Ephemera

[trysail]

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/06/climate-story-telling-angst/#comment-53150

By "Mark"

...When you put that in context with all the flaws, retractions and admissions from pro-AGW scientists themselves (Himalayan glaciers by 2035, rain forests, Phil Jones’ interview etc), I don’t need to hear anything any skeptics say to undermine the case for immediate, economically crippling action on AGW. The words of AGW scientists themselves prove that the rational course is for mankind to take no steps that would harm economic growth, wait and see what happens. None of the extreme catastrophic scenarios are really credible any longer and many AGW scientists and proponents admit that they aren’t (eg 20 foot sea rise) and if some downsides do eventually happen, adaptation is far less expensive. A few of degrees of man-made warming are entirely manageable (actually probably negligible to net positive) compared to the tens of millions of human lives that hang in the balance if we shut down our energy economy before there is a complete replacement ready at equivalent cost. And even that hypothetical few degrees of man-made warming is very far from certain.

 

[trysail]

http://www.thegwpf.org/science-news/2604-penn-state-university-whitewashed-climategate.html


Penn State University Whitewashed ClimateGate
Tuesday, 08 March 2011
Chris Horner, Daily Caller.

A federal government inspector general has revealed prima facie proof that the so-called independent inquiries widely if implausibly described as clearing the ClimateGate principals of wrongdoing were, in fact, whitewashes. This has been confirmed to Senate offices. It will not be released to the public for some time because the investigation is ongoing.

The document, an interview transcript, will put an end to the foolish talk of anything resembling a ClimateGate “inquiry” having taken place. It will also invite a real inquiry into the affair. Expect fireworks, as the one such effort, by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, is being fought hysterically by Big Science and Big Academia.

Critically, it also begs questions of Penn State University, which conducted one of the three supposed inquiries into ClimateGate.

The key point is that the Penn State investigators never interviewed a principal who was able to confirm or deny a key charge against “Hockey Stick” lead author of “Hide the Decline” infamy Michael Mann. This individual has now been interviewed, and what he told federal investigators has indicted Mann and Penn State.

The inspector general’s report specifically reveals Penn State’s wagon-circlers to have been at best comically negligent/inept in allowing Mann to not answer the damning charge they were tasked with examining: did he delete or ask others to delete records? At worst, they were complicit in the cover-up.

Simply by interviewing Mann’s colleague Eugene Wahl, PSU would have exposed Mann’s “answer” for what it was (and wasn’t). Such an interview was obviously necessary for any inquiry. Penn State chose not to conduct it, for its own reasons. A federal inspector general has now conducted it. And the result is damning of both Mann and the parties that chose not to interview Wahl.

As background, Phil Jones in the United Kingdom asked Mann, now at Penn State, by email ( http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=893&filename=1212073451.txt ) to delete records being sought under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, and to get a colleague to do so as well:

Mike:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.​

“Gene” is Eugene Wahl, who now works for the federal government.

Mann’s terse reply ( http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=891&filename=1212063122.txt ) included in pertinent part:

I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP​

Now, from Penn State’s supposed inquiry and exoneration ( http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf ) of Michael Mann:

Allegation 2: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?

Finding 2. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data related to AR4, as suggested by Dr. Phil Jones. Dr. Mann has stated that he did not delete emails in response to Dr. Jones’ request. Further, Dr. Mann produced upon request a full archive of his emails in and around the time of the preparation of AR4. The archive contained e-mails related to AR4.​

If the above excerpt accurately reflects Mann’s testimony, both Mann’s “answer” and his peers’ acceptance of it ought to raise red flags. Penn State asked Mann and only Mann if he destroyed records or was indirectly involved in destroying records. Mann said only that he did not destroy records. And that did it. Even though Phil Jones asked Mann to instruct Wahl to do so as well.

Allow me to translate this in relevant part:

PSU: This is potentially very grave. We must know: Did you do A or B?

Mann: I did not do A.

PSU: Ah. There we go. It appears there is no evidence he did A or B.​

Close enough for academia, I suppose. But spare us the “cleared” ( http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20009501-503544.html ) tag and the claim to have conducted an inquiry.

Not only is it risible to accept this, but Penn State then chose to not speak with the one person Jones asked Mann to also have destroy records.

So, were Penn State’s investigators staggeringly incompetent, willfully ignorant, or knowingly complicit?

Did Mann merely let investigators so grossly misrepresent what he told them in order to paint him as less culpable than he admitted to them? Did he have some reason to believe they would let him get away with that non-answer?

Does instructing someone to delete records violate any U.S. laws?

Of course, Mann might just say that his colleague is a liar. Get some popcorn.

Regardless of how this evidence particularly indicts Penn State, it offers further troubling evidence about Michael Mann — still vacuuming ( http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/no...st-received-economic-stimulus-funds-media-mum ) federal taxpayer money — and his relationship with the truth. Combined with other evasive answers ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/michael-mann-in-his-own-w_b_371414.html ), it’s clear he has lawyered up. Putting aside for the moment how well he did so, we at least now see why.

This begs the same questions of PSU as it does of the UK’s two supposed inquires into ClimateGate, which were also cited as “clearing” the participants. Obviously we know that’s not possible because, if either had bothered to interview Wahl, they’d know what we now know. Wahl says Mann did indeed ask Wahl to destroy records, and Wahl did.

One cannot be cleared if there is no inquiry, and we have proof that no inquiry worthy of the name was conducted. New talking points must be developed, sans the spurious claim that anyone has been exonerated or even that any actual inquiry has been undertaken.

At best, the key questions still remain outstanding. Worse, the list of implicated parties has grown. Which is it, Penn State? Were you incompetent, willfully ignorant, or willfully in on covering for Michael Mann?

Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of “Red Hot Lies“, which explained the actions underlying ClimateGate nearly a year before they were revealed in leaked emails.

 

[trysail]

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/06/climate-story-telling-angst/#comment-52928


By Curt Doolittle
http://www.capitalismv3.com/

I’m an economist. (A political economist. I’m not an econometrician – the kind of people who in economics make the same mistakes as physical scientists – forecasting.) Whether economists are scientists is still open for debate, but we have a similar problem of credibility in our field, although economics and politics are more interdependent than are the physical sciences and politics.

Regarding Past Achievements.
If we study both the history of science, the history of political activism, and the history of marketing we end up with a very different conclusion than you state above, and storytelling wont’ cure it:

1)Science is riddled with as many faulty conclusions as successful achievements – in fact, of necessity, far more faulty conclusions than successful achievements. (Everything from the notorious Phlogiston theory, to the Mathusian error, to the 70′s fascination with ‘global cooling’ and the upcoming ice age. Furthermore, Apocalyptic pronouncements are almost universally false if we look at the history of ideas across all fields. The universe is far more equilibrial than we are. Christendom in particular, is anti-apocalyptic because the apocalyptic vision is attached to ancient sentiments.)

2) Far more than 90% of research papers that achieve public attention contain errors in reasoning that invalidate the premise. (Depends upon whose study you look at, but it’s bad no matter how you look at it.) But a random selection of papers from PhD’s and candidates from any number of fields from any university’s library will contain amateurish exaggerated conclusions from insufficient data. (First, because graduate ‘training’ work is publicized, and second, because the short form peer reviewed process for scientific achievement appears to be far less valuable than the long form book process for scientific achievement.)

3) Nearly all research work that reaches the public contains overreaching editorial content that invalidates the research. This is a combination of the desire for attention by researchers and editorial license that seeks attention on the part of publishers.

4) Good science is meticulous. Bad science is not. (I lost a quarter of a million dollars of my own money backing climate science, and the November 09 scandal was the reason for it. The field must take responsibility for the shoddy science.)

5) It certainly seems that economics as a profession is more skeptical of it’s calculations than are the physical sciences, partly because economic variables are so complex that we are afraid to make pronouncements. We realize we can be descriptive of the past but we cannot be PREDICTIVE of the future in economics. The same applies for highly complex systems of all kinds, even the environment – the heuristics of which is not terribly different in intertemporal terms than are social constructs.

And, as an economist I can observe that the physical sciences are reversing the accumulated prestige of the field for a single reason: the perverse incentives of the graduate training process in research universities.

6) Movements need to be skeptical of their acolytes. For example, certain musicians who employ the compositional structure of hymns to rock music, must sometimes specifically eschew association with Christian groups because they know it will impact their credibility with the broader audience. The fact that the international communist movement has effectively co-opted the green movement means that the entire research program is now effectively discounted as a political movement. The global warming movement must associate itself with commerce if it is to succeed. And it is not impossible to do so. Moral arguments are UNIVERSALLY masks for wealth transfers. Without exception. Scientists are notoriously ignorant of economics and politics. Where science succeeds, is where it unifies with the pragmatism of commerce. Not where it aligns with religion and politics.

In economic terms, science as a profession is discounted in the marketplace because of a record of exaggerated claims and faulty advertising. It isn’t that scientists need to tell better stories. It’s that science needs to produce better work, and be extremely cautious with public pronouncements. Scientism is a religion if it believes it has a lock on forecasting the future, even of simple physical events.

The degree to which the academic scientific community in the west, since the 1970′s has undermined scientific credibility is not understood in the incestuous circle of academia. To counter this effect: Write books not papers. Falsify your own work. Seek to justify opposing views. Ruthlessly attack others who undermine scientific credibility in the public debate. Reduce the number of graduate students and hide their work unless it is extremely well argued. (this is a contrary incentive) It’s not about writing stories. It’s about doing good science. And right now, climate science is insufficiently articulated for human beings to justify paying the huge cost associated with the apocalyptic visions. Human beings are rational. They just need a rational argument and to understand the costs and benefits in relation to ALL THEIR OTHER COSTS AND BENEFITS.

Why do I know that what I say here will not make a difference? Because researchers in the physical sciences have perverse and adverse incentives because of the economic structure of labor in academic research. Therefore, scientists will not change their behavior because it would cause them to pay the cost of that change, and that cost is too high in relation to ALL THEIR OTHER COSTS AND BENEFITS.

In other words: People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

 

[trysail]

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/12/property-rights-and-climate-change/#comment-55535

By Willis Eschenbach

...we are discussing solutions to a problem which has not been shown to exist … after the null hypothesis is falsified, that’s the time to talk about possible solutions. Until then, it’s just auto-computeroticism...

