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Global Warming Research Must Become More Transparent, UK Report Says

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Crossposted

By Bradley J. Fikes

Thanks to Watts Up With That?, which provided the UK parliamentary report on the Climategate global warming scandal in PDF.

Inevitably, the report will be spun according to whatever political views one holds. Those who back AGW will probably say it vindicates Phil Jones and the other University of East Anglia’ Climatic Research Unit scientists, because it finds no evidence that the science is false. Global warming skeptics will say the report provides evidence that the scientists’ practices were inadequate and need to be improved.

Of course, these interpretations can both be true. It’s like the dueling claims that global temperatures in the last decade are the highest recorded, and that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995, or that there’s still a question about whether the Medieval Warm Period some thousand years ago could have been warmer than the present.

It all depends on which facts you emphasize.

Doublethink

However, the report is rather ambiguous on the evidence. in fact, it smacks of doublespeak and doublethink:

From Page 50, a troublesome paragraph:
“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.”

So, the report says:
“We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”.

That seems clear enough. But in the very next sentence the troublesome paragraph states:
“It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.”

So the report authors say there’s no reason to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming, but they didn’t seek evidence on CRU’s science. And anyway, examining the consensus view is the job of the Scientific Appraisal Panel.

With such clarity in writing, you can see why they’re in government.

Associated Press Saves The Day

An Associated Press article by Raphael G. Satter ignores the contradiction in favor of a pro-AGW interpretation. That’s much easier for readers than pointing out the report’s flaws.

Of course, as a professional reporter for the AP, Satter is beyond bias. He’s just telling it like he sees it — the facts just always seem to come out in favor of global warming activism, which has nothing to do whatsoever with any personal agenda. Even in the unlikely event that the vast majority of journalists were well to the left of the American public, you’d never detect a hint of it in their objective reporting.

Just to show how totally fair Satter and AP are in covering global warming, here’s part of an earlier Satter “news” article on a petition blitz organized by the UK’s Met office to drum up political support for AGW activism.

A typically unbiased AP story on global warmingA typically unbiased AP story on global warming

Click the photo for more unbiased AP global warming reporting.Hiding evidence

Just to recap, here’s the troublesome paragraph in the report, with the confusing stuff AP has helpfully omitted in boldface:

“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid.“

Highlighted -- the confusing stuff AP doesn't think you should know.Highlighted — the confusing stuff AP doesn’t think you should know.

And here’s Satter’s deft editing of that troublesome paragraph:

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

A masterful job of editing out inconvenient truthA masterful job of editing out inconvenient truth

Isn’t it easier to understand when the narrative is predigested?

The Total Exoneration of Phil Jones And CRU*
*If you don’t pay attention to those emails about hiding and destroying data, which is totally acceptable practice among climate scientists.

Now let’s look at the second paragraph of Satter’s article, and then look again at the report.
Satter writes:

“The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.”

On pages 26-28, the report details allegations that the CRU violated the Freedom of Information Act, quoting from emails by Phil Jones and others.

This excerpt from a Phil Jones email to Michael Mann is on Page 26:
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,[…]Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of
Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !. […]

The report then discusses these and other examples of emails that ask for research data to be hidden from skeptics.
On page 32, the report states:

It seems to us that both sides have a point. There is prima facie evidence that CRU has breached the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It would, however, be premature, without a thorough investigation affording each party the opportunity to make representations, to conclude that UEA was in breach of the Act. In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six- month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions. Much of the reputation of CRU hangs on the issue. We conclude that the matter needs to be resolved conclusively— either by the Independent Climate Change Email Review or by the Information Commissioner.

In other words, just because a bunch of scientists wrote emails to each other discussing the hiding or destruction of data to keep it from skeptics doesn’t necessarily means FOIA was breached. Or maybe it does. Let’s not be hasty about this. We’ll kick the can down the road and let someone else handle it.

Satter disposes of this complexity nicely.

Phil Willis, the committee’s chairman, said of the e-mails that “there’s no denying that some of them were pretty appalling.” But the committee found no evidence of anything beyond “a blunt refusal to share data,” adding that the idea that Jones was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakened the case for global warming was clearly wrong.

