Ephemera

[trysail]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrod...can-we-really-call-climate-science-a-science/


Can We Really Call Climate Science A Science?
by Paul Roderick Gregory

“Soviet Politburo September 8, 1927

“Trotsky: Let us present our platform to the party congress. What are you afraid of?

Stalin: Comrade Trotsky demands equality between the Central Committee and his opposition group. In whose name do you speak so insolently?

Trotsky ally: Why are you trying to hide our platform? What does this say about your courage?

Stalin: We are not prepared to turn the party into a discussion club.”



George Orwell, Animal Farm, Chapter 7

“They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”




E-mails from Phil Jones (East Anglia University)

July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

March 11, 2003
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”​

There is no disagreement that the earth’s temperature has always changed over time. There are periods of warming and cooling. It appears we are in a period of warming. The debate between “warmists” and “skeptics” is about whether human Co2 emissions are the cause of warming, whether the relatively small effects of these emissions will compound into larger changes, and, if so, whether, the benefits of remediation outweigh the costs. By “warmists,” I mean Global Warming Alarmists who believe that warming is caused by humans and will have disastrous consequences for humankind if unchecked by remediation, no matter how costly.

The “warmist” consensus view of “climate science” is represented at a popular level by advocates like Al Gore and at the scientific and technical level by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as supported by researchers at East Anglia (Phil Jones) and Penn State (Michael Mann). This panoply of people and organizations is the equivalent of the Central Committee in my Stalin dialog above. “Skeptics” (the equivalent of Trotsky above) are individual scientists and advocates who stake out positions at odds with the IPCC-Central Committee orthodoxy. They are the ones who “dare to speak when fierce growling dogs roam everywhere.”


Three recent events have brought the controversy over climate science back into the news and onto my radar screen:

First, Ivar Giaever, the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, resigned from the American Physical Society over his disagreement with its statement that “the evidence (on warming alarmism) is incontrovertible.” Instead, he writes that the evidence suggests that “the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

Second, the editor of Remote Sensing resigned and disassociated himself from a skeptical paper co-authored by University of Alabama Climate Scientist Roy Spencer after an avalanche of criticism by “warmists.” His resignation brings to mind Phil Jones’ threat to “get rid of troublesome editors” (cited above).

Third, the New York Times and other major media are ridiculing Texas Governor Rick Perry for saying that global warming is “not proven.” Their message: Anyone who does not sign on to global warming alarmism is an ignorant hayseed and clearly not presidential material.

What lessons do I, as an economist, draw from these three events?

First: The Giaever story starkly disputes warmist claims of “inconvertible evidence.” Despite the press’s notable silence on such matters, there are a large number of prominent scientists with solid scholarly credentials who disagree with the IPCC-Central Committee. Those who claim “proven science” and “consensus” conveniently ignore such scientists.

With his public resignation, Nobel Laureate Giaever joins a long list of distinguished “skeptics,” which includes Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus and head of The Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, William Happer, physicist, Princeton University, Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada, and Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia (just to name a few from a long list).

Second: As someone with forty years experience with peer reviewed journals. I can testify that the Remote Sensing editor’s resignation and public discreditation of Spencer’s skeptical paper would be considered bizarre and unprofessional behavior in any other scholarly discipline.

In all fields of scientific inquiry, journal editors base their publication decisions on reports of referees, who are supposed to be experts in the area. Presumably, in the case of the Spencer paper, referees supported its publication. Even if there had been a negative report, good editors often publish controversial papers to open a scholarly dialog. (Can anyone think of a topic that is more controversial and more in need of open scholarly dialog than global warming?). In the case of controversial papers, the editor gives credible critics space to air their objections, and the author is accorded the opportunity to respond.

In this odd case, the editor did not follow the normal procedure of publishing critical comments by specialists who disagree with the paper. He chose instead to disavow and discredit the paper himself, despite the fact that he is not an expert on the subject. Nor did the editor give Spencer an opportunity to respond to his personal disavowal. Instead, rebuttals of the Spencer paper are scheduled to be published in another journal friendly to the warmist position. Spencer will not be given an opportunity to respond in that journal. (Spencer is like the muzzled Trotsky in my quote above. Stalin will decide what others are allowed to hear).

In my field of economics, such unprofessional behavior would destroy the editor’s professional reputation and make him or her a laughing stock. Not in climate science apparently. We can see Jones’ threat to “redefine peer review” in action. Like Stalin, the climate establishment cannot allow climate science to be turned into a “discussion club.”

Third: The media is tarring and feathering Rick Perry, we now see, for agreeing with Nobel laureate Giaever and a host of other prominent scientists. I guess if Perry is a know-nothing Texas hick (or worse, a pawn of Big Oil) so is every other scientist who dares to disagree with the IPCC Central Committee. Such intimidation chillingly makes politicians, public figures, and scientists fearful of deviating one inch from orthodoxy. They want to avoid Orwell’s “watching their comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.” How many are willing to shoulder that burden?

I do not know whether the warmists or skeptics are right. I do know that the modeling of the climate is among the most complex of scientific tasks. In this regard, climate science and economics have much in common. We both must try to understand complicated systems with intricate feedbacks and uncertain causality. As recent experience shows, we economists have yet to find “incontrovertible truth.” We will never reach a consensus. Nor should we. Why should we expect climate science, unlike other disciplines, to reach a consensus when we do not expect this of other fields of scientific inquiry.

About a year ago, I attended a debate between a noted warmist and skeptic. They agreed only on one thing: Climate science is in its infancy. We are just beginning to understand the climate. When we look back, we will understand how little we really understood and how wrong our first findings were. This is the way science is created.

False claims of consensus and inconvertible truth reveal a political or ideological agenda wrapped in the guise of science. The incontrovertible bad behavior of the warmists has led skeptics to suspect base motives, and who could blame them?



http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrod...can-we-really-call-climate-science-a-science/

 

[trysail]

A brilliant summation by James Delingpole of the raison d'etre for skepticism of the hypothesis of CAGW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=866yHuh1RYM



Judith Curry's slides for her presentation at M.I.T.:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/uncertainty-monster-mit1.pdf

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/ha...crut3vgl/from:2002/to:2010/trend/offset:-0.13

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2010/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2010/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2010/trend/offset:0.13/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2010/trend/offset:-0.13​

http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/29/acs-webinar-on-climate-change-part-ii/
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/uncertainty-monster-acs.ppt
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/acs-2011-lindzen.pdf
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mckitrick_acs_august.ppt
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/carter-acs.ppt




In 1,250 words ? Want to look at GISS ModelE ? Want to explain the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Roman Warm Period ? Principal components analysis ? Bristlecone pine temperature proxies ? http://www.Surfacestations.org ? The selection of Yamal trees by Keith Briffa ? NASA's GISS historic temperature data for Bartow, Florida ? NASA's GISS historic temperature data for Amundsen-Scot, Antarctica ? NASA's GISS historic temperature data for Markovo, Siberia, Russia ? How about the MONTHLY MEAN CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE (°C) ( the world's oldest continuous instrumental temperature record ) ? Everytime I put links to data on NPR, the post is deleted by the censors.

In 1,250 words shall we discuss atmospheric CO2 levels well in excess of 2,000 ppm in the Cretaceous period ? Where is the missing heat? The ARGOS buoy system can't seem to find it. Shall I post a link to Dr. Curry's presentation slides at MIT only to have the censors delete the entire post? Shall I post Dr. Ivar Giaever's resignation from the APS ? Shall I post Dr. Freeman Dyson's comments ? Dr. Lindzen's slides ?

Scientific evidence for the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the main cause of global warming needs to be:
1. Empirical - That which we can see, hear, record, or write down. A measurement of some sort. An observation of the natural world.
2. Related to CAUSE and EFFECT. That means evidence that shows that our extra carbon caused most of the recent warming. Not just evidence that the world has got warmer (which could be due to some other reason).
3. Evidence that shows carbon has a major role, that doubling the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause, say, 2 – 10 degrees of warming. If doubling carbon only causes 0.5 degrees of warming, who cares?

It doesn’t matter how many associations, unions, or Nobel-Prize-winning Saints believe in a theory. If they claim there is evidence, by thousands of scientists in peer reviewed papers, then it should easy for them to provide it. The problem is, all those thousands of papers are either not empirical, not related to the cause of the warming, or do not show carbon has a major role.

When we talk about the “Major Role”, we’re talking about Feedbacks. Nobody who is anybody believes doubling carbon on it’s own will warm us by much more than one degree C. The Pachuri-Gore-Hansen Team ($$) believe this warming will then cause changes in other factors (like humidity) which will then cause much more warming.

The history of humanity is full of people who were absolutely dead-set sure, and completely wrong. Climate models are not evidence: they are imperfect “simulations” of the climate, not the climate itself. Our global atmosphere is a messy algorithm, with oceans, clouds, rain, water vapor, solar wind, magnetic fields, forests, ice-cover, glaciers, volcanoes, heat from below, and moving dust clouds of soot. It’s just not possible to simulate the real atmosphere without making assumptions, estimates or decisions on which parts to simplify or omit. Since all those things rely on the opinions of the modelers, no matter how well intentioned or educated they are, a model is a glorified opinion.
-Joanne Nova
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/is-there-any-evidence/

______________

No groundwater pollution or disruption of underground sources of drinking water has been attributed to hydraulic fracturing of deep gas formations...
--Joseph J. Lee,
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
1 June 2009

______________

Where’s the actual physical (and chemical) science?
-Judith Curry, Ph.D.

False Equivalence:
If you need to FOIA somebody to get his raw data and statistical methodology, you're dealing with a snake-oil salesman, not a scientist.

It's just amazing to see what a normal y-axis shows:

http://butnowyouknow.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/globa-mean-temp.gif?w=469&h=427​

http://butnowyouknow.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/globa-mean-temp.gif?w=469&h=427

...Here is again the IPCC chart of predictions for 2100. As you see, they range from a low of 1.5 degrees to a high of 6 degrees. That is a 400% variation. It's fine in academic research. Now let's transfer this to the real world.

In the real world, a 400% uncertainty is so great that nobody acts on it. Ever.

-Michael Crichton, M.D.
THE CASE FOR SKEPTICISM ON GLOBAL WARMING
January 25, 2005
National Press Club, Washington DC

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/crichton_3.pdf p.39.

It is the overconfidence of “conventional” climate scientists that I always find so astonishing. It doesn’t take long looking at climate to work out that it’s really complicated, and probably not that well understood.

-Jonathan Jones, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Brasenose College
Oxford University

http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-scientists/#comment-128550

​

Brasenose

_______________________

http://judithcurry.com/2011/05/28/uncertainty-risk-and-inaction/


The Precautionary Principle in the absence of quantified risks is equivalent to Pascal’s Wager. It means that the decision is determined entirely by the scariness of the hypotheses being offered rather than the strength of the evidence. Usually a false dilemma is being offered – two scenarios, one scary, one not, when there are many more scenarios possible (and more likely). A better approach to uncertain risks is to develop more flexible resources ready to jump the right way when more information becomes available. Be an adaptable generalist. Creating economic prosperity for the poor would therefore seem to be the priority, as it is applicable to many different problems and scenarios, rather than only one.

The analogy is fairly straightforward. The Precautionary Principle as commonly applied to climate change says that even if you’re not fully convinced that it will definitely happen, if you accept that it might happen, the costs are so high (e.g. Ted Turner’s cannibal scenario) that it’s still the only rational choice to act to prevent it. Pascal’s Wager applied to the Christian afterlife mythology says that even if you’re not fully convinced that it will definitely happen, the costs (eternal torment versus eternal bliss) are so high that the only rational choice is to believe. The distinctive features of the argument are that it offers only two alternatives with the putative costs embedded the hypothesis, and the conclusion arises from the hypothesised costs alone, not the evidence.



http://judithcurry.com/2011/05/28/uncertainty-risk-and-inaction/

________________

It’s a bogus law of science. … if you were to spend, as Obama is planning to, $3.4 billion on carbon sequestration, to pump carbon underground and store it underground, that’s $3.4 billion which could be used to provide 46 million people with operations to cure their vision,… 46 million people who could be cured of blindness, 100 million could be given clean water and you’re choosing to say: “well we better stuff that carbon underground and let the 46 million go blind”. What do you say to the mother in Tanzania who loses three kids to dysentery because they haven’t got clean water? You say “I’m sorry about your kids, it was worth it though because we’ve changed world temperatures by 0.00001 degree in over 50 years.”
-Joanne Nova


http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/abc-doco-uncut-evans-nova-minchin-and-rose-the-full-unedited-video/

_____________

Turning Uncertainty into Certainty – Reinventing the Precautionary Principle
by Ben Pile

...the application of the precautionary principle passes weak theoretical risk off as certainty; it turns possibility into story lines, about which ‘something must be done’...


http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/06/reinventing-precaution.html

_____________

...Scientists who become advocates, or allow themselves to become adjuncts to an advocacy campaign, damage science and policy-making alike. They end up being neither effective nor honest. One of the poignant revelations of the new emails is that some of the scientists seem to grasp this. Tommy Wils, a British climate researcher at the University of Swansea, wrote in a 2007 note to a large list of recipients: “Politicians like Al Gore are abusing the fear of global warming to get into power (while having a huge carbon footprint himself).” About Michael Grubb, a prominent climate campaigner in Britain, Tom Wigley (a prominent figure in U.S. climate research circles) wrote in 2000: “Grubb is good at impressing ignorant people. .  .  . Eileen Claussen [then-head of the Pew Climate Center] thinks he is a jerk. .  .  . Basically he is a ‘greenie’; and he bends his ‘science’ to suit his ideological agenda.” Did any of the leading climate scientists ever say this publicly, or call out environmental activist organizations for their reckless distortions of climate change? Had the climate scientists been more honest about their doubts, and more willing to discipline their allies, they might not be going through the present agony of having their dirty laundry exposed...

It ( cancer ) is, of course, a false analogy but insidiously seductive because of the invocation, manipulation and influence of emotion. When their back is to the wall, desperate polemicists invoke the spectre of catastrophe notwithstanding a total inability to identify a probability. Carrying this to a reductio ad absurdum, no one should ever get on a airplane because of the possibility that the airplane might crash. No one should ever drive an automobile because of the possibility of an accident. Even these examples do not fully convey the absurdity of CAGW analogies of doom because the current state of climatology does not allow even a SWAG estimate of either catastrophic outcomes or the probabilities thereof.

" ...Wrong information is usually worse than no information. If you have no information about the stock market, you may not bet. If you have wrong information about the stock market, you’ll lose a bundle. If you don’t know if a snake shaking its rattle is poisonous, you’ll back off. If you have wrong information about snakes, you’ll get bit... "

The Arctic Is Melting !!! (1922 version)
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf

THE CHANGING ARCTIC.
By GEORGE NICOLAS IVFT
[Under date of October 10 1922 the American consul at Bergen Norway, submitted
the followlng report to the State Department, Washington, D.C. )

The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers who sail the seas about Spitzbergen and the eastern Arctic, all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-
of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface...

