The Nobel Prize (for propaganda)

AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png


http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
 
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From what I can tell from this graph is that 2003 had the most overall ice and 2007 had the least overall ice in this decade so far. It also look that 2010 will be and average year of the amount of ice in the world.

From this I would assume that any hopes of global warming occurring are not going to be realized. Not in this decade at least.
 

On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II:
Towards Rebuilding Trust

By Judith Curry, Ph.D.
Georgia Institute of Technology
I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic.


Losing the Public’s Trust
Climategate has now become broadened in scope to extend beyond the CRU emails to include glaciergate and a host of other issues associated with the IPCC. In responding to climategate, the climate research establishment has appealed to its own authority and failed to understand that climategate is primarily a crisis of trust. Finally, we have an editorial published in Science on February 10 from Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Science, that begins to articulate the trust issue: “This view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society, demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole. What needs to be done? Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.” While I applaud loudly Dr. Cicerone’s statement, I wish it had been made earlier and had not been isolated from the public by publishing the statement behind paywall at Science. Unfortunately, the void of substantive statements from our institutions has been filled in ways that have made the situation much worse.


Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust. While scientists persist in thinking that they should be trusted because of their expertise, climategate has made it clear that expertise itself is not a sufficient basis for public trust. The fallout from climategate is much broader than the allegations of misconduct by scientists at two universities. Of greatest importance is the reduced credibility of the IPCC assessment reports, which are providing the scientific basis for international policies on climate change. Recent disclosures about the IPCC have brought up a host of concerns about the IPCC that had been festering in the background: involvement of IPCC scientists in explicit climate policy advocacy; tribalism that excluded skeptics; hubris of scientists with regards to a noble (Nobel) cause; alarmism; and inadequate attention to the statistics of uncertainty and the complexity of alternative interpretations.


The scientists involved in the CRU emails and the IPCC have been defended as scientists with the best of intentions trying to do their work in a very difficult environment. They blame the alleged hacking incident on the “climate denial machine.” They are described as fighting a valiant war to keep misinformation from the public that is being pushed by skeptics with links to the oil industry. They are focused on moving the science forward, rather than the janitorial work of record keeping, data archival, etc. They have had to adopt unconventional strategies to fight off what they thought was malicious interference. They defend their science based upon their years of experience and their expertise.


Scientists are claiming that the scientific content of the IPCC reports is not compromised by climategate. The jury is still out on the specific fallout from climategate in terms of the historical and paleo temperature records. There are larger concerns (raised by glaciergate, etc.) particularly with regards to the IPCC Assessment Report on Impacts (Working Group II): has a combination of groupthink, political advocacy and a noble cause syndrome stifled scientific debate, slowed down scientific progress and corrupted the assessment process? If institutions are doing their jobs, then misconduct by a few individual scientists should be quickly identified, and the impacts of the misconduct should be confined and quickly rectified. Institutions need to look in the mirror and ask the question as to how they enabled this situation and what opportunities they missed to forestall such substantial loss of public trust in climate research and the major assessment reports.


In their misguided war against the skeptics, the CRU emails reveal that core research values became compromised. Much has been said about the role of the highly politicized environment in providing an extremely difficult environment in which to conduct science that produces a lot of stress for the scientists. There is no question that this environment is not conducive to science and scientists need more support from their institutions in dealing with it. However, there is nothing in this crazy environment that is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity. And when your science receives this kind of attention, it means that the science is really important to the public. Therefore scientists need to do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints. This is an important responsibility that individual scientists and particularly the institutions need to take very seriously.


Both individual scientists and the institutions need to look in the mirror and really understand how this happened. Climategate isn’t going to go away until these issues are resolved. Science is ultimately a self-correcting process, but with a major international treaty and far-reaching domestic legislation on the table, the stakes couldn’t be higher.


The Changing Nature of Skepticism about Global Warming
Over the last few months, I have been trying to understand how this insane environment for climate research developed. In my informal investigations, I have been listening to the perspectives of a broad range of people that have been labeled as “skeptics” or even “deniers”. I have come to understand that global warming skepticism is very different now than it was five years ago. Here is my take on how global warming skepticism has evolved over the past several decades.


In the 1980’s, James Hansen and Steven Schneider led the charge in informing the public of the risks of potential anthropogenic climate change. Sir John Houghton and Bert Bolin played similar roles in Europe. This charge was embraced by the environmental advocacy groups, and global warming alarmism was born. During this period I would say that many if not most researchers, including myself, were skeptical that global warming was detectable in the temperature record and that it would have dire consequences. The traditional foes of the environmental movement worked to counter the alarmism of the environmental movement, but this was mostly a war between advocacy groups and not an issue that had taken hold in the mainstream media and the public consciousness. In the first few years of the 21st century, the stakes became higher and we saw the birth of what some have called a “monolithic climate denial machine”. Skeptical research published by academics provided fodder for the think tanks and advocacy groups, which were fed by money provided by the oil industry. This was all amplified by talk radio and cable news.


In 2006 and 2007, things changed as a result of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” plus the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and global warming became a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. The reason that the IPCC 4th Assessment Report was so influential is that people trusted the process the IPCC described: participation of a thousand scientists from 100 different countries, who worked for several years to produce 3000 pages with thousands of peer reviewed scientific references, with extensive peer review. Further, the process was undertaken with the participation of policy makers under the watchful eyes of advocacy groups with a broad range of conflicting interests. As a result of the IPCC influence, scientific skepticism by academic researchers became vastly diminished and it became easier to embellish the IPCC findings rather than to buck the juggernaut. Big oil funding for contrary views mostly dried up and the mainstream media supported the IPCC consensus. But there was a new movement in the blogosphere, which I refer to as the “climate auditors”, started by Steve McIntyre. The climate change establishment failed to understand this changing dynamic, and continued to blame skepticism on the denial machine funded by big oil.


Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere
Steve McIntyre started the blog climateaudit.org so that he could defend himself against claims being made at the blog realclimate.org with regards to his critique of the “hockey stick” since he was unable to post his comments there. Climateaudit has focused on auditing topics related to the paleoclimate reconstructions over the past millennia (in particular the so called “hockey stick”) and also the software being used by climate researchers to fix data problems due to poor quality surface weather stations in the historical climate data record. McIntyre’s “auditing” became very popular not only with the skeptics, but also with the progressive “open source” community, and there are now a number of such blogs. The blog with the largest public audience is wattsupwiththat.com, led by weatherman Anthony Watts, with over 2 million unique visitors each month.


So who are the climate auditors? They are technically educated people, mostly outside of academia. Several individuals have developed substantial expertise in aspects of climate science, although they mainly audit rather than produce original scientific research. They tend to be watchdogs rather than deniers; many of them classify themselves as “lukewarmers”. They are independent of oil industry influence. They have found a collective voice in the blogosphere and their posts are often picked up by the mainstream media. They are demanding greater accountability and transparency of climate research and assessment reports.


So what motivated their FOIA requests of the CRU at the University of East Anglia? Last weekend, I was part of a discussion on this issue at the Blackboard. Among the participants in this discussion was Steven Mosher, who broke the climategate story and has already written a book on it here. They are concerned about inadvertent introduction of bias into the CRU temperature data by having the same people who create the dataset use the dataset in research and in verifying climate models; this concern applies to both NASA GISS and the connection between CRU and the Hadley Centre. This concern is exacerbated by the choice of James Hansen at NASA GISS to become a policy advocate, and his forecasts of forthcoming “warmest years.” Medical research has long been concerned with the introduction of such bias, which is why they conduct double blind studies when testing the efficacy of a medical treatment. Any such bias could be checked by independent analyses of the data; however, people outside the inner circle were unable to obtain access to the information required to link the raw data to the final analyzed product. Further, creation of the surface data sets was treated like a research project, with no emphasis on data quality analysis, and there was no independent oversight. Given the importance of these data sets both to scientific research and public policy, they feel that greater public accountability is required.


