Pielke Sr.: Climategate Emails Just a Small Sample of a Broad Issue (PJM Exclusive)
Professor Roger Pielke Sr. is mentioned often in the Climategate data dump emails — generally unkindly. Professor Pielke is an atmospheric scientist at CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University, a former Colorado State climatologist, and an active critic of the IPCC process. (A more detailed biography is appended below.)
In a PJ Media exclusive, Dr. Pielke kindly agreed to an email interview regarding his reaction to the CRU emails and his opinion of their implications.
PJM: The release of the purloined emails and files from the UEA Climatic Research Unit has been a shock that still reverberates in the world of climate science, and among the critics of the current state of climate science. On the one hand, it has led some people to denounce “global warming” as a “hoax”; on the other, RealClimate.org apparently dismisses it as a tempest in a teacup. In your opinion, how important are these revelations?
Pielke: Both those who denounce “global warming” as a hoax and RealClimate’s claim that this is a “tempest in a teapot” are incorrect. With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects. The warming occurs through the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and certain aerosols, and cooling [occurs due to] other types of aerosols. Land use change due to human land management also effects warming and cooling forcings.
With respect to the RealClimate dismissal of the emails, however, there are serious issues exposed by the emails — including the goal of these scientists to prevent proper scientific disclosure of their data, as well as to control what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments. The IPCC assessment, with which major policy decisions are being made, involves the individuals in the emails who have senior leadership positions.
PJM: Do you feel these revelations suggest scientific misconduct on anyone’s part?
Pielke: I will defer to independent assessment of this particular episode. However, it is very important to realize that this is just a sample of what is a much broader goal of the leadership of the IPCC process to control what science the policymakers receive.
PJM: The CRU has now announced its intention to make all data freely available; at the same time, they announced that much of their raw data had been deleted/destroyed. Is the “value-added” data set useful? How much of a loss was the destruction of the original data? Can the original data be recovered, say, by returning to original source documents?
Pielke: The “value-added” terminology just means that they have adjusted the data based on a number of effects, each of which involves statistical uncertainty and bias. It certainly should be possible to return to the original data and recreate (and add photographs of the observing sites). However, the original data should also be at NCDC and GISS, so these sources of this information should be sought as well.
The photographs are essential, however, in order to determine if the locations where the temperatures are being observed are well-sited. Anthony Watts has documented that this is a major concern in the U.S. (Watts, A. 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? 28 pages, March 2009 The Heartland Institute), and this also appears to be true elsewhere in the world.
PJM: Do these revelations call the utility of the peer review system into question? Is it, as some have suggested, the worst method except for all the others? What changes could be made to improve peer review?
Pielke: This episode shows there are problems with the peer review process when editors (who are “judges”) introduce their own biases in the review process with their selection of referees and with their decisions. One suggested improvement is to publish the reviews and papers (at least electronically) of all rejected papers and reviews of all accepted papers.
PJM: Anyone who has followed your blog for some years knows that you have had your own issues with the people included in the “Jones-Mann-Wigley clique.” Do you feel some degree of vindication now?
Pielke: Of course, it is always pleasant to have documentation that these individuals are inappropriately using their senior positions to prejudice the scientific assessment and publication process, as I have reported on my weblog for several years. What is more important, however, is that the significance of this breach of the scientific method be recognized by the policymakers and other scientific colleagues who have requested climate assessments.
Science, as we have understood it since Francis Bacon, is dead. Like a zombie, it retains a few of the superficial characteristics of life — lab coats, test tubes, and the occasional Large Hadron Collider — but none of the essentials that constitute honest intellectual inquiry capable of producing objective, trustworthy conclusions. It cannot and will not be revived until scientists worldwide wean themselves away from governmental funds.
Nothing is more addictive than government funding…and governments have no better lever with which to acquire justifications for increasing their power than the “findings” and “discoveries” of government-funded science. Draw the moral.
When you have to use fraud to support your thesis, you aren’t doing it right.
In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States warned in his farewell speech not to trust the “military-industrial complex.” That’s well known phrase often quoted by the Left when criticising Defense Budgets. What is far less known is a quote warning against Government support of scientific research. Eisenhower said, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” {emphasis mine, ed.}
#1 Francis wrote: …It cannot and will not be revived until scientists worldwide wean themselves away from governmental funds.”
———
Yeah, that might happen. Just think of defense related research, then space, then medicine etc.
Obviously, the potential for and presence of huge abuse exists in all those areas, but welcome to the 21st Century.
All you can do is try to have as many checks and balances as possible. Our government is simply the biggest of all the big businesses involved. The China business is coming on strong, though.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics,
What a tangled web they weaved;
Lots of suppporting lies, including
the siamese twins:
Research is so expensive that only
government can fund it; Tell that to
Moore and Gates. Tell that to the
US Navy, which placed the tiny wager
they could afford on a dark horse, and
won big: Polywell Fusion power plants
to power the Meteor Cannon and Ray Guns on their 21st century combatant vessels.
Cheap electic power is the root of all
manufacturing economic growth, and would
have been developped by the private sector,
_if_ TPTB, mainly the Feds, had not bound
and gagged innovation with patent law and
bureaucratic red tape.
Well,something tells me that before long there are going to be some great deals available at Honest Al’s Used Carbon Credit Lot
There is much more bias and filtering of studies than I imagined. The e-mails tell us they are mis behaving. When I was in grad school, the goal of a study was to provide every detail so the study could be replicated accurately.
This green science industry interferes with the objective of a study being replicated.
To see what is happening here, you have to distinguish between several types of research activity which are all lumped together as ‘Science.’ Traditionally, experimenters like Fermi, Rutherford, Carnot, and Roentgen would perform repeatable experiments which were of a scale that their counterparts could then repeat. Data were published so that anyone who was interested could do the same. There was public debate on the outcomes. This is still the way much of hard science is conducted.
Climate Science, on the other hand, offers no repeatable experimentation, because of the scale of the observations. So practitioners are reduced to debating their interpretations of the same set of numbers. Data are not published so nobody knows what these fellows are up to. We are asked to accept their conclusions without the opportunity even of verifying their analysis. This shouldn’t be called Science in the same sense as the discipline the physicists, chemists, and biologists practice is called Science. The Earth’s climate is not scientifically accesible to experiment in the same sense that atomic systems are accessible.
Why are the emails not on every front page and blog site in the world?????
Why is Al Gore not called to task????? Why is Obama still going to the climate conference?????
Why is America expected to do the most? Don’t give me the patriotic bs.
What the heck is happening to our world with all the lies?
Climatology and Sociology spring from the same well.
What is clear is that the CRU should be shutdown.
We we assume that this “ClimateGate” is nothing, then clearly by the then obvious fact that the “science is settled”, we don’t need them any more, and the money can best be spent elsewhere. And all you “climate scientists” out there, I’m sorry but you hitched your horse to a wagon that isn’t moving any more.
On the other hand, if “ClimateGate” is the worst scientific scandal of the century, these rascals should not be in the business any more.
Regime change over climate change. It looks like it will take place first in Australia. Key legislation was defeated
in the Australian Senate, and it will be reintroduced in February. The rules are, when the same legislation is defeated twice, both houses are dissolved, and it is off to elections.
Now, my question to the Americans here: When will you get off your duffs and introduce an alternative government until
such time as what Michael Ledeen has to say about foreign policy, and what Michael Walker has to say about fiscal policy, and all Valerie Plame’s are discharged from inside the Beltway? For, I reiterate again for those who do not like what I am saying: the rest of the world cannot afford the time for what goes on inside the beltway to be reformed. Either declare an alternative government, or watch the credibility and clout of the US weaken.
I think that they knew it was bunk from the get-go but were trying to ride it out and get legislation on the book so that they could take credit for the global cooling (that they have known all along was soon to take place). In the mean time they get grant money to spend on unworkable computer models and get to fly around the world attending conferences on the taxpayer’s dime. This definitely looks like a target for a RICO prosecution, that is if anybody in the Justice Department was at all interested……….
Twelve days after the leak to the internet of decades of emails between the scientists of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, analysts of the emails are pointing to evidence that those scientists to have been discussing, a) manipulating data to get their preferred results; b) methods of subverting the peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication, and c) working to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom.
