The Nobel Prize (for propaganda)

Possibly the single best deck of slides on climate I've ever seen:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/8/25/kelly-on-the-engineering-challenge.html

Professor Mike Kelly
Department of Engineering
Cambridge University


http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/8/25/kelly-on-the-engineering-challenge.html

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Sorry (this is why I hate links and frequently copy & paste in order to eliminate errors caused by subsequent URL changes or deletions)

The URL was changed to:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/8/25/kelly-on-the-engineering-challenge.html



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Whatever Happened to Global Warming?
Now come climate scientists’ implausible explanations for why the ‘hiatus’ has passed the 15-year mark.

By MATT RIDLEY
September 4, 2014
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/articles/matt...lobal-warming-1409872855?mod=rss_opinion_main





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If ever there was any doubt that NOAA has been politicized and has an agenda, the latest "science (propaganda) by press release" should remove any lingering doubt.





While loudly proclaiming 2014 to be "the warmest year" because it was 0.04°C (that's right, folks, ZERO POINT ZERO FOUR DEGREES) warmer than the dubious previous warmest year, NOAA completely forgot to mention that the margin of error is +/- 0.09°C—

in other words, THEY DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW if 2014 was the warmest year or not (but that didn't stop them from making the claim).​

It is a sorry state of affairs when a U.S. government science-based agency makes scientifically INACCURATE statements— but that's what's happened to NOAA.






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Hollywood and the "We're All Gonna Die From Global Warming" crowd photoshopped images to show a flooded Manhattan.



Well, here's a little (non-photoshopped) reality:







All ready to give up the heat and light provided by fossil fuels?



"Climate change is real."




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by "Bishop Hill" (Andrew W. Montford)


I would have loved to be there when Brown University environmental studies student Jaqueline Ho suddenly realised that the course she had (presumably) forked out oodles of cash for was not actually an education at all. It turned out to be just a very expensive brainwashing exercise. Can you imagine the look on her face?

At Brown, ideas first planted by [Bill] McKibben were reinforced in courses where she read classics by Aldo Leopold and Garrett Hardin, along with recent books by Van Jones and Elizabeth Kolbert.

With these authors anchoring her understanding, it was easy for Ho to believe about climate change “that fossil fuel corporations were to blame, that we had a suite of low-carbon technologies we could deploy immediately, and that grassroots solutions held promise,” she recalls.

Yet only after taking an upper-level political science course on renewable energy and completing a summer fellowship with the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, was Ho introduced to alternative ways of thinking about climate change as a social problem and the possible solutions.
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There are other ways of thinking about a problem! Who would have thought it?! Really though, you have to feel sorry for children who are indoctrinated throughout their school and university careers and only once they get into the wide world do they start to realise what has been done to them. Ms Ho's response to this horrible realisation has been admirable:

Motivated by her experience, in [a] recent study, Ho and Eric Kennedy (a doctoral student at Arizona State University) analyzed 22 syllabi from introductory environmental studies courses taught at top-ranked North American research universities and liberal arts colleges. They recorded course descriptions, objectives, activities, and readings according to specific themes, topics, and perspectives.

Of the 22 syllabi assessed, less than half explicitly mentioned the importance of critical thinking or exposing students to competing perspectives. Only 10 made any reference to the fact that even among those advocating for action to address a problem like climate change, there are competing narratives about the major societal challenges, the possible technological solutions, and the political strategies needed.

Instead, in most cases, diverging views on climate change were defined relatively simplistically in terms of the clash between mainstream scientists and the false claims of climate “deniers.”​

Yes indeed. You wonder whether the students could sue the universities for fraud.


http://bishophill.squarespace.com/b...ed-it-green-studies-indoctrinate-not-edu.html

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Fig. 1. Global (80S to 80N) Mean TLT Anomaly plotted as a function of time. The thick black line is the observed
time series from RSS V3.3 MSU/AMSU Temperatures. The yellow band is the 5% to 95% range of output from
CMIP-5 climate simulations. The mean value of each time series average from 1979-1984 is set to zero so the
changes over time can be more easily seen. Note that after 1998, the observations are likely to be below the
simulated values, indicating that the simulation as a whole are predicting too much warming.


http://www.remss.com/research/climate

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Guess #57(?) — and still counting— as to why there has been no significant global warming for the last 18 years and 7 months:






Has There Been A Hiatus?
by Kevin E. Trenberth

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6249/691.full



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How many people know that there hasn't been any warming for almost two decades?










