Incentive to Slow Climate Change Drives Output of Harmful Gases

I'm sorry, but this made me laugh out loud...

When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system.

Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high — a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle.

Shocking - not - to discover that people respond to incentives. And once again, "productive" and "profitable" are not synonymous.

Unintended consequences, anyone?

Should We Be Bullish on Solar?

Megan McCardle has an interesting and worthwhile piece on the likelihood of solar energy costs falling below those of conventional energies any time soon. But she finishes it with a pretty silly question...

I'd close by restating Tyler's question in a slightly different way: if the price of solar is really likely to keep falling until it's cheaper than coal, why don't we see this revealed in the behavior of global warming activists? Where are Greens saying "We've decided to move on to more pressing issues, because clearly, the carbon emissions problem is just about solved."

For some people, maybe even most, the concern is, in fact, carbon emissions. For many of the activists, however, all of the evidence suggests that the concern is not carbon emissions as much as it is concern about the consumption and lifestyle of the US population. For my entire lifetime, the people in the vanguard of this movement have responded to any proposed crisis with the same set of policy prescriptions - more central control, more rationing, less freedom for individual movement, less individual autonomy. In short, for the most dedicated of the global warming activists, carbon emission control is simply a pretext for the actual goal - socialism.

So, can I get my incandescent bulbs back now?

This is actually the second recent story on the issue. I haven't gotten around to linking the first yet, but I'll do it down below.

First, the news out of NASA.

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

...

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

...

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

Secondly, from a week or so ago, the news out of CERN. To provide some context for it, we look back to 1998, when the experiment was proposed:

A controversial theory proposing that cosmic rays are responsible for global warming is to be put to the test at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. Put forward two years ago by two Danish scientists, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, the theory suggests that it is changes in the Sun's magnetic field, and not the emission of greenhouse gases, that has led to recent rises in global temperatures.

(We all remember 1998, right? The hottest year in the history of the world [since record-keeping started all of 100 years earlier]...)

So, they did their experiment, got results, and were promptly warned not to talk about them...

The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets") experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

...

The CLOUD experiment builds on earlier experiments by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who demonstrated that cosmic rays provide a seed for clouds. Tiny changes in the earth's cloud cover could account for variations in temperature of several degrees. The amount of Ultra Fine Condensation Nuclei (UFCN) material depends on the quantity of the background drizzle of rays, which varies depending on the strength of the sun's magnetic field and the strength of the Earth's magnetic field.

But how much? Speaking at a private event attended by El Reg earlier this year, Svensmark, who has nothing to do with CLOUD, wouldn't be drawn. He said he thought it was one of four significant factors: man-made factors, volcanoes, a "regime shift" in the mid-'70s, and cosmic rays.

The quantity of cosmic rays therefore has an influence on climate, but this isn't factored into the IPCC's "consensus" science at all.

Points to draw from these stories:

1. The science is not settled.
2. The models aren't good enough to justify a plane trip across the ocean, never mind crippling restrictions and restructuring of the world's economies.
3. "Climate change denier" is not synonymous with "flat-earther," and definitely not with the much more pejorative "holocaust denier."

So let me share my position again, at least in the short form:

It is a reasonable hypothesis to suppose that there is a relationship between increased CO2 levels and increased temperature on a global level. This hypothesis has not been proven to my satisfaction. I do not believe that the scientific "consensus" is as strong as the warming alarmists would have us believe.
...
Many of the people favoring what may objectively be looked at as anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies with regards to carbon have a history of favoring anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies at other times in history, for other reasons. Many of the people who are pushing the AGW story the hardest have profited, are profiting, and can be expected to continue profiting from policies and government outlays that are based on their assumptions of short-term climate catastrophe. Many of the people who are profiting from the climate change storyline are living their lives as if it weren't a problem.
...
If you kludge a model with fixed data-specific adjustments to say what you want it to say every time you get new data, as they did at CRU, you can always make it match. A model which matches new data based on kludging it after that data is known, has no useful predictive power for future events...The CRU model was garbage, and it was fed garbage. I would not gamble a nickel based on the output of the CRU model.
...
It is difficult to believe that engaging in economically destructive activities based on the output of a fudged model using an uncertain and non-reproducible data set is a rational course of action.