Today, Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit, one Phil Jones, is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
To those of us who studied the scientific method prior to its corruption by politics, participation in any of those acts is damning evidence of abandoning science for advocacy. Serious examinations of such behavior must be held, and if necessary those participants should be stripped of their authority as scientists. For it is exactly that authority which has fuelled the movement to impose control by government, or super-government, body over the enterprise and economic activity of freely acting humans, as a restraint to a future global warming trend predicted by those very ‘scientists’.
Argument from authority can lead to disaster, when the authorities violate the very method which generates our respect for their conclusions and predictions. Let in the sunshine, then, and begin full and public investigations of those supporters of economic suppression. Dr. Jones was right to remove himself while an independent investigation into the apparent corruption of the scientific method is conducted. Let the world media remove blindfolds and join with all others who value science, in placing the utmost scrutiny on the process to ensure that the investigation is truly independent – unlike the faux “peer review” process which has led to the investigation in the first place.
“With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects.”
When you prove it with numbners from models which work without “adjustment”, models which are robust–then I’ll believe you.
Hint, try predicting the recent past from the more less past.
What a disappointment it is to have the tepid water response from the ‘honest’ scientists. No sane person disputes the fact that humans can do damage and should clean up after themselves. Reason dictates that an attempted takeover of the west by Marxists be treated differently.
#13 Anton: Jonah Goldberg just put this up on the Corner. It’s a quote from Tolstoy:
The power of confirmation bias remains unplumbed.
#15 Tom: When you prove it with numbners from models which work without “adjustment”, models which are robust–then I’ll believe you.
Tom, get back to us when you have diagrammed out that sentence and figured out what it means.
#16 FJ: Dr PIelke is an old-fashioned real-live scientist, and keeps to the old standards of decorum. Trust me, this is a very firm response.
This guy Pielke has something to hide. He is backing off saying the things that should be said, and there is no evidence at all for man-caused global warming. He’s pi**ing backwards.
#16 FJ HARRIS
“Reason dictates that an attempted takeover of the west by Marxists be treated differently.”
Well, we are in the world that has ELECTED a CHIMERA of communists,islamists,black-supremacists as the new administration for America, we can’t ask a scientist to do better when he is AT LEAST SAYING THE TRUTH.
It’s the citizenry that SHOULD DO much better and roll back the totalitarians.
There are still many schools where the kids are trained to sing
BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA MMM MMM MMM
If the scientists can grow an avalanche against the “global warming” commie scam (invented to destroy the free economy) it will be a good thing, WE must help them by increasing the pressure against the totalitarians.
CLAIM: Scientists had private doubts about whether the world really is heating up.
TRUTH: Combing through over a decade of personal correspondence, which is then taken out of context can seem to prove just about anything. Skeptics have been pointing to one email from Kevin Trenberth, in which he said, “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.” However, this is clear example of cherrypicking quotes. Trenberth was referring to that there was an “incomplete explanation” of the short-term variability of temperatures, but concludes that “global warming is unequivocally happening.”
CLAIM: Scientists have manipulated data.
Skeptics have been pointing to an email from scientist Phil Jones where he said he used a “trick” with his data. As climate expert Bob Ward writes, “Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something — a short cut can be a trick.” RealClimate also explained that “the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to … ‘a good way to deal with a problem’, rather than something that is ‘secret’, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.”
CLAIM: This reignites the debate about if global warming is real.
TRUTH: There is strong consensus in scientific community that global warming is real and is caused by humans. The top scientists in the world have just released a new report on the realities of global warming. Kevin Grandia summarizes some of the key points about emissions, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels. The emails don’t change any of this reality.
No matter what. For the hard right to even dream…of rejecting the arguement for a strong policy and vision for the 21st century with regard for our environment on a national and international level is political suicide. From 2000 to 2009 they got it wrong on terror, got it wrong on war(s) and they got it wrong on financial regulation, spending, human rights, the ethnic voters and finally, the economy. The global environment is one area they actually showed real leadership in at one time (From T.R. To Nixon). McCain knew that and supported improving the environment, so will the next nominee if they are to win. Good Luck in 2010 !