Правда doesn't much like Dr. Richard Muller's characterization of MBH98's "Hockey Stick" or where he discusses “hide the decline" and vehemently refers to this as “dishonest," and says “you are not allowed to do this," and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors.

http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI ( Minute 31 )

http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/30/year-in-review-2011/

...As Atte Korhola, Professor of Environmental Change, University of Helsinki, said:

“When later generations learn about climate science, they will classify the beginning of the 21st century as an embarrassing chapter in the history of science...


http://www.scotsman.com/news/cartoo...ll_feel_a_chill_wind_1_2103685?commentspage=0

___________________________

Bob Potter (watches) wrote:
"Fifteen years now— no warming."

[citation needed]
////////////////////////////

I've provided these links many times. For reasons that are beyond comprehension, NPR moderators do not like these links. I'll try once again with the expectation that this post will be deleted. The raw data is available from the first link. The second link shows NASA's Satellite-Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere from 1979 through January of 2012.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1997

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/ha...crut3vgl/from:1997/to:2012/trend/offset:-0.13

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2012/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2012/trend/offset:-0.13​

______________________



0.6° C. over the last 120 years? Given the state of the climate/weather data gathering system, the adjustments ( cough, cough ) made by GISS, the urban heat island effect, Chinese ( cough, cough ) weather stations/data, Russian ( cough, cough ) weather stations/data, Sub-Saharan African ( cough, cough ) weather stations/data— among a multitude of other problems, that's a rounding error— at best.

When one stops to consider the reliability of the historic temperature records, one is left to wonder if we are kidding ourselves about our ability to gauge the extent to which current temperatures are or are not higher or lower.

Do you really believe that Russian temperature records from, say, 1917-1950 are reliable?

Do you honestly believe that Chinese temperature records from, say, 1913-1980 are reliable?

Do you seriously believe that Sub-Saharan African temperatures from, say, 1850-2012 are accurate?

I don't.
_______________

Do you actually expect a rational person to believe that people were making accurate daily observations all over Russia during the Revolution or during the Sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad?

Do you really expect anybody with half a brain to believe that accurate daily temperatures were recorded in China during the Revolution or "The Great Leap Forward?"

Please don't tell us you think accurate daily temperature recordings were made in Sub-Saharan Africa during any part of the 19th century and most of the 20th.

Are you kidding?

Do you really believe there were accurate daily temperature observations made in the Bering Sea or the Weddell Sea or in the middle of the Pacific at any time before the advent of satellite observations?

As the expression goes, "I wasn't born yesterday."

All this is even prior to considering the homogenization adjustments or the adjustments made for the UHI effect.
These are measurement error and uncertainties in excess of the putative change in global temperatures.







_____________________

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/23/the-journal-of-climate-the-ipcc/
Peer-review is untrustworthy because people involved in journals (well, at least the Journal of Climate) are also incestuously involved in the IPCC


http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/05/30/that-wobbly-foundation-peer-reviewed-research/
Peer review is not a guarantee of truth


http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/01/14/the-silent-treatment/
Scientists should debate deniers


http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2010/02/26/let-there-be-no-more-scientific-consensuses/
Science is about doubt, not certainty. Saying consensus is trying to disappear dissenters. Consensus is the opinion of a small group of people. Hundreds of eminent scientists dissent.


_____________________



The facts just don't seem to want to fit. Not only is there no correlation— there isn't even anything remotely resembling an association.


http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/rss/from:1996.83/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.83/normalise

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/rss/from:1996.83/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.83/normalise

Richard Feynman: "In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."

The most important component of climate science is careful, long-term observations of climate-related phenomena, from space, from land, and in the oceans. If observations do not support code predictions—like more extreme weather, or rapidly rising global temperatures—Feynman has told us what conclusions to draw about the theory.

-William Happer, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Princeton University

_________________________


I truly cannot figure out whether the CAGW evangelicals (a) genuinely believe in CAGW; genuinely believe they can extrapolate the 1975-1998 TWWP or (b) know full well that it's a flimsy hoax but have such a vested interest in spinning it out.

I tend toward (a). The Dan Gardner book 'Future Babble' is littered with examples of well-meaning highly-educated apparently-rational prophets who scare the bejaysus out of everybody. (And it's a travesty that these people NEVER issue a public apology afterwards. There's nary an 'oops!') Gardner makes a sound case that our precious rationality is a stagecoach bouncing along behind the runaway horses of instinct, gut-feeling, tunnel vision and peer group pressure.

Scientific method has been massively successful over the centuries in sorting sheep from goats, so why is it that climatology has been granted immunity from it???

CAGW proselytizers: tell us your falsifiability criteria for CAGW.

(P.S. TWWP = the teeny weeny warming period which sparked this global warming silliness.)




_______________________________

Association is not causation.

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

The fact that CO2 levels have risen does not explain changes in temperature. It's one thing to speculate; it's another thing to prove cause and effect. That hasn't been done. Warming isn't proof that greenhouse gases caused the warming.

No one has explained the increase in levels of CO2. Isotope analysis suggests the origin of only a small portion ( a third or less ) of the rise but the remainder is completely unexplained. The modelers and the theorists haven't had the intellectual honesty to admit that they do not understand the climate system. Trenberth finally did ( but only sotto voce in one of his now-famous whistleblown East Anglia emails ).

Climatology is too full of members unwilling to confess that the field's understanding of earth's climate is, at best, primitive. From lapse rates to climate sensitivity to the role of the very largest greenhouse gas, unknowns abound.

The paleoclimatological record confirms that much higher levels of CO2 did not produce a planetary hothouse. For the past half million years, temperature changes preceded CO2 levels. If CO2 was a major driver, temperatures would have risen indefinitely in a runaway greenhouse effect. They didn't. Either some unknown factor stops the runaway greenhouse effect or CO2 is a minor force. In either case, CO2 is trivial.

___________________________

...Expanding Chinese power capacity may increase demand for coal imports. There are at least 26 coal-fired plants being built with a combined output of 21,411 megawatts, equal to 6.6 percent of existing capacity...


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...s-china-hoards-record-coal-heaps-freight.html

_______________________


As stated by Dr. Martin Hoerling, a NOAA climatologist, Hansen is ONCE MORE guilty of exaggerating (there's another word that could be used) "the connection between global warming and specific weather extremes."

In fact, the N.Y. Times quotes Dr. Hoerling as stating: "This isn’t a serious science paper. It's mainly about perception, as indicated by the paper’s title. Perception is not a science."


You can't get much more damning than that.

One could be forgiven for wondering about the role of NPR and Christopher Joyce in publicizing and promulgating the kind of climate nonsense that Hansen is producing. One could also be forgiven for wondering why James Hansen isn't deprived of his government sinecure for abusing his position by continuous and blatant advocacy.

In plain English, Hansen should be fired.

NPR and Christopher Joyce should be embarassed and chastened.

Those who countenance or fail to object to this behavior directly contribute to the perversion of science.


See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/s...he-earth-a-study-says.html?_r=4&smid=tw-share


_____________________


Keith Briffa's Yamal tree ( the most important tree in the world ):

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/web-pics/rcs_chronologies1-ii-web.gif


http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/web-pics/synthesis-report-summary-tar-hockey-stick-web.gif




​

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/





__________________

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
by Richard Harris

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all...

...Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans...

________________


Here's the soi-disant "logic" of the opportunists who have exploited the tragedy of Sandy to proselytize for their political science:

The last sixteen (16) years of non-warming has caused extreme weather because that's what non-warming does: it causes extreme weather events from non-warming. Because there hasn't been any warming, there are extreme weather events from non-warming.

There— that makes perfect sense, er..., uh..., um..., doesn't it ??

ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.C.gif
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/

___________________

Jon Hamilton
Richard Harris
Christopher Joyce

2010 Compensation (taken from Schedule J, Form 990 )
Steve Inskeep $372,097
Renee Montaigne $369,552
Melissa Block $299,229
Robert Siegel $375,652
Scott Simon $362,156


Syntax & code: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466253

​

NPRComments
NPRComment
computermodel
computermodels
precautionary

Glossary of acronyms: http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=39951140&postcount=17

NPR and Richard Harris or Christopher Joyce long ago abandoned any claim to be an honest broker of information on the subject of climate or the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming ("CAGW") conjecture.

The Little Ice Age occurred in the 17th century. To the extent historic temperature proxies are accurate ( remember, recordation of temperatures by thermometer did not commence until the mid-19th century), the world began warming after the Little Ice Age. To this day, nobody really knows why.

The world's oldest continuous instrumental record, the Central England Monthly Mean Temperature Record, actually shows very little warming.
MONTHLY MEAN CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE (°C)
( the world's oldest continuous
instrumental temperature record )
ht tp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ha

You should be aware that there are probably serious problems with the accuracy of the historic temperature data. A rise of 0.6° C. over the last 160 years? Given the state of the weather data gathering system, the adjustments ( cough, cough ) made by GISS, the urban heat island effect, Chinese ( cough, cough ) weather data, Russian ( cough, cough ) weather data, Sub-Saharan African ( cough, cough ) weather data, that's a rounding error— at best.

The claim that CO2 is the sole forcing in the climate system is belied by the fact that there has been little-to-no warming over the last sixteen (16) years nothwithstanding increased CO2 levels. Most assuredly, there has been no statistically significant warming.

There are very significant unresolved fundamental issues in climatology not least of which is the question of climate sensitivity. Anyone who tells you that the "science is settled" is not being truthful.

When one stops to consider the reliability of the historic temperature records, one is left to wonder if we are kidding ourselves about our ability to gauge the extent to which current temperatures are or are not higher or lower.

Do you really believe that Russian temperature records from, say, 1917-1950 are reliable?

Do you honestly believe that Chinese temperature records from, say, 1913-1980 are reliable?

Do you really believe that Sub-Saharan African temperatures from, say 1850-2012 are accurate?

I know I don't.


________________


It is a tenet of the CAGW religion; saving the world is a noble cause, therefore:

FACTS DON'T MATTER, TRUTH DOESN'T MATTER, SCIENTIFIC METHOD DOESN'T APPLY

They're on a mission from Gaia.


___________________


Take unsettled science, dubious historical temperature records, add a bunch of zealots and, before you know it, you'll have really dumb policies in place that hamstring the economy and destroy jobs.

ht tp://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/


______________________


Perhaps you might deign to tell us what global warming you're talking about !

References
Temperature datasets are:

RSS – ht tp://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/
UAH – ht tp://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
HADCRUT – ht tp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/time_series/HadCRUT.4.1.1.0.monthly_ns_avg.txt
GISS – ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt



__________________


Affordable, reliable energy is the bedrock of the "advanced civilization" of which you speak. Look to Madagascar or Haiti for the consequences of expensive/unavailable energy. Darwin proved that nature, entrepreneurs and capitalists always endeavor to provide supply where there is demand.

It's more than a bit premature to put much faith in the prognostications of Thermageddon™. The soi-disant "science" of climatology is nascent and evidence of CAGW is ambiguous and equivocal (think water vapor, climate sensitivity, doubtful accuracy of historic temperature records and a whole host of unknowns).

It's a full-time job keeping you lot from bumping off half of H. sapiens by well-intentioned but misguided accident.

___________________


When greenhouse warming comes up they always cite the work or Arrhenius. You may not be aware of this but if you use the Arrhenius method to calculate sensitivity you will get 1.1 degrees for doubling of CO2, not 3 degrees. The IPCC realized from the start that 1.1 degrees will not scare anyone so they decided to use the help of water vapor to jack up the Arrhenius heat. It goes like this. First, carbon dioxide warms the air. That warm air can now hold more water vapor. The greenhouse effect from that extra water vapor will then cause additional warming that gets added to the original warming from carbon dioxide. Their computers tell us that this can triple or raise even more the original warming from carbon dioxide. This is called positive water vapor feedback. And that is where all those dangerous predictions of warming come from. But this is all wrong as Miskolczi's analysis of radiosonde measurements proves. He showed that atmospheric absorption of long-wave radiation was constant for 61 years while at the same time carbon dioxide increased by 21.6 percent. This substantial amount of carbon dioxide did not increase IR absorption by the atmosphere. And it is this absorption of energy by the greenhouse gases that creates greenhouse warming. No absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. And this sets the true sensitivity to doubling of carbon dioxide exactly to zero. It also tells us that water vapor feedback is negative, not positive, as IPCC claims.
-Arno Arrak


http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ws-of-climate-sensitivity/?comments#permid=34

_________________

http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017d405c309a970c-pi


ht tp://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017d405c309a970c-pi

​

_____________________

A Closer Look at Moderating Views of Climate Sensitivity
ht tp://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/a-closer-look-at-moderating-views-of-climate-sensitivity/?smid=tw-share

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2...g-views-of-climate-sensitivity/?smid=tw-share


_____________________

...Until we better understand natural internal climate variability, we simply don’t know how to infer sensitivity to greenhouse gas forcing. The issue of how climate will change over the 21st century is highly uncertain, and we basically don’t know whether or not different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions will be (or not be) the primary driver on timescales of a century or less. Oversimplification and overconfidence on this topic have acted to the detriment of climate science. As scientists, we need to embrace the uncertainty, the complexity and the messy wickedness of the problem. We mislead policy makers with our oversimplifications and overconfidence...

-Judith A. Curry, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 1982
NASA Advisory Council Earth Science Subcommittee
Fellow, American Meteorologic Society
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow, American Geophysical Union


ht tp://judithcurry.com/2013/02/04/sensitivity-about-sensitivity/#more-11057
http://judithcurry.com/2013/02/04/sensitivity-about-sensitivity/#more-11057

http://judithcurry.com/2013/02/04/sensitivity-about-sensitivity/#more-11057

___________________

The Wegman Report
ht tp://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.




http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

_________________


There would appear to be a logic problem here.

We are told:
=that the reason for ‘Super Storm Sandy” was ‘global warming’;
=that the reason for all the snow is extra moisture caused by ‘global warming’;
=that the reason for the heatwaves in Australia is ‘global warming’
=that the droughts in Texas and the mid-west is ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the continual rain on UK was ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the melt of the Arctic ice cap was ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the extra ice extent in the Antarctic is ‘global warming’

And now we are told that the reason there has been NO global warming for 16 years is because of volcanic aerosols?

So as it is now agreed that there has been no significant global warming for 16 years and we now have been given a solid reason for that being the case – the preceding claims of severe weather being caused by warming they now agree didn’t happen must be false.

ht tp://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/10/25/1
ht tp://judithcurry.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-scientists/


http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/10/25/1
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-scientists/


________________

“Global Warming refers to an obscure statistical quantity, globally averaged temperature anomaly, the small residue of far larger and mostly uncorrelated local anomalies. This quantity is highly uncertain, but may be on the order of 0.7C over the past 150 years. This quantity is always varying at this level and there have been periods of both warming and cooling on virtually all time scales. On the time scale of from 1 year to 100 years, there is no need for any externally specified forcing. The climate system is never in equilibrium because, among other things, the ocean transports heat between the surface and the depths. To be sure, however, there are other sources of internal variability as well.

