Wolf Howling: gore

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Sunday, September 29, 2013

Of Global Cooling, Computer Models & Polar Bears

The only news sources not to parrot the IPCC line when it comes to "man made global warming" are Fox and the Daily Mail. But it is the Daily Mail that is by far the most aggressive in challenging the IPCC with facts. My hat is off to them for it.

In response to the release of the AR5 Summary For Policy Makers (SPM) by the IPCC (see post below), the Daily Mail on Sunday has published two articles on point. The first is on the lack of global warming for the past 17 plus years and what that means for all of the IPCC computer models used to predict global warming. The second article deals with the "endangered" polar bears which, at least until recently, were the poster children of the green's emotional campaign against illusory (but, mind you, 'catastrophic') global warming.

In the IPCC's SPM, they attempt to brush off the fact that there has been no warming for over 17 years, and they shamelessly lie about it when it comes to the implications for their computer models. All of the computer models posit that temperatures will steadily increase in proportion to man pumping ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. Those models have all failed. This from the Daily Mail:

The global warming ‘pause’ has now lasted for almost 17 years and shows no sign of ending – despite the unexplained failure of climate scientists’ computer models to predict it.

The Mail on Sunday has also learnt that because 2013 has been relatively cool, it is very likely that by the end of this year, world average temperatures will have crashed below the ‘90 per cent probability’ range projected by the models.

These also provide the main basis for the sweeping forecasts of a perilous, hotter world in a new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The graph above covers the period June 1997 to July 2013. It was drawn using the official Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ monthly data for world average temperatures, and shows the lack of a warming trend. . . .

A footnote in the new report also confirms there has been no statistically significant increase since 1997.

Last night independent climate scientist Nic Lewis – an accredited IPCC reviewer and co-author of peer-reviewed papers – pointed out that taking start years of 2001, 2002 or 2003 would suggest a cooling trend of 0.02-0.05C per decade, though this would not be statistically significant.

At a press conference to launch the report in Stockholm, the IPCC refused to say how long the pause would have to go on before casting doubt on the models, suggesting trends were only meaningful if they lasted 30 years. But some of the report’s authors are less confident.

Piers Forster, Leeds University’s Professor of Physical Climate Change, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘If it does get beyond 20 years, that would get very interesting.'We would have to revisit the models. As it goes on, it would get more and more peculiar.’

He added: ‘We are right on the edge of the probability distribution now. We have to accept that if we are going to come up with projections, they have to be correct.’

Even this marks a big change from earlier statements by eminent climate scientists. In 2009, Professor Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit, said in a leaked ‘Climategate’ email: ‘Bottom line: the no upward trend has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

However, not only does the report deny the importance of the pause, it makes a firm, short-term forecast that it is about to end – claiming that the period 2016-2035 will, on average, be 0.3-0.7C hotter than 1986-2005. . . .

Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, said that since 1980, climate models had on average overstated the extent of warming by between 79 and 159 per cent. . . .

‘This does not mean that there is not some global warming, but it likely means that temperature rises will be lower than originally expected. That fact makes alarmist scenarios ever more implausible.’

He added: ‘The EU will pay $250 billion [£166 billion] for its current climate policies each and every year until the end of the century. For almost $20 trillion, temperatures will be reduced by a negligible 0.05C.’

In Stockholm, IPCC leaders described the models as ‘more and more remarkable’, insisting that the pause has no significance. . . .

It said no conclusion should be drawn from the lack of warming since 1998 because this was one of the hottest years on record, while the models were ‘not expected to reproduce the timing of internal variability’. Yet the pause has lasted since January 1997, not 1998, and 1997 was not a hot year.

This is all getting more surreal by the day. One has to love how the left claims the models are getting ever more accurate as the data shows them utterly failing. It truly is Soviet-esque. Now, as to the polar bears - whom the greens were able to have listed in 2008 as an endangered species wholly on the basis of computer models that posited that polar bear habitat would fall to global warming - . . .

. . . they are seeming rather fat and happy of late. This from the Daily Mail:

A bitter wind blows off the Arctic Ocean but the mother polar bear and her two cubs standing just 50ft in front of me are in their element.

For more than an hour I watch from a boat just offshore, transfixed and oblivious to the below-freezing temperatures, as the four-month-old twins gambol across the snow.

For years polar bears have been the poster boys of global warming – routinely reported to be threatened with extinction due to melting ice-packs and rising sea temperatures.

Indeed, when they were put on the US Endangered Species list in 2008, they were the first to be registered solely because of the perceived threat of global warming.

One prominent scientist said their numbers would be reduced by 70 per cent by 2050 while global warming proponents – including Al Gore and Sir David Attenborough – used emotive imagery to highlight their ‘demise’.

Yet there is one small problem: many polar bear populations worldwide are now stable, if not increasing. . . .

Last week I travelled to Kaktovik, Alaska – an Inupiat village of 239 hardy souls on Barter Island at the edge of the Arctic – which has become an unlikely boom town thanks to an influx of polar bears.

Village administrator Tori Sims, 26, beamed as she told me: ‘This has been a great year for the bears.

'They are fat, happy and healthy. We’re seeing a boom in tourism which brings much-needed revenue to the village and helps us continue to live the traditional life we cherish.

‘I’ve lived here all my life and there are more bears every year. I read stories about polar bears being on the brink of extinction because of global warming, look out of my window and start to laugh.’ . . .

Laugh? At the IPCC and ManBearPig? How atrocious. The last thing the left wants is for people to start confusing the issue of global warming with facts.

The damage being done to mankind by the global warming scam is the true catastrophe. There needs to be a reckoning for these people. They cannot be allowed to simply slip away into the night as this scam is finally exposed.

Should you think me a bit too vindictive, consider this:

Tar and feathering simply would not be enough. I suggest stripping them of their wealth and positions, then sending them en masse to Siberia where they can enjoy all the global warming they want.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Goracle Looks To Cash In On $andy

The flood waters have yet to recede, power has yet to be restored to millions, and many of the dead remain unburied - yet as sure as the sun rises in the East, it is already time for the biggest con man in history and the world's premier green profiteer, Al Gore, to claim that Hurricane Sandy is the result of global warming. Apocalypse to follow:

Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather

The reality is that Sandy was, according to NOAA's Martin Hoerling, "little more than the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extratropical storm. Both frequent W. Atlantic in Oct....nothing unusual with that."

And indeed, Sandy was hardly unusual in and of itself. Multiple such hurricanes have struck the mid and upper portions of the East coast, with upwards of ten striking between 1954 and 1960. The reality is that we have been in a period of unusual inactivity when it comes to hurricanes. You can find many more facts compiled by Marc Morano at this link. I will post Joe Bastardi's epic takedown of the link between Sandy and climatechange just seen on The O'Reilly Factor as soon as it hits youtube.

While there may not be a link between Sandy and climate change, there is a direct link between climate change, Sandy, and Al Gore's wallet. He needs to be jailed and all of his wealth stripped to reimburse the hundreds of millions whose pockets he has picked.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Gore, Godzilla & The Religion of Global Warming

And just to correct the record, according to IPCC scientist Roger Pielke, Sr., responding to a similar claim made in the NYT: "[T]he oceans have not been warming in recent years (e.g. see the 2010 paper by Know and Douglas)." As I said a month ago, making the same point as Krauthammer:

Thus do we need to be forcing the warmies to answer, at every turn, the simple question, what evidence would be necessary to falsify the theory of global warming? What are the "facts" that they identify as forming the crucial underpinnings of AGW? With that answer in hand, then the meme of AGW will cease to be mindless dogma. It will become actual science that cannot withstand scrutiny.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Meteorologists Attack Global Warming, NYT Recommends Reeducation Camps

Meteorologist Joe Bistrardi, a vocal and articulate critic of antrhopogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW), has done a recent video (see here - unfortunately cannot embed it) wherein he points to a fundamental disconnect between Goddard's map showing massive warming in the polar regions this past winter while other measurments show a significant rise in polar sea ice. As Bastardi points out, those two events are mutually exclusive and, thus, the people at Goddard are making adjustments to the polar temperature data that logically cannot be true.

That leads in to a NYT article today, Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming. The NYT admits that there may not be quite a consensus on anthropogenic global warming [AGW], particularly among meteorologists, a very significant number of whom openly describe AGW as a "scam." That said, the NYT does nothing to hide its own bias, and in the end, quotes from several anthropogenic global warming [AGW] proponents who assure us that it is all a simple case of misunderstanding, nothing that a few months in reeducation camps for dissident meteorologists won't solve.

This from the NYT:

The debate over global warming has created . . . tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters.

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

That last paragraph is incredibly misleading. One, as to a generalized warming trend over the past two centuries, not a single meteorologist would contest that. We have been slowly warming up since the last Little Ice Age. The seminal issue is whether the warming is part of a natural cycle and, if not, then to what extent it is being driven by man. Two, meteorologists looking at the unadjusted temperatures over the last decade can clearly see that temperatures have gotten a bit cooler. They are in good company. Some of the top members of the AGW community happen to have admitted to the same thing. Three, this grossly overstates the "consensus" in AGW among climate scientists. To continue from the NYT:

. . . Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site.

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology.

A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The NYT fails to note an important fact. Unlike academics competing for grants or the vast enviro-industrial complex - i.e., all of those from Al Gore to GE to Goldman Sachs and others who stand to reap a windfall from government mandates concerning AGW - meteorologists are unique in having no vested interest in either proving or disproving AGW theory.

. . . climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

But the cynicism, said Dr. Cullen, who now works for Climate Central, a nonprofit group that works to bring the science of climate change to the public, is in her opinion unwarranted.

“They are not trying to predict the weather for 2050, just generally say that it will be hotter,” Dr. Cullen said of climatologists. “And just like I can predict August will be warmer than January, I can predict that.”

To the NYT credit, they do point out later in the article that Cullen is the radical who advocated that the Meteorological Society withhold accreditation from any meteorologist who did not first swear fealty to AGW theory. But the NYT quoted Cullen without challenging any of her ridiculous assertions. The Times authors fail to note that all of the "complex models" that the AGW theorists relied upon to show catastrophe in 50 to 100 years predict that temperatures will rise in concert with and because of increases in carbon dioxide. Not a single one of these "complex models" predicted the last decade of cooling, even as humans pumped ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, the computer models are fatally flawed and of no predictive value. And for the NYT to let Cullen get away with saying she can predict that it will be hotter in 2050 than today with the same assurance that she can predict warmer weather in August than January is just jaw dropping. That is utterly ridiulous.

Resentment may also play a role in the divide. Climatologists are almost always affiliated with universities or research institutions where a doctoral degree is required. Most meteorologists, however, can get jobs as weather forecasters with a college degree.

Ahhh, here we go. The problem is one of [a] degree, so to speak. Climatoligists should be believed because they, as a group, are smarter than meteorologists, who as a group are also driven by jealousy and envy.

The problem with that theory is you do not have to have a PhD in climatology to be able to evaluate the work produced by the AGW proponents. There are many intelligent people from other walks of life who can look at the work of climate scientists and say, whoa, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. There are more that can understand that there is a problem when the IPCC substitutes peer review in place of the scientific method as the gold standard for reliability. And all people should be able to understand that there is a problem when the IPCC does not even live up to that standard - relying on non-peer reviewed sources for claims of oncomoing and inevitable doom from global warming.

As to meteorologist angst with global warming, a classic example is the link at the top of this post, with Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi pointing out the disconnect between adjusted temperature data showing torid temperatures in the poles while other data shows the growth in polar sea ice. Sceptical meteorologists like Bastardi and Anthony Watts key on unjustifiable adjustments being made to raw data and an even more fundamental concern about how the raw data is collected.

For Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer, his problems with AGW theory have come from looking at the methodology and statistics used by Climatologists - when he could get the data. Much of the stonewalling of climate scientists over the past decade has been their refusal to provide their raw data and methodology to Mr. McIntyre. For example, it was only recently that McIntyre finally got a hold of Kevin Briffa's dataset for Yamal - after a decade of stone-walling - and pointed out that Briffa manipulated his findings by using tree rings from a single outlier.

For historians, their problems are with the AGW alarmists who claim that the earth today is the hottest in history. We know that it was hotter at other times, including most recently during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Parts of Greenland today frozen over were being farmed during the MWP, and the British had a thriving wine industry as far north as Hadrian's Wall. In other words, claims that we are in an unprecedented cycle of warming simply because we are in a general warming trend do not flow from the historical record. That coupled with ridiculous efforts of Michael Mann and the IPCC to wipe the MWP and the Little Ice Age from the historical record have left many of us with the firm conviction that climate scientists are advocates, not scientists, and indeed, the worst sort of scam artists.

And then of course there are numerous other scientists who are agnostic as to AGW, but who, in the wake of Climategate, look at how the scientific method has been bastardized by AGW proponents to produce a "consensus." These scientists recoil in disgust of their own.

The NYT blithely ignores all of that, expounding ever more on their hypothesis that the only reason for the split between climate scientists and meteorologists is because the latter simply don't understand. Thus, the NYT tells us, meteorologists themselves need to be reeducated. This is arrogance unbound. It is of an ilk displayed by Obama and the left when telling us that the only reason we don't support Obamacare is because we don't understand it. It is rather breath-taking - but not surprising.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

"The Cimate Campaign Is A Movement Unable To Hide Its Decline"

The title of this post is a quote from a long and detailed article by Steven Hayward in this week's issue of the Weekly Standard. While I have previously highlighted the facts that show AGW theory unproven, Mr. Smith covers that and much more. Here are some of the highlights:

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC—which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992—has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt—a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.

But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a “climate scientist”), initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December—in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen—but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.

The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research. . . .

. . . Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. (Landsea, who does not consider himself a climate skeptic, resigned from the IPCC in 2005 on account of its increasingly blatant politicization.) . . .

When Pielke, an expert on hurricane damage at the University of Colorado at Boulder, pointed out defects in the purported global-warming/tropical storm link in a 2005 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the lead author of the IPCC’s work on tropical storms, Kevin Trenberth, called the article “shameful,” said it should be “withdrawn,” but in typical fashion refused to debate Pielke about the substance of the article.

Finally, the original Climategate controversy over the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) (see my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009) is far from over. The British government has determined that the CRU’s prolonged refusal to release documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information requests is a potential criminal violation. . . .

But Pachauri’s days as IPCC chairman are likely numbered; there are mounting calls from within the IPCC for Pachauri to resign, amid charges of potential conflicts of interest (like Gore, Pachauri is closely involved with commercial energy schemes that benefit from greenhouse gas regulation) but also in part because Pachauri chose this delicate moment to publish a soft-core pornographic novel. (The main character is an aging environmentalist and engineer engaged in a “spiritual journey” that includes meeting Shirley MacLaine, detailed explorations of the Kama Sutra, and group sex.) . . .

The climate campaign is a movement unable to hide its decline. Skeptics and critics of climate alarmism have long been called “deniers,” with the comparison to Holocaust denial made explicit, but the denier label now more accurately fits the climate campaigners. Their first line of defense was that the acknowledged errors amount to a few isolated and inconsequential points in the report of the IPCC’s Working Group II, which studies the effects of global warming, and not the more important report of the IPCC’s Working Group I, which is about the science of global warming. Working Group I, this argument goes, is where the real action is, as it deals with the computer models and temperature data on which the “consensus” conclusion is based that the Earth has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century, that human-generated greenhouse gases are overwhelmingly responsible for this rise, and that we may expect up to 4 degrees Celsius of further warming if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t stopped by mid-century. As Gore put it in his February 28 Times article, “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.” I note in passing that the 2007 Working Group I report uses the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” more than 1,300 times in its 987 pages, including what it identified as 54 “key uncertainties” limiting our mastery of climate prediction.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil (“hide the decline”) Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years—all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan:
BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over,” what exactly do they mean, and what don’t they mean?

