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If this keeps up, no one's going to trust any scientists.
The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.
For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world's governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium -- and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to "save the planet."
But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of "the best scientists and engineers worldwide" (as the group's own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give "high-quality advice to international bodies," has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices -- and found them badly wanting.
For example, the IPCC's much-vaunted Fourth Assessment Report claimed in 2007 that Himalayan glaciers were rapidly melting, and would possibly be gone by the year 2035. The claim was actually false -- yet the IPCC cited it as proof of man-made global warming.
Then there's the IPCC's earlier prediction in 2007 -- which it claimed to have "high confidence" in -- that global warming could lead to a 50 percent reduction in the rain-fed agricultural capacity of Africa.
Such a dramatic decrease in food production in an already poor continent would be a terrifying prospect, and undoubtedly lead to the starvation of millions. But the InterAcademy Council investigation found that this IPCC claim was also based on weak evidence.
Overall, the IAC slammed the IPCC for reporting "high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach 'high confidence' to the statements." The critics note "many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective or not expressed clearly.
Some IPCC practices can only be called shoddy. As The Wall Street Journal reported, "Some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges 'were not adequately considered,' the InterAcademy Council's investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report."
Yet the Himalayan claim wasn't based on peer-reviewed scientific data, or on any data -- but on spec ulation in a phone interview by a single scientist.
Was science even a real concern for the IPCC? In January, the Sunday Times of London reported that, based in large part on the fraudulent glacier story, "[IPCC Chairman] Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi, was awarded up to 310,000 pounds by the Carnegie Corp. . . . and the lion's share of a 2.5 million pound EU grant funded by European taxpayers."
Thus, the Times concluded, "EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognize as bogus."
All this comes on top of last year's revelation of the "Climategate" e-mails, which revealed equally shoddy practices (and efforts to suppress criticism) by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia -- perhaps the single most important source of data that supposedly proved the most alarming claims of global warming.
Al Gore and many other warming alarmists have insisted that "the debate is over" -- that the science was "settled." That claim is now in shreds -- though the grants are still flowing, and advocates still hope Congress will pass some version of the economically ruinous "cap and trade" anti-warming bill.
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From Fox News: 
Sean Hannity will have a special report: Controlling your carbon footprint has become a global fad, but is it all just a con job? And how much green is it costing you? Sean investigates the truth behind the billion dollar industry!
9PM Eastern, 6PM Pacific, repeated 3 hours later on the same channel. Channel 360 on DirecTV, 205 on Dish Network, check your local cable and satellite listings via http://wattsupwiththat.com
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LIMA – The Peruvian government declared a state of emergency because of the cold wave gripping a number of districts in the nation’s 16 regions, according to an urgent decree published Saturday in the official gazette.
The decree covers all districts of the country more than 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) above sea level, as well as three regions in the Peruvian jungle that have registered strangely low temperatures in the last few weeks.
According to official figures, so far this year at least 409 people have died of pneumonia and ailments related to the cold weather, most of them younger than 5 years old (200 deaths) and over 60 years (158 deaths).
The emergency declaration, which has a duration of 60 days, covers districts in the regions of Ancash, Apurimac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cusco, Huancavelica, Huanuco, Junin, Lima, Moquegua, Pasco, Puno and Tacna, which in recent days reached a temperature of -24 C (-11 F).
A state of emergency was also declared in the jungle regions of Madre de Dios, Ucayali and Loreto.
The decree published Saturday also includes a series of measures that will allow regional and local governments to supply the affected populations with food and vaccines.
The armed forces were also called upon by Defense Minister Rafael Rey to carry out civic actions to help those populations most vulnerable to the cold.
Link: http://bit.ly/doaME2
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via Chlorinated Liberty
The truth about "global warming" continues to reveal itself as a top official with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted yesterday that there never was agreement on global warming and that only a few dozen scientists actually believed it.
The National Post reported:
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, foundhere.
And to think, it was just two years ago that the Goracle promised that the arctic ice cap would be melted entirely in 5 years. And, they gave him a Peace Prize for that.
