Climategate: The Big Picture
It’s been less than three months since the Climategate files were first revealed to the world, and an amazing lot has happened — so much that I think it’s worth bringing things together in one place.
This is an extension of the “fast facts” post I wrote a couple months ago. The facts and threads are now coming together into a narrative, a big picture combining what we learned from the letters and what we have learned since.
The Back Story
The idea that humans are causing changes in the climate is not at all new, going back at least to the Victorian era. But it’s taken on a lot of political weight since the early 1990s, leading to the UN’s endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 (followed promptly by the U.S. Senate rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 1998).
The Kyoto Protocol was supported by the scientific findings of a UN-chartered group called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC released a series of Assessment Reports (AR), with the most recent to date being the IPCC AR4 in 2007. Each of these ARs has repeated and reinforced the conclusion that the primary climate change is a warming of the average temperature of the earth over the last hundred or so years, brought about primarily by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. This theory is what is commonly called anthropogenic — meaning “human caused” — global warming (AGW).
The notion that humans were causing climate change was always more controversial than it was presented by the media — it’s hard to make a story out of someone saying “that’s silly, we don’t know enough to say that.” As time went on, however, the IPCC reports claimed greater and greater certainty, and became the basis for things like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Legal reactions to it became the basis for cap and trade schemes worldwide, and the general reaction became the basis for Al Gore’s Oscar and his share of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Then the Climategate files came out, and the dominoes started to fall.
The emails showed, clearly, that some of the widely mocked conspiracy theories were true. There had actually been a concerted effort to prevent the “skeptics” (or “denialists”) from getting access to data, and to prevent anyone who didn’t accept the AGW theory wholeheartedly from being published. If the skeptics were stubborn enough, there were even conspiracies to attack their professional credentials and to effectively eject them from the scientific community. There were even half-joking threats to “beat the s*** out of them.”
Once the emails shined a light on the “climate cartel,” other things began to show up. It was suddenly clear that “skeptics” would be taken seriously, and it became more acceptable to dig elsewhere in the IPCC reports and to publish criticism.
The Science as Science
One primary public relations argument for the warmists has been the threat of the Himalayan glaciers — which are the source for many rivers in India — disappearing by 2035. That turned out to be based on a conversation, reported by a journalist, repeated by the World Wildlife Fund, and included, without citation, in the IPCC AR4.
This showed up on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog. It spread through numerous outlets (including PJM), and the IPCC was forced to withdraw that statement. Further digging found that the WWF’s unreviewed position papers were used dozens of times to support the “peer reviewed” assessment reports.
Roger Pielke Jr. then demonstrated that peer reviewed research showing there was no evidence that AGW was causing increased storm intensity or storm damage was published by the IPCC as concluding the exact opposite.
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the methods used to “homogenize” global temperature data were very effectively adding a warming bias to that data — a “thumb on the scale” that appears to account for a good bit of the observed warming. Opaque methodology and poor data archiving make it very difficult to reliably, repeatably reconstruct even the homogenized temperatures. And the Climategate emails revealed ways in which people whose research contradicted AGW were marginalized and isolated.
There is more — much more — to come on the science and how it has been distorted.
The Finances of Science
So thanks to the Climategate files and the flood of information that came out following their release, some other interesting points emerged. Dr. Murari Lal admitted that the data was tarted up to be more inflammatory, purely because it was more politically effective. At the same time, long-delayed inquiries into the IPCC and its chief, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, unveiled conflicts of interest.
Dr. Pachauri was employed by the Energy Research Institute, which was formerly the Tata Energy Research Institute. Based on the fraudulent “2035″ data, among others, TERI drew millions of dollars in grants from the European Union, the Carnegie Corporation, and other sources. Dr. Pachauri has a broad collection of other business associations which raise similar suspicions. These conflicts aren’t anything as ungentlemanly as straightforward stock ownership, of course; they are just mysterious ties that undoubtedly pay honoraria as well as Dr. Pachauri’s salary.
Has Climategate made anyone directly “rich”? Perhaps not. But there is a second story about the surprising lifestyle of these mere public servants.
There is a financial empire being built on top of AGW, one that we’ve already begun to discuss on PJM. The basics are simple. If you accept that CO2 is the problem, then steps need to be taken to reduce CO2 emissions, which many developed countries have attempted using “cap and trade” schemes. In cap and trade, you use the law to require companies in developed countries to reduce their CO2 emissions, or to buy carbon offsets if they can’t.
Where do carbon offsets come from? Simply enough, some authority must certify that someone else has either reduced their CO2 output, or has agreed not to do something that would increase CO2 output they would otherwise have done. For every ton of CO2 you don’t emit, you get a certificate that you can sell on the carbon market to someone who needs permission — an indulgence — allowing them to emit a ton of CO2.
But what about the details? Who has the authority to certify? And how do you measure CO2 not emitted? The opportunities for graft are vast. There isn’t much that is easier than not building a facility that therefore doesn’t emit CO2. Convince an inspector that you really would have built that facility, or simply that you built a modern efficient plant where you might otherwise have built a dirty inefficient one, and you’re entitled to a credit.
Once you have the carbon credit you need to sell it, which means there must be a market — a role filled in part by the Chicago Carbon Exchange (CCX). The CCX, which was started with seed money from both government and private non-profit sources, is most emphatically a for-profit firm that functions like any commodity exchange. If you have a story about the carbon you aren’t emitting and need it certified, the CCX can certify it — for a fee. Then the CCX will help you sell it — for a commission. If you need to buy carbon credits, the CCX will match you up with a buyer — for a fee — and sell you the certificate (and charge you a commission).
All of this is reasonable in theory, because after all what you’re doing is letting the market set a price for the carbon reductions, just as it sets a price for the fuels burned that lead to carbon emissions. In practice, it’s at least utterly opaque — the CCX is a U.S. corporation, but it is wholly owned in England, and draws its ability to act to certify CO2 reductions through a UN-chartered NGO out of Geneva. The principals are people who have banking experience with Goldman Sachs and strong political connections with the Democratic Party, through Chicago and through Al Gore.
It is, of course, purely a coincidence that this market, which simply doesn’t exist without the legal requirement that companies reduce carbon emissions, is closely connected with the politically connected people who are pushing for carbon restrictions by law and treaty.
As we saw during the Copenhagen meeting, the one outcome of the meeting was an agreement that allowed the carbon markets to continue. But now consider what would have happened if Copenhagen had gone through and the agreement had been made. The carbon markets would continue, of course, but now nearly every industrial operation in nearly every developed or under-developed or undeveloped country — for all practical purposes, all manufacturing, power generation, or transportation — would need to establish its carbon impact, and buy or sell the appropriate carbon credits. Every one of which would result in paying fees and commissions to the carbon exchanges, as well as the governments involved and the UN.
The owners of the carbon exchanges wouldn’t be as rich as Croesus — they would be so rich they could hire Croesus as a houseboy.
There is a third story, and maybe the biggest story, in the political connections and political pull that make the carbon markets work.
Seeing the Big Picture
So what is the big picture?
First, there were the true believers, like James Hansen, whose belief in the need to eliminate industrial civilization far predates the global warming explanation. (There is a side story to be told there as well. What do the true believers really believe? What do they advocate as ways to reduce humanity’s environmental impact?) These true believers seem to be quite willing to … adapt their scientific results to make sure that people on the outside are as frightened as possible.
There is another, larger group, who may or may not be true believers — who can know what is in another man’s heart? — but who don’t seem to worry too much about their own carbon impact, like Al Gore. (Oh, he buys indulgences from his own company, which is one little mercy — he could conceivably instead say he would have built a bigger house with more carbon impact, and claimed a carbon credit.) A fair number of these people, though, seem to be set up to make an immense pile of money off the carbon markets, and they all seem to have impeccable political connections. This larger group makes sure that the true believers get big grants, and travel to conferences in Gstaad and Tahiti, and have well-financed platforms from which to speak.
It’s that second group we most need to watch. In the old Soviet Union, these people — the Communist Party members who received positions of power — were called the nomenklatura. They weren’t necessarily the true believers (in fact, a lot of the true Communists, like Beria and Trotsky, ended up dead or in Siberia), but they could mouth the slogans, pass on the Communist Party line, and play the system to get positions and power, dachas, and access to the “special” stores that always had sausage, green vegetables, and toilet paper.
And, of course, there is a third group: the rest of us. We are expected to pay the increased carbon offset costs quietly, cold in our darkened rooms, but warm in our hearts because we’re saving the planet.
Eco- Enron!
The CEO of a private company who pulled half of these tricks would find himself up for fraud, racketeering and probably money-laundering too.
All of this unpleasantness and expense could have been avoided ab initio if more people were aware of the requirements of the scientific method. Even the unusually well informed Pajamas Media crowd only turns up the rare commenter who understands that prediction and replicability are keys to scientific inquiry.
Am I saying that the fundamental problem here is one of education? Why, yes, I am. But it’s at the base of so many other political problems that we should hardly be surprised.
Charlie–good rundown, thanks much. I remember that other column you did back a few months back. Keep after it, this information needs to be pursued at every possible angle. Again, nice work Sir.
Charlie – Keep up the good work. As for “True Believers,” the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book is an apt title for them: Liberal Fascists.
Well Charlie it appears someone forgot to reprogram Obama’s teleprompter with the correct information.
From the granite and eternal marble halls of Capitol Hill, through the king’s Oval Office and right on into outer space on the space station climate change is as alive and strong as its ever been.
I’ll probably never see the day that I can top off the freon in my pickup truck again and, so far I haven’t been able to find a Chinese manufacturer that mass produces diapers for bulls and cows; the next target on their agenda.
PS: More snow is forecast for next week to go along with the steady stream of BS we get.
I enjoyed reading your article. Here are some thoughts it inspired (with a link to you): http://newrisks.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/climate-change-and-philosophie-des-als-ob/
regards,
Linda
Add the hordes of camp followers or hangers-on of the notables in the classes you mention, and figure in the cost of their salaries and expense accounts as they live the lives of the rich and famous, and you’ll still only scratch the surface. Take only one class, the Political Class, in one city, Washington, D.C.
Data now years old show the congress of 535 members have thousands of staffers on their direct payrolls, while the staffers’ deputies, assistants and clerks on M Street plus the tens of thousands of lobbyist employees on K Street, add up to over 40,000 job holders — all with salaries, benefits, expenses, transport, and so on, and all living the life of Riley with two newish cars, ATVs and pocket inet and celcomms for the kids, etc., etc.
Now add State Capitals, County and City, Town, borough and township units to the Political Class.
Sum up the cost to the country.
Now do the same taxonomy for the Government Departmental Bureaucrat Class. Then add the Litigation Class. Then the Law Enforcement Class. Then the Academic Class, The Military Class — and do each through the layers of government from National to township, adding in all ancillary and auxillary employees. That’s a rough accounting of your Government without the hidden costs of sleaze and corruption.
Now take the “free market economy” players all of the above subcontract with your money.
The bottom line cost comes to, for all intents and purposes, the GDP of the U.S.A. And that’s the non-sleaze part.
And you think there’s a fix for this? You bet there is. Mad Max has it, and he’s on his way. Collapse.
AGW promised to give university eggheads real power; not only were people compelled to listen to them, but whole nations were going to be subject to the results of their studies. Never underestimate the longing to run things that eggheads secretly crave; in their minds, what’s wrong with the world is that they are not put in charge. Beneath all the machinations are a gaggle of Ivy League twits (lawyers, activists, professors) who tried to set up the biggest scam of all time so they could bully and harass every productive industry, world-wide, without limit. We dodged a bullet there; I’ll never say a bad word about hackers again.
There are of course many reasons to oppose the policies that are proposed to deal with global warming, and Charlie Martin gives a good summary of them.
As usual, I take issue with statements like this:
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the methods used to “homogenize” global temperature data were very effectively adding a warming bias to that data — a “thumb on the scale” that appears to account for a good bit of the observed warming. Opaque methodology and poor data archiving make it very difficult to reliably, repeatably reconstruct even the homogenized temperatures.
First, he offers no evidence in support of these statements–and they are (purposefully) vague. For example, how much is “a good bit” of the observed warming due to this supposed “thumb on the scale”? One percent? Ten percent? Fifty percent? If eighty percent of the warming is due to human carbon dioxide emissions, then isn’t there still a big problem?
Second, the methodology is only “opaque” to people who don’t read the literature. In the papers the methodology is very clearly described–I can’t quote it because it’s too long as equations, and I know know one will read the papers, but here they are:
Climate science groups around the world develop different methodologies, but they all come to pretty much the same global temperature trends. Note that the method described in the Jones paper is not the same as that described by Hansen. Nor are they the same as the satellite trends from NOAA. Yet they all agree within thier uncertainty.
No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that DOESN’T agree, they don’t even attempt it, yet they all say that the current ones are wrong. The raw data has always been publicly available. No climate skeptic has produced a model that shows incresing carbon dioxide WON’T increase global temperatures; they don’t even attempt it.
And of course half the commenters here will accuse the climate scientists of hiding the raw data and models, while the other half of the commenters will accuse me of flogging a straw man when I link to the supposedly unavailable raw data and models.
The fundamental piece that is missing in the Global Warming-Climate Change disccuss is whether or not CO2 that is the result of human activity is responsible for the changes. The heat in Planet Earth has three sources.
The residual core heat release periodically by vulcanism to which you can add the natural heating processes such as radioactive decay and sustained chemical processes in the Earth
The input from the Sun that varies considerable and semi predictably with time
The radiation filter effect that interferes with earth radiating some of it heat to the universe that are the responsibility of green house gasses
The portion of the green house gas effect that is totally the responsibility of the actions of mankind.
We don’t know the relative control that each of the above causes exerts on the climate so how can we intellectually honestly decide how much the acivity of many should be restricted. The activity of mankind relative to the other forces is extremely minor.
I think that this started with people wishing to have fame for something invented this whole subject so that they could have a cause to promote.
Let’s do some energy calculations folks before we decide what is important.
Corus, part of Tata who Pachauri works for has just closed a steelplant in Teesside, Northeast England.
They stand to earn more from carbon credits than actual production by this act.
Thousands now out of work in an already blighted region. Age old settled cultures destroyed. No prospect of other work thus reducing able bodied men especially the over fifty year olds to a lifetime on benefits.
Thats the new socialism folks.
Links to the papers:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1987/1987_Hansen_Lebedeff.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6078/abs/322430a0.html
A complete description of our procedure for defining
large-area temperature change is as follows. We divide each
of the 80 equal-area boxes of Figure 2 into a 10 by 10
array of 100 equal-area subboxes. (The east-west and north-south
dimensions of a subbox are about 200 km; in the polar
boxes the equal area requirement for the subboxes causes
the polemost subboxes to be noticeably elongated in the
north-south direction.) For each subbox we use all stations
located within 1200 km of the subbox center to define the
temperature change of that subbox. The N stations within
1200 km are ordered from the one with the greatest number
of years of temperature record to the one with the least
number. The temperature changes for the first two stations
are combined, then the third with the first two, and so on…
can’t reproduce the equations here, but you can read them in the paper
The temperature changes of the 100 subboxes are then
combined to find the temperature change for a box, in the
manner indicated by Figure 5 and (1)-(3). However, the
subboxes are weighted equally, i.e., by area, except that
subboxes which have no station within 1200 km are excluded.
The zonal mean temperature change for a latitude
band is obtained by combining the temperature changes of
the boxes in this same way, with each box weighted by the
fraction of its subboxesw hich have a defined temperature
change, i.e., the fraction of the box which has a station
within 1200 kin. Finally, the zonal temperature changes are
combined in the same way to obtain hemispheric and global
temperature change, with each latitude band weighted by the
area with a defined temperature change.
One potential disadvantage of the method we have
described for combining station records is that the results,
in principle, depend on the ordering of the station records.
However, we have tested the effect of other choices for
station ordering, for example, by beginning with the station
closest to the subbox center, rather than the station of
longest record. The differences between the results for
alternative choices were found to be very small, about 2
orders of magnitude less than the typical long-term temperature
trend.
We have also tested alternatives to these procedures and
compared the error estimates for the alternatives, the error
estimates being obtained as described in Section 5. For
example, we tried weighting each box by the box area and
each zone by the zone area, rather then weighting by the
area with a defined temperature change. Overall temperature
changes were similar with the different procedures, but the
procedure as we defined it previously was found to yield the
smallest errors of the alternatives which were tested. We
also tried alternatives to the 1200-km limit defined earlier;
although the effects were noticeable on geographical maps
of temperature trends, there was no significant effect on
zonal, hemispheric, or global temperature change.
But do continue to tell us that the climate scientists won’t tell you what they did.
Charlie:
Thank you for an excellent explanation of the back channel market makers who were set to make a killing on this. I assume that the UK is well advanced in these markets since Europe in general is known to fall for these schemes quicker than Americans. Look at the windmill development in the UK and France as an example of their folly. It will be interesting to see if the Europeans continue to walk off the cliff on this global warming faux science. They will be difficult to convince even though they have abandoned their christian values, they have now found a new religion in climate change.
Tommy Gunn
Gabriel Hanna (3):…
No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that DOESN’T agree, they don’t even attempt it, yet they all say that the current ones are wrong.
One problem is that there is no raw data available! It’s been misplaced. What’s available for the most part is the normalized data, and the normalization techniques are what’s in question.
There have been dissenting voices citing original data, but it’s hard to find them. Here’s one:
Can’t See the Signal For the Trees by Willis Eschenbach.
and
Global Warming: A closer look at the numbers.
@Paul of Alexandria: One problem is that there is no raw data available! It’s been misplaced. What’s available for the most part is the normalized data, and the normalization techniques are what’s in question.
That is a lie. Here a links to raw data used by every climate science group:
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
http://icoads.noaa.gov/
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~ttchen/argo/gmap.htm
http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/mirador/presentNavigation.pl?tree=project&project=SORCE
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/atdd
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/
http://eca.knmi.nl/
There are also the records from 1921-1970 published by the Smithsonian, found in libraries worldwide, called “World Weather Records”. I checked, my library’s copy is not “lost” or “misplaced”. Tell me what university you are nearest to, and I can check their library and tell you if it’s there. OR YOU COULD DO IT YOURSELF.
Thanks for the kind words, every. I’m away from the computer most of theNext Generation Suborbital Research Conference, and will have lots of space stuff to talk about soon. (Rand Simberg liveblogged a fair bit of the conference yesterday.)
Gabriel, let me repeat my suggestion you write a whole article on this. I really do appreciate you bringing the contrary voice, but I wish we could get past one thing. You keep coming back with links to the pro-AGW folks saying “we did everything just fine.” The issue isn’t that they think it was fine, the issue is that whatever they did is very hard for outsiders to replicate. Now, over time, and lots of reverse engineering and FOI requests, some of it has been. But in the processs, there have been a number of real problems uncovered.
(1) the raw data is still hard to come by: some of it is considered proprietary, and some has been lost. This isn’t a critic saying this either: in both cases, that is taken directly from the UK Met Office and from Phil Jones. But without the raw data, it’s impossible to process the data to replicate the results of the next point.
(2) the things you link to because someone is telling you it’s “the data” are the GISS, HadCRU, and NCDC datasets. But these aren’t raw data; they have been through two basic processes: site selection and “homogenization.” At this point, several geographical areas’ data have been examined for which raw data was available; all of those (that I know of) select sites and correct the data in a way that emphasizes the “warming signal”. If these were random errors, then you’d expect them to go both ways. This is very curious and has been noted, among others, by one of the editors of the IPCC AR4 report.
(3) The code you link to has a little difficulty itself, in that it doesn’t work, or work correctly. Several people are dealing with this: John Graham-Cumming has been particularly looking at the HADCRU code; ClearClimateCode is working on the GISS code.
None of these prove that “warming is a hoax” as some of the commenters have put it. What it does do is make the results hard to replicate, and suggest there may be some significant selection bias. When we’re talking about literally trillions of dollars in impact, it’s essential that all of the steps be replicable, and right now they’re not. Since we know that the IPCC report in particular was consciously skewed to be more exciting and to engage politicians in the climate problem — and remember, this was also admitted to by one of the IPCC authors — it’s doubly hard to take their results on trust.
@ #3
You bash the author for not going into details about why AGW is junk, then absolve yourself by saying the details take up too much space!
The object of the article is not to debunk this charade; that has been done quite effectively in other places on this and other sites. If you really care, you can easily find them.
The object of the article is to shed light on the conspiracy and hypocracy involved in the AGW junk that has been shoved down the throats of the world by these charlatans!
Clear enough now?
“But do continue to tell us that the climate scientists won’t tell you what they did.”
And you’ll continue to act as if there’s science behind AGW.
@9. Gabriel Hanna: – If eighty percent of the warming …
Woah there, Nelly! It’s been a LONG time since I’ve seen someone work so hard to miss (or is it obfuscate) the point.
First, ANY amount of artificially induced bias toward warming in the “value-added” temperature “data” transforms the entire GW theory into a big pile of steaming hokum. Why? Because the critical raw data used to generate GW “trends” do not exist. Therefore the process by which the “value-added” data were generated CAN NOT BE REPRODUCED and, as such, that process CAN NOT BE VALIDATED. See Phil Jones’ perennial refusal to produce the raw data, with excuses that range from protecting his fragile ego (“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”) to claiming that computer technology was incapable of doing what computers have done since they were invented: store massive amounts of numbers (“Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites … We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data…). The first excuse doesn’t square with the second. Also note that the first is a perfectly plausible – if scientifically unethical – reason for refusal to release the data, while the second is pure horse manure (given the choice, a scientist with a brain would save the RAW data, since the “value-added” data could be re-generated from that, at will, and still preserve the validity of the process). This leads one to believe that the data do exist in some form, somewhere, waiting to blow the lid completely off of this whole thing.
True Believers don’t have a problem with non-scientific statements and attitudes like Jones’ – THAT’s why they don’t make good scientists. The rest of us, however, can see when we’re being scammed.
Note that we haven’t yet touched on your next canard…
- … due to human carbon dioxide emissions …
Sorry, you don’t get to jump right into speculating on the causes for potentially nonexistent “warming” here. Jones himself has already stated that the temperature variations of the last 100+ years are nothing new, and that much warmer periods have likely occurred that can’t be attributed to industrial CO2. You forget, apparently, that “human carbon dioxide emissions” have been a factor in the climate since humans started exhaling. Fail for you.
- Second, the methodology is only “opaque” to people who don’t read the literature.
Irrelevant. The real problem is that the methodology has never been fairly assessed by way of an objective peer review process. We know this because of the damning evidence in the CRU email cache which clearly demonstrates efforts to subvert that process. Now we know why “peer reviewed” became a permanent part of every True Believer’s vocabulary. Since there was little chance that AGW theorists’ work would ever be objectively peer reviewed, it was a perfect dodge: NO ONE who wasn’t considered a “peer” could have credibility when pointing to the glaring flaws in the AGW catechism (like, for instance the fact that CO2 lags temperature increases, historically). Scientifically unethical actions by Jones and the CRU crowd ensured that they effectively controlled who was and who was NOT considered a “peer”.
- No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that DOESN’T agree, they don’t even attempt it, yet they all say that the current ones are wrong.
You really don’t see your problem here, do you. When a theory is put forth, it’s up to the theorist to provide strong evidence. It is NOT up to a “skeptic” to provide counter-evidence. The AGW crowd has failed to make their case. All that’s needed is to demonstrate how they have failed. That has been happening for years, but we’re only just NOW finding out why those demonstrations have been suppressed by the so-called “scientific” community and The Left Wing Media.
Here’s the thing: you can’t just brush off Jones’ litany of self-serving lies, half-truths and misstatements by pointing to “other data sources”. You can’t just ignore the outright manipulation of the peer review process by those with a vested interest in preserving a steady flow of grant money. The wheels have come off of the AGW scam. Deal with it.
Charlie: Brilliant. I’ve never heard a better explanation for how the carbon credit scam will work. Getting paid not to pollute is such a deal, and I’m sure the certifying official has a brother-in-law who needs a job with the party getting paid. Where does the money come from? Everyone, in that ever-so-modest increase in the cost of everything. A perfect skim on humanity.
Gabriel Hanna:
Sorry- your links lead not to raw station data, but to ‘reprocessed’ data. Getting raw data has proven to be like pulling hen’s teeth- and in those cases where digging it up has been successful the amount of warm bias added by the ‘adjustments’ has been prodigious. Browse around http://www.wattsupwiththat.com for several examples. Most damning are the figures from Australia and New Zealand, the countries where raw station data was most easily prised free: Essentially all of the claimed “warming” was the product of adjustments. (This process was also at work in the “fudgefactor” additive array in the Climategate computer code).
You might also want to look at one publicly-available raw set, the Central England Temperature Series, kept continually since the early 18th Century.
The figures GISS puts out have been so adjusted, corrected, homogenized and sanitized for your protection that they amount to virtual temperatures interpolatively assigned to nonexistent weather stations.
@Charlie Martin:
the things you link to because someone is telling you it’s “the data” are the GISS, HadCRU, and NCDC datasets. But these aren’t raw data; they have been through two basic processes: site selection and “homogenization.”
Did you click on a single link? The seventy-year-old volume from the Smithsonian came from HadleyCRU, GISS, and NOAA? Do the climate scientisits have TIME MACHINES?
Let’s take the first one, what does it say when you CLICK THE LINK?
“This world monthly surface station climatology has data for over 4700 different stations (2600 in more recent years). Data for some stations goes as far back as the mid-1700′s. See decadal coverage for more detail. Most of the data was obtained directly from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Asheville, North Carolina. However, much of the data prior to 1951 came from John Wolbach of Harvard College Observatory, who contracted to have this data key entered at NCDC. The first six months of 1961 were key entered at NCAR. Sharon Nicholson, Florida State University, provided African precipitation data to extend the records of over 250 stations. Dennis Shea, NCAR/CGD, has been a valuable source for data obtained directly from various countries.”
These are not HadleyCRU, GISS, or NOAA datasets. These are the SOURCES from which those sets are CALCULATED. They come from WEATHER STATIONS. They SAY SO RIGHT ON THE LABEL.
What does NCDC say?
Land-based observations contain various meteorological elements that over time describe the climate of a location or region. These elements include temperature, dew point, relative humidity, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, wind speed, wind direction, cloudiness, visibility, atmospheric pressure, evaporation, soil temperatures, and various types of weather occurrences such as hail, fog, thunder, etc. This also includes data observed by weather radars. The weather observations vary in their time interval from sub-hourly to hourly to daily to monthly. Summaries are then produced from these data. Land-based data from around the world are archived at NCDC. For an even more comprehensive listing of data products that includes land-based data, upper air data and marine data you may visit our Online Climate Data Directory.
These are data FROM WEATHER STATIONS, Charlie. These are NOT FROM HadleyCRU, NOAA, or GISS.
How can you so blatantly misrepesent these data sources when ANYONE can CLICK THE LINK and see for themselves?
all of those (that I know of) select sites and correct the data in a way that emphasizes the “warming signal”. If these were random errors, then you’d expect them to go both ways. This is very curious and has been noted, among others, by one of the editors of the IPCC AR4 report.
Tell us the magnitude of the effect, Charlie. Is it 10 degrees, 1 degree, 0.1 degree, 0.01 degree? It’s not enough to say “it’s biased”. If it’s biased in the third decimal place it doesn’t affect the results.
“- No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that DOESN’T agree, they don’t even attempt it, yet they all say that the current ones are wrong.”
If it’s fake, it’s fake. When Piltdown Man was exposed, nobody was expected to produce an “alternative.” Nobody expects an example of a “genuine” three-dollar bill.
And when you say, “No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that DOESN’T agree, they don’t even attempt it”, then you are making a false statement. Just for one example, the Vostok ice cores; for the recent past, the UAH satellite temperature series.
@Bohemond:
Sorry- your links lead not to raw station data, but to ‘reprocessed’ data.
I can’t believe you guys are so shameless as to lie about what the links say.
Don’t you realize that anybody can check for themselves?
http://dss.ucar.edu/md/datasets/ds570.0/detailed.html
Types of data: Platform Observations
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
AMSU stands for Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit. It is derived from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) which began service in 1978 on TIROS-N and continued on the NOAA 6 through 14 satellites.
http://icoads.noaa.gov/products.html
The observational records (surface marine reports from ships, buoys, and other platform types) are all available online.
But who should I believe, you or my lying eyes?
When Jones and others have problems rebuilding their datasets, lose data, and cannot go from raw data to their past work, then there is something that needs to be examined in the original work: if the authors of the papers can’t support their positions with data, and can’t rebuild their datasets and lost their notes then the paper, itself, is unsupported. Apparently AGW ate their data.
And there has been both variations from actual surface temperature readings and the published IPCC reports, with Australia showing selection bias. Part of the selection bias is towards weather stations in urban heat islands, which retain more heat than the natural environment. US datasets have been showing this bias which prompted the start of Surfacestations.org to first find the setting and location of each surface station in the US and now that has become a global project. Urban surface stations are demonstrating a heat zone effect that is local in extent, not global. When the datasets are ‘averaged’ between urban heat islands and stations in natural surroundings it added bias to their temperature assessments due to that effect and this has been a problem with the NOAA datasets.
Then there are the folks looking at the Arctic temperatures and have been since 1958. You don’t need someone to do this for you! You can click on a year and get the annual temps and see the overall mean in the background… amazing, DIY science.
In point of fact its the differences between the IPCC reports, plus those of Jones and Mann, et. al. that have been triggering some of the hardest questions about the methodology being used to ‘adjust’ temperatures from observed values. The earliest IPCC report had the Medieval Warm Period clearly marked, yet it disappeared… the temperatures changed… in later reports, so that the IPCC could not even agree with its past work. And then did not explain any changes in methodology, any changes in sampling, indeed anything to support those changes. Now Jones is tryinig to backtrack and ‘discover’ the MWP! Great, huh? A decade of making it disappear and then, suddenly, its back. And still no explanation of where it went to in-between the earliest report and now… if the IPCC can’t even agree with ITSELF on datasets and can’t explain them, then why should they be believed?
Obambi is still a true believer in the sense that it’s another way to tax the proletariat.
Ha ha ha ha, this is just all so much fun. And, by golly, as predictable as an Obama “uh.”
Blogger: AGW is built upon incorrect, incomplete, or fraudulent data. And what’s worse, the original raw data has been “lost” or “destroyed.” In any event, it is conveniently unavailable. Then skads of money was made available to researchers through grants, but only to those that were willing to make the correct findings. Those that weren’t were shut out and ostracized. With the skeptics silenced, “consensus” became a tautology. Peer-review became nothing but a self-feeding echo chamber. Note that there is evidence of a cyclical climate change, or was right up until 1995. The argument is not over whether climate changes; it obviously does and it obviously always has. The argument is political: should we all be forced back into the economic stone ages to ostensibly address an unproven and unscientific assertion?
True Believer: Aw, that’s just a load of crap. Here’s a lengthy list of links to verbose articles that all reach the same conclusions based on various analysis of the raw data. And for crying out loud, you idiot, it’s all PEER-REVIEWED.
Blogger: Sigh.
gabriel …
your comment and quoted literature actually show just how bad the science is from Hansen. One thing that you forget to note is that the wonderful grid Hansen uses is populated with less than 10% of observed data. 90+% of the data is simply made up of averaging “nearby” data and by nearby I mean up to 1200 kilometers away. Just look at your own town and look at 2 towns 100 miles away, one north and one south. Just take the daily average of the 2 other towns and compare that to your towns actual readings. If you think the averaged data is a better measure than the actual records then you don’t understand science.
