Posts Tagged ‘global warming’

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Global Warming is Dead

Monday, September 28th, 2009

New data has now become available that shockingly discredits the Mann “Hockey Stick” graphic used by Al Gore and others in the hysterical climate camp.

rcs_chronologies1

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

The conclusion ?

This comparison to CRU archive data illustrates the most extreme example of scientific cherry-picking ever seen. As Steve writes in comments at CA:

Also keep in mind the implausibly small size of the current portion of the Yamal archive. It would be one thing if they had only sampled 10 trees and this is what they got. But they selected 10 trees out of a larger population. Because the selection yields such different results from a nearby population sample, there is a compelling prima facie argument that they’ve made biased picks. This is rebuttable. I would welcome hearing the argument on the other side. I’ve notified one dendro of the issue and requested him to assist in the interpretation of the new data (but am not very hopeful that he will speak up.)

See the complete report on this new development in the sordid story of tree ring proxies used for climate interpretation at Climate Audit. And while you are there, please give Steve a hit on the tip jar. With this revelation, he’s earned it.

What this means is that data from Russian tree rings has been cherry picked to yield a conclusion that the earth is warming and this is the hottest period in measurable records.

The volume at Climate Audit is so huge that the server is down. This is the global warming equivalent of a pimp and prostitute asking ACORN to help them set up an underage brothel.

UPDATE: More on this story,

While widely published in such prestigious publications as Science, Briffa has consistently refused to release the raw data on which his studies have been based. That alone should have been enough to disqualify him, as that is about as serious a breach of the scientific method as you can commit. But, perhaps because his studies undergirded the received wisdom regarding climate change, he got away with it. Until he published a paper in a publication of the Royal Society. The society has a policy:

As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article… Supplementary data up to 10 Mb is placed on the Society’s website free of charge and is publicly accessible. Large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission. The accession number should be provided for inclusion in the published article.

Steve McIntyre, a statistician and noted climate-change skeptic who has been repeatedly denied access to the data by Briffa for 10 years, wrote the Royal Society, which was embarrassed that this requirement had not been enforced. Briffa was eventually forced to comply (the details of McIntyre’s pursuit of the data he should have been given freely can be found in narrative form here). It appears (and I am no statistician, let alone a dendrochronologist) that the data was seriously cherry-picked to produce a desired result. When a larger and more logical data set is used, the hockey stick disappears (scroll down to see the chart). The late 20th century does not look any different from earlier times.

More yet here.

“1. I don’t believe this data plays into the “it’s worse than we thought” meme. This data is the basis of the hockey stick graphs that assert recent temperature changes are unnatural and AGW is blasting the graph above anything seen in human history.
2. The temperature history of the past thousand years or so is 2000 samples. The 12 trees are the basis of the late 20th century part of that history – the blade of the hockey stick.
3. Trees from the far north are used because their growth is assumed to be primarily limited by temperature. This should make them better treemometers than ones further south which have plentiful sunlight, a long growing season, and may be limited more severely by water availability, nutrients, or being blocked by neighboring trees. Still, they are only valid as treemometers if most of the population shows the same pattern. Once it is shown that the majority of the trees in that area don’t show the same 20th century pattern…
4. McIntyre has repeatedly focused on how the proxies represent current warming vis-a-vis the medieval warming period that some AGW ultraorthodox refuse to admit existed. He is not claiming that this work disproves AGW. I think he is claiming that with proper proxies the MWP can be seen to have been hotter than today.

5. Schweingruber is a colleague of Britta who took samples from the same type of tree in an area within the range of the Yamal samples. The addition of these samples gave a more robust result than the 12 samples Britta used.

6. Neither Britta nor Schweingruber archived samples they collected but decided not to use, but the assertion was made that one expedition would have collected far more samples than were kept. This leads some people to infer that cores were selected based on their conformity to the hockey stick theory.

This is really enough but it won’t be.

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Global Warming triumphant

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

The recent passage of the “Cap and trade” bill, a modern example of the Smoot-Hawley tariff that brought on the Great Depression, raises once again the theory of anthropogenic global warming. That is the theory that human activity, principally through the production of CO2 by the burning of fossil fuels, has caused global warming. There is no other reason for this massive attack on our economic system except the validity of this theory. Al Gore says the debate is over but others disagree. What does the Environmental Protection Agency say ?

The EPA was recently tasked with producing a report that would justify regulation of CO2 as a harmful substance. The report was produced but, because it did not find evidence that CO2 is harmful, the report is being suppressed by the Obama administration. Remember how Bush was accused of manipulating science for political reasons ?