Climate skeptics, birthers, truthers, holocaust deniers, cigarette company lobbyists, etc., etc, you are all viewed, derisively, as being ‘of a kind’ a very weird, paranoid kind
#21 Albert:
You’re not keeping up, Albert. See, for example, Mann’s “dirty laundry” email, McIntyre’s reconstruction of the Phil Jones “trick”, and observe that over 80 percent of the 20th century temperature increase comes from corrections to the data.
There’s no question the data have been manipulated, and from the emails we know that it was manipulated with an end in mind. The question now is whether, when examined openly and independently, whether the manipulations can be justified.
#22 Albert:
You’re making a common mistake. It’s widely accepted that global warming is real: one reason we know there was a medieval warm period and a little ice age is that the cooling and warming involved has been clearly observed. What we don’t know, and what the IPCC has clearly worked to avoid recognizing, is that we’re not at all sure or the magnitude of the warming, of the contribution made by humans to that warming, or as Dr Pielke shows above, what the mechanisms of that warming are.
#23 PC: Politics isn’t my area. But if the politics conflict with the science, I know which one I’d trust.
#24 Albert: Here’s a Wikipedia article you should read.
Today the trolls are particularly funny.
Don’t read the news, Folks, just BELIEVE what the trollies tell you.
because if you read the news you come to know that:
Phil Jones, the head of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia stepped aside while the university investigates. Penn State prof Michael Mann, purveyor of the infamous hockey stick graph of spiking global temperatures peddled by Al Gore, is also under investigation.
But all this is a right-wing conspiracy of course.
CLAIM: Albert knows what he is talking about.
TRUTH: Albert’s little filibuster above is pure sophistry attempting to distract from the apparent fraud being exposed a little more each day. The fact is that any so called consensus is built upon data that has been manipulated and distorted in order to come to a predetermined conclusion. Competing ideas, theories, and work have been intentionally suppressed. Honest people in the scientific community are no doubt quietly being intimidated into silence lest they lose their livelihood. To wave this away as irrelevant shows how the left are truly the ones that are anti-science – an accusation they have been projecting onto us for far too long.
Then to top it off, Albert goes Alinsky and attempts to paint those of us with healthy skepticism as “the other” to be shunned – which is exactly the tactics used to silence debate in the climate change issue and exactly why we are so off course.
Nice try Albert.
WAIT A MINUTE !
The climategate reveals the secret operations of the new
WEATHERMEN !!!
Forty years after, THEY ARE BACK !!!
(Yes I do post this to drive the trolls nuts)
RE:ALBERT… I may be a little late in pointing this out, but the Claim/Truth thing is being cut n’ copied all of the the interwebs. It sounded just a bit to canned …so I used the sword of troll debunking (google) and yeah, this is being disseminated everywhere. Not sure the original source but its pretty thin stuff even by troll standards.
Great article! Find more about Climategate, and a call to end blind faith in scientists, here:
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/eaglesnest.
Great article, and interview. You might also be interested in checking out “Climategate and Evolution: A Call to End Blind Faith in Scientists.”
Here’s a taste: “With recent revelatory emails, confirmed to be legitimate, an international conspiracy is revealed, and so-called settled climate science is now hotly contested. However, the other shoe is still waiting to drop. What about “evidence” for molecules to man evolution? Should we still blindly believe it?”–http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/eaglesnest
Albert,
One of the first requirements of rational discourse is reading and comprehension. You’ve failed both. Please try rereading Dr. Pielke’s first response.
I imagine you also claimed that those besmirching Tiger Wood’s good name by claiming he was having extramarital affairs, were just “Woodies” out to destroy him. Oops, looks like that didn’t hold up either.
(I know, there’s a good joke in there somewhere – just can’t go there!).
29. baal: wrote
“RE:ALBERT… I may be a little late in pointing this out, but the Claim/Truth thing is being cut n’ copied all of the the interwebs….Not sure the original source but its pretty thin stuff even by troll standards.”
The text Albert is using is direct cut and paste from the original source, a laughably presented opinion article on Huffington Post. The main intent of the article appears to be an attempt to get the marching moron crowd to stop using ‘ClimateGate’ and instead use and disseminate the author’s idea that ‘Swifthack’ should be used instead. (This dofus does not understand that given how it proved out, ‘swiftboating’ the CRU scientists would be forcing honesty into claims the make.)