So according to Satter, this email from Jones to Michael Mann isn’t evidence of a conspiracy to hide evidence that would weaken the case for global warming:

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.

Obviously this email is totally innocent of unethical intent. It’s customary for climate scientists to be “worried” about FOIA requests and “hide behind” excuses not to honor them. Why should climate scientists share data with skeptics? They’re just trying to find something wrong with it! Real scientists should only share data with trusted colleagues, and keep the “dirty laundry” away from skeptics.

But the report insists on once again injecting doubt into what should be a total exoneration of these totally ethical scientists who would never, ever, practice deception or break the law.


In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six- month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions. Much of the reputation of CRU hangs on the issue. We conclude that the matter needs to be resolved conclusively— either by the Independent Climate Change Email Review or by the Information Commissioner.

All sarcasm aside, I’ll say one thing in favor of Satter and the Associated Press: The story included a link to the report, so people could read it for themselves.

AP's link to the UK parliament's reportAP’s link to the UK parliament’s report

Unfortunately, this is the message I got when clicking the link: http://bit.ly/c4VfsY

The AP's link to the reportThe AP’s link to the report

Surprisingly, those crazy climate denialist at Watts Up With That? managed to get a copy and even correctly posted it on their server.

Oh, that’s just the blogosphere. Everyone knows the news is defined by what professional journalistic outlets like AP cover, because they have an unimpeachable record of accuracy.

A consensus about what?

And what is this scientific “consensus” of which they speak? In the report, the consensus quoted on page 46 states that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”

That definition is most interesting for what it doesn’t mention. No mention of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases. It doesn’t even say how much warming is taking place, or whether it’s dangerous.

As a global warming skeptic, I find little objectionable in that bare-bones definition of “consensus.”

There is indeed strong evidence of human influence on climate, such as in the Himalayan glaciers. Research has found the glacial melting is almost entirely (90 percent) caused by soot and other aerosol particulates. Unfortunately for the alarmists, greenhouse gases are not aerosols.

The “global” aspect of this “consensus” definition is about the only thing I would take exception to. I don’t think this is conclusively proven. And someone tell the committee that prepared the report that “global warming” is out of fashion. The politically correct description is “climate change,” because it allows for both unusually hot and cold changes to be attributed to human influence.

But let’s say there is some global human warming influence. It’s quite plausible that human-produced aerosols, changes in land use or greenhouse gas emissions have some warming effect on global temperatures. But is the influence overwhelming, somewhat important, or minor in comparison with natural climate fluctuations? And what is the relative importance of these human-created warming influences? The quoted “consensus” definition doesn’t say.

What global warming skeptics like myself really object to is the hysterical we-stand-to-get-fried apocalyptic demonization of CO2 and the Draconian measures proposed to combat this unproven menace. But don’t expect most of the mainstream media reporters, who have swallowed the global warming Kool-Aid, to note the difference.

Such is the slippery, Janus-faced use of language about “consensus” by global warming alarmists.

Even Phil Jones now admits that a lot of warming isn’t due to CO2 after all, according to the UK Guardian.

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.

What’s not in the report
For a supposedly exhaustive investigation into whether CRU scientists unethically tried to suppress skeptical research, the report leaves a lot out.
Here’s one Climategate email from a scientist, Keith Briffa, seeking help about reviewing a skeptical paper. You can see that Briffa meticulously follows the norms of peer review as practiced in climate science.

From: Keith Briffa
To: Edward Cook
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 13:42:54 2003

I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting – to support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith

And returning the scientific courtesy ….
(email portion from Briffa omitted)
Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper. Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims. If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. . .

Isn’t the impartiality of climate science peer review a beautiful thing to behold?