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Is It Time To Stop The Insanity Of Wasting Time and Money On More Climate Models?

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By Tim Ball, Ph.D.

Nearly every single climate model prediction, projection or whatever else they want to call them has been wrong. Weather forecasts beyond 72 hours typically deteriorate into their error bands. The UK Met Office summer forecast was wrong again. I have lost track of the number of times they were wrong. Apparently, the British Broadcasting Corporation had enough as they stopped using their services. They are not just marginally wrong. Invariably, the weather is the inverse of their forecast.

Short, medium, and long-term climate forecasts are wrong more than 50 percent of the time so that a correct one is a no better than a random event. Global and or regional forecasts are often equally incorrect. If there were a climate model that made even 60 percent accurate forecasts, everybody would use it. Since there is no single accurate climate model forecast, the IPCC resorts to averaging out their model forecasts as if, somehow, the errors would cancel each other out and the average of forecasts would be representative. Climate models and their forecasts have been unmitigated failures that would cause an automatic cessation in any other enterprise. Unless, of course, it was another government funded, fiasco. Daily weather forecasts are improved from when modern forecasting began in World War I. However, even short term climate forecasts appear no better than the Old Farmers Almanac, which appeared in 1792, using moon, sun, and other astronomical and terrestrial indicators.

I have written and often spoken about the key role of the models in creating and perpetuating the catastrophic AGW mythology. People were shocked by the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), but most don’t know that the actual instructions to “hide the decline” in the tree ring portion of the hockey stick graph were in the computer code. It is one reason that people translate the Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) acronym as Gospel in, Gospel Out when speaking of climate models.

I am tired of the continued pretense that climate models can produce accurate forecasts in a chaotic system. Sadly, the pretense occurs on both sides of the scientific debate. The reality is the models don’t work and can’t work for many reasons, including the most fundamental; lack of data, lack of knowledge of major mechanisms, lack of knowledge of basic physical processes, lack of ability to represent physical mechanisms like turbulence in mathematical form, and lack of computer capacity. Bob Tisdale summarized the problems in his 2013 book Climate Models Fail. It is time to stop wasting time and money and put people and computers to more important uses.

The only thing that keeps people working on the models is government funding, either at weather offices or in academia. Without this funding computer modelers would not dominate the study of climate. Without the funding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could not exist. Many of the people involved in climate modeling were not familiar with or had no training in climatology or climate science. They were graduates of computer modeling programs looking for a challenging opportunity with large amounts of funding available and access to large computers. The atmosphere and later the oceans fit the bill. Now they put the two together to continue the fiasco. Unfortunately, it is all at massive expense to society. Those expenses include the computers and the modeling time but worse the cost of applying the failed results to global energy and environmental issues.

Let’s stop pretending and wasting money and time. Remove that funding and nobody would spend private money to work on climate forecast models.

I used to argue that there was some small value in playing with climate models in a laboratory, with only a scientific responsibility for the accuracy, feasibility, and applicability. It is clear they do not fulfill those responsibilities. Now I realize that position was wrong. When model results are used as the sole basis for government policy, there is no value. It is a massive cost and detriment to society, which is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was specifically designed to do.

The IPCC has one small value. It illustrates all the problems identified in the previous comments. Laboratory-generated climate models are manipulated outside of even basic scientific rigor in government weather offices or academia, and then become the basis of public policy through the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

Another value of the IPCC Physical Science Basis Reports is they provide a detailed listing of why models can’t and don’t work. Too bad few read or understand them. If they did, they would realize the limitations are such that they preclude any chance of success. Just a partial examination illustrates the point.

Data

The IPCC people knew of the data limitations from the start, but it didn’t stop them building models.

In 1993, Stephen Schneider, a primary player in the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and the use of models went beyond doubt to certainty when he said,



A February 3, 1999, US National Research Council Report said,


To which Kevin Trenberth responded,


Two Directors of the CRU, Tom Wigley, and Phil Jones said,


70% of the world is oceans and there are virtually no stations. The Poles are critical in the dynamics of driving the atmosphere and creating climate yet there are virtually no stations in 15 million km2 of the Arctic Ocean or for the 14 million km2 of Antarctica. Approximately 85% of the surface has no weather data. The IPCC acknowledge the limitations by claiming a single station data are representative of conditions within a 1200km radius. Is that a valid assumption? I don’t think it is.

But it isn’t just lack of data at the surface. Actually, it is not data for the surface, but for a range of altitudes above the surface between 1.25 to 2 m and as researchers from Geiger (Climate Near the Ground) on show this is markedly different from actual surface temperatures as measured at the few microclimate stations that exist. Arguably US surface stations are best, but Anthony Watts diligent study shows that only 7.9 percent of them accurate to less than 1°C. (Figure 1) To put that in perspective, in the 2001 IPCC Report Jones claimed a 0.6°C increase over 120 years was beyond a natural increase. That also underscores the fact that most of the instrumental record temperatures were measured to 0.5°C.




Figure 1

Other basic data, including precipitation, barometric pressure, wind speed, and direction are worse than the temperature data. For example, in Africa there are only 1152 weather watch stations, which are one-eighth the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recommended minimum density. As I noted in an earlier paper, lack of data for all phases of water alone guarantees the failure of IPCC projections.

The models attempt to simulate a three-dimensional atmosphere, but there is virtually no data above the surface. The modelers think we are foolish enough to believe the argument that more layers in the model will solve the problem, but it doesn’t matter if you have no data.

Major Mechanisms

During my career as a climatologist, several mechanism of weather and climate were either discovered or measured, supposedly with sufficient accuracy for application in a model. These include, El Nino/La Nina (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Dansgaard-Oeschger Oscillation (D-O), Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), among others.

Despite this, we are still unclear about the mechanisms associated with the Hadley Cell and the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which are essentially the entire tropical climate mechanisms. The Milankovitch Effect remains controversial and is not included in IPCC models. The Cosmic Theory appears to provide an answer to the relationship between sunspots, global temperature, and precipitation but is similarly ignored by the IPCC. They do not deal with the Monsoon mechanism well as they note,


There is very limited knowledge of the major oceanic circulations at the surface and in the depths. There are virtually no measures of the volumes of heat transferred or how they change over time, including measures of geothermal heat.

Physical Mechanisms.

The IPCC acknowledge that,


That comment is sufficient to argue for cessation of the waste of time and money. Add the second and related problem identified by Essex and McKitrick in Taken By Storm and it is confirmed.

Climate research is anything but a routine application of classical theories like fluid mechanics, even though some may be tempted to think it is. It has to be regarded in the “exotic’ category of scientific problems in part because we are trying to look for scientifically meaningful structure that no one can see or has ever seen, and may not even exist.


Computer capacity

Modelers claim computers are getting better, and all they need are bigger, faster computers. It can’t make any difference, but they continue to waste money. In 2012, Cray introduced the promotionally named Gaea supercomputer (Figure 2). It has a 1.1 petaflops capacity. FLOPS means Floating-Point Operations per Second, and peta is 1016 (or a thousand) million floating-point operations per second. Jagadish Shukla says the challenge is


Regardless of the computer capacity it is meaningless without data for the model.




Figure 2: Cray’s Gaea Computer with the environmental image.