So, I ask again - can I get my incandescent light bulbs back now?

All of the 100 watt incandescent's that I could possibly use for the rest of my life...

...won't equal the "carbon footprint" of this one-day fund-raising trip...

Obama mines riches of Aspen in re-election bid

But those with Aspen ties aren’t done giving. First Lady Michelle Obama will arrive in our fair city a week from today, on Tuesday, July 26, for a luncheon to benefit her husband’s bid for a second term, according to the Chicago Sun Times. The first lady will be hitting up two ski resorts in one day, first stopping in Park City, Utah, for a breakfast before hopping a flight to Aspen. It will be a quick fundraising trip. She will promptly return to Washington, D.C.

If the people who claim to believe in Global Warming¹ won't even pretend to behave as if they believe it, why should we?

(H/T: Instapundit)



¹ - And the contrary evidence is mounting...more on that later.

Spotted on facebook...

"Hundreds gather to protest Global Warming....."

(Original here...)

A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

Richard Lindzen (the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology):

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

Today's global warming story. Well, yesterday's, really...

Another news story on climate change:

The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports...all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface...Ice conditions [are] exceptional...so little ice has never before been noted.

Many old landmarks are so changed as to be unrecognizable. Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now often moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended far into the sea they have entirely disappeared.

No doubt that will be all over the news this week.

Well, probably not. We've heard it all before, right? We know that the Arctic is melting, it's unprecedented, polar bears are dying, manmade CO2 from the mid-to-late 20th century automobiles caused it, etc., etc.,

But this story did make the papers.

In 1922.

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...

Why is a "global warming" a partisan issue?

Q: Why is "global warming" a conservative vs. liberal issue?

A: Much of modern "liberalism/progressivism/leftism" is driven by a utopian belief that, with the right set of laws or regulatory framework, the perfectability of the human condition is achievable. Barack Obama, in his Nobel acceptance speech, actually admitted that "we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected." Conservatives tend to look on that kind of utopianism as not only wrong but dangerous.

"Liberals'/progressives'" dreams of utopia require a strong central planning government, with the ability to carry out its plans, and themselves in charge of making those plans. Freedom is messy and difficult, and people don't behave the right way to lead to a perfect human society. Well, what could be better than an environmental catastrophe that results from people cutting down trees or burning oil (to live independently outside of a controlled community) or gas (to move from place to place with government transportation or permission)? If society can be coerced or convinced into giving the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions to some centralized planning bureaucracy, there is literally no aspect of human behavior that cannot be regulated and controlled. (The same is true, of course, of giving that bureaucracy authority over medical decisions.)

So there is a tremendous amount of "watermelon environmentalism" - green on the outside, red (Marxist) on the inside. As I wrote three years ago

When leftists who have been telling me my entire life that Americans need to stop burning fossil fuels because America is using an "unfair" amount of the world's resources, or because exhaust fumes cause birth defects or sterility, or because it causes acid rain, or it's going to cause global cooling, decide that we need to stop burning fossil fuels because it's causing global warming, it's not easy to fight the suspicion that what they are really concerned with isn't global warming - it's Americans burning fossil fuels.

Obviously, not all liberals are jack-booted tyrants at heart, and the vast majority of the people who are advocating cap-and-trade and other freedom-destroying measures don't actually have the destruction of human freedom as their goal. The great majority are well-meaning, concerned citizens. But human beings are human beings, and Lord Acton's dictum still holds. You cannot centralize the kind of power that cap-and-trade requires (or government health-care requires) without also introducing staggering levels of corruption.

Conservatives do not believe in the perfectability of the human condition. And they don't believe that the kind of radical changes and centralized power required are good for society. Many are also skeptical of the urgency, because they recognize that the climate has changed constantly over the history of the planet. There is a school of thought that none of the regulatory schemes proposed could actually stop any climate change, anyway, and that the way to deal with the consequences will be to ... deal with the consequences. A wealthier society will be better able to do so than a poorer one. A society that imposes central controls and cap-and-trade will be a poorer one.

