Another inconvenient truth

[busybody..]

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/how-did-you-get-in-the-box

 

[trysail]

The author:
B.S. ( engineering ), Caltech
M.A. ( physics ), Dartmouth ( thesis topic; atmospheric physics )
Ph.D. ( atmospheric physics )

I am not going to disclose his name here.

On October 31,2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.

How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America's industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.

America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?

Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.

But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?

We need to look no further than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America's elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups. Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos started to fall.

They began stopping nuclear power plants in the 1970's. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources with land laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers to foot the bill for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less productive wind and solar energy projects.

In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with environmental interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in the San Francisco Bay Area. The meeting was in a theater-like lecture room with the seating curved to face the center stage and rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending were many atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.

The room became silent when a man walked up to the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem was global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were trapping the earth's radiation like a greenhouse and causing the atmosphere to heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will lead to environmental disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will now concentrate its research funding toward quantifying the disasters that would be caused by our carbon dioxide.

The room was silent. I was the first to raise my hand to ask a question, "How can you defend your global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis contradicts the paper by Lee * in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1973 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse?"

He answered me by saying, "You do not know what you are talking about. I know more about how the atmosphere works than you do."

Not being one to drop out of a fight, I responded, "I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room, and many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is your background and what makes you know so much more than me?"

He answered, "I know more than you because I am a lawyer and I work for the EPA."

After the meeting, many of my atmospheric science friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for what I said, saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared for their jobs.

And that, my dear readers, is my recollection of that great day when a lawyer, acting as a scientist, working for the federal government, announced global warming.

Fast forward to today. The federal government is spending 1000 times more money to promote the global warming charade than is available to those scientists who are arguing against it. Never before in history has it taken a massive publicity campaign to convince the public of a scientific truth. The only reason half the public thinks global warming may be true is the massive amount of money put into global warming propaganda.

The green eco-groups have their umbilical cords in the government's tax funds. Aside from a few honest but duped scientists living on government money, the majority of the alarms about global warming - now called "climate change" because it's no longer warming - come from those who have no professional training in atmospheric science. They are the environmentalists, the ecologists, the lawyers and the politicians. They are not the reliable atmospheric scientists whom I know.

Nevertheless, our politicians have passed laws stating that carbon dioxide is bad. See California's AB32 which is based upon science fiction. (For readers who take issue with me, I will be happy to destroy your arguments in another place. In this paper, we focus on the damage to America that is being caused by those promoting the global warming fraud.)

In the year 2000, America planned 150 new coal-electric power plants. These power plants would have been "clean" by real standards but the Greens managed to have carbon dioxide defined legally as "dirty" and this new definition makes all emitters of carbon dioxide, including you, a threat to the planet. Therefore, using legal illogic, the Sierra Club stopped 82 of these planned power plants under Bush II and they expect it will be a slam dunk to stop the rest under Obama.

And now you know the real reason the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company had to shut down. America stopped building new power plants a long time ago. There is now no other source where the company can buy energy. Our energy-producing capability is in a decline and it is taking America with it.

I used to belong to the Sierra Club in the 1960's. It used to be a nice hiking club. In the late 1960's the Sierra Club began turning its attention toward stopping nuclear power. Then I quit the Sierra Club. It continues to prosper from the many subscribers who think they are supporting a good cause. What they are really supporting is the destruction of America brick by brick. The Sierra Club and similar organizations are like watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside. They are telling us we have no right to our own natural resources, and in doing so they are sinking America.

Inherent in ecology are three assumptions: "natural" conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and human influences are bad. Physics makes no such assumptions. By assuming climate is fragile, the global warming supporters have assumed their conclusion. In fact, the climate is not fragile. It is stable.

The non-adherence to physical logic in the global warming camp is what makes many physical scientists say that global warming is a religion.

So we have a new age religion promoted by environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and brainwashed into our people that is now destroying America from the inside.

Like a vast ship, America is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by its real citizens, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent into oblivion ... her many resources saved for whom?

_____________________
References:
* R. Lee: "The 'greenhouse' effect" J. Appl. Meteor. 12, 556-557 (1973)

Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner: "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics," Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)

International Journal of Modern Physics B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275-364.

http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb/23/2303/S02179792092303.html

Page 37: "Lee's paper is a milestone marking the day after which every serious scientist or science educator is no longer allowed to compare the greenhouse with the atmosphere."

The hypothesis that human greenhouse gases cause global warming is invalid for many reasons but here are a few physics reasons:


1. Physics calculations show the global temperature increase from doubling carbon dioxide concentration is about 1 degree C maximum, and most likely about 0.5 degrees C.


2. This increase is insignificant and it does not justify political action or restricting carbon dioxide emissions.


3. Climate models have incorrectly predicted 4 degrees C or more and contain errors that make them invalid. That many climate models produce similar results does not mean they are correct. Rather, it shows they are all wrong.