Exit Note: Don't expect this news to deter the Democrats from pursuing their cap and trade agenda.
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Newsmax
Former Vice President Al Gore admits that mistakes have been made by the scientific community regarding the issue of climate change.
In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Gore said: "It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law."
Gore states that it's unrealistic to expect scientific research to be 100 percent error-free. And he says the errors have not changed the consensus opinion of the scientific community on climate change.
He also states in the Times that:
- January was the second-hottest January in 130 years, globally speaking.
- The last decade has been the hottest 10 years since records were first kept.
- Warmer temps have been increasing ocean evaporation.
Gore ends his article by urging the Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill that will be introduced later this week by Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.
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guardian.co.uk
Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown
[Translation - We got caught - AGAIN]
Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.
At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.
Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.
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UK Mail Online
- Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
- There has been no global warming since 1995
- Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.
Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.
Read more:
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Times Online
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.
It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.
In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.
“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.
Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.
“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.
Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”
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By James Delingpole
Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.
As Richard North says: This is serial.
UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil
And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent
And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:
The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.
One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.
Not, of course, dear readers that I’m in any way tempted to crow about these latest revelations. After all, so many of my colleagues, junior and senior, have been backing me on this one to the hilt….
Oh, if anyone speaks Russian, here’s the full report.
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By Sarah Palin
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.
"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.
This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development.
Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.
But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real. Unlike the proposals China and India offered prior to Copenhagen -- which actually allow them to increase their emissions -- President Obama's proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions. Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs (as Obama admitted during the campaign). That's not exactly what most Americans are hoping for these days. And as public opposition continues to stall Congress's cap-and-tax legislation, Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats plan to regulate carbon emissions themselves, doing an end run around the American people.
In fact, we're not the only nation whose people are questioning climate change schemes. In the European Union, energy prices skyrocketed after it began a cap-and-tax program. Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament recently defeated a cap-and-tax bill. Surely other nations will follow suit, particularly as the climate e-mail scandal continues to unfold.
In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.
Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.
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From Christopher Monckton of Brenchley: Copenhagen, 7 December 2009
The opening day of the largest international conference ever held has dawned with dense, wet fog blanketing the city of Copenhagen – a metaphor for the two weeks of obnubilation, obfuscation, and obscurantism that are upon us.
Copenhagen is usually a beautiful city, but it has been disfigured by mawkish Green propaganda exhibits in every public place, reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda that dismally blanketed the city during World War II.
In the great hall of the railway station, as we arrived by politically-correct, low-carbon-footprint train from Berlin, there was an enormous, self-serving display saying what a good idea it would be if everyone went everywhere by rail. Actually, the carbon footprint of an Airbus 380, per passenger mile, is lower than that of a train. The railways have some catching up to do, footprint-wise.
Yesterday morning in front of the Folketinget (literally “People’s Thingy”), which is the Danish Parliament, several heavy lorries from the UK were unloading enormous tree-stumps of best mahogany wrenched from the rain-forest by a soi-disant “artist” as a way of raising consciousness of the perils of deforestation. As I was saying to the Prince of Wales the other day (how’s that for a name-drop), deforestation is a real environmental problem, but “global warming” is not.
However pious the “artist’s” intentions, can he justify the astronomical number of timber-miles involved in shipping in these huge tree-stumps, to say nothing of the carbon footprint of the gros-culs that transported it from the British docks all the way to Copenhagen? No, I didn’t think so. No doubt he was paid a disproportionate fee – at taxpayers’ expense, of course.
Taxpayers’ expense. Ay, there’s the rub. Never mind the billions that are being spent on getting the national delegations from at least 192 countries to the conference – not to mention the 300+ UN bureaucracies, each with dozens of bureaucrats, all passing the check to Johnny Taxpayer.
If the provisions already in draft in the Copenhagen Treaty are agreed here in Copenhagen, here’s what it’s going to cost you -
- The equivalent of half the US Defense Budget every year will be taken from your trouser pocket in supposed reparation for imagined – and imaginary – “climate debt”. That’s 2% of gross domestic product, which will be used to pay for the unelected, communistic World Government that the treaty draft describes.