Schmitt on AGW

Harrison Schmitt is a geologist and a former Senator from New Mexico. He's also the last man to have stepped on to the surface of the moon¹ (until the next one). And he has a great article this morning about the earth's climate and the AGW movement.

Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.

Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.

All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.

In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change. The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.

Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.

Go ahead and read the whole thing...



¹ - None of that, of course, should cause anyone to listen to what he has to say on this topic. People should listen to what he has to say because he's right...

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...

Ironing...

A reader to Instapundit:

“Today, Michael Mann was scheduled to give a colloquium on climate change at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a graduate student. As you may know, Philadelphia has been hit by multiple snowstorms in the past week. Today, for what I am told is the first time since the mid-1990s, the university suspended normal operations due to snow, and his colloquium on climate change has been postponed.”

To quote Bart Simpson, "the ironing is delicious..."

(For those who don't know, Mann is the climatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work and behavior are under fire following the release of the data from the CRU last November. He's one of the "sky is falling" climatologists, convinced that the earth is burning up because people are still driving cars and heating their houses. He's one of the oracles on whom the Goreacle depends for his info.)

"His musings were wafted upwards...to a global fait accompli..."

Steyn:

But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scientific evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

Al Gore was unavailable for comment.

As always, Steyn's brilliant. Read it all...

"[the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses..."

Because, you know, the science is settled...

the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

Al Gore was unavailable for comment.

IPCC, like CBS News, is fake but accurate

Climate change deniers, of course, are foolish, uneducated, partisan know-nothings. They're deniers because the science is settled:

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

Oops.

Well, I'm sure they mean well. This is no real reason not to just give over control of the world's economies. They aren't really lying - they wanted it to be accurate, so there is a certain kind of metaphysical truth to it, even if it isn't exactly true. And besides, it was 2007 and they had to fight against George W. Bush's attempted destruction of the planet. So really, it's all Bush's fault.

Professor Christopher Field...the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written.

It's just like CBS news - fake but accurate!

Field: "The 2007 study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around."

So the science is settled. Unless it isn't. If you are skeptical about the results, if you think something's wrong, you're an evil denier, but we reserve the right to correct any errors later.



(H/T: Instapundit, Tim Blair)

More "data" issues at the IPCC

The data is overwhelming - mankind is destroying the climate. We know this because the IPCC tells us so. And they wouldn't lie, would they?

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

...

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Hey, they obviously meant well - we should just cede control of the world's economies to them anyway...

Climate skeptics still out there, still not insane

Former director of the National Hurricane Center, Neil Frank, on AGW skeptics:

What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic a la Al Gore.

Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.

Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.

The revelation of Climate­gate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?

Climategate reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science rather than the other way around. It is high time to question the true agenda of the scientists now on the hot seat and to bring skeptics back into the public debate.

Excellent piece - check it out, read it all...

Do we have ANY good temperature measurements?

Yet another piece of information comes out indicating that the "scientists" who have been measuring the planet's temperature have been doing so with a foot on the scale:

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.

I've long believed that there was plenty of evidence that the planet was warming. What I've been far less willing to buy, without substantial proof, is that mankind is the cause. And what I've been absolutely unwilling to accept is that we need to trash the world's economy to "save the planet." But the more information that comes out about the data measurements, the less willing I am to even believe that there's been any significant warming. The available public evidence - not the super-homogenized "consensus" data pictures presented, but the actual public evidence available for people to look at - now suggests that we don't have any idea whether there's been significant warming or not, because the data is being manipulated and presented to us by ideologues rather than scientists.

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...

Coerced petition-signatures - the true proof of scientific theories

The "scientific" consensus:

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the "professional integrity" of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fueling skepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

...


One scientist told The Times of London he felt pressure to sign. "The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming," he said.

The science is settled. The consensus is clear. Skeptics are deniers.

Because there is no better way to judge scientific claims than coerced signatures of non-climate scientists on petitions. If you can pressure enough geologists, botanists and micro-biologists to sign, under implicit threat of future failed grant applications, then the science must be good...