Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111031201555/http://icecap.us:80/index.php
The United Nation�s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report Four (AR-4) of 2007, concerning the influence of rising levels of CO2 on global increases of tropical cyclone (TC) activity is inaccurate and a disgrace to the scientific community. The public expected there would be rigor and objectivity coming out of such an important document which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore. The summary of TC activity of this report was based on discredited peer-reviewed papers whose lack of authenticity was known before the report was released. A select cadre of global warming advocates (with little TC knowledge or experience) bent their objectivity to drive this report toward a desired (but faulty) conclusion that global TC activity was increasing in frequency and intensity. They further implied that a large portion of this alleged TC increase could likely be attributed to rising levels of CO2.
This paper brings forth observational and theoretical evidence to show that rising levels of CO2 have not had any observable association with increases in global tropical cyclone frequency and intensity. In fact, levels have been trending downward over the last 20 years.
This paper discusses why we should not be able to measure any potential future CO2-TC association for many decades, and if any such potential future relationship should ever be able to be isolated, it would be quite small. It also dissects the many observational and theoretical errors of the IPCC-AR4 concerning its reported past and likely future increases of global TC activity.
This paper extends the list of IPCC-AR4�s many questionable conclusions and misrepresentation beyond those that have already been earlier pointed out such as the Himalayas becoming snow-free by 2035, the Arctic Ocean possibly becoming ice-free in coming decades, and the possible coming Amazon rainforest destruction. The issuance of these erroneous IPCC reports does much damage. They should be terminated.
This Mann-made global warming lawsuit could backfire on the Penn State alarmist. Support science, energy and freedom - donate to Dr. Tim Ball’s legal defense fund
Lewis Carroll died too soon. Just imagine the fun he’d have with the cliquish clan of climate catastrophe researchers who seek to control science, debate and public policy on global warming and energy - and then get outraged when someone challenges their findings, methodologies or integrity.
On October 1, Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and “hockey stick” fame published an angry riposte in Colorado’s obscure Vail Daily Voices (circulation 15,000), expressing his umbrage over an article that had appeared in the free coffee shop newspaper a day earlier.
“An individual named Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues in his recent commentary in your paper,” Mann began. (Hertzberg is a research scientist and former US Navy meteorologist.) The thin-skinned Penn State scientist then ranted:
“These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.” [emphasis added]
Meanwhile, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, recipient of huge monetary awards for strident climate disaster claims, wants oil and coal company CEOs prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”
So Mann and Hansen are honest scientists, trying to do their jobs. But Hertzberg and anyone else who questions the “imminent manmade climate change catastrophe” thesis are dishonest crooks, liars, Holocaust deniers, hired guns for fossil fuel interests, criminals threatening all humanity.
Hertzberg’s views were defamatory, but Mann’s and Hansen’s accusations are mild, rational and truthful.
(Readers can find Mann’s letters and lively discussions about them and Hansen on Dr. Anthony Watts’ WattsUpWithThat.com climate change website. Hertzberg�s letter appeared, mysteriously disappeared, then reappeared in the Vail Voices online archives as the controversy raged and ebbed.)
The bizarre saga gets even stranger when viewed alongside Dr. Mann’s kneejerk lawsuit against Dr. Tim Ball, a Canadian scientist, historical climatologist and retired professor who has frequently voiced his skepticism about claims that hydrocarbon use and carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause of climate change and present an imminent risk of widespread planetary cataclysms. Dr. Ball has analyzed Canadian and global climate history, and does not regard computer models as much more than virtual reality scenarios that should never be the basis for real-world public policy.
Dr. Ball had poked fun at Dr. Mann, playing word games that suggest the computer guy should not be at Penn State, but in a similarly named state institution. Unfortunately, Mann is not easily amused, as Dr. Ball should have known from the PSU professor’s testy reaction to the “Hide the decline” animation and other spoofs that various AGW “deniers” posted online.
Mann insisted that Dr. Ball’s little joke was libelous and took him to court. Mann’s legal principal seems to be that libel is fine only when he and Hansen practice the craft, albeit with far less good humor than others display. More importantly, Dr. Ball does not live or work in the United States.
US libel cases are governed by the First Amendment, “public figure” rules and other safeguards that ensure open, robust debate, and make it difficult and expensive to sue people over slights, affronts, insults, disagreements and jokes.
Canada, unfortunately, has more limited free speech protections. So Dr. Mike sued Dr. Tim in Canada, assuming victory would be rapid and sweet. Surprise! Dr. Ball decided to slug it out.
In Canada, the principal defenses against libel claims are that the alleged defamation constitutes “fair comment” or was in fact “the truth.” Ball chose the latter defense.
Doing so means the penalty for losing could be higher than under “fair comment” rules. But arguing that his statement was based on truth allows Dr. Ball to seek “discovery” of evidence that Dr. Mann’s actions reflect a use of public funds to alter or falsify scientific data, present highly speculative results as solid facts, or otherwise engage in something that a reasonable person would conclude constitutes dishonest activity or criminal culpability, undertaken moreover through the use of taxpayer funds.
Proving that will not be easy, especially since Mann has steadfastly refused to provide such potential evidence to anyone, including Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. That evidence might include Climategate emails; computer codes and data used, misused or used selectively to generate global warming spikes in historical graphs; and questionable research or proposals used to secure additional government grants, misinform citizens or lawmakers, or promote costly or harmful public policies.
The US government alone spent an estimated $79 billion on climate, renewable energy and related research between 1989 and 2009 - and many billions more since then. Obviously, there is a lot at stake for scientists, universities, government agencies and other institutions engaged in trying to demonstrate a link between human greenhouse gas emissions and climate, weather, agricultural, sea level and other “disasters.” The reputations and credibility of researchers and their institutions are likewise at stake.
Keeping people alarmed, insisting that numerous disasters will soon result from carbon dioxide emissions and a few degrees of planetary warming - and silencing anyone who questions climate chaos claims - are essential if this money train is to be kept on the tracks.
Dr. Mann is likely aided by Penn State lawyers, largely paid for with climate research taxpayer dollars the university wants to safeguard, by preventing criticism or scientific disclosure and transparency.
A judge and jury will decide the Mann vs. Ball case, after carefully weighing all the evidence on whether Dr. Ball’s allegations and insinuations were factual, accurate and truthful.
Dr. Mann’s research was conducted primarily with public money. It is being presented as valid, peer-reviewed science. It is also being used to champion and justify major policy recommendations at state, national and international levels. And those recommendations call for carbon taxes and other penalties for using hydrocarbon energy; the replacement of affordable, dependable fossil fuel energy with expensive, unreliable wind and solar facilities; a roll-back of living standards in rich developed nations; and limited or minimal energy and economic development in poor countries.
Therefore, as I have argued previously, the public has a right to demand that Mann & Comrades show their work, not merely their answers and policy demands. Thus far, serious questions about Mann’s research remain unanswered. The public also has a right to require that Mann, Penn State & Company provide their source material, not just their results - along with anything else that may be relevant to gauging the validity, accuracy and honesty of the work and its conclusions and policy recommendations.
We the People have a further right, duty and obligation to protect free speech, robust debate, the integrity of the scientific method, our personal freedoms, and our access to the reliable, affordable energy that makes our jobs and living standards possible. One way you can do this is by supporting Dr. Tim Ball’s legal defense fund. Just click here or go to http://DrTimBall.com/
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
First estimate of global land temperature trends from the RUTI project , recently presented at Joanne Nova for the Coastal-Noncoastal issues.
... Between 1950 and 1978, the BEST results for global land temperatures have 0.55K more warming than RUTI. Otherwise, the 2 datasets are strikingly similar ....
Fig1. First estimate of global land temperature trends (enlarged). As always in the RUTI project, data are unadjusted GHCN and the main efforts in the RUTI project is to identify areas of similar temperature trend before averaging - this due to limited data periods made available from GHCN (see more). As will be the case for all data sources, older data, especially before 1900 has limited data as foundation. All RUTI data in the present article use 1961-90 as base period.
Results:
1) Temperature peak in the latest decade appears to be around 0,22 K warmer than the 1940�ies heat peak.
2) We see a strong temperature decline 1940-78 around 0;55-0.6 K.
Lets compare with the Berkeley’s BEST project:
Fig1a. Recently, Berkeley released data for land temperatures as shown (enlarged). Lets compare Undajusted GHCN/RUTI with Berkeley:
October 31, 2011 11:36 A.M. By Greg Pollowitz
The Consumers Alliance for Global Prosperity has a new video out exposing Greenpeace and how Greenpeace�s environmentalism actually hurts the developing world. I don�t know who they got to do the voice in the vid, but he�s pretty scary. Perfect for Halloween today. Enjoy:
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You Cannot have it Both Ways
By Harold Ambler
I spent 25 years of my life worried about global warming. And one of the best proofs that the scientists and the media both had to keep me convinced was warmer winters, with less snow. Al Gore talked about it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote about it. Dozens of scientists published papers showing that winters were getting warmer, with less snow.
Well, in the midst of this kind of certainty about warmer winters, with less snow, some scientists, among them a Russian named Habibullo Abdussamatov, dared to question the idea that warmer winters, with less snow, were caused by carbon dioxide in the first place and also questioned whether Earth would continue to warm during the next few decades.
Abdussamatov and the rest of the skeptical scientists were widely ridiculed, even condemned. Corrupt, sub-human, blind, people called them. And worse.
They were none of these things.
Then, a funny thing started happening a couple of autumns ago. First, significant early-season snow events began to materialize during fall. Second, winters in the Northern Hemisphere started to show characteristics of the winters that Al Gore and RFK Jr. said they missed so much.
But now, in our era of terror of weather, the return to colder winters, with more snow, has been twisted by the same people who missed the colder winters, with more snow, of their youth. These new cold winters, with more snow, were not evidence of natural climate cycles, they said. The snow was, in fact, caused by global warming. This is what they said. And I have to believe that it is what they meant.
But it cannot continue. The science claiming that the unfolding transition to colder winters, with more snow, is proof of global warming is bad science. And turning an entire generation of people into nature-fearers is a grave sin.
The ocean-atmosphere system did not used to sit in benevolent stasis. Sea level did not used to remain ever stable. Droughts are not a product of modernity, and they are not increasing in number. And early-season snowstorms like the one unfolding in the Northeast were never proof of global warming. Not when they happened in the past, and not now.
To Mr. Gore, and his still passionate supporters, I say this: You cannot have it both ways. You cannot count the absence of snow as proof of your theories and the presence of snow as the proof of your theories.
We’re smarter than that. And you�re going have to do better, if you wish to win this debate.
Halloween is this weekend or Monday. Already before Halloween, two snowstorms have hit the east bringing record October snows. New York City’s snow is greatest for October since records began in 1869.
The excuse they used the last few years was that the snow and cold was the result of strong blocking high pressure in the arctic pushing cold air south. Well that is NOT currently hapoening. So how does one explain the cold and snow??? Or the fact that winters have cooled 4.13F the last decade for the lower 48 states. Every region has cooled.
Here is another good example why I have come to view parts of the climate science research enterprise with a considerable degree of distrust.
A paper was released yesterday by PNAS, by Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou, which asserts that the 2010 Russian summer heat wave was, with 80% probability, the result of a background warming trend. But if you take a look at the actual paper you see that they made some arbitrary choices (which are at least unexplained from a scientific standpoint) that bias the results in a particular direction.
Look at the annotated figure above (enlarged), which originally comes from an EGU poster by Dole et al. (programme here in PDF). It shows surface temperature anomalies in Russia dating back to 1880. I added in the green line which shows the date from which Rahmsdorf and Coumou decided to begin their analysis—1911, immediately after an extended warm period and at the start of an extended cool period.
Obviously, any examination of statistics will depend upon the data that is included and not included. Why did Rahmsdorf and Coumou start with 1911? A century, 100 years, is a nice round number, but it does not have any privileged scientific meaning. Why did they not report the sensitivity of their results to choice of start date? There may indeed be very good scientific reasons why starting the analysis in 1911 makes the most sense and for the paper to not report the sensitivity of results to the start date. But the authors did not share that information with their readers. Hence, the decision looks arbitrary and to have influenced the results.
Climate science—or at least some parts of it—seems to have devolved into an effort to generate media coverage and talking points for blogs, at the expense of actually adding to our scientific knowledge of the climate system. The new PNAS paper sure looks like a cherry pick to me. For a scientific exploration of the Russian heat wave that seems far more trustworthy to me, take a look at this paper.
Oct 25, 2011
Rewriting The Past At The Ministry Of Truth
Posted on October 25, 2011 by Steven Goddard
In 1975, NCAR generated this graph of global cooling. Temperatures plummeted from 1945 to at least 1970.
Arctic and Antarctic measurements show significant warm biases
Scientists Discover Arctic Temperature Dataset Seriously Flawed - Significant Fabricated Warming Is The Result
Read here. Over 2,000 previous peer-reviewed studies are severely tainted with bad data from the often used ERA-40 Reanalysis regarding Arctic region temperature trends. Researchers Screen and Simmonds concluded that this dataset should no longer be relied on in future studies, which implies that many past studies indicating Arctic warming are robustly in error.
Essentially, group-think consensus science by “experts” at its worst: “Hey...why don’t we all use the same computer output for every Arctic study.” Brilliant.
“This study explicitly documents a discontinuity in the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) that leads to significantly exaggerated warming in the Arctic mid- to lower troposphere, and demonstrates that the continuing use of ERA-40 to study Arctic temperature trends is problematic...Decadal or multidecadal Arctic temperature trends calculated over periods that include 1997 are highly inaccurate...It is shown that ERA-40 is poorly suited to studying Arctic temperature trends and their vertical profile, and conclusions based upon them must be viewed with extreme caution. Consequently, its future use for this purpose is discouraged."....."Such an error not only affects the Arctic troposphere, but necessarily must effect the entire northern hemisphere jet stream."[James A. Screen, Ian Simmonds 2011: Journal of Climate]
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New paper finds some Antarctic temperature measurements show false warming of up to 10C (18F)
A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology finds that temperature measurements on the Antarctic plateau “are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation,” resulting in temperature measurements up to 10C (18F) warmer than actual temperatures. The authors find that the summer Sun heats the housing for the electronic thermometers causing the warming bias during summer, which is also exacerbated by low wind conditions. Surface temperature measurements are particularly important at the poles, because satellite measurements of temperature do not include data poleward of 82.5 North and 70 South and the only available measurements in these areas are from surface temperature stations. Considering the tiny change in global temperature over the past 161 years of only 0.7C, this newly-discovered large warming bias of up to 10C calls into question data from areas critical to the AGW debate.
Abstract
Observations of atmospheric temperature made on the Antarctic plateau with thermistors housed in naturally (wind) ventilated radiation shields are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation. High incoming solar flux and high surface albedo result in radiation biases in Gill (multiplate) styled shields that can occasionally exceed 10�C in summer in case of low wind speed. Although stronger and more frequent when incoming solar radiation is high, biases exceeding 8C are found even when solar is less than 200 Wm-. Comparing with sonic thermometers, which are not affected by radiation but which are too complex to be routinely used for mean temperature monitoring, commercially available aspirated shields are shown to efficiently protect thermistor measurements from solar radiation biases. Most of the available in situ reports of atmospheric temperature on the Antarctic plateau are from automatic weather stations that use passive shields and are thus likely warm biased in the summer. In spite of low power consumption, deploying aspirated shields at remote locations in such a difficult environment may be a challenge. Bias correction formulae are not easily derived and are obviously shield dependent. On the other hand, because of a strong dependence of bias to wind speed, filtering out temperature reports for wind speed less than a given threshold (about 4- ms- for the shields tested here) may be an efficient way to quality control the data, albeit at the cost of significant data loss and records biased towards high wind speed cases. See more here.
Oct 25, 2011
What the BEST data actually says
Important updates: See Anthony Watts and Lubos Motl respond with comments from Muller BEST co-author Judith Curry. Muller had so many people attack his findings and premature release of incomplete data before peer review that he has his own page on Climate Depot.
See enlarged of Best confirmation that global warming stopped.
My theory is that the BEST folks must have eaten at a Hollywood Chinese restaurant. You can tell because when you eat there, an hour later you find you’re hungry for stardom.
Now that the BEST folks have demanded and received their fifteen minutes of fame before their results have gone through peer review, now that they have succeeded in deceiving many people into thinking that Muller is a skeptic and that somehow BEST has ‘proven the skeptics wrong’, now that they’ve returned to the wilds of their natural scientific habitat far from the reach of National Geographic photographers and people asking real questions, I thought I might take a look at the data itself. Media whores are always predictable and boring, but data always contains surprises. It can be downloaded from the bottom of this page, but please note that they do not show the actual results on that page, they show smoothed results. Here’s their actual un-smoothed monthly data:
Figure 1. BEST global surface temperature estimates. Gray bars show what BEST says are the 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) for each datapoint (enlarged).
I don’t know about you, but Figure 1 immediately made me think of the repeated claim by Michael Mann that the temperatures of the 1990s were the warmest in a thousand years.
WHAT I FIND IN THE BEST DATA
Uncertainty
I agree with William Briggs and Doug Keenan that “the uncertainty bands are too narrow”. Please read the two authors to see why.
I thought of Mann’s claim because, even with BEST’s narrow uncertainty figures, their results show we know very little about relative temperatures over the last two centuries. For example, we certainly cannot say that the current temperatures are greater than anything before about 1945. The uncertainty bands overlap, and so we simply don’t know if e.g. 2010 was warmer than 1910. Seems likely, to be sure...but we do not have the evidence to back that up.
And that, of course, means that Mann’s claims of ‘warmest in a mill-yun years’ or whatever he has ramped it up to by now are not sustainable. We can�t tell, using actual thermometer records, if we’re warmer than a mere century ago. How can a few trees and clamshells tell us more than dozens of thermometers?
Disagreement with satellite observations
The BEST folks say that there is no urban heat island (UHI) effect detectable in their analysis. Their actual claim is that “urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change”. Here’s a comment from NASA, which indicates that, well, there might be a bias. Emphasis mine.
The compact city of Providence, R.I., for example, has surface temperatures that are about 12.2 C (21.9 F) warmer than the surrounding countryside, while similarly-sized but spread-out Buffalo, N.Y., produces a heat island of only about 7.2 C (12.9 F), according to satellite data. SOURCE
A 22F (12C) UHI warming in Providence, and BEST says no UHI effect...and that’s just a couple cities.
If there were no UHI, then (per the generally accepted theories) the atmosphere should be warming more than the ground. If there is UHI, on the other hand, the ground station records would have an upwards bias and might even indicate more warming than the atmosphere.
After a number of adjustments, the two satellite records, from RSS and UAH, are pretty similar. Figure 2 shows their records for global land-only lower tropospheric temperatures:
Figure 2. UAH and RSS satellite temperature records. Anomaly period 1979-1984 = 0 (enlarged).
Since they are so close, I have averaged them together in Figure 3 to avoid disputes. You can substitute either one if you wish. Figure three shows a three-year centered Gaussian average of the data. The final 1.5 years are truncated to avoid end effects.
Remember what we would expect to find if all of the ground records were correct. They’d all lie on or near the same line, and the satellite temperatures would be rising faster than the ground temperatures. Here are the actual results, showing BEST, satellite, GISS, CRUTEM, and GHCN land temperatures:
Figure 3. BEST, average satellite, and other estimates of the global land temperature over the satellite era. Anomaly period 1979-1984 = 0 (enlarged).
In Figure 3, we find the opposite of what we expected. The land temperatures are rising faster than the atmospheric temperatures, contrary to theory. In addition, the BEST data is the worst of the lot in this regard.
Disagreement with other ground-based records.
The disagreement between the four ground-based results also begs for an explanation. Note that the records diverge at the rate of about 0.2C in thirty years, which is 0.7 per century. Since this is the approximate amount of the last century’s warming, this is by no means a trivial difference.
My conclusion? We still have not resolved the UHI issue, in any of the land datasets. I’m happy to discuss other alternative explanations for what we find in Figure 3. I just can’t think of too many. With the ground records, nobody has looked at the other guys’ analysis and algorithms harshly, aggressively, and critically. They’ve all taken their own paths, and they haven’t disputed much with each other. The satellite data algorithms, on the other hand, has been examined minutely by two very competitive groups, UAH and RSS, in a strongly adversarial scientific manner. As is common in science, the two groups have each found errors in the other’s work, and when corrected the two records agree quite well. It’s possible they’re both wrong, but that doesn’t seem likely. If the ground-based folks did that, we might get better agreement. But as with the climate models and modelers, they’re all far too well-mannered to critically examine each other’s work in any serious fashion. Because heck, if they did that to the other guy, he might return the favor and point out flaws in their work, don’t want that kind of ugliness to intrude on their genteel, collegiate relationship, can’t we just be friends and not look too deeply"…
w.
PS - I remind folks again that the hype about BEST showing skeptics are wrong is just that. Most folks knew already that the world has been generally warming for hundreds of years, and BEST’s results in that regard were no surprise. BEST showed nothing about whether humans are affecting the climate, nor could it have done so. There are still large unresolved issues in the land temperature record which BEST has not clarified or solved. The jury is out on the BEST results, and it is only in part because they haven’t even gone through peer review.
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Addendum: Palmer’s stations that reported continuously since 1900
Scientific case for man-made climate change is dead
By: Marc Morano 10/23/11
OpEd Contributor
Many of the proponents of man-made global warming are now claiming that climate change is worse than they predicted. According to an Oct. 18, 2011, Daily Climate article, global warming activists claim that the “evidence builds that scientists underplay climate impacts,” and “if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested.”
But a forthcoming Climate Depot A-Z Climate Reality Check report on the failure of the science behind man-made global warming theory will shatter any such illusions that the climate is “worse than we thought.” Recent scientific data and developments reveal that Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on the promoters of man-made climate fears.
The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim, the scientific case for man-made climate fears has collapsed. The only thing “worse than we thought” is the shoddy journalism of the mainstream media, which parrots global warming activists’ baseless talking points.
Consider these facts:
The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers; the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007; polar bears are thriving; the sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping; cholera and malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions; Mount Kilimanjaro-melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover; global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more as many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead; deaths because of extreme weather are radically declining; global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows; the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined; the oceans are missing their predicted heat content; big tornadoes have dramatically declined since the 1970s; droughts are neither historically unusual nor caused by mankind; there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather; scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement; the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists; and scientists continue to dissent at a rapid pace.
Even President Obama has been criticized by former Vice President Gore for failing to do enough when it comes to climate change legislation. The now-defunct congressional climate bill failed because the Democrats realized it was political suicide. The new political expediency in Washington is global warming skepticism. The U.N. global warming treaty process lies in shambles.
The promoters of man-made climate fears are now reduced to claiming—as University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Muller did last week—that any warming trend equals some sort of “proof” of man-made warming. Those of us who laugh at Gore’s mythical “climate crisis” tip our hat to Obama for not pushing very hard for the Congressional Climate Bill and for being so tepid at U.N. climate conferences.
Of course, Obama is still threatening to unleash the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate that harmless trace essential gas we exhale from our mouths—CO2—but that effort will most likely wait until after the next presidential election.
As for Gore and the U.N.’s scientific claims, it has been quite a joy to watch the entire man-made global warming fear movement disintegrate before our eyes. A movement that had the divisive Gore as its face was bound to fail. A movement that utilized the scandal-ridden U.N.—which is massively distrusted by the American people—as the repository of science was doomed to fail. Gore is now reduced to pointing to every storm, flood, hurricane or tornado as proof of man-made global warming.
But a scientific moment of clarity is now prevailing: The U.N. and Congress do not have the power to legislate, tax or regulate the weather.
Professor emeritus of biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London explained the crux of the entire global warming debate when he rebutted the notion that CO2 is the main climate driver.
“As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets,” Stott wrote.
To put it bluntly, the great man-made global warming catastrophe that was predicted has been canceled! And that is a victory for science.
Marc Morano is publisher of Climate Depot and a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Anyone who knows anything about global climate knows the Earth has generally warmed since the 1680s. Politics has made that period, which covers the Industrial Revolution, of climatic interest as people wanted to prove that human production of CO2 was causing warming. The problem, ignored by proponents, is that it has warmed naturally since the nadir of the Little Ice Age in the 1680s. The issue isn’t the warming, but the cause.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) says,
“Our aim is to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions.”
Their actions and results completely belie this claim and all appear to point to a political motive. The entire handling of their work has been a disaster. It is not possible to say it was planned but it has completely distorted the stated purpose and results of their work. The actions are almost too naive to believe they were accidental, especially considering the people involved in the process. Releasing reports to mainstream media before all studies and reports are complete is unconscionable from a scientific perspective. They replicate the deceptive practice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of releasing the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) before the Scientific Basis Reports with which it differs considerably.
Like the IPCC, the BEST panel appears deliberately selected to achieve a result or at least ensure a bias. It begins with the leader Richard Muller, who has historically supported the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. There is only one climatologist, Judith Curry, who only recently shifted from a very vigorous pro AGW position to a more central and conciliatory position indicating awareness of the political implications. Involvement in the BEST debacle and especially her admission that early release of some results before the peer-reviewed articles and supporting documentation, in other words the IPCC approach, was at her suggestion is troubling. Ms. Curry’s comments indicate a very peripheral involvement in the entire process. This appears to suggest her participation was for public relations. This is supported by her admission that she was not involved in the data portion of the work.
“I have not had “hands-on” the data.”
Failure to include a skeptical climatologist appears to confirm the political objective.
Climate is the average of the weather so it is inherently statistical. I am not a statistician, but whenever statistical analysis was required I sought professional advice. I watched the discipline change from simple analysis of the average condition at a location or in a region to a growing interest in the change over time. My experience with climate statistics taught me that the greater and more detailed the statistical analysis applied the more it underscores the inadequacies of the original data. It increasingly becomes an exercise in squeezing something out of nothing. The instrumental record is so replete with limitations, errors, and manipulations that it is not even a crude estimate of the pattern of weather and its changes over time. This is confirmed by the failure of all predictions, forecasts, or scenarios from computer models built on that database.
Problems start with the assumption that the instrumental measures of global temperature can produce any meaningful results. They cannot! Coverage is totally inadequate in space and time to produce even a reasonable sample. The map (Figure 1) shows the pattern of Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) stations from the BEST Report. It distorts the real situation. Each dot represents a single station but in scale probably covers over 500 Sq. km. They also don�t show the paucity of stations in Antarctica, most of the Arctic Basin, the deserts, the rain-forests, the boreal forest, and the mountains. Of course none of these equal the paucity over the oceans that cover 70 percent of the world. It�s bigger problem in the Southern Hemisphere, which is 80 percent water.
Figure 1. Area coverage of GHCN stations. Diagram from the BEST Report
BEST also shows the reduction in the number of stations after 1960. A major reason for the reduction was the assumption that satellites would provide a better record, but but BEST didn�t consider that record. It appears the main objective is to offset Ross McKitrick�s evidence that much of the warming in the 1990s was due to a reduction in the number of stations (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Ross McKitrick’s plot of global temperature against # of stations
It is presented as a “Surface” temperature record but it isn’t. It’s the temperature in a Stevenson Screen (Figure 3), which is set according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) between 1.25 m (4 ft 1 in) and 2 m (6 ft 7 in) above the ground. The difference is significant because temperatures in the lower few meters vary considerably as research has shows. The 0.75 m difference means that you are not comparing the same temperatures.
Figure 3. Stevenson Screen
Temperatures, sometimes to four decimal places, are thrown around as if they are real, measured, numbers. All temperatures are recorded to half a degree because until thermocouple thermometers appeared any greater precision was impossible.
Most of the land data is concentrated in western Europe and eastern North America so these latitudes dramatically overrepresent the record. This is important because climate change is reflected most in these latitudes as the Circumpolar vortex shifts between Zonal and Meridional flow and the amplitude of the Rossby Waves vary.
BEST used a subset of global temperatures, albeit a larger subset than anyone else however, because the full data set is inadequate, a bigger subset does not improve the analysis potential. Also those who used smaller subsets did so to create a result to support a hypothesis. The BEST study apparently was designed to confirm the results and negate the criticisms
Regardless of the BEST findings the other 3 agencies did achieve different results using by the stations they chose and they are significant. For example, one year there was a difference of 0.4C between their global annual averages, which doesn’t sound like much, but consider this against the claim that a 0.7C increase in temperature over the last approximately 130 years. What people generally ignore, is that in the IPCC estimate of global temperature increase produced by Phil Jones of 0.6C the error factor was �0.2C. An illustration of how meaningless the record and the results are is given by the fact that in many years the difference in global annual average temperature is at least half the 0.7C figure. In summation, all 4 groups selected subsets, but even if they had used the entire data set they could not have achieved meaningful or significant results.
The use of the phrase “raw temperature data” is misleading. What all groups mean by the phrase is the data provided to a central agency by individual nations. Under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WM0) each nation is responsible for establishing and maintaining weather stations of different categories. The data these stations record is the true raw data. However, it is then adjusted by the individual national agencies before it is submitted to the central record. They didn’t use “all” stations or “all” data from each station. However, it appears there were some limitations of the data that they didn’t consider, as the following quote indicates. Here is a comment in the preface to the Canadian climate normals 1951 to 1980 published by Environment Canada.
“No hourly data exists in the digital archive before 1953, the averages appearing in this volume have been derived from all available ‘hourly’ observations, at the selected hours, for the period 1953 to 1980, inclusive. The reader should note that many stations have fewer than the 28 years of record in the complete averaging.”
BEST adjusted the data, but they are only as valid as the original data. For example, the ‘official’ raw data for New Zealand is produced by NIWA and they ‘adjusted’ the “raw’ data. The difference is shown in Figure 4. Which set did BEST use? Most nations have done similar adjustments.
Figure 4. Temperature record adjustments for New Zealand
They failed to explain how much temperature changes naturally or whether their results are within that range. The original purpose of thirty-year ‘normals’ was to put a statistically significant sample in a context. It appears they began with a mindset that created these problems and it has seriously tainted their work. For example, they say,
“Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature aims to contribute to a clearer understanding of global warming based on a more extensive and rigorous analysis of available historical data.”
This terminology indicates prejudgement. Why global warming? It doesn’t even accommodate the shift to “climate change” forced on proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as the facts didn’t fit the theory. Why not just refer to temperature trends?
The project indicates lack of knowledge or understanding of inadequacies of the data set in space or time or subsequent changes and adjustments. Lamb spoke to the problem when he established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). On page 203 of his autobiography he said,
“When the Climatic Research Unit was founded, it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.”
BEST confirms Lamb’s concerns. The failure to understand the complete inadequacy of the existing temperature record is troubling. It appears to confirm that there is an incompetence or a political motive, or both.
SCIENCE and technology have already achieved considerable mastery over nature, and massive local achievements. But where is the borderline separating us from what is beyond human power?
Where does scientific striving become uneconomic, immoral or ineffectual and so lapse into hubris? Have scientists been co-opted on to a bigger, better-advertised and more expensive bandwagon than the millennium bug fiasco?
We can only attempt to identify the causes of climate change through science and these causes need to be clearly established after full debates, validated comprehensively, before expensive remedies are imposed on industries and communities.
I first became interested in the question in the 1990s when studying the anti-human claims of the “deep greens”. Mine is not an appeal to the authority of any religious truth in the face of contrary scientific evidence. Neither is it even remotely tinged by a postmodernist hostility to rationality.
My appeal is to reason and evidence, and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues.
Recently Robert Manne, following fashionable opinion, wrote that “the science is truly settled” on the fundamental theory of climate change: global warming is happening; it is primarily caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide; and it is certain to have profound effects in the future .
His appeal is to the “consensual view among qualified scientists”. This is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues.
The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.
I fear, too, that many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence.
Much is opaque to non-specialists, but persistent inquiry and study can produce useful clarifications, similar to the nine errors identified by the British High Court in Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy.
It is not generally realised that in 2001 at least, one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report’s working groups agreed: “In climate research and modelling, we are dealing with a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Claims of atmospheric warming often appear to conflict and depend upon the period of time under consideration.
► The earth has cooled during the past 10,000 years since the Holocene climate optimum.
► The earth has cooled since 1000 years ago, not yet achieving the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period.
► The earth has warmed since 400 years ago after the Little Ice Age three centuries ago.
► The earth warmed between 1979 and 1998 and has cooled slightly since 2001.
The following facts are additional reasons for scepticism.
► In many places, most of the 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age were warmer than the present by up to 2C.
► Between 1695 and 1730, the temperature in England rose by 2.2C. That rapid warming, unparalleled since, occurred long before the Industrial Revolution.
► From 1976 to 2001, “the global warming rate was 0.16C per decade”, as it was from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940.
My suspicions have been deepened through the years by the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views. Those secure in their explanations do not need to be abusive.
The term “climate change denier”, however expedient as an insult or propaganda weapon, with its deliberate overtones of comparison with Holocaust denial, is not a useful description of any significant participant in the discussion. I was not surprised to learn that the IPCC used some of the world’s best advertising agencies to generate maximum effect among the public .
The rewards for proper environmental behaviour are uncertain, unlike the grim scenarios for the future as a result of human irresponsibility which have a dash of the apocalyptic about them.
The immense financial costs true believers would impose on economies can be compared with the sacrifices offered traditionally in religion, and the sale of carbon credits with the pre-Reformation practice of selling indulgences.
Some of those campaigning to save the planet are not merely zealous but zealots. To the religionless and spiritually rootless, mythology - whether comforting or discomforting - can be magnetically, even pathologically, attractive.
Whatever our political masters might decide at this high tide of Western indebtedness, they are increasingly unlikely, because of popular pressure, to impose new financial burdens on their populations in the hope of curbing the rise of global temperatures, except perhaps in Australia, which has 2 per cent of the world’s industrial capacity and only 1.2 per cent of its CO2 emissions, while continuing to sell coal and iron worth billions of dollars to Asia.
Extreme weather events are to be expected. This is why I support the views of Bjorn Lomborg and Bob Carter that money should be used to raise living standards and reduce vulnerability to catastrophes.
The cost of attempts to make global warming go away will be very heavy. They may be levied initially on “the big polluters” but they will eventually trickle down to the end-users. Efforts to offset the effects on the vulnerable are well intentioned but history tells us they can only be partially successful.
Sometimes the very learned and clever can be brilliantly foolish, especially when seized by an apparently good cause. My request is for common sense and what the medievals, following Aristotle, called prudence.
The appeal must be to the evidence. First of all we need adequate scientific explanations as a basis for our economic estimates. We also need history, philosophy, even theology and many will use, perhaps create, mythologies. But most importantly we need to distinguish which is which.
Cardinal George Pell is the Archbishop of Sydney. This is an edited extract of a speech
The United Nations will convene its 17th annual climate-change conference next month in Durban, South Africa, with the purpose of sealing a new carbon-cutting deal to succeed the soon-to-expire 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It promises to be a historic event, if not in the way the organizers might hope.
The chances that a global deal on carbon would ever be reached were always slim, a point brought home by the collapse of the comic 2009 Copenhagen summit. But obituaries are sometimes late to print. Now, at last, the U.S., Russia and Japan have all said they won’t agree to any new binding carbon pact, while India and China were never believers in the first place.
That leaves the European Union, which until last month was “the only one still considering signing up in some fashion to a second commitment period,” according to Todd Stern, the Obama Administration’s climate negotiator. Even that’s no longer true. Last week, EU Climate Action Director General Jos Delbeke told reporters that “in reality what may happen is that the Europeans will pronounce themselves politically in favor of the Kyoto Protocol” but won’t lock themselves into any new anticarbon pacts unless “other parties join the club.” Regarding that likelihood, see above.
That isn’t the only reality check Europe is facing on the carbon front. In an internal memo first reported last week by Dow Jones Newswires, the European Commission’s energy department observed that “there is a trade-off between climate- change policies and competitiveness.” By the EU’s own estimate, the cost of meeting its current carbon emissions targets - a cut of at least 20% of 1990 emissions levels by 2020 - comes to at least 48 billion Euros ($67 billion) per year.
For a closer look at the price Europeans pay for their carbon virtue, consider Tata, Europe’s second-largest steelmaker. Last month the company warned that “EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry,” citing this as one reason to close some of its U.K. operations and possibly cut some 1,200 jobs. Yet under the terms of Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme, Tata could be paid at least 20 million this year and next for those closures and layoffs.
Europe also seems to be getting wiser, if not yet wise, to the prohibitive costs of being green. In Britain, the government of David Cameron - which entered office last year promising to be the country’s “greenest government ever” - has scrapped plans for a carbon-capture-and-storage plant in Scotland, which was set to bust its �1 billion budget. “If there was a completely unlimited resource then we may have been able to surmount the technical problems,” Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne told the BBC.
Then there are those “technical problems.” The process of capturing and compressing CO2 is energy-intensive. Storing the carbon once it’s been sequestered is another issue. In Germany, a 30-megawatt carbon-capture pilot plant has been in operation since 2008. Yet plant-operator Vattenfall must truck the sequestered CO2 more than 150 kilometers daily to store it in the nearest suitable locale. The company also recently suspended its plans for large-scale carbon capture and storage at Janschwalde in Germany. Environmental groups oppose putting carbon underground because they fear living above huge carbon sinks.
And so it goes with every technology that claims to promise greenhouse-gas salvation. Wind power may emit zero carbon, but windmills need up to 90% of their capacity backed up to prevent blackouts - usually with coal and gas plants. Windmills also kill a lot of birds. As for solar power, a new study from the University of Tennessee and Occupational Knowledge International finds that manufacturing the necessary lead batteries threatens to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution by 2022, or one-third of today’s total global lead production.
The science on climate change and man’s influence on it is far from settled. The question today is whether it makes sense to combat a potential climate threat by imposing economically destructive regulations and sinking billions into failure-prone technologies that have their own environmental costs. The earnest people going to Durban next month may think so. The rest of the world is wearier and wiser.
At issue is not whether global warming is occurring, or even whether it is man-made. The issue is how incompetent, biased and astoundingly uncritical the media coverage of the issue has been and continues to be. Now major news publications and respected columnists are participating in yet another global warming ethics train wreck, which helps nobody and nothing.
Here’s is Prof. Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, toward the conclusion of his 2003 paper on global warming data:
“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”
Now here is the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer, on a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Muller announcing the results of his research:
“Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. �So what are the end results? �As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”
Note that the reason Plumer believes Muller’s study is worthy of special notice, and is elevated to a level of presumed objectivity and credibility, is that he is, Plumer says, a “self-proclaimed skeptic.” Does his 2003 statement sound skeptical to you? Did it seem skeptical to Plumer, or any of the many, many media sources that took his lead- “Climate-change skeptic: ‘You should not be a skeptic.’(Atlanta Constitution-Journal); ‘Climate Skeptic Sponsors New Climate Study, Confirms ‘Global Warming Is Real’ (Popular Science); ‘Skeptic Talking Point Melts Away as an Inconvenient Physicist Confirms Warming’ (New York Times); and many more?
It didn’t seem un-skeptical, because Plumer and the other reporters didn’t read it, so eager are they to show common cause with environmentalist�.you know, the good guys. The non-conservatives. Either that, or they did read it, and decided to withhold it from their readers, so their readers couldn’t make up their own minds whether Muller was really a skeptic, or just a canny self-promoter who knows how to move his research to the front of the line. OR perhaps they read it and can�t understand English. Those are really our only options regarding Plumer and the rest of the journalists who aped the “skeptic” misrepresentation. They are:
a) lazy and biased
b) dishonest and biased
c) stupid, or
d) All of the above
They also didn’t read the interview Muller did on the website Grist in 2008, in which he said things like:
“The bottom line is that there is a consensus - the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] - and the president needs to know what the IPCC says. Second, they say that most of the warming of the last 50 years is probably due to humans. You need to know that this is from carbon dioxide, and you need to understand which technologies can reduce this and which can�t. Roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming has taken place; we�re responsible for one quarter of it. If we cut back so we don�t cause any more, global warming will be delayed by three years and keep on going up�” Back in the early ‘80s, I resigned from the Sierra Club over the issue of global warming. At that time, they were opposing nuclear power. What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming.”
Does that sound like a skeptic to you? As for Plumer, I repeat: lazy, dishonest, or stupid. Take your pick.
In assessing Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post’s official Obama flack columnist who once won a Pulitzer Prize somehow, I vote for “all of the above.” Three days after blogger Don Surber posted the Grist interview, Robinson offered a column (today) that proclaimed the global warming debate over because a “skeptic” had completed a study that proved “global warming is real.”
Do they have Google over at the Post, Brad? Eugene? Just wondering.
If the journalists who jumped up and down in joy over Muller’s study had bothered to do minimal research - seventh grade level, really - they would have discovered that Muller�s research project BEST has long been viewed among climate change skeptics as a set-up for exactly this. You can read Climate Depot’s extensively documented criticism of Muller in April of this year here. That’s April, Eugene. This is October.
Even this is not the worst of this spectacular display of incompetent reporting. The majority of rational climate change skeptics do not question that the earth’s temperature has been rising, but that the rise has been sufficiently linked to man-made causes, that scientists have the data to accurately predict whether the rise will continue, and that proposed measures to combat it will have the desired effect, or are necessary at all. And what did Muller’s study show on these issues? Oh, just nothing:
“Muller is claiming in a October 21, 2011 OPED that skeptics of man-made global warming fears no longer have any basis to doubt “global warming” because his new study confirms that the Earth has warmed since the 1950s! Muller seems to imply that the terms “global warming” and man-made global warming are interchangeable and any warming is somehow “proof” of human causation.” [Climate Depot]
That’s still good enough for news media climate change flacks, 99.9% of whom couldn’t decipher any of the data if their lives depended on it (and neither could I) but who just know that the global warming advocates are correct. And what about the critical “man-made” part of the equation?
The latest Nobel Prize for chemistry has confirmed what science students are taught early on: that all scientific theories are intrinsically uncertain; that science progresses through skepticism and attacks on existing theories, and that successful attacks are sometimes rewarded with Nobel Prizes. It follows that skepticism about global warming, far from being antiscience, is in keeping with the standard scientific approach - and could one day fetch a skeptic a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel for chemistry was awarded to the Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman for his discovery of “quasicrystals,” which violate standard theories about crystals. Scientists had believed that all crystals form in repeated periodic patterns, and commercial production of crystals was based on that understanding. But Shechtman exploded the conventional wisdom by discovering quasicrystals, which form regular patterns that never repeat.
When Schechtman first announced his discovery, his superiors were scornful, telling him he should review his basic chemistry textbooks. When he persisted, he was asked to leave his research group. His first paper on the topic was rejected by the Journal of Applied Physics. But Schechtman persevered, and he proved that what 99.9 percent of scientists believed was wrong.
Sound familiar? We keep hearing that 95 percent or 98 percent of scientists believe catastrophic, man-made global warming is proven. Climate skeptics are widely denounced as science deniers. However, as Schechtman showed, 99 percent of scientists can be and have been wrong.
Science proves nothing beyond all doubt. Rather, it progresses by knocking down existing theories in favor of better ones, which in turn are subject to fresh attacks. Skepticism is at the very heart of the scientific method. The scientific approach is at odds not with climate-change skeptics, but with those who claim global warming is completely proven, contestable only by madmen and blackguards paid by oil companies.
A recent experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is casting doubt on another idea believed by about 100 percent of scientists: Einstein’s theory of relativity. CERN scientists have found particles called neutrinos that seemed to have traveled faster than light, challenging a fundamental plank of modern science. According to the theory of relativity, a particle traveling faster than light will go backward in time.
Environmentalists denounce climate skeptics as science deniers. But have the CERN scientists been denounced as Einstein deniers? No. The scientific community is shocked by the discovery but keeping an open mind - even about something as firmly established as the theory of relativity.
To say 95 percent of scientists believe in global warming suggests, incorrectly, that the skeptics are loonies. In fact, they have included Nobel laureates such as Ivar Giaever, Robert B. Laughlin, and Norman Borlaug. Giaever recently resigned from the American Physical Society in protest against its insistence that global warming is “incontrovertible.” He declared, “The claim ... is that the [global average] temperature changed from 288.0 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin in 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable.”
The most scientists know about the climate is not much. They know so little that they can’t predict the next drought or El Ni�o. When they try to predict temperatures a century hence, it’s a real stretch.
When people know only a little about a topic, they tend to make a lot of the little they know. The little in this case is that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will raise temperatures if other things remain constant. But other things are not constant; they vary in ways we do not fully understand.
That’s why we cannot say why temperatures were high in the medieval period despite low carbon dioxide concentrations. It’s also why the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not make a definite prediction of future temperatures, instead positing six scenarios ranging from benign to catastrophic.
We know so little about the climate that we can’t rule out the possibility of a catastrophe. So we can discuss how much insurance we should buy to cover a disaster that may never happen. But that’s different from planning for certain disaster.
Answering the insurance question requires massive funding of research not just by proponents of global warming, but also by skeptics - the breed that has repeatedly won Nobel Prizes for overthrowing the existing orthodoxy.
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and a columnist for the Times of India.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has released its preliminary findings though not in a research journal but to the scientific community and the general public. Their trumpeted finding is not surprising - the world has gotten warmer in recent decades - or at least the land has. This is consistent with the other global temperature datasets.
A press release issued by the project said, “Global Warming is real,” adding that it can find no evidence of a heat island effect, and that even weather stations considered to be of doubtful quality still show relative warming over the 1950 - 2010 period in question.
Whilst the results are not that surprising, the findings of the research have been used by some to talk about the nature of climate skepticism bearing in mind that the impetus for the Berkeley initiative came from self-avowed skeptical scientists. But the results, and how they have been portrayed, also says something about the nature of today�s environmental reporting. In particular it reveals a narrow focus on trouncing sceptics at the expense of putting the science into its proper context.
The Guardian is notable not for what it says but for what it doesn’t say. The article has far too narrow an outlook, providing no overall context. It does not even mention that the Berkeley researchers themselves say they cannot determine why the world has warmed. It makes no mention that those sceptics who doubt that the earth is warming are few in number, and that there is a widespread and respectable group of scientists who, in peer reviewed journals, debate the relative mix of influencing factors concerning that warming.
The Guardian also allows Jim Hansen to misrepresent scepticism and go unchallenged. He says, “as I have discussed in the past, the deniers, or contrarians, if you will, do not act as scientists, but rather as lawyers�.as soon as they see evidence against their client (the fossil fuel industry and those people making money off business-as-usual), they trash that evidence and bring forth whatever tidbits they can find to confuse the judge and jury.” The number of sceptics included in the article is zero.
The Economist (not in my opinion noted for its deep thinking on climate science) article was clearly written by someone unfamiliar with the subject. Like the Guardian it failed to put this research into its proper perspective. Its sceptic count was also zero.
The report in Nature was much better, in my opinion because it actually included comments from the sceptics in that Steve McIntyre said he has found some problems with the Berkeley research. Given Steve’s track record this is something worth noting. The Berkeley team is posting their raw data on the web and no doubt many statistically adroit bloggers will get to work (for me one of the main things to come out of “Climategate” was that professors of climate science were not in the same league as some on the web when it came to statistical analysis.) Nature’s sceptic count is one.
New Scientist did a good job in that they did provide perspective for the research emphasising just how irrelevant was the Berkeley finding to many sceptical questions today. New Scientist sceptic count, three.
But, for me, the worst treatment came from Forbes. This spiteful article says that the scientific community been saying for decades that the earth is warming up? I don’t think so. It goes on; “Indeed, even most remaining climate change skeptics and deniers have moved away from saying there is no warming. Now, their major talking points are that it isn�t caused by humans, or only a little bit, or it won�t be bad, or we can’t afford to fix it, or� Denial is a moving target.”
This prejudiced, intolerant and inaccurate, article completely misrepresents sceptical views, and is a good example of the problem facing the debate about climate science within and without of the scientific community. We must surely rise above such sour and divisive comments that have no place in scientific discourse. The author is in an old sterile paradigm that is inherently anti-science, and is more of the problem facing progress than some at the extreme end of climate scepticism.
Trivial Headlines
There are very few people who do not believe the world hasn’t warmed, in various episodes, since the instrumental record began about 150 years ago. We are today warmer than the Little Ice Age, warmer than the Victorian Era, indeed warmer than the 1970s. The proper question is, of course, why? The Berkeley team have no conclusions about this.
So all the headlines that basically say sceptics have been trounced because the world really is warming are trivial. The Berkeley team confirm what has been found in three other datasets and what “both sides” of the debate already agree on. I could say “so what,” and “is it news?” Well, news is what reporters print.
There are significant questions about the research however. Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre say they have found some serious issues that will no doubt come out in due course.
The 39,000 or so weather stations cover 29% of the planet and a third of them showed no warming over the 60-year period under consideration, indeed they showed cooling. How does the distribution of these two sub-sets of data compare? One would not expect global warming to be even across the globe (indeed most of it seems to take place in the Arctic) but if the cooling stations were well mixed in with the warming stations geographically then that would be interesting. The Berkeley researchers interpolate temperatures between stations and I wonder if the cooling stations fit into this interpolation? Indeed, perhaps one way to look at the data would be that only a third of weather stations (the difference between the warmers and the coolers) contribute to the final conclusion. To my mind that’s a very different stance from saying that two-thirds of temperature stations show warming.
Other things that emerge from the data is that it confirms that the Nasa Giss dataset is anomalously high with respect to the other datasets especially in the past decade. Thus we should be careful, as I have said previously, about claiming temperature records based on Nasa Giss data alone.
The data also confirm the post-2000 standstill, Nigel Calder has noted this. Looking at the data I do not agree with the study’s lead author that the recent standstill is not present in the data.
The British government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, stressed that the study needed to be peer-reviewed before being factored in to the debate, but that if it was found to be correct, it would conform with US work at NASA and NOAA and that of Phil Jones and his colleagues at the UK Hadley Center-UEA Climatic Research Unit. “This work adds to the evidence about how climate change is happening,” he said.
Actually the researchers say they cannot say how global warming is happening just that it is, though one could be charitable and say that Sir John’s comments about how global warming is happening might refer to geospatial data, but refer to my previous comments about that.
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, said he hoped that if and when the study was peer reviewed and published, the focus could shift to “the implications for the future of this warming rather than wrangling over whether the warming is really there.”
I hope not. The implications for the future must be framed in the context of our understanding of what is actually going on. That should be the next focus.
But there is something really important in one of the four papers issued by the Berkeley team, and a considerable irony that it has been missed by all reporters and commentators.
If you do something that most of the reporters haven�t done, and usually never do, study the research paper itself (why bother when there is a press release) you will find something remarkable.
“Human Component Overstated”
The findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project are important because they emphasise the growing realisation that science has underplayed the unknowns and uncertainties in the attribution of the causes of recent climate change. Without doubt, the data compiled and the analysis undertaken, by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project is unambiguous evidence that the root causes of global warming are poorly understood.
The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overstated.”
There is the headline missed by all: Scientists say human component of global warming may be overstated.
Why isn’t it there? It�s just as valid as the headlines used, scientifically more interesting and journalistically light-years better than what has been reported.
The BBC did mention the North Atlantic decadal oscillation aspect of the story saying, “The Berkeley group says it has also found evidence that changing sea temperatures in the north Atlantic may be a major reason why the Earth’s average temperature varies globally from year to year.” But it then fails to explain what this means and gets itself into a twist and doesn’t mention the conclusion reached by the Berkeley researchers.
Now, here’s the irony, the Berkeley team are actually sceptics about the matter where the real debate lies - the question of the mix of human and natural contributions to the recent warming. Now why didn’t any of these “reporters” pick up on that?
Why was this nugget missed or ignored? It is because environmental reporters are too obsessed with bashing sceptics, and reading press releases, than in reporting science.
CO2 (green line) has risen at a record rate over the last decade, while temperatures (red line) have declined. Renowned skeptic Muller of Berkeley has demonstrated that anthropogenic global warming is nonsense.
He has also confirmed that temperature rise since 1960 has been slower than Hansen’s zero emissions scenario - showing that temperature rise over the last 60 years has little or nothing to do with CO2, and putting another nail in the coffin of the global warming scam.
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Hansen Shows That It Is �Almost Dead Certain� He Has No Idea What He Is Talking About
Posted on October 29, 2011 by Steven Goddard
James Hansen is the world�s greatest climatologist. Earlier this year he said :
�multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale are not only possible, but almost dead certain�
James Hansen
Sea level has been falling at a rate of 10mm per year since the start of 2010 (the hottest year ever) and is lower now than it was at the end of 2003.
Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse�.isn’t it our job to bring that about”
Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Richard Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
Peter Menzies in the Calgary Herald, Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister for the Liberal Party of Canada, said in 1998 that “No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits”
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, visited Australia in July 2011. In referring to the ideological orientations of those individuals and organisations who have significant financial and other vested interests in propagating the ‘Doctrine’ of anthropogenic induced climate change, President Klaus said: “They want to change us, to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences, they want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. What is endangered is freedom, the climate is okay." After noting that today’s human-induced climate change alarmists are the ideological descendents of the zero and negative population growth advocates of the 1970s who erroneously forecast that human population pressures would lead to increases in global poverty and growing shortages in resources, President Klaus went on to add: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world - called communism - and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”
IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010 admitted “one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world�s wealth...”
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Neglected truths of climate change By Walter Starck
September 9, 2011
When contentious issues become long standing and widely discussed their public debate tends to become fixated on particular understandings of certain issues.
Ancillary matters that should be of obvious importance often seem to be strangely ignored. The public debate over climate change is rife with such neglected considerations. Here is a selection of a few of the more obvious ones. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING!!!
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Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, explains the scientific dishonesty of scientists participating in the Hide-the-Decline scandal.
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A catalog of collected papers from SPPI has just been updated through February 2011 and posted on our website. Papers cover many aspects of the energy/environment and science/policy arena. Click on the PDF file to open the catalog, and then click on the link to any particular paper to open its PDF for reading or printing. Many of the papers have a Summary for Policy Makers, convenient for highly busy readers.
The sets of papers once called “BlogWatch” , “ScareWatch” and “Commentary and Essays” have been replaced with postings at the SPPI Blog. The SPPI Blog has a pretty good search engines for key words.
See Dr. Doug Hoyt’s Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.
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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.
Heartland VI conference videos are now available for viewing in the web.
NOTE: Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.
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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.
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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additonal scientific youtubes here.
“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”
The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.
Many more papers are catalogued at Pete’s Place here.
The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.
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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.
Also available now some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap):
The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)
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