So why do the mainstream climate researchers have such a problem with the climate auditors? The scientists involved in the CRU emails seem to regard Steve McIntyre as their arch-nemesis (Roger Pielke Jr’s term). Steve McIntyre’s early critiques of the hockey stick were dismissed and he was characterized as a shill for the oil industry. Academic/blogospheric guerilla warfare ensued, as the academic researchers tried to prevent access of the climate auditors to publishing in scientific journals and presenting their work at professional conferences, and tried to deny them access to published research data and computer programs. The bloggers countered with highly critical posts in the blogosphere and FOIA requests. And climategate was the result.


So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate establishment to its knees (whether or not the climate establishment realizes yet that this has happened)? Again, trust plays a big role; it was pretty easy to follow the money trail associated with the “denial machine”. On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda,
are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population.


Towards Rebuilding Trust
Rebuilding trust with the public on the subject of climate research starts with Ralph Cicerone’s statement “Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.” Much has been written about the need for greater transparency, reforms to peer review, etc. and I am hopeful that the relevant institutions will respond appropriately. Investigations of misconduct are being conducted at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State. Here I would like to bring up some broader issues that will require substantial reflection by the institutions and also by individual scientists.


Climate research and its institutions have not yet adapted to its high policy relevance. How scientists can most effectively and appropriately engage with the policy process is a topic that has not been adequately discussed (e.g. the “honest broker” challenge discussed by Roger Pielke Jr), and climate researchers are poorly informed in this regard. The result has been reflexive support for the UNFCCC policy agenda (e.g. carbon cap and trade) by many climate researchers that are involved in the public debate (particularly those involved in the IPCC), which they believe follows logically from the findings of the (allegedly policy neutral) IPCC. The often misinformed policy advocacy by this group of climate scientists has played a role in the political polarization of this issue.. The interface between science and policy is a muddy issue, but it is very important that scientists have guidance in navigating the potential pitfalls. Improving this situation could help defuse the hostile environment that scientists involved in the public debate have to deal with, and would also help restore the public trust of climate scientists.


The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on difficulties of communicating such a complex topic to a relatively uneducated public that is referred to as “unscientific America” by Chris Mooney. Efforts are made to “dumb down” the message and to frame the message to respond to issues that are salient to the audience. People have heard the alarm, but they remain unconvinced because of a perceived political agenda and lack of trust of the message and the messengers. At the same time, there is a large group of educated and evidence driven people (e.g. the libertarians, people that read the technical skeptic blogs, not to mention policy makers) who want to understand the risk and uncertainties associated with climate change, without being told what kinds of policies they should be supporting. More effective communication strategies can be devised by recognizing that there are two groups with different levels of base knowledge about the topic. But building trust through public communication on this topic requires that uncertainty be acknowledged. My own experience in making public presentations about climate change has found that discussing the uncertainties increases the public trust in what scientists are trying to convey and doesn’t detract from the receptivity to understanding climate change risks (they distrust alarmism). Trust can also be rebuilt by discussing broad choices rather than focusing on specific policies.


And finally, the blogosphere can be a very powerful tool for increasing the credibility of climate research. “Dueling blogs” (e.g. climateprogress.org versus wattsupwiththat.com and realclimate.org versus climateaudit.org) can actually enhance public trust in the science as they see both sides of the arguments being discussed. Debating science with skeptics should be the spice of academic life, but many climate researchers lost this somehow by mistakenly thinking that skeptical arguments would diminish the public trust in the message coming from the climate research establishment. Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this, and other academic climate researchers hosting blogs include Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke Sr and Jr, Richard Rood, and Andrew Dessler. The blogs that are most effective are those that allow comments from both sides of the debate (many blogs are heavily moderated). While the blogosphere has a “wild west” aspect to it, I have certainly learned a lot by participating in the blogospheric debate including how to sharpen my thinking and improve the rhetoric of my arguments. Additional scientific voices entering the public debate particularly in the blogosphere would help in the broader communication efforts and in rebuilding trust. And we need to acknowledge the emerging auditing and open source movements in the in the internet-enabled world, and put them to productive use. The openness and democratization of knowledge enabled by the internet can be a tremendous tool for building public understanding of climate science and also trust in climate research.


No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.


And finally, I hope that this blogospheric experiment will demonstrate how the diversity of the different blogs can be used collectively to generate ideas and debate them, towards bringing some sanity to this whole situation surrounding the politicization of climate science and rebuilding trust with the public.
 


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/25/judith-i-love-ya-but-youre-way-wrong/

A selection from Willis Eschenbach's response to Judith Curry's essay "On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II:Towards Rebuilding Trust"
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=33424548#post33424548


...Wiser men than I have weighed in on this question. In a speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854, Abraham Lincoln said:

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

So it will not be easy. The confidence is forfeit, that ship has sailed.

The biggest problem with Judith’s proposal is her claim that the issue is that climate scientists have not understood how to present their ideas to the public. Judith, I respect you greatly, but you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. The problem is not how climate scientists have publicly presented their scientific results. It is not a communication problem.

The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.

And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him.

An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult and an embarrassment to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists at that time, bloviating about how it was such a terrible thing to do to poor Mikey. Now Mann has been “exonerated” by one of the most bogus whitewashes in academic history, and where is your outrage, Judith? Where are the climate scientists trying to clean up your messes?

The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice, or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience.

The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.

And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.

And you still don’t seem to get it. You approvingly quote Ralph Cicerone about the importance of transparency … Cicerone?? That’s a sick joke. ( http://climateaudit.org/2010/02/04/cicerone-then-and-now/ )

You think people made the FOI (Freedom of Information) requests because they were concerned that the people who made the datasets were the same people using them in the models. As the person who made the first FOI request to CRU, I assure you that is not true. I made the request to CRU because I was disgusted with the response of mainstream climate scientists to Phil Jone’s reply to Warwick Hughes. When Warwick made a simple scientific request for data, Jones famously said:

Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?​
When I heard that, I was astounded. But in addition to being astounded, I was naive. Looking back, I was incredibly naive. I was so naive that I actually thought, “Well, Phil’s gonna get his hand slapped hard by real scientists for that kind of anti-scientific statements”. Foolish me, I thought you guys were honest scientists who would be outraged by that.

So I waited for some mainstream climate scientist to speak out against that kind of scientific malfeasance … and waited … and waited. In fact, I’m still waiting. I registered my protest against this bastardisation of science by filing an FOI. When is one of you mainstream climate scientist going to speak out against this kind of malfeasance? It’s not too late to condemn what Jones said, he’s still in the news and pretending to be a scientist, when is one of you good folks going to take a principled stand?

But nobody wants to do that. Instead, you want to complain and explain how trust has been broken, and you want to figure out more effective communication strategies to repair the trust.

You want a more effective strategy? Here’s one. Ask every climate scientist to grow a pair and speak out in public about the abysmal practices of far, far too many mainstream climate scientists. Because the public is assuredly outraged, and you are all assuredly silent, sitting quietly in your taxpayer funded offices and saying nothing, not a word, schtumm … and you wonder why we don’t trust you?

A perfect example is you saying in your post:

Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this …​

For you to say this without also expressing outrage at realclimate’s ruthless censorship of every opposing scientific view is more of the same conspiracy of silence. Debate is not “alive and well” at realclimate as you say, that’s a crock. Realclimate continues to have an undeserved reputation that it is a scientific blog because you and other mainstream climate scientists are unwilling to bust them for their contemptuous flouting of scientific norms. When you stay silent about blatant censorship like that, Judith, people will not trust you, nor should they. You have shown by your actions that you are perfectly OK with realclimate censoring opposing scientific views. What kind of message does that send?

The key to restoring trust has nothing to do with communication. Steve McIntyre doesn’t inspire trust because he is a good communicator. He inspires trust because he follows the age-old practices of science — transparency and openness and freewheeling scientific discussion and honest reporting of results.

