Oh, no, wait, that’s what the GAO said back in 2005. Unfortunately, they have no enforcement powers. What they said this time around was that the funding information:
“… was not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.”
In other words … no change from 2005.
Congressfolk, you are not paying attention. These guys are taking money for research and using it to party in Durban and other nice places around the planet. And the US has been secretly funding them for a decade.
Can anyone name for me one valuable thing that the IPCC has done? Can anyone point to an accomplishment by the IPCC that justifies their existence? Because I can’t. They throw a good party, to be sure, their last global extravaganza had 10,000 guests … but as for advancing the climate discussion, they have done nothing but push it backwards.
And the next Assessment Report, AR5, will be even more meaningless than the last. This time, people are watching them refuse to require conflict-of-interest statements from the authors. This time, people are watching them appoint known serial scientific malfeasants to positions of power in the writing of the report. This time, people are keeping track of the petty machinations of the railroad engineer that’s running the show despite calls from his own supporters to step down.
As a result, the AR5 report from the IPCC has been pre-debunked. It will be published to no doubt great fanfare and sink like a stone, dragged down by the politicized, poorly summarized bad science and rewarmed NGO puff pieces that the IPCC is promoting as though they were real science.
Folks … can we call a long overdue halt to this IPCC parade of useless and even antiscientific actions? Can we stop the endless partying at taxpayer expense? Can we “trow da bums out” and get back to climate science?
Please?
I say DEFUND THE IPCC NOW!
w.
PS—The GAO report is available here. And all is not lost, at least one Congressman is working to defund the IPCC:
Wrapped into the many amendments recently passed by the House of Representatives — a total of $60 billion in spending cuts that the president called a “nonstarter” — was one by Republican Missouri Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer that would prohibit $13 million in taxpayer dollars from going to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group whose occasional missteps have been the source of countless confrontations among climate scientists over the past year.
…
A congressional aide told FoxNews.com that he plans to pursue the bill — regardless of whether it is passed in the larger Republican budget.
“The congressman plans to continue his effort to stop taxpayer support of the IPCC and remains cautiously optimistic that the Senate will take the amendment,” said Keith Beardslee, a spokesman for the congressman. “Failing that, Blaine has reintroduced separate legislation he first introduced in the 111th Congress to halt funding to the IPCC.”
GO MISSOURI! GO LUETKEMEYER!!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/05/defund-the-ipcc-now/
-
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nShKMP7KXk[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nShKMP7KXk
Panic!
-
Woof Guro C.,
I can provide you with a wide variety of experiments that could prove or deny the existence of AGW but unfortunately they require that I construct new planets to my specifications and then carefully control the atmospheres of them. Obviously I can't do that so I look closely at the mathematics and science instead. There seems to be this idea that somehow scientific ideas are better if they can be experimentally verified. It could simply be that we can construct the experiments to test some ideas due to scale and that other ideas should be rigorously tested mathematically and theoretically because we can't do the experiments. That doesn't mean that tested hypotheses are necessarily better, but simply that they have been tested.
IF AGW is swamped by other factors and thus is not a big deal, then why put our government, or worse yet, the UN in charge of the weather-- financed by the US taxpayer?!?
Note that I never recommended that we do anything different :wink: I said that I looked at the underlying data. I didn't precisely say what I found. I do however find that this discussion of how people come by very heartfelt opinionis on complex topics that they have not delved deeply into to be outstanding material for the Pathological Science thread. :-) I do believe that we should have an honest discussion about the risks and there has been a marked failure on both sides IMO. If God giveth, God can take away. If some other factor is swamping the effects of AGW, there is nothing that says it is eternal.
@BBG
Do we have experimentally verified gravitons that I missed?
Einstein's Theory of Relativity (which is not a theory of gravitation) predicted bending of light which was later experimentally verified and also predicted the existence of black holes. The LAWS of gravitation are experimentally verified probably many times every day. There are a rather wide variety of experiments on gravitation that can be performed. I also specifically said why they don't answer the questions required to become a Theory of Gravitation although there are many aspects of the theories that are out there that can be verified. Perhaps I should use the word hypotheses but I was using the word that the authors of the "theories" used.
Easily measure the concentrations of CO2 in all bodies of water on the planet? I guess Alvin has been busy. Just when did this occur?
You are going to have to remind me what this has to do with changing the absorption of infrared light by the ATMOSPHERE. I already said this governs some removal mechanisms in accordance with Henry's Law. It also has bearing on the analysis of potential damage to ecological systems.
Well thank goodness then that whole "hockey stick" thing was some sort of grievous misunderstanding. Has Dr. Mann been informed?
You are going to have to remind me where one of them said that CO2 concentrations were the only factor that affected atmospheric temperatures.
Chuck
-
POSITIVE, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
The AGW establishment should heed this piece, particularly the statistics end of things, as that is where many feel their errors lie. When you make a habit of teasing out data from proxies using suspect statistical methods, false positives are sure to ensue.
Publishing False Positives
Published by Steven Novella under General Science
Recently researchers published a paper in which their data show, with statistical significance, that listening to a song about old age (When I’m 64) actually made people younger – not just feel younger, but to rejuvenate to a younger age. Of course, the claim lacks plausibility, and that was the point. Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn deliberately chose a hypothesis that was impossible in order to make a point: how easy it is to manipulate data in order to generate a false positive result.
In their paper Simmons et al describe in detail what skeptical scientists have known and been saying for years, and what other research has also demonstrated, that researcher bias can have a profound influence on the outcome of a study. They are looking specifically at how data is collected and analyzed and showing that the choices the researcher make can influence the outcome. They referred to these choices as “researcher degrees of freedom;” choices, for example, about which variables to include, when to stop collecting data, which comparisons to make, and which statistical analyses to use.
Each of these choices may be innocent and reasonable, and the researchers can easily justify the choices they make. But when added together these degrees of freedom allow for researchers to extract statistical significance out of almost any data set. Simmons and his colleagues, in fact, found that using four common decisions about data (using two dependent variables, adding 10 more observations, controlling for gender, or dropping a condition from the test) would allow for false positive statistical significance at the p<0.05 level 60% of the time, and p<0.01 level 21% of the time.
This means that any paper published with a statistical significance of p<0.05 could be more likely to be a false positive than true positive.
Worse – this effect is not really researcher fraud. In most cases researchers could be honestly making necessary choices about data collection and analysis, and they could really believe they are making the correct choices, or at least reasonable choices. But their bias will influence those choices in ways that researchers may not be aware of. Further, researchers may simply be using the techniques that “work” – meaning they give the results the researcher wants.
Worse still – it is not necessary to disclose the information necessary to detect the effect of these choices on the outcome. All of these choices about the data can be excluded from the published study. There is therefore no way for a reviewer or reader of the article to know all the “degrees of freedom” the researchers had, what analyses they tried and rejected, how they decided when to stop collecting data, etc.
This is exactly why skeptics are not impressed when, for example, ESP researchers publish papers with statistically significant but small ESP effects, such as the recent Bem papers in which he purports to show a retroactive or precognitive effect. This is as impossible as music rejuvenating listeners and skeptics properly treated it the same way – the result of subtle data manipulation til proven otherwise. Researcher bias is one of the reasons that plausibility needs to be considered in interpreting research.
Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn do not just describe and document the problem, they also discuss possible solutions. They list six things researchers can do, and four things journal editors can do, to reduce this problem. These steps mainly involve transparency – disclosing all the data collected (including any data excluded from the final analysis), making decisions about end points prior to any analysis, and showing the robustness of the results by showing what the results would have been had other data analysis decisions been made. Reviewers essentially make sure this was all done.
They also discuss other options that they feel would not be effective or practical. Disclosing all the raw data is certainly a good idea, but readers are unlikely to analyze the raw data on their own. They also don’t like replacing p-value analysis with a Bayesian analysis because they feel this would just increase the degrees of freedom. I am not sure I agree with them there – for example, they argue that a Bayesian analysis requires judgments about the prior probability, but it doesn’t. You can simply calculate the change in prior probability from the new data (essentially what a Bayesian approach is), without deciding what the prior probability was. It seems to me that Bayesian vs p-value both have the same problems of bias, so I agree it’s not a solution but I don’t feel it would be worse.
They also discuss the problem with replications. An exact replication would partially fix the problem, because then all of the decisions about data collection have already been made. But, they point out, prestigious journals rarely publish exact replications, and so there is little incentive for researchers to do this. Richard Wiseman encountered this problem when he tried to publish exact replications of Bem’s psi research.
Conclusion
Science is not only a self-corrective process, the methods of science itself are self-corrective. (So it’s self-corrective in its self-correctedness.) Simmons and his colleagues have done a great service in this article, highlighting the problem of subtle researcher bias in handling data, and also being very specific in quantifying the effects of specific data decisions, and offering reasonable remedies. I essentially agree with their conclusions, and their discussion about the implications of this problem.
They hit the nail on the head when they write that the goal of science is to “discover and disseminate truth.” We want to find out what is really true, not just verify our biases and desires. That is the skeptical outlook, and it is why we are so critical of papers purporting to demonstrate highly implausible claims with flimsy data. We require high levels of statistical significance, reasonable effect sizes, transparency in the data and statistical methods, and independent replication before we would conclude that a new phenomenon is likely to be true. This is the reasonable position, historically justified, in my opinion, because of the many false positives that were prematurely accepted in the past (and continue to be today).
Science works, but it’s hard. There are many ways in which errors and bias can creep into research and so researchers have to be vigilant, journal reviewers and editors have to be vigilant, and the scientific community needs to continue to self-examine and look for ways to make the process of science more reliable. Those institutions and professions that lack this rigorous self-critical and self-corrective culture and process are simply not truly scientific.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/publishing-false-positives/
-
@BBG
Do we have experimentally verified gravitons that I missed?
Einstein's Theory of Relativity (which is not a theory of gravitation) predicted bending of light which was later experimentally verified and also predicted the existence of black holes. The LAWS of gravitation are experimentally verified probably many times every day. There are a rather wide variety of experiments on gravitation that can be performed. I also specifically said why they don't answer the questions required to become a Theory of Gravitation although there are many aspects of the theories that are out there that can be verified. Perhaps I should use the word hypotheses but I was using the word that the authors of the "theories" used.
Uhm, okay I think I understand. Gravitons have nothing to do with gravity, and we are both discussing and not discussing whether there is a comprehensive, verifiable theory for the stuff that keeps us from floating around. I guess there is some sort of Schrödinger's cat--wave/particle--Zen koan--sister **slap** daughter aspect of this I'm somehow missing. Whups, that last example is from Chinatown and hence is perhaps not germane to this discussion.
Easily measure the concentrations of CO2 in all bodies of water on the planet? I guess Alvin has been busy. Just when did this occur?
You are going to have to remind me what this has to do with changing the absorption of infrared light by the ATMOSPHERE. I already said this governs some removal mechanisms in accordance with Henry's Law. It also has bearing on the analysis of potential damage to ecological systems.
Sure thing. Proxies suggest there were times in the past when there were higher concentrations of of CO2 yet things were not warmer than they are now. They also suggest there were times in the past when concentrations were significantly lower yet things were warmer than they are now. 3/4s of the planet is covered by water which warehouses huge quantities CO2, yet we do not understand how CO2 exchanges between the two media, particularly over time. If we are going to hold a single variable accountable for some sort of coming conflagration we should likely understand that exchange mechanism, particularly as there hasn't been a linear relationship between CO2 and temp demonstrated in the geologic record. Or is there something in Henry's Law or the absorption of infrared that explains these anomalies?
Well thank goodness then that whole "hockey stick" thing was some sort of grievous misunderstanding. Has Dr. Mann been informed?
You are going to have to remind me where one of them said that CO2 concentrations were the only factor that affected atmospheric temperatures.
Whut? You want me to post that silly hockey stick graph with the temps and CO2 levels correlated over time, save for the Medieval Warming Period? Should I then recapitulate how Mann refused to release the source code he applied to his proxies until the Canadian statistician whose name eludes me at the moment backward engineered it, demonstrating processing errors along the way? Maybe I should Google "carbon dioxide & global warming" and then post the link so you can wade through the results yourself? Are you seriously going to argue that CO2 is not the single variable most AGW alarmists have seized on? If so I'm gonna have to ask if you are here to inform or obfuscate.
-
Woof BBG,
You seem fixated on these gravitons. I'm not even convinced that they exist. We currently believe that gravity is instantaneous which makes it faster than light. If we have to postulate the existence of a particle that moves at instantaneous speeds, then I have a problem with that postulate. If we assume that these particles don't actually move terribly much but exist as a sort of ether that can propagate a gravity wave, then we are still saying that they can propagate this wave at near instantaneous speeds which is something that we don't have the ability to account for. I'm definitely allowing for the possibility that there is some completely different means by which gravity is propagated than a particle.
If we are going to hold a single variable accountable for some sort of coming conflagration
I still know of no one that is doing this.
3/4s of the planet is covered by water which warehouses huge quantities CO2, yet we do not understand how CO2 exchanges between the two media, particularly over time.
I have already said that the concentration of CO2 in water which exists as one of the carbonates has a significant effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmopshere. But that is largely irrelevant when I can simply go measure the atmospheric concentration of CO2. It used to be off the top of my head 280 ppm in the early 1900s. It is now again off the top of my head around 400. The ocean did whatever it did during that time and the concentration came up. These are facts. The increase in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere changed the manner in which the atmosphere absorbed infrared light. This is also fact. Perhaps it didn't change it much but it did change. This is all independent of where the CO2 goes.
You want me to post that silly hockey stick graph with the temps and CO2 levels correlated over time, save for the Medieval Warming Period?
Instead of posting someone's bad prediction, perhaps you could post a quotation by that person indicating that CO2 is the only factor governing the temperature of the planet. Considering that water vapor is obviously the more significant greenhouse gas and that aerasol particulates have a large effect (which is also well known), I'm guessing you cannot find this quote. If you can point me to a person that actually said that, then I will show you a fool.
Chuck
-
The scientific proof from the left continues:
On Chris Hayes "Up" show this AM he is quoted as saying, "we now KNOW an earthquake in Ohio is caused by fracking".
Right away I know he could not possible "know" this so I look it up online and find a seismologist from Columbia has made a circumstancial link from "nearby" fracking" and a "rare" event in Ohio. Obviously this is proof. And a guy from 'Columbia' of course is objective:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-earthquake-ohiotre803022-20120103,0,6455763.story
-
Woof CCP,
The actual scientist in the article is a little more circumspect about the earthquake than you are giving him credit for. It is KNOWN that fracking can cause minor earthquakes to occur. Whether it can cause one that is 4.0 on the richter scale is not proven at this time to my knowledge but it doesn't mean it can't happen. You realize of course that fracking actually doesn't cause earthquakes, but tectonic motion does, right? Are you saying it is IMPOSSIBLE that fracking could be the trigger for an earthquake once the stored energy was already present?
Chuck
-
List of 250 Climategate 2.0 emails that are particularly interesting. I've been enjoying the various "when did trees stop functioning as thermometer" threads:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/06/250-plus-noteworthy-climategate-2-0-emails/
-
. . . but zombie parasite flies:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/01/03/zombie-fly-parasite-killing-honeybees/
Second post.
-
Quote of the day:
Newcastle did not beat Manchester United today, because the long term trend is for Manchester United to beat Newcastle.
Stephen Goddard, alluding to last night's footie results.
Have a hot date with my wife tonight so I'll join fray again later, I expect with several drinks in me.
-
Whups, one more:
Failing at Prediction, Succeeding at Bias
Date: January 6, 2012 | Author: Brian Trent
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the future can be predicted through a new method known as psychohistory. It’s a concept that turns up quite a lot — not only in science-fiction but from every so-called analyst, expert, advisor, talking head, and pundit across the spectrum of armchair philosophers and industry insiders.
We’re not talking about psychics here, but good old fashioned datahounds. Surely this suggests a more effective compass to predicting trends, right? Isn’t there a science to extrapolation that is more effective than reading the pattern of coffee grinds at the bottom of your Turkish coffee? Economics and technology and politics are not like trying to divine how many angels can stand on pinheads, after all.
Michael Shermer has a fine and sobering article today in the Huffington Post on how economists and Nostradamus aren’t so different with their respective track records:
At Skeptic magazine we routinely publish articles about the failed predictions of soothsayers, astrologers, tarot-card readers, palm-readers, and psychics of all stripes. But frankly scientists are not much better, especially in the social sciences where we depend on predictions of psychologists, sociologists, and most notably economists.
Shermer highlights the stealthy, insidious logical fallacy that is confirmation bias, as the gremlin in our would-be psychohistorical acumen:
One of the smartest and most deeply read historians of the 20th century, Arnold Toynbee, was spectacularly wrong in his blockbuster A Study of History, in which he thought he had identified a challenge-and-response cyclical pattern that all civilizations follow: birth, growth, expansion, empire, and disintegration. Starting with Greece and Rome, Toynbee dug through the historical record to find confirmatory evidence for his theory (culminating in his call for America to rise to the challenge of its alleged mid-century moral decline). You would think he would have taken heed from his inspiration, the German historian Oswald Spengler, who erroneously predicted the “decline of the west” in the 1920s. But that’s not how the mind works.
Why did Toynbee believe his own theory in the teeth of contradictory evidence presented by other historians? Because of the confirmation bias, which our brains employ to reinforce what we already believe while ignoring disconfirming data.
It isn’t merely the flashy discredited utopias that earlier ages expected — like flying cars or airships or lunar bases by 1999. The world is an astonishingly complex place, while our brains are constantly trying to simplify it into a distinct and candy-coated set of variables that will result in a conclusion ready-to-fit on a poster or soundbyte.
Writes Shermer:
Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one’s focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.
Not bad advice for the new year.
http://theness.com/roguesgallery/index.php/general-science/failing-at-prediction-succeeding-at-bias/
-
Chuck,
I should have posted under the media thread. I doubt fracking is causing *significant* shifts in tectonic plates. Yes I agree scientists can evaluate for the possibility of more local release of "stored" up energy though.
But the main thrust of my points is that a MSNBC host presents a theory as though it is accepted fact. And this is a problem.
And I have a hard time trusting anything that comes out of Columbia University knowing the politics of most of the staff.
-
Woof CCP,
Plates shift all the time. I'm sure there is an active fault in the Youngstown, OH area. I'm not saying that fracking caused the shift but rather that it could have led to the release of stored energy in the observed manner.
The "expert" made the claim that the epicenter of the earthquake was not at a level that is observed in the Youngstown area. This would be an easily verified point considering that we closely track the epicenters of earthquakes. In my opinion, this man made a point that could easily be proved or disproved through research yet you indicted his opinion based on the supposed politics of the university that he is from. Rather unscientific IMO.
Chuck
-
Scientific American article from Nov 11 reviewing evidence for and against contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fracking-evolving-truth-natural-gas
-
Excellent find CCP.
We search for Truth. Lets keep an eye on this.
-
Scientists, Share Secrets or Lose Funding: Stodden and Arbesman
By Victoria Stodden and Samuel Arbesman Jan 9, 2012 7:00 PM ET 9 Comments Q
The Journal of Irreproducible Results, a science-humor magazine, is, sadly, no longer the only publication that can lay claim to its title. More and more published scientific studies are difficult or impossible to repeat.
It’s not that the experiments themselves are so flawed they can’t be redone to the same effect -- though this happens more than scientists would like. It’s that the data upon which the work is based, as well as the methods employed, are too often not published, leaving the science hidden.
Many people assume that scientists the world over freely exchange not only the results of their experiments but also the detailed data, statistical tools and computer instructions they employed to arrive at those results. This is the kind of information that other scientists need in order to replicate the studies. The truth is, open exchange of such information is not common, making verification of published findings all but impossible and creating a credibility crisis in computational science.
Federal agencies that fund scientific research are in a position to help fix this problem. They should require that all scientists whose studies they finance share the files that generated their published findings, the raw data and the computer instructions that carried out their analysis.
The ability to reproduce experiments is important not only for the advancement of pure science but also to address many science-based issues in the public sphere, from climate change to biotechnology.
Too Little Transparency
Consider, for example, a recent notorious incident in biomedical science. In 2006, researchers at Duke University seemed to have discovered relationships between lung cancer patients’ personal genetic signatures and their responsiveness to certain drugs. The scientists published their results in respected journals (the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine), but only part of the genetic signature data used in the studies was publicly available, and the computer codes used to generate the findings were never revealed. This is unfortunately typical for scientific publications.
The Duke research was considered such a breakthrough that other scientists quickly became interested in replicating it, but because so much information was unavailable, it took three years for them to uncover and publicize a number of very serious errors in the published reports. Eventually, those reports were retracted, and clinical trials based on the flawed results were canceled.
In response to this incident, the Institute of Medicine convened a committee to review what data should appropriately be revealed from genomics research that leads to clinical trials. This committee is due to release its report early this year.
Unfortunately, the research community rarely addresses the problem of reproducibility so directly. Inadequate sharing is common to all scientific domains that use computers in their research today (most of science), and it hampers transparency.
By making the underlying data and computer code conveniently available, scientists could open a new era of innovation and growth. In October, the White House released a memorandum titled “Accelerating Technology Transfer and Commercialization of Federal Research in Support of High-Growth Businesses,” which outlines ways for federal funding agencies to improve the rate of technology transfer from government-financed laboratories to the private business sector.
Technology Transfer
In this memo, President Barack Obama called on federal agencies to measure the rate of technology transfer. To this end, agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation should require that scientists who receive federal funds publish full results, including the data they are based on and all the computer steps taken to reach them. This could include providing links to Internet sites containing the data and codes required to replicate the published results.
Exceptions could be made when necessary -- some information might need to be kept confidential for national-security reasons, for example. But standard practice for scientific publication should be full transparency.
Leaving this up to the scientific community isn’t sufficient. Nor is relying on current federal rules. Grant guidelines from the NIH and the NSF instruct researchers to share with other investigators the data generated in the course of their work, but this isn’t enforced. The NIH demands that articles resulting from research it finances be made freely available within a year of publication. But even if this policy were extended to all government-financed studies, the data and computer codes needed to verify the findings would still remain inaccessible.
As Jon Claerbout, a professor emeritus of geophysics at Stanford University, has noted, scientific publication isn’t scholarship itself, but only the advertising of scholarship. The actual work -- the steps needed to reproduce the scientific finding -- must be shared.
Stricter requirements for transparency in publication would allow scientific findings to more quickly become fuel for innovation and help ensure that public policy is based on sound science.
(Victoria Stodden is an assistant professor of statistics at Columbia University. Samuel Arbesman is a senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The opinions expressed are their own.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-10/scientists-share-secrets-or-lose-funding-stodden-and-arbesman.html
-
As someone intrigued by chaos theory, and in view of the fact that world-wide climate system are both chaotic and poorly understood, this piece resonated loudly for me:
No new strange attractors: strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts
This is a comment by Dr. Robert Brown on the What we don’t know about Earth’s energy flow post. I thought it was so insightful on the topic of climate stability being “pushed” by CO2 forcing that I’ve elevated it to a separate post. – Anthony
Is it fair to say that the two systems would oscillate within the same parameters but the probability of them being synchronized is nil?
Sadly, no, not over long times. The systems could be as different as a ferromagnet magnetized up and an “identical” ferromagnet magnetized down. Or in the case of the Earth, as different as Glacial Earth and Interglacial Earth. The point is that both of these latter possibilities can be “stable” states for exactly the same insolation, etc, because feedbacks in the global system can themselves reconfigure to make them stable.
If you look at the link to chaos theory I provided, and look at the figure that shows two loopy braids of lines, that provides an heuristic picture of the kind of possibilities available to coupled nonlinear differential systems.
A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 Image via Wikipedia
At the heart of each loop is something called a “strange attractor”, which is typically a limit point. The x and y axes are coordinates in a generalized (phase) space that represent the state of the system at any given time, x(t),y(t). The lines themselves are the trajectory of the system over time moving under the influence of the underlying dynamics. The point of the figure is that instead of their being a single “orbit” the way the earth orbits a regular attractor like the sun, the system oscillates around one attractor for a time, then the other, then both. Instead of nice closed orbits the orbits themselves are almost never the same.
Two trajectories that are started close to one another will usually start out, for a while, orbiting the attractors the same general way. But over time — often a remarkably short time — the two trajectories will diverge. One will flip over to the other attractor and the other won’t. After a remarkably short time, the two trajectories are almost completely decorrelated in that the knowledge of where one lies (in the general accessible phase space) provides one with no help at all in guessing the location of the other.
It’s only in this final sense that you are correct. Either system has to be found in the space of physically consistent states, states that are accessible via the differential process from the starting points. There is no guarantee that the trajectories will “fill phase space”. So in this sense they are both going to be found within the phase space accessible from the starting points. If those two starting points are close enough, they will probably sample very similar phase spaces, but there is no guarantee that they will be identical — especially if there are (many) more than two attractors, and if some simple parameter. In stat mech, with different assumptions, there is a theorem to that regard, but in the general case of open system dynamics in a chaotic system, IFAIK no.
If you are interested in this sort of thing (which can be fun to play with, actually) you can look up things like the “predator-prey differential equations”, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
IIRC this is one of the simplest systems exhibiting an attractor and limit cycle, and illustrates many of the features of more complicated dynamical systems. The attractor/fixed point in this case is the population of e.g. foxes and rabbits that remains in perfect equilibrium from year to year. Note well that this equation is deterministic, but of course a real population — even being modelled — always has random (or at least, “unpredictable”) variations — a certain amount of noise — and is actually discretized and not continuous as one cannot have half a cheetah eating \pi baboons.
A better continuous “kind” of differential equation for describing systems like this with noise is something called a Langevin equation in physics — a system with “fast” microscopic degrees of freedom that one accounts for on average with a stochastic term, and slower degrees of freedom one integrates out like the predator prey equation. In physics it is a special limiting case of something called a generalized Master equation, which is the full integrodifferential description of a many body open quantum system and is really, really difficult. The general approach, however, is not inapplicable here — and is a presumed part of most of the simplified climate models. When you “smooth” the temperature by e.g. doing a running average, you are giving up information (the short time variation) and trying to reduce the complexity of the system by focussing on the slower time scale dynamics.
If the system really is simple — has a single attractor and is in a very regular oscillation around it where the “noise” one is smoothing out really is irrelevant and just adds small variation to a single trajectory — this is probably OK. If the system is multistable and has many locally stable points, or worse if some of the degrees of freedom are things like the Sun whose time evolution is completely outside of “the system” and whose future you cannot predict and whose effect you do not precisely know, so that the attractors themselves can be moving around as the system evolves locally — it is probably not OK.
The symptom of the latter kind of multistable system where it is probably not OK is a series of punctuated equilibria, visible in the smoothed data. The 30 year satellite data and SST data fairly clearly shows this kind of behavior.
One final very important point — systems that oscillate almost always have negative feedback. In fact, that is the fundamental thing that defines an oscillatory system — it has attractors in it. Attractors are themselves stable (equilibrium) points such that if the system is perturbed from them it is pulled back towards equilibrium, not pushed away from it. In the general case of attractors in high dimensional spaces, this leads to the (Poincare) cycles around the attractors visible in the predator-prey equations or the Chaos figure with two strange attractors, except that they can get very, very complicated (and difficult to visualize) in 3+ dimensional spaces (where I’m not talking about physical spaces, note well, but parametric “phase” spaces, state spaces). Within some neighborhood of an attractor there is generally a fair bit of local stability — trajectories in that neighborhood will oscillate tightly around the one attractor and will be relatively unlikely to switch over to other attractors. Hence glacial and interglacial periods tend to last a fairly long time (compared to all of the many shorter timescales available to the system.
Moving a single underlying external parameter — e.g. anthropogenic CO_2 concentration, Solar state, geomagnetic state — can be thought of as moving the fixed points of the multistable system. If we linearize, we can often guess at least the direction of the first order direction of the movement. For example, more CO_2, given the greenhouse effect, should increase heat trapping, hence increase average global temperature. The stable fixed point should thus move a bit up in the warming direction.
Nearly all of the argument “revolves” (in more ways than one:-) around two simple problems, and note that I’m presenting them in a very different way than usual:
a) Is this linear response assumption valid? This is not a trivial question. Increased CO_2 in a multistable system doesn’t just move the local attractor, it moves all the attractors, and not necessarily in simple linear ways in a really complicated system with many negative feedbacks (there by hypothesis all over the place because the system is dominated by attractors). In many systems, there are conservation principles at work (not necessarily known ones) that act as constraints so that moving one attractor up moves another one down or increases the “barrier height” between two attractors and hence deforms all of the limit cycles.
b) Is the response the order of the mean difference between attractors being predominantly sampled within the system already? If it is greater, then it is likely not just to move the current attractor but to kick the system over to a new attractor. And it may not be the attractor you expect, one on the warmer side of the previous one. More warming, as warmists state in more heuristic terms, can make the system oscillate more wildly and hence be both warmer at the warmest part of the oscillation and colder at the coldest part of the oscillation. If the new excursion of the oscillation is great enough, it can kick the system into oscillation around a new attractor altogether on either side of things.
Note that this latter statement is still oversimplified as it makes it sound like there are only two directions, warmer and cooler. But that is not true. There is warmer with morewater vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with less water vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with the sun active, warmer with the sun not active, warmer with sea ice increasing, warmer with sea ice decreasing, warmer with more clouds, warmer with less clouds, and the clouds in question can be day side or night side clouds, arctic or antarctic clouds, in the summer, fall, winter or spring, really month by month if not day by day, with feedbacks everywhere — tweaking any single aspect of this cycle affects all of the rest, and I haven’t even begun to list all of the important dimensions or note that there are really important time scales with nearly periodic oscillation of many of these drivers, or noted that the underlying dynamics takes place on a spinning globe that generates airflow vortices as standard operating procedure that have lifetimes ranging from days to decades.
I have argued in posts above that the punctuated quasi-equilibrium evident in the climate record makes it very likely that the answer to b) is yes. The anthropogenic CO_2 shifts the system by order of or more than the distance between attractors, simply because the system jumped around between attractors even during time periods when there was no anthropogenic CO_2. Furthermore, the excursion of the system as it wandered among the attractors was as great as it is today, and not qualitatively different.
This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect is less than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act as negative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!
The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.
This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — it almost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.
The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probably going to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.
I’ll close with an analogy. When physicists were getting ready to test the first nuclear bomb, there was some concern expressed by the less gifted physicists present that in doing so they might “ignite the Earth’s atmosphere” or somehow turn the Earth into a Sun (note that this was before there was any understanding of fusion — the sun’s energy cycle was still not understood). I’ve read (far more recently) some concern that collisions at the LHC could have the same effect — create a mini-black hole or the like that swallows the Earth.
Both of these are silly fears (although offered up, note well, by real scientists, because they could see that these outcomes were possible, at least in principle) and here’s why.
The temperature and pressure created by the nuclear bomb is not unique! Although it is rare, asteroids fall to the earth, and when they do they create pressures and temperatures much higher than those produced by nuclear bombs. A very modest sized asteroid can release more energy in a few milliseconds than tens of thousands of times the total explosive energy of all of the man-made explosives, including nuclear bombs, on Earth! In a nutshell, if it could happen (with any reasonable probability), it already would have happened.
Ditto the fears associated with the LHC, or other “super” colliders. Sure, it generates collisions on the order of electron-teravolts, but this sort of energy in nuclear collisions is not unique! The Earth is constantly being bombarded by high energy particles given off by extremely energetic events like supernovae that happened long ago and far away. The energies of these cosmic rays are vastly greater than anything we will ever be able to produce in the laboratory until the laboratory in question contains a supernova. The most energetic cosmic ray ever observed (so far) was a (presumably) proton with the kinetic energy of a fastball-pitched baseball, a baseball travelling at some 150 kilometers per hour. Since we’ve seen one of these in a few decades of looking, we have to assume that they happen all the time — literally every second a cosmic ray of this sort of energy is hitting the Earth (BIG target) somewhere. If such a collision could create a black hole that destroyed planets with any significant probability, we would have been toast long, long ago.
Hence it is silly to fear the LHC or nuclear ignition. If either were probable, we wouldn’t be here to build an LHC or nuclear bomb.
It is not quite that silly to fear CAGW. The truth is that we haven’t been around long enough to know enough about the climate system to be able to tell what sorts of feedbacks and factors structure the multistable climate attractors, so one can create a number of doomsday scenarios — warming to a critical point that releases massive amounts of methane that heats things suddenly so that the ocean degasses all of its CO_2 and the ice caps melt and the oceans boil and suddenly there we are, Venus Earth with a mean temperature outside of 200 C. If we can imagine it and write it down, it must be possible, right? Science fiction novels galore explore just that sort of thing. Or movies proposing the opposite — the appearance of attractors that somehow instantly freeze the entire planet and bring about an ice age. Hey! It could happen!
But is it probable?
Here is where the argument above provides us with a great deal of comfort. There is little in the climate record to suggest the existence of another major stable state, another major attractor, well above the current warm phase attractor. Quite the opposite — the record over the last few tens of millions of years suggest that we are in the middle of a prolonged cooling phase of the planet, of the sort that has happened repeatedly over geological time, such that we are in the warm phase major attractor, and that there is literally nothing out there above it to go to. If there were, we would have gone there, instead, as local variations and oscillation around the many> minor warm phase attractors has repeatedly sampled conditions that would have been likely to cause a transition to occur if one was at all likely. At the very least, there would be a trace of it in the thermal record of the last million years or thereabouts, and there isn’t. We’re in one of the longest, warmest interglacials of the last five, although not at the warmest point of the current interglacial (the Holocene). If there were a still warmer attractor out there, the warmest point of the Holocene would have been likely to find it.
Since it manifestly did not, that suggests that the overall feedbacks are safely negative and all of the “catastrophe” hypotheses but one are relatively unlikely.
The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization. We know that this transition not only can occur, but will occur. We do not know when, why, or how to estimate its general probability. We do know that the LIA — a mere 400-500 years ago — was the coolest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas excursion; in general the Holocene appears to be cooling from its warmest period, and the twentieth century was a Grand Solar Maximum, the most active sun in 11,000 years, a maximum that is now clearly past.
IMO we are far more likely to be hanging out over an instability in which a complete transition to cold phase becomes uncomfortably likely than we are to be near a transition to a superwarm phase that there is no evidence of in the climate record. The probability is higher for two reasons. One is that unlike the superwarm phase, we know that the cold phase actually exists, and is a lot more stable than the warm phase. The “size” of the quasistable Poincare cycle oscillations around the cold phase major attractor is much larger than that around the warm phase attractors, and brief periods of warming often get squashed before turning into actual interglacials — that’s how stable they are.
The other is that we spend 90% of the time in glacial phase, only 10% in interglacial, and the Holocene is already one of the longer interglacials! There is dynamics on long timescales that we do not understand at work here. We have only the foggiest idea of what causes the (essentially chaotic) transition from warm phase to cold phase or vice versa — very crude ideas involving combinations of Milankovich cycles, the tipping of the ecliptic, the precession of the poles, orbital resonances, and stuff like that, but there is clearly a strong feedback within the climate cycle that enables cold phase “tipping”, probably related to albedo.
It could be something as simple as a quiet sun; the LIA-Maunder minimum suggests that we should actively fear a quiet sun, because something in the nonlinear differential system seems to favor colder attractors (still in the warm phase major attractor) during Maunder-type minima. One has to imagine that conversion to glaciation phase is more likely at the bottom of e.g. the LIA than at any other time, and the Holocene is probably living on borrowed time at this point, where a prolonged LIA-like interval could tip it over.
To be honest, even a LIA would be a disaster far greater than most of the warmist catastrophic imaginings. The population of the world is enormous compared to what it was in the last ice age, and a huge fraction of it lives and grows food on temperate zone land. Early frost and late spring could both reduce the available land and halve the number of crops grown on the land that survives, even before full blown glaciation. Cold (warm) phases are often associated with temperature/tropic droughts, as well, at least in parts of the world. IMO, the “rapid” onset of a LIA could kill a billion people as crops in Siberia and China and Canada and the northern US fail, and could easily destabilize the world’s tenuous political situation to where global war again becomes likely to add to our woes.
We may ultimately discover that AGW was our salvation — the CO_2 released by our jump to civilization may ameliorate or postpone the next LIA, it may block cold-phase excursion that could begin the next REAL ice age for decades or even a century. In the meantime, perhaps we can get our act together and figure out how to live together in a civilized world, not a few civilized countries where people are well off and all the rest where they are poor and more or less enslaved by a handful of tyrants or religious oligarchs.
Note well, this latter bit is itself “speculative fiction” — I don’t fully understand climate cycles either (it’s a hard problem). But at least there I can provide evidence for a lurking catastrophe in the actual climate record, so it is a lot less “fiction” than CAGW.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/strange-new-attractors-strong-evidence-against-both-positive-feedback-and-catastrophe/
-
You seem fixated on these gravitons. I'm not even convinced that they exist. We currently believe that gravity is instantaneous which makes it faster than light. If we have to postulate the existence of a particle that moves at instantaneous speeds, then I have a problem with that postulate. If we assume that these particles don't actually move terribly much but exist as a sort of ether that can propagate a gravity wave, then we are still saying that they can propagate this wave at near instantaneous speeds which is something that we don't have the ability to account for. I'm definitely allowing for the possibility that there is some completely different means by which gravity is propagated than a particle.
I'm not fixated so much on gravitons as I am of your slippery method of debate. I came on scene noting a discussion you were involved in that "produced more heat than light." I snagged an analogy from that debate involving physics, where I had hoped to intimate much better minds than those shilling AGW had been working on fundamental questions of physics with far more rigor than that demonstrated by the AGW folks, for far longer, yet had not satisfactorily answered sundry fundamental question. I was hoping that would suggest that the high degree of confidence embraced by most on the AGW side of things might therefore be misplaced. My guess is that you are capable of grasping these sort of nuances, though it is not the ground on which you want to fight and so instead you have alternated back and forth between discussions of theory and discussions of laws, which lead me to allude to this movie scene:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IBZocFkXGY[/youtube]
As that may be, my point stands: this stuff is too complicated and too poorly studied with too few geologically significant data sets for newly minted scientists in a newly minted discipline with neo-Malthusian roots to have their pronouncements taken as gospel when far wiser and more rigorous scientists haven't done the same within their disciplines. Do favor us with another deconstruction of physics laws or theories or other minutia if you must, but understand it has no bearing on the argument I'm making.
Quote
If we are going to hold a single variable accountable for some sort of coming conflagration
I still know of no one that is doing this.
Well there's this fellow named Al Gore who made a move about it; perhaps you can look it up on IMDB. Day After Tomorrow, I think it was called. And then there is this organization called the IIPC that publishes doomstruck reports in which this is a major theme, though each version tends to get walked back a bit more than the previous. Perhaps you can google it.
Quote
3/4s of the planet is covered by water which warehouses huge quantities CO2, yet we do not understand how CO2 exchanges between the two media, particularly over time.
I have already said that the concentration of CO2 in water which exists as one of the carbonates has a significant effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmopshere. But that is largely irrelevant when I can simply go measure the atmospheric concentration of CO2. It used to be off the top of my head 280 ppm in the early 1900s. It is now again off the top of my head around 400. The ocean did whatever it did during that time and the concentration came up. These are facts. The increase in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere changed the manner in which the atmosphere absorbed infrared light. This is also fact. Perhaps it didn't change it much but it did change. This is all independent of where the CO2 goes.
Uh huh. And then when it rains the H2O bonds with carbon on the way down, forming a mild form of carbonic acid that have others on your side of the argument lamenting ocean acidification. Despite the fact that water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 it is much less studied than CO2 the AGW folks fixate on, the carbonic acid cycle mentioned above is similarly poorly studied, though I read a report in the past week that some folks have noted as much as a 3.4 molar (IIRC) change in seawater through that acid cycle that the local fauna appeared to shrug off.
All the while AGW folk who are looking at the heat that has been predicted but not found are beginning to suspect surface waters are heat sinks as they need a plausible explanation for where the heat they predicted is. All of which ought to confirm my point that climate systems are too complex and poorly understood to state with any confidence that a single variable, atmospheric CO2, is responsible for warming.
Quote
You want me to post that silly hockey stick graph with the temps and CO2 levels correlated over time, save for the Medieval Warming Period?
Instead of posting someone's bad prediction, perhaps you could post a quotation by that person indicating that CO2 is the only factor governing the temperature of the planet. Considering that water vapor is obviously the more significant greenhouse gas and that aerasol particulates have a large effect (which is also well known), I'm guessing you cannot find this quote. If you can point me to a person that actually said that, then I will show you a fool.
That's pretty slick, how you transition back and forth using the term I've embraced, "variable," and the one you respond with when some gray area wiggle room is needed: "factor." Variable has a very specific meaning in a scientific context and in the context we are discussing I am quite comfortable saying that CO2 atmospheric concentrations are the variable AGW proponents have seized on while evangelizing about how we must end our wicked ways lest we are smote by global warming, climate change, or whatever the flavor of this week Scary Thing is. Heck, you've done so in this thread repeatedly. Factor is a far more nebulous terms and certainly includes other elements AGW folk bandy, often in terms of "forcing" elements that will cause glaciers to recede, poles to melt, hurricanes to intensify, whatever.
As that may be, I'm glad we agree that CO2 fetishism is foolish. Can we expect that realization to inform your future posts?
-
Woof BBG,
slippery method of debate
Slippery? I am asking you to provide facts and quotes. I am striving for the opposite of slippery.
I was hoping that would suggest that the high degree of confidence embraced by most on the AGW side of things might therefore be misplaced. My guess is that you are capable of grasping these sort of nuances, though it is not the ground on which you want to fight
That is exactly the ground I want to fight. I want to go back and talk about the actual underlying science and work from there. You seem to want to prove ad infinitum that it is difficult to quantify temperature changes on the earth and other large physical systems. Why don't you go prove that boxers punch people in the face while you are at it?
And then when it rains the H2O bonds with carbon on the way down, forming a mild form of carbonic acid that have others on your side of the argument lamenting ocean acidification.
Ocean acidification is a separate and worthy discussion. Let me know if you want to have it. I'm currently working on a nitrification water treatment plant and the relevant bacteria do not shrug off minor pH changes. They go dormant. Not all organisms behave the same way. I personally don't take a cavalier attitude towards poorly understood systems.
And what precisely is this mild form of carbonic acid that you are referring to? CO2 is known to dissolve in water. Not exactly a great mystery. But if I want to know the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere I don't go grab the Encyclopedia Brittanica and start researching photosynthesis. I just grab an oxygen meter and and take a measurement. So again, I fail to understand why you are talking about KNOWN CO2 sinks when I can simply look at the old number and then look at the current number. Do you want to talk about predicting future CO2 concentrations? If so, what you are talking about is of relevance. I didn't realize we were trying to figure that out.
Despite the fact that water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 it is much less studied than CO2 the AGW folks fixate on
And this is the discussion that we WOULD have had if you had bothered to look at the underlying science. BTW water vapor is already fully accounted for and is the reason why this planet is livable. Thanks water. CO2 seems to be changing hence the interest.
Well there's this fellow named Al Gore who made a move about it; perhaps you can look it up on IMDB
I want you to provide a quotation indicating that someone thinks that CO2 is the only reason why the climate is changing. That is the quote, or something close to it, that I want. You seem to think that these scientists completely discount all other reasons why the climate could be changing. Well if one of them truly said it, then you should be able to provide that quotation. And way to pick a movie made by a non-scientist to prove a point and then not even provide a relevant quote. BTW I have never seen the movie in question so you will have to get me a quote from it to make your point.
Variable has a very specific meaning in a scientific context and in the context we are discussing
Well I guess my education never ceases :-P
Variable has a very specific meaning in a scientific context and in the context we are discussing I am quite comfortable saying that CO2 atmospheric concentrations are the variable AGW proponents have seized on while evangelizing about how we must end our wicked ways lest we are smote by global warming, climate change, or whatever the flavor of this week Scary Thing is.
CO2 seems to be of particular interest to me and others because it is the variable that we have some control over. Last time I checked we didn't much control over the amount of water vapor in the air, the wavelengths and intensity of sunlight, or the ability of various molecules to transmit or absorb various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
Chuck
-
Well, the level of learning here is way over my head, but this did catch my attention:
"CO2 seems to be of particular interest to me and others because it is the variable that we have some control over."
For some reason I am reminded of the story of the drunk who drops his keys one night as he is taking a short cut across his lawn to his front door. It is too dark to find the keys so he goes back to the sidewalk where there is a street lamp because the light is better there. :-D
Carry on gentlemen, this is genuinely fascinating. Thank you.
-
Woof Guro C.,
I understand what you are saying. If you take my word for it that there might be something to AGW and we do have measured changes in CO2, and it certainly appears that there has been a small increase in the temperature of the planet over the last 50 or so years, when someone says that CO2 is not responsible where I come from you expect them to provide an alternate hypothesis. Just saying that there are many factors that affect the climate but not putting forth a hypothesis which could be responsible for the change doesn't seem to satisfactory to me. And from what I have seen the sun does not seem to have gotten brighter and that is a fairly easy thing for us to measure so that does not seem to be the likely cause.
On another topic, I'm hanging here in south texas at a refinery. Believe it or not I get along fine with the collection of right wingers that works there. The controls engineer owns a house near San Antonio that overlies some shale deposits. A well has been installed which recovers from an area that underlies his farm so he got a nice chunk of change for the mineral rights plus royalties. Since this is a shale it needs to be fracked before it can produce. He has apparently lived in the area for his entire life and just felt his first earthquake. Apparently they also run a gas sweetening operation close to his house and are venting noticeable quantities of some nasty gas like sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide. He doesn't care about either the earthquakes or the gas but then he is a right winger and $120,000 for the mineral rights plus royalties might have a little something to do with it too.
Chuck
-
Woof BBG,
I calculated the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide in water and it is 6 millimolar so your memory isn't quite right on this. You can dissolve more if you have an excess of carbonate in the water resulting in removal by chemical reaction. I'm interested in the study if you can lay your hands on it.
Chuck
-
Chuck:
Thank you for slowing down to my level for a moment.
"If you take my word for it that there might be something to AGW"
Um , , , I don't. :-) The point as I understand it is that whatever fluctuations we may or may not be seeing are well within the range of variability that we have seen before human industrialization.
" and we do have measured changes in CO2, and it certainly appears that there has been a small increase in the temperature of the planet over the last 50 or so years, when someone says that CO2 is not responsible where I come from you expect them to provide an alternate hypothesis."
Umm , , , not really. The answer, as I understand it is that we are well within the range of variability that we have seen before human industrialization.
"Just saying that there are many factors that affect the climate but not putting forth a hypothesis which could be responsible for the change doesn't seem to satisfactory to me."
But it does seem satisfactory to me. We have ALWAYS seen change and do so now, within previous parameters.
"And from what I have seen the sun does not seem to have gotten brighter and that is a fairly easy thing for us to measure so that does not seem to be the likely cause."
If you are referring to my posts concerning sun spots, the assertion was not that the sun had gotten brighter, it was that sun spots/solar flares seem to have an empirical coorelation that provides an alternative hypothesis-- something for which you have been asking.
-
Woof,
The point as I understand it is that whatever fluctuations we may or may not be seeing are well within the range of variability that we have seen before human industrialization.
This may be true, but there could be an effect from the CO2 which is additive or subtractive with other effects. Thus if there is something to the AGW theory, then at some point in the future there could be a problem which is not fully mitigated by whatever cooling effects might exist. It would be nice to scientifically analyze the AGW prior to that date which I would contend isn't precisely happening right now.
I will paraphrase an example that you will completely understand. I'll use only initials to protect the identities of those involved:
GC: Higher taxes are a drag on the economy reducing GDP and therefore government revenue.
CB: But I can point to numerous periods in our past and other countries where there were higher taxation rates than now which also had comparatively higher standards of living, prosperity, and the government was solvent.
GC: Well there are other factors that effect economies which can swamp the effects of the higher tax rates.
CB: Well if the effect that you are describing is so easily swamped by other factors, why do we spend so much time discussing it and why are we trying to set taxation rates based on this principle:
GC: Because higher taxation rates are a burden on the economy even if it is buoyed by other factors.
CB: Well can I see some sort of proof? Underlying mathematics? Etc?
And on it goes.
Umm , , , not really. The answer, as I understand it is that we are well within the range of variability that we have seen before human industrialization.
Probably so, but this does not argue against CO2 increases due to industrialization. If there is another hypothesis for the 20th century CO2 increase, I have not seen it. It seems to me that most people accept that industrialization is the cause of the recent increase in CO2 and simply are not worrying about it.
But it does seem satisfactory to me. We have ALWAYS seen change and do so now, within previous parameters.
No one argues this but this seems to me to fall into "What me worry?" land. If a doctor told you that you had six months to live, you probably would tell him that you feel fine, assuming that you did. Then you would immediately ask him for his reasoning. What you wouldn't do, I think, is point out all the times in the past that you felt fine and lived, and then point out all the times in the past where you felt crappy and lived. I don't see many people trying to understand the AGW reasoning but are rather focused on temperatures right now and temperatures in the past.
I'm not excusing any shenanigans by scientists who study AGW who may have fudged things or prepared what should have obviously been a bad model, but... I do feel for people that have no way to explain to the common man in a language that they typically use the work that they are doing which I would say in part encourages BS.
If you are referring to my posts concerning sun spots, the assertion was not that the sun had gotten brighter, it was that sun spots/solar flares seem to have an empirical coorelation that provides an alternative hypothesis-- something for which you have been asking.
There have been some people that have hypothesized that the sun has put out more energy but the info from the Max Planck institute seems to contradict that. I will try to look at the sunspot hypothesis a little more but since sunspots are not generally that I know of linked to greater energy flux to the planet, the connection seems tenuous to me right now.
Chuck
-
Getting ready to leave for 12 days and so may have to sign off for a while, but I will offer the Reagan tax rate cuts, the JFK tax rate cuts, the Clinton-Gingrich capital gains tax rate cuts, and the tax rate cuts of 1920 (I forget the President in question's name at the moment) as examples of the Laffer Curve in action.
-
No one argues this but this seems to me to fall into "What me worry?" land. If a doctor told you that you had six months to live, you probably would tell him that you feel fine, assuming that you did. Then you would immediately ask him for his reasoning. What you wouldn't do, I think, is point out all the times in the past that you felt fine and lived, and then point out all the times in the past where you felt crappy and lived. I don't see many people trying to understand the AGW reasoning but are rather focused on temperatures right now and temperatures in the past.
The key difference being that a doctor will diagnose you with something medical science has proven to be real.
-
Woof G.M.,
I have already told you that there is underlying science that says that there is something there. Science that you either refuse to look at or are incapable of understanding. Of course you don't believe that AGW is possible. You haven't remotely looked at it. Again, I find this to be an outstanding topic for the Pathological Science thread, so thanks for that.
Chuck
-
Woof Guro C.,
It would be of some interest to me to track down the relevant semilog graphs and do a little graphical analysis of the periods that you mention, but I haven't done it yet. Let's assume for now that what you said is demonstrated by the data. There are still some interesting points.
1. Although the precise shape of the Laffer Curve isn't known, it clearly suggests that the amount of change in revenue and I would hazard in GDP becomes incrementally lower as you approach a deminimus average tax rate. The fact that we have had multiple reductions in tax rate in this country which has pushed us toward whatever that deminimus rate might be has in no way diminished how vocal the proponents of the Laffer Curve are.
2. Although the Laffer curve is posited as a way to increase government revenue or at least hold it nearly constant while reducing tax rates, it is nearly always held up as a model by people that don't want to maximize government revenue but would rather minimize it.
If I were only to analyze those two points, I would surely come to the conclusion that the Laffer Curve was junk.
chuck
-
"Although the Laffer curve is posited as a way to increase government revenue or at least hold it nearly constant while reducing tax rates, it is nearly always held up as a model by people that don't want to maximize government revenue but would rather minimize it."
Complete straw argument or false observation IMO that the people pressing for the policies that grow revenues most during these times of paralyzing deficits want to minimize revenues. Please cite evidence. You passed up a much more obvious point that comes from American experience of 4 or 5 of Crafty's examples: Proponents of higher government spending look blindly at these periods of rapidly growing revenues and are missing out on the largest source of program funding - a vibrant economic expansion. Example: the Obama administration - the are dying to grow government but willing to pass up the greatest opportunities to fund it, instead seeking limited growth policies on all fronts.
Revenues to the Treasury doubled in the 1980s for example yet opponents of lower tax rates cling to the false math that lower rates increased the deficit. Just one example, but there is a similar trend in each example that Crafty cited.
"If I were only to analyze those two points, I would surely come to the conclusion that the Laffer Curve was junk."
Translated/paraphrased by me - If you were to fully mischaracterize your point, it would lose all validity. Not one of your more persuasive statements in the thread IMHO. :wink:
-
Woof G.M.,
I have already told you that there is underlying science that says that there is something there. Science that you either refuse to look at or are incapable of understanding. Of course you don't believe that AGW is possible.
Chuck
Unlike pancreatic cancer as an example, there is no proof of AGW. A doctor who told that that your average temp went up a degree until the 90's meant you were going to die, and based on falsified research would be seen by most to be a quack. A few guillible types might buy it though, if you dress it up in hysteria and pseudoscience.
-
I get that with the Laffer Curve you are reasoning by analogy for application to the subject at hand, but I sense here a huge potential for thread drift :lol: If we want to continue this, and you do have an interesting point in what you say, lets take it over to the Economics thread in this sub-forum.
-
Pardon the data dump, getting ready to both teach and take classes while also keeping my day job nailed down. Thoughtful keyboard time is hard to come by.
No new strange attractors: strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts
This is a comment by Dr. Robert Brown on the What we don’t know about Earth’s energy flow post. I thought it was so insightful on the topic of climate stability being “pushed” by CO2 forcing that I’ve elevated it to a separate post. – Anthony
Is it fair to say that the two systems would oscillate within the same parameters but the probability of them being synchronized is nil?
Sadly, no, not over long times. The systems could be as different as a ferromagnet magnetized up and an “identical” ferromagnet magnetized down. Or in the case of the Earth, as different as Glacial Earth and Interglacial Earth. The point is that both of these latter possibilities can be “stable” states for exactly the same insolation, etc, because feedbacks in the global system can themselves reconfigure to make them stable.
If you look at the link to chaos theory I provided, and look at the figure that shows two loopy braids of lines, that provides an heuristic picture of the kind of possibilities available to coupled nonlinear differential systems.
A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 Image via Wikipedia
At the heart of each loop is something called a “strange attractor”, which is typically a limit point. The x and y axes are coordinates in a generalized (phase) space that represent the state of the system at any given time, x(t),y(t). The lines themselves are the trajectory of the system over time moving under the influence of the underlying dynamics. The point of the figure is that instead of their being a single “orbit” the way the earth orbits a regular attractor like the sun, the system oscillates around one attractor for a time, then the other, then both. Instead of nice closed orbits the orbits themselves are almost never the same.
Two trajectories that are started close to one another will usually start out, for a while, orbiting the attractors the same general way. But over time — often a remarkably short time — the two trajectories will diverge. One will flip over to the other attractor and the other won’t. After a remarkably short time, the two trajectories are almost completely decorrelated in that the knowledge of where one lies (in the general accessible phase space) provides one with no help at all in guessing the location of the other.
It’s only in this final sense that you are correct. Either system has to be found in the space of physically consistent states, states that are accessible via the differential process from the starting points. There is no guarantee that the trajectories will “fill phase space”. So in this sense they are both going to be found within the phase space accessible from the starting points. If those two starting points are close enough, they will probably sample very similar phase spaces, but there is no guarantee that they will be identical — especially if there are (many) more than two attractors, and if some simple parameter. In stat mech, with different assumptions, there is a theorem to that regard, but in the general case of open system dynamics in a chaotic system, IFAIK no.
If you are interested in this sort of thing (which can be fun to play with, actually) you can look up things like the “predator-prey differential equations”, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
IIRC this is one of the simplest systems exhibiting an attractor and limit cycle, and illustrates many of the features of more complicated dynamical systems. The attractor/fixed point in this case is the population of e.g. foxes and rabbits that remains in perfect equilibrium from year to year. Note well that this equation is deterministic, but of course a real population — even being modelled — always has random (or at least, “unpredictable”) variations — a certain amount of noise — and is actually discretized and not continuous as one cannot have half a cheetah eating \pi baboons.
A better continuous “kind” of differential equation for describing systems like this with noise is something called a Langevin equation in physics — a system with “fast” microscopic degrees of freedom that one accounts for on average with a stochastic term, and slower degrees of freedom one integrates out like the predator prey equation. In physics it is a special limiting case of something called a generalized Master equation, which is the full integrodifferential description of a many body open quantum system and is really, really difficult. The general approach, however, is not inapplicable here — and is a presumed part of most of the simplified climate models. When you “smooth” the temperature by e.g. doing a running average, you are giving up information (the short time variation) and trying to reduce the complexity of the system by focussing on the slower time scale dynamics.
If the system really is simple — has a single attractor and is in a very regular oscillation around it where the “noise” one is smoothing out really is irrelevant and just adds small variation to a single trajectory — this is probably OK. If the system is multistable and has many locally stable points, or worse if some of the degrees of freedom are things like the Sun whose time evolution is completely outside of “the system” and whose future you cannot predict and whose effect you do not precisely know, so that the attractors themselves can be moving around as the system evolves locally — it is probably not OK.
The symptom of the latter kind of multistable system where it is probably not OK is a series of punctuated equilibria, visible in the smoothed data. The 30 year satellite data and SST data fairly clearly shows this kind of behavior.
One final very important point — systems that oscillate almost always have negative feedback. In fact, that is the fundamental thing that defines an oscillatory system — it has attractors in it. Attractors are themselves stable (equilibrium) points such that if the system is perturbed from them it is pulled back towards equilibrium, not pushed away from it. In the general case of attractors in high dimensional spaces, this leads to the (Poincare) cycles around the attractors visible in the predator-prey equations or the Chaos figure with two strange attractors, except that they can get very, very complicated (and difficult to visualize) in 3+ dimensional spaces (where I’m not talking about physical spaces, note well, but parametric “phase” spaces, state spaces). Within some neighborhood of an attractor there is generally a fair bit of local stability — trajectories in that neighborhood will oscillate tightly around the one attractor and will be relatively unlikely to switch over to other attractors. Hence glacial and interglacial periods tend to last a fairly long time (compared to all of the many shorter timescales available to the system.
Moving a single underlying external parameter — e.g. anthropogenic CO_2 concentration, Solar state, geomagnetic state — can be thought of as moving the fixed points of the multistable system. If we linearize, we can often guess at least the direction of the first order direction of the movement. For example, more CO_2, given the greenhouse effect, should increase heat trapping, hence increase average global temperature. The stable fixed point should thus move a bit up in the warming direction.
Nearly all of the argument “revolves” (in more ways than one:-) around two simple problems, and note that I’m presenting them in a very different way than usual:
a) Is this linear response assumption valid? This is not a trivial question. Increased CO_2 in a multistable system doesn’t just move the local attractor, it moves all the attractors, and not necessarily in simple linear ways in a really complicated system with many negative feedbacks (there by hypothesis all over the place because the system is dominated by attractors). In many systems, there are conservation principles at work (not necessarily known ones) that act as constraints so that moving one attractor up moves another one down or increases the “barrier height” between two attractors and hence deforms all of the limit cycles.
b) Is the response the order of the mean difference between attractors being predominantly sampled within the system already? If it is greater, then it is likely not just to move the current attractor but to kick the system over to a new attractor. And it may not be the attractor you expect, one on the warmer side of the previous one. More warming, as warmists state in more heuristic terms, can make the system oscillate more wildly and hence be both warmer at the warmest part of the oscillation and colder at the coldest part of the oscillation. If the new excursion of the oscillation is great enough, it can kick the system into oscillation around a new attractor altogether on either side of things.
Note that this latter statement is still oversimplified as it makes it sound like there are only two directions, warmer and cooler. But that is not true. There is warmer with morewater vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with less water vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with the sun active, warmer with the sun not active, warmer with sea ice increasing, warmer with sea ice decreasing, warmer with more clouds, warmer with less clouds, and the clouds in question can be day side or night side clouds, arctic or antarctic clouds, in the summer, fall, winter or spring, really month by month if not day by day, with feedbacks everywhere — tweaking any single aspect of this cycle affects all of the rest, and I haven’t even begun to list all of the important dimensions or note that there are really important time scales with nearly periodic oscillation of many of these drivers, or noted that the underlying dynamics takes place on a spinning globe that generates airflow vortices as standard operating procedure that have lifetimes ranging from days to decades.
I have argued in posts above that the punctuated quasi-equilibrium evident in the climate record makes it very likely that the answer to b) is yes. The anthropogenic CO_2 shifts the system by order of or more than the distance between attractors, simply because the system jumped around between attractors even during time periods when there was no anthropogenic CO_2. Furthermore, the excursion of the system as it wandered among the attractors was as great as it is today, and not qualitatively different.
This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect is less than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act as negative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!
The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.
This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — it almost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.
The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probably going to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.
I’ll close with an analogy. When physicists were getting ready to test the first nuclear bomb, there was some concern expressed by the less gifted physicists present that in doing so they might “ignite the Earth’s atmosphere” or somehow turn the Earth into a Sun (note that this was before there was any understanding of fusion — the sun’s energy cycle was still not understood). I’ve read (far more recently) some concern that collisions at the LHC could have the same effect — create a mini-black hole or the like that swallows the Earth.
Both of these are silly fears (although offered up, note well, by real scientists, because they could see that these outcomes were possible, at least in principle) and here’s why.
The temperature and pressure created by the nuclear bomb is not unique! Although it is rare, asteroids fall to the earth, and when they do they create pressures and temperatures much higher than those produced by nuclear bombs. A very modest sized asteroid can release more energy in a few milliseconds than tens of thousands of times the total explosive energy of all of the man-made explosives, including nuclear bombs, on Earth! In a nutshell, if it could happen (with any reasonable probability), it already would have happened.
Ditto the fears associated with the LHC, or other “super” colliders. Sure, it generates collisions on the order of electron-teravolts, but this sort of energy in nuclear collisions is not unique! The Earth is constantly being bombarded by high energy particles given off by extremely energetic events like supernovae that happened long ago and far away. The energies of these cosmic rays are vastly greater than anything we will ever be able to produce in the laboratory until the laboratory in question contains a supernova. The most energetic cosmic ray ever observed (so far) was a (presumably) proton with the kinetic energy of a fastball-pitched baseball, a baseball travelling at some 150 kilometers per hour. Since we’ve seen one of these in a few decades of looking, we have to assume that they happen all the time — literally every second a cosmic ray of this sort of energy is hitting the Earth (BIG target) somewhere. If such a collision could create a black hole that destroyed planets with any significant probability, we would have been toast long, long ago.
Hence it is silly to fear the LHC or nuclear ignition. If either were probable, we wouldn’t be here to build an LHC or nuclear bomb.
It is not quite that silly to fear CAGW. The truth is that we haven’t been around long enough to know enough about the climate system to be able to tell what sorts of feedbacks and factors structure the multistable climate attractors, so one can create a number of doomsday scenarios — warming to a critical point that releases massive amounts of methane that heats things suddenly so that the ocean degasses all of its CO_2 and the ice caps melt and the oceans boil and suddenly there we are, Venus Earth with a mean temperature outside of 200 C. If we can imagine it and write it down, it must be possible, right? Science fiction novels galore explore just that sort of thing. Or movies proposing the opposite — the appearance of attractors that somehow instantly freeze the entire planet and bring about an ice age. Hey! It could happen!
But is it probable?
Here is where the argument above provides us with a great deal of comfort. There is little in the climate record to suggest the existence of another major stable state, another major attractor, well above the current warm phase attractor. Quite the opposite — the record over the last few tens of millions of years suggest that we are in the middle of a prolonged cooling phase of the planet, of the sort that has happened repeatedly over geological time, such that we are in the warm phase major attractor, and that there is literally nothing out there above it to go to. If there were, we would have gone there, instead, as local variations and oscillation around the many> minor warm phase attractors has repeatedly sampled conditions that would have been likely to cause a transition to occur if one was at all likely. At the very least, there would be a trace of it in the thermal record of the last million years or thereabouts, and there isn’t. We’re in one of the longest, warmest interglacials of the last five, although not at the warmest point of the current interglacial (the Holocene). If there were a still warmer attractor out there, the warmest point of the Holocene would have been likely to find it.
Since it manifestly did not, that suggests that the overall feedbacks are safely negative and all of the “catastrophe” hypotheses but one are relatively unlikely.
The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization. We know that this transition not only can occur, but will occur. We do not know when, why, or how to estimate its general probability. We do know that the LIA — a mere 400-500 years ago — was the coolest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas excursion; in general the Holocene appears to be cooling from its warmest period, and the twentieth century was a Grand Solar Maximum, the most active sun in 11,000 years, a maximum that is now clearly past.
IMO we are far more likely to be hanging out over an instability in which a complete transition to cold phase becomes uncomfortably likely than we are to be near a transition to a superwarm phase that there is no evidence of in the climate record. The probability is higher for two reasons. One is that unlike the superwarm phase, we know that the cold phase actually exists, and is a lot more stable than the warm phase. The “size” of the quasistable Poincare cycle oscillations around the cold phase major attractor is much larger than that around the warm phase attractors, and brief periods of warming often get squashed before turning into actual interglacials — that’s how stable they are.
The other is that we spend 90% of the time in glacial phase, only 10% in interglacial, and the Holocene is already one of the longer interglacials! There is dynamics on long timescales that we do not understand at work here. We have only the foggiest idea of what causes the (essentially chaotic) transition from warm phase to cold phase or vice versa — very crude ideas involving combinations of Milankovich cycles, the tipping of the ecliptic, the precession of the poles, orbital resonances, and stuff like that, but there is clearly a strong feedback within the climate cycle that enables cold phase “tipping”, probably related to albedo.
It could be something as simple as a quiet sun; the LIA-Maunder minimum suggests that we should actively fear a quiet sun, because something in the nonlinear differential system seems to favor colder attractors (still in the warm phase major attractor) during Maunder-type minima. One has to imagine that conversion to glaciation phase is more likely at the bottom of e.g. the LIA than at any other time, and the Holocene is probably living on borrowed time at this point, where a prolonged LIA-like interval could tip it over.
To be honest, even a LIA would be a disaster far greater than most of the warmist catastrophic imaginings. The population of the world is enormous compared to what it was in the last ice age, and a huge fraction of it lives and grows food on temperate zone land. Early frost and late spring could both reduce the available land and halve the number of crops grown on the land that survives, even before full blown glaciation. Cold (warm) phases are often associated with temperature/tropic droughts, as well, at least in parts of the world. IMO, the “rapid” onset of a LIA could kill a billion people as crops in Siberia and China and Canada and the northern US fail, and could easily destabilize the world’s tenuous political situation to where global war again becomes likely to add to our woes.
We may ultimately discover that AGW was our salvation — the CO_2 released by our jump to civilization may ameliorate or postpone the next LIA, it may block cold-phase excursion that could begin the next REAL ice age for decades or even a century. In the meantime, perhaps we can get our act together and figure out how to live together in a civilized world, not a few civilized countries where people are well off and all the rest where they are poor and more or less enslaved by a handful of tyrants or religious oligarchs.
Note well, this latter bit is itself “speculative fiction” — I don’t fully understand climate cycles either (it’s a hard problem). But at least there I can provide evidence for a lurking catastrophe in the actual climate record, so it is a lot less “fiction” than CAGW.
rgb
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/scripps-paper-ocean-acidification-fears-overhyped/
-
Second post.
A Summary of Climate Change over the Past Millennium in China
Reference
Zhou, XJ. 2011. The characteristics and regularities of the climate change over the past millennium in China. Chinese Science Bulletin 56: 2985.
Background
The author - who is with the State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences in Beijing - writes in an introductory editorial in a special issue of the Chinese Science Bulletin (October 2011) that "research on global climate change has been at the frontier of the contemporary sciences," and within this context he further states that "debate has focused on whether the greenhouse effect produced by human activities is a major factor responsible for modern climate warming."
What was done
Zhou reports that "in 2009, the major project 'Research on tree-ring and millennium climate change in China' was implemented under the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China." Noting that eight articles published in this special issue of the Bulletin "present partly preliminary results obtained by the project over the past two years," he then goes on to summarize, in the broadest possible sense, their findings.
What was learned
In the words of Zhou, the eight articles "reveal some characteristics and regularities of changes in temperature and precipitation in China and in East Asian monsoons over the past 1000 years," and he says that "notable conclusions," of which he lists only two, are that (1) "temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to those in the current warm period over China," and (2) "the effect of solar activity on climate cannot be neglected in any period of the millennium."
What it means
These two findings stand in stark contrast to what is generally claimed by the world's climate alarmists, which is no small matter, as they apply to a significant portion of the planet. Hence, they should give everyone reason to reconsider the climate-alarmist claim that modern warming has been unprecedented over the past millennium or more, which claim is also refuted by many additional scientific studies described in our Medieval Warm Period Project.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N3/C3.php
-
Third post
Daren Jonescu: Global Warming: The Evidence is Endless
Wednesday, January 18th 2012, 9:46 AM EST Co2sceptic (Site Admin)
If I believed the Earth was slowly turning into cheddar cheese, I could invoke this theory to explain a lot of things. Why is the rat population in our major cities growing so quickly? Earth cheesification is providing more rat food. Why have there been so many earthquakes lately? The cheesification of the tectonic plates has made them less resistant to sudden shifts. Why are glaciers melting? The freezing point of cheddar cheese is lower than that of water; as the Earth at the poles undergoes cheesification, the unfrozen cheese is causing a slight warming of the ice sheets from below, resulting in unusual levels of melting.
I could go on like this for a long time, I suppose. At some point, however, you would confront me with some natural fact that I could not logically account for by means of my cheese theory. In other words, even the greatest faith in this underlying assumption could never withstand all possible evidence.
If, however, we could devise a theory that might literally be able to repel absolutely any possible counterevidence, then we would have accomplished something truly diabolical: an unfalsifiable theory. If we could indeed devise such a theory, then we could run wild explaining anything and everything, and absorb absolutely any eventuality, without ever needing to question our faith in the underlying hypothesis.
Then we would be at liberty to publish headlines such as this: “Research suggests warmer summers could be causing colder winters.” This conjecture, brought to you via the magical theory of global climate change, is reported as though it is the most plausible explanation of the peculiar fact that Canadian winters do not appear to be getting any warmer.
Article continues below this advert:
Question you aren’t supposed to ask: Why is the non-warming of recent winters a peculiar fact in need of an explanation? After all, did anyone in the past harbor any presumption that winters ought to be getting warmer? Why should they? The difference, of course, is that in the age of global warming, everyone is supposed to know, beyond any doubt, that the Earth is indeed getting significantly warmer. Thus, every time someone casually observes that the weather is pretty chilly, or that there has been a lot of snow, all hearers in the room look at their hands awkwardly, smirk bemusedly, or display some other symptom of that feeling familiar to anyone who has had to face doubts about a deeply held religious belief: “But this just can’t be true, because if it is, then my world is about to crumble.”
The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago
The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago. That, in fact, is why we have a theory called “anthropogenic global climate change” in the first place. Thirty-five years ago, it was called global cooling. When the temperature records made minced meat of that “theory,” it was put on ice for a few years, as it were. Finally, on the principle that if you can’t beat Mother Nature, you must join her, the wizards who brought us global cooling conveniently revised their models to prove beyond any doubt that the newly discovered global warming trend was a man-made phenomenon. Then, around 1998, the temperature records began to flat-line. Carbon dioxide, the Enemy, was reaching ever-higher levels in the atmosphere; and yet it was no longer having the desired – er, I mean “anticipated” – effect of warming the planet as it should (oops, I mean “as the models predicted”).
For several years, the global crusaders against carbon dioxide mocked, ridiculed, and/or ignored anyone who dared to ask why, if rising CO2 levels cause global warming, temperatures were not rising at accelerating rates, as CO2 levels continued to rise exponentially. Oh, but temperatures are indeed rising, the faithful said. In fact, each year, they produced annual temperature record analyses, garnered through the official scientific records center, the UN, showing that that year had been the warmest ever recorded. Then, a little later, some fine print would appear somewhere explaining how the report had slightly overestimated the warming for the year in question.
Hedging their bets, the global warmers began offering arguments to account for the stalled warming trend, even while they continued to deny that the trend had stalled – a method equivalent to saying, “I didn’t kill my wife, but if I did, it was in self-defense.” Their main argument was a condescending appeal to the big picture that the skeptics were allegedly too narrow-minded to see: Global temperature change, they said, is a process that develops over a very long period of time. Therefore, they harrumphed, claiming that a broader trend has ceased because temperatures have not changed for a few years shows an unscientific short-sightedness.
Of course, if one were to accept this bet-hedging argument, one could turn it back on the global warmers: Eighty years can hardly be called a “big picture,” in planetary terms. The Earth is believed to be more than four billion years old. If five years without warming is too short a period to call a trend, then why is eighty years of net warming a long enough period to call a trend? From the point of view of four billion years, eighty looks an awful lot like five, does it not? (To be precise, as a percentage of four billion, 5 is 0.000000125%, while 80 is 0.000002%.) So how sure can we be that the period during which this unnatural warming is alleged to have happened is a long enough period to indicate a “long-term trend”? Will they be forced back to frightening us about global cooling again in twenty years?
Perhaps dimly recognizing this little problem, the global warming advocates – um, I mean “researchers” – finally hit upon the perfect modification of their theory, namely to say that it doesn’t matter what happens to the temperature; the cause, in any case, is man. Thus, along about the middle of this century’s first decade, we suddenly had John Kerry and Hillary Clinton exiting a Senate hearing and taking to the microphones to discuss “global climate change.” No one officially announced this name change, of course. It just sort of happened. And with it came the lovely new premise that what our CO2 emissions are causing is neither warming nor cooling, per se, but rather “change.” “What kind of change?” you ask. Invalid question. Just “change.” Change from what? From some previous year’s “climate”? From some objective standard of what would have happened “naturally,” had we icky humans not spewed the by-product of so much life-sustaining productivity into Gaia’s aura? It makes little difference; no need to fuss about what exactly the “changers” are claiming is changing, since the particular changes that might occur from here on out are of no consequence to the theory. Any change will do – including no change at all, which can also be interpreted as a change, if you tilt your head a bit to one side.
The unanimous, settled scientists and their masters, the unanimous, settled proponents of global governance, have continued to act as though they still want you to accept that temperatures are rising every year, ice caps are shrinking, polar bears are drowning, and so on. “Global climate change” is, for most practical purposes, still “global warming.” This is necessary, since global regulation requires global panic, and it would be much more difficult to stir panic over the idea – which is, officially, the theory of the moment – that “temperatures, and their effects, may or may not change in one way or another over any given period of time.”
Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change
Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change. Nevertheless, the name change provided good backside protection. “Global climate change” takes a perfectly good bit of crackpot neo-religiosity and elevates it to the level of unfalsifiable pseudo-theory – unfalsifiable, as in nothing you could possibly present to the nutters by way of facts can ever be evidence to the contrary. Why not? Because there is no contrary.
If cooling, warming, and stasis are all evidence of anthropogenic global climate change, then science has finally followed the rest of the modern world into that realm of inescapable self-incrimination dubbed the Kafkaesque. We are guilty of global climate change. There is no proof. There is not even anyone to talk to by way of defending ourselves. Having been inexplicably accused, we will simply be sent on a dreamlike quest through a never-ending maze of inhuman obfuscation until, gradually, we come to accept that the accusation against us must be true, or else it would not have been made. At this point, we must desire our own demise, as the only “just” resolution, given the undefined crimes of which we have convicted ourselves.
At last, as the fight to defend global warming reached fever pitch over some e-mails seeming to discuss evidence-alteration – remember, this defense of warming took place years after the official line was that it didn’t matter whether the temperature was rising or not – one of the main players in the scandal, and one of the most prominent and respected defenders of the cause-without-any-definable-effect, stepped forward to concede that there has been no warming since 1995. When asked whether he thought natural causes could account for the warming from 1975-1998, and if so, to what extent, he answered, “This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system).”
So let’s get this straight: Dr. Phil Jones, one of the world’s foremost authorities on global climate change, says that the question of the possibility and degree of natural climate influences is outside of his area of expertise. Translation: I don’t do climate change; I do man-made climate change. His expertise is in trying to show the existence of an influence on climate that no one prior to 1970 thought was possible, and he thinks that looking at other influences which everyone has always known were real is outside of his area. In other words, looking at known facts of nature would get in the way of his career-advancing conjectures, so, as a matter of professional policy, he doesn’t look at them.
Notice that when Jones lists “all possible factors” of warming from 1975-1998, he lists “human influences” first, as though this were the obvious first place to look for an explanation of a variation in global temperatures over a 23-year period – as though no 23-year period has ever shown a variation in temperatures before. His default assumption is the furthest one from common sense, namely that humans did it.
Likewise, in our latest contribution to unfalsifiability, in which cold winters have been interpreted as a symptom of global warming – in spite of the fact that until recently, the party line was to deny that winters are still cold at all – the research project undertaken to reach this conclusion is described this way: “Cohen and his co-authors began by asking themselves why winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere aren’t going up as quickly as in the spring, summer and fall.” Once again, the default assumption is anthropogenic global warming. The task the researchers set for themselves was to explain away falsifying evidence. For example, why were they not trying to explain how the cold winters might be causing warmer summers? Because the paradigm they are working in demands that all apparent exceptions to global warming be explained away. Thirty-five years ago, they would indeed have been making the opposite argument, in order to salvage global cooling.
Recently, a former Korean student of mine made a typical unquestioning reference to global warming. Constitutionally averse to letting smart people say stupid things, I briefly offered some of the usual arguments against anthropogenic climate change. My student answered, diplomatically, that the issue seemed to be a “mystery,” but that as she was unable to verify my facts in her first language, and as so many intelligent people were working on this issue at the UN, she was obliged to stick to her position. In other words, she was assuming, as we are all meant to do, that the burden of proof is on the “denier.”
I asked her this question: If I went to the police and told them you were a murderer, should they arrest you? Why not? Because we put the burden of proof on the accuser, which is to say, on the person proposing something that falls outside of normal assumptions. Why do we do the opposite with man-made global climate change?
Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea. He can be reached at d_jonescu@yahoo.ca.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8986
-
As best as the lowly layman reader can tell, those three pieces are rather impressive-- especially the Jonescu one--thank you BBG. I note btw, the second posted material, references the variable I have been asking Chuck to address, namely solar activity.
Anyway, Chuck, over to you.
-
Quote
slippery method of debate
Slippery? I am asking you to provide facts and quotes. I am striving for the opposite of slippery.
By excising a sentence fragment, ignoring the pieces, facts, and quotes I have provided, and then taking a high moral tone? Let me know how that works out.
That is exactly the ground I want to fight. I want to go back and talk about the actual underlying science and work from there. You seem to want to prove ad infinitum that it is difficult to quantify temperature changes on the earth and other large physical systems. Why don't you go prove that boxers punch people in the face while you are at it?
What a silly comparison. When a punch lands there is a concrete result, which is why I prefer sparring to internet debate as when I smack someone there is an immediate impact disingenuous debate does not alter. They can then claim that concrete result should not be taken at face value, but the welt remains. Where AGW is concerned, alas, the books are cooked, the single variable most latch on to has failed to produce applicable, replicable results despite hyperventilation unprecedented in science, and exclusive focus on that variable has eclipsed myriad other factors impacting heating/cooling/climate/whatever, while anyone who points out the nekid emperor aspects of this foolishness is called mean names. I understand you want to thrum on IR absorption rate of CO2, but doesn't the complexity of the various systems and the impact of the near exclusive focus on the single variable have critical places in the conversation? Or are we only allowed to tangle on the ground you have staked out?
Ocean acidification is a separate and worthy discussion. Let me know if you want to have it. I'm currently working on a nitrification water treatment plant and the relevant bacteria do not shrug off minor pH changes. They go dormant. Not all organisms behave the same way. I personally don't take a cavalier attitude towards poorly understood systems.
And what precisely is this mild form of carbonic acid that you are referring to? CO2 is known to dissolve in water. Not exactly a great mystery. But if I want to know the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere I don't go grab the Encyclopedia Brittanica and start researching photosynthesis. I just grab an oxygen meter and and take a measurement. So again, I fail to understand why you are talking about KNOWN CO2 sinks when I can simply look at the old number and then look at the current number. Do you want to talk about predicting future CO2 concentrations? If so, what you are talking about is of relevance. I didn't realize we were trying to figure that out.
I'm a lay cave scientist, hence my fascination with carbonic acid infiltration of sandstone microlineaments in Karst formations. We cavers have a really lame joke:
Q: What's worse than caving w/ a geologist?
A: Caving w/ two geologists.
The joke doesn't have to be explained to cavers or most scientists: the only thing worse that spending 12 to 30 hours underground with a droning know-it-all is doing the same with two know-it-alls who argue interminably about every aspect of cave geology. And that experience isn't unique to caving or geology: there is vigorous, conflicting debate in just about every branch of science, except the newly minted branch of climate science where unanimity is demanded and, as evidenced by the Climategate emails, schemed for in a manner that would make Madam Defarge proud.
Be that as it may, I will cede that your science training is likely far more formal than mine, and were I silly enough to fight on that ground I'd likely take a drubbing. That does not mean, however, that I have to accept the premise that rising CO2 levels are causing warming many vocal folks consider catastrophic, particularly as there are so many articulate "deniers" better trained than I taking issue with that premise, with many of those pieces being posted here. In view of the trillions of dollars AGW remediation would cost, the dubious results that remediation would likely bring, and the energy and development strangling politics embraced by many on the left who just so happen to be big AGW boosters, I think there is plenty of reason to question the unanimity this infant discipline pretends.
An aside: I note you embrace DBMA affectations, but don't appear to have much of a handle on its ethos. I expect Marc will chime in if I veer too far from my lane, but as I understand it he likes his discussion sites to be extensions of the tribe strengthening through progressive, realistic contact ethic he favors on the martial arts side of the house. What I've seen in this thread doesn't much reflect that, having a much more traditional martial arts flavor instead: in a horse stance with fists on the hip you marched across the floor throwing IR absorption rate of CO2 punches. Physics theory gets raised and replied to with snap kicks marching the other way. It becomes more convenient to talk about laws of physics so things switch over to outer crescents thrown as the mat is crossed again. Scintillating stuff.
Looks to me like you want to maneuver folks on to very specific scientific ground you have staked out upon which you can recreationally beat them to jelly with the tools you've been trained in, knowing they haven't the same skill set. Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but I suspect that's not the way Crafty wants business conducted around here. I'm certainly not stupid enough to tangle on your terms on your turf and think there are enough credible sources cited on these pages and elsewhere challenging CO2 doomsaying there is very little point in recapitulation.
I do have strong suspicions, however, that scientists with political ends and politicians in need of scientific means have found a window amid the current interglacial interlude during which they can present a non-falsifiable scenario meant to stampede the unwashed masses toward their authoritarian ends. Think one side of the debate had a lot in common with Trofim Lysenko, Piltdown Man, Pons and Fleischmann, Michael Bellesiles, et al, that it's not very difficult to identify where those commonalities lie, and that you can only cry "wolf" while the sky is falling so many times before the doomstruck message loses its thrall. If you'd like to engage on that topic in lay terms, by all means, bring it.
And this is the discussion that we WOULD have had if you had bothered to look at the underlying science. BTW water vapor is already fully accounted for and is the reason why this planet is livable. Thanks water. CO2 seems to be changing hence the interest.
Yeah, "settled science" as they just get the tools to study the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation. All roads lead to the carbon dioxide fetish, I guess.
I want you to provide a quotation indicating that someone thinks that CO2 is the only reason why the climate is changing. That is the quote, or something close to it, that I want. You seem to think that these scientists completely discount all other reasons why the climate could be changing. Well if one of them truly said it, then you should be able to provide that quotation. And way to pick a movie made by a non-scientist to prove a point and then not even provide a relevant quote. BTW I have never seen the movie in question so you will have to get me a quote from it to make your point.
The fight I am picking is with the settled science crowd that has been echoed by the media and exploited by Al Gore. You seem to be a member of that crowd, except when it's expedient to disavow them. Are you seriously suggesting that CO2 doomsaying has not been hyped by scientists to the media to ends that are dubious at best?
As that may be, don't ask the question if you don't want it answered, particularly as you'd have to be living under a rock not to have been bombarded by "global warming is gonna doom us all" foolishness.
Well I guess my education never ceases
And your non-responsivness knows few bounds. Don't change the terms of debate and I won't call you on it.
CO2 seems to be of particular interest to me and others because it is the variable that we have some control over. Last time I checked we didn't much control over the amount of water vapor in the air, the wavelengths and intensity of sunlight, or the ability of various molecules to transmit or absorb various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.
No foolin'? We capping volcanoes? Interdicting asteroid strikes? Ending wildfires? Interrupting Ice Ages and their impact on the CO2 cycle? Who knew?
PS: I did indeed misremember the ocean acidification factor: it was 1.4 molars. More details here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/01/scripps-blockbuster-ocean-acidification-happens-all-the-time-naturally/
-
A long time ago I had a girlfriend who was getting her masters in Geology. She actually moved to Greece to keep working on things related to her dissertation, about the formation of their mountains and why their peaks were composed of mineral dense seafloor material.
Anyway, I went to watch her dissertation where I got to hear some of the greatest scientific bickering of my life. At one point in a break between her professors arguing with each other, one turned to her and aggressively asked, "Why did you call this a pebbly mud-stone." To which she shot back irritably, "Because it is a pebbly mud-stone."
-
Woof BBG,
By excising a sentence fragment, ignoring the pieces, facts, and quotes I have provided, and then taking a high moral tone? Let me know how that works out.
What have you provided? Articles ad infinitum indicating that it is difficult to measure changes in the temperature of the planet. yawn. tell me something I don't already know full well. Show me where one single scientist indicated that carbon dioxide is the sole variable that changes the temperature of the planet or affects the weather. That is what you are claiming they are saying. I'm saying Bull.
What a silly comparison.
Unfortunately it went over your head.
I'm a lay cave scientist, hence my fascination with carbonic acid infiltration of sandstone microlineaments in Karst formations.
And I have spent 20+ years addressing issues associated with calcite and aragonite precipitation in water treatment systems. This is a topic I understand quite well.
That does not mean, however, that I have to accept the premise that rising CO2 levels are causing warming many vocal folks consider catastrophic,
Am I supposedly one of those folks?
Physics theory gets raised and replied to with snap kicks marching the other way.
I have yet to see any physics discussion. The only thing we have been discussing so far has been BBG, G.M., and Guro C IMO. I have been itching for that physics discussion for a while hence my wonderment at you saying that I am slippery.
I do have strong suspicions, however, that scientists with political ends and politicians in need of scientific means have found a window amid the current interglacial interlude during which they can present a non-falsifiable scenario meant to stampede the unwashed masses toward their authoritarian ends.
Now this just sounds like conspiracy theory. Instead look at the underlying science which is not political in nature last time I checked. You have yet to do it.
Yeah, "settled science" as they just get the tools to study the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation. All roads lead to the carbon dioxide fetish, I guess.
Hmm, like a cloud chamber ionizing radiation detector? A rather old tool last time I checked. But sure, maybe the sky fairy will send us more ionization radiation to save us from the effects of global warming. What exactly that has to do with the underlying theory I have no idea. I thought people quit talking about the health effects of ionizing radiation back in the early 1900s but perhaps it will make a comeback.
I remember when you said that the global warming effects of water were more pronounced and less studied than CO2. A rather silly comment when you consider that the greenhouse gas effects of water vapor have been studied from the mid 1800s and is considered to be the only reason that life is possible on the planet Earth. If you would quit trying to prove that we can't accurately measure the temperature of the planet, and actually look at the rest of science, you might have known this.
As that may be, don't ask the question if you don't want it answered, particularly as you'd have to be living under a rock not to have been bombarded by "global warming is gonna doom us all" foolishness.
Still looking for my quote. i guess I'm not going to get it. Scientists say that the temperature of the earth will change by, last time I checked, 4 degrees celcius. I would hardly say that is a doom and gloom forecast. That is your language, not theirs.
And your non-responsivness knows few bounds. Don't change the terms of debate and I won't call you on it.
No clue what you are talking about here. Can you elaborate?
I did indeed misremember the ocean acidification factor: it was 1.4 molars.
er, 1.4 pH units which is not the same as molarity by any stretch. Just put it on your list.
Chuck
-
Woof Doug,
Complete straw argument or false observation IMO that the people pressing for the policies that grow revenues most during these times of paralyzing deficits want to minimize revenues
Well, Guro C. would be one of those people who are not interested in maximizing the revenue that the government receives so I'm thinking that my argument can't be totally false.
Chuck
-
Woof Guro C.,
I can't say I was blown away by any of those articles. So there could be (and probably are) factors that limit the potential catastrophic effects of AGW. This seems like a rather uncontroversial hypothesis to me. I'm surprised they devoted so much space and supposedly erudite mathematical equations to the topic. It could have been a line or two. Temp goes up a bit, more water vapor, more clouds, more IR reflectance. Next.
"the effect of solar activity on climate cannot be neglected in any period of the millennium."
I guess the law of conservation of energy wasn't repealed after all. Of course this is a true statement and again is about as uncontroversial as anything I have ever read. As I have indicated previously the Max Planck institute has indicated that solar power output has not changed in the last 50 years. Do you have anything that indicates that solar output has increased because I don't. I'm still struggling with how solar flares are supposed to have some effect on this.
Chuck
-
I'm not qualified or inclined to debate the science at the level in play here. The articles I cited seemed to me to offer a scientifcally plausible alternate to the temperature variations-- but I sure ain't the one to defend the case. I didn't get that there was an assertion that solar output had changed, only that some see an empirically observed connection between the solar flares and what happens here on earth. Signing off to lurk and enjoy the back and forth between BBG and you.
-
Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Enlarge Image
CloseCorbis
.Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.
If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
By David Rose
Last updated at 5:38 AM on 29th January 2012
Comments (467) Share
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.
More...Hotter summers 'may kill 5,900 every year', warns first national risk assessment of climate change
Winter bites back: Britain braced for first cold snap of year as ice and snow transform countryside in scenes of breathtaking beauty
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop#articleTabs%3Darticle
-
Some of the "factors" so easily dismissed by those who prefer to focus on a minuscule percentage of atmospheric CO2.
The Ridiculousness Continues – Climate Complexity Compiled
Posted on January 21, 2012 by justthefactswuwt
By WUWT regular “Just The Facts”
With the help of an array of WUWT reader comments on this thread and several others documented within, I’ve been compiling a summary of all potential climatic variables in order to build a conceptual map of Earth’s climate system. The goals of this exercise include; To gain a bigger picture understanding and perspective of Earth’s climate system. To demonstrate that Earth’s climate system is a ridiculously complex, continually evolving and sometimes chaotic beast, with the plethora of variables, many interdependencies and an array of feedbacks, both positive and negative. To highlight the challenges associated with accurately measuring the current state, as well as predicting the trajectory and likely future state of Earth’s climate system many decades into the future. To build the WUWT Potential Climatic Variables Reference Page. To lay the conceptual groundwork for the WUWT Likely Climatic Variables Reference Page.
Your help in completing this exercise would be most appreciated. Please take a look through the list below and let me know if you have any additions, suggestions or corrections. For those of you who’ve already read this list, it has grown significantly, especially the later portions. Please pay particular attention to Section 9. Albedo, as most of the content is new, thus it may need more work, and I’m also trying out a different linking/reference format. Your input on preferences between the linking/reference format in Section 9, versus the rest of the document would be most appreciated.
Note: The list below is an evolving document that continues to undergo significant revisions and improvements based upon crowdsourcing input of an array of WUWT contributors. Additionally, this list was posted in a prior article and in comments on WUWT a few times previously, receiving input from a vast number of contributors. This thread, along with these precursor threads will serve as the bibliography for the forthcoming WUWT Potential Climatic Variables Reference Page.
Wikipedia Note: The list relies heavily upon Wikipedia, due to the fact that it is the only source that offers reasonably coherent content on such broad range of subjects. However, there are know issues with Wikpedia’s content, especially biases in their climate articles. As such, please take care to view any Wikipedia articles with a critical eye and check Wikipedia’s references to evaluate the credibility of their sources. Additionally, in comments, please provide your suggestions of articles from alternate sources that can be added to this list in order to help readers to easily verify the veracity of the Wikipedia articles within.
1. Earth’s Rotational Energy;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6h.html
results in day and night;
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_does_rotation_cause_day_and_night
causes the Coriolis Effect;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect
imparts Planetary Vorticity on the oceans;
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter12/chapter12_01.htm
and manifests as Ocean Gyres;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_gyre
the Antarctic Circumpolar Current;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Conveyor_belt.svg
Arctic Ocean Circulation;
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=441&cid=47170&ct=61&article=20727
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/flows.jpg
can result in the formation of Polynya;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynya
and causes the Equatorial Bulge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_bulge
Earth’s Rotational Energy influences Atmospheric Circulation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation
including the Jet Stream;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream
Westerlies;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westerlies
Tradewinds;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_wind
Geostrophic Wind;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostrophic_wind
Surface Currents;
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/ocean_currents.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current
through Ekman Transport;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekman_transport
http://oceanmotion.org/html/background/ocean-in-motion.htm
Rosby Waves;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_wave
which “are principally responsible for the Brewer-Dobson circulation”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer-Dobson_circulation
http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/~lizsmith/SEES/ozone/class/Chap_6/6_4.htm
Tropical Cyclones;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
possibly Tornadoes;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado
however, Windows To The Universe states that, “because there are records of anticyclonic tornadoes, scientists don’t think that the Coriolis Effect causes the rotations.”;
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/tornado/formation.html
and Polar Vortices;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/polar-vortex/
which “are caused when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain.”
http://www.universetoday.com/973/what-venus-and-saturn-have-in-common/
Here’s an animation of the Arctic Polar Vortex in Winter 2008 – 09:
When a Polar Vortex splits or breaks down it can cause a Sudden Stratospheric Warming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_stratospheric_warming
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36972
Earth’s Rotational Energy influences Plate Tectonics;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
“By analyzing the minute changes in travel times and wave shapes for each doublet, the researchers concluded that the Earth’s inner core is rotating faster than its surface by about 0.3-0.5 degrees per year.
That may not seem like much, but it’s very fast compared to the movement of the Earth’s crust, which generally slips around only a few centimeters per year compared to the mantle below, said Xiaodong Song, a geologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an author on the study.
http://www.livescience.com/9313-earth-core-rotates-faster-surface-study-confirms.html
The surface movement is called plate tectonics. It involves the shifting of about a dozen major plates and is what causes most earthquakes”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake
Volcanoes;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano
and Mountain Formation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_formation
which can influence the creation of Atmospheric Waves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_wave
Lastly, Rotational Energy is the primary driver of Earth’s Dynamo;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory
which generates Earth’s Magnetic Field;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field
and is primarily responsible for the Earthy behaviors of the Magnetosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere
with certain secular variations in Earth’s magnetic field originating from ocean flow/circulation;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090622-earths-core-dynamo.html
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/11/6/063015/fulltext
though Leif Svalgaard notes that these are minor variations, as the magnetic field originating from ocean flow/circulation “is 1000 times smaller than the main field generated in the core.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/30/earths-climate-system-is-ridiculously-complex-with-draft-link-tutorial/#comment-707971
Earth Core Changes:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/42580
appear “to be generated in the Earth’s core by a dynamo process, associated with the circulation of liquid metal in the core, driven by internal heat sources”. “Molten iron flowing in the outer core generates the Earth’s geodynamo, leading to a planetary-scale magnetic field. Beyond this, though, geophysicists know very little for certain about the field, such as its strength in the core or why its orientation fluctuates regularly. Researchers do suspect, however, that field variations are strongly linked with changing conditions within the molten core.” These core changes
influence the Magnetosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere
including movement of the Geomagnetic Poles:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
Also of note, “Over millions of years, [Earth's] rotation is significantly slowed by gravitational interactions with the Moon: see tidal acceleration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration
“Tidal acceleration is an effect of the tidal forces between an orbiting natural satellite (e.g. the Moon), and the primary planet that it orbits (e.g. the Earth). The “acceleration” is usually negative, as it causes a gradual slowing and recession of a satellite in a prograde orbit away from the primary, and a corresponding slowdown of the primary’s rotation. The process eventually leads to tidal locking of first the smaller, and later the larger body. The Earth-Moon system is the best studied case.”
“The presence of the moon (which has about 1/81 the mass of the Earth), is slowing Earth’s rotation and lengthening the day by about 2 ms every one hundred years.”
Length of Day;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_length
Earth’s rotation is slowing “due to a transfer of Earth’s rotational momentum to the Moon’s orbital momentum as tidal friction slows the Earth’s rotation. That increase in the Moon’s speed is causing it to slowly recede from Earth (about 4 cm per year), increasing its orbital period and the length of a month as well.” “The slowing rotation of the Earth results in a longer day as well as a longer month. Once the length of a day equals the length of a month, the tidal friction mechanism will cease. (ie. Once your speed on the track matches the speed of the horses, you can’t gain any more speed with your lasso trick.) That’s been projected to happen once the day and month both equal about 47 (current) days, billions of years in the future. If the Earth and Moon still exist, the Moon’s distance will have increased to about 135% of its current value.”
http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae695.cfm
“However some large scale events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, have caused the rotation to speed up by around 3 microseconds.[21] Post-glacial rebound, ongoing since the last Ice age, is changing the distribution of the Earth’s mass thus affecting the Moment of Inertia of the Earth and, by the Conservation of Angular Momentum, the Earth’s rotation period.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation
2. Orbital Energy, Orbital Period, Elliptical Orbits (Eccentricity), Tilt (Obliquity) and Wobble (Axial precession):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synodic
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6h.html
creates Earth’s seasons;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season
which drives annual changes in Arctic Sea Ice;
and Antarctic Sea Ice;
the freezing and melting of which helps to drive the Thermohaline Circulation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
and can result in the formation of Polynyas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynya
Earth’s orbit around the Sun, Earth’s tilt, Earth’s wobble and the Moon’s orbit around Earth, Earth’s Rotation, and the gravity of the Moon, Sun and Earth, act in concert to determine the constantly evolving Tidal Force on Earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force
This Tidal Force is influenced by variations in Lunar Orbit;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon
as seen in the Lunar Phases;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase
Lunar Precession;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_precession
Lunar Node;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_node
Saros cycles;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_cycle
and Inex cycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inex
The combined cycles of the Saros and Inex Cycles can be visualized here:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/image/SEpanoramaGvdB-big.JPG
Over longer time frames changes to Earth’s orbit, tilt and wobble called Milankovitch cycles;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
may be responsible for the periods of Glaciation (Ice Ages);
http://www.homepage.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/time1/milankov.htm
that Earth has experienced for the last several million years of its climatic record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
Also of note, over very long time frames, “the Moon is spiraling away from Earth at an average rate of 3.8 cm per year”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance_%28astronomy%29
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=124
3. Gravitation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation
The gravity of the Moon, Sun and Earth, Earth’s rotation, Earth’s orbit around the Sun, Earth’s tilt, Earth’s wobble and the Moon’s orbit around Earth act in concert to determine the constantly evolving Tidal Force on Earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force
This tidal force results in that result in Earth’s Ocean Tide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide
http://www.themcdonalds.net/richard/astro/papers/602-tides-web.pdf
Atmospheric Tide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_tide
Earth Tide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_tide
and Magma Tide:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7005r0273703250/
Earth’s Gravity;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection#Gravitational_or_buoyant_convection
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=205
in concert with Tidal Forces, influence Earth’s Ocean Circulation;
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ocean_circulation
which influences Oceanic Oscillations including El Niño/La Niña;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Oscillation
the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Decadal_Oscillation
the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Multidecadal_Oscillation
the Indian_Ocean_Dipole (IOD)/Indian Ocean Oscillation (IOO) and;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Dipole
can result in the formation of Polynyas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynya
Gravity Waves;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave
which may be partially responsible for the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-biennial_oscillation
“on an air–sea interface are called surface gravity waves or Surface Waves”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_wave
“while internal gravity waves are called Inertial Waves”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_waves
“Rosby Waves;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_waves
Geostrophic Currents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostrophic
and Geostrophic Wind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostrophic_wind
are examples of inertial waves. Inertial waves are also likely to exist in the core of the Earth”
Earth’s gravity is the primary driver of Plate Tectonics;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
“The Slab Pull;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_pull
force is a tectonic plate force due to subduction. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at trenches. This force and the slab suction force account for most of the overall force acting on plate tectonics, and the Ridge Push;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_push
force accounts for 5 to 10% of the overall force.”
Isostasy also exists whereby a “state of gravitational equilibrium between the earth’s lithosphere and asthenosphere such that the tectonic plates “float” at an elevation which depends on their thickness and density.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostasy
Plate Tectonics drive “cycles of ocean basin growth and destruction, known as Wilson cycles;
http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html
involving continental rifting;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rift
seafloor-spreading;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafloor_spreading
subduction;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction
and collision.”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_collision
“Climate change on ultra-long time scales (tens of millions of years) are more than likely connected to plate tectonics.”
“Through the course of a Wilson cycle continents collide and split apart, mountains are uplifted and eroded, and ocean basins open and close. The re-distribution and changing size and elevation of continental land masses may have caused climate change on long time scales”;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html
a process called the Supercontinent Cycle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle
Earth’s gravity is responsible for Katabatic Wind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabatic_wind
4. Solar Energy;;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
results is Solar Radiation/Sunlight;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation
which varies based upon 11 and 22 year cycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
Total Solar Irradiance (TSI);
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/solar/solarirrad.html
appears to fluctuate “by approximately 0.1% or about 1.3 Watts per square meter (W/m2) peak-to-trough during the 11-year sunspot cycle”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
Solar Energy also drives the Hydrological/Water Cycle;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrological_cycle
within the Hydrosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere
as Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) causes evaporation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation
that drives Cloud formation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud
results in Precipitation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precipitation_%28meteorology%29
that results in the Water Distribution on Earth;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth
creates surface Runoff;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runoff_%28water%29
which result in Rivers;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River
and drives Erosion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erosion
Solar energy is also “The driving force behind atmospheric circulation is solar energy, which heats the atmosphere with different intensities at the equator, the middle latitudes, and the poles.”
http://www.scienceclarified.com/As-Bi/Atmospheric-Circulation.html
Atmospheric Circulation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation
includes Hadley Cells;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell
Ferrel Cells;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation#Ferrel_cell
Polar Cells;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_cells
all of which help to create Wind;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind
that influence Surface Currents;
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/ocean_currents.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current
through Ekman Transport;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekman_transport
http://oceanmotion.org/html/background/ocean-in-motion.htm
and also cause Langmuir circulations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langmuir_circulation
Solar energy drives the Brewer Dobson Circulation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer-Dobson_circulation
which influences Polar Vortices:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/polar-vortex/
Atmospheric Waves;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_wave
including Atmospheric Tides;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_tide
evaporation and condensation that may help to drive changes in Atmospheric Pressure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/24015/2010/acpd-10-24015-2010.pdf
and Atmospheric Escape;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
Solar Ultraviolet (UV) radiation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet
appears to vary by approximately 10% during the solar cycle;
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solarcycle-sorce.html
has been hypothesized to influence Earth’s climate;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/05/courtillot-on-the-solar-uv-climate-connection/
however Leif Svalgaard argues that,
This is well-trodden ground. Nothing new to add, just the same old, tired arguments. Perhaps a note on EUV: as you can see here (slide 13)
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2008ScienceMeeting/doc/Session1/S1_03_Kopp.pdf the energy in the EUV band [and other UV bands] is very tiny; many orders of magnitude less than what shines down on our heads each day. So a larger solar cycle variation of EUV does not make any significant difference in the energy budget.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/05/courtillot-on-the-solar-uv-climate-connection/#comment-636477
Additionally variations in Ultraviolet (UV) radiation may influence the break down of Methane;
(Source TBD)
Infrared Radiation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
Solar – Wind;
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast13dec99_1/
Solar – Coronal Holes;
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/chole.html
Solar – Solar Energetic Particles (SEP);
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/sep.html
Solar – Coronal Mass Ejection;
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMF75BNJTF_index_0.html
http://www.ratedesi.com/video/v/8AuCE_NNEaM/Sun-Erupts-to-Life-Unleashes-a-Huge-CME-on-13-April-2010
Solar Magnetosphere Breach;
Solar Polar Field Reversal;
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast15feb_1/
Solar Sector Boundary;
http://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics/focus-areas/magnetosphere-ionosphere/
Grand Minimum;
Leif Svalgaard says: February 6, 2011 at 8:26 pm
If L&P are correct and sunspots become effectively] invisible [not gone] it might mean another Grand Minimum lasting perhaps 50 years. During this time the solar cycle is still operating, cosmic rays are still modulated, and the solar wind is still buffeting the Earth.”
“It will lead to a cooling of a couple of tenths of a degree.”
Solar Influences on Climate:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009RG000282.pdf
Statistical issues about solar–climate relations
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Yiou-565-2010.pdf
5. Geothermal Energy;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy
influences Earth’s climate especially when released by Volcanoes;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano
“which are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_boundary
or converging”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_boundary
however, “intraplate volcanism has also been postulated to be caused by mantle plumes”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_plume
“These so-called “hotspots”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotspot_%28geology%29
for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapir
from the core-mantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.”
Volcanoes have been shown to influence Earth’s climate;
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm
including in the infamous Year Without a Summer;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
which was partially caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora
and is called a Volcanic Winter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
“Volcanic Ash;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_ash
particles have a maximum residence time in the troposphere of a few weeks.
The finest Tephera;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tephra
remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.
“The greatest volcanic impact upon the earth’s short term weather patterns is caused by sulfur dioxide gas;”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide
“In the cold lower atmosphere, it is converted to Sulfuric Acid;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfuric_acid
sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.
Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.
Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”
http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm
There is also some evidence that if “volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1
Geothermic Energy can also warm the atmosphere through Hot Springs;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_springs
or warm the ocean through Hydrothermal Vents;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
which can be a factor in Hydrothermal Circulations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_circulation
6. Outer Space/Cosmic/Galactic Influences;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy
including Asteroids;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid
Meteorites;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite
and Comets;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet
can all significantly impact Earth’s climate upon impact.
It has been hypothesized that Galactic Cosmic Rays;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_cosmic_ray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
modulated by Solar Wind, may influence cloud formation on Earth:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/04/a-link-between-the-sun-cosmic-rays-aerosols-and-liquid-water-clouds-appears-to-exist-on-a-global-scale/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/breaking-news-cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-rays-influence-climate-change/
Galactic Magnetic Fields also result in the;
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Galactic_magnetic_fields
Galactic Tide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_tide
which may influence the hypothesized Oort cloud;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_Cloud
“Besides the galactic tide, the main trigger for sending comets into the inner Solar System is believed to be interaction between the Sun’s Oort cloud and the gravitational fields of near-by stars or giant molecular clouds.”
Also Cosmic Dust;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust
“is a type of dust composed of particles in space which are a few molecules to 0.1 µm in size. Cosmic dust can be further distinguished by its astronomical location; for example: intergalactic dust, interstellar dust, interplanetary dust (such as in the zodiacal cloud) and circumplanetary dust (such as in a planetary ring).”
“Depending on their size and overall number, cosmic dust and other particles in the atmosphere have the potential to change Earth’s climate. They can reflect sunlight, which cools the Earth, absorb sunlight, which warms the atmosphere, and act as a blanket for the planet by trapping any heat it gives off. They can also facilitate the formation of rain clouds.”
http://www.space.com/1484-source-cosmic-dust.html
In addition, “a study of astronomical and geological data reveals that cosmic ray electrons and electromagnetic radiation from a similar outburst of our own Galactic core, impacted our Solar System near the end of the last ice age. This cosmic ray event spanned a period of several thousand years and climaxed around 14,200 years ago. Although far less intense than the PG 0052+251 quasar outburst, it was, nevertheless, able to substantially affect the Earth’s climate and trigger a solar-terrestrial conflagration the initiated the worst animal extinction episode of the Tertiary period.
The effects on the Sun and on the Earth’s climate were not due to the Galactic cosmic rays themselves, but to the cosmic dust that these cosmic rays transported into the Solar System. Observations have shown that the Solar System is presently immersed in a dense cloud of cosmic dust, material that is normally kept at bay by the outward pressure of the solar wind. But, with the arrival of this Galactic cosmic ray volley, the solar wind was overpowered and large quantities of this material were pushed inward. The Sun was enveloped in a cocoon of dust that caused its spectrum to shift toward the infrared. In addition, the dust grains filling the Solar System scattered radiation back to the Earth, producing an “interplanetary hothouse effect” that substantially increased the influx of solar radiation to the Earth.”
http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/Galactic.html
7. Earth’s Magnetic Field;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field
is primarily responsible for the Earthy behaviors of the Magnetosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere
with certain secular variations in Earth’s magnetic field originating from ocean flow/circulation;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090622-earths-core-dynamo.html
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/11/6/063015/fulltext
though Leif Svalgaard notes that these are minor variations, as the magnetic field originating from ocean flow/circulation “is 1000 times smaller than the main field generated in the core.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/30/earths-climate-system-is-ridiculously-complex-with-draft-link-tutorial/#comment-707971
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field
Earth Core Changes:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/42580
appear “to be generated in the Earth’s core by a dynamo process, associated with the circulation of liquid metal in the core, driven by internal heat sources”. “Molten iron flowing in the outer core generates the Earth’s geodynamo, leading to a planetary-scale magnetic field. Beyond this, though, geophysicists know very little for certain about the field, such as its strength in the core or why its orientation fluctuates regularly. Researchers do suspect, however, that field variations are strongly linked with changing conditions within the molten core.” These core changes
influence the Magnetosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere
including movement of the Geomagnetic Poles:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
According to a 2009 Danish study “Is there a link between Earth’s magnetic field and low-latitude precipitation?” by Knudsen and Riisager, Geology, 2009. “The earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s magnetic field”
“Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth’s magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,” one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.”
http://www.spacedaily.com/2006/090112183735.ojdq7esu.html
“Intriguingly, we observe a relatively good correlation between the high-resolution speleothem δ18O records and the dipole moment, suggesting that Earth’s magnetic field to some degree influenced low-latitude precipitation in the past. In addition to supporting the notion that variations in the geomagnetic field may have influenced Earth’s climate in the past, our study also provides some degree of support for the controversial link between GCR particles, cloud formation, and climate.”
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/37/1/71.abstract
Also, according to the 2008 European Space Agency article;
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQ8LKRQJF_index_0.html
“Oxygen is constantly leaking out of Earth’s atmosphere and into space. Now, ESA’s formation-flying quartet of satellites, Cluster, has discovered the physical mechanism that is driving the escape. It turns out that the Earth’s own magnetic field is accelerating the oxygen away.
8. Atmospheric Composition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
Nitrogen (N2) represents approximately 780,840 ppmv or 78.084% of Earth’s Atmosphere;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen
Oxygen (O2) represents approximately 209,460 ppmv or 20.946%;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
Argon (Ar) represents approximately 9,340 ppmv or 0.9340%;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) represents approximately 390 ppmv or 0.039%;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
contributes to the Greenhouse Effect;
http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_3_1.htm
and influences the rate of Plant Growth;
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CO2plants.htm
Neon (Ne) represents approximately18.18 ppmv or 0.001818%;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon
Helium (He) represents approximately 5.24 ppmv (0.000524%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium
“In the Earth’s atmosphere, the concentration of Helium by volume is only 5.2 parts per million.[66][67] The concentration is low and fairly constant despite the continuous production of new helium because most helium in the Earth’s atmosphere escapes into space by several processes.[68][69][70] In the Earth’s heterosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere, helium and other lighter gases are the most abundant elements.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium
Krypton (Kr) represents approximately 1.14 ppmv (0.000114%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton
Methane (CH4) represents approximately 1.79 ppmv (0.000179%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
contributes to the Greenhouse Effect;
http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_3_1.htm
Hydrogen (H2) represents approximately 0.55 ppmv (0.000055%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) represents approximately 0.3 ppmv (0.00003%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide
contributes to the Greenhouse Effect;
http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_3_1.htm
Ozone (O3) represents approximately 0.0 to 0.07 ppmv (0 to 7×10−6%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) represents approximately 0.02 ppmv (2×10−6%) (0.000002%);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_dioxide
Iodine (I2) represents approximately 0.01 ppmv (1×10−6%) (0.000001%) and;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine
Ammonia (NH3) represents a trace amount of Earth’s Atmosphere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia
Additional atmosphere components includes Water vapor (H2O) that represents approximately 0.40% over full atmosphere, typically 1%-4% at surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor;
“Water Vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66% for clear sky conditions and between 66% and 85% when including clouds.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_vapor
Aerosols;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosol
that “act as cloud condensation nuclei, they alter albedo (both directly and indirectly via clouds) and hence Earth’s radiation budget, and they serve as catalysts of or sites for atmospheric chemistry reactions.”
“Aerosols play a critical role in the formation of clouds;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clouds
Clouds form as parcels of air cool and the water vapor in them condenses, forming small liquid droplets of water. However, under normal circumstances, these droplets form only where there is some “disturbance” in the otherwise “pure” air. In general, aerosol particles provide this “disturbance”. The particles around which cloud droplets coalesce are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or sometimes “cloud seeds”. Amazingly, in the absence of CCN, air containing water vapor needs to be “supersaturated” to a humidity of about 400% before droplets spontaneously form! So, in almost all circumstances, aerosols play a vital role in the formation of clouds.”
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/aerosol_cloud_nucleation_dimming.html
Particulates;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates
including Soot/Black Carbon;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_carbon
Sand;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand
Dust;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust
“Volcanic Ash;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_ash
particles have a maximum residence time in the troposphere of a few weeks.
The finest Tephera;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tephra
remain in the stratosphere for only a few months, they have only minor climatic effects, and they can be spread around the world by high-altitude winds. This suspended material contributes to spectacular sunsets.
The major climate influence from volcanic eruptions is caused by gaseous sulfur compounds, chiefly Sulfur Dioxide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide
which reacts with OH and water in the stratosphere to create sulfate aerosols with a residence time of about 2–3 years.”
“Emission rates of [Sulfur Dioxide] SO2 from an active volcano range from 10 million tonnes/day according to the style of volcanic activity and type and volume of magma involved. For example, the large explosive eruption of Mount Pinatubo on 15 June 1991 expelled 3-5 km3 of dacite magma and injected about 20 million metric tons of SO2 into the stratosphere. The sulfur aerosols resulted in a 0.5-0.6°C cooling of the Earth’s surface in the Northern Hemisphere.”
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php
“The 1815 eruption [of Mount Tambora] is rated 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the only such eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in about 180 AD. With an estimated ejecta volume of 160 cubic kilometers, Tambora’s 1815 outburst was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.”
“The eruption created global climate anomalies that included the phenomenon known as “volcanic winter”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
because of the effect on North American and European weather. Agricultural crops failed and livestock died in much of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora
“In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent “dry fog” was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the “fog”. It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.”
“The greatest volcanic impact upon the earth’s short term weather patterns is caused by sulfur dioxide gas;”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide
“In the cold lower atmosphere, it is converted to Sulfuric Acid;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfuric_acid
sulfuric acid by the sun’s rays reacting with stratospheric water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosol layers. The aerosol remains in suspension long after solid ash particles have fallen to earth and forms a layer of sulfuric acid droplets between 15 to 25 kilometers up. Fine ash particles from an eruption column fall out too quickly to significantly cool the atmosphere over an extended period of time, no matter how large the eruption.
Sulfur aerosols last many years, and several historic eruptions show a good correlation of sulfur dioxide layers in the atmosphere with a decrease in average temperature decrease of subsequent years. The close correlation was first established after the 1963 eruption of Agung volcano in Indonesia when it was found that sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and stayed as a sulfuric acid aerosol.
Without replenishment, the sulfuric acid aerosol layer around the earth is gradually depleted, but it is renewed by each eruption rich in sulfur dioxide. This was confirmed by data collected after the eruptions of El Chichon, Mexico (1982) and Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), both of which were high-sulfur compound carriers like Agung, Indonesia.”
http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm
There is also some evidence that if “volcanic activity was high enough, then a water vapor anomaly would be introduced into the lower stratosphere before the anomaly due to the previous eruption had disappeared. The result would be threefold in the long term: stratospheric cooling, stratospheric humidification, and surface warming due to the positive radiative forcing associated with the water vapor.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1
9. Albedo “or reflection coefficient, is the diffuse reflectivity or reflecting power of a surface. It is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it. Being a dimensionless fraction, it may also be expressed as a percentage, and is measured on a scale from zero for no reflecting power of a perfectly black surface, to 1 for perfect reflection of a white surface.”Wikipedia – Albedo
“The role of Clouds “in regulating weather and climate remains a leading source of uncertainty in projections of global warming.” “Different types of clouds exhibit different reflectivity, theoretically ranging in albedo from a minimum of near 0 to a maximum approaching 0.8.” Wikipedia – Albedo#Clouds
“Cloud Albedo varies from less than 10% to more than 90% and depends on drop sizes, liquid water or ice content, thickness of the cloud, and the sun’s zenith angle. The smaller the drops and the greater the liquid water content, the greater the cloud albedo, if all other factors are the same.” Wikipedia – Cloud Albedo
“On any given day, about half of Earth is covered by clouds, which reflect more sunlight than land and water. Clouds keep Earth cool by reflecting sunlight, but they can also serve as blankets to trap warmth.” Live Science
“Low, thick clouds primarily reflect solar radiation and cool the surface of the Earth. High, thin clouds primarily transmit incoming solar radiation; at the same time, they trap some of the outgoing infrared radiation emitted by the Earth and radiate it back downward, thereby warming the surface of the Earth. Whether a given cloud will heat or cool the surface depends on several factors, including the cloud’s altitude, its size, and the make-up of the particles that form the cloud. The balance between the cooling and warming actions of clouds is very close although, overall, averaging the effects of all the clouds around the globe, cooling predominates.” NASA Earth Observatory – Clouds
Snow “albedos can be as high as 0.9; this, however, is for the ideal example: fresh deep snow over a featureless landscape. Over Antarctica they average a little more than 0.8. Wikipedia – Albedo#Snow
“The albedo for different surface conditions on the sea ice range widely, from roughly 85 per cent of radiation reflected for snow-covered ice to 7 per cent for open water. These two surfaces cover the range from the largest to the smallest albedo on earth.” GRID-Arendal – United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
“Sea ice has a much higher albedo compared to other earth surfaces, such as the surrounding ocean. A typical ocean albedo is approximately 0.06, while bare sea ice varies from approximately 0.5 to 0.7. This means that the ocean reflects only 6 percent of the incoming solar radiation and absorbs the rest, while sea ice reflects 50 to 70 percent of the incoming energy. The sea ice absorbs less solar energy and keeps the surface cooler.
snow has an even higher albedo than sea ice, and so thick sea ice covered with snow reflects as much as 90 percent of the incoming solar radiation. This serves to insulate the sea ice, maintaining cold temperatures and delaying ice melt in the summer. After the snow does begin to melt, and because shallow melt ponds have an albedo of approximately 0.2 to 0.4, the surface albedo drops to about 0.75. As melt ponds grow and deepen, the surface albedo can drop to 0.15. As a result, melt ponds are associated with higher energy absorption and a more rapid ice melt.”
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html
“It should be pointed out that these planetary albedos are averages. Taking Earth as an example, clouds vary from 0.4 to 0.8, snow varies from 0.4 to 0.85, forests vary from 0.04 to 0.1, grass is about 0.15, and water varies from 0.02 with the Sun directly overhead to 0.8 at low levels of incidence. So the Earth’s albedo varies, and depends on the extent of cloudiness, snowfall, and the Sun’s angle of incidence on the oceans. With an average albedo of 0.37, 63% of incoming solar energy contributes to the warmth of our planet.”
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut26-1.htm
“Ocean albedo varies not only with zenith angle, as above, but also tides, clouds, spindrift, plankton, other particulates, and temperature, Wind direction and velocity also have a major effect on waves and chop, affecting reflectance. At high zenith angles, the reflectance of still water, as in small ponds, etc., is close to 1.00. Choppy seas can have fairly high albedo.
See also: http://snowdog.larc.nasa.gov/jin/albedofind.html“
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/21/the-ridiculousness-continues-climate-complexity-compiled/#comment-872099
Also Particulates such as Soot/
Black_carbon warm “the Earth by absorbing heat in the atmosphere and by reducing albedo, the ability to reflect sunlight, when deposited on snow and ice. Black carbon stays in the atmosphere for only several days to weeks, whereas CO2 has an atmospheric lifetime of more than 100 years.”
“Estimates of black carbon’s globally averaged direct radiative forcing vary from the IPCC’s estimate of + 0.34 watts per square meter (W/m2) ± 0.25, to a more recent estimate by V. Ramanathan and G. Carmichael of 0.9 W/m2.” Wikipedia – Black Carbon
“Blooms of snow algea can reduce the surface albedo (light reflectance) of snow and ice, and largely affect their melting (Thomas and Duval, 1995; Hoham and Duval, 2001). For example, some glaciers in Himalayas are covered with a large amount of dark-colored biogenic material (cryoconite) derived from snow algae and bacteria (Kohshima et al., 1993; Takeuchi et al., 2001). The albedo of the intact surfaces bearing the cryoconite was substantially lower than that of the surface from which the cryoconite was artificially removed (5% versus 37%). The melting rates of the intact surfaces were reported to be 3 times larger than that of the surfaces without the cryoconite. Thus, snow algal activity possibly affects heat budget and mass balance of glaciers.” Department of Earth Sciences – Chiba University
Phytoplankton may influence Earth’s climate. A recent study used “a synergistic analysis of satellite observations (MODIS, SeaWiFS, AIRS, SSM/I and CERES)” to try to show that “dimethylsulfide (DMS) and isoprene emissions by marine phytoplankton” “into the atmosphere strongly influences cloud properties within a broad latitude belt in the Southern Hemisphere during the austral summer.” They “detected indirect aerosol effects over the Southern Ocean from 45°S to 65°S, especially in regions with plankton blooms, indicated by high chlorophyll-a concentration in seawater. The strong increase in cloud condensation nuclei column content from 2.0 × 108 to more than 5.0 × 108 CCN/cm2 for a chlorophyll increase from 0.3 to about 0.5 mg/m3 in these regions decreases cloud droplet effective radius and increases cloud optical thickness for water clouds. Consequently, the upward short-wave radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere increases.” There analysis found “reduced precipitation over the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone during strong plankton blooms.” Krüger and Graßl, Geophysical Research Letters, 2011
“Even small shear rates can increase backscattering from blooms of large phytoplankton by more than 30 percent,” said Roman Stocker, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT and lead author on a paper about this work. “This implies that fluid flow, which is typically neglected in models of marine optics, may exert an important control on light propagation, influencing the rates of carbon fixation and how we estimate these rates via remote sensing.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
10. Biology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology
“Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in the cells of living organisms to sustain life.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism
“Phototrophs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoautotroph
are the organisms (usually plants) that carry out photosynthesis;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
to acquire energy. They use the energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic materials to be utilized in cellular functions such as biosynthesis and respiration.” “In plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen as a waste product.”
Chemoautotrophs;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotroph
are “organisms that obtain carbon through Chemosynthesis;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis
are phylogenetically diverse, but groups that include conspicuous or biogeochemically-important taxa include the sulfur-oxidizing gamma and epsilon proteobacteria, the Aquificaeles, the Methanogenic archaea and the neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria.”
Bacteria – TBD
Fungi – TBD
Protozoa – TBD
Chromista – TBD
Animal – Anthropogenic:
Carbon Dioxide;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
contributes to the Greenhouse Effect;
http://www.ucar.edu/learn/1_3_1.htm
and
influences the rate of plant growth ;
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CO2plants.htm
Methane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
Nitrous Oxide
Ozone
Soot/
Black_carbon
Aerosols/
Icebreakers/Arctic Shipping/Fishing/Cruise-Line Transits
Contrails
Land Use Changes
Deforestation
Reforestation
Cultivation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_cultivation
Reclamation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation
Urban Heat Islands
Run Off From Asphalt
Sewage/Wastewater Treatment Discharge
Fossil Fuel Energy Generation and Waste Heat
Nuclear Power Generation – Including Ships
Renewables – Wind Farms, Solar Arrays, Dams and Ethanol
“In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×1018 J=132,000 TWh). This is equivalent to an average energy consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×1013 W).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption
etc.
“Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in the cells of living organisms to sustain life.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism
“The basal metabolic rate of a human is about 1,300-1,500 kcal/day for an adult female and 1,600-1,800 kcal/day for an adult male.”
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2009/VickieWu.shtml
Animal – Non-Anthropogenic including
Plankton
Beaver (Genus Castor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver
etc.
11. Chemical
Fossil Fuels:
Coal
Oil shale
Petrochemicals
- Petroleum
- Mineral Oil
Asphalt
Tar Pits/Sands
Methane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
etc.
Iron Fertilization “occurs naturally when upwellings bring nutrient-rich water to the surface, as occurs when ocean currents meet an ocean bank or a sea mount. This form of fertilization produces the world’s largest marine habitats. Fertilization can also occur when weather carries wind blown <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust“>dust long distances over the ocean, or iron-rich minerals are carried into the ocean by glaciers,[3] rivers and icebergs. Iron Fertilization can result from Geo-engineering; http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=34167
Reactions:
Combustion
- Forest Fires
- Fossil Fuels
- Methane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
etc.
“Photosynthesis;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
is a chemical process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.”
“Chemosynthesis;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis
is the biological conversion of one or more carbon molecules (usually carbon dioxide or methane) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic molecules (e.g. hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide) or methane as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis.”
Conversion of Methane, CO2, etc.
12. Physics
Temperature
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/01/a-big-picture-look-at-earths-temperature/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature
Variations in atmospheric and oceanic temperature can have significant impacts on Earth’s climate, including cloud cover, rainfall, Flora, Fauna, Ocean Circulation and Marine Biology. These variables can in turn affect Albedo and Transpiration.
Length of Day;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_length
“The length of the day varies when any mass on or in the Earth moves, affecting the state of its angular momentum. Take weather in the atmosphere, for instance. The seasonal changes in the trade winds and monsoons have a well-known effect on the length-of-day over the course of the year. The IERS calculates the angular momentum of the whole atmosphere every six hours, allowing the signal of large-scale weather systems to be detected.
The tides of the ocean have the long-term effect of slowing the Earth down and speeding up the Moon (which thus moves away from Earth a few centimeters per year). They also have short-term effects that are being modeled more accurately all the time. Changes in ocean currents change the length-of-day. Our computer models of ocean circulation are getting good enough, thanks to centimeter-precise measurements of the sea surface, that we can analyze this signal too. The National Earth Orientation Service has a page explaining this stuff in clear detail. (These are also the people who announce leap seconds.)
Other factors affecting the LOD data include rises and subsidences of the land surface, the buildup of glaciers, large earthquakes, large-scale pumping of groundwater and construction of reservoirs, and the shape of the ocean’s surface in response to air masses above it.
Each of these can be estimated and their signals extracted from the raw data, untangling the many mixed threads of information in the LOD record. One by one, the sources of variation can be determined and subtracted out, leaving another level to be analyzed.
The last level of variation, a slow drift on the decade scale, seems to be related to the motion of liquid iron in the Earth’s core. This layer allows the solid inner core to rotate freely with respect to the outer mantle and crust. Thus every twist and torque exerted by the atmosphere, oceans, Moon, Sun, other planets and the rest of the universe stirs that inner iron ocean, affecting the great dynamo that drives the Earth’s magnetic field.”
http://geology.about.com/od/tectonicsdeepearth/a/lodresearch.htm
In this paper, “Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate Externally Driven and Do They Affect Climate?”, by Ian R. G. Wilson, the General Science Journal, 2011, “evidence is presented to show that the phases of two of the Earth’s major climate systems, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), are related to changes in the Earth’s rotation rate. We find that the winter NAO index depends upon the time rate of change of the Earth’s length of day (LOD). In addition, we find that there is a remarkable correlation between the years where the phase of the PDO is most positive and the years where the deviation of the Earth’s LOD from its long-term trend is greatest.”
http://www.wbabin.net/files/4424_wilson.pdf
In this paper, “On the correlation between air temperature and the core Earth processes: Further investigations using a continuous wavelet analysis” by Stefano Sello, Mathematical and Physical Models, 2011
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.4924.pdf
The authors main results are: ”…the detection of a broadband variability centered at 78 yr (common variability ranges from 67 to 86 yr from SSA method). Oscillations in global temperatures with periods in the 65-70 yr are well known. Our work suggests that the same core processes that are known to affect Earth’s rotation and magnetic field may also contribute to the excitation of such modes, possibly through geomagnetic modulation of near-Earth charged particle fluxes that may influence cloud nucleation processes, and hence the planetary albedo, on regional as well as global scales.”
Pressure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure
States of Matter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_matter
Heat Conduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_conduction
Convection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection
Thermal Radiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation
Thermodynamics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
Entropy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
13. Known unknowns
Non-Equilibrium Pattern Systems, aka “nonlinear pattern formation in far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems” and “pattern formation in dissipative systems” “The spontaneous formation of spatio-temporal patterns can occur when a stationary state far from thermodynamic equilibrium is maintained through the dissipation of energy that is continuously fed into the system. While for closed systems the second law of thermodynamics requires relaxation to a state of maximal entropy, open systems are able to interchange matter and energy with their environment. By taking up energy of higher value (low entropy) and delivering energy of lower value (high entropy) they are able to export entropy, and thus to spontaneously develop structures characterized by a higher degree of order than present in the environment.” PhD thesis – “Controlling turbulence and pattern formation in chemical reaction” Matthias Bertram,
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9p_cojT-pflY2Y2MmZmMWQtOWQ0Mi00MzJkLTkyYmQtMWQ5Y2ExOTQ3ZDdm&hl=en_GB
Examples of this effect can be seen in the following examples of Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reactions:
Phil Salmon argues in this article;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/25/is-the-enso-a-nonlinear-oscillator-of-the-belousov-zhabotinsky-reaction-type/
that ENSO is a Non-Equilibrium Pattern System. “Of the class of known attractors of nonlinear oscillatory systems, the Lorenz and possibly Roessler attractors bear similarities to the attractor likely responsible for the alternating phases of La Nina and el Nino dominance that characterise the ENSO and constitute the PDO.” Here are several visualizations of Pacific Ocean Temperatures:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/etb58j1.gif?w=640
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/tlon_heat.gif
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/sub_surf_mon.gif
Uncertainty
Randomness
Evolution
Infinite Iterations
Chaos?
14. Unknown unknowns
A lot of other things.
General summaries of the potential variables involved in Earth’s climate system;
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7y.html
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/whatfactors.pdf
http://ioc3.unesco.org/oopc/obs/ecv.php
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/21/the-ridiculousness-continues-climate-complexity-compiled/
-
2nd post.
And the problem of establishing a planetary baseline upon which all the confounding variables would then be added:
Earth’s baseline black-body model – “a damn hard problem”
Posted on January 12, 2012 by Anthony Watts
The Earth only has an absorbing area equal to a two dimensional disk, rather than the surface of a sphere.
By Robert G. Brown, Duke University (elevated from a WUWT comment)
I spent what little of last night that I semi-slept in a learning-dream state chewing over Caballero’s book and radiative transfer, and came to two insights. First, the baseline black-body model (that leads to T_b = 255K) is physically terrible, as a baseline. It treats the planet in question as a nonrotating superconductor of heat with no heat capacity. The reason it is terrible is that it is absolutely incorrect to ascribe 33K as even an estimate for the “greenhouse warming” relative to this baseline, as it is a completely nonphysical baseline; the 33K relative to it is both meaningless and mixes both heating and cooling effects that have absolutely nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. More on that later.
I also understand the greenhouse effect itself much better. I may write this up in my own words, since I don’t like some of Caballero’s notation and think that the presentation can be simplified and made more illustrative. I’m also thinking of using it to make a “build-a-model” kit, sort of like the “build-a-bear” stores in the malls.
Start with a nonrotating superconducting sphere, zero albedo, unit emissivity, perfect blackbody radiation from each point on the sphere. What’s the mean temperature?
Now make the non-rotating sphere perfectly non-conducting, so that every part of the surface has to be in radiative balance. What’s the average temperature now? This is a better model for the moon than the former, surely, although still not good enough. Let’s improve it.
Now make the surface have some thermalized heat capacity — make it heat superconducting, but only in the vertical direction and presume a mass shell of some thickness that has some reasonable specific heat. This changes nothing from the previous result, until we make the sphere rotate. Oooo, yet another average (surface) temperature, this time the spherical average of a distribution that depends on latitude, with the highest temperatures dayside near the equator sometime after “noon” (lagged because now it takes time to raise the temperature of each block as the insolation exceeds blackbody loss, and time for it to cool as the blackbody loss exceeds radiation, and the surface is never at a constant temperature anywhere but at the poles (no axial tilt, of course). This is probably a very decent model for the moon, once one adds back in an albedo (effectively scaling down the fraction of the incoming power that has to be thermally balanced).
One can for each of these changes actually compute the exact parametric temperature distribution as a function of spherical angle and radius, and (by integrating) compute the change in e.g. the average temperature from the superconducting perfect black body assumption. Going from superconducting planet to local detailed balance but otherwise perfectly insulating planet (nonrotating) simply drops the nightside temperature for exactly 1/2 the sphere to your choice of 3K or (easier to idealize) 0K after a very long time. This is bounded from below, independent of solar irradiance or albedo (or for that matter, emissivity). The dayside temperature, on the other hand, has a polar distribution with a pole facing the sun, and varies nonlinearly with irradiance, albedo, and (if you choose to vary it) emissivity.
That pesky T^4 makes everything complicated! I hesitate to even try to assign the sign of the change in average temperature going from the first model to the second! Every time I think that I have a good heuristic argument for saying that it should be lower, a little voice tells me — T^4 — better do the damn integral because the temperature at the separator has to go smoothly to zero from the dayside and there’s a lot of low-irradiance (and hence low temperature) area out there where the sun is at five o’clock, even for zero albedo and unit emissivity! The only easy part is to obtain the spherical average we can just take the dayside average and divide by two…
I’m not even happy with the sign for the rotating sphere, as this depends on the interplay between the time required to heat the thermal ballast given the difference between insolation and outgoing radiation and the rate of rotation. Rotate at infinite speed and you are back at the superconducting sphere. Rotate at zero speed and you’re at the static nonconducting sphere. Rotate in between and — damn — now by varying only the magnitude of the thermal ballast (which determines the thermalization time) you can arrange for even a rapidly rotating sphere to behave like the static nonconducting sphere and a slowly rotating sphere to behave like a superconducting sphere (zero heat capacity and very large heat capacity, respectively). Worse, you’ve changed the geometry of the axial poles (presumed to lie untilted w.r.t. the ecliptic still). Where before the entire day-night terminator was smoothly approaching T = 0 from the day side, now this is true only at the poles! The integral of the polar area (for a given polar angle d\theta) is much smaller than the integral of the equatorial angle, and on top of that one now has a smeared out set of steady state temperatures that are all functions of azimuthal angle \phi and polar angle \theta, one that changes nonlinearly as you crank any of: Insolation, albedo, emissivity, \omega (angular velocity of rotation) and heat capacity of the surface.
And we haven’t even got an atmosphere yet. Or water. But at least up to this point, one can solve for the temperature distribution T(\theta,\phi,\alpha,S,\epsilon,c) exactly, I think.
Furthermore, one can actually model something like water pretty well in this way. In fact, if we imagine covering the planet not with air but with a layer of water with a blackbody on the bottom and a thin layer of perfectly transparent saran wrap on top to prevent pesky old evaporation, the water becomes a contribution to the thermal ballast. It takes a lot longer to raise or lower the temperature of a layer of water a meter deep (given an imbalance between incoming radiation) than it does to raise or lower the temperature of maybe the top centimeter or two of rock or dirt or sand. A lot longer.
Once one has a good feel for this, one could decorate the model with oceans and land bodies (but still prohibit lateral energy transfer and assume immediate vertical equilibration). One could let the water have the right albedo and freeze when it hits the right temperature. Then things get tough.
You have to add an atmosphere. Damn. You also have to let the ocean itself convect, and have density, and variable depth. And all of this on a rotating sphere where things (air masses) moving up deflect antispinward (relative to the surface), things moving down deflect spinward, things moving north deflect spinward (they’re going to fast) in the northern hemisphere, things moving south deflect antispinward, as a function of angle and speed and rotational velocity. Friggin’ coriolis force, deflects naval artillery and so on. And now we’re going to differentially heat the damn thing so that turbulence occurs everywhere on all available length scales, where we don’t even have some simple symmetry to the differential heating any more because we might as well have let a five year old throw paint at the sphere to mark out where the land masses are versus the oceans, and or better yet given him some Tonka trucks and let him play in the spherical sandbox until he had a nice irregular surface and then filled the surface with water until it was 70% submerged or something.
Ow, my aching head. And note well — we still haven’t turned on a Greenhouse Effect! And I now have nothing like a heuristic for radiant emission cooling even in the ideal case, because it is quite literally distilled, fractionated by temperature and height even without CO_2 per se present at all. Clouds. Air with a nontrivial short wavelength scattering cross-section. Energy transfer galore.
And then, before we mess with CO_2, we have to take quantum mechanics and the incident spectrum into account, and start to look at the hitherto ignored details of the ground, air, and water. The air needs a lapse rate, which will vary with humidity and albedo and ground temperature and… The molecules in the air recoil when the scatter incoming photons, and if a collision with another air molecule occurs in the right time interval they will mutually absorb some or all of the energy instead of elastically scattering it, heating the air. It can also absorb one wavelength and emit a cascade of photons at a different wavelength (depending on its spectrum).
Finally, one has to add in the GHGs, notably CO_2 (water is already there). They have the effect increasing the outgoing radiance from the (higher temperature) surface in some bands, and transferring some of it to CO_2 where it is trapped until it diffuses to the top of the CO_2 column, where it is emitted at a cooler temperature. The total power going out is thus split up, with that pesky blackbody spectrum modulated so that different frequencies have different effective temperatures, in a way that is locally modulated by — nearly everything. The lapse rate. Moisture content. Clouds. Bulk transport of heat up or down via convection. Bulk transport of heat up or down via caged radiation in parts of the spectrum. And don’t forget sideways! Everything is now circulating, wind and surface evaporation are coupled, the equilibration time for the ocean has stretched from “commensurate with the rotational period” for shallow seas to a thousand years or more so that the ocean is never at equilibrium, it is always tugging surface temperatures one way or the other with substantial thermal ballast, heat deposited not today but over the last week, month, year, decade, century, millennium.
Yessir, a damn hard problem. Anybody who calls this settled science is out of their ever-loving mind. Note well that I still haven’t included solar magnetism or any serious modulation of solar irradiance, or even the axial tilt of the earth, which once again completely changes everything, because now the timescales at the poles become annual, and the north pole and south pole are not at all alike! Consider the enormous difference in their thermal ballast and oceanic heat transport and atmospheric heat transport!
A hard problem. But perhaps I’ll try to tackle it, if I have time, at least through the first few steps outlined above. At the very least I’d like to have a better idea of the direction of some of the first few build-a-bear steps on the average temperature (while the term “average temperature” has some meaning, that is before making the system chaotic).
rgb
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/
-
Those are some excellent posts today by BBG! I am looking forward to going back and re-reading more closely and saving for reference material.
The earth warmed ever so slightly while CO2 levels reached 390 ppmv or 0.039% of earth's atmosphere. Causation isn't proved, but what else could it be? The science is settled? Not exactly. A large number of other known, poorly understood variables have been nicely identified and posted.
Chuck answered honestly that he didn't know and neither does anyone else, but I am still waiting for the right answer from anyone to my 2-part question - what is the rate of warming and what part of that is directly attributable to the rise in CO2 from human fossil fuel use? (Show your work.) Also if ever answered, what is the margin of scientific error and what then is the change in the global warming rate for each significant political policy initiative as they come up. For example, the Keystone pipeline was blocked for AGW reasons. The US will instead buy and ship that oil in from further away while Canada will sell and ship that oil to Asia. We need to recalculate the new global warming rate taking that important new victory for Robert Redford, Al Gore and 'planetary concerns' into consideration. They fought and they fought for it and they won. We lost jobs, we lost easy access to a reliable and abundant source of demanded energy. We lost a cost advantage for American businesses and consumers and a corresponding enrichment to our neighbor, friend and ally to the north. So what exactly did we gain in the reduced rate of warming?
Any honest answer to that will lead the reader to why we call it pathological science.
-
First global warming disappears, then Chuck.
(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/01/28/article-2093264-1180A4F1000005DC-28_468x286.jpg)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
-
Russian Astrophysicist Predicts Global Cooling
“We can expect the onset of a deep bicentennial minimum of total solar irradiance (TSI) in approximately 2042±11 and the 19th deep minimum of global temperature in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11. After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055±11.” –Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Russian Academy of Science, 1 February 2012
Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age
Applied Physics Research, Vol. 4, No. 1 February 2012
Abstract: http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
Full Study: http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754/10140
-
I am not for or against "climate change" resulting from human behavior. I am simply confused.
***Michael Mann Defends Climate Computer Models
Penn State climate modeler Michael Mann talks about what computer models can tell us--and what they don't need to. David Biello reports
January 10, 2012 | 120
"Even in high school my idea of a good time was sitting in front of a computer and solving problems." Climatologist Michael Mann. “And that has always been true. I love using computational methods to learn about the way, hopefully, the way the world actually works.”
Some critics, such as physicist Freeman Dyson, charge that climate change science relies too much on such computer models. And even worse, that the climate scientists behind them are too much in love with their computational creations. Such mathematical approximations are crude, failing to capture the real world climate impacts of a cloud, for example. That makes them useful for understanding climate but not for predicting climate change, Dyson has argued. I asked Mann in a recent phone interview how he responded to such arguments.
"I have to wonder if Freeman Dyson will get on an airplane or if he’ll drive a car because a lot of the modern day conveniences of life and a lot of our technological innovations of modern life are based on phenomena so complicated that we need to be able to construct models of them before we deploy that technology.
“In the case of the climate, of course, there is only one Earth, so we can’t do experiments with multiple Earths and formulate the science of climate change as if it’s an entirely observationally based, controlled experiment. We need to rely on conceptual models of the system we’re studying and it’s no different in any other field of science. In fact, the way science progresses is by conceptual models being put forward and then testing them against observations. One of the most, I think, striking examples of that was just within the last month, this announcement, the Higgs Boson.
“Its existence was predicted by the standard model of particle physics and the fact that there’s—we got a glimpse of it, it looks like it may very well be there—is a real victory for that model of science where you test, you put forward conceptual models of the way the world or the universe works and test those models against the observations and see the extent to which they can predict new observations and when they do, it gives you increased confidence in the models.
“It’s no different in the case of climate change. The models are simply at some level a formulation of our conceptual understanding and when someone says they don't like models then I’m wondering what alternative they have in mind.
“How do they formalize their conceptual understanding? Through back-of-the-envelope, poorly conceived thought experiments? It's somewhat bewildering when I hear something like that from a premier scientist, and I think it belies a misunderstanding of the way models are used. In climate science, for example, where we don't need an elaborate climate model to understand the basic physics and chemistry of greenhouse gases, so at some level the fact that increased CO2 warms the planet is a consequence of very basic physics and chemistry.
“The details, how much warming you get, depend on things like feedbacks. And you can’t incorporate feedbacks through a back of the envelope approach. You actually have to critically think about the interactions that take place in this very complex system. And those feedbacks ultimately determine the extent to which that initial warming will be amplified, but they don’t even change the fact that you elevate greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and you’ll get a warming of the surface. That’s basic physics and chemistry and people who claim that they don’t believe that, they don’t believe we’re warming the planet through increasing CO2 levels because of climate models, they don’t understand the fact that you don’t need a climate model to come to that conclusion. It's basic physics and chemistry.
“The climate models come in because we wanna know how that's modified by feedback. What are the important feedbacks? How will atmospheric circulation patterns change? And again, does Freeman Dyson, assuming he is willing to get on an airplane even though models have been used to test the performance of the airplane, assuming he does and he knows he’s going somewhere where they’ve predicted, where weather models have predicted rainfall for the next seven days, does he not pack his umbrella because he doesn’t believe the models? It's just in that case the worst that will happen is somebody gets wet when they wouldn’t otherwise have. In this case, the worst that can happen is that we ruin the planet.”
—David Biell
Makes you wonder why to spite such easily obtained search results the science ignorati continue to insists the models are wrong. It is like they have no interests in the science but protecting some int
2. pterostyrax
12:02 PM 1/10/12Freeman Dyson has it right and Michael Mann has it wrong.
Here are just a few of the areas in which the GCMs and conclusions drawn from them are unequivocally wrong.
1. GCMs do not solve the original partial differential equations describing all of the mechanisms included in the models. They solve modified equations that are approximations of the originals, which, by definition, introduce errors in the solution.
2. GCMs require numerical rather than exact solutions of the equations. The numerical solutions introduce additional errors in reproducing the modified equations particularly with regards to the temporal/spatial scales used in the solution and the type of grid chosen to define the physical space modeled.
3. Once the forms of the modified equations and the temporal and spatial scales have been chosen, then one must setup initial and boundary conditions that define and then drive the simulations. Huge errors are introduced in the simulations as a result of uncertainties in defining these boundary conditions for all the myriad processes necessary in GCMs. Give the same model to 10 different modelers, and you will have 10 different results depending upon how the boundary conditions are specified.
4. The myriad processes involving physical, chemical, and biological interactions have their own problems including important processes left out and incomplete mathematical descriptions of the ones included with numerous simplifying assumptions, but the greatest problem is how the processes are parameterized and the specification of these parameters. Give the same model to 10 different modelers, and you will have 10 different results depending upon how the parameters are specified.
5. Even if all the previously described problems could be eliminated, GCMs, or any model for that matter, cannot predict the future. They can only say what would have happened given the proscribed initial and boundary conditions. No one can know the boundary conditions for the future.
Admittedly, the previous is a very brief discussion of why Dyson is right and Mann is wrong. I could easily write a long paper or even a book on the subject, but I will exit this comment with the following statement - If you can give the same model to 10 different modelers and obtain 10 different results, then that aint science, or at least what I have always believed to be science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
3. pterostyrax
in reply to Trent1492
12:13 PM 1/10/12Riddle me this. Why are four different model output runs included when comparing to "observed" temperatures? Additionally, on another graph in the IPCC report, why are the results of 14 (I believe this number is correct) different GCMs averaged and then included in the comparison of computed versus observed temperatures?
I am fairly certain I know why.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
4. Trent1492
12:32 PM 1/10/12pterostyrax Says: Riddle me this. Why are four different model output runs included when comparing to "observed" temperatures?
Trent Says: Each models makes different assumptions about the future input of CO2. If you had even a smidgen of knowledge you would have know that one, Riddler.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-2.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
5. Trent1492
12:35 PM 1/10/12Anyone else wondering why Pterostyrax will not address the fact of the models and temperature match that is found in the peer reviewed literature? It is like he is in denial of reality. Funny that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
6. pterostyrax
in reply to Trent1492
12:56 PM 1/10/12This graph is a comparison to computed versus OBSERVED temperatures. Four different carbon inputs for FUTURE inputs of carbon are irrelevant.
I do not mind the ad hominem, but at least get it right when you conduct one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
7. Trent1492
01:13 PM 1/10/12Pterostyrax Says: This graph is a comparison to computed versus OBSERVED temperatures. Four different carbon inputs for FUTURE inputs of carbon are irrelevant.
Shorter Pterostryax: Please ignore the graph with observed temperatures and the models that reproduce them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
8. just1observer
01:41 PM 1/10/12Michael Mann speaks the truth.
I believe that for Freeman Dyson to malign the accuracy of the current versions of weather models is a false issue and a cheep shot at weather scientists in general. Moreover, arguing over the accuracy of various weather models misses the main issues about the science of weather prediction and global warming.
There are a few things that we know from weather scientists with a high degree of confidence: (1) the earth is indeed warming; (2) human activity is indeed making a meaningful contribution to that global warming; (3) global warming is changing and will continue to change global weather patterns through a very complex set of interactions that we are only just beginning to identify, better yet fully understand, and (4)weather scientists who construct these models to try to identify and understand these interactions and then predict the consequences to test and improve their models are very much on the right track.
These scientific efforts should be supported by the larger scientific community as well as the public. It is an imperative for this science to advance.
If we were to stop or slow the creation, evolution, continuous testing, and improvement of these models we would be doing the world a great disservice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
9. Trent1492
01:46 PM 1/10/12I think at least one note of clarification needs to be put here. It is blatantly obvious that Pterostyrax is engaging in obfuscation. Climate science has been making predictions and successful observations of those predictions since 1896. When Svante Arrhenius constructed a model of the atmosphere using nothing more than pencil and paper he made several key predictions:
1. Nights would warm faster days.
2. Winters would warm faster than Summers.
3. The Arctic would warm faster than anywhere else.
All of these predictions have been observed in the 20th and 21st century. Pterostyrax and friends want the public to not know of these and other successful predictions because their interests lay in the public being confused and ignorant. That is why they never ever address them. Ever.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
10. pterostyrax
in reply to just1observer
02:21 PM 1/10/12"If we were to stop or slow the creation, evolution, continuous testing, and improvement of these models we would be doing the world a great disservice."
No argument here. My and Dyson's argument is that the models are currently not ready for prime time for the reasons I elucidated among many more that could be brought to bear on the efficacy of GCMs. Because one can throw a host of equations at the real world does not mean that the set of the previous has any bearing on the latter. Point in question - Long Term Capital's economic numerical models.
However, the need to improve the modeling efforts does not change the fact that the current status of GCMs in providing some semblance of the real world and conclusions drawn therefrom is greatly lacking any firm basis regarding sound science.
-
"I am not for or against "climate change" resulting from human behavior. I am simply confused." - CCP
If it turns out that humans are irreparably harming the planet right now and that we have a short time to act, the phony, agenda driven 'scientists' like Michael Mann set beck the quest for that truth by about 20 years in my estimation with their dishonesty, deceit and monopolistic practices to take over and dominate the profession.
"...the worst that can happen is that we ruin the planet" ... which is of course justification for all ends and all means. Strangely coincident is that the solution for warming would be bigger and stronger governments, if not world government, and smaller and smaller personal and economic liberties - the same environmental agenda pushed before the discovery of warming. Who knew? Also strange is that none of the scientists or big advocates have quit heating or air conditioning their work spaces, or shrunk their work spaces, or moved into their work spaces, or ended the ritual of all expenses paid global travels to meet with each other regularly - while suggesting all of that is necessary for everyone else to do so. Meanwhile the mercury-based light bulb mandate is now in effect on you, from people who know better than you, unless you can get a waiver from people more powerful than you.
-
As best as I can tell, this directly addresses Chuck's concerns:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213244084429540.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Editor's Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of "No Need to Panic About Global Warming," an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.
The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, "No Need to Panic about Global Warming," is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.)
We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.
In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.
These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.
.Enlarge Image
Close..From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth's temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.
The Trenberth letter tells us that "computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean." The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world's oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of "missing heat" hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?
Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.
Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that "the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible." Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.
One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody's word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don't fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.
What are we to make of the letter's claim: "Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record." We don't see any warming trend after the year 2000 in the graph. It is true that the years 2000-2010 were perhaps 0.2 C warmer than the preceding 10 years. But the record indicates that long before CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere began to increase, the earth began to warm in fits and starts at the end of the Little Ice Age—hundreds of years ago. This long term-trend is quite likely to produce several warm years in a row. The question is how much of the warming comes from CO2 and how much is due to other, both natural and anthropogenic, factors?
There have been many times in the past when there were warmer decades. It may have been warmer in medieval times, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and when wine was exported from England. Many proxy indicators show that the Medieval Warming was global in extent. And there were even warmer periods a few thousand years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth's climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2. The graph strongly suggests that the IPCC has greatly underestimated the natural sources of warming (and cooling) and has greatly exaggerated the warming from CO2.
The Trenberth letter states: "Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused." However, the claim of 97% support is deceptive. The surveys contained trivial polling questions that even we would agree with. Thus, these surveys find that large majorities agree that temperatures have increased since 1800 and that human activities have some impact.
But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes "extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert" is peculiar indeed.
One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.
The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate "extreme views" can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: "I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken."
Or consider the resignation last year of Wolfgang Wagner, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. In a fulsome resignation editorial eerily reminiscent of past recantations by political and religious heretics, Mr. Wagner confessed to his "sin" of publishing a properly peer-reviewed paper by University of Alabama scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell containing the finding that IPCC models exaggerate the warming caused by increasing CO2.
Enlarge Image
CloseGetty Images/Ikon Images
.The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.
The European experience with green technologies has also been discouraging. A study found that every new "green job" in Spain destroyed more than two existing jobs and diverted capital that would have created new jobs elsewhere in the economy. More recently, European governments have been cutting subsidies for expensive CO2-emissionless energy technologies, not what one would expect if such subsidies were stimulating otherwise languid economies. And as we pointed out in our op-ed, it is unlikely that there will be any environmental benefit from the reduced CO2 emissions associated with green technologies, which are based on the demonization of CO2.
Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, "The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible." This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.
Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact "incontrovertible." Otherwise there would be no logical link from "global warming" to the shrill call for mitigation.
The APS response to the concerns of its membership was better than that of any other scientific society, but it was not democratic. The management of APS took months to review the statement quoted above, and it eventually declared that not a word needed to be changed, though some 750 words were added to try to explain what the original 157 words really meant. APS members were permitted to send in comments but the comments were never made public.
In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.
In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.
The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antoninio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
-
Glaciers are growing in the Karakoram range, home to K2 (Increased ice was caused by warming)
(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/15/article-0-02889D4D0000044D-846_634x398.jpg)
Scientists discover glaciers in Asian mountain range are actually getting BIGGER
By Ian Garland UK Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 15:13 EST, 15 April 2012 | UPDATED: 15:20 EST, 15 April 2012
Photos taken by a French satellite show glaciers in a mountain range west of the Himalayas have grown during the last decade.
The growing glaciers were found in the Karakoram range, which spans the borders between Pakistan, India and China and is home to the world's second highest peak, K2. - More at the link...
-
(Caused by an early versions of the Ford F150 and Chevy Suburban.)
Severe global warming 55million years ago 'triggered by changes in Earth's orbit'
By Daily Mail Reporter
PUBLISHED: 06:14 EST, 5 April 2012 | UPDATED: 12:57 EST, 5 April 2012
Changes in the Earth’s orbit 55million years ago caused the planet to warm up by 5C, according to new research.
A study by climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues at the University of Sheffield found that orbital changes triggered the melting of vast areas of permafrost at the poles, which released greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2125533/Global-warming-55m-years-ago-triggered-changes-Earths-orbit.html#ixzz1sB6M8tMy
---------------
Did warming primarily cause the release of CO2 or is that backward? - Doug
-
http://fakegate.org/
Buzwardo, are you out there?
-
Last week I saw the IMAX production of "To The Arctic" with beautiful photography, music by Paul McCartney and narrated by Meryl Streep to a script of deceptive half truths of environmental agendaisms that completely destroyed the peaceful serenity of what they were showing. The focus they chose was the plight of the polar bear whose populations, never mentioned, have dramatically increased over the last 30 and 50 years. Every never-ending worst on record claim was referring to the last 30 years while implying billions of years.
On the other side of the coin is another acclaimed scientist, German Meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls, who has come out vocally against the eroding myth of manmade climate disaster. This interview is from a Swiss magazine, with an English translation below well worth reading. Hghlights:
The Belief That CO2 Can Regulate Climate Is “Sheer Absurdity”
"The entire CO2-debate is nonsense. Even if CO2 were doubled, the temperature would rise only 1°C."
"Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it."
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-cache/dafuer-schaeme-ich-mich-heute/
http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/09/the-belief-that-co2-can-regulate-climate-is-sheer-absurdity-says-prominent-german-meteorologist/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/05/the-belief-that-co2-can-regulate-climate-is-sheer-absurdity.php
factum (Swiss science publication): You’ve been criticising the theory of man-made global warming for years. How did you become skeptical?
Puls: Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it. The CO2-climate hysteria in Germany is propagated by people who are in it for lots of money, attention and power.
factum: Is there really climate change?
Puls: Climate change is normal. There have always been phases of climate warming, many that even far exceeded the extent we see today. But there hasn’t been any warming since 1998. In fact the IPCC suppliers of data even show a slight cooling.
factum: The IPCC is projecting 0.2°C warming per decade, i.e. 2 to 4°C by the year 2100. What’s your view?
Puls: These are speculative model projections, so-called scenarios – and not prognoses. Because of climate’s high complexity, reliable prognoses just aren’t possible. Nature does what it wants, and not what the models present as prophesy. The entire CO2-debate is nonsense. Even if CO2 were doubled, the temperature would rise only 1°C. The remainder of the IPCC’s assumed warming is based purely on speculative amplification mechanisms. Even though CO2 has risen, there has been no warming in 13 years.
factum: How does sea level rise look?
Puls: Sea level rise has slowed down. Moreover, it has dropped a half centimeter over the last 2 years. It’s important to remember that mean sea level is a calculated magnitude, and not a measured one. There are a great number of factors that influence sea level, e.g. tectonic processes, continental shifting, wind currents, passats, volcanoes. Climate change is only one of ten factors.
factum: What have we measured at the North Sea?
Puls: In the last 400 years, sea level at the North Sea coast has risen about 1.40 meters. That’s about 35 centimeters per century. In the last 100 years, the North Sea has risen only 25 centimeters.
factum: Does the sea level rise have anything to do with the melting North Pole?
Puls: That’s a misleading conclusion. Even if the entire North Pole melted, there would be no sea level rise because of the principles of buoyancy.
factum: Is the melting of the glaciers in the Alps caused by global warming?
Puls: There are many factors at play. As one climbs a mountain, the temperature drops about 0.65°C per 100 meters. Over the last 100 years it has gotten about 0.75°C warmer and so the temperature boundary has shifted up about 100 meters. But observations tell us that also ice 1000 meters up and higher has melted. Clearly there are other reasons for this, namely soot and dust. But soot and dust do not only have anthropogenic origins; they are also caused by nature via volcanoes, dust storms and wildfires. Advancing and retreating of glaciers have always taken place throughout the Earth’s history. Glaciology studies clearly show that glaciers over the last 10,0000 years were smaller on average than today.
factum: In your view, melting Antarctic sea ice and the fracture of a huge iceberg 3 years ago are nothing to worry about?
Puls: To the contrary, the Antarctic ice cap has grown both in area and volume over the last 30 years, and temperature has declined. This 30-year trend is clear to see. The Amundsen Scott Station of the USA shows that temperature has been declining there since 1957. 90% of the Earth’s ice is stored in Antarctica, which is one and half times larger than Europe.
factum: Then why do we always read it is getting warmer down there?
Puls: Here they are only talking about the West Antarctic peninsula, which is where the big chunk of ice broke off in 2008 – from the Wilkins-Shelf. This area is hardly 1% of the entire area of Antarctica, but it is exposed to Southern Hemisphere west wind drift and some of the strongest storms on the planet.
factum: What causes such massive chunks of ice to break off?
Puls: There are lots of factors, among them the intensity of the west wind fluctuations. These west winds have intensified over the last 20 years as part of natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, and so it has gotten warmer on the west coast of the Antarctic peninsula. A second factor are the larger waves associated with the stronger storms. The waves are more powerful and so they break off more ice. All these causes are meteorological and physical, and have nothing to do with a climate catastrophe.
factum: Then such ice breaks had to have occurred in the past too?
Puls: This has been going on for thousands of years, also in the 1970s, back when all the talk was about “global cooling”. Back then there were breaks with ice chunks hundreds of square kilometres in area. People were even discussing the possibilities of towing these huge ice chunks to dry countries like South Africa or Namibia in order to use them as a drinking water supply.
factum: What about all the media photos of polar bears losing their ice?
Puls: That is one of the worst myths used for generating climate hysteria. Polar bears don’t eat ice, they eat seals. Polar bears go hungry if we shoot their food supply of seals. The polar bear population has increased with moderately rising temperatures, from 5000 50 years ago to 25,000 today.
(http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/pics/Eisbaer.JPG)
factum: But it is true that unlike Antarctica, the Arctic is melting?
Puls: It has been melting for 30 years. That also happened twice already in the last 150 years. The low point was reached in 2007 and the ice has since begun to recover. There have always been phases of Arctic melting. Between 900 and 1300 Greenland was green on the edges and the Vikings settled there.
factum: And what do you say about the alleged expanding deserts?
Puls: That doesn”t exist. For example the Sahara is shrinking and has lost in the north an area as large as Germany over the last 20 years. The same is true in the South Sahara. The famine that struck Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia was mainly caused by the leasing of large swaths of land to large international corporations so that they could grow crops for biofuels for Europe, and by war. But it is much easier for prosperous Europe to blame the world’s political failures on a fictional climate catastrophe instead.
factum: So we don’t need to do anything against climate change?
Puls: There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob. Many confuse environmental protection with climate protection. it’s impossible to protect the climate, but we can protect the environment and our drinking water. On the debate concerning alternative energies, which is sensible, it is often driven by the irrational climate debate. One has nothing to do with the other.
-
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/two_millennia_of_global_cooling.html#.T_4oFcEnJ6Q.facebook
-
John Hinderaker of Powerline covering for BBG on Pathological Sdcience:
A Tornado of Misinformation
No matter the season, weather is highly variable. So global warming alarmists never miss an opportunity to turn the latest bad weather into an argument for taxing carbon, or whatever. When tornadoes struck this spring, the alarmists and their minions in the press were quick to blame global warming. Just a few examples:
Think Progress: “Poisoned Weather: Global Warming Helped Fuel Killer Tornadoes.”
CNN: “That’s climate change we are seeing.”
Treehugger.com: “[T]ornado season doesn’t usually begin until April, leading climate scientists to link the warmer weather to earlier (and potentially longer) seasons.”
NBC News: “ANNE THOMPSON: Extreme weather blew March 2012 into the record books. It saw almost three times the average number of reported tornadoes. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says our the unusually warm weather created conditions favorable for twisters. And while there’s no one culprit to blame for the rising thermometer, there is a prime suspect.
TOM KARL [NOAA]: Right now, we have a climate on steroids. What we mean by that is green house gases continue to increase in the atmosphere.”
And there was even more alarmism about global warming and tornadoes last year. So, what are the facts? If someone is going to argue that atmospheric CO2 is causing an extraordinary number of tornadoes, the prerequisite is an extraordinary number of tornadoes. Unfortunately for the alarmists, there is no evidence that tornadoes are increasing in the U.S. or anywhere else. Paul Homewood at Watts Up With That has the data. This chart shows “strong to violent tornadoes” as classified by NOAA from 1950 to the present. As is immediately obvious, there is no upward trend, although 2011 happened to have a lot of major tornadoes:
(http://4-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2012/07/600x450xef3-ef5-t.png.pagespeed.ic.gHF-h6bXkN.png)
How about 2012? Is there any evidence of an unusual number of tornadoes this year? No. In fact, 2012 is, so far, a below average year for tornadoes:
(http://2-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2012/07/504x329xptorngraph_thumb.png.pagespeed.ic.PQ1bf5CcU9.jpg)
It would be bad enough if the alarmists merely capitalized on random increases in bad weather phenomena to support their case. But the fact that the alarmists try to blame global warming in years that are actually below average in adverse weather events illustrates why they have no credibility with the American people.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/a-tornado-of-misinformation.php
-
Who could have seen this coming? Usually govenment run businesses do so much better. :roll:
Posted on September 25, 2012 by Steven Hayward in Green Weenie Award
Green Weenie of the Week: The Electric Car
Very stiff competition for this week’s coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award. Al Gore is even warming up for another shot at another Green Chakra Weenie for his solar-powered mantle. But one contender has risen above the rest of the green slime to claim the prize: the electric car.
Who says?
At current vehicle and energy prices, the lifetime costs to consumers of an electric vehicle are generally higher than those of a conventional vehicle or traditional hybrid vehicle of similar size and performance, even with the tax credits, which can be as much as $7,500 per vehicle. That conclusion takes into account both the higher purchase price of an electric vehicle and the lower fuel costs over the vehicle’s life. For example, an average plug-in hybrid vehicle with a battery capacity of 16 kilowatt-hours would be eligible for the maximum tax credit. However, that vehicle would require a tax credit of more than $12,000 to have roughly the same lifetime costs as a comparable conventional or traditional hybrid vehicle.
Assuming that everything else is equal, the larger an electric vehicle’s battery capacity, the greater its cost disadvantage relative to conventional vehicles—and thus the larger the tax credit needed to make it cost-competitive.
GM is probably losing money on each Volt it sells (though GM disputes this):
Reuters recently reported that GM is losing a bundle on each Volt it sells — despite the little plug-in hybrid’s steep $39,995 base price.
While GM took issue with Reuters’ math, it’s clear that the innovative car isn’t a moneymaker for General Motors. With sales of just a few thousand in the best of months, it’ll be many years before the car manages to repay its development costs, estimated at over $1 billion.
Meanwhile, Toyota has announced it is scrapping plans to bring a new all-electric vehicle to the market:
“The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge,” said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota’s development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.
Make it electric, color it green, and I'm there!
Now, if the automakers would offer a model in the shape of a Green Weenie, like the old Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, I might be tempted to buy one!
-
I am pro electric car and pro-hybrid - competing in a free market.
"tax credits, which can be as much as $7,500 per vehicle"
Whether $20,0000 or 200,000, electric or hybrid, that means every taxpayer and every future taxpayer is paying a part of the transportation cost for rich people.
And it didn't save the planet. Who knew. :wink:
-
Report: Global warming stopped 16 years ago
from Watts Up With That? by Anthony Watts
UPDATE: There’s a response from the Met Office here
A report in the UK Daily Mail reveals a Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it:
By David Rose
The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html#ixzz29E78OR9H
h/t to reader “Dino”
regarding the significance of the period from 1997, recall that Dr. Ben Santer claimed 17 years was the period needed:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/17/ben-santers-17-year-itch/
They find that tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
MIT Professor Richard Lindzen said something similar in a WUWT guest post:
There has been no warming since 1997 and no
statistically significant warming since 1995.
Bob Tisdale did a 17 and 30 year trend comparison here
Here’s the HADCRUT4 4.1.1. dataset
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/13/report-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/
-
Gaia obviously foresaw Obama's election and decided to spare us. So Obama has one promise kept.
Lightbringer.
-
Oh my goodness. Several months back National Review Online published a piece excoriating Michael Mann of Hockey Stick statistical manipulation fame. Mann claimed he would sue NRO for the piece, and indeed did so in a DC court recently, claiming, among other things, to be a Nobel laureate. Some called BS on the claim, and the Nobel committee stated Mann in fact was not a winner. As such NRO took a full page ad out in Penn State's student newspaper:
(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcs267L5V01rk8x3uo1_500.jpg)
Ought to be amusing to see what sort of hyperventilation this inspires in Mann. Might want to set up a wind farm in his office. . . .
Whole piece here:
http://nationalreviewonline.tumblr.com/post/34722632643/honoring-michael-manns-nobel-prize-to-mark
-
Nice overview of sundry hockey stick foolishness.
Doomed Planet
“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”
Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles
Speak loudly and carry a busted hockey stick
by Walter Starck
November 19, 2012
The average temperature for the Earth, or any region or even any specific place is very difficult to determine with any accuracy. At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. Weather stations are relatively few and located very irregularly. Well maintained stations with good records going back a century or more can be counted on one’s fingers. Even then only maximum and minimum temperatures or ones at a few particular times of day are usually available. Maintenance, siting, and surrounding land use also all have influences on the temperatures recorded.
The purported 0.7°C of average global warming over the past century is highly uncertain. It is in fact less than the margin of error in our ability to determine the average temperature anywhere, much less globally. What portion of any such warming might be due to due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is even less certain. There are, however, numerous phenomena which are affected by temperature and which can provide good evidence of relative warming or cooling and, in some cases, even actual temperatures. These include growth rings in trees, corals and stalactites, borehole temperature profiles and the isotopic and biologic signatures in core samples from sediments or glaciers. In addition, historical accounts of crops grown, harvest times, freezes, sea ice, river levels, glacial advances or retreats and other such records provide clear indication of warming and cooling.
Recent Warming Nothing Unusual
The temperature record everywhere shows evidence of warming and cooling in accord with cycles on many different time scales from daily to annual, decadal, centennial, millennial and even longer. Many of these seem to correlate with various cycles of solar activity and the Earth’s own orbital mechanics. The temperature record is also marked by seemingly random events which appear to follow no discernable pattern.
Over the past 3000 years there is evidence from hundreds of independent proxy studies, as well as historical records, for a Minoan Warm period around 1000 BC, a Roman Warm Period about 2000 years ago, a Medieval Warm Period (WMP) about 1000 years ago and a Modern Warm Period now developing. In between were markedly colder periods in the Dark Ages and another between the 16th and 19th centuries which is now known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The warmer periods were times of bountiful crops, increasing population and a general flourishing of human societies. The cold periods were times of droughts, famines, epidemics, wars and population declines. Clearly life has been much better in the times of warmer climate, and there is nothing to indicate that the apparent mild warming of the past century is anything other than a return of this millennial scale warming cycle.
Good News Unwelcome to Alarmists
This rather good news about a possibly warmer climate has not met with hopeful interest from those who purport to be so concerned about the possibly dangerous effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). On the contrary, their reaction has overwhelmingly been a strong rejection of any beneficial possibility. It is apparent that their deepest commitment is to the threat itself and not to any rational assessment of real world probabilities or the broader consequences of any of their proposed remedies.
Fabricating a Hockey Stick from Hot Air
This blanket rejection of any possibility other than the hypothetical threat of AGW has led to some strange behaviour for people who modestly proclaim themselves to be the world’s top climate scientists. Not only have they ignored and dismissed the hundreds of studies indicating the global existence of a Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, they have set out to fabricate an alternate reality in the form of a graph purporting to represent the global temperature for the past thousand years. It portrays a near straight line wiggling up and down only a fraction of a degree for centuries until it begins an exponential rise gradually starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then shooting steeply up in the latter part of that century. This hockey stick-shaped graph was then heavily promoted as the icon of AGW. It appeared on the cover of the third climate assessment report of the IPCC published in 2003 and was reproduced at various places in the report itself.
Among the emails between leading climate researchers released in the Climategate affair were a number which revealed a concerted effort to come up with some means to deny the existence of the MWP. The implement chosen to do this became known as the Hockey Stick Graph.
The methodology used to construct the graph involved the use of estimates of temperatures from a very small sample of tree growth rings from the Yamal Peninsula in far northern Siberia and ancient stunted pine trees from near the tree line in the High Sierras of California. This data was then subjected to a statistical treatment later shown by critics to produce a hockey stick form of graph even when random numbers were used as raw input data. To make matters even worse, the same tree ring data also indicated a significant decline in temperature for the 20th century, but this was hidden by burying it in a much larger number of data points from instrument measurements. The resulting study was published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature in 1998. Remarkably, this very small, highly selected and deceptively manipulated graph was proclaimed to be an accurate representation of global temperatures and the extensive body of contrary evidence was simply ignored.
Continuing the Game With a Busted Stick
When serious shortcomings of the hockey stick study began to be exposed and questioned the climate alarmists closed ranks and proclaimed their preeminent authority and expertise but refused to engage in any genuine scientific debate with their critics. Instead, they appealed to a supposed consensus of experts, peer review, and personal denigration of any who dared to disagree.
All of the name calling, pissing contests over credentials and abstruse statistical manipulations made it difficult for the general public to come to any conclusion. Regardless of various provable errors and conflicting evidence, the alarmists could and did simply ignore it all and claim the HS graph as gospel truth.
Then came Climategate. Obvious scams, lies and connivance are something that doesn’t require a computer model or a PhD to recognise. In the Climategate emails discussion of things like things like “…Mike’s Nature trick…,”, manipulations to “…hide the decline”, requests to destroy correspondence, efforts to supress publication of conflicting studies, vilification of critics, and abuse of peer review were matters anyone could see were not ethical. Certainly they were not the kind of behaviour we should expect from high level scientists whose advice we are being asked to accept in policies that could be expected to have major effects on the prosperity of our entire society.
The loss of public trust and credibility resulting from Climategate was immense and has been compounded by additional ongoing exposures of misconduct, repeated failures of alarmist predictions and the slow motion economic train wreck of green energy initiatives.
Although one might rationally expect that the obvious collapse of alarmist momentum would have them reassessing their approach and perhaps even the validity of their earlier assumptions, it seems that the idea that they may have been wrong in any respect must be be inconceivable to them. Instead, their response to conflicting reality and declining credibility has been only to declare still greater certainty and ratchet up the alarm to an even less believable level of hype.
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Repeat the Failure
Introduction of the carbon tax in Australia was supposed to lead the world along the path of righteousness toward cheap renewable energy and environmental correctness. Unfortunately for the current government both economic reality and climate itself have not co-operated. The intended good example is becoming one of an obvious foolishness to be avoided and nobody is following. Ongoing exposure of scientific misconduct by alarmist researchers and repeated failure of their predictions haven’t helped either. The alarmist community is in disarray and becoming increasingly shrill in the tone of their pronouncements. The need for strong new scientific evidence to reinforce the shredded remnants of their discredited claims is becoming desperate.
CSIRO has tried to help with a series of increasingly dire predictions but having become a heavily bureaucratised and politicised institution they have been careful to cover their backsides with qualifiers and disclaimers which dull the sharp edge of hype, certainty and urgency needed by government. However, through generous grants government has also bought and paid for reliable cadres of university based academics whose funding and even whole careers are now based on research into Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). Although science may aspire to value free objectivity, it is observable fact that when generous funding is provided to study a purported problem, one thing is certain. It will never be found that there really wasn’t one.
In early June this year a new research report announced the finding of a distinct hockey stick shaped graph for Australian climate over the past millennium. If correct, this would be of great value in supporting the faltering case for CAGW. As the original HS graph was based entirely on data from the northern hemisphere, finding the same pattern from the Southern Hemisphere would bolster the claim that the recent warming is indeed global and unprecedented. Based on different much more extensive data and free of the inappropriate statistical treatment of the original HS study, this new one would also greatly bolster the tattered credibility of the original study.
The new study appeared in Journal of Climate under the title, "Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium". It was authored by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Ailie Gallant, Steven Phipps and David Karoly. In mid-May 2012 it was made available online in preprint form, having been peer reviewed and accepted for print publication in an upcoming issue of the journal. In a number of key aspects what followed has been a rerun of the original HS story. Shortly after the online preprint appeared, the Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre pointed out that a statistical procedure which was stated in the Gergis et al. study to have been applied had not in fact been used.
Not coincidentally, it was McIntyre who exposed the statistical shortcomings in the original HS study.