Now, on to the news coverage:

Bloomberg says:
U.K. Climate Science ‘Damaged’ by Leaked E-Mails, Lawmakers Say

Canada’s National Post says
‘Climategate’ scientists didn’t manipulate data: lawmakers

The UK Independent says:
Climate change scandal: MPs exonerate professor

The UK Daily Mail says
Climategate university condemned for ‘unacceptable culture of secrecy’

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says
House of Commons: No “Climategate”

Eureferendum says
It was never going to be any different

Climate Progress says
House of Commons exonerates Phil Jones

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Posted in media, science, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Uncommon Sense On Global Warming

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Crossposted

By Bradley J. Fikes

The Breakthrough Institute is a rarity among progressive think tanks: It repudiates the scare tactics, along with exaggeration and spin used by most left-wing lobbying groups, such as the deceptively named Union of Concerned “Scientists” and Center for American Progress.

This think tank members, such as Roger Pielke, Jr., recognize that the hard work of global warming skeptics is not necessarily “anti-science,” but represents a differing viewpoint that has been shut out of scientific discussion in favor of a phony consensus, driven by the politics of demonization instead of rational discussion. People like Steve McIntyre, (shown in cartoon below), have helped bring down that consensus, although the worst damage has been done by the global warming activists themselves.

The fearsome, well-funded global warming skeptic movement.The fearsome, well-funded global warming skeptic movement.

Now two of the Breakthrough Institute’s leaders have called for environmentalist organizations to abandon the 20-year quest to push all their interests, such as reducing energy consumption, under the global warming mantra. They want these subjects to be discussed on their own merits, without the global warming fear tactics. And I wholeheartedly concur.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus write in Yale 360 that not only have the wheels come off the supposedly invincible global warming juggernaut, but that the wreckage threatens other environmentalist goals. In short, the hysterical rhetoric has lost credibility with the public. Even some mainstream media reporters are experiencing synaptic activity over facts that have been obvious for months, if not years.

They write:

“While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.”

Amen to that. Shameless appeals to fear don’t work any more. Many environmental goals are worthy in their own right, but they’ve been tainted as propaganda vehicles for global warming. Scientists are pressured to bring their research into line with the so-called consensus, prostituting the integrity of science. Even zoos and aquariums have been turned into propaganda vehicles.

At last, the dirty secret is out. While global warming activists claim to be motivated by science, their true agenda is enacting their far-left, anti-business agenda. Rational environmentalists are wise to keep their distance from them.

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Posted in energy, science | Comments Closed

Earth Hour’s California Power Failure

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Crossposted

By Bradley J. Fikes

UPDATED at end of post.

The news media has stuffed us with a surfeit of naive, boosterish articles about the importance of Earth Hour, that self-congratulatory expression of feel-good environmental chic and global warming hype.

Leave it to the relentlessly factual Anthony Watts to illuminate what really happened in the eco-center of environmentalism, California: Nothing. Zip. Zilch, zero, nada.

According to power consumption records from the California Independent System Operator, the much-heralded Earth Hour made no perceptible difference in energy consumption. Below is a graph illustrating the great non-effect of Earth Hour:
earthhour2010

Watts writes:

If there was a big effect from Earth Hour, you’d see a step event like the street lights at 7AM as everybody turned off their home lights in California at 8:30PM (2030). Plus, the greens don’t seem to realize that no power plants get switched off, so there’s really no CO2 savings. The power plants are run based on demand forecast. Short term spikes from well intentioned stunts really don’t make a blip of difference to CO2 emissions.

Earth Hour is a failure in California and according to Richard North at the EU Referendum, a failure in Britain too.

It’s nice to see some real fact-checking taking place in the blogosphere, while the media’s faithful acolytes of the Church Of Global Warming continue to emit information pollution.

What did I do during Earth Hour? I was busy replacing old fluorescent lights at home. I celebrate the modern conveniences of life, and reject meaningless, atavistic stunts like Earth Hour — regardless of how wholeheartedly some people comply with it.

North Korea is so enviro-friendly, it observes Earth Hour continually!North Korea is so enviro-friendly, it observes Earth Hour continually!

UPDATE: Some in the media get it about this political event.
From the UK Telegraph

It’s time for “Earth Hour”, a pointless, hypocritical and silly stunt organised by the WWF in which people turn off their lights and other appliances and delude themselves into thinking they’ve made a difference. So here goes.
Click.
Click.
Where’s the oven switch? Ah, yes. Click.
Nearly forgot the loo! This one’s on a cord. Done!
Now to turn up the stereo.
Telly on, though sound off.
Laptop one: already on.
Laptop two: booting up now.
And why not the printer? Done.
Maybe my electricity bill will be a pound or two higher. And, of course, I won’t have shortened the planet’s life by a nanosecond, any more than the thousands of Guardian readers, Lib Dems, sad celebs, smug tech journalists and poor brainwashed children will have made a difference.
Still, if this is “Earth Hour”, might as well be able to see it properly, no?”

And while people have their lights and computers on, they might find it interesting to read about how the UN’s IPCC and other global warming activists have biased their “science” toward global warming alarmism.

Learning about the fallacies of that political movement would be a much more productive use of their time than mindlessly turning out the lights and holding candles to honor the anti-science political agenda of Earth Hour.

UPDATE X2
While Watts disdains political stunts like Earth Hour, he’s all in favor of rational energy conservation, and carries it out in his daily life. His latest home project was installing a new kind of LED that emits more pleasing, less harsh light. He’s installed some compact fluorescent lights, but doesn’t like their drawbacks, such as their use of mercury, and their often-poor quality.

I do much of the same energy-conservation lighting in my home, although the only LEDs I use now are night lights. I use no incandescents, not even in the refrigerator. And I’ve also found that most CFLs don’t live up to their promise. The ones that are heavily subsidized by utilities often are of the el cheapo variety, and don’t last long. In my home, I use a few of the better CFLs, but mostly rely on the regular 48? tube fluorescents — plenty of them. My vision is not the best, and I like being able to see where I’m going and what I’m doing.

Today, there are a plethora of low-mercury tube fluorescents that give off light tailored to most environments. A warmer hue is good for bathrooms, bedrooms and living rooms. I use the daylight-simulating kind in my home office. And at my desk there, I use a lamp with an extremely bright CFL from Feit Electronics, model BPESL23TM/D. The color temp of 6500 provides great contrast. It provides the illumination of a 100-watt incandescent using just 23 watts. And it emits a lot less heat than an equivalent incandescent, an important consideration in warm weather.

The proof of savings is in my electric bill, which most of the year is less than $30 a month.

Your mileage may vary. Some people prefer to use incandescents, and I say (no pun intended), more power to them. Such domestic decisions should be a matter of personal choice, not controlled by conformity-enforcing eco-fascists and their job-killing parasitical political hacks.

Technology is supposed to improve our lives. I’d rather use the same amount of light, or more, and consume less electricity year-round, than give up the blessings of electrical light and take a symbolic plunge back into the Dark Ages.

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Posted in politics, science | 1 Comment »

Gerald R. North Attacks Bloggers At Panel On Global Warming Research

Friday, February 19th, 2010

(Crossposted)

By Bradley J. Fikes

The leak of Climategate emails is part of a campaign of “vilification” waged by skeptical bloggers against climate science, influential climate researcher Gerald R. North said Friday.Slide from Gerald R. North's presentation

Slide from Gerald North’s presentation at Friday AAAS panel

North, of Texas A&M University, was part of a panel on Climategate and the proper conduct of scientific research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual convention, held this year in San Diego.