Back to the Hansen grid. There are literally hundreds of grids that Hansen and company have decided to thrown out the actual temperature records and subsitute averaged data. The state of California uses 4 thermometers to determine the entire state temperature average. All 4 are located in or near big cities and none are away from the coast at the higher (and cooler) elevations.
Your simply not looking very hard if you can’t see problems with what you call the “raw” data since none of it is raw and all of it has been adjusted before you or I get to see it.
http://eca.knmi.nl/dailydata/index.php
The ECA dataset contains series of daily observations at meteorological stations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.
Seriously, lying about the links I clicked to is not only wrong, but it’s stupid. You’ve totally lost any credibility. Either you didn’t bother to look at what was posted, but said something untrue anyway, or you deliberately lied. Either way it looks really bad.
@26 Hogarth:
And what’s worse, the original raw data has been “lost” or “destroyed.”
Except that I posted links to it, and even told you where to find it in the library.
And then the lot of you DON’T click the links, and then lie about what the links said.
Class act.
@Jeff:
Hansen was calculating GLOBAL TEMPERATURE TRENDS, which, BY DEFINITION, are not the same as the measurements that ANY GIVEN WEATHER STATION will produce. The whole point of all the AVERAGING is to PRODUCE AN ESTIMATE OF THE AVERAGE.
But do keep telling me that I’M the one who doesn’t understand science.
#26 HOGARTH
Well, this story allows us to carry on an in-depth study of primitive thinking: at the time of the evil empire, the dissidents invented the term “homo sovieticus” to describe the regressed mind of people exposed to totalitarian propaganda and control, and this story of the “warming” scam allows us to observe the same phenomenon, perhaps on a larger scale.
There is no amount of criticism that can re-enlighten the minds brainwashed by the totalitarians: they WANT to remain in the dark. Any attempt to talk to them in reasonable terms causes them a sort of pain: they should re-adapt to REALITY and that is truly difficult.
The danger of course is terrifying for our Freedom: the cultists of global warming are the same kind of persons who would have gathered cheering at the burning at the stake of the “witch” who had supposedly “caused” all the bad things that happened in their lives…
They are always ready to answer the call of the false messiah on duty in that moment of history…
Long time ago, England could grow grapes and Greenland was…green and lush…
But if you tell them, they will lynch you.
Gabriel, you’re confusing “some of the data” with “all of the data.” It’s not like it’s climate skeptics who are saying that all the raw data isn’t available — Phil Jones made that point himself, and the Met Office has been very specific that there are parts of the raw data that they can’t release without negotiating around some confidentiality agreements.
But let’s assume that the Met Office is lying — as counterintuitive as that sounds — and all the raw data is available. Then there is still the issue that the selections that were used to compute the CRU adjusted data are not explained, aren’t transparent, and in a number or areas — Russia, parts of Australia, even some of it here in Boulder County — lead to a significant warming signal, where using the whole data set without adjustment shows none. The probability of that happening through random selection is very low — offhand, it seems it should be nCm where n is the number of points chosen, m is the size of the population, and C is the binomial coefficient operation, which is giving me numbers like 27,140 to 1 for one data set. Others have already included links to some of those in these comments.
So then let’s assume that, by whatever method, they made a valid and appropriate choice there. Then you run into the problem that they aren’t publishing workable code, and when the code is made to work, it turns out to have errors. I linked that above.
Now, unlike you, I don’t impute your failure to understand this with lying. But it is a pretty tight argument that the conclusions aren’t trustworthy, and need to be re-examined. This “big picture” article then shows that there appear to be some pretty clear motivations for the conclusions to be exploited by people politically and financially connected.
Once again, I’d rather see you make your case whole than simply sniping.
Gabriel, if all the data is available, then the UK Met Office is lying when it says it can’t release some raw data because of confidentiality agreements. But even if the data were available, that still wouldn’t resolve the selection bias issue, the poor code issue, and the issue that we know, by admission, that the IPCC conclusions were purposefully skewed.
So I tell you what: let’s assume that the Met Office is lying and all not some but all of the data is available. How do you explain the appearance of selection bias, which a non-skeptical member of the IPCC editors says is very suspicious? And how do you explain the fact that the published code doesn’t work?
And try to lose the word “lying”. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Either Gabriel Hanna has a cognitive disorder or Charlie does. And I’m pretty sure Charlie doesn’t.
@Charlie Martin:
You said that I didn’t link to raw data–you said that ALL MY LINKS went to HadleyCRU or GISS temperature records that have been homogenized and adjusted, that it wasn’t “raw data” at all.
What you said was false. Each of those links says they come from meteorological OBSERVATIONS from satellites and weather stations, not from HadleyCRU or GISS. HadleyCRU and GISS do not maintain those datbases I linked to.
If you are dealing with me in good faith, then I think you have an obligation to retract what you said about the data I linked to.
If you can’t do that, why should I have to go to the time and trouble of writing an editorial, which of course will require a lot of time spent on research, when I’m going to be subjected to abuse and misrepresentation of what I said?
Hansen was calculating GLOBAL TEMPERATURE TRENDS, which, BY DEFINITION, are not the same as the measurements that ANY GIVEN WEATHER STATION will produce. The whole point of all the AVERAGING is to PRODUCE AN ESTIMATE OF THE AVERAGE.
Which increases the variance and thus the error bars. how much we can’t tell until we know the selection method and the methods used to average. We also need to have more information about the methods, and there’s some real question whether the sample is big enough to make a good estimate.
And when we’re done, we get a signal in the order of 10^-2°C/yr.
I’ve often wondered why skeptics and “deniers” (which I am proudly one!) spin their wheels arguing the “data”, or lack of data, or the obvious stonewalling and misdirection of those who “HAD” the data…
Yes, it’s what’s been used by those to pawn this world-wide hoax on us, and yes, it is an obvious target when so much is there to question and PROVE manipulation and outright fraud… and yes, those with something to gain from AGW have been caught red-handed with MONEY being their motive…
But why not go after the HYPOTHESIS of AGW itself?
Well…someone has, and it makes for a verifiable (not antedotal) case:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
Best account I’ve read so far about how the carbon credit scheme would work! You are a true master of polite sarcasm.
Once again, I’d rather see you make your case whole than simply sniping.
And you can start by defining “global mean temperature.” Next, you can define how many years of data make a trend on a planet 3.5 billion years old. Then, you can explain the reliability of mix-and-match proxy data to predate Mr. Fahrenheit’s day. And if you get this far, you can start to show why some data needs to be tossed and others kept, and why these decisions need to made in secret.
And that’s just part of what you need to do to prove “warming.” Tying it with causation to man is nearly impossible. In medical studies, using brute force causation to study illnesses in diverse populations is known as epidemiology. Sound medical journals, like NEJM, will not publish a study with an RR (or slope) of less than 3:1; 4:1 or more is preferable. None of the tools used for this sort of research is available to climate research. You can’t isolate independent variables like age, sex, weight, family history, etc. We only have one planet. It has an incredibly diverse climate with myriad factors, not the least of which is the sun, whose output and variability and its effect on our planet are poorly understood.
There is literally no way to prove that man is causing this alleged warming. And even if there were, there is very little that can be done about it. Warmers are engaging, as they frequently do, in teleological thinking: they think something should be true, therefore in their minds it is true. This is fantasy, it is not scientific, and it is, at bottom, madness.
@Charlie Martin:
Which increases the variance and thus the error bars.
Are you really going to try to argue that averaging measurements is WORSE than using single measurements? Or are you going to argue a fine point about non-Gaussian distributions?
how much we can’t tell until we know the selection method and the methods used to average.
And when I quoted it above you didn’t read it. The 1987 Hansen-Lebedeff paper describes the algorithm clearly enough that JEFF got it.
What Gabriel Hanna does not seem to accept is that the burden of proof is on the proponents of AGW theory not on the skeptics. And it is not that the scientists prove anything, they provide data and an interpretation of the data. Given the doubts expressed by skeptics about the completeness of the data, it is in the interest of scientists to show in detail how they arrived at their conclusions. A paper is one way to do this, but as the CRU emails show, the peer review process was corrupt. An alternative is to have a web site which goes through the processing of the data step by step. If they cannot be bothered, they have no case.
Has anyone here read the article on American Thinker entitled “The AGW Smoking Gun?” It shoots a rather large hole in the AGW hypothesis that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere will block more outgoing long-wave IR radiation from exiting the atmosphere and thereby warm the earth’s surface.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
Gabriel/Charlie et. al.:
Here is an interesting URL. Is uses freely available data and
open source tools for analysis.
Enjoy!
http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/01/global-warming/
Gabriel,
‘And of course half the commenters here will accuse the climate scientists of hiding the raw data and models, while the other half of the commenters will accuse me of flogging a straw man when I link to the supposedly unavailable raw data and models.’
These are two of the three strawman arguments you continuously put up. While you can find a commenter or more than one saying one or more of the above, they are not nor has ever been the basis of Mr Martin’s articles critiquing CO2 based AGW here on PJM in the last few weeks. Nor has they been the basis for disputing your take on things by the commenters wasting their time be actively engaging you in good faith.
You’ve repeatedly been told that the ‘raw data’ is not the issue. The issue is the datasets used for modeling. Mr Martin has repeatedly told you why, most recently in comment 15 above. Succinctly, without the data sets that Phil Jones admits to having lost, the raw data has no weight in the argument over whether the CO2 based AGW hypothesis is good science. There is no way to independently verify that any treatment of that data does not skew the model results. There is every indication at this point both that it has done so and that it has been purposefully done.
Mr Martin in comment 15 is once again telling you that your claim that the modeling methodology and code that has produced the two disputable claims that there is observable, measurable, and verifiable global warming linked to human industrialization and that anthropogenic CO2 is a factor in that are freely available. If what is available is what those claims are based on, then those claims seem to have been made up out of whole cloth.
Your third strawman argument is your insistence that until the CO2 based AGW skeptics produce a competing hypothesis, they should be ignored as a Flat Earth type of faith based denialist.
This presupposes one thing right off the bat. That the CO2 based AGW hypothesis has already met the tests of independent peer review and independent reproduction of results using the original methodology. Neither is true. Be that as it may, the real inanity here is your clueless insistence that is up to those holding the skeptical view that CO2 based AGW has not met the test required of any scientific hypothesis to prove or disprove the CO2 based AGW hypothesis in the first place. Goy readdresses this above when noting that it is up to the proponents of the hypothesis to do that and he is absolutely correct. Until they do, the healthy skepticism applied to any new hypothesis, and of absolutely essential importance to a hypothesis like CO2 based AGW that if accepted will transform human society, is not and cannot be satisfied.