Although advanced statistical analysis is widely used in science, very few researchers have a thorough mathematical understanding of what they are doing in this regard. Most are simply following a recipe. However, there is little risk of having to justify the validity of anything as their peers are not statisticians either. McIntyre has an unfair advantage in this. He is a genuine expert in statistics critiquing the work of researchers who are really not very skilled in his discipline.
What ensued in subsequent critical discussion on the Internet and in emails between the authors, their colleagues and the journal editors was a litany of shifting denial, obfuscation, excuses, trivialisation and denigration that could have been borrowed from the original HS script. Without going into the tedious and tawdry details (readily available on the net), the key points of the story are that in response to McIntyre’s finding of the statistical problem the authors announced they had already discovered it themselves the day before McIntyre pointed it out, and that it was really just an oversight in the data processing routine which could quickly be corrected and would have no effect on the overall findings of the study. The journal editors accepted this and gave the authors a deadline with sufficient time to rerun the data routine and make any necessary corrections to the MS.
After much speculation in the blogosphere and varying opinion among the authors and their supporters about what to do and how it might affect the outcome, the deadline passed without a corrected MS being received by the journal. The editors then asked for the study to be withdrawn. Such a request is the scientific equivalent of hara-kiri, a dishonour so great that the only honourable atonement is what amounts to ritual scientific suicide.
If, as publically maintained, all that was involved was a data processing error which could easily be corrected and would have no important effect on the outcome, surely the correction would have been made. However, email correspondence between the authors (which became available through an FOI request) revealed a concern that if properly applied the omitted data processing routine would not result in the desired HS graph or, if it did so, would at best yield only highly uncertain results.
The direct cost of this fiasco to taxpayers is reported to have totalled some $950,000 in research grants from 2009 to 2012. To further this failed work the latest Australian Research Council grants announcement also lists another $350,000 in funding to the lead author approved for 2013 – 2015. The climate gravy train can provide a sumptuous ride for those whose work shows promise of producing what the government wants.
Climatology - Science or Ideology?
Climatology is no longer recognisable as a science but has morphed into a fundamentalist ideology of a millenarian nature. Science only serves it to enhance claims of authority and certainty. Scientific ethics and evidence are employed selectively in accord with the noble cause of saving the planet from the corruptions of humanity and capitalism. Any conflicting reason or evidence is never sufficient for doubt but is only a test of faith to be overcome. Any opposing argument is not simply incorrect but driven by wilful evil, in league with big business if not Satan himself.
For third rate academics CAGW has much to offer. One doesn’t need to be particularly capable to speculate about some dire consequence of warming, receive widespread publicity and be treated as an important expert. Unlike in real science, no colleagues will dispute them and the few sceptics willing to question anything will generally be ignored and denigrated by all their peers. The news media will describe them as experts and provide the public attention they know they deserve but somehow had never been recognised by anyone else until they climbed onto the climate bandwagon. Grants then flow and jetting off to attend important conferences in attractive places with all expenses paid provides frequent welcome breaks from the tedium of academia. Perhaps best of all, is a delicious feeling of importance and moral superiority over all of the high achievers striving so hard to discover something of consequence about the real world. The only personal cost is to one’s own scientific integrity and that’s not worth much if one is just another unrecognised minor league academic no one had ever heard of before they joined into the climate alarm. In any case, saving the planet is the noblest of all causes and absolves any tinge of guilt in such regard.
Uncertainty and a Duty of Care
Recently an Italian court sentenced several scientists to jail terms in connection with a failed prediction regarding an earthquake. The court decision provoked widespread condemnation from the global scientific community because earthquakes are beyond the ability of current science to predict. However, the legal basis of their culpability was not in failing to predict the quake but in falsely asserting certainty in their own prediction. In this instance the scientists assured the local population that there was little risk of a dangerous event and that they should all go home, have a nice bottle of wine and not worry. A strong quake took place and several hundred people were killed.
The situation was perhaps exacerbated by a conflicting opinion from an independent researcher who had detected a sharp rise in radon gas in the air and felt this was evidence of an impending temblor. The government experts disagreed and assured everyone they were the experts and they were confident there was little or no risk.
If scientists are going to claim high levels of expert authority they have a duty of care to make clear the level of uncertainty in their predictions. This is especially so where there are potentially major detrimental consequences from following their advice should it prove to be incorrect. The essential difference between belief and science, or between alarmists and sceptics, is that the former assert certainty while the latter admit room for doubt. False claims of certainty and expertise by alarmist researchers have been a major obstacle to any rational public debate of the matter.
Fantasies vs. Reality
In the meantime, while we have been indulging the fantasies of activists and academics vying for our attention on the threat of CAGW, the economies of the developed world have come to teeter on the brink of financial chaos.
Democracies everywhere have voted for more government and more benefits than their productive sectors can support. Deficits are now chronic and blowing out while productive activity struggles under the burden of ever more government imposed restrictions and demands. The climate-alarmist push to penalise and restrict the use of fossil fuels and force the premature adoption of expensive, inadequate, unreliable renewable energy is a dagger to the very heart of our society at a time of great vulnerability. Ironically, if the alarmist aim is achieved they themselves, the urban non-producers, will be among the first to become truly unsustainable. The next few years look to become a decisive reality test.
In news just in (and curiously ignored in the mainstream Western media) it is reported that for the first time since it began The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not invited to attend an upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference. Could it be that in a global financial crisis nations have finally come to realise that climate hysterics are more of a problem than a solution?
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/11/speak-loudly-and-carry-a-busted-hockey-stick
-
At climate talks in Qatar (something of an oxymoron to begin with) participants are duped into wearing a "carbon sequestration" mask. Critical thinking does not seem to be something the participants caught here are endowed with: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/04/doha-delegates-pwned/
-
Hmm, a little sunlight goes a long way it appears:
IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing
Posted on December 13, 2012 by Guest Blogger
UPDATE1: Andrew Revkin at the NYT weighs in, an semi endorses the leak, see update below – Anthony
UPDATE2: Alternate links have been sent to me, should go faster now. – Anthony
Full AR5 draft leaked here, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing
(Alec Rawls) I participated in “expert review” of the Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”), and am now making the full draft available to the public. I believe that the leaking of this draft is entirely legal, that the taxpayer funded report report is properly in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act, and that making it available to the public is in any case protected by established legal and ethical standards, but web hosting companies are not in the business of making such determinations so interested readers are encouraged to please download copies of the report for further dissemination in case this content is removed as a possible terms-of-service violation. My reasons for leaking the report are explained below. Here are the chapters:
Fromhttp://www.stopgreensuicide.com/
Summary for Policymakers
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
Chapter 3: Observations: Ocean
Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere
Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives
Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols
Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
Chapter 8 Supplement
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
Chapter 11: Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
Chapter 13: Sea Level Change
Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change
Chapter 14 Supplement
Technical Summary
Why leak the draft report?
By Alec Rawls (email) [writing at http://www.stopgreensuicide.com/ ]
General principles
The ethics of leaking tax-payer funded documents requires weighing the “public’s right to know” against any harm to the public interest that may result. The press often leaks even in the face of extreme such harm, as when the New York Times published details of how the Bush administration was tracking terrorist financing with the help of the private sector Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), causing this very successful anti-terror program to immediately collapse.
That was a bad leak, doing great harm to expose something that nobody needed to know about. With the UN’s IPCC reports the calculus is reversed. UN “climate chief” Christina Figueres explains what is at stake for the public:
… we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science.
So may we please see this “science” on the basis of which our existing energy infrastructure is to be ripped out in favor of non-existent “green” energy? The only reason for secrecy in the first place is to enhance the UN’s political control over a scientific story line that is aimed explicitly at policy makers. Thus the drafts ought to fall within the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Obama administration implicitly acknowledged this when it tried to evade FOIA by setting up private “backdoor channels” for communications with the IPCC. If NCAR’s Gerald Meehl (a lead author of AR5′s chapter on near-term climate change), has working copies of the draft report (and he’s only one of dozens of U.S. government researchers who would), then by law the draft report (now finished) should be available to the public.
The IPCC’s official reason for wanting secrecy (as they explained it to Steve McIntyre in January 2012) is so that criticisms of the drafts are not spread out across the internet but get funneled through the UN’s comment process. If there is any merit to that rationale it is now moot. The comment period ended November 30th so the comment process can no longer be affected by publication.
As for my personal confidentiality agreement with the IPCC, I regard that as vitiated by the systematic dishonesty of the report (“omitted variable fraud” as I called it in my FOD comments). This is a general principle of journalistic confidentiality: bad faith on one side breaks the agreement on the other. They can’t ask reviewers to become complicit in their dishonesty by remaining silent about it.
Then there is the specific content of the Second Order Draft where the addition of one single sentence demands the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole.
Lead story from the Second Order Draft: strong evidence for solar forcing beyond TSI now acknowledged by IPCC
Compared to the First Order Draft, the SOD now adds the following sentence, indicated in bold (page 7-43, lines 1-5, emphasis added):
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
The Chapter 7 authors are admitting strong evidence (“many empirical relationships”) for enhanced solar forcing (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI), even if they don’t know what the mechanism is. This directly undercuts the main premise of the report, as stated in Chapter 8 (page 8-4, lines 54-57):
There is very high confidence that natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic forcing. In particular, over the past three decades (since 1980), robust evidence from satellite observations of the TSI and volcanic aerosols demonstrate a near-zero (–0.04 W m–2) change in the natural forcing compared to the anthropogenic AF increase of ~1.0 ± 0.3 W m–2.
The Chapter 8 authors (a different group than the Chapter 7 authors) are explicit here that their claim about natural forcing being small compared to anthropogenic forcing is based on an analysis in which the only solar forcing that is taken into account is TSI. This can be verified from the radiative forcing table on page 8-39 where the only solar variable included in the IPCC’s computer models is seen to be “solar irradiance.”
This analysis, where post-1980 warming gets attributed to the human release of CO2 on the grounds that it cannot be attributed to solar irradiance, cannot stand in the face of the Chapter 7 admission of substantial evidence for solar forcing beyond solar irradiance. Once the evidence for enhanced solar forcing is taken into account we can have no confidence that natural forcing is small compared to anthropogenic forcing.
The Chapter 8 premise that natural forcing is relatively small leads directly to the main conclusion of the entire report, stated in the first sentence of the Executive Summary (the very first sentence of the entire report): that advances since AR4 “further strengthen the basis for human activities being the primary driver in climate change” (p.1-2, lines 3-5). This headline conclusion is a direct descendant of the assumption that the only solar forcing is TSI, a claim that their own report no longer accepts.
The report still barely hints at the mountain of evidence for enhanced solar forcing, or the magnitude of the evidenced effect. Dozens of studies (section two here) have found between a .4 and .7 degree of correlation between solar activity and various climate indices, suggesting that solar activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of all past temperature change, very little of which could be explained by the very slight variation in TSI. At least the Chapter 7 team is now being explicit about what this evidence means: that some mechanism of enhanced solar forcing must be at work.
My full submitted comments (which I will post later) elaborate several important points. For instance, note that the Chapter 8 premise (page 8-4, lines 54-57) assumes that it is the change in the level of forcing since 1980, not the level of forcing, that would be causing warming. Solar activity was at historically high levels at least through the end of solar cycle 22 (1996), yet the IPCC is assuming that because this high level of solar forcing was roughly constant from 1950 until it fell off during solar cycle 23 it could not have caused post-1980 warming. In effect they are claiming that you can’t heat a pot of water by turning the burner to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to keep turning the flame up to get continued warming, an un-scientific absurdity that I have been writing about for several years (most recently in my post about Isaac Held’s bogus 2-box model of ocean equilibration).
The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.
President Obama is already pushing a carbon tax premised on the fear that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming. Last week his people were at the UN’s climate meeting in Doha pretending that Hurricane Sandy was caused by human increments to CO2 as UN insiders assured the public that the next IPCC report will “scare the wits out of everyone” with its ramped-up predictions of human-caused global warming to come, but this is not where the evidence points, not if climate change is in any substantial measure driven by the sun, which has now gone quiet and is exerting what influence it has in the cooling direction.
The acknowledgement of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing should upend the IPCC’s entire agenda. The easiest way for the UN to handle this disruptive admission would be to remove it from their final draft, which is another reason to make the draft report public now. The devastating admission needs to be known so that the IPCC can’t quietly take it back.
Will some press organization please host the leaked report?
Most of us have to worry about staying within cautiously written and cautiously applied terms-of-service agreements. That’s why I created this new website. If it gets taken down nothing else gets taken with it. Media companies don’t have this problem. They have their own servers and publishing things like the draft IPCC report is supposed to be their bailiwick.
If the press has First Amendment protection for the publication of leaked materials even when substantial national security interests are at stake (the Supreme Court precedent set in the Pentagon Papers case), then it can certainly republish a leaked draft of a climate science report where there is no public interest in secrecy. The leaker could be at risk (the case against Pentagon leaker Daniel Ellsberg was thrown out for government misconduct, not because his activity was found to be protected) but the press is safe, and their services would be appreciated.
United States taxpayers have funded climate science to the tune of well over 80 billion dollars, all channeled through the funding bureaucracy established by Vice President Albert “the end is nigh” Gore when he served as President Clinton’s “climate czar.” That Gore-built bureaucracy is still to this day striving to insure that not a penny of all those taxpayer billions ever goes to any researcher who is not committed to the premature conclusion that human contributions to atmospheric CO2 are causing dangerous global warming (despite the lack of any statistically significant warming for more than 15 years).
Acolytes of this bought “consensus” want to see what new propaganda their tax dollars have wrought and so do the skeptics. It’s unanimous, and an already twice-vetted draft is sitting now in thousands of government offices around the world. Time to fork it over to the people.
=============================================================
UPDATE1: Andrew Revkin writes in a story at the NYT Dot Earth today:
It’s important, before anyone attacks Rawls for posting the drafts (this is distinct from his views on their contents), to consider that panel report drafts at various stages of preparation have been leaked in the past by people with entirely different points of view.
That was the case in 2000, when I was leaked a final draft of the summary for policy makers of the second science report from the panel ahead of that year’s round of climate treaty negotiations. As I explained in the resulting news story, “A copy of the summary was obtained by The New York Times from someone who was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in The Hague.”
Here’s a question I sent tonight to a variety of analysts of the panel’s workings over the years:
The leaker, Alec Rawls, clearly has a spin. But I’ve long thought that I.P.C.C. was in a weird losing game in trying to boost credibility through more semi-open review while trying to maintain confidentiality at same time. I’m sympathetic to the idea of having more of the I.P.C.C. process being fully open (a layered Public Library of Science-style approach to review can preserve the sanity of authors) in this age of enforced transparency (WikiLeaks being the most famous example).
I’ll post answers as they come in.
Full story at DotEarth
==============================================================
UPDATE2: Alternative links for AR5 WG1 SOD. At each page click on the button that says “create download link,” then “click here to download”:
Summary for Policymakers
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425211/SummaryForPolicymakers_WG1AR5-SPM_FOD_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 1: Introduction
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425214/Ch1-Introduction_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch01_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436270/Ch2_Obs-atmosur_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch02_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 3: Observations: Ocean
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436276/Ch3_Obs-oceans_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch03_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436279/Ch4_obs-cryo_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch04_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436282/Ch5_Paleo_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch05_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436285/Ch6_Carbonbio_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch06_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436286/Ch7_Clouds-aerosols_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch07_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425217/Ch8_Radiative-forcing_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch08_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 8 Supplement
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436312/Ch8_supplement_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch08_SM_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436298/Ch9_models_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch09_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436302/Ch10_attribution_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch10_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 11: Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436303/Ch11_near-term_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch11_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425220/Ch12_long-term_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch12_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 13: Sea Level Change
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425221/Ch13_sea-level_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch13_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425222/Ch14_future-regional_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch14_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 14 Supplement
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436309/Ch14_supplement_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch14_SM_Final.pdf.html
Technical Summary
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425223/TechnicalSummary_WG1AR5-TS_FOD_All_Final.pdf.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/13/ipcc-ar5-draft-leaked-contains-game-changing-admission-of-enhanced-solar-forcing/
-
BBG:
As usual, you bring a serious level to this subject with your greatly appreciated posts. I THINK I understand what he is saying, but would you be so kind as to write a summary in layman's English?
TIA,
Marc
-
BBG:
As usual, you bring a serious level to this subject with your greatly appreciated posts. I THINK I understand what he is saying, but would you be so kind as to write a summary in layman's English?
TIA,
Marc
Yes great find and post by BBG. I too am looking forward to knowing the details and learning BBG's take. Enhanced solar forcing means that the group that backed Al Gore's movie and shared his award is now giving some blame or credit to the sun for warming the earth. Solar fluctuations are presumably cyclical while man made greenhouse gas emissions are partly cumulative, so the difference could be the survival of the planet.
The other big deal is that leaking the draft makes it harder to scrub the data and conclusions before the final report.
I wonder where people could have learned sooner that the sun might be part of the cause:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg10019#msg10019
Reports of warming on Jupiter, Pluto and Mars, Venus and Triton, the largest moon of Neptune:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_jr.html - Jupiter
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warming_021009.html - Pluto
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html - Mars
"Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says"
-
Anyone out there who is fluent in agendadriventechnobureaucraticbabble want to translate this from the IPCC report into English:
"As discussed in Section 8.2.1.4.1, a recent satellite measurement (Harder et al., 2009) found much greater than expected reduction at UV wavelengths in the recent declining solar cycle phase. Changes in solar uv drive stratospheric O3 chemistry and can change RF. Haigh et al. (2010) show that if these observations are correct, they imply the opposite relationship between solar RF and solar activity over that period than has hitherto been assumed. These new measurements therefore increase uncertainty in estimates of the sign of solar RF, but they are unlikely to alter estimates of the maximum absolute magnitude of the solar contribution to RF, which remains small (Chapter 8 ). However, they do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate (as discussed in 10.3.1.1.3), that are not necessarily reflected by the RF metric (see 8.2.16)."
http://climatefailfiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ch11_near-term_wg1ar5_sod_ch11_all_final.pdf
David M. Hoffer writing at he world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change translates it this way:
They got the physics completely reversed, but we should still trust them that the order of magnitude is small, but allow that the impacts might be larger anyway?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/23/ipcc-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection/
Tropical cyclones, what about hurricanes getting worse:
"Two recent reports, the SREX (IPCC, 2012; particularly Seneviratne et al., 2012) assessment and a WMO Expert Team report on tropical cyclones and climate change (Knutson et al., 2010) indicate the response of global tropical cyclone frequency to projected radiative forcing changes is likely to be either no change or a decrease of up to a third by the end of the 21st century."
The science says nothing about intensity, but on frequency, somewhere between no change and a one third decrease. One would think that a projection of up to a one third decrease in tropical cyclone frequency would be important enough to make it into the Executive Summary.
-
I bet Buzward will have a field day with this :evil:
-
"there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration"
"greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated, and the perceived relationship between these variables is a spurious regression phenomenon"
New Study Finds No Significant Human-Induced Warming
At the journal Earth System Dynamics, M. Beenstock, Y. Reingewertz, and N. Paldor have published a paper titled “Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming” which Anthony Watts describes as a potential bombshell. The authors conducted an exhaustive statistical analysis of data from 1850 through 2007, applying the technique of cointegration, which the authors describe as follows:
Cointegration theory is based on the simple notion that time series might be highly correlated even though there is no causal relation between them. For the relation to be genuine, the residuals from a regression between these time series must be stationary, in which case the time series are “cointegrated”. Since stationary residuals mean-revert to zero, there must be a genuine long-term relationship between the series, which move together over time because they share a common trend. If on the other hand, the residuals are nonstationary, the residuals do not mean-revert to zero, the time series do not share a common trend, and the relationship between them is spurious because the time series are not cointegrated.
You can follow the link for the statistical details, but here is the authors’ conclusion:
We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period. This key result is shown graphically in Fig. 3 where the vertical axis measures the component of global temperature that is unexplained by solar irradiance according to our estimates. In panel a the horizontal axis measures the anomaly in the anthropogenic trend when the latter is derived from forcings of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. In panel b the horizontal axis measures this anthropogenic anomaly when apart from these greenhouse gas forcings, it includes tropospheric aerosols and black carbon. Panels a and b both show that there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.
This is Fig. 3a:
(http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/01/clip_image0026.jpg)
Interestingly, the authors also conclude that the data admit the possibility that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” could contribute to to a temporary increase in global temperatures:
However, we find that greenhouse gas forcings might have a temporary effect on global temperature. This result is illustrated in panel c of Fig. 3 in which the horizontal axis measures the change in the estimated anthropogenic trend. Panel c clearly shows that there is a positive relationship between temperature and the change in the anthropogenic anomaly once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.
Other scientists will weigh in on these findings, as the debate over climate continues to rage. Still, it is increasingly clear that the most reliable and sophisticated scientific work tends to show that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong. In that sense, it is fair to say that a consensus is emerging.
http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/173/2012/esd-3-173-2012.html
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/new-study-finds-no-significant-human-induced-warming.php
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/03/agw-bombshell-a-new-paper-shows-statistical-tests-for-global-warming-fails-to-find-statistically-significantly-anthropogenic-forcing/
-
Brrr! China's coldest winter in decades at new low
BEIJING (AP) Jan. 5 2013 -- China is experiencing unusual chills this winter with its national average temperature hitting the lowest in 28 years, and snow and ice have closed highways, canceled flights, stranded tourists and knocked out power in several provinces.
China Meteorological Administration on Friday said the national average was -3.8 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) since late November, the coldest in nearly three decades.
The average temperature in northeast China dipped to -15.3 degrees C (4.5 degrees F), the coldest in 43 years
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_COLDEST_WINTER?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-05-07-52-05
-
Interesting twist:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-liberals-war-on-science
-
Previously on the thread we see record cold temps in China and Siberia when it was warmer in other places. The phrase global warming seems to be dead now because the warming isn't consistent or necessarily global. The climate is always changing so the term climate change is safer to use, can apply to everything and can't be disproven.
The last 5 winters in Germany were colder than 'normal'. This chart show the cooling trend since 1988:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/germancoolingtrendsince1988_zps443c6561.jpg)
I keep running into evidence that winter continues at least so far despite humans and their bad behaviors. Yesterday I took a long drive along the mighty Mississippi only to find it completely frozen over. Not up north where it is small but in southern Minnesota where it is a mile wide. A truck parked at at an ice fishing house prompted me to take a picture. Apologies for the quality of the shot not showing just how beautiful this is, but this is the Mighty Mississippi fully frozen over and blanketed with snow for as far as the eye can see:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/f675df55-ff50-4bb2-b79e-513809a9834f_zps2c147ad7.jpg)
Next is an ice road on the world's largest freshwater lake:
(http://bayfield.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/iceroad_icicles.jpg)
http://bayfield.org/bayfield-activities/ice-road/
Maybe next year warming will spiral out of control or maybe from where you are it looks like it already has. Not so here.
-
Global
warming errr... Global Climate Change!
Whatever, give Al Gore and his peers more money and power and just shut up.
-
http://www.dennisprager.com/columns.aspx?g=0cdb1edc-f871-4870-a8bb-5c11d6c1e463&url=dennis-prager-n1520196
-
Snow postpones global warming hearing
3/6/13 6:13 AM EST
A House Science Committee hearing on global warming won't go on after all — the committee's environmental subpanel has just announced that it's postponing this morning's session on climate change "due to weather."
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/19965/Snow-postpones-Congressional-global-warming-hearing
-
Locally I can report the lake is still frozen and that it was a high of 34 degrees for the outdoor baseball opener yesterday, sunny and 24 right now, April 2. 28 days of March were below historical averages at the high and at the low.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/climate-change-endgame-in-sight.php
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
"OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar."
The question people (who didn't read the emails) are asking is - why are the climate models so wrong:
(http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20130330_STC334_1.png)
Looks like the 'deniers' had it right and the alarmists are the new deniers:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/denial
-
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/04/01/economist-breaks-with-climate-orthodoxy/?singlepage=true
-
Global warming right now looks like a cold, cruel hoax. From my outpost: 20 inches of ice depth, still, plus another foot of snow falling now. Last year the lake was clear of ice by March 20. 135 years ago it was clear by March 11. I took this photo across a snow covered lake in metro Mpls yesterday in sunshine. The view now is all white-out. My catamaran and kayak are patiently awaiting the change of season. The geese look a confused. Another 2-day 'winter' snowstorm all day today through tomorrow. In two months the days start getting shorter.
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/frozenapr172013_zps3c9cc290.jpg)
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2013/04/16/lake-minnetonka-could-face-historically-late-ice-out/
-
In the first place, I think tornado activity is actually down. That news is no help to today's victims.
Hearts and prayers go out to the Oklahoma tornado victims. This is a HORRIBLE tragedy. Where I live people can't imagine homes without basements, that may have saved hundreds or thousands of lives in Mpls 2 years ago. Besides that people who could not get below ground for cover, another part of the story is saying that a number of children got to the school basement for safety and drowned there! This is Sandy Hook and far worse I think. Ughhh! Glenn Beck was broadcasting live from Moore, OK this morning and has a relief fund setup on his site to donate directly to help victims: http://mercuryone.fundly.com/2013-midwest-tornado-relief
All that said, on a lighter note, Newsweek predicted global cooling could cause this kind of carnage:
(http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/screenhunter_376-may-20-18-53.jpg?w=640)
(http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/screenhunter_373-may-20-18-50.jpg?w=331&h=402)
(http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/screenhunter_384-may-20-21-58.jpg?w=640)
(http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/screenhunter_375-may-20-18-51.jpg?w=640)
-
David Solway writing at PJ Media about a talk in Ottawa by Tom Harris, director of the International Climate Science Coalition
http://pjmedia.com/blog/who-are-the-real-climate-deniers/?singlepage=true
...the science is far from settled and that if we were honest with ourselves and wished to approach the subject with scientific rigor and impartiality, we would have to modestly agree, in his own words, that “the more we learn, the more we realize that we just do not know.
Uncertainty, however, is not synonymous with confusion or ignorance. We do not know everything or even enough, but we still know a fair amount about climate realities, as Harris’s discourse made clear. We know the long history of climatological variations, the many different factors that impinge upon and largely account for vast fluctuations in weather over the centuries and millennia, and the response of the scientific community, often, it must be said, disingenuous and repressive, to the data at its disposal.
We know, via proxies like ice core samples, fossil remains, marine specimens, temperature-dependent remanence measurements, as well as historical documents, etc., that there were periods in history when the earth was significantly warmer than it is today, though human beings were not pumping CO2 into the atmosphere — CO2 levels during the Ordovician Age 440 million years ago were ten times higher than they are at present and happened to coincide with an ice age; closer to home, during the Medieval Warm Period the Scandinavians farmed Greenland and in the Roman Warm Period olive groves flourished in Germany. We know that the Northwest Passage was open during the early part of the 20th century and that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, as recounted in his The North West Passage, navigated the strait between 1903 and 1906. (Its “gates” have been “forced…ajar,” he writes, and “traced from end to end by one ship’s keel” — his own.)
We know that solar activity is a primary driver of climate change. We know that temperatures have stabilized since 1998 and may possibly have declined by a fraction of a degree, and that we are currently in what is defined as an “interglacial” — and in fact, temperatures recorded at the American base at the south pole show it to be colder today than when the base was established over 50 years ago.
...
We know, too, that Michael Mann’s celebrated “hockey stick” graphs depicting an abrupt spike in temperatures in the recent era are fraudulent and are in process of being retired; that computer models are notoriously unreliable and are unable even to retrodict the past; that temperature reading stations are both too few and egregiously misplaced, often in urban areas and near man-made structures that capture or produce heat, thus recording misleading data; and that the media contention that the majority of the world’s scientists are firm adherents of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) thesis is simply false.
... more than 31,000 scientists who added their signatures to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine “petition project” in 2008, repudiating the 600 or so scientists who have signed on to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warming consensus. Further, it seems, as the petition states, “that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth,” a subject Harris also touched on but one studiously avoided by the warmists.
...
We know that assessments counter to the prevailing orthodoxy have been deliberately suppressed and that the evidence for AGW was often just made up — witness the infamous “hide the decline” email dumps emanating from the mysteriously hacked Hadley Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which have disclosed the duplicitous and counterfeit nature of its methods and procedures. The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU, Phil Jones, has gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others. As I wrote in Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science, “What we are seeing is the unfolding of a Climategate scandal that, one hopes, will put paid to a vast and tenacious hoax.” The climate mavens will stoop to practically anything to defend their ideological patrimony.
(more at link)
-
Great post - thanks Doug.
-
In order to measure man's impact or CO2's impact on temperature, one would first need to know where we were in nature's cycles, not compare with a perfectly constant global temperature which ignores or denies the cycles.
-------
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-global-warming-alarmists-global-cooling-is-here/
To the Horror of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here
Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.
Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.
Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.
Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.
The Siple Dome, an ice dome roughly 100 km long and 100 km wide, about 100 km east of the Siple Coast of Antartica, also reflects effects of the Little Ice Age synchronously with the GISP2 record, as do sediment cores from the Bransfield Basin of the Antarctic Peninsula. Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline between 1270 and 1475 A.D.
The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s. The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.
Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period from 1600 to 1800. Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods from 1270 to 1380 and from 1520 to 1670. Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile from 1675 to 1766, which continued into the 19th century.
The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana advanced until the late 18th or early 19th centuries. The last River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814. The Little Ice Age phased out during the middle to late 19th century.
The Little Ice Age, following the historically warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950 to 1250, has been attributed to natural cycles in solar activity, particularly sunspots. A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum began in 1280 and persisted for 70 years until 1350. That was followed by a period of even lower sunspot activity that lasted 90 years from 1460 to 1550 known as the Sporer Minimum. During the period 1645 to 1715, the low point of the Little Ice Age, the number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder. That was followed by the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.
The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.
Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.
The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.
At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states,
“Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 [the current short term 11 year cycle] is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.”
That is even more significant because NASA’s climate science has been controlled for years by global warming hysteric James Hansen, who recently announced his retirement.
But this same concern is increasingly being echoed worldwide. The Voice of Russia reported on April 22, 2013,
“Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”
That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.
The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013,
“German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is now the coldest in 208 years – and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory [saying this] is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.” Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an ‘unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.’”
Faith in Global Warming is collapsing in formerly staunch Europe following increasingly severe winters which have now started continuing into spring. Christopher Booker explained in The Sunday Telegraph on April 27, 2013,
The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory Peter Ferrara Peter Ferrara Contributor
As The Economy Recesses, Obama's Global Warming Delusions Are Truly Cruel Peter Ferrara Peter Ferrara Contributor
Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling Peter Ferrara Peter Ferrara Contributor
Salvaging The Mythology Of Man-Caused Global Warming Peter Ferrara Peter Ferrara Contributor
“Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record – according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.”
A news report from India (The Hindu April 22, 2013) stated, “March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to –25° Celsius in central parts of the country and –45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century….Weathermen say spring is a full month behind schedule in Russia.” The news report summarized,
“Russia is famous for its biting frosts but this year, abnormally icy weather also hit much of Europe, the United States, China and India. Record snowfalls brought Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to a standstill for several days in late March, closed roads across many parts of Britain, buried thousands of sheep beneath six-metre deep snowdrifts in Northern Ireland, and left more than 1,000,000 homes without electricity in Poland. British authorities said March was the second coldest in its records dating back to 1910. China experienced the severest winter weather in 30 years and New Delhi in January recorded the lowest temperature in 44 years.”
Booker adds, “Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations.”
Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, did concede last December that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That reflects grudging recognition of the newly developing trends. But that reflects as well growing divergence between the reality of real world temperatures and the projections of the climate models at the foundation of the global warming alarmism of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies. That is why, “In the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [global temperature]forecasts [of the Met Office] were too high — and… none were colder than [resulted],” as BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson wrote in January.
Global warming was never going to be the problem that the Lysenkoists who have brought down western science made it out to be. Human emissions of CO2 are only 4 to 5% of total global emissions, counting natural causes. Much was made of the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeding 400 parts per million. But if you asked the daffy NBC correspondent who hysterically reported on that what portion of the atmosphere 400 parts per million is, she transparently wouldn’t be able to tell you. One percent of the atmosphere would be 10,000 parts per million. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 deep in the geologic past were much, much greater than today, yet life survived, and we have no record of any of the catastrophes the hysterics have claimed. Maybe that is because the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically. That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, which would be well before any of the supposed climate catastrophes the warming hysterics have tried to use to shut down capitalist prosperity.
Yet, just last week, there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson telling us, by way of attempting to tutor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, “For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no ‘great amount of uncertainty’ about whether the planet is warming and why.” If you can read, and you have gotten this far in my column, you know why Robinson’s ignorance is just another Washington Post abuse of the First Amendment. Mr. Robinson, let me introduce you to the British Met Office, stalwart of Global Warming “science,” such as it is, which has already publicly confessed that we are already three quarters through 20 years of No Global Warming!
Booker could have been writing about Robinson when he concluded his Sunday Telegraph commentary by writing, “Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion?”
But there is a fundamental problem with the temperature records from this contentious period, when climate science crashed into political science. The land based records, which have been under the control of global warming alarmists at the British Met Office and the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit, and at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S., show much more warming during this period than the incorruptible satellite atmosphere temperature records. Those satellite records have been further confirmed by atmospheric weather balloons. But the land based records can be subject to tampering and falsification.
-
Does the model fit the data? Does the warming model explain the recorded data better than other models or random fluctuations? This is a mathematical, not a measurement question or environmental question, and the answer is no.
Long, interesting story of trying to get an answer to the above question from the meteorological office of Britain (The Met Office), also posed in a WSJ editorial in 2011 linked below. Why wouldn't scientists be excited to answer that question?
Simple example presented, let's say you flip a coin and get heads ten times in a row. Of the competing theories as to why that happened, something about the coin leaning toward heads is a thousand time more likely model (explanation) than it being just the result of random occurrence. (Try it.) In the case of 0.8 degree warming over 150 years, randomness explains it better than the model chosen by the IPCC:
----------------
"It is not only the Met Office that has claimed that the increase in global temperatures is statistically significant: the IPCC has as well. Moreover, the IPCC used the same statistical model as the Met Office, in its most-recent Assessment Report (2007). The Assessment Report discusses the choice of model in Volume I, Appendix 3.A. The Appendix correctly acknowledges that, concerning statistical significance, “the results depend on the statistical model used”.
What justification does the Appendix give for choosing the trending autoregressive model? None. In other words, the model used by the IPCC is just adopted by proclamation. Science is supposed to be based on evidence and logic. The failure of the IPCC to present any evidence or logic to support its choice of model is a serious violation of basic scientific principles — indeed, it means that what the IPCC has done is not science.
To conclude, the primary basis for global-warming alarmism is unfounded. The Met Office has been making false claims about the significance of climatic changes to Parliament—as well as to the government, the media, and others — claims which have seriously affected both policies and opinions. When questioned about those claims in Parliament, the Met Office did everything feasible to avoid telling the truth."
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/5/27/met-office-admits-claims-of-significant-temperature-rise-unt.html
http://www.informath.org/media/a41.htm
http://www.informath.org/media/a41/b8.pdf
-
This is already case closed and well reported, but I will keep going since our President is still gearing up for another big fight against "global warming". WTF else is 'climate change' if not natural fluctuations or liberal code for slow the economy and 'save the planet'.
-----
"Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections".
"there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/climate-change
-----
The phony movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released in 2006 with cherrypicked data picked by quack scientists to help elect the Pelosi-Reid agenda in congress and elect the Senate's furthest left member to the White House. At the moment of that trickery, we were 8 years into a no warming plateau, impossible according to their own models. Now it is 15 years and counting and we still stop pipelines and fight for backward economic movement.
When the data doesn't fit the model, this crowd 'adjusts' the data instead of scrapping the phony model.
Like BBG, I survived 400 PPM.
-
Doug,
Agreed. This is all out of control.
I heard an ad recently for the Coast Guard advertising for recruits. The pitch is for people to join to protect the nation, our coastlines, and our wild habitats against polluters.
I am waiting for the ad for army recruits to protect America from Republicans, Christians, and white men.
-
No, you say. Think again.
I remember reading in the 1960s about temperatures reaching the 130's. I remember the record in the Guinness Book was in 1922 in Libya. I am wondering why we keep hearing 122 in Death Valley is approaching the World record now. Now I know. The environmentalist have been able to expunge the 1922 record just recently in 2012. Just in time for their media blitz to shove the carbon tax in front of our faces:
****What is the hottest air temperature ever recorded on earth?
In: Meteorology and Weather, Atmospheric Sciences, Temperature
Answer:
The world's highest recorded air temperature is officially recognized by the World Meteorological Organization as 134°F (57.6°C) recorded at Death Valley, California, USA on 10 July 1913.
Note that this is in recorded history. Higher temperatures have occurred, of course, at different times during the 4.55 billion years of Earth's history.
Related Information:
El Azizia, Libya, held this record for decades, after recording a temperature of 136 °F (58°C) on 13 September 1922. It was coincidentally also on 13 September of 2012 that this record was stripped by the WMO after a team of experts determined that there were enough questions surrounding this measurement that this temperature was probably not really recorded.
The temperature had been suspect in atmospheric science circles for a number of reasons. One being that the time of year is inconsistent with such a high reading. Also, the type and exposure of the measuring instruments cast doubt on the accuracy of the data. However, other temperatures in the same general area approach that maximum, especially in the cloudless southern Sahara, far from the moderating effects of water. Several links are provided below for more information on this process.
Other Earth Temperature Highs:
The modern, most reliably recorded air temperature at Death Valley was 129°F (54°C) on 7/20/1960, 7/18/1998, 7/20/2005, and 7/7/2007. Still, the hottest in the Western Hemisphere.
The highest naturally occurring temperature (at Earth's core) is higher than the melting point of iron and is estimated to be approximately 5000°C.
The highest temperature ever created in a laboratory experiment: Scientists, using the Z machine, have produced plasma at temperatures of more than 2 billion degrees Kelvin (3.6 billion degrees F) at Sandia National Laboratories, located near Albuquerque New Mexico.
Dasht-e Lut, a desert in southeastern Iran, was identified as having the hottest surface temperature (not air temperature) of 70.7 degrees C (159 degrees F) This was only during the years of study in 2004 and 2005 by MODIS, which is a satellite remote sensor, mounted on NASA satellites Aqua and Terra.
Caveats to the Above:
Modern measuring methods, instruments, and techniques are more sophisticated and standardized today. Example: The World Meteorological Organization, recommends that air temperatures be measured at a height of 1.25 to 2 meters (4.1010 to 6.5617 feet) above ground level.
The most likely places on Earth for record high temperatures are in depressions in desert regions, especially in areas below sea level. The Dallol (Danakil) Depression in Africa (Ethiopia), Death Valley in USA, and the area around Lake Eyre in Australia are likely candidates. However, the Gobi Desert's temperatures, while far from any ocean, are mitigated by altitude. The Dallol (Danakil) Depression had a weather station for a short while, only a few years, that was run by a mining company. It wasn't there long enough to measure an extreme maximum to beat the Libyan record, although it did measure very high mean average temperatures while it operated.
The thing to remember about very hot places, is that data is sparse. This is because very few people with high levels of technology stay in these places for long. The environment of the Danikil Depression is inimical (hostile) to human life.****
-
Yesterday the temperature hit 128 in death valley. Highest recorded but today with the clarification - highest in *June*. Over the last several days it was simply the highest recorded.
I've been to DV. It was merely 110 at the time. If one likes there is a golf course and a resort hotel in the middle. Some of the colors of the mountains and bluffs are amazing as the sun shifts.
Other locations have very strong winds. Sand dunes. Cracked earth. Lowest point below sea level. Neat place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
-
First, a comment or two to the above regarding Death Valley, Vegas in summer etc.: Records are in the context of how short a time we have measured and measured accurately. Also, they are in the context that here we just had a record long and cold winter, as did China, Russia and other places. Good reporting would be that it is hot out, or cold out in a particular place, not that the planet is turning to molten rock - unless it is. How much air conditioning did Vegas have 50 or 100 years ago? If Vegas would prohibit air conditioning, which puts more heat outside than cold air inside, the outdoor temps in summer would not be so bad. Just a thought. Fewer people would fly there, hence less greenhouse gas. We make choices.
------------
From the Times of London: “Global Warming Has a Bright Side”:
A SURGE in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions could create a boost for parts of the British economy, a government report will suggest this week.
The National Adaptation programme, to be published tomorrow by Defra, the environment ministry, will suggest that farming, forestry and tourism will all benefit from warmer summers, while shipping will profit from the shorter sea routes caused by the melting of the ice caps.
It will even say that rising warmth might boost Britons’ health, encouraging them to spend more time outdoors, where exposure to sunshine would boost vitamin D levels.
And the Telegraph reports:
Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, with exotic crops such as melons already thriving. In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.
-
http://iceagenow.info/category/glaciers-are-growing-around-the-world/
-
Interesting stories at the link, CCP. If I unplug a freezer (global warming), I don't find that some ice cube trays freeze and some thaw. Everything gets warmer. The earth's systems and patterns are more complicated. We are talking about tenths and hundredths of a degree of alleged change over an entire planet, a far smaller change than our ability to measure.
Some say a glacier may increase as it warms because of more snowfall. But they tell you that any loss of glacial ice is due to global warming, because of humans, even if the trend line precedes human industrialization. Winter here was 2 months longer this year than last year, proof of nothing more than natural fluctuation. The ocean level goes up more in a day with tide than in a century due to global warming.
I love the examples of counter-trends just as an answer to the naive people, such as our President, who give 2 or 3 anecdotal examples as proof of global warming. Anecdotal examples, such as noticeably warmer now than when you were a kid, are false. You can't feel a rate of warmer of a half a degree a century. Your body adjusts faster than that.
Headlines from CCP's link:
British press acknowledges Antarctic ice at record high levels
Antarctic sea-ice extent 193,000 sq miles higher than average
Sweden’s Kebnekaise glacier now growing
Many Himalayan glaciers advancing rather than melting, study finds
Glaciers on Asia’s largest mountain range getting BIGGER
Arctic Ice Extent Shatters More Records
Himalayas have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
Glaciers are growing on Kilimanjaro, guide insists
-
In the final paragraph the impression is being made that this is a "global warming" problem. From what I read the glaciers on the West of Antarctica are shrinking but are getting larger on the East Side. It is admitted the phenomenon of large ice breaks from glaciers is poorly understood.
Yet the global warming crowd will seize on this and use it as armament for their cause of the day.
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Blog/2013/07/12/Giant-iceberg-breaks-off-Antarctica-glacier/5841373628126/
-
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/18/billions-spent-in-obama-climate-plan-may-be-virtually-useless-study-suggests/?test=latestnews#ixzz2ZSFr46N4
-
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/18/billions-spent-in-obama-climate-plan-may-be-virtually-useless-study-suggests/?test=latestnews#ixzz2ZSFr46N4
Very funny title. Fox News should read the forum and they wouldn't be so surprised.
----
News at the link below from the global warming crowd, they are now explaining the lack of warming over the last 15 years before they have admitted the lack of warming over the last 15 years. The explanation was that it all went into the oceans. But the models said warming is LINKED to CO2. The 'scientists' said the earth has no mechanism to handle 400 ppm or more and warming would spiral upward until civilization was flooded over. Oh well. Keep the research money coming nonetheless. Lack of global warming means we have even more to fear.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/has-global-warming-stopped-no--its-just-on-pause-insist-scientists-and-its-down-to-the-oceans-8726893.html
-
I'm reminded of the Monty Python dead parrot skit. "It's dead !" " No it's not!" "It's just stunned, global warming stuns easily."
-
I'm reminded of the Monty Python dead parrot skit. "It's dead !" " No it's not!" "It's just stunned, global warming stuns easily."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active
-
Sun’s bizarre activity may trigger another ice age
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/sun-s-bizarre-activity-may-trigger-another-ice-age-1.1460937
(http://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.1460921.1373612491!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_600/image.jpg)
Illustration mapping the steady decline in sunspot activity over the last two solar cycles with predicted figures for the current cycle 24
The sun is acting bizarrely and scientists have no idea why. Solar activity is in gradual decline, a change from the norm which in the past triggered a 300-year-long mini ice age.
Three leading solar scientists presented the very latest data about the weakening solar activity at a teleconference yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, organised by the American Astronomical Society. It featured experts from Nasa, the High Altitude Observatory and the National Solar Observatory who described how solar activity, as measured by the formation of sunspots and by massive explosions on the sun’s surface, has been falling steadily since the mid-1940s.
...
“It is the smallest solar maximum we have seen in 100 years,” said Dr David Hathaway of Nasa.
-
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/08/the-first-global-warming-prophet-was-he-the-most-accurate.php
Guy Callendar was a superb scientist and an expert on the physics of steam. He wrote a seminal article in 1938 on the potential for increasing levels of CO2 to warm the atmosphere:
(http://4-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/08/700x218xCallender0013.jpg.pagespeed.ic.OhkXF8zv9H.jpg)
Callendar posited a logarithmic relationship between concentration of CO2 and global temperatures, as shown in this graph:
(http://3-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/08/720x560xcallendar-1938-logarithm-annotated.png.pagespeed.ic.VGjN90AE5_.png)
By Callendar’s calculation, a doubling in CO2 from 300 ppm to 600 ppm would cause about a 1.7 degree C increase in atmospheric temperature. What is interesting about this is that Callender’s calculations track much more closely with actual temperatures than the formulas that are used by alarmists today. The reason is that the alarmists’ models build in hypothetical positive feedback effects in order to generate greater temperature impacts. Steve McIntyre explains: (http://climateaudit.org/2013/07/26/guy-callendar-vs-the-gcms/)
It is completely bizarre that a simple reconstruction from Callendar out-performs the CMIP5 GCMs – and, for most of them, by a lot. … Even if the Callendar parameters had been calculated using the observed temperature history, it is surely surprising that such a simple formula can out-perform the GCMs, especially given the enormous amount of time, resources and effort expended in these GCMs. And, yes, I recognize that GCMs provide much more information than GLB temperature, but GLB temperature is surely the most important single statistic yielded by these models and it is disquieting that the GCMs have no skill relative to a reconstruction using only the Callendar 1938 formula. As Mosher observed in a comment on the predecessor post, a more complicated model ought to be able to advance beyond the simple model and, if there is a deterioration in performance, there’s something wrong with the model.
Emphasis added. The modest temperature increase suggested by Callendar, and validated so far by observation, poses no threat, and won’t bring about any of the catastrophic consequences that the alarmists are paid to predict. Callendar himself thought the effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would be salutary:
It may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance the above mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure (Brown and Escombe, 1905): In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.
It is somewhat ironic that the “science” of global warming has regressed since 1938.
-
State-Funded Science: It’s Worse Than You Think!
By Patrick J. Michaels
Response Essays
August 12, 2013
Comments
Terence Kealey’s insightful essay is likely to provoke a vigorous debate among libertarians on the utility of publicly funded science. He concludes that “the public funding of research has no beneficial effects on the economy.” I will argue that the situation, at least in a prominent environmental science, is worse, inasmuch as the more public money is disbursed, the poorer the quality of the science, and that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
This is counter to the reigning myth that science, as a search for pure truth, is ultimately immune from incentivized distortion. In fact, at one time James M. Buchanan clearly stated that he thought science was one of the few areas that was not subject to public choice influences. In his 1985 essay The Myth of Benevolence, Buchanan wrote:
Science is a social activity pursued by persons who acknowledge the existence of a nonindividualistic, mutually agreed-on value, namely truth…Science cannot, therefore, be modelled in the contractarian, or exchange, paradigm.”
In reality, public choice influences on science are pervasive and enforced through the massive and entrenched bureaucracies of higher education. The point of origin is probably President Franklin Roosevelt’s November 17, 1944 letter to Vannevar Bush, who, as director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, managed and oversaw the Manhattan Project.
Roosevelt expressed a clear desire to expand the reach of the government far beyond theoretical and applied physics, specifically asking Bush, “What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations.” In response, in July, 1945, Bush published Science, The Endless Frontier, in which he explicitly acknowledged Roosevelt’s more inclusive vision, saying,
It is clear from President Roosevelt’s letter that in speaking of science that he had in mind the natural sciences, including biology and medicine…
Bush’s 1945 report explicitly laid the groundwork for the National Science Foundation, the modern incarnation of the National Institutes of Health, and the proliferation of federal science support through various federal agencies. But, instead of employing scientists directly as the Manhattan Project did, Bush proposed disbursing research support to individuals via their academic employers.
Universities saw this as a bonanza, adding substantial additional costs. A typical public university imposes a 50% surcharge on salaries and fringe benefits (At private universities the rate can approach 70%.)
These fungible funds often support faculty in the many university departments that do not recover all of their costs; thus does the Physics Department often support, say, Germanic Languages. As a result, the universities suddenly became wards of the federal government and in the thrall of extensive programmatic funding. The roots of statist “political correctness” lie as much in the economic interests of the academy as they do in the political predilections of the faculty.
As an example, I draw attention to my field of expertise, which is climate change science and policy. The Environmental Protection Agency claims to base its global warming regulations on “sound” science, in which the federal government is virtually the sole provider of research funding. In fact, climate change science and policy is a highly charged political arena, and its $2 billion/year public funding would not exist save for the perception that global warming is very high on the nation’s priority list.
The universities and their federal funders have evolved a codependent relationship. Again, let’s use climate change as an example. Academic scientists recognize that only the federal government provides the significant funds necessary to publish enough original research to gain tenure in the higher levels of academia. Their careers therefore depend on it. Meanwhile, the political support for elected officials who hope to gain from global warming science will go away if science dismisses the issue as unimportant.
The culture of exaggeration and the disincentives to minimize scientific/policy problems are an unintended consequence of the way we now do science, which is itself a direct descendent of Science, The Endless Frontier.
All the disciplines of science with policy implications (and this is by far most of them) compete with each other for finite budgetary resources, resources that are often allocated via various congressional committees, such as those charged with responsibilities for environmental science, technology, or medical research. Thus each of the constituent research communities must engage in demonstrations that their scientific purview is more important to society than those of their colleagues in other disciplines. So, using this example, global warming inadvertently competes with cancer research and others.
Imagine if a NASA administrator at a congressional hearing, upon being asked if global warming were of sufficient importance to justify a billion dollars in additional funding, replied that it really was an exaggerated issue, and the money should be spent elsewhere on more important problems.
It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as administrator.
So, at the end of this hypothetical hearing, having answered in the affirmative (perhaps more like, “hell yes, we can use the money”), the administrator gathers all of his department heads and demands programmatic proposals from each. Will any one of these individuals submit one which states that his department really doesn’t want the funding because the issue is perhaps exaggerated?
It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would be one of his last acts as a department head.
The department heads now turn to their individual scientists, asking for specific proposals on how to put the new monies to use. Who will submit a proposal with the working research hypothesis that climate change isn’t all that important?
It is a virtual certainty that such a reply would guarantee he was in his last year as a NASA scientist.
Now that the funding has been established and disbursed, the research is performed under the obviously supported hypotheses (which may largely be stated as “it’s worse than we thought”). When the results are submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, they are going to be reviewed by other scientists who, being prominent in the field of climate change by virtue of their research productivity, are funded by the same process. They have little incentive to block any papers consistent with the worsening hypothesis and every incentive to block one that concludes the opposite.
Can this really be true? After all, what I have sketched here is simply an hypothesis that public choice is fostering a pervasive “it’s worse than we thought” bias in the climate science literature, with the attendant policy distortions that must result from relying upon that literature.
It is an hypothesis that tests easily.
Let us turn to a less highly charged field in applied science to determine how to test the hypothesis of pervasive bias, namely the pedestrian venue of the daily weather forecast.
Short-range weather models and centennial-scale climate models are largely based upon the same physics derived from the six interacting “primitive equations” describing atmospheric motion and thermodynamics. The difference is that, in the weather forecasting models, the initial conditions change, being a simultaneous sample of global atmospheric pressure, temperature, and moisture in three dimensions, measured by ascending weather balloons and, increasingly, by downward-sounding satellites. This takes place twice a day. The “boundary conditions,” such as solar irradiance and the transfer of radiation through the atmosphere, do not change. In a climate model, the base variables are calculated, rather than measured, and the boundary conditions—such as the absorption of infrared radiation in various layers of the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”) change over time.
It is assumed that the weather forecasting model is unbiased—without remaining systematic errors—so that each run, every twelve hours, has an equal probability of predicting, say, that it will be warmer or colder next Friday than the previous run. If this were not he case, then the chance of warmer or colder is unequal. In fact, in the developmental process for forecast models, the biases are subtracted out and the output is forced to have a bias of zero and therefore an equal probability of a warmer or colder forecast.
Similarly, if the initial results are unbiased, successive runs of climate models should have an equal probability of producing centennial forecasts that are warmer or colder than previous one, or projecting more or less severe climate impacts. It is a fact that the climate change calculated by these models is not a change from current or past conditions, but is the product of subtracting the output of the model with low greenhouse-gas concentrations from the one with higher ones. Consequently the biasing errors have been subtracted out, a rather intriguing trick. Again, the change is one model minus another, not the standard “predicted minus observed.”
The climate research community actually believes its models are zero-biased. An amicus brief in the landmark Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, by a number of climate scientists claiming to speak for the larger community, explicitly stated this as fact:
Outcomes may turn out better than our best current prediction, but it is just as possible that environmental and health damages will be more severe than best predictions…”
The operative words are “just as possible,” indicating that climate scientists believe they are immune to public choice influences.
This is testable, and I ran such a test, publishing it in an obscure journal, Energy & Environment, in 2008. I, perhaps accurately, hypothesized that a paper severely criticizing the editorial process at Science and Nature, the two most prestigious general science journals worldwide, was not likely to be published in such prominent places.
I examined the 115 articles that had appeared in both of these journals during a 13-month period in 2006 and 2007, classifying them as either “worse than we thought,” “better,” or “neutral or cannot determine.” 23 were neutral and removed from consideration. 9 were “better” and 83 were “worse.” Because of the hypothesis of nonbiased equiprobability, this is equivalent to tossing a coin 92 times and coming up with 9 or fewer heads or tails. The probability that this would occur in an unbiased sample can be calculated from the binomial probability distribution, and the result is striking. There would have to be 100,000,000,000,000,000 iterations of the 92 tosses for there to be merely a 50% chance that one realization of 9 or fewer heads or tails would be observed.
In subsequent work, I recently assembled a much larger sample of the scientific literature and, while the manuscript is in preparation, I can state that my initial result appears to be robust.
Kealey tells us that there is no relationship between the wealth of nations and the amount of money that taxpayers spend on scientific research. In reality, it is in fact “worse than he thought.” At least in a highly politicized field such as global warming science and policy, the more money the public spends, the worse is the quality of the science.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-science
-
A rare BBG sighting in this thread yesterday, take a look! "State-Funded Science: It’s Worse Than You Think!"
----------------------
Apparently the reason the world did not explode and people didn't suffocate at 400 ppm (parts per million) CO2 is because we missed it. Next summer for sure! Wrap up you unfinished business. It's still coming.
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/co2_weekly_mlo1-e1376168771698.png?w=960&h=698)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/10/what-the-year-of-living-dangerously-at-nearly-400-ppm-of-co2-in-earths-atmosphere-looks-like/
I would be more worried if atmospheric CO2, at such thin levels was decreasing.
-
I'm working on getting BBG to come around some more. :-D We miss him.
-
I'm working on getting BBG to come around some more. :-D We miss him.
Thank you. I second the motion.
-
Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson on Yale Environment 360, an online magazine offering opinion, analysis, reporting and debate on global environmental issues.
'It’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. The question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models?'
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment/2151/
From the 2009 interview:
...the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.
Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
What’s wrong with the models... the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.
So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it.
...enhanced carbon dioxide has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system.
...it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being
real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction.
-
Quote from Doug's post:
"...enhanced carbon dioxide has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system."
Yes liberal environmentalists almost ignore the benefit to plants of rising CO2.
The Greens are *waging war* on plants by trying to choke them to death by reducing CO2. If only plants could vote......
The first time I read anything about plants doing better is this article that picks on a single plant only to further their agenda:
****Poison Ivy is Growing Out of Control, Thanks to Climate Change
Sean Breslin Published: Jul 24, 2013, 2:55 PM EDT weather.com
Poison ivy. (Flickr/Diego3336)
A rising carbon dioxide level is bad for many things on our planet, but there's one plant that eats it up like candy: poison ivy.
Higher levels of carbon dioxide benefit the growth of all plants, yet poison ivy seems to be enjoying it more than most, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Poison ivy's growth and potency has doubled since the 1960s, the newspaper reports. With CO2 rates expected to rise from 400 parts per million to 560 ppm in the next 30 to 50 years, it could double again.
If carbon dioxide levels reach 800 ppm by the end of the century, as the report suggests they could, poison ivy would become even more prevalent.
"Poison ivy and vines in general really, really benefit from higher atmospheric CO2," Jacqueline Mohan, assistant professor of biology at the University of Georgia, told the Post-Gazette.
According to Sustainable Business, poison ivy leaves have grown as big as pie pans in some parts of the country. Bears, deer and other animals that eat the plants won't experience a food shortage in the coming years.
The creatures' voracious appetite for the plant should lessen the chance of humans experiencing serious reactions to the ivy's oil, known as urushiol.
The enhanced poison ivy won't just threaten humans with its rash-creating oil, it could also kill trees at a faster pace. Sustainable Business also mentions that the plant can quickly crawl up trees and starve them, and when combined with the possibility that climate change could cause more intense wildfires, there could be more fuel for blazes if more dead trees are in the path.
A Grist article notes poison ivy is one of few plants thriving in the forests along the South Carolina coast. Then, to demonstrate the enhanced nature of a 21st-century attack, the piece concludes by documenting the trials of climate and energy blogger David Roberts, affected by a recent bout with poison ivy.
The frustration and likelihood of a brush with urushiol will only grow, affecting more people, until poison ivy's carbon dioxide food supply is slowed and eventually choked off.****
-
"The first time I read anything about plants doing better is this article that picks on a single plant only to further their agenda:
****Poison Ivy is Growing Out of Control, Thanks to Climate Change"
In our untouched forests I actually see less poison ivy than when I was a kid. CO2 is a factor; so is heat, shade, water. But yes, isn't it funny that was the only thing they could think of, not that enhanced CO2 is helping to feed the planet or the other most obvious point: Increased plant growth is a negative feedback factor preventing the dreaded spiraling effect. The higher the CO2 level, the higher the rate CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by plants. Who knew?!
There is a website I have watched for a long time called CO2Science.org (http://www.co2science.org/) that rather than denying warming or enhanced CO2 levels, just studies, publishes and editorializes on the mostly positive impact of it.
-
in "part of the US". I am sure everyone who reads this board knows why I post in this thread. I would have been completely totally shocked if I got through this article and there was no mention of "climate change". Sure enough far down is the implication this is due to climate change. And we are all being brainwashed to assume of course the change is due to man destroying his/her/gay/transgenders/gender neutral's environment. (I am not sure which pronoun is correct so as not to offend I include a variety).
I recall my whole life that whenever we have more rain the mosquitoes have a field day. So what's new? NOTHING. Just more propaganda. The good part of this is now I remember how to spell mosquito.
Is it "mosquito"? Is it "m*i*squito*e*" or "mosquitoe"?:
****Mosquitoes are worse this summer in parts of US
This undated handout photo provided by the Agriculture Department shows a female yellowfever mosquito probes a piece of Limburger cheese, one of few known mosquito attractants. Despite our size and technological advantages, we still can't seem to win our ancient blood battle with the pesky and lethal mosquito. In much of the nation this summer you can tell just by looking at the itchy bumps on our arms. A large section of the United States seems like it is getting eaten alive worse than usual this summer because of quirks in recent weather. It may be the worst in the Southeast, where after two years of drought when mosquito eggs laid dormant, there have been incredibly heavy rains much of the spring and summer. Rainfall in parts of North Carolina is more than two feet above normal this year. The rains have revived the dormant eggs, so the region is essentially getting three years' worth of mosquitoes in one summer. (AP Photo/Peggy Greb, USDA)
Associated Press
SETH BORENSTEIN 21 hours ago Florida
WASHINGTON (AP) — The tiny mosquito all too often has man on the run. And this summer, it seems even worse than usual.
"You can't get from the car to inside our house without getting attacked, it's that bad," high school teacher Ryan Miller said from his home in Arlington, Va. Minutes earlier, he saw a mosquito circling his 4-month-old daughter — indoors.
Experts say it's been a buggier-than-normal summer in many places around the U.S. because of a combination of drought, heavy rain and heat.
It may be worst in the Southeast, which is getting hit with three years' worth of bugs in one summer, said Jonathan Day, who studies insects at the University of Florida.
Two years of drought were followed by incredibly heavy rain this year. During dry spells, mosquito eggs often didn't get wet enough to hatch. This year's rain revived those, along with the normal 2013 batch.
In parts of Connecticut this summer, mosquito traps had double the usual number of bugs. Minnesota traps in July had about triple the 10-year average. And in central California, traps had five times as many of one key species as the recent average.
Humans have been battling the blood-drinking bugs for thousands of years, and despite man's huge advantages in technology and size, people are not getting the upper hand. Just lots of bites on the hand.
"We have to keep fighting just to hold our own," said Tom Wilmot, past president of the Mosquito Control Association and a Michigan mosquito control district chief. And in some places, he said, the mosquitoes are winning.
In southwestern Florida around Fort Myers, Lee County mosquito control was getting more than 300 calls per day from residents at times this summer, a much higher count than usual. But the more impressive tally was the number of bugs landing on inspectors' unprotected legs: more than 100 a minute in some hotspots, said deputy director Shelly Radovan.
Across Florida near Vero Beach, Roxanne Connelly said there have been some days this month when she just wouldn't go in the backyard. It's been too bad even for her — and she's a mosquito researcher at the University of Florida and head of the mosquito association.
Many communities fight back by spraying pesticides, but mosquitoes are starting to win that battle, too, developing resistance to these chemicals. Soon many places could be out of effective weapons, Connelly and other mosquito-fighters said.
Miller, who teaches environmental sciences, said he normally would oppose spraying but has been lobbying for the county to break out the pesticides this year. The county told him there was no money in the budget and recommended he hire a private pest control business, he said.
The type that buzzed his daughter — the Asian tiger mosquito, named for its striped body — hit the U.S. a quarter-century ago in a batch of imported scrap tires in Houston and eventually spread to the Northeast, the Midwest and, in 2011, the Los Angeles area.
Climate change is also likely to worsen mosquito problems in general because the insects tend to do better in the hotter weather that experts forecast, said Chet Moore, a professor of medical entomology at Colorado State University.
Mosquitoes, of course, can be more than a nuisance: They can spread diseases. In the U.S., the biggest mosquito-borne threat is West Nile virus. Last year, there were a record 286 West Nile deaths, but this year appears to be milder.
Worldwide outside the United States, mosquito-borne diseases kill far more people than sharks, snakes and bears combined, with more than 600,000 deaths from malaria each year in poorer countries.
People should wear light-colored clothing — dark colors attract mosquitoes — long pants and long sleeves; get rid of standing water, where mosquitoes breed; and use repellents with the chemical DEET, experts said.
But even those substances may not work for long. Mosquitoes could be developing resistance to repellents as well as insecticides, said mosquito researcher James Logan at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"It's an arms race," he said. "I always think they are one step ahead of us."****
___
-
“As a result of the Sun entering a ‘hibernation’ phase, the Space and Science Research Corporation hereby declares that the past two hundred years of global sea level rise is expected to end no earlier than mid-2014 and no later than 2020. After that time, global sea levels are expected to begin a long term period of decline, lasting at least through the decade of the 2030’s. The estimated global sea level decline during that period will range from 20 to 25 cm from current levels.”
http://www.spaceandscience.net/id16.html
-
Seeing how "global warming" seems to have lost some of it's lexicographic shizzle leaving a gap "climate change" doesn't have the spark to fill, perhaps the doomsayers should give "weather cooking" a whirl. Hey, not only has it worked before, but if we manage to dispense with modern follyswaddles we could inspire those rotten deniers to STFU:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAy4sOcS5M
-
BBG, Amazing how backward the thinking was 500 years ago, and amazing what a short distance we have come since. To everyone else, watch the video. 7 minutes with a history professor (I presume) to learn a lot about what was happening centuries ago.
Update on global warming:
Satellite data set RSS shows no warming over the last 16 years and 8 months, with a cooling trend currently in progress:
(http://4-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/08/640x480xtrend11.gif.pagespeed.ic.nZY1_OFzsn.png)
Fewest 100+ degree readings at temperature stations in 100 years in the US:
(http://2-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/08/580x355xTemps-copy-600x368.jpg.pagespeed.ic.VSLo6W1M9i.jpg)
Nonetheless, here is Presidential confidant, flaming liberal, husband of UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Cass Sunstein, writing as if it is 1600 again. Shall we have a witch trial?
People Don’t Fear Climate Change Enough, by Cass Sunstein
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/people-don-t-fear-climate-change-enough.html
With respect to the science of climate change, many experts regard the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the world’s authoritative institution. A draft summary of its forthcoming report was leaked last week. It describes the panel’s growing confidence that climate change is real, that it is a result of human action, and that if the world continues on its current course, it will face exceedingly serious losses and threats (including a significant rise in sea levels by century’s end).
While the draft report states these conclusions with unprecedented conviction, they are broadly consistent with the panel’s judgments from the past two decades, which raises an obvious question: Why have so many nations (including China and the U.S., the world’s leading greenhouse-gas emitters) not done more in response?
There are many answers. Skeptics say that the IPCC is biased and wrong. Companies whose economic interests are at stake continue to fight against regulatory controls. The leaders of some nations think that if they acted unilaterally to reduce their emissions, they would impose significant costs on their citizens without doing much to reduce climate change. Especially in a difficult economic period, they don’t think it makes sense to act on their own.
To this extent, the real challenge lies in producing an international agreement. It isn’t easy to obtain a consensus on the timing and expense of reductions, especially because developing nations (including China) insist that developed nations (including the U.S.) are obliged to take the most costly steps toward reducing emissions.
Psychological Barriers
All of these positions play a major role. But we should not disregard purely psychological factors. An understanding of what human beings fear -- and what they do not -- helps to explain why nations haven’t insisted on more significant emissions reductions.
The first obstacle is that people tend to evaluate risks by way of “the availability heuristic,” which leads them to assess the probability of harm by asking whether a readily available example comes to mind. An act of terrorism, for example, is likely to be both available and salient, and hence makes people fear that another such event will occur (whether it is likely to or not). So, too, a recent crime or accident can activate attention and significantly inflate people’s assessment of risk.
By contrast, climate change is difficult to associate with any particular tragedy or disaster. To be sure, many scientists think that climate change makes extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Sandy, substantially more likely. But it is hard to prove that climate change “caused” any particular event, and as a result, the association tends to be at best speculative in many people’s minds.
Second, people tend to be especially focused on risks or hazards that have an identifiable perpetrator, and for that reason produce outrage. Warmer temperatures are a product not of any particular human being or group, but the interaction between nature and countless decisions by countless people. There are no obvious devils or demons -- no individuals who intend to create the harms associated with climate change. For terrorism, a “we-they” narrative fits the facts; in the context of climate change, those who are the solution might well also be, or seem to be, the problem. In these circumstances, public outrage is much harder to fuel.
Third, human beings are far more attentive to immediate threats than to long-term ones. Behavioral scientists have emphasized that in their private lives, people sometimes display a form of myopia. They may neglect the future, seeing it as a kind of foreign country, one they may not ever visit. For this reason, they might fail to save for retirement, or they might engage in risk-taking behavior (such as smoking or unhealthy eating) that will harm their future selves.
Future Threat
In a political context, citizens might demand protection against a risk that threatens them today, tomorrow or next month. But if they perceive climate change as mostly a threat to future generations -- if significant sea-level rises seem to be decades away -- they are unlikely to have a sense of urgency.
Climate change lacks other characteristics that spur public concern about risks. It is gradual rather than sudden. The idea of warmer climates doesn’t produce anger, revulsion or disgust. Depletion of the ozone layer was probably the most closely analogous environmental concern; public attention to that problem was easier to mobilize because of fears of a huge rise in skin cancer.
In this light, it should not be surprising if people don’t get much exercised by the IPCC’s forthcoming report. All the obstacles are daunting -- skepticism about the science, economic self-interest, and the difficulties of designing cost-effective approaches and obtaining an international agreement. But the world is unlikely to make much progress on climate change until the barrier of human psychology is squarely addressed.
-
North West Passage blocked with ice - yachts caught
(http://www.sail-world.com/Photos_2013_6/Alt_North%20West%20Passageshowing%20ice%20blockages1.jpg)
'North West Passage - showing ice blockages' © Environment Canada
The Northwest Passage after decades of so-called global warming has a dramatic 60% more Arctic ice this year than at the same time last year. The future dreams of dozens of adventurous sailors are now threatened. A scattering of yachts attempting the legendary Passage are caught by the ice, which has now become blocked at both ends and the transit season may be ending early. Douglas Pohl tells the story:
The Passage has become blocked with 5/10 concentrated drifting sea ice at both the eastern and at the western ends of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. At least 22 yachts and other vessels are in the Arctic at the moment. Some who were less advanced have retreated and others have abandoned their vessels along the way. Still others are caught in the ice in an unfolding, unresolved drama.
The real question is if and when the Canadian Coast Guard(CCG) decides to take early action to help the yachts exit the Arctic before freeze-up... or will they wait until it becomes an emergency rescue operation?
The first blockage area is at Prince Regent Inlet in position 73.7880535N, -89.2529297W which became blocked on 27th August with 5/10 ice concentration with 7/10 ice pushing.
This effectively closes the 2013 Northwest Passage without Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker escorts for transit. The alternative is a very technical and risky southern navigation through Fury & Hecla Strait mostly blocked with sea ice.
Currently there is a commercial cruise ship on a west to east passage which will reach Prince Regent Inlet in another day. It is unknown if there is a CCG icebreaker in the area to provide assistance since government ships do not provide Automatic Identification Service (AIS) to public AIS websites.
Since one of the Canadian Coast Guard’s prime missions is to provide icebreaking for commercial shipping it will be interesting to see if Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Government views this as an opportunity for good public relations to help recreational yachts transiting the Northwest Passage.
Another choke-point stopping marine traffic is on the western Canadian Arctic at Cape Bathurst in position 70.6672443N, -128.2763672W which became blocked on 26th August with 2/10 ice concentration and quickly filled with 5/10 ice on 27th August and today has 8/10 ice pushing towards Cape Bathurst. Latest word is the ice is retreating at an agonizing 1 nautical mile per day northward.
Empiricus - one of the ice-blocked yachts, still smiling - © Environment Canada
There are a number of yachts known to be in the Cambridge Bay area heading west: ACALEPHE (CA), ISATIS (NEW CALEDONIA), LA BELLE EPOQUE (DE), LIBELLULE (CHE), NOEME (FRA), and TRAVERSAY III (CA). PAS PERDU LE NORD (DE) was ahead by 10 days and has already gone on to Arctic Alaska waters. While BALTHAZAR (CA) departed from Inuvik a month ago and is now on the hard in Nome Alaska.
The following yachts are enroute from the west to the east: ANNA (?), rowboat ARCTIC JOULE (CA), DODO'S DELIGHT (GBR), EMPIRICUS (USA). rowboat FAIRMONT's PASSION (USA), tandem-kayak IKIMAYIA (CA), in Russian sea ice is LADY DANA (POL), POLAR BOUND (GBR), rowboat ROWING ICE (FRA), in Russian sea ice is TARA (FRA), and a group of jetskis known as DANGEROUS WATERS (USA) reported east of Gjoa Haven.
Several updates on known others:
LE MANGUIER (FRA) is wintering over in the ice at Paulatuk. Motor Yacht Lady M II (Marshal Islands) was escorted by CCGS icebreaker HENRY LARSEN through Bellot Strait eastbound on 20130824. ARCTIC TERN (GBR) and TOOLUKA (NED) retreated to the east towards Greenland/Newfoundland away from Bellot Strait on 20130822 with the opinion that the Arctic ice was finished melting and freeze-up would prevent them from reaching the Northwest Passage finish line at the Arctic Circle in the Bering Strait.
Watch this space for ongoing news about the situation.
Douglas Pohl is a USCG licensed ocean master of motor and steam vessels, fifth issue, retired. Doug and Michelle now live their dreams cruising aboard their 55' steel motor yacht GREY GOOSE and provide yacht routing, satcom and wifi communications consulting. He can be contacted by e-mail at: douglas_pohl (at) yahoo (dot) com
........................
http://www.sail-world.com/USA/North-West-Passage-blocked-with-ice—yachts-caught/113788
-
Who could have seen this coming? Ice in the Arctic, varying weather conditions! The humanitarian thing to do might be to rescue the people and leave equipment removal to their own insurance companies or personal resources.
-
Maybe if they fart a lot the methane will melt the ice, , ,
-
"Maybe if they fart a lot the methane will melt the ice, , ,"
Liberals don't even have to fart. Just open their mouths.
-
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130902-hurricanes-climate-change-superstorm-sandy-global-warming-storms-science-weather/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ng%2FNews%2FNews_Main+%28National+Geographic+News+-+Main
a new study says climate change could eventually help safeguard the U.S. Atlantic Coast from hurricanes.
Climate change might alter atmospheric conditions so that future hurricanes may be pushed away from the East Coast, according to a study published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The warming caused by greenhouse gases—could redirect atmospheric winds that steer hurricanes.
By the next century, the study's authors report, atmospheric winds over the Atlantic could blow more directly from west to east during hurricane season, pushing storms away from the United States.
The study was conducted by meteorologists Elizabeth Barnes at Colorado State University; Lorenzo M. Polvani of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York; and Adam H. Sobelband at Columbia University.
-
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/09/08/conservative-wins-australia-by-landslide-declares-end-to-climate-change-crap-82935
-
And now it's global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html
Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013
Publication of UN climate change report suggesting global warming caused by humans pushed back to later this month
A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/08/article-2415191-1BAEE1D0000005DC-503_640x366.jpg)
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.
The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.
THERE WON'T BE ANY ICE AT ALL! HOW THE BBC PREDICTED CHAOS IN 2007
Only six years ago, the BBC reported that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013, citing a scientist in the US who claimed this was a ‘conservative’ forecast. Perhaps it was their confidence that led more than 20 yachts to try to sail the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific this summer. As of last week, all these vessels were stuck in the ice, some at the eastern end of the passage in Prince Regent Inlet, others further west at Cape Bathurst.
Shipping experts said the only way these vessels were likely to be freed was by the icebreakers of the Canadian coastguard. According to the official Canadian government website, the Northwest Passage has remained ice-bound and impassable all summer.
The BBC’s 2007 report quoted scientist Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, who based his views on super-computer models and the fact that ‘we use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice’.
He was confident his results were ‘much more realistic’ than other projections, which ‘underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice’. Also quoted was Cambridge University expert
Professor Peter Wadhams. He backed Professor Maslowski, saying his model was ‘more efficient’ than others because it ‘takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice’.
He added: ‘This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.’
The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was due in October to start publishing its Fifth Assessment Report – a huge three-volume study issued every six or seven years. It will now hold a pre-summit in Stockholm later this month.
Leaked documents show that governments which support and finance the IPCC are demanding more than 1,500 changes to the report’s ‘summary for policymakers’. They say its current draft does not properly explain the pause.
At the heart of the row lie two questions: the extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 years – so far, just 0.8C – is down to human greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural variability.
-
Amazing post Doug.
Not a freaking peep from MSM.
I get Scientific American and nearly every article about everything somehow has references to man made "climate change".
They refuse to admit, maybe just maybe they are wrong.
The left never does.
-
Not a freaking peep from MSM.
I get Scientific American and nearly every article about everything somehow has references to man made "climate change".
They refuse to admit, maybe just maybe they are wrong.
The left never does.
Not just no correction for new data (no warming since 1997 covers the entire Kyoto Protocol / Inconvenient Truth era), but also no real disclaimers in past work that the theories were unproven, that natural volatility obviously plays the largest role, no recognition of negative feedback forces and their role in cycles, factors unaccounted for such as clouds, or that the best models do not fit or explain past data, much less future data.
Instead they run with phony polls of scientists that group anyone who believes CO2 emissions play ANY role in climate as agreeing with alarmism's wildly exaggerated predictions.
-
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?action=post;topic=1454.700;num_replies=700
-
NEWER » What's Really Going On With Arctic Sea Ice?
I Told You So: Congressman Parrots Climate Change Denial Errors
By Phil Plait
Man, sometimes I hate it when I’m right.
This whole week I’ve been writing about how an article in the tabloid newspaper The Mail on Sunday is riddled with climate change denial nonsense, with error piled upon error. They even updated the atrocious article, making it in some ways worse—the basic mistake about temperatures increasing upon which the article was based was changed, but not corrected.
I also posted about how misinformation like this spreads through the deny-o-sphere, going from one mouthpiece to the next, changing and morphing into even more ridiculous claims. I pointed out that this kind of bilge eventually makes its way to people who have actual power.
And here we are. On Wednesday, the congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing on the climate change policies President Obama has announced. On the subcommittee sits a congressman by the name of David McKinley (R-W. Va.). By many measures, he is a rank-and-file Republican, sitting squarely in the middle of his party’s ideological stance. During that meeting, where important issues in climate change policies were discussed, he said this:
Here’s what he said:
But here’s the reality of temperature changes over the last 40 years… Actually we can say over 40 years there’s been almost no increase in temperature – very slight – in fact […] even with increased greenhouse CO2 level emissions, the Arctic ice has actually increased by 60 percent. Also that the Antarctica is also expanding… most experts believe by 2083, in 70 years, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.
Let me be clear: What he said here is complete nonsense.
To start with, his claim that temperatures haven’t gone up in 40 years is just dead wrong. I think he was trying to talk about the flattening of temperatures over the past few years that deniers are making so much hay out of. At best, this leveling out of surface temperatures goes back 15 years or so, but certainly not 40. I might forgive the Congressman and say it was a slip of the tongue, but he says it more than once.
Temperatures are rsising, despite the claims of Rep. McKinley.
The reality is that since 1973 land surface temperatures have gone up a full 0.6° C in a trend so clear it’s hard to believe anyone could honestly miss it. And as I have pointed out, the recent flattening is only due to a downswing in ocean temperatures due to a natural and well-known cycle in the Pacific. Once that goes back to an upswing, land temperatures will increase once again as well.
Also, McKinley propagates the Mail’s grossly misleading claim about Arctic sea ice increasing. Last year at this time we had a record low extent of sea ice over the North Pole. This year, the ice is way, way below average, by about a million square kilometers. Sure, it’s more than last year, but that’s only because last year’s minimum was extremely low. It’s incredibly misleading to say this year’s ice recovered from that. It’s far more fair to note that this minimum is one of the lowest ever seen (the sixth lowest since satellite measurements began, and possibly for millennia).
His claim that Antarctica is “expanding” is also baloney. It’s an old denier trope, and doesn’t differentiate between sea ice and land ice. The sea ice around Antarctica grows every winter, and melts away every summer. Right now it’s winter in Antarctica, and sure enough the sea ice is at a maximum. In fact, it is at a record max: about 4% higher above the previous maximum. But this will all melt away again in the austral summer; it doesn’t really have any long-term implications for global warming (although a case can be made that warming means more moisture in the air, which can then snow out when it’s cold, ironically temporarily increasing ice extent). And note that this is happening when Arctic sea ice extent is still 30% below average.
And what of Antarctic land ice? Surprise: That’s decreasing over time, to the tune of about a hundred billion tons per year.
ice loss in Antarctica
Monthly ice mass change in the Antarctic, measured in billions of tons (normalized to 0 in 2007). The average annual drop is roughly 100 billion tons per year.
Image credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech; NASA GSFC; CU-Boulder; Technical University of Munich; Technical University of Denmark; Delft University of Technology, Aerospace Engineering, Netherlands; Durham University, UK; Leeds University, UK
Finally, about McKinley’s claims that most experts think climate change will have more benefits than harm: I will be very, very surprised—shocked, floored even—if that turns out to be the case. I have not read the full IPCC report (it’s still not released), but I’ve read a draft of the “Summary for Policymakers” and did not see any mention of this (to be fair, I might have missed it, but the SfP goes over specific topics like temperatures, history, and so on). But I have to wonder what “experts” would say such a thing. Most of the climate and environmental scientists I have read say that global warming on the scale and rate we’re seeing is catastrophic; only full-blown climate change deniers have made any claims that the benefits outweigh the harm.
So there you have it: A duly-elected Representative from West Virginia sits on the House Subcommittee for Energy and Power, and can make easily-disproven and frankly ridiculous statements like that, empowered by the kind of error-riddled articles published by the likes of The Mail, just as I warned.
I was glad to see Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) call McKinley out on his statements at the end of that video excerpt, and make a clear call for more science and scientists at hearings like this. But as long as Republicans hold a majority in the House I despair of that happening; they tend to call well-known deniers to testify at these panels, and the sitting Congresspeople on those committees are overwhelmingly anti-science.
This matters, folks. This is our future we’re talking about, and from top to bottom, people who flatly deny reality have infiltrated the system, with just enough influence to obstruct any real progress. This must change if we’re ever to fix this looming and globally critical problem.
-
Second post today. OTOH:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10310712/Top-climate-scientists-admit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html
-
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change-uncertainty-20130923,0,791164.story
Global warming 'hiatus' puts climate change scientists on the spot
Theories as to why Earth's average surface temperature hasn't risen in recent years include an idea that the Pacific Ocean goes through decades-long cycles of absorbing heat.
By Monte Morin
September 22, 2013, 9:14 p.m.
It's a climate puzzle that has vexed scientists for more than a decade and added fuel to the arguments of those who insist man-made global warming is a myth.
Since just before the start of the 21st century, the Earth's average global surface temperature has failed to rise despite soaring levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and years of dire warnings from environmental advocates.
Now, as scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gather in Sweden this week to approve portions of the IPCC's fifth assessment report, they are finding themselves pressured to explain this glaring discrepancy.
The panel, a United Nations creation that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, hopes to brief world leaders on the current state of climate science in a clear, unified voice. However, experts inside and outside the process say members probably will engage in heated debate over the causes and significance of the so-called global warming hiatus.
"It's contentious," said IPCC panelist Shang-Ping Xie, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. "The stakes have been raised by various people, especially the skeptics."
Though scientists don't have any firm answers, they do have multiple theories. Xie has argued that the hiatus is the result of heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean — a little-understood, naturally occurring process that repeats itself every few decades. Xie and his colleagues presented the idea in a study published last month in the prestigious journal Nature.
The theory, which is gaining adherents, remains unproved by actual observation. Surface temperature records date to the late 1800s, but measurements of deep water temperature began only in the 1960s, so there just isn't enough data to chart the long-term patterns, Xie said.
Scientists have also offered other explanations for the hiatus: lack of sunspot activity, low concentrations of atmospheric water vapor and other marine-related effects. These too remain theories.
For the general public, the existence of the hiatus has been difficult to reconcile with reports of record-breaking summer heat and precedent-setting Arctic ice melts.
At the same time, those who deny the tenets of climate change science — that the burning of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and warms it — have seized on the hiatus, calling it proof that global warming isn't real.
Climate scientists, meanwhile, have had a different response. Although most view the pause as a temporary interruption in a long-term warming trend, some disagree and say it has revealed serious flaws in the deliberative processes of the IPCC.
One of the most prominent of these critics is Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias.
"All other things being equal, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will have a warming effect on the planet," Curry said. "However, all things are never equal, and what we are seeing is natural climate variability dominating over human impact."
Curry isn't the only one to suggest flaws in established climate models. IPCC vice chair Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria in Canada, co-wrote a paper published in this month's Nature Climate Change that said climate models had "significantly" overestimated global warming over the last 20 years — and especially for the last 15 years, which coincides with the onset of the hiatus.
The models had predicted that the average global surface temperature would increase by 0.21 of a degree Celsius over this period, but they turned out to be off by a factor of four, Zwiers and his colleagues wrote. In reality, the average temperature has edged up only 0.05 of a degree Celsius over that time — which in a statistical sense is not significantly different from zero.
Of course, people don't actually spend their entire lives subjected to the global average temperature, which is currently about 15 degrees Celsius, or 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Those who fixate on that single measurement lose sight of significant regional trends, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, climate scientists say.
Xie and Yu Kosaka, an assistant project scientist at Scripps, used computer models to simulate the Pacific decadal oscillation, a phenomenon related to the El Niño and La Niña ocean temperature cycles that lasts for 20 to 30 years. The model suggested that the northern mid-latitudes — an area that includes the United States and most of Europe and China — were "insulated" from the oscillation's cooling effect during the summer months, as was the Arctic region.
"In the summer you've basically removed the Pacific cooling, so we're still baked by greenhouse gases," Xie said.
As a consequence, 2012 marked two climate milestones, he said. The U.S. experienced its hottest year on record, while ice cover in the North Pole shrank to the lowest level ever observed by satellite.
Other climatologists, such as Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, say sea level rise is "unequivocal proof" that greenhouse gases are continuing to heat the planet, and that much of this added heat is being absorbed by the oceans.
As ocean water warms, it expands and drives sea levels higher, Patzert said. Currently, oceans are rising at an average of more than 3 millimeters, or 0.12 of an inch, per year. This pace is significantly faster than the average rate over the last several thousand years, scientists say.
"There's no doubt that in terms of global temperatures we've hit a little flat spot in the road here," Patzert said. "But there's been no slowdown whatsoever in sea level rise, so global warming is alive and well."
Whether that message is communicated successfully by the IPCC this week remains to be seen. In the days leading up to the meeting, the organization has found itself on the defensive.
A draft summary that was leaked to the media reported that scientists were "95% confident" that human activity was responsible for more than half of the increase in average global surface temperature between 1951 and 2010. But critics openly scoff, considering the IPCC's poor record for predicting short-term temperature increases.
"This unpredicted hiatus just reflects the fact that we don't understand things as well as we thought," said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and vocal critic of the climate change establishment. "Now the IPCC finds itself in a position that a science group never wants to be in. It's in spin management mode."
monte.morin@latimes.com
-
Read it all at the Weekly Standard:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/pay-no-attention-bad-data_759168.html
Pay No Attention to the Bad Data
Behind the curtain at the IPCC.
Oct 14, 2013, Vol. 19, No. 06 • By STEVEN F. HAYWARD
Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report?
If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations—you too can be an environmental reporter. Because that’s exactly what the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did on Friday, September 27, in Stockholm, releasing only the SPM while withholding the full report. And the media played along, generating predictable headlines over the weekend about the increasing certainty of climate scientists that humans are warming the world.
To be fair, if they had waited until Monday’s release of the full Working Group I report on the current state of climate science, they’d have had to make sense of a jargon-filled report that Dutch scientist Arthur Petersen told the BBC “is virtually unreadable!” Churchill once quipped about a massive bureaucratic report that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read.” The IPCC appears to be following this example.
It is important to understand that the IPCC report is not an original scientific inquiry but a wide-ranging literature review and “synthesis.” The technical nature of climate science is such that only other scientists can possibly follow it, and even that is doubtful, as the specialized nature of so many aspects of climate science is beyond the grasp of scientists who work in widely scattered subfields. Whether the domain of climate science can be “synthesized” in this way is a debatable question.
A close reading of some of the key passages shows that it cannot bear the weight of the sensationalized parts of the SPM, at least as rendered in the media. One of the most misleading aspects of this story is the way in which the SPM conveys a “95 percent confidence” or certainty of its findings, as though this figure represented a rigorous or robust test familiar to first-year students of statistical correlation. The IPCC’s methodology behind these conclusions is thoroughly opaque. When you strip away the fog, the IPCC admits these conclusions are “qualitative,” and based essentially on a poll of the self-selecting participants in the IPCC review process itself.