Jones: It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well [emphasis added].
Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and one of the few scientists convinced of the potential for catastrophic global warming who is willing to engage skeptics seriously, wrote February 24: “No one really believes that the ‘science is settled’ or that ‘the debate is over.’ Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”

The next wave of climate revisionism is likely to reopen most of the central questions of “settled science” in the IPCC’s Working Group I, starting with the data purporting to prove how much the Earth has warmed over the last century. A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” The Climategate emails and documents revealed the disarray in the surface temperature records the IPCC relies upon to validate its claim of 0.8 degrees Celsius of human-caused warming, prompting a flood of renewed focus on the veracity and handling of surface temperature data. Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded.

The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. John Christy of the University of Alabama, a contributing author to the IPCC’s Working Group I chapter on surface and atmospheric climate change, tried to get the IPCC to acknowledge this anomaly in its 2007 report but was ignored. (Christy is responsible for helping to develop the satellite monitoring system that has tracked global temperatures since 1979. He received NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for this work.) Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. The models the IPCC uses for projecting a 3 to 4 degree Celsius increase in temperature all assume large positive (that is, temperature-magnifying) feedbacks from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; Schwartz, Lindzen, and Choi discern strong negative (or temperature-reducing) feedbacks in the climate system, suggesting an upper-bound of future temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

If the climate system is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the climate campaign believes, then what is causing plainly observable changes in the climate, such as earlier arriving springs, receding glaciers, and shrinking Arctic Ocean ice caps? There have been alternative explanations in the scientific literature for several years, ignored by the media and the IPCC alike. The IPCC downplays theories of variations in solar activity, such as sunspot activity and gamma ray bursts, and although there is robust scientific literature on the issue, even the skeptic community is divided about whether solar activity is a primary cause of recent climate variation. Several studies of Arctic warming conclude that changes in ocean currents, cloud formation, and wind patterns in the upper atmosphere may explain the retreat of glaciers and sea ice better than greenhouse gases. Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt. Above all, if the medieval warm period was indeed as warm or warmer than today, we cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the “Little Ice Age” that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century. Skeptics have known and tried to publicize all of these contrarian or confounding scientific findings, but the compliant news media routinely ignored all of them, enabling the IPCC to get away with its serial exaggeration and blatant advocacy for more than a decade.

The question going forward is whether the IPCC will allow contrarian scientists and confounding scientific research into its process, and include the opportunity for dissenting scientists to publish a minority report. Last March, John Christy sent a proposal to the 140 authors of IPCC Working Group I asking “that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than has been the IPCC’s recent message—all based on published information. . . . An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process.” Christy received no response. . . .

. . . [A]d hominem arguments from the climate campaigners also make clear which camp is truly guilty of anti-intellectualism. Gore and the rest of the chorus simply will not discuss any of the scientific anomalies and defects in the conventional climate narrative that scientists such as Christy have pointed out to the IPCC. Perhaps the climate campaign’s most ludicrous contortion is their response to the record snowfall of the eastern United States over the last two months. The ordinary citizen, applying Occam’s Razor while shoveling feet of snow, sees global warming as a farce. The climate campaigners now insist that “weather is not climate,” and that localized weather events, even increased winter snowfall, can be consistent with climate change. They may be right about this, though even the IPCC cautions that we still have little ability to predict regional climate-related weather changes. These are the same people, however, who jumped up and down that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that talking point.

The ruckus about “weather is not climate” exposes the greatest problem of the climate campaign. Al Gore and his band of brothers have been happy to point to any weather anomaly—cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters—as proof of climate change. But the climate campaigners cannot name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory. Pretty convenient when your theory works in only one direction. . . .

There is much more to this exceptional article. Read it here.

Note that I added bolding to one line:

Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt.

I highlighted that just to make a point as to how alternative theories that are very deserving of a hearing - and that would significantly impact how we allocate scarce resources - have gotten pushed wholly aside by the politicized science of AGW. More on that here.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

The Goracle Returneth

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

George Will, Global Warming Advocates Ignore The Boulders, 21 Feb. 2010

Gore has emerged from his Climategate hibernaton – and he is in full hysterics mode as he attempts to protect his gravy train in a lengthy NYT op-ed. He opens his tome of yesterday by warning that we face “unimaginable calamity” if we don't institute the “large-scale preventive measures.” Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory posits that as man introduces more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then temperatures around the globe will warm. Gore:

- ignores that there is no historic link in geological history between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperatures. Sometimes there have been high temperatures and high CO2, such as during the Cretaceous, but at other times the link does not appear. For example, a recent study shows that 81,000 years ago, sea levels were 1 meter higher than today, but that carbon levels were significantly lower.

- ignores that the world warms and cools naturally – and that even the IPCC in its pre-hockey stick days admitted that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was both a reality and warmer than today, even though there was no human contribution to carbon dioxide then. High priest of the AGW Church Phil Jones admitted the other day that global proof of the MWP would undercut the AGW theory.

- ignores that the very computer models he relies on to forecast “unimaginable calamity” are fatally flawed. Gore is relying on them to forecast doom a century from now, yet not a one of these computer models predicted the apporximately 15 yr. period through today in which temperatures have plateaued even as ever more carbon has been pumped into the atmosphere. The link between carbon dioxide and warming temperatures is not established.