Anyway, many of the Huffington Post crowd’s comments indicate they aren’t buying and are calling for discarding any studies based on CRU publications and/or forcing an open review of all still existing data, methodology, data reduction, and program code etc.
(I know, there’s a good joke in there somewhere – just can’t go there!).
Chicken.
no 26 and 28
Ok, funny. However, back then, forty years later? We were correct number 26…., maybe not necessarily right (like you). Vietnam fell, and yes, we lost (as the left predicted, unless you love hollywood). And yes, the left was correct back then too..sorry pal, you lose again, our lakes and rivers are sewers. Our wars are still endless domestic disputes, our economy in ruins, our air and our lakes a cesspool…so..u got another hope and change answer other than your right wing drama?….
I didn.t think so…
Good Luck.
“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus … that tells us the earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity,” said another government scientist Jane Lubchenco. A marine biologist and climate researcher, she heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
With this exert in mind, exactly how does a genuine government scientist explain the other 10′s of times that the earth warmed to end ice ages? Shall we blame the cave men for discovering fire? How far back can science pitch the guilt-society reflex and still pretend to be objective?
The evidence is irrefutable. Climate Change doesn’t exist, at least 80% of it doesn’t exist because it was added in through fudge-factors, guesses and “corrections”. Look at the graphs here for the level of corrections and the Al Gore graph:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/0000000000000736
Take away that 80% and you will be left with a very moderate warming that is now heading for cooling.
The main polluters of planet Earth will never change their ways, and there is nothing America can do about them..and we are not a “main”.
I would worry more about the chemicals and plastic can rings in the oceans.
Yes, as DaveT. points out Albert is simply cutting and pasting snippets of a HuffPo article, without attribution.
And, as Dave T also notes, even HuffPo readers aren’t buying that load of BS:
“I am a working scientist, have maintained a well-funded lab group for 25 years, and have published over 100 papers in my career, and I have never heard a scientist (at least not in the life sciences) use the word “trick” when describing data analysis. ”
“I’m sorry but if I were sitting on a jury and the Prosecutor told us ‘since we have the police report and our investigation report we destroyed the evidence because it was no longer needed, I’d look out the window to see what color the sky was!”
“Fact: The University of East Anglia has admitted that they destroyed their raw data, and all that is available for their peers to fact check is the manipulated data they used to construct their report.”
“Fact: The programmers working on both the raw and manipulated data noted that the raw data itself was rubbish. In fact, programmers notes indicate that they could just make it up.”
Here’s another fact: Albert is a hopelessly stupid tool.
Sorry, deniers, the facts are emerging, despite your best efforts to cover them up. Australia’s version of Cap and Trade was flushed in their Senate yesterday. I raise my glass to them. If any of the Dems have an IQ above room temp (debatable), they’ll kill our bill too.
#37 CC: We don’t actually know that. Taking a bunch of data from different sources, with different standards, is going to require some corrections. As Dr Pielke said when I asked the same question: “As we wrote in our 2007 JGR paper, there are major problems with the quantitative accuracy of the surface temperature data. As you correctly summarize, the adjustments are often larger than the trends.” That doesn’t mean the corrections are necessarily wrong. On the other hand, when they “they have failed is in preventing, in their leadership position, a proper scientific debate of the issues” it’s damned hard to tell if they’re correct or not.
I must take issue with the good professor when he says: “The data is quite convincing that there was warming at many locations around the Earth over the last hundred years.”
He says that based on the four available weather series that inextricably linked and contaminated with each other’s processing. Please see Lord Monckton’s masterly review at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/lord-moncktons-summary-of-climategate-and-its-issues/
Make sure to read the accompanying PDF file. In particular read about the discrepancy between the “official, processed” New Zealand weather data and the raw data. The first shows a steep increase in temperature over the last century (relative to the base period) while the second shows no significant change. If that is true for other data sets, and I think it is based on Lord Monckton’s paper, then no climatologist can say anything about temperature trends in the last century. All the raw data need to be recompiled and looked at in an unbiased way. People like Hansen and Mann in the US, and Jones, etc. in the UK, as well as others, cannot be part of the review process. They are not scientists; they are charlatans and propagandists and should be RICOed for what they did.
