Meanwhile, we get to live life in a socialist regulatory bureaucracy run wild: You Are Probably Breaking The Law Right Now
While I agree with Prof. Reynold's comments about partial correction, the real correction is to reestablish the Constitutional balance. Nothing should pass with the force of legislation that has not been voted upon by our elected representatives. See Art. 1 Sec. 1 of our Constitution.
Peer review is not a measure of reliability or accuracy, nor is it in any way a substitute for the scientific method: The Peerless Pitfalls of Peer Review
But in the end, this is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.
The above quote of Michio Kaku came as part of his discussion of the CERN finding that neutrinos might travel faster than the speed of light, thus defying Einstein's theory of relativity and falsifying virtually the entire foundation of modern physics. As Mr. Kaku, himself a physicist, makes crystal clear, what separates science from religion is reproducability. Asking the world to take the finding of an experiment on faith - or peer review, for that matter - is not science. Experiments must be archived and all data and methodology made public as the first immutable step in the scientific method. Moreover, if the results are not capable of being falsified, then it falls outside the definition of science and enters into the theological realm of faith.
Why do I bring all of this up? I for one firmly believe in the scientific method. I believe that science, properly done through the scientific method, will tell me the "how" of our world, wherever it may lead. There is no tension between my respect for science and my faith in religion to tell me the "why." And yet, according to our modern Orwellian left, I am "anti-science."
What the left means by that charge is that I refuse to accept, on the basis of peer review alone, the many warmie assertions about anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The IPCC and the modern left have, when it comes to global warming, tried to substitute peer review as the gold standard for reliability as opposed to making their methodology and data fully available for testing by other scientists. They use computer models to forecast global warming, yet they don't release the programming code so that it can be analyzed and either validated or falsified. Jim Hansen - a fraud who should be behind bars - doesn't just massage our temperature record, he blatantly alters it behind closed doors. The warmies top all of this off with the claim that the science surrounding global warming is settled. It is the antithesis of actual science as posited by Micho Kaku. It truly is anti-science.
What rattled my cage on this issue today were two posts. The first is by Rand Simberg, discussing how the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has "announced that it's going to take on climate change denial" in k-12 education:
. . . [A]fter hearing an increasing number of anecdotes about K-12 teachers being challenged about how they taught climate science to their students, she says she began to see "parallels" between the two debates --namely, an ideological drive from pressure groups to "teach the controversy" where no scientific controversy exists. . . .
“There’s a climate of confusion in this country around climate science,” says McCaffrey, and NCSE’s goal will be to ensure that “teachers have the tools they need if they get pushback and feel intimidated.” Recent surveys, such as one done among K-12 teachers in September by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), suggest that attacks on climate education are far from rare. NSTA found that over half of the respondents reported having encountered global warming scepticism from parents, and 26% had encountered it from administrators. And a December survey from the National Earth Science Teachers’ Association found that 36% of its 555 K-12 teachers who currently teach climate science had been “influenced” to “teach the controversy.”
As a threshold matter, if only 36% of science teachers in the U.S. are teaching both sides of the AGW debate, than our science education is in deep, deep trouble. Parent's need to be checking their children's science curriculum and raising holy hell if their children are part of the 64% who are being indoctrinated by the warmies. Indeed, to go one further, any global warming curriculum that does not include at least a class on Henrick Svensmark's theory - that solar activity and its effect on cloud formation is the primary determinant of our warming and cooling - is not a balanced curriculum.
As to the NCSE, they embrace the position that the "science is settled" and that the mountain of contravening theories and evidence are to ignored. The fact that warming has stopped for the past fifteen years despite steadily increasing human contributions of CO2, the fact that the geologic record shows that there has been nothing unusual about the recent warming of our planet, the fact that all of the computer models predicting global warming have proven utterly worthless, the fact that much of the "science" upon which AGW rests has never been subject to the type of analysis, criticism and reproduction that define the scientific method - all of these are to be ignored? Where in hell do people like the NCSE come from? What they seek is indoctrination, not the teaching of science as a method of acquiring knowledge. It is the very definition of anti-science.
The second post that caught my eye was an article at Space.com entitled "The Crackpot Theory of Everything Reveals The Dark Side of Peer Review." It is about an article that passed peer review yet had obvious defects in methodology and findings. Peer review is, at the very best, nothing more than a tool by which scientific publications can be reasonably sure that an article has been reviewed and found plausible by other experts - not that the findings themselves are accurate or have been reproduced. Peer review is not, and never will be, a substitute for the scientific method. It is those who would have it so that are "anti-science."
At any rate, my suggestion is this. The next time a warmie puts a bull horn up to your ear and yells "anti-science," look him square in the eye, tell him global warming is anti-science, and proceed to repetitively kick him square in the crotch until he experiences an epiphany. It seems the only way we will ever get through to these little Orwellian nightmares.
Why is the off the rails, capitalism hating uber warmie James Hansen still working at NASA and riding herd over our temperature records? Indeed, why is he not in jail for fraud, since he is cooking the books and becoming personally wealthy for doing so? These are but two of the life's perplexing mysteries.
How blatant is Hansen these days about his cooking the temps? This catch from Willis Eschenbach posting at Watts Up With That:
. . . Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):
The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).
I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.”
And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.
Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …
Hansen isn't even trying to hide his bastardization of the numbers. If he doesn't like the result, he just changes it. And you don't need a PhD in physics to understand that to go from 6.5 to .85 is change by an order of magnitude.
It really is too bad that Rick Perry, the one person running for the nomination who actually gets that this is all the world's greatest scam, is simply unable to articulate it. All he would have to say is that the whole temperature record is untrustworthy and that climate scientists are refusing to subject their work to the scientific method, instead trying to argue that a corrupt peer review process should substitute. That isn't science.
At any rate, step one to sanity is to fire James Hansen and everyone under him at NASA. Step two is to open up the temprature record to full transparency, including all raw data and all of the underlying math used to arrive at the final numbers. Step three is to withhold all future funding from institutions and individuals that publish findings that do not allow for full replication by the scientific method. Step four is to start putting warmie frauds in jail. Hansen, Gore and Mann should be sharing a jail cell if there is any justice in the cosmos.
THE ANTI-SCIENCE PARTY.... This segment . . . helps reinforce much of what's wrong with the state of critical thinking in the Republican Party.
"Real Time" host Bill Maher asked Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) a fairly straightforward question: "Do you believe in evolution?" Kingston not only rejected the foundation of modern biology, he explained it this way: "I believe I came from God, not from a monkey." He added, "If it happened over millions and millions of years, there should be lots of fossil evidence."
Seriously, that's what he said. . . .
Let's pause to appreciate the fact that it's the 21st century -- and Jack Kingston is a 10-term congressman who helps oversee federal funding on the Food and Drug Administration. . . .
In the larger context, there's a renewed push underway for the United States to value and appreciate science in the 21st century -- our future depends on it. And while this push is underway, Republican leaders are more comfortable walking a bridge to the 18th century.
What an embarrassment.
As a threshold matter, the deeply disingenuous Benen extrapolates that since there is one Republican congressman who believes in creationism, then all Republicans are anti-science. Talk about your non-sequiturs. That would be like me extrapolating that since Benen is such an intellectually dishonest donkey's ass, that all on the far left are likewise intellectually dishonest donkeys' asses. While I happen to believe that they are, it does not follow from the single example of Benen.
And while I happen to disagree with creationism or reading the bible too literally, so what. Belief in creationism versus the big bang theory and/or evolution - the latter both embraced by Catholicism and many Christians - has no practical effect on 99.99% of modern science. Embracing either position does not establish whether a person - or an entire group of people - is "anti-science" except in the far left fantasy of Benen.
One clear litmus test to divide the science embracers from the "anti-science" folk is whether a person embraces the "scientific method." The lynchpin of the scientific method is that the scientist postulating results must "document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, giving them the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them."
All of that said, one place where the science/anti-science divide is of absolutely critical importantance is in regards to the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The entire theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is built on mountains of "results" that have never been verified because, in the AGW world, it is not the custom to share the information necessary to verify the results.