And if carbon isin't the culprit, those “large-scale preventive measures” he wants in place, most of which would involve a sizable transfer of the world's wealth to Gore and his cronies in the name of minimizing carbon dioxide output, would be worse than useless.

I say “worse than” because it would take away our ability to respond to real climate crisis. For example, in the name of AGW, we have moved to highly subsidized “bio-fuels,” a move that has seen a significant increase in agricultural land being used for fuel rather than food. That move alone has driven a significant portion of the worlds poor from above to below the poverty line and contributed significantly to world hunger. It harms, not helps, the environment, and actually leads to more carbon dioxide production than it saves. Moreover, if those who predict that the sun is the prime driver of temperatures – hardly an unreasonable thesis – are correct, than we may actually be in for a period of global cooling which could very seriously impact agricutural production.

The one very valid point that Gore makes in his tome is that “we . . . still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.” I couldn't agree more. Which is why we need to be exploiting our own natural resources to their fullest potential. Drill baby drill - and mine baby mine. We have the resources to substantially, if not in the near term completely, reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But we are doing next to no new drilling, we are not even able to explore in many locales, and Obama is waging a war on coal. Instead, Gore and the left would have us bet our nation's economic future on “alternative energy” that is neither cost effective nor proven to scale. In the UK, where a similar scenario is already playing out, energy prices have doubled in five years and portend to grow exponentially over the next decade. While this doesn't sound like too good a deal for the unwashed masses, it would make Gore and his ilk fabulously wealthy.

According to Gore, the sum total of the case against AGW amounts to nothing of any import:

[T]he reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

This charlatan is shameless. He would have us pity the poor climate scientists who hide their data and refuse to make their methodology and code public to allow testing of their experiments. To paraphrase Gore - “why can't you just take it all on faith.” And it is no wonder that AGW theorists have been able to operate so long with so few errors made public. The worst thing that the IPCC and climate scientists have done is to corrupt the “scientific method” and to substitute a bastardized peer review process in its place as a facade of reliability. As the Institute of Physicists wrote the other day:

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

In other words, Gore is asking us to trust the work of “thousands” even though the wide spread practice among them is to publish results but not the materials that would allow reproduction and verification of their published results. To put this into perspective better, read Steve McIntyre's submission to the British Parliament on the corruption of the scientific process by the IPCC scientists. As he opines:

CRU has manipulated and/or withheld data with an effect on the research record. The manipulation includes (but is not limited to) arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data. The problem is deeply rooted in the sense that some forms of data manipulation and withholding are so embedded that the practitioners and peer reviewers in the specialty seem either to no longer notice or are unoffended by the practices. Specialists have fiercely resisted efforts by outside statisticians questioning these practices – the resistance being evident in the Climategate letters. These letters are rich in detail of individual incidents.

As to the errors found, there are more than two, and they are being found at rapid pace. For example:

- Gore ignores that the “hockey stick” graph – of parmount importance to the AGW theory - continues to be an issue that has regular revelations – the most recent of which is Ken Briffa's cherry picking of the Yamal tree ring data – indeed, so outrageous as to amount to scientific fraud – all in an effort to shore up the hockey stick. It took years to get Briffa to put up his data – just as it took seven years and an act of Congress to get Michael Mann to post even the basic data for the original hockey stick graph, MBH98.

- Just recently, it was found that the IPCC, again relying on non-peer reviewed data, understated by half the annual increase of Antarctic ice.

- Just recently, it was found that the IPCC's claim that global warming will reduce African crop yields by 50% by 2020 was wholly unsubstantiated.

- Gore ignores the fact that, as the CRU e-mails clearly demonstrate, many of the central theories of “AGW” remain unchallenged because a cabal of AGW scientists made damn sure that the work was not published. Possibly the most infamous story of this type concerns physicist Henrik Svensmark who has theorized that our climate is driven by cloud production seeded by solar rays. It is a theory still being tested, but that seems borne out in large measure by the historical record. Not merely was he ostricized for articulating this theory, but he was publicly criticized by the IPCC chairman as “naive” for positing his theory.

Here is one of my favorites from the Goracle's tripe in the NYT: “even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.”

Would those climate deniers include Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth, two scientists at the very top of the AGW cabal? Both have concluded its not warming and, as Jones points out, hasn't been for "15 years."

The problem with the surface data temperature is that it, like seemingly everything else in AGW, is subject to massive manipulation and adjustments. It is fundamentaly untrustworthy. Measurements themselves are not standardized. Rural and colder measuring stations have been culled by the thousands, leaving 80% of the data stations in the U.S. in locals that are below standard. Raw data from these stations show adjustments that cannot possibly be justified, but which invariably act to more warming in recent decades even while ignoring the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. We know this not because the changes are transparent and the code is provided for public inspection, but by individuals pulling reverse engineering that CRU and others have done in back rooms. It is a massive fraud.

The rest of the Goracle Manifesto is mostly pure drivel. He attacks capitalism, free markets and Faux News. Then he comes to this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

"Redemption" is the language of sin and theology. In biblical terms, redemption is an individual choice, and to be redeemed, a person must want it. As the Goracle uses the word, he uses the language of the inquisition, where “sinners” were forcibly redeemed by the police powers of the state using the auto-de-fe. Is there any person of rationale mind who thinks that using the police powers of the state for “human redemption” is a good idea?