- The other half of the US Defense Budget will also be taken from you, this time by way of a 2% tax on every financial transaction into or out of any Western country. In fact, this could end up costing a lot more than 2% of GDP, because the volume of transactions far exceeds total GDP.
- Suppose a newly-elected US Administration – after the mid-term elections, say – decides it wants nothing to do with Copenhagen, the world government will have the right to inflict unlimited financial penalties on – well, on you, Johnny boy. You elected the Obama team, and you’re going to have to pay for it, in spades.
- The new World Governnent will have the power to regulate all world markets. If the Treaty is passed in its original form, the very concept of the free market – the concept on which the prosperity of the West was built – will be swept away. It is this provision, taken with the absence of any provision for democratic election of the World Government, which establishes that world communism would be the outcome. Say farewell to freedom, and her comely handmaidens democracy and prosperity. The Treaty is against all three.
And that’s not all. The new World Government will have powers to interfere directly, at will, in the economic and financial as well as environmental affairs of your nation, over the heads of your elected representatives and against their will.
The World Government will also have the power to impose carbon rationing and taxation worldwide, flinging the West into bankruptcy in the name of Saving The Planet.
You may wonder why you haven’t heard about the World Government. That’s because the mainstream news media aren’t telling you. They pride themselves on being, in the old phrase, “mirrors of the Establishment”, but now they are merely its poodles.
They are deliberately not telling you about what’s in the Copenhagen Treaty draft, just as they’re silent about what’s in the Climategate emails – the thousands of emails between all of the leading IPCC scientists over the past decade that were recently released by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
The emails reveal that self-serving “scientists” have been inventing, fabricating, falsifying, tweaking, altering, losing, concealing, and destroying the very scientific data on which the entire case for “global-warming” alarm is based. The scientific case for doing anything but waiting and seeing was always thin: now it is in tatters.
Let me end today’s introductory posting with the answers I gave a couple of days ago to a schoolboy who had been asked to do a school project on why “going green” was essential to Save The Planet. His questions, and my answers, are below.
Dear Mr. Hampshire, – Thank you for your questions. The answers are -
1. What are your experiences with “global warming”?
There has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. On all measures, there has been rapid global cooling for nine years. These simple and easily-verifiable facts have not been reported in most news media.
There had been 300 years of warming from 1695 to 1995, during which we could not have had any measurable influence over the first 280 years.
We might, in theory, have influenced the 20 years’ warming from 1975-1995, but the rate of warming in that period was no greater than the rate of warming in two previous periods over which we had no influence – 1860-1880 and 1910-1940.
Therefore there is no discernible human influence on global temperature.
It was considerably warmer than the present in nearly all of the past 600 million years; warmer by up to 6 Celsius degrees in each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years; warmer in at least 7500 of the past 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age; warmer in the Holocene, Bronze Age, Roman and medieval warm periods, warmer (in the most reliably-recorded parts of the world, such as the US and the Arctic) in the 1930s.
Therefore today’s global temperatures are unexceptional, unsurprising, and uninteresting.
2. Are scientists ignoring “global warming”?
Scientists are not ignoring “global warming”: they invented it.
Emails exchanged between all of the leading international scientific institutions that have profited lavishly from the “global warming” fraud show that a malevolent clique of perhaps two dozen politicized scientists whose common purpose is the extinction of freedom, democracy, and prosperity worldwide for the profit of themselves and their institutions has fabricated, distorted, altered, lost, concealed, or destroyed scientific data, temperature records and computer programs with intent to obtain a substantial financial advantage by deception.
At least two universities and two prosecuting authorities are currently investigating what may prove to have been the most substantial, unpleasant, and expensive scientific fraud the world has ever known.
3. If scientists are ignoring “global warming”, why now, when the Earth is at its weakest?
The Earth is by no means “at its weakest”. It has survived 4.5 billion years of catastrophes on a scale unimaginable today.
As recently as 70,000 years ago, the eruption of a single supervolcano in Sumatra wiped out all of humanity except just 7000 people, from whom today’s population of 7 billion are all descended. The dinosaurs were wiped out by a single, sudden event – perhaps the impact of the Xixtulub meteorite – 70 million years ago.