The information about suppression of the EPA report has not appeared in the media. I wonder why ?

We have the Obama administration, which was put into office on the pledge and the promise of openness and transparency and full disclosure and a new change in government. And one of their biggest issues is the issue of climate change and whether we should move a massive reorganization of our entire economy because of CO2 emissions.

In order to move forward, the EPA administrator had to find an endangerment finding, which is a legal term meaning the EPA administrator had to declare that there was an endangerment to human health, and, therefore, we needed to regulate this substance — in this case, CO2.

There is a group within the EPA that’s tasked with doing some of the economic and environmental analysis. And a career scientist in that group prepared an extensive report, close to 100 pages in length, in which he found that there were very serious concerns about going forward with the finding of endangerment. And that’s the substance of this press conference, is how that report was suppressed, censored, prevented from going through the review process.

Well, I guess it’s just not news.

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Of degrees and science and politics.

Friday, January 30th, 2009

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is producing a report on the effects of CO2 and global climate change. Of course, the study suggests that limits on CO2 production are necessary. There has been a lot of writing and talk about how “the overwhelming number” of scientists support the concept of anthropogenic global warming and endorse the extreme measures necessary to reduce its effect. Somewhere in all this, the credentials of the scientists became a major factor. After all, if “the science is settled,” it matters who settled it.

That resulted in a bit of a flap today. The lead author of the NOAA study was described as “Dr Tom Karl”, although that bio does not include a PhD. I don’t know if the bio has been “corrected” since yesterday but there has been an impression left with many in the climate world that he had a PhD. Like here.

Day 1 / Afternoon (Wednesday, June 11, 2003: NIST Auditorium)

Session 2: Customers Speak to the Government:
Economic Benefits / Customer Satisfaction
Moderator: Dr. Tom Karl

Anyway, the report was printed with his phantom PHD until it was noticed by NRO, after which the first draft disappeared. A new version is now up with ALL degrees omitted for ALL authors.

They can’t fix this, though.

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

Hmmmm.

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Posted in energy, politics, science | 10 Comments »

Two stories today; same subject

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Representative Henry Waxman, known to some of his friends as The Mole (see above), assured us yesterday that he will address climate change in legislation before May.

Meanwhile, Chicago has the largest snowfall since 1884 and subfreezing temperatures are breaking records everywhere.

Maine residents braced for nighttime readings down to 40 below zero. And in the Midwest, Iowans were warned that temperatures could drop as far as 27 below zero during the night, matching a Jan. 15 record set in 1972.

Temperatures Thursday were expected to range from 10 below zero in the far north to the low teens in southern coastal areas.

Farther south, morning temperatures were in the 20s from Texas to Georgia, and along the Gulf Coast the weather service reported a low of just 28 at Mobile, Ala.

Even northern Georgia and Kentucky could see single-digit lows by Friday, with zero possible at Lexington, Ky., the weather service warned. Kentucky hasn’t been that cold since December 2004.

There is an old rule: when Congress gets around to fixing a problem, it is over already.

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Posted in politics, science | 2 Comments »

Something is happening with the sun

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

UPDATE: Even the Huffington Post is now allowing doubts about global warming to be posted. Wonders will never cease.

The global warming discussion has drawn attention to the sunspot cycle, which seems to be approaching a Maunder Minimum. This is a possible explanation for the warming and cooling cycles that have affected the earth for at least 250,000 years and possibly for millions of years.

Now, a new phenomenon that is probably related has been discovered. The Solar Wind is decreasing.

“The average pressure of the solar wind has dropped more than 20% since the mid-1990s,” says Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This is the weakest it’s been since we began monitoring solar wind almost 50 years ago.”

The measurement of Solar Wind is a recent development of the Space Age.

“What we’re seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s,” explains Arik Posner, NASA’s Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.

How unusual is this event?

“It’s hard to say. We’ve only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age—from the early 60s to the present,” says Posner. “Over that period of time, it’s unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody’s guess. We don’t have data going back that far.”

Another event has occurred that may add more information about what is happening. The Voyager spacecraft are about to leave the Heliosphere. They are very close to the limits and the Heliosphere is shrinking as the Solar Wind loses strength.

Some of most dramatic effects of the phenomenon may be felt by NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft. After traveling outward for 30+ years, the two probes are now at the edge of the heliosphere. With the heliosphere shrinking, the Voyagers may soon find themselves on the outside looking in, thrust into interstellar space long before anyone expected. No spacecraft has ever been outside the heliosphere before and no one knows what the Voyagers may find there.