4. All models fail in replicating cloud cover, which is much more important than all human greenhouse gases.


5. Climate models do not properly calculate water vapor which is responsible for 95% of the total greenhouse gas effect.


6. The maximum greenhouse effect from human emissions is 0.28%. Even a 10% error in the calculating water vapor is 300 times greater than the whole human greenhouse effect. The models are not close to 10% accuracy in water vapor. In order to evaluate the human component, the models must be 1000 times better.


7. Climate models give similar results because they use the same “fudge factor” given them by the UN IPCC. This fudge factor (climate sensitivity) determines how the models compute global warming. The IPCC has not published its derivation of its fudge factor for scientific peer review.


8. The fudge factor is needed to calculate the effects of water vapor and clouds which the models cannot calculate directly.


9. In 2007, scientists reversed engineered the secret UN IPCC fudge factor, found it to be incorrect, corrected it, and showed the correct factor would make the models predict 0.5 to 1.0 C change for a doubling of carbon dioxide.


10. ... the standard faulty argument to justify the conclusion that humans cause global warming... is circular. It first assumes the models are correct. Then the models adjust many fudge factors until they fit the temperature data from 1860 to 1980. Then they change the fudge factors to assume simulated human and natural caused changes. Simulations make wild guesses at the effects of volcanoes, solar input and aerosols. The fudge factors allow the models to fit the last 20 years of data. [ Those ] ... promoting global warming conclude this magician stunt “proves” humans are causing global warming. This reasoning is so bad it has been highly criticized in Science magazine.

According to the scientific method, carbon dioxide is innocent until proven guilty. The guilty verdict in science can only be rendered when the thousands of skeptic scientists change their minds.

It is very easy to change the scientists minds: simply come up with a valid hypothesis linking human CO2 emissions with significant global warming and demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis by making valid predictions.

That is how science is supposed to work. To date, this has not been done. The promo has been all media hype and politics. This works on the general public but the scientists won't come aboard until they see a hypothesis that makes valid predictions.

To believe in something that has been invalidated by science, is not science. According to Ivar Giaever, Nobelist in Physics, "Global warming has become a new religion."

Mathematical Physicist Dr. Frank Tipler, Professor at Tulane University wrote: “Whether the ice caps melt, or expand --- whatever happens --- the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology,"

 

[phrodeau]

The author:
B.S. ( engineering ), Caltech
M.A. ( physics ), Dartmouth ( thesis topic; atmospheric physics )
Ph.D. ( atmospheric physics )

I am not going to disclose his name here.

Good. We don't need to know any more about him.

Do you believe his claim that the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse? If so, what should we make of your subsequent quotes that describe greenhouse effects in the atmosphere?

 

[trysail]

Good. We don't need to know any more about him.

Do you believe his claim that the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse? If so, what should we make of your subsequent quotes that describe greenhouse effects in the atmosphere?

The atmosphere is not a greenhouse. That ought to be obvious to anybody with half a brain.

By definition, that means that the atmosphere does not behave as a greenhouse. Almost needless to say, the atmosphere is orders of magnitude more complex than a greenhouse. While there may be similarities, it is, in fact, an unfortunate accident of history that the name was attached to the atmospheric effect because it implies a non-existant identity.

 

[Peregrinator]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/berry-e1.1.1.html


Who cares if you reveal his name here?

 

[Ishmael]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/berry-e1.1.1.html


Who cares if you reveal his name here?

Now that it's been shown that the IPCC has spent years 'cooking the books', what can be expected is extreme retraction of affiliation with the proponents of AGW. Which is exactly what we're seeing.

Once science has entered the political realm it's no longer science. It's just religion and politics as usual.

Ishmael

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

We already have a cap on emissions. You can argue that the cap is too high, or too low, but "cap and trade" is a good idea. It let's factories keep operating (and keep people at work) that would otherwise have to shut down, and provides a financial incentive/reward for those that invest in new technology (also keeping and putting people to work), that they would have had to invest in anyway.

Anything that makes us move toward cleaner forms of energy than fossil fuels is a good thing, and will be fought against tooth and nail by those who provide the fuels we use today.

They don't want cap and trade, fine. Drop a hard cap on industry and force those who can't adapt to the lower emissions levels to upgrade immediately or close. Does that sound like a viable alternative to anyone?

Cap and Trade of emissions moves us toward cleaner sources of energy without dropping the hammer on those who can't comply immediately.

 

[castagnus]

Now that it's been shown that the IPCC has spent years 'cooking the books', what can be expected is extreme retraction of affiliation with the proponents of AGW. Which is exactly what we're seeing.

Once science has entered the political realm it's no longer science. It's just religion and politics as usual.

Ishmael

Since numbers are so important to the True AGW Believers; here is something to ponder:


For the IPCC 4 th report: Of the 250 IPCC "Scientists" only 7 wrote the report. Two of these have expressed reservations about the causes of GW but their views have been supressed.