Without going into the detail I have in answering all this nonsense in other threads, suffice to say quite bluntly that you yourself gainsay any claim of your being a competent scientist and/or understanding the scientific method as long as you take the positions you do based on the arguments you have been making.
Hah. Obviously, Dave II has!
@uburoisc “Beneath all the machinations are a gaggle of Ivy League twits (lawyers, activists, professors) who tried to set up the biggest scam of all time so they could bully and harass every productive industry, world-wide, without limit.”
Especially our affirmative action, Ivy League professor, President.
When it comes to debunking, it’s worth considering what the master debunker has to say:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/805-agw-revisited.html
The Amazing Randi has spent a lifetime exposing charlatans and fraudsters of all kinds. I think his take on AGW is quite reasoned. I especially like his conclusion:
“In my amateur opinion, more attention to disease control, better hygienic conditions for food production and clean water supplies, as well as controlling the filth that we breathe from fossil fuel use, are problems that should distract us from fretting about baking in Global Warming.”
DD
Gabriel, to answer your question, we are no longer required to deal with you in good faith, because a substantial amount of evidence indicates that your ilk has dealt with us in bad faith. Your side has lied to us; you have hidden data, distorted data, and flat-out fabricated data. You have willfully misrepresented the work of others and conspired to ruin the reputations and careers of those who disagreed with you. Your side has concealed its conflicts of interest, flouted the law in the US and the UK, and turned up your noses at the people who tried to hold your use of taxpayer money to account.
The question of AGW is no longer a scientific investigation. It’s a criminal investigation. And the prosecution is not required to explain or justify its motivations to the defendant.
@Gabriel Hanna #9 et sequlae
Whoa! What you claim is just flat wrong. I’ve seen plenty of accurate temperature charts. Here’s a pageful: http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-years-of-temperature-swings/
While you’re at it, another page at the site provides a graphic explanation why CO2 cannot possibly account for any increase in warming even if increased in concntration: http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/4-carbon-dioxide-is-already-absorbing-almost-all-it-can/
Finally, GW was shown to be first-order scientific rubbish almost a year ago (the scientist with the high entrance scores (physicists) are starting to weigh in on the work of the climate guys): http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
Here’s the funny thing. The climate model of the 70s (not at all based on greenhouse gases, but on projecting from historical patterns, as in my first link above) was that we were just ending an anomalous 60-year stretch of the most moderate weather experienced during the ENTIRE HOLOCENE and would be slowly entering a MORE NORMAL pattern of weather variability… hotter and colder and wetter and drier summers and winters–just what we are seeing. Get used to it; it’s normal!
Hey, I appreciate every single point Gabriel Hanna brings up. In fact, I applaud him for it.
We can’t have a rational discussion if we try to silence principled dissent. Oh, wait. That’s precisely what the OTHER side did.
And, if I am looking for mens rea or “intent” to deceive, one of the things I look at, is whether one side is willing to put ALL of their information out for perusal…or if they begin to say things like
1)The evidence is lost
2)The evidence has been destroyed
3)I don’t have to give you evidence, you aren’t worthy of it
4)I “fudged” the evidence by redacting, amending, fiddling with it in a way that is not within the normal course of business
5)I blocked reporters if I didn’t think they were “friendly” already and would report ONLY my side of the debate
6)I engage in a smear campaign of ad hominem attacks against those who disagree
If ONE of these elements is present, it raises reasonable doubt. If two or more of these elements are present it strains credulity. If ALL of these elements are present, somebody has something to hide.
And all the clever defense tactics and all the apologias and all the “lawyering up” of why they didn’t do this and weren’t responsible for that…won’t eradicate this one fact. They acted guilty as hell.
— it’s hard to make a story out of someone saying “that’s silly, we don’t know enough to say that.”
Too bad, because that’s really the only operative truth.
But hell, writers, moviemakers, legions of UN bureaucrats, journalists, so-called scientists chasing grant money, dried up failed vice-presidential candidates of marginal intelligence, warmism religionists celebrating Marxist ideology, would be presidents seeking election and promising to stem the rise in sea levels…they all need work, self-aggrandizement, recognition, power over others, whatever.
So we have a longstanding history of a variety of individuals feeding off this situation, spewing mis- and disinformation for fun, profit and, in some cases, for control and subjugation.
I don’t want to get too far off the thread here…but I have a bone to pick.
Where the hell are the Republicans? This has been going on right under their noses, it appears to my eye to be a clear case of manipulation of a “Weather Y2k” for the purpose of ripping off the taxpayers of Western civilization.
Clearly, the entrenched media were not simply dupes…they know and STILL sit on their hands…which means, once again…if we look at “intent”, they are complicit in the scheme to defraud the purses and pocketbooks of certain “haves” in order to redistribute wealth to the “have nots”…while their cronies rake in the vig…..in the trillions of dollars.
So, where are our watchdogs? Who fights for the “big guy”…the American who has perhaps a better life than a third world country resident? Who cries for the “big guy” when he gets ripped off repeatedly in scheme after scheme after scheme?
It seems to be ok to adopt this mantle of a faux Robin Hood, stealing from the “rich” and giving to the “poor”. By means of lying, deceit, the complete abandonment of our entrenched media to protect the interests of their own countrymen.
But, where the hell are the Republicans? Asleep at the switch…yet again?
@charlie #49:
Finally, GW was shown to be first-order scientific rubbish almost a year ago (the scientist with the high entrance scores (physicists) are starting to weigh in on the work of the climate guys):
I’m flattered that you think physicists are the smartest scientists, but unfortunately the American Insitute of Physics does not think climate science is rubbish.
http://www.aip.org/gov/policy12.html
Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth’s climate. These effects add to natural influences that have been present over Earth’s history. Scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century.
“Human impacts on the climate system include increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and their substitutes, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.), air pollution, increasing concentrations of airborne particles, and land alteration. A particular concern is that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide may be rising faster than at any time in Earth’s history, except possibly following rare events like impacts from large extraterrestrial objects.
“Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have increased since the mid-1700s through fossil fuel burning and changes in land use, with more than 80% of this increase occurring since 1900. Moreover, research indicates that increased levels of carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. It is virtually certain that increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will cause global surface climate to be warmer.
“The complexity of the climate system makes it difficult to predict some aspects of human-induced climate change: exactly how fast it will occur, exactly how much it will change, and exactly where those changes will take place. In contrast, scientists are confident in other predictions. Mid-continent warming will be greater than over the oceans, and there will be greater warming at higher latitudes. Some polar and glacial ice will melt, and the oceans will warm; both effects will contribute to higher sea levels. The hydrologic cycle will change and intensify, leading to changes in water supply as well as flood and drought patterns. There will be considerable regional variations in the resulting impacts.
“Scientists’ understanding of the fundamental processes responsible for global climate change has greatly improved during the last decade, including better representation of carbon, water, and other biogeochemical cycles in climate models. Yet, model projections of future global warming vary, because of differing estimates of population growth, economic activity, greenhouse gas emission rates, changes in atmospheric particulate concentrations and their effects, and also because of uncertainties in climate models. Actions that decrease emissions of some air pollutants will reduce their climate effects in the short term. Even so, the impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations would remain.
“The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change states as an objective the ‘ . . . stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.’ AGU believes that no single threshold level of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere exists at which the beginning of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system can be defined. Some impacts have already occurred, and for increasing concentrations there will be increasing impacts. The unprecedented increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, together with other human influences on climate over the past century and those anticipated for the future, constitute a real basis for concern.
“Enhanced national and international research and other efforts are needed to support climate related policy decisions. These include fundamental climate research, improved observations and modeling, increased computational capability, and very importantly, education of the next generation of climate scientists. AGU encourages scientists worldwide to participate in climate research, education, scientific assessments, and policy discussions. AGU also urges that the scientific basis for policy discussions and decision-making be based upon objective assessment of peer-reviewed research results.
“Science provides society with information useful in dealing with natural hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and drought, which improves our ability to predict and prepare for their adverse effects. While human-induced climate change is unique in its global scale and long lifetime, AGU believes that science should play the same role in dealing with climate change. AGU is committed to improving the communication of scientific information to governments and private organizations so that their decisions on climate issues will be based on the best science.
“The global climate is changing and human activities are contributing to that change. Scientific research is required to improve our ability to predict climate change and its impacts on countries and regions around the globe. Scientific research provides a basis for mitigating the harmful effects of global climate change through decreased human influences (e.g., slowing greenhouse gas emissions, improving land management practices), technological advancement (e.g., removing carbon from the atmosphere), and finding ways for communities to adapt and become resilient to extreme events.”
It’s AGW True Confessions time, Mr. Hanna:
“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.” Climatologist Kevin Trenberth, NCAR, email 10/12/2009
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.” Phil Jones, CRU director, email 7/5/2005
Why do you refuse to believe your own “experts”???
@47DD: Your quotation of Randi really is incomplete without his follow-up:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
I do not, and did not, deny the established fact — arrived at by extensive scientific research — that average global temperatures have increased by a bit less than one Celsius degree. My commentary was concerned with my amateur confusion about the myriad of natural phenomena that obviously bring about worldwide climate changes and whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences. Yes, I’m aware of the massive release of energy — mostly heat — that we’ve produced by exhuming and burning oil, natural gas, and coal. We’ve also attacked forests and turned them into fuel by converting them into paper at further energy expense, paper that is also burned, in turn. My remarks, again, are directed at the complexity of determining whether this GW is anthropogenic or not. I do not deny that possibility. In fact, I accept it as quite probable.
“I do not, and did not, deny the established fact — arrived at by extensive scientific research — that average global temperatures have increased by a bit less than one Celsius degree.”
Bingo. Why should anyone care if planet temperatures might have “have increased by a bit less than one Celsius degree”? How does this justify draconian controls over the citizens behavior and inevitable financial destitution? This question is being conveniently ignored.
G. Hanna, #53
Obama’s Sec’y of Energy Steven Chu was co-winner (1997) of the Nobel Prize in physics…
Last year, Chu (who acknowledged not being up to speed on the whole AGW thing) recommended painting roofs white to deflect the sun’s rays.
Why, an idea right up there with another physicist’s recommendation (perhaps a not serious one) to shoot a ring of pollution around the earth & block the sun’s rays that way.
Maybe those guys should stick to physics.
Anyway, the topic du jour isn’t whether or not manmade emissions do or do not contribute to weather (or even to climate) but the perfidy and lies surrounding the AGW movement that have come to light over the past 6 months or so.
OK Gabriel
Please enlighten us all and answer these simple questions.