Left wing researchers and institutions have made an art form out of excusing their refusal to provide such information and their justifications for refusing to respond to FOIA requests (See here, here, here, here, here). They do not practice the scientific method. Instead of allowing for replicability, they demand that we accept "peer review" as the gold standard for the reliabiilty of their results. But peer review itself, which does not involve replication, is anything but a standard of reliability. That is doubly true in the AGW world, where the Climategate e-mails provided clear evidence of bias and deliberate tampering with the "peer review" process by a small clique at the top of the AGW pecking order In short, AGW proponents, including Obama's EPA, are demanding that we accept their unverified theory on faith. That is the very definition of "anti-science."
One of the most shining examples of this comes out of NASA and the GISS. James Hansen, who oversees our temperature records, has spent years making unexplained adjustments to our historical temperature records, yet he has never made public the raw numbers, nor his calculations or justifications for making changes. And there are significant issues with even the most basic question of how NASA is measuring our temperatures to begin with. Moreover, Hansen's changes have been anything but uniform, with older temperatures being adjusted downward and more recent temperatures upward. So when Hansen announces that 2010 is the hottest year on record, he is not just asking us to take his assertion on faith, he is making a joke.
Now, interestingly enough, Benen is himself a true believer in AGW, as evinced by this supremely snarky article of two years ago, wherein he takes Palin to task for daring to question AGW theory:
I can appreciate Palin being embarrassed about her beliefs now; she's obviously well outside the scientific mainstream. . . .
But Palin's record is Palin's record, and the fact remains that she's so far out there, she's rejected the connection between global warming and human activity. Indeed, she's done so more than once. This not only tells us something important about Palin's understanding of public policy, it also tells us a great deal about how she perceives and considers evidence that runs counter to her ideology
So, Mr. Benen, since you are asking us to take the theory of global warming on faith when all we ask for is honest, replicable science, tell me again, who is it here that is anti-science? "What an embarrassment" indeed.
The continued arrogance of climate scientists, particularly in the aftermath of Climategate, is simply jaw dropping. Exhibit 1 - Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit who is yet again denied data that would allow the scientific process - i.e., independent verification - to be applied to a recently published study:
Phil Jones and his coauthors in the recent multiproxy study (Neukom et al 2010, (Climate Dynamics) Multiproxy summer and winter surface air temperature field reconstructions for southern South America covering the past centuries) did not archive proxy data in the Supplementary Information. Many proxy series used in the study are not otherwise publicly archived. . . .
Every inquiry into paleoclimate controversies, no matter how much whitewash was applied, concluded that climate scientists should archive data. If Neukom, Jones and their coauthors publish a multiproxy article, that means the multiproxy data, not just the output. If the contributing authors are not willing to archive their data, then it shouldn’t be used in a study in a climate journal. End of story.
Nor is it sufficient for the author to provide the addresses of the various contributors and force an interested reader to obtain data from each of them individually. There’s no guarantee that they will cooperate. The obligation rests with the publishing authors.
Making matters even worse in the present case is that many of the unarchived series were published by named Neukom coauthors. If they aren’t prepared to have their data see the light of day, don’t sign on as a coauthor and don’t allow Neukom to use your data. . . .
. . . we should be demanding that our government pass legislation holding that anyone operating pursuant to publicly funded grants and who publishes studies in respect thereof without information that would allow for independent verification be thereafter banned from recieving any future public grants. I can assure you that would shake the AGW promoting academia to their core
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.
In a response to a solicitation for input from the University of East Anglia as it prepares to conduct is substantive investigation of Climatege, the UK's Institute of Physics, a highly respected organization that publishes several important scientific journals, has responded. Although many individual scientists have weighed in on Climategate, this to my knowledge is the first major, neutral organization of scientists to discuss the ramifications of Climategate. The points they raise are hardly new, but they are damning.
The IOP highlight many of the complaints that "sceptics" have been making and that Barbara Boxer and the EPA have been dismissing out of hand - that the science of AGW is not settled. There are problems with the integrity of the scientific process, the peer review process as a standard of reliability, the replicability of AGW findings, and the lack of transparency of the methods by which raw data is adjusted. This from the IOP:
What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
2. 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.
3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:
· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of 'proxies', for example, tree-rings.
4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.
5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.
6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.
8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much 'raw' data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.
9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.
Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.
11. The first of the review's terms of reference is limited to: "...manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice..." The term 'acceptable' is not defined and might better be replaced with 'objective'.
12. The second of the review's terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU's policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.
How independent are the other two international data sets?
13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.
All of these concerns go to the fundamental unreliability of the AGW theory. An equally fundamental concern arises over the accuracy of modern temperature measurements. Raw data is merely the starting point for those organizations collecting our temperature data. What we get at the end of the process us data that has been "adjusted" for variables. But those adjustments are questionable indeed. Most recently, scientist David Schnare has posted his review of how one long term rural weather station - one that seemingly would need no adjustment to its raw data to account for the Urban Heat Island effect - has nonetheless been subject to such data adjustment. It's raw data shows a .24 celsius rise in temperature over its century plus life time. Yet the adjustments by GISS and USHCN show double that warming.
On a different topic, where in the world is Al Gore. There seem to have been more sightings recently of Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis than of the Goracle. One would think he would be out defending his golden egg. Update: Hah. Just saw the Goracle's tome today in the NYT. Like a bad dream . . . heeeee'sssssssss back.
No matter, I guess, as all of this is being ignored by the left as they push this forward as a political issue. In what can only be described as surreal, this from WaPo:
Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has instructed Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to produce a revamped climate bill as soon as possible, according to sources, a task Kerry intends to accomplish within two weeks.
The marching orders could represent the best chance advocates will get to pass a climate and energy bill before the November elections. . . .
Over the weekend came a series of revelations and admissions by one of AGW's most influential figures, the current head of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones (technically, he is on leave). His bombshells concerning paleoclimatalogical data, the Medieval Warming Period and its ramifications, and the current period of alleged global warming are a dagger in the heart of AGW. Also over the weekend, yet another major research paper documented that modern climate records are untrustworthy and have been significantly manipulated.
To prove the theory of AGW, climate scientists had to show that global warming is occurring at a historically unprecedented rate and that such warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet, in light of Climategate and revelations both before and since, it would appear that the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW is anything but.
. . .The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.
This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.
At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.
But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.
They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.
One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.
The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler! . . .
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1. The Medieval Warm Period, Recent Heating Spikes, and the Hockey Stick
The Medieval Warm Period, lasting from abut 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., saw a significant jump in temperature to levels higher than today. For example, during the MWP, the British were growing grapes for wine along Hadrian's Wall, indicating that Britain at the time was hotter than it is today. The MWP occurred during a period when human contribution to carbon dioxide was negligible. Thus, if one accepts the reality of the Medieval Warm Period, then there is nothing unusual about increases in temperature we have supposedly seen in recent years. The theory of AGW loses its validity as there is nothing to distinguish it from natural cycles of heating and cooling that occurred in the absence of any human contribution to CO2 levels.
In 1990, the recently formed UN IPCC ran the following graph in their report. It shows both a robust MWP - hotter than today - and a Little Ice Age lasting through 1600 A.D., after which, in fits and starts, our climate is warming back up.
In the mid-1990's, the use of boreholes as a means to determine past climate history was validated, leading, in 1997 to an incredibly extensive worldwide study by Huang, et. al, the results of which are shown in the following graph:
The similarity to the UN IPCC's own 1990 graph is striking. But then, in 1997, Michael Mann published his hockey stick - a study that purported to do away with both the MWP and the Little Ice Age, writing them out of the historical record while making recent temperature increases appear to be without precedent.
To understand how Mann accomplished this amazing feat of erasure, the most understandable explanation comes from Ross McKitrick in his article, “What is the Hockey Stick Debate About?" It should be required reading for everyone debating AGW. In it, Mr. McKitrick itemizes the faulty math, the fundamentally flawed choice of proxy data Mann used to rewrite climate history, and Mann's stonewalling against making public disclosure of all his data, meta data, and computer programs that would allow scientists to verify his work.
Regardless, given Mann's Hockey Stick's utter centrality to the validity of AGW, the global warming crowd has stood by Mann's graph ever since - and indeed, replicated it with the now infamous Yamal Tree Ring study - a study based on possibly the worst case of cherry picking so far seen in AGW. Regardless, the hockey stick just got invalidated by Dr. Phil Jones in a BBC interview yesterday.
BBC: There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?
Jones: There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. . . .
Jones admits that the validity of AGW theory rests on proof that the MWP was not a worldwide phenomena. Then he puts the stake in the heart of the "unequivocal" and "settled" theory of AGW. Jones admits that the MWP is well documented in the Northern hemisphere and he claims that there is simply not enough data in the Southern Hemisphere to prove or disprove that the MWP was a worldwide phenomena. Mann's hockey stick - and Yamal, which purport to establish that the MWP did not occur or, in the alternative, was not global with finality, is dead. They are in fatal contradiction with Jones's pronouncements. At a minimum, this means that AGW is unproven.
But Jones goes beyond that. In his interview, he admitted that there have been similar warming spikes in just the past two centuries that are not any larger than the most recent spike through 1998:
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
... Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. . . .
This too would mean that there is nothing anomalous about our current warming. And, as Powerline notes, it is "completely at odds with the UN's 2007 IPCC report."
But going back to the MWP, the truth may be that there is in fact enough paleoclimatalogical data to establish the world-wide phenomena of the MWP. Unless someone challenges the validity of the borehole study, that would seem to provide sufficient evidence. But there have been many reports of recent vintage that also establish a robust MWP as a reality. Here is a graphic showing peer reviewed studies and their conclusions regarding the degree to which temperatures were higher (red) or lower (blue) during the MWP than they are today:
But its not just the MWP that calls into question the validity of AGW. To the extent that climate can be traced back into the distant past, such as from unadjusted data derived from Greenland's ice core, it shows repeated periods of rapid warming and cooling and that we are in a prolonged period of global warming far predating the industrial period:.
2. Whether Modern Day Temperature Data Showing Global Warming Is Trustworthy?
One would think that measuring modern temperatures would be straightforward. The truth is that it is anything but. And indeed, this difficulty in agreement on a common measurement protocol coupled with manipulation of raw data to add "corrections" calls into question the validity of AGW every bit as much as the MWP.
As a threshold matter, no less a person than NASA's James Hansen explains in detail that there is no agreement on how to measure Surface Air Temperature(SAT), that temperatures measured at the same station can vary widely depending on the method used, and that SAT can change from the ground to just a few feet above ground. In other words, the precision claimed by the climate scientists in measuring temperature to tenths or hundredths of degrees over the entire globe is simply smoke and mirrors.
. . . The global surface-station data is seriously compromised. First, there is a major station dropout and increase in missing data in stations that remained which occurred suddenly around 1990; about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles. A clear bias was found towards removing cooler higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations during this culling process though leaving their data in the base periods from which ‘averages’ and anomalies are computed.
The data also suffers contamination by urbanization and other local factors such as land-use/land-cover changes and improper siting. There are uncertainties in ocean temperatures; no small issue, as oceans cover 71% of the earth's surface. These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for overestimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggest that global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts. And, consequently, such surface data should be ignored for decision making.
One of the major facets to which D'Aleo refers is the so called "heat island" effect. Many of man's activities generate heat that, if picked up by a station, then shows a false warming. Rather than make an effort to resite the vast number of stations that today are subject to the heat island effect, entities that collect this data have applied "corrections." But as D'Aleo points out, "numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone" and that "cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming."
The findings of Professor Christy are similar and were summed up in a Times article the other day:
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
So there is a real question the validity about surface temperature data. That is an independant basis that establishes that the supposed "unequivocal" and "settled" science of the AGW theory is anything but.
On a different issue, one of the points of contention has been whether there has been any warming shown in the past ten to fifteen years - a period that, if AGW theory was valid - should have shown temperatures increasing hand in glove with rises in man-made CO2 emissions. Responding to criticism in the wake of Climategate, the AGW cabal pushed the fiction - duly published by the Washington Post - that the world was still warming and that "nine of the world's hottest years occurred this decade."
This contradicts the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who, in an e-mail released as part of the CRU tranche, noted:
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Enter Phil Jones in the BBC interview with another bombshell admission, Jones "admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming . . ."