Fire ‘em all and let Gaia sort ‘em out.
@ Charlie Martin #17
“Tom, get back to us when you have diagrammed out that sentence and figured out what it means.”
I know what it means, I suspect you are one of the few who can’t tell.
Pielke should get back to us when he proves his baseless assertion that we know the AGW’ers are roughly correct, and he has done it when he has a model which can predict the recent past from the more distant past.
For myself, I think he can’t.
@ me, # 43
Dangit, dropped a sentence.
“which can predict the recent past from the more distant past.
For myself, I think he can’t.”
should read
“which can predict the recent past from the more distant past. Of course that model would have to explain how warm it hasn’t gotten and then correctly predict a resumed, CO2 consistent warming.
For myself, I think he can’t.”
Perkins #43 — Pielke should get back to us when he proves his baseless assertion that we know the AGW’ers are roughly correct, and he has done it when he has a model which can predict the recent past from the more distant past.
George E.P. Box said that all models are wrong, but some are useful.
To wit: it’s interesting that models designed from the start to investigate the consequence of added CO2 spit out answers that relate to added CO2.
Pielke is correct. Man contributes to warming; this cannot be denied. He mentions land use, for example, which is clearly verifiable via known and proven measurement (UHI effect, for one.) Changing land from natural grazing land to farming raises temps due to irrigation (i.e. evaporation puts water vapour in the air, the most potent of the greenhouse gases.) You can read about that case (it’s real) at the Anthony Watts site. And so on.
Certainly humankind is running an open ended experiment dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. This ought to be seriously investigated (see quote from G.E.P. Box above.) If we continue to spew CO2 and we’re wrong that there’s no ill effect, we’d be tremendously stupid. Surely everyone can agree that gathering data and continued modeling is neither harmful nor a leftist plot.
As far as I’m concerned, we ought to build a couple of hundred nuclear generating plants and do our best to do as much with clean electricty as possible. This isn’t about global warming per se but the proven relationship between energy and wealth creation, and it would lessen our CO2 output somewhat by definition (just in case we really do discover we shouldn’t be emitting as much CO2.) Win-win.
As far as I’m concerned, we ought to build a couple of hundred nuclear generating plants
I’m all in favor of that. Think the Left will agree? This is one area where they are curiously reluctant to emulate the French.
Wow: “The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus … that tells us the earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity,”
Well, I guess the dearth of data was not discussed in the emails, so technically, this might be correct, but quite evasive. We are left with the assertion: there are no data, but that doesn’t undermine the ‘strong scientific consensus’? How interesting. At this very moment, there are a long line of experimenters, beginning with Galileo, who are turning over in their graves.
No. 10 Bear; “climatology and sociology” + and science, sounds like Scientology but I am not insulting religious fervor, or religion. I just can’t figure out which one of these is fervored or fevered, yet they all seem to possess that voodoo that cause mankind to stare trance like up into the sky and wave magic wands at the stars and clouds and yell and moan unintelligible gobbledygook in the hope of making rain, and at the end of the day the public gets’ soaked ha ha.
#43,44 Tom: For myself, I think he can’t.
Oh, read the damn sentence. “With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects.” Then look up, for example. urban heat islands. And then think it out: if we “exert both warming and cooling effects”, do we know that we are creating any net warming or cooling?
You’re vehemently arguing exactly what Pielke argues: that the predictions have no skill and the CO2-based model of anthropogenic overall global warming aren’t supported by the data.
Now, go change your nick and hope to live down the embarrassment.
#47 wGraves: Well, I guess the dearth of data was not discussed in the emails, so technically, this might be correct, but quite evasive.
I don’t think it’s even correct. A good bit of the “consensus” that warming is caused by human activity is based on the data the emails show is being manipulated.
Graves #47 — We are left with the assertion: there are no data, but that doesn’t undermine the ’strong scientific consensus’?
From a CNN article —
[Head of CRU Dr Phil] Jones admitted that some of the emails that were published “do not read well” but he apologized for the “upset” and “confusion” they may have caused. But he remained confident of the data that the CRU and other climate institutions are collecting.
“That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice,” he said.
The AGW side is claiming plenty of data.