Indeed, 99.9% of all creatures that ever walked the Earth were flung into extinction, often violently, millions of years before humankind first stood erect, gazed at the stars, and wondered.
Yet today the Earth is teeming with life – and most of that life lives and moves and has its being in the Tropics, where the climate is warmest. A minuscule fraction of the Earth’s species live at the Poles, where it is coldest. Faced with this compelling evidence that life prefers a warmer climate, in which direction should global temperature ideally change?
The Earth, therefore, far from being weak, has come through the disasters of previous ages with life triumphant and flourishing.
If that is weakness, let us have more of it.
4. What contributions have you made to slow the effects of “global warming”?
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is rising at 2 parts per million by volume per year. Let us pretend that all of that increase is attributable to the energetic industries and enterprises of our busy species. To forestall that small and harmless increase it would be necessary for us to shut down the entire global economy immediately and forever, taking us back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light carbon-emitting fires in our caves. No automobiles, trains, or planes. No hospitals, factories, elevators, Internet, lights, heat.
And what would be the climatic effect of this self-inflicted economic immolation, 95% of which the draft Treaty of Copenhagen actually advocates? The effect would be as near nil as makes no difference.
Here is why. Let us pretend that the UN’s flagrantly-exaggerated central estimate of the warming effect of extra CO2 in the air is accurate. Then, taking today’s CO2 concentration of 388 ppmv, the amount of future “global warming” we should be able to forestall by shutting down the entire global economy for a year would be 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 C. That is less than one-fortieth of a Celsius degree.
At today’s rate of carbon dioxide emissions, it would take 40 years of total or very-near-total economic shutdown – two entire generations – to prevent just 1 Celsius degree of “global warming”.
However, the UN has exaggerated the warming effects of CO2 approximately sixfold, as numerous papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature have established. So make that 240 years of pre-Stone-Age economic activity to forestall 1 Celsius degree of “global warming”.
Now, you ask me what contribution I have made to slow “global warming”. Well, the answer is this. Suppose I committed suicide. After the decomposition of my body, my personal “carbon footprint” would be zero. Each year, my ultimate personal sacrifice in the name of Saving The Planet would forestall one-seven-billionth of one-two-hundred-and-fortieth of a Celsius degree.
Or would it? No, it wouldn’t, because – remarkably – as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased the atmospheric concentration of water vapor has decreased by an amount more or less exactly sufficient to match the (very small) warming effect of the (very small) increase in CO2 concentration,
At least one paper in the scientific literature says that such compensatory decreases in the absolute humidity of the atmosphere must occur. At any rate, so far it has occurred, so that the total greenhouse effect of the whole atmosphere is exactly the same as it was before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere in measurable quantities after the Second World War.
The only “global warming” that occurred after the Second World War was the warming of 1975-1995, and that warming cannot have been caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect, whether anthropogenic or natural, because there has been no increase in the greenhouse effect at all. So our carbon emissions have been harmless.
Our planet was saved 2000 years ago. It does not need to be saved again
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By Alan Caruba
It’s ironic that the United Nations Conference on Climate Change began on December 7th. For an aging portion of the U.S. population, December 7, 1941 will always mark the Japanese Empire’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It drew the U.S. into World War Two.
Humanity has been threatened for decades by the effort of the United Nations, through its environmental program in general and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in particular, to impose an international treaty that would put the UN in charge of all energy use.
The treaty, like the former Kyoto Protocols, would have no basis in science.
The pretext has been that “global warming” is the result of greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the Earth to warm exponentially. The IPCC encountered a problem when the planet began to measurably cool beginning in 1998.
Satellite data since then have demonstrated that the average global temperature has been dropping, mostly in response to the Sun whose solar radiation has moved into what is called “a solar minimum”, a reduction in magnetic storms. This is a natural cycle the Sun has gone through many times over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence.
Like an invading army, more than 16,500 of the world’s greatest liars will descend on Copenhagen for what may well be the last attempt by the United Nations to use the “global warming” fraud to alter the economies of industrialized nations in the name of “saving the Earth.”
We now know conclusively that a key element of the fraud, the data put forth by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was deliberately falsified. This will test whether the participants in the conference can maintain their massive, international fraud.
If the UN can control energy use, it controls mankind.
The Copenhagen conference has already generated a torrent of green lies from environmental organizations. The fraud-—now dubbed Climategate—-will require the masters of worldwide media to choose between repeating discredited climate lies or to finally report the views of legitimate climate scientists and others that have been repudiating them for decades.
Here are just a few examples of the Climategate propaganda being perpetrated.
Despite the revelations of a massive climate data fraud initially reported on November 20, on November 23, the World Wildlife Fund released a report filled with the usual predictions of climate-related catastrophes, from hurricanes destroying New York to changes in the Asian monsoon patterns.
The World Wildlife Federation announced that it is hosting “Eco-Schools USA” intended to “Green K-12 buildings, grounds and curriculum.” Instead of learning the three R’s, in addition to some real science, groups like the WWF have been steadily indoctrinating young Americans to believe the Earth is doomed.
In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a $52,000 grant for projects in which students “will explore their coastal ecosystems” in New Jersey. The projects “emphasize the importance of taking action to protect the environment.” Not much money, but “since 1992, EPA has funded over $45 million in environmental education grants to support more than three thousand projects across the country.” Is this education or indoctrination?
The EPA has gone on record dismissing the revelations of distorted and false climate data used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is moving ahead to produce a finding that would permit the agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions despite ample evidence that it plays no role in climate change. This reflects the effort of environmentalists to control energy use.
A group called Rare Conservation that describes itself as “a leader in local social and behavioral change for global biodiversity conservation” released a statement to the effect that “tropical deforestation is widely believed to be responsible for 15-20% of climate change.” The Washington Post reported their absurd claim that the Earth’s great “carbon sinks”, oceans and forests, will not be able to absorb increased levels of carbon dioxide, though they have been doing this for millennia!
In October, it was reported that “The federal government has paid out billions of dollars to environmental groups for attorney fees and costs, according to data assembled by a Cheyenne, Wyoming lawyer. A review by the attorney, Karen Budd-Falen, revealed that “the government, between 2003 and 2007, paid more than $4.7 billion in taxpayer money to environmental law firms “and that’s just the lawsuits she tracked.”
It is very doubtful that Americans are aware that they have been paying billions for green lawsuits, many of which were intended to stop various forms of development, i.e. jobs, or to encumber agricultural activity.
Who has grown wealthy from the greening of America? In November, the Capitol Research Center compiled a list based on budget figures from environmental groups.
Nature Conservancy, $910.7 million.
Wildlife Conservation Society, $197.4 million,
World Wildlife Fund, $169.5 million.
Environmental Defense Fund, $108 million.
Natural Resources Defense Fund, $122.8 million.
Natural Resources Defense Council, $108 million.
National Audubon Society, $92.7 million.
Natural Wildlife Federation, $90.1 million.
Sierra Club, $81.8 million.
Sierra Club Foundation, $29.9 million.
Greenpeace, Inc, $26.3 million.
These are groups that have infiltrated the curriculums of the nation’s schools, frightening a generation of children with global warming claims, along with predictions of the extinction of species, rising sea levels to flood cities, and other base nonsense.
These are just a handful of environmental organizations that have grown fat while doing everything they could to slow the U.S. economy by acquiring private property to put it off-limits to mining, drilling, timber, and agricultural use, among others.
These are groups that have lobbied Congress for all manner of legislation and regulations that have encumbered industrial and agricultural development. The “Cap-and-Trade” bill, based on IPCC data, is awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate. If passed, it would destroy all hope of any economic recovery.
These are groups that signed onto the global warming fraud and whose representatives will be attending the UN Conference on Climate Change.
It is a sneak attack on humanity.
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Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.
As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.
So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.
First and foremost -- contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.
In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists – those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.
Truth be told -- even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.
And yet -- most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in.
While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.
They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.
And while reconstructions -- as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called -- can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.
Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.
Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period
It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.
Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings.
But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland. And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.