Because the quantity we are speaking of is so small, and the error bars are so large, the quantity is easy to abuse in a variety of ways.”

-Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology


______________

As a retired NASA manned aerospace engineer involved with decision-making where unintended consequences could be fatal, I am embarrassed that our politcal leaders are so ready to make sweeping public policy desisions in the face of so little firm understanding of causes of constant variations in global average temperature. Who or what is experiencing a well-defined problem in terms of temperature deviating in a harmful way form the norm of the last 10,000 years? If we aren’t deviating from the norm, why do so many believe we have a global warming “problem”?

And, given that global average temperature trends have not followed atmospheric CO2 concentration trends of the last 15 years, why do so many believe that CO2 is a “problem”? We need to precisely define the problem in terms of a harmful deviation from a norm (which I don’t see has happened yet), and determine the true root cause of the “problem” before trying decide what to do about the “problem”. CO2 control won’t control global warming due to natural phenomenon that seems to have dominated climate behavior for the last 15 years, and I suspect for the last 150 years as well.
-Harold H. Doiron, Ph.D.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/04/forthcoming-congressional-hearing/#comment-300122

_____________________


ht tp://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/3/13/climategate-30.html
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/13/climategate-3-0-has-occurred-the-password-has-been-released/


"Mr. FOIA" has released the 3rd batch of Climategate emails. The first release was crucially important in stopping the momentum of the <B><I>BAD SCIENCE</I></B> that was about cause the world to adopt bad policies.

Judging from the message accompanying this 3rd release, it appears very likely that "Mr. FOIA" is an inside whistleblower and not a hacker.

If anybody involved in “climate science” deserves a Nobel Prize, it’s <b>Mr. FOIA</b>, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Anthony Watts, Richard Lindzen, Judy Curry, Will Happer, Freeman Dyson, Tim Ball, Hal Lewis, Ivar Giaever, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Joanna Nova, Burt Rutan, Andrew Montford (“Bishop Hill”) and the rest of the skeptics who, at considerable personal expense, reputational and professional risk, took on the ginormous, exceedingly well-funded and bent climate machine.

They are living proof that “Truth Will Out.”

Mr. FOIA:
<blockquote>...That's right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn't plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words...

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science -- on the contrary. I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren't the decisive concern.

It was me or nobody, now or never. Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn't occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.

Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material "might". The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script. We're dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.

Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn's future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can't pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it's not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

It's easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our "clean" technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.

Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. don't have that luxury. The price of "climate protection" with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.

Conversely, a "game-changer" could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.

If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I'd have to try. I couldn't morally afford inaction. Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.

I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations -- trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan ;-).

Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far...

ht tp://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/3/13/climategate-30.html

</blockquote>

_________________

You crack me up. Delight us with a description of what you think a climatologist is. Apparently, you believe a dendrochronologist is qualified to be a climatologist (Michael Mann) but an Oxford don with a doctorate in physics isn't.

Climatologist: One who gazes earnestly into the distant future using a combination of crystal balls, tea leaves and extrapolation of a highly complex and little understood climate system using questionable data derived from a combination of thermometers (for 150-odd years) and temperature proxies such as bristlecone pine tree rings, foraminafera and SWAGs (Sophisticated Wild-Ass Guesses).

ht tp://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/9/the-yamal-deception.html
You really need to read Andrew Montford's book The Hockey Stick Illusion if you're ever going to comprehend how shonky this soi-disant science is.

___________________

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009
‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
—–
Dr. Phil Jones – BBC – 13th February 2010
“I’m a scientist trying to measure temperature. If I registered that the climate has been cooling I’d say so. But it hasn’t until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend.”
—–
Dr. Phil Jones – BBC – 13th February 2010
[Q] B – “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming”

[A] “Yes, but only just”.

_________________


Unbelievable. John Cook's putative study is completely bogus. This is trumped up nonsense authored by an extremely dodgy character— and NPR obligingly rolls over and reads a press release. Nice journalism.

All the result says is that of about 11,000 papers that mentioned global warming, a little under 4,000 mention that anthropogenic CO2 contributes to temperature, but only 143 specify how much. 65 say more than half the observed warming is manmade, and 78 say less than half is manmade.

Never was NPR's function as a regurgitator of propaganda more obvious.

<blockquote>...When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie...</blockquote>
-Anthony Watts
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/to-john-cook-it-isnt-hate-its-pity-pity-for-having-such-a-weak-argument-you-are-forced-to-fabricate-in-epic-proportions/



Another opinion—

Brandon Shollenberger:
ht tp://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/
<blockquote>This study done by John Cook and others... found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

The “consensus” they’re promoting says it is more likely humans have a negligible impact on the planet’s warming than a large one.</blockquote>

_____________________

A summary of the sequence of events for the last 130,000 years ('real' years);

150,000 y.a. - cold, dry full glacial world

around 130,000 y.a. - rapid warming initiates the Eemian interglacial (Stage 5e) [Without human interaction]

130,000-110,000 y.a. - global climates generally warmer and moister than present, but with progressive cooling to temperatures more similar to present.

(except for possible global cold, dry event at 121,000 y.a.)

?110,000 y.a. - a strong cooling marks the end of the Eemian interglacial (Stage 5e).

105,000-95,000 y.a. - climate warms slightly but still cooler and drier than present; strong fluctuations.

95,000 - 93,000 y.a. - another cooler phase similar to that at 110,000 y.a.

93,000 - 75,000 y.a. - a milder phase, resembling that at 105,000-95,000 y.a.

75,000 - 60,000 y.a. - full glacial world, cold and dry (the 'Lower Pleniglacial' or Stage 4)

60,000 - 25,000 y.a. - 'middling phase' of highly unstable but generally cooler and drier-than-present conditions (Stage 3)

25,000 - 15,000 y.a. - full glacial world, cold and dry; Stage 2 (includes the 'Last Glacial Maximum')

(This period includes two 'coldest phases' - Heinrich Events - at around 23,000-21,000 y.a. and at 17,000-14,500 y.a.)

14,500 y.a. - rapid warming and moistening of climates in some areas. Rapid deglaciation begins. [Without human interaction]

13,500 y.a. - nearly all areas with climates at least as warm and moist as today's

12,800 y.a. (+/- 200 years)- rapid onset of cool, dry Younger Dryas in many areas

11,500 y.a. (+/- 200 years) - Younger Dryas ends suddenly, back to warmth and moist climates (Holocene, or Stage 1) [Without human interaction]

9,000 y.a. - 8,200 y.a. - climates warmer and often moister than today's

about 8,200 y.a. - sudden cool and dry phase in many areas

8,000-4,500 y.a. - climates somewhat warmer and moister than today's [Without human interaction]

Since 4,500 y.a. - climates fairly similar to the present

about 2600 y.a. - relatively wet/cold event (of unknown duration) in many areas

1,400 y.a. {536 - 538 A.D.} wet cold event of reduced tree growth and famine across western Europe and possibly elsewhere

700 - 200 y.a. (~1300 - ~1800 A.D.) 'Little Ice Age'

200 y.a. - today - began gradual NATURAL warming from lows of 'Little Ice Age'

1970's - 1980's "scientists" predict coming Ice Age is imminent

1990's - 2000 same "scientists" predict catastrophic Man-made Global Warming.

Which era do we pick to try to recreate / maintain and spend $$$$$$$$$ with no real impact on nature's climate whims?

________________


Dr. Murry Salby
Professor of Climate Science
Macquarie University


Sydney, NSW
Sydney Institute
11 August, 2011

http://youtu.be/YrI03ts--9I

ht tp://youtu.be/YrI03ts--9I



Hamburg, Germany
18 April, 2013

http://youtu.be/2ROw_cDKwc0

ht tp://youtu.be/2ROw_cDKwc0


_______________

The problem is simple: climatology shot its mouth off. It cried "Wolf" prematurely and, in doing so, has done permanent damage to its credibility. To compound that, the failure to police itself through rigorous peer review allowed some bad apples to further poison the field.

We are finally beginning to see the backpedaling and waffling and admissions and rationalizations that wouldn't have been necessary if the science hadn't permitted itself to be hijacked in the first place. Acknowledgement of the multiple uncertainties of the CAGW conjecture should have preceded or, at least, accompanied the original shrieking claims of imminent doom.


_____________


Hottest decade in recorded history? Well, yes, since the record starts in 1979.

But if its the thermometer record, then, no, not based upon unadjusted data. That would be the 1930s, since the thermometer was invented during the depths of the Little Ice Age.

If its on the paleoclimate proxy record, then no, not even close. Ten of thousands of decades have been warmer in the Holocene, to say nothing of millennia during the Eemian integlacial, the interglacials which preceded it during the Pleistocene, previously in the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene & Paleocene Epochs, most if not all of the Mesozoic Era & most of the Paleozoic, with rare exceptions.

Climate isn’t weather. Decades don’t have climate. Minimum time frame for “climate” is 30 years, but 300, 3000 or 30,000 is more like it.


_____________

Argumentum ad hominem
Argumentum ad misericordiam
Argumentum ad verecundiam
Argumentum ad populum
Argumentum ad ignorantiam


______________


‘Global warming’ was conceived, defined, modeled and sold as a scary story to the public on the basis of global average surface temperature.

Now that they are losing that game, they are changing the rules.

You want to redefine ‘global warming’ to be a phenomenon of ocean heat content instead of surface temperature? Fine. Back to first principles for you. Call back in 150 years, when you have the start at sufficient OHC data to begin attribution studies. Otherwise, all you are doing is a brazen attempt at fallacious ad hoc salvage of your failed surface temperature based assertions.

Oh, and next time, do it on your own goddam dime.

____________


[The new IPCC AR5] SPM in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.
-Ross McKitrick, Ph.D.
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/27/reactions-to-ipcc-ar5-summary-for-policy-makers/#comment-1428281
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/...r5-summary-for-policy-makers/#comment-1428281


__________________


"...We do not know enough about the climate to say in what direction, let alone by how much, the climate would be changing in the absence of any anthropogenic influence. We do not know the forcing from CO2 or any other greenhouse gas...

...We do not know what fraction of manmade warming is attributable to each of the greenhouse gases. We do not know the magnitude or even the sign of the forcing from our emissions of soot to the atmosphere.

We certainly do not know the values of the individual temperature feedbacks to anything like the narrow error bars falsely claimed by the IPCC. We do not even know the sign of the cloud feedback, and the IPCC has recently been forced to reduce the value of that feedback drastically.

Then there are the major non-radiative transports: evaporation and convection up, advection across, and precipitation and subsidence down.

We cannot predict the behavior of the oceans – indeed, we cannot even measure changes in their heat content with sufficient resolution to give a meaningful result.

We cannot predict el Niño and la Niña events..."

In other words, climatology has absolutely no idea whatsoever why the climate changes.

_______________

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/...nino-and-longer-solar-cycles/#comment-1712372

ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/19/excuse-31-for-the-pause-el-nino-and-longer-solar-cycles/#comment-1712372

Of course, the same error that they are asserting is occurring in the Arctic could have also occurred in the Antarctic in the past record, so that the net effect of the correction could be null. Or, we could just look at lower troposphere temperatures, which are not subject to the measurement and sparsity errors of the surface record, and note that they’ve been all but flat over almost all of the 30+ years they have been measured, and use them the way Lief et. al. are using secondary e.g. magnetic data to correct the equally corrupted and unreliable sunspot record.

I don’t think even people like this undoubtedly honest scholar realize that the LTT record is a hard constraint on how much you can “adjust” the contemporary record, and that adjusting the past record, in addition to being enormously dangerous and susceptible to confirmation bias, can be done only at the expense of increasing the error bars to the point where the change really doesn’t matter. Almost by definition, in fact. There ain’t no such thing as a free statistical lunch, and you can’t squeeze a given collection of data with various uncertainties in it for more certainty than it contains, from an information theoretic point of view. You can only insert your own biases or beliefs into it on the basis of a belief that your model for doing so is right. That’s all well and good, but if you do that you cannot then turn around and use the data to prove that your model is right. Somewhere in there you need an independent way to affirm the model.

The one useful take home message from the top article is that yes, models can be built that are in much better agreement with observation, and yes, they can only get there by re-attributing the importance of discrete events such as ENSO oscillations and long term variabilities such as the sun so that the natural variation is a strictly larger fraction of the observed variation. As you make the 1997-1998 super-ENSO event responsible for more of the single burst of global warming visible over the last 75 years, which all occurred between roughly 1980 and 2000 (or arguably over the even shorter interval 1983-1998) then you leave less room for CO_2 to be a cause for the rest.

Nobody (rational) doubts that increasing CO_2 will have a net positive effect on the average temperature. The real question is: how large an effect can we expect? This, in turn, empirically depends in critical ways on the way natural variability and CO_2 driven variability are apportioned, which is in turn basically impossible to precisely determine as the two are not separable in the dynamics of any climate model; one is stuck making guesses that are nearly impossible to defend. An argument can be made for total feedback from the water cycle alone being strongly negative and cancelling nearly all of the CO_2-linked warming. An argument can be made (and often is for it being the exact opposite, for water vapor to be a strong positive feedback, in spite of the general empirical divergence of models that are built on top of this assumption.

That’s one thing the top article apparently ignores right from the beginning. By attributing more of the lack of warming to increased volcanic aerosols, it maintains the fiction that the temperature rise we observe is certain to be a balancing of CO_2 warming, strong positive feedback from water vapor that much more than triples or quadruples that warming, and a variety of aerosols that cancel much of that warming to leave us with an overall doubling (plus some assumptions as to the strength of the original CO_2-only warming.

But what if they have the sign of the net water vapor feedback wrong from the beginning? What if ENSO and non-grand solar maximum were responsible for most of the warming observed in the entire 20th century, with direct CO_2 forcing being mostly cancelled by water vapor and atmospheric pressure and circulation feedbacks? This is not all that implausible, given that if one assumes that the Earth is generally in a state of approximate GHG balance when one isn’t adding CO_2, water vapor must be at the crossover point where increasing it leads to negative feedback or else the temperature would not be locally stable. This is a simple property of stable equilibrium — perturbing he system away from it must produce a net forcing back to equilibrium, not away from it.

That is what is so puzzling to me. They are asserting the following chain of reasoning:

a) The Earth is in a (dynamic) equilibrium within small responses to things like solar variability.
b) Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas — indeed the most important greenhouse gas responsible for over 90% of the total GHE warming relative to the Earth’s greybody temperature.
c) Increasing water vapor must increase global average temperature. Note that this assertion is contradicted by a) — if true, the global average temperature would increase as every increase in temperature increases water evaporation from the ocean, which then warms it still more. In simple fact, any increase in water vapor in the asserted equilibrium of a) from increased warming must lead to net cooling and an eventual restoration of the equilibrium water vapor concentration.
d) Increasing CO_2 must increase global average temperature.
e) This in turn must increase water vapor.
f) From c), we expect to get even more warming from increased CO_2 because of increased water vapor.

How, I ask, can they possibly defend assertion c) without destabilizing the entire climate to increases in water vapor, enabling runaway solutions even if there are no changes in anything else? The net feedback from increased water vapor in the neighborhood of any asserted equilibrium must change sign at the equilibrium point, just as is the case of the force exerted by a mass on a spring or the combined action of string and gravity on a pendulum!

They are performing the mathematical equivalent of asserting that if you pull a mass on a spring a small distance away from a stable equilibrium point with your finger, the spring will stretch even more because of some separable part of the net total force that pulls it back towards equilibrium. This seems rather implausible to me.

_____________________




Michael "Piltdown" Mann’s charlatanism

...He claims, without a shred of evidence, that extreme weather events are caused by human activity. That is not only anti-science; if there were any evidence for that, it would have been the source of dozens, if not hundreds of peer reviewed papers.

Mann does the same thing when he claims that human activity is the cause of global warming. That has always been his central premise. But where is the evidence? Where are the measurements??

There is zero evidence for that assertion. There are zero measurements. If something is scientific, then there must be verifiable, testable measurements quantifying it. Science is nothing without measurements. But with AGW, there are none. It is no more than an evidence-free conjecture. An opinion. A belief.

In fact, that is all that AGW is. If I am wrong, then someone needs to post measurements quantifying the specific extent of human-caused global warming. It is accepted that there has been about 0.7ºC of global warming over the past 150 years or so, from all sources. Of that amount, how much is due to human activity? THAT is the central question in the entire debate.

But no one has ever produced any testable, verifiable measurements of the extent of AGW. They say, “Half”. Or “Most”. But they never produce testable measurements showing how many tenths, or hundreths of a degree of that 0.7º warming were produced by human emissions. Do they?

No, they don’t. No one has produced any such verifiable, testable measurements. Everything is always a conjecture; an opinion. They are happy to post endless charts showing global warming to tenths and hundreths of a degree. But they have never measured the human contribution specifically. It is always simply assumed that human activity is the cause of global warming. Why does anyone put up with that evidence-free presumption?


​

-dbstealey
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/24/the-mann-talk-and-travel-day-open-thread/#comment-1746140

 

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A reader's comment on the Climategate I & II emails

Characterization of the "Climategate" emails as revealing private doubts on the part of climate science is on target. Such a conclusion does not come from skimming headlines but is rather supported by the emails themselves. I'll cite just a few examples. Douglas Mauran of the University of East Anglia in 2007 proposed an informal discussion seminar among his colleagues. Among the topics of discussion he listed was this: "How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that 'our' reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest."

Here's Tim Barnett in 2004: "not to be a trouble maker but……if we are going to really get into the paleo stuff, maybe someone(s) ought to have another look at Mann’s paper. His statistics were suspect as i remember."

Heinz Wanner, in 2005 explaining why he won't take his criticisms of Mann before the media: "I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science." [The irony is red meat indeed.]

There are many more. You should read them.

Latimer Adler wrote the comment below on Andrew Montford's "Bishop Hill" blog. It makes some salient points about the timing of the appearance of Marcott's paper and the state of affairs in climate science. If you'd like to read it in its original form, it appears at 10:15 AM on March 15 at: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/3/15/marcott-in-freefall.html


The abject failure of peer review to prevent the appearance of shonky science in previous papers (Michael Mann's Hockey Stick being the poster child) is a well-documented fact ( Andrew Montford's wonderful account of Steve McIntyre's effort to reproduce the "Hockey Stick" is the subject of his book <u>The Hockey Stick Illusion</u>— a book which ought to be required reading for anyone with any interest in climate science).

<blockquote>'What does it say about <i>Science</i> that it would publish such a paper?'

It says that the deadline for inclusion on IPCC AR5 is this week. And that since any critiques of Marcott <i>et al</i> - however devastating - will not have been published in a scientific journal by then, the paper will stand as the latest part of the public record for the purposes AR5.

As far as they are concerned The Hockey Stick was not dead...only sleeping.

But gaming the publication system such an obvious way is a much higher risk strategy nowadays than it was for earlier IPCC 'reviews'. For AR4 the deadline was in 2005 or 2006. The 'sceptic' movement had hardly found a voice for itself in those days, let alone in the MSM. IPCC reports were accepted without question then as the independent results of objective scientists. There was no scrutiny..the few who tried (McIntyre, McKitrick) were universally denounced as deranged heretics

But along came Climategate and WUWT and HSI and AIT and the GWPF and all dem tings and the world was never the same again.

Like the awful example of Gergis <i>et al</i>, Marcott's paper is being ripped apart by many determined and skilled investigators. After less than a week it is clear that it has (as a minimum) severe problems with its methods and conclusions. It may survive the scrutiny..but only in a much diluted form.

And after such a mauling, the IPCC editors would surely be deranged to rely on this paper as part of their argument. It would lay them open to charges of special pleading and lack of judgement. I can imagine those few IPCC authors with both ability and integrity already writing

'I'm going to keep this paper out of AR5 even if I have to redefine what peer-reviewed' means.

I think we can see already that Marcott's bid for scientific superstardom has failed, He is damaged goods. He's taken a foolish career gamble and lost.</blockquote>

 

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The world's oldest continuous instrumental temperature record:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/


​

 

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There is SO much ca$h in climate “science” right now, and science professors and government researchers would be derelict if they they didn’t go for the money, particularly when your performance metric as a scientist is based on how much money you bring to your institution.

I do agree that these abstracts hilariously almost write themselves. You could probably come up with an automatic abstract generator for any project like this:

Title: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN [your research topic] AND DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE
Authors: [Your name + 10 of your friends (need not be scientists)]
Keywords: Danger, climate, disruption, hot, warming, chaos, help!, yikes!
Funding: NSF, DOE, and the Taxpayers

It is well-known that dangerous climate change is unequivocal, and that the threat to humans, animals, and plants is obvious. In our study, we show how [your research topic] is related to dangerous climate change. A description of our computer modeling techniques for [your research topic] is presented in this paper. We show that our modeling studies verify our conclusions robustly, and that dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions are required to stave off disaster.

 

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Why Has It Warmed So Much Less Than The IPCC Predicted?

Saturday, 04 February 2012
by Jonathan Leake
The Sunday Times (London)

John Prescott was apocalyptic. “Our polar ice caps are melting,” the then deputy prime minister thundered. “Only this weekend Mexico was hit by freak snowstorms ... a world of drought and crop failures, rising seas, mass migration and disease ... rising greenhouse grasses [sic] . . .”

The year was 1997 and Prescott had just come back from Kyoto in Japan to give the House of Commons his account of the latest climate talks.

Prescott’s terrifying warnings were backed by Britain’s leading climate scientists. Just before Kyoto a Met Office report warned that climate-related floods would put 50m people at risk of death from starvation in the coming decades. Whole island nations would disappear, it added, while the American Midwest, which helps to feed 100 nations, was likely to face drought and the North Pole might melt.

That was 15 years ago — what has happened to world temperatures since then? Last month came the suggestion that the answer was, embarrassingly, nothing. Research based on Met Office figures pointed to temperatures having been flat since 1997.

It was the kind of admission that those who doubt climate science pounce on. “Forget global warming,” trumpeted The Mail on Sunday, because “the planet has not warmed in 15 years”. It then cited other research, into the declining energy output of the sun, to suggest the real danger was from a big freeze, raising the prospect of a reprise of the frost fairs held on the frozen Thames in the 17th century.

Two days earlier The Wall Street Journal had published a letter from 16 scientists advancing similar arguments. It said: “The lack of warming for more than a decade . . . suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.”

Since then the same cry has been taken up by innumerable bloggers, exemplified by Dr David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC’s science editor, now an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which frequently challenges the views of climate-change scientists. He, it turns out, was a source of the research that sparked the whole row.

“We set out to see how long it had been since the temperature had risen, and 15 years was what emerged from the data set,” he said. “It raises serious questions about how the Met Office models future climate.”

Some scientists appear to be warning we will fry, while other sources fear we will freeze It seemed a strong argument but the climate scientists came out fighting, starting with a furious blog posted by the Met Office itself, which attacked the Mail on Sunday article as “entirely misleading”.

That was followed by another letter in The Wall Street Journal, this time signed by 35 leading climate scientists, who pointed out that few of the signatories to its sceptical predecessor were actually involved in climate research.

“Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?” it asked, adding: “Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest on record.”

What were the rest of us meant to make of this? Some scientists appear to be warning we will fry, while other sources fear we will freeze. For the public the outcome is, increasingly, confusion. Where might the truth lie?

Perhaps the simplest first step is to put aside the arguments and get back to the data. Is it really true that global temperatures have not risen since 1997?

The simple answer is: they have risen, but not by very much. “Our records for the past 15 years suggest the world has warmed by about 0.051C over that period,” said the Met Office. In layman’s terms that is 51 thousandths of a degree.

These figures come from the Met Office HadCruT3 database, which takes readings from 3,000 land stations around the world, along with oceanic readings from a similar number of ships and buoys.

However, HadCruT3 is just one of several global temperature databases, each overseen by different scientists and calculated in slightly different ways. This allows each group to cross-check results, confirming findings or spotting errors.

One, held at the National Climate Data Centre (NCDC), run by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that global temperatures rose by an average of 0.074C since 1997. That’s small, too — but it is another rise.

A third and very different data set is overseen by John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He gathers figures from three satellites that orbit the Earth 14 times a day. They measure the average temperature of the air from ground level to a height of 35,000ft, a method completely different from those of the Met Office and NCDC. Oddly, given his reputation as a climate sceptic, he found the biggest rise of all.

“From 1997-2011 our data show a global temperature rise of 0.15C,” he said. “What’s more, our satellites have been taking this data since 1979, and over that period [the] global temperature has risen 0.46C, so the world has been getting warmer.”

Overall, then, the world has got slightly warmer since 1997. Perhaps the real question is: why has it warmed so much less than was predicted by the climate models?

For most climate scientists the answer is simple. “Fifteen years is just too short a period over which to measure climate change,” said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the Met Office. “The world undergoes natural temperature changes on all kinds of time scales from daily variations to seasonal ones. It also varies naturally from year to year and decade to decade.”

Whitehouse accepts this point. “The records do show that global temperatures have risen by about 0.4C over the past three decades, most of it in the 1990s,” he said.

“I accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that might warm the world but the key issue is how strong the effect is and how the data compare with the models used to predict the future.”

This is an interesting admission, turning what had appeared to be an attack on the keystones of climate science — that greenhouse gases cause global warming — into a “shades of grey” debate over whether global warming will happen slowly and steadily or in jerks, accelerating in some decades but then slowing or even reversing a little in others.

For the critics of climate science this is a crucial point — but why? The answer goes back to the 2001 and 2007 science reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that had predicted the world was likely to warm by an average of about 0.2C a decade. The implication was that temperatures would rise steadily, not with 15-year gaps. The existence of such gaps, the critics argue, implies the climate models themselves are too flawed to be relied on.

Other leading climate scientists have raised similar issues. One is Judith Curry, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She argues that global climate is affected by so many factors, ranging from solar output to volcanic eruptions, that predicting how the world will warm is impossible.

Crucially, however, Curry accepts that greenhouse gas emissions are likely to lead to long-term warming. She wrote on her blog: “We don’t know what the climate will be for the next several decades. In terms of when global warming will come ‘roaring back’, it is possible this may not happen for the first half of the 21st century.”

For Curry and many others one of the key unresolved issues lies in the behaviour of the sun, whose output appears to be undergoing a steady but small decline. Most scientists accept that this will reduce global warming. The debate is over just how strong this effect will be, with people such as Curry suggesting it could be powerful while others see it as small.

Among the latter is Mike Lockwood, professor of space physics at Reading University’s meteorology department, who believes the sun has been in a “grand solar maximum” since the 1960s, thought to be the longest-lived peak in its output for more than 9,000 years.

“A decline in activity is long overdue,” he said. “How deep will it go? We think there is about an 8% chance that it will drop below the famous Maunder minimum.”

This was a 60-year period, starting in about 1645, when the sun had very few sunspots; it was marked by an unusually high proportion of cold winters in Europe.

That sounds ominous but Lockwood calculates that even a decline in activity on that scale would now have little effect because the impact would be far smaller than the opposing effects of surging greenhouse gas emissions.

What about the most evocative image of all — the prediction that the Thames might freeze over? This did happen in 1963, but far upstream in the stretches around Windsor. The idea that the lower tidal reaches might be in similar danger generates little but scorn from all sides.

Lockwood said: “The disappearance of frost fairs is nothing to do with climate. It is because the old London Bridge — really more of a weir — was pulled down and the embankments were put in. So the river now flows much too fast to freeze and is also a lot saltier. Even a return to Maunder minimum solar conditions would not cause the Thames to freeze again so far downstream.”



http://thegwpf.org/science-news/490...-warmed-so-much-less-than-ipcc-predicted.html

 

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http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/montford-royal_society.pdf


Nullius in Verba
On the Word of No One

The Royal Society and
Climate Change

By Andrew Montford
Foreword by Professor Richard Lindzen

...in an exchange in the Financial Times (April 9, 2010), Martin Rees and Ralph Cicerone (President of the NAS) defended global warming concern by noting essentially that carbon dioxide (CO2) was increasing and that climate was changing. Of course, climate is always changing, and increasing CO2 must make some contribution, but none of this suggests anything alarming. The alarm results from controversial feedbacks wherein the small impacts of CO2 are, in current computer models, greatly amplified. With respect to these feedbacks, Rees and Cicerone say: “Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise (referring to global mean temperature anomaly), stemming largely from ‘feedback’ effects on water vapor and clouds are topics of current research.” That is to say, we don’t even know if there is a problem. Yet, Rees and Cicerone conclude: “Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy.”


In other words, regardless of the science, the answer is predetermined. Is this simply ignorance or dishonesty? My guess is that Rees and Cicerone were only mindlessly repeating a script prepared by the environmental movement...

-Richard H. Lindzen, Ph.D.
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meterology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology​

http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/montford-royal_society.pdf

 

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213244084429540.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet


Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming
February 21, 2012

The authors of the Jan. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed, 'No Need to Panic about Global Warming,' ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html ) respond to their critics.

Editor's Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of "No Need to Panic About Global Warming," an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AO923_scient_G_20120220154702.jpg​

The interest generated by our Wall Street Journal op-ed of Jan. 27, "No Need to Panic about Global Warming," is gratifying but so extensive that we will limit our response to the letter to the editor the Journal published on Feb. 1, 2012 by Kevin Trenberth and 37 other signatories, and to the Feb. 6 letter by Robert Byer, President of the American Physical Society. (We, of course, thank the writers of supportive letters.)

We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.

In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.

These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.

From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth's temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.

The Trenberth letter tells us that "computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean." The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world's oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of "missing heat" hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?

Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.

Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that "the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible." Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.

One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody's word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don't fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.

What are we to make of the letter's claim: "Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record." We don't see any warming trend after the year 2000 in the graph. It is true that the years 2000-2010 were perhaps 0.2 C warmer than the preceding 10 years. But the record indicates that long before CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere began to increase, the earth began to warm in fits and starts at the end of the Little Ice Age—hundreds of years ago. This long term-trend is quite likely to produce several warm years in a row. The question is how much of the warming comes from CO2 and how much is due to other, both natural and anthropogenic, factors?

There have been many times in the past when there were warmer decades. It may have been warmer in medieval times, when the Vikings settled Greenland, and when wine was exported from England. Many proxy indicators show that the Medieval Warming was global in extent. And there were even warmer periods a few thousand years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum. The fact is that there are very powerful influences on the earth's climate that have nothing to do with human-generated CO2. The graph strongly suggests that the IPCC has greatly underestimated the natural sources of warming (and cooling) and has greatly exaggerated the warming from CO2.

The Trenberth letter states: "Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused." However, the claim of 97% support is deceptive. The surveys contained trivial polling questions that even we would agree with. Thus, these surveys find that large majorities agree that temperatures have increased since 1800 and that human activities have some impact.

But what is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes "extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert" is peculiar indeed.

One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.

The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate "extreme views" can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: "I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken."

Or consider the resignation last year of Wolfgang Wagner, editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. In a fulsome resignation editorial eerily reminiscent of past recantations by political and religious heretics, Mr. Wagner confessed to his "sin" of publishing a properly peer-reviewed paper by University of Alabama scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell containing the finding that IPCC models exaggerate the warming caused by increasing CO2.

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

The European experience with green technologies has also been discouraging. A study found that every new "green job" in Spain destroyed more than two existing jobs and diverted capital that would have created new jobs elsewhere in the economy. More recently, European governments have been cutting subsidies for expensive CO2-emissionless energy technologies, not what one would expect if such subsidies were stimulating otherwise languid economies. And as we pointed out in our op-ed, it is unlikely that there will be any environmental benefit from the reduced CO2 emissions associated with green technologies, which are based on the demonization of CO2.

Turning to the letter of the president of the American Physical Society (APS), Robert Byer, we read, "The statement [on climate] does not declare, as the signatories of the letter [our op-ed] suggest, that the human contribution to climate change is incontrovertible." This seems to suggest that APS does not in fact consider the science on this key question to be settled.

Yet here is the critical paragraph from the statement that caused the resignation of Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever and many other long-time members of the APS: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." No reasonable person can read this and avoid the conclusion that APS is declaring the human impact "incontrovertible." Otherwise there would be no logical link from "global warming" to the shrill call for mitigation.

The APS response to the concerns of its membership was better than that of any other scientific society, but it was not democratic. The management of APS took months to review the statement quoted above, and it eventually declared that not a word needed to be changed, though some 750 words were added to try to explain what the original 157 words really meant. APS members were permitted to send in comments but the comments were never made public.

In spite of the obstinacy of some in APS management, APS members of good will are supporting the establishment of a politics-free, climate physics study group within the Society. If successful, it will facilitate much needed discussion, debate, and independent research in the physics of climate.

In summary, science progresses by testing predictions against real world data obtained from direct observations and rigorous experiments. The stakes in the global-warming debate are much too high to ignore this observational evidence and declare the science settled. Though there are many more scientists who are extremely well qualified and have reached the same conclusions we have, we stress again that science is not a democratic exercise and our conclusions must be based on observational evidence.

The computer-model predictions of alarming global warming have seriously exaggerated the warming by CO2 and have underestimated other causes. Since CO2 is not a pollutant but a substantial benefit to agriculture, and since its warming potential has been greatly exaggerated, it is time for the world to rethink its frenzied pursuit of decarbonization at any cost.

< signed >

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris

J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting

Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University

Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society

Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences

William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton

Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.

William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT

James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University

Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences

Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne

Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator

Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service

Antoninio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213244084429540.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

 

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http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012...bal-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/


[ emphasis supplied ]


Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake?
by Simon Carr

At a public meeting in the [ House of ] Commons, the climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT made a number of declarations that unsettle the claim that global warming is backed by “settled science”. They’re not new, but some of them were new to me.

Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.

Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”

He said our natural body temperature varies by eight tenths of a degree.

He showed a Boston newspaper weather graphic for a day – it had the actual temperature against a background of the highest and lowest recorded temperature for that day. The difference was as much as 60 degrees F.

When you double CO2 there’s a two per cent change in the “radiation budget”. Yet two billion years ago, the sun was 20 to 30 per cent dimmer – and the planet’s temperature was about the same.

The Al Gore graph showing CO2 and temperature rising and falling in tandem showed that the release of CO2 from the oceans was prompted by warming, not vice versa.

He gave us a slide with a series of familiar alarms – melting ice caps, disappearing icebergs, receding glaciers, rising sea levels. It was published by the US Weather Bureau in 1922.

And one further element of the consensus: there’s been no increase in temperature for 15 years.

He concluded with an exposition of science that, frankly, I didn’t follow. However, the reliability and explanatory power of climate models was satirised convincingly. And I found myself believing – or accepting the possibility – that warming would reduce rather than increase tropical storms.

He also said that the IPCC needs “positive feedback mechanisms” to justify anything above a one degree C increase in their predictions. But: “Observation points to small negative feedbacks.”

How to explain the procession of eminent opinion leaders – some even in our own Royal Society – who advance the tenets of catastrophic global warming? “It is science in the service of politics,” he said.

If Lindzen is right, we will never be able to calculate the trillions that have been spent on the advice of “scientists in the service of politics”.



http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012...bal-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/

 

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http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/24/peter-gleick-then-and-now/



Peter Gleick – Then and Now
by Donna Laframboise

Back in 2001, water specialist Peter Gleick was quoted ( http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/010205/archive_005736_print.htm ) by a journalist writing about climate change for the US News & World Report. His pearls of wisdom?

The debate is over.

That was his message 11 years ago. It’s a direct quote (backup link here: http://www.webcitation.org/65hBU4LmK ).

Earlier this week, when Gleick issued his non-apology ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/-the-origin-of-the-heartl_b_1289669.html ) to innocent third parties whose privacy he invaded by making confidential documents public, he sang a dramatically different tune:

a rational public debate is desperately needed…

he declared. Indeed, the word debate appeared three times in his 385-word statement (backup link here: http://www.webcitation.org/65hCFg3yv ). He also said:

Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.

…My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate… [bold added]

Right. So after more than a decade of declaring that the debate is over Gleick now claims he’s all in favour of it. He also has the chutzpah to suggest that it’s those on the other side of the fence who are preventing such a debate from taking place.

Now let’s add one more detail to the mix. In late January Gleick turned down ( http://climateaudit.org/2012/02/23/heartlands-invitation-to-gleick-details/ ) an invitation to debate a climate skeptic even though a $5,000 donation would have been made to a charity of his choice.

What is any reasonable, rational person supposed to conclude? Does Gleick really, truly cherish open debate – the kind in which people treat opposing perspectives with courtesy and good grace? Or is he the sort of individual who’ll say anything to make himself look good?

How very sad.



http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/24/peter-gleick-then-and-now/

http://www.real-science.com/peter-gleick-hypocrite-extraordinaire

Read the background story here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/

 

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The Beginning Of The End Of Wind
by Matt Ridley
The Spectator
3 March, 2012
http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5128-matt-ridley-the-winds-of-change.html

The government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long?

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.

Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.

The big conservation organisations have been disgracefully silent on the subject, like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which until last year took generous contributions from the wind industry through a venture called RSPB Energy. Even journalists: at a time when advertising is in short supply, British newspapers have been crammed full of specious but lucrative ‘debates’ and supplements on renewable energy sponsored by advertising from a cohort of interest groups.

And just as the scam dies, I find I am now part of it. A family trust has signed a deal to receive £8,500 a year from a wind company, which is building a turbine on land that once belonged to my grandfather. He was canny enough not to sell the mineral rights, and the foundations of the turbine disturbs those mineral rights, so the trustees are owed compensation. I will not get the money, because I am not a beneficiary of the trust. Nonetheless, the idea of any part of my family receiving ‘wind-gelt’ is so abhorrent that I have decided to act. The real enemy is not wind farms per se, but groupthink and hysteria which allowed such a flawed idea to progress — with a minimum of intellectual opposition. So I shall be writing a cheque for £8,500, which The Spectator will give as a prize to the best article devoted to rational, fact-based environmental journalism.

It will be called the Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy [see below for details]. Barring bankruptcy, I shall donate the money as long as the wind-gelt flows — so the quicker Dave cancels the subsidy altogether, the sooner he will have me and the prizewinners off his back.

Entrants are invited forthwith, and a panel of judges will reward the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

My donation, though significant for me, is a drop in the ocean compared with the money that pours into the green movement every hour. Jeremy Grantham, a hedge-fund plutocrat, wrote a cheque for £12 million to the London School of Economics to found an institute named after him, which has since become notorious for its aggressive stance and extreme green statements. Between them, Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) spend nearly a billion a year. WWF spends $68 million a year on ‘public education’ alone. All of this is judged uncontroversial: a matter of education, not propaganda.

•••

By contrast, a storm of protest broke recently over the news that one small conservative think-tank called Heartland was proposing to spend just $200,000 in a year on influencing education against climate alarmism. A day later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with assets of $7.2 billion, gave a grant of $100 million to something called the ClimateWorks Foundation, a pro-wind power organisation, on top of $481 million it gave to the same recipient in 2008. The deep green Sierra Club recently admitted that it took $26 million from the gas industry to lobby against coal. But money is not the only reason that the entire political establishment came to believe in wind fairies. Psychologists have a term for the wishful thinking by which we accept any means if the end seems virtuous: ‘noble-cause corruption’. The phrase was first used by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcock in 1992 to explain miscarriages of justice. ‘It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned,’ said the late Lord Denning, referring to the Birmingham Six.

Politicians are especially susceptible to this condition. In a wish to be seen as modern, they will embrace all manner of fashionable causes. When this sets in — groupthink grips political parties, and the media therefore decide there is no debate — the gravest of errors can take root. The subsidising of useless wind turbines was born of a deep intellectual error, one incubated by failure to challenge conventional wisdom.

It is precisely this consensus-worshipping, heretic-hunting environment where the greatest errors can be made. There are some 3,500 wind turbines in Britain, with hundreds more under construction. It would be a shame for them all to be dismantled. The biggest one should remain, like a crane on an abandoned quay, for future generations to marvel at. They will never be an efficient way to generate power. But there can be no better monument to the folly of mankind.

Announcing the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy
Fraser Nelson
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeeho...s&utm_medium=Clickthroughs&startcampaign=true

Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The trust would be paid £8,500 a year for it, and Matt couldn’t abide the idea of profiting — even in part — from this. So he is donating £8,500 in an annual prize to be given to the best essay exposing environmental fallacies. Entries open today.

The rules are simple. We invite pieces from 1,000 to 2,000 words in length, to gore one of the sacred cows of the environmentalist movement. Matt says more in his cover essay for the new Spectator (which you can also read on Facebook) : ‘There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest or that organic farming is good for the planet or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species.’ A shortlist of six will be put to a panel of judges and the winning entry will be published in the magazine in July.

Entries, please, to ridleyprize@spectator.co.uk and they close on 30 June 2012. And will do every year from now on. I’ll leave the final word to Matt: ‘The real enemy is not wind farms per se, but the groupthink and hysteria which allowed such a flawed idea to progress with a minimum of intellectual opposition. I shall donate the money as long as the wind-gelt flows — so the quicker Dave cancels the subsidy altogether, the sooner he will have me and the prizewinners off his back.’

 

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How Can I Get Some of That Anti-Global Warming Big Oil Money?
by Larry Bell
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybe...me-of-that-anti-global-warming-big-oil-money/

It seems we keep hearing that scientists who challenge claims that our planet is on fire fueled by fossil energy are lackeys of a heavily funded disinformation campaign underwritten by Big Oil, Big Coal, and other Big Spenders. Notable authority on this conspiracy, Internet pioneer, Academy Award Oscar winner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Arnold Gore warned about this last year in a Rolling Stone article: “Polluters and Ideologues are financing pseudoscientists whose job it is to manufacture doubt about what is true and false [and] ….spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media.”

Given that the mercenary climate skeptic cadre appears to be awash in ill-gotten carbon footprint-stained gains, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that such evil organizations have never seen fit to offer me gobs of money. After all, I frequently write articles arguing that there is no basis for climate alarm and critical of charities essential to support otherwise unsustainable “green” energy fantasies. Why should I, alone, miss out on those pay offs? Sure, I have repeatedly opposed subsidies for all other energy providers as well. Still, it just hasn’t seemed fair to be passed over with such harsh neglect.

Frankly, this didn’t really bother me all that much until I recently read that the Heartland Institute received “shocking” contributions from nefarious donors. This was revealed in confidential information illegally obtained and distributed by renowned “mainstream” climate scientist Peter Gleick who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and chaired the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task force on Scientific Ethics. It seems he had a simultaneous lapse of both attributes. And by the way, that’s the same AGU that released a famous conclusion based on Ouija board survey methodology that 97% of all scientists believe that global warming is a serious, human-caused curse.

At first, it appeared that Heartland’s fossil industry-funded debauchery was much worse than many of us could have possibly imagined…an astounding gift of $25,000 from the Koch Foundation alone… over a short period of just ten years! Well okay, that money was actually earmarked for a health care newsletter rather than to advance their insidiously skeptical positions regarding a looming climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, that suspected salacious liaison was titillating enough to get some prominent press pundits panting.

If that wasn’t bad enough, another forensically and factually flawed document in the batch, which was falsely attributed to Heartland, put the contribution amount at $200,000. But then, why quibble over what amounts to little more than an innocently misplaced decimal point? And as warminista sensationalists apparently believe: numbers, schlumbers…what does it matter so long as you get the big message across?

Think rising oceans for example. In a December 6, 2005 presentation to the AGU, NASA Goddard Space Institute head and long-time Gore advisor James Hansen predicted that the Earth’s climate was reaching a human-caused tipping point that will cause sea levels to rise as much as 80 feet during this century. Not one to understate scary probabilities, this was more than 40 times higher than even the upper worst case end of what the most recent alarmist U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary report has projected.

Absent any known basis for this, I’m unaware of any criticism of that remarkable assertion from the AGU or any other of those self-proclaimed mainstream climate organizations. Also, what about unsupportable claims regarding imperiled polar bears, a human CO2 -caused Himalayan glacier retreat, and increasing global warming-induced hurricane threats…to name only a few examples? Have you heard any vociferous rebuttals from established bastions of scientific authority?