And until mainstream climate science follows his lead, I’ll let you in on a very dark, ugly secret — I don’t want trust in climate science to be restored. I don’t want you learning better ways to propagandize for shoddy science. I don’t want you to figure out how to inspire trust by camouflaging your unethical practices in new and innovative ways. I don’t want scientists learning to use clever words and communication tricks to get people to think that the wound is healed until it actually is healed. I don’t want you to learn to use the blogosphere to spread your pernicious unsupported unscientific alarmism.

You think this is a problem of image, that climate science has a bad image. It is nothing of the sort. It is a problem of scientific malfeasance, and of complicity by silence with that malfeasance. The public, it turns out, has a much better bullsh*t detector than the mainstream climate scientists do … or at least we’re willing to say so in public, while y’all cower in your cubbyholes with your heads down and never, never, never say a bad word about some other climate scientist’s bogus claims and wrong actions.

You want trust? Do good science, and publicly insist that other climate scientists do good science as well. It’s that simple. Do good science, and publicly call out the Manns and the Joneses and the Thompsons and the rest of the charlatans that you are currently protecting. Call out the journals that don’t follow their own policies on data archiving. Speak up for honest science. Archive your data. Insist on transparency. Publish your codes.

Once that is done, the rest will fall in line. And until then, I’m overjoyed that people don’t trust you. I see the lack of trust in mainstream climate science as a huge triumph for real science. Fix it by doing good science and by cleaning up your own backyard. Anything else is a coverup.

Judith, again, my congratulations on being willing to post your ideas in public. You are a rara avis, and I respect you greatly for it...

Eschenbach
 
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Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets.

Edward Long, Ph.D.

Raw Data:

long_rural_urban_raw.png



"Adjusted" Data:
long_urban_rural_adjusted.png


“The problem would seem to be the methodologies engendered in treatment for a mix of urban and rural locations; that the ‘adjustment’ protocol appears to accent to a warming effect rather than eliminate it. This, if correct, leaves serious doubt for whether the rate of increase in temperature found from the adjusted data is due to natural warming trends or warming because of another reason, such as erroneous consideration of the effects of urban warming.”​

Note that even adjusted urban data has as much as a 0.2 offset from adjusted rural data.

Dr. Long suggests that NCDC’s adjustments eradicated the difference between rural and urban environments, thus hiding urban heating. The consequence:
“…is a five-fold increase in the rural temperature rate of increase and a slight decrease in the rate of increase of the urban temperature.”​

The analysis concludes that NCDC “…has taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values”.

Thus the adjusted rural values are a systematic increase from the raw values, more and more back into time and a decrease for the more current years. At the same time the urban temperatures were little, or not, adjusted from their raw values. The results is an implication of warming that has not occurred in nature, but indeed has occurred in urban surroundings as people gathered more into cities and cities grew in size and became more industrial in nature. So, in recognizing this aspect, one has to say there has been warming due to man, but it is an urban warming. The temperatures due to nature itself, at least within the Contiguous U. S., have increased at a non-significant rate and do not appear to have any correspondence to the presence or lack of presence of carbon dioxide.

The paper’s summary reads:

Both raw and adjusted data from the NCDC has been examined for a selected Contiguous U. S. set of rural and urban stations, 48 each or one per State. The raw data provides 0.13 and 0.79°C/century temperature increase for the rural and urban environments. The adjusted data provides 0.64 and 0.77°C/century respectively. The rates for the raw data appear to correspond to the historical change of rural and urban U. S. populations and indicate warming is due to urban warming. Comparison of the adjusted data for the rural set to that of the raw data shows a systematic treatment that causes the rural adjusted set’s temperature rate of increase to be 5-fold more than that of the raw data. The adjusted urban data set’s and raw urban data set’s rates of temperature increase are the same. This suggests the consequence of the NCDC’s protocol for adjusting the data is to cause historical data to take on the time-line characteristics of urban data. The consequence intended or not, is to report a false rate of temperature increase for the Contiguous U. S.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/temperature_trends.html
 
UKIP would ban Al Gore film in schools
Al Gore's global warming film would be banned in schools under plans by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to court the climate sceptic vote.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Published: 6:30AM GMT 25 Feb 2010


Inconvenient Truth: A recent poll found the just one in five people believe climate change is man-made, compared to one in three a year ago Photo: AP
The party, that has traditionally campaigned on the anti-European Union vote, launched a manifesto for the environment.
Following a number of scandals around the science of climate change, UKIP are promising to launch a Royal Commission led by a High Court judge to investigate whether global warming is man-made.

Pending the results of the commission, the party, that has no MPs at the moment, have promised to build new fossil-fuelled power stations to meet energy demands and scrap subsidies for wind farms. Global warming 'propaganda' like the Al Gore film Inconvenient Truth will be banned in schools and public authorities will not be allowed to spend money on climate change initiatives.

A recent poll found the just one in five people believe climate change is man-made, compared to one in three a year ago.
The survey of 1,000 people found people over 65 were more likely to be sceptical.
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, the UKIP climate change spokesman, said his party was the only opportunity to vote against the climate change consensus.

"At the moment all the major parties have decided to sign up to the eco-fascist agenda and therefore anyone who does not believe in eco-fascist agenda has no where else to go," he said.

Climate change sceptics claim that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate the data around global warming in a scandal known as 'climategate'.

In another scandal known as 'glaciergate' the UN body in charge of climate change science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was forced to retract a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
However leading scientists, including the Royal Society, insist the case for man-made global warming remains convincing and it is a grave threat to human civilisation.

As part of ongoing efforts to restore public confidence, the Met Office announced it is to re-look at all the temperature data going back for the last 160 years.

The global project, in partnership with other weather services around the world, will gather the original data from thousands of weather stations around the world and add new information. The data will then be independently analysed to assess how the temperature has changed over time and in different regions. The results are due in three year's time.
 

Documentation of Uncertainties and Biases Associated with Surface
Temperature Measurement Sites for Climate Change Assessment


BY ROGER PIELKE SR., JOHN NIELSEN-GAMMON, CHRISTOPHER DAVEY, JIM ANGEL, ODIE BLISS, NOLAN DOESKEN, MING CAI, SOULEYMANE FALL, DEV NIYOGI, KEVIN GALLO, ROBERT HALE, KENNETH G. HUBBARD, XIAOMAO LIN, HONG LI, AND SETHU RAMAN

http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/pdfs/Pielke-etal_BAMS_Jun07.pdf

Bulletin of American Meteorological Society
June, 2007

The use of temperature data from poorly sited stations can lead to a false sense of confidence in the robustness of multidecadal surface air temperature trend assessments.

Davey and Pielke (2005) presented photographic documentation of poor observation sites within the U.S. Historical Climate Reference Network (USHCN) with respect to monitoring long-term surface air temperature trends...

*****​

...A continued mode of corrections using approaches where statistical uncertainties are not quantified is not a scientifically sound methodology and should be avoided, considering the importance of such surface station data to a broad variety of climate applications as well as climate variability and change studies.

*****​
REFERENCES
*****​
 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc5502.htm

I am writing at this late juncture regarding this matter because I have now seen that two separate pieces of written evidence to your committee mention me (without using my name) and I feel it is appropriate to provide you with some further information. I am a professional computer programmer who started programming almost 30 years ago. I have a BA in Mathematics and Computation from Oxford University and a DPhil in Computer Security also from Oxford. My entire career has been spent in computer software in the UK, US and France.



I am also a frequent blogger on science topics (my blog was recently named by The Times as one of its top 30 science blogs). Shortly after the release of emails from UEA/CRU I looked at them out of curiosity and found that there was a large amount of software along with the messages. Looking at the software itself I was surprised to see that it was of poor quality. This resulted in my appearance on BBC Newsnight criticizing the quality of the UEA/CRU code in early December 2009 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm).