This is like polling the Romney campaign staff about how confident they are their candidate will win the election, and representing it as
the firm “consensus” of all political scientists. The IPCC’s main report finally admits that the methodology for their confidence calibrations is derived from social science, and that “confidence should not be interpreted probabilistically, and it is distinct from ‘statistical confidence.’ ” You won’t see this admission reflected in any of the breathless news reports about the IPCC’s high confidence of our future doom.
The late James Q. Wilson argued that social scientists should quit trying to predict the future because they can’t predict the past. The climate science community might heed this advice. While the domain of climate science is highly complex, the heart of the enterprise is the calibration of climate models to explain the modest warming we have observed, mostly from 1960-98, which in turn is supposed to enable us to predict the future. Much was made in the media in recent weeks of how some governments were pressuring the IPCC to offer an explanation of the current 15-year “pause” in warming that is confounding the models. (This raises a curious question: Why do we need a “Summary for Policymakers” if policymakers determine what’s emphasized in the summary? Clearly the SPM should be called by its true name: Summary for Headline Writers.) The “pause” is glossed over in the SPM, because the underlying chapters in the full report do their best to skip over this inconvenient fact.
This conundrum is what makes Chapter 9 of the full report (“Evaluation of Climate Models”) fascinating reading. Out of the dense prose a reader can make out increasing confidence that by twisting the computer knobs (called “parameterizing”) we can match up models to the observed temperature record and other empirical data on clouds, oceans, and a multitude of other variables. But there are admissions of serious limitations of the models. Many of the models still produce results that match up poorly with the observational data, and some aspects of the models can’t be validated at all. The IPCC can’t even agree on a method for singling out the most accurate models. Our understanding of clouds—one of the most important variables for understanding climate—remains very low: “There remain significant errors on the model simulation of clouds,” the chapter says. Among other problems, our grasp of what’s going on in the oceans is still severely limited, and our ability to simulate the dynamics of the Amazonian basin is very poor.
But more important is the carefully worded concession that all this computer knob-twisting to make the models match the temperature record may not work for the future—or the past. An early draft of Chapter 9 included this startling sentence: “The ability of a climate model to make future climate projections cannot be directly evaluated.” This has been dropped from the final draft; now the chapter includes an embarrassing excuse for the failure of the models to match up with the current temperature “pause”: “[T]hese projections were not intended to be predictions over the short time scales for which observations are available to date.” Translation: Pay no attention to our models behind the curtain; just trust our judgment that the end is nigh.
The 12 chapters of the report are full of anomalous findings and admissions of scientific weaknesses that are not reflected in the SPM. Not to worry: the report is not final. The fine print on the IPCC’s website says that “following copy-editing, layout, final checks for errors, and adjustments for changes for consistency with the Summary for Policy-makers, it will be published online in January.” (My emphasis.)
In other words, this supposedly authoritative product of international scientific consensus will be reverse-engineered to match up with the politically determined SPM. No wonder skepticism of the climate science community is on the rise.
Steven F. Hayward is the visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
-
The Computer says NO – The IPCC 2013 Summary for Policymakers
Posted on October 7, 2013 by Anthony Watts
By Tom Quirk
The IPCC use of computer models to predict temperatures, rain fall, sea level rises and other weather related events either global or regional has comprehensively failed to predict most of the observations made in the last twenty years and ignores any analysis that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate. Ad hoc effects are put forward in order to explain why the model predictions parted company from the observations. This is most obvious in looking at the components of radiative (temperature) forcing (Figure SPM.5) where such effects as aerosols appear as contributions with 100% uncertainty. This is not a statistically derived uncertainty but rather an “expert” opinion on an effect that is needed to “balance the books”. Yet all the uncertainties are combined as if they are all well behaved statistical errors.
The report is best summed up by the classic Polish saying from Soviet times – The future is certain only the past is unpredictable.
There are a series of points that one can take immediate objection to:
The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present year is dismissed as of no consequence. The report has borrowed the reply of Chou En Lai who, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, replied that “It was too early to tell”. Yet in 1988 James Hansen appearing before a Congressional committee said he was 99% certain that the temperature rise from 1977 was not a natural variation.
The oceans that have been ignored up to now have suddenly become centre stage as the lodging place for the heat that should have raised the global temperature. The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. This is then mixed by wave motion through the top 100 to 200 metres of the oceans. But the sea surface temperature is in equilibrium with the air surface temperatures so how has the heat energy achieved this avoidance. Of course the deep ocean from 1,000 to 4,000 metres is at 40C or less and any overturning of the deep ocean would cause no end of trouble. This looks like another ad hoc explanation.
Sea level rises are forecast to be as much as 1 metre by 2100 yet the measurements show quite different annual rises in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Indeed a good pair of gumboots should get our grandchildren through 2100 with the present measured annual increases.
Methane is referred to as reaching unprecedented levels in the atmosphere with no suggestion that its annual increases have fallen by a factor of eight since 1995[2]. Three of the scenarios (now called trajectories) have reasonable methane concentrations out to the year 2100 but the fourth (RCP 8.5) is an echo of the early extreme scenario A1FI and a little more borrowed from another earlier scenario of the IPCC 2007 report. The main justification for the more than doubling of the present methane level of 1750 ppb to 3750 ppb in 2100 may be to keep the highest temperature and sea level rise predictions in play. This last scenario is of course used by the CSIRO to predict the end of Sydney and Brisbane airports.
There is a reference (Figure SPM.4 (a)) to the long running time series measurements of atmospheric CO2 at the South Pole (black line) and Mauna Loa (red line). What has not been pointed out is that in 1958 to 1960, there is no difference in these measurements between the two stations but it remains unexplained. Also there is a modest bump in 1990 that had the Point Barrow measurements at latitude 710N been included would have shown a modest 2 year plateau in CO2 concentration. This, when properly analysed, shows that about 2.5 GtC of CO2 entered and left the Northern Hemisphere atmosphere in the space of 4 years when fossil fuel CO2 emissions were 6 GtC in 1990 with 90% occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.. Yet we are taught that fossil fuel emissions are absorbed with great difficulty by the land and oceans.. This is at the time of the Mount Pinatubo eruption but the CO2 output has been estimated at only 0.015GtC so volcanic activity is not the cause.
The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present has been variously explained by heat disappearing into the oceans, volcanic activity and a lessening of solar radiation (dismissed in this IPCC report). The failure to acknowledge the impact of the oceans that cover 70% of the surface of the earth not only on the temperature behaviour but also CO2 is extraordinary[3]. But the explanation may be that we do not understand what triggers the phase changes in the oceans where up-welling cold water displaces warmer water and of course the reverse. So it is not possible to model such events and this would be an admission of complete failure of the computer models.
Regional models should not be regarded as having any useful predictive power if the global models have been unsuccessful. There is a problem with regional modelling over land as the assumption that the mean temperature is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures can increase temperatures by up to 0.50C. This distorts the heat load over the land and thus would cause a systematic error in computer modelling results.
This report from the IPCC should be its last. Not only has the climate science research community extracted billions of dollars from politicians but tens if not hundreds of billions have been invested in schemes to reduce CO2 emissions with little to show by way of reductions.
The last word should be left to Jonathon Swift who brilliantly satirized the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels[4]. Gulliver is taken to the country of Balnibarbi whose enlightened rulers have adopted new methods of agriculture and building but the country appears to be in ruins as “the only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection”.
[1] Catch phrase from Little Britain BBC TV series
[2] http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463096_document_twentieth_century_sources_of_methane_in_the_atmosphere.pdf
[3] See http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463007_document_break_paper_apjas_ipa.pdf
[4] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9213
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/07/the-computer-says-no-the-ipcc-2013-summary-for-policymakers/
-
This takedown made me laugh:
Vitamin D And Cancer
Posted on 21 October 2013 by Briggs
This is our second big week focusing on colorectual cancer. Three weeks makes a streak. We’ll see.
Our paper is Mapping Vitamin D Deficiency, Breast Cancer, and Colorectal Cancer by Sharif Mohr, including four authors whose surnames suspiciously begin with G.
Paper is making the rounds with people concerned that they ought to be popping Vitamin D (VD for short?) pills to stave off the big C (today’s post sponsored by the letters C, D, G, and V).
Idea is that there’s more sun the closer to the equator you get, therefore the more opportunity there is for your body to produce VD. Why is this important? Because statistics appear to show that people who live in equatorial lands have lower rates of breast and colorectal cancer.
(http://wmbriggs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/smohr.vd_-300x231.jpg)
Rates of colorectual cancer countries classed by latitude.
This picture from their paper gives you the idea. Shows the rates of colorectal cancer (found in various and variable public data sources) by about 200 different countries classed by latitude (not all countries are labeled). Paper has a similar picture for breast cancer.
Seems plausible that the further from the sun you get the more at risk you are of cancer, no?
No. Those equatorial countries are places like the Democratic (don’t laugh) Republic of Congo, life expectancy 45; Equatorial Guinea, life expectancy 48, and so on and such forth (data source; from 2000).
This is versus sunlight depraved countries like Finland, life expectancy 78; Denmark, life expectancy 78; and on and on.
Now the longer you live the higher the chance you’ll develop one of these “old age” cancers (you have to die of something, after all). Most people are diagnosed north of 50. So if you die before 50, you don’t have much chance of getting these cancers. This is my “theory”, which has the benefit of parsimoniously explaining the observed data.
This explanation was much too simple for Mohr and the Four Gs, who show no sign of having thought of it. They instead developed complicated regression models of solar irradiance, optical depth, population density and, oh, I don’t know what all else. They got the wee p-values they sought, which was all the proof they needed.
And, hey, it could be that their vastly more complicated hypothesis is true and mine false. Plus, they have a wee p-value and I don’t. I can’t even get one! So, as the authors say (as they always say), “More research is clearly needed.”
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=9612
-
Read to the end for attribution of the quote at the beginning.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579177651057373802?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
(subscribe at https://buy.wsj.com/offers/pages/OfferMulti1a?trackCode=aaqa209l)
Climate-change alarmists warn us about coming food shortages. They said the same in 1968.
By Bret Stephens, WSJ Nov. 4, 2013
Warming is becoming a major problem. "A change in our climate," writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, "is taking place very sensibly." Snowfall, he notes, has become "less frequent and less deep." Rivers that once "seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now."
And it's having an especially worrisome effect on the food supply: "This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits."
That isn't a leaked excerpt from the latest report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well be. Last week, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise of the website No Frakking Consensus posted a draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate change will have on food production. The New York Times then splashed the news on its front page Saturday. It's another tale of warming woe:
"With or without adaptation," the report warns, "climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050."
Two silly books, now being recycled by global warming alarmists.
If this has a familiar ring, it's because it harks back to the neo-Malthusian forecasts of the 1960s and '70s, when we were supposed to believe that population growth would outstrip food production. This gave us such titles as "Famine 1975!", a 1967 best seller by the brothers William and Paul Paddock, along with Paul Ehrlich's vastly influential "The Population Bomb," a book that began with the words, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
In case you're wondering what happened with that battle to feed humanity, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization has some useful figures on its website. In 1968, the year Mr. Ehrlich's book first appeared, Asia produced 46,321,114 tons of maize and 439,579,934 of cereals. By 2011, the respective figures had risen to 270,316,205, up 484%, and 1,289,633,254, up 193%.
It's the same story nearly everywhere else one looks. In Africa, maize production was up 247% between 1968 and 2011, while production of so-called primary vegetables has risen 319%; in South America, it's 308% and 199%. Meanwhile, the world's population rose to just under seven billion from about 3.7 billion, an increase of about 90%. It is predicted to rise by another 33% by 2050.
But what about the supposedly warming climate? According to the EPA, "average temperatures have risen more quickly since the late 1970s," with the contiguous 48 states warming "faster than the global rate." Yet U.S. food production over the same time has also risen by robust percentages even as the number of acres under cultivation has been steadily falling for decades.
In other words, even if you believe the temperature records, a warming climate seems to correlate positively with greater food production. This has mainly to do with better farming practices and the widespread introduction of genetically modified (GMO) crops, and perhaps also the stimulative effects that carbon dioxide has on photosynthesis (though this is debated). Warming also could mean that northern latitudes now not suited for farming might become so in the future.
But whatever the reason, the world isn't likely to be getting any hungrier. Quite the opposite: Purely natural (as opposed to man-made) famines are becoming unknown. As the Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda noted in a 2010 paper, "in global terms, the margin over subsistence is now much wider than it was a generation ago. This also holds for former famine zones such as India and Bangladesh, whereas China, once the 'land of famine,' nowadays faces a growing problem of childhood obesity." Only in Africa is food scarcity still an issue, but even there recent food crises in Malawi and Niger did not result in major loss of life.
What does hurt people is bad public policy. Exhibit A is the U.S. ethanol mandate—justified in part as a response to global warming—which diverted the corn crop to fuel production and sent global food prices soaring in 2008. Exhibit B is the cult of organic farming and knee-jerk opposition to GMOs, which risk depriving farmers in poor countries of high-yield, nutrient-rich crops. Exhibit C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop the spread of malaria, which kills nearly 900,000 people, mostly children, in sub-Saharan Africa alone with each passing year. The list goes on and on.
Environmentalists tend to have conveniently short memories, especially when it comes to their own mistakes. They would do better to learn from history. Just take the quote about the warming climate with which this column began. It's from "Notes on the State of Virginia" by Thomas Jefferson, published in 1785.
-
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/ipcc_s_bogus_evidence_for_global_warming.html
November 12, 2013
IPCC 's Bogus Evidence for Global Warming
By S. Fred Singer
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up by the United Nations in 1988 and has been trying very hard to demonstrate the threat of a dangerous human influence on climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases. This is in line with their Charter, which directs the IPCC to assemble reports in support of the Global Climate Treaty -- the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) of Rio de Janeiro.
It is interesting that IPCC "evidence" was based on peer-reviewed publications - but (reluctantly) abandoned only after protracted critiques from outside scientists. E-mails among members of the IPCC team, revealed in the 2009 'Climategate' leak, describe their strenuous efforts to silence such critiques, often using unethical methods.
I will show here that the first three IPCC assessment reports contain erroneous scientific arguments, which have never been retracted or formally corrected, but at least have now been abandoned by the IPCC -- while the last two reports, AR4 and AR5, use an argument that seems to be circular and does not support their conclusion. Australian Prof. "Bob" Carter, marine geologist and paleo-climatologist, refers to IPCC as using "hocus-pocus" science. He is a co-author of the latest (2013) NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) report "Climate Change Reconsidered-II" www.climatechangereconsidered.org . We also co-authored a critique of the 2013 IPCC-AR5 Summary <http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/critique_of_ipcc_spm.pdf>
1. IPCC-AR1 (1990)
This first report of the IPCC bases its entire claim for AGW on the fact that both CO2 and surface temperatures increased during the 20th century -- although not in lock-step. They assign the major warming of 1910 to 1940 to a human influence -- based on a peer-reviewed paper by BD Santer and TML Wigley, which uses a very strange statistical argument. But the basis of their statistics has been critiqued (by Tsonis and Swanson) -- and I have demonstrated empirically elsewhere that their conclusion does not hold.
While this faulty paper has never been retracted, it is now no longer quoted as evidence by the IPCC -- nor accepted by the overwhelming majority of IPCC scientists: Most if not all warming of the early 20th century is due to natural, not human causes.
2. IPCC AR2 (1996)
This report devotes a whole chapter, #8, to "Attribution and Detection." Its main feature is what one might call the "invention" of the "Hotspot," i.e. an enhanced warming trend in the tropical troposphere -- never actually observed.
Unfortunately, the "evidence," as presented by BD Santer, was published only after the IPCC report itself appeared; it contains two fundamental errors. The first error was to argue that the Hotspot is a "fingerprint" of human influence -- and specifically, related to an increase in greenhouse gases. This is not true. The Hotspot, according to all model calculations, is simply an atmospheric amplification of a surface trend, a consequence of the physics of the tropical atmosphere.
[Technically speaking, it is caused by increased convective activity whereby cumulus clouds carry latent heat from the surface of the tropical ocean into the upper troposphere. In other words, the Hotspot is not human-caused, but arises from a "moist-adiabatic lapse rate" of the atmosphere. This effect is discussed in most meteorological textbooks and is widely accepted.]
How then did AR2 conclude that a Hotspot exists observationally? This is the second issue: The IPCC selected a short interval in the atmospheric temperature record that showed an increase -- while the general trend was one of cooling. In other words, they cherry-picked their data to invent a Hotspot -- as pointed out in a subsequent publication by PJ Michaels and PC Knappenberger [see graph below]
The matter of the existence of a Hotspot in the actual tropical troposphere has been the topic of lively debate ever since. On the one hand, DH Douglass, JR Christy, BD Pearson and SF Singer, demonstrated absence of a Hotspot empirically while Santer (and 17[!] IPCC coauthors), publishing in the same journal, argued the opposite. This issue now seems to have been finally settled, as discussed by Singer in two papers in Energy & Environment [2011 and 2013].
It is worth noting that a US government report [CCSP-SAP-1.1 (2006)] showed absence of a Hotspot in the tropics (Chapter 5, BD Santer, lead author). But the report's Executive Summary managed to obfuscate this result by referring to global atmosphere rather than tropical.
It is also worth noting that while the IPCC-AR2 used the Hotspot invention to argue that the "balance of evidence suggest a human influence," later IPCC reports no longer use the Hotspot argument.
Nevertheless, one consequence of this unfortunate phrase in AR2 has been the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. Even though Kyoto expired in 2012, it has managed to waste hundreds of billions of dollars so far -- and continues to distort energy policies with uneconomic schemes in most industrialized nations.
3. IPCC AR3 (2001)
AR3 attributes global warming to human influences based on the "Hockey-Stick" graph, using published papers by Michael Mann, derived from his analysis of multi-proxy data. The hockeystick graph [bottom graph below] claims that the 20th century showed unusually rapid warming -- and thus suggests a strong human influence. The graph also does away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, which were shown in earlier IPCC reports [see top graph below].
It was soon found that the Hockeystick graph was in error and did not deserve continued reliance. Canadian statisticians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated errors in Mann's statistical analysis and in the use of certain tree-ring data for calibration. In fact, they showed that Mann's algorithm would generate a Hockeystick graph -- even if the input data was pure noise. [I served as a reviewer for M&M's initial paper in Energy & Environment 2003.]
It is worth noting that the IPCC no longer uses the Hockeystick to support human-caused warming, even though AR3 still claims to be at least 66% certain that greenhouse-gas emissions are responsible for 20th century warming.
4. IPCC-AR4 (2007) and AR5 (2013)
Both reports use essentially the same faulty argument in their attempt to support their conclusion of human-caused global warming. Their first step is to construct a model that tries to match the reported 20th-century surface warming. This is not very difficult; it is essentially a 'curve-fitting' exercise: By selecting the right level of climate sensitivity and the right amount of aerosol forcing, they can match the reported temperature rise of the final decades of the 20th century, but not the initial decades -- as becomes evident from a detailed graph in their Attribution chapter. This lack of agreement is due to the fact that their models ignore major forcings -- both from variations of solar activity and from changes in ocean circulation.
They then use the following trick. They re-plot their model graph, but without an increase in greenhouse gases; this absence of forcing now generates a gap between the reported warming and unforced model. Then they turn around and argue that this gap must be due to an increase in greenhouse gases. It appears to me that this argument may be circular. Even if the reported late-20th-century surface warming really exists (it is absent from the satellite and radiosonde records), the IPCC argument is not convincing.
It is ironic, however, that IPCC claims increasing certainty (at 90% in AR4 and at least 95% in AR5) for an attribution to human causes, which appears to be contrived. Additionally, while AR4 calculates a Climate Sensitivity (for a doubling of CO2) of 2.0 - 4.5 degC, AR5 expands the uncertainty interval to 1.5 - 4.5 degC. So much for the claim of increased certainty in the IPCC-AR5 Summary.
Yet, while claiming increased certainty about manmade global warming, both reports essentially ignore the absence of any surface warming trend since about 1998. Of course, they also ignore absence of any significant warming in the troposphere, ocean record, and proxy data during the crucial preceding (1979-1997) interval.
Conclusion
In spite of much effort, the IPCC has never succeeded in demonstrating that climate change is significantly affected by human activities -- and in particular, by the emission of greenhouse gases. Over the last 25 years, their supporting arguments have shifted drastically -- and are shown to be worthless. It appears more than likely that climate change is controlled by variations in solar magnetic activity and by periodic changes in ocean circulation.
There is no doubt about the existence of such a solar influence on climate. As shown in the graph below, cosmic-ray intensity (as measured by the radioactive carbon isotope C-14) and terrestrial climate (as measured by the oxygen isotope O-18) correlate in amazing detail over an interval of at least 3000 years (see graph below; the bottom graph is the central section, blown up to reveal detail)
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years.
-
My impression is that most people are coming to the conclusion there is a global warming affect though what to do about it is in question.
I don't know what to think.
On this board we tend to only post the deniers point of view. In some places I read just the opposite. They conclude it is fact and anyone who disagrees is corrupt, stupid, or a crazed denier.
Again I don't know what to think.
-
Well, the Aussies appear to have changed their minds:
Australia – you beaut.
By Pointman
We have lived in a globalised society for a lot longer than that relatively recently coined phrase might suggest. Because we've greater and easier access to foreign news, and even if we don't take advantage of that, more foreign news is still reported on by domestic outlets, but usually through the prism of a local worldview.
By a large, this new global information age is a good thing but I think it comes with some downsides. Possibly the most obvious is that in a certain sense, it's a global disinformation age. The line between reportage and pure opinion is too often blurred and this combined with a supposed short attention span of the Internet reader, leads to ridiculously short and simplified articles on complex issues. All too often definitive and authoritive statements are made which have absolutely no provenance, and the sad thing is that it's rarely noticed.
The worst problem is information overload - there's simply too much of it and teasing out a useful signal from the background noise can be challenging. I once knew this guy who was a RIO (Radio Intercept Officer) on a MacDonnell Douglas F4 Phantom. He spent a lot of time in the rear seat of one as it made occasional hops into places like Hai Pong Harbour with a lot of people trying very hard to kill him while he was visiting. He told me something interesting.
He turned off stuff, in point of fact, he turned off pretty much everything except the essentials, closing down most of those multi-million dollar systems so he could concentrate on those few which could actually help complete the mission and save his own and his pilot's life. In an analogous fashion, looking on the web for information on a controversial issue involves tuning out the crap, because there are too many creatures like William Connolley skulking about.
The more subtle problem is that it gives the impression that we're all somehow aligned across the world in terms of popular opinion on controversial subjects. At a grassroots level, this is certainly not true and is compounded in the developed world by the stranglehold the left has over most organs of the mainstream media. They have a statist tendency to represent what they think the people should be thinking rather than what they're actually thinking.
Granted, we may all eventually come to the same rough consensus but that rarely happens as some sort of global gestalt thing. More usually, an opinion which eventually becomes mainstream thinking, is first expressed somewhere and the growing sentiment is reflected independently at different rates around the world.
Such changes in sentiment happen suddenly or they can be quite gradual. The sudden variety are usually brought about by things like surprise attacks such Pearl Harbour, the Twin Towers, or the Madrid or London bombings. Suddenly nobody's talking about multiculturalism any more but rather integration and oaths of allegiance by immigrants.
The hysteria about global warming, something nobody had even heard of twenty years ago, came about quite gradually. It was created by a building synergy between a headline hungry media, political interests, a coterie of activists scientists on an ego trip, some good but badly misguided intentions and of course greed by the seamier side of the financial services industry. Slow change like that becomes the establishment line, and since so many people and their livelihoods have become invested in it, is very difficult to reverse. Where something deeply flawed has become so ingrained, it's usually reversed just as slowly and mainly by people quietly withdrawing support for it once its problems have become apparent to all.
That process of slow reversal has to start somewhere and the longer it's delayed, the stronger and more violent it will necessarily become. No one wants to be the one to do it first, but it's inevitable and when it eventually happens, the unthinkable has been expressed and soon gathers support from the silent watchers who've long ago come to the same conclusion. The pressure of the magma underneath that great tectonic plate of public opinion has simply grown too great and finally breaks through somewhere. A change is gonna come.
We've just witnessed that eruption in Australia.
For decades we've had a united political front displayed by major western governments about a need to fight global warming and that has just been shattered into a million pieces by Australia. The newly elected government, after eviscerating the duplicitous and climate obsessed previous administration, is beginning the long process of dismantling both climate legislation and its administrative organs and has said flatly that it won't be kicking any money into the various global warming relief funds being pushed by the UN.
What's more, they're hacking back government spending on research aimed at combating global warming and by the abolition of such feel-good spinoff things as the Australian Animals Welfare Advisory Committee, Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Committee, National Inter-country Adoption Advisory Council; National Steering Committee on Corporate Wrongdoing, Antarctic Animal Ethics Committee, Advisory Panel on the Marketing in Australia of Infant Formula, Maritime Workforce Development Forum, Advisory Panel on Positive Ageing, Insurance Reform Advisory Group and the National Housing Supply Council among others. A lot of fat cat rent seekers have just been tossed out on their butt.
This is a government taking an axe to big government.
They're not even sending their environment minister, who's thankful he's got more than one ministerial portfolio, to the COP19 meeting in Warsaw and what's more, the language being employed is unequivocal. The junior representative turning up a Warsaw carried the "leaked" message that Australia - “will not support any measures which are socialism masquerading as environmentalism”. That tell it like it is form of words will probably be on the headstone of what looks to be the final annual climate conference of any significance.
The fallout is of course unfolding. The home-grown media is tearing its hair out and rending its garments like a distraught drama queen having an attack of the vapours but the ordinary person, once you get outside the ambit of stylish chatterati circles, is pleased as punch with a bit of muscular government which is for once doing what they wish for a change. The red light going off for climate alarmists is that Australia's gutsy stance was backed within days by Canada and there'll be more. The first girl has left the party and instead of being talked about, will shortly be joined by the rest.
I wrote an article last year about what I saw as the alarming erosion of basic democracy in Australia. All those bad bad signs were there. Censorship, a phoney political choice, a media which was a grovelling mouthpiece of government, attacks on free speech, a proposed Soviet style Finkelstein regulation of even blogs and the petty bureaucratic intimidation of any small opposition like the Thompson family. Of all the countries threatened by creeping totalitarianism masquerading as caring for the planet, Australia was the one on the very cusp of tipping over into that nightmare abyss.
Instead of that disaster happening, within the space of a year it's turned around big time, delivering a long overdue kick up the arse to its political establishment, reasserting its right to national prosperity and shucking off the foreign UN vampires wanting to feed on its lifeblood.
If it was going to be anyone, it just had to be the bloody Aussies. Well done you bunch of diggers.
©Pointman
-
Putting business interests ahead of the ski resort industry's anti-global warming activism, in Whistler Mountain decides to open early - in mid November!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/skiing-news/10449066/Whistler-ski-resort-to-open-13-days-early.html
(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02734/Paul_Morrison_0613_2734198b.jpg)
A statement from Whistler said: "Thanks to oodles of snow, Whistler Mountain will open 13 days early this season. Whistler is renowned, season upon season, for being the number one ski resort for guaranteed snow - lots of it - and this winter will be no exception."
-
If it snows too little it's global warming, if it snows too much, it's global warming. If you dare to disagree, you are worse than Hitler.
-
Ice Everywhere, But No Hockey Sticks http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/365220/ice-everywhere-no-hockey-sticks-mark-steyn
By Mark Steyn December 2, 2013
News from Santa’s Grotto: (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/12/arctic_ice_cap_grows_29_in_one_year.html)
Global warming hysterics at the BBC warned us in 2007 that by summer 2013, the Arctic would be ice-free. As with so many other doomsday predictions by warmists, the results turn out to be quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, down the other end at Santa’s summer vacation condo: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/)
Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world.
Antarctic ice is now at a 35-year high. But scientists are “baffled” by the planet’s stubborn refusal to submit to their climate models. Maybe the problem with Nobel fantasist Michael Mann’s increasingly discredited hockey stick is that he’s holding it upside down. (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359731/times-climbs-hockey-stick-mark-steyn)
Nonetheless, the famously settled science seems to be re-settling: (http://usfinancepost.com/scientists-increasingly-moving-to-global-cooling-consensus-9198.html)
Scientists Increasingly Moving To Global Cooling Consensus
Global warming will kill us. Global cooling will kill us. And if it’s 54 and partly cloudy, you should probably flee for your life right now. Maybe scientists might usefully consider moving to being less hung up on “consensus” – a most unscientific and, in this context, profoundly corrupting concept.
-
I know Doug looked outside his Minneapolis window and cursed the big oils for all that snow. :-D
We had a lot of rabbits in the area this year. The wild turkeys were not seen.
I cursed the carbon producing scum all season. It is their fault.
Thank God we are going to get a carbon tax. I really don't mind paying higher prices to compensate oil companies who will be forced to pay this tax.
Nothing grander than financing the Democrat Party. One third of my life or more already is devoted to their existence.
-
I know Doug looked outside his Minneapolis window and cursed the big oils for all that snow. :-D
We had a lot of rabbits in the area this year. The wild turkeys were not seen.
I cursed the carbon producing scum all season. It is their fault.
Thank God we are going to get a carbon tax. I really don't mind paying higher prices to compensate oil companies who will be forced to pay this tax.
Nothing grander than financing the Democrat Party. One third of my life or more already is devoted to their existence.
Yes, 42" of new snow in Two Harbors (by Duluth) with "highs" forecasted below zero. No one needs to dream of a white Christmas here. Most cruel is to keep hearing about global warming during this 17 year pause. Are they nuts? OTOH, it is a beautiful sunny day in the land of abrupt season changes! Seems like only 2 days ago we were raking leaves. Live cam out my frosty living room window this morning:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/IMG_20131206_101633_zps91002d84.jpg)
Snow totals: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/285242/
-
Just 13 years ago, Dr. David Viner, senior scientist at Britain’s University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, confidently predicted that, within a few years, winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event.” “Children [in Britain] just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Nothing was said about Israel and Egypt...
http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-snow-israel-egypt-20131213,0,1691393.story#axzz2nMzV6vMp
snow blankets Middle East
A bruising winter storm brought severe weather to the Middle East, forcing the closure of roads and schools
http://www.latimes.com/la-wn-snow-middle-east-pictures,0,4657856.photogallery#ixzz2nNFfAFFD
CAIRO -- Snow coated domes and minarets Friday as a record Mideast storm compounded the suffering of Syrian refugees, sent the Israeli army scrambling to dig out stranded motorists and gave Egyptians a rare glimpse of snow in their capital.
Nearly three feet of snow closed roads in and out of Jerusalem, which is set in high hills, and thousands in and around the city were left without power. Israeli soldiers and police rescued hundreds trapped in their cars by snow and ice. In the West Bank, the branches of olive trees groaned under the weight of snow.
In Cairo, where local news reports said the last recorded snowfall was more than 100 years ago, children in outlying districts capered in white-covered streets, and adults marveled at the sight, tweeting pictures of snow-dusted parks and squares
Photos: Rare snow blankets Middle East
http://www.latimes.com/la-wn-snow-middle-east-pictures,0,4657856.photogallery#ixzz2nNEMXRdq
Associated Press / December 13, 2013
(http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/3dJzgGYPTpN5D8ZmJLrq5A--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTQyNjtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz02Mzk-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/1fa29be71512155b1ede5e30c216137091ced83b.jpg)
Jerusalem, 12/12/2013
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/snowstorms-in-syria-slideshow/
-
The Vast Majority of Raw Data From Old Scientific Studies May Now Be Missing
| | | REDDIT | DIGG | STUMBLE | EMAIL | MORE
Image via Flickr user dabblelicious
One of the foundations of the scientific method is the reproducibility of results. In a lab anywhere around the world, a researcher should be able to study the same subject as another scientist and reproduce the same data, or analyze the same data and notice the same patterns.
This is why the findings of a study published today in Current Biology are so concerning. When a group of researchers tried to email the authors of 516 biological studies published between 1991 and 2011 and ask for the raw data, they were dismayed to find that more 90 percent of the oldest data (from papers written more than 20 years ago) were inaccessible. In total, even including papers published as recently as 2011, they were only able to track down the data for 23 percent.
“Everybody kind of knows that if you ask a researcher for data from old studies, they’ll hem and haw, because they don’t know where it is,” says Timothy Vines, a zoologist at the University of British Columbia, who led the effort. “But there really hadn’t ever been systematic estimates of how quickly the data held by authors actually disappears.”
To make their estimate, his group chose a type of data that’s been relatively consistent over time—anatomical measurements of plants and animals—and dug up between 25 and 40 papers for each odd year during the period that used this sort of data, to see if they could hunt down the raw numbers.
A surprising amount of their inquiries were halted at the very first step: for 25 percent of the studies, active email addresses couldn’t be found, with defunct addresses listed on the paper itself and web searches not turning up any current ones. For another 38 percent of studies, their queries led to no response. Another 7 percent of the data sets were lost or inaccessible.
“Some of the time, for instance, it was saved on three-and-a-half inch floppy disks, so no one could access it, because they no longer had the proper drives,” Vines says. Because the basic idea of keeping data is so that it can be used by others in future research, this sort of obsolescence essentially renders the data useless.
These might seem like mundane obstacles, but scientists are just like the rest of us—they change email addresses, they get new computers with different drives, they lose their file backups—so these trends reflect serious, systemic problems in science.
And preserving data is so important, it’s worth remembering, because it’s impossible to predict in which directions research will move in the future. Vines, for instance, has been conducting his own research on a pair of toad species native to Eastern Europe that seem to be in the process of hybridizing. In the 1980s, he says, a separate team of researchers was working on the same topic, and came across an old paper that documented the distribution of these toads in the 1930s. Knowing that their distribution had changed relatively little over the intervening decades allowed the scientists to make all sorts of calculations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. “That original data being available, from a very small old study written in Polish, was incredibly useful to researchers that came along 70 years later,” he says.
There’s also the fact that so much of this research is paid for with public funding, much of it coming through grants that stipulate that resulting data be made freely available to the public. Additionally, field data is affected by the circumstances of the environment in which it’s collected—thus, it’s impossible to perfectly replicate later on, when conditions have changed.
What’s the solution? Some journals—including Molecular Ecology, of which Vines is a managing editor—have adopted policies that require authors to submit raw data along with their papers, allowing the journal itself to archive the data in perpetuity. Although journals, like people, are susceptible to changing email addresses and technological obsolescence, these problems can be much more easily managed at the institutional scale.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/12/the-vast-majority-of-raw-data-from-old-scientific-studies-may-now-be-missing/#ixzz2o3hpgpPk
-
To become administrators of liberal causes. Seems like a good profession to be in:
Just the other day I was reading the Greens fighting oil, gas, and coal companies with huge complicated legal challenges all over the place. I was thinking where do they get the money for this? Must be Soros and others like him.
Answer, it is:
*****Indiatimes|The Times of India|The Economic Times|
Wall Street tycoon donates fortune, kills self
Jenn Selby,The Independent | Dec 29, 2013, 04.57 AM IST
A renowned Wall Street tycoon gave away his $800 million fortune before falling to his death in a suicide jump this week.
Hedge fund multi-millionaire Robert W Wilson, who was 87-year-old, leapt from the 16th floor of his San Remo apartment building in New York's Upper East Side.
According to the New York Police Department, he left a note at the scene. He had suffered from a stroke just a few months before.
"He always said he didn't want to suffer," close friend Stephen Viscusi said. "His plan was to give all his money away. He told me recently, 'I only have about $100 million to go,'" he said.
He has since been praised as a "legend" by his peers, after pledging his entire worth to charity some years before he ended his life. He gave the last $100 million of his money to not-for-profit environmental advocacy group the Environmental Defence Fund(EDF).
Fred Krupp, the president of the EDF, said of the group's biggest benefactor: "Robert was a Wall Street legend who became a prominent philanthropist," he said. Other beneficiaries of his money include the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the World Monuments Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society, each of which received $100 million before Wilson passed away.
"I realized that Catholic schools were closing all over the country, and Bill Gates probably didn't have enough money to save them," Wilson said in 2010 when asked about his decision to donate such a large sum to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
Wilson is survived by his brother William, 88. He had no children.
-
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/Global-warming-researcher-gets-stuck-in-ice-5102720.php
Global warming researcher gets stuck in ice
Debra J. Saunders December 30, 2013
A funny thing happened during Australian climate-change professor Chris Turney's venture to retrace a 1912 research expedition in Antarctica and gauge how climate change has affected the continent: Two weeks into a five-week excursion, Turney's good ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy got trapped in ice. It turns out, global warming notwithstanding, that there's so much ice down under that two ice-breaking vessels sent to rescue the research team cannot reach the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
"Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition acknowledges.
---------------------
To the San Francisco Chronicle, Why is this in the Opinion section??
-
It's the Al Gore effect. Just his presence alone is good for snow storms and record cold.
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/Global-warming-researcher-gets-stuck-in-ice-5102720.php
Global warming researcher gets stuck in ice
Debra J. Saunders December 30, 2013
A funny thing happened during Australian climate-change professor Chris Turney's venture to retrace a 1912 research expedition in Antarctica and gauge how climate change has affected the continent: Two weeks into a five-week excursion, Turney's good ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy got trapped in ice. It turns out, global warming notwithstanding, that there's so much ice down under that two ice-breaking vessels sent to rescue the research team cannot reach the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
"Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition acknowledges.
---------------------
To the San Francisco Chronicle, Why is this in the Opinion section??
-
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=636296209765833&set=a.571165216278933.1073741830.440106476051475&type=1&theater
-
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=636296209765833&set=a.571165216278933.1073741830.440106476051475&type=1&theater
"Remember, this is summer in Antarctica."
(https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/q71/1505058_636296209765833_1949321345_n.jpg)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304591604579292611684898656?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
Carbon to the Rescue
Fossil fuels to power retrieval of trapped climate scientists.
"...the helicopters and ships that participate in the next rescue attempt won't be powered by renewable-energy credits."
-
Parts of Manitoba colder than Mars today. -53 C.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-deep-freeze-as-cold-as-uninhabited-planet-1.2479967
-
Interesting exploration of how the Party Line re the Stuck Ship diverges from some of the tweeting/blogging going on re the same:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/02/the-cause-of-the-akademik-shokalskiy-getting-stuck-in-antarctica-sigtseeing-mishaps-and-dawdling-by-the-passengers-getting-back-on-ship/
-
I'm not complaining, but to imagine the high temp in sunny Mpls today, 'real feel' of -45 , walk into a refrigerator, close the door and feel 80 degrees of warming.
-
At least they were rescued by those champions of environmental responsibility, the Chinese.
-
Mark Steyn in fine form:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9112201/ship-of-fools-2/
-
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/454657/Ice-age-on-the-way-as-scientists-fear-the-Sun-is-falling-asleep
-
I don't know who to believe or what to think. ON Drudge is posted two agencies one being NASA that claim the hottest years globally on record are recent. I am not fan of lets all drive electric junk and tax how many times I flush my toilet but if the world is being affected to humanities future detriment what do we do? I'll be long dead I guess....
-
As I have stated numerous times transactions where all costs are not born by buyer and seller are a fair area for governmental action.
I agree that in various ways we are overloading our planet-- e.g. our oceans are being fished to empty, forests and eco-systems destroyed, the air being fouled, etc. These are fair areas for governmental action.
However, science must rule and the global warming hypothesis is fairly challenged e.g. in this thread. Before creating a world government to be put in charge of the weather (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) we must be REAL clear on the danger, and on the solutions!
-
I am not sure you understood my question.
"However, science must rule and the global warming hypothesis is fairly challenged e.g. in this thread"
My point is I don't know which science to believe. I don't know what to conclude. I don't know who to believe.
-
Sorry I failed to communicate that I get that.
My intended point is that absent proof, putting the government and the UN in charge of the weather, and taxing us to do so to boot, is probably a real bad idea.
-
Sorry I failed to communicate that I get that.
My intended point is that absent proof, putting the government and the UN in charge of the weather, and taxing us to do so to boot, is probably a real bad idea.
Even with proof, putting either in charge is a bad idea.
-
But I enjoyed the different views in the comments section that follow her agenda laden comments:
http://news.yahoo.com/regardless-cold-winters-global-warming-fact-050113690.html
-
15,000 years ago, where I live was like Antarctica and I would be writing from under a 1/2 mile of glacial ice. We have come so far, now it is sunny here with a high today in terms of wind chill of -31 F (-35 C).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/25/when-did-global-warming-begin/
Many charts at the link. You can look at any time frame of measurement scheme that you choose. The earth most certainly warms and cools. There is no truth in denying it.
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/temps-ar1.jpg?w=542&h=329)
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/450-thousand.jpg?w=867&h=396)
-
http://www.cato.org/blog/closing-books-2013-another-year-another-nail-coffin-disastrous-global-warming
-
Thank you BBG.
This clarifies my latest confusion about the right's claims temperatures in the US fall but the left's claims global temps are nearly highest recorded.
Like I have questioned before I don't know what to think or believe because we are rarely getting unbiased balanced views. This article indeed does address this:
*******Global Temperatures
And we’d be remiss not to review the global temperature for 2013.
The liberal-leaning press reports the 2013 global temperature as the seventh (or fourth) highest on record, while the conservative-leaning press reports it as another year in which the global temperature has refused to rise (Figure 4).
Figure 4. TOP: Annual global surface temperature history, 1880-2013, as compiled by NOAA (blue) and NASA (red) (figure source, NOAA/NASA Joint Briefing). BOTTOM: Monthly global surface temperature anomalies, 1997-2013 (source: U.K. Hadley Center).
But all can agree that the temperatures in 2013 further extended the “pause” in the global surface temperature record-which now stands at some 17 years. A lot of people are at work trying to explain what’s behind the “pause,” but no matter the cause the longer that it continues, the further from reality climate model projections become (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Observed (blue) and projected (red) temperatures, 1980-2013. The projected temperatures are the annual mean of 106 climate runs (data source, Climate Explorer).
The most viable explanation that ties everything together is that the climate sensitivity-that is, how much the earth will warm in response to a doubling of the effective carbon dioxide concentration-is much larger in the climate models than it is in reality.
If this is indeed the case, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is, than the urgency to “do something” about climate change is reduced and so too the level of support for federal regulations aimed at limiting carbon dioxide and thus limiting our energy choices.*******
-
http://www.startribune.com/local/244470191.html
Lake Superior nearing ice-over
February 8, 2014
DULUTH – Ice has overtaken a great swath of Lake Superior’s surface, edging it toward its first complete ice-over since 1996 and worrying the shipping industry.
...
http://www.startribune.com/galleries/243389031.html
Ice caves on Apostle Islands
February 3, 2014
It's been 5 years since the ice has frozen along the south shore of Lake Superior, creating access to the wonders of the Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Over the weekend over 8,000 people made the pilgrimage, a mile walk along the frozen shore, to witness and photograph the crystal wonders of the caves.
(http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/492*328/06ICECAVE020414.JPG)
-
It's fun to catch famous people reading the forum. The Drudge lead now was posted here 3 days ago. EXPERT PREDICTS COMPLETE FREEZE OF GREAT LAKE
http://www.startribune.com/local/244470191.html
Lake Superior nearing ice-over
February 8, 2014
DULUTH – Ice has overtaken a great swath of Lake Superior’s surface, edging it toward its first complete ice-over since 1996
End of Snow?
Not persuaded at the Pravdas, the NY Times today published "The End of Snow", I kid you not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-snow.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140207&tntemail0=y&_r=5
The Times found a place in Germany with no snow. Last week in Colorado we found plenty:
(http://harfordskiclub.org/images/vail2011/vailpowder.jpg)
http://www.onthesnow.com/colorado/skireport.html
Up to 140 inches, that's 12 feet of snow.
Not reported in the Times:
(5 hours ago) DENVER (Reuters)Colorado Avalanche Information Center has issued an advisory to high-country visitors that avalanche danger is high in the Colorado mountains because of recent heavy snowfalls.
http://news.yahoo.com/skier-killed-colorado-avalanche-tenth-u-death-season-231739214--ski.html;_ylt=AvngQv8CCTSzqV2q_zbhv2DQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBsbzR0bHJyBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHNlYwNzcg--
-
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/
http://nypost.com/2012/04/02/faith-in-science/
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-myth-of-settled-science/2014/02/20/c1f8d994-9a75-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html
-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html
Some of the criticism struck me as curmudgeonly crankiness, but on the whole a fair point is made.
-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html
Some of the criticism struck me as curmudgeonly crankiness, but on the whole a fair point is made.
100% organic snake oil.
-
Is anyone following the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn legal contest? Maybe it is more a freedom of speech or freedom of press issue, but it is based on the merits of the pathological science.
Steyn I think has been quiet but posts the views of others here:
http://www.steynonline.com/6125/mann-about-the-house
Mann About the House
by Mark Steyn
February 24, 2014
UPDATE! My fellow free-speech warrior Down Under, Andrew Bolt, threatens to sue Michael Mann for a characteristically witless and leaden Tweet from a guy with the warm-monger's version of Tourette's. Hey, come on in, Andrew, the more the merrier!
UPPERDATE! Mann has apparently deleted the Tweet, and apologized. He's already in court in Virginia, the District of Columbia and British Columbia. I guess he figured side-trips to Melbourne would play havoc with his schedule. Easier to stick to bullying notorious Koch-funded denialist Diane Rehm.
**
Steve McIntyre continues his series on self-conferred Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann's equally false claims (in his legal pleadings against me and my co-defendants) to have been "exonerated" by multiple international inquiries. On Lord Oxburgh's panel, the President of the Royal Statistical Society described Mann's methods as "inappropriate" and the results "exaggerated". With the Muir Russell report, Mann and his lawyers doctored a quote to make it appear as if it applied to him rather than merely faculty of the University of East Anglia.
Now Steve turns his attention to the third of the United Kingdom's "official exonerations" of Mann cited in his court pleadings - by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons. There's no reason why a committee at Westminster would investigate a professor at a university in Pennsylvania, and indeed they don't: the handful of references to Mann in the report are in the recipient lines of emails, plus a reference to "Mike's Nature trick". Nevertheless, on page 20 of his Plaintiff's Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Defendants National Review and Mark Steyn's Motion to Dismiss, Mann and his Big Tobacco lawyer falsely cite the House of Commons report in Paragraph Two of Section C, titled "Dr Mann is Exonerated":
In March 2010, the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report finding that the skeptics' criticisms of the CRU were misplaced, and that its actions "were in line with common practice in the climate science community."
As Steve McIntyre puts it:
The first sentence is completely untrue: the Committee Report said nothing of the sort. The assertion that "criticisms of the CRU were misplaced" is neither made nor supported in the Committee Report. This phrase originated instead with SKS [Skeptical Science, a Mann-friendly site], who, once again, altered the language, though, in this case, not going so far as to fabricate a quotation.
But the second half of that first sentence is even worse. With the Muir Russell report, the result of doctoring the quote is that it appears inclusive of Mann. With the House of Commons report, the meaning of the quote is entirely inverted. Here's what the Commons report actually says:
As we explained in chapter 2, the practices and methods of climate science are a key issue. If the practices of CRU are found to be in line with the rest of climate science, the question would arise whether climate science methods of operation need to change. In this event we would recommend that the scientific community should consider changing those practices to ensure greater transparency.
In other words: If the Mann-Jones hockey-sticky hanky-panky is indeed normal climate-science behavior, then climate science needs to change. The Commons committee returns to this point:
54. It is not standard practice in climate science and many other fields to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. We think that this is problematic because climate science is a matter of global importance and of public interest, and therefore the quality and transparency of the science should be irreproachable. We therefore consider that climate scientists should take steps to make available all the data used to generate their published work, including raw data; and it should also be made clear and referenced where data has been used but, because of commercial or national security reasons is not available. Scientists are also, under Freedom of Information laws and under the rules of normal scientific conduct, entitled to withhold data which is due to be published under the peer-review process. In addition, scientists should take steps to make available in full their methodological workings, including the computer codes. Data and methodological workings should be provided via the internet.
In other words: all the stuff that Mann has spent the last 15 years obstructing access to - including right now in court in Vancouver and Virginia.
The brazen misrepresentation of these reports, the doctored quotations and inversions of meaning, in Mann's court pleadings is remarkable. I said above that Skeptical Science was a "Mann-friendly site". That's true. It's where he and his lawyers turned to get the bogus quotes they use in their legal pleadings. But, behind the scenes, Skeptical Science operated a private forum in which the "climate community"'s disquiet over Mann's methods and their distaste at feeling obliged to defend them is palpable. Robert Way:
I don't mean to be the pessimist of the group here but Mc brought up some very good points about the original hockeystick. The confidence affirmed to it by many on our side of the debate was vastly overstated and as has been shown in the recent literature greater variability on the centennial scale exists than was shown. The statistical methodology used by Mann did rely too much on tree rings which still are in debate over their usefulness to reconstruct temperature and particularly their ability to record low-frequency temperature variations. I've personally seen work that is unpublished that challenges every single one of his reconstructions because they all either understate or overstate low-frequency variations. My personal experience has been that Moberg still has the best reconstruction and his one does show greater variability. That's why I don't like to talk the HS stuff, because I know a lot of people who have doubts about the accuracy of the original HS.
Just like we complain about skeptics like Pielke and Christy etc letting their work be miscontrued, Mann et al stood by after their original HS and let others treat it with the confidence that they themselves couldn't assign to it. They had just as much of a responsability to ensure their work was used to promote properly just as Christy et al do. It is a tight rope we must all walk afterall.
And again:
Even his newest reconstruction doesn't validate past 1400 if you don't include disputed series (which I have no idea why he's including them at all).
Principal Component Analysis honcho I T Jolliffe:
'My strong impressive is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics...' [THIS IS THE EPITOME OF HOW I FEEL-Robert Way]
Neal King of UC Berkeley:
The real question is, Why would you believe the tree-ring proxies at earlier times when you KNOW that they didn't work properly in the 1990s? I guess there is a good answer to that, but no one has ever given it to me.
I believe a good 50% of the game is being able to avoid booby traps. Because the science is at the edge of ignorance, mistakes WILL be made. The question is, How do you avoid putting your foot in the traps? I think Mann (and maybe Steig) are examples of how NOT to proceed.
Robert Way again:
MBH98 was not an example of someone using a technique with flaws and then as he learned better techniques he moved on… He fought like a dog to discredit and argue with those on the other side that his method was not flawed. And in the end he never admitted that the entire method was a mistake. Saying "I was wrong but when done right it gives close to the same answer" is no excuse. He never even said that but I'm just making a point. What happened was they used a brand new statistical technique that they made up and that there was no rationalization in the literature for using it. They got results which were against the traditional scientific communities view on the matters and instead of re-evaluating and checking whether the traditional statistics were valid (which they weren't), they went on and produced another one a year later. They then let this HS be used in every way possible (including during the Kyoto protocol lead-up that resulted in canadian parliament signing the deal with many people ascribing their final belief in climate change being assured by the HS) despite knowing the stats behind it weren't rock solid.
John Cook of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland:
I have to tell you that you should warn those doing that particular one to stay away from Mann's 2008 paper if they take this topic as it seems it has actually been invalidated by climate audit (as much as I hate to admit it they are right about the issue of the study failing verification statistics past 1500 for one)
This is what the climate community says to each other about Michael Mann in private. Why won't they say it in public?
To reprise Judith Curry's words from yesterday:
For the past decade, scientists have come to the defense of Michael Mann, somehow thinking that defending Michael Mann is fighting against the 'war on science' and is standing up for academic freedom. It's time to let Michael Mann sink or swim on his own. Michael Mann is having all these problems because he chooses to try to muzzle people that are critical of Mann's science, critical of Mann's professional and personal behavior, and critical of Mann's behavior as revealed in the climategate emails. All this has nothing to do with defending climate science or academic freedom.
~If you'd like to support Steyn's pushback against Mann and his enforcers, please see here.
http://www.steynonline.com/6048/give-the-gift-of-steyn
-
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated.
Richard Van Noorden
24 February 2014 Updated: 25 February 2014
Article tools
Rights & Permissions
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
*Update: One of the named authors replied to Nature News on 25 February. He said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013; and that he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper. "The matter is being looked into by the related investigators," he said.
How to create a nonsense paper
Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement” (see ‘Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper’). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.
Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted — or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries.
Related stories
•Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing
•Editor will quit over hoax paper
•Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper
More related stories
“I wasn’t aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely happens. We do get occasional e-mails from good citizens letting us know where SCIgen papers show up,” says Jeremy Stribling, who co-wrote SCIgen when he was at MIT and now works at VMware, a software company in Palo Alto, California.
“The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study1 published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence.
Ruth Francis, UK head of communications at Springer, says that the company has contacted editors, and is trying to contact authors, about the issues surrounding the articles that are coming down. The relevant conference proceedings were peer reviewed, she confirms — making it more mystifying that the papers were accepted.
The IEEE would not say, however, whether it had contacted the authors or editors of the suspected SCIgen papers, or whether submissions for the relevant conferences were supposed to be peer reviewed. “We continue to follow strict governance guidelines for evaluating IEEE conferences and publications,” Stickel said.
A long history of fakes
Labbé is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see pdf]. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world's 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbé’s work, boosting their own citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long lists to their own previous work2.
Labbé says that the latest discovery is merely one symptom of a “spamming war started at the heart of science” in which researchers feel pressured to rush out papers to publish as much as possible.
There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls — from a fake paper published by physicist Alan Sokal of New York University in the journal Social Text in 1996, to a sting operation by US reporter John Bohannon published in Science in 2013, in which he got more than 150 open-access journals to accept a deliberately flawed study for publication.
Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.
Labbé adds that the nonsense papers were easy to detect using his tools, much like the plagiarism checkers that many publishers already employ. But because he could not automatically download all papers from the subscription databases, he cannot be sure that he has spotted every SCIgen-generated paper.
Naturedoi:10.1038/nature.2014.14763
-
Fascinating interview with profound critiques of science starting about halfway through.
http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/
-
That is an interesting read. Thank you.
-
Vegans eat plants. Plants reduce CO2. Therefore Vegans are destroying the planet.
I eat animals who produce CO2 and eat CO" reducing plants. Therefore I am a hero.
-
Vegans eat plants. Plants reduce CO2. Therefore Vegans are destroying the planet.
I eat animals who produce CO2 and eat CO" reducing plants. Therefore I am a hero.
LOL!
-
http://fourthcrown.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/liquid-water-discovered-on-surface-of-minnesota/
...comes as a surprise to the space exploration organization which has listed the state of Minnesota as “unsuitable for any and all biotic life” since mid-November.
-
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
-
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributors
Global Warming Scare Tactics
By TED NORDHAUS and MICHAEL SHELLENBERGERAPRIL 8, 2014
OAKLAND, Calif. — IF you were looking for ways to increase public skepticism about global warming, you could hardly do better than the forthcoming nine-part series on climate change and natural disasters, starting this Sunday on Showtime. A trailer for “Years of Living Dangerously” is terrifying, replete with images of melting glaciers, raging wildfires and rampaging floods. “I don’t think scary is the right word,” intones one voice. “Dangerous, definitely.”
Showtime’s producers undoubtedly have the best of intentions. There are serious long-term risks associated with rising greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from ocean acidification to sea-level rise to decreasing agricultural output.
But there is every reason to believe that efforts to raise public concern about climate change by linking it to natural disasters will backfire. More than a decade’s worth of research suggests that fear-based appeals about climate change inspire denial, fatalism and polarization.
For instance, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” popularized the idea that today’s natural disasters are increasing in severity and frequency because of human-caused global warming. It also contributed to public backlash and division. Since 2006, the number of Americans telling Gallup that the media was exaggerating global warming grew to 42 percent today from about 34 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on whether global warming is caused by humans rose to 42 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006, according to the Pew Research Center.
Other factors contributed. Some conservatives and fossil-fuel interests questioned the link between carbon emissions and global warming. And beginning in 2007, as the country was falling into recession, public support for environmental protection declined.
Still, environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
2013 has shown the true colors of the left’s false narrative on global warming. Both poles have expanding ice, with the Antarctic breaking...
Claims that current disasters are connected to climate change do seem to motivate many liberals to support action. But they alienate conservatives in roughly equal measure.
What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.
One recent study, published by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions. Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that “communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society” rather than “on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.”
Nonetheless, virtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?
While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.
Ted Nordhaus is the chairman and Michael Shellenberger is the president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.
-
Not funny, but rare - this is the first time I've seen this. Soon we will all suffer this. Current atmospheric levels are 400 ppm. The CDC toxic level is 40000 ppm. We don't have much time... http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/124389.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.kare11.com/story/news/local/2014/04/14/1-hospitalized-after-carbon-dioxide-poisoning/7721665/
1 hospitalized after carbon dioxide poisoning
Associated Press 9:19 p.m. EDT April 14, 2014
ROCHESTER, Minn. - A Rochester bar employee is hospitalized after being overcome by carbon dioxide from the restaurant's pop machine. Authorities say 63-year-old Jerry Johnson was poisoned by the gas while working Monday morning at Rooster's Barn and Grill. Deputy Fire Chief Vance Swisher tells KTTC-TV employees at Rooster's heard what sounded like something leaking. That's when Johnson went downstairs to check it out. Swisher says a carbonation machine that puts the fizz into the restaurant's pop had malfunctioned and filled the basement with carbon dioxide. Johnson collapsed when he went into the basement. A co-worker called 911. Restaurant patrons and employees tried to pull him out, but turned back because they couldn't breathe. Firefighters had to use breathing tanks while inside the restaurant. Mayo Clinic says Johnson is in serious condition.
-
As long as the alarmists rely on anecdotal evidence, I would like to share my anecdotal rebuttals.
It is late April and in not too long of a time the days will again begin to get shorter, yet parts of MN received 19 inches of snow this week, the Great Lakes are still 37% frozen over (below) and our own 17,000 acre skating rink pictured here in the twin cities metro shows winter in full bloom. It is 70 now and spring will spring quickly, but this was one heck of a winter here for the record books. (http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/77f67cbf-4fb9-45d4-9ca2-783f9c19d5aa_zpsb5fd9669.jpg)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/great-lakes-still-frozen_n_5168962.html
The Great Lakes Are Still Almost Half Frozen, And It Could Affect The Environment For Years
The Huffington Post | by Joseph Erbentraut
(http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1745240/thumbs/o-FROZEN-GREAT-LAKES-570.jpg?8)
Posted: 04/17/2014
-
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/20/dueling-climate-reports-this-one-is-worth-sharing-on-your-own-blog/
Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts demonstrates that life on Earth is not suffering from rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels. Citing reams of real-world data, it offers solid scientific evidence that most plants actually flourish when exposed to both higher temperatures and greater CO2 concentrations. In fact, it demonstrates that the planet’s terrestrial biosphere is undergoing a great greening, which is causing deserts to shrink and forests to expand, thereby enlarging and enhancing habitat for wildlife. And much the same story can be told of global warming and atmospheric CO2 enrichment’s impacts on terrestrial animals, aquatic life, and human health.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The toxicity level for CO2 poisoning is 40,000 ppm, not 400!)
-
There is no question the atmospheric level of CO2, an inefficient greenhouse gas, has increased by one part per ten thousand over the last hundred years.
There is no question the general temp trend since the last "Little Ice Age" has been that of gradual warming.
There is also no question that the Great Lakes froze over THIS YEAR and that Antarctica and parts of the Himalayas have gained ice mass most recently.
CO2 was higher in the past, followed by glacialization, not a heat spiral. http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm
Earth was warmer in the past, including periods 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. http://qualimetrics.com/global-warming-a-natural-occurrence/
And there is no doubt that the solution that leftists have to this contradictory data is to create a large, intrusive world government.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/06/us-usa-climatechange-idUSBREA4503Q20140506 Pres. Obama
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/06/climate-change-affects-all-solutions-new-york-summit Ban Ki-moon
Give up sovereignty, prosperity, personal freedom and choices, they say.
Coincidentally, that is what they wanted before they discovered cyclical changes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8&feature=kp John Lennon:
Imagine there's no countries... Nothing to kill or die for
Imagine no possessions.... No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world
-
Grasping desperately to distract from a horrific economy and the train wreck called obamacare and an utterly dismal foreign policy. Oh, and a heap of scandals.
Squirrel!
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617270/President-Obama-racked-close-3-million-flight-costs-year.html
President Obama racked up close to $3 million in flight costs this year on two trips he billed as business but spent playing golf
President Barack Obama spent spent $2,952,278 in flight costs on trips to Palm Springs, California, and Key Largo, Florida, earlier this year
The president went on the trips under the guise of official business
But the president's schedule and news reports from the trips show that he spent significatly more time playing golf than he did on presidential duties
ByFrancesca Chambers
Published: 17:18 EST, 30 April 2014 | Updated: 07:28 EST, 1 May 2014
The White House spent $2,952,278 in flight expenses this year for two trips President Barack Obama took on which he spent a large chunk of his time playing golf.
Obama billed both trips as official business, but he spent more time golfing than he did participating in government meetings, government oversight organization Judicial Watch reports.
+4
President Barack Obama boards Marine One helicopter before his departure from Key Largo, Florida on Sunday, March 9. Taxpayers paid $885,683 in Air Force One flight costs alone for Obama's trip
The conservative organization obtained the cost of Obama's Air Force 1 trips through Freedom of Information Act requests. The cost per flying hour of the president's plane is $210,877, the Department of the Air Force told Judicial Watch.
The cost per flying hour includes fuel, food consumed on the flight and maintenance to the plane, the Department of the Air Force said in its response. It does not include the cost of the cargo plane that accompanies the president, as The White House Dossier points out.
The two trips in question occurred in February and March of this year when the president flew to Palm Springs, California, and Key Largo, Florida, respectively.
The first trip took place over President's Day weekend from February 17- 20. The total flight cost for this trip was $2,066,594.60, Judicial Watch reports.
On the first day of the trip, President Obama arrived in Fresno, California, at 2.30 pm local time. There he met with community leaders at a water facility before touring a local farm and making public remarks on the state's water crisis.
'It can’t just be a matter of there’s going to be less and less water so I’m going to grab more and more of a shrinking share of water,' Obama said at the event. 'Instead what we have to do is all come together and figure out how we all are going to make sure that agricultural needs, urban needs, industrial needs, environmental and conservation concerns are all addressed.'
Obama then flew to Palm Springs, where he he met with King Abdullah II of Jordan. The two had a working dinner that begin at 7.50 pm local time.
The president's public schedule does not say when their meeting ended nor does it say how he spent Saturday, Sunday or the first half of Monday, a federal holiday, before he left Palm Springs at 2 pm local time.
+4
Room with a view: This photo taken from inside the Sunnylands Center & Gardens at Rancho Mirage, California, where President Barack Obama played golf two times over President's Day weekend while he was on a trip billed as official White House business
+4
President Barack Obama played golf with friends during his trip to Palm Spring, California at luxury course Porcupine Creek. This exclusive golf course is not open to the public
Time Magazine reports that Obama spent those three days golfing with friends at two of the area's exclusive golf clubs - Sunnylands and Porcupine Creek. Neither are open to the public.
Obama's outings drew ire immediately afterward because the area's golf clubs are a contributing factor to the region's water crisis.
Each golf course Obama visited uses an average of one million gallons of water a day to keep the grass green. The courses use three to four times more water per day than normal American golf courses because of the area's hot, dry climate, Time reports.
The second trip, which occurred less than a month later, from March 7-9, cost $885,683.40 in flight expenses, the watchdog group said.
For that trip, the First Family joined the president. The Obama's arrived in Homestead, Florida, on Friday at 1.40 pm eastern time. The President and the First Lady spoke at a high school at 2.25 pm. There are no public events on the president's schedule after that until Monday morning, when he is listed as having received his daily briefing at the White House at 10 am.
The White House said Obama had 'a bit of down time in the warm weather with his wife and daughters' that weekend.
The Obama's stayed at the Ocean Reef Club, where the president played two rounds of golf with friends.
The First Family was accompanied on that trip by 50 secret service agents and five government helicopters, the Washington Times reports.
'Only President Obama would deliver a brief speech about education and then have the nerve to jet over to the posh Ocean Reef Clubs — an exclusive members-only resort for the wealthy — for a quick vacation,' said Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, in March of the trip.
Other costs for the trips such as food and lodging are unknown, but Judicial Watch says the President, Vice President and their immediate families have spent upward of $40 million since 2009 on taxpayer funded trips.
The Obama's most expensive trips were in 2013 when they went to Africa and Honolulu, Hawaii, the reports says.
+4
Obama billed both trips as official business, but he spent more time golfing than he did participating in government meetings. Obama is pictured here at a golf course in Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii, during another expensive trip he took this year
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617270/President-Obama-racked-close-3-million-flight-costs-year.html
-
"The mitigation chapter implicitly recognizes the unreality of the conventional climate agenda, and it concludes with an acknowledgment that we need much more research on affordable low- and non-carbon energy sources along with more basic climate science research into key "uncertainties." Anyone else who talks this way gets called a "denier." "
Steven Hayward of UC Boulder, Pepperdine, AEI, Reagan Biographer and Powerline blogger fame brings the latest alarmism report down to earth in yesterday's WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303701304579549842512581848
The Latest Storm of Climate Alarmism
The National Climate Assessment is not nearly as dire as its cheerleaders suggest.
By STEVEN F. HAYWARD
May 8, 2014 6:55 p.m. ET
The third National Climate Assessment, released Tuesday by the White House, may not do anything to protect Americans from the effects of climate change, but it has done its primary job—generating alarming headlines in the media and setting the stage for a renewed push by the Obama administration for its climate-policy agenda.
Coming barely six weeks after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent alarmist report—also duly trumpeted in the media—we have now reached the junkie's-craving phase of the climate-change story, where bigger and more frequent fixes are necessary to keep alive the euphoria of saving the world. Confronted with polls and surveys finding that the public is tuning out climate change as a matter of vital concern, the climate campaign seemingly persists in thinking that one more report will turn the tide in its favor.
At 829 pages—plus a separate 137-page "highlights" summary—the National Climate Assessment is yet another behemoth report that few will entirely read, let alone fully comprehend or be able to judge. It can, however, be summarized by a sentence from the online introduction to the report: "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present."
The report was produced by "more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee." Each chapter was assembled by specialists in subfields, though the complete roster of participating scientists includes a number who have expressed caution or skepticism about many of the claims popular today, such as climate-change-induced increases in damaging droughts, violent "superstorms," species extinction and air pollution.
In coming weeks, knowledgeable critics will no doubt do the tedious job of noting the report's omissions of contrary or confounding scientific findings. But this will likely have little effect on the shape of the climate debate, which is deluged with clichés and slogans such as "97% of scientists agree" and "only the fossil-fuel industry" stands in the way of solutions. Never mind that one of the lead authors of the report's chapter on "Adaptation" is an employee of Chevron. CVX -0.05%
The report argues that significant economic impacts of human-caused climate change in the U.S. are already occurring: "Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience." These are less scientific facts than they are political statements. While climate changes can indeed be measured in economic terms, proof that they are "human-caused" is far from definitive.
In this respect, the report loosely tracks the economically risible 2006 "Stern Review" in Great Britain; its principal author, Nicholas Stern, later admitted that the report was crafted purely with political aims in mind. With the deep-Malthusian John Holdren advising President Obama and overseeing U.S. climate policy, does anyone think this report wasn't also politically calculated?
More interesting are the chapters on what should be done, which account for barely 100 pages of the 829-page report. Missing from the admirably short chapter on "Mitigation," the term of art for suppressing hydrocarbon energy, is any of the dreamlike slogans that we can replace fossil fuels easily, quickly, or cheaply if only we'd ratify the Kyoto Protocol and step up subsidies for renewable-energy sources.
The mitigation chapter implicitly recognizes the unreality of the conventional climate agenda, and it concludes with an acknowledgment that we need much more research on affordable low- and non-carbon energy sources along with more basic climate science research into key "uncertainties." Anyone else who talks this way gets called a "denier."
This refreshing realism, almost wholly ignored in the media coverage, sets the stage for the longer chapter on "Adaptation," which is woefully incomplete in many respects. It laments rather than celebrates that a great deal of adaptation and planning, such as better water management and developing heat-resistant crops, is already happening spontaneously without a central policy, and will be necessary even if future climate change occurs for entirely natural reasons. And yet, as with the latest U.N. report on climate change, the chapter requires careful reading to see that climate realism—a responsible, "no regrets" policy that skeptics have recommended for more than two decades—is slowly if grudgingly gaining the upper hand in the inner councils of the climate establishment.
This will not slow the Obama administration's drive to kill off coal-fired power, block the Keystone XL pipeline... (more at link)
-
http://www.thegwpf.org/lennart-bengtsson-he-knows-how-little-we-know/
-
Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.
http://climateaudit.org/2014/05/09/mann-misrepresents-the-epa-part-1/
"alarmists needed tree ring data to negate the overwhelming evidence of temperature variation in the past, e.g., the Medieval Warm Period. The problem was that the same tree ring data that the alarmists needed to smooth out past ups and downs in the Earth’s climate showed cooling, not warming, after 1960."
Michael Mann and his co-conspirators simply deleted the data that didn’t fit their theory, without disclosing that they had done so. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/michael-mann-is-a-liar-and-a-cheat-heres-why.php
John Christy, a lead author of IPCC 2001 report siad later in congressional testimony:
https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/ChristyJR_written_110331_all.pdf
The Hockey Stick curve depicts a slightly meandering Northern Hemisphere cooling trend from 1000 A.D. through 1900, which then suddenly swings upward in the last 80 years to temperatures warmer than any of the millennium when smoothed. To many, this appeared to be a “smoking gun” of temperature change proving that the 20th century warming was unprecedented and therefore likely to be the result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. …
We were appointed L.A.s in 1998. The Hockey Stick was prominently featured during IPCC meetings from 1999 onward. I can assure the committee that those not familiar with issues regarding reconstructions of this type (and even many who should have been) were truly enamored by its depiction of temperature and sincerely wanted to believe it was truth. Skepticism was virtually non-existent. Indeed it was described as a “clear favourite” for the overall Policy Makers Summary (Folland, 0938031546.txt).
In our Sept. 1999 meeting (Arusha, Tanzania) we were shown a plot containing more temperature curves than just the Hockey Stick including one from K. Briffa that diverged significantly from the others, showing a sharp cooling trend after 1960. It raised the obvious problem that if tree rings were not detecting the modern warming trend, they might also have missed comparable warming episodes in the past. In other words, absence of the Medieval warming in the Hockey Stick graph might simply mean tree ring proxies are unreliable, not that the climate really was relatively cooler.
The Briffa curve created disappointment for those who wanted “a nice tidy story” (Briffa 0938031546.txt). The L.A. [Michael Mann] remarked in emails that he did not want to cast “doubt on our ability to understand factors that influence these estimates” and thus, “undermine faith in paleoestimates” which would provide “fodder” to “skeptics” (Mann 0938018124.txt). One may interpret this to imply that being open and honest about uncertainties was not the purpose of this IPCC section. Between this email (22 Sep 1999) and the next draft sent out (Nov 1999, Fig. 2.25 Expert Review) two things happened: (a) the email referring to a “trick” to “hide the decline” for the preparation of report by the World Meteorological Organization was sent (Jones 0942777075.txt, “trick” is apparently referring to a splicing technique used by the L.A. [Michael Mann] in which non-paleo data were merged to massage away a cooling dip at the last decades of the original Hockey Stick) and (b) the cooling portion of Briffa’s curve had been truncated for the IPCC report (it is unclear as to who performed the truncation.) …
When we met in February 2000 in Auckland NZ, the one disagreeable curve, as noted, was not the same anymore because it had been modified and truncated around 1960.
(http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/05/article-0-07949B82000005DC-809_634x447.jpg)
Where did the green line go? It was covered up and then cut off at the point where it contradicted the 'hockey stick'.
If tree ring data is unreliable, fine. But then why did they allow the earlier data to rely on it? These graphs make the inference that we are measuring the same phenomenon, the same way, over an extended period of time. In fact, we weren't. And that fact, among so many others, was kept from even the lead authors of the report!
Now we see honest scientists backing off while we see crooked politicians doubling down.
-
Unless I misunderstand, this is a big deal?
-
Unless I misunderstand, this is a big deal?
Yes, wouldn't you think so? But No. We already knew they were lying, cherry picking and altering data and deceiving. We already knew their models are all wrong - built on false premises, omitting major natural phenomena and putting out wrong forecasts, and no one seems to care. They poll the scientists and public on vague questions and assert that 98%, or 66%, all agree (on what??). Human caused warming is false but true. We can't measure it, and the data, models and forecasts are all false, but we are emitting CO2 and there is some fraction of a degree per century, temporary, human caused warming. It is unmeasurable and less than the variations in the sun, the oceans, the clouds, and many other things, but it is true.
I don't know where the line is when people will get fed up with being lied to - on a number of topics. This forum and especially this thread exposing deceit is a great resource for following it. Posts going back to the first page here exposed most of this, just not the emails, texts and the full extent of their agenda motive and their abandonment of scientific methods.
Look back at this post:
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1454.msg20739#msg20739
BBG: Damn Liars & Stats September 06, 2008
"...Mann includes at this site a large number of temperature proxy data series. ... nless the data is measured with error, you never, ever, for no reason, under no threat, SMOOTH the series! And if for some bizarre reason you do smooth it, you absolutely on pain of death do NOT use the smoothed series as input for other analyses! ... The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy. Because it is a proxy, the uncertainty of its ability to predict temperature must be taken into account in the final results. Did Mann do this?"
Also in a 2008 BBG post: "no rise in temperatures since 1998". Add 6 more years to that! Where is the warming??! When warming does in fact come back, we will know it is cyclical, not on a straight line upward. It is cold here still. How come global warming has nothing to do with the temperature outside? It does of course, but only the data that supports the theory.
Didn't Dan Rather start the false but true defense? They went to broadcast with the smoking gun. It was a 1970s military typewriter document showing that Bush's military record was weak. Within days it was exposed by rightwingers on Powerlineblog.com that their smioking gun was made using a Microsoft proportional spacing font, obviously not available in the early 1970s. Confronted with exposed, amateur fraud, Rather and CBS argued that although the evidence was false, the larger story was true.
-
ead more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631477/Revealed-How-green-zealots-gagged-professor-dared-question-global-warming.html#ixzz32Anz3nuT
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Revealed: How green zealots gagged professor who dared to question global warming
• Professor Lennart Bengtsson's study was rejected and branded 'harmful'
• This sparked accusations that scientists are censoring findings
• The 79-year-old is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists
• Last week, he resigned from the Global Warming Policy Foundation's advisory council
By David Rose
+4
Row: Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week
Ground-breaking climate research that was controversially ‘covered up’ suggests the rate that greenhouse gases are heating the Earth has been significantly exaggerated, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week when his study was rejected by a leading science journal after it was said to be ‘harmful’ and have a ‘negative impact’.
The rejection sparked accusations that scientists had crossed an important line by censoring findings that were not helpful to their views.
Prof Bengtsson further claims one of the world’s most recognised science publications also decided not to use his research findings, because, he said, they were considered to be ‘uninteresting’.
Prof Bengtsson’s critical paper was co-authored with four colleagues. It focused on the growing gap between real temperatures and predictions made by computers.
In a recent key report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated the ‘climate sensitivity’ – the amount the world will warm each time carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere double – was between 1.5C and 4.5C.
According to Prof Bengtsson’s paper, it is more likely to be 1.2C to 2.7C. The implications of the difference are huge. If the planet is warming half as fast as previously thought in response to emissions, many assumptions behind targets for reducing emissions and green energy subsidies are wrong.
The subsidies in turn have led to a significant increase in consumers’ power bills. Last week, it was revealed Environmental Research Letters had rejected his paper because it would be seized on by climate ‘sceptics’ in the media.
Established: The Global Warming Policy Foundation was set up by former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and is regarded as being part of the 'sceptic camp' when it comes to climate change. Later the journal said it had rejected the paper because the reviewers questioned the paper’s methods. But another journal turned it down without it even being sent out for peer review. Prof Bengtsson says this only normally happens if the editors believe the work is ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’.
Prof Bengtsson, 79, is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists. Last week he was forced to step down from the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the sceptical think-tank set up by Lord Lawson.
.
• I was victimised for challenging zealots, says Professor: Poison, plots and a battle to neuter climate change critics
• Billionaires are 'scary smart' and more likely to have attended elite schools such as Harvard
• Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in 'McCarthy'-style witch-hunt by academics across the world
He was accused by former friends and colleagues of ‘crossing into the deniers’ camp’.
Prof Bengtsson said the pressure was so great he had feared for his health. He said he had been stunned by the ‘emotional’ reaction to his joining the GWPF.
‘The way some in the climate community behaved shocked me,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had been married for many years, and then discovered my wife was a completely different person.’
Prof Bengtsson said the paper was now being considered by a third journal, after some revisions. But he had asked for his name to be to be removed in the wake of the row over the GWPF.
Is this the tipping point for climate McCarthyism?
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week.
If they do, they won’t mean that this was when global warming became unstoppable. Instead, they’ll be pointing to the curious affair of Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University as the moment that the rigid, authoritarian campaign to shut down debate on climate science and policy finally began to unravel.
For several years, this newspaper has been at the forefront of efforts to publicise the highly inconvenient truth that real world temperatures have not risen nearly as fast as computer models say they should have, thanks to the unexpected ‘pause’ in global warming which has so far lasted some 17 years. As Prof Bengtsson has now discovered, anyone who draws attention to this will be vilified and accused of ‘denying’ supposedly ‘settled’ science.
The dogma – the insistence, as Bengtsson put it yesterday, that ‘greenhouse gas emissions are leading us towards the end of the world in the not-too-distant future’ – dominates many aspects of our lives, from lessons taught in primary schools to the vast and rising ‘green’ energy subsidies on household fuel bills.
To be sure, Bengtsson’s treatment is not encouraging. As a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, he is one of the world’s most eminent experts.
Yet last week, he was accused of having joined the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan and the Flat Earth Society, and of peddling ‘junk science’ – all because he accepted a place on the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week
So great was the pressure, he feared for his health, and decided to resign. The most cursory look at the GWPF’s website makes clear it does not ‘deny’ any aspect of the science of global warming, nor that this has happened in response to human activity. Its focus (as its name rather suggests) is on policy, where it has indeed been critical of the approach thus far. But for the climate enforcers, that was enough. Bengtsson said: ‘I was labelled a heretic. I felt as if I was dealing with the medieval church.’
It also emerged that a paper he co-authored, arguing that temperatures would rise by only half as much as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims, had been rejected by a prestigious journal – after an anonymous reviewer said publishing it would be ‘harmful’ to the environmental cause, because it was bound to be reported by media sceptics.
Nevertheless, there are grounds for optimism. Perhaps it was simply that a man of Bengtsson’s stature who is still producing research at the age of 79 deserves respect, but the story was reported – not favourably, from the enforcers’ point of view – around the world. It even made the front page of The Times. Some of those who deplored the ‘climate McCarthyism’ that Bengtsson experienced, such as Prof Judith Curry of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, have received similar treatment for saying global warming may not pose the imminent threat so many want us to fear. Others, however, were from the very centre of the climate science mainstream, such as Prof Mike Hulme of King’s College, London. He condemned scientists who ‘harassed’ those with whom they disagreed until they ‘fall into line’. But if this really was a tipping point, it will be because the areas of uncertainty in climate science are simply too big to be ignored: claiming the debate is over does not make this true.
As former Nasa scientist Roy Spencer put it: ‘We might be seeing the death throes of alarmist climate science. They know they are on the ropes, and are pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to shore up their crumbling storyline.’
So here’s a question. Like Bengtsson, this newspaper believes global warming is real, and caused by CO2. It’s also clear that, thus far, the computer models have exaggerated its speed. So what exactly are we and others who hold such views denying?
-
Kerry: If We're Wrong on Climate Change, 'What's the Worst That Can Happen?'
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kerry-if-were-wrong-climate-change-whats-worst-can-happen_793392.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not as old as Sec Kerry but old enough to know to quit asking what is the worst that can happen.
I'll take a shot at answering that. In the U.S. alone, pursuing economy crippling policies ostensibly about climate control has brought a zero growth economy, accelerated income inequality, left 50% of black youth out of work, 100 million working age adults out of work, turned us against each other, run up between100 and 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities, cost us our national security, forced out manufacturing and ended our run as the world's greatest economy. All that is before we enact whatever backwards steps he is now proposing.
'What's the Worst That Can Happen?'
I guess an economy something like Afghanistan where we grow poppies and answer to warlords..
-
Kerry: If We're Wrong on Climate Change, 'What's the Worst That Can Happen?'
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kerry-if-were-wrong-climate-change-whats-worst-can-happen_793392.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not as old as Sec Kerry but old enough to know to quit asking what is the worst that can happen.
I'll take a shot at answering that. In the U.S. alone, pursuing economy crippling policies ostensibly about climate control has brought a zero growth economy, accelerated income inequality, left 50% of black youth out of work, 100 million working age adults out of work, turned us against each other, run up between100 and 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities, cost us our national security, forced out manufacturing and ended our run as the world's greatest economy. All that is before we enact whatever backwards steps he is now proposing.
'What's the Worst That Can Happen?'
I guess an economy something like Afghanistan where we grow poppies and answer to warlords..
Sounds like parts of Chicago.
-
http://www.ihatethemedia.com/12-more-glaciers-that-havent-heard-the-news-about-global-warming
vs.
http://www.nasa.gov/.../nasa-uci-study-indicates-loss.../...
http://www.theguardian.com/.../climate-change-antarctica...
http://www.nytimes.com/.../the-melting-isnt-glacial.html...
-
While it is 82 and a sunny, gorgeous day in Mpls today, signs of the past winter remain in the Great Lakes region:
(http://cdn.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Sunbathers-by-ice-filled-Lake-Superior-04-685x685.jpg?76d27a)
May 27 2014, Duluth MN, Lake Superior
http://twentytwowords.com/minnesotan-sunbathers-enjoy-summer-by-lake-superior-despite-tons-of-remaining-ice-5-pictures/
Don't be fooled by your lying eyes. Ice is still on the lake and in 3+ weeks the days start getting shorter.
Earth warming by 0.5 degrees C over the last century with no measurable warming in the last 18 years does not mean the end of the world.
-
The science is settled!
Death to the deniers!
/devout warmist
-
BY JOHN HINDERAKER http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/the-settled-science-of-polar-bears.php
THE SETTLED SCIENCE OF POLAR BEARS
Leftists decided that their global warming scam needed a poster child, and polar bears were selected for that honor. For some years now we have been exposed to mournful photographs of polar bears floating away on ice floes, or otherwise appearing endangered:
(http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/05/Polar0087.jpg)
The theory on which polar bears are supposed to be endangered because their environment is becoming more benign has never been entirely clear, nor has there been data to support the claim that their populations are declining. Indeed, polar bears inhabit such remote and forbidding regions that no one has much idea how many of them there are. But no matter. Polar bears are cuddly–from a distance, anyway–and so they served the hoaxers’ purpose.
Like so much of the global warming fraud, the polar bear theme has unraveled. Thomas Lifson has the latest. A prominent advocate for the endangered polar bear theory has just admitted to an actual scientist that he made the whole thing up:
[P]olar bear scientist Dr. Susan Crockford…publishes the website Polar Bear Science. In it she documents how a scientist responsible for an alarmist lowball estimate of polar bear population is backing away from numbers that she has been questioning:
Last week (May 22), I received an unsolicited email from Dr. Dag Vongraven, the current chairman of the IUCN [International Union for the Conservation of Nature – TL] Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).
The email from Vongraven began this way:
Dr. Crockford
Below you’ll find a footnote that will accompany a total polar bear population size range in the circumpolar polar bear action plan that we are currently drafting together with the Parties to the 1973 Agreement. This might keep you blogging for a day or two. [my bold]
It appears the PBSG have come to the realization that public outrage (or just confusion) is brewing over their global population estimates and some damage control is perhaps called for. Their solution — bury a statement of clarification within their next official missive….
The statement of clarification is an Emily Litella classic: oops, never mind!
Here is the statement that the PBSG proposes to insert as a footnote in their forthcoming Circumpolar Polar Bear Action Plan draft:
“As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic. Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand. It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated. Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations. Consequently, there is either no, or only rudimentary, knowledge to support guesses about the possible abundance of polar bears in approximately half the areas they occupy. Thus, the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term.” [my bold]
I love that phrase, “in a scientific sense.” Nothing about the claims made by the global warming hysterics should be taken in a scientific sense.
For a more comprehensive review of the polar bear fraud, along with many other topics, check out the Congressional testimony of Daniel Botkin, Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara, President of The Center for The Study of The Environment, and author of Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century and the textbook Environmental Science:
Some of the [IPCC's 2014 report's] conclusions are the opposite of those given in articles cited in defense of those conclusions.
For example, the IPCC 2014 Terrestrial Ecosystem Report states that “there is medium confidence that rapid change in the Arctic is affecting its animals. For example, seven of 19 subpopulations of the polar bear are declining in number” citing in support of this an article by Vongraven and Richardson, 2011. That report states the contrary, that the “decline” is an illusion.
In addition, I have sought the available counts of the 19 subpopulations. Of these, only three have been counted twice; the rest have been counted once. Thus no rate of changes in the populations can be determined. The first count was done in 1986 for one subpopulation.
The U. S. Marine Mammal Commission, charged with the conservation of this species, acknowledges “Accurate estimates of the current and historic sizes of polar bear stocks are difficult to obtain for several reasons–the species‘ inaccessible habitat, the movement of bears across international boundaries, and the costs of conducting surveys.”
According to Dr. Susan Crockford, “out of the 13 populations for which some kind of data exist, five populations are now classified by the PBSG [IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group] as ‘stable’ (two more than 2009), one is still increasing, and three have been upgraded from ‘declining’ to ‘data deficient’. . . . That leaves four that are still considered ‘declining’‐ two of those judgments are based primarily on concerns of overhunting, and one is based on a statistically insignificant decline that may not be valid and is being reassessed (and really should have been upgraded to ‘data deficient’). That leaves only one population – Western Hudson Bay – where PBSG biologists tenaciously blame global warming for all changes to polar bear biology, and even then, the data supporting that conclusion is still not available.”
To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the Earth’s history, the suggestion that polar bears are threatened by a change in the planet’s average temperature of a degree or two–or five or six, if we pretend that the climateers’ models have any scientific basis–is ludicrous. Polar bears have been around, I suppose, for millions of years. Yet, in just the last 450,000 years–practically the blink of an eye–polar bears have lived through climate changes far more drastic than anything now predicted by the fraudsters:
(http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/05/RecentClimateHistory08.jpg)
I think that to the extent the climate hysterics are able to fool anyone, it is largely because most people have no idea of the natural variability of the Earth’s climate.
-
who understands why gaseous sulfur waste from carbon fuels cannot be recycled into something else:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur
-
This chart perhaps tells it all:
(http://www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2014/07/clip_image009_thumb.png)
if the climateers’ disaster scenarios are correct, then Germany’s investment of $100 billion in solar power schemes “can only reduce the onset of Global Warming by a matter of about 37 hours by the year 2100.” A similar calculation would show the futility of the Obama administration’s “green” initiatives.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/04/message-to-the-president-data-shows-co2-reduction-is-futile/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/why-does-obama-want-to-reduce-co2-emissions.php
-
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/press/2014/jul/7.htm
Chen created up to 130 fake email accounts of "assumed and fabricated identities" that created a "peer review and citation ring." In other words, it appears that he suggested his own fake identities to the journal as reviewers of his papers.