North said skeptical bloggers have harassed climate scientists with demands for data, assisted in their efforts at times by “energy-friendly members of Congress”.
But despite blogger harassment and potential misuse of data, North said scientists should be open and share their data, even with nonscientists, as part of good scientific practice and building public trust.
North defended global warming research as by and large accurate, repeating highlights of a report from the National Academy of Sciences, produced by a team chaired by North. Condensed copies of the report, “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,” were distributed at the panel discussion.
North said global temperatures in the last few decades are the highest they’ve been in 700 years and that it is “plausible” that the warmth exceeded that of any time in the last 1,000 years.
But these scientists have been troubled by unfair attacks and repeated demands for data from various blogger skeptics, North said, whom he did not name.
The “hacked emails” that triggered Climategate and the investigations of climate scientists Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain and Michael Mann of Penn State University are “phase 2″ of the “vilification” according to a slide North showed.
North said climate scientists face an “asymmetry” in responding to attacks from blogger skeptics, because the attacks were outside the norms of scientific criticism, including demands that the global warming researchers commit suicide.
“That is a big challenge for us,” North said, because researchers are uncertain of how to respond to blogger requests and challenges.
“Sometime you answer, and you think you’re being helpful to someone, and they turn right around and do harm,” North said. “Should we share data with persons … who might misuse the data? I’m inclined to make everything available.”
Other panelists were noted evolutionary biologist Francisco J. Ayala, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at Harvard, and Philip A. Sharp, a Nobel prize-winning geneticist.
Jasanoff devoted most of her talk to describing the context of science in society, and how that relationship has changed.
While once scientists could reasonably demand to be left alone, massive public funding of science makes that no longer an option, she said.
Jasonoff only touched lightly over the Climategate emails, which cover a 13-year span up to November, 2009.
“We know they’re 10 years old,” Jasanoff said. “How do you make use of 10-year-old stuff?”
The statement about the emails’ age parallels similarly incorrect statements made by former Democratic vice president Al Gore.
The panel did not include any global warming skeptics.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has a blog post on the discussion. As an AGW believer who says we “stand to get fried” if we don’t act, Mooney’s opinion is quite different from mine. I think AGW science need to be re-studied and errors and bias need to be removed. Some of it may be true, but as we have seen in the last few months, AGW activists have made major claims that turn out to be ungrounded.
In particular, the fad of blaming every climate trend on CO2 is distorting science. In some of the most spectacular examples of the supposed effects of AGW, CO2 is at best a minor player. The main culprits are local, not global.
Mooney writes: “I get the sense that scientists and their institutions are so concerned over what has occurred in the past few months that there are going to be very real changes made, so as to ensure that better defenses of science are mounted in the future.”


I hope these “better defenses” emphasize openness and transparency, and promptly admitting and correcting errors with humility and without anger or defensiveness. If they are just more politicized advocacy efforts that don’t take skeptical views seriously, the efforts will fail.

Let’s have a mature discussion of differences of opinion on global warming science, and leave out the politicized attacks and name-calling.

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Posted in science | 3 Comments »

They are all liars

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

One of the responses to the CRU scandal is that NASA has all the data and they agree with the global warming hysterics so the East Anglia scandal is no big deal. Well, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has had a Freedom of Information Act request for NASA data in place for two years. Finally, after two years of stonewalling, the CEI notified NASA that they would file suit soon. Probably because of the CRU “Climategate” scandal, the NSAS people finally released the data requested. And is it interesting !

The documents released via the FOIA request, however, contain admissions of data unreliability that are staggering, particularly in light of NASA’s claims to know temperatures and anomalies within hundredths of a degree, and the alarm they helped raise over a mere one degree of claimed warming over more than an entire century.

Dr. Reto Ruedy, a Hansen colleague at GISS, complains in his August 3, 2007, email to his co-worker at GISS and RealClimate blogger Gavin Schmidt:

[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date (at this point the (sic) seem to end in 2002).

This lapse led to wild differences in data claimed to be from the same ground stations by USHCN and the Global Climate Network (GHCN). NASA later trumpeted the “adjustments” they made to this data (upward only, of course) in extremely minor amounts — adjustments they are now seen admitting are well within any uncertainty, a fact that received significantly less emphasis in their public media campaign claiming anomalous, man-made warming.

GISS’s Ruedy then wrote:

[NASA’s] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data … may not have been correct. … Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.

Ruedy claimed this introduced an estimated warming into the record of 0.1 deg C. Ruedy then described an alternate way of manipulating the temperature data, “a more careful method” they might consider using, instead.

Read the whole thing. Maybe thee people should be prosecuted. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this nonsense. The next Congress might be interested. This one certainly isn’t.

I especially like this e-mail quote:

Although in public he often used his high-profile perch for global warming cheerleading, former New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin privately wrote that he was worried about the integrity of the ground stations. When still at the Times he wrote to Hansen on August 23, 2007:

i never, till today, visited http://www.surfacestations.org and found it quite amazing. if our stations are that shoddy, what’s it like in Mongolia?

Of course, that is the point and always has been.