...One by one, the majority of the “individual arguments” have all been dismantled and dismissed. The accuracy of the models, the Himalayan glaciers, the underlying climate math, the Hockeystick, the “Jesus Paper”, the IPCC itself, the claimed temperature changes in Antarctica, they have been weighed and found very wanting. What “cumulative weight” is there of discredited arguments? If there is any “cumulative weight”, it is the cumulative weight of unsuccessful attempts to establish the AGW hypothesis. People have been trying unsuccessfully to falsify the null hypothesis for a quarter century now … I find the cumulative weight of that quite persuasive...


...people have been trying for a quarter century to disprove the null hypothesis. Read up on that, as your comments seem to indicate that you don’t understand it. You keep claiming that GHGs are causing all kinds of strange weather … but whenever we examine the weather, it’s the same as it’s always been. Yes, there’s less ice in the Arctic … and there’s more ice in the Antarctic, and the global total is unchanged. Where is the evidence that GHGs are a problem, much less a catastrophe?...


...The problem, you see, is that there is very, very little evidence that man is warming the planet. There’s plenty of evidence that the planet has been slightly warming, overall, for a long time. But no evidence of unusual weather. No evidence of a human effect. So please, bring out the evidence. (Remember that computer model output, while interesting and possibly useful, is not evidence. For example, the fact that a computer program says your stock portfolio will make lots of money, while it is encouraging, is not evidence that you will soon be rich, you probably shouldn’t buy the new BMW quite yet.)

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/12/property-rights-and-climate-change/#comment-55535

 

[trysail]

http://www.realclearscience.com/art..._energy_surely_you_must_be_joking_106232.html


Risk-Free Energy: Surely, You Must Be Joking
By Alex B. Berezow
March 15, 2011

It was only a matter of time before environmentalists would point toward Japan, say, “We told you so,” and then declare a moral victory for anti-nuclear activism. Merely for the sake of argument, let’s pretend they are right.

Eliminating nuclear power might be a nice experiment. But there is one big problem: Environmentalists are trying to eliminate all the other alternatives, as well.

They oppose oil because drilling poses a risk to the environment. That is primarily why the United States is not tapping its own natural resources, such as in ANWR. Also, the U.S. has to rely on foreign powers-- often dictators-- to satisfy our “oil addiction.” This threatens our national security and is ethically questionable. So, scratch oil off the list.

Coal is no good, either. The reason is because it is environmentally hazardous to extract, in addition to being dangerous to miners. Besides, burning it produces too much carbon dioxide and contributes to global warming. “Clean coal” is a fiction, according to environmentalists, so it is not worth researching.

Natural gas? Nope. Although it is much cleaner than coal, it is not carbon neutral. Thus, natural gas should be avoided, too.

Hydroelectric power used to enjoy broad support, but that appears to no longer be the case. Some now express concern because the process of constructing the plant itself (such as creating a reservoir) releases greenhouse gases. Environmentalists in Ohio blocked the construction of a hydroelectric plant because it would endanger plants and inconvenience fish.

It is fashionable today to support wind energy, unless you live near Nantucket Sound, where it is socially acceptable to oppose the Cape Wind project on aesthetic grounds. Others oppose wind turbines because they occasionally kill a few birds.

Ideally, the world would run entirely on solar power. It is both clean and safe, and the sun provides the planet with enough energy in a single hour to power the world for an entire year. And the best thing is it’s completely renewable. (Well, that is, until the sun burns out.)

This is as close to a magical solution as is currently possible. However, solar cell efficiency (converting sunlight to electricity) remains an enormous technological obstacle. Currently, solar power only provides about 1% of our national energy, and it is unlikely to greatly increase anytime soon. But even if we could increase the efficiency of solar power, evidence indicates that environmentalists would oppose that, too. In California, the construction of a solar power plant has been held up due to concerns raised over the welfare of a lizard.

By now, the following fact should be quite obvious: All sources of energy pose some sort of risk or cost. Risk-free, cost-free energy is a complete myth and simply does not, and will not, exist.

Groups that never propose realistic solutions are simply not worth taking seriously. Unfortunately, this characterizes the arguments put forth by some environmentalists. They should not be given a seat at the adults’ table until they demonstrate an ability to propose a serious solution to the most serious of problems.

Alex B. Berezow is the editor of RealClearScience. He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.

_____________________


Renewable Energy Delusions: Getting A Real Grip On Alternatives
http://blogs.forbes.com/larrybell/2...elusions-getting-a-real-grip-on-alternatives/
March 15 2011
By LARRY BELL

The public continues to be deceived by gross misrepresentations of “scientific” climate facts and “renewable” alternative energy prospects perpetrated through extravagantly funded green washing campaigns. In reality, the sky isn’t falling, the oceans aren’t rising, polar bear populations aren’t in danger, and carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant. Blatant science corruption revealed by the “Climategate” scandal, Earth’s long history of extreme temperature cycles predating possible human influences, recent climate fluctuations, broadly recognized uselessness of climate models as predictive devices, and U.S. Senate testimony volunteered by more than 700 leading experts from around the world debunk global warming alarmism.

Despite a lack of any real evidence that a climate crisis exists, green marketing campaigns continue to demonize fossil fuels and CO2, their agent of doom. Empty propaganda served up by government mandate and subsidy-dependent promoters would also have us believe that environmentally “cleaner” and eternally “renewable” alternatives can deliver independence from mining, drilling and importing the evil stuff. Such claims are deceitful and delusional.


Consumers generally have no idea how expensive “green” power actually is because much of the cost is passed on through taxpayer subsidies and preferential treatment that drives conventional prices higher. Even with that invisible support, it still costs more than most utility customers are willing to pay voluntarily. When pollsters ask people if they would pay more for alternatives that are “better for the environment,” the results are usually overwhelmingly positive. Yet when they are asked to actually sign up and pay more the euphoria disappears.


Most fortunately, America is blessed with vast amounts of coal (providing about 45% of our electricity in 2009) and natural gas (about 23% of power). We also have huge land and offshore oil reserves vital for transportation fuel, including enormous amounts contained along with gas in oil shale deposits amounting to several hundred years of supply. In comparison, potential solar, wind and geothermal power-generation capacities are anemic, and hydropower, which many “environmentalists” love to hate, has practically no dam places to expand at all.


Consider also that alternatives currently account for only about 10% of U.S. electrical power production (half of that from hydro). Wind power (about 2.4% of the total) offers the only prospect for any significant growth, and has a long way to go in replacing fossils, or nuclear (about 20%). On the basis of cost and capacity, solar power (about 0.01% of electricity), is an even much less likely contender for a significant market share. Geothermal expansion is also very economically and geographically restricted.


In reducing dependence on coal and natural gas for power and heating, and petroleum for transportation, biofuels have proved to be much less promising than advertised. Corn ethanol yields little more energy than is required to produce it, competes with food demand, and releases copious CO2 emissions (if you really care). Much-touted cellulosic ethanol from plant waste remains a long way from commercial production reality.


The term “hydrogen economy” is an oxymoron because it requires much more energy to produce than it yields. Its primary commercial source is natural gas, which has more efficient and beneficial uses. Of course hydrogen can also be produced from water — assuming that cheap and abundant energy is available from another source to electrolyze the water and compress or liquefy the gas. Compressing it sufficiently for practical range automotive use is also a big problem.


And just how “green” are those alternatives? Over time, fossil and nuclear energy may look a lot less objectionable to many true environmentalists. Others are likely to remain more united in opposition to “brown” energy than support of any particular alternative, and no option is immune from eco-attacks.


Utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) systems that produce electricity using lenses or mirrors to focus radiation on thermal collectors or photovoltaic cells draw criticism from environmental groups for taking up too much desert land, thus displacing certain animal and reptile species. Those that use photovoltaic collectors are also challenged on environmental grounds because they are manufactured using highly toxic heavy metals, explosive gases and carcinogenic solvents that present end-of-life disposal hazards.


The best sites for wind power production are typically along mountain ridges and coastal areas, locations that are also prized for scenic views and over-flown by bird and bat species that become turbine blade casualties. Many residents in proposed wind farm locations including the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Adirondacks in northern New York, the Chesapeake off the Atlantic coast between Maryland and Virginia, the ridges of northern Appalachia, and Cape Cod in Massachusetts have filed successful protests. Some Texans don’t like them either. In 2007 owners of the famous King Ranch lobbied the Texas Legislature seeking permitting restrictions based on whether turbines interfere with the environment and the property rights of nearby landowners, cutting into revenues from hunting and other recreational tourism activities.


Hydropower dams are unpopular with conservationists because they disrupt river ecosystems, kill spawning fish populations, and release large amounts of methane from decaying vegetation along riverbeds. Pressure from environmentalists persuaded the Bush-Quayle administration to drop hydro incentives in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and both the Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited criticized the Clinton-Gore administration that followed for including it as a global warming prevention strategy.


Geothermal energy seems too good to be true, and unfortunately for most parts of the U.S., it truly is. Economically feasible power production sites are principally located west of the Rocky Mountains, and only California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah currently have operating plants. The majority of usable reservoirs are located in remote, scenic wilderness areas where construction of plants, access roads, power lines and other infrastructure is perceived as an unwelcome intrusion on nature. And according to a lawsuit filed against two proposed plants in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the developments would introduce “highly toxic acids” into geothermal wells … turning the lands into “an ugly, noisy, stinking wasteland.


Although nuclear power hasn’t been historically embraced as a politically correct alternative, many former opponents are beginning to have second thoughts. For example, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Energy and Resources in April 2005, “Nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossils while satisfying the world’s increasing demand for energy.” Nuclear power (which emits only water vapor) also has demonstrated a remarkable safety history, particularly considering that most of our current 104 operating plants (yes — 104) are several decades old with comparably outdated technology.


The present U.S. nuclear policy is bewildering. On the one hand, the Obama administration recently announced plans to issue $8 billion in loan guarantees to help finance two new plants in Georgia. Then, at nearly the same time, it cancelled plans to proceed with development of a national Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository after $10 billion has already been spent on the project. This termination will hobble efforts to create the “new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants” proposed in the president’s first State of the Union address. The Yucca facility is the only site that has been vetted for safety, and without a permanent nuclear waste storage solution, several states, including California, won’t allow new plants to be built.


It is essential to our national energy future that the public be much better informed about advantages and disadvantages of all alternatives, and that government policies not be allowed to constantly interfere with free market principles. “Green energy” has become a meaningless term, where capacities and benefits have been grossly exaggerated, and sustainability ceases to exist without an endless supply of government-rigged special-interest financing. Unfortunately, those “free” power lunches, like others we have been warned about, aren’t any bargain after all.