Against AGW and the IPCC 4 Report: 32,000 verified scientists , of whom 9,500 are PhD's, who signed the the Second Oregon Petition expressing opposition to any government action to limit the release of CO2.

 

[trysail]

Science has become truly strange in the 21st century. Unverified models based on weak assumptions which don’t perform or compare with the real world are held as revealed truth, while hypotheses based on observations are treated as false because they “might” distract from the message.

"Doug in Seattle"

 

[busybody..]

Oppose the KNEE GROW, GO TO JAIL!

Environmental Agency Warns 2 Staff Lawyers Over Video Criticizing Climate Policy

By JOHN M. BRODER and LESLIE KAUFMAN

November 10, 2009

The Environmental Protection Agency has directed two of its lawyers to makes changes to a YouTube video they posted that is critical of the Obama administration’s climate change policy.

The agency, citing federal policies, told the two lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are married and based in San Francisco, that they could mention their E.P.A. affiliation only once; must remove language specifying Mr. Zabel’s expertise and their years of employment with the agency; and must remove an image of the agency’s office in San Francisco.

They have been told that if they do not edit the video to comply with the policy, they could face disciplinary action.

The video, titled “The Huge Mistake,” was produced and posted in September. But the agency did not issue its warning until The Washington Post published a widely cited opinion article by the couple on Oct. 31 that raised concerns, echoing those in the video, about cap-and-trade legislation that the Obama administration supports.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Zabel say cap and trade, in which the government sets a limit on gases that contribute to global warming and then lets companies trade permits to meet it, can be easily gamed by industry and fail to reduce the emissions linked to global warming.

On Thursday, Mr. Zabel said, regional ethics officers with the agency met with him to express concerns about the video and to demand that it be taken down by the next day. Ms. Williams was traveling and did not take part in the meeting.

E.P.A. officials said the agency did not object to the content of the video or the op-ed article or challenge the couple’s right to express their opinions. But they said that government ethics rules required them to state that the opinions were their own and not those of the agency.

“E.P.A. has nearly 18,000 employees, and all of them are free to — and many do — publicly express their views on issues of the day, including issues that are central to E.P.A.’s mission,” Scott Fulton, the agency’s general counsel, said in a statement. However, the video did say the opinions were those of Mr. Williams and Ms. Zabel and were not meant to represent the agency.

In addition, Mr. Williams and Ms. Zabel say they quickly removed the video from their Web site and YouTube. But they said that others had copied the video and put it up on separate YouTube accounts and that it is still easily found.

Green Shirts are the new Brown Shirts.

The agency, citing federal policies, told the two lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are married and based in San Francisco, that they could mention their E.P.A. affiliation only once; must remove language specifying Mr. Zabel’s expertise and their years of employment with the agency; and must remove an image of the agency’s office in San Francisco.

Is this not what is called restriction of free speech by prior restraint? Does not the US Constitution specifically prohibit the federal government from doing this very thing?

Mr. Zabel can’t even mention his expertise or their employment background?

For once we are on the side of lawyers and we hope they sue.

E.P.A. officials said the agency did not object to the content of the video or the op-ed article or challenge the couple’s right to express their opinions. But they said that government ethics rules required them to state that the opinions were their own and not those of the agency.

Note that even The Times admits that the Zabels did comply with this rule and announced that they were simply expressing their own private opionions in the video. And still they are being forced to remove it and sanitize it.

It’s funny, we don’t recall such actions being taken against Mr. James Hansen (of NASA) when he makes his doomsday pronouncements in defense of the climate change cult.

But, apparently, some people are more equal than others.

 

[busybody..]

there aint no GLOWBALL BULLSHIT

and CLIMATE CHANGE is an ongoing process not to be fucked with

except by Algore who needs to make BILLION or SO to pay for all the energy his house uses


http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report

 

[Peregrinator]

Since numbers are so important to the True AGW Believers; here is something to ponder:


For the IPCC 4 th report: Of the 250 IPCC "Scientists" only 7 wrote the report. Two of these have expressed reservations about the causes of GW but their views have been supressed.

Against AGW and the IPCC 4 Report: 32,000 verified scientists , of whom 9,500 are PhD's, who signed the the Second Oregon Petition expressing opposition to any government action to limit the release of CO2.

Holy SHIT. People are still seriously citing the Oregon Petition? Wtf?

 

[Peregrinator]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine

In addition to the bulk mailing, OISM's website enables people to add their names to the petition over the Internet, and by June 2000 it claimed to have recruited more than 19,000 scientists. The institute is so lax about screening names, however, that virtually anyone can sign, including for example Al Caruba, a pesticide-industry PR man and conservative ideologue who runs his own website called the "National Anxiety Center." Caruba has no scientific credentials whatsoever, but in addition to signing the Oregon Petition he has editorialized on his own website against the science of global warming, calling it the "biggest hoax of the decade," a "genocidal" campaign by environmentalists who believe that "humanity must be destroyed to 'Save the Earth.' . . . There is no global warming, but there is a global political agenda, comparable to the failed Soviet Union experiment with Communism, being orchestrated by the United Nations, supported by its many Green NGOs, to impose international treaties of every description that would turn the institution into a global government, superceding the sovereignty of every nation in the world."
When questioned in 1998, OISM's Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, "and of those the greatest number are physicists." This grouping of fields concealed the fact that only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science - such as meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology - and almost none were climate specialists. The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology." Even in 2003, the list was loaded with misspellings, duplications, name and title fragments, and names of non-persons, such as company names. The current web page of the petition itself states "31,478 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs."[15]

 

[flagyl]

dude.