And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC – both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors -- that task was far less daunting than one might imagine.
Proxies, Tricks and Hockey Sticks
The first step was taken in the 1995 Second Assessment Report, when the above Figure 7c was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction from RS Bradley and Phil Jones himself that used 1400 AD as its base – effectively wiping the MWP off the radar-screen.
But it wasn’t until the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) that the MWP simply vanished. This multi-proxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies appeared in chapter 2, page 134, of the Working Group 1 (WG1) report [PDF].
IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.20
Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that both the MWP and LIA have indeed disappeared. In fact, temperatures appear to trend downward throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century. But if you look closer, you’ll also notice that the “reconstructed” series terminate in 1980. What forms the dramatic blade to the hockey stick shape (yes, this is indeed the famous “Hockey-Stick” graph) is instead the distal segment of the 1902 to 1999 instrumental data series.
Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980. And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise. So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.
The figure below, found on the same page of the WG1 report reveals this trick more clearly. This chart plots the original 4 reconstructions used: 2 from Mann et al, 1 from Jones et al and 1 from Briffa et al. Notice how all but the first series continue to trend downward around 1960 while instrumental readings begin to trend upward? And even that series ends abruptly in 1980.
IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.21
So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down. They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures. The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.
Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.
And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.
Every multi-volume IPCC Assessment has been accompanied by a relatively brief and highly-politicized Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This synopsis invariably commands the bulk of the media and political attention. Here’s the version of the graph depicted prominently on page 3 of the 2001 TAR SPM [PDF], the only version of the report most policymakers and reporters would ever actually see. Notice how they further obscured their chicanery by omitting the series defining legend and the “1988 instrumental value” declaration:
IPCC 2001 SPM Fig 1b
And despite the fact that the only confirmable segment of the series failed that very test, which should have declared the entire series null and void, the chart’s caption informed policymakers that:
“the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.”
And it’s this highly fraudulent version that has become the poster child of the equally fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.
Thanks in large part to the trick that hides the decline.
Trick or Cheat
Now we'll take a closer look at exactly what Jones meant when he wrote that he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Why did Jones refer to the ruse as “Mike’s Nature Trick?”
As die-hard Hockey Team opponents and fans alike already know – the original 600-year version of the now infamous “Hockey-Stick” graph was dubbed MBH98 because it first appeared in the Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes paper Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries [PDF], originally published in the science journal Nature in 1998. And “Mike’s Nature Trick” received its dubious designation among CRU insiders for the very same reason.As to the rest of the sentence -- It seems Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, when he wrote the email. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, he was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann’s series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.
And what I uncovered in the source code told the tale why. While Mann used multiple proxy sources, Briffa’s reconstructions were based solely on a property of annual tree ring growth known as maximum latewood density (MXD). And the MXD-only-driven plots began to diverge from actual temperatures as early as 1960. In fact, while many of CRU’s programs are designed to exclude all data after 1960 for later manual splicing with instrumental data, others employ “fudge factors” to force the generated plot to more closely adhere to measured temperatures as far back as 1930.
And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.
Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:
Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th Century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows but less sharply and then begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th Century.
Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:
Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.
But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here -- there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud.
And I hope that those investigating the fraud will carefully consider this explanation of his WMO cheating given last week by Jones: [my emphasis]
“One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”
And they’ll immediately recognize the dishonest denial they’re dealing with when they read the WMO Statement figure from the inside cover Jones referred to:
“Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal. Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).”
Even if MNT had been explained as Jones claimed -- which it wasn’t -- just how was the observer expected to differentiate the reconstructed from the actual data? And good luck finding that newsletter.
Spin it anyway you want – Mike’s Nature Trick is Phil’s WMO cheat.
More Tricks of the Charade
While suddenly the most famous, Mike’s is not the only in CRU’s bag of tricks.
Many of the programs I reviewed contained routines to exclude proxy data that demonstrated poor correlations with local temperature, which of course explains why CRU’s 19th through mid-20th century proxy temperatures appeared to be observationally accurate. Others “estimated” values for missing data.
And then there’s the Yamal matter – also a popular subject of the CRU emails.