My suggestion, let's feed Gore to the polar bears and be done with it.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Global Warming & Horoscopes

[I]f every weather event that happens fits your global warming hypothesis or theory, the theory cannot be invalidated by real world observations or data. Climate fear promoters are now morphing to the level of the daily horoscope in your local newspaper. Horoscopes are worded in such a vague manner that essentially anything that happens to you that day can be touted as “proof” the horoscope was correct.
Marc Morano, Climate Depot

We learn to today that heavy snow is proof of global warming.

We learned two years ago, compiled here by Breitbart, that lack of heavy snow is proof of global warming.

(H/T Hot Air, here and here)

So the question has to be, is there anything that is not proof of anthropogenic global warming? Or has it all reached the same level of trustworthiness as astrology.

The AP has out a story on people who suggest that "Scientists seek better way to do Climate Report" in the wake of Climategate. But you have to hand it to the AP. They insure that we understand that the important parts of the IPCC report all show AGW to be a virtual certainty:

A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.

The flaws — and the erosion they've caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. . . .

No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. . . .

Scientists — including top U.S. government officials — argue that the bulk of the reports are sound.

"The vast majority of conclusions in the IPCC are credible, have been through a very rigorous process and are absolutely state of the science, state of the art about what we know of the climate system," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, who runs the agency that oversees much of the U.S. government's climate research. . . .

Many IPCC scientists say it's impressive that so far only four errors have been found in 986 pages of the second report, with the overwhelming majority of the findings correct and well-supported. . . .

One would think that the fact that computer programs, raw data and meta data are still being largely withheld and that the peer review process is not merely corrupt, but systemically unreliable, might lead to a few less attempts by these folk to claim scientific certainty. Unless and until scientists make available their raw data, meta data, and computations/computer programs, there is absolutely nothing that can relied upon in the area of Climate Science.

And indeed, Yid With Lid walks us through just how unreliable that climate science really is. Probably the most influential single graph furthering the mania of AGW has been Mann's Hockey Stick - the one where he dropped the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historical record. Yid blogs on a Guardian article exposing how others at the CRU were skeptical of Mann's rather amazing feat of erasure at the time it took center stage.

And on a final surreal note, the Senate has postponed hearings on "Global Warming Impacts, Including Public Health, in the United States." Anyone who discounts the reality of the Gore effect or the existence of a God with a sense of humor is missing the obvious.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Climategate Update 22: Hiding The Raw Data, Gore's Mosquitos, & The Smart Grid

Double click on the graph above, showing Orland GISS data plotted in June 2007, to see how it is plotted today, showing data recently deleted from the public record maintained by NASA.

The more global warming rocks are kicked over, the more the stench of corruption rises to our collective noses. Several days ago, we learned about how the AGW cabal had "adjusted" the raw data for the temperature monitoring station at Darwin, a station that is now in a "heat island." Thus, any adjustments to Darwin's raw data should have been downward. Instead, a correction was applied that raised the temperature significantly in the past few years. True, that could have been an anamoly. But now as more attention is drawn to this issue, the more we see similar fraud being repeated:

For the past six days, several climate scientists have discovered an alarming trend: clear evidence of alteration of historical data at weather stations around the world, in order to support the contention of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The changes appear to affect the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), a project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center. Note that this is the same agency that employs Dr. Eugene Wahl, who might be implicated in the research misconduct allegations made against Michael E. Mann at Penn State University.

Richard Keen at the University of Colorado was the first to notice the changes. On December 5, he published this report comparing his own research into the climate of Alaska with the official version of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). He found no evidence of warming in Alaska over the past three decades, and no substantial difference in average temperature between 1935-1944 and the present time. Overall he found a warming trend of 0.69 Kelvin per century over the span of the twentieth century--while the GHCN dataset projects a warming trend of 2.83 K/century. (The Kelvin is the International System equivalent of a Celsius degree.) . . .

Today, Anthony Watts himself reported on a comment by a reader on the most disturbing finding yet: several GISS station datasets have been altered. The only reason why Watts and his commenter could detect the deletion is that Watts had saved the data from two of the affected weather stations (Orland, CA and Fairmont, CA) two years ago. The alteration at Orland is more serious: prior temperature records (between ca. 1880 and 1900), clearly warmer than subsequent temperatures, are now missing. Those data were in place as recently as 29 December 2008 and are not present today. [Double-click on the graph at the top of this post]. By way of explanation, the GISS data selector (captured by Watts) says this:
Note to prior users: We no longer include data adjusted by GHCN and have renamed the middle option (old name: prior to homogeneity adjustment).
Watts suggests that the problem might be not with the GISS data but with the GHCN dataset upon which GISS depends for historical data.

Developing...

Developing indeed. And much more on this from Joseph D'Aleo writing at PJM:

Climategate has sparked a flurry of examinations of the global data sets — not only at CRU, but in nations worldwide and at the global data centers at NOAA and NASA. Though the Hadley Centre implied their data was in agreement with other data sets and thus trustworthy, the truth is other data centers are complicit in the data manipulation fraud.

The New Zealand Climate Coalition had long solicited data from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA), which is responsible for New Zealand’s National Climate Database. For years the data was not released, despite many requests to NIWA’s Dr. Jim Salinger — who came from CRU. With Dr. Salingers’ departure from NIWA, the data was released and showed quite a different story than the manipulated data. The raw data showed a warming of just 0.06C per century since records started in 1850. This compared to a warming of 0.92C per century in NIWA’s (CRU’s) adjusted data.

