New Anti-global warming debate?

[Plant Life]

The final group of actors in all this were the mass audience of self-described “sceptics”. With few exceptions (in fact, none of whom I am aware), members of this group have lost their moral bearings sufficiently that they were not worried at all by the crime of dishonesty involved in the hacking attack. Equally importantly, they have lost their intellectual bearings to the point where they did not reflect that the kind of person who would mount such an attack, or seek to benefit from it, would not scruple to deceive a gullible audience as to the content of the material they had stolen. The members of this group swallowed and regurgitated the claims of fraud centred on words like “trick”. By the time the imposture was exposed, they had moved on to the next spurious talking point fed to them by the rightwing spin machine.

That is all.

 

[pixelsmith]

The jig is up, the scam is totally exposed now. Professor Jones has conceded that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Jones is the creator of the now debunked hockey stick graph.

This global scam has made a lot of intelligent people look pretty silly and gullible.

 

[jkoci]

Professor Jones has conceded that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Jones is the creator of the now debunked hockey stick graph.

Here is a link to his interview with the BBC so his own words can be interpreted.

BBC News - Q&A: Professor Phil Jones

Here is what he says about the last 15 years.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Here are his words on the Medieval Warm Period.

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.
We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.

H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see my answer to your question D.

 

[Schuyler]

A perfect example of why you can't trust the temperature readings. This is a picture of a weather reporting station in Rome, Italy. That's one hell of an 'urban heat island.'

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.


The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.


These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.


Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.


“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”


The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.


The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.


“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
….

​

 

[jkoci]

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

Here is an interesting interview with Christy from 2004.

Three Views on Global Warming : NPR

From Fortune magazine in 2009.

What if global-warming fears are overblown? - May. 14, 2009

Here are his comments on temperature records from then.

In laymen's terms, what's wrong with the surface temperature readings that are widely used to make the case for global warming?

First is the placement of the temperature stations. They're placed in convenient locations that might be in a parking lot or near a house and thus get extra heating from these human structures. Over time, there's been the development of areas into farms or buildings or parking lots. Also, a number of these weather stations have become electronic, and many of them were moved to a place where there is electricity, which is usually right outside a building. As a result, there's a natural warming tendency, especially in the nighttime temperatures, that has been misinterpreted as greenhouse warming.

His view of AGW.

Why did you help write the 2001 IPCC report and the 2003 AGU statement on climate change if you disagreed with their fundamental conclusions?

With the 2001 IPCC report, the material in there over which I had control was satisfactory to me. I wouldn't say I agreed with other parts. As far as the AGU, I thought that was a fine statement because it did not put forth a magnitude of the warming. We just said that human effects have a warming influence, and that's certainly true. There was nothing about disaster or catastrophe. In fact, I was very upset about the latest AGU statement [in 2007]. It was about alarmist as you can get.

 

[Schuyler]

Here's just part of an interview with Dr. Phil Jones, ex head of the CRU at East Anglia. It's from "The Devil's Kitchen." The Devil's Kitchen The interview has been widely reported in many places. There's also, yet again (and right on schedule so as not to disappoint); Scandanaviagate!!! Here's the skinny: Hide the decline - Latest News (home) Next up, some interesting information about The Sun (as in the one 93 million miles from us). Seems it's likely to 'slow down a bit.' Incidentally, as you no doubt noticed by the spelling, many of the climate skeptics are British, Australian, and Canadian, putting the lie to the idea that only Americans are climate skeptics.

P.S. If the table below doesn't work I'll try to get a better copy.

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

​

This is pretty significant because Jones is admitting that—over the timescale for which we have actual measurements (rather than proxies)—the current warming trend is not unprecedented—an aspect that the whole alarmist argument depends on.

Watt's Up With That summarises the relevant points from the interview in this way.

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

Now, some of these conclusions might be slight leaps, as Climate Skeptic opines.

I think some of these conclusions are a bit of a reach from the Q&A. I don’t get the sense that Jones is abandoning the basic hypothesis that climate sensitivity to manmade CO₂ is high (e.g. 3+ degrees per doubling, rather than <=1 degrees as many skeptics would hypothesize). In particular, I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that alarmists were bailing on the hockey stick / MWP-related arguments as indicative of high sensitivities.

The new news for me was the admission that the warming rate from 1979-present is in no way unprecedented. This is important as the lead argument (beyond black box “the models say so” justifications) for blaming anthropogenic factors for recent warming is that the rate of warming was somehow unprecedented. However, Jones admits (as all rational skeptics have said for some time) that the warming rate from 1979 to today is really no different than we have measured in other periods decidedly unaffected by CO₂.​

However, there was one of Phil Jones's answers that left me absolutely gob-smacked, and it is this one:

H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see my answer to your question D [where he referenced Chapter 9 of the IPCC AR4].​

You what? So, since you are unable to account for the warming in terms of volcanos or solar warming, then it must be human induced? What the hell?

 

[jkoci]

Here's just part of an interview with Dr. Phil Jones, ex head of the CRU at East Anglia. It's from "The Devil's Kitchen." The Devil's Kitchen The interview has been widely reported in many places.

Looks like they used the BBC source.

Q&A: Professor Phil Jones

Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.
The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA's press office.

---------- Post added at 09:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:07 PM ----------

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

Here is an article about his recent work .

The Canadians who changed the climate debate


Here are his final comments from the article.

While McKitrick said he's dubious about the threat of climate change, and thinks his research has helped cast doubt on such fears, McIntyre -- despite the demonization of him by his opponents -- said he really doesn't know what to think.

"I honestly don't know whether it is a big problem, a little problem or a medium problem. And I don't think the skeptics have proven that global warming is not a problem."

 

[pixelsmith]

"CO2: as a business model…..
1) hype it’s dangers.
2) prey upon guilt.
3) hype some more.
4) create a market.
5) sell new technology to counteract it.
(repeat steps 3,4 and 5 as needed.)
6) get out before the bubble bursts.
7) if you’re still reading, go back to #1."

 

[Schuyler]

Ah! Here it is! From: Watt's Up With that. Although the proponents of AGW are 'quite sure unequivocally' that the non-rise in temperature the last few years is due to human activity, they blithely ignore 4.5 billion years of earth's history. Surely no one doubts that it has been quite warm in the past (like 75 million years ago) or that it has been quite cold (like 25,000 years ago). What could have caused these vast fluctuations when no SUVs were out polluting our atmosphere?

The last glacial period occurred from 70,000 to about 15,000 years ago, which was known as the Wisconsin or Wurm (with an umlaut) period. During this period a vast glacier of ice covered my location (near Seattle, WA) with a mile-deep swath of ice extending between and filling the valleys between the Olympic Mountains on the West and the Cascade range on the East down as far south as Olympia, Washington. When this glacier receded (Oh, my God! Global Warming!!!!) it carved out Puget Sound and left a vast array of islands in the midst of it, all oriented North-South in line with the receding glacier. The glacier also left behind huge rocks, like 'Big Rock' which I used to play on in my youth and 'Frog Rock,' an icon on Bainbridge Island today.

(there's Slug Rock' hidden to the left of the frog there with a big grin on his slime face.) When you look at the history of the ice ages, you see the familiar fluctuation of ages of ice followed by inter-glacial ages of little ice. In fact, today we are still coming off of the Wisconisn/Wurm glacial period which is part of a larger cycle called the Quaternary Ice Age. As a matter of fact, the onset of the Wurm severely affected the rise of Homo sapiens, which was just seeking to get out of Africa for the first time. However, the Glacial period effectively wiped out those few tribes that had made it into the Levant and turned the plains of the Sahara into a desert. That area was later re-occupied by Neanderthal Man, a northern cold-adapted Homo species. From then on 'mankind' stuck to the south and expanded along the equator as far North as India, and just as they got to what is now Malaysia: Kaboom!

Mt. Toba erupted about 74,000 years ago, causing an instant ice age and nuclear winter lasting 1,000 years which also took the human population down to about 10,000 total. Then a dramatic warming period happened and mankind took full advantage of it, moving for the first time into Europe at about 50,000 years ago, repopulating India, and expanding both from the Malyasian and African bases. BUT, just as mankind had just gotten into Russia and northern Europe, here cam another glacial expansion. It pushed Cro-Magnon south into Spain, and the soon-to-be Native Americans just mamanged to slip over the Bering Straits land bridge and into North America. Meanwhile Scandanavia, Great Brtain and Ireland were frozen solid between 22 and 15,000 years ago.

Then it began to warm up. Humanity re-occupied the North. Agriculture happened, and civilizations began. But what about those pesky ice ages? What causes them? One theory is that the cycles of the Sun (same one again) cause these vast changes. And THAT's what this is all about. It's something called the Dalton Minimum:

The Dalton Minimum is one of many minimums when solar activity is less than normal. During the Dalton Minimum we had 'the Year without a summer" (1816). During the Maunder Minimum, from 1645-1715 we had a lack of sunspot activity AND (cough) the 'Little Ice Age.'

the reason this is important is because it looks like we're about to go through another minimum. The current sun spot cycle was supposed to start a year ago (I'm a HAM radio operator) and the sun has been quiet up until just recently. Even now it is way BELOW expected. If this happens, we're going to be for a cold spell, a REAL cold spell. I'm not claiming we're in for another ice age, but we are in for some seriously cold weather.

So you guys can worry yourself to death about CO2 and I'm going to lay in some supplies and buy a very warm winter coat. Maybe if I can burn some wood and contribute to AGW the weather won;t ba as cold as it otherwise would have been. Meanwhile, enjoy the Great Climate Change Retreat: Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online

Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream Watts Up With That?
​

 

[jkoci]

The current sun spot cycle was supposed to start a year ago (I'm a HAM radio operator) and the sun has been quiet up until just recently. Even now it is way BELOW expected. If this happens, we're going to be for a cold spell, a REAL cold spell. I'm not claiming we're in for another ice age, but we are in for some seriously cold weather.

From the following article.

NASA - Deep Solar Minimum

A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

 

[Kieran]

From the following article.

NASA - Deep Solar Minimum

A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

I have read everyone's posts and there is lot of information to follow, but I Believe Schuyler is probably more right than wrong.

The theory of Global warming is not very convincing considering the information. However call me Green if you want. I still believe we should treat our surroundings with more respect. And reduce our levels of pollution.

---------- Post added at 11:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:13 PM ----------

Here's just part of an interview with Dr. Phil Jones, ex head of the CRU at East Anglia. It's from "The Devil's Kitchen." The Devil's Kitchen The interview has been widely reported in many places. There's also, yet again (and right on schedule so as not to disappoint); Scandanaviagate!!! Here's the skinny: Hide the decline - Latest News (home) Next up, some interesting information about The Sun (as in the one 93 million miles from us). Seems it's likely to 'slow down a bit.' Incidentally, as you no doubt noticed by the spelling, many of the climate skeptics are British, Australian, and Canadian, putting the lie to the idea that only Americans are climate skeptics.

P.S. If the table below doesn't work I'll try to get a better copy.

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

​

This is pretty significant because Jones is admitting that—over the timescale for which we have actual measurements (rather than proxies)—the current warming trend is not unprecedented—an aspect that the whole alarmist argument depends on.

Watt's Up With That summarises the relevant points from the interview in this way.

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

Now, some of these conclusions might be slight leaps, as Climate Skeptic opines.

I think some of these conclusions are a bit of a reach from the Q&A. I don’t get the sense that Jones is abandoning the basic hypothesis that climate sensitivity to manmade CO₂ is high (e.g. 3+ degrees per doubling, rather than <=1 degrees as many skeptics would hypothesize). In particular, I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that alarmists were bailing on the hockey stick / MWP-related arguments as indicative of high sensitivities.

The new news for me was the admission that the warming rate from 1979-present is in no way unprecedented. This is important as the lead argument (beyond black box “the models say so” justifications) for blaming anthropogenic factors for recent warming is that the rate of warming was somehow unprecedented. However, Jones admits (as all rational skeptics have said for some time) that the warming rate from 1979 to today is really no different than we have measured in other periods decidedly unaffected by CO₂.​

However, there was one of Phil Jones's answers that left me absolutely gob-smacked, and it is this one:

H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see my answer to your question D [where he referenced Chapter 9 of the IPCC AR4].​

You what? So, since you are unable to account for the warming in terms of volcanos or solar warming, then it must be human induced? What the hell?

I was listening to climatologist or guy within that profession the other day. He claimed we are likely to experience more longer periods of Cold spells with snow and hotter summers during the summer. In my opinion and considering what I Know. I Think there will be more extended colder spells in the coming years than hotter summers.

 

[Schuyler]

I've just got to tell you about a new book called The Hockey Stick Illusion; Climategate and the corruption of science, by A.W. Montford (2010: Stacey International, 482pp. ISBN: 978-1-906768-35-5). You can't get it in the US yet (except at a very high price), but you can get it from Great Britain for L10.99 plus a hefty shipping fee. It reads like a detective novel.

The book covers the history of the now famous Mann Hockey Stick graph in detail, from the first indications that something was awry (Jonathan Overspect to David Deming: "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.") to the statistical manipulation of the data to show a warming where none had occurred. Far from simply castigating a public official for claiming "The science is settled," this book gets into the statistical nitty gritty, the science of it all.

As you know, the essence of science is its repeatability. In other words, if a scientists reports a worthy result, it is incumbent on other scientists to replicate the results. The interesting thing about Climategate is that no one was able to start from scratch and replicate the results using the original data. That's because NO ONE TRIED to replicate the results, and when two researchers tried to do exactly that, Michael Mann refused to give it up, misled them as to where and what the data was, and was generally antagonistic to their research.

Ross McKitrick is Professor of Economics at Guelph University and Steve McIntyre is a semi-retired mining consultant whose expertise is in the field of statistics. He was also a mathematical prodigy in college. They are called "M&M" in the literature. McIntyre got interested in replicating the Hockey Stick in the proper scientific manner, and what he found in the data itself is amazing. The fact is, it's been manipulated. I've taken three college level statistics courses myself. I've never considered myself an expert. I'm at the level where if you give me a cookbook approach, I can apply the formulas to the data and come up with what I hope is a valid answer, but I'd never proffer my calculations as proof without checking with an expert first. (My first statistics teacher, a sociologist named Robert E. Lee Farris, told us, "Never be afraid of a formula. The bigger a formula, the more work it does for you." I credit him with reversing my mathaphobic nature, which had major effects on my own career when I got over it.) But McIntyre is a bona fide expert. When you tell him you used R(squared) instead of r, he understands what that means and how it effects the data.

Better yet, Montford, the author here, is also quite statistics aware, and he explains the manipulations in language you and I can understand. When he finishes telling you how 'short centering on red noise' causes data to be manipulated, you can actually follow the text. 'White noise' is random data; 'Red noise' is a random walk through data that depends on the last data point, such as in any linear graph. In other words, with red noise, the next data point is random, but depends on where the last data point was, thus a 'random walk.'

M&M encountered great difficulty in getting hold of the raw data from Mann. He misled them several times, but ultimately, through many means, they found the raw data and also found segments of a computer program that analyzed the data. McIntyre was able to take an old Fortran program, dissect it, and translate it into a modern computer language to run the data through. (Fortran is considered rather archaic by today's standards.)

Once M&M got the data the next step was to replicate what Mann had done. Against the active resistance of the AGW community they were able to do so and see what had happened. The first major issue was that if you took ANY red noise and applied the same statistical techniques of 'normalizing' the data as Mann had done, you'd get a Hockey Stick graph. It didn't matter what the original data was: stock market numbers, hogs head futures, anything--out spit a hockey stick.

The basic issue here is that the way the data was normalized caused a heavy bias for 20th century numbers. Further, the weight of the data was heavily influences by single data sets so, for example, where you had a hockey stick when using tree rings from 12 (that's right: 12) bristle cone pines in the US southwest, you got a massive increase in temperature. When you took that single series out, you did not.

M&M also found dozens of instances where data had been back-filled when it was not available. For example, in one dataset that went back to 1403, there was no data for the first three years of the 1400's so they just used the 1403 number for 1400-1402. This had the effect of minimizing the Medieval Warm period--precisely what they said they were going to eliminate! In another data set, they discovered the same exact number in two different series, accurate to seven places past the decimal. One series had been copied onto another.

The bigger problem in this case is that other scientists who claim to have replicated the findings of Mann have been using the exact same data sets! they are NOT independent of each other. So, in essence, what you have is a small cadre of people who control the data sets themselves, control what constitutes peer reviewed literature, and control what gets published. This, of course, is a recipe for disaster and is precisely why the whole idea of AGW is falling apart.

I'm not done with this book yet. I'm still in the midst of the controversy, but anyone who purports to know what they are talking about in this debate needs to read this book cover to cover. I find the book fascinating. If there's anyone out there who wants to pursue this line of inquiry and is statistically literate, I would like to continue the discussion. I'll even buy the book for you. However, I'm not interested in furthing this discussion with people calling me stupid, right wing, a 'denier,' or other similarly biased and frankly un-interesting epitaphs. We've got to raise the level of debate here away from the politics of it to a discussion of the data, data you have actually studied.

 

[jkoci]

I've just got to tell you about a new book called The Hockey Stick Illusion; Climategate and the corruption of science, by A.W. Montford (2010: Stacey International, 482pp. ISBN: 978-1-906768-35-5).

Thanks. I'll keep watch for it.

---------- Post added at 12:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:25 AM ----------

I have read everyone's posts and there is lot of information to follow, but I Believe Schuyler is probably more right than wrong.

He could be. However just as global warming would need time to show itself for certain so would another "Little Ice Age". A few cooler years is not enough to tell either way. I am more on the fence than ever with this issue. Just as global warming alarmists are dogmatic in what they believe so are those who are anti-AGW. I try to remain open to credible information from both sides. For me blogs and websites dedicated to either side of the issue just don't cut it.

 

[Rick Deckard]

I try to remain open to credible information from both sides. For me blogs and websites dedicated to either side of the issue just don't cut it.

The internet is a double-edged sword - the truth is on the internet and so are the lies. In the end, we end up reassuring ourselves with the sites that support our position and ignoring the sites that don't. The pro-AGW group are demanding huge changes for us all on the assumption that the science is settled - the reality appears to be that a carefully orchestrated 'consensus' has been reached between a select group of scientists (some of which aren't even climatologists) and that the scientific method has been grossly distorted to support their argument.

How can we have any confidence in the validity of the 'scientific proof' when we can see that the pro-arguments are politically motivated rather than based on transparent scientific process?

 

[Bent Faith]

Well whattaya know? C2C may be worth listening to during the first hour (hey I said MAY). The guest is Tim Ball, talking about Climategate. I went to his web site and here is a list of six points he makes on the front page.

SIX THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE:

1. The earth is cooling. Click here.
2. The Sun causes climate change. Click here.
3. Al Gore was wrong about C02. Click here.
4. Violent weather isn’t getting worse. Click here.
5. It’s been hotter. Click here.
6. Climate computer models are proven wrong. Click here.

I know, I know, looks like he is all on "our side" (the anti-AGW croud), but at least he is being interviewed by a show that was started by one who co-authored "The Coming Global Superstorm"
Seems things have come full circle (how fitting).

Jonah (where has he been anyway?) will probably find that this guy Ball got a rebate of $50 from Exxon 10 years ago and say he is bought by big oil -- or is that bad oil now that Jonah thinks Shell is OK? Don't know.

---------- Post added at 11:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:35 PM ----------

Oh, and this --

Popular Technology.net: 500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming

 

[Rick Deckard]

Jonah (where has he been anyway?)

Dunno - consulting with the CRU at East Anglia about their next 'move'?

 

[pixelsmith]

I think Jonah maybe finally got educated here or maybe he checked the latest information available that proves how it was all fabricated.

---------- Post added at 06:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:27 PM ----------

The Continuing Climate Meltdown
Source: Wall Street Journal

More embarrassments for the U.N. and ’settled’ science.

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.”

But as Jonathan Leake of London’s Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, “did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning.”

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the “transformation of natural coastal areas,” the “destruction of more mangroves,” “glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches,” changes in the ecosystem of the “Mesoamerican reef,” and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its “research” reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.

The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell’s corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.

The IPCC report made aggressive claims that “extreme weather-related events” had led to “rapidly rising costs.” Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there’s even a minor uproar over the report’s claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It’s 26%.

Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.

This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no “statistically significant” warming over the past 15 years, though he considers this to be temporary.

All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby’s regulatory agenda.

The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC’s shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.

 

[Schuyler]

I actually agree with jkoci that you've got to get beyond the vested interests to the data itself. Some sites DO provide data, and insofar as that is verifiable, it's worthwhile. The problem is the selective reporting of data, and that's where you have to use your own grey cells and not rely on others. That's one reason I took the trouble to actually read 1000 emails, those emails that weren't supposed to be any big deal. Nothing to see here. Move along. well, there's a LOT to see in those emails, and when they are put 'in context' ("Oh, they were taken out of context!") there's even more to see. I've also read, and sympathized with, Harry in Harry's Read Me File where he tries to come to grips with very poor programming, and I've rad through some of the computer programs themselves. It's a wonder they ran at all. And that's why I picked up the Hockey Stick Illusion from Great Britain. Is it biased? If you say so, but it tells the story of how M&M tried to get to the DATA and what they found. It shows how they did it. This is valuable stuff and shows, if nothing else, what happens to you when you do try to get beyond the rhetoric and to the actual data itself. Turns out it's pretty shaky stuff.

I've also been grappling with the issue of scientists intentionally deceiving the public. Aren't they supposed to be objective? I suspect they originally were, and I'm thinking here of Michael Mann, especially. I don't think he set out to deceive anyone, but was trying to objectively analyze the data--until it got away from him. Understand that this isn't just mathematics that has been known for hundreds of years. Climatology is not a well-established science. There are no established procedures and methodologies. These guys are 'pioneers' in that they get to establish those methodologies, which have NOT been thoroughly tested.

There is also a tremendous amount of data to be compiled. Without computers it couldn't be done. And there is a tremendous amount of uncertainity because there simply weren't thermometers 1000 years ago with scribes faithfully recording the data. they have to use proxies, and it is with thee proxies that they can get into serious trouble. Using tree rings to assess past temperature is really not a good idea for a variety of reasons, but the climatologists say they have to use them if that's all they've got. The thing is, the Hockey Stick is prefaced on 12 trees in the American Southwest that have a 20th century bias because they grew faster (because of CO2 fertilization, no less). If you take those 12 trees out of the equation, the Hockey Stick flattens out. In part of the equations taking out JUST ONE TREE changes the entire thing.

Remember now that McIntyre is a legitimate expert in mathematics and statistics with a lifetime of experience analyzing drill cores for mining. His job was to statistically analyze presentations by mining corporations trying to prove there was sufficient evidence of mineral deposits to justify investors giving them gobs of money to drill. He's seen hundreds of times how mining companies would try to separate investors from heir money with skewed presentations. In other words, McIntyre is perfect for the job.

So his first task was to replicate Mann's research. In other words, he WANTED to get the same result and strove to do so. Here's where Mann got defensive. Here Mann's entire reputation and rapid advancement in academia was based on his Hockey Stick. If someone could disprove--scientifically disprove--the Hockey Stick, it could be that his reputation would be ruined. So he fought back by refusing to cooperate. Also, by this time the entire thing had become political, so there was a LOT at stake here, trillions of dollars worldwide, millions in fat research grants. If you want to 'follow the money' here it's not about Big Oil.

Also, there are NOT "thousands of scientists in agreement" here. The number of scientists who actually are bona fide climatologists and actually do the research here is probably less than a hundred. Most of them have not done the analytical and statistical work themselves. They just have read about it. They are, by and large, NOT statisticians, which is a separate field. Most scientists are NOT expert computer programmers. Scientific programming is notoriously poor. Yet they tend to want to do it all themselves. I'm not saying they know nothing. In modern science at the PhD level, you MUST know some statistics, but you likely don't know statistics as well as McIntyre.

So think about it. Here is Michael Mann, who was an obscure late bloomer until the Hockey Stick happened, and he was vaulted into the limelight with his Hockey Stick. And NO ONE had checked his data. That has come out. No one had tried to use his data to replicate his work. And along comes McIntyre, fully qualified academically to take on the task, and he's a skeptic. And he wants the data, ALL of it. But since McIntyre is semi-retired and was never an academic per se, Mann tries to brush him off. But it doesn't work. McIntyre, a very polite guys, btw, is persistent as a dog after a bone and he goes after it. Not only that, unlike anyone else, he knows exactly what he wants, and Mann knows it.

So Mann & Co, including CRU, circle the wagons. Rather than participate in the investigation, which is how science is supposed to work, they take on the air of 'I'm superior to you,' and fight McIntyre. They have a tremendous number of 'scientists' on their side (That's the thouands of scientists they talk about), but these folks are on the AGW side in principle only. They haven't looked at the data and most of them aren't even in the field.

And that's how this whole thing has gotten perverted.

 

[jkoci]

I've also been grappling with the issue of scientists intentionally deceiving the public. Aren't they supposed to be objective?

I wonder about this too. Why would they do this if they do not have someone else telling them to do it such as a financial contributer to their work? Could it be ego for some?

 

[pixelsmith]

I wonder about this too. Why would they do this if they do not have someone else telling them to do it such as a financial contributer to their work? Could it be ego for some?

Scientists are supposed to be Objective AND Skeptical