In an October 5th email to climatologist Tom Wigley, Jones took issue with a piece I had written that day exposing the lies in CRU-based UN climate reports, which included a section on Keith Briffa’s mistreatment of Polar Ural data in order to exaggerate 20th century warming. That email prompted the reply from Wigley -- now familiar to AT readers -- in which he admitted it was “distressing to read that American Stinker item,” before offering to help Briffa, who “does seem to have got himself into a mess,” write an “explanation” for his deceitful cherry-picking of Yamal peninsula data.
Indeed, Keith’s Yamal Trick also “fudged” proxy reconstructions, not by overwriting them with instrumental data ala Mike, but rather by underhandedly stacking the actual dataset with trees hand-picked to assure his predetermined outcome. Yet both methods intentionally corrupted reconstruction results for the same devious purpose -- to skew late 20th century temperatures higher in order to artificially create the dreaded hockey stick effect.
Now, you might be wondering why all this fuss is being made over late 20th century temperatures when even we realists accept that they did rise until 1998. Hopefully, you now understand why the divergence between proxy and measured temperatures betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. And that any reconstruction demonstrating such a flaw-revealing divergence should be dismissed outright, not presented as policy fodder.
But there’s another issue at stake here.
Anthony Watts has surveyed over 75% of the 1200-plus U.S weather stations from which national temperatures are accumulated. Most of those were found to be inaccurate by more than 2°C, largely due to being located within 10 meters of an artificial heating source. In fact, less than 10% met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not to worry -- NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations.
Unpublished computer programs artificially adjusting the data -- what could possibly go wrong with that?
Would you be shocked to learn that at ICCC 3, Watts told us he had calculated such adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive? That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century.
And that’s here in America. Try to imagine what kind of shenanigans might be going on elsewhere in the world.
Consequently, even the “instrumental” temperatures the CRU crooks were fudging their results to align with were likely themselves fudged. So they were pumping the incline while hiding the decline
Hold the Fudge and the MWP won’t budge
In a June 2003 email to Jones and company, Mann discussed the notion of expanding CRU charts to 2 millennia, in an effort to ‘try to "contain" the putative "MWP."’ No deception in that, I suppose. Of course, an honest 2000 year reconstruction, such as this one from CO2Science.org, adapted from a 2005 Moberg et al. temperature history derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments, would actually emphasize rather than “contain” the MWP:
Any questions why Mann and friends work so diligently to “contain” (hide) the MWP?
As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular. And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.
And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.
After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC, based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change.
Of course, asking Americans to pay reparations based on the claim they’ve done harm to other nations by spoiling the climate is like asking me to pay damages to my neighbor based on his claim that he can’t sell his house because my great-grandmother’s ghost is haunting it.
As many have known and Climategate has proven, either would be equally preposterous.
But at least belief in ghosts is only marginally inspired by fraud.
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NASA's Hansen to Obama: Use Global Warming to Redistribute Wealth
By Noel Sheppard
January 1, 2009
Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming to redistribute wealth.
On Monday, one of Gore's leading scientific resources, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate.
The eco-socialism cat was let out of the bag on page five of a PDF Hansen published at Columbia University's website on December 29
Read the rest here:
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Via Urgent Agenda
Frank Tipler, the distinguished mathematical physicist at Tulane University, is an Urgent Agenda reader. We recently asked him for his view of the global-warming controversy, and he was kind enough to send us this thoughtful reply. We reprint it in full. Recommended reading:
As regards global warming, my view is essentially the same as yours: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science.
A few comments on my own particular view of global warming:
(1) I am particularly annoyed by the claims that the "the debate is over," because this was exactly the claim originally made against the Copernican theory of the Solar System. Copernicus' opponents said the idea that the Earth was the third planet from the Sun was advanced by Aristrachus in 300 B.C. (true), and had been definitely refuted by 100 A.D. The debate is over! Sorry, it wasn't: the Earth IS the third planet.
(2) It is obvious that anthropogenic global warming is not science at all, because a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this. The theory has predicted steadily increasing global temperatures, and this has been refuted by experience. NOW the global warmers claim that the Earth will enter a cooling period. In other words, whether the ice caps melt, or expand --- whatever happens --- the AGW theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.