1. True science is falsifiable. What specific data would prove that AGW is false? Please note that “More cooling than we had since 1999″ is not a scientific answer.
2. If humans can take action and stop global warming, how will we know when we are done. Again, please note that “We are never really done because you can never have too much clear air” is also not a scientific answer.
3. If humans can cause global warming, then we can also cause global cooling. What actions would you propose if climate science shows that we are heading into a period of global cooling.
One other thing:
“The complexity of the climate system makes it difficult to predict some aspects of human-induced climate change: exactly how fast it will occur, exactly how much it will change, and exactly where those changes will take place.”
If there is no “exactly”, there is no science.
Science versus science? Man-caused global warming may account for a bit of the temperature changes, but how much or how little? Hmmm? How about closer looks at naturally caused warmings or coolings to put things in perspective. Thus I was happy to see the following this week:
“Computer-simulated results based on climate models are never a replacement for actual measured data, and they should never be used to draw conclusions when actual measured data contradicts those models. So the results of three different peer-reviewed papers show that over a period of 36 years, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis is disproven. ” –By Gary Thompson, in American Thinker 2/17/10:
The growth of climate change as a movement may be easier to understand if it is seen as the most recent outcome of a complex self organizing system (the environmental movement) that started to gain strength in the 1960s. 3 groups battled for control of the movement -preservationists, conservationists and the new left. The new left represented by the likes of Barry Commoner saw pollution as the product of capitalist excess. Most importantly the creed called for attacking the underlying problem of capitalistic excess-means of production- rather than fixing past environmental problems. The works of Ehrlich and Holdren (our science adviser) put the blame more specifically on inexpensive energy. The attack on energy would become a focus for the movement.
Climate change is the most recent incarnation of the energy war -no nukes, no drilling, no new refineries, mercury and acid rain being earlier campaigns. By the end of the 1970s the left’s philosophy was in total control of the environmental movement. Many conservationists and preservationists do not yet understand they have been rendered irrelevant- they are in the words of Steven Gould-”dead clades walking.”
With protectionism and conservation pushed aside -civil rights and environmentalism battled for supremacy in the court of public opinion. Environmental Justice EJ was the ideology that allowed the environmentalists and civil rights to find common cause in 1990. EJ claims the poor and 3rd world are the primary victims of pollution and as such are due compensation. Climate change is how the price is determined and cap and trade is how the judgement is to be collected. Green economics (which has a meaning far beyond windmills to the left) is the replacement for capitalism.
Environmental Justice was born in Chicago’s United Church of Christ(Yup that one)- the idea of Rev Ben Chavis working under Rev Wright. The first EJ legislation was submitted into Congress by Al Gore and became the marching orders of EPA under its Chief Carole Browner – now our energy czar. (Current EPA chief Jackson is also a leading EJ activist.) The 1990 Rio conference married EJ with a similar UN vision. WWF and IUCN (both quasi UN “special status” organizations) were to take leading roles in climate change along with the US NGOs. It is why we see Lubchenco (IUCN) as our head of NOAA.
The NGOs were a daily source of alarmist press releases. News sells advertising not news and the NGO model of scare the pants off them was a proven news strategy. Plus the media would now have most of their “news” stories written for free. It is not surprising that MSM would seek to undermine what for them was was a valuable commodity.
There is much more to this story but the above is a quick overview. Do not see this as directed or planned but simply as a self organizing system. Many ideologies vied for control-some won and some lost- new turf wars commenced again with winners and losers and importantly each time there were those that adapted to the changing paradigm and the opportunities that were presented. The bureaucracies and politics also organized to take advantage of the public attention. Rent seekers (initially Enron) and later companies like GE sought to seize financial advantages afforded by climate change. See this as diverse interests finding common cause – the shared the illusion of alliance. Cap and trade as a selected system solution. There is no conspiracy here- it is far too complex. Conspiracy is the word we too often use to describe an outcome of a complex system we do not understand.
Most citizens who pay the salaries of bureaucrats and government-funded scientists are not themselves scientists. Using technical language, it is easy to snow most tax-paying citizens into either going along with the government program, or into believing that they themselves are at fault for not being able to precisely follow the arguments being made.
Climate is too complex even for climate scientists to understand. But by using numerical methods and complex differential equations they can build an edifice of mathematical physics that convinces themselves that they know what is happening — even when they do not.
This is the pomposity of Gabriel Hanna and the rest. They pretend to know what they cannot know — and use the pretense in order to suck taxpayers of the US and the advanced world dry, and divert hundreds of billions of dollars to third world dictatorships. That is the man behind the curtain, the ugly truth behind the equations. US industry will be shut down due to energy starvation, while the US government continues to pay funds it does not have to the United Nations and other fronts for redistribution to corrupt governments.
Gabriel Hanna is the flak-man, boys and girls. He is not arguing, he is throwing flak into the discussion. Since there is a lot of money in the carbon game, such persons are paid to provide this flak-service.
Gavin Schmidt operates Realclimate.org on the government dime. He denies this, but it has been demonstrated time and again that Schmidt is not honest on this point.
People such as Gabriel Hanna are a dime a dozen. They are easily bought. But they do provide a service to the thinking world. They demonstrate how easily the quasi-logic of the obfuscators can be penetrated.
For Gabriel Hanna in #9,
First of all, the so-called scientists that believe in AGW tell us that there has been 1 degree C of warming in the past 160 years. BY THEIR OWN ADMISSION in the CRU emails, the “thumb on the scale” due to their own machinations is equal to about 0.5 C, or 50% of this warming. Fifty percent is a significant number. It not only changes the overall amount of warming in the past 160 years, it also changes the slope of the “warming curve”.
So, if we take their thumb off of the scale we are left with 0.5 C of warming over 160 years, or 0.03125 C per decade of warming. 0.03 C/Decade is well within the scale of “warming events” from the past, and is not outside of the realm of natural variability; therefore there is absolutely nothing unusual in such warming whatsoever.
As far as CO2 causing warming, yes, it can. However, it does so on a logarithmic scale. In the absence of any positive feedback, CO2 warms the atmosphere by 1C/doubling of concentration. This means that if we doubled the current CO2 concentration from 390ppm to 780ppm, the temperature would go up by 1C, all other factors being equal.
Unfortunately, all other factors are NOT equal. The AGW believers (err.. “scientists”) have always claimed that ALL feedback in the system would be highly positive, especially water-vapor feedback, and this would cause between 3C and 5C warming per doubling of CO2 rather than 1C. Recent papers have shown that water-vapor feedback is NOT strongly positive, and is, in fact, negative. What this means is that the interactions between CO2 and water vapor actually cause the warming from a doubling of CO2 to be LESS THAN 1C (not more).
Also, the global temperature networks have periodically and routinely eliminated temperature stations in higher elevation, cooler, and more rural areas. What this means is that in the early temperature data-set, many of these cooler stations were included, thus driving the early average lower. In later days, as many of these stations were dropped, the fact that only warmer, lower altitude, and more urban stations were present in the record artificially drove the average higher. This means that any plot of temperature increase has had it’s slope skewed to a much more positive (and alarming) value than it would have had without this “March of the Thermometers”.
Finally, the AGW believers did not participate in science, they merely participated in pseudo-scientific prognostication (like alchemists or fortune-tellers). The scientific method requires that a scientist share ALL RAW DATA, along with experimental design, data analysis programs and parameters, and results. This is absolutely crucial because according to the scientific method, an hypothesis can never be proven, it can only be falsifiable. If the rest of the scientific community agrees that the raw data, the experimental design, the data analysis parameters, and the conclusions all seem reasonable, that DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE HYPOTHESIS HAS BEEN PROVEN. It only means that it is the current best available hypothesis to explain the observed phenomenon. It might be tomorrow, or it might be 1000 years from now, but eventually a better hypothesis to explain the phenomenon will come along and supplant the current one.
Unfortunately for the believers, they lost/destroyed raw data, did not share their experimental designs, and did not share their data analysis parameters, so their conclusions could neither be supported nor falsified. Since their conclusions could neither be supported nor falsified, what they did was not science, but something else entirely.
I am not eager to send my earnings to Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, and all the rest of the corrupt henchmen of the undeveloped world. Much better for the UN to be toppled into Turtle Bay.
This will continue until there are investigations, until there are sworn statements, until there are trials for fraud, until there are jails sentences for those that tried to pull the biggest and most audacious fraud in the history of the world for their friends , their fellow co-conspirators, their business associates, their political crony’s and the rest of the Algores, the United Nations and their henchmen. This is being treated by our political class as a non crime but the only reason this hasn’t cost the United States $$$ Trillions of dollars is because the blogs and other than MSM would never let go. Our own politician’s were/are in on the scam and were planning on making millions/billions and trillions; the have to go for that reason. We have an Oligarchy of 536 mostly thugs and criminals who won’t listen to the People, “we’ve had enough and won’t take it anymore.”
Why can’t you people just shut up and do what President Obama tells you is the right thing to do? Gabriel Hanna and Barack Obama know what is best for you. Be good little boys and girls, and let the big strong smart men of social justice do your thinking for you!
For Gabriel Hanna, #11.
“Sub-boxes with no temperature station within 1200km were excluded”
How convenient. Because NASA-GISS has chosen to drop temperature stations in cooler, higher elevation, and more rural locations, this means that they can omit the vast majority of Siberia (most Siberian sub-boxes no longer have an “accepted” temperature station within 1200km), and also most of the Arctic, and most of Antarctica.
For example, even though the Canadian Meteorological Service has 1400 temperature stations in Canada, NASA-GISS only uses data from 35 of them, and only 1 of the 35 is above the arctic circle.
But of course, I am sure you think that will not bias the data in any way whatsoever.
Also, think about it this way:
1200km is about 730 miles. What this means is that if there is no temperature data for a place like Steamboat Springs, CO (elevation 6900 ft.) but there is data for Wichita, KS (elevation 1320 ft.) the data for Wichita will be used for the entire box (regarless of the fact that most of that “box” is actually up in the mountains whereas Wichita is in the plains below.
Of course, THAT wouldn’t bias the data at all either now, would it?
Cousin Dave,
Phil Willis, who headed up the UK investigation of East Anglia started his focused on two things that were revealed by the email dump to be, putting it mildly, questionable. One was obstruction of valid Freedom of Information Act requests for reasonable disclosure of publicly funded research documentation. The other focused on whether there was reason to suspect the provenance of the data used in that research. Put in question was data integrity generally and data suppression and/or data manipulation specifically.
I believe that Phil Jones did little more than preemptively provide rather vague and self-serving answers to the investigation in a obfuscatory attempt to close off both lines of inquiry while revealing as little as possible. Call it the first meeting with the DA trying to cut a deal.