Willis Eschenbach, in a guest post on Anthony Watts’ blog, found a smoking gun at Darwin station in Australia. Raw data from NOAA (from their GHCN, Global Historical Climate Network, that compiled data that NASA and Hadley work with) showed a cooling of 0.7C. After NOAA “homogenized” the data for Darwin, that changed dramatically. . . .

He found similar discrepancies in the Nordic countries. And that same kind of unexplainable NOAA GHCN adjustment was made to U.S. stations.

In this story, see how Central Park data was manipulated in inconsistent ways. The original U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) data showed a cooling to adjust for urban heat island effect — but the global version of Central Park (NOAA GHCN again) inexplicably warmed Central Park by 4F. The difference between the two U.S. adjusted and global adjusted databases, both produced by NOAA NCDC, reached an unbelievable 11F for Julys and 7F annually! Gradually and without notice, NOAA began slowly backing off the urban heat island adjustment in the USHCN data in 1999 and eliminated it entirely in 2007.

Anthony Watts, in his surfacestations.org volunteer project “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?”, found that of the 1000-plus temperature recording stations he had surveyed (a 1221-station network), 89% rated poor to very poor – according to the government’s own criteria for siting the stations.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues with the global data is station dropout after 1990. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today. The stations that dropped out were mainly rural and at higher latitudes and altitudes — all cooler stations. This alone should account for part of the assessed warming. China had 100 stations in 1950, over 400 in 1960, then only 25 by 1990. This changing distribution makes any assessment of accurate change impossible.

No urbanization adjustment is made for either NOAA or CRU’s global data, based on flawed papers by Wang (1990), Jones (1990), and Peterson (2003). The Jones and Wang papers were shown to be based on fabricated China data. Ironically, in 2008 Jones found that contamination by urbanization in China was a very non-trivial 1C per century — but that did not cause the data centers to begin adjusting, as that would have eliminated global warming.

Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here).

Just as the Medieval Warm Period made it difficult to explain why the last century of warming could not be natural (which the hockey stick team attempted to make go away), so did the warm spike in the 1930s and 1940s. In each of the databases, the land data from that period was adjusted down. And Wigley suggested that sea surface temperatures could likewise be “corrected” down by 0.15C, making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

Wigley also noted:
Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
NOAA complied in July 2009 — removing the satellite input from the global sea surface temperature assessment (the most complete data in terms of coverage), which resulted in an instant jump of 0.24C in ocean temperatures.

Is NASA in the clear? No. They work with the same base GHCN data, plus data from Antarctica (SCAR). To their credit, they attempt to consider urbanization — though Steve McIntyre showed they have poor population data and adjust cities warmer as often as they do colder. They also constantly fiddle with the data. John Goetz showed that 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the 2 1/2 years ending in 2007. . . .

Some have suggested that confirmation bias may be responsible for the multiplicity of questionable data and studies that we are seeing. But things such as the changed historical data, Mann's Hockey Stick, hiding Briffa's decline, the Yamal tree ring data, the Rothera Station study - these are acts of knowing fraud. These are things that any non-scientist can look at and, when shown the sleight of hand involved in their creation, can grasp immediately how they have been conned. These are obviously not the work of mere unconscious bias.

And speaking of knowing fraud . . . entymologist Paul Reiter takes Gore - and in particular his advisors - to task for their complete misstatements of fact in his area of expertise - malaria. According to Gore, global warming means that the "tropical" disease of malaria will explode throughout the world due to global warming. This from Paul Reiter writing in The Spectator:

. . . I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As the film began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they’re a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared.

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth. . . .

Another good read out today is from Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards. Dafydd hypothesizes that the "environmentalist" movement . . . [is] anti-human insanity. He then sets to proving his hypothesis. It's an excellent post I strongly recommend.

Lastly, one of the pushes of the environmentalist movement is to adopt the "smart grid" technology. The smart grid does not create a single new kilowat of power, nor, for that matter, does it make the power grid necessarily more secure. It involves installing computer controlled utility meters in individual houses and businesses. These meters are able to show individuals, in real time, how much electricity they are using. It also feeds information directly back to the power company so that they have no need to send out meter readers. But it comes with serious issues. Some where discussed in WaPo today:

. . . Customers in California are in open revolt, and officials in Connecticut and Texas are questioning whether the rush to install meters benefits the public.

Some consumers argue that the meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. And many find it unfair that they will begin to pay immediately for the new meters through higher rates, when the promised savings could be years away.

Wapo goes on to discuss numerous customers complaining of being overcharged in light of their past electric usage history. But Wapo ignores perhaps the most fundamental issue with these "smart grid" meters - the power companies now control your thermostat and other electric usage. This are some of the comments to a PJM article on the smart grid, extolling its virtures. The commentors did not share the joy:

HoosierHawk:

Another writer pushing something that they have no understanding of. Why can’t authors self limit themselves to things that they know about? Probably because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Now why would a “smart” grid be better than a “stupid” grid? If ever there was an obvious case of marketing duping the uninformed this is it. Smart is better than stupid, it has to be better! Smart is good, we all know that.

Ask a few smart questions, like, is there going to be more generating capacity? No, it’s not about that. Are there going to be higher capacity transmission routes installed? Ah, no that’s not going to occur. Will it prevent terrorists from causing problems? Well actually it may enable them to do so, as it will create many more avenues for causing trouble, and allow them do remotely, what they now need to do in person, like shutting down a transformer.

What exactly is a smart grid all about? They call it smart because they will be transmitting encoded information over the power lines. Bear in mind that power lines don’t have shielding to prevent RF leakage for the high frequency signals required, so there will be all kinds of interference to radio transmissions, particularly in the shortwave bands.

What are the advantages? It will enable real time monitoring of electrical usage by individuals, and allow the control of that usage. It doesn’t create any more of what we need nor does it create the pathways needed to bring it to us. It allows them to control us.

We already have smart grid technology where I live. The power company doesn’t have to send anyone out to read our meter every month, they know exactly what we are using all the time. Our electric company doesn’t have any generating capacity of their own, they only buy it, and distribute it. When the price of electricity rises during times of peak usage, they send a signal that shuts off our water heater, it saves them money. Oh don’t worry you’ll get used to a cold shower, may not like it, but you will get used to it, we have. I have a 7 year old, modern house, but don’t have a choice about the temp of my shower. Progress is wonderful.

The next step is to make more appliances smart – air conditioning for example. You don’t really need it and hey the power company can make more money if you let them control it. It’s not that they don’t have power, they would just rather not sell it right now, it saves them money.

The final step is to start billing based on WHEN you use the power. That way when the factory miles away starts pulling more juice, and generating stations have to start using less efficient “peaking” capacity, they can bill you for it. That way you will learn to shut down your house, so that they can supply the factory using cheaper power.

Personally, I would rather see cheaper generating stations, like nuclear, being built. Instead they want to invest in ways to control and monitor an individuals usage, rather than creating more of what we need. I don’t call that smart, it’s a step backwards.

Chris:

As wife to a former Electrical Engineer in the power industry, now a Production Manager, this article is sheer idiocy. A national power grid does nothing to keep power on. All it does is redistribute power. Which is what most companies are already doing. Only now, the companies are paid for excess production. Once you nationalize the grid, who is in charge of where the power is going? The government employee. How do they determine who pays whom for the load? All it does is allow the government the ability to deny energy to a certain sector or area. And likewise, feed that load to some other area. Sound like wealth redistribution to anyone else?

But most of all, if the grid fails, everyone will be affected. Not just a state or city who rely on a ill run energy company. Poorly run power plants will benefit while those that are well run will be punished. Do we see a pattern here

- - Climate Update 21: AGW Investigation Begins? 100 Reasons AGW Is Natural, Green Profiteers, Conflict Of Interest & Arctic Sea Ice

Monday, December 14, 2009

Climate Update 21: AGW Investigation Begins? 100 Reasons AGW Is Natural, Green Profiteers, Conflict Of Interest & Arctic Sea Ice

Is there going to be a real investigation over Climategate? Perhaps so. The Dept. of Energy has issued a "litigation hold notice" to its employees. The notice requires employees, in relevant part, to "preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.” " This is heartening news indeed.

There is not a complete MSM blackout on Climategate. The UK Daily Express again jumps into the fray, publishing a report of the European Foundation giving "100 reasons why global warming is natural." Many of the "reasons" discussed are political and have nothing to do with science. That said, here is a truncated list:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds . . .

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity” . . .

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control. . .

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations. . .

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change

49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions. . .

51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”. . .

56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.

57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.” . . .

61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years. . . .

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn. . . .

67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. . . .

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.” . . .

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years. . . .

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years. . . .

85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.

86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water. . . .

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent). . . .

100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”

The carbon market creates a massive market distortion. Likewise is the market distortion being caused by the move into all things green, most of which cannot survive on their own with massive subsidies. Among the many things - most bad - that happen in a situation of market distortion, a few favored rent seekers stand to become extraordinarily wealthy. And that is the subject of a recent article in The Telegraph.

Al Gore has made lots of money by lecturing us all about being green. Some say he's become the world's first "carbon billionaire".

What you can be sure of is that the move toward a more environmentally sustainable future is an unstoppable trend – and Mr Gore is unlikely to be the first to get very rich from environmental policy.

One great business to be in as we move into a greener future is the copper industry. Copper is going to help us cut down on carbon. . . .

You can read the entire article. Gore is merely the face of "green backs from selling green snake oil." Another carbon multi-millionare is none other than the IPCC's Chairman Mao, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachaur. EU Referendum has done a yeoman's job in itemizing Pachaur's deep financial interests in such thing as the carbon trading scheme and other "green" regulations. One might think that a conflict of interest for an IPCC chariman.

The AGW crowd is quick to point out that 2007 was saw a lowpoint for ice in the Arctic. Since 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic has rebounded - indeed, it is clearly shown in sattelite photos.

Hmmm, that's a problem. How to possibly challenge that? Enter Dr. David Barber, who takes a short trip into the arctic and concludes that the sattelite images are wrong and that the new ice is "rotten." As Watts Up With That responds:

If this “rotten ice” problem and satellite duping proposed by Dr. Barber is in fact real, I’d fully expect that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) would make some sort of announcement or post a caveat about it on the “Arctic Sea Ice News and analysis” web page where they present the satellite data. I couldn’t find anything on that page about “rotten ice” or satellite data being inaccurate.