(3) In contrast, the alternative theory, that the increase and decrease of the Earth's average temperature in the near term follows the sunspot number, agrees (roughly) with observation. And the observations were predicted before they occurred. This is good science.
(4) I emphasized in point (2) that the average person has to be able to check the observations. I emphasize this because I no longer trust "scientists" to report observations correctly. I think the data is adjusted to confirm, as far as possible, AGW. We've seen many recent cases where the data was cooked in climate studies. In one case, Hanson and company claimed that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Watts looked at the data, and discovered that Hanson and company had used September's temperatures for Russia rather than October's. I'm not surprised to learn that September is hotter than October in the Northern hemisphere.
It snowed here in New Orleans last week and it was the second heaviest snowfall I've seen in the 25 years I've lived in New Orleans. According to the local newspaper, it was the earliest snow had fallen in New Orleans since records were kept, beginning in 1850. I myself have looked at the relative predictive power of Copernicus's theory and the then rival Ptolemaic theory. Copernicus was on the average twice as accurate, and the average person of the time could tell. Similarly, anybody today can check the number of sunspots. Or rather the lack of them. When I first starting teaching astronomy at Tulane in the early 1980's, I would show sunspots to my students by pointing a small $25 reflecting telescope at the Sun, and focusing the Sun's image on the wall of the classroom. Sunspots were obviously in the image on the wall. I can't do this experiment today, because there are no sunspots.
(5) Another shocking thing about the AGW theory is that it is generating a loss of true scientific knowledge. The great astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, observed in the early 1800's that warm weather was correlated with sunspot number. Herschel noticed that warmer weather meant better crops, and thus fewer sunspots meant higher grain prices. The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.
(6) AGW supporters are also bringing back the Inquisition, where the power of the state is used to silence one's scientific opponents. The case of Bjorn Lomborg is illustrative. Lomborg is a tenured professor of mathematics in Denmark. Shortly after his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," was published by Cambridge University Press, Lomborg was charged and convicted (later reversed) of scientific fraud for being critical of the "consensus" view on AGW and other environmental questions. Had the conviction been upheld, Lomborg would have been fired. Stillman Drake, the world's leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book "Galileo: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called "natural philosophers"), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The "out-of-the-mainsteam" Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo's fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these "scientists" tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo's fellow "scientists" called in the Inquisition to silence him.
I find it very disturbing that part of the Danish Inquisition's case against Lomborg was written by John Holdren, Obama's new science advisor. Holdren has recently written that people like Lomborg are "dangerous." I think it is people like Holdren who are dangerous, because they are willing to use state power to silence their scientific opponents.
(7) I agree with Dick Lindzen that the AGW nonsense is generated by government funding of science. If a guy agrees with AGW, then he can get a government contract. If he is a skeptic, then no contract. There is a professor at Tulane, with a Ph.D in paleoclimatology, who is as skeptical as I am about AGW, but he'd never be considered for tenure at Tulane because of his professional opinion. No government contracts, no tenure.
(8) This is why I am astounded that people who should know better, like Newt Gingrich, advocate increased government funding for scientific research. We had better science, and a more rapid advance of science, in the early part of the 20th century when there was no centralized government funding for science. Einstein discovered relativity on his own time, while he was employed as a patent clerk. Where are the Einsteins of today? They would never be able to get a university job --- Einstein's idea that time duration depended on the observer was very much opposed to the "consensus" view of the time. Einstein's idea that light was composed of particles (now called "photons") was also considered crazy by all physicists when he first published the idea. At least then he could publish the idea. Now a refereed journal would never even consider a paper written by a patent clerk, and all 1905 physics referees would agree that relativity and quantum mechanics were nonsense, definitely against the overwhelming consensus view. So journals would reject Einstein's papers if he were to write them today.
Science is an economic good like everything else, and it is very bad for production of high quality goods for the government to control the means of production. Why can't Newt Gingrich understand this? Milton Friedman understood it, and advocated cutting off government funding for science.
The Rest here: Urgent Agenda
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