Pathological Science

[Boyo]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Rarick]

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!

[Crafty_Dog]

Its enough to give one hope!!! 

[Rarick]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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. . . .

[DougMacG]

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:

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Body-by-Guinness]

Interesting front in the Climategate scandal:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP6BzhZb8z0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Body-by-Guinness]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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]

[Body-by-Guinness]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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.”



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?”



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

[Rarick]

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)

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Rarick]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Rarick]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Rarick]

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...........

[Body-by-Guinness]

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."

[Rarick]

Who did that, was he following directions given in the e-mails?

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Rarick]

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?

[Body-by-Guinness]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

Anyone care to assess this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvMmPtEt8dc&feature=player_embedded

[Body-by-Guinness]

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#

[Body-by-Guinness]

Another piece that speaks to your question, Marc:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/13/congenital-climate-abnormalities/#more-16395

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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!



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.



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.



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.



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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[prentice crawford]

 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.

[Rarick]

I do.  Creepy thought police stuff.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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/

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[Body-by-Guinness]

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