Climategate scientist ‘hid flaws in data’, say sceptics
Professor in leaked email scandal tried to hide fact that numbers he used were wrong
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor | The Independent | 2 February 2010
The “climategate” controversy intensified last night when the senior British scientist at its centre, Professor Phil Jones, faced fresh accusations that he attempted to withhold data that could cast doubt on evidence for rising world temperatures.
The charges follow an analysis of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, of which Professor Jones is the director.
The emails, published online on the eve of the recent Copenhagen climate summit, led to allegations that Professor Jones and other researchers had behaved inappropriately in withholding or deleting scientific information to prevent its disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). Last week the charge became more serious when the Information Commissioner’s Office said that in withholding information, UEA had broken the law.
The university has set up an independent inquiry into the affair headed by Sir Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and Professor Jones has taken leave from his director’s post until the inquiry is completed. But the new allegations go beyond refusing FOI requests and concern data that Professor Jones and other scientists have used to support a record of recent world temperatures that shows an upward trend.
Climate sceptics have suggested that some of the higher readings may be due not to a warmer atmosphere, but to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, where cities become reservoirs of heat and are warmer than the surrounding countryside, especially during the night hours.
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.
Climate sceptics have demanded the two professors now withdraw their heat island paper. Professor Wei-Chyung was investigated by his university, but exonerated, but the emails indicate there was also concern among Professor Jones’ s colleagues at UEA, including from Dr Tom Wigley, his predecessor as head of the CRU, about the Chinese weather station data and Professor Jones’s contuing reliance on it.
No-one was available for comment at the University of East Anglia last night.
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
By Richard Gray | The Telegraph | 30 Jan 2010
The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.
This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.
But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”.
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”.
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.
Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.”
The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.
Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.
The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.
One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.
In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.
In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.
When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.
The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.
A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel’s vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.
But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.
The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: “The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed.”
Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC’s latest report, added: “The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.
“It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tends to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.”
The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.
Swine Flu Didn’t Fly
By Niko Kyriakou | January 27, 2010
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.”
Last year the World Health Organization predicted that H1N1 could infect two billion and claim hundreds of thousands of lives, while President Obama’s science advisers said the outbreak could infect up to 120 million Americans and kill 90,000. But thankfully, H1N1 turned out to be a mild flu. The type-A influenza has taken around 14,000 lives worldwide, according to World Health Organization numbers from January 22. The CDC said in December confirmed US deaths had reached 4,000, although it recently estimated that due to underreporting, the true death toll could be as high as 16,500 – a tragic sum, but less than half of what the CDC attributes to seasonal flu-related illness. In most of the northern hemisphere, hog flu has been on the decline for some about three months. New transmissions are largely contained to North Africa and South Asia, according to the WHO.
Signs swine flu wasn’t much of a killer grew throughout 2009, but WHO and most domestic health agencies around the globe chose instead to man the war bugles at full volume. The result was that governments poured tens of billions of dollars into vaccines. The US alone has spent $2 billion on the drugs and has allocated $7.5 billion in supplemental spending for H1N1 preparedness.
With the disease basically over, however, countries are stuck with millions of unused doses. French and German governments have had to cancel millions of orders of the vaccines due to falling demand and late-breaking news that European health authorities had recommended twice the necessary dosage. The CDC has dealt with the glut in another way. It now says all Americans should go and get the shot – a shift from its earlier recommendation that at-risk groups such as the young, sick, pregnant, and nurses seek injections first. But why should everyone get a shot when that the disease is petering out?
On January 22, WHO issued a statement calling allegations that it irresponsibly stoked H1N1 fears, “scientifically wrong and historically incorrect.” The statement defends figures WHO publicized on transmission rates, mortality, and the virulence of swine flu.
“The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible. We welcome any legitimate review process that can improve our work.”
At the hearing, WHO’s flu director, Dr Keiji Fukuda, denied the accusations against WHO.
“Let me state clearly for the record – the influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were not improperly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Previously, WHO had offered scant response to allegations of corruption, but deigned to defend itself after the Council of Europe meeting was announced. The public meeting to examine accusations against WHO was set up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which represents 800 million people in 47 countries. The Council’s January 26 meeting involved WHO officials, European drug-makers, and medical experts. PACE’s findings are expected to be announced January 29 and will likely be followed by an in-depth study and recommendations to European governments.
The hearing is just latest in a series of investigations into WHO’s propriety, which also include a 2009 Danish Parliamentary review of links between WHO expert – Albert Osterhaus – and makers of the swine flu drugs. Russian lawmaker Igor Barinov has also started an inquiry into WHO’s ties to H1N1 drug makers. In France, Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot was forced to a Paris court on January 4th over swine flu campaign irregularities – including ordering millions unnecessary vaccine doses. Demonstrations over statistical improprieties have taken place in Scotland and Canada.
Inquiries into WHO misdoing are likely to plunge deep into the statistical methods for data collection, however, it takes no expertise to see that health agencies’ data about H1N1 was wildly misleading.
In addition to bad guesses about how many would be infected, a study released December 7 by the Harvard School of Public Health found that the WHO also estimated the deadliness of H1N1 to be 40 to 250 times higher than it was.
Proving the drug industry squeezed WHO into selling swine flu is very difficult to establish, but the string of clues which points to this corruption is not hard to follow.
Pandemic or just plain Panic?
Swine flu took center stage in June of 2009, when WHO declared H1N1 the first “pandemic” in 42 years. This move caught the eye of every health authority from Tampa to Timbuktu and revved drug company engines. But to do it, WHO had to redefine the word.
One month after swine flu appeared in April, WHO rewrote the definition of “pandemic”. Under the new meaning, a pandemic does not need to cause high numbers of death or illness. A month after changing the definition, with just 144 people dead from H1N1, the flu was given the WHO’s highest threat classification: a “stage-six pandemic alert”. By comparison, the mildest 20th Century pandemic killed a million people.
Before the change, WHO had classified a pandemic as a disease that has “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” After the alteration, the organization’s website stated that, “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” In May, WHO spokesperson Natalie Boudou told CNN that the original definition was an error.
The Los Angeles Times writer Michael Fumento called the redefinition “bizarre”. “Such a declaration could render the term “flu pandemic” essentially meaningless — risking lethal public complacency if a bona fide one hits,” Fumento wrote.
Tom Jefferson, Formerly a general practitioner in the British Army who has worked for the well-respected Cochrane Collaboration for 15 years, Jefferson asked in July: “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic?”
“The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic,” Jefferson told Der Spiegel, a German magazine with a weekly circulation of 1 million. “There’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions. And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”
Yet the WHO stands by its decision to label H1N1 a pandemic, citing geographic spread and the virus’ novelty as its primary reasons. Moving ahead, Fukuda said his organization “will definitely consider whether we can define things better.” But some participants in Tuesday’s meeting wondered what the WHO is waiting for, since complaints have poured in from all sides.
The Associated Press reported on May 19, 2009, that China, Britain, Japan and other countries had urged WHO to “be very cautious about declaring the arrival of a swine flu pandemic, fearing that a premature announcement could cause worldwide panic and confusion.”
Critics say what was needed was not a frightful label, but hard scientific data to show how many people were getting swine flu. But on July 10, the WHO quit tracking cases of infection and told governments they should stop testing for individual cases, ostensibly because the speed of H1N1’s spread had already been confirmed.
“Rational scientific independent advice should be supreme, but there was an imperative behind this which was a financial one,” said Paul Flynn, a parliamentary representative in the UK who spoke at the Council of Europe’s hearing.
Corruption in Health Organizations?
Critics of the WHO say they promoted bad data to help drug makers get rich selling vaccines. This attack implies drug makers have a network of influence within the decision-making structure of the organization, a suggestion various officials confirm.
One high-level, long-term WHO employee who preferred to remain anonymous for job security, described the WHO as follows: “WHO is infested by corruption. There is big corruption, like the management of H1N1, and there is small corruption; and between the big and the small corruption there is [corruption] in all imaginable forms. Unfortunately, it’s not only the WHO.”
William Aldis, a retired senior WHO official who worked on the bird flu crisis, said in a Huffington Post article from September 24:
“I am concerned WHO’s communications is corrupted by the fact they push the buttons in the public’s brains that will raise the most funds. That is incompatible with what the organization should be doing: serving the public with technically correct factual information, pure and simple.”
Louise Voller, a journalist at the Danish Daily Information newspaper, has reported that pharmaceutical companies are present at meetings of WHO experts, and, that purportedly independent scientists hired by the WHO are also consultants to the drug companies that make the vaccines.
On Tuesday, WHO’s Fukuda insisted that its swine flu scientists’ were not tainted by their private sector associations. The reason, he said, is that before each meeting, scientists are asked to declare all possible conflicts of interest. “These documents are gone over and examined. If there is some potential conflict of interest we go back and talk with them.”
WHO was initially set up to rely on funding from UN member countries, in recent years, this source has been rapidly overtaken by “voluntary contributions”, which are provided by the private sector, national governments, and NGOs. According to WHO’s 2008-2009 budget, $958 million was supplied by the UN, while three times as much — $3.2 billion — came from voluntary donations.
Dr. Wodarg told the Council on Tuesday that the shift towards public-private partnership which began in earnest in 2001 puts WHO officials under extreme pressure.
“Already then there were very critical voices against the influence. [WHO’s] administration is made of people not well paid who can’t fight against the pay of people in and from the industry – they are simply swept aside…[private] influence is rampant and that is why we can’t understand why the WHO we used to love…has become unrecognizable to us.”
Whether or not WHO officials are being bought off, clearly, the capacity and incentive of drug makers to lean on science are enormous.
Pandemic Profit
All US contracts for H1N1 vaccines went to just five companies: CSL Limited, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune. All five also produced shots for either SARS or avian flu. When swine flu took full flight in the third quarter of 2009, these firms’ earnings skyrocketed. But according to British MP, Paul Flynn, that was part of drug-makers plan.
Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, he said. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former health expert for the Council of Europe. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones, Wodarg said.
“If you have a patent you can monopolize…and this is what industry did…The alternative is not to have vaccines patented…By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn’t have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises.”
Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.
Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.
The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.
The incredible profits associated with outbreaks have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
“Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”
Angell reports that the drug industry spent around 14 percent of sales profits on research and development in 2000, while spending closer to 35 percent on “marketing and administration”. How that expenditure breaks down is not public knowledge, but 35% comes out to a lot of money. For instance, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck alone made $287 billion in 2007, according to the 2008 Pharma Report by IMS, a market intelligence firm.
The larger question begged by health agencies’ bad data, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it, is this: if fears are overstated every time there’s a flu outbreak, when the public really does need a vaccine, who will believe the boys who cried wolf?
What’s more, should the European investigations conclude that the WHO deliberately incited H1N1 paranoia to levels beyond reason in order to help drug makers, the implication is that both the private and public sectors need better oversight before being given any greater control over health care.
ManBearPig Attacked by Science!
By Khephra | Aletho News | January 28, 2010
Today I’d like to more thoroughly address specific planks of Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory (AGW) that I think deserve further scrutiny. Over the past year AGW rhetoric has reached deafening levels, and advocates have successfully framed the hypothesis as unassailable. Propagandists have yolked AGW with “wise stewardship” and today it’s common for skeptics of AGW to be derided as ignorant anti-environmentalists. But I don’t think that things are nearly so simple.
Unfortunately, once people become emotionally invested in a position, it can be very difficult to provoke them into changing course. Liberals and progressives hailed the election of Obama as the most wonderful thing since sliced-bread. With a battlefield full of broken promises behind him and the insinuation of institutionalized corruption and illegal forced detentions stretching into the foreseeable future, many of those same liberals and progressives have fallen into an exasperated, listless complacency. They became emotionally invested in the “hope” engendered by Obama, and when the reality failed to live up to the myth, they were forced into cognitive dissonance, apathy, or synthesis. If you meet someone who still supports Obama, dig a little and you’ll find the cognitive dissonance – and, I would argue, the same could be said of supporters of AGW.
To get us started, I think we should rehash the essential assumptions of AGW:
• As atmospheric levels of C02 increase, Earth’s median temperature increases.
• As Earth’s median temperature increases, atmospheric imbalances precipitate increases in the frequency and strength of weather events (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts).
• Humans are directly exacerbating this process through the burning of fossil fuels and any activity that yields C02 as a byproduct.
• Increased median temperatures are melting the polar ice caps and causing glaciers to recede or vanish.
Since AGW has the pleasant benefit of being a bonafide scientific theory, it suggests falsifiable claims. If these claims can be demonstrated invalid, the theory is in need of reconsideration. On the other hand, if emotional investment and cognitive dissonance are high enough, no amount of contradictory data will matter. Young Earth Creationists make a fine example of this psychopathology. In spite of overwhelming tangible evidence that their theory is invalid, they fall back on dogma or the Bible – and no amount of science will provoke them into reconsidering their position. Thankfully, AGW is far easier to invalidate than dogma from the Bible, because it makes so many suppositions that are easily testable.
Let’s begin with the most crucial component of AGW – C02. Here’s a graph of historical global C02 levels and temperatures. According to their analysis:
“Current climate levels of both C02 and global temperatures are relatively low versus past periods. Throughout time, C02 and temperatures have been radically different and have gone in different directions. As this graph reveals, there is little, if any correlation, between an increase of C02 and a resulting increase in temperatures.”
If we realize that C02’s correlation with global temperature is not a given, the entire edifice of AGW begins to crumble. Therefore, it’s difficult to get adherents of AGW to accept the implications of this data. Again and again they’ll fall back on the assumption that the correlation between C02 and global temperatures is incontrovertible, but they must avoid an ever-expanding amount of dissonant data:
MIT’s professor Richard Lindzen’s peer reviewed work states “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”
The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend. More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale. – Science & Public Policy Institute: Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009
“Just how much of the “Greenhouse Effect” is caused by human activity?
It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account– about 5.53%, if not.
This point is so crucial to the debate over global warming that how water vapor is or isn’t factored into an analysis of Earth’s greenhouse gases makes the difference between describing a significant human contribution to the greenhouse effect, or a negligible one.” – Geocraft
Next, let’s further consider the hypothetical tangential effects of AGW – e.g., rising global temperatures melt icecaps, etc.:
• Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out: “Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.”
• ‘AGW – I refute it thus!’: Central England Temperatures 1659 – 2009: “Summary: Unprecedented warming did not occur in central England during the first decade of the 21st century, nor during the last decade of the 20th century. As the CET dataset is considered a decent proxy for Northern Hemisphere temperatures, and since global temperature trends follow a similar pattern to Northern Hemisphere temps, then the same conclusion about recent warming can potentially be inferred globally. Based on the CET dataset, the global warming scare has been totally blown out of proportion by those who can benefit from the fear.”
• 50 Years of Cooling Predicted: “‘My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,’ Lu said. ‘Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming….’
In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.”
A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming.
Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’:
If there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”. – Telegraph.co.uk
Since the early Holocene, according to the findings of the six scientists, sea-ice cover in the eastern Chuckchi Sea appears to have exhibited a general decreasing trend, in contrast to the eastern Arctic, where sea-ice cover was substantially reduced during the early to mid-Holocene and has increased over the last 3000 years. Superimposed on both of these long-term changes, however, are what they describe as “millennial-scale variations that appear to be quasi-cyclic.” And they write that “it is important to note that the amplitude of these millennial-scale changes in sea-surface conditions far exceed [our italics] those observed at the end of the 20th century.”
Since the change in sea-ice cover observed at the end of the 20th century (which climate alarmists claim to be unnatural) was far exceeded by changes observed multiple times over the past several thousand years of relatively stable atmospheric CO2 concentrations (when values never strayed much below 250 ppm or much above 275 ppm), there is no compelling reason to believe that the increase in the air’s CO2 content that has occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution has had anything at all to do with the declining sea-ice cover of the recent past; for at a current concentration of 385 ppm, the recent rise in the air’s CO2 content should have led to a decrease in sea-ice cover that far exceeds what has occurred multiple times in the past without any significant change in CO2. – C02 Science.org
See also:
• The Global Warming Scandal Heats Up: “The IPCC has been forced to admit that the claim made was actually taken from an article published in 1999. The article was based around a telephone interview with an Indian scientist who has admitted that he was working from pure speculation and his claims were not backed by research.”
• The Dam is Cracking: “[The claims of Himalayan glacial melting] turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole.
The truth, as seen by India’s leading expert in glaciers, is that “Himalayan glaciers have not in anyway exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.” …
Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.”
• Arctic Sea Ice Since 2007: “According to the World Meteorological Organization, Arctic sea ice has increased by 19 percent since its minimum in 2007, though they don’t make it very easy to see this in the way that they report the data.”
Now let’s consider some of the agents and institutions that are strong advocates of AGW:
Howard C. Hayden, emeritus professor of physics from the University of Connecticut, told a Pueblo West audience that he was prompted to speak out after a visit to New York where he learned that scaremongering billboards about the long-term effects of global warming were being purchased at a cost of $700,000 a month.
“Someone is willing to spend a huge amount of money to scare us about global warming,” Hayden said. “Big money is behind the global-warming propaganda.”
Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s Climate Doctor:
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the bands members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.” – National Post
The ‘ClimateGate’ scandal that broke a couple of months ago warrants some elaboration, too. For previous posts on this topic, see:
• Using ClimateGate to Reason with ManBearPig
• ClimateGate Crashes ManBearPig’s Party
• ManBearPig Meets the Vikings
• ManBearPig on Life Support?
That foundation established, let’s take a closer look at who was involved with ClimateGate:
For a thorough, email-by-email elaboration of exactly what the ‘big deal’ is, see here:
Climategate publicly began on November 19, 2009, when a whistle-blower leaked thousands of emails and documents central to a Freedom of Information request placed with the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. This institution had played a central role in the “climate change” debate: its scientists, together with their international colleagues, quite literally put the “warming” into Global Warming: they were responsible for analyzing and collating the various measurements of temperature from around the globe and going back into the depths of time, that collectively underpinned the entire scientific argument that mankind’s liberation of “greenhouse” gases—such as carbon dioxide—was leading to a relentless, unprecedented, and ultimately catastrophic warming of the entire planet.
The key phrase here, from a scientific point of view, is that it is “unprecedented” warming.
• The Proof Behind the CRU ClimateGate Debacle: Because Computers Do Lie When Humans Tell Them Too: “As you can see, (potentially) valid temperature station readings were taken and skewed to fabricate the results the “scientists” at the CRU wanted to believe, not what actually occurred.”
• Unearthed Files Include “Rules” for Mass Mind Control Campaign: “The intruded central computer was not only filled to the brim with obvious and attempted ostracizing of scientists who don’t blindly follow the leader, the files also reveal that the folks of the IPCC made use or considered making use of a disinformation campaign through a ‘communication agency’ called Futerra.
The agency describes itself as ‘the sustainability communications agency’ and serves such global players as Shell, Microsoft, BBC, the UN Environment Programme, the UK government and the list goes on. The co-founder of Futerra, Ed Gillespie explains: ‘For brands to succeed in this new world order, they will have to become eco, ethical and wellness champions.’
The document included within the climategate treasure-chest is called ‘Rules of the Game’ and shows deliberate deception on the part of this agency to ensure that the debate would indeed be perceived as being settled. When facts do not convince, they reasoned, let us appeal to emotions in order to get the job done.”
• Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming: “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.”
• ClimateGate Expanding, Including Russian Data and Another Research Center: “Well now some Russian climate officials have come forward stating that the data they handed over to the Hadley Centre in England has been cherry-picked, leaving out as much as 40% of the cooler temperature readings and choosing the hottest readings to make it appear things were warmer than they actually are (regardless of whether the temperature is human-induced or natural).”
Scientists using selective temperature data, sceptics say:
Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.
In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.
Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada. – Canada.com
The ClimateGate emails were highly damning, and have led to Phil Jones’ (one of the researchers at the centre of the scandal) resignation and an investigation into Michael Mann’s ’scholarship’. Furthermore, the UN is also ‘investigating’ the ’scholarship’ underlying the scandal, but if something as incontrovertible as the Goldstone Report can get whitewashed, I have little hope for a meaningful or just analysis in a scandal of this magnitude. In theory, science is self-correcting; but in practice it’s “defend your thesis at all costs”.
Nevertheless, each of our original four suppositions are demonstrably ambiguous – if not outright invalid. Therefore, science – and empiricism – invalidates AGW.
Humanity has irrevocably altered – blighted? – the Earth, but C02 levels are far less relevant than other forms of industrial pollution: mercury-seeping lightbulbs, dioxin pollution, gene drift, cell phone-induced genetic damage, and all manner of other harmful and silly endeavours pose greater unambiguous threats to humanity than C02. Therefore, if you really want to help clean up the Earth, leave the AGW rhetoric in the dustbin and let’s get on with disempowering the hegemons.