I can emphasize with that to some SMALL extent as a few scientists poised to go down in flames once the full extent of the Co2 based AGW fraud is exposed aren’t guilty of anything more than being too trusting of others in their community. Happily though, I don’t think Phil’s gambit worked. The DA in this instance, the UK investigation, wasn’t buying the last I read about it. The DA so to speak is asking for full disclosure as a prerequesite – full elocution or no deal.
Not just Phil Jones’ reputation, which is already pretty much trashed, will be damaged. Quite a few scientific reputations that richly deserve to be discredited will be at risk. Someone will salvage what they can by turning their coats. One or more of the guiltiest will be driven by the fear that someone else will close off that route to redemption by beating them to the punch. Always happens when it hits the fan. When that happens, we’ll begin to get real insight into collusion leading outside the scientific community where criminal conduct is easier to define.
We’ve also attacked forests and turned them into fuel by converting them into paper at further energy expense, paper that is also burned…
My concern about attacking forests has a different emphasis.
I accept that there is a relationship between deforestation and changes (climactic and otherwise) for example, that decreasing snow pack on Kilimanjaro is not unrelated to deforestation at its base & broader regions at lower altitude.
I don’t think that human beings can simply wake up and decide to replace complex forest systems.
It’s a shame if all the politicized, agenda driven emphasis on AGW has actually taken attention away from more substantive and demonstrable insults to the planet.
@Gabriel Hanna #14,
Please review your own links. Educate us all as to which ones specifically provide the exact RAW UNADJUSTED temperature datasets used by Phil Jones, James Hansen, et al. for their analyses of 1850-present trends in temperature.
(Hint, none of the links you provided provide the raw unadjusted 1850-present station data which they used).
Perhaps you should click on your own links and figure out exactly what they are before you admonish US to click on them for the supposed raw data.
Thanks for this summary of enlightment. To those of us who have been following the unraveling of this hoax via such websites as wattsupwiththat, climate-audit, climate-skeptic, etc. this article gives a good overall picture of this sunshine. It’s good to have one place to direct those who have depended upon MSM for their news.
Keep up the good work.
@52. cfbleachers: – Where the hell are the Republicans?
They left politics. Members of Congress and other branches of government past and present – who happened to be members of the Republican Party – have for the most part regressed to exactly what you described, cf’: ripping off the people.
The U.S.A. is now foundering at the hands of openly narcissist governance, which has come to see the People as objects – mere sources of revenue and subjects to be managed – rather than the hundreds of millions of individual sources of initiative (to borrow from Lyle Rossiter) that made America an exception to the historic rule.
And that didn’t just happen in 2008. Or 2006. It’s been an ongoing process that began with Wilson’s and FDR’s influence, and has gone hand-in-hand with the slow shift from the Republican Form of Government guaranteed by our Constitution, to therapeutic governance and “compassionate conservatism”. Both of those infantilize the People and perpetuate a pathological dependence, whereby a morally adolescent notion of entitlement to “government” (read: productive Taxpayers’) support and services slowly replaces the morally mature, individual responsibility necessary for individual liberty to exist.
Without that socially suicidal sea change toward the left, AGW would have been laughed at as the fad it was, and is.
The works of Ehrlich and Holdren (our science adviser) put the blame more specifically on inexpensive energy. The attack on energy would become a focus for the movement.
And don’t forget Barack Obama’s exact words (slightly paraphrased…)…”With institution of cap and trade, energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.
It’s very difficult to view the cap and trade agenda as benign or to separate it from an anti-capitalist (even Marxist)agenda.
The thought system of every marxist/progressive on the planet is completely unchanged, unfazed even, by recent negative revelations about the AGW movement.
Illegitimacy doesn’t change squat about the agenda.
Gabriel Hanna,
Are you aware that the vast majority of MEMBERS (the actual SCIENTISTS) of the AIP have roundly REJECTED the 2004 statement (AIP Policy 12) which you linked?
If you are aware that most AIP memebers roundly rejected the statements of policy 12, you conveniently forgot to mention it in your post.
@ Gabriel Hanna, #23 this time,
Once again, absolutely none of the links you cite in your post point to any of the actual raw unprocessed data used by ANYONE for calculating temperature change globally from 1850-present. Yes, some of the links do provide MORE CURRENT data, and some of the links do provide older data (but it is not RAW data), but none of the links provide the actual raw data sets which were used in the analyses which are under dispute.
#55 Gabriel,
Come on now. Many AGW skeptics accept that the average temperature may be going up by somewhere in the neighborhood of 1C/century. It is attributing that change to manmade activities, particularly CO2 that is controversial. And even more controversial is the existence of strong positive-feedback. Randi is expressing a recognition that the myriad factors that influence climate are extraordinarily complex. He would be the first to admit that whether he BELIEVES in AGW or not is irrelevant. What counts is the quality and integrity of the science.
Climategate has shown that the science is highly suspect. Overinterpreted at best, fraudulently manipulated at worst. As a scientist myself (not climate science), I would like to think that it is simply individuals caught up in the heady excitement of the moment. If it turns out that it was more than that (i.e. fraud), then I fear it will tarnish all science. That is why it is important to get to the truth of the matter.
DD
Gabriel, #28 this time.
Once again, the ECA data is NOT the raw, unadjusted data set used by Jones et. al. for their studies.
You keep coming up with data sets that are supposedly raw, and saying “see I told you so!”, but you are missing the bus entirely.
In order to either support of falsify the global warming hypothesis, we must have THE ACTUAL DATA USED BY THE SCIENTISTS, not some other raw data or other adjusted data WHICH THEY DID NOT USE.
Using data which they did not use does not do us any good as far as supporting or falsifying their hypotheses. Only using the actual data set which they used will allow us to do that.
So,
Tell me where I can find, EXACTLY THE FOLLOWING:
ALL raw data used in all climatological studies done by Jones, Mann, Trenbreth, or any other scientists that produced papers supporting AGW. They are scientists, right? Scientists are supposed to understand the scientific method. One of the requirements of the scientific method is the preservation of raw data for later reproduction upon request of other scientists.
ALL of the experimental design parameters for these experiments. Again, a requirement of the scientific method is that you must preserve the design of your experiment so that it is repeatable by other scientists. An experiment which is not repeatable is not science because it cannot be validated.
All of the data analysis parameters used to “adjust” the data. Again, science requires that you METICULOUSLY go through all of the methodology of not only HOW you adjusted the data, but WHY the data was adjusted, so that other scientists can evaluate your adjustments and judge whether such adjustments were valid or not. Unexplained adjustments are, once again, not science.
Jones, Mann, Briffa, Trenberth, and many others have been asked repeatedly to produce everything which I have described above, so that other scientists could attempt to support or falsify their hypotheses as required by the scientific method. According to Jones, Mann, Brifffa, Trenberth, et. al. THEY THEMSELVES have either been unable or unwilling to supply other scientists with all of the above items. Apparently you seem to think that you can using the wonderful links you have provided us in your comments.
Go for it!
#53 Gabriel Hanna:
“the American Insitute of Physics does not think climate science is rubbish.”
You mean the *board* of the AIP does. The rank and file, the actual membership, are in fact in open revolt over it. Co-opting the top is after all standard Leftist SOP, like the enlistment of the AMA and AARP to support Obamacare, notwithstanding overwhelming membership opposition.
The fact of the matter is that very few scientists, real ones, have bothered to look at “climate science.” They’ve just taken it on trust that their colleagues were honest and ethical, or at least that the system would winnow out the chaff. Recent events have opened their eyes.
With a friend like Gabriel Hanna—the global warming alarmists do not need any enemies. He has inadvertently given the game away. Hanna candidly admits that the earth’s temperatures have, at the most, risen by a mere fraction. He is making a complete fool of Al Gore, Jr.
1. Martin Owens:
Eco- Enron!
The CEO of a private company who pulled half of these tricks would find himself up for fraud, racketeering and probably money-laundering too.
It was Enron that pioneered the carbon-trading scheme! How’s that for irony?
Bohemond,
‘You mean the *board* of the AIP does.’
When you think about that a bit, the board of AIP still currently holding to their position both makes sense and is the right thing to do. As you point out, they took it on trust that their colleagues were honest and ethical. The AIP board undoubtedly rues the day that they accepted the CO2 based AGW hypothesis on that basis without examining whether it went truely went through the usual independent per review and reproducibility hoops.
So they end up with egg on their faces for their initial mistake. A mistake they never would have made had the mounting evidence that the hypothesis is at best based on flawed science been available then. While the evidence is fast becoming incontrovertible that the hypothesis is not just based on flawed science but may well be fraudulent science, it is not quite at the tipping point yet. It’s imploding, but the rebound that will actually blow it apart hasn’t happened yet. I suspect that the AIP board, along with more than a few other governing boards for other sciences, is understandably wary of making any pronouncement of a change in position until the dust settles to the point where they can do so without any remote fear of having to retract a second time.
In other words, they are applying the proper caution and skepticism to the debunking of a major scientific hypothesis that they undoubtedly at this juncture fervently wish they had applied when they originally endorsed it.
Is Gabriel Hanna the new and improved Troll Version 2.0? The homos,davids, etc. must be out of the game, so in comes the 2nd string. . . How long till this poor little fella is home crying to his mommy?
@Gabriel Hanna, #53
The link I provided you was a peer-reviewed science paper from a physicist. What you provided in reply was apparently from the PR staff of a lobbying group singing the song that attracts funding these days.
More than one way to raise temperatures by averaging.
Max temp. 60 degrees
Min temp. 30
AVERAGE 45 degrees
Max temp 60 (remains same)
Min temp 40
AVERAGE 50 degrees
The temp. increased 5 degrees without any actual increase in temps on the high end.
There is no way to get a global average temp. that actually means anything and makes sense or is applicable to the real world. What useful and revealing info do I get from averaging temps of St. Paul and Miami?? Where did the rise in temps occur? 34 U.S. States show no stat increase in temps. What increased…the MINIMUM or the Maximum temps?? It’s all a scientific slight-of-hand. Once the max temp is reached, how long does it remain there? Could be a matter of minutes or a few hours before it starts to decrease. Today’s low in my area…22 and the high 58, so how do I dress if I’m told that the average temp. is 40 degrees. Average means nothing in telling me what is actually happening!
They never tell us what the actual temp increase is, when they declare…”hottest year ever”, etc. It’s so ridiculous that most people would think them nuts.
There needs to be a special jail built for all these people that have caused such misery and scaring children. What kind of person tells a 6 yr. old their home is going to be covered by the ocean, as happened in a school class and the girl went home crying. That’s psycho. Madoff is a saint compared to these heartless criminals. Showing Gore’s movie to grade-schoolers should be a criminal offense and prosecuted as child abuse.
