Nothing makes me see red in the AGW debates like another warmie hiding data, thus negating the scientific method. Yet it seems to be SOP for warmies. The latest example comes from a urinating match between Michael Mann and Hu McColloch. You can read about it at Climate Audit. The passage that caught my eye was this:
If all of Thompson’s cores had been fully archived at the NCDC’s website, as is customary for this sort of data, it would be feasible to back out which ones he used by a least squares regression on decadal averages of all of them, region by region. The excluded ones would then simply show a zero coefficient. However, with the notable exception of Quelccaya, Thompson has kept most of this primarily NSF-funded data to himself (and a few select friends, apparently), for one, two, or even three decades after it was collected.
This is criminal. But there is a very simple solution. Anyone who accepts public funding for their research but who then refuses to make all data and methods fully available to the public should thereafter be permanently ineligible for all future public grants.
If they are not following the scientific method, than it is not science. Indeed, their findings are useless but for warmie propaganda.
Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)
- Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
So what is the biggest bombshell in this article?
Is it that the MET and the University of East Anglia have confirmed that there has been no global warming for the past 15 years (contrary to NASA numbers from the despicable James Hansen?)
Is it that all of the IPCC computer models - predicated on the theory that the world will warm in direct proportion to increases in atmospheric CO2 - have failed utterly?
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Interestingly, the MET is still taking the position that there will be no global cooling because it will all be offset by increasing carbon dioxide. Cue Henrick Svensmark:
‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’
He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.
CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.
So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.
Talk about your deadenders. The MET is hanging onto their AGW CO2-centric models with the very edges of their bloody fingernails at this point. They won't be able to do it much longer.
‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’
So is tar and feathering serious enough for these world's greatest scam artists, or is something more serious warranted? Perhaps it is for Al Gore, Michael Mann and James Hansen. What do you think, maybe permanent deportation to Siberia where they can live out their lives with a zero carbon footprint?
The real crime with all of this is that, while our governments still push global warming, the reality is that global cooling may soon be upon us - and the effects could be devastating. Unfortunately, our world will not be able to prepare for this eventuality until the AGW gravy train is brought to its final, bitter end. And given that the global warming scam is not about science, but rather about political power, patronage and money, we will be well into global cooling before that will ever happen.
One does not need an extensive vocabulary to respond appropriately to concerns recently voiced by Democrats. For example:
Having been swamped in the 2010 elections, particularly in state legislatures where Congressional redistricting will soon take place, it would seem that several Democrats now want to make redistricting "fairer" via federal control over state redistricting plans. The only approriate response:
And over in the House Oversight Committee, Dem. Rep. Elijah Cummings is demanding veto power over the Chairman Issa's use of subpoenas to investigate the Obama Administration. That one deserves an equal response:
Then in Virginia, where the Attorney General is investigating fraud by climate science charlatan Michael Mann, the Democrats are seeking to take away his subpoena power and scuttle the investigation. Let's call George Bush out of retirement for that response, since he resisted all attempts to regulate CO2 during his administration:
Indeed, responding appropriately requires few words indeed.
Over the weekend came a series of revelations and admissions by one of AGW's most influential figures, the current head of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones (technically, he is on leave). His bombshells concerning paleoclimatalogical data, the Medieval Warming Period and its ramifications, and the current period of alleged global warming are a dagger in the heart of AGW. Also over the weekend, yet another major research paper documented that modern climate records are untrustworthy and have been significantly manipulated.
To prove the theory of AGW, climate scientists had to show that global warming is occurring at a historically unprecedented rate and that such warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet, in light of Climategate and revelations both before and since, it would appear that the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW is anything but.
. . .The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.
This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.
At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.
But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.
They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.
One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.
The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler! . . .
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1. The Medieval Warm Period, Recent Heating Spikes, and the Hockey Stick
The Medieval Warm Period, lasting from abut 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., saw a significant jump in temperature to levels higher than today. For example, during the MWP, the British were growing grapes for wine along Hadrian's Wall, indicating that Britain at the time was hotter than it is today. The MWP occurred during a period when human contribution to carbon dioxide was negligible. Thus, if one accepts the reality of the Medieval Warm Period, then there is nothing unusual about increases in temperature we have supposedly seen in recent years. The theory of AGW loses its validity as there is nothing to distinguish it from natural cycles of heating and cooling that occurred in the absence of any human contribution to CO2 levels.
In 1990, the recently formed UN IPCC ran the following graph in their report. It shows both a robust MWP - hotter than today - and a Little Ice Age lasting through 1600 A.D., after which, in fits and starts, our climate is warming back up.
In the mid-1990's, the use of boreholes as a means to determine past climate history was validated, leading, in 1997 to an incredibly extensive worldwide study by Huang, et. al, the results of which are shown in the following graph:
The similarity to the UN IPCC's own 1990 graph is striking. But then, in 1997, Michael Mann published his hockey stick - a study that purported to do away with both the MWP and the Little Ice Age, writing them out of the historical record while making recent temperature increases appear to be without precedent.
To understand how Mann accomplished this amazing feat of erasure, the most understandable explanation comes from Ross McKitrick in his article, “What is the Hockey Stick Debate About?" It should be required reading for everyone debating AGW. In it, Mr. McKitrick itemizes the faulty math, the fundamentally flawed choice of proxy data Mann used to rewrite climate history, and Mann's stonewalling against making public disclosure of all his data, meta data, and computer programs that would allow scientists to verify his work.
Regardless, given Mann's Hockey Stick's utter centrality to the validity of AGW, the global warming crowd has stood by Mann's graph ever since - and indeed, replicated it with the now infamous Yamal Tree Ring study - a study based on possibly the worst case of cherry picking so far seen in AGW. Regardless, the hockey stick just got invalidated by Dr. Phil Jones in a BBC interview yesterday.
BBC: 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?
Jones: 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. . . .
Jones admits that the validity of AGW theory rests on proof that the MWP was not a worldwide phenomena. Then he puts the stake in the heart of the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW. Jones admits that the MWP is well documented in the Northern hemisphere and he claims that there is simply not enough data in the Southern Hemisphere to prove or disprove that the MWP was a worldwide phenomena. Mann's hockey stick - and Yamal, which purport to establish that the MWP did not occur or, in the alternative, was not global with finality, is dead. They are in fatal contradiction with Jones's pronouncements. At a minimum, this means that AGW is unproven.
But Jones goes beyond that. In his interview, he admitted that there have been similar warming spikes in just the past two centuries that are not any larger than the most recent spike through 1998:
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?
... 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. . . .
This too would mean that there is nothing anomalous about our current warming. And, as Powerline notes, it is "completely at odds with the UN's 2007 IPCC report."
But going back to the MWP, the truth may be that there is in fact enough paleoclimatalogical data to establish the world-wide phenomena of the MWP. Unless someone challenges the validity of the borehole study, that would seem to provide sufficient evidence. But there have been many reports of recent vintage that also establish a robust MWP as a reality. Here is a graphic showing peer reviewed studies and their conclusions regarding the degree to which temperatures were higher (red) or lower (blue) during the MWP than they are today:
But its not just the MWP that calls into question the validity of AGW. To the extent that climate can be traced back into the distant past, such as from unadjusted data derived from Greenland's ice core, it shows repeated periods of rapid warming and cooling and that we are in a prolonged period of global warming far predating the industrial period:.
2. Whether Modern Day Temperature Data Showing Global Warming Is Trustworthy?
One would think that measuring modern temperatures would be straightforward. The truth is that it is anything but. And indeed, this difficulty in agreement on a common measurement protocol coupled with manipulation of raw data to add "corrections" calls into question the validity of AGW every bit as much as the MWP.
As a threshold matter, no less a person than NASA's James Hansen explains in detail that there is no agreement on how to measure Surface Air Temperature(SAT), that temperatures measured at the same station can vary widely depending on the method used, and that SAT can change from the ground to just a few feet above ground. In other words, the precision claimed by the climate scientists in measuring temperature to tenths or hundredths of degrees over the entire globe is simply smoke and mirrors.
. . . The global surface-station data is seriously compromised. First, there is a major station dropout and increase in missing data in stations that remained which occurred suddenly around 1990; about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles. A clear bias was found towards removing cooler higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations during this culling process though leaving their data in the base periods from which ‘averages’ and anomalies are computed.
The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting. There are uncertainties in ocean temperatures; no small issue, as oceans cover 71% of the earth's surface. These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for overestimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggest that global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts. And, consequently, such surface data should be ignored for decision making.
One of the major facets to which D'Aleo refers is the so called "heat island" effect. Many of man's activities generate heat that, if picked up by a station, then shows a false warming. Rather than make an effort to resite the vast number of stations that today are subject to the heat island effect, entities that collect this data have applied "corrections." But as D'Aleo points out, "numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone" and that "cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming."
The findings of Professor Christy are similar and were summed up in a Times article the other day:
“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.”
So there is a real question the validity about surface temperature data. That is an independant basis that establishes that the supposed "unequivocal" and "settled" science of the AGW theory is anything but.
On a different issue, one of the points of contention has been whether there has been any warming shown in the past ten to fifteen years - a period that, if AGW theory was valid - should have shown temperatures increasing hand in glove with rises in man-made CO2 emissions. Responding to criticism in the wake of Climategate, the AGW cabal pushed the fiction - duly published by the Washington Post - that the world was still warming and that "nine of the world's hottest years occurred this decade."
This contradicts the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who, in an e-mail released as part of the CRU tranche, noted:
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Enter Phil Jones in the BBC interview with another bombshell admission, Jones "admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming . . ."
3. AGW & The UN IPCC's Climate Computer Models
The AGW movement has relied upon computer modeling to pose nightmare scenarios and drive policy. For example, it was in 2008 that, acting in response to a legal action brought by Center for Biological Diversity and other green organizations to have polar bears declared endangered under the Endangered Species Act, that the Bush Interior Dept. actually made such a finding. The head of the Interior Dept., Dirk Kempthorne, made his decision based on climate computer modeling showing that arctic sea ice, which even then was rebounding from its 2007 low, would disappear 45 years into the future due to AGW. He made this decision even though the polar bear population had exploded in the Arctic and was deemed at or near optimum levels.
Yet there is a problem. All of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC to posit AGW far into the future suffer a fatal flaw. All are built on the presumption that as more man-made carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, global temperatures will rise. And as the quotes from both Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth in the above section prove, the world stopped warming in 1995. This means that AGW proponents have not established that there is a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.
But the problems of the computer models go even beyond that, as explained by MIT Professor of Meterology Richard S. Lindz:
. . . The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
The fact that the IPCC's computer models did not anticipate and could not account for the current lack of warming is significant proof that the AGW theory is neither "unequivocal" nor "settled."
4. Peer Review, IPCC, Scientific Method and Climategate
The validity of AGW has been pushed on the oft repeated claim that all of the work of AGW proponents has been subject to the gold standard of reliability - peer review. But in light of Climategate - the scandal arising in the wake of the unauthorized release of a vast tranche of internal e-mails and other data from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit - probably few things were so much called into question as the peer review process and the bastardization of the scientific method by AGW proponents.
For anything to be called science, others need to be able to access the raw data, the meta data, and the calculations or computer progams and then either verify or disprove the experiment. That is the "scientific method" as practiced across all sciences. But it stopped happening in climate science over a decade ago. What climate scientists began doing, beginning with Michael Mann's hockey stick graph in the late 1990's, was to refuse to provide the information necessary to reproduce their experiments. Indeed, it took over 7 years and literally an act of Congress to force Mann to post his data.
Probably no one has more experience with the repeated and continuous stonewalling by AGW scientists to every request for data than Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre. He has devoted an entire section of his blog to his litany of posts on this topic. You can find it here. The Climategate e-mails make crystal clear how determined the top level of climate scientists - Phil Jones, Michael Mann, etc. - were to keep their data and methods out of the public domain, even at the risk of violating the law of FOIA.
.. . . What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.
Dr. Carter added in a seperate essay that climate scientists needed to start acting like . . . real scientists:
Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented. This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why. This would seem to be an obvious and simple requirement, but the need for such transparency has only been voiced recently as the policy relevance of climate data has increased. The HADCRU surface climate dataset and the paleoclimate dataset that has gone into the various “hockeystick” analyses stand out as lacking such transparency. Much of the paleoclimate data and metadata has become available only because of continued public pressure from Steve McIntyre. Datasets that were processed and developed decades ago and that are now regarded as essential elements of the climate data record often contain elements whose raw data or metadata were not preserved (this appears to be the case with HADCRUT). The HADCRU surface climate dataset needs public documentation that details the time period and location of individual station measurements used in the data set, statistical adjustments to the data, how the data were analyzed to produce the climatology, and what measurements were omitted and why. If these data and metadata are unavailable, I would argue that the data set needs to be reprocessed.
There is no reason whatsoever that any of the climate science community should not, on all occaisions, act in accordance with Dr. Carter's advice. For a climate scientist to have to counsel others in her field on this issue gives some idea of just how far the AGW crowd has strayed from the practice of science. In the absence of this level of transparency and reproducability, there is not a single thing about AGW that can be called "unequivocal" or "settled."
The IPCC and AGW supporters attempt to sidestep this fundamental malfeasance by claiming that their experiments were verified by the peer review process. It is a neat trick - and amounts to asking the rest of the world to take their word - and the word of a few reviewers - on faith. That is not science, it's theology.
The IPCC and AGW crowd hold up peer review as the gold standard of reliability. But if the Climategate e-mails exposed anything, it was the degree to which the peer review process has been bastardized by climate scientists. This from Mark Steyn, summing up the situation:
The more frantically [the IPCC and AGW scientists] talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you're as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?" Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer-reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc. (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out, glassy-eyed, into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled."
This bastardization of the peer review process largely shut out both criticism of AGW and alternative theories. Thus is it any wonder that AGW proponents should claim, in true Orwellian fashion, a "scientific consensus" that the science of global warming is "unequivocable" and "settled" because there are no substantive body of peer reviewed studies to the contrary? It is a variant on the old saw about the boy who killed his parents then asked for mercy from the court because he was an orphan.
There is one last systemic issue on the peer review as it relates to climate science. Shannon Love has written an insightful article regarding peer review in the context of climate science where so much now relies on complex computer programs to arrive at finished data. Peer reviewers do not have the time to review the programs and, in any case, are never provided with them. This effectively negates any claim that peer review provides any standard for the reliability of the data and conclusions in the article. Ms. Love's solution is very practical:
Eric S. Raymond, the famous computer scientist and writer, has called for open source science. I think this is the way we should go. In the past, it cost too much to print out all a study’s data and records on paper and ship that paper all over the world. With the internet, we have no such limitations. All scientific studies should upon publication put online all of their raw data, all of their protocols, all of their procedures, all of their records and the code for all of their custom-written software. There is no practical reason anymore why only a summary of a scientist’s work should be made public.
Scientific software has grown too large and complex to be maintained and verified by a handful of individuals. Only by marshaling a scientific “Army of Davids” can we hope to verify the accuracy and precision of the software we are increasingly using to make major public decisions.
In the short term, we need to aggressively challenge those who assert that studies that use complex custom software have been “peer reviewed” in any meaningful way. In the long term, we have a lot of scientific work to do over again.
Summary
It is incumbant on those championing the theory of AGW to establish that the globe is warming in unprecedented fashion and that the cause of this warming is man via emissions of carbon dioxide. To this end, AGW proponents have written the Medieval Warm Period out of the historical record, relied on fundamentally untrustworthy Surface Air Temperature data, they have often refused to make public their data and methods and they have wholly corrupted the peer review process - all the while relying on peer review to stand in as a proxy for the scientific method as a means to establish the validity of AGW.
Between Climategate, the subsequent revelations by CRU head Phil Jones, and recent studies, it is apparent that the AGW crowd has not proven their theory. Dr. Jones admitted that the Medieval Warm Period existed in the northern hemisphere, and further admitted that, if it was shown to be global in scope, than it could well mean that our current warming trend is nothing more than a natural cycle of the earth. He also admitted that the MWP has not been contradicted, but merely that there is not enough data from the Southern Hemisphere to confirm or deny the MWP. This explodes the hockey stick graph which purported to show the MWP never occurred. Likewise, Jones admitted that the current rate of warming is not statistically different than in other warming spikes over the past 200 years. This contradicts the claim that our most recent spike in temperatures was itself anamolous.
The Surface Air Temperature (SAT) data, upon which the historical record rests since the advent of mechanical weather readings circa 1800, is not subject to any sort of precision in identification that would provide any confidence in the fine calculations being made in determining the historical data. Moreover, as two recent studies indicate, there are very fundamental flaws in our current system - from the vast decrease in monitoring stations over the past two decades to insufficient and improper manipulation of SAT data in light of the "heat island" effects. This also calls into question the accuracy of the AGW theory.
The IPCC's climate computer modeling shows a relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures. Each of the models fails to account for increasing levels of carbon dioxide, yet a plateau of temperatures since 1995. Thus the relationship between global warming and carbon dioxide is called directly into question.
Lastly, the AGW proponents have sufficiently bastardized the peer review process that it in no way can be considered an indicator of reliability for published reports, nor an indicator of unreliability for rejected reports attacking AGW or proposing alternative theories. In conjunction with the AGW scientists refusal to partake in the normal practice of the "scientific method," it means they have turned AGW from a "science" requiring reproducability into a theology requiring faith.
The sum of all this is that AGW, at a minimum and in all of its aspects, is unproven. Claims that the science of AGW is "unequivocal" and "settled" are ludicrous. Indeed, in many respects, there is no science even involved.
Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."
The science is overwhelming -- but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."
Kudos to Mr. Masters for something approaching intellectual honesty as to the state of AGW science.
Update: Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret has been kind enough to link to this post. There is an interesting debate going on in the comments section of Robert's post with an AGW proponent who, among other things, finds fault with my/this post. Do feel free to click over and have a read.
Finally! We now have a real consensus as to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The consensus among Americans is that AGW is not settled science and the AGW crowd has been committing fraud. This from Rasmussen:
Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming. . . .
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
The real cannibalism begins. Michael Mann, he of "hockey stick" infamy and one of the climate scientists at the very heart of the AGW scandal, threw his colleague Dr. Phil Jones, the former head of East Anglia CRU, under the bus yesterday. Appearing on the BBC (Britain's ideological equivalent of MS-NBC) Mann was questioned about the CRU e-mails on a BBC show:
. . . Speaking to BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: "I can't put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email."
Prof Mann also said he could not "justify" a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.
"I can't justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that's clear."
Prof Mann then argued however that there was "absolutely no evidence" that he too had manipulated data, while he also said "I don't believe that any of my colleagues have done that". . . .
CBS News, is beginning to take rather a jaundiced view of the AGW deniers. By "deniers," I don't mean those who question AGW, but rather those who deny that the CRU e-mails and data don't call into question the validity of AGW. And in particular, the author takes on the Democrats in Congress.
If you're a U.S. politician calling for expensive new laws relating to global warming, you know you're in trouble when Jon Stewart lampoons the scientists whose embarrassing e-mail messages were disclosed in what's being called "ClimateGate." [see Climate Update 9 below]
But Democrats put a brave face on it on Wednesday, with Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey saying that the leaked files and allegations of scientific misconduct should not stand in the way of the U.S. Congress swiftly enacting cap and trade legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. . . .
Markey, the head of a House global warming committee, said during a hearing that his Republican colleagues "sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet." And: "There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual."
That's a bit of an overstatement. The leak includes over 1,000 e-mail messages, and another 2,500 or so computer files, many of which are still being analyzed. And the burden of proof should properly be on anyone -- even a House committee chairman -- proposing new taxes and extensive regulations, especially when climate science is anything but settled. . . .
Read the entire post here. Now if we can just get these stories on the front burner of our MSM . . . The Goreacle had scheduled a meet and greet on Dec. 16 in Copenhagen to promote has new book, Our Choices. He has now pulled out of the event for unspecified reasons.
Lastly, the best tongue-in-cheek opinion piece on the Climategate scandal comes from the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby in his article "Climategate, Dissent On Ice"
Richard Nixon said he wasn’t a crook. O.J. Simpson said he didn’t kill his wife. The scientists who run the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia say they are “committed to scientific integrity . . .and . . . respectful and informed debate’’ with climate-change skeptics.
But as Nixon and Simpson eventually discovered, truth has a way of undoing even the most determined stonewall. Now it is the turn of the CRU’s climate scientists - especially its director, Phil Jones - to learn that lesson.
The CRU, a highly influential source of data on global warming, is home to some of the foremost proponents of the scientific “consensus’’ that climate change is a looming man-made disaster to be reversed at all costs. It is also at the center of “Climategate,’’ the international furor triggered when thousands of e-mails and documents were hacked from CRU computers and released over the Internet last month.
Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous. They reveal celebrated climate scientists apparently conspiring to corrupt the peer-review process, to suppress or finesse temperature data at odds with global-warming alarmism, to silence or discredit climate experts who criticize their work, and to hide or eliminate the raw data on which their own much-trumpeted claims have been based. , , ,
While much of the left wing MSM and the AGW community are studiously ignoring Climategate, at least one group is not. That group is the academic institutions who have staked a good portion of their reputations on their association with climate science. Today we get two bits of news.
The first is from Britain, where East Anglia University officials seem to have stepped into this damning controversy with both feat. The University announced today that its Climate Research Unit will in fact make all of its data and programs publicly available at the earliest opportunity. That is huge. It marks a complete reversal in the way the CRU has been allowed to conduct its business for over a decade. One wonders who was read the riot act on that one.
The second major bit of news comes from Penn St. University where Michael Mann, he of hockey stick graph fame, is now being investigated by the University over the issues raised in the hacked CRU e-mails and data. One gets the sense that this latter may be simply pro forma, given that Penn St. previously gave a pass to Mann after the hockey stick controversy. None-the-less, the process has begun and may develop into a true investigation if, as widely believed by skeptics, the release of data shows conclusivelywidescale data manipulation.
Lastly, Mark Steyntakes to task a Wapo criticism of the blogging world as wholly dependent on dinosaur media for its story base. As Steyn notes, that's "laughably untrue" when it comes to Climategate. The blogging world has sunk into this one with the tenacity of a pit bull, while reading the MSM, one would have little to no idea that any controversy is even afoot.
. . . having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic
Dictionary.com
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's annual conference is occurring next week in Copenhagen. Could anything be more surreal than Obama, blithely going to Copenhagen to announce that he will commit the U.S. to a massive, economy busting reduction in carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming just days after release of a massive tranche of e-mails, data and programs, all of which paint a picture of junk, manipulated and politicized “climate science.”
The e-mails from East Anglia University's CRU, released publicly by someone last week ,have been a bomb thrown into the middle of the man-made global warming community (AGW) – albeit a silent bomb (thus raising the deeply philosophical question, if a tree containing climatologically significant tree ring data falls in a forest and the NYT pretends not to hear it, does it make a noise?)
The CRU tranche are proof of what many have posited for years. That is that the “science” behind the global warming juggernaut (or, as Mark Steyn called it, a tree ring circus) has been manipulated to the point of falsification.
Even absent the CRU tranche, it is beyond argument that the ever shriller cries of the AGW'istas have become ever more disconnected from reality. AGW posits that as carbon dioxide levels rise, global temperatures will rise. The problems with this theory are manifold. For example, all evidence indicates that the Medieval Warm Period, a period of minimal human contribution to global carbon dioxide, was hotter than today. We have had many periods of warming and cooling since then. Indeed, by the end of the "Little Cooling" that occurred from about 1940 to 1975, the dominant scientific scare was the return of an ice age.
And then there is the giant pink elephant in the room. For the last fifteen years, even while carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen, the earth has not seen a corresponding increase in temperature. To the contrary, there has actually been global cooling. Even before the release of the CRU data, we knew that not a single computer program relied by the AGW crowd to predict future catastrophe predicted this turn of events. In short, all of the AGW programs are fundamentally – and fatally – flawed. What the CRU tranche has done has been to turn well founded suspicion into verifiable reality. Indeed, to quote from a now public e-mail of the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth:
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
I for one concur.
So how do the world's small clique of “top climate scientists” manage to keep alive the AGW canard that it is a consensus among scientists that man is causing global warming? Here is what is spelled out in the CRU tranche of e-mails:
- refuse to provide their raw data and computer code so that their findings can't be verified and tested (particularly galling, since that is what defines “science.” How the AGW crowd could get away with this for years is a strong indication that much of climate science” is utterly corrupt. It is good to hear calls throughout the scientific community for complete transparency in future climate research, such as this from Dr. Judith Curry - though if you read the comments, you will see a plethora of AGW ideologues disagreeing with her, claiming withholding such information is justified because otherwise the studies would be subject to countless attacks by "deniers.")
- manipulate data to minimize evidence of cooling and maximize, if not create out of whole cloth, warming trends;
- delete data and e-mails subject to Freedom of Information Act requests;
- blatantly corrupt the peer review process through cronyism (do read Mark Steyn's hilarious exposition on peer review and climate science)
- seek to prevent the publication of any “peer reviewed” articles calling AGW into question;
- conspire to remove journal editors who allowed publication of papers that questioned the "consensus” of AGW
- make scurrilous and ad hominem attacks on scientists who contest AGW; and,
- in all of this, they are supported by a vast conglomerate of European and American left wing politicians, left wing media, and rent seekers, all of whom have deeply vested interests in seeing AGW accepted as truth and acted upon in the policy sphere.
As James Lewis writes at PJM:
. . . The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.
All of the above is evidence of a system and people corrupt at their core. But that said, the true smoking gun lies in the actual manipulation of the supposed objective data these individuals have published. It is on these numbers and extrapolations that these "scientists" have asked us, for years, to take on faith. But now, at least a part of their programs and raw data are now in the public domain. As A.J Strata explains:
As I suspected when this story broke, the minor problem for the AGW alarmists was dealing with the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. The big headache was the warm period prior to 1960, which we can see in the CRU data was equal to or higher than today. This warm period in the first half of the last century is a real problem for the theory of CO2 driven, man-made warming.
What we see time and time again is one of two ‘tricks’ used by the alarmists to exaggerate or manufacture runaway warming. One is the application of ‘corrections’ which shove down the pre 1960 warm periods and raise up the most recent temperatures (see here and here).
The other ‘trick’ is to cherry pick data that supports the AGW fiction and discard data that contradicts that meme. Over at WUWT Warwick Hughes (original link) has discovered another smoking gun, showing how CRU selected stations and only used post 1950 data to create their fictional warming. When you use ALL the data, the myth of global warming magically disappears!
Likewise is this short video discussing what we are learning now from the released data sets and programs:
Its not that confirmation of any of this is surprising. Even for all their obfuscation, key planks of the AGW “science” have long been known to be fraudulent. [Update: An article by J.R. Dunn at the American Thinker rolls up all the evidence of past frauds in an exceptional article.] Michael Mann's “hockey stick graph” that the IPCC relied upon so heavily to promote AGW a decade ago, magically did away with the Medieval Warming Period and other periods of warming, thus showing a millennium long temperature constant, all ending in a huge spike in global temperatures since about 1980. It was proven an utter fraud by two Canadian computer analysts several years ago. Yet it didn't slow down the AGW juggernaut. The same is true more recently for the claims regarding Ymal tree ring study. Yet “climate scientists” and all of the vested interests simply ignored these frauds, attacked those who pointed out the AGW emperor was in the buff, and then increased the shrillness of their doomsday predictions. All of which brings us to the most pressing question, how will the AGW crowd, from Michael Mann to Al Gore to President Obama, treat the CRU file dump confirming the utter fraud, collusion and possible illegality occurring at the very core of AGW “science?”
On one hand we have the majority of AGW crowd who, in collusion with a compliant left wing press, are simply ignoring the issue. It clearly worked in the past. Thus do we have today the NYT refusing to print the e-mails because of their ethical concerns with hacking (oh spare me) and Obama going to Copenhagen as if nothing is amiss. Others are floating ancillary alternatives.
As equally surreal as Obama's trip to Copenhagen is the response of the head of UN's IPCC to this bombshell - that the IPCC's data and doomsday forecasts are accurate becasue they are all based on "peer reviewed" work.
The thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.
Even AGW acolyte Megan McCardle is having trouble with that one.
According to Salon.com, AGW science is simply beyond the ken of the unwashed masses and we should simply rely on faith. The author then goes a step further, implying that disbelief in AGW is a conspiracy of the energy industry.
You can see James Delingpole at The Telegraph for a further round up of equally laughable responses.
The AGW canard survived past frauds because so many on the left and so many rent seekers have such a vested interest. We can expect they will use every means at their disposal to keep the AGW canard alive - and they hold all the levers of power in both Europe and America. I suspect that this will only unravel when members of the AGW crowd begin to publicly turn on their own in order to protect their livelihoods. And indeed, we see evidence of that already beginning to happen, with, for example, the call of IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita to have "Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf . . . barred from the IPCC process" because "the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore." It has not made it into the MSM yet, but get a hundred more Mr. Zorita's and the MSM will no longer have any choice but to cover it. And that will mark the end to this mortal threat to Western Cvilization. To whoever released this tranche of e-mails and data from Hadley CRU, you, sir or madame, are a true hero.
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