Related articles
- NCSE: When Is purported Science not Science? (wattsupwiththat.com)
Obama Administration Orders World Bank To Keep Third World In Poverty
More starvation and death guaranteed by blocking poorer countries from building coal-fired power plants
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
January 26, 2010
Under the provably fraudulent and completely corrupted justification of fighting global warming, the Obama administration has ordered the World Bank to keep “developing” countries underdeveloped by blocking them from building coal-fired power plants, ensuring that poorer countries remain in poverty as a result of energy demands not being met.
Even amidst the explosive revelations of the United Nations IPCC issuing reports on the Himalayan Glaciers and the Amazon rainforest littered with incorrect data, the U.S. government has “Stepped up pressure on the World Bank not to fund coal-fired power plants in developing countries,” reports the Times of India.
The order was made by U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank Whitney Debevoise, who represents the United States in considering all loans, investments, country assistance strategies, budgets, audits and business plans of the World Bank Group entities.
By preventing poor nations from becoming self-sufficient in blocking them from producing their own energy, the Obama administration is ensuring that millions more will die from starvation and lack of access to hospitals and medical treatment.
Not only does strangling the energy supply to poorer countries prevent adequate food distribution and lead to more starvation, but hospitals and health clinics in the third world are barely even able to operate as a result of the World Bank and other global bodies ordering them to be dependent on renewable energy supplies that are totally insufficient.
A prime example appeared in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which highlighted how a Kenyan health clinic could not operate a medical refrigerator as well as the lights at the same time because the facility was restricted to just two solar panels.
“There’s somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop,” said author and economist James Shikwati. “I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry … We are being told, ‘Don’t touch your resources. Don’t touch your oil. Don’t touch your coal.’ That is suicide.”
The program labels the idea of restricting the world’s poorest people to alternative energy sources as “the most morally repugnant aspect of the global warming campaign.”
As we have previously highlighted, the implementation of policies arising out of fraudulent fearmongering and biased studies on global warming is already devastating the third world, with a doubling in food prices causing mass starvation and death.
Poor people around the world, “Are being killed in large numbers by starvation as a result of (climate change) policy,” climate skeptic Lord Monckton told the Alex Jones Show last month, due to huge areas of agricultural land being turned over to the growth of biofuels.
“Take Haiti where they live on mud pie with real mud costing 3 cents each….that’s what they’re living or rather what they’re dying on,” said Monckton, relating how when he gave a speech on this subject, a lady in the front row burst into tears and told him, “I’ve just come back from Haiti – now because of the doubling in world food prices, they can’t even afford the price of a mud pie and they’re dying of starvation all over the place.”
As a National Geographic Report confirmed, “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”
In April 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted that biofuels were a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices that have led to riots in countries such as Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines, and even Italy.
“We estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty,” he stated.
Even if we are to accept that fact that overpopulation will be a continuing problem in the third world, the very means by which poorer countries would naturally lower their birth rates, by being allowed to develop their infrastructure, is being blocked by global institutions who craft policies designed to keep the third world in squalor and poverty.
This goes to the very heart of what the real agenda behind the global warming movement really is – a Malthusian drive to keep the slaves oppressed and prevent the most desperate people on the planet from pulling themselves out of destitution and despair.
IPCC climate report riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers
Aletho News | January 25, 2010
World Wildlife Fund* is renowned for being a phony green organization whose primary role is influencing environmental regulation so as to protect corporate interests. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has provided WWF grants with the aim of “Combating Global Warming”. WWF became a focal point for IPCC critics after it was revealed that the IPCC report’s erroneous assertion of Himalayan glaciers being threatened by global warming was sourced from a WWF publication.
As per the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’. However it has now been reported that the report relied heavily on literature that, rather than being scientific or neutral, was in fact sourced from the WWF. Donna Laframboise writes:
AR4 is the shorthand name for the 2007 Nobel-winning IPCC report. When one types “WWF” into an AR4 search box dozens of references are returned.
For example, a WWF report is cited twice on this page as the only supporting proof of IPCC statements about coastal developments in Latin America. A WWF report is referenced twice by the IPCC’s Working Group II in its concluding statements. There, the IPCC depends on the WWF to define what the global average per capita “ecological footprint” is compared to the ecological footprint of central and Eastern Europe.
Elsewhere, when discussing “mudflows and avalanches” linked to melting glaciers, the oh-so-scientifically-circumspect IPCC relies on two sources to make its point – an apparently still unpublished paper delivered to a conference five years earlier (Bhadra, 2002) and a WWF document.
Similarly, the only reason the IPCC can declare that “Changes in climate are affecting many mountain glaciers, with rapid glacier retreat documented in the Himalayas, Greenland, the European Alps, the Andes Cordillera and East Africa” is because a WWF report makes this claim.
In a section on coral reefs and mangroves, a WWF report is the IPCC’s sole reason for believing that, in “the Mesoamerican reef there are up to 25 times more fish of some species on reefs close to mangrove areas than in areas where mangroves have been destroyed.”
When the IPCC advises world leaders that “climate change is very likely to produce significant impacts on selected marine fish and shellfish (Baker, 2005)” it doesn’t call attention to the fact that the sole authority on which this statement rests is a WWF workshop project report (see the “Baker” document below).
All told, an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF is cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC report:
- Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp. [Accessed 03.05.07: http://www.wwf.org.uk/ filelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf]
- Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.
- Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey, 79 pp.
- Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004: Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp. http://www.wwf.org.au/ publications/acg_solutions.pdf
- Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change – agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich [may be the same document as “Allianz” above, except that one is dated 2006 and the other 2005]
- Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November
- Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland. Accessed 01.10.2006 at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/medreportfinal8july05.pdf.
- Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246 pp.
- http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/our_solutions/business_industry/climate_savers/ index.cfm
- Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005: Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal
- Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.
- Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf
- WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. http://www.wwf.org/
- WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.
- WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.
- Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland
Yet just last week Australia’s Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had this to say about the IPCC report:
“The Fourth Assessment Report represents the international consensus on climate change science. All reports of the IPCC are subjected to extensive expert and government review.”
It seems that the WWF’s position papers (and its agenda) have become the holy writ of modern science, Nobel prize included.
*In North America, WWF stands for World Wildlife Fund. Elsewhere, it stands for World Wide Fund for Nature.
Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified
By David Rose | Daily Mail | January 24, 2010
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.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’
Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.
According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.
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.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’
In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.
Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.
‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.
‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’
One of the problems bedeviling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’
When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.
- IPCC chairman Raj Pachauri
Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.
It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’
However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.
For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.
In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.
The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.
The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.
Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.
Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.
The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.
Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.
Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’
Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.
Related article
- Déjà Vu : Himalayan glaciers to melt (again) by 2035! (climatism.wordpress.com)
Copenhagen Accord formalized by 9 of 193 nations
Copenhagen Climate Accord Deadline Is Flexible, De Boer Says
By Alex Morales
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — The Jan. 31 deadline for countries to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord climate-change agreement that was brokered last month is flexible, United Nations climate chief Yvo De Boer said.
“I think you could describe it as a soft deadline,” de Boer said today on a Webcast from Bonn. “There’s nothing deadly about it. If you fail to meet it, you can still associate with the accord afterwards.”
The Copenhagen Accord was crafted by the U.S., China and two dozen other countries on the sidelines of a two-week UN climate summit in the Danish capital that was beset by walkouts and squabbles between developed and developing nations.
The accord called for countries to indicate their support by the end of this month. As of yesterday, nine of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 193 members had done so formally, a UN spokesman said. Most of the countries who agreed to the deal in Denmark have yet to do so, according to the UN.
Countries have been asked to “associate” themselves with the accord, which is “an important tool to advance the negotiations,” de Boer said. “Countries are not being asked to sign the accord, they’re not being asked to take on a legally binding target; they will not be bound to the action which they submit to the secretariat.”
De Boer said the deadline is to enable him to meet internal requirements to produce a report on the Copenhagen meeting and that countries can indicate whether they support the agreement and their own targets later.
‘Living Document’
“I very much see the accord as a living document that tracks actions that countries want to take,” de Boer said.
Under the deal, countries will aim to keep the global rise in temperatures since industrialization in the 1800s to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Industrialized nations can submit greenhouse-gas reduction targets for inclusion in an appendix and developing nations can spell out in a separate annex actions they intend to take to limit their own emissions.
Australia, Canada, France, Ghana, the Maldives, Papua New Guinea, Serbia, Singapore and Turkey have notified the UNFCCC that they want to be “associated” with the accord while Cuba has rejected it, the UN spokesman said yesterday.
De Boer said the document will be an “important tool” to advance the formal UN negotiations, which countries “want to reach a conclusion” at another meeting in Mexico at the end of the year.
“Copenhagen didn’t produce the final cake but it left countries with all the right ingredients to bake a new one in Mexico,” de Boer said. Even so, it isn’t clear whether the outcome in Mexico will be a legally binding treaty, he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net
IPCC did not consult me; relied on press interview: Hasnain
The Economic Times | 19 Jan 2010
NEW DELHI: The controversy over the IPCC observations on melting of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 took a new turn with glaciologist Syed Hasnain contending that he has never mentioned the time in his research papers which the UN body had included in its climate change report.
He also said that he was not even consulted by the IPCC for including his research papers in the report.
“I am unnecessarily being dragged into the controversy. The IPCC did not even consult me or ask me for my research papers for inclusion in the fourth assessment report,” Hasnain, a Fellow with The Energy and Resources Institute, said.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), headed by Rajendra K Pachauri, has triggered a controversy with claims that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 due to global warming.
The Indian government had questioned the finding last year and come out with its own report doubting the glacier melt at the pace the IPCC had predicted.
The IPCC findings were based on Hasnain’s interview to “New Scientist” magazine in 1999 which were used by Murari Lal who had edited the chapter on glaciers for the IPCC report.
Lal claimed Hasnain had “misled” the entire scientific community by making the claims and IPCC had relied on his remarks made in the interview “in good faith”.
“I do not understand why they picked only the interview I had given to New Scientist. I have not mentioned the year 2035 in any of the research papers written by me,” Hasnain said.
UN report that said Himalayan glaciers would melt within 25 years was all hot air
By David Derbyshire | Daily Mail | 18th January 2010
Claims by the world’s leading climate scientists that most of the Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 25 years were last night exposed as nonsense.
The alarmist warning appeared two years ago in a highly influential report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At the time the IPCC insisted that its report contained the latest and most detailed evidence yet of the risks of man-made climate change to the planet.
But the experts behind the warning have now admitted their claim was not based on hard science – but a news story that appeared in the magazine New Scientist in the late 1990s.
That story was itself based on a telephone conversation with an Indian scientist who has since admitted it was little more than speculation.
The revelation is a major blow to the credibility of the IPCC which was set up to provide political leaders with clear, independent advice on climate change.
It follows the ‘Climategate’ email row in which scientists at the University of East Anglia appeared to have manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made climate change.
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: ‘The IPCC review process has been shown on numerous occasions to lack transparency and due diligence.
‘Its work is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports.
‘Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice – as the Copenhagen summit showed.’
The flawed claim appeared in chapter ten of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which stated: ‘Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.’
Rather than being based on a peer-reviewed, published scientific study, the claim was borrowed from a 2005 report by the campaigning green charity WWF.
The WWF, in turn, took the claim from a 1999 report in New Scientist. The magazine based its story on a phone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Dr Hasnain now says the comment was ‘pure speculation’.
The gaffe is a major embarrassment for the IPCC.
Yesterday Prof Murari Lal, who edited the section on glaciers in the IPCC report, told a Sunday newspaper: ‘If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.’
Glacier experts are astonished it has taken so long to expose the blunder. Most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt within 25 years. The quickest melting are shrinking at a rate of two to three feet of thickness a year.
Climate science: models vs. observations
By Richard K. Moore | Aletho News | January 16, 2010
This document continues to evolve, based on continuing research. The latest version is always maintained at this URL:
http://rkmdocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/climate-science-observations-vs-models.html
You can click on any graphic in this document to see a larger image.
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
— Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, 1918
Science and models
True science begins with observations. When patterns are recognized in these observations, that leads to theories and models, which then lead to predictions. The predictions can then be tested by further observations, which can validate or invalidate the theories and models, or be used to refine them.
This is the paradigm accepted by all scientists. But scientists being people, typically in an academic research community, within a political society, there can be many a slip between cup and lip in the practice of science. There are the problems of getting funding, of peer pressure and career considerations, of dominant political dogmas, etc.
In the case of models there is a special problem that frequently arises. Researchers tend to become attached to their models, both psychologically and professionally. When new observations contradict the model, there is a tendency for the researchers to distort their model to fit the new data, rather than abandoning their model and looking for a better one. Or they may even ignore the new observations, and simply declare that their model is right, and the observations must be in error. This problem is even worse with complex computer models, where it is difficult for reviewers to figure out how the model really works, and whether ’fudging’ might be going on.
A classic example of the ’attached to model’ problem can be found in models of the universe. The Ptolemaic model assumed that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that the universe revolves around that center. Intuitively, this model makes a lot of sense. On the Earth, it feels like we are stationary. And we see the Sun and stars moving across the sky. “Obviously” the universe revolves around the Earth.
However, in order for this model to work in the case of the planets, it was necessary to introduce the arbitrary mechanism of epicycles. When Galileo and Copernicus came along, a much cleaner model was presented, that explained all the motions with no need for arbitrary assumptions. But no longer would the Earth be the center.
In this case it was not so much scientists that were attached to the old model, but the Church, which liked the model because it fit their interpretation of scripture. We’ve all heard the story of the Bishop who refused to look through the telescope, so he could ignore the new observations and hold on to the old model. Galileo was forced to recant. Thus can political interference hold back the progress of science, and ruin careers.
Climate models and global warming
Over the past century there has been a strong correlation between rising temperatures, and rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, caused by the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels. And it is well known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Other things being equal, higher CO2 levels must cause an increase in temperature, due to trapping more heat from the sun. Many scientists, quite reasonably, began to explore the theory that continually rising CO2 emissions would lead to continually rising temperatures.
Intuitively, it seems that the theory is “obviously” true. Temperatures have been rising along with CO2 levels; CO2 is a greenhouse gas; what is there to prove? And if the theory is true, and we keep increasing our emissions, then temperatures will eventually reach dangerous levels, melting the Antarctic ice sheet, raising sea levels, and all the other disasters presented by Al Gore in his famous documentary. “Obviously” we are facing a human-generated crisis – and something has got to be done!
But for many years, before Gore’s film, governments didn’t seem to be listening. Environmentalists, however, were listening. Public concern began to grow about CO2 emissions, and the climate scientists investigating the theory shared these concerns. They had a strong motivation to present the scientific case convincingly, in order to force governments to pay attention and take effective action — the future of humanity was at stake!
The climate scientists began building computer models, based on the observed correlation between temperature and CO2 levels. The models looked solid, not only for the past century, but extending back in time. Research with ice-core data revealed a general correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, extending back for a million years and more. What had been “obvious” to begin with, now looked even more obvious, confirmed by seemingly solid science.
These are the very conditions that typically cause scientists to become attached to their models. The early success of the model confirms what the scientists suspected all along: the theory must be true. A subtle shift happens in the mind of the scientists involved. What began as a theory starts to become an assumption. If new data seems to contradict the theory, the response is not to discard the theory, but rather to figure out what the model is lacking.
In the case of the Ptolemaic model, they figured out that epicycles must be lacking, and so epicycles were added. They were certain the universe revolved around the Earth, and so epicycles had to exist. Similarly, the climate scientists have run into problems with their models, and they’ve needed to add more and more machinery to their models in order to overcome those problems. They are certain of their theory, and so their machinery must be valid.
Perhaps they are right. Or perhaps they’ve strayed into epicycle territory, where the theory needs to be abandoned and a better model needs to be identified. This is the conclusion that quite a few scientists have reached. Experts do differ on this question, despite the fact that Gore says emphatically that the “science is settled”. Which group of scientists is right? This is the issue we will be exploring in this article.
Question 1
Compared to the historical record, are we facing a threat of dangerous global warming?
Let’s look at the historical temperature record, beginning with the long-term view. For long-term temperatures, ice-cores provide the most reliable data. Let’s look first at the very-long-term record, using ice cores from Vostok, in the Antarctic.
Data source:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/deutnat.txt
Vostok Temperatures: 450,000 BC — Present
Here we see a very regular pattern of long-term temperature cycles. Most of the time the Earth is in an ice age, and about every 125,000 years there is a brief period of warm tempertures, called an inter-glacial period. Our current inter-glacial period has lasted a bit longer than most, indicating that the next ice age is somewhat overdue. These long-term cycles are probably related to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, which follows a cycle of about 100,000 years.
We also see other cycles of more closely-spaced peaks, and these are probably related to other cycles in the Earth’s orbit. There is an obliquity cycle of about 41,000 years, and a precession cycle, of about 20,000 years, and all of these cycles interfere with one another in complex ways. Here’s a tutorial from NASA that discusses the Earth’s orbital variations:
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sprecess.htm
Next let’s zoom-in on the current inter-glacial period, as seen in Vostok and Greenland, again using ice-core data. Temperatures here are relative to the value for 1900, which is shown as zero:
Vostok Temperatures: 12,000 BC — 1900
Data source:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-icecore-2475.html
Greenland Temperatures: 9,500 BC — 1900
Here we see that the Southern Hemisphere emerged from the last ice age about 1,000 years earlier than did the Northern Hemisphere. As of 1900, in comparison to the whole inter-glacial period, the temperature was 3°C below the maximum in Vostok, and 3°C below the maximum in Greenland. Thus, as of 1900, temperatures were rather cool for the period in both hemispheres, and in Greenland, temperatures were close to a minimum.
During this recent inter-glacial period, temperatures in both Vostok and Greenland have oscillated through a range of about 4°C, although the patterns of oscillation are quite different in each case. In order to see just how different the patterns are, let’s look at Greenland and Vostok together, for the period 500BC–1900. Vostok is shown with a feint line, actually a dotted line if you click to see the enlarged version.
The patterns are very different indeed. In many cases we see an extreme high in Greenland, while at the same time Vostok is experiencing an extreme low. And in the period 1500—1900, while Greenland temperatures were relatively stable, within a range of .5°C, Vostok went through a radical oscillation of 3°C, from an extreme high to an extreme low. These differences between the two hemispheres might be related to the Earth’s orbit (See NASA tutorial), or they might be related to the fact that the Southern Hemisphere is dominated by oceans, while most of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere. Whatever the reason, the difference is striking.
There may be some value in trying to average these different records, to obtain a ’global average’, but it is important to understand that a global average is not the same as a global temperature. For example, consider temperatures 2,000 years ago. Greenland was experiencing a very wram period, 2°C above the baseline, while Vostok was experiencing a cold spell, nearly 1°C below the baseline. While the average for year 1000 might be near the baseline, that average does not represent the real temperature in either location.
This distinction between a global average, and real temperatures, is very important to keep in mind. Consider for example the concern that warming might lead to melting of the tundra in the Arctic, leading to the runaway release of methane. If that happens, it must happen in the Arctic. So it is the temperature in the Arctic that is relevant, not any kind of global average. In Greenland, temperatures 2,000 years ago were a full 2°C higher than 1900 temperatures, and there was no runaway release of methane.
The fact that the global average 2,000 years ago was dragged down by Antarctic cooling is completely irrelevant to the issue of melting tundra. Temperatures in the Arctic must rise by more than 2°C above 1900 levels before tundra-melting might be a problem, and this fact is obscured when we look at the global-average-derived hockey stick put out by the IPCC:
This graph gives the impression that temperatures 2,000 years ago were relatively low, and that in 1900 temperatures were higher than that. This may have some kind of abstract meaning, but it has nothing to do with what’s been going on in the Arctic, and it is very misleading as regards the likelihood of tundra-melting, or Arctic-melting in general. The graph is a gross misrepresentation of what’s been happening in the real world. It obscures the actual temperature record in both hemispheres, by presenting an artifical average that has existed nowhere.
Let’s now look at some other records from the Northern Hemisphere, to find out how typical the Greenland record is of its hemisphere. This first record is from Spain, based on the mercury content in a peat bog, as published in Science, 1999, vol. 284, for the most recent 4,000 years. Note that this graph is backwards, with present day on the left:
This next record is from the Central Alps, based on stalagmite isotopes, as published in Earth and Planteary Science Letters, 2005, vol. 235, for the most recent 2,000 years:
And finally, let’s include our Greenland record for the most recent 4,000 years:
While the three records are clearly different, they do share certain important characteristics. In each case we see a staggered rise, followed by a staggered decline — a long-term up-and-down cycle over the period. In each case we see that during the past few thousand years, temperatures have been 3°C higher than 1900 temperatures. And in each case we see a gradual descent towards the overdue next ice age. The Antarctic, on the other hand, shares none of these characteristics.
If we want to understand warming-related issues, such as tundra-melting and glacier-melting, we must consider the two hemispheres separately. If glaciers melt, they do so either because of high northern termperatures, or high southern temperatures. Whether or not glaciers are likely to melt cannot be determined by global averages. In this article we will concern ourselves with the Northern Hemisphere.
In the Northern Hemisphere, based on the shared characteristics we have observed, temperatures would need to rise at least 3°C above 1900 levels before we would need to worry about things like the extinction of polar bears, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or runaway methane release. We know this because none of these things have happened in the past 4,000 years, and temperatures have been3°C higher during that period.
However such a 3°C rise seems very unlikely to happen, given that all three of our Nothern Hemisphere samples show a gradual but definite decline toward the overdue next ice age. Let’s now zoom in the temperature record since 1900, and see what kind of rise has actually occurred. Let’s turn to Jim Hansen’s latest article, published on realclimate.org, 2009 temperatures by Jim Hansen. The article includes the following two graphs.
Jim Hansen is of course one of the primary proponents of the CO2-dangerous-warming theory, and there is considerable reason to believe these graphs show an exaggerated picture as regards to warming. Here is one article relevant to that point, and it is typical of other reports I’ve seen:
Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data
Nonetheless, let’s accept these graphs as a valid representation of recent temperature changes, so as to be as fair as possible to the warming alarmists. We’ll be using the red line, which is from GISS, and which does not use the various extrapolations that are included in the green line. We’ll return to this topic later, but for now suffice it to say that these extrapolations make little sense from a scientific perspective.
The red line shows a temperature rise of .7°C from 1900 to the 1998 maximum, a leveling off beginning in 2001, and then a brief but sharp decline starting in 2005. Let’s enter that data into our charting program, using values for each 5-year period that represent the center of the oscillations for that period. Here’s what we get for 1900-2008:
Consider the downward trend at the right end of the graph. Hansen tells us this is very temporary, and that temperatures will soon start rising again. Perhaps he is right. However, as we shall see, his arguments for this prediction are seriously flawed. What we know for sure is that a downward trend has begun. How far that trend will continue is not yet known.
Next, let’s append that latest graph to the Greenland data, to get a reasonable characterization of Northern Hemisphere temperatures from 2000 BC to 2008:
This graph shows us that the temperature rise in the Northern Hemipshpere from 1800 to 2005 was not at all unnatural. That rise follows precisely the long-term pattern, where such rises have been occurring approximately every 1,000 years, with no help from human-caused CO2. Based on the long-term pattern of diminishing peaks, we would expect the recent down-trend to continue, and not turn upward again as Hansen predicts. If the natural pattern continues, then the recent warming has reached its maximum, and we will soon experience about two centuries of rapid cooling, as we continue our descent to the overdue next ice age.
So everything depends on the next decade or so. If temperatures turn upwards again, then the IPCC may be right, and human-caused CO2 emissions may have taken control of climate. However, if temperatures continue downward, then climate has been following natural patterns all along in the Northern Hemisphere. In this case there has been no evidence of any noticeable influence on climate from human-caused CO2, and we are now facing an era of rapid cooling. Within two centuries we could expect temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere to be consideralby lower than they were in the recent Little Ice Age.
We don’t know for sure which way temperatures will go, rapidly up or rapidly down. But I can make this statement:
As of this moment, based on the long-term temperature patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, there is no evidence that human-caused CO2 has had any effect on climate. The rise since 1800, as well as the downward dip starting in 2005, are entirely in line with the natural long-term pattern. If temperatures turn sharply upwards in the next decade or so, that will be the first-ever evidence for human-caused warming in the Northern Hemisphere.
As regards the the recent downturn, here are two other records, both of which show an even more dramatic downturn than the one shown in the GISS data:
University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH)
Dr. John Christy
UAH Monthly Means of Lower Troposphere LT5-2
2004 – 2008
Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA (RSS)
RSS MSU Monthly Anomaly – 70S to 82.5N (essentially Global)
2004 – 2008
Based on the data we have looked at, all from mainstream scientific sources, we are now in a position to answer our first question with a reasonable level of confidence:
Answer 1
Temperatures, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, have been continuing to follow natural, long-term patterns — despite the unusually high levels of CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels. There have indeed been two centuries of global warming, and that is exactly what we would expect based on the natural pattern. Temperatures now are more than 2°C cooler than they were only 2,000 years ago, which means we have not been experiencing dangerously high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere.
The illusion of global warming arises from a failure to recognize that global averages are are a very poor indicator of actual conditions in either hemisphere.
Within the next decade, or perhaps sooner, we are likely to learn which way the climate is going. If it turns again sharply upwards, as Hansen predicts, that will be counter to the long-term pattern, and evidence for human-caused warming. If it levels off, and continues downwards, that is consistent with long-term patterns, and we are likely to experience about two centuries of rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, as we continue our descent toward the overdue next ice age.
Question 2
Why haven’t unsually high levels of CO2 significantly affected temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere?
One place to look for answers to this question is in the long-term patterns that we see in the temperature record of the past few thousand years, such as the peaks separated by about 1,000 years in the Greenland data, and other more closely-spaced patterns that are also visible. Some forces are causing those patterns, and whatever those forces are, they have nothing to do with human-caused CO2 emissions. Perhaps the forces have to do with cycles in solar radiation and solar magnetism, or perhaps they have something to do with cosmic radiation on a galactic scale, or something we haven’t yet identified. Until we understand what those forces are, how they intefere with one another, and how they effect climate, we can’t really build useful climate models, except on very short time scales.
We can also look for answers in the regulatory mechanisms that exist within the Earth’s own climate system. If an increment of warming happens on the surface, for example, then there is more evaporation from the oceans and more precipitation. While an increment of warming may melt glaciers, it may also cause increased snowfall in the arctic regions. Do these balance each other or not? Increased warming of the ocean’s surface may gradually heat the ocean, but the increased evaporation acts to cool the ocean. Do these balance each other?
Vegetation also acts as a regulatory system. Plants and trees gobble up CO2; that is where their substance comes from. Greater CO2 concentration leads to faster growth, taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Until we understand quantitively how these various regulatory systems function and interact, we can’t even build useful models on a short time scale.
In fact a lot of research is going on, investigating both lines of inquiry. However, in the current public-opinion and media climate, any research not related to CO2 causation is dismissed as the activity of contrarians, deniers, and oil-company hacks. Just as the Bishop refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, so today we have a whole society that refuses to look at many of the climate studies that are available.
I’d like to draw attention to one example of a scientist who has been looking at one aspect of the Earth’s regulatory system. Roy Spencer has been conducting research using the satellite systems that are in place for climate studies. Here are his relevant qualifications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)
Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
He describes his research in a presentation available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos49g1sdzo&feature=channel
In the talk he gives a lot of details, which are quite interesting, but one does need to concentrate and listen carefully to keep up with the pace and depth of the presentation. He certainly sounds like someone who knows what he’s talking about. Permit me to summarize the main points of his research:
When greenhouse gases cause surface warming, a response occurs, a ‘feedback response’, in the form of changes in cloud and precipitation patterns. The CRU-related climate models all assume the feedback response is a positive one: any increment of greenhouse warming will be amplified by knock-on effects in the weather system. This assumption then leads to the predictions of ‘runaway global warming’.
Spencer set out to see what the feedback response actually is, by observing what happens in the cloud-precipitation system when surface warming is occurring. What he found, by targeting satellite sensors appropriately, is that the feedback response is negative rather than positive. In particular, he found that the formation of storm-related cirrus clouds is inhibited when surface temperatures are high. Cirrus clouds are themselves a powerful greenhouse gas, and this reduction in cirrus cloud formation compensates for the increase in the CO2 greenhouse effect.
This is the kind of research we need to look at if we want to build useful climate models. Certainly Spencer’s results need to be confirmed by other researchers before we accept them as fact, but to simply dismiss his work out of hand is very bad for the progress of climate science. Consider what the popular website SourceWatch says about Spencer.
We don’t find there any reference to rebuttals to his research, but we are told that Spencer writes columns for a free-market website funded by Exxon. They also mention that he spoke at conference organized by the Heartland Institute, that promotes lots of reactionary, free-market principles. They are trying to discredit Spencer’s work on irrelevant grounds, what the Greeks referred to as an ad hominem argument. Sort of like, “If he beats his wife, his science must be faulty”.
And it’s true about ‘beating his wife’ — Spencer does seem to have a pro-industry philosophy that shows little concern for sustainability. That might even be part of his motivation for undertaking his recent research, hoping to give ammunition to pro-industry lobbyists. But that doesn’t prove his research is flawed or that his conclusions are invalid. His work should be challenged scientifically, by carrying out independent studies of the feedback process. If the challenges are restricted to irrelevant attacks, that becomes almost an admission that his results, which are threatening to the climate establishment, cannot be refuted. He does not hide his data, or his code, or his sentiments. The same cannot be said for the warming-alarmist camp.
Question 3
What are we to make of Jim Hansen’s prediction that rapid warming will soon resume?
Once again, I refer you to Dr. Hansen’s recent article, 2009 temperatures by Jim Hansen.
Jim begins with the following paragraph:
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
The Southern Hemisphere may be experiencing warming, but it has 2°C to go before that might become a problem there, and it has nothing to do with the Northern Hemisphere, where temperatures have been declining recently, not setting records for warming. This mathematical abstraction, the global average, is characteristic of nowhere. It creates the illusion of a warming crisis, when in fact no evidence for such a crisis exists. In the context of IPCC warnings about glacers melting, runaway warming, etc., this global-average argument serves as deceptive and effective propaganda, but not as science.
Jim continues with this paragraph, emphasis added:
The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below. There is a high degree of interannual (year‐to‐ year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long‐term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long‐term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. The 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures are shown in Figure 2 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Niño – La Niña cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐ year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.
As I’ve emphasized in bold, Jim is assuming that there is a strong and persistent warming trend, which he of course attributes to human-caused CO2 emissions. And then that assumption becomes the justification for the 5 and 11-year running averages. Those running averages then give us phantom ’temperatures’ that don’t match actual observations. In particular, if a downard decline is beginning, the running averages will tend to ‘hide the decline’.
It seems we are looking at a classic case of over-attachment to model. What began as a theory has now become an assumption, and actual observations are being dismissed as “confusion” because they don’t agree with the model. The climate models have definitely strayed into the land of imaginary epicycles. The assumption of CO2 causation, plus the preoccupation with an abstract global average, creates a warming illusion that has no connection with reality in either hemisphere, as we see in these two graphs from Jim’s article:
As with the Ptolemaic model, there is a much simpler explantation for our recent era of warming , at least in the Northern Hemisphere: long term patterns are continuing, for whatever reasons, and human-caused CO2 has so far had no noticeable effect. This simpler explanation is based on actual observations, and requires no abstract mathematical epicycles or averages, but it removes CO2 from the center of the climate debate. And just as powerful forces in Galileo’s day wanted the Earth to remain the center of the universe, powerful forces today want CO2 to remain at the center of climate debate, and global warming to be seen as a threat.
Question 4
What is the real agenda of the politically powerful factions who are promoting global-warming alarmism?
One thing we always need to keep in mind is that the people at the top of the power pyramid in our society have access to the very best scientific information. They control dozens, probably hundreds, of high-level think tanks, able to hire the best minds, and carrying out all kinds of research we don’t hear about. They have access to all the secret military and CIA research, and a great deal of influence over what research is carried out in think tanks, the military, and in universities.
Just because they might be promoting fake science for its propaganda value, that doesn’t mean they believe it themselves. They undoubtedly know that global cooling is the real problem, and the actions they are promoting are completely in line with such an understanding.
Cap-and-trade, for example, won’t reduce carbon emissions. Rather it is a mechanism that allows emissions to continue, while pretending they are declining — by means of a phony market model. You know what a phony market model looks like. It looks like Reagan and Thatcher telling us that lower taxes will lead to higher government revenues due to increased business activity. It looks like globalization, telling us that opening up free markets will “raise all boats” and make us all prosperous. It looks like Wall Street, telling us that mortgage derivatives are a good deal, and we should buy them. And it looks like Wall Street telling us the bailouts will restore the economy, and that the recession is over. In short, it’s a con. It’s a fake theory about what the consequences of a policy will be, when the real consequences are known from the beginning.
Cap-and-trade has nothing to do with climate. It is part of a scheme to micromanage the allocation of global resources, and to maximize profits from the use of those resources. Think about it. Our ‘powerful factions’ decide who gets the initial free cap-and-trade credits. They run the exchange market itself, and can manipulate the market, create derivative products, sell futures, etc. They can cause deflation or inflation of carbon credits, just as they can cause deflation or inflation of currencies. They decide which corporations get advance insider tips, so they can maximize their emissions while minimizing their offset costs. They decide who gets loans to buy offsets, and at what interest rate. They decide what fraction of petroleum will go to the global North and the global South. They have ‘their man’ in the regulation agencies that certify the validity of offset projects. And they make money every which way as they carry out this micromanagement.
In the face of global cooling, this profiteering and micromanagenent of energy resources becomes particularly significant. Just when more energy is needed to heat our homes, we’ll find that the price has gone way up. Oil companies are actually strong supporters of the global-warming bandwagon, which is very ironic, given that they are funding some of the useful contrary research that is going on. Perhaps the oil barrons are counting on the fact that we are suspicious of them, and asssume we will discount the research they are funding, as most people are in fact doing. And the recent onset of global cooling explains all the urgency to implement the carbon-management regime: they need to get it in place before everyone realizes that warming alarmism is a scam.
And then there’s the carbon taxes. Just as with income taxes, you and I will pay our full share for our daily commute and for heating our homes, while the big corporate CO2 emitters will have all kinds of loopholes, and offshore havens, set up for them. Just as Federal Reserve theory hasn’t left us with a prosperous Main Street, despite its promises, so theories of carbon trading and taxation won’t give us a happy transition to a sustainable world.
Instead of building the energy-efficient transport systems we need, for example, they’ll sell us biofuels and electric cars, while most of society’s overall energy will continue to come from fossil fuels, and the economy continues to deteriorate. The North will continue to operate unsustainably, and the South will pay the price in the form of mass die-offs, which are already ticking along at the rate of six million children a year from malnutrition and disease.
While collapse, suffering, and die-offs of ‘marginal’ populations will be unpleasant for us, it will give our ‘powerful factions’ a blank canvas on which to construct their new world order, whatever that might be. And we’ll be desperate to go along with any scheme that looks like it might put food back on our tables and warm up our houses.
Author contact – rkm@quaylargo.com
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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