 

[TurdFergeson]

Interesting, how by and large the Earth is a self-regulating mechanism:

Antarctica's ice loss helps offset global warming: study

(AFP) – 2 hours ago

PARIS — Global warming has been blamed for the alarming loss of ice shelves in Antarctica, but a new study says newly-exposed areas of sea are now soaking up some of the carbon gas that causes the problem.

Scientists led by Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said that atmospheric and ocean carbon is being gobbled up by microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton, which float near the surface.

After absorbing the carbon through the natural process of photosynthesis, the phytoplankton are eaten, or otherwise die and sink to the ocean floor.

The phenomenon, known as a carbon sink, has been spotted in areas of open water exposed by the recent, rapid melting of several ice shelves -- vast floating plaques of ice attached to the shore of the Antarctic peninsula.

Over the last 50 years, around 24,000 square kilometres (9,200 square miles) of new open water have been created this way, and swathes of it are now colonised by phytoplankton, Peck's team reports in a specialist journal, Global Change Biology.

Their estimate, based on images of green algal blooms, is that the phytoplankton absorbs 3.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 12.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.

To put it in perspective, this is equivalent to the CO2-storing capacity of between 6,000 and 17,000 hectares (15,000 and 42,500 acres) of tropical rainforest, according to the paper.

The tally is minute compared to the quantities of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation, which amounted to 8.7 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007.

But, said Peck, "it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature's ability to thrive in the face of adversity.

"We need to factor this natural carbon absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change," he said in a BAS press release.

"So far, we don't know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica's coast, but it's something we'll be keeping an eye on."

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts up towards South America -- has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth.

In the past 50 years, temperatures there have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average.

Ice shelves are ledges of thick ice that float on the sea and are attached to the land. They are formed when ice is exuded from glaciers on the land.

In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves.

The process is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast.

It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards.

The Antarctic ice shelves do not add to sea levels when they melt. Like the Arctic ice cap, they float on the sea and thus displace their own volume.

Ice that runs from land into the sea does add, though, to the ocean's volume, which is why some scientists are concerned for the future of the massive icesheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ioKN-6tqKqccbLbVgmtkNuDRgo7w

 

[trysail]

McIntyre and Lindzen appear on Finnish TV documentary
[ N.B., This transcript does not include the illustrations ]

Climate catastrophe cancelled
Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.



Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen. The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil. The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.


(Picture: The global warming hockey stick graph. Music: Electric organ sounds from an ice-hockey game)

VO: This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history. The stick’s handle stretches for almost a thousand years, creating an impression of a steady climate, and its’ rising blade in the late 1900’s is proof of sudden, strong warming, which is caused by man.

According to the older view, climate has naturally varied considerably over the past millennium, and in the middle ages it was clearly warmer than today. But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared. The hockey stick was promoted to honorary status in the IPCC’s third assessment report’s cover. It became the logo of catastrophic climate change. The stick was used to back up the claim that, 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.

Steve McIntyre: “At the time I was doing mining exploration business and I just wondered, in the most casual possible way, how they knew that. So that led me start looking at the data and six years later, I’m still doing it”.

VO: The Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre had doubts about the scientific strength of the hockey stick graph, and he decided to unravel the numbers behind it, with the diligence of an auditor. The father of the hockey stick, professor Michael Mann resisted McIntyre’s efforts to get hold of his research data, and it wasn't until 2003 that McIntyre succeeded in getting access to the data.

McIntyre: “It turned out that he had modified a principal components method incorrectly and the modified method produced hockey stick-shaped graphs ninety-nine percent of the time. It also emphasized a class of proxies, strip-bark bristlecone pines that previous authors had said were not actually a temperature proxy”.

VO: Temperature records measured by thermometers are at most 150 years long. Earlier histories have to be reconstructed with so-called proxies, or surrogate thermometers. Past climates are deduced for example from tree rings and lake sediments or varves. The shape of the hockey stick was to a large extent caused by tree rings from a few North American bristlecone pines. McIntyre succeeded in deconstructing the stick. The United States National Academy of Sciences set up a committee to investigate his findings. The committee found that, McIntyre had been right to question the temperature reconstruction and announced that, bristlecone pines should no more be used as proof of climate change.

Steve McIntyre, an outsider in climate science, had succeeded in breaking Mann’s hockey stick, the icon of the climate change movement. But the story was not over. A whole factory started to produce new sticks to replace the broken one.

McIntyre: “There was another class of study, which used a series of tree rings from a scientist called Keith Briffa, from Northern Russia, from a site called Yamal, and this had an even bigger hockey stick-shape than the Michael Mann - hockey stick and this one - has been used in multiple studies as well and so, over the past few years I’ve been trying to get information about how this particular series was constructed”.

VO: Keith Briffa is one of the big names in climate research. He is a professor in the IPCC’s scientific stronghold in Britain, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He is also a lead author of the past climate chapters of the IPCC's assessment reports. McIntyre had to fight for three years to get Briffa’s Yamal data under his microscope. But a lot happened before that.

The well-known medieval warmth was disturbing to the scientists close to the IPCC, the so-called hockey team. In the mid 1990’s the American geologist David Deming received an astonishing e-mail, in which one prominent climate researcher announced to his colleagues: Actor’s voice: “We have to get rid of the medieval warm period.”

(Picture of Deming’s written statement from the Senate Environmental committee website)
VO: Deming testified about the e-mail at hearings in the United States congress.

Soon after this e-mail, Keith Briffa published a study, where the millennial temperature history looked like this: (the upper curve appears on screen)



VO: The Briffa study was based on a very limited number of tree ring samples from the so-called Polar Urals region in Siberia. With the help of just three short tree ring series he claimed that the year 1032 in the middle of the balmy middle ages, had been the coldest in the millennium. And the modern period appeared to be very warm. A real hockey stick. A couple of years later, Briffa’s colleague returned to Siberia to drill new tree ring samples. When they were added to Briffa’s original data, the curve looked surprisingly like this: (lower curve appears on screen, the curves merge). The hockey stick had disappeared, and the medieval warm period had been reinstated as warmer than the present.

McIntyre: “Unfortunately, this updated Polar Urals result was never published and Briffa, in his works since 2000, has made no � - reference to this updated study”.

VO: The updated Polar Urals series was forgotten. Instead, Briffa replaced his original weak Polar Urals data in 2000 with new tree ring series drilled from the Yamal peninsula hundreds of kilometers away. With this data, the climate reconstruction looks like this: (lower curve appears).



VO: The blade of the hockey stick rises at the end of the millennium stronger than ever and the medieval warm period is clearly shadowed by it, if not made to vanish completely. Yamal data became the most important temperature proxy for all later hockey sticks, and it was used in at least seven temperature reconstruction studies.

But McIntyre knew something about the construction of hockey sticks, and he could not believe in the Yamal curve. The contradiction to established paleoclimatic knowledge was simply too big.

McIntyre: “And the question is just, why was the Polar Urals update not reported? And if the Yamal series was going to be used rather than Polar Urals, that should have been clearly explained to readers. The criteria for preferring one rather than the other should have been also clearly explained”.

VO: Finnish Lapland lies at the same latitudes as Yamal, and there are plenty of Finnish studies on past climates based on tree rings. These studies are considered to be among the best in the world, for their sample quality as well as methodologically. What kinds of hockey sticks have been found in them?

Kari Mielikainen, professor of forest research (Metla, Finland): “We have this long series going back over 7,000 years, and there’s no hockey stick there.”

VO: Briffa’s Yamal hockey stick was published in the prestigious journal Science. McIntyre asked for a copy of the raw data from Yamal.

McIntyre: “Briffa refused. The editors of Science refused to require Briffa to provide the measurement data.”

VO: It took McIntyre three years to get hold of the data, although one of the most important rules in science is that, raw data should be made available to anybody who is interested in checking and replicating a study.

Finally Briffa made a “mistake”. He published yet another article based on the Yamal data in a journal of the British Royal Society. The prestigious scientific society held on to the principle of data transparency and forced Briffa to make his raw data public. In September this year, the Canadian climate auditor had his forebodings confirmed.

McIntyre: “So after, after sort of, three years of frustration and trying to examine the data that Briffa had used and probably four years of people saying that this data supported the Michael Mann -work on other grounds, it was really quite frustrating to find that it was built up on ten trees that had been not randomly selected”.

VO: So the Yamal data included only ten living trees from the 1990’s, and the rapid growth of these individuals caused the steep rise of the hockey stick blade. In Finnish dendrological studies, hardly anything would be said based on just ten trees. What’s demanded is at least 50 trees for each year, and several other quality criteria as well. How have these criteria been observed in the Yamal data?

Kari Mielikainen (professor of forest research, Finnish Forest Research Institute Metla): “Rather weakly it seems. It looks like there are problems with both cohort structure and also the regional distribution (of the sample).”

VO: McIntyre conducted a simple statistical exercise. He replaced the 10-tree Yamal sample by a larger 34-tree sample collected from the same area. (In this figure) the added material is depicted with the black curve, and the combination of both data sets as a green curve.



VO: The hockey stick blade disappears, or actually turns downwards. And the medieval period is again warmer than the present.