Didn’t think so.

Maybe that’s because there’s no record that the sources received any money from ExxonMobil or their conspiratorial ilk. No, it all came from us through tax money we generously provided to “get the truth”.

Perhaps you can imagine my relief to learn that Heartland didn’t get any ExxonMobil money after all…that I wasn’t the only one they overlooked. In fact it turned out that most of Heartland’s budget was provided by innocuous and rather boring private donations and grant sources. You gotta admit that it’s pretty chintzy for Exxon not to give at least something to them…an organization that according to the Associated Press is “one of the loudest voices denying human-caused global warming, hosting the largest international scientific conferences on climate change.”

Wouldn’t you expect Exxon and other fossil confederates to be at least a little charitable to a not-for-profit entity that has been dubbed “the ideological center of the denial movement”? Geeze, they sure are providing a great deal of bang for the buck in what …as Al claims to be…manufacturing a lot of doubt about what is true and what is false.

Consider that about one-quarter of their total $4.4 million 2011 budget that Heartland devoted to climate research dissemination activities is barely a rounding error in what other opposing-view non-profits spend. For example, compare this with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection which reportedly netted more than $88 million in 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which reportedly took in more than $95 million in 2011 operating revenues, and the World Wildlife Fund that raised more than $238 million last year.

Then there’s also many other international philanthropic organizations that copiously support climate-frenzy causes. Consider, for example, the European Climate Foundation (ECF) which “aims to promote climate and energy policies that greatly reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions and help Europe play an even stronger international leadership role in mitigating climate change.” ECF partners include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which awarded a $460,800,000 donation to another partner, the ClimateWorks Foundation in 2008…plus $100 million more to them this year. ClimateWorks presents itself as “a global family of affiliated organizations that support public policies that prevent climate change and catalyze sustainable global prosperity.” (“Prevent climate change”? Understandably, that alone will really cost a bunch!)

Also, lest we forget, there’s a whole lot of other money available for those who will carry water for climate crisis and renewable energy promotion. The IPCC costs Western taxpayers about $6.5 million annually, and that’s but a drop in the bucket compared with the $2.6 billion the White House plans to spend on research into “the global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.” (Is it just me, or does this possibly constitute a somewhat biased premise for science funding?)

That ain’t nearly all. Data compiled by Joanne Nova at the Science and Policy Institute indicates that the U.S. Government spent more than $32.5 billion in climate studies between 1989 and 2009. This doesn’t count about $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, foreign aid and tax breaks for “green energy”.

According to the GAO, annual federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010, amounting to $106.7 billion over that period. The money was spent in four general categories: technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, science to understand climate changes, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes. Technology spending, the largest category, grew from $2.56 billion to $5.5 billion over this period, increasingly advancing over others in total share.

OMB pointed out that their previously noted agency budget compilations didn’t include revenues lost for the special deductions and tax credits intended to encourage greenhouse gas emission reductions. They attributed those subsidies to costing $7.2 billion in federal revenue losses during 2010 alone, ($16.1 billion since 1993), bringing the total since 2003 to $122.8 billion. Then there’s also still another $26.1 billion earmarked for climate change programs and related activities within the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or “Stimulus Bill”).

Climate change spending won’t slow any time soon…not so long as current Obama policies prevail. A proposed $1.328 billion FY 2012 budget presented last June for its Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI) aimed at helping developing countries address man-made global warming problems we have allegedly caused represents a 557% increase since FY 2008 ($202 million). Implemented through programs sponsored by the Department of State, Treasury, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it is funded by the administration’s executive budget.

As stated, “The President’s FY2012 budget request follows on the December 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, which formulated a package of ‘nationally appropriate’ measures toward the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change.” This is part of “…a commitment to near-term and long-term climate financing for the least developed countries amounting to nearly $30 billion for the period 2010-2012, and $100 billion annually by 2020.”

So if climate crisis and “green energy” skeptics expect to make any money, we’ve obviously joined the wrong side of the funding divide. Yup, sadly, I’ve pretty much abandoned any expectations that the Koch brothers or Exxon are going to send me a gratitude check any time soon. Like a large number of others who share my concerns about America’s current scientifically unjustified, economically disastrous climate and energy policies, I guess I’ll just have to continue plugging along, tilting at windmills and warm-mongers, solely because it’s important to do so. That’s plenty of reason enough.

But, hey, just in case, my bank deposit account routing number is available upon request.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybe...me-of-that-anti-global-warming-big-oil-money/

 

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Global Warming As Cargo Cult Science

Science is all about establishing and understanding cause and effect. Unfortunately, there are few examples in science where causation can be easily established, since the physical world involves myriad variables interacting in different ways.

I would argue that this is why there is a “scientific method” at all. Because it is so easy to fool ourselves regarding what causes what to happen in the physical world.

Laboratory experiments are powerful because, if you can control the factors you think are operating, you can isolate a specific effect and more reliably trace it to its cause.

But many problems are not amenable to laboratory investigation. Global warming is one of them. There is only a single subject, or ‘patient’ if you will (the Earth), it apparently has a low-grade fever, and we are trying to determine the cause of the fever.

It’s not that there isn’t any laboratory evidence supporting global warming theory. There have been many laboratory (spectroscopic) investigations where it has been convincingly established that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (the fundamental starting point for global warming theory). We even see evidence from satellites that greenhouse gases reduce the Earth’s ability to cool to space.

But to extend those observations to the conclusion that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will cause substantial global warming is another matter entirely.

If we had hundreds of Earth-like planets nearby that we could visit with satellites and probes, we might randomly split them into two equal groups, inject one group with more carbon dioxide, then monitor them to see whether that group of planets’ climate systems warmed relative to the others. This would allow us to more reliably determine how much warming (if any) was likely due to adding CO2 versus natural, internal quasi-chaotic climate variations, which are always occurring. This is one of the more rigorous methods of research in epidemiology, but one which is not often performed due to expense and ethical issues.

Needless to say, we don’t have hundreds of Earth-like planets to do experiments on. Instead, we have only one subject to study, the Earth. Establishing causation in such a situation is dicey, at best.

Contrary to what you have probably been told, there are no ‘fingerprints’ of human-induced warming which distinguish it from other, natural radiatively induced sources of warming. The warming is indeed (as the IPCC so artfully claims) “consistent” with increasing CO2, but it would also be consistent with other potential causes. Maybe not from direct effects of solar irradiance changes, or from changes in ozone, but I could list many more possibilities which we don’t have good enough data for enough years to thoroughly investigate.

Cargo Cult Science
I am on a mailing list of a career MD/JD who claims much of what passes as policy-relevant science these days (global warming, air pollution epidemiological studies) is what physicist Richard Feynman in 1974 called “cargo cult science“.

The story goes that after primitive South Pacific tribes were exposed to the modernized world with transport planes bringing supplies, they later tried to build mock-airstrips and planes which they believe would ’cause’ the real cargo planes to reappear.

Of course, the villagers were confused about causation. In this case, the need of advanced societies to deliver cargo is what causes airports to be built, not the other way around.

Humans are endlessly ingenious at devising explanations for physical phenomena, while typically there is only one explanation. You can believe that global warming is mostly caused by increasing CO2, changing sunspots, natural climate cycles (my personal favorite), the moon, the planets, HAARP experiments in Alaska, or whatever you can dream up. But to actually prove any of those is impossible, and to even convincingly establish a connection is more a matter of how easy it is to convince people, rather than how good the evidence is.

The Earth has warmed…but there is also abundant proxy evidence that it warmed (and cooled) in the past. So, did increasing CO2 in the last half century really cause the most recent period of warming? We might never know.

The courts are increasingly deferring such matters of causation to the “expertise” of government agencies, such as the EPA. The Circuit Court of DC recently heard challenges to EPA’s 2010 endangerment finding (or ruling) that increasing CO2 is a threat to human health and welfare, and thus must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Yet the judges sitting on that court did not want to hear any challenges to the science(!) If the endangerment finding was based upon the science, how the hell can a court hear challenges to the Finding if it does not want to hear about the science? I’m not an attorney, but it seems like lawyers are so busy arguing procedural and obscure legal issues, they are not willing to go after the fundamental premise: that more CO2 in the atmosphere is bad for you.

Yeah, science is hard. It can make your head hurt. But if you are going to base policy on what some scientists claim, you’d better be prepared to address challenges to that science.


-Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/03/global-warming-as-cargo-cult-science/

 

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


March 26, 2012
Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again
The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with predictions.

By William Happer, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Princeton University

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather."

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, complied at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned. The burning of fossil fuels has been one reason for an increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to around 395 ppm (or parts per million), up from preindustrial levels of about 280 ppm.

CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated. Nations with affordable energy from fossil fuels are more prosperous and healthy than those without.

The direct warming due to doubling CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be calculated to cause a warming of about one degree Celsius. The IPCC computer models predict a much larger warming, three degrees Celsius or even more, because they assume changes in water vapor or clouds that supposedly amplify the direct warming from CO2. Many lines of observational evidence suggest that this "positive feedback" also has been greatly exaggerated.

There has indeed been some warming, perhaps about 0.8 degrees Celsius, since the end of the so-called Little Ice Age in the early 1800s. Some of that warming has probably come from increased amounts of CO2, but the timing of the warming—much of it before CO2 levels had increased appreciably—suggests that a substantial fraction of the warming is from natural causes that have nothing to do with mankind.

Frustrated by the lack of computer-predicted warming over the past decade, some IPCC supporters have been claiming that "extreme weather" has become more common because of more CO2. But there is no hard evidence this is true. After an unusually cold winter in 2011 (December 2010-February 2011) the winter of 2012 was unusually warm in the continental United States. But the winter of 2012 was bitter in Europe, Asia and Alaska.

Weather conditions similar to 2012 occurred in the winter of 1942, when the U.S. Midwest was unusually warm, and when the Wehrmacht encountered the formidable forces of "General Frost" in a Russian winter not unlike the one Russians just had.

Large fluctuations from warm to cold winters have been the rule for the U.S., as one can see from records kept by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. For example, the winters of 1932 and 1934 were as warm as or warmer than the 2011-2012 one and the winter of 1936 was much colder.

Nightly television pictures of the tragic destruction from tornadoes over the past months might make one wonder if the frequency of tornadoes is increasing, perhaps due to the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. But as one can read at Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, dotearth, "There is no evidence of any trend in the number of potent tornadoes (category F2 and up) over the past 50 years in the United States, even as global temperatures have risen markedly."

Like winter temperatures, the numbers, severity and geographical locations of tornadoes fluctuate from year-to-year in ways that are correlated with the complicated fluid flow patterns of the oceans and atmosphere, the location of the jet stream, El Niño or La Niña conditions of the tropical Pacific Oceans, etc.

As long as the laws of nature exist, we will have tornadoes. But we can save many more lives by addressing the threat of tornadoes directly—for example, with improved and more widely dispersed weather radars, and with better means for warning the people of endangered areas—than by credulous support of schemes to reduce "carbon footprints," or by funding even more computer centers to predict global warming.

It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or are already happening as a result of mankind's use of fossil fuels. But these ominous predictions are based on computer models. It is important to distinguish between what the climate is actually doing and what computer models predict. The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with model predictions.


We need high-quality climate science because of the importance of climate to mankind. But we should also remember the description of how science works by the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman:

"In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."

The most important component of climate science is careful, long-term observations of climate-related phenomena, from space, from land, and in the oceans. If observations do not support code predictions—like more extreme weather, or rapidly rising global temperatures—Feynman has told us what conclusions to draw about the theory.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

 

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/climate-science-goes-megalomaniacal/




Why Geo-Engineering Is Like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Climate Science Goes Megalomaniacal
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming. At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction. Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places. Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.

Their dependence on money is a subject proponents of anthropogenic global warming avoid like the plague, even though they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being in the pay of the fossil fuel companies. The Guardian report is important, because it inadvertently shines a light on how the intersection of money and groupthink among insular cohesive groups sharing a common interest is discrediting climate science in particular, but also science in general. (I am not introducing groupthink as a casual buzz word but in the context the distinguished psychologist Irving Janis used in his classic book Groupthink. Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read The Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)

Obviously, geo-engineering the earth’s climate would be a big deal, culturally as well as scientifically. It would make the pyramids, the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program look puny and intellectually trivial in comparison. By necessity, indeed by definition, geo-engineering would be forever dependent on analyses of the outputs of computerized global climate models (GCMs), because we can not put anything as complex as the world’s atmosphere on a lab bench or in a wind tunnel for testing. Computer models, like all scientific theories, are mental constructs of reality — really analogies — to represent and cope with that reality. The first point to note is that no model can be perfect or exact in its representation of reality. All models are imperfect and therefore mutable, as the historian Thomas Kuhn, among others, explained in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All scientific models must be continually tested to ensure their predictions match up to external conditions, and as the precision of observations increases, sooner of later, all scientific models become creaky and eventually need to be replaced with a newer construction to better explain a reality that is always receding as one seems to get closer to it by making more precise observations.

The second point to note is that GCMs are complex mathematical constructs made by like-minded or group-thinking minds. They are not the products of individuals. This requires a consensus-based mentality and the intense communal effort required to build these models reinforces that mentality. The need to raise money to pay for these models further intensifies the communal outlook. Consensus building, and especially the invocation of consensual authority, shapes the mentality of contemporary climate scientists in a very different way from the conceptions of physics that shaped the individual mental outlooks during the experiments that produced the models of the atom that competed for acceptance during the first half of the twentieth century. The great physicist who invented the first model of the atom, Niels Bohr, for example, used to introduce his lectures by saying everything he was about to say was wrong. By that he meant no theory is eternal.

You will not hear Bohr’s kind of humility, tolerance, or encouragement of dissent and debate from dogmatic proponents of global warming like Michael Mann or James Hansen, ironically, both physicists, even though the GCMs they are basing their sense of authority on have not been validated with empirical data (or in the case of Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, have been shown to be statistically flawed). The dogmatic sense of certainty exhibited by goupthinking climate scientists exists despite the fact that the comprehensive data needed to test the GCM models for matchups to the environment simply do not exist. Yet, this uncertainty is not at all unlike that which created the far more open-minded debate among the advocates of different atomic models, like Bohr, Schrödinger, or Heisenberg in the early Twentieth Century. So, the authority of the GCMs needed to justify geo-engineering must be based on unvalidated assumptions about reality — really conjectures which are now stated as dogma, like, for example, the crucial quantification of the sensitivity of the warming response to changes in CO2 levels.

But there is more to the speculative analytical pathway leading climate science into the geo-engineering cul de sac, which brings me to my third point. To justify the huge public expenditures and diversion of resources needed to geo-engineer the world, it will be necessary to perform cost-effectiveness analyses of the predicted benefits in a political context to convince policy makers of the need to undertake such a drastic and costly course of action. Although the Guardian does not mention it, I have met some global warming alarmists (all card-carrying decarbonizers) who are already advocating that we combine the output of the GCMs with econometric models of the global economy to predict the global relationship between the monetary inputs to the economic benefits of global temperature reduction via solutions like carbon sequestration, etc. If you want to know how accurate econometric models are, just ask Alan Greenspan. This kind of operation, clearly, would be like piling a house of cards on top of a house of cards.