Failed Forecasts, (Predictions, Projections)

Figure 3 shows the IPCC failed forecast. They call them projections, but the public believes they are forecasts. Either way, they are consistently wrong. Notice the labels added to Hayden’s graph taken from the Summary for Policymakers. As the error range increase in the actual data the Summary claims it is improving. One of the computer models used for the IPCC forecast belongs to Environment Canada. Their forecasts are the worst of all of those averaged results used by the IPCC (Figure 4).



Figure 3




Figure 4 Source; Ken Gregory

The Canadian disaster is not surprising as their one-year forecast assessment indicates. They make a one –year forecast and provide a map indicating the percentage of accuracy against the average for the period 1981-2010 (Figure 5).




Figure 5

The Canadian average accuracy percentage is shown in the bottom left as 41.5 percent. That is the best they can achieve after some thirty years of developing the models. Other countries results are no better.

In a New Scientist report Tim Palmer, a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading England said:

The Cost

Joanne Nova has done most research on the cost of climate research to the US government.


There is no doubt that number grew, and the world total is likely double the US amount as this commentator claims.


These are just the computer modeling costs. The economic and social costs are much higher and virtually impossible to calculate. As Paul Driessen explains

It’s no wonder Larry Bell can say,



If it is impossible for a supposedly sophisticated agency like US GAO to determine the costs, then there is no hope for a global assessment. There is little doubt the direct cost is measured in trillions of dollars. That does not include the lost opportunities for development and lives continuing in poverty. All this because of the falsified results from completely failed computer model prediction, projections or whatever they want to call them.

It is time to stop the insanity, which in climate science is the repetition of creating computer models that don’t and can’t work? I think so.



ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/14/is-it-time-to-stop-the-insanity-of-wasting-time-and-money-on-more-climate-models/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/...asting-time-and-money-on-more-climate-models/

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Essay by David Siegel

[ There are lots of links in Mr. Siegel's essay. If you want to follow his links, go to the site where this essay was posted— http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/...ch-from-climate-proponent-to-climate-skeptic/
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/16/how-a-liberal-vegan-environmentalist-made-the-switch-from-climate-proponent-to-climate-skeptic/ ]




My name is David Siegel. I’m not a climate expert; I’m a writer. Early in 2015, I became interested in climate science and decided to spend the better part of this year trying to learn what I could. It didn’t take long before it was clear that there isn’t likely going to be any catastrophic warming this century. What was clear is that skeptics are losing this battle, and I want to tell you why.

For thirty years, James Hansen and Al Gore have been building their PR machine along with David Fenton, the wizard of nonprofit PR. They understand that the messenger is more important than the message. People don’t easily change their minds. People get their opinions from “experts” and brand names like NASA, MIT, Harvard, TIME, The Daily Show, etc. Fenton knows the game is about credibility and repetition, not science. As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.

So I did my homework and wrote a 9,000-word essay aimed at liberals who have a voice, who have access to media, and who might take 30 minutes to educate themselves.

I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down. Now I’m launching it myself and hope you will read it and help spread the word.

I ask you to help get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after. Links really help. If you can help reach Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, and other influential liberals, I hope to help them understand that the science is not settled. I think this is the best way to tip the scales back to reasonable, impactful environmentalism. If you can help move it on Reddit, Voat, Quora, NewsVine, etc., I would appreciate that.

I’m going to ask people to leave comments here, rather than on my page, because I can’t manage the comment spam there. I will, however, read the comments here and will respond if I can.

My work is aimed at your liberal friends; please send them to read it.

Excerpt:

What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.

Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.




Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey

You’ll find it at: www.climatecurious.com






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Nature

http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-hiatus-debate-flares-up-again-1.19414

ht tp://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-hiatus-debate-flares-up-again-1.19414

Researchers now argue that slowdown in warming was real.

...a prominent group of researchers is arguing in Nature Climate Change that the slowdown was real.


“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.”

Susan Solomon, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that Fyfe’s framework helps to put twenty-first-century trends into perspective, and clearly indicates that the rate of warming slowed down at a time when greenhouse-gas emissions were rising dramatically.



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