That appearance and subsequent errors I have found in both the data provided by the Met Office and the code used to process that data are referenced in two submissions. I had not previously planned to submit anything to your committee, as I felt that I had nothing relevant to say, but the two submissions which reference me warrant some clarification directly from me, the source.



I have never been a climate change skeptic and until the release of emails from UEA/CRU I had paid little attention to the science surrounding it.



In the written submission by Professor Hans von Storch and Dr. Myles R. Allen there are three paragraphs that concern me:



"3.1 An allegation aired on BBC's "Newsnight" that software used in the production of this dataset was unreliable. It emerged on investigation that the neither of the two pieces of software produced in support of this allegation was anything to do with the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record. Newsnight have declined to answer the question of whether they were aware of this at the time their allegations were made.



3.2 A problem identified by an amateur computer analyst with estimates of average climate (not climate trends) affecting less than 1% of the HadCRUT data, mostly in Australasia, and some station identifiers being incorrect. These, it appears, were genuine issues with some of the input data (not analysis software) of HadCRUT which have been acknowledged by the Met Office and corrected. They do not affect trends estimated from the data, and hence have no bearing on conclusions regarding the detection and attribution of external influence on climate.



4. It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely. The close correspondence between the HadCRUT data and the other two internationally recognised surface temperature datasets suggests that key conclusions, such as the unequivocal warming over the past century, are not sensitive to the analysis procedure."



I am the 'computer analyst' mentioned in 3.2 who found the errors mentioned. I am also the person mentioned in 3.1 who looked at the code on Newsnight.



In paragraph 4 the authors write "It is possible, of course, that further scrutiny will reveal more serious problems, but given the intensity of the scrutiny to date, we do not think this is particularly likely." This has turned out to be incorrect. On February 7, 2010 I emailed the Met Office to tell them that I believed that I had found a wide ranging problem in the data (and by extension the code used to generate the data) concerning error estimates surrounding the global warming trend. On February 24, 2010 the Met Office confirmed via their press office to Newsnight that I had found a genuine problem with the generation of 'station errors' (part of the global warming error estimate).



In the written submission by Sir Edward Acton there are two paragraphs that concern the things I have looked at:



"3.4.7 CRU has been accused of the effective, if not deliberate, falsification of findings through deployment of "substandard" computer programs and documentation. But the criticized computer programs were not used to produce CRUTEM3 data, nor were they written for third-party users. They were written for/by researchers who understand their limitations and who inspect intermediate results to identify and solve errors.



3.4.8 The different computer program used to produce the CRUTEM3 dataset has now been released by the MOHC with the support of CRU."



My points:



1. Although the code I criticized on Newsnight was not the CRUTEM3 code the fact that the other code written at CRU was of low standard is relevant. My point on Newsnight was that it appeared that the organization writing the code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering. The code had easily identified bugs, no visible test mechanism, was not apparently under version control and was poorly documented. It would not be surprising to find that other code written at the same organization was of similar quality. And given that I subsequently found a bug in the actual CRUTEM3 code only reinforces my opinion.



2. I would urge the committee to look into whether statement 3.4.8 is accurate. The Met Office has released code for calculating CRUTEM3 but they have not released everything (for example, they have not released the code for 'station errors' in which I identified a wide-ranging bug, or the code for generating the error range based on the station coverage), and when they released the code they did not indicate that it was the program normally used for CRUTEM3 (as implied by 3.4.8) but stated "[the code] takes the station data files and makes gridded fields in the same way as used in CRUTEM3." Whether

3.4.8 is accurate or not probably rests on the interpretation of "in the same way as". My reading is that this implies that the released code is not the actual code used for CRUTEM3. It would be worrying to discover that 3.4.8 is inaccurate, but I believe it should be clarified.



I rest at your disposition for further information, or to appear personally if necessary.





John Graham-Cumming

March 2010
 
Do we have a winner...........?



"Aliens Cause Global Warming," a speech by the late Michael Crichton:

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

"...There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period...
...I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough... "





I suggest everyone take the time to read this essay by Michael Crichton.
And I move that the Nobel Prize for Propaganda go to trysail.
 
The case against the hockey stick

A book review by Matt Ridley
( Author of Genome: The Biography Of A Species In 23 Chapters )
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
10th March 2010 — Issue 168


The "hockey stick" temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man's efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes.

Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.

I can remember when I first paid attention to the “hockey stick” graph at a conference in Cambridge. The temperature line trundled along with little change for centuries, then shot through the roof in the 20th century, like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. I had become somewhat of a sceptic about the science of climate change, but here was emphatic proof that the world was much warmer today; and warming much faster than at any time in a thousand years. I resolved to shed my doubts. I assumed that since it had been published in Nature—the Canterbury Cathedral of scientific literature—it was true.

I was not the only one who was impressed. The graph appeared six times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s third report in 2001. It was on display as a backdrop at the press conference to launch that report. James Lovelock pinned it to his wall. Al Gore used it in his film (though describing it as something else and with the Y axis upside down). Its author shot to scientific stardom. “It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been,” said the BBC. The hockey stick is to global warming what St Paul was to Christianity.

Of course, there is other evidence for global warming, but none of it proves that the recent warming is unprecedented. Indeed, quite the reverse: surface temperatures, sea levels, tree lines, glacier retreats, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic, early spring flowers, bird migration, droughts, floods, storms—they all show change that is no different in speed or magnitude from other periods, like 1910-1940, at least as far as can be measured. There may be something unprecedented going on in temperature, but the only piece of empirical evidence that actually says so—yes, the only one—is the hockey stick.

And the hockey stick is wrong. The emails that were leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year are not proof of this; they are merely the icing on the lake, proof that some of the scientists closest to the hockey stick knew all along that it was problematic...

*****​

Full review:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
 
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Excerpts from an interview of Judith Curry, Ph.D., professor of climatology, Georgia Institute of Technology:

Q: The hockey stick—Michael Mann’s widely cited graph of average temperatures in North America over the past 1,000 years—was attacked by two prominent critics, Steven McIntyre, a former mineral company executive, and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. Where does that dispute stand?

A: One would have hoped it would have an outcome similar to the hurricane story, but the hockey stick thing was exacerbated by Michael Mann’s behavior, trying to keep the data and all the information away from McIntyre, McKitrick, and other people who are skeptical of what they were doing. So we’ve just seen this blow up and blow up and blow up, and it culminated in the East Anglia hack and the e-mails that discredited those guys quite a bit. This made us reflect on the bigger issues of how scientists should be interacting with the media and how we should be dealing with skeptical arguments. I think the way that Mann and Phil Jones [the former director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, who resigned over the scandal] and those guys were going about it was wrong, not just in terms of ethics. It also backfired.

Q: Is this a case of politics getting in the way of science?

A: No. It’s sloppiness. It’s just how our field has evolved. One of the things that McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out was that a lot of the statistical methods used in our field are sloppy. We have trends for which we don’t even give a confidence interval. The IPCC concluded that most of the warming of the latter 20th century was very likely caused by humans. Well, as far as I know, that conclusion was mostly a negotiation, in terms of calling it “likely” or “very likely.” Exactly what does “most” mean? What percentage of the warming are we actually talking about? More than 50 percent? A number greater than 50 percent?

Q: You’ve talked about potential distortions of temperature measurements from natural temperature cycles in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and from changes in the way land is used. How does that work?

A: Land use changes the temperature quite a bit in complex ways—everything from cutting down forests or changing agriculture to building up cities and creating air pollution. All of these have big impacts on regional surface temperature, which isn’t always accounted for adequately, in my opinion. The other issue is these big ocean oscillations, like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and particularly, how these influenced temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century. I think there was a big bump at the end of the 20th century, especially starting in the mid-1990s. We got a big bump from going into the warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation was warm until about 2002. Now we’re in the cool phase. This is probably why we’ve seen a leveling-off [of global average temperatures] in the past five or so years. My point is that at the end of the 1980s and in the ’90s, both of the ocean oscillations were chiming in together to give some extra warmth.