Glacial retreat on Kilamanjaro is often invoked despite proof that the retreat is a localised phenomenon having to do with land use and farming. Alpine glacial retreat is problematic and rarely mentioned since inconveniently Otzi the Iceman was found a few years back; he had died in the open when there was no glacier there. Abnormal sea level rise is almost entirely invented; the rate of 2mm/yr has been steady for a very long time and is normal for a rebound from the little ice age. Doesn’t stop them from invoking Tuvalu, the island nation claimed to be sinking into the ocean, either. Problem is that geologists say that this is the result of the LAND sinking naturally, not the ocean rising.
The point here is that almost every piece of ‘evidence’ is disputed in that there’s a ton of proper scientific inquiry proving that the cause of these things isn’t your SUV.
Meanwhile check out the CNN.com page this morning: Alaskan village faces extinction. Alarm Bells. Haven’t read it, but I’m sure there’s a mention of the poor polar bear. The populations are increasing, however. Another problem…
The actual reliable data is paleo-reconstruction and this is how we know about the medieval warm period. We also have Satellite data and the UAH (Univ Alabama Huntsville) data is that there’s been zero warming for 10 years. Satellite data is a bit more believable in that these measure air temps, not ground temps.
The data that’s been actually mucked about with is land temp records and cherrypicked paleo data (go to climateaudit.com and you’ll see that Penn States’s Michael Mann has released yet another AGW alarm paper with one of the datasets INVERTED!) Meanwhile we can now see that CRU guys conveniently ignored a boatload of dendrochronological data because it didn’t yield the results they wanted (google “Yamal” and “Divergence.”)
The underlying theme here is that the data is sound but the AGW alarmists are cherrypicking data and doing wierd things with it to make their [political] claims.
You read the posts, Charlie. I’m vehemently arguing against this statement of his:
“With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects.”
There is no evidence we exert a heating effect, a cooling effect, or both. The signal, if there is any, has not been separated from the noise. The evidence is not merely controvertible, it hasn’t been seen yet–the warmist’s models are worth nothing. I’m not saying it doesn’t stand to reason we have an effect, I’m saying it hasn’t been shown.
If Pielke wants to truthfully say what I just quoted from him, he needs a model which at least recreates the recent past from the more distant past, and it would be good if it could be seen to predict the future.
If you still think I’m in violent agreement with him, you’re a moron.
Also, you’re putting words into his mouth, he never says, “that the predictions have no skill and the CO2-based model of anthropogenic overall global warming aren’t supported by the data.”
He states human contributions of CO2 to warming are important–and that’s nothing the data supports because the data is invented by warmists he claims he believes are sincere.
Pielke praises the warmists with faint damns.
#51 Tom: Tom, there’s really not much more to say, except that what you’re saying really can’t be made consistent with what is known.
Go follow Dr Pielke’s links and read some of his work; follow some of the references. There simply is extremely strong evidence that we, for example, create “urban warming islands”. There is extremely strong evidence that increasing CO2 levels produce a warming effect. The magnitude of those effects on climate are less clear.
“…there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects.”
Isn’t Pielke Sr. a scientist? Is he not supposed to keep an open, ‘skeptical’ mind about any such ‘incontrovertible’ evidence?
Scientists should be wary of carving statements in stone because politicians will use them as cornerstones for extremely unscientific policies. Cap and trade, to mention one.
No politician would bother with ‘…there is evidence.’
Pops, you’re making the same error Tom is. Look at what Roger says: “incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects.” That’s a true statement: for example, go stand in the middle of a big parking lot on a sunny day, and then move over to a lawn Asphalt absorbs much more sunlight than the usual open ground, and we’ve added a lot of asphalt. That’s a warming effect, and it’s incontrovertable, ie, undeniable, and it doesn’t take any models or complicated scienceto observe it.
The thing is, it appears, that you’re confusing “we have incontrovertible affects” with “and that net effect is large and observable.” PIelke consistently says, instead, “and further research is needed to determine how large that net effect is.”
I have just bought this years Tide Tables for my location (Auckland New Zealand). These predict the precise sea-levels each day, at any time on each day. These tables are relied on for safe ship movements, etc. If there were rising sea levels, the tide tables would have to include this.