Yet, the econometric-GCM mansion of cards is probably inevitable. It is a tiny logical step for advocates of geo-engineering to link their theoretical GCMs to econometric models, and given the money needed (and the sacrifices that would be made elsewhere), cost-benefit analyses will eventually become necessary. A policy decision to launch a “Manhattan Plus” project to geo-engineer the earth’s climate based on analyses of the output of such poorly understood computer models (GCMs and econometric) would go beyond madness and descend into megalomania. The Guardian report inadvertently makes the madness quite clear: some climate scientists are calling for a political consensus to geo-engineer the globe, because the world cannot reach a political agreement on the vastly simpler problem of simply reducing carbon emissions. Such an argument is at once illogical and bizarre. Perhaps this yawning disconnect is why this report appeared in the Guardian, usually the most rabid pro global-warming mainstream newspaper in the world.

But of course, the megalomania implicit in geo-engineering has nothing to do with madness; it is about a group of like-minded intelligent people trying to feather their nest by creating a cash cow to do what they think is right and good. This is something I saw every day in the Pentagon.

Indeed, creating cash cows in the name of the greater good is the essence of the Pentagon’s game. My 28 years experience in the Pentagon made me quite familiar with the steps needed to create the financial equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone: (1) Inflate a threat to scare the bejeezus out of the people and induce politicians to unleash a torrent of publicly-funded money; (2) then, front-load a solution to neutralize that threat by overstating its benefits, understating its costs, and downplaying the uncertainties surrounding what is at best a poorly understood course of action; and then, (3) politically engineer a social safety net by spreading the money (grants and contracts) around the polity to lock in the constituent dependencies needed to keep the money flowing after the inevitable problems begin to surface.

Incidentally, the geo-engineering game, if publicly funded, will be manna from heaven for the US hi-tech weapons industry, which cannot compete commercially, but is in need of diversification, because of marginal cutbacks in the rate of future growth in the Pentagon’s budget. You can bet what little is left of your IRA that defense mega-giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman will be attracted to the cash flow potential of geo-engineering like flies to honey, should a serious geo-engineering effort begin to materialize.

Speaking of the similarities between the advocates of geo-engineering to the inhabitants of the Pentagon and the defense industry — consider, as an example, the resemblance of using computer simulations to cope with the uncertainties of geo-engineering to the use of computer simulations in the now deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Bear in mind, the Pentagon wrote the script for basing high-cost decisions with long term consequences on highly complex, poorly-understood computer driven simulations, while short-shrifting testing. It has more experience in modeling than just about any organization in the world. It began cost-effectiveness modeling on computers in the mid 1960s and has continued with increasing intensity ever since. Nevertheless, the unfolding debacle of the F-35 has taken these kinds of simulations to a new level of disaster: No less an authority that Frank Kendall, the acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition said recently that the F-35 program was started with the idea of putting it into production before it was fully tested under ”the optimistic prediction that we were good enough at modeling and simulation that we would not find problems in flight test.” … He characterized this decision as “acquisition malpractice” … that … “was wrong, and now we are paying for that.” Of course, Kendall’s use of “we” is a wee bit disingenuous, because it is the taxpayer not the Pentagon who is footing the malpractice bill.

It goes without saying that the uncertainties limiting our understanding of our ability to model the future consequences of a decision to design and produce the F-35 are trivial compared to those of geo-engineering the entire climate system. But humility is not in order, because geo-engineers, like milcrats and defense contractors, will be spending other people’s money.



FRANKLIN “CHUCK” SPINNEY is a former military analyst for the Pentagon.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/climate-science-goes-megalomaniacal/

 

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/lying-for-the-cause/



Why It Is Time to Clean the Augean Stables of Climate Science
Lying for the Cause?
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

On 24 February, the Scientific American carried a revealing blog by John Horgan entitled, "Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?" Horgan is the Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He analyzes his question in the context of a discussion he held in a freshman humanities class. The subject was the morality of Dr. Peter Gleick’s use of identity theft to steal documents from the Heartland Institute. Horgan is a promoter of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and he is clearly at pains to rationalize the implications of Gleick’s caper. Included in Gleick’s distribution was a forged document, although Gleick denies any connection to its fabrication. Of particular interest to this essay is Horgan’s last sentence, because it unintentionally places the politicization of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) debate into sharp relief.

To put this into context, however, we need to begin with a little background: Dr. Gleick, winner of a MacArthur genius award, is a very prominent scientist and a highly respected AGW advocate. Prior to this episode he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s ethics committee, and he is also the President of the small but prestigious Pacific Institute, an influential AGW advocacy organization. His target for the identity theft, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, is also a small, but relatively obscure, libertarian organization that promotes a skeptical viewpoint of AGW theory as well as the ideology of free-market solutions to all problems. The latter is a point of view to which I do not subscribe.

Heartland provides skeptical scientists, so-called climate deniers, like UVA physics professor Fred Singer with small grants of funds donated legally by the kind of wealthy conservative activists that liberal-minded citizens who fear the rise of oligarchy — including myself — love to loathe.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the dollars Heartland distributes to the so-called ‘deniers’ are minuscule when compared to the billions of taxpayer dollars and the hundreds of millions in grants from private foundations now being rained down on the scientists promoting AGW theory.⁠[1] The Heartland-funded scientists examine and publish questions about and uncertainties implicit in AGW theory, and part of its motives are surely political, as are those of far more luxuriously-funded, pro-AGW outfits like Climateworks [see endnote #1]. So, from the point of view of the AGW fraternity, if Heartland’s efforts ever hit pay dirt, a lot of money would be at stake, and taxpayer and private donations to the fraternity could be reduced. That makes Heartland a threat to the AGW honey pot and therefore one of the fraternity’s many enemies. As a veteran of many Pentagon budget battles, I can assure you that any threat to any program’s honey pot, no matter how small or inconsequential, is taken very seriously by the faction that benefits from the continued cash flow. [2]

Suffice to say, Gleick’s theft is not in dispute; he has admitted to it. However, he denies any relationship to the crucial, smoking-gun, forged memo that he distributed anonymously along with the package of authentic Heartland documents he stole. Without the forged Heartland memo, that package of real Heartland documents would have been a yawner. The forgery, the source of which is still in dispute, makes it clear that the entire operation was intended to smear Heartland by discrediting the motivations of its scientific work with unflattering claims of influence peddling that Heartland insists are false. Descriptions of and apologia relating to Gleick’s caper can be easily found all over the net, and for interested readers, I recommend they start with Megan McArdle’s relatively balanced one in the Atlantic Monthly blog site at this link ( http://www.theatlantic.com/business...and-fact-not-the-leaks-but-the-leaker/253449/ ).

Here, we are concerned with the ramifications of Horgan’s ethical rationalization of Gleick’s behavior, because together, they shine a bright light on the state of moral decay in climate science.

To those who say I am cherry picking examples, I can only say that Horgan’s blog appeared in the Scientific American, a prestigious magazine professing to be a promoter of science and the ethical practice of science. SA is an enormously influential source of information for concerned citizens interested in learning about science and public policies affecting science. Horgan is an influential teacher of science in one of America’s top science and engineering colleges. Therefore, it is worth taking the time to examine Horgan’s reasoning by reading his blog entry at this link ( http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-warming-activists-lie-to-defend-their-cause/ ). Briefly, here is how Horgan framed the moral dilemma by synthesizing a twisted interpretation of Immanuel Kant to irrelevant reading of John Stuart Mill:

Kant said that when judging the morality of an act, we must weigh the intentions of the actor. Was he acting selfishly, to benefit himself, or selflessly, to help others? By this criterion, Gleick’s lie was clearly moral, because he was defending a cause that he passionately views as righteous. Gleick, you might say, is a hero comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 stole and released documents that revealed that U.S. officials lied to justify the war in Vietnam.

But another philosopher my students and I are reading, the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, said that judging acts according to intentions is not enough. We also have to look at consequences. And if Gleick’s deception has any consequences, they will probably be harmful. His exposure of the Heartland Institute’s plans, far from convincing skeptics to reconsider their position, will probably just confirm their suspicions about environmentalists. Even if Gleick’s lie was morally right, it was strategically wrong.

The comparison of Gleick to Ellsberg is absurd, even if we accept Horgan’s warping of Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative [3] to infer that any self-defined goodness of the “end” justifies the “means” employed to achieve that end. Ellsberg was an insider who exposed illegal government behaviour. Federal officials who lie to Congress are committing a felony that carries both a heavy fine and time in the slammer. That it is almost never enforced is beside the point. The most charitable description of Gleick’s behaviour is that he committed a crime (identity theft) to expose perfectly legal if unsavory behaviour — and the adjective ‘unsavory’ would apply only if the forged document was accurate. By the way, Horgan seems not to realize that many of the federal officials committing the crime of lying to Congress about the Vietnam war believed passionately, like Gleick, in the righteousness of their cause, but their self-defined righteousness did not absolve them of the crime. For this reason, a more appropriate comparison would be of Gleick to General Westmoreland, not Daniel Ellsberg.

Horgan’s invocation of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy is equally bizarre. It does not even address the moral question, but simply introduces the unrelated idea that Gleick’s Heartland caper was strategically stupid.

So, Horgan’s moral appeal to the authority of philosophers on the question of lying boils down to a system of right and wrong based on the belief that the ends justify the means conditioned only by a condition that the means achieve the desired end are not stupid. This curious conception of morality gets worse when one considers Horgan’s conclusion:

“I’ll give the last word to one of my students. The Gleick incident, he said, shows that the “debate” over global warming is not really a debate any more. It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.”

That seem true enough, but does the argument end there?

To be fair, Horgan did not endorse this view, but significantly, he did not dispute it either. He just left it hanging ambiguously to be interpreted any way you want, like a chad in a Florida election.

Horgan may invoke Kant and Mill to rationalize Gleick, but then he fails to place the philosophical nature of his endpoint — war — into a philosophical context. Also, his subject is behaviour in moral conduct of scientific debate, yet he did not invoke noted philosophers of scientific thought like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, or Bertrand Russell. Let’s shine a light on these glaring omissions:

Sun Tzu is certainly the most influential philosopher of the morals used in the conduct of war. Sun Tzu said correctly, 2500 hundred years ago, ‘all war is based on deception.’ Winston Churchill certainly agreed, when he said the truth must be guarded by a “bodyguard of lies.” Sun Tzu and Churchill justified deceptions and lies to wreak havoc inside the adversary’s mind, because war is clearly a matter of life and death, and in matters of life and death, the ends justify the means, by definition. Horgan’s omission of any discussion of the philosophical essence of war is doubly strange, because he just published a book entitled “The End of War” in which he claims to have applied the scientific method to the study of war.

Had Horgan bothered to think about the implications of Sun Tzu’s or Churchill’s philosophy, his last word might might have been a response to the student by noting the practice of science most certainly cannot be based on deceptions and lies.

Scientific debate can be a spirited and passionate conflict, but the rules of engagement must be based on the polar-opposite principles of transparency (i.e.,information is freely available so experiments/reasoning can be replicated via some kind of critical testing) and conditional truth (i.e., accepted theories must be stated in such a way that they always can be tested for falsification). Transparency in testing and observation and conditional truth are what separates science from religion and protects science from the oppressive authority of dogma, be it the consensus view of priests or other scientists. [4]

Horgan must be familiar with the moral ideal of conditional truth as postulated by Popper and implied by Kuhn’s theory of revolutionary as opposed to normal science. After all, he has interviewed Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, who authored the classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book about the limits of knowledge. Surely, as a seasoned writer of science, he is aware of Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability in the pursuit of science. If the twin ideas of conditional truth and fidelity in observation and testing were good enough to condition the sometimes creaky evolution of celestial physics from Ptolemy to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, or evolution from Darwin [5] to Mendel to Crick and Watson, they ought to be good enough to condition the evolution of AGW theory.

But apparently that is not the case with AGW theory, because those who disagree with the consensus view of the AGW fraternity are the enemies of a good and moral cause. And that mentality opens the door to a moral war between good and evil, where incontrovertible truth and authority are absolute, and therefore, the self-proclaimed goodness of the end always justifies the use of any means, including crimes like identity theft and lying. Taken to its extreme, this is the kind of thinking that led to the Inquisition and ultimately I.G. Farbin’s ovens.

That is the message of Gleick’s theft and Horgan’s equivocations. Together, they shine a spot light on the moral swamp that climate science has become.

There is only way to drain this swamp: The advocates for AGW need to come clean. They should make their warming data, together with the assumptions and computer codes used to analyze that data (like the proxies in paleoclimatology), freely available to anyone, including especially the Galileo and Michaelson-Moreley wannabees who want to falsify the consensus worldview.

The necessary condition of transparency is especially true for the overwhelming mass of climate data that is produced through billions of grant dollars that are publicly funded by taxpayers, like those to (1) the Climate Research Unit at U. of East Anglia in the UK, (2) the data/codes that Michael Mann and his cohorts used to produce the centrally important ‘hockey stick’ in the US and the UK, and (3) data/codes used to produce the global climate models and their flawed predictions contained in the reports of the UN funded IPCC. These predictions that have failed miserably since 1990 as explained in the prediction/reality comparisons at this link ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/ ).

On the other hand, if that data continues to be withheld or “lost’ (a frequent response to FOI requests by principled skeptics like Steven McIntyre { http://climateaudit.org/ }, see here { http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illusion-Cl...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330174405&sr=1-1 } also), AGW theory will remain a war where deception and obfuscation are accepted rules of engagement.

When science is practiced according to its core values, cream rises naturally to the top, and charlatans naturally expose themselves. This can and will happen without AGW proponents having to steal documents as part of smear campaigns, or resort to name calling that implicitly compares their adversaries to holocaust and evolution deniers. But of course, to excercise these core values, they must have the character to run the risk of having to eat sour cream.

FRANKLIN “CHUCK” SPINNEY is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean..


Notes:

[1] Heartland has total budget of about $4.4 million for all its issues: health care, education, and technology policy, including global warming. Consider the scale of just one of Heartland’s opposite nongovernmental organizations: The Climateworks Foundation, which exists to “support public policies that prevent dangerous climate change,” received $46 million from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation in 2010, $26 million from the McNight Foundation in 2010, and $100 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation on 15 Feb 2012.

[2] While it is probably a coincidence, revenues to Dr. Gleick’s Pacific Institute, which is about half the size of Heartland, declined by 17% between 2009 and 2010, according the most recent financial statement on its website. No information is yet posted for 2011.