3. AGW & The UN IPCC's Climate Computer Models
The AGW movement has relied upon computer modeling to pose nightmare scenarios and drive policy. For example, it was in 2008 that, acting in response to a legal action brought by Center for Biological Diversity and other green organizations to have polar bears declared endangered under the Endangered Species Act, that the Bush Interior Dept. actually made such a finding. The head of the Interior Dept., Dirk Kempthorne, made his decision based on climate computer modeling showing that arctic sea ice, which even then was rebounding from its 2007 low, would disappear 45 years into the future due to AGW. He made this decision even though the polar bear population had exploded in the Arctic and was deemed at or near optimum levels.
Yet there is a problem. All of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC to posit AGW far into the future suffer a fatal flaw. All are built on the presumption that as more man-made carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, global temperatures will rise. And as the quotes from both Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth in the above section prove, the world stopped warming in 1995. This means that AGW proponents have not established that there is a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.
But the problems of the computer models go even beyond that, as explained by MIT Professor of Meterology Richard S. Lindz:
. . . The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
The fact that the IPCC's computer models did not anticipate and could not account for the current lack of warming is significant proof that the AGW theory is neither "unequivocal" nor "settled."
4. Peer Review, IPCC, Scientific Method and Climategate
The validity of AGW has been pushed on the oft repeated claim that all of the work of AGW proponents has been subject to the gold standard of reliability - peer review. But in light of Climategate - the scandal arising in the wake of the unauthorized release of a vast tranche of internal e-mails and other data from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit - probably few things were so much called into question as the peer review process and the bastardization of the scientific method by AGW proponents.
For anything to be called science, others need to be able to access the raw data, the meta data, and the calculations or computer progams and then either verify or disprove the experiment. That is the "scientific method" as practiced across all sciences. But it stopped happening in climate science over a decade ago. What climate scientists began doing, beginning with Michael Mann's hockey stick graph in the late 1990's, was to refuse to provide the information necessary to reproduce their experiments. Indeed, it took over 7 years and literally an act of Congress to force Mann to post his data.
Probably no one has more experience with the repeated and continuous stonewalling by AGW scientists to every request for data than Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre. He has devoted an entire section of his blog to his litany of posts on this topic. You can find it here. The Climategate e-mails make crystal clear how determined the top level of climate scientists - Phil Jones, Michael Mann, etc. - were to keep their data and methods out of the public domain, even at the risk of violating the law of FOIA.
.. . . What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.
Dr. Carter added in a seperate essay that climate scientists needed to start acting like . . . real scientists:
Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented. This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why. This would seem to be an obvious and simple requirement, but the need for such transparency has only been voiced recently as the policy relevance of climate data has increased. The HADCRU surface climate dataset and the paleoclimate dataset that has gone into the various “hockeystick” analyses stand out as lacking such transparency. Much of the paleoclimate data and metadata has become available only because of continued public pressure from Steve McIntyre. Datasets that were processed and developed decades ago and that are now regarded as essential elements of the climate data record often contain elements whose raw data or metadata were not preserved (this appears to be the case with HADCRUT). The HADCRU surface climate dataset needs public documentation that details the time period and location of individual station measurements used in the data set, statistical adjustments to the data, how the data were analyzed to produce the climatology, and what measurements were omitted and why. If these data and metadata are unavailable, I would argue that the data set needs to be reprocessed.
There is no reason whatsoever that any of the climate science community should not, on all occaisions, act in accordance with Dr. Carter's advice. For a climate scientist to have to counsel others in her field on this issue gives some idea of just how far the AGW crowd has strayed from the practice of science. In the absence of this level of transparency and reproducability, there is not a single thing about AGW that can be called "unequivocal" or "settled."
The IPCC and AGW supporters attempt to sidestep this fundamental malfeasance by claiming that their experiments were verified by the peer review process. It is a neat trick - and amounts to asking the rest of the world to take their word - and the word of a few reviewers - on faith. That is not science, it's theology.
The IPCC and AGW crowd hold up peer review as the gold standard of reliability. But if the Climategate e-mails exposed anything, it was the degree to which the peer review process has been bastardized by climate scientists. This from Mark Steyn, summing up the situation:
The more frantically [the IPCC and AGW scientists] talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you're as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?" Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer-reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc. (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out, glassy-eyed, into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled."