UPDATE: Here is more evidence of the coverup, this time by Nature. They are all crooks.

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Posted in corruption, energy, science | 6 Comments »

The Global Warming Comedy Show

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

By Bradley J. Fikes

(Cross-posted at Brad’s Sci-Tech Blog)

Farce, actually. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

First, the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has contributed to global warming with a steamy sex novel.

IPCC now in Bizarroland: Pachauri releases “smutty” romance novel
Just when you think things can’t get any more bizarre with the IPCC, having just learned that the IPPC 2007 report used magazine articles for references, head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, provides comedy gold. According to the UK Telegraph, he’s just released what they describe as a “smutty” romance novel, Return to Almora laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. Oh, and Shirley MacLaine.

*****************************************************************

Second, more revelations that the IPCC’s 2007 report used more amateurish sources in its supposedly high-quality report on climate change, the same report that included a now-retracted claim that some Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2025.

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps…
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”

Pachauri can always blame the error on being uh, otherwise occupied.

***************************************************************

Third, Pachauri appears to have learned of the falsity of the Himalayan glacier claims earlier than he admitted:

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists…
Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”
However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

****************************************************************

Fourth, with friends like these . . .

‘Bin Laden’ blames US for global warming
A new message said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has blamed global warming on the US and other big industrial nations.
The audio tape, broadcast on al-Jazeera TV, urges a boycott of the US dollar “to free humankind from slavery”.
It comes days after another tape said to be from Bin Laden was released, praising the attempted bombing of a US airliner on 25 December.
The authenticity of neither tape has been verified.
But IntelCenter, a US group that monitors Islamist activity, has said the voice on the earlier tape appeared to be that of Bin Laden.

***************************************************************

UPDATE: A commenter has kindly provided the text of a statement from Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor emeritus Richard Somerville, defending global warming theory against attacks by “denialists.”

I have given my responses to the statement in the comments. Somerville’s statement is entirely an appeal to authority, without any links to evidence backing up his claims. He even repeats the increasingly farcical claim about “solid settled science.”

Most hilariously of all, Somerville tries to puff up certainty about AGW theory by bragging about the high quality of scientific work.

“Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals.”

Shortly after Somerville issued his Jan. 14 statement, the IPCC retracted its sensational claim that many Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. The report, which was supposed to use only peer-reviewed sources, made its claim based on one article that appeared in the New Scientist, not a peer-reviewed journal.

The telephone-game quality of the claim is vividly illustrated in a story in the UK Sunday Times.

The IPCC says its statement on melting glaciers was based on a report it misquoted by WWF, a lobby group, which took its information from a report in New Scientist based on an interview with a glaciologist who claims he was misquoted.

And as this post indicates, other errors and poorly-sourced claims are still being found in the IPCC’s work.

Scientists in other fields should be wary of the increasingly desperate attempts of AGW believers to mute criticism of their own sloppy research by appealing to the credibility of science.

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The Ice Age cometh

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The world is experiencing a severe cold spell. This is what Britain looks like now from the weather satellite. Florida is seeing temperatures that haven’t been seen in decades. What is going on ?

This is not a welcome answer.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007– and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Whoa ! I thought “the world’s most eminent climate scientists” were all telling us we were about to fry. What happened to those swimming polar bears with no ice to rest upon ?

It really is ironic that the year the CRU scam collapsed, we start a severe cold trend. This sort of thing only happens in fiction, right ? This may be more than a cold snap.

Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

I think this statement is a bit of ass covering in 2003 when the warmists still held sway and were perfectly capable, as we have seen, of spiking any “skeptic” piece submitted to a journal. The “regional” theory might be a sop to the warming fraternity who might otherwise have had a word with the editors at Wood’s Hole to spike this paper.

This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

So maybe this is the first year of a new ice age. A 100 year “Gore effect.” Of course, the “Little Ice Age” lasted 1000 years.

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The hockey stick

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Watch this video to see the magnitude of the Mann “hockey stick” when compared to the past using Greenland ice cores.

Well ?

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Yes, global warming is man-made

Friday, November 27th, 2009

UPDATE # 3: The IPCC chair says there is no problem. “Peer review” will save us. Full speed ahead to Copenhagen.

No surprise there.

UPDATE # 2: More chicanery. The raw data was dumped years ago and there is no way to check their work. This is not science.

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson, who became famous over the Bush TANG story (He was the first to demonstrate the fact that the alleged 1972 memo was written on a computer with Times New Roman font), has gone off the deep end on the climate data manipulation story and is attacking all the stories about data manipulation and falsification as “lies.” Charles is an expert by virtue of the fact that he is a musician. He seems to have gotten obsessed with creationism and this has led to his downfall on these other issues.

From his link, a comment explains it all:

Thanks, Gareth – NZC”S”C revealed yet again to be idealogues and propagandists with little knowledge of either climate or science; mere shills for the fossil fuel industry who fund them through the Heartland Institute.

And we know who funds the alarmists.

There is another comment that makes a much more sensible point:

Sorry CJ, this time your avoiding some troubling facts. If you haven’t go look at the code (I know your skilled in this area and you will see how bad this PhD quality code is to real SW that can endanger people). For those of us who stood by you on Rathergate, while your credibility was attacked by folks who don’t know why you made sense, you should realize there are some of us just as insightful and trained to detect bad assumptions, questionable massaging, unfounded theories on global climate.

The fact is the raw data across the globe (even the CRU raw temps) don’t show runaway global warming. It’s not just the emails (which you have been cherry picking, avoiding the hard ones where people tell others to illegally destroy data). It’s the code with hard coded overwrites. It is the deletion of data that tells a contradictory story, of cutting off the picture when it looks bad.

Honestly, I thought much higher of you than this.

BTW, to disagree with global warming does not make you a Palinista or Right winger. They can be right for the wrong reasons. Just like loving you family doesn’t make you an evil right winger – something else they have in common with all of us.

Whatever your issues forget them and look at the code and the data objectively. And realize Jones, Mann et al were persecuting people with differing theories and opinions. They were the ones acting like right wing purists – not us independents who just happen to be able to detect hundreds of problems with the current theories and the methods they use to hide the full picture.

Look at the entire picture, no matter how uncomfortable

This is an example of the fact that, unlike most left wing blogs, Johnson is still posting critical comments. We’ll see how he responds.

Unfortunately, he responds like a left wing blog:

re: #35 AJStrata

And I thought much more highly of you too, before learning that you’re a hardcore climate change denier who’s not above distorting and misrepresenting facts.

Oh well. He was right about the Bush story. I don’t know where this stuff came from.

It is now becoming clear that global warming is man-made. The cause is not CO2 but something simpler and more easy to explain. It was caused by the manipulation of data for the purpose of creating a fraud. When bankers and stock brokers do it, they go to jail.

Kiwigraph1

This is what the official New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has posted as the unmistakable trend of temperature since 1853 in New Zealand.

Kiwigraph2

This is a graphic created from unaltered raw data, which is fortunately still available from their files. The raw data at the East Anglia CRU has been destroyed, making such a comparison impossible.

Straight away you can see there’s no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.
Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?
Why does NIWA’s graph show strong warming, but graphing their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!
Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?
It is relatively easy to find out. We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.
Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

At least the data was not destroyed as it has been at East Anglia.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

These people who committed this fraud (I agree that hoax is not the proper term as it is too benign) should be prosecuted. They were paid government funds to do research and they falsified it. Why ? That is still to be determined but there are several possibilities. They could have convinced themselves that the natural slight warming trend after the end of the Little Ice Age was more serious. They could be ideologically opposed to modern life and especially capitalism. Maybe they just thought that more funds for research would be forthcoming if a crisis was created.

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They are criminals !

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

UPDATE # 5: More evidence that this was a fraud all along. The Chinese scientist I have referred to in other places appears to be the one mentioned.

In 1999, I had a stroke of luck. I asked one of the IPCC officials for the data from which one of their maps was compiled, and I received it. I wrote a paper analyzing the results, and submitted it to Geophysical Research Letters. They just sat on it. I instead published it on John Daly’s website. Today, it is still the only paper recognized by Google on “Regional Temperature Change.”

I now know my paper was not critical enough, since we have proof that the basic data and its processing is far more dubious than I had envisaged.

I tried to update my paper and resubmit it. Nothing doing. Since the small group — revealed within the CRU emails — control most of the peer reviewers, very few peer reviewed papers which criticize that group are allowed to appear in the most prominent published literature which dominates the academic establishment.

I have only been able to find a place to release my criticisms on the internet, now the only realm where unfettered scientific discussion is possible.

UPDATE # 4: If this is the best they can do to respond, they are toast. The evil “fossil fuel industry” is the villain.

UPDATE # 3: This isn’t a real update but a comment on how the lefty web sites, like the legacy media, have their eyes firmly closed. Not one mention, even in comments, of the CRU scandal!

Nothing on Mother Jones either.

UPDATE #2: The original climate data, on which all the models are based, no longer exists !!!UPDATE #2: The original climate data, on which all the models are based, no longer exists !!!

From the CRU web site: (That web page has now also disappeared.) What is left is this.

We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.

This is surely a crime.

Say what?! CRU has lost track of the original data that it uses to create its global temperature record!? Can this be serious? So not only is it now impossible to replicate or reevaluate homogeneity adjustments made in the past — which might be important to do as new information is learned about the spatial representativeness of siting, land use effects, and so on — but it is now also impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. CRU is basically saying, “trust us.” So much for settling questions and resolving debates with empirical information (i.e., science).

To be absolutely clear, none of what I write here should be taken as implying that actions to decarbonize the global economy or improve adaptation do not make sense — they do. However, just because climate change is important and because there are opponents to action that will seize upon whatever they can to make their arguments, does not justify overlooking or defending this degree of scientific sloppiness and ineptitude. Implementing successful climate policy will have to overcome the missteps of the climate science community, and this is a big one.

I’m just not sure it is sloppiness and ineptitude. It is also a good way to hide evidence of a crime. Businessmen have gone to prison for this.

UPDATE: Another well known “skeptic” scientist comments on the scandal.

Another glimpse into what the files and emails reveal was the report by Professor Deming. He wrote, “ With publication of an article in Science (in 1995) I gained sufficient credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said. “We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The person in question was Jonathan Overpeck and his even more revealing emails are part of those exposed by the hacker. It is now very clear that Deming’s charge was precise. They have perverted science in the service of social and political causes

Yes, they are criminals.

Lord Monckton, who has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to a debate on climate, now weighs in on the AGW leaked e-mail story.

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

This may well turn out to be the greatest scientific scandal in a century. the “Piltdown Man” was a minor scandal of no great significance to the world.

these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I wonder if anything will actually be done to them. There is a well-known book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I wonder if it is time for another book about the madness of self anointed elites. Actually, if you read that book, you will find that almost all delusions begin with elites. There is another concept at the foundation of market economies; it is called the wisdom of the market. One who believed in this was Bernard Baruch.

It is important to “follow what the market is currently doing as opposed to following what one might personally think the market should do.” As he said, “Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

The AGW theory fit the concept that a lot of people have about what is “right” and it turns out that they manipulated the facts to make the answer come out “right.” There is already enough doubt about science among people with no scientific education. Catching scientists as liars will certainly not help that situation.

Here is another valuable discussion from a scientist with impeccable qualifications.

In identifying the burning of fossil fuels as the chief cause of warming today, many politicians and environmental activists simply appeal to a so-called “scientific consensus.” There are two things wrong with this. First, there is no such consensus: An increasing number of climate scientists are raising serious questions about the political rush to judgment on this issue. For example, the widely touted “consensus” of 2,500 scientists on the United Nations Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an illusion: Most of the panelists have no scien-tific qualifications, and many of the others object to some part of the IPCC’s report. The As-sociated Press reported recently that only 52 climate scientists contributed to the report’s “Summary for Policymakers.”

Likewise, only about a dozen members of the governing board voted on the “consensus statement” on climate change by the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Rank and file AMS scientists never had a say, which is why so many of them are now openly rebelling. Estimates of skepticism within the AMS regarding man-made global warming are well over 50 percent.

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