McIntyre: I think that the preferential selection of Yamal, rather than Polar Urals, biases the result that's presented to the public.

VO: All good proxy-based climatic reconstructions should compare the results with adjacently located measurements from thermometers. When this is done in the Yamal area, it emerges that none of the near-by weather stations have recorded warming that would explain the hockey stick graph. In other words, if those ten trees have grown abnormally fast in the 1990’s it is due to something else than heat.

Mielikainen: “If you choose one convenient series just to prove a point, be it a hockey stick or anything, you are definitely on a wrong track.”

VO: Problems with tree ring studies will be addressed next summer in an international scientific congress chaired by Mielikainen in Rovaniemi (Finnish Lapland).

VO: The author of the Yamal reconstruction, Keith Briffa, has disputed the criticism aimed at his study, but it still draws heated debate. Briffa’s employer, the IPCC-affiliated climate research unit CRU maintains a global database of temperature measurements from weather stations. This database is central to the conclusion that global temperatures have risen to a worrying extent during the past 40 years. The CRU has combined thermometer readings into a global average with a method which it refuses to disclose, but which allegedly has brought added value to the raw data. McIntyre has requested the data from CRU director Phil Jones, but he has been turned down, and others as well.

McIntyre: “An Australian named Warwick Hughes had asked for the data and Warwick Hughes had published some articles that had been critical of how the temperature histories had been prepared, and Jones said “Why should I send - we have twenty-five years invested in this, why should I send the data to you when your only objective is to find anything wrong with it?”, which is a very unscientific statement.”

VO: The CRU database is the most important scientific justification for the demands that the most ambitious treaty in mankind’s history should be finalized in Copenhagen in December. In spite of this, there is no way to replicate it's validity.

Recently the CRU director Phil Jones has announced that the original measurement data does not exist anymore because of data storage difficulties.

 

[Applesaround]

I listened to 'Quirks and Quarks' on the CBC yesterday and they had a scientist on about Mt. Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro has become the "poster-child" for human-induced global warming, and as I sip my coffee I thought I might touch on it. I hope no-one minds.

The Kilimanjaro glacier (i.e. Furtwangler Glacier) has shrunk 9.8 sq. km since 1880. One of the interesting coincidences of global warming trends is that the industrial age ca. 1850 occurs around the same time as the end of the Little Ice Age (a solar minima). However, it seems very unlikely that the human emissions took 30 years to affect climate, especially since the response of glaciers to climate change is lagged (i.e. it doesn't occur overnight).

So if it isn't human-induced climate change what caused it? Well Kilimanjaro is within 3 degrees of the equator, and it's a stratovolcano, now dormant. But what's in question here is what causes glaciers to retreat and advance--three factors: aridity, solar radiation, and temperature. Temperatures at high altitudes tend to be less dramatic, and are often relatively stable; that`s why tree ring data is best acquired from high altitude trees. In other words, temperature is not as large a factor as sublimation and solar radiation. At Kilimanjaro, 2m high needle-like spires act like compasses pointing to the sun due to sublimation driven by aridity and solar energy.

Drier air causes sublimation. Dry air means less precipitation and glaciers wax and wane based on the precipitation/sublimation ratio (Kaser, G., Hardy, D.R., Molg, T., Bradley, R.S. and Hyera, T.M. 2004. Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology 24: 329-339. ).


So what caused the drier air? Well maybe not CO2, but possibly still anthropogenic forces--some speculate that denuding of forest around the mountain has cause drier air, but this is just speculation. It's counterintuitive to imagine how increased temperatures can make an area less humid, unless the evapotranspiration process is retarded--plants are essential in regulating humidity (hence the cold nights in deserts--no vapour=no latent heat). THere are well documented examples of how human land use can alter regional humidity by changing vegetation, farming and water transfer (e.g. Lake Chad), which can cause chronic drought (e.g. Australia) and subsequently lead to things like out of control brush fires (e.g. Australia). Note that this is NOT CO2 induced geomorphological response but actual human geomorphological change, the same way a dam alters it`s ecosystem. Either way, the key gas in question here is H2O(v) not CO2. Environmentalists might be better served trying to reclaim the vegetation around Kilimanjaro--an irony that plagues such groups in my opinion: they seek a singular culprit (e.g CO2) for all the Earth`s problems and ignore the very complexity they seem to cling to as the primary aesthetic of Nature. Oops...i didn`t mean to get political there, but I`ll leave it in

Enjoy your day!

 

[Applesaround]

Interesting, how by and large the Earth is a self-regulating mechanism:

Antarctica's ice loss helps offset global warming: study

(AFP) – 2 hours ago

PARIS — Global warming has been blamed for the alarming loss of ice shelves in Antarctica, but a new study says newly-exposed areas of sea are now soaking up some of the carbon gas that causes the problem.

Scientists led by Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said that atmospheric and ocean carbon is being gobbled up by microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton, which float near the surface.

After absorbing the carbon through the natural process of photosynthesis, the phytoplankton are eaten, or otherwise die and sink to the ocean floor.

The phenomenon, known as a carbon sink, has been spotted in areas of open water exposed by the recent, rapid melting of several ice shelves -- vast floating plaques of ice attached to the shore of the Antarctic peninsula.

Over the last 50 years, around 24,000 square kilometres (9,200 square miles) of new open water have been created this way, and swathes of it are now colonised by phytoplankton, Peck's team reports in a specialist journal, Global Change Biology.

Their estimate, based on images of green algal blooms, is that the phytoplankton absorbs 3.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 12.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.

To put it in perspective, this is equivalent to the CO2-storing capacity of between 6,000 and 17,000 hectares (15,000 and 42,500 acres) of tropical rainforest, according to the paper.

The tally is minute compared to the quantities of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation, which amounted to 8.7 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007.

But, said Peck, "it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature's ability to thrive in the face of adversity.

"We need to factor this natural carbon absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change," he said in a BAS press release.

"So far, we don't know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica's coast, but it's something we'll be keeping an eye on."

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts up towards South America -- has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth.

In the past 50 years, temperatures there have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average.

Ice shelves are ledges of thick ice that float on the sea and are attached to the land. They are formed when ice is exuded from glaciers on the land.

In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves.

The process is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast.

It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards.

The Antarctic ice shelves do not add to sea levels when they melt. Like the Arctic ice cap, they float on the sea and thus displace their own volume.

Ice that runs from land into the sea does add, though, to the ocean's volume, which is why some scientists are concerned for the future of the massive icesheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ioKN-6tqKqccbLbVgmtkNuDRgo7w

The East Antarctic Ice sheet has grown by 5 percent since the early 90`s, and it is 4 times larger than the West Antarctic Ice sheet. The Antarctic Ice sheet also occupies a basin, which itself responds isostatically to such crustal shifts due to plume activity. Remote sensing and satellite measurements indicate that the Antarctic Ice sheet has shown elevation change by several meters (positive). This is attributed to thickening or uplift: either will cause destabilization of the ice sheets--e.g. calving, ice shelf separation. Calving is normal--it`s where iceburgs come from.

Regardless--it speaks to the phenomenon of the carbon sink which is far greater in water itself rather than algae.

I notice no mention is made of iron. Iron is a nutrient for photosynthetic algae. Sediments from Antarctica cause algal blooms down to 3km depth (Pollard et al. 2009: Southern Ocean deep-water carbon export enhanced by natural iron fertilisation. Nature 457: 577-581.)

The significance is that iron sources are terrigenous (i.e. from land), coming from dust, soils, etc. The more terrigenous sediment that enters the ocean the increase in algal-blooms. (deBaar et al. 1999: Importance of iron for plankton blooms and CO2 drawdown in the southern ocean. Nature 373: 412-415). Increased human activity causes greater contribution of dusts. More importantly, if such a drawdown becomes significant, arid palaeoclimates might result in runaway ice ages--UNLESS CO2 isn`t a factor in climate change.


http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5730/1898

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/revealed-antarctic-ice-growing/story-e6frg6no-1225700046908

 

[busybody..]

Opps

Someone get re-write

Bad news for global warming fanatics: Greenland’s icecap is getting thicker
November 12, 2009, 1:00 am · 2 comments



How could this be? How is it possible? We’re ruined.

Based on Al Gore’s assurances that the Greenland icecap was melting and that sea levels were rising, we invested all our spare cash in future beachfront property in South Dakota.

The Australian Broadcasting Company reports the story of our personal economic doom and the current shoreline’s salvation:

Greenland’s icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists.

A team led by Professor Ola Johannessen, at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, report their findings online ahead of print publication in the journal Science.

The 3,000-metre thick Greenland icecap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 metres. And a runaway thaw might slow the Gulf Stream that keeps the North Atlantic region warm.

Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning. But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes, say Johannessen and team.

 

[Ham Murabi]

Anything that makes us move toward cleaner forms of energy than fossil fuels is a good thing, and will be fought against tooth and nail by those who provide the fuels we use today.

They don't want cap and trade, fine. Drop a hard cap on industry and force those who can't adapt to the lower emissions levels to upgrade immediately or close. Does that sound like a viable alternative to anyone?

Cap and Trade of emissions moves us toward cleaner sources of energy without dropping the hammer on those who can't comply immediately.

And if that energy costs consumers twice as much or more, well, I guess the hammer can drop on them too. It'll be worth it, because it's cleaner energy.

 

[phrodeau]

And if that energy costs consumers twice as much or more, well, I guess the hammer can drop on them too. It'll be worth it, because it's cleaner energy.

You mean another hammer? Like the skyrocketing costs of fossil fuels?

 

[castagnus]

I listened to 'Quirks and Quarks' on the CBC yesterday and they had a scientist on about Mt. Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro has become the "poster-child" for human-induced global warming, and as I sip my coffee I thought I might touch on it. I hope no-one minds.

The Kilimanjaro glacier (i.e. Furtwangler Glacier) has shrunk 9.8 sq. km since 1880. One of the interesting coincidences of global warming trends is that the industrial age ca. 1850 occurs around the same time as the end of the Little Ice Age (a solar minima). However, it seems very unlikely that the human emissions took 30 years to affect climate, especially since the response of glaciers to climate change is lagged (i.e. it doesn't occur overnight).

So if it isn't human-induced climate change what caused it? Well Kilimanjaro is within 3 degrees of the equator, and it's a stratovolcano, now dormant. But what's in question here is what causes glaciers to retreat and advance--three factors: aridity, solar radiation, and temperature. Temperatures at high altitudes tend to be less dramatic, and are often relatively stable; that`s why tree ring data is best acquired from high altitude trees. In other words, temperature is not as large a factor as sublimation and solar radiation. At Kilimanjaro, 2m high needle-like spires act like compasses pointing to the sun due to sublimation driven by aridity and solar energy.



Enjoy your day!

What a splendid and lucid discourse !

It is so refreshing, but unfortunatewly rare, to see someone using original thinking on the subject of AGW. Its scientific foundations are suspect, so much so that it should really be considered a religion. Here in the USA we have a doctrine of separation of state and religion and I have argued that the government should stay out of AGW matters and its "mitigation" on this basis.

 

[Slowlane]

I listened to 'Quirks and Quarks' on the CBC yesterday and they had a scientist on about Mt. Kilimanjaro. Kilimanjaro has become the "poster-child" for human-induced global warming, and as I sip my coffee I thought I might touch on it. I hope no-one minds.

The Kilimanjaro glacier (i.e. Furtwangler Glacier) has shrunk 9.8 sq. km since 1880. One of the interesting coincidences of global warming trends is that the industrial age ca. 1850 occurs around the same time as the end of the Little Ice Age (a solar minima). However, it seems very unlikely that the human emissions took 30 years to affect climate, especially since the response of glaciers to climate change is lagged (i.e. it doesn't occur overnight).

So if it isn't human-induced climate change what caused it? Well Kilimanjaro is within 3 degrees of the equator, and it's a stratovolcano, now dormant. But what's in question here is what causes glaciers to retreat and advance--three factors: aridity, solar radiation, and temperature. Temperatures at high altitudes tend to be less dramatic, and are often relatively stable; that`s why tree ring data is best acquired from high altitude trees. In other words, temperature is not as large a factor as sublimation and solar radiation. At Kilimanjaro, 2m high needle-like spires act like compasses pointing to the sun due to sublimation driven by aridity and solar energy.

Drier air causes sublimation. Dry air means less precipitation and glaciers wax and wane based on the precipitation/sublimation ratio (Kaser, G., Hardy, D.R., Molg, T., Bradley, R.S. and Hyera, T.M. 2004. Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology 24: 329-339. ).


So what caused the drier air? Well maybe not CO2, but possibly still anthropogenic forces--some speculate that denuding of forest around the mountain has cause drier air, but this is just speculation. It's counterintuitive to imagine how increased temperatures can make an area less humid, unless the evapotranspiration process is retarded--plants are essential in regulating humidity (hence the cold nights in deserts--no vapour=no latent heat). THere are well documented examples of how human land use can alter regional humidity by changing vegetation, farming and water transfer (e.g. Lake Chad), which can cause chronic drought (e.g. Australia) and subsequently lead to things like out of control brush fires (e.g. Australia). Note that this is NOT CO2 induced geomorphological response but actual human geomorphological change, the same way a dam alters it`s ecosystem. Either way, the key gas in question here is H2O(v) not CO2. Environmentalists might be better served trying to reclaim the vegetation around Kilimanjaro--an irony that plagues such groups in my opinion: they seek a singular culprit (e.g CO2) for all the Earth`s problems and ignore the very complexity they seem to cling to as the primary aesthetic of Nature. Oops...i didn`t mean to get political there, but I`ll leave it in

Enjoy your day!

This subject was on PBS a few months ago. Several scientists climbed to the top to try to determine why the ice is melting. Several theories were tossed around including "it's a volcano, volcanic activity could be increasing". The consensus seemed to be that all there theories were just guesses and they really have no idea why the ice is melting.

In fairness, they were much more interested in the affect the melting was having on vegetation at lower elevations than the actual ice cap.

 

[Slowlane]

You mean another hammer? Like the skyrocketing costs of fossil fuels?

Yes, another hammer. Costs of fossil fuels are already fueling the drive for other energy sources, and the public is demanding cleaner energy. For now, the government can do little else but muddy the water and make companies invest money in cap and trade that could be much better used in other places - such as research.

 

[trysail]

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=national&image=timeseries02&byear=2009&bmonth=10&year=2009&month=10&ext=gif&id=110-00