Jones - "peer review means no one looks at it..."

Remember all of that science that Al Gore assures us correct? Because, after all, it's all "peer-reviewed?" Sounds pretty formidable, doesn't it? Herds of scientists diligently poring over ever piece of data, every piece of code in the model?

Yeah, apparently not...

[On-leave CRU head Phil] Jones's general defence was that anything people didn't like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all "standard practice" among climate scientists. "Maybe it should be, but it's not."

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. "They've never asked," he said.

So the CRU has produced "data," which consists of manipulated raw climate station data, apparently no longer extant, run through models of poorly-written, poorly-maintained and never reviewed computer code, and the "science is settled."

I've written a lot of software over the years, and modeled a lot of different hardware behavior in a lot of different ways, so this is something I know something about. Let me tell you this - if no one's reviewed the model, nothing that the model produces can possibly qualify as peer-reviewed¹. I don't care whether an editor did a grammar check or some other acolyte at the church of AGW agrees that it accurately represents his point-of-view. If no one has walked through the process, including careful examination of the tools that produced the output, then the data isn't peer-reviewed. Or, to put it a little bit differently, if that's what passes for peer-review in the climate apocalypse movement, then none of those peer-reviewed journals are worth the paper on which they're printed.



¹ - And let me just say this again - if the models cannot explain a 15-year period of non heating, which they cannot, then the models don't work. There's something either wrong or missing, but either way, the output is not trustworthy. The amount of centralized control that the Al Gore's of the world are looking for, the amount of economic devestation, is unjustifiable without far, FAR better information than we have right now...

An interview with Professor Jones

Professor Phil Jones is the currently-on-leave director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, source of the massive "leak" in November of e-mails, data, computer code and other files related to climate change research ("Climategate"). Professor Jones is the author of the controversial e-mail in which he talked of using "Mike's nature trick" to "hide the decline."

He is a man who is supported with taxpayer dollars because of concern about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and has, therefore, a vested interest in producing materials which perpetuate or exacerbate concerns about that possibility. To quote Al Gore quoting Sinclair Lewis, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (The climate alarmists have for years been warning us that we couldn't trust any "science" funded by the oil companies - why we should trust science funded by zealous, power-hungry bureaucrats and performed by leftist academicians?)

Professor Jones has been a significant figure in the propagation of the kind of scientific information which leads to widespread panic and enables "well-meaning public servants" to argue for greater central control of world-wide economies and private behaviors. He's fought to suppress any kind of research which doesn't support the AGW position out of peer-reviewed literature, to "hide the decline," and, in short, to paint the picture of "settled science" which suggests a imminent catastrophe.

And the BBC got a chance to ask him some questions last week. Before we look at some of the excerpts, here are a couple of key points to remember. There are some who have questioned various aspects of the official story, as represented by the UN's IPCC, and been criticized or ostracized as "deniers." In the case of the AGW story, "skepticism" has been a dirty word. The following articles of the AGW case are considered to be "settled science," which no one of any intelligence would challenge, indisputable facts.

1. There has been an unprecedented rise in global temperature over the past 30 years.
2. The earth has never before been this hot.
3. The rise in temperature has proven to be caused by human behavior.
4. There is no legitimate "debate" about the causes of the current unprecedented warming.
5. Warming has continued rapidly over the past 15 years.

So, let's hear from Professor Jones:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

Let's see. The debate's not over, the MWP may have been warmer, the recent warming is similar to other warming periods in the last 150 years, there's been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years, there's been cooling in the last 8 (albeit also not statistically significant). It sounds to me as if Professor Jones is one of those "skeptics" or "deniers" that draw so much opprobrium from the likes of Al Gore.

I know this - I need a LOT more convincing before I'll peacefully acquiesce to the planned destruction of the US economy...

The quality of the "filter"

Worth keeping in mind when reading NYT analyses of Climategate.

In 1920, Robert Goddard was conducting experiments with rockets. In an editorial, The New York Times sneered at Goddard’s work and particularly at the idea that a rocket could function in a vacuum:

That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

In 1969…the year of the Apollo moon mission…the NYT finally got around to issuing a correction for their 1920 mistake.

What is noteworthy about the original editorial is not just the ignorance, but the arrogance and the outright nastiness...It appears that some of the attributes of the NYT which make it so untrustworthy and unlovable today are actually cultural characteristics of long standing.

How many journalists are qualified scientists? How many have good experience and expertise, even from an academic perspective, in any of the hard sciences, higher level math or statistics? Are not they drawn almost exclusively not just from the ranks of Liberal Arts majors, but from the ranks of Liberal Arts majors who want "to make the world a better place?" And that's the filter through which we've gotten our news on everything. Al Gore, for example, depends on it.

Thankfully, there's a lot of information getting past the filters now...

As I've said...