 

[trysail]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/11/it-was-the-worst-of-the-times/


It Was The Worst of Times
by Willis Eschenbach

Science and "Noble Cause Corruption"

...if a scientist thinks it is ethical to break the laws of civil society in the name of saving the planet, I have absolutely no confidence that the same man will not break the laws of honest, transparent, ethical science in the name of saving the planet. As we have seen, sadly, this more than a thoretical threat.

When this occurs in science, it is called “noble cause corruption”. It occurs when a scientist thinks that their cause (saving the world from Thermageddon) is so important and so noble that it transcends plebeian concerns. Their cause is much more critical and vital and important than, you know, mundane boring things like transparency, and scientific integrity, and archiving data that may not agree with your hypothesis, and revealing adverse results. For scientists like that, those are petty scientific concerns, things that only apply to people who are not engaged on a mission from Gaia.

This noble cause corruption, amply personified by Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Gene Wahl, Caspar Amman, Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Stephen Schneider, Lonnie Thompson, and far too many other leading lights of AGW orthodoxy, has been the root cause of the mistrust of the public in climate science.

And reasonably so. When the public sees top-notch, world-renowned climate scientists lying and cheating and breaking the rules and stuffing the peer-review panels and subverting the IPCC, what do you think will happen to the reputation of the field?

Judith Curry and others keep presenting this as a communications problem. It is not. The AGW folks think the problem is that they’re not getting the word out. So they’ve formed some kind of Guerrilla AGW Killer Rapid Response Ninja Suicide Death Commando Team to answer questions, at least I think that’s the name … guys, lack of AGW scientific opinion is not a problem as far as I can see, quite the opposite. We’ve heard your scientific claims of upcoming catastrophe proclaimed at full volume over and over. And over. And over. The problem is not that your message is not getting across. We hear it. It’s crystal clear, no problem with either the medium or the message. RST is five by five, as the ham radio operators have it.

But most folks simply don’t believe anything you say. You’ve lied to everyone before, you conned us in the past, people are determined it won’t happen again.

The problem is that a large number of the top names in the field have been shown to be, well, liars, cheats, and thieves. They were working hard, in secret, using deplorable, unethical, and likely illegal tactics to advance their noble cause and to protect their secrets and their data and methods.

Now, if that were all, it would be bad. But it is worse than that. If, when all that was revealed, the rest of the honest, decent climate scientists had stood up and pointed and said “For Shame!”, the breach in trust could have been repaired. If the miscreants were identified and disowned by the majority of climate scientists, there would have been problems, but not huge problems.

But that’s not what happened. When the Climategate rock was rolled over, and the UEA nest of scorpions was revealed and they started running from the sunlight, with few and notable exceptions the good, decent, honest climate scientists suddenly found something else really fascinating to talk about. About how it was just boys being boys. About how it was just scientists talking trash about each other in private. About how Climategate meant nothing. About how the use of “hacked” emails was unethical. The overwhelming majority of the good honest decent AGW supporters talked volubly about everything under the sun … everything except the putrid scientific rot Climategate revealed within the top ranks. Nor did they say a peep about a succession of ludicrous whitewash investigations apparently led by Inspector Clouseau of “Pink Panther” fame … silence and closing the ranks was the order of the day.

So as a result much of the general public in the US at least believes that all climate scientists are crooks. They’re not. They’re mostly just reasonable, curious scientists who tragically were unwilling to speak up for scientific honesty and integrity when history called on them to do so. And as the saying goes, for scorpions to succeed, all that is necessary is for good climate scientists to do nothing.

After all of that, anyone who thinks that what we have is a communications problem, or that it can be solved by better scientific explanations, or that it can be fixed by reframing the discussion, is seriously deluding themselves. Someday, good science will eventually win out. Not communication. Not reframing. Good science.

But until then, I can assure you that if a climate scientist says it’s raining outside, any reasonable person will surreptitiously glance out the window …

 

[trysail]

Caught between a rock and a warm place: A geologist's perspective

Earth scientist and TV presenter Iain Stewart looks at how geologists view global warming.

...Earth history is all about cycles. It is a story of the unceasing motion of landmasses that constantly scatter and reform, and of the perpetual change of a planet wobbling along an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The combination orchestrates a climate that switches episodically between greenhouse and icehouse states. Which is exactly why many geologists abhor the implied notion that climate change is somehow a modern aberration.

"Climate is, and will continue to be, created and controlled by immense and complex natural forces, not by political fact, " chides one geologist, Bob Carter. He goes on to argue, in his book, Climate - The Counter Consensus, that: "Any practical way forward out of the present 'stop global warming' fiasco must acknowledge that reality."

It's a question of time
Acknowledging that reality, it seems, necessitates a different view of time.

It is argued that politicians, journalists and the public are gullible over climate change because they lack a long-term perspective on how the Earth's ambient conditions can, and do, vary. In contrast, geologists, by virtue of an intimate appreciation of 'deep time' (i.e. change over many billions of years), have a better handle on this.

In his work Heaven and Earth, Ian Plimer, an economic geologist thoroughly unconvinced by 'global warming speak', puts it succinctly: "Human forces are orders of magnitude lower than natural forces that drive climate. The global cooling and warming observed during the last 150 years is just a short episode in geologic history and current global warming is most likely a result of the combined effects of many natural drivers of climate, and cannot be attributed to human impact."

Higher carbon dioxide levels
So, do the rock-tinted spectacles of deep time give a different lens through which to examine global warming?

The likes of Plimer and Carter argue yes, because:

•When viewed over the last billion years, we humans live in a CO2-deficient world. Back when complex life really started motoring, levels of this greenhouse gas were in the thousands of parts per millions, rather than the paltry 386 ppm or so that vexes us today.
•At least two global ice age gripped that CO2-choked world, so temperatures and greenhouse gas levels need not be coupled; cosmic ray fluxes appear to give a clearer partnership.
•In an echo of the view that global warming will be good for crop productivity, the balmy conditions in which early life evolved was a positive boom.​

"Global warming and high CO2 do not lead to extinction", contends Plimer. "Warming creates biodiversity, a thriving life, species migration and adaptation."...

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/o/5/Holocene.jpg
Fig 2. Schematic plot of the scale and timescales of the climate system, highlighting how geologists focus on large-scale mechanisms operating over millions of years (white area). The extent to which geological studies reveal the shorter-term semi-chaotic intricacies of the climate system (green area) is questionable. (Source: modified from Maslin et al. (2003) "Evidence of Holocene climate variability from marine sediments" In Global Change in the Holocene (Ed: A. Mackay, et al.))



​

...What is perhaps more problematic to the majority is precisely what role, utility or value the past record of the rocks has in helping contemporary climate change. After all, as Plimer complains: "If we cannot understand the biggest climate changes of all times, then we have to be circumspect about claiming that we can understand modern climate."

To the chagrin of many of my geological colleagues, I think this is one sceptical statement with which I tend to agree.

-Iain Stewart

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guest-writer/iain-stewart

 

[trysail]

By "manacker"
http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/23/inconvenient-truths-about-energy-policy/#comment-57433

Here are my comments to the study by Rutt Bridges.

He has gone into the various CCS alternates and the costs for these alternates, but has left out the answer to the key question, namely what will this all do for our climate?
Let’s go through that quickly:

The study by Pacala and Socolow, to which Bridges refers,

“implies that we need to cut a cumulative 25 GtCO2 over the next 50 years just to cap the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at a modest 500 ppm (we are now at 390 ppm). If all our solutions cost €25 per ton, the economic impact would be €625 billion ($833 billion) over the next 50 years”.​

OK. So what do we get for our $833 billion?

Assumed CO2 concentration in 50 years if CCS proposal implemented = 500 ppmv
CO2 reduction in atmosphere over 50 years = 25 GtCO2
Mass of atmosphere = 5,140,000 Gt
Reduction = 25 * 1,000,000 / 5,140,000 = 4.9 ppm(mass) = 3.2 ppmv

Case 1 – No CCS
C1 = 390 ppmv
C2 = 503.2 ppmv
C2/C2 = 1.2903
ln(C2/C1) = 0.2548
2xCO2 = 2
ln2 = 0.6931
dT(2xCO2) = 3.2°C
dT after 50 years = 3.2 * 0.2548 / 0.6931 = 1.18°C

Case 2 – CCS as proposed
C1 = 390 ppmv
C2 = 500 ppmv
C2/C2 = 1.2821
ln(C2/C1) = 0.2485
2xCO2 = 2
ln2 = 0.6931
dT(2xCO2) = 3.2°C
dT after 50 years = 3.2 * 0.2485 / 0.6931 = 1.15°C

Warming avoided by CCS implementation = 1.18 – 1.15 = 0.03°C
Cost of CCS implementation = $833 billion.

Is this a good deal?

Obviously not.

And it just shows us the inconvenient truth that, no matter how much money we throw at it, we cannot change our planet’s climate.

It is a shame that Bridges did not add this simple “return on investment” calculation to his otherwise excellent study.

As to his conclusions.

I believe that they are all valid: nuclear will be difficult (for political reasons – especially now after the Japan tsunami), retrofitting US coal plants to CCS will be difficult and costly, natural gas (NGCC) plants are a low-cost alternate to new coal plants, there is plenty of natural gas in the USA (and he has not even included the shale deposits or possible future harvesting of deep ocean clathrates), coal power will get more expensive (as pollution restrictions on SO2, NOx, particulates, Hg, As, etc. get tighter).

Bridges then adds

Though such a change is unlikely, replacing all coal-fired electricity with NGCC plants would cut total US CO2 emissions by 20%​

Is this is another economic no-brainer? How high would the capital cost be to shut down all of the US coal-fired power plants and replace them with new NGCC plants?.

This study estimates all-in capital investment of $621/kW in 2002 dollars (or with 23% inflation since then, around $765/kW today).
http://www.westgov.org/wieb/electric/Transmission Protocol/SSG-WI/pnw_5pp_02.pdf

Bridges cites a figure of $894, but let’s use the lower figure and add in $50/kW for shutting down and decommissioning the coal plants.

At the end of 2009, the US had about: 310,000 MW of coal plants. So replacing these would involve a capital investment of: 815 * 1000 * 310,000 = $253 billion

Total US CO2 emissions were around 6 GtCO2 per year, so a 20% reduction would mean 1.2 GtCO2/year. Let’s say the shutdown and replacement occurred over a 20-year period from today through 2030, and let’s calculate the long-term climate impact by 2050.