This bastardization of the peer review process largely shut out both criticism of AGW and alternative theories. Thus is it any wonder that AGW proponents should claim, in true Orwellian fashion, a "scientific consensus" that the science of global warming is "unequivocable" and "settled" because there are no substantive body of peer reviewed studies to the contrary? It is a variant on the old saw about the boy who killed his parents then asked for mercy from the court because he was an orphan.
There is one last systemic issue on the peer review as it relates to climate science. Shannon Love has written an insightful article regarding peer review in the context of climate science where so much now relies on complex computer programs to arrive at finished data. Peer reviewers do not have the time to review the programs and, in any case, are never provided with them. This effectively negates any claim that peer review provides any standard for the reliability of the data and conclusions in the article. Ms. Love's solution is very practical:
Eric S. Raymond, the famous computer scientist and writer, has called for open source science. I think this is the way we should go. In the past, it cost too much to print out all a study’s data and records on paper and ship that paper all over the world. With the internet, we have no such limitations. All scientific studies should upon publication put online all of their raw data, all of their protocols, all of their procedures, all of their records and the code for all of their custom-written software. There is no practical reason anymore why only a summary of a scientist’s work should be made public.
Scientific software has grown too large and complex to be maintained and verified by a handful of individuals. Only by marshaling a scientific “Army of Davids” can we hope to verify the accuracy and precision of the software we are increasingly using to make major public decisions.
In the short term, we need to aggressively challenge those who assert that studies that use complex custom software have been “peer reviewed” in any meaningful way. In the long term, we have a lot of scientific work to do over again.
Summary
It is incumbant on those championing the theory of AGW to establish that the globe is warming in unprecedented fashion and that the cause of this warming is man via emissions of carbon dioxide. To this end, AGW proponents have written the Medieval Warm Period out of the historical record, relied on fundamentally untrustworthy Surface Air Temperature data, they have often refused to make public their data and methods and they have wholly corrupted the peer review process - all the while relying on peer review to stand in as a proxy for the scientific method as a means to establish the validity of AGW.
Between Climategate, the subsequent revelations by CRU head Phil Jones, and recent studies, it is apparent that the AGW crowd has not proven their theory. Dr. Jones admitted that the Medieval Warm Period existed in the northern hemisphere, and further admitted that, if it was shown to be global in scope, than it could well mean that our current warming trend is nothing more than a natural cycle of the earth. He also admitted that the MWP has not been contradicted, but merely that there is not enough data from the Southern Hemisphere to confirm or deny the MWP. This explodes the hockey stick graph which purported to show the MWP never occurred. Likewise, Jones admitted that the current rate of warming is not statistically different than in other warming spikes over the past 200 years. This contradicts the claim that our most recent spike in temperatures was itself anamolous.
The Surface Air Temperature (SAT) data, upon which the historical record rests since the advent of mechanical weather readings circa 1800, is not subject to any sort of precision in identification that would provide any confidence in the fine calculations being made in determining the historical data. Moreover, as two recent studies indicate, there are very fundamental flaws in our current system - from the vast decrease in monitoring stations over the past two decades to insufficient and improper manipulation of SAT data in light of the "heat island" effects. This also calls into question the accuracy of the AGW theory.
The IPCC's climate computer modeling shows a relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures. Each of the models fails to account for increasing levels of carbon dioxide, yet a plateau of temperatures since 1995. Thus the relationship between global warming and carbon dioxide is called directly into question.
Lastly, the AGW proponents have sufficiently bastardized the peer review process that it in no way can be considered an indicator of reliability for published reports, nor an indicator of unreliability for rejected reports attacking AGW or proposing alternative theories. In conjunction with the AGW scientists refusal to partake in the normal practice of the "scientific method," it means they have turned AGW from a "science" requiring reproducability into a theology requiring faith.
The sum of all this is that AGW, at a minimum and in all of its aspects, is unproven. Claims that the science of AGW is "unequivocal" and "settled" are ludicrous. Indeed, in many respects, there is no science even involved.
Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."
The science is overwhelming -- but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."
Kudos to Mr. Masters for something approaching intellectual honesty as to the state of AGW science.
Update: Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret has been kind enough to link to this post. There is an interesting debate going on in the comments section of Robert's post with an AGW proponent who, among other things, finds fault with my/this post. Do feel free to click over and have a read.
[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.
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.
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