That isn't very different than the IPCC cartel working behind the scenes to cherry pick studies and data, hand pick reviewers and block out dissent.
-
"climate change" :roll:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mysterious-260-foot-crater-discovered-in-remote-region-of-siberia-003800386.html
-
Climate Records Shattered in 2013
.
LiveScience.com
By By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer July 18, 2014 9:28 AM
Climate Records Shattered in 2013
Surface temperatures in 2013 compared to average temperatures since 1981.
If global warming could be compared to middle-age weight gain, then Earth is growing a boomer belly, according to a newly released report on the state of the global climate.
Climate data show that global temperatures in 2013 continued their long-term rising trend. In fact, 2013 was somewhere between the second- and sixth-hottest year on record for the planet since record keeping began in 1880, according to the climate report, released Thursday (July 17) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Four groups of scientists, who rely on slightly different methods to calculate global surface temperatures, ranked 2013 slightly differently compared with other years.)
The annual State of the Climate report compiles climate and weather data from around the world and is reviewed by 425 climate scientists from 57 countries. The report can be viewed online.
"You can think of it as an annual checkup on the planet," said Kathryn Sullivan, NOAA administrator.
And the checkup results show the planet ranged well outside of normal levels in 2013, hitting new records for greenhouse gases, Arctic heat, warm ocean temperatures and rising sea levels.
"The climate is changing more rapidly in today's world than at any time in modern civilization," said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "If we look at it like we're trying to maintain an ideal weight, then we're continuing to see ourselves put more weight on from year to year," he said.
Climate scientists blame rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere for the planet's changing climate. The levels of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 2013. The worldwide average reached 395.3 ppm, a 2.8 ppm increase from 2012, NOAA reports. (Parts per million denotes the volume of a gas in the air; in this case, for every 1 million air molecules, 400 are carbon dioxide.) [In Images: Extreme Weather Around the World]
"The major greenhouse gases all reached new record high values in 2013," said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with ERT, Inc., and a NOAA contractor who helped write the report.
Most parts of the planet experienced above-average annual temperatures in 2013, NOAA officials said. Australia experienced its warmest year on record, while Argentina had its second warmest and New Zealand its third warmest. There was a new high-temperature record set at the South Pole, of minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius).
Here are the highlights from the report:
Sea level continued rising: Boosted by warm Pacific Ocean temperatures (which causes water to expand) and melting ice sheets, sea level rose 0.15 inches (3.8 millimeters), on par with the long-term trend of 0.13 inches (3.2 mm) per year over the past 20 years.
Antarctic sea ice hit another record high: On October 1, Antarctic sea ice covered 7.56 million square miles (19.5 million square kilometers). This beats the old record set in 2012 by 0.7 percent. However, even though the Antarctic sea ice is growing, the continent's land-based glaciers continued to melt and shrink.
Arctic sea ice low: The Arctic sea ice extent was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. The sea ice extent is declining by about 14 percent per decade.
Extreme weather: Deadly Super Typhoon Haiyan had the highest wind speed ever recorded for a tropical cyclone, with one-minute sustained winds reaching 196 mph (315 km/h). Flooding in central Europe caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 24 people.
Melting permafrost: For the second year in a row, record high temperatures were measured in permafrost on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range. Permafrost is frozen ground underneath the Earth's surface. The temperatures were recorded more than 60 feet (20 meters) deep.
Arctic heat: Temperatures over land are rising faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the planet. Fairbanks, Alaska, had a record 36 days with temperatures at 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius) or warmer. However, Greenland had a cooler than average summer.
Warm seas: Sea surface temperatures for 2013 were among the 10 warmest on record. Temperatures in the North Pacific hit a record high in 2013.
Email Becky Oskin or follow
-
OK, folks, what do we make of that?
-
OK, folks, what do we make of that?
I doubt anything coming from NOAA.
-
"OK, folks, what do we make of that?"
We have gone from the planet is being destroyed by an out of control heat spiral to concern about "above average temperatures"? lol.
Weren't we in a warming phase before the industrial age?
Now we are in a warming "pause". The buffer allowing the pause is believed to be the absorption of heat by the oceans. Is that so?
---------------------------------------
There’s a new paper just out in the Journal of Physical Oceanography by Carl Wunsch of Harvard and Patrick Heimbach of MIT
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/heatcontentchange_26dec2013_ph.pdf
—both prominent figures in the field, neither known as a climate “skeptic”—that is likely to make waves (pun intended). This sentence in particular appears significant:
Interpretation requires close attention to the long memory of the deep ocean, and implying that meteorological forcing of decades to thousands of years ago should still be producing trend-like changes in abyssal heat content.
In other words, it would not be unfair to suggest that ocean trends might have much longer-term causes than the emissions from your SUV alone.
And there’s this possibly inconvenient fact:
Parts of the deeper ocean, below 3600 m, show cooling.
And on p. 22 of the complete manuscript, the authors say this:
Direct determination of changes in oceanic heat content over the last 20 years are not in conflict with estimates of the radiative forcing, but the uncertainties remain too large to rationalize e.g., the apparent “pause” in warming.
In other words, “we don’t know.”
Steven Hayward, Powerline, yesterday (more at link)
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/are-the-oceans-warming.php
-
Somewhere around 8000BC. This may have been the basis of the great flood myths that appear in ancient myths and eventually the Bible:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-11/uoe-fk111507.php
-
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/warming_stops_warming/
-
I noticed a flock of birds heading south a few days ago. Yesterday on the drive home I saw birds massing on the telephone wires. Normally we see that only when they are moving South. I don't recall the beginning of the migration in mid-AUGUST!
-
Regenerative medical therapies.
Lizards, which are amniote vertebrates like humans, are able to lose and regenerate a functional tail. Understanding the molecular basis of this process would advance regenerative approaches in amniotes, including humans. We have carried out the first transcriptomic analysis of tail regeneration in a lizard, the green anole Anolis carolinensis, which revealed 326 differentially expressed genes activating multiple developmental and repair mechanisms. Specifically, genes involved in wound response, hormonal regulation, musculoskeletal development, and the Wnt and MAPK/FGF pathways were differentially expressed along the regenerating tail axis. Furthermore, we identified 2 microRNA precursor families, 22 unclassified non-coding RNAs, and 3 novel protein-coding genes significantly enriched in the regenerating tail. However, high levels of progenitor/stem cell markers were not observed in any region of the regenerating tail. Furthermore, we observed multiple tissue-type specific clusters of proliferating cells along the regenerating tail, not localized to the tail tip. These findings predict a different mechanism of regeneration in the lizard than the blastema model described in the salamander and the zebrafish, which are anamniote vertebrates. Thus, lizard tail regrowth involves the activation of conserved developmental and wound response pathways, which are potential targets for regenerative medical therapies.
Full report here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0105004?bcsi-ac-8674f2e18b5252d0=22CB2F9000000205OHFgCtakE4XONKOM0IHinFYQmJRJAAAABQIAACXQQwCgjAAAAAAAAI2oBAA=
P.C.
-
Sounds like the Spiderman movie with "The Lizard" :lol:
More seriously now, we live in wondrous times.
-
Whatever Happened to Global Warming?
http://online.wsj.com/articles/matt-ridley-whatever-happened-to-global-warming-1409872855
Now come climate scientists’ implausible explanations for why the ‘hiatus’ has passed the 15-year mark.By MATT RIDLEY
Sept. 4, 2014 7:20 p.m. ET THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won’t attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?
In effect, this is all that’s left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).
Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.
First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after all invalidate their theories.
Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.
When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”
We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”
Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statisticalcalculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.
It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30 years of slight cooling after 1940. (more at link)
-
By the way, I have a number of books by Matt Ridley, the author of that piece-- including "Nature via Nuture", and "The Red Queen". His area of science is evolutionary biology. He has my great respect.
-
Matt Ridley Replies to His Climate-Change Critics
Jeffrey Sachs blows a gasket, and our contributor cleans up the intellectual mess.
Sept. 9, 2014 9:56 a.m. ET
Editor's note: Matt Ridley's Sept. 4 op-ed, "Whatever Happened to Global Warming?," stirred a strong response, not least among the enforcers of climate-change orthodoxy. Here is Mr. Ridley's reply to his critics, adapted from his blog:
Post-script. After the article was published, an astonishing tweet was sent by the prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs saying:
"Ridley climate ignorance in WSJ today is part of compulsive lying of Murdoch media gang. Ridley totally misrepresents the science."
Curious to know how I had lied or "totally misrepresented" the science, I asked Sachs to explain. There was a deafening silence.
There then appeared at the Huffington Post an article under Sachs's name. Its style was quite unlike that of Sachs. The piece purported to—in a spin doctor's words—expose:
"The Wall Street Journal Parade of Climate Lies - @JeffDSachs destroys daft @mattwridley article in@WSJ"
However, it does nothing of the sort. It's all bluster and careful misdirection, and contradicts nothing in my article, let alone producing evidence of lies. The sheer inaccuracy of the riposte in its descriptions of what I said or what I think are breathtaking, as are its failure to address any of the issues I raise, let alone contradict them. I had respect for Jeffrey Sachs as a scholar before reading this. Here are some key passages:
"Ridley's "smoking gun" is a paper last week in Science Magazine by two scientists Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung . . ."
Notice the quote marks around "smoking gun," implying that I used the phrase. I did not. In any case, the Chen and Tung paper was only one of the pieces of evidence I cited.
". . . which Ridley somehow believes refutes all previous climate science."
I said nothing of the sort and I believe nothing of the sort. Chen and Tung is about currents in the Atlantic, not about "all climate science"!
"The Wall Street Journal editors don't give a hoot about the nonsense they publish if it serves their cause of fighting measures to limit human-induced climate change. If they had simply gone online to read the actual paper, they would have found that the paper's conclusions are the very opposite of Ridley's."
In his writing the real Mr. Sachs does not often use phrases like "don't give a hoot."
In any case, he's plain wrong about the contradiction. The quote I gave from the press release is accurate. And I have read the paper and can assure Mr. "Sachs" that its conclusions are not the opposite of what I have said. As further confirmation, how about asking the paper's lead author himself? This is what he wrote to Prof. Judith Curry in response to her questions:
"Dear Judy,
The argument on the roughly 50-50 attribution of the forced vs unforced warming for the last two and half decades of the 20th century is actually quite simple. If one is blaming internal variability for canceling out the anthropogenically forced warming during the current hiatus, one must admit that the former is not negligible compared to the latter, and the two are probably roughly of the same magnitude. Then when the internal cycle is of the different sign in the latter part of the 20th century, it must have added to the forced response. Assuming the rate of forced warming has not changed during the period concerned, then the two combined must be roughly twice the forced warming during the last two and half decades of the 20th century."
In other words, as I said, the warming of 1975-2000 was only half caused by man-made emissions and half by natural causes, according to their conclusions, and natural causes were enough to cancel man-made forcing in the years after 2000.
To continue with the "Sachs" article:
"First, the paper makes perfectly clear that the Earth is warming in line with standard climate science, and that the Earth's warming is unabated in recent years. In the scientific lingo of the paper (it's very first line, so Ridley didn't have far to read!), "Increasing anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-emissions perturb Earth's radiative equilibrium, leading to a persistent imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) despite some long-wave radiative adjustment." In short, we humans are filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel use, and we are warming the planet."
Mr. "Sachs" did not have far to read in my own article to find this is in complete agreement with what I wrote also:
"I've long thought that man-made carbon-dioxide emissions will raise global temperatures, but that this effect will not be amplified much by feedbacks from extra water vapor and clouds, so the world will probably be only a bit more than one degree Celsius warmer in 2100 than today."
Instead of using words like "unabated" why not give numbers? I did.
The warming during 1975-2000, even if you cherry-pick the end points, was about 0.4 degrees C if you average the five main global data sets, and if half of that was natural, then man-made forcing was going at the rate of less than 1 degree per century, rather less than what I said.
"Second, the total warming is distributed between the land and ocean surface on the one hand and the ocean deep water on the other. The total rise of ocean heat content has continued unabated, while the proportion of heat absorbed at the surface and in the deeper ocean varies over time. Again, in the scientific lingo of the paper, "[T]his forced total OHC [ocean heat content] should be increasing monotonically over longer periods even through the current period of slowed warming. In fact, that expectation is verified by observation . . . " In other words, the ocean has continued to warm in line with predictions of just such a phenomenon seen in climate models."
This is highly misleading. The quote from the paper does not contradict me at all. In any case, remember, the data on ocean heat content is highly ambiguous. As Judith Curry summarized it recently:
"The main issue of interest is to what extent can ocean heat sequestration explain the hiatus since 1998. The only data set that appears to provide support for ocean sequestration is the ocean reanalysis, with the Palmer and Domingues 0-700 m OHC climatology providing support for continued warming in the upper ocean.
All in all, I don't see a very convincing case for deep ocean sequestration of heat. And even if the heat from surface heating of the ocean did make it into the deep ocean, presumably the only way for this to happen involves mixing (rather than adiabatic processes), so it is very difficult to imagine how this heat could reappear at the surface in light of the 2nd law of thermodynamics."
Back to the "Sachs" article:
"Third, it is the 'vertical distribution' of the warming, between the surface and deep water, which affects the warming observed on land and at the sea surface. The point of the paper is that the allocation of the warming vertically varies over time, sometimes warming the surface rapidly, other times warming the deeper ocean to a great extent and the surface water less rapidly. According to the paper, the period of the late 20th century was a period in which the surface was warmed relative to the deeper ocean. The period since 2000 is the opposite, with more warming of the deeper ocean. How do the scientists know? They measure the ocean temperature at varying depths with a sophisticated system of 'Argo profiling floats,' which periodically dive into the ocean depths to take temperature readings and resurface to transmit them to the data centers."
I have no problem with this paragraph, which merely reiterates what I said about the Chen and Tung paper, with a bit more detail about the Argo floats, etc. It finds no evidence of my misrepresentation, let alone total misrepresentation.
"So, what is Ridley's 'smoking gun' when you strip away his absurd version of the paper? It goes like this. The Earth is continuing to warm just as greenhouse gas theory holds."
Check, I agree—over the long term and slowly, just as greenhouse gas theory holds. But the atmosphere is not continuing to warm right now.
"The warming heats the land and the ocean. The ocean distributes some of the warming to the surface waters and some to the deeper waters, depending on the complex circulation of ocean waters."
Check. Could not have said it better myself, though remember this is still speculation and was not predicted.
"The shares of warming of the surface and deeper ocean vary over time, in fluctuations that can last a few years or a few decades."
Check.
Where's the contradiction with what I wrote? There is none. If Mr. "Sachs" had bothered to read my article properly, he would find that his description of what is happening is pretty well exactly the same as mine. Except that he gives no numbers. What I did was to show that if Chen and Tung are right, and half the warming in the last part of the last century was natural, then the "rapid" warming of those three decades was still too slow for the predictions made by the models. It will if it resumes give us a not very alarming future. And if it does not resume for some time, as Chen and Tung speculate that it might not, then the future is even less alarming.
And no, again, I did not use the phrase "smoking gun." I used several other arguments, all of which Mr. "Sachs" fails to address at all, so presumably he agrees that there has been a "pause," that it was denied for many years by the climate establishment, that there was general agreement among them that a pause of more than 15 years would invalidate their models, and so on.
He goes on:
"If the surface warming is somewhat less in recent years than in the last part of the 20th century, is that reason for complacency? Hardly. The warming is continuing, and the consequences of our current trajectory will be devastating unless greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide) are stopped during this century. As Chen and Tung conclude in their Science paper, 'When the internal variability [of the ocean] that is responsible for the current hiatus [in warming] switches sign, as it inevitably will, another episode of accelerated global warming should ensue.' "
I hardly think it was complacent of me to ask world leaders to address the much more urgent issues of war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.
The only disagreement is whether future warming will be "devastating," and that is a prediction not an empirical fact. I cannot yet be "wrong" about it.
When will Mr. "Sachs" get around to including a number? He surely cannot be under the impression that lukewarmers like me think there is no greenhouse effect? He surely knows that the argument is not about whether there is warming, but how fast.
And where did I lie, or misrepresent? Where did he "destroy" me, pray? He did not.
Mr. "Sachs," who is usually a careful academic, has published a lot of wild accusations against me and "totally" (his word) failed to stand them up. How did this come about? Perhaps, being a busy man, he asked somebody else to ghost-write much of the piece for him and did not check it very thoroughly. Perhaps he wrote it himself. Either way, no problem, a quick tweet apologising to me and admitting that nothing in his article contradicts anything in mine, that we merely disagree on the predictions of dangerous warming, and I will consider the matter closed.
I published most of this riposte to Mr. Sachs's article on my blog post on Sunday and drew his attention to it on Twitter.
He ignored it but posted a single tweet as follows:
"WSJ ignores science conclusion that another episode of accelerated warming should ensue as ocean variability 'inevitably' switches sign."
Actually, the word the scientists use is "rapid" warming and they use it also to describe the warming of the 1980s and 1990s, which as I showed was not nearly as rapid as predicted by the models. So, even when the Atlantic currents are boosting the man-made warming, it is not as fast as the models predict.
Clearly Mr. Sachs and I disagree about how dangerous man-made global warming is likely to be in the future. I think all the explanations for the pause, including the Chen and Tung one, only make my case stronger that man-made warming is not being enhanced by feedbacks and is proceeding according to the greenhouse effect of CO2 alone. I may of course be wrong. But it is ludicrous, nasty and false to accuse me of lying or "totally misrepresenting the science." I have asked Mr. Sachs to withdraw the charges more than once now on Twitter. He has refused to do so, though he has been tweeting freely during the time.
Soon after my article was published, another peer-reviewed paper appeared in the Journal Nature Climate Change, about as mainstream a climate science publication as you can find. It is entitled: "Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming." The respected commentator and academic Roger Pielke Jr. tweeted:
"Can't wait to see @JeffDSachs eviscerate this paper, no doubt by more of Murdoch's lying henchmen"
-
Anecdotal stories of warming or cooling prove nothing and I will quit citing isolated examples of unusual cold and cooling as soon as the warming alarmists stop citing individual examples of warmth.
---------------------------------------------------
Rapid City sees earliest snowfall since 1888, Sept 11, 2014
http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/crime/2014/09/11/inches-possible-black-hills/15434275/
---------------------------------------------------
Posted previously on Environmental Issues:
the Arctic has added ice area twice the size of Alaska over the last 2 years and increased the mass, thickness and density in the rest of it. http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg83423#msg83423
--------------------------------------------------=
Here is an example of global warming: When a freezer loses power, we don't find that some ice cube trays are melting while others that were liquid are freezing. It may warm unevenly, but it all warms.
The man-made cause of warming hinges on the underlying assumption that the earth is still warming, warming significantly, warming more than the margin of error, warming at a faster rate than before the alleged cause started and more that it would be otherwise.
As for now, it is not.
-
Trees offer a way to delay the consequences of climate change
Washington Post, Sept 19, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trees-offer-a-way-to-delay-the-consequences-of-climate-change/2014/09/19/8b24b636-3d04-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html
To Save the Planet, Don’t Plant Trees
New York Times, Sept 19, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/to-save-the-planet-dont-plant-trees.html?_r=0
Climate Science Is Not Settled
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19, 2014
http://online.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565?mod=trending_now_1
CLIMATISTAS CAN’T KEEP THEIR STORY STRAIGHT
Powerline Blog, Sept 21, 2014
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/09/climatistas-cant-keep-their-story-straight.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/09/climatistas-cant-keep-their-story-straight-part-2.php
You can't make this stuff up!
-
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-pacific-warming-20140923-story.html
100 years of west coast warming nature caused!
-
Watts up with Mann?
Sep 26, 2014
Climate: Sceptics
This is a guest post by Katabasis.
It’s been an interesting few days, having attended both the Cook and Mann talks and have some valuable meetings (many for the first time) with other climate sceptics. I wanted to share a perspective that deviates somewhat from what appears to be an emerging – er – ‘consensus’ among a number of the people I had the pleasure to spend time with over the last week or so. There has been discussion in person, here and over at WUWT regarding the pursuit of some kind of rapprochement with the mainstream of climate science and climate scientists. A significant feature of the conversation thus far appears to be concern over the fractious nature of the debate, especially online. In particular there have been concerns raised regarding the effect on, and perception of, sceptics more generally as a result of the more angry and impassioned amongst us.
I want to offer something of a counterpoint. I want to, instead, make a few points in defence of angry sceptics.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to the arguments made thus far in favour of maintaining calm, polite discourse. However, I think it’s important to remember that you can’t control other people’s reactions – and that’s where most of the anger resides, anger in response to perceived provocations. Moreover I don’t think the anger is going to let up any time soon, even if some of us ‘angry sceptics’ mellow somewhat – new sceptics are joining the fold every day, and many of them are pissed off from the moment they’ve ‘turned’ to climate realism.
Why?
Let’s review the two Cabot Institute talks. First we had Cook repackaging his “97% consensus” propaganda for the hapless Bristol audience. I say ‘hapless’ because at no point in his presentation was there even the slightest acknowledgement that his work – and the prior efforts that had inspired it – had come under such severe and comprehensive criticism that it was holed below the waterline. If one of my papers had received that kind of criticism I think I would have been embarrassed to even mention it in public, never mind carry out high profile presentations of it, hoping that mere repetition of memes would carry me through.
As I mentioned over at WUWT,[1] I found the whole presentation highly offensive. Cook continues the proud tradition of the ‘team’ where they paint a cartoon image of a sceptic in crayon on the wall and then go through a clown-dancing performance of `dialogue' with the gurning visage of primary colours they’ve splattered in front of them. Just the criticisms and points Cook received in the Q & A afterwards should have shattered that image of ‘sceptics’ as defined by the Skeptical Séance team for the undecided in the audience. Or at least one would hope. His presentation was largely fact free drivel and assertion that his research was right. It was the classic ‘team’ bait and switch of asserting an authoritative consensus over a modest area (the ‘basic physics’ of CO2) and then arguing through direct implication that this applied to an astronomically wider domain (catastrophic outcomes). This is despite his work having been comprehensively monstered by José Duarte[2] and many others. I even cited Duarte’s work in my own question to Cook, highlighting the inclusion of numerous, ridiculously inappropriate, papers in the measure of the ‘consensus’. A point which, like all of the others, he airily dismissed whilst going on to trail the politician’s path of answering the question he would have preferred you had asked.
Then there was Mann. There has already been significant commenting here and elsewhere regarding the bizarrely short Q and A at the end. James Delingpole[3] has noted that Mann even posted about it on Facebook. As I noted in the comments, Mann and his sychophants are backslapping eachother over how it `speaks volumes', that `there were no questions at all from the climate change denier contingent that supposedly had come out in force'. There weren’t many hands up it is true, but I know for sure that mine and Barry’s were two of them. I noticed that Mann had also taken the liberty of deleting Barry’s perfectly polite and reasonable replies on that thread.
The primary thrust of Mann’s talk, prior to slating as many perceived enemies as he could, was ‘going large’ on the bait and switch I mentioned above. He even used an identical slide to Cook on the `many lines of evidence' that support AGW. He emphasised the venerability of the ‘basic science’ and then machine gunned the audience with imagery of extreme weather. Every single damn point he made about extreme weather from then on in, as far as I can tell, is unsupported by AR5. And yet the audience lapped it up. There must have been dozens of academics in the audience who just swallowed it uncritically. There was no mention of the ‘hiatus’ (his x axis stopped shortly after the year 2000 on temperature graphs); Cook on the other hand explicitly denied it using the famous Sceptical Séance ‘escalator graph'.[4]. This is despite the fact that the ‘hiatus’ is now a major topic of discussion in the ‘mainstream’ of climate science – I can verify this personally as it was brought up regularly by the IPCC scientists present at the ‘RSclimate’ event last year.[5]
Cook, Mann and many of the other members of ‘the team’ are wilfully deceptive. They should have been laughed off the stage, not applauded. I’m not willing to accept the ‘Noble cause corruption’ narrative and neither, it seems, are some others. This isn’t just individual failure, it’s institutional. And that’s where it really sticks in the craw for me. And it drives much of my anger, as well as that of the people who I have successfully introduced to climate scepticism/realism.
The wellspring of that anger deserves proper articulation. There’s a quote attributed to Martin Luther King that I have always liked that is apposite:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
If any of those reading consider themselves part of the ‘climate mainstream’, then I urge you to meditate on the above carefully when reading what follows as it applies to you on several levels.
When I am introducing someone to the sceptical range of views an exercise I often use is to give them a link to the IPCC WG1 report (now AR5, previously I linked them to AR4). I then invite them to pick three chapters at random – any three whatsoever (other than the Summary for Policymakers (SPM)) – and skim them (or read them in full if they have the time) and come back to me with their impressions. I experience the same response every time and indeed, it matches my own. Reading the report’s individual chapters (sans the SPM), one comes away with the impression of a scholarly, ponderous document. Lots of caveats, uncertainties, doubts, gaps and so on are clearly articulated. In short, it is what one generally expects from academic output. Then the anger flows in. It is a painfully sharp contrast to the mainstream narratives. Within those there’s disaster lurking at any moment, around every corner. It’s always ‘worse than we thought’. The climate science establishment are unanimous in agreeing that thermageddon is imminent – they’re 95% certain, in fact! About every aspect of the topic!
At this point the brakes screech. The red lights start flashing. As I get older each year, the people I introduce to sceptical books, blogs and insights become ever younger. They move ever closer to that group of young men and women just entering adulthood who have not seen global warming for their entire lives. Yet they’ve been indoctrinated right from the very start. Many come out of our education fearful for the future, as our host has amply demonstrated.[6]
They are told incessantly that the world is dying, there isn’t much hope without urgent and extreme action, and it’s all their fault for living with some creature comforts. We’re drowning in something, but it isn’t rising sea levels. It’s prognostications of doom in a legion of screaming litanies that continually fail to occur as advertised. Why hasn’t action been taken? It’s those evil ‘deniers’ and their tobacco/oil/[insert idiocy] industry backing spreading doubt and preventing action. Except it isn’t. The ‘mainstream’ of climate science is chock full of doubts, including about the hysterical prophecies of the reverend Al Gore and sychophants. The heart rate rises, respiration increases. A state of low level adrenal emergency is entered. Why didn’t they tell us? Why have our school teachers, our media, our parents, our climate science establishment not reined in the irresponsible activist-scientists and their supporters in advocate groups? Angry? You bet.
And that’s just among the general public. What of those of us who have, or have had, a continuing relationship with academia? Some of the reactions I’ve witnessed there have eclipsed even my white hot reaction.
Of my friends and family who take an interest in sincere discussion on these issues, those with a more political bent I sent to Pointman’s blog.[7] Those of a more philosophical to Ben Pile’s.[8] For those of my friends pursuing academic careers however, I sent them to Duarte’s holdout. Duarte does two things particularly well – he provides a comprehensive and scholarly critique of recent Cook and Lewandowsky offerings. He also proffers a very particular kind of outrage. That of the academic betrayed.
I felt exactly the same when I turned fully to climate scepticism/realism. As I discussed this week with Barry Woods and Richard Drake, I was working in a lab at the time. I still regarded the scientific and academic establishments as the last hold out for hope. It didn’t matter that political and economic wrangling was hopelessly fragged. Science and the quest for an ever clearer insight into the ways of the world, led by paragons of integrity, would see us through. Or so I naively believed. Discovering that a substantive area of science had let itself be presented in such a monstrous form in the public eye was an extremely bitter pill to swallow indeed.
I discovered that being a climate sceptic in the ivory towers was dangerous. It’s why I maintain a veneer of pseudonymity still. I can’t express the anger or bitterness at the sense of extreme betrayal in the written word, though I’ve often burst my top with expletives on the subject online and off. To find that the bladder bursting conniptions of our literati concerning our imminent doom as a result of our carbon sins is in fact an exaggeration of the facts off the scale even when compared to the famous UK ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq was, for a budding academic, the worst betrayal.
I didn’t sign up for this. Duarte didn’t sign up for this. Nor did any of my friends and colleagues in my age group who planned a career either in, or closely related to academia. The covenant has been broken. It’s precisely this kind of hyperbole that they should exist in order to rein in, to let cooler heads prevail. But there’s no ponderous pontification here, the overheated chicken littles run the roost whilst the ‘mainstream’ of climate science appears to sit comfortably, keeping eggs warm for the future. I’ve met a few of you in person now. You tell me, quietly, that you don’t agree with the hysteria at all, and that it’s clear from your published work.
Not good enough.
Some of you may remember from my report on the ‘RSclimate’ event that I challenged Mat Collins on this issue. That’s the same Mat Collins who is the Joint Met Office Chair in Climate Change. When I asked why he and others didn’t attempt to rein in the hysterics, who do not represent what the IPCC actually says, he said it wasn’t his responsibility. More recently, at the Walker Institute annual lecture, on climate change communication, myself and Barry Woods questioned none other than the government’s chief scientific adviser himself, Mark Walport. I put it to him that AR5 did not support catastrophic conclusions with any certainty. He responded that when he said climate change was going to be ‘bad’ he did not mean ‘catastrophic’. He failed to provide a definition of ‘bad’. This was the keynote lecture for a climate change communication outfit. If he can’t communicate something so important that is so very easily misconstrued into the worst case scenario to someone like myself who is relatively well informed on the topic, what hope the general public?
In short, there seems to be no stomach amongst the ‘mainstream’ climate establishment to do anything very much to counter the incredibly pernicious effect of our Cooks, Manns, Lewandowskys and Hansens. You don’t seem to realise that the public already lumps all of you together and some of us who know better are at the end of their tether in trying to maintain that distinction. The effort is a law of diminishing returns – why should we attempt to lift you out of a hole you continue to keep digging deeper? History won’t care what your inscrutable paywalled article actually said. Neither will the general public. They’ll care that you didn’t speak out when you should have. That you allowed everyone who raised objections be painted as part of some shady conspiracy funded by billions in filthy lucre. That you allowed their children to be terrified by a vision of monstrous and hopeless futures. The anger is going to continue to grow until a significant portion of the climate mainstream steps up to the plate, and would be well advised to do so before the leash well and truly snaps.
Whilst I’m loathe to use a Socialist Worker Party slogan here, this one is entirely apt:
If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
Well?
[1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/20/my-report-on-the-cook-talk-in-bristol-attendees-are-invited-to-leave-their-impressions/
[2] http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
[3] http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/24/Professor-Michael-Mann-shows-his-true-class
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96MoYbVeD0M
[5] http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/10/2/a-report-from-the-royal.html
[6] http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-control/
[7] http://thepointman.wordpress.com/
[8] http://www.climate-resistance.org/
Original URL: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/9/26/watts-up-with-mann.html
-
http://ricochet.com/13-ridiculous-predictions-made-earth-day-1970/
-
I recall seeing pictures of massive herds of walruses before so I found this:
Myth Debunked: Arctic Walrus Beachings Are Nothing New
Replay Myth Debunked: Arctic Walrus Beachings Are Nothing NewDaily CallerEnvironmentalists have been trying to link reports about the beaching of a 35,000-strong walrus herd to global warming, which they say is melting the polar ice caps. Margaret Williams, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, says "The massive concentration of walruses onshore,when they should be scattered broadly in ice-covered waters—is just one example of the impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine species in the... Share VideoLink & EmbedAt Paris Motor Show, Carmakers Hope to Impress
Environmentalists have been trying to link reports about the beaching of a 35,000-strong walrus herd to global warming, which they say is melting the polar ice caps. Margaret Williams, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, says "The massive concentration of walruses onshore,when they should be scattered broadly in ice-covered waters—is just one example of the impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine species in the Arctic." But is global warming really driving walrus herds to Alaska’s shoreline? Zoologist Susan Crockford says there are many recorded mass walrus beachings in history going back at least 45 years, when Arctic sea ice extent was much greater than it is now.??
Myth Debunked: Arctic Walrus Beachings Are Nothing New
4:49 PM 10/01/2014
Michael Bastasch
Environmentalists have been trying to link reports about the beaching of a 35,000-strong walrus herd to global warming, which they say is melting the polar ice caps.
“The massive concentration of walruses onshore—when they should be scattered broadly in ice-covered waters—is just one example of the impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine species in the Arctic,” Margaret Williams, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, said.
But is global warming really driving walrus herds to Alaska’s shoreline? Zoologist Susan Crockford says there are many recorded mass walrus beachings in history going back at least 45 years — when Arctic sea ice extent was much greater than it is now.
“At least two documented incidents like this have occurred in the recent past: one in 1978, on St. Lawrence Island and the associated Punuk Islands and the other in 1972, on Wrangell Island,” Crockford wrote on her blog Polarbearscience.com. “These events included mass mortality associated with very large herds.”
Crockford cites a 1980 study by University of Alaska scientists which found that a “conservative estimate of the area covered by the animals is at least 2 km… which suggests the possibility that about 35 000… walruses had hauled out there” in autumn of 1978. The study added that “Eskimos believe that it was used in this case as an alternative to the Punuk Islands, which may have been fully occupied at the time.”
“If all of the areas had been occupied at one time, it is conceivable that some 50,000 to 60,000 walruses were on shore on the Punuk Islands sometime during the late autumn of 1978,” the study continued, adding that “between 1930 and 1932 an unusually large number of walruses hauled out in autumn on the Punuk Islands… sufficient to cover the southwestern peninsula of the North Island and most of the Middle Island as well.”
Mamas LatinasKourtney Kardashian's Baby Gender Reportedly Revealed -- She's Having a ...Mamas LatinasBills.comAn Extremely Brilliant Way to Pay Off MortgagesBills.comWe WorkHow to email like a bossWe WorkStirring DailyKate Middleton's Bizarre Behavior at Event Gets Everyone Talking Stirring Daily
by Taboolaby TaboolaSponsored LinksSponsored LinksPromoted LinksPromoted Links
The Alaska Dispatch News reports that the beaching of 35,000 walruses in Northwest Alaska “is one of the biggest onshore gatherings of the animals documented.” Walruses use the sea ice to rest on in between dives for fish.
Ecologist Chadwick Jay who heads up the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific walrus research program told ADN melting ice has forced these walruses to come ashore to rest between hunts. Jay told ADN that in “only two of the last eight years has the Chukchi had enough floating ice to provide resting spots that allowed walruses to avoid having to swim to shore.”
Beachings can be dangerous for a herd as smaller females and pups might get crushed underneath the press of bigger walruses and because beachings generally occur far from prime feeding grounds. ADN reports that there have no signs of major problems yet, but 36 walruses were reported dead.
“The sharp decline of Arctic sea ice over the last decade means major changes for wildlife and communities alike,” said WWF’s Williams. “Today’s news about the sea ice minimum is yet another reminder of the urgent need to ratchet down global greenhouse gas emissions—the main human factor driving massive climate change.”
Arctic sea ice extent is near its yearly low, now hitting 1.91 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center — the sixth lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979.
But regardless of high or low sea ice levels, walruses have always seemed to beach themselves, according to Crockford.
“As you can see, this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public,” she said. “Walrus numbers are up considerably from the 1960s, although they are notoriously difficult to count. Population sizes may fluctuate for a number of reasons that have little to do with the low ice levels.”
Crockford notes that recent episodes of mass walrus beachings — which occurred in 2009, 2011 and 2014 — did not coincide with the lowest levels of Arctic summer sea ice. These lowest levels occurred in 2007 and 2012.
Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/14/yet-another-significicant-paper-finds-low-climate-sensitivity-to-co2-suggesting-there-is-no-global-warming-crisis-at-hand/
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/12/observations-show-ipcc-exaggerates.html
Observations show IPCC exaggerates anthropogenic global warming by a factor of 7.5!
-
Very nice job of tearing asunder a current warmist treatise:
http://www.geocurrents.info/physical-geography/eco-authoritarian-catastrophism-dismal-deluded-vision-naomi-oreskes-erik-m-conway
-
New term: ‘Grubering’ and how it applies to Climate Alarmism
Guest Blogger / 4 hours ago November 16, 2014
WUWT reader M. Paul writes: Sometimes a new word emerges that neatly encapsulates a set of complex ideas. We have recently seen such a word enter the lexicon: Grubering.
For those of you who missed it, an MIT Professor named Jonathan Gruber has been caught on video describing all the various ways that he helped the Obama Administration to deceive the public regarding the true nature of Obamacare.
grubering
People are now referring to what the Obamacare campaigners did as “Grubering”. Grubering is when politicians or their segregates engage in a campaign of exaggeration and outright lies in order to “sell” the public on a particular policy initiative. The justification for Grubering is that the public is too “stupid” to understand the topic and, should they be exposed to the true facts, would likely come to the “wrong” conclusion. Grubering is based on the idea that only the erudite academics can possibly know what’s best of the little people. Jefferson would be turning in his grave.
I think that no other word describes what we have seen in the climate debate quite as well as Grubering. The Climategate emails are full of discussions about how to “sell” the public on CAGW through a campaign of lies and exaggerations. There are many discussion about how the public could not possibly understand such a complex subject.
The late Steven Schneider puts it succinctly:
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Our critics sometimes dismiss skeptics as “conspiracy theorists” noting how unlikely it would be that thousands of scientists would collude. They miss the point. We now know that Grubering takes place — we see it laid bare in the Obamacare campaign. It was not strictly a “conspiracy”. Rather it was an arrogant belief that lying was necessary to persuade a “stupid” public to adopt the policy preferences of the politicians and the academics in their employ. Its Noble Cause Corruption, not conspiracy, that is at the root of this behavior.
“Climate Grubering” — its a powerful new word that can help us to describe what’s been going on.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/16/new-term-grubering-and-how-it-applies-to-climate-alarmism/
-
" Grubering is when politicians or their segregates engage in a campaign of exaggeration and outright lies in order to “sell” the public on a particular policy initiative. The justification for Grubering is that the public is too “stupid” to understand the topic and, should they be exposed to the true facts, would likely come to the “wrong” conclusion. Grubering is based on the idea that only the erudite academics can possibly know what’s best of the little people. Jefferson would be turning in his grave."
This is a great point and a great post. The concept applies way beyond healthcare and climate alarmism as well. The whole leftist economic model is based on Grubering.
I only regret that we couldn't make a more universal verb out of the entire Democratic party of the last 10 years instead of out of one obscure academic whose work they used.
-
A rare siting of real science and journalism below. 14.1 million square kilometers of snow coverage is a lot! No mention of CO2. No doubt Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley will be all over this. (The leftist Guardian missed this data and went ahead with the usual diatribe, snow cover gone from the Rockies by 2100: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/07/snow-climate-change-effect-on-skiing)
Siberian snow cover is causing the cold air here. What caused the increase in Siberian snow cover? Warmth? If so, then the earth has self correcting (negative feedback) mechanisms? Where are those in the IPCC model??
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/climate-model-predicts-very-cold-winter.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-06/harsh-winter-outlook-made-a-bit-more-dire-by-early-snow.html
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/index.php
Climate Model Predicts Very Cold Winter in Northern Hemisphere
About 14.1 million square kilometers of snow blanketed Siberia at the end of October, the second most in records going back to 1967, according to Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab. The record was in 1976, which broke a streak of mild winters in the eastern U.S. In addition, the speed at which snow has covered the region is the fastest since at least 1998.
Taken together they signal greater chances for frigid air to spill out of the Arctic into more temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who developed the theory linking Siberian snow with winter weather.
“A rapid advance of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October favors that the upcoming winter will be cold across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen said in an interview yesterday. “This past October the signal was quite robust.”...
Last year, 12.85 million square kilometers covered Eurasia at the end of October. By January, waves of frigid air were pummeling the U.S.
-
(http://www.co2science.org/articles/V17/dec/Esperetal2014b.jpg)
New Study: Two Thousand Years of Northern European Summer Temperatures Show a Downward Trend
In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.” And working with what they call “the world’s two longest MXD-based climate reconstructions” – those of Melvin et al. (2013) and Esper et al. (2012) – they combined portions of each to produce a new-and-improved summer temperature history for northern Europe that stretches all the way “from 17 BC to the present.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2726/full
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V17/dec/a19.php
-
Cherry pick your data point and prove any trend that you want.
The area of Arctic sea ice is nearly identical to 30 years ago
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/last-remaining-global-warming-scam-dies/
(https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screenhunter_5604-dec-29-08-36.gif)
(https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screenhunter_5601-dec-29-08-07.gif)
All of these things are the exact opposite of what experts forecast. Hansen predicted peak sea ice loss in the Weddell Sea, right where the peak gain has occurred.
-
Weddell Sea being in Antarctica just to clarify (photos show the Artic Ocean and some may state "yes, but... Antarctica...").
-
Weddell Sea being in Antarctica just to clarify (photos show the Arctic Ocean and some may state "yes, but... Antarctica...").
Thanks DDF for the clarification. I was picking different excerpts hoping to encourage people to read the source. Yes there is a global map at the link showing the antarctic sea marking "scientist" Hanson's colossal error.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Overnight windchill in the Twin Cities was -25 F last night. (http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/story/20932635/minnesota-temperature-minneapolis-wind-chill) Where does global warming occur if not here, arctic, antarctic or anywhere else?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Satellite Temperatures Reveal the ‘Global Warming Pause’ Lengthens to 18 years 2 months
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/12/04/duelling-data-sets-satellite-temperatures-reveal-the-global-warming-pause-lengthens-to-18-years-2-months-218-months/
(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DSPrbsJoR9Y/VIBsV1_nyrI/AAAAAAABtPw/EpWec6gdEMI/s604/clip_image0021.png)
Which of the alarmists' models predicted warming would take a two decade pause?
(http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/clip_image010_thumb1.png?w=1204&h=882)
-
Weddell Sea being in Antarctica just to clarify (photos show the Arctic Ocean and some may state "yes, but... Antarctica...").
Where does global warming occur if not here, arctic, antarctic or anywhere else?
The $64,000 question. :mrgreen:
"In the hearts and minds of idealists around the world, for the win Chuck." :-D
-
From May of last year
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631477/Revealed-How-green-zealots-gagged-professor-dared-question-global-warming.html#ixzz32Anz3nuT
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Revealed: How green zealots gagged professor who dared to question global warming
• Professor Lennart Bengtsson's study was rejected and branded 'harmful'
• This sparked accusations that scientists are censoring findings
• The 79-year-old is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists
• Last week, he resigned from the Global Warming Policy Foundation's advisory council
By David Rose
+4
Row: Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week
Ground-breaking climate research that was controversially ‘covered up’ suggests the rate that greenhouse gases are heating the Earth has been significantly exaggerated,
The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Renowned Swedish scientist Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University was at the centre of an international row last week when his study was rejected by a leading science journal after it was said to be ‘harmful’ and have a ‘negative impact’.
The rejection sparked accusations that scientists had crossed an important line by censoring findings that were not helpful to their views.
Prof Bengtsson further claims one of the world’s most recognised science publications also decided not to use his research findings, because, he said, they were considered to be ‘uninteresting’.
Prof Bengtsson’s critical paper was co-authored with four colleagues. It focused on the growing gap between real temperatures and predictions made by computers.
In a recent key report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated the ‘climate sensitivity’ – the amount the world will warm each time carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere double – was between 1.5C and 4.5C. According to Prof Bengtsson’s paper, it is more likely to be 1.2C to 2.7C. The implications of the difference are huge. If the planet is warming half as fast as previously thought in response to emissions, many assumptions behind targets for reducing emissions and green energy subsidies are wrong. The subsidies in turn have led to a significant increase in consumers’ power bills. Last week, it was revealed Environmental Research Letters had rejected his paper because it would be seized on by climate ‘sceptics’ in the media.
Fear: Professor Bengtsson of the University of Reading said the pressure was so great he feared for his health
Established: The Global Warming Policy Foundation was set up by former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson and is regarded as being part of the 'sceptic camp' when it comes to climate change Later the journal said it had rejected the paper because the reviewers questioned the paper’s methods. But another journal turned it down without it even being sent out for peer review. Prof Bengtsson says this only normally happens if the editors believe the work is ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’. Prof Bengtsson, 79, is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists. Last week he was forced to step down from the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the sceptical think-tank set up by Lord Lawson.
More...
• I was victimised for challenging zealots, says Professor: Poison, plots and a battle to neuter climate change critics
• Billionaires are 'scary smart' and more likely to have attended elite schools such as Harvard
• Climate change scientist claims he has been forced from new job in 'McCarthy'-style witch-hunt by academics across the world
He was accused by former friends and colleagues of ‘crossing into the deniers’ camp’. Prof Bengtsson said the pressure was so great he had feared for his health. He said he had been stunned by the ‘emotional’ reaction to his joining the GWPF.
‘The way some in the climate community behaved shocked me,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had been married for many years, and then discovered my wife was a completely different person.’
Prof Bengtsson said the paper was now being considered by a third journal, after some revisions. But he had asked for his name to be to be removed in the wake of the row over the GWPF.
Is this the tipping point for climate McCarthyism?
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week.
If they do, they won’t mean that this was when global warming became unstoppable. Instead, they’ll be pointing to the curious affair of Professor Lennart Bengtsson of Reading University as the moment that the rigid, authoritarian campaign to shut down debate on climate science and policy finally began to unravel.
For several years, this newspaper has been at the forefront of efforts to publicise the highly inconvenient truth that real world temperatures have not risen nearly as fast as computer models say they should have, thanks to the unexpected ‘pause’ in global warming which has so far lasted some 17 years.
As Prof Bengtsson has now discovered, anyone who draws attention to this will be vilified and accused of ‘denying’ supposedly ‘settled’ science.
The dogma – the insistence, as Bengtsson put it yesterday, that ‘greenhouse gas emissions are leading us towards the end of the world in the not-too-distant future’ – dominates many aspects of our lives, from lessons taught in primary schools to the vast and rising ‘green’ energy subsidies on household fuel bills.
To be sure, Bengtsson’s treatment is not encouraging. As a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, he is one of the world’s most eminent experts. Yet last week, he was accused of having joined the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan and the Flat Earth Society, and of peddling ‘junk science’ – all because he accepted a place on the council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Some climate scientists have long been warning that the planet is approaching a tipping point. Future historians may one day reflect that we reached it last week
So great was the pressure, he feared for his health, and decided to resign. The most cursory look at the GWPF’s website makes clear it does not ‘deny’ any aspect of the science of global warming, nor that this has happened in response to human activity.
Its focus (as its name rather suggests) is on policy, where it has indeed been critical of the approach thus far. But for the climate enforcers, that was enough. Bengtsson said: ‘I was labelled a heretic. I felt as if I was dealing with the medieval church.’ It also emerged that a paper he co-authored, arguing that temperatures would rise by only half as much as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims, had been rejected by a prestigious journal – after an anonymous reviewer said publishing it would be ‘harmful’ to the environmental cause, because it was bound to be reported by media sceptics.
Nevertheless, there are grounds for optimism. Perhaps it was simply that a man of Bengtsson’s stature who is still producing research at the age of 79 deserves respect, but the story was reported – not favourably, from the enforcers’ point of view – around the world. It even made the front page of The Times.
Some of those who deplored the ‘climate McCarthyism’ that Bengtsson experienced, such as Prof Judith Curry of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, have received similar treatment for saying global warming may not pose the imminent threat so many want us to fear.
Others, however, were from the very centre of the climate science mainstream, such as Prof Mike Hulme of King’s College, London.
He condemned scientists who ‘harassed’ those with whom they disagreed until they ‘fall into line’.
But if this really was a tipping point, it will be because the areas of uncertainty in climate science are simply too big to be ignored: claiming the debate is over does not make this true.
As former Nasa scientist Roy Spencer put it: ‘We might be seeing the death throes of alarmist climate science. They know they are on the ropes, and are pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to shore up their crumbling storyline.’
So here’s a question. Like Bengtsson, this newspaper believes global warming is real, and caused by CO2.
It’s also clear that, thus far, the computer models have exaggerated its speed.
So what exactly are we and others who hold such views denying?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631477/Revealed-How-green-zealots-gagged-professor-dared-question-global-warming.html#ixzz32AnbvebU
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
-
Hot Stuff, Cold Logic
RICHARD TOL
Politically correct climate change orthodoxy has completely destroyed our ability to think rationally about the environment.
Climate change is sometimes called humanity’s biggest problem. Ban Ki-moon, Christine Lagarde, and John Kerry have all said as much recently. The mainstream Western media often discuss climate change in catastrophic, or even apocalyptic, terms. Indeed, if you take newspaper headlines seriously, the Fifth Assessment Report of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came accompanied by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; predictions of famine, pestilence, war, and death proliferated hither and yon. Conversely, when, on November 11, 2014, the United States and China inked an agreement on climate whose actual consequences are at best liable to be indistinct, banner headlines broke out, as though messianic times were nigh.
Assuming it falls somewhat short of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, how serious will the impact of climate change be really? How much do we know about these impacts? What are the implications for policy?
It’s helpful to recall here that climate change means a lot more than just different temperatures. It means more or less rain, snow, wind, and clouds in various places. It means different outcomes for plants, whether direct or, since plants compete for resources, indirect. It means changes for the animals that eat those plants. And this includes changes for everything that hitches a ride on those plants and animals, and hence changes for all sorts of pathogens. Nature, agriculture, forestry, and health will all be different in the future. The seas will rise as water expands and glacial ice melts, affecting coastlines and everyone and everything that resides there. Water supplies will be affected by changing rainfall patterns, but water demand will also be altered by changing temperatures. Energy demands will change, too; there may be less need to heat houses in winter and perhaps greater need to cool them in summer. Traffic, transport, building, recreation, and tourism, too, will all feel the impact of a changing climate.
For some, the mere fact of these impacts is reason enough for governments, businesses, and individuals to exert themselves to reduce greenhouse gases to minimize the change. That is strange logic, however. Change, after all, can be for the better or the worse, and at any rate it is inevitable; there has never been a lengthy period of climate stasis.
Just as there is no logical or scientific basis for thinking that climate change is new, there is no self-evident reason to assume that the climate of the past is “better” than the climate of the future. With just as little logic, we might assume that women’s rights, health care, or education were necessarily better in the past. Any such judgment also contradicts Hume’s Law and, perhaps worse, is grounded in a fallacious appeal to nature understood in a very slanted way.
There is no prima facie reason to assume that any given past climate was better than the prospective one. The climate of the 21stcentury may well be unprecedented in the history of human civilization; the number of people living in countries with free and fair elections is unprecedented, too. So what? “Unprecedented” is not a synonym for “bad.”
Others argue that the impacts of climate change are largely unknown but may be catastrophic. The precautionary principle thus enjoins that we should work hard, if not do our utmost, to avoid even the slim possibility of catastrophe. This logic works fine for one-sided risks: We ban carcinogenic material in toys because we do not want our kids to get cancer. Safe materials are only slightly more expensive, and there is no likely or even imaginable “upside” to children having cancer. Climate policy, on the other hand, is about balancing risks, and there are risks to climate policies as well as risks caused by climate change. Sharp increases in energy prices have caused devastating economic recessions in the past, for example. Cheap energy fueled the industrial revolution, and lack of access to reliable energy is one factor holding back economic growth in most developing countries. In the short run, we rely on fossil fuels to keep us warm and keep the lights on, to grow our food, and to purify our drinking water. So there is a cost to human well-being in constraining fossil fuel use.
What this means is that, instead of assuming the worst, we should study the impacts of climate change and seek to balance them against the negative effects of climate policy. This is what climatologists and economists actually have done for years, but their efforts have been overshadowed by the hysteria of the Greens and the Left, and the more subtle lobbying of companies yearning for renewables subsidies and other government hand-outs. It is especially important to maintain an objective attitude toward the tradeoff between possible dangers and the costs of policy, because estimating the impacts of climate change has proven to be remarkably hard. Past climate change is not much of a guide. The climate supposedly changed much less over the previous century than it is projected to do over the current one, but global mean surface air temperature has barely moved over the past two decades—and this is the period with the best data, in which almost all climate change impact studies have been done.
Besides, the faint signal of past climate change is drowned out by all the other things that have changed. If one tries to study the impacts of climate change on crops, for example, one must factor in the impact of new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and a host of other confounding variables such as air pollution and atmospheric deposition of nutrients. If one is interested in commercial agriculture, one needs to consider subsidies and international trade. If one studies the impacts of climate change on health, one needs to control for progress in medical technology, different diets, changes in work and leisure, aging, migration, and so on and so forth. If one studies the impacts of sea-level rise, one needs to cope with subsidence and tectonic movements, changing land use, shifting priorities in coastal zone management, eutrophication, and more besides. The same is true for all past climate change impacts: Many things are changing, often much faster than the climate, and in ways that confound all unifactoral explanations potentially relevant to policy.
The same is true for the impacts of future climate change. The confounding factors will not go away. In academic papers, we typically do the scientifically respectable thing and change one variable at a time. Controlled experiments make great science—even if done in silico—and since we cannot observe the future, experiments with computer models are the only option available to study the impacts of climate change. Controlled experiments make for poor predictions, however. The future is not ceteris paribus. It’s ceteris imparibus. Change happens, pretty much all the time.
We know a lot about some of the impacts of climate change, such as those on agriculture, human health, and coastal zones. Other impacts are not as well understood even to the point of opacity, such as those on transport, production, and water resources. This partly reflects the differences in the complexity of the impact. Projections of future sea-level rise agree on the direction of the change and its order of magnitude. Projections of future rainfall, however, are all over the place. But our differential knowledge also reflects variations in attention. Academic incentives do not help. It is much easier to publish a paper in a good journal if it improves on a previous one. It is much easier to get funding if you have a track record on a particular subject. Papers or proposals that are genuinely new are often ill-regarded. This implies that some impacts of climate change have been extensively studied whereas other impacts have been largely ignored.
Impacts of climate change are so many and so diverse, varying over space, over time, between impacts, and across scenarios, that it makes no sense to speak of “the” impact of climate change. People have tended to produce two solutions for this problem. Some just write about their favorite impact (or perhaps about the impact that supports their political position), pretending that this impact is somehow representative of all other impacts. Others add up impacts. This exercise is just as fraught as adding up all those proverbial apples and oranges, but it at least reflects the sum total of our knowledge, and the inescapably subjective elements in aggregation are well understood. (Below I use human welfare to add up impacts.)
Understanding what the science of climate does and does not enable us to do readily in a policy vein is hard enough for some people. If one adds to that a requirement to know some basic economics, a good number of deeply concerned people appear to be rendered completely incapable of anything we should wish to bless with the term “thought.” And indeed, many an otherwise intelligent economist has lost his marbles when confronted with global warming.
In a barter economy, one needs to know the price of everything relative to everything else. How many eggs for a liter of milk? How many slices of bread for a liter of beer? How many iPads for a yacht? In a monetary economy, however, one needs to know the price of everything in money only. In a barter economy, there are n2-2n prices (with n being the number of goods and services for sale). In a monetary economy, there are only n prices. That is why, at some time in the deep past, many human civilizations of diverse origins independently invented money.
If one knows the prices of the things one wishes to buy, and one knows one’s own budget, informed trade-offs become possible. Most of us have to make choices. We cannot go on expensive holidays, send our kids to posh schools, drive fancy cars, and quit work all at the same time. In our daily life, we constantly choose among things that are otherwise incomparable. We may choose to pay more for a product because it says on the tin that it is good for the environment. We may opt to buy products that we think are good for our health. The same is true in the public domain. We vote for politicians who promise to do more (or less) for environmental protection and health care. From this, we can deduce our willingness to pay for a better environment or a healthier life. We can then apply these “prices” to the impacts of climate change.
Studies, assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest report, that have used such methods find that the initial, net impacts of climate change are small (about 1 percent of income) and may even be positive. Many people, including supposedly objective academics, find it hard to admit that climate change can have positive impacts. But, as already noted, warmer winters mean less money spent on heating. They also mean fewer people dying prematurely of cold. Carbon dioxide makes plants grow, and makes them more drought-tolerant, a boon particularly to poorer countries. In the short run, these positive impacts may well be larger than the negative impacts.
In the long run, however, negative impacts may surge ahead of positive ones. The positive impacts saturate quickly; one cannot save more on winter heating than one spends. The negative impacts do not saturate quickly; air conditioning bills will keep rising as summers get hotter. The long-run impacts are what matter most for policy. The climate responds only slowly to changes in emissions, and emissions respond only slowly to changes in policy. The climate of the next few decades is therefore largely beyond our control. It is only in the longer term that our choices affect climate change, and by then its impacts are likely to be negative on net. This implies that climate change is an economic problem, and that if economics could be rid of politics, greenhouse gas emissions should be taxed.
The economic case for emission reduction is thus remarkably simple and robust. We only need to argue that in the long run unabated climate change will do more harm than good. If so, we need to start moving away from using fossil fuels. The question is therefore not whether there is an economic case for climate policy; it’s how much emission reduction can be justified at given losses to social welfare. To answer that question, we need to understand the size of the impacts of climate change. The current evidence, weak and incomplete as it may be, as summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that moderate warming—say, what we might expect around the year 2075—would make the average person feel as if she had lost 0.2 to 2.0 percent of her income.
In other words, a century worth of climate change is about as bad as losing a year of economic growth.
Larger climate change would have more profound impacts. Negative surprises are more likely than positive surprises. But even if we take this into account, a century of climate change is not worse than losing a decade of growth. So if, as Bjørn Lomborg has been at pains to point out, we “spend” the equivalent of a decade of growth or more trying to mitigate climate change, we will not have spent wisely.
Climate change is a problem, but at least as an economics problem, it is certainly not the biggest problem humankind faces. The euro crisis knocked off a third of the income of the people in Greece in five years’ time. Climate change does not even come close. And the people of Syria wish their problems were as trivial as those of the Greeks. Climate change is not even that large compared to other environmental problems. Urban air pollution kills millions of people per year in Asia. Indoor air pollution kills millions of people per year in Africa. The health problems related to climate change are unlikely to cause similar carnage before the end of the century.
The estimates of the total impact of climate change call for a modest tax on greenhouse gas emissions—or perhaps a cap-and-trade system with a generous allocation of emission permits. The best course of action is to slowly but surely move away from fossil fuels, and in that, as usual, both markets and the parameters governments invariably set for markets to function have roles to play.
Many disagree with this plan of action, of course, calling for a rapid retirement of fossil fuel use. Economically, their justification rests on assuming that we should care more about the future than we do in contexts other than climate change, that we should care more about small risks than we do, or that we should care more about poor people than we do. These justifications rest in politics or raw moral logic, not economics. Each of these arguments would affect not just climate policy but other areas, too. If one argues we should care more about the future, one argues not just for increased investment in greenhouse gas-emission reduction, but also, logically, in pensions, in education, in health care, and so on. If one argues we should be more wary of risk, one argues not only for increased investment in greenhouse gas-emission reduction, but also in road safety, in food safety, in meteorite detection, and whatnot. Ditto for concern about the poor.
Speaking of the poor: Poorer countries are notably more vulnerable to climate change than richer ones. They tend to have a larger share of their economic activity in areas that are directly exposed to the weather, particularly agriculture. Poorer countries often lack access to modern technology and institutions that can protect against the weather; for example, air conditioning, malaria medicine, crop insurance. Poorer countries may lack the ability, and sometimes the political will, to mobilize the resources for large-scale infrastructure—irrigation and coastal protection, for example.
Bangladesh and the Netherlands are two densely populated, low-lying countries at risk from flooding by river and sea. Bangladesh is generally seen to be very vulnerable to climate change, whereas most think that the Netherlands will be able to cope; the Netherlands is famous for thriving below sea level, after all. The Netherlands started its modern, large-scale dike building program only in 1850. Before that, dike building was local, primitive, and not very effective: The country was regularly plagued by devastating floods. In 1850, the Netherlands was only slightly richer than Bangladesh is now, but Bangladesh now of course has access to much better technology than the Netherlands did then.
However, the main difference between the Netherlands in 1850 and Bangladesh in 2014 is political. In response to the European Spring of 1848, the Netherlands adopted a new constitution in 1849 that introduced a powerful central government broadly representative of the population (or rather, the male Protestant part of the population). The new Dutch government promptly went after public enemy number one: floods.
Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and its political elite is more interested in partisan fights and self-enrichment than in the well-being of its citizens. Floods primarily hurt the poor, who live near the river and the coastal flats where land is cheap. There is no political reason to protect them; after all, floods are thought to be an act of Allah rather than a consequence of decisions made or not made by incompetent and indifferent politicians. As long as this is the case, Bangladesh will be vulnerable to climate change.
The disproportionate exposure to climate change of those most vulnerable is a good reason to be cautious about greenhouse gas emissions. The case has been exaggerated, however.
It is peculiar to express great concern about the plight of the poor when it comes to climate but not in other policy domains. Levels of charitable giving and official development aid suggest that we are actually not that bothered. Our trade and migration policies would even suggest that we like to see them suffer. More importantly, there are two ways to mitigate the excessive impact of climate change on the poor: Reduce climate change, and reduce poverty.
In the worst projections, climate change could cut crop yields in Africa by half. At present, subsistence farmers often get no more from their land than one-tenth of what is achieved at model farms working the same soil in the same climate. The immediate reason for the so-called yield gap is a lack of access to high-quality seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, tools, and things like that. The underlying causes include a lack of access to capital and product markets due to poor roads and insecure land tenure. Closing the yield gap would do more good sooner than climate change would do harm later. If one really wants to spend money to help farmers in Africa, one should invest in the land registry rather than in solar power.
Indeed, modernizing agriculture in Africa would also make it less vulnerable to climate change. African farming is particularly vulnerable, because isolated, undercapitalized farmers struggle to cope with any change, climatic or otherwise. Infectious diseases illustrate the same point. There were outbreaks of malaria in Murmansk until the 1920s. Sweden suffered malaria epidemics in the 1870s, and the disease was endemic in Stockholm. George Washington did not want the new capital to be built in the estuary of the Potomac because of the malaria risk. Nowadays, malaria only occasionally returns to these places by plane, and it rarely kills.
Largely as a consequence, malaria has become a tropical disease. Many fear that climate change would spread malaria because the parasite is more vigorous in hot weather and mosquitoes thrive in hotter and wetter places. However, in the rich world, habitat reduction, mosquito control, and medicine long ago tamed malaria. Mosquitoes need warm, still-standing water to breed. As we roofed houses, paved roads, and drained wetlands, their habitats disappeared. Clouds of DDT helped bring about the demise of the mosquito as well. Malaria medicine stops one from getting (seriously) ill, and from infecting others.
These things cost money. A dose of malaria medicine costs $100—small change in the United States but a fortune in South Sudan. Therefore, malaria is first and foremost a disease of poverty. We can spend our money on combatting greenhouse gas emissions, reducing malaria risks for future generations. We can also spend our money on insecticides and bed nets, reducing malaria risks today. We can also invest in medical research. A malaria vaccine holds the prospect of a world free of this awful disease, regardless of climate. If our resources were unlimited, we could do all things worthwhile. With a limited budget, we should focus on those investments with the greatest return.
These three examples—of coastal protection, agriculture, and malaria—show that development and vulnerability to climate change are closely intertwined. Slowing economic growth to reduce climate change may therefore do more harm than good. Concentrating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries will not solve the climate problem. And slower growth in rich countries means less export from and investment in poor countries.
There is an even more direct link between climate policy and development. Cheap and abundant energy fueled the industrial revolution. Sudden increases in the price of oil caused many of the economic recessions since World War II. Lack of (reliable) electricity retards growth in poor countries, not just today through its effect on production, but also in the future, as electric light allows kids to do their homework after sunset.
A fifth of official development aid is now diverted to climate policy. Money that used to be spent on strengthening the rule of law, better education for girls, and improved health care, for instance, is now used to plug methane leaks and destroy hydrofluorocarbons. Some donors no longer support the use of coal, by far the cheapest way to generate electricity. Instead, poor people are offered intermittent wind power and biomass energy, which drives up the price of food. But the self-satisfaction environmentalists derive from these programs does not put food on poor peoples’ tables.
In sum, while climate change is a problem that must be tackled, we should not lose our sense of proportion or advocate solutions that would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid.1 Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II.2 That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it.
1Tutu, “We Fought Apartheid. Now Climate Change Is Our Global Enemy”, Guardian, September 20, 2014.
2Mann and Kammen, “The Gathering Storm”, Huffington Post, September 19, 2014.
Richard Tol teaches economics at the University of Sussex and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a veteran of four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/10/hot-stuff-cold-logic/
-
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/inside-the-global-warming-scandal.php
-
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/inside-the-global-warming-scandal.php
Great post. Persuasive evidence and an excellent question: If true, why the constant need to lie, deceive, alter, doctor, embellish the sketchy facts?
Those who truly believe there is a human crisis should be the most offended by the chicanery that is distracting the discussion.
Link from inside the post: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Amazing documentation of graphical evidence turned upside to suit the agenda. What kind of scientist approves of "adjusting" data?
-
"Left unmitigated, global warming will continue to cause increasingly extreme weather."
“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence."
– said President Obama
http://www.biotech-now.org/environmental-industrial/biofuels-climate-change/2013/06/president-obama-talks-climate-change-we-need-to-act
----------------
And extremes like this, 41 degrees below zero -- without wind chill - today.
http://www.startribune.com/local/292617161.html
We never had extremes in weather before man-made global warming, or did we??
-
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/22/climate-denialisms-star-scientist-exposed-paid-1-2m-by-oil-companies-to-deliver-friendly-results/
-
http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-climate-sensitivity-environmental-worries-are-trending-downward
-
I suspect social activism disguised as science and pressure to be one with the homogenous herd lest one be labeled a "denier" has a lot to do with this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150403073439.htm
-
BG,
Thanks for the post.
I am glad some one like Arthur Caplan is sounding the alarm besides me. At least in journals with "peer review" there would be some checks and balances. But this does not guarantee truth and veracity. Who is checking the data that is collected much less the evaluation of data.
Excerpt from my post #1261 01/03/14 under the politics of healthcare thread. I warned to beware of the proliferation of "studies". I am concluding more and more there is at least as much fraud in medical studies as there is in the entertainment industry, or say in our government. I've talked to people in academia. Some have great integrity. But there are many stories of petty, crooked, selfish, phony, shenanigans as well. And now with THIS WH and its Democrat Party machine I am certain much of what is published is pure politics. For Gods sake the new Surgeon General's only claim to fame is he is a cheerleader for Obamacare.
I couldn't agree more with Arthur Caplan a famous medical ethicist from University of Penn (I believe):
**********From the education thread is my proposal to beware the academic industrial government complex.
OF course there is much to learn from our scientific community. But much harm can come from it too.
We are seeing an infinite exponential rise in "studies" and experiments the vast majority of which are total BS. We see it in the health field ALL the time. If one or two percent of all the research done actually gives us new meaningful information that changes the way we practice medicine that is a lot.
Indeed look at how many times over the last decade we in the medical community have kept changing our recommendations.
For example I just read online that Vit E supposedly helps delay Alzheimer's ( a tad by maybe six months - at best). In the nineties this was claimed too until additional tests suggested it might worsen or not help. So which the "f" is it? I would not recommend anyone waste their money on high doses of Vit E (2,000 IU per day).
I guarantee one thing. We will hear over the radio, the cable, the online airwaves many shysters selling us their Vit E promoting with this study as the evidence that it is real.
I do question whether these professors have already cut deals with the promoters of these products to cash in. They are supposed to report "conflict of interests". Don't count on it. And don't think for one second this doesn't happen either.
There are many great men and women in academia. But there are just as many scum bags as every other sector of society. So GM is absolutely correct in taking academic's claims with some skepticism.
The spread of controlled trials into economics is just another example of the tumbleweed spreading of "science". Also I have shown in posts years past how anyone can often juggle the data to suggest any outcome best for their cause.
The academic industrial government complex. To all of us - BEWARE.**********
-
Effective today, Earth Day, May 5, 2015, Castostrophic, Human-caused Global Warming (aka. Climate Change) is no longer an issue. It's too late now. Just enjoy the limited days of hell-like heat you have left and that's it.
According to the UN IPCC, we had only 8 years to act 8 years ago and our time is up. Nothing we can do now can stop it from being an out-of-control death spiral. I'm sorry to tell everyone this.
The fact was that government needed to be more global and more coercive. From the report:
"governments must act quickly to force through changes across all sectors of society"
We didn't do that to their satisfaction and now it's over. Global warming is already here and already irreversible.
May 5, 2007: "there could be as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C [2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] or more."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/26/global-warming-irreversible-un-panel-report
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/may/05/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment
Look for "global temperatures up as much as 6C by 2100, triggering a surge in ocean levels, destruction of vast numbers of species, economic devastation in tropical zones and mass human migrations."
Not only that, "climate change will worsen violent conflicts and refugee problems and could hinder efforts to grow more food."
The UN IPCC also said it would rather we die of the heat than generate electricity with carbon-free nuclear power.
What we have left to look forward to is nothing but mayhem, like in the All State commercials.
This isn't funny. The science is settled. It's all over.
Further your affiant sayeth not.
... Except that the oceans didn't rise. The Arctic isn't ice-free. Hurricanes and typhoons did not get worse. Food Production has never been better. And there has been no measurable warming on earth in NINETEEN YEARS!
-
Past temperatures were LOWERED by an accumulated 151.2°F to make current temps look warmer.
Actual temps in Maine: Thermometers have recorded no net warming since 1895.
Who are the deniers of math and science? And why do we pay government to desecrate science?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/noaa-caught-rewriting-us-temperature-history-again.php
NOAA CAUGHT REWRITING US TEMPERATURE HISTORY (AGAIN)
We have written a number of times about how government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the U.S., have systematically adjusted temperature history to make the past look colder. They apparently do this, usually surreptitiously and without explanation, in order to stoke global warming hysteria. See, for example, He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/07/he-who-controls-the-present-controls-the-past.php and Inside the Global Warming Scandal. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/inside-the-global-warming-scandal.php
Now Mike Brakey, an engineering physicist and heat transfer specialist, has caught NOAA revising historic temperature data for Maine–as always, to make the past look cooler and the present warmer by comparison: http://notrickszone.com/2015/05/02/151-degrees-of-fudging-energy-physicist-unveils-noaas-massive-rewrite-of-maine-climate-history/#sthash.hfRbwyGw.Wa7E1hPm.dpbs
Over the last months I have discovered that between 2013 and 2015 some government bureaucrats have rewritten Maine climate history… (and New England’s and of the U.S.). This statement is not based on my opinion, but on facts drawn from NOAA 2013 climate data vs. NOAA 2015 climate data after they re-wrote it.
We need only compare the data. They cooked their own books (see numbers below).
http://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2015/05/Brakey_1.png
This graph presents the data visually. The black line shows average annual temperatures for Maine from 1895 to the present as they were recorded at the time, and as NOAA published them in 2013. Thermometers have recorded no net warming since 1895. The blue line represents NOAA rewritten history as it appears in 2015. Note how NOAA reduces earlier temperatures more than recent ones to give the graph a plausibly warming trend. The green line shows average annual temperatures for a single location, Lewiston-Auburn, showing a steep decline since 2000.
http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2015/05/Brakey_2.png
NOAA has made similar adjustments to past temperatures around the United States. Brakey writes:
It appears NOAA panicked and did a massive rewrite of Maine temperature history (they used the same algorithm for U.S. in general). The new official temperatures from Maine between 1895 and present were LOWERED by an accumulated 151.2°F between 1895 and 2012.
In my opinion, this is out-and-out fraud. Why did they corrupt national climate data? Global warming is a $27 billion business on an annual basis in the U.S alone.
Now NOAA data revised in 2015 indicate that 1904, 1919 and 1925 in Maine were much colder than anything we experience today. (See the scorecard above comparing the NOAA data that are 18 months apart). Note how for 1913 the NOAA lowered the annual temperature a whole 4°F!
For the balance of the years, as they get closer to the present, the NOAA tweaks less and less. They have corrupted Maine climate data between 1895 and present by a whopping accumulated 151.2°F.
Their cooling of the past to keep the global warming meme alive reminds me of the old Soviet joke – the future is known, it is the past that keeps changing.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/04/a-prediction-coming-true/
Would someone please try to explain why this isn’t the biggest scandal in the history of science?
-
I've encountered several pieces like this lately, all of which steer clear of including climate science in the mix. I suspect the subtexts, however, suggest that the most panic mongering of "sciences" is likely the one most guilty of the practices noted here:
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/science/maligned-study-on-gay-marriage-is-shaking-trust.html?emc=edit_th_20150526&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
-
Oh dear, the missing heat presumed to be in the deep ocean is so missing that the Atlantic is cooling:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/atlantic-cooling-means-global-climate-change-of-a-different-kind-coming/
-
I've posted this on my FB page to poke at some climate change folks I know. :evil:
-
Bad science begets perverse incentives begets failed solutions:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3113908/How-world-s-biggest-green-power-plant-actually-INCREASING-greenhouse-gas-emissions-Britain-s-energy-bill.html#ixzz3cOfC1uYP
-
Spot. On.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenhayward/2015/06/09/why-the-left-needs-climate-change/
-
Everything old is new again:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/06/50000-witches-executed-because-they-caused-climate-change-video/
-
Boom. Game, set, match.
The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science
Matt Ridley
The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested -- or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas
For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.
Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.
Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.
This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.
What these two ideas have in common is that they had political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate. Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the defence. It’s tosh that scientists always try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other’s. Science has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what keeps science honest.
What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.
Cheerleaders for alarm
This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science. The “bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently dangerous to require urgent policy responses. In the 1970s, when global temperatures were cooling, some scientists could not resist the lure of press attention by arguing that a new ice age was imminent. Others called this nonsense and the World Meteorological Organisation rightly refused to endorse the alarm. That’s science working as it should. In the 1980s, as temperatures began to rise again, some of the same scientists dusted off the greenhouse effect and began to argue that runaway warming was now likely.
At first, the science establishment reacted sceptically and a diversity of views was aired. It’s hard to recall now just how much you were allowed to question the claims in those days. As Bernie Lewin reminds us in one chapter of a fascinating new book of essays called Climate Change: The Facts (hereafter The Facts), as late as 1995 when the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its last-minute additional claim of a “discernible human influence” on climate, Nature magazine warned scientists against overheating the debate.
Since then, however, inch by inch, the huge green pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms—over population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops—have often proved wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the most exaggeration trousered the most money. In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be debunked.
These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous.
Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a “pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.
Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report.
Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused. Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.
Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in lucrative green prizes, regularly joined protests against coal plants and got himself arrested while at the same time he was in charge of adjusting and homogenising one of the supposedly objective data sets on global surface temperature. How would he be likely to react if told of evidence that climate change is not such a big problem?
Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who frequently testifies before Congress in favour of urgent action on climate change, was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist for nineteen years and continues to advise it. The EDF has assets of $209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million from charitable foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants. In that time it has spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory committees. How likely is it that they or Oppenheimer would turn around and say global warming is not likely to be dangerous?
Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna Laframboise, for the IPCC to “put a man who has spent his career cashing cheques from both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace in charge of its latest chapter on the world’s oceans?” She’s referring to the University of Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.
I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.
What consensus about the future?
Sceptics such as Plimer often complain that “consensus” has no place in science. Strictly they are right, but I think it is a red herring. I happily agree that you can have some degree of scientific consensus about the past and the present. The earth is a sphere; evolution is true; carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The IPCC claims in its most recent report that it is “95 per cent” sure that “more than half” of the (gentle) warming “since 1950” is man-made. I’ll drink to that, though it’s a pretty vague claim. But you really cannot have much of a consensus about the future. Scientists are terrible at making forecasts—indeed as Dan Gardner documents in his book Future Babble they are often worse than laymen. And the climate is a chaotic system with multiple influences of which human emissions are just one, which makes prediction even harder.
The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.
What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).
But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.
Politicians love this polarising because it means they can attack a straw man. It’s what they are good at. “Doubt has been eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech in 2007: “It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time for a meeting of the flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”. That’s just a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I point out above, there is no consensus that it’s dangerous.
So where’s the outrage from scientists at this presidential distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a homeopath. The first was a poll that found that 97 per cent of just seventy-nine scientists thought climate change was man-made—not that it was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854 members of the American Meteorological Society found the true number is 52 per cent.
The second source of the 97 per cent number was a survey of scientific papers, which has now been comprehensively demolished by Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is probably the world’s leading climate economist. As the Australian blogger Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings, John Cook of the University of Queensland and his team used an unrepresentative sample, left out much useful data, used biased observers who disagreed with the authors of the papers they were classifying nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed the data in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their preliminary conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever there was one. The data could not be replicated, and Cook himself threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal nor the university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the scientific establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow the whistle on it. Its conclusion is too useful.
This should be a huge scandal, not fodder for a tweet by the leader of the free world. Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an example of a new breed of science critic that the climate debate has spawned. With little backing, and facing ostracism for her heresy, this talented science journalist had abandoned any chance of a normal, lucrative career and systematically set out to expose the way the huge financial gravy train that is climate science has distorted the methods of science. In her chapter in The Facts, Nova points out that the entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day there is no evidence.
The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models.
Scandal after scandal
The Cook paper is one of many scandals and blunders in climate science. There was the occasion in 2012 when the climate scientist Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of the (sceptical) Heartland Institute’s board of directors, leaked confidential documents, and included also a “strategy memo” purporting to describe Heartland’s plans, which was a straight forgery. Gleick apologised but continues to be a respected climate scientist.
There was Stephan Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western Australia, who published a paper titled “NASA faked the moon landing therefore [climate] science is a hoax”, from which readers might have deduced, in the words of a Guardian headline, that “new research finds that sceptics also tend to support conspiracy theories such as the moon landing being faked”. Yet in fact in the survey for the paper, only ten respondents out of 1145 thought that the moon landing was a hoax, and seven of those did not think climate change was a hoax. A particular irony here is that two of the men who have actually been to the moon are vocal climate sceptics: Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin.
It took years of persistence before physicist Jonathan Jones and political scientist Ruth Dixon even managed to get into print (in March this year) a detailed and devastating critique of the Lewandowsky article’s methodological flaws and bizarre reasoning, with one journal allowing Lewandowsky himself to oppose the publication of their riposte. Lewandowsky published a later paper claiming that the reactions to his previous paper proved he was right, but it was so flawed it had to be retracted.
If these examples of odd scientific practice sound too obscure, try Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for thirteen years and often described as the “world’s top climate scientist”. He once dismissed as “voodoo science” an official report by India’s leading glaciologist, Vijay Raina, because it had challenged a bizarre claim in an IPCC report (citing a WWF report which cited an article in New Scientist), that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. The claim originated with Syed Hasnain, who subsequently took a job at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general, and there his glacier claim enabled TERI to win a share of a three-million-euro grant from the European Union. No wonder Dr Pachauri might well not have wanted the 2035 claim challenged.
Yet Raina was right, it proved to be the IPCC’s most high-profile blunder, and Dr Pachauri had to withdraw both it and his “voodoo” remark. The scandal led to a highly critical report into the IPCC by several of the world’s top science academics, which recommended among other things that the IPCC chair stand down after one term. Dr Pachauri ignored this, kept his job, toured the world while urging others not to, and published a novel, with steamy scenes of seduction of an older man by young women. (He resigned this year following criminal allegations of sexual misconduct with a twenty-nine-year-old female employee, which he denies, and which are subject to police investigation.)
Yet the climate bloggers who constantly smear sceptics managed to avoid even reporting most of this. If you want to follow Dr Pachauri’s career you have to rely on a tireless but self-funded investigative journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise. In her chapter in The Facts, Laframboise details how Dr Pachauri has managed to get the world to describe him as a Nobel laureate, even though this is simply not true.
Notice, by the way, how many of these fearless free-thinkers prepared to tell emperors they are naked are women. Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist, has steadfastly exposed the myth-making that goes into polar bear alarmism, to the obvious discomfort of the doyens of that field. Jennifer Marohasy of Central Queensland University, by persistently asking why cooling trends recorded at Australian weather stations with no recorded moves were being altered to warming trends, has embarrassed the Bureau of Meteorology into a review of their procedures. Her chapter in The Facts underlines the failure of computer models to predict rainfall.
But male sceptics have scored successes too. There was the case of the paper the IPCC relied upon to show that urban heat islands (the fact that cities are generally warmer than the surrounding countryside, so urbanisation causes local, but not global, warming) had not exaggerated recent warming. This paper turned out—as the sceptic Doug Keenan proved—to be based partly on non-existent data on forty-nine weather stations in China. When corrected, it emerged that the urban heat island effect actually accounted for 40 per cent of the warming in China.
There was the Scandinavian lake sediment core that was cited as evidence of sudden recent warming, when it was actually being used “upside down”—the opposite way the authors of the study thought it should be used: so if anything it showed cooling.
There was the graph showing unprecedented recent warming that turned out to depend on just one larch tree in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.
There was the southern hemisphere hockey-stick that had been created by the omission of inconvenient data series.
There was the infamous “hide the decline” incident when a tree-ring-derived graph had been truncated to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent cooling.
And of course there was the mother of all scandals, the “hockey stick” itself: a graph that purported to show the warming of the last three decades of the twentieth century as unprecedented in a millennium, a graph that the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it six times in its third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC chairman at his press conference. It was a graph that persuaded me to abandon my scepticism (until I found out about its flaws), because I thought Nature magazine would never have published it without checking. And it is a graph that was systematically shown by Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be wholly misleading, as McKitrick recounts in glorious detail in his chapter in The Facts.
Its hockey-stick shape depended heavily on one set of data from bristlecone pine trees in the American south-west, enhanced by a statistical approach to over-emphasise some 200 times any hockey-stick shaped graph. Yet bristlecone tree-rings do not, according to those who collected the data, reflect temperature at all. What is more, the scientist behind the original paper, Michael Mann, had known all along that his data depended heavily on these inappropriate trees and a few other series, because when finally prevailed upon to release his data he accidentally included a file called “censored” that proved as much: he had tested the effect of removing the bristlecone pine series and one other, and found that the hockey-stick shape disappeared.
In March this year Dr Mann published a paper claiming the Gulf Stream was slowing down. This garnered headlines all across the world. Astonishingly, his evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down came not from the Gulf Stream, but from “proxies” which included—yes—bristlecone pine trees in Arizona, upside-down lake sediments in Scandinavia and larch trees in Siberia.
The democratisation of science
Any one of these scandals in, say, medicine might result in suspensions, inquiries or retractions. Yet the climate scientific establishment repeatedly reacts as if nothing is wrong. It calls out any errors on the lukewarming end, but ignores those on the exaggeration end. That complacency has shocked me, and done more than anything else to weaken my long-standing support for science as an institution. I repeat that I am not a full sceptic of climate change, let alone a “denier”. I think carbon-dioxide-induced warming during this century is likely, though I think it is unlikely to prove rapid and dangerous. So I don’t agree with those who say the warming is all natural, or all driven by the sun, or only an artefact of bad measurement, but nor do I think anything excuses bad scientific practice in support of the carbon dioxide theory, and every time one of these scandals erupts and the scientific establishment asks us to ignore it, I wonder if the extreme sceptics are not on to something. I feel genuinely betrayed by the profession that I have spent so much of my career championing.
There is, however, one good thing that has happened to science as a result of the climate debate: the democratisation of science by sceptic bloggers. It is no accident that sceptic sites keep winning the “Bloggies” awards. There is nothing quite like them for massive traffic, rich debate and genuinely open peer review. Following Steven McIntyre on tree rings, Anthony Watts or Paul Homewood on temperature records, Judith Curry on uncertainty, Willis Eschenbach on clouds or ice cores, or Andrew Montford on media coverage has been one of the delights of recent years for those interested in science. Papers that had passed formal peer review and been published in journals have nonetheless been torn apart in minutes on the blogs. There was the time Steven McIntyre found that an Antarctic temperature trend arose “entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together”. Or when Willis Eschenbach showed a published chart had “cut the modern end of the ice core carbon dioxide record short, right at the time when carbon dioxide started to rise again” about 8000 years ago, thus omitting the startling but inconvenient fact that carbon dioxide levels rose while temperatures fell over the following millennia.
Scientists don’t like this lèse majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind based on the evidence. And that is precisely what the non-sceptical side just does not get. Its bloggers are almost universally wearily condescending. They are behaving like sixteenth-century priests who do not think the Bible should be translated into English.
Renegade heretics in science itself are especially targeted. The BBC was subjected to torrents of abuse for even interviewing Bob Carter, a distinguished geologist and climate science expert who does not toe the alarmed line and who is one of the editors of Climate Change Reconsidered, a serious and comprehensive survey of the state of climate science organised by the Non-governmental Panel on Climate Change and ignored by the mainstream media.
Judith Curry of Georgia Tech moved from alarm to mild scepticism and has endured vitriolic criticism for it. She recently wrote:
There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists and advocates. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. The closing of minds on the climate change issue is a tragedy for both science and society.
The distinguished Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson was so frightened for his own family and his health after he announced last year that he was joining the advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation that he withdrew, saying, “It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”
The astrophysicist Willie Soon was falsely accused by a Greenpeace activist of failing to disclose conflicts of interest to an academic journal, an accusation widely repeated by mainstream media.
Clearing the middle ground
Much of this climate war parallels what has happened with Islamism, and it is the result of a similar deliberate policy of polarisation and silencing of debate. Labelling opponents “Islamophobes” or “deniers” is in the vast majority of cases equally inaccurate and equally intended to polarise. As Asra Nomani wrote in the Washington Post recently, a community of anti-blasphemy police arose out of a deliberate policy decision by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation:
and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion … The insults may look similar to Internet trolling and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site. But they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.
Compare that to what happened to Roger Pielke Jr, as recounted by James Delingpole in The Facts. Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and a hugely respected expert on disasters. He is no denier, thinking man-made global warming is real. But in his own area of expertise he is very clear that the rise in insurance losses is because the world is getting wealthier and we have more stuff to lose, not because more storms are happening. This is incontrovertibly true, and the IPCC agrees with him. But when he said this on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website he and Silver were savaged by commenters, led by one Rob Honeycutt. Crushed by the fury he had unleashed, Silver apologised and dropped Pielke as a contributor.
Rob Honeycutt and his allies knew what they were doing. Delingpole points out that Honeycutt (on a different website) urged people to “send in the troops to hammer down” anything moderate or sceptical, and to “grow the team of crushers”. Those of us who have been on the end of this sort of stuff know it is exactly like what the blasphemy police do with Islamophobia. We get falsely labelled “deniers” and attacked for heresy in often the most ad-hominem way.
Even more shocking has been the bullying lynch mob assembled this year by alarmists to prevent the University of Western Australia, erstwhile employers of the serially debunked conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky, giving a job to the economist Bjorn Lomborg. The grounds were that Lomborg is a “denier”. But he’s not. He does not challenge the science at all. He challenges on economic grounds some climate change policies, and the skewed priorities that lead to the ineffective spending of money on the wrong environmental solutions. His approach has been repeatedly vindicated over many years in many different topics, by many of the world’s leading economists. Yet there was barely a squeak of protest from the academic establishment at the way he was howled down and defamed for having the temerity to try to set up a research group at a university.
Well, internet trolls are roaming the woods in every subject, so what am I complaining about? The difference is that in the climate debate they have the tacit or explicit support of the scientific establishment. Venerable bodies like the Royal Society almost never criticise journalists for being excessively alarmist, only for being too lukewarm, and increasingly behave like pseudoscientists, explaining away inconvenient facts.
Making excuses for failed predictions
For example, scientists predicted a retreat of Antarctic sea ice but it has expanded instead, and nowadays they are claiming, like any astrologer, that this is because of warming after all. “Please,” says Mark Steyn in The Facts:
No tittering, it’s so puerile—every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by the El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet …
Or consider this example, from the Royal Society’s recent booklet on climate change:
Does the recent slowdown of warming mean that climate change is no longer happening? No. Since the very warm surface temperatures of 1998 which followed the strong 1997-98 El Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases, with more of the excess heat being stored in the oceans.
You would never know from this that the “it’s hiding in the oceans” excuse is just one unproven hypothesis—and one that implies that natural variation exaggerated the warming in the 1990s, so reinforcing the lukewarm argument. Nor would you know (as Andrew Bolt recounts in his chapter in The Facts) that the pause in global warming contradicts specific and explicit predictions such as this, from the UK Met Office: “by 2014 we’re predicting it will be 0.3 degrees warmer than in 2004”. Or that the length of the pause is now past the point where many scientists said it would disprove the hypothesis of rapid man-made warming. Dr Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said in 2009: “Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” It now has.
Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and insist you’re even more right than before. The Royal Society once used to promise “never to give their opinion, as a body, upon any subject”. Its very motto is “nullius in verba”: take nobody’s word for it. Now it puts out catechisms of what you must believe in. Surely, the handing down of dogmas is for churches, not science academies. Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
The harm to science
I dread to think what harm this episode will have done to the reputation of science in general when the dust has settled. Science will need a reformation. Garth Paltridge is a distinguished Australian climate scientist, who, in The Facts, pens a wise paragraph that I fear will be the epitaph of climate science:
We have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis for society’s respect for scientific endeavour.
And it’s not working anyway. Despite avalanches of money being spent on research to find evidence of rapid man-made warming, despite even more spent on propaganda and marketing and subsidising renewable energy, the public remains unconvinced. The most recent polling data from Gallup shows the number of Americans who worry “a great deal” about climate change is down slightly on thirty years ago, while the number who worry “not at all” has doubled from 12 per cent to 24 per cent—and now exceeds the number who worry “only a little” or “a fair amount”. All that fear-mongering has achieved less than nothing: if anything it has hardened scepticism.
None of this would matter if it was just scientific inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods. They want us to spend a fortune getting emissions down as soon as possible. And they want us to do that even if it hurts poor people today, because, they say, their grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very wealthy) matter more.
Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind their concern. That seems wrong to me.
Matt Ridley is an English science journalist whose books include The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. A member of the House of Lords, he has a website at www.mattridley.co.uk. He declares an interest in coal through the leasing of land for mining.
http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/06/climate-wars-done-science/
-
Good to have you with us once again BBG!
-
UK's MET, hardly a friend to global warming skeptics, are noticing the sun's impact on warming:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/24/uk-met-fastest-decline-solar-activity-last-ice-age/
-
Space and Science Research Corporation
P.O. Box 607841 * Orlando, FL 32860
(407) 667-4757 * www.spaceandscience.net
Government Climate Data Found Unreliable
Monday, June 29, 2015 Press Release 4-2015
9:00 AM EDT
Effective immediately, the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC), a leader in climate prediction, has dropped the US government's ground based global temperature data from its list of reliable sources.
This significant step has been made by the SSRC after extensive review of the US government's ground temperature data and its wide divergence from more reliable sources of climate data, namely satellite systems.
The SSRC has found multiple flaws that it says render the US government's climate data virtually unusable. The SSRC has further observed that the US government and specifically, President Barack Obama, have routinely deceived the people regarding the true status of the Earth's climate, its causes, and where the global climate is heading.
In the past, the SSRC has used five global temperature data sets, three ground based (NOAA, NASA and HADCRUT) and two satellite data sets (RSS, UAH). These data sets are analyzed and an integrated picture of all five allows the SSRC to produce its semi-annual Global Climate Status Report (GCSR). HADCRUT is a combined set from two UK science groups.
As of today, the SSRC will no longer use the ground based data sets of NASA and NOAA because of serious questions about their credibility and allegations of data manipulation to support President Obama's climate change policies. Use of HADCRUT will also be suspended on similar grounds.
According to SSRC President, Mr. John L. Casey, "It is clear that during the administration of President Barack Obama, there has developed a culture of scientific corruption permitting the alteration or modification of global temperature data in a way that supports the myth of manmade global warming. This situation has come about because of Presidential Executive Orders, science agencies producing unreliable and inaccurate climate reports, and also with statements by the President about the climate that are patently false.
For example, the President has said that global warming is not only a global threat but that it is "accelerating" (Georgetown Univ. June 2015). Further, he has said that "2014 was the planet's warmest year on record" (State of the Union Address, January 2015). Both these statements are simply not true. He has also publicly ridiculed those who have correctly stated that there has been no global warming for eighteen years therefore nullifying any need for US government actions to control greenhouse gas emissions for any reason. Climate mendacity seems to be the rule and not the exception in this administration.
"As a result, the US government's apparently politically manipulated ground based temperature data sets can no longer be regarded as credible from a climate analysis standpoint. Until scientific integrity is restored in the White House and the rest of the federal government, we will henceforth be forced to rely solely on satellite measurements.
"Most disturbing of course, is that the President has failed to prepare the country for the difficult times ahead as a result of the ominous changes taking place on the Sun. Not only is the Sun the primary agent of climate change, but it is now cutting back on life giving warmth, bringing a new cold climate period. We will all face a more difficult future, one which the President is ensuring we will be totally unprepared for."
Dr. Ole Humlum, a Professor of Physical Geology at the University of Oslo, Norway and an expert of global glacial activity, is the co-editor of the SSRC's Global Climate Status Report (GCSR). He adds to Mr. Casey's comment with, "It is regrettable to see the politically forced changing of temperature data which will of course lead to the wrong conclusions about the causes and effects of climate change. Recently, NOAA indicated that May 2015 was the warmest May since 1880. Yet, this cannot be verified by satellite measurements which show that May was in the average range for the month over the past ten years. Also, on page 41 of the June 10, 2015 GCSR, we noted that the temperature spread between ground based and satellite based data sets, has now widened to a point that is problematic. The average in degrees Centigrade among the three ground based sets shows a 0.45 C warming in temperature since 1979. For the more reliable satellite systems, it is only 0.17 C warming. This 264% (0.45/0.17) differential is scientifically unacceptable and warrants ending the reliance on the ground based data sets until some independent investigation of the variance resolves the matter. While the use of satellite data only, will limit the depth of quality of the Global Climate Status Report, it will at the same time allow us to still provide the best available climate assessment and climate predictions possible using only the most reliable data."
http://www.spaceandscience.net/id16.html
-
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/06/climate-wars-done-science/
-
I think I remember reading somewhere that burning hydrocarbons may help contend with this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LKTZRjJFdXk
More info here:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/07/60-reduction-in-solar-activity-means-a-5c-drop-by-2030-video/
-
I think I remember reading somewhere that burning hydrocarbons may help contend with this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LKTZRjJFdXk
More info here:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/07/60-reduction-in-solar-activity-means-a-5c-drop-by-2030-video/
My prayers and offerings made to Al Gore finally worked!
-
Some fine "denier" jiu jitsu on display in this video linked here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/22/patrick-j-michaels-testifies-before-the-committee-of-natural-resources-at-the-hearing-an-analysis-of-the-obama-administrations-social-cost-of-carbon/
-
Second post:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/07/arctic-global-warming-research-expedition-put-on-hold-too-much-ice/
-
This will be an interesting series to track. I suspect those with a carbon fetish who bandy about a lot of math will be provided plenty of food for thought:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/25/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-1/
-
Over the years nefarious Big Oil funded denier efforts are often blamed as the reason AGW panic mongering has foundered where the general public is concerned, and indeed tangential relationships between some oil company organ and who paid for some researchers lunch and the like are often cited as the ad hominem reason this or that piece of research should be discounted, wholly ignoring the fact that Big Oil contributes directly to AGW research and those results are considered beyond reproach.
And when the undeniable links between AGW enchanted lawmakers citing stories of doom as reasons to increasingly encroach on American freedom (like your low flow toilet? Looking for a 100 watt lightbulb?) and those who ballyhoo the grim climate scenarios many lawmakers embrace--and provide one sided research funding for--as they ever expand the turf they legislate for putative environmental reasons are pointed out AGW adherents cry "conspiracy theory" despite the fact doomsayers and legislators clearly work hand in glove.
Well here's a little tale making the rounds about Big Oil funded hit squads engineering lighting strikes and such that take out AGW researchers. No doubt the panic mongers will fall all over themselves, uh, denying these conspiracy theories and making it clear they don't support these Big Oil libels, though I'd expect the sky is falling scenarios they keep hawking to actually occur first.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/07/climate-death-squads-funded-by-big-oil-strike-people-with-lightning-hows-that-for-an-ideated-conspiracy/
-
This will be an interesting series to track. I suspect those with a carbon fetish who bandy about a lot of math will be provided plenty of food for thought:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/25/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-1/
I agree that the math and science of CO2 is all quite interesting.
From the article:
(http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png)
I'm not sure how sea ice was increasing back to mean, historic levels while CO2 directly tied to 'warmth' was increasing.
In all the times I've warmed a freezer I've never seen ice cube tray ice increase.
Besides no new warmth in the last 19 years while measured CO2 levels kept increasing, I question the assumptions that fossil fuel addiction is permanent and that negative feedback mechanisms are insignificant.
-
Well at least some of the sky is falling types are being honest about their intentions:
One top Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official bluntly says climate policy is no longer about environmental protection; instead, the next climate summit will negotiate “the distribution of the world’s resources.” UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres goes even further. UN bureaucrats, she says, are undertaking “probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the global economic development model.” [emphasis added]
http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2015/07/25/the-errant-environmental-encyclical-n2030191?newsletterad
-
Averaging tainted averages against other tainted averages:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/03/how-good-is-the-nasa-giss-global-temperature-dataset/
-
Averaging tainted averages against other tainted averages:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/03/how-good-is-the-nasa-giss-global-temperature-dataset/
" GISS homogenization cooled the past to add a spurious warming trend to all but one station."
Maybe we can discuss global warming someday after they provide honest data.
-
Simpler is often better:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/06/pocket-calculator-climate-model-outperforms-billion-dollar-brains/
-
While contending with sundry sky-is-falling types over the years it's been interesting to chart the trajectory of their reliance on faux Nobel Prize winner Michael Mann, who has gone from off cited source to embarrassment that most warmists now avoid mention of.
Some may recall that Mann embarked on a suit against National Review and columnist Mark Steyn. Amusingly, not one amicus brief was filed on Mann's behalf, while Steyn has responded by publishing a book where scientists state their concerns about Mann's "science," a review of which is linked below.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/11/a-review-of-steyns-scathing-new-book-about-michael-mann-a-disgrace-to-the-profession/
-
JoNova, an Australian science blogger, has a post about Mark Steyn's new book up on her site, which includes this great quote that inspired Steyn:
The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year.
Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that’s what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science… It is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst.
More here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/08/a-disgrace-to-the-profession-the-worlds-scientists-own-words-on-mann-and-his-hockey-stick/
-
There's been a fair amount of noise made in the DC metro area about the number of 90 degree plus days, with of course the term "record" being bandied about. It is indeed a record, alas for warmists it's a failure to record accurate data:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/latest-climate-kerfuffle
-
Where, pray tell, did those who claim the tangential peanuts some "deniers" are said to have been paid for their skepticism gone? And how would they respond to this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/22/climate-crisis-inc/
-
Second post.
How folks can speak with authority while basic parameters have yet to be established continues to mystify me.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/08/carbon-accounting-error-reduces-chinas-emissions-tally-by-twice-australias-entire-output/
-
The Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse gets outed once again:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/26/the-cult-of-climate-change-nee-global-warming/
-
Scientists reexamine tree ring proxy data sans "adjustments" and find the resulting measurements do not support the doomstruck anthropomorphic global warming narrative:
http://www.cato.org/blog/tree-ring-temperature-reconstructions-may-have-masked-prior-warmth
-
A FB friend of dubious reliability who occasionally gets something right counters with this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/esper-millennial-cooling-in-context.html
-
Another amusing review of Steyn's book about Mann:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/28/a-detailed-review-of-the-book-a-disgrace-to-the-profession-by-mark-steyn/
-
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/06/22/mark-steyns-newest-attack-on-michael-mann-and-the-hockey-stick/
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+Journal+of+climate+science&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0CBsQgQMwAGoVChMIst_B_szPxwIVAfGACh1dkAiz
-
More icebreakers for a warming planet:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/09/obama-seeking-more-icebreakers-for-arctic-ice-that-is-supposedly-disappearing/
-
Miscount the number of carbon sinks by nearly 2.6 "settled science" trillion? Just when you think you've seen the acme of arrogance and ignorance:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/09/news-2-6-billion-lost-trees-found-whole-world-owes-carbon-credits-to-whole-world/
-
More icebreakers for a warming planet:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/09/obama-seeking-more-icebreakers-for-arctic-ice-that-is-supposedly-disappearing/
Sierra Club Canada: Ice will be gone in 2013.
Al Gore: Ice Free in 2014
BBC: Ice-Free in 2013
Obama, 2015: We need more Ice Breakers!
Funny, BBG, if it wasn't our money they are messing with.
National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder CO September, 2015: Arctic Gaining Ice Last 3 Years.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/arctic-has-gained-hundreds-of-miles-of-ice-the-last-three-years/
Who knew?
(https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ScreenHunter_2977-Sep.-09-07.43.gif)
Green is the ice gain of the last 3 years.
-
Does a nice job of deconstructing AGW silliness.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TCy_UOjEir0
-
No doubt caused be global warming/climate change/something else unfalsifiable:
http://iceagenow.info/2015/09/glaciers-advancing-on-mt-baker-washington-says-renowned-geologist/
-
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058265/us-physics-professor-global-warming-is-the-greatest-and-most-successful-pseudoscientific-fraud-i-have-seen-in-my-long-life/
-
Heh, the gent who authored the letter asking Obama to use RICO laws against climate "deniers" has been shown to have played fast and loose with various payroll policies, including padding a grant with family members. Said letter has since mysteriously disappeared, the Streisand Effect is in full swing, and yet another panic monger has been given hoist on his own petard. More info here:
http://climateaudit.org/2015/09/28/shuklas-gold/
-
:lol: :lol:
-
The RICO instigators are reaping all sorts of fun:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/01/uh-oh-jagdish-shukla-and-the-rico20-has-captured-the-attention-of-congress-and-foia-documents-are-coming-out/
-
Oh dear, a newly understood aerosol producing volatile organic compound process thought to have a cooling effect hasn't been accounted for in any of the settled science models. Lay explanation here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/30/massive_global_cooling_factor_discovered_ahead_of_paris_climate_talks/
Published paper here:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.5b02388
-
Follow up to my previous post. The comments are well worth perusing.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/30/new-discovery-surface-of-the-oceans-affects-climate-more-than-thought/
-
Second post.
Haven't followed all the links yet, but this appears to be a brilliant piece of null hypothesis jiu jitsu.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/03/did-james-hansen-unwittingly-prove-the-null-hypothesis-of-agw/
-
Something I've long believed is that global warming hyperventilation amounts to an appeal to authority with which political class micromanagers demand adherence to their often times extra-constitutional dictates. I think much of the recycling scam is founded on a similar foundation: demanding people sift through and clean their trash for a higher good that is never realized:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-of-recycling.html
-
Something I've long believed is that global warming hyperventilation amounts to an appeal to authority with which political class micromanagers demand adherence to their often times extra-constitutional dictates. I think much of the recycling scam is founded on a similar foundation: demanding people sift through and clean their trash for a higher good that is never realized:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-of-recycling.html
Environmentalism has become a religion.
-
Oct. 9, 2015 6:31 p.m. ET
36 COMMENTS
Elizabeth Warren recently drove out a think-tank scholar for having the nerve to report that a new federal regulation could cost billions, but the progressive censor movement is broad and growing. Advocates of climate regulation are urging the Obama Administration to investigate people who don’t share their views.
Last month George Mason Professor Jagadish Shukla and 19 others signed a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House science adviser John Holdren urging punishment for climate dissenters. “One additional tool—recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse—is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change,” they wrote.
In other words, they want the feds to use a law created to prosecute the mafia against lawful businesses and scientists. In a May op-ed in the Washington Post, Mr. Whitehouse specifically cited Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has published politically inconvenient research on changes in solar radiation.
The RICO threat is intended to shut down debate because it can inflict treble damages upon a defendant. Enacted to stop organized crime and specifically to prosecute individuals tied to loansharking and murder-for-hire, it was long seen as so powerful a tool that the government warned prosecutors to limit its use.
“The demand by Senator Whitehouse and the 20 climate scientists for legal persecution of people whose research on science and policy they disagree with represents a new low in the politicization of science,” says Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry on the Fox News website. She should know, as one of seven academics investigated last winter by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.) for their climate research.
By the way, Mr. Shukla appears to have no problem taking money from the government to support his climate theories. Though it has since been taken down, the letter from the Shukla gang demanding a RICO assault was published on the website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a tax-exempt entity run by Mr. Shukla that the website says has also employed his wife and daughter. The House Science Committee says the outfit has received more than $25 million in federal grants since 2008. House Science Chairman Lamar Smith says the family’s earnings from IGES are “in addition to an annual salary of approximately $314,000 paid to Dr. Shukla by George Mason University.”
When we contacted George Mason to sort out these financial arrangements, the school suggested we contact Mr. Shukla directly. He hasn’t responded to our inquiries.
Meanwhile, Sen. Warren also doesn’t seem to want to live by the rules she enforces on others. Recall that she drove Robert Litan out of the Brookings Institution last week in part because his research on new financial regulations was funded by the asset manager Capital Group—which he clearly disclosed. The website OpenSecrets.org says Ms. Warren has accepted more than $600,000 from the securities and investment industry, including more than $6,000 from Capital Group executives.
Perhaps she’d say it’s fine for her to use her Senate Banking Committee perch to rake in contributions from financial firms because she often disagrees with them. Then again, lawyers and law firms that benefit from her policy interventions have given her more than $2 million. She’s also collected more than $1.3 million from the education industry, which benefits from her campaign to expand education subsidies.
We called Sen. Warren’s office to ask why the Senator isn’t living by the Warren standard. A press aide replied that among other alleged offenses, Mr. Litan had accepted “editorial input” from the sponsors of his research. Yes it’s true, as Mr. Litan has said forthrightly all along, he did accept comments from the sponsor. He has also maintained that the analysis and conclusions were his own and those of co-author Hal Singer.
If accepting “editorial input” is grounds for dismissal, academics or journalists wouldn’t be the only ones preparing resignation letters. Is Sen. Warren now going to tell us that a campaign donor has never made a suggestion to her about government policy?
The strategy of the progressive left is no longer to win public debates, but to forcibly silence their opponents. And to enforce a double standard in the bargain.
-
This is very interesting, albeit mathematically intensive stuff: This paper looks at the likelihood of confirmation bias in papers estimating the social cost of carbon (an important "estimate [self serving fantasy] used to calculate just how far back into the Stone Age we must be cast to appease the climate gods or some such) using statistical techniques including regression analysis that reveal the presence of confirmation bias. Basically, if you show the root cost assumptions are deeply flawed by wishful, if it can be called that, thinking then much of the "science" associated with those assumption are likely deeply biased, too.
http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=822120120111024006081068077007088101052045036029007018028086098122126080069022088096017052125052057022012005125081068106119026118059005053080005028008000127087091019058062072114125065080030123093098002080000021124066000064066101108068016114083031083&EXT=pdf
Abstract
We examine potential selective reporting in the literature on the social cost of carbon (SCC) by conducting a meta-analysis of 809 estimates of the SCC reported in 101 studies. Our results indicate that estimates for which the 95% confidence interval includes zero are less likely to be reported than estimates excluding negative values of the SCC, which might create an upward bias in the literature. The evidence for selective reporting is stronger for studies published in peer-reviewed journals than for unpublished papers. We show that the findings are not driven by the asymmetry of the confidence intervals surrounding the SCC and are robust to controlling for various characteristics of study design and to alternative definitions of confidence intervals. Our estimates of the mean reported SCC corrected for the selective reporting bias are imprecise and range between USD 0 and 130 per ton of carbon at 2010 prices for emission year 2015.
-
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/13/top-physicist-freeman-dyson-obama-picked-wrong-side-climate-change/
-
. . . and writes a long piece about why climate panic is unwarranted:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/16/how-a-liberal-vegan-environmentalist-made-the-switch-from-climate-proponent-to-climate-skeptic/
-
. . . and writes a long piece about why climate panic is unwarranted:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/16/how-a-liberal-vegan-environmentalist-made-the-switch-from-climate-proponent-to-climate-skeptic/
He will learns that leftist apostasy is almost as unpleasant as islamic aspostasy.
-
As though there weren't already enough reasons to loathe the SS:
http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/102115-776750-john-kerry-climate-change-deniers-should-be-barred-from-office.htm
-
Another panic mongering trope laid to rest:
http://www.cato.org/blog/two-millennia-snowfall-accumulation-antarctica?utm_content=buffer85ea6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
-
Over the years I've watched all sorts of alarmists blame nefarious oil companies for any number of ills, always neglecting to note that oil companies contribute to green causes also and then failing to suggest a commensurate level of evil influences on the alarmist side of the house that they forever rattle on about where "deniers" are concerned.
Well here sits those hypocritical habits taken to their illogical extreme:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2986288/paris_attacks_cop21_and_the_war_on_terror.html
-
Oh dear, a NOAA paper rushed through to dispute "the pause" in global warming is being outed by whistleblowers, with Senate subpoenas to follow:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/19/is-noaa-about-to-crack/
-
Much of climate alarmism rests on models that don't lend themselves to reproducible results, usually while also failing to adhere to the historical record when checking to see if they are congruent with it. To my mind this is intentional as it's much easier to hyperventilate about doom when not constrained by the need to produce replicable science.
Though this piece doesn't speak directly to climate alarmism, some of the recommendations herein would do much to address climate panic mongering:
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/11/24/improving-reproducibility-what-can-funders-do-guest-post-by-dorothy-bishop/
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/25/study-demonstrates-a-pattern-in-how-scientists-lie-about-their-data/
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/
BBG, I wonder what percentagbe of scientists know the temperature pattern of the last 10,000 years.
Here is one arctic look at just the last 10k:
(http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/easterbrook_fig41.jpg)
Source: NOAA
Another look, last 12k, here is the Antarctic:
\(http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/vostok-last-12000-years-web.gif)
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/
-
A common sense, middle ground view of global warming. A must read and must read the links article IMO.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/11/30/what_should_we_do_about_climate_change_128876.html
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/
Orwell, the Soviets, now it's modern, western, taxpayer funded science wiping its pages. No, we never said that.
I've been wondering when the Inconvenient Truth movie people would be coming out with their correction...
Don't know about Britain with a jetstream coming out of the Caribbean, but ice and snow is the law of the land here.
-
Obama has witnessed global warming personally, visited "our northern most state". Fish are swimming in the streets of Miami.
8 inches of snow here last night, lakes freezing over. Must be some other globe.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So how much is 400 parts per million. let's visualize the math.
400 per 1,000,000 is the same as 4 parts per 10,000.
Now visualize a 10,000 seat stadium with 4 people in it and 9,996 seats empty.
The alarmists are calling that over-crowded?
Keep in mind that as atmospheric CO2 approaches zero, all life dies, starting at about 150 PPM. And without CO2 and plant life, there is no oxygen production.
Some scientists believe a safer level would be closer to 1000 PPM to sustain life.
http://deforestation.geologist-1011.net/
(http://deforestation.geologist-1011.net/PhanerozoicCO2-Temperatures.png)
Thank God CO2 levels aren't falling any further at this point. The economic externality might be to pay the emitters...
-
Next time a climate alarmist tells you the science is settled show them this and ask if they support Chicago Style sorts of settlements such as those cited here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/08/mark-steyns-illuminating-and-entertaining-testimony-to-the-cruz-hearing-on-climate-today/
-
One half of the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year!?
http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-temperatures-rising-breakneck-speed-155146987.html
-
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/12/17/surfacestations-the-punchline.html
-
. . . masking the warming that must be there. This non-falsifiable science stuff sure makes life easy, what with all data points confirming notions pre-concieved:
http://iceagenow.info/complete-turn-around-now-nasa-says-burning-fossil-fuels-cools-planet/
-
Lots of links in this piece leading various interesting directions:
http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-publication-bias
-
To all the people who say they can feel 1/4 degree per generation of warming or point to a warm day somewhere as evidence of warming, I would like to remind them that that is still too f'ing cold in too many places on this planet.
Minneapolis tore down an indoor stadium last year that served fine to host Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four and World Series twice. Vikings are playing temporarily in the U of M stadium outdoors for a couple of years. So welcome NFL and the Seattle Seahawks to Mpls in January. 33 degrees today with more new snow and water vapor trapping in the 'heat', but sunny and a high barely above zero on Sunday with nothing but manmade CO2 trapping in the heat. 4 'above', as we say, will feel like -12, and that is the high, not the low! The concrete below your feet and seat will also be in the teens below zero from the overnight lows. Coldest game ever in Seattle franchise history. Bradygate officials may want to add some air to the ball if this goes into overtime and darkness. Analysts say the kicking game may be affected. 'ya think?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/nfl-wild-card-weekend-playoffs-seattle-seahawks-and-minnesota-vikings-brutal-cold/54624092
-
Can't mine coal until the unquantifiable is quantified:
http://www.cato.org/blog/you-ought-have-look-use-abuse-social-cost-carbon-taking-down-precautionary-principle-rebound
-
https://www.facebook.com/stolethispage/photos/a.327937670613947.75523.327615240646190/981459551928419/?type=3&theater
-
https://badscidebunked.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/your-worst-day-ever-david-avocados-himalayan-salt-debunked/
-
The unanimity demanded by those who embrace the "climate science" mantle never ceases to astound. More so as established disciplines under less political pressure to produce a homogenized product are finding that much of their peer reviewed research proves to be less than replicable:
http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/19/broken-science
-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/saturday-silliness-wind-turbine-photo-of-the-year/
-
This has to have something to do with 'global warming' and 'climate change', when did we start naming snowstorms?
http://www.weather.com/storms/winter/news/winter-storm-jonas-latest-storm-reports-blizzard
-
Heh:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/30/saturday-satire-welcome-to-the-new-era-of-climate/
-
Record Feb 2 snowstorm in Minneapolis. 1st snowfall ever in Okinawa. Or as alarmist funded scientists would say, whatever.
http://www.startribune.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I92uWkQWTHo&list=TLF9Ea78NUPH0wMjAyMjAxNg
(We are in South Florida this week where the ocean levels still look manageable.)
NOAA central global warming claim debunked:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/02/scientist-ruthlessly-debunks-one-of-nasas-central-climate-claims/
When a theory contradicts the facts” you need to change the theory, Christy said. “The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board.”
-
This won't surprise anyone except those so enamored with their doomstruck pronouncements that they believe any tactic is justified when trumpeting their beliefs, but someone has taken a look at whether a lack of neutrality correlates with the embrace of activism. Anyone who has watched environmental hysteria unfold knows that answer already:
http://www.cato.org/blog/do-scientists-suppress-uncertainty-climate-change-debate
-
This material never ends:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● “Snow and ice expected to cause chaos for rush hour commuters.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/snow-and-ice-expected-to-cause-chaos-for-rush-hour-commuters-a6878556.html
—Headline, London Independent, yesterday.
● “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/
—Headline, London Independent, March 20th, 2000.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
-
By choosing a different starting date and intermixing the urban heat island effect, NOAA press releases find one half of a degree of warming over 37 years while their more accurate data show no warming over 60 years.
(http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/2016-03-07083633-1-768x692.png)
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/03/noaa-radiosonde-data-shows-no-warming-for-58-years/
Read the longer story. These people take Billions in taxpayer money just to commit a fraud on us.
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But [to show warming] they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming. (see graphs)
[NOAA data] shows that the earth’s atmosphere has not warmed at all since the late 1950’s.
The omission of this data from the NOAA report, is just their latest attempt to defraud the public. NOAA’s best data shows no warming for 60 years. But it gets worse. The graph in the NOAA report shows about 0.5C warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original published data shows no warming during that period.
Due to Urban Heat Island Effects, the NOAA surface data shows nearly one degree warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original radiosonde data showed no warming during that time. Global warming theory is based on troposphere warming, which is why the radiosonde data should be used by modelers – instead of the UHI contaminated surface data.
NOAA’s original published radiosonde data showed no net troposphere warming from 1958 to 2010, when the data set ended.
-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html
Some of the criticism struck me as curmudgeonly crankiness, but on the whole a fair point is made.
100% organic snake oil.
http://www.realclear.com/funny/2015/10/30/reasons_to_never_step_inside_a_whole_foods_again_12295.html
-
I can't believe this, Climate forecasts may be flawed...
https://in.news.yahoo.com/climate-forecasts-may-flawed-says-170007812.html
Predictions of unprecedented rainfall extremes in the 20th century driven by global warming turned out wrong, a study said Wednesday, casting doubt on methods used to project future trends.
A massive trawl of Northern Hemisphere rainfall data for the last 1,200 years revealed there had been more dramatic wet-dry weather extremes in earlier, cooler centuries before humans set off fossil fuel-driven global warming.
This is problematic, said a study in the journal Nature, as the same data models used to anticipate that global warming would cause record rainfall extremes in the 1900s, are the basis for projections of things to come.
"It might be more difficult than often assumed to project into the future," the study's lead author Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University told AFP of the findings.
--------------
Who knew?
-
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/09/conservatives-will-always-lose-climate-change/
-
http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-crowd-ignores-a-scientific-fraud-1460758426
-
Earth is on brink of a sixth mass extinction, scientists say, and it’s humans’ fault
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22/the-earth-is-on-the-brink-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction-scientists-say-and-its-humans-fault/
-----------------------------------------------------
Al Gore: Polar Ice Gone in 5 Years, 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI
John Kerry claims the Arctic will be ice-free by summer 2013
PoliticFact rates this "Barely True" in 2009. Huh?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/02/john-kerry/kerry-claims-arctic-will-be-ice-free-2013/
In 2011, PolitiFact changed the name of Barely True to Mostly False. Huh??
Doug rates all of this as pathologically, reality denyingly false, then and now.
-
Who knew these predictions would all be false. Probably everyone who knew the models were wrong, like the designers of the models and the manipulators of the data.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/gore-ten-years-later.php
GORE, TEN YEARS LATER - Steven Hayward, Powerline
Hey, kids—did you realize it’s the tenth anniversary of Al Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Prize winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth? Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller has gone back and checked on some of Gore’s near-term predictions and found—spoiler alert!—that lots of them look pretty silly now:
One of the first glaring claims Gore makes is about Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He claims Africa’s tallest peak will be snow-free “within the decade.” Gore shows slides of Kilimanjaro’s peak in the 1970s versus today to conclude the snow is disappearing.
Well, it’s been a decade and, yes, there’s still snow on Kilimanjaro year-round. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure this out. One can just look at recent photos posted on the travel website TripAdvisor.com.
In 2014, ecologists actually monitoring Kilimanjaro’s snowpack found it was not even close to being gone. It may have shrunk a little, but ecologists were confident it would be around for the foreseeable future.
“There are ongoing several studies, but preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” Imani Kikoti, an ecologist at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park, told eturbonews.com.
Actually that one was easy to knock back at the time, since there’s good data showing the slow retreat of Kilimanjaro’s snow going back well into the 19th century, before Ford and GM built their first SUVs.
Bastasch goes through several more Gore howlers, but I’ll just add one of my own from recent studies. Gore made much of Greenland’s ice sheet melting so rapidly you’d think the continent was a grilled cheese sandwich in a pizza oven. Science magazine reports this week that the interior of Greenland’s enormous ice mass appears to be . . . completely stable. Here’s the University of Illinois’s press release about it yesterday:
Study finds ice isn’t being lost from Greenland’s interior
Scientists studying data from the top of the Greenland ice sheet have discovered that during winter in the center of the world’s largest island, temperature inversions and other low-level atmospheric phenomena effectively isolate the ice surface from the atmosphere — recycling water vapor and halting the loss or gain of ice. A team of climate scientists made the surprising discovery from three years of data collected at Summit Camp, an arid, glaciated landscape 10,500 feet above sea level in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.
“This is a place, unlike the rest of the ice sheet, where ice is accumulating,” says Max Berkelhammer, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Berkelhammer is first author on the study, reported in Science Advances, an open-access online publication of the journal Science.
For fans of classic films, here’s my 46-minute rebuttal of Gore’s movie, though it is way out of date now, since it was done before climategate, before the duration of the temperature pause became evident, and before the numerous recent studies concluding that most of the UN IPCC computer models overestimate climate sensitivity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seGyLIrH1-4
And here’s the seven-minute update I did one year later—complete with a Bruce Jenner reference!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nITPIK6cZtE
-
Doug,
I really don't know who to believe.
Many other places in the news claim just the opposite.
I recently read something about Kilimanjaro's ice cap is clearly disappearing though maybe not as fast as Gore had us believe
Same is true for Greenland.
I have different sources making different claims. So how the heck can I possibly have any clue?
-
Doug,
I really don't know who to believe.
Many other places in the news claim just the opposite.
I recently read something about Kilimanjaro's ice cap is clearly disappearing though maybe not as fast as Gore had us believe
Same is true for Greenland.
I have different sources making different claims. So how the heck can I possibly have any clue?
There is warming and there is human caused warming. The real warming started at the peak of the last ice age. It started hundreds of years before the industrial age' and the hockey stick, sharp uptick of late theory has been proven false. The current peak has held 18 years without warming even though CO2 levels are still increasing. We had a cooling in the 1970s too. Which means other factors are coming into play. Factors not factored into the models.
Agreed, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and fossil fuel combustion releases it. Therefore some warming effect comes from man. That CO2 came from decomposed plants, fossil fuels, which in turn took it from the atmosphere where it is being returned, not an unnatural process. These 'high levels' of CO2 we are experiencing measure at 0.4 parts per thousand, not exactly smothering us. And what is there is enhancing plant life, greening the planet and producing more oxygen for the animal life. Again, not an unnatural or unprecedented cycle.
The models and forecasters have been off by a factor of about 7 fold. They don't account for negative feedback effects, and were skewed by the lying and manipulation of the data. Alarmist politicians, Al Gore, etc. get it wrong by a factor of maybe 100-fold.
None of the proposed solutions solve anything, they just cause poverty.
Nuclear is safe and CO2-free, it could power the whole grid and is being ignored, which means no one is serious about this anyway.
Do you know any climate scientists who refuse travel or work summers without air conditioning?
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/09/facts-clear-astrophysicist-soon-of-wrongdoing-while-indicting-journalists-covering-climate-debate/
-
This guy and his family have made out like bandits with taxpayer funding of his climate change institute. Talk about cashing in on government programs. Whole family are living like 1 %. Even tax deduction for charity sent to India for Gods sake:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424875/climate-extremist-taxpayer-funded-ian-tuttle
-
No Need to Panic About Global Warming
There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.
January 27, 2012
Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Corbis
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
Related Video
Princeton physics professor William Happer on why a large number of scientists don't believe that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.
A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.
If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.
-
What about the theory that the oceans may be absorbing the additional heat?
Or the melting of the glaciers?
I am not disagreeing only I cannot make up my mind as to what to think.
-
WE kept hearing how the antarctic ice is melting (maybe it is in the West) but much less about how it is expanding in the East. The net effect was as far as i was able to read kept in the dark . Apparently the net is that Antarctic ice is expanding:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0706/Scientists-may-have-solved-a-mystery-Why-is-Antarctic-sea-ice-growing
-
We kept hearing how the antarctic ice is melting (maybe it is in the West) but much less about how it is expanding in the East. The net effect was as far as i was able to read kept in the dark . Apparently the net is that Antarctic ice is expanding:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0706/Scientists-may-have-solved-a-mystery-Why-is-Antarctic-sea-ice-growing
Arctic ice is (was) contracting because of global warming. Antarctic ice is expanding because of global warming.
The oceans are rising because of the (formerly) melting Arctic ice. The only ocean not rising is the Arctic Ocean.
Human caused global warming is from the release of CO2 into the atmosphere - CO2 that naturally came from the atmosphere.
Liberals are (were) concerned about the black teenage unemployment rate. Minimum wage laws (and open border policies) worsen the black teenage employment rate.
Black lives matter is a great liberal cause. An innocent black baby is four times more likely to be aborted than a white baby. Whatever.
Liberalism is not really a deep or consistent thought experiment.
-
And every ill now to man, the world is now due to global warming now know as climate change one of our biggest industries to make a fortune from. Just ask Al when he is not chasing massage therapists around a cubicle like a wolf in heat.
-
And every ill now to man, the world is now due to global warming now know as climate change one of our biggest industries to make a fortune from. Just ask Al when he is not chasing massage therapists around a cubicle like a wolf in heat.
Warming temps in Antarctica cause more snowfall. But not elsewhere? Warming doesn't cause more melting too?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Record-snowfall-disproves-global-warming.htm
But snow cover mitigates warming trend.
Antarctic Ice hits new record maximum:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
The area of North America covered in snow has increased in the last 30 years. Who knew?
(https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_figures/snow-cover-figure1-2015.png)
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/snow-ice/snow-cover.html
You heard about this where else, NY Times, MSNBC, nowhere??
CO2 emissions are continuous. Warming is not. Is there something else going on here?
Not just the science and the media are biased, google search results too!
The "ever-thickening blanket wrapped around the planet" consists of CO2 levels of one part per 2500, a 0.0004 concentration of atmospheric CO2, just slightly above the minimum in earth's history.
If CO2 levels were falling continuously instead, plant life, and eventually all life, would cease to exist.
-
I cannot even browse through my medical readings without being inundated with Climate Change propaganda. We are even advised to discuss it with all our patients! What are these people kidding me? I should discuss climate change on patient's health? Oh you have a cough? Must be climate change. You have a rash? Must be climate change. You are depressed? Must be the rainy day we had which is of course due to climate change. You are constipated? Also climate change. Allergies bad this year? Well we know that is man made. You are overweight. Obviously that is because the Republicans are blocking a soda sugar tax:
https://www.acpinternist.org/archives/2016/07/presidents.htm
-
AUTHOR: KATIE M. PALMER SCIENCE
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 07.29.16.07.29.16
COOL CATCHPHRASE, HILLARY, BUT SCIENCE ISN’T ABOUT BELIEF
Hillary Clinton pauses while speaking during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia on July 28, 2016.DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
ON THURSDAY NIGHT, Hillary Clinton made history when she became the first woman to lead a major presidential ticket. In a speech filled with reminders of her experience and her plans for reform, one remark stood out: “I believe in science!” she said, chuckling. “I believe climate change is real, and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good paying clean energy jobs.”
Delegates filling the convention hall in Philadelphia roared in approval. Pockets of Twitter, too. Just as quickly, though, reactions turned cynical: How awful it is, in this day and age, that a presidential candidate must say she believes in science? In the retelling, Clinton’s laugh became a nod to the absurdity of the moment.
Yes, it’s absurd that a presidential candidate has to explicitly declare an allegiance to science. But the problem with what Clinton said runs deeper. Science is not a philosophy or a religion. It is a method—imperfect, yet powerful—of testing and accumulating knowledge. It’s not something you believe. You can believe that the scientific method is a good way of amassing knowledge. You can use that knowledge to shape policy.
Yet that’s not how American politics—especially in this election—talk about science. “When people say ‘Do you believe in climate change or global warming,’ that is the wrong framing,” says Cristine Russell, a veteran science reporter now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Science is not a belief system.”
Of course, the word “science” has come to represent much more than the scientific method. More than ever, it shapes American culture and is a subculture unto itself. To be giddily fascinated and informed by the discoveries of neuroscientists and physicists and climate scientists is a privilege. When Clinton says she believes in science, she’s using the language of a community, fostered by the Internet, that builds cachet out of scientific curiosity. A love for the products of science has become cultural currency.
It has also become political shorthand. Both US political parties have adopted positions on issues informed by science, and as those issues have become more divisive and the positions more extreme, some people have characterized them as either “pro-science” or “anti-science.” But of course the platforms don’t actually have anything to do with science as a practice. Both sides may choose different evidence to rely on, or interpret that evidence differently. At the extremes, some groups may ignore evidence entirely.
Nowhere is that divide more apparent than climate change. The science here has reached all-but-inescapable conclusions. Some policymakers, primarily liberal, have formed policies that depend upon those conclusions. Others, mostly conservative, have made policies that dispute those conclusions (for all kinds of different reasons). But to the public, that divide now gets framed in terms of acceptance and denial—states of belief. “The idea that you can believe your own facts is an unfortunate consequence of the whole climate denial movement,” says Russell.
And now the Democrats have adopted those same words and tactics. Theparty platform echoes Clinton’s belief framework: “Democrats believe that climate change poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and future.” In a short film shown at the convention on Wednesday, director James Cameron explicitly focused on an emotional message about the dangers of a warming climate to target swing voters.
Clinton’s line suggests that she’s at least in on the joke. It was a laugh line—offset by a pause, thrown out in a mocking, sing-song voice: “And I-I-I believe in science!” She’s intentionally using emotional rhetoric, both as a jab at her opponents and a signal to supporters.
But even if Clinton understands how silly it is to conflate belief in science with belief in the products of the scientific method, her line is still problematic. Clinton’s target is Donald Trump, who has claimed that climate change is a hoax—that the evidence for it isn’t real, or true. But Republicans could hear her tone as mocking not their candidate, but them.
People who remain unconvinced that humans are a significant contributor to climate change are not necessarily anti-science (whatever that means). Many have simply grown distrustful of climate scientists and their relationship with the government. They’re not wrong to be skeptical. Science in its purest form is the best method humans have yet come up with to apprehend the world around them. But it’s humans who execute it—people with hopes and dreams and fears. To deny the potential for bias is to marginalize a huge number of potential voters who have doubts, or who hope scientists describing an impending apocalypse are wrong.
Clinton did not say that she believes in science unequivocally—she likely understands the imperfections in the research she uses to guide her policy positions. But by playing the science card for laughs, she risks alienating the voters she’s trying to attract. In this narrative, not only does Clinton become the candidate of the “pro-science” voters, but she validates the opposition of people who think science is just another way of knowing.
To reinforce the idea of science as something you can believe or not believe, to force Americans into “pro-science” and “anti-science” camps, robs science of its power. It changes the practice of science from a method for understanding into a dangerous political weapon. And in the end, that makes science smaller. At its best and most objective, science can heal divides, answer questions, solve problems. It’s not a talking point.
http://www.wired.com/2016/07/cool-catchphrase-hillary-science-isnt-belief/
-
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is an American scientific agency within the United States Department of Commerce focused on the conditions of the oceans and the atmosphere.)
Raw data, actual data (Science):
(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-6.15.56-AM.png)
(http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-6.49.44-AM.png)
'Global warming' / 'climate change' (as measured in July temperatures in the US) was 0.02 degrees Celsius since the beginning of the Industrial age and 0.00 since 1896. The human caused component was considerably less, less than any margin of error and mathematically rounds to zero.
Adjusted data (Science deniers?):
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-6.16.18-AM.png)
After tweaking the data by often more than a degree they still show less than one degree of warming in Celsius since the beginning of the industrial age.
NOAA adjusts all pre-2000 data lower and all recent data increasingly higher in order to draw their conclusion:
(http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-6.22.29-AM.png)
A good measure of how fraudulent the NOAA adjustments are, is the percent of days over 90 degrees. July 1936, 1901, 1934, 1931, 1930 and 1954 all had more days over 90 degrees than 2012 did, yet NOAA shows 2012 as the hottest. The frequency of 90 degree days in the US has declined since the start of records in 1895. July 2016 (NASA’s hottest July ever) was almost exactly average since 1895.
(http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-6.29.58-AM_thumb.png)
A good indicator of hottest years is the number of July daily maximum temperature records. The 1930’s were much hotter than any recent years.
(http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Screen-Shot-2016-08-27-at-7.19.59-AM_thumb.png)
The NY Times USED TO report this stuff:
(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/09/CpqdPWXUAAAy-qu.jpg)
Which group has the science deniers?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/09/will-2016-be-the-hottest-year-on-record.php
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/noaa_adjustments_increase_us_july_warming_by_1000/
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/08/noaa-adjustments-increase-us-july-warming-by-1000/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/tavg/1/7/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000&trend=true&trend_base=10&firsttrendyear=1895&lasttrendyear=2016
-
Doug.... well done. :-D
I love it.
To me, man's understanding of nature pales in comparison to the eternity of perfection exhibited by the system of nature. Everything that exists, that has ever existed, or that ever will exist, was meant by nature to exist or die; yet, mankind, armed with 70 years of personal knowledge, and perhaps two centuries of collective, "advanced" knowledge, thinks that he knows how things "should be."
The Rhinos never even existed before they became "extinct." Some people need to think about that for a moment, because they clearly don't get the concept... Gore and Kerry being amongst them.
-
DDF, Thank you. Isn't it amazing that 99% of the warming comes from agenda-paid 'scientists' adjusting the real temperatures.
Who is denying the data?
-
DDF, Thank you. Isn't it amazing that 99% of the warming comes from agenda-paid 'scientists' adjusting the real temperatures.
Who is denying the data?
You're welcome. Great post...interesting.
-and-
The ones making money off of it, or the new age hippies coming out of school that want you to adhere to their vegan, birkenstock wearing, moral code. :-D :-D :-D
-
WikiLeaks Exposes Podesta-Steyer Climate McCarthyism
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441438/wikileaks-john-podesta-silenced-climate-change-dissent
How the Center for American Progress campaigned to suppress speech
The latest WikiLeaks dump contains plenty of insider dirt on John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the tawdriest story to be exposed by Podesta’s pilfered e-mails is the bragging by an employee of ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress, about how they got Roger Pielke Jr.’s scalp.
A July 2014 e-mail from Judd Legum, an editor at ThinkProgress, to billionaire Democratic climate activist (and former coal-mine investor) Tom Steyer exposes the climate-change McCarthyism that the Left — and its myriad allies in the liberal media — use to discredit or silence anyone who doesn’t adhere to the orthodoxy of the climate catastrophists.
In the e-mail, Legum boasted to Steyer about how ThinkProgress had silenced Pielke by preventing him from publishing at Nate Silver’s then-new website, fivethirtyeight.com, on the issue of climate change. Legum was also asking Steyer, indirectly, for more money. Steyer and Podesta both sit on the board of the Center for American Progress. Between 2008 and 2014, Steyer gave the Center for American Progress some $3.85 million. I’ll come back to the specifics of that e-mail shortly.
First, some background. Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001, holds degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science. He has authored or co-authored seven books. He has won several awards for his academic work. For about two decades, he was a prolific writer and speaker on climate issues. In 2013, he testified before Congress and declared that there is “exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.” During that same testimony, he said that global weather-related losses have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP. He went on, saying that there were also no observable increases in floods, tornadoes, or droughts.
Pielke’s work was backed up by data and, in many cases, by the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that didn’t matter to Podesta’s attack dogs at ThinkProgress. Long before his congressional testimony, Pielke had been the subject of a years-long smear campaign led by ThinkProgress’s Joe Romm. In fact, Romm had what can only be described as an obsession with Pielke. In a recent Twitter posting, Pielke wrote: “Propaganda works: I count more than 160 articles at the Center for American Progress trashing me over the years.”
A review of those articles shows that the vast majority of them were written by Romm. In reply to Romm’s increasingly shrill attacks, Pielke was civil, even gentlemanly. In 2010, Pielke challenged Romm to a public debate — in Romm’s hometown, at a date and venue of his choosing — offering to contribute up to $10,000 to the winner’s favorite charity. Romm, to his eternal discredit, refused. Furthermore, on his blog, Romm routinely deleted comments he didn’t like, including those that called him out for ducking Pielke’s challenge to debate.
I have followed Pielke’s work for years. In 2007, while editing Energy Tribune, I published an interview with his father, Roger Pielke Sr., who is also a climate scientist. In 2009, I published an interview with the younger Pielke on the same subject. I find both of them to be careful observers and thoughtful writers. Last year, I reviewed one of Roger Jr.’s books for The Weekly Standard.
This week I spoke to Pielke by phone. Asked for his initial reaction to the ThinkProgress e-mail, he replied, “I was just a professor with a blog. I had no funding. Really? They are going to go brag to a billionaire to shut down a professor with a blog? If that’s the case, I guess I was doing some pretty good stuff.”
Pielke went on to say that Romm had waged a “campaign of personal destruction” against him. “Nothing less than removing my voice from the public space was acceptable.” That campaign was carried out by Romm and other members of the Green Slime Machine at liberal media outlets like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post. Among other things, those outlets labeled Pielke a “disinformer” and “climate confusionist.” They did so even though Pielke’s views on climate are decidedly mainstream: He favors a carbon tax, increased energy efficiency, and a global effort at “removing incentives for fossil fuels and creating incentives for carbon neutral sources, including both nuclear and renewable.”
ThinkProgress’s smear efforts reached an apogee in 2014, after Pielke published a single article on fivethirtyeight.com — the website Silver had launched with the goal of using data and statistics to inform a new style of journalism. Pielke’s article addressed the inflation-adjusted cost of hurricanes. “I made the fairly mundane but obvious observation that disaster costs are not increasing because of extreme weather events,” Pielke said. ‘I made the fairly mundane but obvious observation that disaster costs are not increasing because of extreme weather events,’ Pielke said.
Nevertheless, Pielke’s article met a storm of protest, led by the bloggers at ThinkProgress, who published not one but two articles on the same day (March 19, 2014) that Pielke’s article was published on fivethirtyeight.com. The first person quoted in both of ThinkProgress’s articles was none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the originators of the much-disputed “hockey stick” graph. It is worth noting that four years ago this month (October 22, 2012, to be precise), Mann sued National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg, and Mark Steyn for defamation. That litigation is still pending. (For Steyn’s paint-blistering take on Mann, the lawsuit, and climate McCarthyism, read his December 15, 2015, testimony before a U.S. Senate committee.)
And it wasn’t just ThinkProgress. Immediately after Pielke’s article appeared on fivethirtyeight.com, the Green Slime Machine went into overdrive. The Daily Kos expressed dismay that “Silver would hire as one of his science writers the egregious purveyor of disinformation on climate change, Roger Pielke, Jr.” Pielke was also trashed by writers at Slate, Earth Island Journal, and the Guardian. Rather than stand behind Pielke, Silver fired him. Silver didn’t even favor him with a phone call. Pielke told me that two and a half years later, Silver still hasn’t contacted him. “You can’t have a real journalistic enterprise if your only goal is to be popular,” Pielke told me.
Now, back to WikiLeaks. In Legum’s e-mail to Steyer, he wrote that “it’s fair to say” that without ThinkProgress’s continual trashing of Pielke and his work, “Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.” Legum continued, “He would be providing important cover for climate deniers backed by Silver’s very respected brand. But because of our work, he is not. I don’t think there is another site on the internet having this kind of impact on the climate debate.” Legum concluded his note by writing, “Thanks for your support of this work. Looking forward to doing even more in the coming months.”
So there you have it: One of Podesta’s highest-profile operatives is bragging to one of America’s richest climate activists that he and his team have silenced a prominent academic for the sin of disagreeing with Mann and other climatologists. ThinkProgress, Romm, and their fellow travelers denigrate anyone who might be getting money from the “wrong” funders. But when it comes to soliciting big bucks from Steyer — and then bragging about how effective you are at defaming people on the other side — well, that’s okay because, you know, climate change.
The WikiLeaks story about Pielke has, predictably, been ignored by the liberal media. No stories about it have appeared in the Daily Kos, Huffington Post, or Media Matters. It doesn’t fit their narrative. A few pieces about the Podesta-WikiLeaks story have appeared in conservative outlets, include a recent piece published on Breitbart by the British journalist James Delingpole, who got it exactly right. He wrote: “If the ‘science’ is as settled as it frequently claims, why is it necessary to orchestrate attacks on any scientist who speaks even slightly out of turn?”
Since the fivethirtyeight.com uproar, Pielke has quit publishing about climate change. He’s gone on to become a world-leading expert on sports and doping. He now heads the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, which is housed within the university’s athletics department. He has more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and is an active, maybe rabid, tweeter. “I’m having a blast,” he told me. Working on climate change, he said, “you wake up, it’s the same people arguing about the same stuff. In sports, you have no idea what idea you will be writing about. . . . There’s so much going on. There’s so much upheaval.”
What lessons did he learn from his stint in the climate-change discussion? He replied that the debate is “almost religious in its intensity.” Instead of having a rational discussion about the best ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has become solely “about power, about who gets to speak and whose voices are deemed legitimate.” The smear campaign against him by Romm and ThinkProgress was designed “to make public speech costly.”
In a concluding thought, he told me: “After all this, I’m a big supporter of academic tenure. I have no doubt that if I didn’t have tenure, I’d be doing landscaping now.” — Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441438/wikileaks-john-podesta-silenced-climate-change-dissent
-
It's looking like a white christmas as seen from my living room this am on a beautiful day of roughly -10 F. Anecdotal proof of ... nothing.
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/2b8465ce-26b4-43bc-8aea-380cb9038787_zpsfnx9vdgx.jpg)
Probably looks a lot like photos I've posted other years. Winters just keep coming, in spite of what you read. Forecast is for below 0 C. highs and lows for the next 3 months. Much like 100 years ago.
Alarmists only claim less than one degree warming per century. Skeptics point out 90% of that is in the 'adjustments' made by the alarmists.
If it did warm one or two more 10ths of a degree before we got off fossil fuels and the plants all had a nice increase of one more parts per 10,000 of CO2 to blossom and produce oxygen for us to all breathe, well that's not all bad!
-
New study suggest oceans are warmer than previously measured due to inaccurate measurement techniques:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/study-just-blew-hole-one-204337230.html
Here is the new study:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601207.full
This definitely reminds me of the endless meta analyses we see more and more of in medicine trying to splice every pubic hair down the middle to find some sort of answer.
I have no idea if this new study is legitimate or not, but I am very suspicious of much of what I read in medical literature as to the results, interpretation or usually even the significance of it other then it makes names for those who get their article in the journal and the journal acts as though any of it means anything to the real world individual patient care .
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
Might I second the idea that this is an important piece.
The skeptics have been asking the alarmists to explain the 18, 19 and nearly 20 year pause in global warming that violates and invalidates all of their models.
In response we this this false, duped, manipulated report put out by presumably esteemed scientists "based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data".
And they allege 2016 was the hottest year on record without saying how much hotter, what was the margin of error in the sampling, or whether they were using actual or 'adjusted' data to reach that unverified conclusion.
From the article:
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.
His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.
-
Interesting that Michael Mann's famous hockey stick of global temperature change charts was proven false 2 years before the release of "An Inconvenient Truth".
"This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not."
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/403256/global-warming-bombshell/
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/fallupdate04/update.fall04.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkDK2mZlOo
MIT Technology Review
Sustainable Energy
Global Warming Bombshell
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
by Richard Muller October 15, 2004
Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.
But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
The net result: the principal component will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not.
McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, youll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis. I emphasize the bug in their PCA program simply because it is so blatant and so easy to understand. Apparently, Mann and his colleagues never tested their program with the standard Monte Carlo approach, or they would have discovered the error themselves. Other and different criticisms of the hockey stick are emerging (see, for example, the paper by Hans von Storch and colleagues in the September 30 issue of Science).
Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true–but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed–and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitricks only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish.
How does this bombshell affect what we think about global warming?
It certainly does not negate the threat of a long-term global temperature increase. In fact, McIntyre and McKitrick are careful to point out that it is hard to draw conclusions from these data, even with their corrections. Did medieval global warming take place? Last month the consensus was that it did not; now the correct answer is that nobody really knows. Uncovering errors in the Mann analysis doesnt settle the debate; it just reopens it. We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.
If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously–that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small–then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.
A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one–if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.
-
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg33227#msg33227
DougMacG
Environmental issues - re: Sea Levels
« Reply #193 on: November 25, 2009, 11:34:16 PM »
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5076322.stm
Arctic dips as global waters rise
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC
Arctic sea level has been falling by a little over 2mm a year - a movement that sets the region against the global trend of rising waters.
A Dutch-UK team made the discovery after analysing radar altimetry data gathered by Europe's ERS-2 satellite.
It is well known that the world's oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results.
----------------------------------
"Indian Ocean - sea levels falling
In 2003, Nils-Axel Mörner and his colleagues (see below) pub-
lished a well-documented paper showing that sea levels in the
Maldives have fallen substantially – fallen! – in the last 30 years.
I find it curious that we haven't heard about this.
"The Maldives in the central Indian Ocean consist of some 1,200
individual islands grouped in about 20 larger atolls," says Mörner.
In-as-much as the islands rise only three to seven feet above sea
level, they have been condemned by the IPCC to flooding in the
near future.
Mörner disagrees with this scenario. "In our study of the coastal
dynamics and the geomorphology of the shores," writes Mörner,
"we were unable to detect any traces of a recent sea level rise.
On the contrary, we found quite clear morphological indications
of a recent fall in sea level."
Mörner’s group found that sea levels stood about 60 cm higher
around A.D. 1150 than today, and more recently, about 30 cm
higher than today."
- http://www.iceagenow.com/Indian_Ocean_sea_levels_are_falling.htm
Update, now rising: https://phys.org/news/2016-09-indian-ocean-sea.html
Once again, why aren't these clear, cause and effect measurements in a straight line with CO2?
-----
Besides drought and flood, warming and cooling, not surprisingly, the United Nations also says that climate change also causes prostitution:
"The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said."
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/177346/climate-change-pushes-poor-women-to-prostitution-dangerous-work
----------
Arctic update: Ocean rising 2.2 mm/yr +or- 1.1.
an improved version of the Arctic Ocean sea level record for the region 66°N–82°N covering the period 1993–2015. The dataset was modified to account for an unknown error...
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmars.2016.00076/full
-
Published before the advent of adjusted data.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/us/us-data-since-1895-fail-to-show-warming-trend.html
New York Times
U.S.
U.S. Data Since 1895 Fail To Show Warming Trend
By PHILIP SHABECOFF, Special to the New York Times
Published: January 26, 1989
WASHINGTON, Jan. 25— After examining climate data extending back nearly 100 years, a team of Government scientists has concluded that there has been no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period.
While the nation's weather in individual years or even for periods of years has been hotter or cooler and drier or wetter than in other periods, the new study shows that over the last century there has been no trend in one direction or another.
The study, made by scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was published in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. It is based on temperature and precipitation readings taken at weather stations around the country from 1895 to 1987.
Dr. Kirby Hanson, the meteorologist who led the study, said in a telephone interview that the findings concerning the United States do not necessarily ''cast doubt'' on previous findings of a worldwide trend toward warmer temperatures, nor do they have a bearing one way or another on the theory that a buildup of pollutants is acting like a greenhouse and causing global warming. He said that the United States occupies only a small percentage of Earth's surface and that the new findings may be the result of regional variations.
Readings taken by other scientists have suggested a significant warming worldwide over the last 100 years. Dr. James E. Hansen, director of National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, has reported that average global temperatures have risen by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit in this century and that the average temperatures in the 1980's are the highest on record.
Dr. Hansen and other scientists have said that that there is a high degree of probability that this warming trend is associated with the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other industrial gases that absorb and retain radiation.
But other scientists, while agreeing with this basic theory of a greenhouse effect, say there is no convincing evidence that a pollution-induced warming has already begun.
Dr. Michael E. Schlesinger, an atmospheric scientist at Oregon State University who studies climate models, said there is no inconsistency between the data presented by the NOAA team and the greenhouse theory. But he said he regarded the new data as inconsistent with assumptions that such an effect is already detectable. More Droughts Predicted
Many of the computer models that predict global warming also predict that certain areas, including the Midwest in the United States, would suffer more frequent droughts.
Dr. Hanson of NOAA said today that the new study does not in any way contradict the findings reported by the NASA scientists and others. He said that his study, in which he was joined by George A. Maul and Thomas A. Karl, also of NOAA, looked at only the 48 contiguous states.
Dr. Hanson said that global warming caused by the greenhouse effect might have been countered by some cooling phenomenon that has not yet been identified and that the readings in his study recorded the net effect.
''We have to be careful about interpreting things like this,'' he said. What About Urbanization? One aspect of the study that Dr. Hanson said was interesting was the finding that the urbanization of the United States has apparently not had a statistically significant effect on average temperature readings. A number of scientists have theorized that the replacement of forests and pastures by asphalt streets and concrete buildings, which retain heat, is an important cause of rising temperatures.
Dr. Hansen of NASA said today that he had ''no quarrel'' with the findings in the new study. He noted that the United States covered only 1.5 percent of Earth. ''If you have only one degree warming on a global average, how much do you get at random'' when taking measurements in such a relatively small area, he asked rhetorically.
''We are just arguing now about whether the global warming effect is large enough to see,'' he added. ''It is not suprising we are not seeing it in a region that covers only 1.5 percent of the globe.''
Dr. Hansen said there were several ways to look at the temperature readings for the United States, including as a ''statistical fluke.'' Possibililty of Countereffects
Another possibility, he said, was that there were special conditions in the United States that would tend to offset a warming trend. For example, industrial activity produces dust and other solid particles that help form liquid droplets in the atmosphere. These droplets reflect radiation away from Earth and thus have a cooling influence.
Dr. Hansen suggested that at some point there could be a jump in temperature readings in the United States if the measurements in the new study were a statistical aberration or the result of atmospheric pollutants reflecting heat away from Earth. He noted that anti-pollution efforts are reducing the amount of these particles and thus reducing the reflection of heat.
Several computer models have projected that the greenhouse effect would cause average global temperatures to rise between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit in the next century. But scientists concede that reactions set off by the warming trend itself could upset these predictions and produce unanticipated changes in climate patterns. Legislative Action Sought
Coincidentally with the new report, legislation was introduced in the Senate today prescribing actions for addressing the threat of global warming. Senator Al Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, introduced a bill that calls for creating a Council on World Environmental Policy to replace the White House's Council on Environmental Quality. This change would emphasize the international aspects of environmental issues.
The bill would also require a ban on industrial chemicals that not only are depleting the atmosphere's ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation, but are believed to be contributing to the warming trend. It would also require stricter fuel-economy standards for automobiles to reduce the consumption of gasoline to reduce carbon dioxide.
graphs of temperatures and rainfall from 1895 to 1987 (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
-
"Let me explain in somewhat greater detail why we call for withdrawal from the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].
The UNFCCC was established twenty-five years ago, to find scientific support for dangers from increasing carbon dioxide. While this has led to generous and rapidly increased support for the field, the purported dangers remain hypothetical, model-based projections. By contrast, the benefits of increasing CO2 and modest warming are clearer than ever, and they are supported by dramatic satellite images of a greening Earth.
• The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer claims a greater likelihood of significant as opposed to negligible future warming,
• It has long been acknowledged by the IPCC that climate change prior to the 1960’s could not have been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Yet, pre-1960 instrumentally observed temperatures show many warming episodes, similar to the one since 1960, for example, from 1915 to 1950, and from 1850 to 1890. None of these could have been caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2,
• Model projections of warming during recent decades have greatly exceeded what has been observed,
• The modelling community has openly acknowledged that the ability of existing models to simulate past climates is due to numerous arbitrary tuning adjustments,
• Observations show no statistically valid trends in flooding or drought, and no meaningful acceleration whatsoever of pre-existing long term sea level rise (about 6 inches per century) worldwide,
• Current carbon dioxide levels, around 400 parts per million are still very small compared to the averages over geological history, when thousands of parts per million prevailed, and when life flourished on land and in the oceans.
Calls to limit carbon dioxide emissions are even less persuasive today than 25 years ago. Future research should focus on dispassionate, high-quality climate science, not on efforts to prop up an increasingly frayed narrative of “carbon pollution.” Until scientific research is unfettered from the constraints of the policy-driven UNFCCC, the research community will fail in its obligation to the public that pays the bills."
-------------------------------------
About the author:
Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT. MIT’s web site suggests his scientific eminence:
Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause, and provided accepted explanations for atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other. He is currently studying what determines the pole to equator temperature difference, the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere and in generating upper level cirrus clouds. He has developed models for the Earth’s climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate.
Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS’s Meisinger and Charney Awards, the AGU’s Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS. He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., ’64, S.M., ’61, A.B., ’60, Harvard University)
-
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/29/peoples-climate-march-postponed-colorado-due-snow/
The Gore effect.
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/01/global-temperatures-plunge-in-april-the-pause-returns/
It's strange to see measured temperatures vary almost as much in a month as they do in a century. Makes me think the end of the world is coming.
-
I can't find where I put the moist recent hoax, apparently didn't get posted.
Peer reviewed hoax, penis is not physical, only a social construct. [I beg to differ]
This article shows "real" research in the same field that passes for peer reviewed science and inspired a hoax that survived peer review. This tells a lot about flaws today in education and science.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/read-the-gender-studies-papers-that-inspired-the-penis-causes-climate-change-hoax/
-
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448121/donald-trump-paris-climate-agreement-trump-should-scrap-accord
-
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/20059/2015/acpd-15-20059-2015.pdf
Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms:
evidence from paleoclimate data, climate
modeling, and modern observations that
2◦C global warming is highly dangerous
Polling question to 'scientists' needs to include the word "catastrophic" or word "highly dangerous":
Are you certain or nearly certain the earth as we know it and life on earth will be destroyed by human activity by the year 2100? 98% if honest scientists would say know.
I don't have the phony credentials, but it seems to me that if you add a massive amount of ice to the waters of the earth, it would cool the atmosphere, slowing or stopping the ice melt BEFORE it flooded the earth.
Notice that the temperature rise is an inserted assumption, not a scientific conclusion. The rest is extrapolation without figuring in negative feedback factors that have governed the cycles throughout the history of the planet. More CO2 for example leads to more photosynthesis converting CO2 back to oxygen. No figuring for clouds, wind, sun cycles or even the fact that we will out-grow fossil fuels during the first half of this century without the 'help' of government.
-
We know sea level rise is real because it's not possible for land to shift, right?
Land Subsidence and Relative Sea-Level Rise
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1392/pdf/circ1392.pdf
"for the Chesapeake region, Houston-Galveston, Texas, area, Santa Clara Valley, California, and other places around the globe, the primary cause of seawater intrusions is not rising oceans – but land subsidence due to groundwater withdrawal
"glacial isostatic adjustments” that have been ongoing since the last glaciers melted"
http://www.cfact.org/2016/12/10/sea-level-rise-or-land-subsidence/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxlccjc0lQY
Sinking land isn't possible!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUqxhYJqGhU
http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2015/01/10-lost-underwater-cities-ancient-world-sunken-civilisations/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/sunken-cities-the-man-who-found-atlantis/
http://www.newstatesman.com/world/africa/2016/06/ancient-egypt-s-perfectly-preserved-underwater-cities-and-how-they-were
Gradual movement of land has never happened before!
(https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-01744fc26abdf238150d6a0b51cb103c)
-
Understanding the Climate "adjustments"
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2017/7/8/the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xv
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062817.pdf
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XV
July 08, 2017/ Francis Menton
It's been several months since I've added a post to this series, since this one back on February 22. There's good reason for that. With the breakup of last year's big El Niño, global temperatures declined significantly. The latest global temperature anomaly from the UAH satellite temperature series is +0.21 deg C for June 2017 -- down a remarkable 0.65 deg C from the February 2016 global anomaly of +0.86 deg C. The Northern Hemisphere anomaly dropped even more, by 0.86 deg C, from +1.19 deg C to only +0.32 deg C. Those declines represent well more than half of the entire warming that had been present in the satellite record at the peak of the El Niño, and bring recent temperatures below those recorded during many months in the 1980s and 90s. It's no wonder that the breathless press releases from NASA and NOAA trumpeting "hottest [April, May, June, etc.] ever!" have at least temporarily ceased.
But the lack of "record warming" announcements coming out of the government has not stopped independent researchers from further examining the surface temperature records from NASA and NOAA (and also from a British group called Hadley CRU that gets its starting data from the same source) to try to quantify and understand the "adjustments" that continue to be made. Readers of my series know that NASA, NOAA and Hadley CRU report global temperatures derived from a different source from the satellites, namely a network of land- and ocean-based surface weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network, or GHCN. These so-called "surface temperatures" are inherently in need of some ongoing adjustments, to account for things like station moves and nearby urbanization. But somehow the adjustment process has gotten into the hands of some committed global warming zealots, and next thing you know each round of adjustments seems progressively to make the past cooler and the present warmer, thus always enhancing the apparent warming. Oh, plus the adjusters refuse to release details of the bases and methodology for the adjustments. After a few decades of this, reasonable people come to have serious and well-justified doubts about whether the reported warming trends can be trusted.
The latest effort at analyzing the adjustments comes from a team of independent researchers led by James Wallace, and including Joseph D'Aleo and Craig Idso. Their new Research Report can be found at this link, titled "On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature [GAST] Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding." The new Research Report has seven highly qualified peer reviewers identified in the paper itself. From the Abstract:
In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.
As others have previously noticed, the periodic revisions to GAST data from all three entities have brought with them a systematic cooling of the past and warming of the recent and the present, to a degree that hugely strains credulity. But the new Wallace, et al., paper takes another step, and examines the equally systematic removal from the surface temperature record of a cyclical pattern widely reflected in raw temperature data from multiple regions. As the paper notes, if you look at much raw (unadjusted) data, a cyclical pattern is immediately obvious: temperatures gradually increase from the beginning of records in the late nineteenth century through about 1940; then temperatures decrease through about the 1970s; then the increase resumes through about 2000; and finally temperatures level off through the present. This cycle results in a temperature peak around 1940, sometimes referred to as the "blip." The "blip" has long been recognized to be a problem for the hypothesis that human greenhouse gas emissions are the principal control knob for global temperatures, because human emissions had barely begun before 1940 -- when temperatures were increasing -- and then human emissions began to increase sharply from the 1950s to the 1970s -- when temperatures were declining. Doesn't that significantly undermine the hypothesis? The successive rounds of adjustments to the surface temperature records have systematically removed this "blip," making for a temperature record seemingly supporting the hypothesis. Could this possibly be honest? From the Wallace, et al., paper:
As has been clearly shown in Section IV above, the consequences of the changes made to previously reported historical versions of GAST data have been to virtually eliminate the previously existing cyclical nature of their previously reported trend cycle patterns. The notion that there was a 1930 and 40s warm period followed by a mid-1970 cool period now gets lost in the noise so to speak.
As just one example from the paper, a comparison of the GAST data from NASA from May 2017 versus May 2008 shows that, in between the issuance of those two versions of the data, nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1920 to 1940 have been reduced by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C, while nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1980 to 2000 have been increased by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C. The obvious effects have been substantially to remove the 1940s "blip" and to strongly enhance the warming trend. Other data revisions at different points in time have made additional changes to the same effect. The basis and methodology for these adjustments have never been explained.
Have these adjustments been part of an intentional program to alter data to fit the desired hypothesis -- in other words, classic scientific fraud? The 2009 Climategate emails give additional evidence. For example, one of the best known of those emails is the September 27, 2009 message from Tom Wigley of NCAR to Phil Jones, head of Hadley CRU. In that email, Wigley proposes an intentional effort to reduce the ocean part of the surface record by 0.15 deg C, not to make the record a better representation of reality, but rather to make the evidence fit the narrative. Excerpts:
So, if we could reduce the [1940s] ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). . . . My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".
From the conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:
While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU. . . .
The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.
The adjustments to the GAST record have been part of a coordinated effort to influence public policy by supporting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, the EPA's finding that CO2 constitutes a "danger" to human health and welfare rests on what EPA calls its three "lines of evidence," one of which is the supposedly "record warming" as shown in the GAST data. Oh, it now seems that the "record warming" is not present in the raw data, but is nothing more than an artifact of adjustments made by government bureaucrats. The final conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:
Since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.
On July 6 my co-counsel and I submitted a Supplemental Petition to EPA, citing this new paper, seeking to have EPA reopen and reconsider the Endangerment Finding. We have called upon EPA to hold hearings on the record and under oath, at which hearings the people who have made the "adjustments" to create supposedly record warming should be called upon to set forth their detailed methods. It is high time that the people who have made these adjustments justify their handiwork to the American people.
UPDATE, July 9, 2017: It occurs to me that readers may be interested in this tidbit of information: That September 27, 2009 email from Wigley to Jones has a cc -- to a guy named Ben Santer. Do you recognize the name? He is another "scientist" on the government/taxpayer dime, and another serious global warming zealot, who works at the Livermore Lab in California. You may have seen his op ed in the Washington Post on June 21, 2017, title "Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science." Excerpt:
Calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.
What are you afraid of, Ben? Time to get this guy under oath!
And here's yet another bit of similar news. You may recall that several years ago (real) Canadian climate scientist Tim Ball wrote of (fake) Penn State climate scientist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann that "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State." Mann sued Ball for libel in a court in Vancouver, Canada. Ball demanded to get in discovery the underlying data and computer code that support Mann's "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction. Back in February, the Canadian court ordered Mann to produce that information. According to Principia Scientific, Mann has now defaulted on that obligation and has gone into contempt of court. According to PS:
Under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake.
That may turn out to be an overprediction of how bad this will prove for Mann. Still, it is very remarkable that Mann would think he could be a plaintiff in a libel case and not have to produce the data and code that support his statements. Another guy to get under oath!
-
Famous people caught NOT reading the forum:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
"The effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out."
I'm guessing they don't know about adjusted data. Adjusting old temperature data downward and new temperature data upward doesn't actually make temperatures hotter.
"No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough."
-
"Pacific Ocean's response to greenhouse gases could extend California drought for centuries"
- Science Daily, Science News, September 15, 2016
"California projected to get wetter through this century"
- Science Daily, Science News, July 6, 2017
Stephen Hayward, Powerline http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/settled-science-in-two-headlines.php
-
http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/12/malpractice-americas-crime-labs-putting-innocents-jail-letting-convicts-off-hook/
Malpractice in America’s Crime Labs Is Putting Innocents in Jail, Letting Convicts Off the Hook
Michelle Malkin / @michellemalkin / July 12, 2017 / comments
Misconduct by one Massachusetts lab chemist led to the dismissal of over 21,000 drug convictions.
Michelle Malkin
@michellemalkin
Michelle Malkin is the senior editor of Conservative Review. She is a New York Times best-selling author and a FOX News Channel contributor.
Junk science endangers lives. Forensic junk science in the hands of overzealous prosecutors, ignorant police detectives, and reckless experts threatens liberty.
There is a crisis in America’s government-run crime labs—and it’s not just the result of a few rogue operators. The problem is long-festering and systemic.
In April, Massachusetts state crime lab chemist Annie Dookhan made national headlines after investigations and lawsuits over her misconduct prompted the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to order the largest dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history.
Prosecutors were forced to dismiss a stunning 21,000-plus drug cases after Dookhan admitted to forging signatures, misleading investigators, and purposely contaminating drug samples en masse over nearly a decade.
Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>
Dookhan pleaded guilty to dozens of charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and tampering with evidence. Hundreds of defendants have had their convictions tossed on appeal.
Despite a district judge concluding that her actions were “nothing short of catastrophic,” Dookhan served a measly three years in prison before being released last spring.
Another Massachusetts state crime lab worker, Sonja Farak, abused her position to pilfer and ingest the drugs she was supposed to be testing over an eight-year period.
Instead of cleaning up, two former assistant attorney generals covered up for Farak and misled a judge who last month dismissed several of the cases tainted by the narcotics-addicted lab worker. Upward of 10,000 prosecutions may eventually be overturned.
The fraudster’s fate? Crackhead and meth junkie Farak received a mere 18-month jail sentence for snorting the evidence, plus five years’ probation. The two assistant attorneys general left their jobs for higher-paying positions in government.
Law journals and scientific publications are filled with similar horror stories that have spread from the New York City medical examiner’s office and Nassau County, New York’s police department forensic evidence bureau to the crime labs of West Virginia; Harris County, Texas; North Carolina; and jurisdictions in nearly 20 other states.
It’s the wrongfully prosecuted and convicted who suffer the heaviest deprivations—and taxpayers who must foot the astronomical bill for all the costs and damages incurred by crime lab corruptocrats and their enablers.
As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA—minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact—which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people.
The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value.
Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result of investigators’ contamination, won a new court date for a hearing that may set him free.
Costly errors and gross misconduct will continue as long as politicized prosecutors operate with a “win at all costs” agenda and stubbornly refuse to admit their failures.
Dark history seems to repeating itself at the Oklahoma City Police Department, home of the late forensic faker, Joyce Gilchrist. Known as “Black Magic,” Gilchrist conjured mountains of phony DNA evidence out of whole cloth in collaboration with an out-of-control district attorney over two ruinous decades.
Gilchrist, whose tainted testimony sent 11 inmates to their deaths, passed away two years ago unpunished and unrepentant.
Now, nearly a quarter-century after Gilchrist’s misconduct was first exposed, Oklahoma City has been rocked by secret hearings held two weeks ago in the case of former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw.
He was convicted in 2015 on multiple sexual assaults after being railroaded by incompetent and biased police detectives and a district attorney’s office more concerned about appeasing the social justice mob than seeking the truth.
My investigation of Holtzclaw’s case helped publicize the flawed, sloppy testimony by Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab analyst Elaine Taylor and Assistant District Attorney Gayland Gieger, who misled jurors with false assertions about trace skin cell DNA tied to one accuser found on Holtzclaw’s pants—the only indirect forensic evidence in the case.
One of the key attendees at the secret hearings last month was Taylor’s Oklahoma City Police Department crime lab supervisor, Campbell Ruddock.
Taylor and Gieger failed to fully inform the jury of unknown male DNA found on Holtzclaw’s pants, as well as DNA mixtures from multiple unknown female and male contributors, which clearly supported the hypothesis of innocent, nonsexual DNA indirect transfer.
But Gieger baselessly claimed the DNA came from vaginal fluid (when Taylor conducted no such confirmatory tests for body fluids nor used an alternate light source). Gieger recklessly yoked the phony DNA “smoking gun” in one accuser’s case to all of the accusers’ allegations.
At least two jurors publicly stated after trial that the shoddy DNA evidence persuaded them of Holtzclaw’s collective guilt.
Secrecy about the crime lab crisis is a toxic recipe for more wrongful convictions. The solution lies in greater transparency, external scrutiny, stiffer criminal penalties, and real financial consequences for forensic fraudsters and fakers.
It’s time to incentivize more whistleblowers, instead of more destructive witch hunts.
-
John Hinderaker of Powerline following the forum:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/is-global-warming-alarmism-a-complete-fraud.php
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1454.msg104937#msg104937
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062717.pdf
Besides the adjustments exposed (must read), take a look at some charts of practical, relevant, human witnessed data:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/d91ed38c-f3a5-41ce-acb6-3d628ef17f59_zpsxic1kfeb.png)
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/2868fb4b-3ddd-47c5-bb50-37bd71f7ecc1_zpsvzrxyi9g.png)
-
Hat tip to our Buzwardo/BBG
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-science/
-
MN: coldest, wettest summer in 48 years
http://addins.kttc.com/blogs/weather/one-of-the-coolest-summers-so-far/
-
MN: coldest, wettest summer in 48 years
http://addins.kttc.com/blogs/weather/one-of-the-coolest-summers-so-far/
Obviously global warming is to blame.
-
This should go under education and tenure, why can't they fire people like this?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-more-deadly
It's a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly
Michael E Mann
Why do they publish this under "opinion" when the author says it is fact?
It it's global, why isn't he commenting on the coldest summer in 48 years in the north country too? Is it fact that humans caused this weather event too? What about the dearth of hurricanes since his last prediction?
Sea level rise started WHEN? https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/907
(https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth107/files/Unit2/Mod4/Figure17.jpg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsURVgoRD0
-
(https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Image1091_shadow.png)
As reported all over the msm, right?
-
Hat tip Powerline, John Hinderaker
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/lake-superior-drying-up-due-to-climate-change-no-wait.php
Congressional Record June 25, 2013
What we are seeing in global warming is the evaporation of our Great Lakes. It is a scary thing to think about what this will ultimately do to us. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2013-06-25/pdf/CREC-2013-06-25-pt1-PgS5105-3.pdf#page=1
Climate change is lowering Great Lakes water levels.
National Resources Defense Council, August 7, 2013
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/aliya-haq/climate-change-lowering-great-lakes-water-levels-should-waukesha-be-allowed-tap
Climate Change Drive(s) Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Water Currents, National geographic, November 20, 2012
https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2012/11/20/climate-change-and-variability-drive-low-water-levels-on-the-great-lakes/
Scientists at the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that climate change is playing a role in determining Great Lakes water levels. - National Public Radio News
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/04/23/environment/great-lakes-water-levels-reaching-record-lows
------------------------------------
And now this:
Lake Superior is near record high and threatening shoreline
Star Tribune OCTOBER 11, 2017
Lakes Michigan and Huron... the water is higher than normal there, too.
“Rainwater doesn’t have anywhere to go,” he added. “Everything’s saturated.”
Weather is cyclical. Who knew?
----------------------------------
I know there is drought and fires in Calif. Droughts are local/regional, and cyclical; we are swimming in water here.
For translation, one inch of Lake Superior water equals 551 BILLION gallons of water. That number increases as the shorelines overflow.
https://www.lakesuperior.com/the-lake/lake-superior/how-big-is-lake-superior/
(http://stmedia.stimg.co/ows_15076890362627.jpg?w=525)
-
Gaia be praised! It's another global warming miracle!
Hat tip Powerline, John Hinderaker
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/lake-superior-drying-up-due-to-climate-change-no-wait.php
Congressional Record June 25, 2013
What we are seeing in global warming is the evaporation of our Great Lakes. It is a scary thing to think about what this will ultimately do to us. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2013-06-25/pdf/CREC-2013-06-25-pt1-PgS5105-3.pdf#page=1
Climate change is lowering Great Lakes water levels.
National Resources Defense Council, August 7, 2013
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/aliya-haq/climate-change-lowering-great-lakes-water-levels-should-waukesha-be-allowed-tap
Climate Change Drive(s) Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Water Currents, National geographic, November 20, 2012
https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2012/11/20/climate-change-and-variability-drive-low-water-levels-on-the-great-lakes/
Scientists at the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that climate change is playing a role in determining Great Lakes water levels. - National Public Radio News
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/04/23/environment/great-lakes-water-levels-reaching-record-lows
------------------------------------
And now this:
Lake Superior is near record high and threatening shoreline
Star Tribune OCTOBER 11, 2017
Lakes Michigan and Huron... the water is higher than normal there, too.
“Rainwater doesn’t have anywhere to go,” he added. “Everything’s saturated.”
Weather is cyclical. Who knew?
----------------------------------
I know there is drought and fires in Calif. Droughts are local/regional, and cyclical; we are swimming in water here.
For translation, one inch of Lake Superior water equals 551 BILLION gallons of water. That number increases as the shorelines overflow.
https://www.lakesuperior.com/the-lake/lake-superior/how-big-is-lake-superior/
(http://stmedia.stimg.co/ows_15076890362627.jpg?w=525)
-
http://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/alaskan-snow-more-than-doubles-due-to-global-warming-study
"Due to global warming."
I didn't know we had a human caused CO2 catastrophe in the 1800s. Were people over-exhaling. Or is climate change a natural occurrence?
"The world's nations vowed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to under 2 deg C over pre-industrial levels."
What in this study says that humans control earth's temps? Pathological Science reporting.
-
"I didn't know we had a human caused CO2 catastrophe in the 1800s. Were people over-exhaling. Or is climate change a natural occurrence?"
I might have seen a study from USC - wolf and grizzly bear farts caused the climate disruption in Alaska since the 1850s.
:wink:
-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/new-yorks-temperature-record-massively-altered-by-noaa/
Excerpts:
On average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F.
Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.
[In another instance]...NOAA has adjusted temperatures by an astonishing 2.4F, or about 1.3C.
There is only one pattern at this taxpayer supported scam, "NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were".
-
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
-
Only because climate alarmists constantly use anecdotal evidence to advance their view I like to point out observations to the contrary. Some of my best memories of sailing are being out on the lake in April. But not today with a morning windchill of -2 F, a couple of feet of new snow this week and the lake ice that still has greater strength than our roads and bridges.
Forecast: Colder with more snow.
http://www.startribune.com/record-cold-about-to-slap-winter-weary-twin-cities/478755623/
English children will never know snow
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/12/global-warming-hysteria-2000-english-children-will-not-know-snow-2010-oops-nevermind
http://princevault.com/index.php?title=Sometimes_It_Snows_In_April
Photo this am: https://www.flickr.com/photos/141120830@N06/40338079705/in/dateposted-public/
-
Where is the taxpayer funded government agency rebuttal to these charges of manipulated data?
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/the-stunning-statistical-fraud-behind-the-global-warming-scare/
https://www.sott.net/article/381722-NOAAs-adjustments-The-stunning-statistical-fraud-behind-the-Global-Warming-scare
NOAA's 'adjustments': The stunning statistical fraud behind the 'Global Warming' scare
Business Investors Daily
Mon, 02 Apr 2018 03:12 UTC
Arctic sea ice
© YouTube/Adapt 2030 (screen capture)
Global Warming
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent.
What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated "adjustments" to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.
Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing - lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present.
This creates a data illusion of ever-rising temperatures to match the increase in CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere since the mid-1800s, which global warming advocates say is a cause-and-effect relationship. The more CO2, the more warming.
But the actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.
That is, until the NOAA's statisticians "adjust" the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That's clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.
That's not what NOAA does.
According to the NOAA, the errors aren't random. They're systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they're very fuzzy about why this should be.
Far from legitimately "adjusting" anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government's underlying policies for the better part of two decades.
What NOAA does aren't niggling little changes, either.
As Tony Heller at the Real Climate Science web site notes, "Pre-2000 temperatures are progressively cooled, and post-2000 temperatures are warmed. This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895."
Other stories:
https://www.sott.net/article/323047-The-coming-ice-age-Antarctic-peninsula-has-been-cooling-not-warming
https://www.sott.net/article/378727-Austrian-ski-industry-researcher-declares-every-mountain-station-in-the-Alps-shows-winters-have-gotten-colder
-
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-bad-is-the-governments-science-1523915765
-
http://www.startribune.com/lake-minnetonka-ice-out-ties-record-set-in-1857/481831301/
Lake Minnetonka late ice-out ties record set in 1857
Just after noon Saturday, the Freshwater Society and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office water patrol declared ice-out on the 14,500-acre lake, the largest in the metro area. This year’s ice-out date tied May 5, 1857, for late ice-out honors.
That means roughly: coldest winter and latest spring in the Twin Cities (MN) in recorded history. Right after the coldest summer in Rochester MN last year.
And later next month the days will start getting shorter again...
I wonder if LA who stole our basketball team will start calling them the Icers.
I don't believe in anecdotal evidence of anything, just sick of hearing it - selectively - from the other side.
------------------------
Update: hERE IS ONE EXAMPLE I see a minute after posting that. Because it will be hot on one day in one place next week, a state will be unlivable by 2050. Note to idiot experts, without you people burning fossil fuels for air conditioning, IT IS UNLIVABLE NOW for the retired people who are moving there.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/as-thermometer-gets-set-to-climb-climate-experts-worry/article_635c1e7e-519f-11e8-afc2-cfc906c78ed6.html
As thermometer gets set to climb, climate experts worry [Mesa Arizona]
As temperatures in the East Valley were predicted to hit over 100 the early part of next week, some climate researchers predict Arizona could be unlivable by 2050.
They are worried their climate change budgets will double.
If climate change is warming, why don't they call it warming? But it's climate change if you have drought, torrential rain or extreme cold too. You can't prove them wrong, all bases are covered. We know exactly what's happening but need more money to study it.
Good f-ing grief.
-
Drought is not caused by global warming IF global warming is caused by fossil fuel emissions. Combustion releases more H2O than CO2. It is indisputable math and science. The worry should be the opposite!
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1118.msg106708#msg106708
http://www.kunc.org/post/climate-change-making-droughts-worse-western-us
Climate Change Is Making Droughts Worse In The Western U.S.
"The culprit is human-caused climate change."
https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s40641-018-0093-2?author_access_token=T1hdYfHGCFbt9ixLNLXzrPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY7RpRxd_ESwnYfHsVVpnYJ7tBUkUMF8GxzdMENKcFeDyn_cGiqu3A2_SlLGNX7o_2iI1b5DmXeW3uPLfHt9CAbRpjVOpeS_SxHCUZeJ4-nykg==
The release of H20 into the atmosphere causes drought??!!
Warmth may cause evaporation, but evaporation does not destroy water. Like flushing a toilet or running your faucet, it merely moves it around. Damming up a river to make a fake lake does not create water either. Combustion actually creates water.
The drought crisis is caused by tens of millions of over-taxed and shivering northerners (and illegal immigrants) moving to areas that lack sufficient water.
Maybe I'm biased with 130,340,400,000 gallons out my door and far more than that underneath in the ample aquifers.
https://www.lakelubbers.com/minnesota-largest-lakes-in-minnesota-volume-L34-C7/
Living away from plentiful on earth is a choice.
-
https://nypost.com/2018/09/19/no-global-warming-isnt-causing-worse-hurricanes/
For the United States, the trend of all land-falling hurricanes has been falling since 1900, as has that of major hurricanes. In the 51 years from 1915, Florida and the Atlantic coast were hit by 19 major hurricanes. In the 51 years to 2016, just seven. In the last 11 years, only two hurricanes greater than category 3 hit the continental USA — a record low since 1900. From 1915 to 1926, 12 hit.
--------
But, as the Washington Post editorial board put it, Trump is complicit.
-
http://ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
How to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C instead of 2 degrees C.
Maybe we should have a world government agency manage the temperature of the planet and all of the activities that contribute to it. Leftist Utopia, what could possibly go wrong?
Watch for future releases of the chapters not covered in the study, such as how much warming we would have had without humans and how much of the warming is contained in the adjustments to the data.
Changing the limit from 2 degrees to 1.5 degrees will allegedly allow the oceans to rise by one tenth of one less.
If this was math or science, the professionals would include certainty level and margin of error with that type of statement.
-
Man-made hurricanes. Funny that my grandpa knew about hurricanes when he bought us East Coast Florida property 75 years ago. But these victims caused this hurricane.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/oct/11/victims-of-hurricane-michael-voted-for-climate-deniers
Elections have consequences and professional journalists thoroughly research their topics before going to print.
Reap what we sow, "Victims of Hurricane Michael are represented by (voted for) climate deniers".
What is a "climate denier"? Same wordsmiths who think killing your young is a "choice" and government paying your housing cost is "affordable housing".
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APFP1OsV02Y
Just rewatched part of this silly movie last night. Totally forgot the dire warnings we had back in the early 90's.
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/07/how-they-airbrushed-out-the-inconvenient-pause/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/24/updated-do-the-adjustments-to-land-surface-temperature-data-increase-the-reported-global-warming-rate/
https://skepticalscience.com/understanding-adjustments-to-temp-data.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/feb/08/no-climate-conspiracy-noaa-temperature-adjustments-bring-data-closer-to-pristine
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-data-adjustments-affect-global-temperature-records
-
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/10/30/1-4-statisticians-say-they-were-asked-commit-scientific-fraud-13554?fbclid=IwAR2Zp2SKp2KR1DrQWbJiq5m5Sn3jLfFwtyeNAj-x4PSDS8W1vSTW3zqW8rk
-
Thanks
CD
There is a lot of fudging and I suspect fraud in the medical literature and it is alarming
as with everything else there is endless studies involving data analyses
and they do these meta analyses taking multiple studies and putting them together in on big data analysis and actually come up with conclusions
the data crunchers try to mathematically correct for the different variables and these get published
and we are supposed to just believe the results.
I really don't believe most if not any of them.
Anyone can make the date come out any way they want.
some do it for the payer of their fees
some do it to make a "name" for themselves as some sort of authority on a topic
some may actually do it for money
not all researchers are crooks but a significant portion are not legit
how many are and are not I really don't know. I could believe the 25 % estimate from this study would be a good guess.
Ironically ,
I did not renew my membership in the American College of Physicians this year # 1 because of their political correctness #2 because many of their studies were nothing more then datan analyses of other studies and not worth the toilet paper I wipe my behind on .
They try to claim this is "best available evidence " with the data we have but that does not mean it is any good
I am tired of it.
I am getting bitter in my old age.........
-
To any unprejudiced person reading [Goklany’s] account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.
- Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most eminent scientists. Dyson, a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of Mathematical Physics and Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is famous among other things for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/11/why-wont-liberals-look-at-the-evidence-on-climate.php
-
My own experience with this...
In the very early days of global warming (late 80s - early 90s?), before climate science merged with anti-capitalism and became a religion (all together now, "I Believe!"), I saw a disturbing headline about a study out of NCAR, Boulder Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (who knew we had one back then?). Without remembering exact details, the news story made a new and bold claim about warming and human causation. My reaction included some skepticism so I looked into it, got my hands on the entire report and read it.
As I read through I discovered some things one step at a time. The news story was more sensational than the actual title page of the report. The title of the report was more sensational than the conclusion in the report. The conclusion was more sensational than the summaries of the sections referred to in the report. And the summaries of the sections were more sensational than the actual analysis of the data written by the scientists in the detail of the report. In short, the news story was not backed up at all in the scientists' analysis of the data.
In 'journalism' it is known that the headlines are not written by the writers of the story. I suddenly realized this was also true inside of so-called scientific reports. The scientists studying this data did not write the summaries, the conclusions, the titles or the press reports. Something else was going on. someone was driving a narrative, not reporting data or science. Somebody wanted that headline and worked their way backwards to pretend it was backed up in the study. Criminal fraud IMHO.
It bothered me deeply that I discovered all that only because I invested all that time digging in thoroughly. No one else was going to hear or know of the falsities and deception. Others, even the scientists whose work was butchered, never spoke up or objected, apparently liking and embracing the shock appeal of the headline. Research dollars and prestige to the work they were doing exploded with the new mission and no honest voices objected.
I like that we expose the deception and misuse of science here.
-
That is an interesting distinction between the researchers and the writers of the headlines and summaries.
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/24/peter-foster-another-report-reluctantly-admits-that-green-energy-is-a-disastrous-flop/
Shocking! :roll:
-
Now who else on this board nwill notice the extraordinarily distinct lack of mention of one key phrase we see nearly everywhere else in this article:
https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/2018-will-be-the-first-year-with-no-violent-13491861.php
(Hint: " The causes for 2018′s lack of violent tornadoes are many, but one key factor is high pressure tending to be more dominant than normal throughout peak season" )
-
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612658/the-day-i-tasted-climate-change/
Like Russian collusion without a Russian, we have extreme damage from global warming without the warming.
I can't for the life of me find the part where they say the opinions expressed here are those of the author only. Nor can I find where they even label this bunk opinion.
-
Now who else on this board nwill notice the extraordinarily distinct lack of mention of one key phrase we see nearly everywhere else in this article:
https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/2018-will-be-the-first-year-with-no-violent-13491861.php
(Hint: " The causes for 2018′s lack of violent tornadoes are many, but one key factor is high pressure tending to be more dominant than normal throughout peak season" )
If it refutes global warming it is anecdotal and if it affirms it, it is proof.
-
Now who else on this board nwill notice the extraordinarily distinct lack of mention of one key phrase we see nearly everywhere else in this article:
https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/2018-will-be-the-first-year-with-no-violent-13491861.php
(Hint: " The causes for 2018′s lack of violent tornadoes are many, but one key factor is high pressure tending to be more dominant than normal throughout peak season" )
If it refutes global warming it is anecdotal and if it affirms it, it is proof.
That's the game.
-
Yes and I was thinking that if the number of tornados was going up the title and everything in the article would be global warming .
But since the count is down, one would think a good thing suddenly there is ZERO even a mention of it.
-
Global warming!
-
Global warming!
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/winds-could-make-las-vegas-new-years-eve-fireworks-dicey-1562570/
-
Global warming!
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/winds-could-make-las-vegas-new-years-eve-fireworks-dicey-1562570/
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/gradual-warming-in-las-vegas-valley-after-freezing-temps-1563906/
Global warming is bringing ice and snow to Vegas, just like Al Gore predicted!
-
"Global warming is bringing ice and snow to Vegas, just like Al Gore predicted!"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/08/global-warming-brings-deadly-snowfall-to-germany-and-austria/
Ski resorts in the Austrian Alps reported up to seven feet of snow in the first days of January, which lead to many resorts closing amid safety fears.
----------------
10 feet of snow in one week in places.
'Your children and grandchildren may never see snow.' Oops.
-
accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/climate/greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/rcp-85-the-climate-change-disaster-scenario/579700/
Does a speeding freight train have high or low acceleration? Just curious. And what kind of 'scientist' doesn't know acceleration from velocity?
Reminds me of Al Gore and the "explicit implication".
Blah, blah blah! For all the bunk they never tell us how much the earth has warmed in the last hundred years in unadjusted data and what part of that warming is demonstrably attributable to the cause they are suggesting.
-
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/abc-disappearing-islands-claim-proved-false-again/news-story/3fcaf6b1187d279f06f0bcb9e794db84
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/wcc.557
So there is zero evidence for the ABC's claim that Kiribati is sinking, but there is plenty of evidence for the opposite - that such low-lying atoll islands are not sinking, but growing.
From a new paper by Virginie K. E. Duvat, of the Institut du Littoral et de l'Environnement, University of la Rochelle, France:
A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
-
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/abc-disappearing-islands-claim-proved-false-again/news-story/3fcaf6b1187d279f06f0bcb9e794db84
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/wcc.557
So there is zero evidence for the ABC's claim that Kiribati is sinking, but there is plenty of evidence for the opposite - that such low-lying atoll islands are not sinking, but growing.
From a new paper by Virginie K. E. Duvat, of the Institut du Littoral et de l'Environnement, University of la Rochelle, France:
A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
Any islands flipping over?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs23CjIWMgA
-
Dangerous, Record-Breaking Cold to Invade Midwest
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2019/01/dangerous-record-breaking-cold-to-invade-midwest-chicago/
-----------------------------------------------
Record cold is an unexpected consequence of global warming.
High of -15 with sunshine!
Accuweather Forecast this week at home:
TODAY
JAN 28
-15°F
Mostly cloudy; blowing snow
TUE
JAN 29
-10° /-30°
Periods of sun; frigid
WED
JAN 30
-15° /-31°
Partly sunny; bitterly cold
THU
JAN 31
-6° /-10°
Mostly cloudy; frigid
RealFeel® Wednesday hourly
-50°
-50°
-50°
-51°
-52°
-50°
-50°
-49°
How helpful is that? What does -52 'feel like'?
-
Well according to this you would be dead in less than five minutes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-can-you-stay-outside-in-cold-temperatures-2014-1
-
Well according to this you would be dead in less than five minutes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-can-you-stay-outside-in-cold-temperatures-2014-1
We have a trick to avoid that, wear clothes. And burn fossil fuels!
What 52 Below looks like from the living room:
(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipP8aMV4uXqvRhiY_xdVrEcbp2d76Ai1eF6b5PFg=s512-p-qv=pcrq061okkar234g2vmer5q0dtc3sjlk6,m=2ab99662c9cf3b06bfb6a613bd67126e,x=,t=25-iv818?key=Mk9sZVUtempSN2x1N2c1S1BudVdVSHMyRkphUEZR)
-
Well according to this you would be dead in less than five minutes:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-can-you-stay-outside-in-cold-temperatures-2014-1
We have a trick to avoid that, wear clothes. And burn fossil fuels!
What 52 Below looks like from the living room:
(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipP8aMV4uXqvRhiY_xdVrEcbp2d76Ai1eF6b5PFg=s512-p-qv=pcrq061okkar234g2vmer5q0dtc3sjlk6,m=2ab99662c9cf3b06bfb6a613bd67126e,x=,t=25-iv818?key=Mk9sZVUtempSN2x1N2c1S1BudVdVSHMyRkphUEZR)
Well, if it weren't for global warming, it would be -100!
-
"We have a trick to avoid that, wear clothes. And burn fossil fuels!"
and probably hunt for arctic animal skins!
I remember buying one of those alpaka pillows at the Disney store and within 5 minutes or putting my face on it I had sweat dripping down my neck.
-
Of course :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science-says-used-polar-vortex-outbreaks-205751811.html
along with the phobias me too lexicon we now have to have shoved in our facies this phrase "polar vortex" :roll:
-
Of course :
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science-says-used-polar-vortex-outbreaks-205751811.html
along with the phobias me too lexicon we now have to have shoved in our facies this phrase "polar vortex" :roll:
We have always been at war with Eastasia global warming the POLAR VORTEX!
-
I gather this is the coldest it has been since 1985?
I note that now temps are reported including "wind chill" factor. Better click bait effect?
OTOH I must say on an intuitive level I'm beginning to wonder "WTF?".
-
Windchill or 'realfeel' is the temp exposed skin feels. They do use it for shock appeal but in the very extreme weather there is a very real life and death aspect to it. Convincing people to stay home saves lives.
Global warming saves lives.
-
I agree wind chill numbers are highly relevant. My only point in this moment however is that, IIRC, when I was younger, the wind chill number was not the primary reported number and now it seems to be and that this heightens the perception that things are different this time.
-
I agree wind chill numbers are highly relevant. My only point in this moment however is that, IIRC, when I was younger, the wind chill number was not the primary reported number and now it seems to be and that this heightens the perception that things are different this time.
Agree, same for 'heat index'. Interesting that the extreme cold doesn't fit the preferred narrative but they can't stop themselves from dramatizing it.
I can say from a MN perspective, people talk windchill only when it allows you to say 'below zero'. When temp or windchill is below zero, everyone around you is experiencing something of challenge and you need to check in on your more vulnerable friends and family.
It is +44 C in Melbourne today, 111 F, and when we have extreme heat across the US, you can always find extreme cold somewhere else on the globe. Amazing how adaptable the human body is to temperature fluctuations even if we can't handle full exposure to the real extremes.
The deaths certain to happen from cold today are because of extremely cold weather, not global cooling. When they report extreme heat or drought it too often gets labeled 'proof' of catastrophic, human caused global warming. Now we find out the California wild fires were ignited by public utility failures?
-28 F and clear here this am, not figuring windchill.
Newer high efficiency furnaces, now mandated, are less reliable than older simpler types. Condensation from the combustion process freezes in the exhaust pipes, wind blown snow clogs them from the outside and then the pressure switch shuts the furnace off and doesn't allow it to restart. Power outages were reported over night as grid equipment fails and natural gas furnaces won't work at all without electricity. Cell chargers go off with the power and people don't have landlines anymore. Drive to safety but car batteries lose 70% of their power, all the old ones fail and the viscosity of motor oil can turn to sledge. Moisture freezes in fuel lines, tires lose pressure and salt is ineffective with ice on roads. Furnace (and car) repairmen are fully booked up, stores are closing early and shelters are full. What could possibly go wrong?
I posted the peaceful frozen lake picture to note that our extreme weather, if you are fully prepared for it, is not as bad as other things like being in a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, monsoon, forest fire or beneath a volcano.
Tell me again about half a degree per century of warming; I wish I could live long enough to fully appreciate it.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/02/10/study-claims-european-slaughter-indigenous-americans-caused-little-ice-age/
-
http://bigislandnow.com/2019/02/10/first-time-snow-falls-at-hawaii-state-park/
Just like Al Gore predicted!
-
GM posted:
" http://bigislandnow.com/2019/02/10/first-time-snow-falls-at-hawaii-state-park/
Just like Al Gore predicted!"
https://www.bankrate.com/lifestyle/celebrity-money/al-gore-net-worth/
Gore is probably chasing 20 something girls around his private jet laughing hahahahahahhahahah.
-
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-snow-comes-and-goes-leaves-cold-temps-1594556/
-
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-snow-comes-and-goes-leaves-cold-temps-1594556/
Yes, like they say in Antarctica with its increasing ice mass, global warming causes more snowfall because [Las Vegas?] would otherwise be too cold to snow. ??
When do they update their Orwellian misdirection and erase all previous explanations?
Global warming caused California forest fires - on every network - although 95% are human started and 2000 of them over the last 3 years were caused by utility lines.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-utilities-wildfires-regulators-20190128-story.html
-
Rep Liz Cheney to expert climate witnesses pushing for ban of the use of all fossil fuels and air travel, 'How did you get here today?'
https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/12/liz-cheney-green-new-deal-question/
-
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-snow-comes-and-goes-leaves-cold-temps-1594556/
Yes, like they say in Antarctica with its increasing ice mass, global warming causes more snowfall because [Las Vegas?] would otherwise be too cold to snow. ??
When do they update their Orwellian misdirection and erase all previous explanations?
Global warming caused California forest fires - on every network - although 95% are human started and 2000 of them over the last 3 years were caused by utility lines.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-utilities-wildfires-regulators-20190128-story.html
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-may-see-more-snow-after-summerlin-flurries-1598808/
More global warming snowstorms hit Vegas.
-
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-snow-comes-and-goes-leaves-cold-temps-1594556/
Yes, like they say in Antarctica with its increasing ice mass, global warming causes more snowfall because [Las Vegas?] would otherwise be too cold to snow. ??
When do they update their Orwellian misdirection and erase all previous explanations?
Global warming caused California forest fires - on every network - although 95% are human started and 2000 of them over the last 3 years were caused by utility lines.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-utilities-wildfires-regulators-20190128-story.html
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-valley-may-see-more-snow-after-summerlin-flurries-1598808/
More global warming snowstorms hit Vegas.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/weather/las-vegas-snow-blankets-parts-of-valley-more-coming-overnight-1599300/
-
I'm trying to make some plans here but I can't figure out how many years we have left now.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/319399/
In 1989 we had 10 years left:
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
—AP, June 29, 1989.
[Note that only governments can do it.]
In 2006 we had 10 years left:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14834318/ns/us_news-environment/t/warming-expert-only-decade-left-act-time/
In 2009 we had 4 years left:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
In 2018 we had 10 years left:
(https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ocasio-cortez_final_countdown_11-15-18-1-680x800.jpg)
[Big break, net gain of 15 years there.]
In 2019, we are up to 12 years left:
https://news.grabien.com/story-ocasio-cortez-millennials-were-world-going-end-12-years-if-w
[One year went by and we gained two for a net gain of three additional.]
Am I taking them too literally here? If the world like ends, did it end or not end?
And their main complaint with Trump is that he is inaccurate and imprecise!
---------------
58% of millennials believe this is the most stressful time to be alive, ever!
Is it global warming? Nope.
Of the very top stressers affecting an entire generation, experiencing slow wifi is number 6, not having your cell phone charger is number 10. Global warming and fear of getting raped on campus do not make the top 16.
https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-radio/millennials-say-life-today-is-more-stressful-than-ever-before-here-are-their-top-16-reasons
-
I'm still worried about dihydrogen monoxide and now this:
http://thepeoplescube.com/current-truth/anthropogenic-continental-drift-an-incoherent-truth-t1668.html
Industrial Nations Threaten Globe Again
A new menace to the planet has been discovered and validated by a consensus of politically reliable scientists: Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD) will result in catastrophic damage and untold suffering, unless immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates, Europe, and Australia be made to the governments of non-industrial nations, to counteract this man-made threat to the world's habitats.
(http://thepeoplescube.com/images/ACD_Save.gif)
-
Day three of major winter snowstorm blanketing the midwest - in mid-April!.
http://www.startribune.com/recovery-is-name-of-the-game-on-day-3-of-major-snowstorm/508482702/
Why? Weather, random occurrence.
If this was record warming the story is climate change and global warming.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1116443502689255424
-
Mentioned on radio yesterday, I thought I would capture this column on the forum. Stephens, an anti-Trumper, was hired away from WSJ by the NYT and this was his first column, causing liberals to cancel their all liberal all the time subscriptions. [I hope the leftists leaving didn't miss the Pulitzer winning 10 articles of fake news on Russian collusion.]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/climate-of-complete-certainty.html
Climate of Complete Certainty
By Bret Stephens
April 28, 2017
When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
— An old Jew of Galicia
In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.
Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.
That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.
“Mook and his ‘Moneyball’ approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete,” Allen and Parnes write about the campaign’s final days. “The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.”
There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.
We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.
With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.
Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.
Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?
Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.
Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.
By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”
Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.
I’ve taken the epigraph for this column from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
----------------
Cancellations link:
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23showyourcancellation&src=typd
-
A-listers flock to Google summit in private
jets, mega yachts to talk climate change
https://pagesix.com/2019/07/30/a-listers-flock-to-google-summit-in-private-jets-mega-yachts-to-talk-climate-change/
'Elites' Flock to Google Summit in 114 Private Jets, Mega Yachts to Talk Climate Change
http://humansarefree.com/2019/08/elites-flock-to-google-summit-in-114.html
They are gathering to strategize on how to limit the rights of ordinary people to use fossil fuels to better their lives. Make sure you carve out exceptions for the elite. Their meetings, their travel, their mansions and their AC are a little more important than yours.
HAS ANYONE EVER HEARD OF VIDEO CONFERENCING?
-
I certainly can see how the likes of Kate Perry who has sung stolen songs and claims she writes them
has the merits to help change the Earth's weather
she must be someone's girl friend
maybe Eric Schmidt who probably goes there though retired
-
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/16/global-temperature-how-can-we-trust-a-statistic-that-might-not-even-exist/
"while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. ... it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate'."
------
A few years after the University of Copenhagen report was published, University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, one of the report’s authors, noted in another paper that “number of weather stations providing data . . . plunged in 1990 and again in 2005. The sample size has fallen by over 75% from its peak in the early 1970s, and is now smaller than at any time since 1919.”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1653928
Not to mention biased adjustments to measured data...
-
British Columbia Supreme Courts ruled against the climate fraud Michael Mann and ordered him to pay his opponent's court costs. The 30 day clock to appeal this ruling is ticking.
At issue, Dr. Tim Ball has said that "Michael Mann should be in the state pen not at Penn State", meaning the hockey stick graph is a fraud. Mann sued for libel. Ball asserted the truth defense. Mann refused to release the data behind his work, Mann's R2 regression numbers, that either support the hockey stick graph or the fraud characterization. Had Mann released the source data, it would be game over for the alarmism industry. As one analyst put it, you can put baseball scores into Mann's climate model and get the hockey stick graph.
Two graphs, which one is right?
(https://www.naturalnews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/91/2019/08/Battle-of-the-Graphs-Mann-vs-Ball.jpg)
https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-08-26-climate-change-hoax-collapses-as-michael-mann-bogus-hockey-stick-graph.html
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/michael-mann-refuses-to-produce-data-loses-case.php
https://principia-scientific.org/breaking-news-dr-tim-ball-defeats-michael-manns-climate-lawsuit/
https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Mann-Ball%20Libel%20Claim.pdf
Mann's original paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/33859.epdf?referrer_access_token=UcQMRAUPUscPRGtZ_nmN0tRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PIU6928D7U3LQJxug20QYL9ESIIW5WxXKIhZdkFHPvJyCgGXYnBzO2iiIqbRp1deponI44NSXsWPHevD1owOCzy-M7seCPmAtP9uptNzLwM0cPBtAqbyWTRLYziB4QAcNUZppYicirN1qvEePdK7PXfPV0rWC3s1R_r-yu5jgaARXTHsmrZypQ4t2zgUOLblqSL4dO3ayXicSrBFhH94ERlk4rGXq0DDsogNi_Vg4Asw%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=blogs.scientificamerican.com
-
https://patriotpost.us/articles/65114-a-burning-sensation-in-brazils-amazon
From looking at all the close ups of the forest that burning one would think the entire northern half of S America is going up in flames.
More fake news.
-
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brazil-amazon-rainforest-fires-climate-emissions-oxygen
due in part to deforestation
-
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brazil-amazon-rainforest-fires-climate-emissions-oxygen
due in part to deforestation
Well, global warming killed us all off around 2000, so we are ok.
-
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environment/
or not doing great?:
Boomer news says no:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-10/europe-is-dangerously-behind-on-deforestation-goals-idh-says
This is a perfect example of the total bullshit in the news about climate "change"
you can't believe anything
Europe tells Brazil it should stop the deforestation while they do it unmercifully.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes
or just we are better at measuring them.
I remember growing up the weather forecasts were more wrong then right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Pacific_hurricanes
-
Image links preserve the actual news stories!
1967: ‘Dire famine by 1975.’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/1_2.png
Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967
1969: ‘Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/2_2.png
New York Times, Aug 10, 1969
1970: Ice age by 2000
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/3_2.png
Boston Globe, April 16, 1970
1970: ‘America subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/4_1.jpg
Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970
1971: ‘New Ice Age Coming’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/5_0.png
Washington Post, July 9, 1971
1972: New ice age by 2070
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/6.png
NOAA, October 2015
1974: ‘New Ice Age Coming Fast’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/8.png
The Guardian, January 29, 1974
1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/10.png
NASA
1980: ‘Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/13_1.jpg
Noblesville Ledger (Noblesville, IN) April 9, 1980
Acid Rain No Environmental Crisis
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/14.png
Associated Press, September 6, 1990
1978: ‘No End in Sight’ to 30-Year Cooling Trend
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/15.png
New York Times, January 5, 1978
1988: James Hansen forecasts increase regional drought in 1990s
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/17.jpg
Miami News June 24, 1988
But the last really dry year in the Midwest was 1988, and recent years have been record wet.
1988: Washington DC days over 90F from 35 to 85
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/19.gif
Lansing Journal, Dec 12, 1988
But the number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since.
(https://cei.org/sites/default/files/20.png)
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/20.png
Source: RealClimateScience.com
1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/21.png
Agence France Press, September 26, 1988
1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/22.png
Associated Press, June 30, 1989
1989: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/23.gif
Salon.com, October 23, 2001
1995 to Present: Climate Model Failure
(https://cei.org/sites/default/files/24.jpg)
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/24.jpg
Source: CEI.org
2000: ‘Children won’t know what snow is.’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/25.png
The Independent, March 20, 2000
2002: Famine in 10 years
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/27.png
The Guardian, December 23, 2002
2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/29.png
The Guardian, February 21, 2004
2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/30.gif
Associated Press, June 24, 2008
2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/31.png
Dec 14, 2008, COP15 Climate Conference
But… it’s still there:
(https://cei.org/sites/default/files/32.png)
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/32.png
2009: Prince Charles says only 8 years to save the planet
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/33.png
The Independent, July 9, 2009
2009: UK prime minister says 50 days to ‘save the planet from catastrophe’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/34.png
The Independent: October 20, 2009
2009: Arctic ice-free by 2014
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/35.png
USA Today, December 14, 2009
2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/36.png
The Guardian, July 24, 2013
2013: Arctic ice-free by 2016
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/37.png
The Guardian, December 9, 2013
2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/38.png
Planet still Standing 500 days after Climate Chaos Warning:
Washington Examiner, Sept 29, 2015
Ship with Climate Change Warriors caught in ice, Warriors evacuated
September 4, 2019
https://maritimebulletin.net/2019/09/04/ship-with-climate-change-warriors-caught-in-ice-warriors-evacuated/?via=
http://maritimebulletin.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/MALMO.jpg
"Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.
Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors."
Fossil fuel powered ship rescued with fossil fuel powered aircraft. 'nuff said.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/23/greta-thunberg-to-world-leaders-at-united-nations-how-dare-yougreta-thunberg-to-world-leaders-at-united-nations-how-dare-you/
I would have preferred this Swedish actress give the speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZIwBa67xU
but alas she has escaped this Earth before the Climate catastrophe soons kills all life.
-
Didn't know that Greta is diagnosed with mild autism spectrum disorder .
This would explain the nature of her emotions and mood during her speech.
I am sympathetic to her for that.
I am not sympathetic to the adults who are using her.
-
"I am not sympathetic to the adults who are using her."
---------------------------
I am not sympathetic to the adults who are abusing her.
How many children suffer from anxiety and depression based on what they are taught about global warming and catastrophe? How many don't marry, don't have children, don't buy houses because of that? How many don't start businesses, invest for the long term, don't care about debt because of that?
Greta transcript:
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/sep/23/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-un/
She quotes dates and statistics with precision that were not calculated with any.
Not to Greta in particular, this is to her generation: How dare you say you studied math, say you studied science, say you studied history and say you care about people and then tell us that a global government-run solution is the only and best way forward.
-
"I am not sympathetic to the adults who are using her."
---------------------------
I am not sympathetic to the adults who are abusing her.
How many children suffer from anxiety and depression based on what they are taught about global warming and catastrophe? How many don't marry, don't have children, don't buy houses because of that? How many don't start businesses, invest for the long term, don't care about debt because of that?
Greta transcript:
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/sep/23/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-un/
She quotes dates and statistics with precision that were not calculated with any.
Not to Greta in particular, this is to her generation: How dare you say you studied math, say you studied science, say you studied history and say you care about people and then tell us that a global government-run solution is the only and best way forward.
https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/june-2019/gretas-very-corporate-childrens-crusade/
-
" .Trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project"
wait, isn't he the guy who chases young massage therapists around the room with saliva running down his mouth?
"Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism"
in my day it was getting "turned on" to (drugs) . today the fad is "woke" to eco crap , the alphabet, Lbtsjueoendocnemm, socialism , f the rich, f the repbulicans, f the Christians and Jews, f the 2 amendment, f the electoral college, f anything that stands in our way ......etc.
-
...
https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/june-2019/gretas-very-corporate-childrens-crusade/
"Catherina Ringborg is also a member of green energy venture capital firm Sustainable Energy Angels."
- Did people know the save the world crowd have venture capital firms?
"Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think-tank owned by an ex-Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector. His board was stacked with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrats, major union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his board’s vice-chair was a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful green energy investment groups."
- How come folks like the Liz Warren types don't distrust THESE big corporate interests?
"When I asked Rentzhog if he had introduced Greta and her parents to other Global Challenge board members, he replied, “I don’t know, maybe I did, but if Svante says no, maybe it was not connected.”
"Wijkman leads the anti-growth Club of Rome."
- The Anti-Growth Club of Rome??!! Over here we just call it the "Democrat Party".
"Greta’s father Svante, who now devotes himself to managing her career,"
- He what?? Quit his job to manage her career? She's 16. This is a career? Not a hobby, an interest, a passion, it's a career. But we can't fact check her because she is a child?
--------------------------------------------------------
How did she get to New York? One step ahead of the criticism of jets going to climate events, she sailed on a $4 million luxury racing yacht owned by the royal family of Monaco. 'carbon-free, except for ... '
(https://www.monaco-tribune.com/wp-content/uploads/thumbs/monegasque-ship-sets-sail-on-the-route-du-rhum-37znuzimhmwexq41pi8e80.jpg)
Isn't that how an ordinary schoolgirl without handlers travels?
https://news.yahoo.com/cramped-basic-greta-thunbergs-voyage-york-163315047.html
-
The UN IPCC, third report (2001):,
In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. (Chapter 14, Section 14.2.2.2. )]
----------------------------------------
"These models completely lack some critically important climate processes and feedbacks, and represent some other critically important climate processes and feedbacks in grossly distorted manners to the extent that makes these models totally useless for any meaningful climate prediction.
I myself used to use climate simulation models for scientific studies, not for predictions, and learned about their problems and limitations in the process."
- Climate Modeler Dr. Mototaka Nakamura. From 1990 to 2014 he worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Centre, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He’s published about 20 climate papers
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/a-climate-modeller-spills-the-beans/
Continued:
He projects warming from CO2 doubling, “according to the true experts”, to be only 0.5degC. He says he doesn’t dispute the possibility of either catastrophic warming or severe glaciation since the climate system’s myriad non-linear processes swamp “the toys” used for climate predictions. Climate forecasting is simply impossible, if only because future changes in solar energy output are unknowable. As to the impacts of human-caused CO2, they can’t be judged “with the knowledge and technology we currently possess.”
Other gross model simplifications include
# Ignorance about large and small-scale ocean dynamics
# A complete lack of meaningful representations of aerosol changes that generate clouds.
# Lack of understanding of drivers of ice-albedo (reflectivity) feedbacks: “Without a reasonably accurate representation, it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions of climate variations and changes in the middle and high latitudes and thus the entire planet.”
# Inability to deal with water vapor elements
# Arbitrary “tunings” (fudges) of key parameters that are not understood
Concerning CO2 changes he says,
I want to point out a simple fact that it is impossible to correctly predict even the sense or direction of a change of a system when the prediction tool lacks and/or grossly distorts important non-linear processes, feedbacks in particular, that are present in the actual system …
… The real or realistically-simulated climate system is far more complex than an absurdly simple system simulated by the toys that have been used for climate predictions to date, and will be insurmountably difficult for those naïve climate researchers who have zero or very limited understanding of geophysical fluid dynamics. I understand geophysical fluid dynamics just a little, but enough to realize that the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans are absolutely critical facets of the climate system if one hopes to ever make any meaningful prediction of climate variation.
Key model elements are replete with “tunings” i.e. fudges. Nakamura explains how that trick works
The models are ‘tuned’ by tinkering around with values of various parameters until the best compromise is obtained. I used to do it myself. It is a necessary and unavoidable procedure and not a problem so long as the user is aware of its ramifications and is honest about it. But it is a serious and fatal flaw if it is used for climate forecasting/prediction purposes.
One set of fudges involves clouds.
Ad hoc representation of clouds may be the greatest source of uncertainty in climate prediction. A profound fact is that only a very small change, so small that it cannot be measured accurately…in the global cloud characteristics can completely offset the warming effect of the doubled atmospheric CO2.
Two such characteristics are an increase in cloud area and a decrease in the average size of cloud particles.
Accurate simulation of cloud is simply impossible in climate models since it requires calculations of processes at scales smaller than 1mm.” Instead, the modellers put in their own cloud parameters. Anyone studying real cloud formation and then the treatment in climate models would be “flabbergasted by the perfunctory treatment of clouds in the models.
Nakamura describes as “moronic” the claims that “tuned” ocean models are good enough for climate predictions. That’s because, in tuning some parameters, other aspects of the model have to become extremely distorted. He says a large part of the forecast global warming is attributed to water vapor changes, not CO2 changes. “But the fact is this: all climate simulation models perform poorly in reproducing the atmospheric water vapor and its radiative forcing observed in the current climate… They have only a few parameters that can be used to ‘tune’ the performance of the models and (are) utterly unrealistic.” Positive water vapor feedbacks from CO2 increases are artificially enforced by the modelers. They neglect other reverse feedbacks in the real world, and hence they exaggerate forecast warming.
The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. “We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.” This makes meaningless the Paris targets of 1.5degC or 2degC above pre-industrial levels.
He is contemptuous of claims about models being “validated”, saying the modellers are merely “trying to construct narratives that justify the use of these models for climate predictions.” And he concludes,
The take-home message is (that) all climate simulation models, even those with the best parametric representation scheme for convective motions and clouds, suffer from a very large degree of arbitrariness in the representation of processes that determine the atmospheric water vapor and cloud fields. Since the climate models are tuned arbitrarily …there is no reason to trust their predictions/forecasts.
With values of parameters that are supposed to represent many complex processes being held constant, many nonlinear processes in the real climate system are absent or grossly distorted in the models. It is a delusion to believe that simulation models that lack important nonlinear processes in the real climate system can predict (even) the sense or direction of the climate change correctly.
-
Nature is retracting a 2018 paper which found that the oceans are warming much faster than predicted by previous models of climate change.
... quickly drew the attention of an influential critic who said the analysis was flawed.
The authors withdrew the paper and said, we'll get back to you:
"The authors agreed, and within three weeks the paper received the following update:
We would like to alert readers that the authors have informed us of errors in the paper. An implication of the errors is that the uncertainties in ocean heat content are substantially underestimated. We are working with the authors to establish the quantitative impact of the errors on the published results, at which point in time we will provide a further update."
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/25/nature-paper-on-ocean-warming-retracted/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0651-8#change-history
-------------------
Meanwhile, the [false] narrative is out there, the oceans are warming faster than predicted, despite a fourfold increase in uncertainty.
-
(https://img.newspapers.com/img/img?institutionId=0&user=0&id=89276088&width=557&height=663&crop=2626_5488_655_795&rotation=0&brightness=0&contrast=0&invert=0&ts=1569635898&h=1b2a42bd1bf6c916fc1f6528da8a99f6)
“All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting,” the Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier reported on Dec. 17, 1939.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/13966113/climate_change_in_1939/
-------------------
Unprecedented?
-
Global warming caused WWII!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:cry:
(https://img.newspapers.com/img/img?institutionId=0&user=0&id=89276088&width=557&height=663&crop=2626_5488_655_795&rotation=0&brightness=0&contrast=0&invert=0&ts=1569635898&h=1b2a42bd1bf6c916fc1f6528da8a99f6)
“All the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting,” the Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] Sunday Courier reported on Dec. 17, 1939.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/13966113/climate_change_in_1939/
-------------------
Unprecedented?
-
https://www.christianpost.com/news/church-in-sweden-names-greta-thunberg-successor-to-jesus-christ.html
-
"Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you. ...except for preventing war, the greatest challenge of our lifetime."
The only solution is to shut off the lights, turn down the heat, shut off the AC - and stay home. "The alternative could be a national catastrophe."
“The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out.”
“Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil than it can produce.”
“World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.”
“We can’t substantially increase our domestic production…”
“Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil—from any country, at any acceptable price.”
“If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.”
- Jimmy Carter, 1977, not exactly a visionary, but he was right that under his policies, if allowed to continue, we would soon be a disaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=bbNFKgNoWc0
https://fee.org/articles/jimmy-carter-and-the-energy-crisis-that-never-happened/
-
To think one might receive a prize the same as Baraq and Yassar:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/03/greta-thunberg-is-bookies-early-favorite-for-nobel-peace-prize/#
-
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/10/03/study-chinese-cargo-ships-dump-73-trash-atlantic-ocean/#
Time to give China hell.
-
Notable & Quotable: Climate Change c. 2004
‘Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver?mod=article_inline
https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-climate-change-c-2004-11570142794?mod=article_inline
------
Can you believe then President Bush was denying the certainty of this Pentagon report leaked to the opposition press?
-
Notable & Quotable: Climate Change c. 2004
‘Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver?mod=article_inline
https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-climate-change-c-2004-11570142794?mod=article_inline
------
Can you believe then President Bush was denying the certainty of this Pentagon report leaked to the opposition press?
Wow! We don't have much time left!
-
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/scientific-journal-forced-to-retract-landmark-climate-change-study-due-to-falsehoods/
-
another Nobel contender:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2019/10/07/climate-change-protester-chained-to-car-cries-because-his-kids-are-very-frightened-of-their-future-n2554307
-
This of course proves nothing - except that warming is not global and not spiraling out of control.
Coldest 'ever'.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/10/30/utah-sees-record-cold-of-43-6-of-may-be-lowest-october-temperature-ever-recorded-in-continental-u-s/
It will be far more dangerous to find out the sun or the earth is cooling.
-
I report weather as climate, like the warmists do.
http://www.startribune.com/twin-cities-brace-for-lowest-high-temperature-on-record-for-today/564744672/
Record Cold in MN is cold.
January in November.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/11/11/arctic-blast-frosting-eastern-half-lower-with-january-like-cold-snow/
https://denver.cbslocal.com/2019/10/29/second-snowstorm-denver-record-cold-weather-hits-sooner-than-expected/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-chicago-cold-weather-20190127-story.html
Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Washington, Toronto, maybe its just a local phenomenon.
-
Correct info for Indian Ocean here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41748-017-0020-z
Conclusion
The reconstructed tide gauge records of Aden, Mumbai and Karachi are perfectly consistent with multiple lines of evidence from other key sites of the Indian Ocean including Qatar, Maldives, Bangladesh and Visakhapatnam. The sea levels have been stable since the start of the twentieth century in Aden similar to Karachi and Mumbai. [Who knew? Where is the glacier melt-off going?]
This scandal was previewed 50 years ago on television:
https://gilligan.fandom.com/wiki/Quick_Before_It_Sinks
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/15/u-n-anger-as-u-s-australia-lead-revolt-against-climate-demands/
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/15/u-n-anger-as-u-s-australia-lead-revolt-against-climate-demands/
If you are a hammer, every problem is a nail. Same with global tax on 'the wealthy' if you are the UN or any of its member Kleptocracies.
Whatever they say it is - that is not what it will be once it gets going.
Like everything else, tax wealth and you will get less of it. Is that what we want?
Just ask Democrats, prosperity is the answer to climate change. All their ideas cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. We better get this country rich. Fast. And same for the rest of the world. Maybe we should put an emergency global mandate of freedom and free enterprise on all of them - to save the planet.
-
What is the matter with these people. The phenomenon is only political because of exaggeration, and because everything they propose to do about involves totalitarianism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.
- Good thing they "obtained" the "suppressed report", or else we wouldn't have had any notice this was coming.
Or did they "suppress" it because it was hogwash?
-----------------------------
Reminds me of my business. People say, "I will have the rent on Friday." What they don't seem to know is that on Friday I will know if that was true.
In the case of climate, they try to keep the emphasis on the end of the century - making everyone old enough to have a little perspective irrelevant to the discussion.
-
Counting the minutes until the end of the world. Or 2020. Whichever comes first.
What is the matter with these people. The phenomenon is only political because of exaggeration, and because everything they propose to do about involves totalitarianism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.
- Good thing they "obtained" the "suppressed report", or else we wouldn't have had any notice this was coming.
Or did they "suppress" it because it was hogwash?
-----------------------------
Reminds me of my business. People say, "I will have the rent on Friday." What they don't seem to know is that on Friday I will know if that was true.
In the case of climate, they try to keep the emphasis on the end of the century - making everyone old enough to have a little perspective irrelevant to the discussion.
-
Who knew?
https://reason.com/2020/08/01/the-global-environmental-apocalypse-has-been-canceled/
...
According to these activists and politicians, humanity is beset on all sides by catastrophes that could kill off civilization, and maybe even our species. Are they right?
Absolutely not, answers the longtime environmental activist Michael Shellenberger in an engaging new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. "Much of what people are being told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right," he writes. "I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism." While fully acknowledging that significant global environmental problems exist, Shellenberger argues that they do not constitute inexorable existential threats. Economic growth and technological progress, he says, can ameliorate them.
Shellenberger's analysis relies on largely uncontroversial mainstream science, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization. And as a longstanding activist, Shellenberger is in a good position to parse the motives behind the purveyors of doom. ...
------------
Read it all.
------------
"On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years," he wrote in an essay to promote his new book. "Climate change is happening. It's just not the end of the world. It's not even our most serious environmental problem."
...
"(1) human being are not causing a "sixth mass extinction," (2) the Amazon rainforests are not the "lungs of the world," (3) climate change is not making natural disasters worse, and (4) fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003."
...
"no strong trends in floods, tropical cyclones, or tornadoes have been identified."
...
"the number of people who die in natural disasters annually has dropped by 99 percent since the 20th century peak in 1931. World population has nearly quadrupled over that period of time."
...
"a 2018 study in Earth's Future points out that the "area burning in recent years is a small fraction of what burned prior to the 1920s." Even in 1930 and 1931, more than 50 million acres of wildlands burned, compared to the recent high of 10 million acres burned in 2015."
...
"while the amount of land devoted to agriculture has increased 8 percent since 1961, the amount of food produced in that space has increased 300 percent. Meanwhile, the amount of land devoted to raising the livestock we use for meat has "declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska." "
...
"the acreage devoted to power transmission—coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, plus mines, wells, and waste storage currently occupy just over 3,000 square kilometers (just under 1,200 square miles) of U.S. land"
"the wind and solar components of the proposed infrastructure would occupy more than 600,000 square kilometers (about 232,000 square miles). That is just a bit smaller than Texas."
...
"Solve poverty, Shellenberger says, and problems like species extinction, rainforest deforestation, natural disaster risks, wildfires, rising sea levels, and food insecurity become tractable."
...
"he founded Environmental Progress, which campaigns for, among other things, the deployment of clean modern nuclear power."
[Good idea!]
-
The forum is nicely divided into distinct and overlapping topics but some of the most interesting observations happen with when phenomena cross over seemingly unrelated topics.
"Experts" have lied to us, embellished, exaggerated, "adjusted" the data, hid the decline, banned dissent, etc for decades now on catastrophic anthropogenically-caused catastrophic (redundancy intentional) global warming that threatens to kill the earth and all the species who inhabit it. We caught them red-handed lying and manipulating in their own emails and in their own behaviors and words and yet we tolerate this BS in all our greatest institutions from our politics to our media to the Nobel Prize to K-12 to all of higher education. Facts be damned. [And today we close our windows because it's too cold out in mid-August.]
In 2020 we started the Covid experience with estimates out of London and all the American universities and research centers that exaggerated everything bad to do with covid, wrong by factors of ten to one hundred fold. cf. death rates, death totals, etc. On those errors we made personal and policy decisions that shut down the local, state, national and global economies doing immeasurable personal, fiscal, cultural and societal harm. The discoveries of these errors is met with a global yawn. "Didn't everyone get it wrong?" Why is that acceptable? Who makes estimates based on no one making any adjustment to the news of a global pandemic??
I would just like to note the connection. The failure to bring the liars of CAGW down off their pedestal is related to the mess we are in now. We lie about economics. We lie about the weather.
Now we lie about health. Fake news is the norm. Destruction of our economy and society are the consequences. Wise man said, 'plan accordingly'.
-
Children are big spreaders of COVID?
https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/Massachusetts-general-hospital-researchers-show-children-are-silent-spreaders-of-virus-that-causes-covid-19
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(20)31023-4/fulltext
3) Another Fake Hype Anti-School Media Cycle
You saw it everywhere yesterday: "Mass General Study Shows Children Are Silent Spreaders"
This time it wasn't even just the media's fault; Mass General itself put out a mendacious press release that drove this latest anti-school hype cycle.
But the study itself -- which they forgot to even *link to* in the press release -- well, it's embarrassing for a once-great hospital.
To begin with, the press release failed to mention that the paper expressly says "transmissibility was not assessed in this study." Oops.
It's all speculation based on viral load and ignoring the now vast body of empirical evidence. A redux of Drosten paper that got savaged in Germany and slammed by every major medical society before Germany went ahead and reopened schools.
But it's even worse than that. "Children ages 0-22 years participated in this study." What the heck? 22-year old children?
And how many potential "silent spreaders" are among the 49 age 0-22 "children" in this study? "Of the 11 asymptomatic children presenting for SARS-CoV-2 testing based on exposure to an infected individual rather than symptoms, 3 (27%) tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection."
That's three.
This is science?
In Sweden 1.8 million school children went to school every day with no social distancing or masks, right through the peak and fall of the epidemic. What happened there?
"We found no additional impact of co-residing with children, even though Swedish schools have remained open for children below age 16 throughout the pandemic. This result does not support hypotheses of children as major transmitters of SARS-CoV-2."
https://su.figshare.com/articles/preprint/Residential_Context_and_COVID-19_Mortality_among_the_Elderly_in_Stockholm_A_population-based_observational_study/12612947/1
We'll take the real-world data from 1.8 million kids under 16 over three "kids" up to age 22.
What is the agenda here? The anti-schoolers are mounting a campaign to keep schools closed and the media is always ready for another anti-school hype cycle.
And these are the same people who endlessly lecture us about how liberals care about “the children.”
http://click1.e.freedomworks.org/ViewMessage.do?m=yvmqfskb&r=rncclcjtgv&s=hnmfcvcclsgcwhmslmqfjplfgpghgvprfww&q=1598022900&a=view
-
Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-2020-trnd/index.html CNN!
https://www.krtv.com/news/montana-and-regional-news/glacier-national-park-is-removing-glaciers-will-be-gone-by-2020-signs
What happened?
-
Systemic racism.
Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-2020-trnd/index.html CNN!
https://www.krtv.com/news/montana-and-regional-news/glacier-national-park-is-removing-glaciers-will-be-gone-by-2020-signs
What happened?
-
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48-years-democrats-endorse-nuclear-energy-in-platform/#3e9d265f5829
-
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48-years-democrats-endorse-nuclear-energy-in-platform/#3e9d265f5829
Famous people caught reading the forum. How can CO2 be an existential threat and the number one source of carbon-free energy be banned? And then deny they want to shut down the economy. How do we pay for wind and solar, free healthcare, free college, free daycare, universal comfortable income, free housing, free internet, free food, free transportation, did I miss anything they demand of us?
Electric cars are carbon-free, if they stay without charge in your garage. But the minute you plug it into the wall it connects to coal, natural gas etc. Every additional solar panel and wind turbine installed adds to the carbon footprint - for the what, 60% of the time those intermittent sources are not producing. They want the whole transportation sector added to the grid. What grid? The one we have now? Build a new one? Keyword one. We want one weak point attacked or failed to take down everything. I want more than one way of heating my home in case of failure or outage,more than one way of getting to work, etc. They want central power, central control.
These electric cars (and air conditioners, thermostats and everything else) are capable of being controlled centrally. Has any freedom loving conservative thought that might be a bad idea? The totalitarians on the Left finally support bigger power and bigger grid? I wonder what they have in mind for it?
Final question before I applaud their new enlightenment, if they were so wrong for so long (48 years!) on nuclear power, what else might they be wrong about?
-
Return Of The Dust Bowl? The “Megadrought” In The Southwest Is Really Starting To Escalate
August 28, 2020
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/return-of-the-dust-bowl-the-megadrought-in-the-southwest-is-really-starting-to-escalate
If it seems like the rain won't go away ... you're right.
Record rainfall in US history:
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/record-rain-most-in-us-history-over-past-year-3rd-in-mn/89-bfddffe8-68a4-4ef3-8685-c7ca7d56f276
https://watchers.news/2020/07/06/record-rain-flood-kyushu-japan-july-2020/
-
should it be dumped in California?
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/The-World-Is-Facing-A-Solar-Panel-Waste-Problem.html
-
should it be dumped in California?
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/The-World-Is-Facing-A-Solar-Panel-Waste-Problem.html
Yes. Wind power has a waste problem too.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste-problem-caused-by-wind-energy
We were lied to about the new ecological paradise.
-
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145421/building-a-long-term-record-of-fire?utm_source=CCNet+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e948f36358-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_16_02_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fe4b2f45ef-e948f36358-20154709&mc_cid=e948f36358&mc_eid=b8de9e4ac4
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/fire-fanaticism-2.php
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-16-at-10.51.36-AM.png?w=1004&ssl=1)
-
https://alethonews.com/2020/11/19/new-footage-reveals-netflix-faked-walrus-climate-deaths/
-
https://alethonews.com/2020/11/19/new-footage-reveals-netflix-faked-walrus-climate-deaths/
"Fake but true"!- All leftists/professional journalists
-
Dim the sun to save the earth. Say it isn't so.
https://news.trust.org/item/20201218140025-po1gu
-
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/28/egg-on-their-faces-10-climate-alarmist-predictions-for-2020-that-went-horribly-wrong-n1289371?fbclid=IwAR20NsUMGk5RWw5F1Ut-eUHS3gjvXBlFYTNq6JbGJ0adGjjpRGdUsEPDSig
-
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/28/egg-on-their-faces-10-climate-alarmist-predictions-for-2020-that-went-horribly-wrong-n1289371?fbclid=IwAR20NsUMGk5RWw5F1Ut-eUHS3gjvXBlFYTNq6JbGJ0adGjjpRGdUsEPDSig
Great compilation. One liberal outdoorsman friend asked me, do you really deny all the science of global warming and I answered that I believe the alarmism is 2 1/2 to seven times overstated and that THAT it backed up in science.
The evidence of massive overstatement, lies and false promises keeps coming in.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the article:
1. "within 15 to 20 years of this [1987], the earth will be warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years,” Hansen said.
Good grief. Only if you lie about how warm it was over the last 100,000 years.
2. [1978] the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will double by 2020
That would make put atmospheric CO2 levels at 670 parts per million, still less than one part per thousand, a trace element. Actual number today: 413 PPM. The increased was over-promised by more than 400%.
3. "China says it will, by 2020, reduce gases by 40 to 45 percent"
China increased emissions by 168%. Oops. China lies (too).
4. "Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth predicted that there would be no snow on Kilimanjaro in 2020." Wrong.
Times of London, 2020: Staying power of Kilimanjaro snow defies Al Gore’s gloomy forecast
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/staying-power-of-kilimanjaro-snow-defies-al-gores-gloomy-forecast-8x8l7s0v3
(https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F65244c24-50e2-11ea-a869-24971f770bf3.jpg?crop=1326%2C746%2C7%2C153&resize=1180)
Do the writers keep their money anyway? Academy award? Nobel Peace Prize??
5. In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Jim Titus predicted that the sea level around Florida would rise two feet by 2020, The Miami Herald reported. https://junkscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The_Miami_Herald_Sun__Sep_21__1986_.pdf
According to NOAA, the sea level at Virginia Key has risen by about 9 centimeters, which works out to 3.54 inches.
Is the man still a paid government forecaster?
...
10. 2010, Glacier National Park erected signs warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020. This year, the park rushed to change the signs as the glaciers still existed.
Question: Does Glacier National Park lose its National Park status if it loses it's glaciers? Moot.
Do people who once believed all this still believe their sources.
-
https://electroverse.net/eleven-years-ago-today/
ELEVEN YEARS AGO TODAY (Dec 13 2020) AL GORE PREDICTED THE NORTH POLE WOULD BE COMPLETELY ICE FREE IN FIVE YEARS
DECEMBER 13, 2020 CAP ALLON
On December 13 & 14, 2009, professor, prophet, and soothsayer Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.
Gore made his prediction at COP15 Copenhagen which ran from Dec 7 – Dec 18, 2009, where he repeatedly referenced “state-of-the-art” computer modeling to suggest that the north polar ice cap may lose all of its ice by 2014.
“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI&feature=emb_logo
The IPCC was created by the UN for the sole purpose of pushing its AGW agenda, and no real world observations, no matter how contradictory to that agenda, will get in the way.
Just look at past narrative shifts as the real world observations altered: we’re now to believe a warming world means more record snow and more record cold, not less as was previously prophesied.
https://electroverse.net/eleven-years-ago-today/
“Join me in asking president Obama and the US Senate to set a deadline of 22 April for final action in the US Senate,” he said. “I do not believe we can wait till next November or December.”
The Guardian wrote on Dec 16, 2009 in an article entitled “Al Gore rallies the troops in Copenhagen“:
[Gore] kept up the pace by calling for the international community to sign up to a fully fledged climate change treaty by July 2010 – and then announcing that Mexico was prepared to host a deal-making summit.
https://climate.nasa.gov/system/news_items/main_images/3023_still_noaverage1.jpg
(https://climate.nasa.gov/system/news_items/main_images/3023_still_noaverage1.jpg)
-
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2021/01/29/cu-professor-says-much-of-climate-research-untethered-from-the-real-world-cites-misuse-of-scenarios/
"Peer review" has come to mean Orwellian enforced fake science, false history compliance.
"RCP8.5 is the scenario of “business as usual” where no efforts to rein in carbon dioxide emissions are made, something Pielke says is made obsolete [FALSE] by the fact that emissions, particularly in the U.S., have been drastically reduced in the last 25 years or more."
---------------------------------------
CO2 emissions will only go up and up and up geometrically is the assumption used in US policy decisions - except for the fact CO2 emissions in the US have been dropping for 25 years!
What can you say back to this deceit? If there really is a problem with emissions and warming that requires consensus and action, it is completely obscured by the false information put out by people we call experts.
-
"."Peer review" has come to mean Orwellian enforced fake science, false history compliance."
yes
Like Stalin passing the study propaganda to his inner circle
and asking them to review
https://www.rbth.com/history/332961-stalins-closest-comrades
then they come back and saying , yes we reviewed it, and conclusions are all sound , based on objective science
without flaws and irrefutable!!
"Uncle Joe" says, 'see and tells the world science evidence is beyond repute !!'
-
But weather and climate are not fully unrelated.
Beautiful, still sunny day, high of -10 F today according to the outside thermometer measured by my car.
Ice fishing tournament canceled today on Twin Cities Medicine Lake. Too cold.
Like a series of record highs, this proves nothing, but it is something that does not happen in a warm climate.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/the-polar-vortex-is-back-and-here-to-stay/895575
https://www.twincities.com/2021/02/03/ice-road-northwest-angle-mn-canadian-border-lake/
https://townhall.com/columnists/vijayjayaraj/2021/01/17/record-cold-of-2021-reminds-us-be-wary-of-climate-predictions-and-energy-priorities-n2583143
-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/26/snow-las-vegas-sedona-arizona/
Nothing says "global warming" like snow in Las Vegas and Tucson, AZ.
But weather and climate are not fully unrelated.
Beautiful, still sunny day, high of -10 F today according to the outside thermometer measured by my car.
Ice fishing tournament canceled today on Twin Cities Medicine Lake. Too cold.
Like a series of record highs, this proves nothing, but it is something that does not happen in a warm climate.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/the-polar-vortex-is-back-and-here-to-stay/895575
https://www.twincities.com/2021/02/03/ice-road-northwest-angle-mn-canadian-border-lake/
https://townhall.com/columnists/vijayjayaraj/2021/01/17/record-cold-of-2021-reminds-us-be-wary-of-climate-predictions-and-energy-priorities-n2583143
-
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=47252
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fort-worth-texas-vehicle-freeway-crash-fatalities-injuries
----------------------------------
7 degrees in Austin sounds great to me. -7 here. Forecast -18. Looks like we will go 10 days in a row (in mid February!) without hitting high of +7.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/excelsior/55331/february-weather/2247524
The earth has a fever. Temperatures are spiraling upward, out of control? (When were they IN control?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/2021/01/26/163f9dcc-5b52-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html
Are you sure?
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392806.php
Thank God for all the GLOBAL WARMING! Otherwise it would be -30 in Texas!
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=47252
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fort-worth-texas-vehicle-freeway-crash-fatalities-injuries
----------------------------------
7 degrees in Austin sounds great to me. -7 here. Forecast -18. Looks like we will go 10 days in a row (in mid February!) without hitting high of +7.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/excelsior/55331/february-weather/2247524
The earth has a fever. Temperatures are spiraling upward, out of control? (When were they IN control?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/2021/01/26/163f9dcc-5b52-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html
Are you sure?
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392806.php
Thank God for all the GLOBAL WARMING! Otherwise it would be -30 in Texas!
The facts keep pointing back to nuclear energy. -10 degrees F. with an ice storm does not touch nuclear energy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Nuclear_Generating_Plant
MN nuclear plant operates at 91% of capacity 24/7/365, compared with 35% of capacity for wind and 26% for solar.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-100-percent-renewable-energy-myth/
In other words, wind and solar respectively are the equivalent of off, 65% and 75% of the time. What's so surprising about off in an extreme weather event? Wind and solar are off in EVERY extreme weather event.
How come nuclear power wasn't one of President Biden's first 52 executive actions. We could power the country, cut carbon emissions to zero and save the planet. They just admitted that for the first time in 48 years in the DNC platform. But no. Just more "renewable" boondoggles. Solyndra on steroids. Stuck on stupid.
Solar and wind do not replace coal or any fossil fuel, ever. Nuclear does. Oh well. Who cares.
-
Nuclear power is cis-gendered, heteronormative and RACIST!
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392806.php
Thank God for all the GLOBAL WARMING! Otherwise it would be -30 in Texas!
The facts keep pointing back to nuclear energy. -10 degrees F. with an ice storm does not touch nuclear energy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Nuclear_Generating_Plant
MN nuclear plant operates at 91% of capacity 24/7/365, compared with 35% of capacity for wind and 26% for solar.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-100-percent-renewable-energy-myth/
In other words, wind and solar respectively are the equivalent of off, 65% and 75% of the time. What's so surprising about off in an extreme weather event? Wind and solar are off in EVERY extreme weather event.
How come nuclear power wasn't one of President Biden's first 52 executive actions. We could power the country, cut carbon emissions to zero and save the planet. They just admitted that for the first time in 48 years in the DNC platform. But no. Just more "renewable" boondoggles. Solyndra on steroids. Stuck on stupid.
Solar and wind do not replace coal or any fossil fuel, ever. Nuclear does. Oh well. Who cares.
-
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/05/20/unsettled_what_climate_science_tells_us_what_it_doesnt_and_why_it_matters_by_steven_e_koonin_778065.html
Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.
Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other news, it was 36 degrees here this morning less than a month before the days start getting shorter again. Oh, that's weather, not climate.
The droughts in Calif. are caused by global warming? Then how do you explain THIS?
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-braces-summer-floods-71-rivers-exceed-warning-levels-2021-05-26/
Or this:
https://electroverse.net/england-on-for-its-coldest-may-since-records-began-back-in-1659/
The earth has a fever? The science is settled? The warming is spiraling out of control? - Bullsh*t. If these "scientists" knew the truth, they wouldn't tell us.
-
"The science is settled" ="This is what the left wants now".
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/05/20/unsettled_what_climate_science_tells_us_what_it_doesnt_and_why_it_matters_by_steven_e_koonin_778065.html
Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.
Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other news, it was 36 degrees here this morning less than a month before the days start getting shorter again. Oh, that's weather, not climate.
The droughts in Calif. are caused by global warming? Then how do you explain THIS?
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-braces-summer-floods-71-rivers-exceed-warning-levels-2021-05-26/
Or this:
https://electroverse.net/england-on-for-its-coldest-may-since-records-began-back-in-1659/
The earth has a fever? The science is settled? The warming is spiraling out of control? - Bullsh*t. If these "scientists" knew the truth, they wouldn't tell us.
-
Finally some of this malevolent nonsense is called out by experts.
The following is sourced through Powerline blog:
Power Line
POSTED ON JULY 22, 2021 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CLIMATE, GERMANY
ABOUT THOSE GERMAN FLOODS
Most people understand that leftists take advantage of real or alleged crises to expand their power. But an equally important phenomenon is that they use crises of various kinds to excuse their own incompetence. (Covid has served such a purpose over the last year and a half; it has become a near-universal excuse for failure of performance.) The recent floods in Germany, which killed more than 150 people, are a case in point, as Die Welt and the No Tricks Zone report.
The starting point, of course, is the Left’s knee-jerk blaming of German floods on “climate change”–just as the current drought in the Midwestern United States is blamed on “climate change.” Any weather you don’t like is “climate change,” and “climate change” exists for the sole purpose of giving government more power over our lives.
Germany’s climate alarmist media appears to be waking up a little, and thus are not totally buying the claims being made by German leaders that the devastating floods were due to climate change. It’s becoming increasingly clear the human catastrophe was the result of unimaginable government incompetence.
***
Today we are seeing unusually harsh criticism coming from a number of media outlets aimed at the German government’s ineptitude. For example, “Welt” science editor Axel Bojanowski wrote a commentary that the flood catastrophe was made possible by “inconceivable ignorance”.
Bojanowski comments further:
Politicians, authorities and the media point to climate change as the cause of the flood disaster. Yet severe weather warnings were not taken seriously. And disaster protection in our country is at the level of a developing country.
The risk was known: Rainfall like this week’s has happened repeatedly in Germany, historical chronicles read like blueprints for the current flood disaster, and hazard maps show the flood risk. Yet politicians, authorities and the media point to climate change as the cause – while disaster protection in Germany is at the level of a developing country. An unbelievable scandal.
At least 156 people have died because of heavy rain in Germany. Rain had fallen in amounts that have always been expected in Germany and have been an occasional occurrence since time immemorial. The same places that have been devastated by floods of rain this week have been hit in a similar way in the past, as chronicles show.
Such floods have afflicted this area of Germany for centuries:
Those claiming that the weather catastrophe came unexpectedly and that there was no way to be ready for it are no longer being taken very seriously, and are only confirming their historical ignorance.
Dr. Karl August Seel provides a comprehensive history of the River Ahr flood events – going back to the year 1348.
The Ahr River, the ground zero of last week’s flood disaster, is the northernmost tributary of the Rhine and has a length of 90 km and a catchment area of 900 square kilometers.
As the chronicles show, flooding events happened dozens of times and the authorities were obviously comatose at the wheel.
For too many years a crusty old bureaucracy focused on climate protection while ignoring protection from the whims of the weather. Their strategy, as unbelievable as it may sound, was to try to produce good weather by cutting CO2 emissions. It’s that stupid.
The people who want us to think they can rescue the world’s climate couldn’t even manage a flood.
Were the political elites of centuries ago better at managing floods than today’s German greenies? I suspect they were. They lacked the universal excuse of global warming, and had to actually do their jobs.
-
It's not the inflation that's the problem, it's the way you think about it, that's your problem!
Tell that to my nephew who needed $100 to fill his truck with diesel while between jobs. It's real people and real money you dangerous buffoons are messing with, Krugman, Yellen and the Sanders-Chavez administration.
You would think a column by Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman of Princeton would post under 'Economics' but this is just pathological science. Link at RealClearPoitics.com is called:
Don't Let Inflation Anxiety Undermine Our Future
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/inflation-infrastructure-debt.html (don't click)
I used to read and answer these propagandists point by po9int but now I refuse to click on the link because each click raises his profile and stature. Best ignored, but clear, even predictable, that the main point is we can throw away this $6 trillion and another $6 trillion, and more, and the danger is our worry about inflation, not inflation itself.
There's no point in tracking his predictions because they are always wrong and no one cares. cf. Market will never come back under Trump. Oops.
----------
Update, his small thoughts sidekick in liberal thought leading, Robert Reich, also says inflation is not the problem, wage growth is. Hmmm. Wage growth was greatest in a generation under Trump.
Inflation, debt fears misplaced.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/13/joe-biden-spending-plans-inflation-debt-fears-misplaced
(Don't click these links.)
Warning: These lying morons are Professors we trust with our children.
-
https://nypost.com/2021/08/26/were-told-to-follow-the-science-yet-some-of-it-is-just-plain-wrong/
-
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/31/global-warming-narrative-takes-another-hit/
-
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-the-climate-apocalypse-is-nigh/
1972: UN Environmental Chief: We have 10 years... Washington Post
Oops it got cooler in the 70s.
(https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1972.jpg?quality=90&strip=all)
Same newspaper, Washington Post, October 1, 2021, Coldest Winter Record at the South Pole in 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/01/south-pole-coldest-winter-record/
Can somebody explain this to me.
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/11/28/the-profound-junk-science-of-climate/
--------
If climate is important, we should apply real science to it. And report it with real journalism.
-
Strangely, it was Trump that lowered emissions.
If the science was right the last 30 years, why are we still trying to save the world?
-----------
"Scientist" James Hansen regarding Obama, Inauguration 2009:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.
Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."
Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.
Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.
Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.
Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.
However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.
As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.
-------------------------------------------------------
I guess he did stop the rise of the oceans. By the time he left office he was buying sea level property on Martha's Vineyard.
Coldest Winter Ever at the South Pole, 2021. - Washington Post
-
Previous post, coldest winter on record at the South Pole.
Coldest game in NHL [Ice] Hockey history tonight.
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/video/6180353-fans-brave-bitter-cold-for-winter-classic-at-target-field/
On TNT right now, NHL Winter Classic, Minnesota Wild hosting St Louis Blues outdoors at MN Twins stadium Target Field. Windchill is -24 F. ["The earth has a fever."] Heated benches for the players, not for the fans. People paid $250 each for upper deck to attend this. Capacity 39,000 and the place looks full.
Player comment at intermission: "great ice conditions". I suppose so. But the water bottles don't work.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/global_warming_traps_hundreds_in_the_snow.html
------------------------------------
They also have blamed R Gov Youngkin for the Virginia pileup, Oops, who hasn't taken office yet.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/global_warming_traps_hundreds_in_the_snow.html
------------------------------------
They also have blamed R Gov Youngkin for the Virginia pileup, Oops, who hasn't taken office yet.
Everyone knows that global warming had nothing to do with this.
It’s obviously the result of transphobia.
-
Everyone knows that global warming had nothing to do with this.
It’s obviously the result of transphobia.
How many consecutive years of Dem rule in Virginia, and they can't clear the highway?
It's not a joke. There's more money in their infrastructure bills for social engineering than there is for readiness for THIS.
-
https://www.newsweek.com/more-foot-new-snow-where-snowmobilers-died-triggers-avalanche-warning-1667104
Pretty good video at the link of the powder skiing we hope to find on an upcoming trip to Utah.
Weather is variable. If it gets colder and snowier, it's an anomaly. If it fits the narrative, no snow in the mountains in the winter and then drought all next year in the melt, then it's climate change. My ad nauseum point is you can't have it both ways. The weather is variable.
Skiing through deep powder snow makes the sound of putting your sleepy head in a soft pillow. Hard to imagine so much snow that it makes the sound of thunder and destroys everything in its path. Respect, don't underestimate Mother Nature.
-
https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/mountain.jpg?fit=1200%2C800
(https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/mountain.jpg?fit=1200%2C800)
Caption: "You can't ski down a mountain if there's no snow on it."
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/science/winter-sports-skiing-versus-climate-change
"SCIENCE | JANUARY 11, 2022 6:00 AM
Winter Sports Are the Latest Victim of Climate Change
An existential threat on several levels"
Um, the mountain pictured isn't a ski area, no mention of when or where the picture was taken.
"How is the industry responding? More consolidation, for one thing; more high-altitude skiing, for another. "
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over in the real world is Alta, Utah, one of the nation's oldest ski areas founded in 1938, where they treasure skiing the powder so much they keep the snowboards off of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta%2C_Utah
Today's snow report, 256 inches of snowfall to date this winter. It's only January 11! Same date as the false story above.
(The summit is only 11,000' versus the 14ers in Colorado or Mt Whitney Calif. The base is 1700' lower than my home in Leadville Colo.)
https://www.skiutah.com/members/alta/snowreport
They get 500,000 winter visitors per year, including Doug later this month.
Not just in Utah, it's been snowing like crazy in the Twin Cities, almost every day over the holidays, where it has been rated "Too cold to ski" for the past 2-3 weeks.
Plus major avalanche danger in Colorado:
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/12/28/colorado-mountains-avalanche-warning-snow/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/avalanche-danger-rises-for-colorado-backcountry-riders-as-storms-bring-new-snow/ar-AASfHMW
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/avalanche-danger-around-front-range-zone-remains-considerable-after-snowstorm
https://coloradosun.com/2022/01/09/snowshoers-killed-colorado-avalanche-hoosier-pass/
https://www.skyhinews.com/news/avalanche-danger-is-climbing-across-colorados-high-country/
"Nearly all of the Colorado high country was under "considerable" avalanche danger Monday"
False climate change story is scored 14,000 Pinocchios. Who writes this stuff?
Adding this, NH:
https://www.masslive.com/weather/2022/01/how-do-you-measure-the-cold-on-mount-washington-30-below-zero-or-cold-enough-to-freeze-spaghetti-in-mid-air.html
-
The picture is clip art, available for use by anyone.
https://unsplash.com/photos/hkhCV41gOpA
https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/mountain.jpg?fit=1200%2C800
(https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/mountain.jpg?fit=1200%2C800)
Caption: "You can't ski down a mountain if there's no snow on it."
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/science/winter-sports-skiing-versus-climate-change
"SCIENCE | JANUARY 11, 2022 6:00 AM
Winter Sports Are the Latest Victim of Climate Change
An existential threat on several levels"
Um, the mountain pictured isn't a ski area, no mention of when or where the picture was taken.
"How is the industry responding? More consolidation, for one thing; more high-altitude skiing, for another. "
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over in the real world is Alta, Utah, one of the nation's oldest ski areas founded in 1938, where they treasure skiing the powder so much they keep the snowboards off of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta%2C_Utah
Today's snow report, 256 inches of snowfall to date this winter. It's only January 11! Same date as the false story above.
(The summit is only 11,000' versus the 14ers in Colorado or Mt Whitney Calif. The base is 1700' lower than my home in Leadville Colo.)
https://www.skiutah.com/members/alta/snowreport
They get 500,000 winter visitors per year, including Doug later this month.
Not just in Utah, it's been snowing like crazy in the Twin Cities, almost every day over the holidays, where it has been rated "Too cold to ski" for the past 2-3 weeks.
Plus major avalanche danger in Colorado:
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/12/28/colorado-mountains-avalanche-warning-snow/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/avalanche-danger-rises-for-colorado-backcountry-riders-as-storms-bring-new-snow/ar-AASfHMW
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/avalanche-danger-around-front-range-zone-remains-considerable-after-snowstorm
https://coloradosun.com/2022/01/09/snowshoers-killed-colorado-avalanche-hoosier-pass/
https://www.skyhinews.com/news/avalanche-danger-is-climbing-across-colorados-high-country/
"Nearly all of the Colorado high country was under "considerable" avalanche danger Monday"
False climate change story is scored 14,000 Pinocchios. Who writes this stuff?
-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-60014059
Guess I won't be watching the Australian (not) Open
-
https://grist.org/climate-change/2011-03-28-ask-umbra-on-flatulence-and-climate-change/
-
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/business/2022/02/02/winter-storm-power-outages-oge-customers-lose-power-freezing-temperatures/6640668001/
-------
Did I mention coldest winter ever at the coldest place, south pole, per Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/01/south-pole-coldest-winter-record/
The planet has a fever? - Top scientist on the planet?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/19/gores-grades-belie-image-of-studiousness/5da4b9e3-a017-4dd5-9bb5-bfc68f0b4eb5/
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_inconvenient_truth_about_electric_vehicles.html
who wants to bet on the likelihood of this leading to big problems?
-
Temperatures -10 F when I returned to MSP from a USTA Nationals tennis tournament in Phoenix, where a high of low 70s was a little chilly for them. Fine, but do I still have to hear about rising temps spiraling out of control?
It's late February now, roughly the day Minneapolis closes its skating rinks for the season, and still below zero this nice sunny morning today. Too cold for ice skating:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/excelsior/55331/february-weather/2247524?year=2022
I mentioned to a friend Monday Nt after outdoor sports in freezing temps that Antarctica just had its coldest winter ever.
He said, "That's too bad. It just feeds the deniers."
Yes it does.
--------------------------------------------------------
"If global warming isn’t reversed by the year 2000, it will be too late to avert catastrophe." - United Nations, 1989
https://www.westernjournal.com/10-failed-global-warming-predictions/
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2009, 50 days to save the planet.
Prince Charles, 2010, 96 months to save the planet:
https://www.westernjournal.com/10-failed-global-warming-predictions/
More here, deserving of its own post:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2015/02/09/top-10-global-warming-lies-that-may-shock-you/?sh=5a557c9953a5
-
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-2-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxix
Can you guess? Global temperature records alterations.
Mentioned on the forum once or twice (or more) .
--------
“The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of world temperature history records to create and/or augment a warming trend, and thereby support a political narrative that the world’s energy economy needs to be completely transformed by government command in order to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change. A U.S. government agency called the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, in turn a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce) is the most important source for world historical temperature information. NCEI collects data daily from a network of several thousand ground-based weather stations both in the U.S. and around the world, and reports the results in various “global time series” going back to 1880. When graphed, the NCEI data show the classic “hockey stick” formation, with rapid, and seemingly alarming, temperature increases in recent years.
But the NCEI data as presented have been subject to extensive massaging, referred to as “homogenization,” before being finalized and presented to the public as the alarming hockey stick. Curious citizens, seeing the government bent on undermining the reliability and cost of the energy system based in substantial part on these charts, might reasonably ask, what is the level of accuracy of the temperature presentation, and how much of the presented temperature increase is real versus an artifact of adjustments made by bureaucrats with a vested interest in getting the “right” outcome?
NOAA/NCEI make no secret of the fact that they are altering the raw data, and they give what appear to be legitimate reasons for the adjustments (e.g., a given temperature station may have moved to a warmer location); but at the same time they make the details of the alterations completely opaque such that no outsider can directly assess the appropriateness of each adjustment. A Japanese scientist named Kirye,
gathered pre- and post-adjustment data from six weather stations in Ireland and Greece, and showed that in each case NCEI had altered the 1988-2020 temperature trend at the station from down to up, without any association of the data alterations with any specific event, such as a station move or instrumentation change, that might give rise to legitimate “homogenization.”
A new article (February 8, 2022) published in the journal Atmosphere, written by some 17 co-authors led by Peter O’Neill, Ronan Connolly, Michael Connolly, and Willy Soon, “Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset.” ... have collected some ten plus years of both adjusted and unadjusted NCEI data from every station in Europe, close to 4000 stations in total. They then attempt to some degree to reverse-engineer the adjustments to figure out what NCEI is doing, and particularly whether NCEI is validly identifying station discontinuities, such as moves or instrumentation changes, that might give rise to valid adjustments. The bottom line is that the adjusters make no attempt to tie adjustments to any specific event that would give rise to legitimate homogenization, and that many of the alterations appear ridiculous and completely beyond justification.
...
Disclosure in the (adjusted) data:
NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values. These factors, together, mean that calculations from the past may be superseded by the most recent data and can affect the numbers reported in the monthly climate reports.
-----------
What??!!!! The people who make the conclusions and "news" reports (and policy recommendations), not thermometers, determine the data, including the "historical data", updated monthly.
And these ' adjustments' are made in two direction, up for recent data and down for historical data.
I can't believe this is still happening.
Greatest Scientific fraud of all time.
-
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2022/02/28/un-climate-change-report-cant-hide-mt-kilimanjaro-ice
New deadlines have been set without acknowledging the old ones were wrong.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/eba2c49ca64c72bfc10d8675a47de02117d9bf57/0_0_2200_1464/master/2200.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=e3ec8bbd7c8ecb9c8c3ed5140fcd8d1a)
PolitiFact rates it False but true: https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/07/kilimanjaros-ice-fields-didnt-disappear-2020-doesn/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In other government knows best news, I stumbled across an old brochure about electric use and lighting that says, "make the switch to compact fluorescents". Mercury based bulbs are "better for the environment". The brochure comes from a MN public utility with no mention they don't work in cold. Just turn your heat up and you save energy? They were quickly made obsolete by LED, a technology invented a century ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode How could all government "scientists" miss that? Brochure says "technical information provided by Sylvania" - as unbiased as a vaccine maker's opinion on mandates.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/food_shortages_soon_come__what_to_do.html
-
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/on-this-date-51-years-ago-climate-scientists-predicted-a-new-ice-age-was-coming
-
https://humanevents.com/2022/03/24/industrial-wind-towers-cause-warming/
after reading this delete
before you deleted from google FB twitter tik tok
and have a mob chase you down and post your address and family information
Or you can simply virtue signal (I am for diversity and vote for Dems only) and maybe "they " will let you slide
-
Journal Publisher Retracts Over 300 Chinese-Affiliated Papers, Citing Fake Peer-Review Process
China has retracted more scientific papers over fake peer reviews than all other nations combined, journal watchdog says
By Winnie Han May 15, 2022 Updated: May 15, 2022biggersmaller Print
China has frequently been at the forefront of peer-review scandals, with numerous fake-paper factories a growing concern in the global scientific community. The country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories combined, according to a scientific journal watchdog.
The scientific publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was recently forced to retract 323 Chinese-affiliated research papers that had reportedly undergone a fabricated peer-review process, according to Retraction Watch, a research journal watchdog.
In addition, many among the 323 retracted papers reportedly came from Beijing-certified top universities, called the “Double First-Class Universities.”
ACM’s Director of Publications Scott Delman told Retraction Watch that the papers appeared to have come from China’s “paper mills,” referring to the Chinese fake-paper factories.
According to the report, the now-retracted papers published by ACM were said to have come from the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) held in Jakarta, Indonesia, from Aug. 19 to 20, 2021.
The retractions took place after a tipster told ACM that IEEE Xplore, another publisher of peer-reviewed journals, had also published what appeared to be the same batch of ICIMTech conference papers.
The allegation prompted an investigation that led to the mass retraction of the entire ICIMTech conference proceedings and more than 300 papers, citing integrity concerns over the papers and their peer-review process, Delman said. He added that “a company in China billing itself as a conference organizer had handled all of the peer review.”
According to Indonesia’s Binus University, an organizer of the 2021 ICIMTech, all accepted papers in ICIMTech 2021 would be published in the conference proceedings and submitted for publication in IEEE Xplore.
Delman said a similar case took place in 2018 when ACM received an anonymous allegation that one of its published conference papers had been generated by a computer. After an investigation, they found that a Beijing-based firm had handled the paper’s peer review.
After tracking down one of the conference organizers in Beijing named Lily Gao, who worked at the firm, Gao “informed us that the paper was peer-reviewed and after multiple requests, Gao sent a PDF of the alleged review, which appeared itself to have been falsified, based on the metadata in the PDF sent to ACM,” Delman said, according to Retraction Watch.
After further investigation, all 26 papers from the Information Hiding and Image Processing (IHIP) conference in 2018 were retracted by ACM after none of the authors who allegedly presented at the conference responded to ACM’s inquiry, which raised significant integrity concerns.
ACM is the world’s largest and most influential learned society for computing, headquartered in the United States. The A.M. Turing Award, an annual prize given by ACM, is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing.”
‘Flourishing’ Fake-Paper Factories in China
Zheng Jie, a current affairs commentator and doctor of medicine from the University of Tokyo, told The Epoch Times that fraud in Chinese-affiliated research papers is not limited to the field of computing, but has long been prevalent in all fields because it determines job promotions, wages, and other benefits.
“The ethics-lacking system built by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encourages Chinese people to create falsehoods in order to advance in life,” Zheng added.
The number of published academic papers is one of the primary indicators for researchers in Chinese universities, hospitals, and research institutions to receive professional titles or be promoted.
For example, in August 2020, the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau stipulated that an attending physician must publish at least two professional journals as the first author to be promoted to a deputy chief physician, while three papers are required for a promotion to a chief physician.
However, some scholars, especially medical workers, do not have time to engage in research, let alone write papers, while many don’t have the capacity to publish authoritative papers. But for promotion and other needs, many turn to the “black market” for academic work.
According to Science Magazine, the authorship fees for fake academic papers in China range from $1,600 to $26,300. And at the high end, the cost of a paper exceeds the yearly salary of some assistant professors in China.
“A five-month investigation by Science uncovered a flourishing academic black market involving shady agencies, corrupt scientists, and compromised editors—many of them operating in plain view,” the report said.
“[A] company would sell the title of the co-first author on the cancer paper for $14,800. Adding two names—co-first author and co-corresponding author—would run $26,300.”
According to the Chinese state-run Xinhua, since 2009, buying and selling academic papers in China has become an industry with a conservatively-estimated market value of $150 million.
A 2017 publication by Retraction Watch pointed out China has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer-reviews than all other countries and territories combined.
The UK-based scientific journal Nature published an article in March 2021 examining China’s prevalent “paper mill” problem as journal publishers cope with the growing challenge.
Ellen Wan contributed to this report.
-
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399350.php
Whoops!
We'll need a larger budget next year.
-
There is a strong probability that the “accelerations” predicted by Nerem et al in their 2018 Paper (1) are due to the method of calculation and not inherent in the data.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/28/sea-level-rise-acceleration-an-alternative-hypothesis-part-2/
-
"There is a strong probability that the “accelerations” predicted by Nerem et al in their 2018 Paper (1) are due to the method of calculation and not inherent in the data."
Excellent point.
Always watch "the data"
Who is calculating , why and how
and if it even makes sense.
I don't believe the majority of the data "studies " that come out.
-
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/25/climate-emergency-what-a-crock/
Joe Biden did not declare a climate emergency last week, as many in his party urged him to do. One Democratic senator claimed that the changing climate required “bold, intense executive action” from the president. Another said Biden needed to move because “the climate crisis is a threat to national security.” But there’s no emergency. It’s a wholly manufactured charade.
Though he put off an executive action, Biden said last Wednesday that he has “a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger. And that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger. The health of our citizens and our communities is literally at stake.”
His non-COVID fever continued:
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world. … Right now, 100 million Americans are under heat alert – 100 million Americans. Ninety communities across America set records for high temperatures just this year, including here in New England as we speak.”
On the same day Biden issued an authoritarian’s threat:
“Since Congress is not acting on the climate emergency, I will,” he tweeted. “And in the coming weeks my Administration will begin to announce executive actions to combat this emergency.”
Most Americans who aren’t named Barack Obama like to think that the U.S. is the center of our world if not the universe. But just because much of the country has been hot, it doesn’t mean the entire Earth is on fire. Yet our politicians and media focus on unusual heat despite the obvious: If the global temperature “is just about average” – and it is – “then clearly it must be well below average somewhere else.”
The facts, not the Democrats and activists’ political desperation, show that global temperatures have gone nowhere over the past four decades, which is the only period of time they can be accurately measured and compared. Anyone who believes that the temperature record before 1979 is reliable is fooling themselves (and also a blind ideologue).
The only data that can be trusted, that makes a genuine apples-to-apples comparison, are the measurements from satellites. All other temperature reconstructions require faith in subjective readings of often poorly placed primitive instruments, and compromised tree ring signals.
So, then what do the satellite data tell us? That we just went through “the coolest monthly anomaly in over 10 years, the coolest June in 22 years, and the ninth coolest June in the 44 year satellite record,” says University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer.
Repeat the line: Last month was “the coolest monthly anomaly in over 10 years, the coolest June in 22 years, and the ninth coolest June in the 44 year satellite record.”
Yeah, that’s some emergency.
But then June 2022 is just one month of many. What about the rest of the record? While global temperature based on satellite readings has trended upward, the increase has been slight. “The linear warming trend since January 1979” is a mere 0.13 of a degree Celsius per decade, says Spencer. June 2022 was also cooler than a number of months on Spencer’s chart, quite a few of them going back more than 20 years.
Other evidence than the emergency exists only in the overly political minds of Democrats, their communications department (the mainstream media), and the usual zealots include:
“Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is still plenty of sea ice over Arctic regions this summer, supplying feeding platforms for polar bears, ice-dependent seals, and walrus cows nursing their young calves.” – Watts Up With That?
“If you took a very careful look with consistent data over long periods of time, you will find that these (natural) disasters are not increasing. In fact, the health of the world is increasing tremendously. For example, deaths from weather disasters and so forth have gone down about 95% in the last hundred years. … They really aren’t increasing in frequency or intensity.” – John Christy, University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist
“The ice caps on Mars have been shrinking in sync with ice caps on earth. To me, that’s fairly good evidence that the sun is involved but NASA assures us that’s not so.” – Bookworm Room
“Natural variability of the atmosphere was the proximate cause of the (recent) warmth and does not represent an existential threat to the population of Europe. Clearly, there’s no cause for alarm, no matter what the media says. But the media won’t tell you any of that, because it ruins their narrative of being able to blame the heatwave on climate change, while hoping you don’t notice their distortion of the truth about ordinary weather events we see every summer.” – Anthony Watts
It’s probably an even bet that Biden will eventually declare a climate emergency. His handlers probably think doing so would help pull his miserable ratings out of their tailspin. But we don’t think Americans want their presidents to act like dictators, especially when they are as feeble of mind as Biden is.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
-
all we hear on left msm is "HEAT WAVE"
and all I think is , well , it is July.
OTOH
how is GB's climate suddenly becoming great for growing grapes and becoming a great wine making power?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom
-
all we hear on left msm is "HEAT WAVE"
and all I think is , well , it is July.
OTOH
how is GB's climate suddenly becoming great for growing grapes and becoming a great wine making power?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom
Heat wave for 2 days in London, BIG news.
Heat wave east coast , BIG news.
Arctic losing ice, Catastrophe.
Coldest June in 22 years. Nothing.
Coldest winter in Antarctica on record, nothing.
Record cold Australia, nothing.
AGN News. Agenda Driven Narrative. The CNN Project Veritas video, G M post, nailed it.
-
https://summit.news/2022/07/19/hottest-day-ever-really/
all we hear on left msm is "HEAT WAVE"
and all I think is , well , it is July.
OTOH
how is GB's climate suddenly becoming great for growing grapes and becoming a great wine making power?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom
Heat wave for 2 days in London, BIG news.
Heat wave east coast , BIG news.
Arctic losing ice, Catastrophe.
Coldest June in 22 years. Nothing.
Coldest winter in Antarctica on record, nothing.
Record cold Australia, nothing.
AGN News. Agenda Driven Narrative. The CNN Project Veritas video, G M post, nailed it.
-
https://twitter.com/jamesmelville/status/1547536170992779266
https://summit.news/2022/07/19/hottest-day-ever-really/
all we hear on left msm is "HEAT WAVE"
and all I think is , well , it is July.
OTOH
how is GB's climate suddenly becoming great for growing grapes and becoming a great wine making power?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom
Heat wave for 2 days in London, BIG news.
Heat wave east coast , BIG news.
Arctic losing ice, Catastrophe.
Coldest June in 22 years. Nothing.
Coldest winter in Antarctica on record, nothing.
Record cold Australia, nothing.
AGN News. Agenda Driven Narrative. The CNN Project Veritas video, G M post, nailed it.
-
always biased in the direction of Democrat agenda:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/29/study-noaa-advances-bogus-heat-data-based-on-collection-practices-96-corrupted/
like CNN polls .......
-
https://katiecouric.com/health/alzheimers-research-fraud-matthew-schrag-sylvain-lesne/?fbclid=IwAR2Y0Syf4PdiDsgMZW59MWka2KSkF7mom7BcNV9LYAbbLNC4AVatCEIgkcw
-
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/great-barrier-reef-areas-show-highest-coral-cover-seen-in-36-years.html
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2425775/Climate-scientists-told-cover-fact-Earths-temperature-risen-15-years.html
-
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-china-asia-beijing-b252479810add6a225fa1e4a6d441983
me: they were just meaningless talks anyway
send cutie Greta over to admonish them !
-
"World's top climate scientists told to 'cover up' the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years"
elites again distort, lie, and cover up to control us more.
Exactly *who* told *them* to "cover this up"
Klaus ? :x
Kerry? :x
Greta? :))
-
Bill Gates?
Leonard DeCaprio?
Butti?
Amanpour?
Cooper?
Mika Brezinski?
Soros?
I could go on.
-
No warming for 15 years article says it will be published next week. Let's follow up and see if it says what it is alleged here to say.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/white-house-climate-science-overseer-sanctioned-and-barred-national-academy-sciences?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=860
-
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2022/08/17/jane-lubchenco-white-house-science-ban/4181660752541/
authors include "collaborators "
and her brother in. law
"ERROR IN JUDGEMENT "
i am sorry .....blah blah blah
-
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FbBeVVeWQAAFNmQ?format=png&name=small
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FbBeVVeWQAAFNmQ?format=png&name=small)
-
Very witty of course, but the buzz kill answer is that the fluctuations due to the tide mean that the photo is irrelevant to the point asserted.
-
Right. Previously on these page, the ocean goes up and down more in a day than it does in a century.
Also unaccounted for, the ground level can go up, down or shift.
-
Very witty of course, but the buzz kill answer is that the fluctuations due to the tide mean that the photo is irrelevant to the point asserted.
Really? Show me where the newly risen ocean has swallowed up the previously unsubmerged landmarks. It should be easy to find.
-
You are changing the subject from the subject at hand-- which is that the photo is not proof either way.
-
You are changing the subject from the subject at hand-- which is that the photo is not proof either way.
Sure they are. The GW types keep predicting cities disappearing beneath the seas. They never do, but the deadlines keep moving.
-
This ain't hard. Daily tidal variations are greater than the mainstream green projections/claims.
-
Stories seldom told:
"for the first time in more than 80 years, the Atlantic Ocean hasn’t produced a named storm between July 3 and Aug. 31"
"The Atlantic storms will eventually arrive. And the alarmists will blame them on human greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the blueprint. But for now, their taste for disaster has to go unsated as their narrative fails again."
"Arctic ice is at a decade-high level."
... Great Barrier Reef, which “set new records for extent this year.”
"... the release of the World Climate Declaration, which calmly points out “there is no climate emergency.” More than 1,100 scientists and related professionals signed the document, including physics Nobel Prize laureate Ivar Giaever of Norway, and more than 235 professors."
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/01/more-bad-news-for-the-eco-radicals/
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg)
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2022/08/31/maldives-construction-boom-despite-climate-fears-many-new-resorts-expected-to-open-by-2025/?sh=6ac70ba112f9
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/905/823/original/ca451a325c43b96f.jpeg)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2022/08/31/maldives-construction-boom-despite-climate-fears-many-new-resorts-expected-to-open-by-2025/?sh=6ac70ba112f9
From 1989:
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/major-scientific-publisher-retracting-over-500-papers_4768649.html?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-10-01&src_cmp=gv-2022-10-01&utm_medium=email&est=SkkujAOIBIsrqpL%2BSerkt1hSzSscbjVMFeXTNqlsF2gYIwhZkGCkGJBJJPuBzZybp1Hn
Major Scientific Publisher Retracting Over 500 Papers
By Zachary Stieber October 1, 2022 Updated: October 1, 2022biggersmaller Print
One of the world’s largest open-access journal publishers is retracting over 500 papers, based on the discovery of unethical actions.
London-based Hindawi, which publishes over 200 peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines, says its research team in June identified “irregularities” in the peer review process in some of the journals.
“All Hindawi journals employ a series of substantial integrity checks before articles are accepted for publication. Following thorough investigation, we identified that these irregularities in the peer review process were the result of suspicious and unethical activities. Since identifying this unethical activity and breach of our processes, we began proactively adding further checks and improving our processes and continue to do so,” Liz Ferguson, a senior vice president for John Wiley & Sons, Hindawi’s U.S.-based parent company, said in a statement on Sept. 28.
As a result of the investigation, 511 papers will be retracted.
The papers were all published since August 2020.
Sixteen journals published the papers that are being retracted.
Some of the authors and editors who contributed to the articles may have been “unwitting participants” in the unethical scheme, according to Ferguson. She said that the scheme involved “manipulation of the peer review process and the infrastructure that supports it.”
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told the Retraction Watch blog that the review uncovered “coordinated peer review rings,” which featured reviewers and editors coordinating to get papers through peer review.
Neither Ferguson nor Bennett identified any of the suspects.
Bennett said that the investigation started after an editor flagged some suspicious papers. He also said that the individuals identified by the review as “compromised” will be banned from the Hindawi journals. Other people were described as “potentially compromised.”
“These efforts, and the individuals who participate in them, impede scientific discovery, and impact the validity of scholarly research, and will not be tolerated,” Ferguson said. She said the company has been in touch with other publishers and industry bodies.
Further retractions are expected as the investigation proceeds.
Hindawi journals include Advances in Agriculture, the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, and the Journal of Nanotechnology.
-
https://retractionwatch.com/2022/09/28/exclusive-hindawi-and-wiley-to-retract-over-500-papers-linked-to-peer-review-rings/
I suppose no one will be punished
no one really held accountable
just some late date "retractions"
and perhaps a "we regret the errors or omission"
and that is it
what a scam.
-
As I understand it, a group of scientists is suing the EPA over it's CO2 Endangerment Finding.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-11-joining-battle-over-the-science-of-global-warming
Excerpt:
Sheahen shows the stunning agreement between the calculations of van Wijngaarden and Happer (W & H) with satellite observations of outgoing infrared radiation emitted by the earth going to space . . .
Sheahen's major point is that, because of the exceptionally good agreement between observational data and the calculations of W & H, we conclude that their model has now been validated. That embodies the scientific method. In that case, it is reasonable to use it to study other hypothetical cases. It is not possible to do so with IPCC models, which have never achieved agreement with observation. . . .
The gist of the Happer/van Wijngaarden work is that the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is almost entirely saturated, such that additional CO2 can have almost no warming effect. Here is a chart prepared by Sheahen to illustrate the Happer/van Wijngaarden results:
(https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/503a5bade4b0b543ed240317/982477e1-09d9-47df-aadb-43f15eddb35f/Screen+Shot+2022-10-11+at+11.49.57+PM.png?format=1500w)
-
https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database?wallit_nosession=1
-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/07/melting-arctic-sea-ice-summer-report
:-o
maybe Greta is right . :?
-
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/12/anthony-fauci-merges-covid-climate-infectious-diseases-largely-the-result-of-human-encroachment-on-nature-often-aided-by-climate-changes/
New England Journal of Medicine Dec 1 2022.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2213814
"Today, there is no reason to believe that the threat of emerging infections will diminish, since their underlying causes are present and most likely increasing. The emergence of new infections and the reemergence of old ones are largely the result of human interactions with and encroachment on nature. As human societies expand in a progressively interconnected world and the human–animal interface is perturbed, opportunities are created, often aided by climate changes, for unstable infectious agents to emerge, jump species, and in some cases adapt to spread among humans."
-----------------------------
Good Grief. This passes as science, or medicine? Best info available says the latest catastrophe came from a lab in a communist country doing "research" that this author lied about funding.
-
often aided by climate changes, for unstable infectious agents to emerge, jump species, and in some cases adapt to spread among humans."
-----------------------------
Good Grief. This passes as science, or medicine? Best info available says the latest catastrophe came from a lab in a communist country doing "research" that this author lied about funding.
I agree Doug
interjecting climate change is complete bulls**t
and NO MENTION OF SCIENTISTS GOING OUT INTO NATURE TO OBTAIN DANGEROUS VIRUSES FROM NATURE AND BRINGING TO LAB AFTER WHICH THEY CAN AND CERTAINLY DO LEAK OUT.
No mention at the fact that no new oral antibiotics that are less prone to bacterial resistance have come out in yrs
IV antibiotics - yes - since big pharma can bill tons for them to the hospitals etc
nothing by mouth
yet we doctors are incentivized encouraged cajoled to limit antibiotic use due to resistance that becomes a bigger threat year in and year out.
-
It's not unique to our area but the high today at MSP is real feel 33 below zero fahrenheit. North wind gusts of 40 mph.
Coldest winter ever (recorded history) in Antarctica per Washington post.
But every time unusual warmth comes it's global warming, climate change.
Isn't it all just weather in the short run?
Greenhouse gases trap the heat in?
Not enough!
-
"It's not unique to our area but the high today at MSP is real feel 33 below zero fahrenheit. "
God almighty. :-o
-
remember 1816?
I don't but
this is the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
a year without summer s/p Tambora a huge volcanic eruption
in 1815 causes a volcanic winter :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
NOW FAST FORWARD TO 1/22 :
Tonga volcanic eruption (THE LARGEST SINCE 1883 KRAKATOA) :
https://reliefweb.int/disaster/vo-2022-000005-ton#:~:text=Useful%20Links-,Disaster%20description,eruption%20of%20Krakatoa%20in%201883.
although
this here states it will have warming effect:
https://reliefweb.int/disaster/vo-2022-000005-ton#:~:text=Useful%20Links-,Disaster%20description,eruption%20of%20Krakatoa%20in%201883.
-
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/1-german-police-detain-greta-170121580.html
:-o
-
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/justice-joe-biden-classified/2023/01/17/id/1104803/
"ATMOSPHERIC RIVER STORMS" - OMG We are doomed ! :-P
tomorrow snow breezes will be called tornado storms .
-
all due to climate change!!!!!
"There is a climate connection to *frost quakes*. A 2016 study revealed that frost quakes could become more frequent in a warming climate"
*** Frost Quakes ***
https://www.yahoo.com/news/artic-blast-could-trigger-rare-194327370.html
everything is described with
"river storms "
"el nino "
"arctic cyclones"
"bomb cyclones"
every weather event is somehow renamed with more dramatic titles.
I think there other old phenomenons that have been renamed to exaggerate and reverberate the sense of impending catastrophe around the media echo chamber
-
i just saw another
"polar vortex"
-
Kerry to Nassau Bahamas
one of the great polluters in the world
for climate change tour
on taxpayer dime
[to windsurf while promoting windmills of course ]
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/10/04/oklahoma-political-ad-archive
-
https://abcnews.go.com/US/122000-power-california-storm-brings-rain-heavy-snow/story?id=97465105
-
https://abcnews.go.com/US/122000-power-california-storm-brings-rain-heavy-snow/story?id=97465105
https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Fq9KJ8-aYAAEZY4.jpg
(https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Fq9KJ8-aYAAEZY4.jpg)
-
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/democrats/al-gore-net-worth/
hahahahaha
kerry married the queen of catsup
hahahah
joke on the world
:roll:
-
is this even constitutional ?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/04/20/biden-gifts-1-billion-to-u-n-s-flagship-green-climate-fund/
is he using some commander in chief shyster argument that climate change is a threat to the world so he must take action?
"it is only a bill"
a billion here, a billion there - no biggie anymore
-
is this even constitutional ?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/04/20/biden-gifts-1-billion-to-u-n-s-flagship-green-climate-fund/
is he using some commander in chief shyster argument that climate change is a threat to the world so he must take action?
"it is only a bill"
a billion here, a billion there - no biggie anymore
It's almost like the constitution isn't relevant anymore. Good thing we can vote harder!
-
you guessed it : DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/27/drought-horn-africa-climate-change-role
I never remember ever hearing about drought or starvation in the past :roll: :roll: :roll:
from article below link which pops up right away in search:
***"However, a major, continent-wide historical climate study shows that eastern Africa experienced droughts – at least as bad as those in recent decades – throughout the 1820s and 1830s, during the 1880s and around 1900."***
The 1820s-1830s drought was probably the worst of the last 200 years
https://climatechampions.unfccc.int/is-eastern-africas-drought-the-worst-in-recent-history-and-are-worse-yet-to-come/#:~:text=However%2C%20a%20major%2C%20continent%2D,of%20the%20last%20200%20years.
remember parents used to say eat all on your plate - they are starving in Ethiopia ?
I sure do.[even the broccoli !]
-
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/harvard-student-reveals-her-dining-123156855.html
where are the bugs ?
-
https://nypost.com/2023/07/19/some-cold-water-for-eco-warriors-this-heat-wave-isnt-that-abnormal/
-
". Even our National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the principal government scientific research bodies in the US, has backed away from the claim that this year is the hottest in 125,000 years, acknowledging problems with the validity of the computer models that generated the headline."
From WP 7/8/23:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/08/earth-hottest-years-thousands-climate/
Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earth’s average temperature has been rising.
In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years
-
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/the-daily-chart-the-most-dishonest-climate-chart-ever.php
-
https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/08/10/trust-the-science-study-retractions-up-13650-in-22-years/
of course I don't even know if these numbers cited are accurate ! :-o
maybe this article is BS too.......
-
More correctly, the time for debate hasn't started yet.
https://www.oplaneta.com/manufactured-climate-consensus-deemed-false-by-climate-scientist-the-time-for-debate-has-ended/
-
https://apnews.com/article/hurricane-hilary-mexico-southern-california-7fddeb8c6eaf2e6cb8893dfe4db838fe
the LEFT bitched about Climate change drought - not enough water in California
now the LEFT bitches too much rain
either way =====>>>> CLIMATE CHANGE
-
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/28/phony-peer-review/?fbclid=IwAR3EBYb1qvvlFwGllxnJ-MDrSjNVfunaS_u_41mCaZtb9T1DK71hEsEbgbo
-
list of med journals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_journals
Probably the 10 best:
https://www.ampliz.com/resources/top-10-medical-journals-in-the-world/
-
Temperature rise away from urban heat islands, without "adjustments" is unnoticeable.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/08/USCRN-July-2023.png-768x487.webp
https://wattsupwiththat.com/u-s-surface-temperature/
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/
-
findings dispute the official government response about whale deaths
I was thinking that perhaps the turning wind turbines emit some impulses below the ocean surface confusing whales
This study finds it is the wind turbine boats that are doing this:
https://nypost.com/2023/08/26/new-documentary-proves-that-offshore-windfarms-kill-whales/
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/gulf-coast-temperatures-surge-to-highest-levels-ever-observed/ar-AA1fTCtr
don't see this mentioned:
https://www.space.com/tonga-undersea-volcano-eruption-disrupted-satellite-signals
obviously the volcano was due to fracking in the middle of the ocean
and the heat wave we see now is unrelated to this but due to man made automobiles cow farting gas stoved pizza joints, straws and Republicans .
-
https://edberry.com/seven-proofs/
Fundamentals:
CO2 flows through the atmosphere as water flows through your bathtub.
Half-life is how long it takes for the level to decrease by half with no inflow.
IPCC’s core theory:
(a) Natural CO2 stayed constant at 280 ppm after 1750.
(b) Human CO2 caused all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm, or 140 ppm today.
(c) This theory makes human CO2 33% of today’s CO2 level of 420 ppm.
(d) Human CO2 half-life is 1000 years.
Here are seven proofs (not opinions) that show IPCC’s core theory is false.
IPCC argues, “Nature absorbs human CO2. So, nature cannot also emit CO2. So, human CO2 increased CO2.” This circular argument assumes (a) is true to prove (a) is true.
Natural CO2 and human CO2 flow independently through the atmosphere. When at equilibrium, the percent of human CO2 in the atmosphere equals the percent of human CO2 in the CO2 inflow, which IPCC says is about 5%. So, human CO2 is about 5% (or 20 ppm), not 33% (or 140 ppm) as IPCC’s core theory claims.
IPCC data show the natural CO2 half-life is 2.4 years. Human CO2 half-life cannot be 1000 years because human and natural CO2 molecules are identical, so their half-lives are identical, or 2.4 years. To get 1000 years, IPCC needs a fictitious magic demon to trap human CO2 and let natural CO2 go free.
Human CO2 has added only 1% to the total carbon in the carbon cycle, which adds only 4 ppm to the CO2 level. So, there is no climate emergency.
(D14C + 1000) measures the carbon-14 in a sample of carbon-12. The natural level of (D14C + 1000) is 1000. Human CO2 has no carbon-14, so it lowers D14C. If human CO2 were 33% of CO2, it would lower (D14C + 1000) from 1000 to 666. But (D14C + 1000) is still 1000. This proves human CO2 is insignificant to the CO2 increase.
Human CO2 cannot have caused the CO2 increase before 1955 because the sum of all human CO2 emissions before 1955 is less than the CO2 increase above 280 ppm.
The COVID-caused 20% decrease in human CO2 emissions did not slow the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 because natural CO2 causes the CO2 increase.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Doug) Another "proof", none of their models, forecasts or predictions have been accurate.
-
Please post that in the Environment thread as well!
-
https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/as-a-scientist-im-not-allowed-to-tell-the-full-truth-about-climate-change/
-
The final paragraph or so strikes me as being both de rigueur and self-contradictory, but the rest rings true. And from the Chronicles, of all places:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-need-scientific-dissidents-now-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR0vZX3oVxQmpugEtmSUWQ9nmIFiZK9c7fSh16NFDEsxtHEyAKm8mtJcs1I
-
2nd post.
Datasets controlled for the heat island effect show no catastrophic warming:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/10/12/noaa-u-s-contiguous-uscrn-temperature-anomaly-september-2023-data-shows-no-climate-emergency/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=noaa-u-s-contiguous-uscrn-temperature-anomaly-september-2023-data-shows-no-climate-emergency
-
This is about as succinct a statement of my views as I've ever found:
https://the-pipeline.org/lies-damn-lies-and-polling-questions/?fbclid=IwAR1Iivl2pkFxnjCHTMoQcK5LwaWyJh1RGSbcdM0lq8-vRVZlw9dSOAl9_z8
-
These folks go through the MSM pablum that's all the talking heads and dead tree rags have been circulating of late:
https://climaterealism.com/2023/10/climate-fact-check-september-2023-edition/
-
China won’t meet “net-zero” goals, which makes out effort to do so basically pointless:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4252904-bidens-kamikaze-climate-plan-for-the-us-economy/
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/era-of-unquestioned-and-unchallenged-climate-change-claims-is-over-5503316?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-10-15&src_cmp=mb-2023-10-15&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=Morningbrief&est=4kOylaKwcqv7NXcKRPSYK3mCzaWQo5OcaC%2B6hdnX%2FGoXq2nroljm0Ha1slQ%3D
-
You see this a lot in “climate science” (as well as other sciences). Often it’s statistical tools; often a scientist understands a great deal about their field, but seeks to bulwark a finding with the tools of statistics with only a semester or two of those studies underneath their belts. Here we have someone that works in applied gas science taking issue with those in theoretical gas science who make CO2 the boogie man in their climate passion play and, having done so, continue to build on the frightful message long after tools at hand have shown it to be untrue.
https://twitter.com/owengregorian/status/1714619596303430084?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw&fbclid=IwAR3caUO14ry9YJWe8KzWyYBKvhk5Sh4bi-zUZw_0DyuV5Y8VfDHD7QKgiGo
-
Good stuff! We know the models don't match reality but (almost) no one ever says why. One side point:
"Because their world is theoretical, they use peer review for approval."
- "Peer review" in climate 'science' is a proven fraud.
-
Conclusion: man made gasses have little to do with what little climate change is noted:
https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-miljo/forurensning-og-klima/artikler/to-what-extent-are-temperature-levels-changing-due-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions/_/attachment/inline/5a3f4a9b-3bc3-4988-9579-9fea82944264:f63064594b9225f9d7dc458b0b70a646baec3339/DP1007.pdf
\
-
2nd post.
Gawd, some of these bozos shill for the gender dysmorphia that has caused numerous impressionable teens to be irreversibly surgically altered are branching out I guess:
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/climate-change-and-mental-health-connections?fbclid=IwAR37FW0aLYMcwUnJMxnTPGD1a8ng8rOks3YniSID9krYRKg9ezQib5Zr2Gk
-
I never expected an honest lockdown reckoning
Samizdata.net by Johnathan Pearce (London) / October 23, 2023 at 03:52AM//keep unread//hide
“Since apologies are now required. Challenging any consensus is fundamentally important to good science – especially that of an unproven intervention such as lockdown. The onus should have been on those proposing such a radical new policy to justify it, not the reverse. Sweden is the elephant in the room. A nation of relatively similar wealth and standing to us, it largely avoided lockdowns yet has emerged with impressively low excess deaths. Should the inquiry not be asking how? Anders Tegnell, the architect of their successful strategy, should have been a priority witness.”
– Prof Karol Sikora is a consultant oncologist. Daily Telegraph (£)
When the pandemic petered out and lockdowns were – with some reluctance from the powers-that-be – abandoned, there was some speculation about how there needed to be “a reckoning” over the damage done, that we should examine the Swedish case, and re-visit the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments. But I feared at the time that this was unlikely to happen, at least for some time with the present political establishment. Simple reputation protection is part of it. Also, it appears the large majority of the public in countries such as the UK supported lockdowns. Maybe too many voters did not want to face the full, ugly fact that what had been done was a massive mistake, on a par with entering a war. In this day and age – and I suspect it has been like this since forever – soul searching and honest reflection is not encouraged. Parts of the media probably thought the same about lockdowns and in far too few cases has there been much reflection. You can almost detect a certain awkwardness. I mean, at any social gathering I have been at, among journalists and suchlike, the folly of lockdowns never comes up unless I raise it (I try not to make a habit of it, mind), and if I ever do, I get that “oh, look at that oddball” stare, or desire to shift the conversation to something less controversial.
On the Conservative and Labour sides, and across the public sector, most were invested into lockdowns; already, when I saw journalists have a go at the Boris Johnson government, for example, it was usually that it did not lock down hard enough and early enough. The whole “meta-context” was about repression, speed and duration of lockdown, and the need to throw the full apparatus of the State at it. The idea that ordinary members of the public were already acting to socially distance back in February and early March of 2020, that various methods, freely embraced, might have made a difference (I am not a doctor, so usual disclaimers), were ignored. Not just ignored, but as we saw over the GBD crowd, mocked and scorned.
It became clear to me that there is a clear overlap between the lockdowners, as I call them, and much of today’s Green movement. It was hard for me to ignore an almost pleasurable embrace of lockdowns by the Greens. I mean, we’d stopped most people flying! Look at how clear the canals of Venice are, daaaahling. The Net Zero phenomenon, whatever else it is, is about using the coercive power of the State to force people to change how they behave in ways they will find restrictive and unpleasant for some sort of supposed provable collective goal. The lockdowns were a trial run, in a way, for the sort of repressive measures that such Green activists seek. In one story, an academic suggested that lockdowns were actually a sort of “liberation”.
Clearly, it is possible to be alarmed by all this even if you are, for example, concerned about viruses, possibly cooked up in a lab, or Man-made global temperature increases. These are matters of empirical science. Just because freedom-loving individuals don’t like lockdowns or restrictions on fossil fuels doesn’t mean these fears are unfounded. (The correct approach is to accept the best evidence available without rushing to junk freedom.) But it surely does suggest that in so many cases, top-down responses to this or that threat need to be questioned more. To go back to the quote at the top of this article, there is a need for a burden of proof to sit with those who want to slam measures on the public, not the other way around. And there needs to be more willingness to embrace the solutions and tools to which a free, entrepreneurial society give rise to.
https://www.samizdata.net/2023/10/i-never-expected-an-honest-lockdown-reckoning/
-
Super cold Halliween:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/halloween-artic-blast-allow-temperatures-111155755.html
Search word 'climate' = 0/0.
----------------
And THIS, that went by so quietly:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/01/south-pole-coldest-winter-record/
---------------------
More:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/archives/2021/08/22/uncharted-waters-lake-michigan-water-levels-record-low-2013-could-mark-new-era/1366664001/
"New Era"
"This is not a story about climate change.
It is a story about climate changed."
The following year:
https://eos.org/science-updates/water-levels-surge-on-great-lakes#:~:text=Water%20level%20data%20from%20the,January%20through%20the%20following%20December).
Water Levels Surge on Great Lakes
The recent 2-year surge represents one of the most rapid rates of water level change on the Great Lakes in recorded history and marks the end of an unprecedented period of low water levels."
-
… that lead to this piece with all sorts of apt source material:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/two-princeton-mit-scientists-say-epa-climate-regulations-based-on-a-hoax-5460699?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=facebook&rs=SHRNCMMW&fbclid=IwAR0RgSof5dIf6bgEmcDaVYx2Joa3T4rLryzX-Q89rPTks388X8EPU3WNKlk
-
Was this SNL Weekend News or NBC News? They both do it with a straight face.
https://twitter.com/mazemoore/status/1719441354319679620
Oddly, that would have been better than what we have now.
Temperatures still swing more in an hour than they do in a century.
Nothing (anecdotal) says Unstoppable Catastrophic Human Caused Global Warming more than having the coldest winter EVER (on record) at the South Pole, 2021:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/01/south-pole-coldest-winter-record/
-
Preach it sir!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/10/04/truth-and-science-a-nobel-laureates-advice-to-students/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=truth-and-science-a-nobel-laureates-advice-to-students&fbclid=IwAR1C5ALZQpR90APKIZJpXz4ppZ7s9x4RjToPrdL2WOkbeuvKVfKVGtb_q3I
-
… we’d hear no end of it:
https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2023/11/08/weird-its-cold-in-winter-again/?fbclid=IwAR38J7LcKYQffXjgpbqUjYOjzj-l_z6Q1La1dN4E5i68DypWmAMq0ZwXYS0
-
https://the-pipeline.org/who-wants-to-live-in-caves/?fbclid=IwAR0UALLxfKEbGiPHGEWZ-4CgQe5QRQlgSW_upQXJyR6mXni_KMf1X-Kbqg0
-
Perhaps misfiled as this piece takes issue with the pathological science, but if correct what’s presented here sure poops on the alarmist parade.
The real villain.
Many factors determine the weather at any given time and place on the globe: water cycles, air masses, jet streams, weather fronts, elevation, and topography are among them. The more these natural factors are examined, the less credible the environmental narrative -- that man’s use of fossil fuels is the most significant factor in those changes -- appears to be. If you believe, as I do not, that human-emitted CO2 is the principal driver of climatic warming, you have to downplay the importance of other natural phenomena.
Take volcanos. This year through October, there were 67 confirmed eruptions from 66 different volcanos around the world. This is not an unusual amount of volcanic activity -- it has been fairly consistent for two centuries -- though the population increases near volcanos and better reporting sometimes obscures that fact. Here's what The Smithsonian has to say on the matter:
The best evidence that these trends are apparent rather than real comes from the record of large eruptions, whose effects are far reaching and less likely to escape documentation even in remote areas. Their constancy over the past two centuries is a better indicator of the global frequency of eruptions than the improved reporting of smaller eruptions.
The volume of volcanic CO2 emissions has been substantially underestimated. Because naturally-emitted CO2 and Co2 emitted as a result of human activity have the very same isotopes, it is impossible to distinguish the source and has not been accurately assessed for a number of reasons. For example, the amount of CO2 from volcanic action cited over and again is based on an analysis of only seven active volcanoes and three seafloor emitting volcanos (o.oo.1 percent of earth’s volcanic features). Recent studies indicate massive amounts of C02 are emitted from non-erupting volcanos, such as Greenland’s Katla volcano.
A recent study, authored by Hermann Harde, a professor of Experimental Physics and Materials Science at Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, indicates that CO2 emissions from volcanos and other natural causes are six times higher than man-made sources. Not only is the data relied on to argue against this phenomenon surprisingly inaccurate, the claim of higher human-sourced CO2 relies on a fiddling of the record of how long these emissions remain in the atmosphere.
According to a new study, the claim that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driven exclusively by humans relies on a made-up, disparate accounting model, with the residence time for natural emissions three to four years (which is consistent with actual observations), but CO2 from human sources is claimed to have a residence time of 50 to over 100 years. [emphasis, links added]
The 15 to 30 times longer residence time for human emissions is an imaginary conceptualization that is wholly inconsistent with (1) bomb tests (1963) and (2) seasonal CO2 variations found in real-world observations. Human emissions account for under 5 percent of the total from all sources, natural and anthropogenic.
I suppose the climate change crowd’s response is to conduct a worldwide search for enough virgins to throw into volcanos to keep them from belching and oozing CO2 into the atmosphere, but how far removed from this supposition is from the rest of their schemes?
Clarice Feldman is a retired attorney living in Washington, D.C. During her legal career she represented the late labor leader Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski and the reform mine workers against Tony Boyle. She served as an attorney with the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, in which role she prosecuted those who aided the Nazis in World War II. She has written for The Weekly Standard and is a regular contributor to American Thinker.
-
One of the Environment threads would be a good place to post this as well.
-
BBG very interesting.
I am trying to pull up whether the water vapor released by last yrs underwater volcano in Tonga is responsible for the recent warming
I remember the description of Tonga in the Washington Post forecast it would increase temperatures worldwide by few degrees.
Of course, now the libs seem to be certain it would not cause this:
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/did-the-tonga-eruption-cause-this-years-extreme-heat
I really don't know who to believe and who is honest or simply juggling the "data"
-
BBG very interesting.
I am trying to pull up whether the water vapor released by last yrs underwater volcano in Tonga is responsible for the recent warming
I remember the description of Tonga in the Washington Post forecast it would increase temperatures worldwide by few degrees.
Of course, now the libs seem to be certain it would not cause this:
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/did-the-tonga-eruption-cause-this-years-extreme-heat
I really don't know who to believe and who is honest or simply juggling the "data"
Data on the Tonga eruption is very difficult to come by, I suspect because that data doesn’t gird alarmist narratives.
-
https://realclimatescience.com/2023/12/origin-of-the-global-warming-threat/#gsc.tab=0
-
Very unusually warm Christmas here.
Is it global?
Record cold in Beijing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/25/beijing-records-most-hours-of-sub-zero-temperatures-in-december-since-1951.html#:~:text=As%20of%20Sunday%2C%20a%20weather,to%20state%2Dbacked%20Beijing%20Daily.
Record cold in Nigeria.
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2023/nigerian-naira-falls-to-record-low
Record cold in the Arctic!.
https://watchers.news/2023/12/24/arctics-40-year-record-low-temperatures-spawn-rare-clouds/
-
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/09/weather/weather-record-cold-antarctica-climate-change/index.html
Antarctica’s last 6 months were the coldest on record
By Allison Chinchar, CNN Meteorologist
6 minute read
Updated 12:30 PM EDT, Sat October 9, 2021
-
:-o
Until I read this section below.
Funny, how every single weather event is consistent with climate change but when there is something that contradicts the theory of man made climate change we get some sort of poo pah about it like this:
Weather versus Climate Change
It is important to understand weather is different from climate. Weather is what happens over shorter periods of time (days to months), such as the seven-day forecast. Climate is what happens over much longer periods of time, such as several years, or even entire generations.
“One such example is a cold snap, which can happen due to sudden changes in atmospheric circulation and may not be linked to climate change,” says Tom Slater, Research Fellow at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds. “Texas is a good example of this; even though parts of it experienced extreme cold weather earlier this year when air from the Arctic was pushed south, looking at the long-term change in temperature tells us that Texas is 1.5 degrees warmer on average now than it was 100 years ago. That’s climate.”
Scientists also agree that since the 1950s extreme cold snaps do occur, but climate change is bringing far more heat records than cold records.
“In other words, while the globe may be warmer than average as a whole, some areas will still observe colder temperatures and even severe cold outbreaks,” says Zack Labe, Climate Scientist at Colorado State University. “This regional variation is due to the influences of the oceans, mountains, deserts, ice sheets, and other geographic features that all affect our weather and climate. It’s also from changes in weather patterns that are related to the position of the jet stream (storm track), which can vary from day-to-day or even month-to-month.”
So, this recent winter stretch from June-August is definitely interesting from a research standpoint, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect what Antarctica is doing in the long term.
View of the Argentinian Esperanza military base from the Brazilian Navy's Oceanographic Ship Ary Rongel in Antarctica on March 5, 2014. (Vanderlei Almida/AFP via Getty Images)
Antarctica just registered its hottest temperature ever
One great example of this is while June-August of this year may have been quite cold, February of the previous year recorded the new all-time record high for the Antarctic continent. On February 6, 2020, the Esperanza Research Station recorded a high temperature of 18.3°C degrees (64.9°F). This broke the previous record for the Antarctic region (continental, including mainland and surrounding islands) of 17.5°C (63.5°F) recorded in March 2015 at the same station.
“There were thousands upon thousands of these penguins just in distress because they were so overheated and there was no snow,” Camille Seaman, a photographer who has traveled to Antarctica, told CNN in August. “They were looking for any little patch of snow or ice to lay on.”
Polar opposites
-
Yes. If the anecdotal matches the narrative, it is "climate change". If it opposes the narrative it is "weather". And then both happen at once. We are having the craziest warm start of a winter here in memory with open water on the lake at Christmas (although it was crazy cold at Thanksgiving etc). Record cold on three other continents. The warmth is climate change, the cold everywhere else is weather. "Climate change" causes drought and torrential rains. How do you argue with these people?
Then they conflate climate change (that has been going on since the beginning of time) with anthropogenic (human caused) climate change, and 1 1/2 degrees in 100 years warming without telling us if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, or what the temp would have been with fires and volcanos but not cars.
If concrete causes it, let's at least stop building government buildings. We can do that without crushing the private economy.
Funny how all the solutions involve fascism and loss of freedoms, but all the dirtiest places on earth already have fascism and already lost all their freedoms.
Nothing gives us the power to innovate and build cleaner, healthier solutions than prosperity. Why isn't THAT their focus?
Electricity for air conditioning is killing us but electricity for charging electric vehicles will save the planet.
There isn't going to be an honest debate on this anytime soon.
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/climate-scientists-say-we-should-embrace-higher-co2-levels-5551562?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-12-31&src_cmp=mb-2023-12-31&utm_medium=email&est=2T4kHf%2FCK11nhboxdI852x5mFix7kLyPln2B%2Btvq9VKmsLYvPQj4g6ya0d8%3D
Endless confusing back and forth "research" being published.
I am unable to sort this out from my armchair
But I still think Repubs can speak of this a a reasonable way and not simply say it is all BS and ignore it.
that is definitely NOT politically astute.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/junk_climate_science.html
-
Soon you will hear 2023 was the hottest year ever, hottest year on record, etc.
Wouldn't you think they are comparing temperature readings then with temperature readings now?
I've already railed on this but the point is their still doing it, in particular adjusting older records downward to make current data look warmer.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-1-7-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxi
https://realclimatescience.com/2024/01/what-did-they-do-wrong/#gsc.tab=0
Doesn't "data" in science mean raw data. Raw, unaltered data, and everything else is something else, analysis by someone. Why can't they simply disclose it's altered data and release their algorithms for it and their justifications for doing so, like good economists do?
Maybe it is getting warmer, but how would we know?
-
Doug 2 days ago:
" Soon you will hear 2023 was the hottest year ever, hottest year on record, etc."
Right on time:
https://news.yahoo.com/earth-just-had-hottest-ever-165025339.html
-
... so it's hardly surprising that the Israelis can create a "climate catastrophe:"
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/media-beclowns-itself-with-articles-linking-israels-military-efforts-in-gaza-to-climate-crisis/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=media-beclowns-itself-with-articles-linking-israels-military-efforts-in-gaza-to-climate-crisis
-
Five minute video demonstrating why datasets used to demonstrate claimed warming are bunk:
https://realclimatescience.com/2024/01/imaginary-record-heat-2/#gsc.tab=0
-
Even climate czars are admitting Net Zero goals are based on poor data as the US & other “quiet quit” hydrocarbon abstinence:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/british-scientist-admits-climate-change-committees-net-zero-goals-based-on-insufficient-data/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=british-scientist-admits-climate-change-committees-net-zero-goals-based-on-insufficient-data
-
Long but very readable piece examining the difference between what alarmist predictions claim will occur and what has indeed occurred, with basic possibilities presented to explain the difference:
https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/global-warming-observations-vs-climate-models
-
If you see a mark on Dr. Hansen, this is what left it:
https://archive.is/TTPP8
-
Like my grandpa used to say “figures never lie, but liars always figure.” Juking wildfire stats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-__pY6Dp5M&t=345s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-__pY6Dp5M&t=345s)
-
This is delicious! After decrying rumored right wing big meanies and dragging detractors to court whereupon he dragged his feet through discovery for YEARS, Michael Mann is on the stand testifying in the libel suit he initiated, and is screwing the pooch.
In many ways he’s already lost. His Hockey Stick hyperbole which, at one time, you couldn’t turn a corner without being smacked in the face with has been utterly memory holed, and indeed despite refusing to share either his data our source code because science doesn’t have to be replicable if you claim those seeking to follow this basic tenet of science are big meanies, the math behind his inane graph was backward engineered and shown to be so poorly construed one could drop the recipe for chicken salad into it and have a hockey stick shaped line plot emerge. Alarmist these days tend to turn pink when you mention that chapter in their panic mongering, yet Mann proceeded with his lawfare nonetheless. Now that’s chutzpah!
It’s a DC court and Mann is playing the right wing extremist card so it’s likely too soon to count chickens, but it’s fun to watch him squirm and equivocate on the stand.
I began this thread with Mann in mind; hope to punctuate it with a trial loss here:
The Emperor Has No Clothes
by Amy K. Mitchell
Mann vs Steyn Trial Day Eight
January 29, 2024
Michael Mann took the stand for the third day at the trial of his own making to start Week 3. Mark's cross-examination continued in full force today. By the end of the day, Mann's lawyers were clearly flustered as illustrated by their attempts to rebut Mann's own testimony (in vain).
C.S. Lewis (yes, that C.S. Lewis) once said, "Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others." We witnessed a lot of blame in Room 132 of the DC Superior Court today, so hell must be near.
As Mark detailed in exhibit after exhibit, Mann, despite his protestations to the contrary of double-checking (nigh, triple checking) his work and always ensuring that he has facts right each and every time, had to resort time and again to the common refrain, "it was an honest mistake."
What mistakes you ask?
Well, let's start with Mann's own deposition — the deposition that was signed under penalty of perjury. Mann failed to disclose all persons who he believed had "communicated false statements of fact about you or your work that caused damage to your reputation, as well as the statements."
Mann's response: "It fell through the cracks. It was an honest mistake... there were hundreds of pages." Hundreds of pages? This from the man whose entire profession (and career) is contingent upon hundreds of, if not thousands, points of data? And those other persons? Well, they "didn't have nearly the reach" as Mark and the other defendants.
The discrepancy in the alleged decline in the Plaintiff's grant funding submitted in his own documentation admitted as evidence? "It was the lawyers."
The distortion of Hockey and Football, one of the "statements at issue," in Mann's book in which the word "mad" was added to a direct quote attributed to Mark, as in, "Mad Michael Mann was the man behind..." Oh, that is a "typo." No wait, it was "the editors."
Mann is never to blame. He is innocent. Perfect, if one will.
Let's turn to Mann's emails, which in discovery included the following gem about Judith Curry:
"... folks here were relieved to see her go. I don't know all the details. What I do know is that Peter Webster was a married faculty member and Judy Curry was a graduate student. Affairs, ugly divorce, et cetera, yada, yada. Webster and Curry left together... to the relief of everyone I know here who was around then. mike."
Except the woman in question wasn't actually a graduate student, but was in fact another faculty member. Mann admitted: "These are rumors I was passing along" (lovely), and his "facts could be wrong," AND wait for it... "she is what I would a call a serial misinformer when it comes to science."
Ah ha. So spreading rumors of an affair in academic circles if you're Michael Mann — on purpose — to discredit someone who doesn't agree with you to ruin their reputation isn't defamation? Got it.
Finally, ICYMI — This evening, Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal writes, "This is lawfare. The message is: If you don't like a critic's tweet or blog posts, just drag him through the courts. It's especially sweet if someone else foots your bill." Read the full column here.
National Review is also tracking the trial, with coverage here.
And Mark's Opening Statement can be found here.
https://www.steynonline.com/14056/the-emperor-has-no-clothes?fbclid=IwAR1ww5SwRU6uHGqNPnkx1B8E0IwA5nKoWouZvmlghlEaBF_K0dgEe1GvzoQ
-
CO2 level responsible for planetary “greening:”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/30/new-study-2001-2020-global-greening-is-an-indisputable-fact-and-its-driven-by-co2-fertilization/
-
Heh heh.
-
Feldman looks the UK’s Net Zero plan, with the Royal Society head noting the energy emperor is way underdressed:
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes say, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. ” Recent admissions by Britain’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) indicate they've done just that, relying on insufficient data to induce parliament to embrace net-zero. Without accurate data the net-zero plan must be suspended or repealed until further, more accurate assessment is made.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who headed a Royal Society study on future energy supply, is the man who pulled back the curtain on the Climate Change Committee’s sloppy, misleading work. Whether this was just incompetence or an intent to deceive, I leave it to readers to decide. Llewellyn Smith determined that the CCC grossly overestimated the potential number of days during which the U.K. could rely on wind and solar energy to reach a net-zero goal.
The CCC has admitted the error: through its chief executive, Chris Stark, it conceded its projections were based on “the hourly energy demand and real weather data from a low-wind year.” The CCC’s advice to ministers in 2019 projected “there would be only seven days in which wind turbines would produce less than ten percent of their potential output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.”
Performance anxiety.
By using data from only one year, just as the CCC overestimated the energy output of these renewables it also underestimated the amount of storage capacity needed when relying on these “intermittent weather dependent energy sources.” The Royal Society report estimates that by 2050 one hundred terawatt hours (TWh) of storage will be needed to make up for the variations in wind and sunshine, an estimate not based on the CCC’s reliance on one year’s worth of data, but on 37 years of weather data.
It’s hard to imagine how such an optimistic forecast based on so little was not the product of deliberate misinformation, misinformation unquestioned by parliament or Theresa May when they enshrined the 2050 target into law. It’s even harder to imagine why, with the error admitted, parliament won’t suspend or repeal it.
In the process of critical examination of the data underpinning the Net-Zero law, parliament ought to also consider the words of John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Physics Nobel Prize:
I can very confidently assert, there is NO climate emergency.... atmospheric CO2 and methane have negligible effect on the climate. The policies government have been implementing are total unnecessary and should be eliminated.
Clauser asserts that, as with the U.K.’s net-zero policy, the “climate emergency” policy is based on bad data—in this case the IPCC’s computer models which “have all misidentified the dominant process that controls the earth’s climate.” Neither is he alone in debunking the “climate emergency” claim. More than 1,600 climate science professionals have signed a declaration saying the same thing:
Politicized the climate debate certainly is; with no consequences for producing bad data and inducing passage of laws based on it, fakery will continue until the charlatans who peddle such things face some consequences and voters wise up and demand change.
Clarice Feldman is a retired attorney living in Washington, D.C. During her legal career she represented the late labor leader Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski and the reform mine workers against Tony Boyle. She served as an attorney with the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, in which role she prosecuted those who aided the Nazis in World War II. She has written for The Weekly Standard and is a regular contributor to American Thinker.
https://the-pipeline.org/net-zero-a-capital-mistake/?fbclid=IwAR1lUxk_pv0AtIFjzbVtZB6ckvA0fCcB6VK3IJBoQt-wt00krXUXQaxUJdM
-
thanks for the climate posts BBG
help clarify the ongoing debates
-
thanks for the climate posts BBG
help clarify the ongoing debates
Something of a peeve of mine. 30 years of doomsaying, primarily made off of models, models that when extrapolated rearward don’t match the weather we’ve had, and when a couple years pass after a model is presented, they invariably fail to have predicted the weather we did have. Combined with all the duplicity associated with the alarmist side—Michael Mann’s suit against Mark Steyn and others currently occurring in DC is a fine case in point—and it’s difficult to conclude the alarmist side is little more than a ham handed attempt to stampede the hoi poli into relinquishing liberty and choice to politicians and politicized “scientist” pursuing power rather than truth.
-
Some serious irony here. I handle print and mail at a college. Trying to talk faculty out of their desktop printers despite there being a more energy efficient multifunction print producing higher quality impressions 30 feet from their office, or for that matter getting students to break down their boxes for recycling in the mail room are both tasks I’ve banged me head against the wall regarding. Now these woebegone profs. are claiming they can’t take action on behalf of the climate? Hell, in academia the horse is led to water, a bucket full thereof raised to its lips, but no drinking done? Hell, what they want is for someone to do the drinking for them so they can take credit for it.
Claim: University Researchers Feel Powerless to Take Personal Climate Action
4 hours agoEric Worrall31 Comments
Essay by Eric Worrall
“Barriers” to climate action include pressure to travel, and a lack of financial incentives to embrace low carbon approaches to research.
Climate change: university researchers feel powerless to take action – survey
Published: January 31, 2024 2.38am AEDT
Briony Latter
Researcher in Climate Change Engagement, Cardiff University
University researchers in the UK, across all disciplines and at all career stages, are struggling to take action against climate change despite wanting to do so.
Many academics worry about climate change but face several barriers to changing their habits, including the pressure to travel. In one case, a climate researcher conducting field work abroad wanted to use slower and more sustainable forms of transport rather than fly back to work at a research institute in Germany. He was fired.
The majority think their university does not give them enough information about how to conduct research in a sustainable way. Funding processes, such as applications for grants to carry out research, do not incentivise low-carbon approaches either, they say.
Different barriers to climate action appear at different career stages. Early career researchers in particular lack institutional support (such as job security or the encouragement to act), are involved in few projects about climate change (whether as part of research or outside of their roles) and feel uncertain about what they can do.
Mid-career researchers were more likely to complain of a high workload thwarting their ambitions. When asked if senior researchers should have a high responsibility for addressing climate change in universities, senior researchers themselves were more likely to think so than early and mid-career researchers, suggesting that they recognise their own potential role.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-university-researchers-feel-powerless-to-take-action-survey-221830
Why are academics yielding to pressure to travel frequently, if every flight brings us closer to a lethal climate tipping point? Why is keeping their job so important, if the world is on the brink of climate catastrophe?
Why do university academics want OTHERS to spoon-feed them information on how they can be more carbon neutral? Why can’t they take 5 minutes to look up low carbon lifestyle and professional alternatives for themselves?
If this pathetic effort is all the energy and concern university academics can muster to address the alleged climate crisis, there is no reason for the rest of us care.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/04/claim-university-researchers-feel-powerless-to-take-personal-climate-action/
-
This is a hoot. Psycologists theorize “deniers” are more selfish that those who swallow alarmist claims. Alas, a series of experiments all fail to prover their hypothesis, leaving these True Believers bewildered:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/02/psychologists-were-sure-climate-deniers-were-selfish-but-a-study-of-4000-showed-the-experts-were-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=psychologists-were-sure-climate-deniers-were-selfish-but-a-study-of-4000-showed-the-experts-were-wrong
-
If a "denier" were to do what Mann has done he'd be cancelled with extreme prejudice. Check out what Mann said about Curry toward the end of this piece. Indeed, Mann was forced to state under oath that he had lied about Curry. He has yet to apologize. This is the face of unbridled narcissism, and the "progressive" left hasn't and won't hold him to account:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/06/quote-of-the-week-manntastic-claims/
-
Posted as an example of everything wrong with journalism these days. No mention of Mann’s sexist slander of Judith Curry, the poor statistical analysis, the unwillingness to share source code, of who is paying for Mann’s suits as NPR slings around guilt by association non sequiturs about oil companies and right wing boogie men as Steyn serves as his own attorney because he isn’t backed like Mann is as he has dragged these proceedings out for a decade precisely because he seeks to were down and bankrupt people with the gall to use protected speech to tell the truth as they see it. Behold this example of media malpractice and keep it in mind the next time some talking head proclaims her journalistic virtues, and then go count your silverware in case she stole some:
The Courts Science
A Famous Climate Scientist Is In Court With Big Stakes For Attacks On Science (npr.org) 25
Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @10:30PM from the climate-information-on-trial dept.
Julia Simon reports via NPR:
In a D.C. courtroom, a trial is wrapping up this week with big stakes for climate science. One of the world's most prominent climate scientists is suing a right-wing author and a policy analyst for defamation. The case comes at a time when attacks on scientists are proliferating, says Peter Hotez, professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Even as misinformation about scientists and their work keeps growing, Hotez says scientists haven't yet found a good way to respond. "The reason we're sort of fumbling at this is it's unprecedented. And there is no roadmap," he says. The climate scientist at the center of this trial is Michael Mann. The professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania gained prominence for helping make one of the most accessible, consequential graphs in the history of climate science. First published in the late 1990s, the graph shows thousands of years of relatively stable global temperatures. Then, when humans start burning lots of coal and oil, it shows a spike upward. Mann's graph looks like a hockey stick lying on its side, with the blade sticking straight up. The so-called "hockey stick graph" was successful in helping the public understand the urgency of global warming, and that made it a target, says Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, a climate accountability nonprofit. "Because it became such a powerful image, it was under attack from the beginning," he says.
The attacks came from groups that reject climate science, some funded by the fossil fuel industry. In the midst of these types of attacks -- including the hacking of Mann's and other scientists' emails by unknown hackers -- Penn State, where Mann was then working, opened an investigation into his research. Penn State, as well as the National Science Foundation, found no evidence of scientific misconduct. But a policy analyst and an author wrote that they were not convinced. The trial in D.C. Superior Court involves posts from right-wing author Mark Steyn and policy analyst Rand Simberg. In an online post, Simberg compared Mann to former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child sex abuser. Simberg wrote that Mann was the "Sandusky of climate science," writing that Mann "molested and tortured data (PDF)." Steyn called Mann's research fraudulent. Mann sued the two men for defamation. Mann also sued the publishers of the posts, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but in 2021, the court ruled they couldn't be held liable.
In court, Mann has argued that he lost funding and research opportunities. Steyn said in court that if Penn State's president, Graham Spanier, covered up child sexual assault, why wouldn't he cover up for Mann's science. The science in question used ice cores and tree rings to estimate Earth's past temperatures. "If Graham Spanier is prepared to cover up child rape, week in, week out, year in, year out, why would he be the least bit squeamish about covering up a bit of hanky panky with the tree rings and the ice cores?" Steyn asked the court. Mann and Steyn declined to speak to NPR during the ongoing trial. One of Simberg's lawyers, Victoria Weatherford, said "inflammatory does not equal defamatory" and that her client is allowed to express his opinion, even if it were wrong. "No matter how offensive or distasteful or heated it is," Weatherford tells NPR, "that speech is absolutely protected under the First Amendment when it's said against a public figure, if the person saying it believed that what they said was true."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/06/2254240/a-famous-climate-scientist-is-in-court-with-big-stakes-for-attacks-on-science?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
-
Posted as, in view of recent California rain etc. we can expect other alarmists to to embrace weather anecdote caused by a known phenomenon and instead ascribe it in pursuit of a hidden political end.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/07/is-northwest-snow-history-scientific-errors-in-a-major-seattle-times-climate-story/
ETA: And of course I find an immediate piece embracing what I predicted:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/07/no-los-angeles-times-climate-change-is-not-supercharging-the-latest-winter-storm/
-
2nd post: a bit of alarmist hand wringing that minds me of a scene in This is Spinal Tap:
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and…
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: (pause) These go to eleven.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/07/hurricane-category-6/
-
2nd (or third today, I'm losing track) post. If you have a spare hour this podcast is well worth your time as they reenact some of the jawdropping testimony and cross examination that occurred Tuesday in Mann's supposed defamation trial. One of the things that came out is that Mann has serially defamed to a far greater degree than any of the claimed defamation (read "nonexistent") that came his way. Ugly and brutal.
And the British observers conducting this effort discuss the utter disconnection from reality the NPR piece I note below is. I was pleased to find others utterly flabbergasted by that piece.
Another bon mot: our noble narrators mention they are the only two reporters they've seen in the courtroom all day, every day, which raises the question: what is the source material used by NPR and other MSM orgs framing things to fit Mann's narrative? Moreover, when these reporters--who again have been in court every day and who have asked questions of Mann's lawyers before--sought point another series of questions the direction of Mann's lawyers just outside the courthouse, Mann's lawyers went back in to the courthouse, had a hushed conversation with the security guard on the door, before scurrying further inside. When our intrepid Brit tried to reenter, he was stopped at the door and told he could not enter. After some back and forth it turns out Mann's lawyers had told the guard they were being "stalked" by the reporter.
There's more to the tale worth hearing, but this false claim is emblematic of everything Mann and his torchbearers touch. And NPR will be reporting on it ... sometime soon, mayhaps.
Oh, and Judith Curry's testimony, particularly regarding Mann's claim she had "slept her way to the top," is all kinds of damning. Uh, where are the Me Too shock troops excoriating Mann for this blatant, sexist, pervaricating behavior? Let's ask the crickets, eh?
Mann, I mean, man I wish some of the alarmists that used to carry climate change water were around to tell us why we should ignore the Mann behind the keyboard.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-change-on-trial/id1713827256
Posted as an example of everything wrong with journalism these days. No mention of Mann’s sexist slander of Judith Curry, the poor statistical analysis, the unwillingness to share source code, of who is paying for Mann’s suits as NPR slings around guilt by association non sequiturs about oil companies and right wing boogie men as Steyn serves as his own attorney because he isn’t backed like Mann is as he has dragged these proceedings out for a decade precisely because he seeks to were down and bankrupt people with the gall to use protected speech to tell the truth as they see it. Behold this example of media malpractice and keep it in mind the next time some talking head proclaims her journalistic virtues, and then go count your silverware in case she stole some:
The Courts Science
A Famous Climate Scientist Is In Court With Big Stakes For Attacks On Science (npr.org) 25
Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @10:30PM from the climate-information-on-trial dept.
Julia Simon reports via NPR:
In a D.C. courtroom, a trial is wrapping up this week with big stakes for climate science. One of the world's most prominent climate scientists is suing a right-wing author and a policy analyst for defamation. The case comes at a time when attacks on scientists are proliferating, says Peter Hotez, professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Even as misinformation about scientists and their work keeps growing, Hotez says scientists haven't yet found a good way to respond. "The reason we're sort of fumbling at this is it's unprecedented. And there is no roadmap," he says. The climate scientist at the center of this trial is Michael Mann. The professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania gained prominence for helping make one of the most accessible, consequential graphs in the history of climate science. First published in the late 1990s, the graph shows thousands of years of relatively stable global temperatures. Then, when humans start burning lots of coal and oil, it shows a spike upward. Mann's graph looks like a hockey stick lying on its side, with the blade sticking straight up. The so-called "hockey stick graph" was successful in helping the public understand the urgency of global warming, and that made it a target, says Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, a climate accountability nonprofit. "Because it became such a powerful image, it was under attack from the beginning," he says....
https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/06/2254240/a-famous-climate-scientist-is-in-court-with-big-stakes-for-attacks-on-science?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
-
Just read a report the the DC jury found for Mann. Time to face facts: if you aren’t part of the “Progressive” herd you won’t get a fair trial in DC.
I imagine it would be too much to hope that the judge sets the verdict aside given all the misbehavior by Mann and his legal team….
-
I am beyond extremely annoyed by this verdict--what trial was this DC jury watching?--and was wondering what sort of appeals were available to Steyn; I'm glad to learn this is not over.
[Jonathan H. Adler] Climate Scientist Michael Mann Wins Defamation Suit Against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg
Climate defamation trial intensifies
•The Volokh Conspiracy by Jonathan H. Adler / Feb 9, 2024 at 5:01 PM//keep unread//hide
Is this article about Politics?
[The jury found no real damages, but gave a sizeable punitive award that could be challenged on appeal. ]
Yesterday, a jury in the District of Columbia ruled for climate scientist Michael Mann in his long-running defamation suit against writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, for blog posts the two had written challenging the validity of his research and comparing Penn State's investigation into Mann's alleged misconduct with the University's whitewash of Jerry Sandusky. The suit was initially filed in 2012, and initially included National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute as defendants.
The jury awarded Mann nominal compensatory damages of $1 against each defendant, but then added punitive damage awards of $1 million against Steyn and $1,000 against Simberg. I would think that these damages–if not the verdict itself–are likely to be appealed.
The punitive damages would seem to be the most vulnerable part of the judgment. Under existing Supreme Court precedent, excessive punitive damages violate Due Process. So, for example, in BMW of North America v. Gore, the Court held that a punitive damage award of $2 million was excessive given that the plaintiff had only been awarded $2,000 in compensatory damages. This 1000-to-1 ratio, the Court held, could not be justified even considering the extent to which the defendant had engaged in egregious conduct.
There is some question whether BMW would continue to attract a majority of the Court today. That decision was 5-4. Justice Stevens wrote the majority, joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and Breyer. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg and Rehnquist dissented. Nonetheless, the BMW holding is binding on lower courts.
While Mann prevailed at trial, the proceedings also unearthed some slimy conduct on his part, including his disparagement of scientists with whom he disagrees and behind-the-scenes efforts to suppress articles by scientists he does not like.
This long-running litigation may not be over. Steyn's camp has indicated they intend to challenge the punitive damages award (if not other aspects of the decision). Mann's attorney also told the NYT they still plan to appeal the prior decisions that had removed CEI and National Review from the case: "Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, John Williams said, 'They're next.'"
* * *
A post-script. Here is a disclaimer I have included in prior posts about this litigation:
DISCLOSURE: As I've noted in prior posts on this case, I am a contributing editor at National Review Online, which means I have a fancier byline when I submit articles to the publication and occasionally contribute to The Corner and Bench Memos. It is not a salaried position. I also worked at the Competitive Enterprise Institute from 1991 to 2000 — many years before the events at issue in this litigation. If either of these facts makes you suspect bias on my part, so be it.
Note that while I was once something of a climate skeptic (much like Jerry Taylor), my views have changed. Today I have profound disagreements with CEI on the subject of climate change, having argued in defense of the scientific "consensus" on climate change and in favor of a carbon tax, among other measures to address the climate threat. My interest in this litigation arises from this implications for robust debate on matters of public concern, as I explained in this post.
The post Climate Scientist Michael Mann Wins Defamation Suit Against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg appeared first on Reason.com.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/09/climate-scientist-michael-mann-wins-defamation-suit-against-mark-steyn-and-rand-simberg/
-
https://api.theepochtimes.com/article/un-says-melting-arctic-ice-is-a-key-indicator-of-climate-change-but-its-not-melting-5580038?ea_src=frontpage&ea_med=premium-report-1
But this "data" appears like it is from satellites which would only measure the surface extent of sea ice.
Elsewhere I read the ice is getting thinner over the oceans which satellites would not pick up.
It is so hard to get a straight answer.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/21/exclusive-leaked-confidential-leftist-document-details-plot-to-pressure-republicans-into-protecting-bidens-radical-green-energy-agenda/
Who in their right mind would not want to protect our climate, our planet?
How do Repubs do this (show concern and the recognition it is something very worthy of attention)without destroying our economy?
Just calling it a hoax, just answering well China and India are now the biggest polluters is not going to placate those who are concerned.
Just my thoughts.
Anyone with any thoughts on this?
-
EXCELLENT QUESTION!
FWIW, here is what I do:
Core principle-- embrace opportunities to express congruence.
For example, here on FHOF, despite GM's snark, I regularly posted about plastics in the environment and efforts to do something about them.
On my FB page, I regularly share clips of someone doing random acts of kindness to a wild animal in trouble, often with human technology e.g. freeing an owl or a sea turtle or seal trapped in fishing line-- always with the heading of "Working our Way back to the Garden".
The thing to understand about lefties/Dems/greens is that they begin with the Heart, not Logic. There position is a statement of Faith, and in the face of Logic (In point of fact what you are suggesting creates a result contrary to your intentions etc) they just dig in deeper and take our Logic as proof that we lack Heart.
To communicat with such a person, the first order of business is what is sometimes called the Ransberger Pivot-- to converse with "we" instead of "you" and "me"-- this means communicating that in point of fact we SHARE Heart. Hence my sharing "Working our Way Back to the Garden" clips on my FB page.
With this in place, they become more receptive to working towards our Shared goal of bringing our Earth bac to the Garden of Nature.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/21/exclusive-leaked-confidential-leftist-document-details-plot-to-pressure-republicans-into-protecting-bidens-radical-green-energy-agenda/
Who in their right mind would not want to protect our climate, our planet?
How do Repubs do this (show concern and the recognition it is something very worthy of attention)without destroying our economy?
Just calling it a hoax, just answering well China and India are now the biggest polluters is not going to placate those who are concerned.
Just my thoughts.
Anyone with any thoughts on this?
ccp is right on this. We shouldn't answer their alarmism with silence, we should address the issue with honesty, real facts and a real plan. (Details of which are in these threads.) Maybe a ten point plan like the Contract with America, and some underlying principles.
Energy needs to be abundant, not scarce.
Base energy needs to be round the clock, not sporadic.
Wind and solar have a role.
Nuclear has a bigger role being the largest source known of carbon free energy.
Prosperity has a role, solutions cost money.
Fossil fuels have a role in the transition.
Getting emissions down here at a high cost while production moves to dirtier places is no solution.
If building more nuclear power capacity takes 10 years, the time to start was 10 years ago. Next best is now.
We won't force anything onto the grid until the grid is fully powered to handle it.
Widespread blackouts and brownout are a sign of a third world country and we won't accept moving backward on that score.
Restricting our mobility and our freedom isn't an option.
International agreements, if any, will include India, China etc.
Besides that it was a Republican President who took on slavery, it was a Republican President who started the EPA. Who knew?
They want a divisive political issue. We want clean, sustainable solutions that help not harm the people.
-
Very good Doug!
-
people's concern about Climate:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191678009/climate-change-republicans-economy-natural-disasters-biden-trump-poll
Just think if Trump could outline a plan that would both address and give attention to Climate Study AND preserve out economy.
That might help win over some who are on the fence.
Having seen some shows that present evidence of Climate Change and the best explanation is man made
it is wrong to simply and blindly accept it as fact.
But it is also wrong to simply and blindly call it horsecrap too.
It seems that Repubs like to focus only on issues they deem as "winning" for them.
Climate could be a winning issue if handled properly.
But calling it all a hoax is certainly a loser position.
-
people's concern about Climate:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191678009/climate-change-republicans-economy-natural-disasters-biden-trump-poll
Just think if Trump could outline a plan that would both address and give attention to Climate Study AND preserve out economy.
That might help win over some who are on the fence.
Having seen some shows that present evidence of Climate Change and the best explanation is man made
it is wrong to simply and blindly accept it as fact.
But it is also wrong to simply and blindly call it horsecrap too.
It seems that Repubs like to focus only on issues they deem as "winning" for them.
Climate could be a winning issue if handled properly.
But calling it all a hoax is certainly a loser position.
Alarmists are the ones who make human impact of the environment an all or nothing proposition, accusing those of us that take issue with their trillions of dollar remediation schemes that just so happen to put them in control of just about every level of power from regulation to production to finance to consumption, of being “deniers.” Humans are just one contributor to the huge list of variables impacting the ever changing climate, one that was at times historically much warmer long before humans were on the scene.
Those alarmists do propagate and embrace a number of hoaxes to further their schemes, schemes which to my mind are more about assuming control in such a way they can force all human actions to be conducted under the aegis of a command economy that they, as they of course are so much brighter than the rest of us, command, despite the abject failure of all previous efforts to force command economic schemas.
The only way to overcome those abject failures and convince people to embrace their dubious prescriptions are through exaggerated claims and prophecies of doom, so that is just what they vend, at least until they control things to the point they need no longer concern themselves with what the hoi poli prefer, and then likely embracing the techniques other command authoritarians have: “reeducation” and outright liquidation, both of which some alarmists have already called for.
Those of us that prefer freedom to tyranny and market driven solutions to mandated ones that invariably fail to deliver need to resist these efforts to stampede voters toward authoritarian alarmist ends. We moreover should not let alarmists determine and define the terms of debate and resists their efforts to cast all that don’t join the stampede as being unconcerned with how humans negatively impact the environment.
-
"Those of us that prefer freedom to tyranny and market driven solutions to mandated ones that invariably fail to deliver need to resist these efforts to stampede voters toward authoritarian alarmist ends. We moreover should not let alarmists determine and define the terms of debate and resists their efforts to cast all that don’t join the stampede as being unconcerned with how humans negatively impact the environment. "
Yes. WE need to define the terms of the debate, the controversies, and the evidence, and the prescriptions to combat with *agreed* upon solutions, all of which have pros and cons.
Just like in Medicine - there are different approaches to treating disease (most times) and the patient with their doctors decide which to choose from with pros and cons taken into account.
With man made climate change -
1st what is the evidence for and against
2nd how strong is it for and against
3rd what can be done - and are their more then one option and pros and cons of each
4th is watchful observation an option
instead of
The world will come to an end in 12 yrs and we must shut down all coal oil and gas now
and take every fossil fuel engine out of commission now.
-
"Those of us that prefer freedom to tyranny and market driven solutions to mandated ones that invariably fail to deliver need to resist these efforts to stampede voters toward authoritarian alarmist ends. We moreover should not let alarmists determine and define the terms of debate and resists their efforts to cast all that don’t join the stampede as being unconcerned with how humans negatively impact the environment. "
Yes. WE need to define the terms of the debate, the controversies, and the evidence, and the prescriptions to combat with *agreed* upon solutions, all of which have pros and cons.
Just like in Medicine - there are different approaches to treating disease (most times) and the patient with their doctors decide which to choose from with pros and cons taken into account.
With man made climate change -
1st what is the evidence for and against
2nd how strong is it for and against
3rd what can be done - and are their more then one option and pros and cons of each
4th is watchful observation an option
instead of
The world will come to an end in 12 yrs and we must shut down all coal oil and gas now
and take every fossil fuel engine out of commission now.
I highly recommend following this blog. It doesn't outright answer the questions you posed, but does a great job of outlining the complexity of the question and usually destroys alarmist propaganda and claims:
https://wattsupwiththat.com
-
BBG:
looks like a good resource thanks
-
This fits more than one place, but given the patholgical disregard of the sort of "settled science" "Progressives" whip their skippies to when it supports a cause they favor, I'll drop it here:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/02/st-philips-college-reinstates-fired-prof-who-taught-x-and-y-chromosomes-determines-sex/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=st-philips-college-reinstates-fired-prof-who-taught-x-and-y-chromosomes-determines-sex
-
… sky-is-falling narratives:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/02/billionaires-are-paying-to-pump-climate-porn-through-hollywood/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=billionaires-are-paying-to-pump-climate-porn-through-hollywood
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/prominent-scientists-challenge-key-data-underlying-climate-change-agenda-5593800?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2024-03-01&src_cmp=mb-2024-03-01&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYuw4IktV6djJ5LwB8GZWBu1axachNqyXsy29F2zjSh8%3D
From NASA:
their evidence :
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/?n
Questions about data collection , interpretation, contextualizing historically remain.
What to do about it : fission nuclear, NG over coal and oil
hopefully fusion nuclear
end deforestation
-
… and if it doesn’t you are unlikely to remember the original predictions, making our panic mongering a win/win:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/failed-prediction-timeline/
-
That is rather fg awesome.
-
"Low information voters" is a term I most commonly see used pejoratively by "Progressives" and their handmaidens when describing those that don't vote as their moral superiors would have them vote, meaning those wretched Republicans and all others that don't allow themselves to be stampeded into acting upon this noble cause and associated demands and sacrifices or that.
But, confound it, sometimes low information is a virtue rather than a curse, like when the unwashed masses need to embrace a goal without understanding the associated costs and impacts thereof, such as "Net Zero." This piece seeks to fill that info gap. Expect those who claim to abhor low information voters to do their best to conceal this honest assessment from those the left seek to manipulate into serfdom.
Forward provided below; the rest at the link:
Foreword
By Lord Frost of Allenton
The message in this briefing from Professor Gordon Hughes could hardly be more urgent. It is that the energy transition, as currently structured as part of the broader net zero policy, will lead to another ‘policy fiasco’. He rightly says that we are ‘pos- turing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous’, and urges a rethink of the strategy before it is too late.
The view of Western governments and of the expert class that supports their Net Zero policies is that the necessary tran- sition can be accomplished at limited cost. The UK’s Climate Change Committee argues that the fiscal cost of transforming our energy system will be an average of around 1–2% of GDP per year between now and 2050, and that this investment in new energy technology will actually improve the country’s growth performance. Believe that if you will.
Professor Hughes is more honest. He points out that inde- pendent experts assess the real cost to be at least 5% of GDP for the next couple of decades, and potentially even higher. He notes that we can’t find this money by redeploying it from other investment areas, because we already invest, net, almost nothing in assets other than housing. It’s clear that we can’t borrow such sums without risk of a fiscal crisis. So the only way of doing it is to reduce consumption by 8–10% over two decades – and, even then, only if the necessary funds can be extracted by taxation. This is doubtful when the tax burden is already at its highest point since the war.
Put these propositions to the Net Zero proponents, and you will be told there is no need to worry. Costs will magically come down, new technology will somehow be invented, and we will find ourselves in the new promised land of clean, green, growth that will pay for everything. But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening.
The real world cannot be avoided. As Professor Hughes says, either we must be honest with the people and be clear that they are going to have to pay at a currently unanticipated level, or we must extend the time period for the transition – that is, delay the Net Zero 2050 target, perhaps out till 2070 or 2075. Failure to do either – sadly, perhaps the most likely outcome – will mean that we simply muddle on, pretending we are making progress, spending at high levels, but achieving little. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the West will look on, incredulous at this unprecedented act of economic self harm.
This whole debate badly needs more honesty and openness. Professor Hughes’paper is an important contribution to it. I hope policymakers are listening.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/03/Hughes-Financing-Energy-Transition.pdf?mc_cid=b2426b62a0
-
Entitled idiots beget more of the same:
These posh eco-loons need to check their privilege
The upper-crust halfwits of Just Stop Oil are causing misery to ordinary people.
Julie Burchill
21st February 2024
These posh eco-loons need to check their privilege
POLITICS
UK
Reading about Cressida Gethin, the latest Just Stop Oil protester to be convicted of causing a nuisance, I found myself thinking of the strange days when British débutantes, young women making their first appearance in upper-class society, used to curtsey to a cake. I also thought of their other odd rituals, such as the parlour game, ‘Are You There, Moriarty?’, as splendidly showcased recently in Netflix’s One Day. Such customs appear perfectly reasonable to the ruling class, while utterly insane to the rest of us.
The last débutantes were presented to Queen Elizabeth II in 1958, after which the wise old bird abolished the ceremony, knowing how anachronistic it appeared. From then on, in the absence of a monarch to curtsey to, those young women who wished to do ‘the season’, and find themselves a husband at the end of it, would instead genuflect to an eight-foot-tall cake. I suppose it made sense to them, in the way that stopping cars carrying sick children being taken to hospital makes sense to the Just Stop Oil mob. Maybe you need to be born in a certain class, with a certain kind of cretinous confidence, not to feel totally ridiculous when doing either of these things.
Gethin is a 22-year-old music student who, among other things, clambered on to a gantry over the M25 in 2022. In doing so, she ruined the trips of 4,000 airline passengers. Whether swinging from gantries or attempting to destroy great art, these young people have the air of never having heard the word ‘No’.
Why are the climate fanatics all so posh? The Just Stop Oil activists are always called Cressida or Amy Rugg-Easey or Indigo Rumbelow. (Rumbelow has inspired an amusing Twitter game called Find Your Silly Posh Girl Name ‘by combining a colour with a defunct shop’.) In this, JSO is simply carrying on the glorious tradition of Extinction Rebellion, the leading lights of which had such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattinson.
Infamously, Boardman-Pattinson opined in 2019 that ‘air travel should only be used in emergencies’, despite having been on a number of skiing trips that very year, which he had foolishly posted on social media. It’s no wonder Cressida Gethin picked on desperate sun-seekers to make her point. Like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey who once asked, ‘What is a weekend?’, posh people who do nothing find it hard to understand what a holiday means to ordinary folk.
Like aristocrats down the ages, these posh clowns get together and breed new generations of clowns. Trans activist Riz Possnett, who glued her hands to the floor of the Oxford Union to protest against feminist Kathleen Stock last year, is the daughter of Extinction Rebellion activist Robert Possnett. He has been arrested several times for making a nuisance of himself. He once glued himself to a Brexit Party bus. The bananas don’t fall far from the tree in this family’s case.
Possnett was once a member of a ‘band’ called Working Class Broccoli, even though her father is a wealthy businessman and her mother is the chief executive of South Cambridgeshire district council. They live in a five-bedroomed house, complete with a swimming pool, in a Suffolk village. Who could blame Tory MP Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group, for opining to the Telegraph that Riz had ‘gone off the rails’ because she hailed from a ‘deranged bourgeois liberal family, blinded by privilege’?
Trans: the medical scandal of the century?
The privileged have always been drawn to ecological concerns – as I wrote of King Charles many moons ago: ‘It’s easy for the rich to be Friends of the Earth – it’s always been a good friend to them.’ Environmentalism gives our rulers a new way to corral and control hoi polloi now that the old ways of pushing us around are deemed unprogressive.
It is striking that only white people of a certain class and level of over-education enjoy making commuters’ lives a misery. And it is heartening that the people pleading with them to get out of the way are of every colour, creed and class imaginable. Think of the rousing attempts by a crowd to pull a pair of XR clowns from the roof of a rush-hour commuter train (electric!) in Canning Town back in 2019. Or take the summer of 2023, when Stratford schoolchildren were seen remonstrating with Just Stop Oil for making them late to lessons, in some cases ripping protesters’ banners from their hands.
A hastily deleted tweet by XR, comparing its activists to Rosa Parks, probably wasn’t the cleverest move. Not least as every climate-change protest is so overwhelmingly white that it makes the Lib Dem party conference look like the Notting Hill Carnival.
It’s telling that Cressida Gethin has taken two years out of her studies to make a nuisance of herself. Gap years, self-indulgent and virtue-signalling as they were, at least used to be about helping under-privileged people have better lives, however briefly. They were about giving something back. In Gethin’s case, hers is about attempting to drag people back to the Dark Ages, when travel was only for the rich and the poor were expected to stay in one place all their lives – like cattle. A great number of those 4,000 souls whose holidays she ruined will have worked all year round in jobs they don’t like to pay for that week of escape. They will never have the privilege of doing a thing they love for a living, as Gethin will undoubtedly get to do, as soon as she has had enough of playing the fool.
Surveying the antics of the upper-crust, half-wit eco-loons of today, curtseying to a cake suddenly looks quite sensible.
Julie Burchill’s new play, Making Marilyn, co-authored with Daniel Raven, will be at Brighton Palace Pier in May. Get tickets here.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/21/these-posh-eco-loons-need-to-check-their-privilege/
-
2nd post. Oh dears, the BBC rolls out the starving polar bears again (I’ve also bumped into similar hand wringing closer to home). Problem is, they are not, as this piece points out. Also some good info about weather station siting issues with the large majority used by the MET (the UK’s central climate bureau) being of inferior quality, with the MET knowing it:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-its-time-for-the-starving-polar-bears-again-trouble-is-theyre-thriving/
-
Replace this:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=wC3N4gkH&id=277952F2A5C4C6FBFDEA6BD8104F59EFA0EBB726&thid=OIP.wC3N4gkH7fgCxLcar4Zn6gAAAA&mediaurl=https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2023/03/06/13/57/polar-bear-7833514_1280.jpg&exph=474&expw=474&q=polar%20bear%20image&ck=227CC11BD6AF357EA94D40CB2A251374&idpp=rc&idpview=singleimage&form=rc2idp
With this:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=3yamSutn&id=CC896CC444F478E413EB0EF4B44B9E3F78E5E6BD&thid=OIP.3yamSutnVM0NyHP1X!_EczQHaF3&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.dreamstime.com%2Fb%2Fsmiling-polar-bear-6306458.jpg&cdnurl=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.df26a64aeb6754cd0dc873f55ff11ccd%3Frik%3DvebleD%252beS7T0Dg%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0&exph=633&expw=800&q=smiling+polar+bear+image&simid=607988351322450478&form=IRPRST&ck=F2221492443253EB913914EDAAF3323B&selectedindex=0&itb=0&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0&vt=0&sim=11
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-make-kombucha-discovery-that-may-unlock-life-on-mars/ar-AA1gEbdp?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a2149f56544048c4a078ec866853353b&ei=15
" As wildfires, floods and earthquakes continue to ravage the world, it’s no wonder experts are planning escape routes from our trouble-ridden planet - and one involves a fizzy drink."
:roll:
-
Those of us that take issue w/ green energy scams are apparently conspiring to launch a conspiracy. Or something:
https://realclimatescience.com/2024/03/the-vast-right-wing-conspiracy/#gsc.tab=0
The Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse owns the media, colleges, over half the government, and every nitwit that abandons their critical faculties in favor of whatever greatest, latest, bit of sky-is-falling hyperventilation being peddled by all the above and yet we skeptics—and if it don’t have skeptics it ain’t science—are the ones wielding inordinate power? Just what are these CACA fools smoking?
ETA: Here’s what an actual argument using real data looks like. Note one interesting feature: it doesn’t cite any vast conspiracy while making its case.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/03/15/the-holocene-climatic-optimum-and-the-pre-industrial/
-
Great points made. Pointing out facts on the other side of an argument is not some great conspiracy, it's due diligence they should have done before ramming solutions down our throats with government mandates and coercion.
Why do we compare the amount warmed with a little Ice Age, an abnormal time? Why not compare with a time when they named Greenland 'Greenland'?
Doesn't fit the narrative. But it isn't science when you pick data that only advance your agenda. What about Inconvenient Truths?
Even if it was a great solution, how do you build, transport, install wind turbines without using fossil fuels? Did anyone on the Left ever think about that?
I live in a cold climate, left leaning state. The idea of taking away natural gas from our pipelines right now has not been fully thought through. When I have a tenant's furnace or boiler go out, it is a life-threatening, end of the world situation (to them) even if I bring them electric heaters to use until the problem is fixed. Same people vote for representatives who want to take away natural gas furnaces. Good grief.
The switch from coal to natural gas accounts for nearly all of the progress we've made on CO2 emissions. Do we celebrate that as progress? No. We celebrate the things that are not making a measurable difference and will never solve the problem.
-
do much for any knock on BTC and reducing fossil fuels:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/
Perhaps this would work :
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=Qp1i6ALF&id=621A90427135F9E54D45D0D9FC08E11C908CC5D3&thid=OIP.Qp1i6ALF1nZUwyiBv3ZT-wHaGK&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fimg.freepik.com%2ffree-photo%2fhouse-with-windmill_1048-1776.jpg%3fsize%3d626%26ext%3djpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.429d62e802c5d67654c32881bf7653fb%3frik%3d08WMkBzhCPzZ0A%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=521&expw=626&q=windmill+at+every+house&simid=608038069796425153&FORM=IRPRST&ck=71F69E8EEB827A1554CFB57FB58708C8&selectedIndex=21&itb=0&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0
-
… perhaps our “seas are rising” one will:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-3-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxii-sea-level-rise-edition?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR0wnuLWrX5JWjaNtd3bSPqQQacgYBwYsazPmlsKYh52lvD4yCw_7CJDpRk
-
Why wouldn't we just harness the wind more widely and have zero carbon emissions?
Of course we know it takes all these trucks full of diesel (and ships) to transport each part of the turbine to it's destination.
What is never mentioned is the concrete required.
Manufacturing a cubic yard of traditional concrete emits about 400 pounds of carbon dioxide,
https://www.machinerypartner.com/blog/concrete-is-one-of-the-biggest-contributors-to-carbon-emissions-new-technologies-could-change-that
The footings are 9 feet thick and 60 feet in diameter and require 30 to 40 truckloads of concrete – about 300 cubic yards. Each footing weighs about 2 million pounds and is not removed from the soil when a turbine tower is decommissioned.
https://www.windsystemsmag.com/cutting-the-concrete/#:~:text=The%20footings%20are%209%20feet,concrete%20%E2%80%93%20about%20300%20cubic%20yards.
40 truckload, 2 million pounds of concrete per turbine delivered to rural areas, all transported by EVs is still a massive amount of CO2, times 80,000 wind turbines s far, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-turbines-are-contained-us-wind-turbine-database?items_per_page=6#:~:text=As%20of%20January%202022%2C%20the,plus%20Puerto%20Rico%20and%20Guam).
All this to supply less than 4% of our total energy usage.
And for every mW of wind capacity, one mW of gas or coal generating capacity is required for those times (70% of the time?) when the wind doesn't blow.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-638/the-economics-of-wind-power/#:~:text=A%20typical%20wind%20farm%20would,times%20when%20electricity%20is%20needed.
The more we build solar and wind versus other 'carbon free' sources such as nuclear, the more we are committed permanently (?) to oil, coal and gas. Who knew? Follow the money.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/oil-companies-renewable-energy/
-
https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=2209&q=drudge+report+2024&cvid=7cad25b0f88f4ccbb6c6aea69eb62a29&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBggAEAAYQDIGCAAQABhAMgYIARBFGDsyBggCEEUYOTIGCAMQABhAMgYIBBAuGEAyBggFEC4YQDIGCAYQRRg8MgYIBxBFGDwyBggIEEUYPNIBCDE5NDJqMGoxqAIAsAIA&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=DCTS
what a joke
the elites think they know what is best for us
-
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/offshore-wind-now-costs-more-than-double-the-original-estimates-in-new-york/
It's the wind. It's free, or something. The know-it-all Green-Left tells us exactly what we need and why we need it and how it actually costs less and then they get the cost wrong by double.
Try sending in half your electric bill payment sometime and see how that goes for you.
Whatever costs they incur, we pay all of it. One way or the other.
California is paying twice what other states are paying for electricity, but that tells half the story. The other states are loaded with mandates and green energy goals too. Recall the Texas winter storm outage a few years back. So-called red Texas is one of the worst.
We are all paying twice too much for someone else's agenda, except for those paying twice that, and it isn't the best way to cut emissions.
Women and children and poor families are hit the hardest. Who cares, certainly the Democrats.
-
Kill the whales!
-
Women and children and poor families are hit the hardest. Who cares, certainly the Democrats.
But then the Dems get to offer subsidies to the downtrodden masses they created and pass themselves off as rescuers for inefficiently addressing the condition they worked overtime to create. Good work if you can get it.
-
I’ll be watching it this weekend; I’ve encountered numerous rave reviews.
Note: Google/Youtube is said to have shadowbanned this flick. As such I provide the Bitchute link:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ONMGnSiOLhjG/
-
In junior high I was taken on a field trip to the University of Chicago’s Circle Campus where Erlich’s Malthusian tome The Population Bomb was a topic of discussion and we 7th graders were told one of the critical issues we would have to wrestle with was what to do with all the excess, unsupportable, humans.
Just shy of 50 years later, not so much. Birth rates are down in most nations, well below rates of replacement, which all serves to illustrate that today’s doomsayer may very well end up being as wrong as they could be. If only the Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse would let examples like this inform them and their CACA dictates:
https://nypost.com/2024/04/03/opinion/the-world-struggling-to-make-more-babies-the-population-bomb-was-wrong/
-
I’ll be watching it this weekend; I’ve encountered numerous rave reviews.
Note: Google/Youtube is said to have shadowbanned this flick. As such I provide the Bitchute link:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ONMGnSiOLhjG/
I've indeed watched Climate The Movie and it is indeed a powerful, well sourced and documented, and chilling indictment of the Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse and all the pathologies that ensue once CACA "science" takes root.
Shadow banned YouTube (Guulag) link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAUsvVhgsU
-
2nd post. YOu know all the hoopla over LNG being extra specially carbon pollutie or whatever? It seems it was based on a single, non-peer reviewed "study:"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/03/the-entire-push-to-halt-new-natural-gas-exports-traces-back-to-one-ivy-league-prof-and-his-shaky-study/
-
They are increasing in land mass instead:
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/06/islands-that-climate-alarmists-said-would-soon-disappear-due-to-rising-sea-found-to-have-grown-in-size/?fbclid=IwAR1X99RSNuacjpTwsKs-1YnBVjwQpYPxwSOY_TYmM9G85-UTGG8uTbC71gY
It’s worth noting this is based on a Chinese study. As noted in Climate the Movie, these days most federally funded US research has to at least have a built in nod to “climate change,” if not making it a central tenet of the research.
Research that threatens to undermine “climate change” hysteria is not funded. I posted a piece yesterday noting that the amount of US R&D is falling. With China emerging as our primary geo-political foe, and as their research isn’t required to hobble itself by embedding ever more laughable climate hysteria into its foundation, one wonders what sort of impact that will have on geopolitics, and if that impact is seen by those championing “net zero” as a problem or a boon?
-
2nd post. Never let a crisis go to waste? Heck, never let a minor non-event go to waste:
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/weather/weather-stories/a-rare-earthquake-hits-tri-state-area-can-climate-change-make-quakes-more-common-experts-weigh-in/5293196/
-
for some reason few people seem to remember a quake we had in NJ somewhere Circa 2011 - 2012
I don't recall the exact year though I recall where I was and vividly what I was thinking.
At first I questioned what it was, since never in my experience happened in Jersey thinking did a car hit the building then when it continued for ~ 20 to 40 seconds I realized it either had to be an earthquake or a mushroom cloud over NYC. When I saw nothing outside I knew the truth.
This time I knew right away but for some reason most people don't remember the one from a dozen yrs ago.
Hear it is :
2011
https://whyy.org/articles/7-years-ago-5-8-magnitude-earthquake-rattled-the-jersey-shore/
it was centered in Va and 5.8 !
I also was in the medical school library on ~ 1982 in Grenada when we had a minor rumble.
-
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/hidden-behind-climate-policies-data-from-nonexistent-temperature-stations-5622782?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2024-04-10&src_cmp=mb-2024-04-10&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYuw4IktV6djJ5LwB8GZWBu1axachNqyXsy29F2zjSh8%3D
-
Thanks to Climate Change ( :wink:)
all reservoirs are above historical averages:
https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/rescond.pdf
The Greens look like this => :-o :cry:
-
I don't even know how to make fun of them anymore. Warming causes drought, Right? Or excessive rains? Which is it?
https://www.newsweek.com/map-lake-michigan-illinois-water-levels-rise-future-1889765
Now is this because the polar ice caps melting?
Wasn't it just a short time ago the Great Lakes were disappearing because of global warming, climate change?
How stupid do they think we are? Don't answer that...