Gloom & Doom With A Distinct Odor Of BS - The IPCC Releases AR5 Summary For Policy Makers

[AR5 Summary For Policy Makers] in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.

Comment from Ross McItrick to post at Watts Up With That, Reactions To IPCC AR5 Summary For Policy Makers, 27 Sep. 2013

The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change today released their SPM [Summary For Policy Markers] to their about to be released AR5 report on climate change. It is a painfully tortured attempt to keep the meme of catastrophic man made global warming alive - and the money flowing in.

The IPCC faced multiple problems with this report. Their mission is to shill for man made global warming (really - their mission statement is not to analyze climate change, but "human induced" climate change). Yet the earth hasn't warmed for the past 17 plus years despite steadily increasing human contributions to CO2 levels; every one of the climate models used by the IPCC have failed with observed temperatures now falling at or below their minimum projections, Antarctica is adding ice, not losing it; and hurricanes are down.

So how does the IPCC address these problems - a lot of tap dancing and a lot of studied ignorance, all laid over top truckloads of bull excreta. The single most glaring example - the claim of 95% confidence that global warming is occurring and that man is the cause juxtaposed with this nugget in footnote 16 of the SPM:

No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity [to increases in CO2] can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.

In other words, as to the central thesis of climate change alarmism, the IPCC can no longer agree on whether more CO2 will increase temperature by a nominal amount, a measurable amount, or a catastrophic amount. In other words, there is nothing approaching a consensus to their 95% confidence level.

It is only downhill from there.

The IPCC explains away the 17 year hiatus in warming with a wave of its hand, saying its either volcanoes and a weak sun (yet the models do not account for either) or that the missing heat from all the new CO2 over the past fifteen years has gone into the deep ocean. Why the deep? Because the upper and mid level portions of the ocean, for which we have good data measurements via ARGO, show no appreciable warming. How heat is transferred from the surface to the deep ocean without heating the upper and middle layers of the ocean - that is a mystery. And what little data we have on deep ocean temperatures shows only 1/100th of 1 degree of heating over the past 44 years. This hypothesis - which is the last best hope of the warmies - is more than a bit weak. Yet they do not blink in raising it. Shameless.

The IPCC continues to talk about the rise of the oceans, and how this is caused by melting ice. But the truth is that is done using corrupt data. Joe D'Aleo explains here, that instead of relying on the single best measurement source - satellites - the IPCC cherry picks from tidal gauges at places where the land is subsiding. These people really should be indicted for fraud.

As Richard North states of the AR5, it is not science, "it is a political statement by a politically motivated body, made for political reasons. And if you need to know the basis of the politics, start with Rio in 1992 and Agenda 21."

And on a related note, the next time you here Obama justify destroying our energy sector in response to global warming based on a claim that the period 2002 to 2012 was the hottest on record, note two things. One, the "record" they refer to - of recorded observation - only extends back 130 years, with only the the last 50+ years being global. Two, that record has been corrupted. The claim that this most recent period is the warmest is based on tenths of degrees. And yet, the warmies in charge of our temperature records have systematically altered the raw data to make the older temperature records appear colder. For but one example, this from an essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University:

The warm peaks from the 1930s and 40s had been adjusted downward by 3 to 4°F and these adjustments created dubious local warming trends as seen in examples from other USHCN stations at Reading, Massachusetts and Socorro, New Mexico.

What Dr. Steele has stumbled upon is the trick Jim Hansen played on us in 2007, "homogenizing" the raw data in a way that significantly cooled the temperatures from the 1930's and 40's. Without that adjustment, the hottest decade on "record" would be the 1930's. There needs to be a reckoning for these people. The harm they are causing our nation to pay for this scam, the harm they are causing our children by inculcating in them an unquestioning belief in this junk science, it must all be paid for in the end. Bastards.

Tweet

Read More...

Summary only...

An Inconvenient Book

I've posted below on the latest from the Church of the Environmentalists about the ever more dire threat posed by global warming. We are being asked to drastically alter our lifestyle, to accept a tsunami of regulation, and to spend untold billions to meet this threat, even as voices of dissent are silenced and such dissent is chategorized as "criminal."

The history of the politicization of science and the current facts surrounding global warming all suggest that we should be very careful indeed before spending another dollar to "combat global warming."

With that in mind, probably the best investment you can make for Christmas is to purchase Scared to Death: The Anatomy of a Very Dangerous Phenomenon by journalist Christopher Booker and Dr. Richard North, author of EU Referendum, one of if not the most consistently intelligent blog on the web.

This from the EU Referendum should give you a sense of the book:

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most all-pervasive political issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left in the world will be Antarctica.

Inevitably many people have been left bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of the pattern followed by other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international political agenda falls into five main stages.

Stage one, as an overture, came in the 1970s, when many scientists, followed by the media, expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, heralding the approach of "a new Ice Age".

The reason for this was that for three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age glaciation 20,000 years ago, temperatures have several times been through significant swings.

The hottest period since man appeared on the earth, around 8,000 years ago, was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman Empire. Three more centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when Greenland was inhabited and all the evidence agrees the world was hotter than it is today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Age", when glaciers advanced, the Thames froze over, Greenland had to be abandoned, and this did not end until, 200 years ago, we entered on what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such those years between 1940 and 1975 known as the "Little Cooling", when scientific and media sages predicted that return to the Ice Age.

Then, in the late 1970s, evidence showed that the world was warming up again. As we see from many other examples, a scare is often set off when two things are observed together and scientists suggest that one must have been caused by the other.

In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been sharply rising. Perhaps it was this increase in greenhouse gases which was causing the new warming in the 1980s?


Stage two of the story began in 1988, when with remarkable speed global warming story was elevated into the ruling orthodoxy of the time, partly due to publicity given to hearings in Washington chaired by a comparatively new young Senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 60s.

This helped make fighting climate change the fashionable cause of the moment, taken up by leading environmentalist groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and by an array of Hollywood celebrities, from Robert Redford to Barbra Streisand.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because the UN in 1988 set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which from now on was to play the leading role in the whole debate.

Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts from all over the world to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was then prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials, which was essentially a political document, in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report disappeared.

This contradiction was already obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established.

This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence by what became known as "the fingerprinting fraud". But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policymakers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, now US vice-president, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing the governments of the developed world to making drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its unanimous rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best efforts of Vice-President Gore.

One of the less familiar aspects of Gore's career is how he had already by now become somewhat notorious among America's leading climate scientists for the ruthless way in which he used his influence to try to suppress any evidence they came up with to contradict the approved global warming thesis.

Not least of his efforts to rewrite the historical record was his bid to suppress an article co-authored just before his death by Dr Revelle. Gore didn't want to be known that his guru had expressed serious doubts about the supposed consensus, urging that the global warming thesis should be viewed with much more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in past times, such as the Mediaeval Warming, global temperature had been even higher than they were in the late 20th century, long before CO2 levels had started to rise. Even the first two IPCC reports had included a graph conceding this point, But In 1998 came the answer they were looking for – a completely new temperature chart, devised by another obscure young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" (pictured) because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, only suddenly flicking up at the end to temperatures never recorded before.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1, and prominently repeated four more times. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling when CO2 had already been rising, all had simply been wiped from the record.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise very fundamental doubts about how Mann had arrived at his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadian computer analysts, showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shaped graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged (pictured) just as it had looked before. The Mediaeval Warming was back in place, again showing the early Middle Ages as even hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the great global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led politically by the European Union.

In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and President Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified. Climate change had at last hit the top of the Western world's political agenda and the ratifying governments now had to act.

In the past three years, we have seen the EU in particular announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines to produce derisory amounts of absurdly expensive electricity to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced its carbon emissions by 60 percent.

This is a pledge which could only be met by such a massive reduction in Europe's standard of living that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it. All this frenzy of political activity and propaganda has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with levels of CO2 and that, unless mankind takes the most drastic action, our planet is faced with the kind of apocalypse so vividly portrayed by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet in the past year or two, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of huge new question marks beginning to be raised over Gore's alleged consensus. It was not just that every single assertion in his film was dismissed by experts who knew their subject very much better than he did. For instance, Gore claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 feet when even the IPCC itself, in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between 4 and 17 inches.

There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by Kyoto, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly 10 percent a year, with China alone building a new coal-fired power station every four days, and likely within two years to be emitting more CO2 than the United States.

More serious than either of these points, however, has been all the evidence recently accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies was forced to revise his long-influential record of US surface temperatures, showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the ten warmest years in the past 100 were not in the present decade but in the 1930s.

Furthermore scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate much more consistently with the patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of abnormally high solar activity the sun's effect is now weakening again, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality by our politicians as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next ten years will be very interesting.

Read More...

Summary only...

Interesting News from Around the Web

"This Is Your Brain on Hillary: Political Neuroscience Hits New Low in New York Times." Heh.

American culture is defined by our ideas, not our cheese or puddings.

Dinah Lord has a hilarious look at the top yahoo searchs in the Middle East. They show some rather unusual lifestyle choices.

Robert Novak documents the pork barrel machinations of Harry Reid. More on the topic here.

The Oxford Medievalist questions the veracity of Hillary's claims of victimhood - and he has a poll up on the greatest Roman Emperor to boot. I'm still debating between Augustus and Constantine myself.

Hamas fires into a crowd of Fatah supporters marching to honor Yassir Arafat on the anniversary of his death, alleging that some Fatah gunmen fired on Hamas first.

An article published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences highlights information on the benefits of diets high in fruit, vegetables, cereals and fish and low in saturated fats in reducing dementia risk.

Read More...

Summary only...