On the above basis, the switch to gas would result in a calculated cumulative reduction of CO2 by 2050 of 37 GtCO2.

Going through the same calculation as above we arrive at 0.04°C reduction in global temperature at a cost of $253 billion. So this is a better deal than CCS, but still a lousy investment, since we are not really changing our planet’s climate.

And I believe that this is the inconvenient take-home from Bridges’ study:

we are unable to change our planet’s climate, no matter how much money we throw at the problem.

 

[trysail]

http://joannenova.com.au/2011/03/david-evans-carbon-modeler-says-its-a-scam/#more-14022


A speech by David Evans, Ph.D.
23 March, 2011

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen.

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools and liars out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now cheat and lie outrageously to maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next. The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: for each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three – so two thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors), only one third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Hardly anyone in the public does, but it’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements, lies, and misunderstanding spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism. Which is why the alarmists keep so quiet about it and you’ve never heard of it before. And it tells you what a poor job the media have done in covering this issue.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot-spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10km up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the weather balloons found no hot-spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid 1990s. At this point official “climate science” stopped being a science. You see, in science empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance, otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. Surprise surprise, their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the US Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade – yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected”. These people are not scientists. They over-estimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they cheat and lie to conceal the truth.

One way they cheat is in the way they measure temperature. The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at wastewater plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in tenths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the US, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source. Nearly 90%! The photos of these thermometers are on the Internet; you can get to them via the corruption paper at my site, sciencespeak.com. Look at the photos, and you’ll never trust a government climate scientist again.

They place their thermometers in warm localities, and call the results “global” warming. Anyone can understand that this is cheating. They say that 2010 is the warmest recent year, but it was only the warmest at various airports, selected air conditioners, and certain car parks.

Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has leveled off.

So it’s a question of trust. If it really is warming up as the government climate scientists say, why do they present only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results? And why do they put their thermometers near artificial heating sources? This is so obviously a scam now.

So what is really going on with the climate? The earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after WWII, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 – 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.

We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only way to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

A carbon tax? Even if Australia stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the stone age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate tenfold – in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

Sorry, but you’ve been had. Finally, to those of you who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes carbon dioxide a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.

Dr. David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavor with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a skeptic.



http://joannenova.com.au/2011/03/david-evans-carbon-modeler-says-its-a-scam/#more-14022

 

[trysail]

One Page Summary of
Testimony of John R. Christy, Ph.D.
University of Alabama in Huntsville
to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee
Examining the Process concerning Climate Change Assessments
31 March 2011

( this summary and the full testimony can be found at: http://science.house.gov/sites/repu...nts/hearings/ChristyJR_written_110331_all.pdf )

Climate assessments like the IPCC have to date been written through a process in which IPCC-selected authors are given significant authority over the text, including judging their own work against work of their critics. This has led to biased information in the assessments and thus raises questions about a catastrophic view of climate change because the full range of evidence is not represented. Three examples follow.

1.A. Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

1.B. In the IPCC 2007 report, Dr. Ross McKitrick presented evidence that indicated warming processes other than greenhouse gas warming affected the popular surface temperature data sets. The IPCC authors were themselves producers of these data sets, yet as “final-say” authors they sat in judgment over this controversy, eventually denying McKitrick’s evidence with what turned out be (apparently) their own fabricated claim.

1.C. The EPA Finding misrepresented key evidence on the evaluation of climate models against real data. In IPCC-like fashion, the EPA gave authority to its hand-picked author team to respond to evidence which contradicted the Finding with assertions that were not based on reliable data or methods. The evidence shows the EPA overstated the agreement between models and observations when in fact there was disagreement.


2. Warming in surface temperatures is caused by many factors other that greenhouse gases, one reason they are poor proxies to depict greenhouse warming. Bulk atmospheric temperatures, a more direct proxy, show much less warming that models predict.


3. Because this issue has policy implications that may potentially raise the price of energy significantly (and thus essentially the price of everything else), the U.S. Congress should not rely exclusively on the U.N. assessments because the process by which they were written includes biased, false, and/or misleading information about one of the most murky of sciences – climate. In my opinion, the Congress needs at least one second opinion produced by well-credentialed climate scientists but overseen by a non-activist team which includes those with experience in the scientific method, the legal aspects of “discovery,” and who simply know what is important in answering the questions at hand.

 

[trysail]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704615504576171863463697564.html


How Scientific Is Climate Science?
What is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in plain English.


By DOUGLAS J. KEENAN

For years, some researchers have argued that the evidence for global warming is not nearly as strong as has been officially claimed. The details of the arguments are often technical. As a result, policy makers and other people outside the debate have relied on the pronouncements of a group of climate scientists. I think that is unnecessary. I believe that what is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in terms that most people can understand.

Consider the graph of global temperatures in Figure 1, which uses data from NASA. At first, it might seem obvious that the graph shows an increase in temperatures. In fact the story is more involved.

View figures here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/keenan_chart.pdf​

Imagine tossing a coin ten times. If the coin came up Heads each time, we would have very significant evidence that the coin was not a fair coin. Suppose instead that the coin was tossed only three times. If the coin came up Heads each time, we would not have significant evidence that the coin was unfair: Getting Heads three times can reasonably occur just by chance.

In Figures 2 and 3, each graph has three segments, one segment for each toss of a coin. If the coin came up Heads, then the segment slopes upward; if it came up Tails, then it slopes downward. In Figure 2, the graph on the far left illustrates tossing Heads, Tails, Heads; the middle graph illustrates Tails, Heads, Tails; and the last graph illustrates Heads, Tails, Tails. Figure 3 illustrates Heads, Heads, Heads.

Three Heads is not significant evidence for anything other than random chance occurring. A statistician would say that although the graph shows an increase, the increase is "not significant."

Suppose now that instead of tossing coins, we roll ordinary six-sided dice. We will roll each die three times. If a die comes up 1, we will draw a line segment downward; if it comes up 6, the segment is drawn upward; and if it comes up 2, 3, 4 or 5, the segment is drawn straight across. Figure 4 gives some examples of possible outcomes.

Now consider Figure 5, which corresponds to rolling 6 three times. This outcome will occur by chance just once out of 216 times, and so offers significant evidence that the die is not rolling randomly. That is, the increase shown in Figure 5 is significant.

Note that Figure 3 and Figure 5 look identical. In Figure 3, the increase is not significant; yet in Figure 5, the increase is significant. These examples illustrate that we cannot determine whether a line shows a significant increase just by looking at it. Rather, we must know something about the process that generated the line. But in practice, the process might be very complicated, which can make the determination difficult.

Consider again the graph of global temperatures in Figure 1. We cannot tell if global temperatures are significantly increasing just by looking at the graph. Moreover, the process that generates global temperatures—Earth's climate system—is extremely complicated. Hence determining whether there is a significant increase is likely to be difficult.

***
This brings us to the statistical concept of a time series, which is any series of measurements taken at regular time intervals. Examples include prices on the New York Stock Exchange at the close of each business day, the maximum daily temperature in London, the total wheat harvest in Canada each year and the average global temperature each year.

In the analysis of time series, a basic question is how to determine whether a given series is significantly increasing (or decreasing). The mathematics of time-series analysis gives us some tools to do this, requiring us first to state what we believe we know about the series in question. For example, we might state that we believe the series goes up one step whenever a certain coin comes up Heads, and that the series in question comprises three upward steps, as in Figure 3. Next, we must complete some computations based on what we have stated. For example, we compute that the probability of a coin coming up Heads three times in a row is ½ × ½ × ½ = 1/8, or a 12.5% probability of occurring randomly. From that, we conclude that the three upward steps in the coin-toss time series can be reasonably attributed to chance, and thus that the increase shown in Figure 3 is not significant.

Likewise, in order to determine if the global temperature series is increasing significantly, we must first state what we know about what causes those temperature movements. Because our understanding of the dynamics of global temperature is incomplete, we must make some assumptions. As long as the assumptions are reasonable, we can at least be confident that the conclusions drawn from our time-series analysis are reasonable.

***
This is standard practice, but is it always adhered to in the work of climate scientists? The latest report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2007. Chapter 3 of Working Group I considers the global temperature series illustrated in Figure 1. The chapter's principal conclusion is that the increase in global temperatures is extremely significant.

To draw that conclusion, the IPCC makes an assumption about the global temperature series, known as the "AR1" assumption, for the statistical concept of "first-order autoregression." That assumption implies, among other things, that only the current value in a time series has a direct effect on the next value. For the global temperature series, it means that this year's temperature affects next year's, but that the temperature in previous years does not. Intuitively, that seems unrealistic.

There are standard checks to (partially) test whether a given time series conforms to a given statistical assumption; if it does not, then any conclusions based on that assumption must be considered unfounded. For example, if the significance of the increase in Figure 5 were computed assuming that the probability of a line segment sloping upward were one in two instead of one in six, then that would lead to an incorrect conclusion. The need for such checks is taught in all introductory courses in time series. The IPCC chapter, however, does not report doing any such checks.

That is a startling omission, one with consequences for how the IPCC's recommendations should be interpreted. A fairly elementary alternative assumption that some researchers and I have tested fits the actual temperature data better than the IPCC's AR1 assumption—so much better that we can conclude that the IPCC's assumption has no support. Under the alternative assumption, the data do not show a significant increase in global temperatures. We don't know whether the alternative assumption itself is reasonable—other assumptions might be even better—but the improved fit does tell us that until more research is done on the best assumptions to apply to global average temperature series, the IPCC's conclusions about the significance of the temperature changes are unfounded.

None of this is opinion. This is factual and indisputable. It applies to any warming—whether attributable to humans or to nature. This assumption problem is not unique to the IPCC, either. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which advises Congress, published its report on temperature increases in 2006, and relied on the same insupportable assumption.

***
This is not the only instance of serious incompetence in climate science.

Over many millennia, the most important cycles in Earth's climate have been those of the ice ages, which are caused by natural variations in Earth's orbit around the sun. These variations alter the intensity of summertime sunlight. The relevant data are presented in Figure 6: One line represents the amount of ice globally and the other line represents the intensity of summertime sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, where the effects are greatest. But notice that the similarity between the two lines is very weak.

To understand what's going on, we have to consider the changes in the amount of ice globally. For example, if the amount of ice at different times were 17, 15, 14, 19, . . . , then we must subtract adjacent amounts to obtain the changes: 2, 1, -5, . . . . One line in Figure 7 shows these changes, while the other, as before, shows the intensity of summertime sunlight. Now we see that the similarity between the two lines is strong: one excellent piece of evidence that ice ages are indeed caused by orbital variations.

Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed a connection between ice ages and orbital variations in 1920, though data on the amount of ice present in past millennia didn't become available until 1976. But not until 2006 did scientists first study the changes in the amount of ice. That is, it took 30 years for scientists to think to do the subtraction needed to draw the second line in Figure 7. During these three decades, scientists analyzing Milankovitch's proposed link based their studies on graphs like Figure 6, and they considered a variety of assumptions to try and explain the weak similarity of the two lines.

***
We have already seen that the authors of the IPCC report have made one fundamental mistake in how they analyze their data, drawing conclusions based on an insupportable basic assumption. But they commit another error as well—the same one, in fact, that hindered the scientists working to verify Milankovitch's hypothesis. Nowhere in the IPCC report is any testing done on the changes in global temperatures; only the temperatures themselves are considered. The alternative assumption I tested does make use of the changes in global temperatures and obtains a better fit with the data.

To be sure, there have been other studies that consider other alternative starting points and thereby reach different conclusions about the temperature data. The IPCC report nods toward such work, but without really acknowledging how crucially the soundness of its conclusions rests upon its choice of assumptions. Making the right choice, the one that best corresponds to physical reality, requires further, difficult research, and accepting conclusions based on shaky premises risks foreclosing upon such work. That would be gross negligence for a field claiming to be scientific to commit.

Mr. Keenan previously did mathematical research and financial trading on Wall Street and in the City of London; since 1995, he has been studying independently. He supports environmentalism and energy security. Technical details of this essay can be found at http://www.informath.org/media/a41/b8.pdf.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-NJ617_KEENAN_G_20110404221702.jpg​

 

[trysail]

http://htronline.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/3/5143156/2010_volume_29.pdf


Humanities and Technology Review
Fall 2010, Volume 29.
Pages 79-86
ISSN 1076-7908

©2010 George Sochan. This is an Open Access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-
Commercial, No Derivatives license which permits non-commercial
use, distribution, and reproduction of this article in any medium,
provided the author and original source are cited and the article is
not modified without permission of the author.

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the
Corruption of Science.
A. W. Mortford (author).
London: Stacey International, 2010. 482 pages. ISBN:
1906768358 (paper). $18.00.
Reviewed by George Sochan, Bowie State University.

For two decades, certainly since the early 1990s,
anthropogenic (manmade) global warming has been one
of the most prominent issues discussed in academic
seminars, written about in scholarly journals, reported by
the media, taught in schools, publicized in certain
nongovernmental assemblies, legislated on in some
governmental assemblies, decried by many activists, and
dramatized in documentaries. An example of the
conspicuous attention given to this topic would be Al
Gore‟s book, An Inconvenient Truth, which inspired a
film documentary by the same name in 2006. A less
famous but more scholarly expression of anthropogenic
global warming is the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change‟s (IPCC‟s) Third Assessment Report
produced for the United Nations in 2001. The iconic
depiction of this type of global warming is the so-called
hockey stick graph that originated in a paper published in
Nature, a science journal, in 1998, and, since then, has
appeared ubiquitously, including in the third IPCC
Report and Gore‟s film, as if it were the Gospel truth.
One source that assumes a less than laudatory view of
the graph is A. W. Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion:
Climategate and the Corruption of Science. In his well-documented,
450-page book, Montford, a blogger with a
background in chemistry, covers eleven years of history
that is centered on the hockey stick graph, beginning
with its introduction in the 1998 Michael Mann article in
Nature and closing with the email scandal centering on
Dr. Mann in 2009. In the process of unfolding the story
of a deceptive graph, upon which anthropogenic global
warming has been set, Montford establishes the general
framework of some of the debate on global warming;
shows the important place of the graph in the debate;
unfolds the work of two Canadians who revealed the
many flaws in the graph‟s construction; reveals the
unprofessional conduct of many climatologists; and
exposes the corrupt connection between politics and
science.

In The Hockey Stick Illusion Montford picks up the
climate story, in 1998, after the paradigm for
anthropogenic global warming had already been
established in the previous decade. Before the twentieth
century many scientists as well as millions of Americans
assumed that nature, including the weather, was fairly
stable and that any momentous change in the weather,
like the last Ice Age, would not occur abruptly but evolve
over millennia. During the twentieth century, especially
after World War II, this interpretation was overthrown as
scientists constructed a new paradigm that included the
following features: the fragile balance of the planet‟s
eco-systems; the abrupt volatility of the weather; and the
potential for humanity to change the weather, including
in a very catastrophic way. In regard to the latter item,
the main cause for concern has been the tremendous
increase in the emission of CO2 as well as other
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By the late 1970s
the new scientific paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn‟s term,
had been established. Since then, normal science, which
Kuhn explains in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
as the research conducted in accordance with the
prevailing paradigm to resolve particular problems, has
been conducted to show that anthropogenic global
warming is probable and has already started. Appearing
just before the new millennium, the hockey stick graph
seemed to provide the proof for many climatologists that
anthropogenic global warming had, indeed, begun.
Those who disagreed have been labeled skeptics and, in
Kuhnian terms, seemed to be engaged in a
counterrevolution against the new paradigm. The
Hockey Stick Illusion is a publication that can be set
within this so-called counterrevolution and much of its
information has been used by skeptics to challenge
claims about global warming.

In the book's introduction two graphs are shown:
The one on page twenty-five shows varying temperatures
during the last one thousand years while the one on page
thirty-four shows unvarying temperatures from the
beginning of the fifteenth century into the twentieth
century but with a sharp upward spike at the end of the
1900s. The former graph shows both the Medieval
Warm Period, occurring from 1000 to 1400, and the
Little Ice Age, lasting from 1450 to 1850. The other
graph is the hockey stick one that first appeared in
“Global Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing
Over the Past Six Centuries,” published in Nature in
1998 and that later resurfaced six times in the IPCC‟s
Third Assessment Report (TAR). This graph, which is
the work of Michael Mann and his two associates, Ray
Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, looks like a hockey stick
with the handle leveling out the Medieval Warm Period
and the Little Ice Age and the blade shooting up
temperatures for the late twentieth century. The
importance of the hockey stick graph is that it did two
things: removed the warmth of the Middle Ages when
temperatures were apparently higher than today and
indicated exceedingly high temperatures during the
carbon-dioxide-profligate years of the late twentieth
century. Stated simply, this graph supported the
contention that it was not until the massive urban
industrialization of contemporary history that
temperatures rose and, since humans had caused this
noxious rise in temperature, they were responsible to
change their lifestyle in order to save the planet.

While many persons and institutions accepted,
supported, and even propagated anthropogenic global
warming and humanity‟s responsibility to stop it, there
were skeptics. Some, like S. Fred Singer, a noted
physicist, referred to the extensive record that supported
a Medieval Warm Period while others felt that
significantly higher temperatures for the 1980s and the
1990s did not accord with their personal experiences.
Included among the latter is Steve McIntyre, who, at the
turn of the millennium when TAR was published, was a
semi-retired mining consultant who had lived in one of
the areas cited by Mann as having sharply higher
temperatures. Since McIntyre did not personally recall
these for the late twentieth century where he had been
living in Canada, he began to post questions on the
Internet about Mann‟s methods and conclusions,
especially on his own site Climate2003, where bloggers
encouraged him to critique Mann‟s work. Through much
of The Hockey Stick Illusion, especially chapters three
through five, Montford first details McIntyre‟s many
efforts at wrestling with Mann‟s evidence (the principal
components) and calculations upon which the hockey
stick graph is based and then, in chapters six and eight,
recounts McIntyre‟s responses to Mann‟s many
supporters among the climatologists. In chapter three
Montford details McIntyre‟s review of Mann‟s
development of the hockey stick graph. McIntyre, who
has a background in mathematics and is skilled in the use
of statistics, discovered serious flaws in Mann‟s work.
According to McIntyre, it was the cherry-picked data of
certain tree rings (bristlecone pines) and Mann‟s use of a
faulty algorithm that produced a graph in the shape of a
hockey stick. Montford claims that McIntyre conducted
10,000 simulations of the climatologists‟ work, but using
different data, and always produced a hockey stick,
provided that he used the few bristlecone pines. As
statistician David Stockwell noted, “a 'hockey-stick'
shape is inevitable” because the “reconstructions are
essentially already encoded into the methodology” (p.
300). When McIntyre believed he was ready to publish
in 2003, he was joined by another Canadian, Ross
McKitrick, a professor of economics, who co-authored
papers with McIntyre that were published in various
journals between 2003 and 2005.

During the years that McIntyre and McKitrick
published their papers, a war of words ensued between
McIntyre, McKitrick and their supporters and Mann and
his supporters. Much of this engagement occurred on the
Internet, especially at their respective websites,
ClimateAudit for the former and RealClimate for the
latter. The importance of blogging on the Internet
became apparent when members of both camps posted
parts of their scholarly papers and aspects of their
research on the web. At the time of this web
engagement, McIntyre and McKitrick were unaware that
a concerted, behind-the-scenes action was occurring to
restrict their access to data and codes used by many
climatologists, to deny them publication in certain
scholarly journals, and to sanction journals that had
published them. In the final chapter of The Hockey Stick
Illusion Montford excerpts from numerous personal
emails, which were hacked in late 2009, that reveal the
aforementioned unprofessional conduct of Mann and
some of his associates as they wrangled publicly with the
climate skeptics on the Internet. The Internet
controversy spilled into the newspapers, such as The Wall
Street Journal, which published an article critical of the
climatologists, centered on the question “But is the
hockey stick true?” in February 2005 (cited on p. 187 in
Montford‟s book). The battle on the blogs even reached
Washington, DC where Congress set up two committees
to investigate the hockey stick graph in 2006. By this
year it had become apparent even to proponents of
anthropogenic global warming that significant flaws
affected Mann‟s methodology. The defense offered on
behalf of the hockey stick graph is that while Mann‟s
work has some errors, his conclusions, including the
spike of high temperatures at the end of the twentieth
century, has been confirmed by other professionals
working in the field of climatology. On page 254 in his
book Montford uses a diagram to show what
confirmation by others means. At the center of the
diagram is Mann and lines link him, either directly or
indirectly, to forty-two other scientists who had
published papers, often in association with Mann, on
global warming. In his report to one of the two
congressional committees Edward Wegman, a professor
of statistics at George Mason University, noted “the
isolation of the paleoclimate community” and asserted
that its “work has been sufficiently politicized” (p. 252) .

In chapter fifteen, effectively the book‟s conclusion,
Montford reflects on the meaning of the hockey stick
graph. He concludes that while the graph‟s scientific
value was successfully challenged by McIntyre and
McKitrick, it has continued to maintain its propaganda
value. Mounted on a timeline, the hockey stick clearly
conveys the message that temperatures had skyrocketed
at the same time that more and more Americans began to
drive SUVs, use air-conditioning nearly everywhere, and
fly on jets for at least one annual trip. The graph was
used in schools to teach children that the aforementioned
behavior was responsible for the melting of the glaciers
that, as shown in Gore‟s documentary, had left a lonely
polar bear floating on an iceberg in a warming Arctic
Ocean. Many scientists within that “paleoclimate
community” used the hockey stick image to promote
anthropogenic global warming as they received grant
monies for further research to confirm what they already
fervently believed. Finally, those who wanted to change
patterns of living in the developed countries also latched
onto the hockey stick as an effective weapon to beat back
skeptics and others who opposed more governmental
regulation of personal behavior.

To use Kuhn‟s terminology, A. W. Montford's The
Hockey Stick Illusion provides a detailed account of
normal science in the field of climatology. In the case
of this book the perspective comes from the side of the
skeptics who, for more than two decades, have been
challenging the paradigm that presents humanity as being
primarily responsible for global warming. In particular,
Montford focuses on two Canadians who have
challenged a key representation of anthropogenic global
warming, which is the hockey stick graph. Chapter after
chapter reveal the contentious debates between the
climatologists and the skeptics. In The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions Kuhn sees such academic battles
as comparable to those of political revolutions, wherein
the participants in the revolutionary process try to
impose a new world view or to maintain an existing one.
Since Kuhn does not perceive the history of science as
the story of one achievement progressing to another and
then to another, he might find the account contained
within Montford‟s book to be the usual practice of
professional scientists as they establish or overthrow a
paradigm. Some readers of The Hockey Stick Illusion,
however, may conclude that the book‟s subtitle, “the
corruption of science,” is the more appropriate
assessment for at least some of the so-called normal
science of certain climatologists.

 

[trysail]

Annual Temperature
Contiguous United States
Annual 1901 - 2000 Average = 52.79 degF
Annual 1980 - 2010 Trend = 0.40 degF / Decade



http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/tmp/graph-Jun518:42:307589111328.gif
​

What global warming? The last two years of annual mean temperature for the USA (2009, 2010) is about the same as it was in 1980 and 1981, and lower than many years since.This graph is from the National Climatic Data Center. You can plot it yourself here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
with the default base period, no trend line, and years 1980-2010.

 

[trysail]

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/international-conservation-group-global


No Decline in Polar Bear Population
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
By Terence P. Jeffrey

(CNSNews.com) - The Polar Bear Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the organization of scientists that has attempted to monitor the global polar bear population since the 1960s, has issued a report indicating that there was no change in the overall global polar bear population in the most recent four-year period studied.

“The total number of polar bears is still thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000,” the group said in a press release published together with a report on the proceedings of its 15th meeting

20,000 to 25,000 polar bears worldwide is exactly the same population estimate the group made following its 14th international meeting.

“The total number of polar bears worldwide is estimated to be 20,000–25,000,” the scientists said in the report they issued after that previous meeting.

The 15th meeting of the IUCN’s Polar Bear Specialist Group took place from June 29-July 3, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark—four years after the 14th meeting, which took place in Seattle, Wash., June 20-24, 2005. But the report on the 15th meeting and its conclusions about the polar bear population—including subsequent information that was developed through March 2010—was not published until this year (on Feb. 25, 2011).

The February report concedes that scientists still have limited scientific data about the polar bear population in many parts of the Arctic—lacking sufficient information to even determine whether the population is increasing or decreasing in 7 of 19 subpopulations.

“Reviewing the latest information available, the PBSG concluded that one of 19 subpopulations is currently increasing, three are stable, and eight are declining,” said the group’s press release on the report.

“For the remaining seven subpopulations available data were insufficient to provide an assessment of current trend. The total number of polar bears is still thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000,” it said.

The group said it viewed anticipated changes in the Arctic environment caused by “climate change” to be the greatest threat to the future of the polar bear.

“The PBSG renewed the conclusion from previous meetings that the greatest challenge to conservation of polar bears is ecological change in the Arctic resulting from climatic warming,” the group said. “Declines in the extent of the sea ice have accelerated since the last meeting of the group in 2005, with unprecedented sea ice retreats in 2007 and 2008.”

“The PBSG confirmed its earlier conclusion that unabated global warming will ultimately threaten polar bears everywhere,” it said.

At the same time, the report cited an American scientist who told the group that a research team had used a collar to track a polar bear that swam for more than 650 kilometers across the sea. “He described the extensive spatial data recovered from one particular collar that showed the bear swimming more than 650 km in the Beaufort Sea,” said the report.

Despite its concern that climate change could threaten the polar bear, the group also said it supported the right of human beings to “harvest” the bears.

“The PBSG recognizes that where habitats are stable, polar bears are a renewable resource, and reaffirmed its support of the right of aboriginal groups to harvest polar bears within sustainable limits,” said the group’s release.

In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the polar bear a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The declaration was not based on an actual decline in the polar bear population but on the government’s conclusion that future declines in Arctic sea ice will reduce the bear’s habitat and put it at risk.

PolarBear
PolarBears

 

[trysail]

Food for thought—

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we do not know we don’t know.

-Donald Rumsfeld​

​

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld was not specifically referring to climate science back in 2002, yet there can be few other disciplines so riven with uncertainties from top to bottom that are still able to attract voluble proponents enthusiastically promoting the latest findings as incontrovertible facts, to a world largely unable to question the work of scientists.

-Tony Brown​

 

[trysail]

http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/files/2011/02/co2greenhouse31-550x413.jpg​

 

[trysail]

http://www.john-daly.com/photo.jpg
The 1841 sea level benchmark (centre) on the `Isle of the Dead',
Tasmania. According to Antarctic explorer, Capt. Sir James Clark Ross, it
marked mean sea level in 1841. Photo taken at low tide 20 Jan 2004.

Mark is 50 cm across; tidal range is less than a metre. © John L. Daly.

http://www.john-daly.com/photo2.gif

These two photos are both derived from the photo on the main
page. One has relatively light lines drawn over the mark to make clear where
the mark is within the photo...
​

http://www.john-daly.com/index.htm
http://www.john-daly.com/photomrk.htm

 

[trysail]

“Not only does God play dice, but sometimes he throws the dice where we can’t see them.”

-Stephen Hawking​

...[ The hypothesis of CAGW] reasoning is explicitly an argument by exception— it must be CO2, because we can think of no other explanation.

I do not believe this is sound scientific reasoning.

If he is still following, would like to ask him 2 simple questions:
First, while I appreciate that many factors have been considered, how can you possibly have confidence that some other factor or factors, or which you are currently unaware, may be exerting a substantial influence on the climate system (or that one or more of the less well understood factors – clouds, soot, or oceanic oscillations, for instance, have been poorly accounted for in your calculations).

Secondly, the temperature increase we are concerned with is of the order of 3/4 degree C. There is ample evidence that fluctuations of this degree are not unusual in the millennial timescale. Why are you so sure there is anything requiring an explanation at all, above the normal noise of natural variation?

http://www.masterresource.org/2011/06/lindzen-choi-special-treatment/
#36

 

[trysail]

But..., but..., Gavin, you told us, "The science is settled."

...Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the founders of the RealClimate blog, said the effects of solar activity on climate over the past 30 years have been “at the margin of what we can detect.”


“They are detectable in the high atmosphere, but when you get down to the surface, there is so much other stuff going on that it’s been really hard to get a clean signal,” he told me.


One of the reasons why so little is known about solar effects on climate is that the sun’s highs and lows have been within such a narrow range in recent history.


“If we were to see a return to what’s called Maunder Minimum conditions in the next 50 years or so, that would be interesting,” Schmidt said. “I think we’d learn a lot about solar physics and solar variability. … It’s going to be scientifically very exciting if all this pans out.”


Even then, however, he estimated that the effect of greenhouse-gas emissions would be on the order of 10 times as great. “What you might see over a 20- to 30-year period is a slight slowdown in the pace of warming,” Schmidt said. “In terms of how we should think about climate change prediction in the future, reducing emissions and so on, it really wouldn’t make much of a difference.”


But what about the Little Ice Age in the 1600s, when Swiss Alpine villages were reported destroyed by encroaching glaciers? Schmidt said that period also coincided with an upswing in volcanic emissions, which are known more definitely to contribute to global cooling.


“Parsing out how much of that was solar, how much of that was volcanic and how much of that was just noise … that’s tricky,” Schmidt said...


http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/15/solar-snooze-discussion-thread/

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill

 

[trysail]

http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/17/an-opening-mind-part-ii/#comment-76679


by "Bruce"

Lynas: “they (and their supporters) actually see everything they do as being good for the planet, ergo justifiable in principle. ”

And you know where that has gotten us?

China now burns over 3x the coal the USA burns. And is on route to doubling that amount every 7 years.

India now burns half the coal the USA does, and will match the USA in about 7 years.

Germany will need to burn more coal to make up for closed nuclear power plants.

And on and on.

Greenpeace and all the environmentally “goody two shoes” have actually made the planet dirtier by driving manufacturing to China.

No good deed goes unpunished.

You and your former “friends” have made things worse. The air is filthier, more carbon soot is in the air and on the ground and a lot more CO2 is being produced than if the manufacturing had been left alone to flourish in cleaner energy countries.

 

[trysail]

Run Away! The “Anthropocene” is coming!!!
by David Middleton

I just love it when the authors of these sorts of articles start out with a series of mistakes…

The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?

by Adam Frank

About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended. The planet became warmer, wetter and entered the geological era scientists call the Holocene. Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans. The entire history of our civilization (agriculture, city building, writing etc.) is bound within the Holocene and its bounty of productive land and oceans.

Now, it appears, the Holocene is over…

[...]

NPR http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/...n-humans-survive-a-human-age?ft=1&f=114424647

​

The author, an astrophysicist, must have never taken a course in Quaternary geology.

Mistake #1: “About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended.”

The glaciers retreated; but we are still very much in the grip of an ice age that began about 35 million years ago (the x-axes of first four graphs are denominated in millions of years ago (MYA) – Today is to the left)…


http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/Zachos_67mya.png

The boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene marks the beginning of the Cenozoic ice age. It’s the fourth major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon…

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/PhanerozoicCO2vTemp.png

The Holocene is an interglacial period within an ice age. The only thing that distinguishes the Holocene from previous Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the fact that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction…

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Quaternary.png

Yes… I know that there’s not much evidence that our ancestors were capable of causing so much extinction prior to the invention of capitalism – But those megafauna had coped with all of the previous glacial-interglacial cycles just fine, so long as our ancestors stayed in Africa.

At this point in time there is no reason to assume that the Holocene marked the end of the Cenozoic ice age… There’s not even any reason to think that it marked the end of very cold Quaternary Period…


http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Neogene-1.png

Mistake #2: “Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans.”

The Holocene has been a heck of a lot more stable than the preceding Pleistocene glacial episode (the x-axes of next three graphs are denominated in calendar years – Today is to the right)…


http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/alley.png

But it has been far from stable…

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/GISP2_Ljung_HadCRUT_10kya.png

And it hasn’t always been nice to humans…

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Ljungqvist_HadCRUT3.png

The Holocene of the Dark Ages Cold Period and Little Ice Age were quite often very unkind to humans.

Will there one day be a clear geological distinction between the “Anthropocene” and the Holocene and the rest of the Quaternary? I seriously doubt it – But no one will know for hundreds of thousands of years.

Professor Frank started out with a paragraph-full of mistakes; which then formed the basis of his sheer speculation about the Anthropocene’s future relevance in the geologic record.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/24/run-away-the-anthropocene-is-coming/

 

[trysail]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/01/climate-data-uea



Oxford academic wins right to read UEA climate data

Decision by information commissioner hailed as landmark ruling in favour of public access to scientific research


by Fred Pearce
Friday 1 July 2011

An Oxford academic has won the right to read previously secret data on climate change held by the University of East Anglia (UEA). The decision, by the government's information commissioner, Christopher Graham, is being hailed as a landmark ruling that will mean that thousands of British researchers are required to share their data with the public.


The ruling also marks a victory for critics of the UEA and its Climatic Research Unit in the "climategate" affair. It comes at the end of a two-year rearguard action by UEA climate scientists to prevent publication of their "crown jewels", an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office.


Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.


Graham gave the UEA one month to deliver the data, which includes more than 4m individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. The commissioner's office said this was his first ruling on demands for climate data made in the wake of the climategate affair.


Critics of the UEA's scientists say an independent analysis of the temperature data may reveal that Phil Jones and his colleagues have misinterpreted the evidence of global warming. They may have failed to allow for local temperature influences, such as the growth of cities close to many of the thermometers.


But Jonathan Jones, who is not a climate scientist, said he thought "the most significant features of this decision are the precedents that have been set". The commissioner is likely to rule more generally in favour of public access to scientific data.


Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, public bodies such as universities have to share their data unless there are good reasons not to. But when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available.


But in a damning verdict, Graham said suggestions that international relations could be upset by disclosure were "highly speculative", and "it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information requested."


Jonathan Jones said this week that he took up the cause of data freedom after Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician, had requests for the data turned down. He thought this was an unreasonable response when Phil Jones had already shared the data with academic collaborators, including Prof Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. He asked to be given the data already sent to Webster, and was also turned down. So he appealed to the information commissioner.


"I am extremely concerned about the apparent pattern of secrecy and evasion," he said. "My sole aim [in pursuing the case] is to help restore climate science to something more closely resembling scientific norms."


more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/01/climate-data-uea

 

[trysail]

Temperature records from NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

Fort Smith, NWT, Canada
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=403719340000&dt=1&ds=14

Coppermine, NWT, Canada
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=403719380000&dt=1&ds=14

Anadyr, Siberia, Russia
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=222255630000&dt=1&ds=14

Markovo, Siberia, Russia
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=222255510000&dt=1&ds=14

Punta Arenas, Argentina
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=304859340000&dt=1&ds=14

San Antonio, Chile
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=301877840000&dt=1&ds=14

Amundsen-Scot, Antarctica
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=700890090000&dt=1&ds=14

Davis, Antarctica
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=700895710008&dt=1&ds=14

Christchurch, New Zealand
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507937800000&dt=1&ds=14

Hokitika Aero, New Zealand
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507936150000&dt=1&ds=14

Bartow, Florida USA
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425000804780&dt=1&ds=14

Billings, Montana USA
ht tp://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425726770000&dt=1&ds=14

___________________

Fort Smith, NWT, Canada
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=403719340000&dt=1&ds=14

Coppermine, NWT, Canada
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=403719380000&dt=1&ds=14

Anadyr, Siberia, Russia
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=222255630000&dt=1&ds=14

Markovo, Siberia, Russia
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=222255510000&dt=1&ds=14

Punta Arenas, Argentina
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=304859340000&dt=1&ds=14

San Antonio, Chile
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=301877840000&dt=1&ds=14

Amundsen-Scot, Antarctica
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=700890090000&dt=1&ds=14

Davis, Antarctica
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=700895710008&dt=1&ds=14

Christchurch, New Zealand
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507937800000&dt=1&ds=14

Hokitika Aero, New Zealand
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=507936150000&dt=1&ds=14

Bartow, Florida USA
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425000804780&dt=1&ds=14

Billings, Montana USA
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425726770000&dt=1&ds=14

http://csccc.fcpp.org/files/f13.jpg​

Atmospheric CO2 by volume (as of 1800) 280 ppm
Atmospheric CO2 by volume (as of 2011) 390 ppm
% change~ 40%

Temperature (1800) -0.5°C. from average
Temperature (2011) 0.5°C. from average
(as the earth emerged from the Little Ice Age)

1800 average temperature 9.23 °C.
2010 average temperature 8.83 °C


MONTHLY MEAN CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE (°C)
( the world's oldest continuous instrumental temperature record )
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat ​

...We strongly believe that the increases in atmospheric CO2 since the start of the 20th century have had little or no significant effect on Atlantic basin or global TC activity as extensively discussed in our many previous forecast write-ups and recently in Gray (2011). Global tropical cyclone activity has shown no significant trend over the past thirty years...

QUALITATIVE DISCUSSION OF ATLANTIC BASIN SEASONAL HURRICANE ACTIVITY FOR 2012
By Philip J. Klotzbach, Ph.D. and William M. Gray, Ph.D.
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/2011/dec2011/dec2011.pdf
p. 23

'twixt land and sea
61 recommendations

Report item as: (required) X Obscenity/vulgarity Hate speech Personal attack Advertising/Spam Copyright/Plagiarism Other Comment: (optional)
About me: Them was the days, sonnies
Them was the men
Them was the ships
As we'll ne'er see again.

Oh but it was somethin'
then to be alive-
thrashin' under royals
south o'forty-five!
_______________________
"What The Old Man Said"
By C. Fox Smith

Favorites
Music: Aaron Copland, Dmitry Shostakovich, Frank Zappa, Giacomo Puccini, Igor Stravinsky, John Williams [composer], Leonard Bernstein, Manuel de Falla, Philip Glass, Ralph Vaughan Williams, U2, Wagner, Stravinsky, Enya, Beethoven, Verdi, Mark O'Connor

Books: The Phantom Tollbooth, Huckleberry Finn, many, The Intelligent Investor, Time Enough For Love, anything by John McPhee, Mark Twain, The American Language by H.L. Mencken, Into Thin Air, The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene, The Killer Angels, The Sot-Weed Factor, the man who loved only numbers, The Education of Henry Adams, Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Anything ever written by H.L. Mencken, Homer To Joyce, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Anything by John le Carré, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and The Corruption of Science by Andrew W. Montford, American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch

Movies: Fargo, Das Boot, Dances With Wolves, Little Shop of Horrors, Little Big Man, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, Le Mans, Animal House, Dr. Strangelove, Rain Man, Kingpin, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, Me Myself & Irene, grizzly man, Addams Family Values, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Hobbies: downhill skiing, chess, Climbing, running, backgammon, Squash, Military History, Skiing, Tennis, canoeing, Sailing, Cycling, Sailboat racing, celestial navigation, Bibliophilia, Excel

Areas of Expertise: Economics, energy, investing, climate change, sailing, tennis

All this so that the hand-wringing, anxiety-ridden, world-savers of zip codes 10021, 20001 and 02138 can assuage themselves of guilt. Half this hysteria would end if these people were relocated to Pottawatamie, Kansas.

_____________________

So what? Sixty years ago, the temperature gauge was located in the cow pasture that was Crystal City. Now, that same temperature gauge is located on a concrete pad surrounded by miles of asphalt.

In case you're wondering, the figures are not comparable.


__________________

The Tyndall gas effect is not disputed.

That's not what the CAGW controversy is about.

Despite the assertion that "the science is settled," that simply is not the case. Nobody knows why the climate changes. The largest portion— by far— of atmospheric CO2 comes from natural sources.

In the last 16 years, notwithstanding rising atmospheric CO2 levels, there hasn't been any statistically significant rise in temperatures.

Despite the steady drumbeat of noise and the loud proclamations of impending doom, temperatures haven't risen:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rs...83/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.83/normalise

Not only that, there are serious problems related to the accuracy of the temperature records that could make one question the advisability of leaping to a potentially faulty conclusion about a problem that may not even exist in the first place.

___________________

35 years of warming (1910-1945) with very little increase in radiative forcing (~0.2W/m²) followed by 30 years of cooling (1945-1975) with an increase in radiative forcing of ~0.5W/m².

The 25 years of recent warming is little different from the 1910-1945 warming except that it was accompanied by an increase in radiative forcing of ~1.0W/m² - five times the radiative forcing increase of the earlier warming.

It is evident that warming does not correlate with radiative forcing from increased greenhouse gases.

May 31, 2013 at 6:41 PM | Billy Liar
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/5/31/met-office-responds-to-keenan.html

________________

For your edification, here is a brief course in economics and economic history (I have eliminated most of the links because the NPR censors won't tolerate a large number of links):
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recession_of_2008
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recession_of_2001
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/197...
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recession_of_1958
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recession_of_1953
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Recession_of_1937
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Panic_of_1907
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1893
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1890
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1884
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1873
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1866
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1857
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1847
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1837
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Panic_of_1825
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Panic_of_1819
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ South_seas_bubble
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mississippi_Scheme
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tulip_bubble



ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_Business_Cycle_Theory
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

As anyone can readily see, business and economic cycles are perfectly normal, recurring facts of life.


________________


"My Personal Path To Catastrophic AGW Skepticism"
ht tp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/my-personal-path-to-catastrophic-agw-skepticism/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/my-personal-path-to-catastrophic-agw-skepticism/



________________

This image of electrons orbiting around a molecule is incredible
ht tp://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/08/this_is_an_imag.php
http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/08/this_is_an_imag.php
Evan Ackerman
Friday, August 26, 2011

ht tp://www.dvice.com/sites/dvice/files/styles/blog_post_media/public/images/electron_orbitals1.jpg?itok=ujMN3WpC

http://www.dvice.com/sites/dvice/files/styles/blog_post_media/public/images/electron_orbitals1.jpg?itok=ujMN3WpC

I don't know about you, but this picture has just blown my mind. What we're looking at here is an actual image which shows electrons orbiting around a molecule. Whoa.

Let me explain just what exactly is going on here. Pictured above is a single molecule of pentacene, made up of five rings of carbon atoms and bordered all the way around by hydrogen atoms. It looks like this:

ht tp://www.dvice.com/sites/dvice/files/images/assets_c/2011/08/pentacene-thumb-330x139-69450.jpg

http://www.dvice.com/sites/dvice/files/images/assets_c/2011/08/pentacene-thumb-330x139-69450.jpg

Of course, the above diagram is just a representation of where the nuclei of the atoms are. We can take an actual image of the pentacene molecule using what's called an atomic force microscope.

An atomic force microscope (AFM) isn't anything like an optical microscope that you simply look through to make small things appear bigger. Instead, it's more like a very very very very very small bit of charcoal that you can rub on tracing paper placed over a surface to view carved patterns that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see. The tip of an AFM (also called a probe) is so small that you need an electron microscope to even see it.

To operate, the tip of the AFM moves across a surface, and when it encounters an atom or a molecule, the tip bumps up a little bit as it passes over. This jiggles a laser beam, which records precisely how much the tip was deflected. By making a bunch of passes, the AFM can gradually build up a sort of topographic map of a surface. It's also possible to place a single atom on the very tip of the AFM's probe, and by watching how that atom interacts with the atoms that it passes over, you can tell what's underneath.

Now, measuring an atom and measuring an electron orbital are two entirely different things. You probably know that in an atom, you've got the nucleus (protons and usually neutrons) in the middle, with electrons whizzing around the outside. But when electrons are hanging out with an atom or a molecule, they don't behave like particles. Instead, they behave more like waves. You can still think of an electron around an atom as a particle if you like, but the tricky bit to wrap your head around is that rather than existing in one specific spot, the electron instead has a certain probability that it will exist in a number of specific spots all at once, as defined by its wave function. This is what an orbital is: a region of probability than an electron will exist in a certain area.

If you're dealing with lots of electrons around different atoms all at once (like in a molecule), these orbitals all bunch up against one another, since multiple electrons can't* share the same orbital. To measure these tiny changes in probabilities across all the electron orbitals of a molecule, researchers suck a single atom of carbon dioxide onto the tip of their AFM. Carbon dioxide atoms have a very distinctive pattern of electron orbitals of their own, and by watching how those orbitals interact with a molecule, the researchers were able to make a map of where there definitely weren't electrons, and that let them estimate where the actual electron orbitals were and generate an image.

The two different pictures are showing two separate sets of orbitals: the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) which illustrates the full range of the orbiting electrons. On the bottom are mathematical models of what the orbitals should look like, and the actual images are pretty darn close, which I bet makes quantum physicists all over the world breathe a big sigh of relief. And as for practical applications, data like these could help with the construction of molecular machines that rely on "designer" orbitals to function.

Nature, via Science Mag

http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/08/this_is_an_imag.php

_____________


Commentary from <I>Nature Climate Change</I>, by John C. Fyfe, Nathan P. Gillett, & Francis W. Zwiers

<blockquote>...It is worth noting that the observed trend over this period — not significantly different from zero...</blockquote>
ht tp://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n9/full/nclimate1972.html?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201309

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n9/full/nclimate1972.html?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201309


______________


NPRComments
NPRComment

 

[trysail]

Reasons to be a [catastrophic anthropogenic] Global Warming Skeptic:

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/08/30/reasons-to-be-a-global-warming-skeptic/
By Charles Martin

(I ended up writing this as a lengthy answer to someone on Google+ — might as well let the world see it.)
Here’s what I’ve said so far:

“There are few skeptics (I can’t think of any, and I’ve been reporting on this for two solid years and an interested bystander for several years before that) who don’t believe there has been significant warming since the Little Ice Age, or that humans contribute to it, or that additional CO2 or other greenhouse gases aren’t probably part of that contribution.”​

Unless one is arguing that humans are the only cause of global warming — in which case i’d have to point to that big glowing thing in the sky during the daytime — what I said explicitly includes a human contribution and even a greenhouse gas contribution.

Now, the IPCC AR4 model is rather stronger than that: it insists that anthropogenic, greenhouse-gas forced warming is the dominant — so dominant that it leads the unthoughtful to turn it into “only” — cause of global warming. For conciseness, call that the AGW model. Reasons I don’t find that hypotheses convincing include:

(1) from the start, it has depended on very sensitive statistical techniques to tease a signal out of an overall warming that has been going on for 500 years. Refer back to the famous “hockey stick” charts and then look for one with actual error bars: even in the papers making the strongest arguments for the AGW hypothesis have very wide error ranges — so wide that the AGW component barely exceeds the limits of the technique.

(2) the specific methods used for some of the dominant studies turn out to be mathematically flawed. in particular, the methods of Mann _et al_ turn out to present a clear hockey stick no matter what the input data is, including pure random numbers.

A method that detects a signal when there is no signal is necessarily suspect. At best.

Other examples of questionable parts of these results include:

•the methods used to select data points in the GCHN data sets — examined carefully, it turns out that the selected points used to compute GAST and regional temps are, to a *very* high probability, the points from the raw data set that lead to the most warming. Carefully read, the descriptions of the analysis even say that’s a selection criterion: they’re selecting data points that fit the models well — but then testing the models by how well they fit the data.
•actual site locations turn out to very commonly have poor site placement and site changes that would add significant warming. This warming has not be appropriately compensated for.
•odd ad hoc methods to fit together paleoclimate data and actual temperature measurement, including the famous “hide the decline” patching, and contrariwise the exclusion of recent tree ring data that suggests tree rings may not be as strongly correlated with temperature as we think. The explanations for those exclusions end up looking very ad hoc in themselves.​

(3) There is actually extensive literature showing anthropogenic components that are not driven by greenhouse gases. These results have been excluded from the IPCC, often in very questionable ways (cf Roger Pielke Sr’s removal from the IPCC editorial board.)

(4) The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.

Anyone with a unbiased eye who looks into it will find any number of people who have found that a model that predicts more warming gets funded; a model that predicts relatively less warming gets less funding. Pre-tenure researchers in particular are warned away from results that don’t fit orthodoxy.

(5) The models themselves turn out not to be very predictive. Grossly, you could look at Jim Hansen’s prediction from the 80′s that Manhattan Island would be awash by the 2000′s. More technically, there were a number of models that predicted pretty significant warming, and in fact an increased warming rate, increased 2nd derivative, in the span 1990-2010. In fact, the warming was much smaller than predicted, and the second derivative appears even to have turned negative.

These models are often revised so that after the fact that predict what really happened. This isn’t very satisfactory.

In the mean time, actual observation, as eg with Dick Lindzen’s recent paper, simply isn’t fitting the models very well. As Granddaddy used to say “if the bird book and the bird disagree, believe the bird.”

(6) It’s unclear how the AGW hypothesis can be falsified in its current form. Certainly, anecdotally, there are people who predict that unusual warm spells are a sign of global warming, as are unusual cold spells. Should we have a period of unusually small variation, there are people who have suggested that as an effect of global warming. And in any case, simply observing warming doesn’t allow one to infer the truth of AGW as a hypothesis.

(7) The arguments against the skeptics turn out to be unscientific, and often unprofessional, in the extreme.

These range from the common — “the consensus is” — to the ad hominem, and even to outright attempts to suppress free inquiry.

“The consensus is” neglects the fact that science isn’t decided by consensus, not permanently at least. (At one time, the consensus was that fire involved a special elemental substance called phlogiston; at another, it was that atoms were indivisible and unchangeable; not so long ago, it was that light was a wave in a literally ethereal substance called the “luminiferous aether.” If consensus precluded further testing, we would still believe those today.)

The ad hominems include the way that anyone who ever received so much at a 10 cents off gas coupon from a service station is accused of being in the pay of Big Oil. Sometimes, the ad hominems are frank lies, but they get out into the AGW enthusiast community and are treated as truth.

And, well, anyone who read the ClimateGate files knows about actual attempts to suppress certain authors and papers. Perhaps it’s not fair to call it “conspiracy”, but the fact is that there is clear and unequivocal evidence of collusion and bullying on authors, reporters, and journal editorial boards.

If the AGW arguments are that strong, they don’t need collusion and bullying.

So, this is a very long piece considering I’m not getting paid to write it; let me summarize.

First of all, what *I* said wasn’t what you supposed I’d said. It would be worth considering what else you _think_ you’ve read recently for other cases.

Second, to the extent that I have a position, as I said, I think warming is unequivocal, a human contribution very probable, and the magnitude of that contribution in the face of feedbacks and homeostasis currently unknown and on the very edge of what we can actually measure.

And third, I don’t think the AGW enthusiasts consider the costs and benefits of AGW amelioration versus the other possibilities. If preventing a sea level rise of one meter means dooming future generations in the Third World to sickness, hunger, and darkness, it’s not worth it.

 

[trysail]

Science is increasingly being manipulated by those who try to use it to justify political choices based on their ethical preferences, and who are willing to act to suppress evidence of conflict between those preferences and the underlying reality. This problem is clearly seen in two policy domains, healthcare and climate policy. In the area of climate policy, recent revelations of emails from the government-sponsored Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveal a pattern of data suppression, manipulation of results, and efforts to intimidate journal editors to suppress contradictory studies and indicate that scientific misconduct has been used intentionally to manipulate a social consensus to support the researchers’ advocacy of addressing a problem that may or may not exist.

-George H. Avery
Purdue University
World Medical and Science Policy
http://www.psocommons.org/wmhp/vol2/iss4/art3/​