If you go back to the 1930s and ’40s, you see a similar bump in the temperature records. That was the bump that some of those climate scientists were trying to get rid of [in the temperature data], but it was a real bump, and I think it was associated with these ocean oscillations. That was another period when you had the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation chiming in together. These oscillations and how they influence global temperature haven’t received enough attention, and it’s an important part of how we interpret 20th-century climate records. Rather than trying to airbrush this bump in the 1940s and trying to get rid of the medieval warm period—which these hacked e-mails illustrate—we need to understand them.

They don’t disprove anthropogenic global warming, but we can’t airbrush them away. We need to incorporate them into the overall story. We had two bumps—in the ’90s and also in the ’30s and ’40s—that may have had the same cause. So we may have exaggerated the trend in the later half of the 20th century by not adequately interpreting these bumps from the ocean oscillations. I don’t have all the answers. I’m just saying that’s what it looks like.

Q: Do you think the IPCC is going to have a reduced role?

A: If they are going to continue to be relevant, they need to tighten up their act in terms of making the process more open and transparent. How do you actually get to be a lead author of the IPCC? I have no idea who actually makes those selections. Things like that. All the data sets need to be out there and available and documented, so we don’t have these issues that we ran into with the hacked e-mails. The UNFCCC has become a big free-for-all. The G20, or some other group of nations, is where you’re going see the action.

Q: Do you subscribe to the argument that today’s climate models are crude and need to be taken with a grain of salt?

A: No, I think the climate models are becoming quite sophisticated. We learn a lot from the simulations. But you have to keep in mind that these are scenario simulations. They’re not really forecasts. They don’t know what the volcano eruptions are going to be. They don’t know what the exact solar cycles are going to be. There will be a whole host of forcing uncertainties in the 21st century that we don’t know.

Q: You’ve said that climatologists should listen more to bloggers. That’s surprising to hear, coming from a scientist.

A: There are a lot of people with Ph.D.s in physics or chemistry who become interested in the climate change story, read the literature, and follow the blogs—and they’re unconvinced by our arguments. There are statisticians, like McIntyre, who have gotten interested in the climate change issue. McIntyre does not have a Ph.D. He does not have a university appointment. But he’s made an important contribution, starting with criticism of the hockey stick. There’s a Russian biophysicist I communicate with who is not a climate researcher, but she has good ideas. She should be encouraged to pursue them. If the argument is good, wherever it comes from, we should look at it.

Q: Is there a denial machine?

A: It’s complicated. The denial thing is certainly not monolithic. The skeptics don’t agree with each other at all. The scientific skeptics—[hurricane forecaster] Bill Gray and [MIT meteorologist] Dick Lindzen and [University of Alabama climatologist] Roy Spencer—criticize each other as much as we criticize them.

Q: You wrote an article for climateaudit.org,... Are people now calling you a denier?

A: No, they’re calling me naive. I stepped off the reservation, clearly.

Q: Are you taking a career risk?

A: A couple of people think so, but I’m senior enough and well-established enough that it doesn’t matter. I also live in Georgia, which is a hotbed of skeptics. The things I’m saying play well in Georgia. They don’t play very well with a lot of my colleagues in the climate field.

Q: Does it bother you that skeptic has become a bad word?

A: It’s an unfortunate word. We should all be skeptical of all science. The word denier has some unfortunate connotations also. I use “scientific skeptics” versus “political skeptics.” A scientific skeptic is somebody who’s doing work and looking at the arguments. A political skeptic is somebody who is getting the skepticism from talk radio.


Full article: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/ap...le_view?searchterm=michael mann&b_start:int=0

 
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...The issue is not whether CO2 is irrelevant, but, rather, how relevant is it? The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) maintains that CO2 induced warming dominates the climate system. They project that increasing emissions will result in a 2°C to 6°C rise in global average temperature by the year 2100.

This has been widely misunderstood by the public to mean that energy absorbed and reradiated by atmospheric CO2 is the direct cause of the warming. In reality, the IPCC claims that CO2, acting alone, will result in only a 1.2°C rise in temperature. The rest depends on whether the climate amplifies (positive feedback) or diminishes (negative feedback) CO2 forcing.

This is where the real dispute lies. Climate “sensitivity” is based on numerous interactions that are poorly understood. Scientists who disagree with the IPCC’s conclusions are not contesting the fact that CO2 can cause atmospheric warming (.3°C according to more conservative estimates). They disagree with the science behind the water vapor feedback mechanisms that are said to amplify this warming on a global scale. The complex and chaotic processes underlying these mechanisms, especially as they relate to cloud formation and precipitation, exceed the limits of our knowledge. As a result, climate feedback is not simply the product of numerical calculations (“straightforward physics”) as is often supposed, but depends extensively on large scale estimates (parameterizations) by computer modelers.

“Deniers” demand empirical proof and are quick to point out that the water vapor feedback hypothesis is poorly supported by hard evidence, and even contradicted by the absence of warming in both the oceans and the atmosphere over the last several years. In fact, some scientists (Lindzen, Spencer, etc.) theorize that water vapor and cloud cover act like a thermostat (negative feedback) to maintain the earth’s temperature in approximate equilibrium...

-Bill DiPuccio
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/03/six-myths-about-deniers
 

A voice of sanity, knowledge and reason ( from 2007 !):

Count me as a vote that it’s overblown. The climate is always changing, and so I’m not surprised that we’ve noticed some change within the last 100 years. I’m sure that man has a finite influence, but I’m not convinced that man made CO2 emissions are causing a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.
As for the phenomenon listed above, there is plenty of evidence that the climate is quite variable between ice ages, including the existence the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age. Nothing above indicates that there is anything unprecedented about our current climate situation compared to the last 1000 years.

The paleo-reconstructions of the climate (using tree rings, etc…) which attempt to eliminate the MWP and LIA have been shown to have very serious statistical flaws. The famous “hockey stick” was eliminated from the IPCC’s executive summary for their latest report. The convoluted statistical method used to create the hockey stick would create hockey stick reconstructions even if random stock market data was used. The tree rings are not calibrated to local temperatures for these global studies. They are calibrated to global temperatures, so that individual trees may be highly weighted in their reconstructions, even if the aren’t good proxies for temperatures.

CO2 is a trace component of the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is overwhelmingly dominated by water vapor. The atmosphere is already largely opaque in the regions of the spectrum that CO2 absorbs, and additional CO2 has a diminishing effect as the concentration increase further. Each 10 ppm increase in CO2 has smaller effect the 10 ppm before it.

The effects of CO2 alone won’t cause the catastrophic temperature changes of that the alarmists predict. The alarmist predictions require enormous positive feedbacks in which the temperature rise from feedback is much larger than original temperature rise from the CO2. The recently IPCC report includes 6C as a likely temperature rise resulting from a doubling of CO2. Without feedback of effects, a doubling of CO2 would only increase temperatures about 1C.

The actual temperature rise from CO2 will be dominated by how much actual feedback occurs from water vapor and especially clouds. The computer models are not able to predict cloud behavior and require assumptions. Studies which have looked at cloud cover and temperatures have actually shown a significant negative feedback due to clouds. If this is true, then there would be less than a 1C temperature change due to a doubling of CO2.
[/list]
As I look deeper into the specific methods used, I become more skeptical.

What specific scientific data do you find compelling?

The term "alarmist" isn't intended to be derogatory, but I do feel the need to distinguish between those who feel that there is need for alarm due to man-made CO2 emissions and those who are skeptical about the state of crisis. "Alarmists" and "skeptics" seemed like acceptable terms to me, though I'm open to suggestions. I saw a documentary on PBS which referred to "scientists" vs "skeptics" which I thought was derogatory to the skeptics since it implied that skeptics were not scientists. I've also seen a variety of other derogatory terms for skeptics that I won't list here. I think that it is very likely that the climate has experienced a warming trend over the past 150 years or so as we have drifted out of the Little Ice Age (LIA). I am not surprised to see a reduction in ice over this period of time. I also think that it is likely that the planet experienced some cooling between 1940 and 1970, followed by some warming between 1970 and now. Between 1979 and now, satellite measurements have shown that the year-to-year variations in average temperature have been larger then the overall trend over this period of time. I haven't seen convincing data to suggest that the "fingerprint" of significant man made global warming has been detected and has proven that our current climate is unprecedented in the last 1000 years. I do see evidence of significant short and long term natural variations.

I find the question "is global warming going on" to be a little ambiguous. Has the average temperature of the planet increased over the past 100 years? Yes, probably, but the climate is always drifting, so I'd expect to always to detect either warming (50%) or cooling (50%) if you have a fine enough thermometer. I don't see credible evidence that our current climate to be particularly unusual. I don't think that drastic action is warranted. I don't see our current climate state as being one that will have a enormous and unprecedented effect on the current global world population. However, I think that it would be helpful to be able to predict trends in climate. We have always had droughts and they have generally been bad. However, the statistical basis for blaming an increase in hurricane intensity on global warming has been weak and somewhat contrived in my opinion. A better understanding of the oceanic oscillations and storm trends would be helpful regardless.

To be honest, I am more knowledgeable about the physics and methods, and less knowledgeable about the global economics. Bjorn Lomborg, who was written that "global warming is real and man-made" thinks that the consequences are often vastly exaggerated. He makes a point that global warming is only one of many issues, and there are other issues in which money could be better spent than trying to abate CO2. Do an internet search for "Perspective on climate Change," were he shows global priority list of other low hanging fruit as defined by a group of of economists (including 4 Nobel Laureates) in Copenhagen. I'm not an expert on this area, but I do find it worthy of discussion.

For the record, I agree with the "Hockey Stick Hokum" article. I find the hockey stick debate interesting, though I disagree with the statement that the hockey stick is alive and well. Let me address some of the issues introduced in a recent comment

First, I'll point out that the dismissal of the Wegman report is simply an ad hominem attack, and does not address any specific scientific argument. I don't want to get too caught up in this game, but I will point out the following:

  • The 2006 NAS panel's report was never published in a peer reviewed journal either.
  • Wegman is not a climatologist, but that's not a bad thing given the topic of his report. He's a renowned statistician and he was asked to look at the statistical methods used to create the hockey stick graph. Since he isn't a climate scientist, he arguably would be less biased, since his career isn't affected by any particular outcome. Edward Wegman is the chair of the National Academy of Science' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. For what it's worth, he also voted for Al Gore in 2000. His resume can be found here and is quite impressive.
For the sake of discussion, let me state the following definitions:

MBH = Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, & Malcolm K. Hughes, the authors of the original hockey stick graph. MBH98 and MBH99 refer to their 1998 and 1999 papers.

MM = Steve McIntrye & Ross McKitrick, the authors of the papers pointing out problems with the MBH methodology. Their first such paper was published in 2003 (MM03).

Some findings of the Wegman report include:

  • In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling.
  • Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history.
  • Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.
  • It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications.”
I have read several instances where someone has stated that “independent” studies confirm the original MBH study. However, as Wegman has stated, these studies tend to use extremely similar datasets and methodologies. There are other serious problems that the Wegman report did not address.

=================

Note that the article Report Affirms 'Hockey Stick' Climate Change Data was written by Raymond Bradley, one of the original hockey stick authors. That doesn’t necessarily make the article incorrect, but I would like to dissect some of the statements in the article and from the 2006 NAS report.

The 2006 NAS report has an interesting history. This report was commissioned by Congress to answer a very specific set of questions regarding the MBH hockey stick, and to determine whether the claims in the McIntyre-McKitrick studies were valid. A list of questions was sent to Ralph Cicerone at NAS, who then watered down the questions when he formed the NAS panel to investigate these claims and to write a report. By the time the panel was formed, the mission had changed to one that was much less focused on the specific claims against MBH. The panel members watered down their final report further by making it even their focus even more general and less specific, further avoiding direct confrontations with MBH. The makeup of the panel membership was hardly unbiased. Of the twelve panel members, only one, John Christy, has somewhat skeptical views of the negative climate forecasts. Many of the rest sound like activists when they make public statements regarding climate change. Given this situation, I found many statements from their report to be striking admissions on their part. Let's look at some of text in the actual report:

  • It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.

They essentially said that it's warmer now than during the Little Ice Age. No one is really surprised by this. A key issue was whether the MWP was cool or warm. If it was cool, then we have a hockey stick. If the MWP was warm, then we don't have a hockey stick. The MWP corresponds to roughly the years 800 - 1300.

  • Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600
  • Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.
  • Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.
The panel waffled the best the could. The word "plausible" is key. They state that the data doesn't rule out the possibility that the MWP wasn't warm, but the data certainly does not credibly support a conclusion that it was cool. The MM studies show that the MBH studies have serious problems, but they never claimed to produce an accurate reconstruction either. As a demonstration, MM used the MBH technique to create their "reconstructions" which show a much warmer Medieval Warm Period by making some arbitrary changes in the input parameters. The MM reconstructions are just as valid as the MBH reconstruction. However, MM claim that both sets of reconstructions are junk. MM actually don't even like to have their graphs referred to as a reconstruction since they don't endorse the methods used to create them.

What does this mean? If the climate of the last 1000 years was really a hockey stick, then this would show that today's climate is "unprecedented" and would be moderately strong circumstantial evidence man's influence on climate. If there was no hockey stick, then it would show that our climate situation is nothing special.
 

An interview of James Lovelock by Leo Hickman

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock


When I recently interviewed James Lovelock for the G2 section of the Guardian, we spoke for nearly two hours about the various events of the past few months – a period in which he'd remained silent because he'd been over-wintering with his wife Sandy in her native Missouri. There was a lot to talk about: the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the intense scrutiny placed on the IPCC, and the rather nippy winter experienced across much of the Northern Hemisphere. As is inevitable with an interview appearing in the newspaper, space was at a premium so the quotes used were tightly edited. But, just as I did with my interview with Al Gore last year, I have decided to publish a transcript of his key points here online for anyone interested in hearing in much more detail what Lovelock had to say on some of these controversial and much-discussed topics.


Lovelock's reaction to first reading about the stolen CRU emails [he later clarified that he hadn't read the originals, saying: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry"]:



I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: "Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work." That's no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

You can make mistakes; they're helpful. In the old days, it was perfectly OK to make a mistake and say so. You often learned from it. Nowadays if you're dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can't make mistakes as you won't get another one if you do. It's an awful moral climate and it was all set up for the best of reasons. I think it was felt there was far too much inequality in science and there was an enormous redress. Looking around the country [at the wider society] this was good on the whole, but in some special professions you want the best, the elite. Elitism is important in science. It is vital.​

On what the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – and climate scientists in general – should do to help restore public trust in their work:



Careers have been ended by this affair and the reputation of the institution [CRU] will go down for a while. It's sad because there are some good people there. They have to clean their house if they know people are behaving badly. They have got a rotten job ahead, but it will blow over in a few years. I think if they can produce a coup and produce some really good climate research they will undo all the harm that's been done. And they've now got an incentive to do that.

I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.

You don't hide data. But there are some natural limitations to making data public. For example, if you have just received a fresh batch of data you want to make sure that the instruments are properly calibrated and that something else hasn't happened in that region that might explain why a sudden change might have occurred. You've got to be honest about it and explain why you've done what you have done. I think to release the raw data as it comes up, you could see silly sceptics misusing it quite badly.​

On the over-reliance on computer modelling:



I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they're not complete models. They're based more or less entirely on geophysics. They don't take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict the climate. It's not the computational power that we lack today, but the ability to take what we know and convert it into a form the computers will understand. I think we've got too high an opinion of ourselves. We're not that bright an animal. We stumble along very nicely and it's amazing what we do do sometimes, but we tend to be too hubristic to notice the limitations. If you make a model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it's a model and think of it as the real world. You really start to believe it.​

On climate sceptics:



We're very tribal. You're either a goodie or a baddie. I've got quite a few friends among the sceptics, as well as among the "angels" of climate science. I've got more angels as friends than sceptics, I have to say, but there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well. He raises questions. I find him an interesting sceptic. What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: "Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?" If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek. The good sceptics have done a good service, but some of the mad ones I think have not done anyone any favours. Some of them, of course, are corrupted and employed by oil companies and things like that. Some even work for governments. For example, I wouldn't put it past the Russians to be behind some of the disinformation to help further their energy interests. But you need sceptics especially when the science gets very big and monolithic.

I respect their right to be sceptics. Nigel Lawson is an easy person to talk to. He's more like a defence counsel for the sceptics than a right-winger banging the drum. His book is not a diatribe or polemic. He tries to reason his case.

There is one sceptic that everyone should read and that is Garth Paltridge. He's written a book called The Climate Caper. It is a devastating, critical book. It is so good. This impresses me a lot. Like me, he's convinced that if you put a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which we will have done in 20 years' time, it's going to have some nasty effects, but what we don't know is how nasty and when. If you look back on climate history it sometimes took anything up to 1,000 years before a change in one of the variables kicked in and had an effect. And during those 1,000 years the temperature could have gone in the other direction to what you thought it should have done. What right have the scientists with their models to say that in 2100 the temperature will have risen by 5C? There are plenty of incidences where something turns on the heat, but temperatures actually go down perversely, before eventually going up. A cold winter may mean nothing, as could 10 cold winters in a row.

The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven't got the physics worked out yet. One of the chiefs once said to me that he agreed that they should include the biology in their models, but he said they hadn't got the physics right yet and it would be five years before they do. So why on earth are the politicians spending a fortune of our money when we can least afford it on doing things to prevent events 50 years from now? They've employed scientists to tell them what they want to hear. The Germans and the Danes are making a fortune out of renewable energy. I'm puzzled why politicians are not a bit more pragmatic about all this.

We do need scepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It's almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it's wrong to do it.​

On the blogosphere's reaction to the various revelations over the past few months:



I think the sceptic bloggers should worry. It's almost certain that you can't put a trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere without something nasty happening. This is going to resolve itself and global heating is going to come back on stream and it's these bloggers who are going to be made to look weird when it does. When something like this happens again, they'll say we had all this before with 'Climategate'. But there's a danger that you can go off too strong, like they have. They are not sufficiently aware of the longer-term consequences. I think the sceptics have done us a good service because they've made us look at all this a lot more closely and hopefully the science will improve as a result. But everything has a price and an unexpected price may hit these bloggers. It's the cry-wolf phenomenon. When the real one comes along, they'll be laughed at.​

On the Copenhagen summit:



Copenhagen was doomed to fail. But I think it was worth their while trying. A lot of people put their hearts into it. But I've never felt entirely happy with that sort of environmental wing-ding. It's obscene to have 10,000 people flying to Bali or whatever to talk about the environment. It just shows how hopeless humans are. The UN was a lovely idea, but its primary objective was to make sure the British Empire was got rid of. You just can't get all those people to agree.​

On the IPCC:



I was all for the IPPC when it was set up. I greatly respect Sir John Houghton [IPCC's co-chairman from 1988-2002]. It wasn't just a bunch of gung-ho scientists wanting to save the world. But then in 2007 there was a paper published in Science with the observational measurements saying the predictions [for sea-level rises] were underestimated. It was a serious underestimating of sea-level rises. The thing people should know about the sea is that surface temperatures can fluctuate all over the place, but we're not measuring the temperatures far down below. There's very little funding, or interest, in direct observational data.​

On the influence of vested interests:



We shouldn't let the lobbies influence science. Whatever criticism might befall the IPCC and the UEA, they're nothing as bad as lobbyists who are politically motivated and who will manipulate data or select data to make their political point. For example, it's deplorable for the BBC whenever one of these issues comes up to go and ask what one of the green lobbyists thinks of it. Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda. This is wrong. They should ask the scientists, but the problem is scientists won't speak. If we had some really good scientists it wouldn't be a problem, but we've got so many dumbos who just can't say anything, or who are afraid to say anything. They're not free agents.​

On how humans will ever manage to tackle climate change:



We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.​

On what it will take to convince the public that meaningful action is required to tackle climate change:



There has been a lot of speculation that a very large glacier [Pine Island glacier] in Antarctica is unstable. If there's much more melting, it may break off and slip into the ocean. It would be enough to produce an immediate sea-level rise of two metres, something huge, and tsunamis. I would say the scientists are not worried about it, but they are keeping a close watch on it. That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion. Or a return of the Dust Bowl in the mid-west. Another IPCC report won't be enough. We'll just argue over it like now.​

On what we should be doing to tackle the predicted threats of climate change?



I've always said that adaptation is the most serious thing we can do. Are our sea defences adequate? Can we prevent London from flooding? This is where we should be spending our billions. If wind turbines really worked, I wouldn't object to them. To hell with the aesthetics, we might need them to save ourselves. But they don't work – the Germans have admitted it. It's like the [EU] Common Agricultural Policy which led to corruption and inefficiencies. A common energy policy across Europe is not a good idea. I'm in favour of nuclear for crowded places like Britain for the simple reason that it's cheap, effective and exceedingly safe when you look at the record. We've had it for 50 years, but I can understand the left hating it because it was Thatcher's greatest weapon against the miners because we were then getting 30% of our electricity from nuclear. We could build a nuclear power station in five years, but it's the legal and planning stuff that makes it take 15 years. If governments were serious they would undo this legislation that holds it back.

I don't know enough abut carbon trading, but I suspect that it is basically a scam. The whole thing is not very sensible. We have this crazy idea that we are setting an example to the world. What we're doing is trying to make money out of the world by selling them renewable gadgetry and green ideas. It might be worthy from the national interest, but it is moonshine if you think what the Chinese and Indians are doing [in terms of emissions]. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.​

On the surveys showing that public trust with climate science is eroding:



I think the public are right. That's why I'm soft on the sceptics. Science has got overblown. From the moment Harold Wilson brought in that stuff about the "white heat of technology", science, in Britain at least, has gone down the drain. Science was always elitist and has to be elitist. The very idea of diluting it down [to be more egalitarian] is crazy. We're paying the price for it now.​

On whether we are capable as a species of tackling climate change:



I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change. We're very active animals. We like to think: "Ah yes, this will be a good policy," but it's almost never that simple. Wars show this to be true. People are very certain they are fighting a just cause, but it doesn't always work out like that. Climate change is kind of a repetition of a war-time situation. It could quite easily lead to a physical war. That's why I always come back to the safest thing to do being adaptation. For example, we've got to have good supplies of food. I would be very pleased to see this country and Europe seriously thinking about synthesising food.​
 


Freeing Energy Policy FromThe Climate Change Debate


http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2257


Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

The Endless Weather Wars
The habit of overstating the current state of climate science knowledge, and in particular our understanding of the relationship between global warming and present-day weather events, has been difficult for environmentalists to give up because, on one level, it has worked so well for them.

Global warming first exploded into mass public consciousness in the summer of 1988, when droughts, fires in the Amazon, and heat waves in the United States were widely attributed as warning signs of an eco-apocalypse to come. Former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth held the first widely covered congressional hearing on the subject that summer and admits having targeted the hearing for the hottest day of the year and turned off the air conditioning in the room to ensure that the conditions would be sweltering for the assembled media.

Such tactics have only intensified over the past two decades. In the run-up to U.N. climate talks in Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton Administration recruited Al Roker and other weathermen to explain global warming to the public. In 2006, Al Gore used his “Inconvenient Truth” slide show to link Hurricane Katrina, droughts, and floods to warming. And some environmental groups have routinely implied that present-day extreme weather and natural disasters are evidence of anthropogenic warming...
 


NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits

By Blake Snow
Maps from NASA’s GISS reveal temperatures where no data exist, thanks to mathematical extrapolation of data... NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center...

http://www.surfacestations.org


Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis
J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0319.pdf


...Temperature records in the United States are especially prone to uncertainty, not only because of high energy use in the United States but also other unique problems such as the bias due to systematic change in the time at which observers read 24-hour max-min thermometers...
...Our adjustment of urban station records uses nearby rural stations to define the long-term trends while allowing the local urban station to define high frequency variations, nominally as described by Hansen et al. [1999], but with details as follows. If an urban station has at least three rural stations within 500 km, all of these are used for the adjustment with closer stations receiving greater weight, as described above. If there are not three stations within 500 km, but there are three or more stations within 1000 km, these stations are used for the adjustment. The mean temperature trend of the rural stations is computed as a two-segment broken line, as in Hansen et al. [1999] but the knee of the broken line is variable (rather than being fixed at 1950) chosen so as to minimize the difference between the urban and rural records...
 
From Report by the Union o Concerned Scientists

Heavy Flooding and Global Warming: Is There a Connection?

March 2010 Backgrounder

Climate change increases the probability of some types of weather. Recent heavy rains and flooding in the Northeast, Midwest, and Great Plains are consistent with a warming planet, and such events are expected to become more common over time.

As average temperatures in regions across the country have gone up, more rain has fallen during the heaviest downpours. Very heavy precipitation events, defined as the heaviest one percent, now drop 67 percent more precipitation in the Northeast, 31 percent more in the Midwest and 15 percent more in the Great Plains, including the Dakotas, than they did 50 years ago.

This happens because warmer air holds more moisture. This fact is apparent when you see water vapor hanging in the air after turning off a hot shower. When warm air holding moisture meets cooler air, the moisture condenses into tiny droplets that float in the air. If the drops get bigger and become heavy enough, they fall as precipitation.

If the emissions that cause global warming continue unabated, scientists expect the amount of rainfall during the heaviest precipitation events across country to increase more than 40 percent by the end of the century. Even if we dramatically curbed emissions, these downpours will still increase, but by only a little more than 20 percent. Regardless of what action we take to cut emissions, municipalities that are vulnerable to heavy precipitation events should plan for more flooding. Any efforts to reduce emissions would make it easier for them to adapt.

Climate science contrarians often argue that it is impossible for global warming to cause both heavy precipitation and drought. They are either misinformed or purposefully confusing the issue. Drought is a measure of annual precipitation, not the intensity of precipitation events.

As a consequence of global warming, annual precipitation levels have increased in many parts of the country and decreased in others. Between 1958 and 2007, for example, the Southeast and Southwest experienced more drought even while overall precipitation across the country increased an average of five percent. These precipitation changes, along with temperature shifts, threaten agriculture and have contributed to the northerly movement of plant hardiness zones.

It is worth noting that last months blizzard in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast also is consistent with global warming. That heavy precipitation event just happened to occur in winter rather than spring, bringing snow rather than rain. Global warming will likely make the winter season shorter and colder weather less common, but winter will not disappear altogether.

Global warming also is causing measurable season creep worldwide. Spring weather is arriving earlier and fall weather is arriving later than ever before. If temperatures were a bit colder in the Northeast or Midwest, those regions would have been contending with a massive snowfall instead of heavy rains.
 
Yahoo News (or just turn on your TV)

From the Cost of Doing Nothing Dept:

New England flooding drowns homes and dreams
AP

By ERIC TUCKER and PAT EATON-ROBB, Associated Press Writers Eric Tucker And Pat Eaton-robb, Associated Press Writers – 24 mins ago

WEST WARWICK, R.I. – Flooding on a scale rarely seen in New England forced hundreds of people from their homes Wednesday, overwhelmed sewage systems to the point that families were asked to stop flushing toilets, and washed out bridges and highways from Maine to Connecticut.

Hardest hit by three days of record-breaking rain was Rhode Island, where the worst flooding in 200 years could persist for several more days and permanently close businesses already struggling in the weak economy.

"I think we're all done," said Angelo Padula Jr., a West Warwick town councilman whose family owns a 100-year-old auto-restoration shop. The shop and 260 cars stood in 10 feet of water from the Pawtuxet River.

Padula said officials told him they believe his shop and about 40 surrounding businesses would have to be condemned, as will several blocks of nearby homes.

"We were wiped right out," said Padula, whose 86-year-old father was hospitalized after having a heart attack during Tuesday night's flooding. "You're talking millions and millions of dollars in these businesses. Now I know how the people in New Orleans felt" after Hurricane Katrina.

The rain subsided to a drizzle Wednesday, then finally stopped, and the floodwaters began to recede. But authorities across New England warned that much of the water could linger for days. The latest flooding was far worse than an inundation earlier this month in the same areas.

Stonington, Conn., a coastal town on the Rhode Island border, was largely cut off as two of its three bridges went out. A bridge also gave out in Freetown, Mass., isolating about 1,000 residents. In Coventry, R.I., a two-lane bridge threatened to collapse after its abutments washed out.

A stretch of Interstate 95, the main route linking Boston to New York, was closed in Rhode Island and could remain so at least through Thursday.

Amtrak suspended some trains in the area because of water over the tracks. It said its Acela Express service between New Haven, Conn., and Boston and its Northeast regional service between New York and Boston would be suspended into Thursday morning.

In Rhode Island, rescues continued for a third day along the Pawtuxet River, which flooded several blocks past its banks in many spots. The river crested Wednesday morning at 20.79 feet, nearly 6 feet over the previous record — set only two weeks ago — and almost 12 feet above its ordinary level of 9 feet.

[article continues...]
 
From the blog "Climate Progess


Archive for the ‘Hackergate’ Category

Time: “The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change.”
Monday, December 7th, 2009

Bryan Walsh has a long analysis in Time magazine that is well worth reading: “The Stolen E-Mails: Has ‘Climategate’ Been Overblown?“ He finds no significant impact on our understanding of the science — like most sober looks at the issue:

* Nature editorial: “Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause.”
* Washington Times: “stolen e-mails mean less than they seem”
* Reuters: “ANALYSIS-Hacked climate e-mails awkward, not game changer”
* Hacked climate e-mail rebutted by scientists

Credit also goes to Walsh for putting the Swifthack affair in context, which few journalists have:

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Post by Joe in Hackergate, Media | 10 Responses


American Meteorological Society reaffirms “that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies….”
Monday, December 7th, 2009

[We all know what an uneducated bunch of dupes and sheep the AMS is, how they'll say anything to line their pockets with more research dollars, and how they all hunger for the superstar status that could come from crying, "wolf", scientific reputations be damned. Nonetheless, their opinions are amusing. The emphasis is mine.--dr.M.]

AMS Headquarters has received several inquiries asking if the material made public following the hacking of e-mails and other files from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has any impact on the AMS Statement on Climate Change, which was approved by the AMS Council in 2007 and represents the official position of the Society.

The AMS Statement on Climate Change continues to represent the position of the AMS. It was developed following a rigorous procedure that included drafting and review by experts in the field, comments by the membership, and careful review by the AMS Council prior to approval as a statement of the Society. The statement is based on a robust body of research reported in the peer-reviewed literature. As with any scientific assessment, it is likely to become outdated as the body of scientific knowledge continues to grow, and the current statement is scheduled to expire in February 2012 if it is not replaced by a new statement prior to that.

The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results….

So the American Meteorological Society writes in a web piece, “Impact of CRU Hacking on the AMS Statement on Climate Change.” The rest of the piece and the full AMS statement follows, since somebody needs to report on the beauty of science if the status quo media continues focusing on the ugliness of anti-scientific idealogues:

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Post by Joe in Hackergate | 2 Responses
 
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