I’ve seen rather a lot of this ‘data not released’ or ‘data lost’.
I think the data that has not been released often refers to things like tree ring data sets. The analysis would exclude ‘noisy’ data sets and use complex techniques like wavelet analysis to produce a data series. The intermediate data series may well not be kept so that direct tracing of the origin of a datum may prove difficult unless that was the original intention of the project (like the boring accounting systems that I work on). The scientists are also on a budget and the the results are more important than the audit. This is only my opinion but it’s not always practical to keep all the intermediate stages of data analysis, this does not invalidate the result.
Another point is that releasing all the data would lead to more questions and more valuable research budget being swallowed up.
If this type of data is to be released it needs to be funded properly so that it can be supported.
Finally not all of the data are in the public domain and may remain the property of the institution funding the research.
This is purely my opinion, I do not seek to establish the truth, merely the reality.
These factual details are for criminal trials in the courts. “Global Warming” is a lie, a conscious, malicious fraud perpetrated for, 1) dictatorial political power (Obama); 2) professional status and grant money (Jones, Mann, Hansen); and, 3) corrupt, personal financial gain (Gore, Pachuri). That case is closed. “The debate is over.” Why argue with dupes and liars? Let’s focus on convictions and sentencing.
All we need to know is: The World Is Not Warming. Ice caps and glaciers are not melting, rain forests and polar bears are not dying, sea level is not rising, hurricanes and tornadoes are not escalating. Frantic gobbles on the Left to the contrary, the overall temperature trend for the past 100 years has been stable, and for the past fifteen years temperatures have been cooling, not warming. Industrial civilization does not affect global climate. Man could not change it if we tried.
Science is about honest proof and skepticism, and I have never been taken in by what to me is an obvious, juvenile scam. Warmists are the “Deniers,” petulant children running in circles, pointing fingers and shouting bad names. They are “useful idiots” taken in by the propaganda-du-jour without an ounce of normal, intelligent adult reflection. Warmists are delusional, too smug and arrogant to realize they’re being played for fools.
I think we are heading into a dramatic and prolonged global cold phase that will shorten growing seasons and lower crop yields. The promoters of Global Warming’s huge economic distortions and waste of productive resources are likely to be responsible for mass starvation. They don’t care; but they should be held accountable.
Mike (#86) –
The release of tree ring data sets with respect to climate science is immaterial. The “hide the decline” tick invalidated it.
If the divergence between tree ring data and present day temps over the last 50 years was real (and one must assume it was since they needed to hide the decline), then the correlation between tree ring data and past climate is not just suspect, but logically invalid. And therefore that particular support for AGW (and, of course, any flavor of hockey stick) has no validity. This kind of logical disconnect on the part of a first year engineering student would be cause for sending him/her to some other curriculum – like basket weaving.
Secondly, for over 20 years, massive amounts of “valuable research budget” have been swallowed up in generating and fiddling with computer models that have failed to produce results that areeither reasonable or accurate. Releasing all the data would be avery minor hit on the budget by comparison.
The AGW people really HAVE considered a lot of the related weather and statistical phenomenon, and often sneer at the deniers who can appear to lurch from one over-stated, undercomprehended assertion to another, but are not close to being knowledgeable enough to even analyze thousands of pieces of data without falling into mistakes that the warmists can (and do) mock. However, that does not prove that the warmists have not made a number of mistakes, intentional, or otherwise. We have one camp that is suspected of bending things to “prove” warming and another camp, who say “AHA! see this disproves the WHOLE thing” every time a new question arises.
The warmists claim that given their method of determining anomalies, dumping the cold stations does NOT skew the data. Many skeptics claim that it must, but I’m certainly not sure how that phenomenon plays out. My problem (one of many) is to separate the points of the skeptic/deniers which are valid challenges to the theories from the people who can only understand one thing, and that one thing convinces (apparently) them that AGW can’t be happening. It is good that the warmists feet are being held to the fire, but not that some people are getting excited about burning witches.
What would be ideal would be to give a opposite pair like Lindzen and one of the warmists who actually does have his data sets more or less intact a couple million bucks and have Lindzen “check” the data. He is one of the few skeptics whose intelligence and knowledge the warmists respect. In the past, they would never have agreed to this, but given the current pressure on them, maybe one will, and hell might freeze over, too, I suppose.
Michael Crichton observed that we should demand at least the rigor of double-blind drug tests for a policy that impacts hundreds of souls (much less billions of people and trillions of dollars) based on a believed to be technical/scientific “finding of fact” (v. a political judgment which has to stand on its own and face the electorate without an appeal to a higher truth).
Nothing in the climate science record so far suggests one millionth this discipline (and we’ve no reason to expect any university research to be able to meet the corporate bar – I can’t think of a single case where they have – so perhaps we’re also employing the wrong people to do the data collection and analysis of any issue with this import). The U.S. didn’t win WWII with government manufactured anything, it paid (if not conscripted) our best companies to do that job for it.
The dayfiles at http://www.climateaudit.com remind me of archeology, teasing apart the remnants and trying to recreate the original conditions and transformations that could have left the evidence that’s now in view (at times with startling discoveries – including how what appears to be an aversion to modern tools made mistakes inconceivable today commonplace.. because they chose to write code).
Which all means the original work certainly was not science. And not the product of competent scientists or expert peer-review (in other settings would be rejected out of hand by a good editor – who would demand documentation of provenance and step-by-step procedures that the educated non-practitioner could repeat – similar to the requirement for documentation in a patent).
#87 Tulsa Jack
“Why argue with dupes and liars? Let’s focus on convictions and sentencing.”
I agree.
I very much hope that the trials will be televised. I can visualize ALGORELEONI being led into the court room wearing an orange jump suit.
Dave II, the Linzen and Choi papers are interesting, but they have their own problems; that doesn’t mean they’re wrong but I’m not convinced by them either.
Gabriel, the point that we somehow seem to keep missing here is this: both the UK Met Office, and Phil Jones, have said in so many words that they cannot release all the raw data, Jones because he isn’t good with detail, the Met Office because some of it is considered proprietary. I fully agree with you that large amounts of data are available; this data could quite plausibly be used to build a new global temperature reconstruction. But in order to replicate the HADCRU reconstruction the existence of other data is insufficient.
Now, it’s worth considering the actual process we’re talking about. The full sequence of processing steps, in outline, is like this:
(1) Collect all the appropriate raw data
(2) select the appropriate stations to match them with grid points
(3) adjust the data to account for inhomogeneities, gaps, and so on
(4) adjust the data further to get imputed high/low or average temps for each grid point
(5) from that compute the global mean temp.
Then repeat steps 1-5 for every year (or month, or some other appropriate interval) in order to find the change in temp over time.
As it stands right now, as far as I can see, we’re unable to replicate (1): it’s just not possible to both be able to collect all the raw data used in the CRU dataset and be consistent with the Met press release or Jones’ own statements that all the data is either not available any longer, or can’t be released because of proprietary concerns and nondisclosure agreements.
It has so far not been possible to replicate (2): there are still outstanding FOI requests for the selection criteria. In the mean time,however, a number of different investigators have investigated different geographic subsets of the data; ion every case of which I’m aware, they have found that the selection criteria seem to lead to a warming bias that isn’t present in the complete set of raw data. This suggests selection bias, but doesn’t prove it. On the other hand, the consistency with which selection results in a warming signal not in the complete data set is itself an issue: the probability that this would happen with random error is very small, although > 0. We need to know the selection procedure to evaluate it for systematic error.
In any case, don’t get confused: my own opinion is that there has been significant warming since the end of the Little Ice Age — as I’ve said, that’s how we know it was the little Ice Age — that it’s entirely possible that there is an anthropogenic component to that warming, and increasing CO2 from industrialization may be a forcing in that anthropogenic contribution. What I’m unsure about is the magnitude, and the net anthropogenic contribution after any other homeostatic forcings. The other side of that is that, as Phil Jones said to the BBC, it’s unclear that the actual slope of this warming is different in a statistically significant degree from previous, pre-industrial warming periods. This makes me wonder if the CO2-forced AGW hypothesis can be distinguished from the null hypothesis.
Let me thank #43 Anon for the link to this lovely post, interesting both because it’s a nice use of Clojure in practice, and because it uses a very large data set to attempt to reconstruct the similar curves. Rather than repeat his conclusions, I’m going to urge everyone to go look for themselves.
Charlie Martin-..”Dave II, the Linzen and Choi papers are interesting, but they have their own problems; that doesn’t mean they’re wrong but I’m not convinced by them either.”
I’m curious…what are “their own problems” you find there?
Certainly can’t be the lack of verifiable, peer-reviewable data…
Anyway, just another log on the fire to burn this charade to the ground!
On 2/19/2010 Gabriel Hanna wrote: “No climate skeptic has produced a temperature record that doesn’t agree . . .” Yet, Mr. Gore, certainly not a climate skeptic, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” shows a 450,000 year [NOAA?] graph of oscillations of earth temperature and CO2 concentrations in which temperature changes, more often than not, precede changes in CO2. It is a truism that causes precede their effects, so it cannot be claimed from those data that changes in CO2 cause changes in temperature. The opposite conclusion is the more likely, but it is even more likely, given that the temporal relationship between the two variables is not absolutely fixed one way or the other, that some more general factor/factors is/are driving the variables – - i.e., they may not be tightly causally related, only indirectly correlated due to, no doubt, multiple causal factors which also interact with one another.
Dave II, the major problem is that it’s hard to correlate the data Lindzen and Choi are using with some other measures of global temp. (See, eg, Lubos Motl here or Roy Spencer here.)
I had an interesting chat with a NASA guy on Thursday (off the record, so I can’t tell you who) about the issues involved with dealing with the really upper atmosphere and its behavior, and they’re really pretty hard — in fact, the buzzword for the atmosphere between 100,000 feet (about the upper limit for balloons) and 300,000 feet (100 km, the definition of “space”) is “the “ignorosphere” because we know so little about it.
More than that, though, is that the notion that this one paper is the once and final refutation of “global warming”, the “smoking gun” that ends the argument. That’s what Hansen et al would have you believe of some of their papers too. Science doesn’t work like that. Lindzen and Choi are results that contradict some of the global warming feedback models; they don’t falsify the whole AGW idea.
As part of their punishment for being lying creeps, these Climategate guys including Al Gored, should have to buy back all the Prisis people bought based on their stupid gloBULL Warming Religion. All these people have now is a pregnant skateboard with a $3,500 battery in it…
RICO