If the reported sea level rises were fact- then my tide tables would show this. My Tide Tables show that sea-level rises are not occurring here- or anywhere else. Do I have to be a “Denier” to believe my Tide Tables?
Here’s another bit of boatie wisdom, from an old mariner teaching the “Boatmaster” Course-
“When searching for lights or beacons, NEVER look at the chart first. LOOK AT THE BEACON first, and record the flashes and colours. THEN look on your chart to see which beacon corresponds to your observation. Many shipwrecks have been caused by mariners sqinting into the murk, looking for that certain beacon that they wish to see, and seeing what they want to see.”
I think that the Global Warming scientists are sqinting into the murk, and seeing what they want to see. I predict a shipwreck.
I have always liked reading Dr. Pielke Sr.’s work and appreciate his profressionalisim. He appears to be a genuine scientist willing to go wherever the data takes him.
I do take some exception with him regarding his somewhat tacit approval of the science conducted at CRU. In this interview his comments seem limited to the CRU and IPCC efforts to document the temperature record over the last 100+ years. Doing this he ignored what I consider the more sinister implications of the Climategate data and that involves the paleoclimate studies (by Briffa, Mann, etc). In my opinion these are the studies which provide the IPCC/UN’s with the rational for completing uprooting the current politic/economic system and replacing it with a world government with vast power to dictate energy policy to sovereign nations (along with trillions of dollars on spending for green energy technology).
To that end I would be very interested to hear Dr Peilke response to the following questions:
1) Does he feel their is incontrovertible evidence that the warming over the last half of the 20th century is unprecedented in the recent history (last 2000 years) of earth?
2) Does he feel their is incontrovertible evidence that CO2 concentration is closing in on a tipping point that will produce run away/uncontrollable warming over the next century?
Dave
#55 John: one of those odd things that gets sort of submerged (heh heh) in this whole sea-level discussion is that the sea level rise they’re talking about is in the order of 10 meters per century. That is, 10 cm (just under 4 inches) per year. I don’t think that would show up in a tide table very quickly.
It also makes me think the solution might be a beach pail and a trowel, but then I’m a cynic.
#57 Dave: if you go back to Dr Pielke’s blog, he has an email address and such; you could contact him directly.
I am returning to thinking about a conversation I had with an old friend some years ago. His perspective was, and I think still is, that even if we are not certain of AGW’s significance would it not be appropriate to take steps to reduce it just in case [global warming is so severe a threat we are all about to fry]?
The correct response seems to be, “While it seems indeed true that there is both AGW and AGC (Anthropogenic Cooling), reducing either at costs that would seriously impact the world economy and freedom would be premature and harmful. The problem with taking aggressive action at this juncture, when we really do not know what our impact on the earth is, means that we risk doing ourselves in.
If we reduce mankind’s warming influences and the earth is on the verge of another Ice Age miniature or not, we risk accelerating the cooling trend. Doing so at the cost of our economy which would tend to produce solutions to cooling trends would result in untold death and destruction. The same is true if we are about to enter a warming trend and we reduce mankind activities which tend to have a cooling effect. If we are going to do anything at all we damn well better guess right.
If the coming climate changes are going to be very rapid and severe, it is unlikely any steps we take at this late date are going to have much beneficial impact. More likely they will make things worse because we will have wasted financial resources (capital). On the other hand, if our impact on the climate is modest, then climate changes are likely to be slower than have been predicted by climate change alarmists. That given it is entirely likely that entrepreneurs will come up with solutions regardless of which way the changes trend; progress being as inexorable as it is. In that event of course the “trick” is to stay out of their way.
100 mm per sea level year rise? That would most certainly show up in Tide charts. That would mean that the boat club would have to make the jetty 1 metre higher every 10 years, it would mean that I would need to lenghten my moring chains every few years, it would mean that shipping access to the port would be affected.
The answer could easily be a beach pail and trowel- to clean up all of the cow manure being spread around about imaginary sea level rises.
#60 john: I believe that’s their predicted sea level change, not what they claim has happened. But I just looked at the tide tables, choosing San Diego randomly because it’s cold here in Boulder and observe that the day to day variation of high tide is well in excess of 10 cm. I’m unconvinced that this would be all that glaringly obvious.