The phenomenon we are witnessing may be far more important than global warming, which has been grossly exaggerated for political reasons.

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Posted in energy, science | 6 Comments »

Here it comes

Friday, December 19th, 2008

So far, conservatives have been pleasantly surprised by Obama’s foreign policy and national security nominations. He kept Gates at Defense and named General Jones as National Security Advisor. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is not exactly a conservative choice but it could have been worse. Some of his campaign advisors were pretty odd. Now we are starting to see his domestic policy nominations and his leftist roots are showing. His choice for science advisor is an old fashioned eco-nut.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming movement has elements of a New Age religion. Even though the bona fides of the advocates have been debunked, the main stream media is oblivious to skeptics. This is not a good sign.

Here is more on him. Ugh !

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

I’ve worried about this before.

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Posted in politics, science | 1 Comment »

The anti-intellectuals

Monday, November 17th, 2008

The New York Times today has a piece on National Review, and its alleged decline in erudition. It looks to me, on reading the piece, that it is another in the Palin-bashing thread of the left. Erudition and intellectual power on the left have virtually disappeared in an academic world exposed by The Sokol Hoax. Books have been written about the implications of the Hoax for intellectual life in the 21st century.

Now, we have elected an alleged intellectual as president. The Republican Party has been attacked as “anti-intellectual. Sarah Palin has been the focus of some of these stories. Not everyone agrees with the premise.

the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.

We’ll see how the “intellectual” president does.

The most common delusion of the intellectual today is the global warming hysteria, which is reaching a stage where facts appear to be irrelevant. Typically, it was a British newspaper that called attention to the errors.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

So the data was merely extrapolated from September to October. No matter that the time is fall when temperatures are falling in temperate climates.

In fact, there is some evidence that we may be entering a new Ice Age due to decreased sunspot activity.

The intellectuals will persist in their delusion until glaciers begin to appear in upstate New York.

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Posted in education, politics, science | 5 Comments »

Politics and science

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

The first thought when you read this article in the Washington Post is that science education in the US is falling behind. Then you read it.

the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of climate change, the reluctance to federally fund stem cell research, and some U.S. officials casting doubt on evolution as examples that have damaged America’s international standing.

This is all politics. Climate change is leftist-speak for global warming. The politicization of the science of climate is a leftist assault on scientific inquiry. Skeptics find their grant applications denied and their careers threatened. That is a problem created by the political left. Stem cell research is an ethical issue and President Bush is the first US President to agree to fund stem cell research. The fact that he imposed limits on FUNDING, not research, is what has these politicians upset. Thirdly, a small minority of “US Officials” make anything of the doubts about evolution. That is a religious issue and should not be in science classes. The religion of environmentalism is at least as intrusive in schools as schoolchildren are taught economic foolishness about such matters as recycling.

The whole article is about politics, not science.

Here is more about Freeman Dyson whose essay about global warming, I linked to the other day. The man is a giant and his thoughts are worth considering, especially as they agree with mine.

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The economics of global warming

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Here is an excellent essay on the economics of various global warming scenarios. It does not propose that the current hysteria is incorrect. It simply considers the costs of various proposed remedies, a little bit like Bjorn Lomborg does.

Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.

This is a quote from one of the books being reviewed. It is so sensible that I am surprised to find it in The New York Review of Books, a publication I once subscribed to but gave up on years ago.

He proposes five possible scenarios to deal with the problem and calculates the economic cost of each. One scenario is “business as usual.” Two are radical programs proposed by Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern. The results of those two programs, calculated purely on economic terms and based on projected conditions in 2100, are disastrously worse than business as usual.

Personally, I am a skeptic and believe that, while the planet is warming, this is a natural phenomenon and we can do little to alter it, nor should we. I am also watching the sun spot cycle over the next year to see if the climate might change yet again.

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Posted in politics, religion, science | 1 Comment »

I’m convinced

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

I have to confess that I am finally convinced that global warming is real. I have known for some time that we were warming as a result of the end of The Little Ice Age. I just didn’t appreciate how powerful it was.jupiterspots1.jpg

Here is proof. Jupiter now has three “red spots” instead of the single Great Red Spot that has been visible for 300 years. The cause ? Why Global Warming, of course. Since both Jupiter and Earth get their warmth from the Sun and from internal chemical and nuclear reactions, one might assume that global warming is independent of CO2 emissions. That assumes that one is not in thrall to the religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and that may be a big assumption these days.

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Posted in science | 4 Comments »

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