Al Lewis:

[Al] Gore is amassing so much money and influence from global warming that if the problem disappeared he'd have to reinvent it.

In Gore We Trust?

Derb notes a comment from noted super-earth-climate scientist Al Gore:

"People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …"

[Derb] The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that's a mile and a quarter if you're not as science-y as Al) you'll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it's much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was "several million degrees," we'd be a star.

Steyn follows up:

[Al Gores's] entire, highly lucrative shtick rests on the proposition that a one-degree increase in surface temperature in the course of a century imperils not merely the poor old polar bear, not merely the planet itself, but is "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe". But he's so insouciant about "several million degrees" boiling away a couple of miles under his loafers that he can't even be bothered getting it right to within three figures.

It makes you wonder whether even he believes any of this stuff.

The question that I have, not having seen the video, is whether he tossed off that number as a joke that no one got, or whether he really doesn't know or care. I do know this - he's fond of quoting Upton Sinclair's line that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Well, what understandings and not understandings does Al Gore's enormous income depend on? If every scientist in the world decided today that CO₂ was not a problem, would Al Gore understand it?

Global warming post of the day

No wonder Al Gore keeps saying the debate over global warming is over. Whenever he gets an inconvenient question, thugs turn off the questioner's microphone!

Yet another reason to loathe Waxman-Markey...

...in fact, it might be the best reason of all: Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”

Today's (OK, it was last Friday's but I missed it then) global warming news

Read this. Read all of it. The scientist (David Evans) who has been responsible for measuring Australia's compliance with the Kyoto protocols says that there is "no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None."

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

...

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

...

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).

...

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

Read it all. The "consensus" is a lie. The evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change is scant, at best.

And Al Gore's a lying demagogue. I have not been able to sit through his entire movie, but I've seen a few minutes of it. The very first thing that jumps out when he puts up the atmospheric carbon vs. temperature chart is that the temperature changes first. And everything I've read suggests that that makes sense - the oceans are carbon "sinks" - when they cool, they capture it, when they warm, they release it. Which means, of course, that the carbon in the atmosphere is not what is causing the oceans to warm or cool. And he stands up there and says it is and people applaud and no one calls him on it.

Anyway, this is a great piece, and I encourage everyone to read it...

Global warming juxtaposition

Yesterday, Sterling Burnett, over at Planet Gore, reviewed a new book from Canadian journalist Lawrence Solomon about the climate scientists who don't subscribe to the current political orthodoxy on anthropogenic global warming.

As a jacket blurb puts it, “What he found shocked him. Solomon discovered that on every “headline” global warming issue, not only were there serious scientists who dissented, consistently the dissenters were by far the more accomplished and eminent scientists.”
...
The Deniers is among the most effective in showing how science is being fundamentally undermined in the current politicized atmosphere of climate research. In addition, like no other book or paper I know, it provides a concise but thorough overview of the myriad weaknesses of the consensus view, the quality and substance of the criticisms of that view, and the stellar qualifications of those scientists labeled derisively as “deniers.”

In an interesting juxtaposition, also yesterday, the news came out that former United States Vice President Al Gore has continued his marginalization campaign by telling 60 Minutes that "those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man...are acting like the fringe groups who think the 1969 moon landing never really happened, or who once believed the world is flat."

In his Oscar-winning propaganda piece, Al Gore dismisses any scientist who has ever taken any money from an energy company with the old Upton Sinclair line, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It is incredibly ironic that man who has made, and is continuing to build, a fortune entirely upon political demagoguery on a debatable scientific issue would choose to bring that up. After all, who profits more from marginalizing real scientists who disagree with him than Al Gore? Whose salary was ever more "dependent on not understanding it" than Al Gore?

Today's Global Warming story

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was."

Al Gore: "Peace" prize winner

Does this finally puncture the myth that the Nobel Peace Prize is a reward for anything other than leftist hectoring?


(This seems an appropriate time to remind people that Gore's multi-award winning film was recently declared (correctly) to be partisan propaganda by a British court...)

Today's global warming news

Court Finds Truths Inconvenient for Gore

The British government decided that it would be a good idea to send copies of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to all schools, with then Environment Secretary (now Foreign Secretary) David Miliband declaring that "the debate over science is over." ...A truck driver and school governor...took the government to court, alleging that the film portrays "partisan political views," the promotion of which is illegal in schools under the Education Act 1996.

The judge has decided that this is indeed the case and that the Government’s guidance notes that accompanied the film exacerbated the problem. For the film to be shown in schools, therefore, several facts would have to be drawn to students’ attention:

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

Global warming? Not so much.

Heart warming? Absolutely...

Today's global warming news

Offered without comment...

Al Gore, in front of the United States Congress, March 21, 2007.

...there is no longer any serious debate over the basic points that make up the consensus on global warming

According to a press release from the Hudson Institute, September 12, 2007:

A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance...Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate. Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention.