Reexamining The Anthropogenic Global Warming Issue

A guest post from Dr. Weinstein,

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Leonard Weinstein, ScD

December 26,2009

The following is an effort to reduce the AGW issue to a minimum number of necessary claims to support or reject. When I read of “thousands of supporting papers” on the issue, I would like to hear what these papers show that refutes the following.

Warming Explained

An improved model of global warming by Glen Raphael

Merry Christmas

The snow still falls…

Merry Christmas everyone.

CRU Howto

I’ve made some progress finally with Perl. It’s always a pain learning a new language and Perl is no different. I’m going to document here how to get the original version of CRU running so anyone can do it.

First, you need an interpreter for perl. This is the code which understands perl commands and runs them. After a bit of searching, I chose Strawberry Perl, it’s free so I downloaded and installed it. Perl runs from the command line interface which is far too crude for my liking. I found a couple of debuggers and settled on Perl Express. This allows a gui with breakpoints to get things running.

CRU Releases (Some) Data

My next partially completed Siberia post will have to wait.

This is the beginning of the result of climategate. We owe a big debt to those who released the emails, and an even bigger debt to Steve McIntyre for his never ending efforts to force the revelation of some of this information. Now we can begin to understand the premier temperature dataset in climatology. Does this mean it’s done — nope. This is only the beginning, CA has a post describing the release of more metadata (data about data) and actual records for CRU than ever before.

Another Brick

Roger Pielke Sr. with a very interesting post on glacier melt in the Himalayas.

Global Warming And Glacier Melt-Down Debate: A Tempest In A Teapot?” – A Guest Weblog By Madhav L Khandekar

It reminds me of Dr. Morner’s opinion of sea level rise. He happens to mention Kilimanjaro.

Hide the Decline Ringtones

Every time I hear it, it brings Christmas cheer to my heart.

http://www.brinked.com/jeffid-u-261681.html

The second ringtone is better.

Siberia

No politics here. Personally, I’m so sick of politics and climategate, you wouldn’t believe it. I like numbers, science and math, not this constant idiocy. There is more of it to come though. People don’t realize, just how much shit you can pack into several thousand emails. – A thousand by topic, several by individual.

This post is the beginning of an investigation into the Siberian temperature data. Phil Jones personally took the time to kill two Siberia papers about CRU and the discrepency between thermometers and the primary ‘temperature’ dataset in publication. The CRU data may be exactly right, but the zeal with which these papers were killed, gives us a clue that there may be a problem. I’ve looked no further ahead than demonstrated here, so be warned we may prove Dr. Jones right.

First, this is the region in quesiton.

The Siberian station locations from the GHCN network are plotted below. These stations represent a small subgroup of the continent (and the planet). The region is from 50-65 latitude and 100-120 longitude as defined by Lars Kamél in his criticism of CRUtem. The paper was apparently blocked from publication through intense efforts by Phil Climategate Jones and only now the paper is presented at CA.

Common Sense and Prosecutor’s Fallacy(s)

Guest post by John Pittman.  It was supposed to go up last Friday, but in my haste to buy everything on Earth for Christmas, I didn’t have time to do the editing and it slipped my mind this weekend when so much Copenhagen news happened (News always happens on the weekend).  Anyway, John responds to Mann’s WP article in the first link below.  Take a few moments to read the comments to Mann’s article, Mann is not terribly popular with the internet public.

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In this Washington Post Article, Dr. Mann makes a demonstrably weak effort to continue the meme that the scandal from the alleged email leak do not matter. There are several reasons why this response is weak. The first argument:

The State of Climate Science – Fox Special

Fox News Hour special on climate science. Featuring Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Pat Michaels, Bjorn Lomborg and others. Fox wasn’t able to get too many believers, but they did get Gerry North who happens to simply lie his butt off to the reporters in support of the AGW cause. I’ve used that L word pretty often lately here, but in my opinion there is no other word for it. North chaired the NAS panel which reviewed the validity of Mann’s hockey stick after Wegman reported his conclusions. The panel ended up trying to find a balance between the reality that it’s crap and the need for it to exist.

Anyway, we’re used to the advocacy angle here, Fox did a nice job of the special. Steve and Ross were particularly good – of course I’ve spent the last year reading up on their work and doing my own, so I might be biased

It’s good to see the climate scientists on the hot seat for a while. We do have an opportunity to see some sanity break out in the near future but billion dollar industries don’t change easily.

Douglass and Christy on Climategate

This may be the best illustration of the conspiracy (presented to date) to block and minimize papers which don’t support the consensus on the internet. It’s written by Douglass and Christy and puts a long string of the Climategate emails into context. The papers in question are absolutely central to the climate change debate, as they call into question the validity of climate models.

I asked American Thinker for permission to repost this article here and was unfortunately told to excerpt no more than 200 words. The article cannot be summarized in that length, it is technical and requires careful reading. However, it is a must read for everyone, but in particular for the technical CA regulars who know the details in the Santer debate.

Climategate, in context by the victims of those in power, has a whole different flavor – and the revelations will be continuing for some time yet.

h/t Reader Stan

Link to American Thinker is here.

On Conspiracy and Fake Solutions

Faith, the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the human enterprise.

It’s hundred year mission, to predict new strife and constrain civilization;

To boldly hold, such that no man can expand before…..

Bah waaah da da da da daaaaaah

I (and actually we) have often been accused of promoting conspiracy theories in climate science. It’s meant to be an automatic disqualifier of tAV opinions, which from the large number of us who gather here, are shared in some part by much of the public.

First, to clear the air, conspiracies exist everywhere, so at least I’m guilty as charged. People collude though, for a common goal as part of our normal social structure. We are stronger in groups than individually – a basic fact which has led us to organize most everything we human demons do. When our views align, we work together toward our goal, often with unspoken intent to demonstrate what we believe is right. If you don’t agree with this basic point, consider that political parties are a conspiracy by definition, as are businesses, militaries, police forces, religions etc. Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with most conspiracies.

The nice thing about businesses conspiracies is that you always know the motive- Money! You already know what the other guy wants to do before you begin negotiation. You also know that if it doesn’t work out for either one of you, the relationship won’t last. What you don’t know is, whether the other party gives a crap whether you make a dime or survive as a company at all. That’s where we get into gray areas.

Fe ny – How China Saved the World

You can read the pathetic accord here. and in PDF form here. It’s an obvious loss of all points.

I hope you don’t miss the Irony in this. Consider how it happened that communist style international wealth redistribution did not come to pass. Sure there is still voluntary payment to the communists “developing nations”, which is absolutely ignorant in the extreme because they produce nothing – including CO2. Sure there are emission targets, but they have no teeth and absolutely no possibility of coming to fruition – and in the PDF form they are completely left blank!! But the absolute irony of the situation is – we were saved from global communism by China.

The reason is clear (because they flat said it), the Chinese didn’t want to cut emissions to a point which hurt their economy. The Chinese fully intended to get us to sign away our manufacturing base, yet wanted nobody to limit their own output. I’m actually surprised Obama didn’t sign it in that configuration. Obama fully believes in Marxist style wealth redistribution after all, despite the fact that it’s never worked anywhere – ever – even a little.

I often joke with friends that the hardest spot on earth to find a true communist is in Eastern China. These are the people who know the difference. They’ve tried it both ways in the last 50 years, (property free communism and wealthy capitalism). One way they starve, the other they get money, products, cars, heat, food, service and light.

It seems now that the China central government had absolutely no intention of reducing emissions, and was intending to simply lie about it – a not uncommon tactic over there. They flat refused to have any kind of monitoring of their actual output, and simultaneously pushed very hard for fake limit structures that would not limit in any way, their own already shrinking economy.

They were wiser than us —- again. I hope the leftists in the Western world are paying attention to something other than Hollywood pornography, NYT or CNN. We were just taught a real life lesson in government by those who know the difference.

So now that we have this settled, let’s do the right thing and start drilling for cheap energy, start building nuke and coal plants. If you believe the disaster scenarios, which is one thing I’m a full scale denier on, we have no choice except to prepare for mitigation. There is no more purpose in attempting to install a fake global wealth redistribution thermostat, connected to nothing except a chosen few pockets. — oh.. well maybe still one purpose.

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Lord Monkton’s take:

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen – Click here for SPPI original article.

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.

ABSURD AND MORE ABSURD

A guest post by request from, Jon Rappoport

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DECEMBER 18, 2009.  As a reporter, whenever I run into something that sounds, looks, feels like, and adds up to, a non-sequitur, a chunk of absurd illogic, my eyes light up and rays of eager anticipation shoot out of my head.

I’ve got one of those absurdities, as far as I can tell, and I’m chewing on it.  It has to do THE THIRD WORLD and GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTIONS.

I know I’m supposed to assume those two items go hand in hand and are intimately connected.  I’m supposed to assume the tie-ins are obvious.  But I restrain myself from believing as I keep chewing.

So let us begin.

It’s Still Out of Context?

Today the Washington Post gave Michael Mann even more space to waive away problems  with climate gate.  I don’t have time today to finish this post so I could use some help.  You guys can probably work it out better than I anyway.  h/t Boballab – who’s sent several interesting links recently.

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Below are a few points Michael Mann makes, since we know he’s willing to sell his grandma for a hockey stick, this needs a little fact checking done.  So for this thread, we need to check Michael Mann’s original nature article he referred to.  We need to see how well hide the decline was explained in the paper.  We should look at the TAR report quotes and see how it’s addressed and paste it all in the comments.  I’m sure there are other great items to discuss as well but I’m swamped.  Links and quotes are appreciated.

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Maybe Michael’s right this time and ‘everything’ was taken out  of context.  Maybe Mike’s right and we’re all wrong.

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This link at CA is a good place to start.

By Michael E. Mann

Friday, December 18, 2009

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

Gavin thinks it’s getting old

The Copenhagen Kids Playing in Global Warming - Canada.com h/t Reader Mark

In reply to a commenter at Surreal Climate,WRT the Russian accusation that CRU cooked the books.

[Response: Well, journalism is in trouble in Russia too... The relevant figure from the IEA report is here which show the difference between the their 'all station' index and the HadCRU index for Russia as a whole. Since there was no check for inhomogeneities or jumps in the IEA index, it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, but even if it were fine, the differences in the 20th C trend are small. The whole 'someone made adjustments/screened stations therefore fraud!' line of argument is getting very old. - gavin]

RC Wants the Code – No Kidding

So I’m sittin’ there staring at the most unusual thing. A Real Climate post where they are upset that someone (Nicola Scafetta) didn’t get them the code for his paper. Well, clearly we’re not un-supportive of their plight. After all, the data and the code should be released no matter what the result says. I left them a comment to that effect in their thread.

You have my support on his release of code.

I’ve even personally emailed him to release it, to no avail. It will be quite a bit simpler than some of the other code but as you said the 11 and 22 year cycle issue is not obvious.

Lars Kamél

Posted Dec 17, 2009 at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Reply

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

The boundary issue could have been caught but the rest is not apparent and shouldn’t require you to waste your time divining an algorithm from text. As a fellow non-psychic, I hope you succeed on this front.

At the time this conflict happened in blogland, I wrote to Dr. Scafetta to encourage him to release his code, several times in fact. He refused saying something like – it’s too simple to worry about. At RC they make this point:

Uh oh

You never know what’ they’ll do.

BREAKING NEWS: Sydney Morning Herald reports 11th hour Copenhagen deal forged

GreaseMonkey Controls

Thanks to Mr. Pete and Greasemonkey you can now use CA style controls when commenting with Firefox.    Firefox, if you don’t know, is a web browser like internet explorer.  It’s free, open source and better than the other guys.  I haven’t used IE in years except for certain technical issues – created by microsoft.

It looks like image insertion doesn’t work but you can try it here.