[3] In the ethics of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, founder of critical philosophy, a Categorical Imperative is a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end. “Thou shalt not steal,” for example, is categorical as distinct from the hypothetical imperatives associated with desire, such as “Do not steal if you want to be popular.” [quoted from the Encyclopædia Britannica 2007]

[4] One of the most hilarious ironies in the global warming debate is the predilection of AGW scientists/activists to compare their travails to those of Galileo. At the same time, they insist their theory of AGW is the incontrovertible truth, because it is the consensus viewpoint held by the vast majority of scientists. In this, they a making an appeal to authority not unlike that used to silence Galileo. He was discredited and silenced during his lifetime, precisely because he opposed the consensus viewpoint imposed by the authority claimed by the Pope and his cardinals. To add further irony, according to the scientist-humanist Jacob Bronowski, one of the key pieces of evidence in Galleo’s trial by Inquisition was a forgery of still unknown origin, although it remains in the Vatican archives. (At least it did until the mid 1970s, when Bronowski displayed it to millions of viewers in his marvelous TV series, “The Assent of Man.”) It is also pertinent to note the consensus-led notion of authority that suppressed Galileo wrecked the practice of science in the Mediterranean Europe and shifted it to Northern Europe.

[5] One criticism of Darwin has been that his theory is a tautology and can not be tested for falsification. That is a flawed critique, because one clear test of falsifiability would be to find a fossil that is definitely out of sequence time-wise. To date, that has not happened, so as far as the fossil record is concerned, Darwin’s theory of evolution has not been falsified. It remains conditionally true, but like all scientific theories, Darwin’s theory is not and can never be incontrovertibly true.



http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/lying-for-the-cause/

 

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A talk by Dr. Murry Salby

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/19/what-you-mean-we-arent-controlling-the-climate/

All you have to do is point to conclusive evidence that the rise in CO2 has caused verifiable global harm. But so far, that hypothesis has withstood every challenge. Because there has been no global harm due to the rise in CO2. A rise, I might add, that is caused by warming.

Rising CO2 isn’t causing the warming; warming is causing CO2 to rise, just like a warming Coke outgases CO2. It is a proven fact that oceans outgas CO2 as they warm. CO2 may add a small amount of warming, but not nearly as much as the oceans, which predominate. Ocean outgassing is evidence, while CO2=AGW is a conjecture. It may be true. Or not.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/19/what-you-mean-we-arent-controlling-the-climate/#comment-964073

 

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New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
by James M. Taylor

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.


“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is “not much”). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth’s atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth’s atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a “huge discrepancy” between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesta...-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/

 

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Somebody put their finger on the scale:

http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/chron_siteadj2.png

​

http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/06/yamal-foi-sheds-new-light-on-flawed-data/

...Michael Mann has successfully misled tens of millions of the world’s most powerful and influential people, and (c) that Justin Gillis’s NYT piece suggesting that only one skeptic (Lindzen) has only one hope (clouds) to disprove even a portion of AGW is one of the most outrageous examples of biased journalism that even the Times has ever produced.

Don’t sell your coat.


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/...ndrew-revkin-and-michael-mann/#comment-979432

 

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A sad day for British Science – indeed for Britain
May 8, 2012
by Scottish Sceptic
http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/a-sad-day-for-british-science-indeed-for-britain/

When I was young I wanted to be a scientist. It was the time of moon landings, nuclear power, lasers, computers, etc. Britain really did pull above its weight in science. Both my wife and I did science at University and I have nothing but respect for all the lecturers and researchers at St.Andrews and latterly Glasgow University.

There still are some great scientists in the UK and even after this affair there will continue to be great scientists, almost despite the scientific establishment in the UK. I may dislike the way UK science has taken us down an economic alleyway on manufacturing and engineering**, but the people involved are on the whole just keen to do science – and it is not exactly the best paid job.

So, I feel very sorry for these ordinary scientists who have been let down. The episode in the UEA shouldn’t affect all the other people in science, but it will. The problem is that it was not just sloppy work. It was a lie; a lie that underpins the whole unprecedented global warming claims and which led to a hugely expensive policy costing as much as £1trillion worldwide. But far worse, like Watergate it led to a conspiracy by the UK establishment to cover up the original lie.

I can only hope that they realise that by acting promptly, effectively and above all fairly (as in science, the law requires proof beyond reasonable doubt), that they can still do something to redeem the status of UK science.

So, it is with deep regret that I feel I have:
■ Informed the Norfolk police of a likely crime at the UEA.
■ Asked my MP (Jo Swinson) to inform the appropriate parliamentary authorities that they appear to have been lied to.
■ Written to Sir Muir Russell (by way of the judicial appointments board) making him aware of these allegations.
■ Initiated a complaint with the UK civil service against Sir John Beddington.


_______________
**UK science has taken us down an economic alleyway and pushed aside engineering. For example the “science and engineering” committee of parliament became “science and technology”, and there is not a single engineering advisor to government but shed loads of scientist.

http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/a-little-list/

http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/the-real-hockey-stick/

 

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http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/normalised.png

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http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=2208


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By Martin P. Hoerling, Ph.D.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/martin.hoerling/

In his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Jim Hansen asserts:

“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

He doesnt define “several decades,” but a reasonable assumption is that he refers to a period from today through mid-century. I am unaware of any projection for “semi-permanent” drought in this time frame over the expansive region of the Central Great Plains. He implies the drought will be due to a lack of rain (except for the brief, and ineffective downpours). I am unaware of indications, from model projections, for a material decline in mean rainfall. Indeed, that region has seen a general increase in rainfall over the long term during most seasons (certainly no material decline). Also, for the warm season when evaporative loss is especially effective, the climate of the central Great Plains has not become materially warmer (perhaps even cooled) since 1900. In other words, climate conditions in the growing season of the Central Great Plains are today not materially different from those existing 100 years ago. This observational fact belies the expectations from climate simulations and, in truth, our science lacks a good explanation for this discrepancy.

The Hansen piece is policy more than it is science, to be sure, and one can read it for the former. But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.

The article makes these additional assertions:

“The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather…”

This is patently false. Take temperature over the U.S. as an example. The variability of daily temperature over the U.S. is much larger than the anthropogenic warming signal at the time scales of local weather. Depending on season and location, the disparity is at least a factor of 5 to 10.

I think that a more scientifically justifiable statement, at least for the U.S. and extratropical land areas is that daily weather noise continues to drum out the siren call of climate change on local, weather scales.

Hansen goes on to assert that:

“Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.”

Published scientific studies on the Russian heat wave indicate this claim to be false. Our own study on the Texas heat wave and drought, submitted this week to the Journal of Climate, likewise shows that that event was not caused by human-induced climate change. These are not de novo events, but upon scientific scrutiny, one finds both the Russian and Texas extreme events to be part of the physics of what has driven variability in those regions over the past century. This is not to say that climate change didn’t contribute to those cases, but their intensity owes to natural, not human, causes.

The closing comment by Hansen is then all the more ironic, though not surprising knowing he often writes from passion and not reason:

“The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. ”

Let me borrow from a recent excellent piece in New Scientist by tornado expert Dr. Harold Brooks regarding the global warming and tornado debate, and state:

“Those who continue to talk in certain terms of how local weather extremes are the result of human climate change are failing to heed all the available evidence.”


http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/another-view-on-extreme-weather-in-a-warming-climate/

Kerry Emanuel:

I see overstatements on all sides. Extreme weather begets extreme views. On the Russian heat wave, Marty is citing a single paper that claims it had nothing to do with climate change, but there are other papers that purport to demonstrate that events of that magnitude are now three times more likely than before the industrial era.

This is a collision between the fledgling application of the science of extremes and the inexperience we all have in conveying what we do know about this to the public. A complicating factor is the human psychological need to ascribe every unusual event to a cause. Our Puritan forebears ascribed them to sin, while in the 80’s is was fashionable to blame unusual weather on El Niño. Global warming is the latest whipping boy. But even conveying our level of ignorance is hard: Marty’s quotation of Harold Brooks makes it sound as though he is saying that the recent uptick in severe weather had nothing to do with climate change. The truth is that we do not know whether it did or did not; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

[trysail]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300877/climategate-continues-andrew-montford?pg=1



May 24, 2012
Climategate Continues
Will a penalty be called for Keith Briffa’s excessively curved hockey stick?

By Andrew Montford & Harold Ambler

Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.

And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a remote area of northern Russia called Yamal.

For many years, scientists have used tree-ring data to try to measure temperatures from the distant past, but the idea is problematic in and of itself. Why? Because tree-ring data reflect many variables besides temperature. Russian tree growth, like that of trees around the world, also reflects changes in humidity, precipitation, soil nutrients, competition for resources from other trees and plants, animal behavior, erosion, cloudiness, and on and on. But let’s pretend, if only for the sake of argument, that we can reliably determine the mean temperature 1,000 years ago or more using tree cores from a remote part of Russia. The central issue that emerges is: How do you choose the trees?

It was the way Briffa picked the trees to include in his analysis that piqued the interest of Steve McIntyre, a maverick amateur climatologist from Canada. The Climategate e-mails make it clear that McIntyre earned the public scorn of the most powerful U.N. climatologists, including James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Phil Jones, while simultaneously earning their fear and respect in private.

McIntyre noticed a few problems with the way Briffa chose the sampling of Russian trees, and he wrote to Briffa requesting the data Briffa used in a published tree-ring paper. Briffa declined. And so began a four-year saga involving multiple peer-reviewed journals, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Briffa and his closest confidants, and a Freedom of Information Act request on the part of McIntyre that appears to be on the verge of being granted. Even without the final set of data, however, McIntyre has shown beyond the shadow of doubt that Briffa may have committed one of the worst sins, if not the worst, in climatology — that of cherry-picking data — when he assembled his data sample, which his clique of like-minded and very powerful peers have also used in paper after paper.

It was already known that the Yamal series contained a preposterously small amount of data. This by itself raised many questions: Why did Briffa include only half the number of cores covering the balmy interval known as the Medieval Warm Period that another scientist, one with whom he was acquainted, had reported for Yamal? And why were there so few cores in Briffa’s 20th century? By 1988, there were only twelve cores used in a year, an amazingly small number from the period that should have provided the easiest data. By 1990, the count was only ten, and it dropped to just five in 1995. Without an explanation of how the strange sampling of the available data had been performed, the suspicion of cherry-picking became overwhelming, particularly since the sharp 20th-century uptick in the series was almost entirely due to a single tree.

The intrigue deepened when one of the Climategate e-mails revealed that, as far back as 2006, Briffa had prepared a much more broadly based, and therefore more reliable, tree-ring record of the Yamal area. But strangely, he had decided to set this aside in favor of the much narrower record he eventually used.

The question of Yamal had rightly come up when Briffa was questioned by Climategate investigators. He told them that he had never considered including a wider sample than the one he went with in the end, and hadn’t had enough time to include a wider one. However, the specific issue of the suppressed record appears to have largely been passed over by the panel, and Briffa’s explanation, like so many others given to the Climategate inquiries, appears to have been accepted without question.

But the ruse has now been shot to pieces, by the recent decision from the U.K.’s information commissioner that Briffa can no longer withhold the list of sites he used in his suppressed regional record for the Yamal area. The disclosure of these sites has allowed McIntyre to calculate what the broad series would have looked like if Briffa had chosen to publish it. He has shown that it has no hint of the hockey-stick shape that Briffa’s cherry-picked data indicated. Briffa’s decision to publish an alarming but unreliable version of the Yamal series — instead of a more reliable and thoroughly unremarkable one — has been the talk of the climate blogosphere, with many prominent commentators openly speaking of dishonesty.

Two and a half years after the initial revelation of the Climategate e-mails, new controversies, on the part of the scientists and the investigators involved, continue to emerge. Many of the players involved are desperate to sweep the scandal under the rug. However, their machinations have only succeeded in bringing renewed attention to their questionable science and ugly behind-the-scenes shenanigans, reigniting hope that more complete and more independent investigations — on both sides of the Atlantic — will yet be performed.

— Andrew Montford is the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion and the proprietor of the Bishop Hill blog. Harold Ambler is the author of Don’t Sell Your Coat and the operator of the blog http://www.talkingabouttheweather.com.



http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300877/climategate-continues-andrew-montford?pg=1

 

[trysail]

The public is kept distracted by the Hockeystick debate only because climate scientists continue to defend it, or avoid the topic. The correct way to deal with it would have been for all the unsound results to be withdrawn, for the scientific establishment to find out how and then take measures to ensure it couldn't happen again, and for scientists to be rigorous in only using what they consider to be good, solid evidence. They tell me there is lots of it. This shouldn't be so hard.

The current temperature record didn't escape unscathed from ClimateGate. The UHI issue is affected by the Wang-Jones-Keenan affair - Tom Wigley's emails on the subject are particularly significant. And Harry's 'read me' gives an insight into how the databases of current climate are maintained, I'm not entirely sure if CRU TS2.1 feeds into CRUTEM - I've heard conflicting versions on that - but CRU TS2.1 is cited and plotted in AR4 as current climate.

If climate scientists want to stop getting battered with ClimateGate, they need to show how they have dealt with the issues raised. Did Wang and Jones fabricate results? Show us the evidence that they didn't, or issue a correction. Have you hired a team of software engineers to fix the CRU TS database yet? Show us the documentation, the bugfixes, the test results that validate it. Explain how such work got past the peer review process without being detected, and show that you have now fixed the process. Explain how the situation arose such that people were allowed to block scepticism from getting published, and show you have fixed the process. And then show us how with the process fixed, the evidence is still solid.

It's good tactics and it's good science. You disarm the sceptics, depriving them of their strongest weapons. You build a new case without any of the weaknesses of the old, stronger and more convincing by its transparent quality. And this is how science is supposed to work. You detect and discard the errors.

It's mystifying to many of us why you don't, unless it is that you find you can't. That is what people will assume.

As for policy options in case it all turns out to be true, there's another that hasn't been put on the table. That is that in the face of an uncertain future, we do nothing yet, but build up resources and resiliency ready to jump when it becomes obvious where we need to go. We carry on with business as usual for the next forty to fifty years, transition to alternative power sources then when it becomes cheaper to do so, and adapt to whatever changes in climate happen as they happen, as we've been adapting to changes in climate for the last 50,000 years. We have technology now.

Or if you're going to declare an undemocratic emergency, then announce tomorrow that we're going to build a thousand new nuclear reactors in the centres of big cities over the next two decades, no planning permission, no protests, no delays during construction, no compensation if it goes pop. No argument. Because that's what we ought to do if we really believed one word of the apocalyptic predictions.

The basis of democracy is that each faction uses argument and evidence to persuade the majority that they are right. That gives science a big advantage, or ought to, because the scientific method properly applied is the most powerful and most convincing method we have for doing exactly that. If it's not working, it's because you're doing it wrong.

May 26, 2012 at 9:23 AM | Nullius in Verba

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/5/26/myles-allen-writes.html#comments

 

[trysail]

Dayum! Would you look at that— seventeen (17) years and NO WARMING ( as in zero, nil, none, nada ).

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise​

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise