As we have continued to argue on the last thread about whether it makes sense to sort trees by ‘sensitivity’ to temperature (it doesn’t), we left off one of the most important critiques of dendroclimatology. This has been discussed here before in the context of Dr. Craig Loehle’s publication on non-linear tree growth, but it is important that we not forget how critical this issue is in the context of linear regressions. I am glad to have experts around to keep us on track – Jeff Id
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Guest Post by John F. Pittman.
Below is a response from a temperature sensitive species that has been well documented. Different authors were able to control the nutrition, conductivity, spacing, etc, because these are unicellular plants. Actually it is two genera and multiple species. The curve represents an idealized single organism. This particular organism has a peak about 91% of maximum growth response and a peak response at about 28 C. So, now we can discuss the errors and incorrect modeling.
The first constraint of a correct statistically correct biological model is to consider what happens as more individuals are added. The first part we will look at is the area from 5C to 10C. As one adds more and more specimens, the curve will flatten towards the 0% line. The next area is the area above 80% that between 25C and 33C will tend to flatten towards the 80% line. The last is that as one adds more and more specimens the curve tends to go asymptotic to 40C. The reasons have to do with the temperature response of proteins and enzymes, and adaptation of the species wrt time, and acclimation of an individual wrt time, and of course, measurement variance.
Now, we can discuss what has been missed, by some, in JeffID’s “Sometimes They Forget” post. First there is no linear response. Second, any growth measurement has two answers. This was one of the points of Dr. Loehle’s paper. Also, those not familiar with the creation of a skewed bell curve for biological study; the range of temperature can be larger or much smaller. Examples of this are fish that live in extremely hot trapped water systems in deserts, and fish that live in special niches in the arctic.
We are going to assume that the sorting that went on and goes on is close to being correct. One can assume the 6 sigma response of certain trees to be correct, but if you understand the model, it means it is worse than what we will discuss for being close to correct. The first point is JeffID’s comments about the de-amplification or amplification of the signal. In his red noise examples it can be either. In the biological case it can only be one direction, de-amplification when a positive linear assumption is made. The linear model will not detect the temperature going down, since it will be below the threshold of the method’s detection limits at the low end. It will not be able to the temperature change at the top of the bell for the same reason. Finally, by not using the correct curve, there will be the higher temperatures, that will be read as lower temperatures further compacting the response. This is why the handle of the “Hockey Stick” is broken. The red noise series of JeffID and Steve McIntyre will not have the compaction of the series if these trees really are temperature sensitive. Also, where as Steve and Jeff’s results are a probability, using the linear assumption is a guarantee of compaction of the signal in the handle.
The proof lies in believe it or not, in the first email of the original Climategate. In this email, Hantemirov, IIRC, stated that sub fossil trees indicated that the tree line was some distance away and was some thousands of years ago, generally known to be warmer that the current warm period. This tells us that the area of interest is somewhere, in our example, in the 0C to 15C region. The other part of the proof is the disbelief by one of the responders in Climategate II, questioning the use of the linear assumption. This indicates that the authors knew or should have known that linear assumption should not be used. Finally, the sad or joyful part is that the divergence actually could be proof that one can use trees as a decent temperature proxy. There will still be de-amplification problems. However, a good decompression routine could be used to great effect on the initial results to obtain a more realistic temperature change profile. Finally, if you want to really understand why it matters and scientists should be skeptical of attribution, you need to read and understand the posts I wrote for JeffID when the first Climategate occurred.
So I left a comment at RC today bolded below. The boys are stinging again because they are as good at PR as most engineers I know.
You know the lack of disclosure of data not used, is nearly equivalent to the regression methods which automatically reject data not preferred. The mere fact that the reconstruction with ALL of the data wasn’t published is not enough to counter the obvious possibility of pre-selection.
[Response: In any statistical analysis there is always a possibility of pre-selection to get a signal, or the possibility of trying different combinations until the signal disappears depending on what the conscious or unconscious bias might be. Yet the scientific literature is not full of people saying that other authors are deceptive or guilty of misconduct because they got a different result. No one can ever prove that they didn't do a calculation, and ever more insistent demands that they must, are pointless. McIntyre is dead wrong here - both in his conclusions and his conduct. - gavin]
The sophistry here is that we have a history of post-hoc selection of methods (hide the decline), brow-beating of those with different results (the Trenberth travesty), and blocking of papers which refute results (many references). Now we find that many more Yamal region proxy series were available than stated and a reconstruction from such a strong hockey stick temperature region (usually a 3 month project) has taken years to reach the public eye. Unsurprisingly, now that a basic estimate was published by Steve McIntyre, the data doesn’t seem to support the six sigma Yamal trend. So, in context, the request is hardly unreasonable.
In addition, the problem here is that Gavin understands full well the regressomatic techniques of paleoclimate. I flatly don’t believe he is too stupid to miss how the auto-enzyte algorithms work. To sum up: The likelihood of Gavin’s misunderstanding of the probability of a paleoclimate regression (post-selection) to get a signal (hockey stick), is inverse to the probability of actually finding said signal. IOW, he knows damned well how this works.
Of course even Steve’s obviously non-temperature result will work fine in a RegEM, TTLS, TLS, etc…… regression. When doing multivariate regression, noise works fine for creating unprecedented temperatures.
It looks like I missed quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. Not only have I not been writing, I haven’t done any reading! Very unusual for me. I had to check if global warming was still happening, whether the sea still had ice and whether climategate 3.0 had broken out.
It turned out pretty much as before except for the Heartland institute exhibiting Gleick-like reasoning skill. WTF?! Hell, every time I turn around someone does something so rock bottom stupid that it is difficult to get your head around. Then I see people withdrawing from a conference over this and wonder why.
Here is how I see it. Heartland is a group, not an individual. A group will always have individuals which make mistakes. These things are correctable. Apologies and terminations/reassignments are in order but to chuck the message out over this stupidity, and it was spectacularly stupid, is silly. When I can make a better PR judgment than your hired PR professional, you need to hire a new professional. They took the dumb add down and issued an apology but I haven’t heard of any terminations yet. It is painfully obvious that whomever approved the ad. is completely out of touch with those who understand physics and still don’t see climate doom in our future. It is also obvious that they are unaware of the progress being made within the science.
Reality trumps all arguments.
My advice to Heartland is to first, improve the apology. Making mistakes will not hurt you when you admit them. Second, find new advisors who can detect something so blatantly extreme. Extremism is the shelter of the slow witted, and that was really slow! Third, recognize that your organizational message will only generate a specific amount of attention. If you are looking to grow your organizational cash beyond that limit by efforts other than content, it will absolutely fail in the scientific arena on which all sides of AGW are rooted. Keep the message reasonable in all cases no matter what the goals are and you will maximize your results.
Long time readers will be familiar with the Yamal saga. Yamal is the name of a region which allegedly demonstrated proof of extreme recent warming in tree ring data. Recently, after years, Steve McIntyre was granted access to the total dataset site list.
This post is in fairness to the sea ice doom mongers. Some have written that sea ice is the Achilles heel of the non-alarmist. The implication is that the melting is unequivocal and absolutely destructive to the skeptic argument. I’m not an idiot, so why keep posting on sea ice?
Because my opinion is that sea ice isn’t melting from global atmospheric warming – at least not in a major way. My Mrs. Cleo impersonation, which is no better than Klimatologists, is that we will see a little sea ice egg-on-the-face data in the next 5 years. Still, the data is the data, and I did promise to perform the same cutoff for the Antarctic as I had done for the Arctic and provide some kind of global single year ice trend.
Unfortunately, the Antarctic has a strong circumpolar current which catches sea ice in a strange pattern that is not suited to latitudinal cutoffs. Big deal, I knew about this result before I said I would do it.
The result is explained below. I cut off all data below -65 degrees Latitude South and above 72 degrees Latitude North.
Antarctic Sea Ice
Arctic Sea Ice
From those plots I excluded all Antarctic sea ice North of -65 latitude, an admittedly pro AGW choice as the vast majority of the ice in the Antarctic vanishes even south of that line.
My calculation for the southern hemisphere single year ice trend is:
I’m going to try and do something soon but I have no time to blog at all. tAV still has quite a few readers who stop by every day so if anyone would like to contribute, send me a Word doc by email.
Earth day is here again. Twice as many penguins as we thought, polar bear population is up, both Arctic and global sea ice extents are normal, what should we do to celebrate?
Here are a few ideas I had:
Fly penguins to the north pole to feed the polar bears.
Fly polar bears south to give them a new habitat.
Eat a polar bear steak.
Shoot a can of freon.
Run the heat and air conditioning at the same time.
Add sulfur to your diesel fuel.
Ship Al Gore to the Antarctic on a 747, by way of the North pole.
In an article titled, “Himalayan glaciers actually GAINING ice, space scans show An inconvenient truth” Lewis Page of the Register writes:
The study was carried out by comparing two sets of space data, the first gathered by instruments aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000 and the second by the French SPOT5 satellite in 2008. The results were unequivocal. Across the targeted 5,615km2 region of the Karakorum mountains lying on the Chinese border with India and Pakistan, the glaciers had gained substantial amounts of mass by the time the second survey was carried out. Satellite pictures had previously shown the glaciers there spreading to cover more area, but some climate scientists had argued that they might nonetheless be losing ice by becoming thinner: this has now been disproven.
“This is a solid, high-grade measurement,” glaciologist Graham Cogley commented, reviewing the paper published in Nature Geoscience. The study was led by Julie Gardelle of Grenoble uni in France.
Assessments of the state of health of Hindu-Kush–Karakoram–Himalaya glaciers and their contribution to regional hydrology and global sea-level rise suffer from a severe lack of observations1. The globally averaged mass balance of glaciers and ice caps is negative1, 2, 3. An anomalous gain of mass has been suggested for the Karakoram glaciers2, 4, 5, 6, but was not confirmed by recent estimates of mass balance. Furthermore, numerous glacier surges in the region that lead to changes in glacier length and velocity7, 8, 9, 10, 11 complicate the interpretation of the available observations. Here, we calculate the regional mass balance of glaciers in the central Karakoram between 1999 and 2008, based on the difference between two digital elevation models. We find a highly heterogeneous spatial pattern of changes in glacier elevation, which shows that ice thinning and ablation at high rates can occur on debris-covered glacier tongues. The regional mass balance is just positive at +0.11±0.22 m yr−1 water equivalent and in agreement with the observed reduction of river runoff that originates in this area12. Our measurements confirm an anomalous mass balance in the Karakoram region and indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was −0.01 mm yr−1 for the period from 1999 to 2008, 0.05 mm yr−1 lower than suggested before13.
Lower than ‘suggested’ before. I suppose that in newspeak, suggested is a euphemism for ‘screamed from the highest mountain’. I have a hard time keeping up with the kids new slang these days.
I’m well on my way to winning a small wager with a friend about my new blogging venture, 3,000 Quads ( http://3000quads.com/). It’s an unusual bet–I’m betting that I will be religiously ignored by the members of the climate consensus. We’ve never gotten along–I’ve had real battles with Joe Romm, Tim Lambert, Chris Colose, Michael Tobis and the minions that venture forth from their sites to hound and harass those of us who don’t agree with them. But that’s not the reason.
And it’s not because the central message of my weblog conflicts in any way with climate science. I have written 65 posts charting the future of energy consumption for the rest of the century (well, partially–I’m a long ways from finished). And the numbers are sobering and show us why we need to take this climate stuff seriously. The title is a clue–I predict that the world will be burning 3,000 quads every year in 2075, and can pretty much show in detail how we’ll be using 1,000 quads a year in 2030. (For reference, the world burned 500 quads in 2010.) This is far higher than the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration projects–their total is 721 quads in 2030. The difference between their estimate and mine is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy consumed by both the US and China last year. And I keep pounding on the point that if all of that extra energy is provided by coal, the effects on our climate will be severe. Read the rest of this entry »
This article is offered by Jonathan Drake. It discusses the unusual changes in trend noted in sea ice at various points of the historic record paying particular attention to the satellite data. I think it is worth posting, but I have varied opinions and questions regarding the different sea ice datasets displayed here. To me it could be characterized as ‘unusual trends’, as something is certainly up in the longer term combination of data.
The following plots depict annual sea ice area for the Antarctic. This is important in that we are attempting to isolate the response of annually melting sea ice to temperature. Despite the attack on this method by the warmanistas, it does have value in that it is a reasonable proxy for how sea ice responds to temperature.
Readers will recall that I masked all Arctic sea ice North of 72 degrees out of the calculation and looked at areas outside of that circle. Ice south of 72 degrees melts every year. Critics, not understanding what was done, stated that the choice was arbitrary and asked that I mask all ice north of -72 degrees in the Antarctic and repeat the experiment. I have agreed, except that the choice of latidude was not arbitrary in the Arctic. It was based on the following graphs which show the true latitude at which Antarctic sea ice is known to melt every year for the satellite record.
The plot/video indicates that complete sea ice melt in the Antarctic occurs at approximately -65 degrees latitude.
Once again Jeff has handed over both gavel and podium for a guest post from a Lukewarmer–guess he’s trying to keep you all on your toes…
I want to talk about the brief period that will be known going forward as the Global Warming scare, and the inevitable atomization of the efforts on both sides following its closure.
Probably all of you who have followed this issue have your own starting date for this period of heightened interest in climate change and global warming–for many it would begin with Hansen’s testimony before the Senate in 1988, while for others it might go back to Margaret Thatcher’s need to face down the coal miners’ unions back in the 80s. For me, however, it begins with Phil Jones’ 4-page article in Nature about UHI.
This short paper, cited almost maniacally by thousands of other papers since its publication in 1990, served several important functions. First, it showed that climate had become political. Written in response to those claiming that the urban heat island effect had contaminated the temperature record, Jones’ paper was an attempt to squash disagreement.
Second, it showed that science was not as important as the politics. The stations Jones used for his paper did not have the stable histories he claimed for them. (He probably didn’t know this at the time of publication–but he found out very quickly and refused to issue a correction.) Fighting the critics meant that the flaws in the science needed to be hidden.
Third, like almost everything that has happened in the debate since then, Jones’ paper triggered a chain of unintended consequences that led in a manner suitable for a Greek tragedy straight to Jones’ own request to colleagues to delete emails, and was part of an enabling sequence that contributed to Mann’s decisions regarding the Hockey Stick and even, 20 years later, to Peter Gleick’s astonishing theft and fabrication of the Heartland Institute’s documents and strategy.
Everything that the climate consensus team has done in the past 20 years has contained elements of the same fundamental errors in thinking and strategy–from GreenPeace telling us they knew where we lived to No Pressure videos blowing up school children. There are thousands of examples that could be brought forth to show that their strategy had no human heart and no mechanism for enlisting participation–their goal was forcing opponents into silent submission instead. This 20-year war was fought at a soulless, corporate level, with campaigns designed and implemented by the media masters and mistresses of large environmental NGOs and it showed. From fighting World Bank loans for a South African coal plant to wilder statements of how few people the planet could sustainably carry, these people showed an appalling lack of humanity and an amazing excess of energy.
I reluctantly bring up this topic. I’m tired of moderating the blog, even though it has no new posts for a record number of days.
Several other popular climate bloggers and even some climate scientists have made the point that those who don’t understand the second law of thermodynamics are somehow “damaging to the ’cause’ of skepticism”. This whole line of argument smacks of motive to me, and motive is the antithesis of scientific skepticism. Why readers of those blogs quietly put up with that, is beyond me.
Therefore, by nature, I must reject the argument.
My rejection is not due to the fact that the flat stupidity of the second law argument doesn’t have a deleterious affect on public impression of those of us labeled in international media as skeptics or deniers, but rather because anyone who understands anything about physics can spot the crack-pottery of those individuals who reject thermodynamics. Our public disagreement of the magnitude, danger and response to anthropogenic global warming is between those who understand physics and math, and nobody else. On both sides, professional scientists know the difference between the dogs and the puppies and the puppies are yapping too much.
These pretenders who have stepped in with this nonsense about back radiation being a violation of the second law, are just people who know some words and have motives. Not an equation to their credit, yet thermodynamics is overturned.
Claiming to overturn human understanding without equations, is different from the bystanders of the population which don’t have the background to understand thermodynamic reality.
If AGW is as severe as the IPCC repeately states, I am completely certain that most readers here want to know the truth. Then the discussion could shift to proper responses. Right now, nothing, and I mean really NOTHING, indicates that AGW is anything but moderate or even beneficial. Readers are welcome to disagree with that as well. For those extremist environmental types who believe everything humans do is automatic poison, beware, there is a middle ground. Change is not always bad, although in the US we know now that change we can believe in, is pretty clearly bad.
I am literally pissed off that this blog has been shut down by a person/people with a motivation. Even if they believe their nonsense, that is nothing but a lack of self-realization of their own crack-pottery. If they had a lick of courtesy, they would allow us to continue discussing actual science freely and agree to take their useless nonsense elsewhere rather than spam a science blog for months.
In case you one of those who reads about the non-existence of back-radiation and are wondering which is right, basic thermodynamics is not in question anywhere in science. Not one bit. The absoluteness of this statement does NOT contradict proper skepticism.
Some things are known.
For instance, we can all agree, by definition, in an Earthly frame of reference, down is down and up is up.
Were that not correct, the words down and up would have different meaning.
I’m tired, the second law backradiation bullshit needs to go away until a proper mathematical foundation supports it. Those who claim it is ‘damaging’ to the cause, need to consider how similar their proclamations sound to the proprietors of Real Climate and climategate. The scientific discussion is not with the public, although that is a good place to make points, the scientific discussion is with scientists, of all fields.
And on that front, true skepticism is unquestionably taking a firm foothold.
Download a free software called FileZilla and copy sea ice files to a known folder.
The following code is a mathematically clean download and summation of gridded microwave satellited data. For the north the pole-hole (area not observed by the satellites) is infilled to the maximum value for its entire timeframe. For the south, the pole hole is not relevant. Two points of the 12000 plus day record are removed in the south and all points are kept in the north. Results are visually comparable to the UIUC cryosphere page. There isn’t much to improve about this for accuracy except for pole hole infilling or an unknown error.
Well in 3 1/2 years of blogging, millions of views and 45000 comments, the Air Vent is now comment moderated. This situation was caused by a single individual, who’s repetitive nonsense commentary and name changing bypassed the spam filter. Doug accomplished all of this while claiming to have overturned basic thermodynamics without a single equation or any apparent recognition of where his blathering contradicts thermodynamics.
We will no longer discuss or even acknowledge his fake radiation nonsense here. You may however, politely tell him he is not welcome here below. If Doug decides to accept our wishes, I will again turn off moderation of comments.
UPDATE: The post started as a general review of BEST several days ago including some critiques by others. As I finished, an error in the CI calculation became apparent to me. If you are familiar with the work, jump to the section titled Jackknife for the description of that problem.
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Finally, a technical post. As most here know, the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) has released its early results. The media has worked tirelessly to misrepresent the results to the public. I even heard Chicago progressive radio refer to the authors of BEST as denialists who decided they were going to overturn the results of other surface temperature analyses and found that they couldn’t, proving again that global warming is going to doom us all and that skeptics are fools. Really, that’s what mainstream Chicagoan progressives are being told about this. The purpose of the project was actually to create an open and transparent global surface temperature that people can read and critique at will. The authors made it clear in their mission statement which begins with:
Our aim is to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions.
A difficult proposition considering the quality and number of the temperature records involved. I have read all four papers including a multiple read of the methods paper to understand some of the more sophisticated points presented. I’ve also read critiques by several bloggers/sceintists some of which I agree with and others which I believe are mistaken, but in the end I don’t believe any of the critiques could possibly have any appreciable effect on the trend results without a surfacestations style analysis of the raw data. The only places I have concern are in the brush-over given to the UHI effect and the obviously over-tight confidence intervals. Even if the CI’s were widened to more correct levels, it wouldn’t change the result and the UHI effect isn’t going to reverse any trend so despite some statistical critique, I believe the result is very close to the actual global surface temperature average minus some unknown amount of warming by UHI. Still, I do believe that I have identified a specific error in the confidence interval calculation which must be corrected and is discussed below.
Well, I’ve written to Richard Muller yesterday on this as well as Judith Curry, Richard has yet to acknowledge my email. We have seen that my previous explanations of the problems in the confidence intervals of the BEST temperature series were confusing for some pretty smart people. I’m hoping the authors can figure out what I mean but today I wanted to delve a little deeper. The methods paper is here.
On page 17 they are discussing the error calculation methods. It is a bunch of complex stuff which breaks down to weighting stations that have best correlation to the mean value higher. Limits were placed on how much a station can be deweighted and upweighted. The typical error of a point was assigned value ‘e’ as a constant.
The scale of the typical measurement error (𝑒 ≈ 0.55 C)
This is a screen grab of the station weighting section on pages 17 and 18:
Equation 31 limits the weights between 1/13 and 2.
My reasoning for looking deeper into this is because I have yet to receive any reply on the issues of weighting and their effect on the Jackknife calculation. I’ve become more convinced than ever that the problem is real and it will absolutely require a re-write of the CI portion of the paper. I was going to attempt to improve my explanation and started digging deeper into the equations presented.
The way I read the weighting section now, stations are estimated measured for variance from the weighted mean. Weights are re-calculated from this variance and the mean is recomputed from the weighted data. The process is repeated until some convergence threshold is met or the number of iterations is met. The claim by the paper is that the average station weight should be near 1 according to their definition but the actual result after iteration may be a bit different. There appears to be more room for deweighting stations by the equations than for overweighting. Read the rest of this entry »
I will leave this alone for another week or two while I wait for a reply to my emails to the BEST group, but there are three primary problems with the Berkley temperature trends which must be addressed if the result is to be taken seriously. Now by seriously, I don’t mean by the IPCC which takes all alarmist information seriously, but by the thinking person.
1 – Chopping of data is excessive. They detect steps in the data, chop the series at the steps and reassemble them. These steps wouldn’t be so problematic if we weren’t worrying about detecting hundredths of a degree of temperature change per year. Considering that a balanced elimination of up and down steps in any algorithm I know of would always detect more steps in the opposite direction of trend, it seems impossible that they haven’t added an additional amount of trend to the result through these methods. Steve McIntyre discusses this here. At the very least, an examination of the bias this process could have on the result is required.
2 – UHI effect. The Berkeley study not only failed to determine the magnitude of UHI, a known effect on city temperatures that even kids can detect, it failed to detect UHI at all. Instead of treating their own methods with skepticism, they simply claimed that UHI was not detectable using MODIS and therefore not a relevent effect.
This is not statistically consistent with prior estimates, but it does verify that the effect is very small, and almost insignificant on the scale of the observed warming (1.9 ± 0.1 °C/100yr since 1950 in the land average from figure 5A).
Summary and Discussion
The classification of 82.5% of USHCNv2 stations based on CRN criteria provides a unique opportunity for investigating the impacts of different types of station exposure on temperature trends, allowing us to extend the work initiated in Watts [2009] and Menne et al. [2010].
The comparison of time series of annual temperature records from good and poor exposure sites shows that differences do exist between temperatures and trends calculated from USHCNv2 stations with different exposure characteristics. 550 Unlike Menne et al. [2010], who grouped all USHCNv2 stations into two classes and found that “the unadjusted CONUS minimum temperature trend from good and poor exposure sites … show only slight differences in the unadjusted data”, we found the raw (unadjusted) minimum temperature trend to be significantly larger when estimated from the sites with the poorest exposure sites relative to the sites with the best exposure. These trend differences were present over both the recent NARR overlap period (1979-2008) and the period of record (1895-2009). We find that the partial cancellation Menne et al. [2010] reported between the effects of time of observation bias adjustment and other adjustments on minimum temperature trends is present in CRN 3 and CRN 4 stations but not CRN 5 stations. Conversely, and in agreement with Menne et al. [2010], maximum temperature trends were lower with poor exposure sites than with good exposure sites, and the differences in
trends compared to CRN 1&2 stations were statistically significant for all groups of poorly sited stations except for the CRN 5 stations alone. The magnitudes of the significant trend differences exceeded 0.1°C/decade for the period 1979-2008 and, for minimum temperatures, 0.7°C per century for the period 1895-2009.
The non-detection of UHI by Berkley is NOT a sign of a good quality result considering the amazing detail that went into Surfacestations by so many people. A skeptical scientist would be naturally concerned by this and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to say the least that the authors aren’t more concerned with the Berkley methods. Either surfacestations very detailed, very public results are flat wrong or Berkeley’s black box literal “characterization from space” results are. Someone needs to show me the middle ground here because I can’t find it.
I sent this in an email to Dr. Curry:
Non-detection of UHI is a sign of problems in method. If I had the time, I would compare the urban/rural BEST sorting with the completed surfacestations project. My guess is that the comparison of methods would result in a non-significant relationship.
3 – Confidence intervals.
The confidence intervals were calculated in this method by eliminating a portion of the temperature stations and looking at the noise that the elimination created. Lubos Motl described the method accurately as intentionally ‘damaging’ the dataset. It is a clever method to identify the sensitivity of the method and result to noise. The problem is that the amount of damage assumed is equal to the percentage of temperature stations which were eliminated. Unfortunately the high variance stations are de-weighted by intent in the processes such that the elimination of 1/8 of the stations is absolutely no guarantee of damaging 1/8 of the noise. The ratio of eliminated noise to change in final result is assumed to be 1/8 and despite some vague discussion of monte-carlo verifications, no discussion of this non-linearity was even attempted in the paper.
Prayer to the AGW gods.
All that said, I don’t believe that warming is undetectable or that temperatures haven’t risen this century. I believe that CO2 helps warming along as the most basic physics proves. My objection has always been to the magnitude caused by man, the danger and the literally crazy “solutions”. Despite all of that, this temperature series is statistically speaking, the least impressive on the market. Hopefully, the group will address my confidence interval critiques, McIntyre’s valid breakpoint detection issues and a more in depth UHI study.
Well I’ve heard nothing from the Berkeley temperature team (BEST) on my critique of the CI calculation method. As promised, I waited a couple of weeks before starting to publish any demonstrations of the problem. Like Mannian statistics, this one stuck out to me like a sore thumb. They used a neat method to estimate the confidence interval through the algorithm but in the process accidentally violated the main assumptions of the method they used. It is described below in the image grabbed from the methods paper.
As I have written before, Equation 36 is based on the premise that the last term is truly 7/8 of the data. Having no response yet to my critique, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a simple example of the problem for demonstration here. The BEST algorithm works by weighting data closer to the mean greater than data far from the mean. The intent is to weight the better quality stations ahead of the rest. The result, however, may be quite a bit different than the intent.
Well the air is ice cold and the animals are hard to find in Michigan’s upper peninsula. That doesn’t mean that the company isn’t great and the effort isn’t there. For all our efforts, the camp saw dozens of doe a few bucks and some good fun. I’ve been asked if we drank the time away. While there is some alcohol at our camp, the atmosphere is more serious than that. Stands, scents, methods, and long periods of very quiet time in the woods. The trip consists of, walking until you are tired, moving firewood, showering outdoors, clearing spaces for blinds, hiking followed by black-capped chickadees landing on your equipment, snowy owls, partridge, squirrels, cyotes etc.
I would recommend that everyone spend several days in the cold weather watching wilderness by themselves every year. Self discovery, separation from our modern life and time spent in a different mode of existence are seriously undervalued in today’s world. My hunting skills rival those of most engineer basketball players (I don’t intentionally play basketball) but it is a good time full of learning. It is amazingly difficult to sit still on a painfully cold morning and hope you don’t make too much noise for the wildlife. When you get it right, your immediate neighbors are numerous. A good snow/rain and the silence becomes incredible.
In all, the weather variations were tremendous. T-shirt weather followed two days later by 8 inches of snow.
I like to tell my wife how bad the food was but one night we had salmon on a cedar plan(c)k. on another we had beef steaks, so it kind of messes up my story. Perhaps honesty is a bad policy in this case.
By the time I went home I had seen a lot of un-shootable dear, eaten a lot of food and was very ready to get back to work. Still, there is this unshakable sense that the incredible stupidity of the modern world can’t get me down.
I saw no shootable deer but a ten point walked shamelessly through camp the day before season started. My dad was talking with Mark (another hunter) who was explaining that in the past two weeks he had seen not one deer. They were talking outside when a huge beast walked by. “There’s a deer”, dad said. Mark tore down the road with a bow in his hand and came close to a shot when the deer crossed the road but no dice.
Later I asked if the deer walked through camp with its tongue out but deer with an attitude don’t normally live to grow 10 points in the UP of Michigan.
UEA Responds – And it’s the expected BS. Out of context before we put them in context. I suppose that if you aren’t a certified UEA climatologist, you can’t read. I guess I’m probably not welcome at climate school there. Thanks to WUWT again for the link.
Tue, 22 Nov 2011
While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our systems.
If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.
This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and number of studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.
As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the University and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.
———
From WUWT
UPDATE3: 9:25 AM PST – Having read a number of emails, and seeing this quote from Mike Mann in the Guardian:
When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
——-
It happened again. I woke up to find a link from FOIA.org on a thread. Thousands of emails unlocked with 220,000 more hidden behind a password. Despite the smaller size of the Air Vent due to my lack of time, there were twenty five downloads before I saw it once. As before, there are some very nice quotes and clarifications from the consensus. Below is a guest post in the form of a readme file from the FOIA.org group. – Jeff
/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”
“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.
“Poverty is a death sentence.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”
Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.
This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few
remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.
The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning
to publicly release the passphrase.
We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such
as…
I’ve been asked to give context to some of the emails. So far, I have read only a few. This is one though which should have particular resonance with long time Air Vent or Climate Audit readers. It was started by a subversive climate denier – Jeff Severinghaus – who happens to have been an Associate professor at the University of California when he asked the exact same questions that we so often ask in “skeptic” blogland. As you can see, Lord Mann nipped it in the bud as hard as a rabid dog could.
This chain is in reverse order. I’ve bolded the important bits. What caught my attention about this email set is that Jeff makes the same arguments that we evil skeptics make about paleo reconstructions. Non-linearity, loss of sensitivity and the fact that if proxies aren’t tracking temp in the modern era, how can we assume they track historic temps?
Had a smooth trip, almost everything run on time but Brits trains, as
usual, and I just got to Exeter. So replying from the B&B (quite basic
place to stay overnight, but well) and keen to sightseeing into town
For me is clear that likely Omar is the only one in WCDMP working in
several fronts and lines of activity, and MEDARE is just one of his
responsibilities. My guess is he didn’t sent at the end in early summer
the official letters of invitation to de PRs, although I can’t be sure
of this because I recall an email from Serhat Sensoy asking me if
another colleague from his office could attend the meeting. I’ll look at
my email and PC folders to see if I can find any prove of WMO
invitation letters to this WS. Perhaps he’s right and although he had
got the agreement of the local organisers (Malta’s PR), he didn’t send
such letters. If so, still worse because he had plenty of time to do it
(remember our exchange of emails among the SG and I, that they got you
fed up). Another possibility (I think this is more correct) is he spent
the money he got in Jan/Feb 2009 for organising the WS and now has to
ask again for more money! Well, both explanations: Omar is snowed under
work or he run out of money, can be right, but it’s clear he didn’t
realise people have other things to do and have Agendas. I’m
particularly tired of this kind of informality. Yes, please, try to make
Omar understand that he can’t use (dispose) of people’s time !! I was,
and still am, upset with Omar in particular and with WMO in general.
There is no way such stile of working!
Wow, my whole post vanished. I’ll try again but this is very disappointing.
I’ve read about 5 percent of the emails so far and at this point the main conclusion I come to is that the scientists are far more skeptical in private than they are in the public. They don’t say dammit, we know for certain that today’s warming is the greatest ever, they say that it appears to at least equal the historic level. They say that they are unsure of the results and often comment that the data isn’t good enough. This is all in private of course. What we get in public is the certianty that they are correct. We get comments from Mann that the finnish varve sediments can be used either way – upside right or down but the emails discuss corrections to published papers for the same problems. Below are a couple of graphs taken from climate audit. My blog is acting up so you will see them as I am writing rather than after I’ve finished.
This is what Mann had to say about the matter in reply to an official comment by McIntyre and I believe McKitrick on the use of the data in the upside down orientation shown above:
The claim that ‘‘upside down’ data were used is bizarre. Multivariate regression methods are insensitive to the sign of predictors. Screening, when used, employed one-sided tests only when a definite sign could be a priori reasoned on physical grounds. Potential nonclimatic influences on the Tiljander and other proxies were discussed in the SI, which showed that none of our central conclusions relied on their use.
Of course we get an entirely different and correctly skeptical view of using a temperature series upside down from the behind-the-scenes emails below. My bold.
Reader Buffy Minton has done some cool work to extract file attachments with the emails. This was never done for the original climategate files to my knowledge.
There are a lot of interesting emails. This one is worth calling attention to due to the popularity of hide the decline of Climategate 1 fame. It’s my bold in the middle. They chopped off the data and infilled it with temperature data. This is slightly different than Mann08 but it is to the same effect. Chop off the series and infill it with preferred data. In this case though, Tim Osborn says it “may not be defensible”.
Let me just tell you kids, don’t try this trick to hide the decline on your high school science paper.
date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:54:31 +0100
from: Tim Osborn <T.Osborn@uea.ac.uk>
subject: progress
to: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, p.jones@uea.ac.uk
Hi Keith & Phil (a long one this, as I have an hour to kill!)
We’re making slow-ish progress here but it’s still definitely v. useful. I’ve
brought them up-to-date with our work and given them reprints. Mike and Scott
Rutherford have let me know what they’re doing, and I’ve got a preprint by
Tapio Schneider describing the new method and there’s a partially completed
draft paper where they test it using the GFDL long control run (and also the
perturbed run, to test for the effect of trend and non-stationarities). The
results seem impressive – and ‘cos they’re using model data with lots of
values set to missing, they can do full verification. The explained
verification variances are very high even when they set 95% of all grid-box
values to missing (leaving about 50 values with data over the globe I think).
There is a lot to be said about Climategate 2 emails. Since I’ve focused so much of my time on dendroclimatology, much of the climate science I’ve studied is related to that subject. This is in no small part due to the influences of Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. Often, we skeptics have made the point that trees are terrible thermometers and equally often I’ve wondered if these climatologists understand just how bad the hockey stick reconstructions are. When these issues are discussed here in the open, the believer groups usually stop by and claim that the multiple studies with same or similar results are somehow “verification” of their accuracy. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
An important email because it comes from IPCC AR4 Lead Author Richard Alley makes many of the points we stand behind in one single email. This was brought to my attention by reader Kan – #3234. For the most part, emails are included in full in this post for correct context but critical parts have been bolded by me. As a suggestion, you can read the post by skipping to the bold sections first and then checking the email for correct context.
I’m reading endless emails myself. In the meantime, if there are any that readers find particularly important, place the file number and why below. It seems to me so far that this email set fills in some of the holes in the various scientists understanding of the hockey stick curves and their true uncertainty. While I haven’t run across many quotes which might shock the public, it is hard for me to be shocked by these guys anymore. So they chopped and cherry-picked data? Big surprise. It has been standard operating procedure for paleoclimate for some time and was well understood before CG1. That is not a sarcastic comment, it is simply what they do. The machinations they go through to justify the silliness are what make climate blogging fun.
For the readers: Currently this blog has a lot of traffic including a lot of international media. Keep in mind that comments you make will be read by a lot of interested people who probably aren’t as familiar with the issues as you are.
If you are a media member, ask yourself why there are dozens of curves from tree-rings (and various other silly thermometers) proporting to show temperature for the last millennia, and we slow-witted skeptics still want to argue with the consensus. I’ll answer that question in the context of these emails in a post I’m preparing which probably won’t be finished until tomorrow. — Jeff
There is much about paleoclimatology we don’t know. Key among the questions is, “What exactly was done to that innocent, unsuspecting data?” The stealthy nature of these statistical oddities has led to the practice of an informal new field of blog science which could accurately be called forensiclimatology. Long time reader Layman Lurker has discovered an interesting characteristic in Briffa’s famous hide-the-decline series. - Jeff
Exploring the Divergence Problem in the Briffa01 Timeseires
Guest Post By – Layman Lurker
Both before and after climategate 2 broke out, there has been ongoing discussion at tAV, Lucia’s and CA about divergence and particularly about whether the 1960 data truncation we saw in the TAR and other Briffa / Osborne publications was justified. It occurred to me during these discussions that an OLS regression of the full, non-truncated Briffa series in question and annual northern hemisphere temperature observations might show evidence of the divergence problem in the residuals. We are fortunate to have a non-truncated version thanks to a climategate (#1) email which Tim Osborne sent to Michael Mann on October 5, 1999 in the lead up to the IPCC TAR. Later on in another email, Osborne sent the data to Mann again but truncated at 1960, explaining that data after this point was unreliable due to the divergence and an apparent loss of temperature sensitivity. This reconstruction was unpublished at the time of the TAR (and was actually tagged as Briffa ’98 in the spaghetti graph), but was later published (truncated) in the 2001 paper: “Low frequency Temperature Variations from a Northern Tree Ring Density Network” in the Jounal of Geophysical Research. This paper also utilized a time series of NH annual temperature observations prepared by Phil Jones which I used for regression analysis in this post. At this point I should note that I have not read Briffa01 which appears to be behind pay wall (abstract here). However the time series data for both the truncated reconstruction, and the annual NH observations, is posted here.
Willis Eschenbach has an open letter at WUWT which absolutely excoriates Phil Climategate Jones for his lies to the public and to Willis. The letter is quite strongly worded, places the FOI lies in context and is worth a read. The critique is strong enough that it extends not only to Phil, but to his teammembers as well as to the kangaroo investigations of Climategate.
I think it is time for the government to find a new panel and see if they can find any wrongdoing this time. Of course they shouldn’t choose more foxes as hen-house guards in the future but that might be asking too much. I’m kidding of course, even if a less blatantly-biased panel was created, the truth is already public and I rather like the fact that the people charged with investigating cliamtegate 1.0 look so stupid.
Dave Holland, who was widely featured in the CRU emails from his blocked FOIA requests, has a guest post at Andrew Montford’s blog. He doesn’t think much of the Muir Russel review’s either and specifically addresses the false claims that the emails were out of context.
UPDATE: Reader Stacey left a bomb in #9 of the thread below.
Long time readers here will recognize this theme, new readers can assume it from the URL I’ve been using. The concept of a complete consensus among humans only occurs when a structure bands them together on an opinion. In AGW science, we know for certain that we don’t really know much, therefore a consensus must come from unscientific pressures. I and many others have maintained that government funding has corrupted the science and systematically eliminated dissent at all levels. It is a self-filtering process (not a centrally controlled conspiracy) which ensures that climate scientists have a nearly singular mindset on global warming and a singular cause to crusade for. Scientists are naturally skeptics as the infighting on truly major issues in these emails shows. Discussions are often had in terms of good and bad people, causes and damage. How is it that a paper causes damage? Much of the malfeasance in these emails focuses on mitigation of damage to the ‘message’.
When publicly funded, leaders know that outward appearance is critical to the mission. In something as big as global warming, the illusion of a perfect consensus must be maintained for the now massive environmental departments and organizations including the IPCC to succeed in their political goals. Probably the single largest message from both climategate releases is the open viewing of the effects this mechanism has on the science itself. Repression of conflicting evidence in exchange for more extreme results.
It is actually humorous reading these guys talk to each other about how skeptics are oil funded and politically motivated followed by the next proposal for 3million euros from the taxpayer. They never seem to notice that the blogs are unfunded or that their cohorts who disagree don’t take oil money and the few who have get values 1/100th of the UEA. There is even an email from Mike Hulme telling greenpeace that the UEA won’t support their extremist attacks on Exxon and a second ‘private’ email telling them that he does. In case you are unaware, Greenpeace has become an openly anti-capitalist group with a stated mission of reigning in capitalism for the purpose of reducing our standards of living. Hulme, and many of his friends, are absolutely political extremists who somehow never seem to notice that they all agree with each other on politics. If you happen to be one who doesn’t agree, well they know how to take care of that little problem.
This first email relates to a paper I haven’t read that very well may have problems, but it shows the filtering process in action. It is a long email but important. I have highlighted a few quotes which help bring my points above into light.
Buffy Minton who provided the Mime data has produced a spreadsheet of CG1 and CG2 emails in chronological order. This should be an excellent tool to follow conversations through.
UPDATE: I have a couple of timely images from a shocking post at WUWT which relate to my comments below.
From NCDC and WUWT
I have seen this highlighted at other blogs but I don’t think I’ve seen its subject matter discussed outside of the obvious ‘everyone has the same opinion at the UEA’ quote.
date: Mon Aug 23 15:52:14 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: Tonight with Trevor Macdonald
to: “Murphy Melissa (COMM) k816″
Melissa,
There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views – at least not a climatologist. It would also look odd if the two people interviewed with opposite views were from UEA. Maybe you should reply and say we can’t find one, saying that most climate experts would take the same view as Dave. The programme could easily dredge someone up, but they wouldn’t be an expert on the climate. This is the whole point of the debate recently. The people the media find to put the contrary view are not climate experts.
Phil
At 14:54 23/08/2004, you wrote:
Hello All,
Next Monday night the “Tonight with Trevor Macdonald” show will be about climate change. Dr David Viner is going to be featured on the show, presenting his view that recent extreme weather is due to global warming. I have received a call from David Reddings who is part of the show’s team, asking if we have a climate expert who has a different view to Dr Viner – perhaps believing that recent weather has not been caused by global warming but is merely part of the ‘natural variability’ of the weather. Do we have someone at UEA?
Regards,
Melissa.
Melissa Murphy
Communications Assistant
Press & PR Office
Communications Division
University of East Anglia
Norwich, NR4 7TJ
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich
—————————————————————————-
Extreme weather is one of the biggest BS claims of climate science. There have been no detected extreme weather changes since AGW began that I’m aware of. What’s more is that there is no connection yet to the tenths of a degree of warming we’ve measured. It is fantastically insane to imagine that a few tenths of a degree are going to create a noticeable difference in weather. We can barely detect the temp change. The whole concept is so asinine by itself that I can’t even imagine listening to it. Why then do scientists people keep trying to say it?
Money. They need damage for their AGW political and economic goals to be funded well. It doesn’t matter one bit that the data don’t show any differences and no physical attribution has been proven, they need it so they say it. If there were 4C of sudden warming, maybe we find some change but we’ve seen 0.8C so how the hell will that be noticeable in the hurricane or tornado patterns. Hell, until satellites were used, we couldn’t even detect all the hurricanes. We still don’t pick up all the tornadoes.
Crazy people with an agenda.
These aren’t my views only, many scientists have made these points in various fashion. It is absolutely false that you can’t find a climate expert to make the statement that extreme hurricanes, droughts, rain, tornadoes haven’t been detected. We all have read them including Jones. He is simply presenting his fantasy to the media for some unstated purpose.
The majority of this post was left on a previous thread by Justthefacts. Mike Hulme is not above taking exxon money as he shows in the emails further down this post. He even suggests using the money for funding uncertainty studies etc.rather than their intended science. I suppose that ESSO wasn’t aware that Hulme is a political extremist who by these emails regularly associates with Greenpeace. The email below is just one of many examples of Hulme’s background.
date: Fri Apr 30 15:32:41 2004
from: Mike Hulme <m.hulme@uea.ac.uk>
subject: public statements
to: a.minns
Asher,
Below are two responses to Doug Parr at Greenpeace about their stop Esso campaign. They
wanted a statement. The first is what John and I agreed should be a Tyndall statement. The second is what I personally said to Doug.
Is this relevant for Future Forests?
Mike
===============================================
“The Tyndall Centre has a general policy of not officially endorsing the sort of campaign
Greenpeace is running against ExxonMobil. Individual scientists in the Centre will take a
range of views on such campaigns and we do not believe that a Centre-wide position should
be developed on every issue like this that arises. On the other hand, the Centre clearly
recognizes that business organizations play very differing roles in the search for
sustainable solutions to climate change and that their interaction with the scientific
process and policy development also varies.
The Tyndall Centres primary role as a publically-funded research organisation is to advance
understanding of climate change and its implications for society and to communicate these
advances in knowledge effectively to a wide range of audiences. The Tyndall Centre
therefore challenges poor or incorrect science wherever we find it (and we have done so for
example in the case of some science sponsored by ExxonMobil). We also engage with many
different stakeholders in exploring with them the implications of different climate change
response strategies and policies. For this reason we do not believe that boycotting any
organization benefits the work of the Centre, although there may well be occasions when we
engage with them in vigorous debate about the options open to society to manage climate
change.
I hope this helps a little explain the Centres position as individuals, however, I know
that we both have some sympathy with Greenpeaces efforts with ExxonMobil.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Mike Hulme
Professor John Schellnuber
=================================================
11 March 2004 I do indeed support the campaign to boycott Esso (ExxonMobil). I do not purchase petrol
from this company, and have not done so for more than 2 years now. This corporation (whatever its motives and I cant judge these), has consistently ignored, undermined or in other ways distorted, the emerging international scientific knowledge which clearly points
towards a significant and growing human influence on global climate through our emissions
of greenhouse gases. It is my personal view that this reality and future prospect requires
serious and sustained efforts on the part of all nations, organizations and individuals to
reduce the underlying causes of human-induced climate change. ExxonMobils position and
explicit political lobbying thwarts rather than progresses such actions.
Mike Hulme
Below tells a different story It is copied here with the bold from tAV comment thread and was written by Justthefacts. –Jeff
I felt it was important at this stage of Climategate that I give some opinions and express where I’m at personally in this whole mess. I started blogging on climate with a true interest in the science and numbers. There is no question that I’ve been critical of the politically leftist nature of the environmental movement in general and I had been skeptical of the IPCC for its intentionally bias-creating structure. It is clear that the IPCC can’t exist without extreme, dangerous climate change which requires expensive solutions. Without that the group fails to continuously attract funding for the other groups. Still, that is a completely separate issue from data, statistics and methods. Since my introduction to climate science, I have been exposed to numerous flatly false statistical techniques which are often simply accepted by the science as long as the message is right. Shrinking fish, goofy coral papers, false model comparison papers, ridiculous paleo work on and on…. I do not accept the claim that climate scientists believe that selecting preferred data doesn’t automatically bias the results. Most high school students would be able to tell you that. Why the community won’t reject them is now crystal clear.
These emails are actually far worse than the previous batch because we can see the bias in operation through the completeness of numerous conversations, funding discussions, blocked peer review, deletion of emails, promotion of the right kind of people and denial that anything is wrong. It shows the ugly underbelly of a single-minded group of people who have the firm belief that they are right and that it does not matter if data needs to be massaged to prove it. Soon and Baliunas could not set-back a healthy scientific field by decades with a single paper. In a healthy science, a paper strong enough to change opinions would be pushing it forward. From the emails and papers, the paleoclimatologists featured are convincingly not scientists and I beleive the same is true for many modelers who don’t seem to realize the models are running hot. Throughout these emails the featured advocates continually tweak, massage, adjust, reject and modify anything which takes away from the extremist message of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Real Climate website has made the claim that nothing important is in these emails but it is clear from some of the authors featured position in the emails (and the false claim) that RC authors are not in any way qualified to judge. They are so close to their friends good intentions that they have even taken the position that there is nothing at all wrong with selecting the preferred data or adjusting the curves to show what you want.
Well the NOAA almost got it right. Actually, I’m not sure what this is in reference to other than some funding which should have been saved.
date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 08:05:58 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@virginia.edu>
subject: Re: talk
to: Keith Briffa
thanks a bunch Keith,
This sounds interesting–looking forward to hearing more about this latest analysis…
talk to you soon,
mike
At 03:40 AM 6/24/2004, Keith Briffa wrote:
Well done Mike
in case you think I was slacking , I spent the last two days embroiled in Degree
scrutiny/committee (and evenings wining and dining external examiners!). Hope to send
some stuff on our reworking of the Esper et al.analysis for your opinion soon. What are
the real chances of a change of heart on the Palaeo stuff?
Very best wishes
Keith
At 22:46 23/06/2004, you wrote:
Hi Keith,
I think the talk went well received this morning. Thanks a bunch for your input. Peck,
Mark Cane, and I all spoke in the paleo session. Hopefully we might have make some progress in convincing NOAA not to cut paleo. Will have to see what happens…
Hope all is well w/ you. Talk to you again soon,
mike
____________________________
Had Mann and his 13 co-authors shown the Briffa reconstruction, without hiding the decline, one feels that von Storch (and others) might have given more consideration to Soon et al’s criticism of the serious problem arising from the large-population failure of tree ring widths and density to track temperature.
This email demonstrates again exactly why hockey stick temperature curves are all crap.
Bo Christiansen wrote an email (copy below) on March 16 2009, stating in no uncertain terms, what I have written here dozens of times. You can’t regress extremely noisy data on a short series (temperature range) and then project it 2000 years into the past. When the noise approaches the level of (or in the case of paleowhackology, actually dominates over) the signal, you will have a loss of variance in the historic signal in comparison to the calibration range. Loss of variance means, no big changes in historic temp. It seems pretty obvious to me that this is what happens, but in the paleo world, it is nearly completely ignored. The problem is so severe that Mann published a paper in 07 which attempts to cover it up. I use the words, ‘cover it up’ with care as it is based on a lot of experiences and it is my true opinion. Unsurprisingly, he used artificial data which conveniently had the right kind of noise and as so often happens in paleoclimate – he just barely missed detecting the problem.
WUWT (a.k.a. the center of the internet) has a post on Trenberth stating that a hurricane disaster non-believer should be fired. We have to keep the free- thinking scientists in line with the message after all.
Here is a section of the post:
I responded to his earlier message in a fairly low key fashion. I think he has behaved irresponsibly and ought to be fired by NOAA for not have an openenough mind to even consider that climate change might be affecting hurricanes. I am quickly becoming outraged by this and I hope it backfires on
him!!!!
Kevin
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Martin Manning wrote:
> Dear Phil and Kevin
>
> Today Susan received a copy of some correspondence between Chris Landsea and Dr Pachauri regarding coverage of hurricanes and global warming by the IPCC. Although we were aware that Dr Landsea was raising the issue
> generally, we were not aware of the approach to Dr Pachauri and it is
> perhaps unfortunate that this was not referred to Susan.
>
> However, Susan would now like to consider a further appropriate response to
> Dr Landsea and she has asked me to ask you to wait for that before you
> consider any possible response of your own (assuming that you have seen the
> correspondence anyway?).
>
> Thanks
> Martin
>
> –
> Dr Martin R Manning
And a relevant graph by Ryan Maue below. Note the lack of hurricane strength in recent years.
They call us skeptics, deniers, fossil fuel funded, contrarians, anti-science, all because we criticize the IPCC, the hockey stick plots, temperature record quality, biased peer review, and the general politicizing that climate science has undergone. Don’t take it from me though, Climategate II explains the same things in the words of the scientists themselves.
In this post, I’ve posted a large number of quotes from the emails and other online sources which I have been gradually gathering for several days now. The consensus duma will say they are out-of-context so if you question that, check the numbers or links next to the comments. It is not possible that they could ALL be out-of-context but there are many statements from climate science which leave me wondering. This post is started out with a quote from noted scientist Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog and it continues on with quotes from the consensus. All of whom are actual climate scientists.
Be sure that there are many more quotes in these emails. I am only one person and the documentation takes time. If there are more to add to the list (there are) just quote the email number and a few sentences below. No need to copy the whole email. Those interested enough will look it up anyway. I didn’t cover the FOIA and peer review issues here but hope to add them to this list in the future.
The IPCC
From the organization statement: http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.shtml
Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.
Unfortunately, there is no way to “fix” the IPCC, and there never was. The reason is that its formation over 20 years ago was to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth. I know this not only because one of the first IPCC directors told me so, but also because it is the way the IPCC leadership behaves. If you disagree with their interpretation of climate change, you are left out of the IPCC process. They ignore or fight against any evidence which does not support their policy-driven mission, even to the point of pressuring scientific journals not to publish papers which might hurt the IPCC’s efforts.
Trenberth emials a progressives version of the first Noel made up by a NCAR group incorporating the lead authors of the IPCC AR4. It seems appropriate for the time of year.
#0462
Sung to tune of The first Noel
Our First Nobel
Our First Nobel, for the IPCC,
Goes to Beth, Bette, Bill, Jerry, Kathy and Guy.
Kevin, Linda, Paty, Re-to and so many more,
And we’re sharing the honor with Mister Al Gore.
Nobel, Nobel, a story to tell,
We hope our coworkers’ egos don’t swell.
The First Working Group said to sound the alarm,
Rising CO2 levels are causing great harm.
Temperatures and greenhouse gas are racing up neck and neck,
Soon the whole Earth will be hotter than heck.
Nobel, Nobel, the planet’s unwell,
This is the future the models foretell.
The Second Working Group said that change is assured,
>From the melting of glaciers to migration of birds.
>From loss of land and crops to habitats,
How can they make it much clearer than that?
Nobel, Nobel, the oceans swell,
Polar bears search for new places to dwell.
We must work to mitigate, tells us Working Group Three,
Change from fossil consumption to clean energy.
If we all do our share in reversing the trend,
Our children might have a clean Earth in the end.
Nobel, Nobel, sound the warning bell,
Let’s make a future where all can live well.
Nobel, Nobel, we are stars for a day,
Can an Oscar be far away?
You might think Climategate 2.0 is losing wind due to the light coverage by the media and the “out-of-context” dismissal by Real climate before anyone made any context. In fact I believe the opposite is happening. Several new articles are out today and more will be coming as the media begins to grasp that unlike stopping the use of fossil fuel, the story is financially viable. In the meantime, can someone tell the great communicators of climate science that you can’t state out-of-context before someone gives them context. Sometimes I really think that they would best serve their open advocacy by not writing anything at all.
This first article is from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is very well written and a fun popular science style read of the story as we currently know it.
This second article is at the strata-sphere site and it features some of what I’ve written as well as a considerable amount of additional emails placed in context.
Just to give a flavor of what is being said by our unbiased media, here is a dismissal by Discover. Read it at your own risk:
However, it was clear to anyone familiar with how research is done that this was complete and utter bilge; the scientists were not trying to hide anything, were not trying to trick anyone, and were not trying to falsely exaggerate the dangers of climate change.
In each of these reports the CRU was found free of any wrong-doing, if maybe a little silly from time to time.
Unsurprisingly, none of that has been made known by those currently enjoying their second 2 minutes in the spotlight.
What is amazing is that these three dismissive articles all came within 1 day of the email release. I’ve read these as diligently as anyone and even by Dec 4, am only through a fraction of the mess.
I have to add that I’m really not enjoying reading these emails. It stinks that we have to piece together mountains of rubbish so that the public can understand the meaning of what is going on. I would rather be a climate blogger than a climategate blogger but with this new context, I am happy to do any work which exposes the foul play.
I hope people realize that we have 5 times the emails of Climategate 1.0. The reading required is extraordinary and the story is far from done. I’ve got enough material for dozens of posts now and am working very hard to condense them into meaningful statements. In the meantime, things like this email jump out at you which just remind you the size of the machine that the global warming movement is.
Often we here the mantra of skeptics having the ear of Right Wing media, oil funded and the like…. Well here is an email from a reply to Soon and Baliunas who had the gall to conclude something outside of the consensus.
#2630
All,
We issued the press release at 3:40 p.m. EDT Monday, July 7. It was sent to 900 science
writers worldwide on our distribution list and posted on EurekAlert!, the AAAS web site
for science press releases. Almost immediately, we received requests for the full article from The New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, Toronto Star, San Jose Mercury News, Cox Newspapers, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and four freelancers. It was too late for most Europeans to
receive the release Monday, so we expect additional requests Tuesday morning.
Thanks to all for your help.
Harvey
–
Harvey Leifert
Public Information Manager
American Geophysical Union
2000 Florida Avenue, N.W.
And then:
At 09:45 AM 7/11/2003 -0400, Harvey Leifert wrote:
Mike and Phil,
Perhaps more relevant than which media have already carried the story, copies of your
Eos paper were distributed at a Senate briefing yesterday, and the minority (i.e.,
Democratic Party) staff is inviting Mike to appear at a hearing later in the month. (I
trust Mike got and responded to the message??)
Harvey
I don’t remember anyone helping our reply to Steig et al.. which was a flawed work showing too much Antarctic warming and promoted in many hundreds of newspapers across the globe. Heck, I don’t recall any big media attention at all.
It isn’t often that I have cause to agree with Nick lately but he has put a comment in another thread which I would like to copy here in the middle of climategate just to give some perspective on why I don’t fall in line with the IPCC.
Curious,
My general position is, yes, AGW is happening and will change our world a lot. How bad a rise of 3-4C will be I don’t know, but it’s very likely to happen.
You can’t deny Arrhenius and RTE. What that comes down to is that the IPCC judgment, right at the front of the SPM, that AGW has caused a rise of about 2 W/m2 in incoming radiation, is sound. Then you get to the climate sensitivity, which is more controversial. But even 2C per CO2 doubling has a big effect.
The arithmetic that is very basic, often forgotten, is on total C. We’ve burnt overall about 350 gigatons, and about 200 of that is in the atmosphere now. Rough figures – it’s late night here. There’s at least another 3000 Gtons C we could easily dig up and burn. That puts arguments about whether we’ve only had about 0.7C rise so far in perspective. It’s more than the total C in the atmosphere and biosphere (what was there and what we’ve put there, about 1500-2000 Gtons), and doesn’t allow for unconventional carbon. It’s at least two doublings. And the real question is, can we burn it all? And if not, how will we stop ourselves?
I haven’t mentioned the temp record, or paleo. That’s not part of the case. It’s important because if by now we hadn’t seen a temp rise, there would be legitimate questions. But we have. It isn’t the proof of AGW, but it’s consistent with it. Paleo says that it’s beyond the normal expactation, but that’s even less essential to the basic case.
Now I can’t disagree with any of what Nick has written, this is different than fully agreeing but only because I don’t have as much confidence in his warming numbers. So if Iam one of the bad-guy skeptics, where does that put the argument?
If you can’t stop the science, then you have to look elsewhere.
#1680
date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@meteo.psu.edu>
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
<x-flowed>
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.
Do you mind if I send this on to Gavin Schmidt (w/ a request to respect the confidentiality with which you have provided it) for his additional advice/thoughts? He usually has thoughtful insights wiith respect to such matters,
One thing which is abundantly clear from the emails is the incestuousness of the climate consensus. Of course they fail to see the problem but that is what happens when you are blinded by the goal. Below is a particularly honest statement by Hulme on Pachuri’s election to head the IPCC. He is fully aware that the IPCC is not really about the science. DEFRA’s (UK version of the EPA) support of Martin Parry is particularly interesting as you can find internet references of him sitting in front of DEFRA later on to make reports back. So they put him in place and receive reports back on issues which are more about energy and money than science.
I suppose people will tell us that there is nothing wrong there.
#0660
cc: s.raper
date: Mon Apr 22 18:14:44 2002
from: Mike Hulme <m.hulme@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: [Fwd: SSI Alert: IPCC Chair Vote]
to: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
Phil,
I can’t quite see what all the fuss is about Watson – why should he be re-nominated anyway? Why should not an Indian scientist chair IPCC? One could argue the CC issue is more important for the South than for the North. Watson has perhaps thrown his weight about too much in the past. The science is well covered by Susan Solomon in WGI, so why not get an engineer/economist since many of the issues now raised by CC are more to do with energy and money, than natural science.
If the issue is that Exxon have lobbied and pressured Bush, then OK, this is regrettable but to be honest is anyone really surprised? All these decisions about IPCC chairs and co-chairs are deeply political (witness DEFRA’s support of Martin Parry for getting the WGII nomination).
Mike
Yup, like always it is from WUWT, but even when repeated, it is still good to see Climategate 2.0″ on the other side of the blue marble. Think of the carbon footprint!
The emails are far worse than the last time. Many will see that as some kind of salesmanship, but it really is far worse.
The following paragraph is from the zero order draft of the IPCC on the controversial topic of polar amplification. The topic is only controversial because one of the two poles is doing a poor job of cooperating with climate models. Of course some of the pro’s will tell you different, but my understanding is that there is less warming in the Antarctic than was predicted in most models. Like hide the decline in paleoclimatology, there are random theories for the anti-establishment behavior of the Antarctic thermometers (i.e. ozone), however my understanding is that the guesses are unsubstantiated outside of some models which have the ‘guess’ programmed right into them. Please understand that I haven’t spent much time with the models (more than most) but as always, you should confirm my opinions yourself.
Kenneth noticed this next paragraph (from the AR5 ZOD on another thread which I’m not quoting or citing it but it happens to randomly appear below) that discusses ‘polar amplification’ – a phenomenon describing more warming over the poles than the rest of the planet.
Box 5.1: Polar Amplification
Instrumental temperature records show that the Arctic (Bekryaev et al., 2010) and the Antarctic Peninsula [(Turner et al., 2005; Turner et al., 2009)] are experiencing the strongest warming trends (0.5°C per decade over the past 50 years), almost twice larger than for the hemispheric or global mean temperature [(IPCC, 2007)]. West Antarctic temperature also displays a warming trend of about 0.1°C per decade over the same time period (Steig et al., 2009; [Reference needed: O'Donnell et al., ?]). A number of mechanisms can produce larger magnitudes of polar temperature changes compared to mid or low latitudes. These mechanisms involve the dynamics and variability of atmosphere (Alexeev et al., 2005; Serreze and Francis, 2006) and the ocean-sea ice system (Chylek et al., 2009; Polyakov et al., 2010; Semenov et al., 2010; Spielhagen et al., 2011b), as well as local radiative feedbacks linked with snow (Ghatak et al., 2010), ice albedo, water vapour, clouds (Graversen and Wang, 2009; Screen and Simmonds, 2010), and land surface vegetation changes (Bhatt et al., 2010). Each of these mechanisms has specific fingerprints in the seasonality, latitudinal and vertical structure of temperature changes. Detection/attribution studies conducted for the Arctic and Antarctic (Gillett et al., 2008) concluded that human influence dominated the recent polar warming.
The first claim of 0.5C/Decade in the peninsula region is easily confirmed as reasonable (slightly high) with this area plot derived from the raw temperature station data below. The 50 year Antarctic continental trend from the station data is a statistically insignificant 0.05C/decade of warming.
Antarctic temps by ground thermometer. AWS and Manned
The Air Vent hasn’t been as much fun lately. Sure there have been leaks but there has been little discussion of interest outside of the insane climategate garbage. Who wants to listen to a bunch of leftists complain in their emails about governments not repressing industry enough anyway? There is plenty of interesting stuff in science to discuss and since I can’t seem to quit blogging, I intend to re-direct myself to examining data. The pro’s seem to have no propensity for it, so we might as well. Unfortunately, the emails deserve more exposure and there is plenty to write about there but I am an engineer, not a historian. We know the story, a bunch of activists with degrees have taken over climate science – big shock. If any readers want to write on it, send an email. I’m working on a few big posts in the background but they will take time.
So Judith Curry (a very popular blogger) has a post on the communication of science. Willis Eschenbach made the point that communication isn’t the problem, we get it. From my perspective, his point was very welcome:
Public opinion is not “at odds with established scientific evidence”. It is at odds with the IPCC version, the Gavin-sanctioned version of model data that the IPCC and the modelers mistake for evidence.
There is no science communication problem at all in the US. The majority of the public sees the stage productions of the climate alarmists for what they are—pseudo-science and doomsday fantasies.
Like I said, the public sees it very well. They’ve gotten the message that a host of the most important leading lights among the AGW supporters are liars and cheats … so I’d say the communication is getting across very well.
I find this continued insistence that what we have is a problem with bad communication to be hilarious.
It is so blindingly obvious yet earlier today, I listened to Chicago radio and they had a college girl on who was a delegate from here university to Durban. She was blathering on about wanting a livable planet for her kids and how disappointed that she was that the US hadn’t committed enough industrial suicide to make her happy. I’m certain that she hadn’t paid for her plane ticket and passport with her waitressing receipts.
How many ways have we been told by “scienticians” that we’re doomed? If the endless re-wording hasn’t worked, why won’t they consider the content?
Answer: Because the sandwich board – end of the worlder’s -
Despite its now obvious flaws, Steig et al. (S09) appears destined for a prominent role in the upcoming AR5 report. We are told a lot of things by climate scientists, one being publish your results because blogs are not peer reviewed. It turns out that even when you publish your results, they go unnoticed. S09 is cited in at least 3 different chapters of AR5 initial drafts. The O’Donnell refutation (O10) of S09 was orders of magnitude more thorough than S09 and various stages of it were reviewed in blogland. Therefore our work had accurate results. Apparently, accuracy counts for little in climate science™ as S09 is a mess and nobody seems to care. Instead of recognizing these widely discussed issues, IPCC authors have taken little notice of our unexciting blue/red plots (that match ALL previous work) and have gone instead to the pretty red colors of S09.
Apparently, the way to get noticed in climate science is to publish unreasonable hockey stick style warming trends written in such a confusing manner that even other scientists can’t work out how you succeeded in communicating the AGW message. If others notice some problems, you refuse to release your messy code and tease their skepticism. If they write in blogs, well that’s not credible because it hasn’t gone through peer review. If they fight back in print, count on your friends to allow you to review the critique. You can recommend to the journal editor that the work be changed to agree with yours and if they won’t, you can recommend it not see the light of day. If the skeptics of your work still manage to publish, you can count on the media to ignore it. Your friends in charge of the institutions will then pretend not to notice the problems and accept your original pretty warming plots with an uncritical eye.
I find him a far more effective communicator in person than in papers ‘ntttt’. This is the same man who throws away data that doesn’t agree with his conclusions ‘nttt’. If the data won’t cooperate with climate policy, it is both scientific and fair to simply delete it ‘nttt’.
Mike only wants one thing. Why won’t you ignorant masses just stop driving and heating!!!
It seems that the world governments are escalating cliamtegate to the next level. Tallbloke a fellow recipient blog of the climategate emails, and linked on the right, was raided today in what seems to be a coordinated effort by Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division. His home was raided and computers were taken for ‘examination’.
Updates are coming shortly which will explain further. The same is coming to a blogger near you.
Perhaps this post should be titled - “The Empire Strikes Back”
UPDATE: Tallbloke and I both received the following notification from the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and forwarded by Ryan at WordPress. ClimateAudit is also mentioned yet I’m not certain that Steve Received notice. It seems that the larger paid blogs may not have received any notice. On pdf -WordPress Preservation Request-1
U.S. Department of Justice
Criminal Division
1301 New York Avenue, NW, 6th floor
Washington, DC 20005
PHONE: 202-353-2854
FAX: 202-514-6113
December 9, 2011
VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL
Automattic Inc.
60 29th Street #343
San Francisco, CA 94110
Attn: law-enforcement@wordpress.com
Re: Request for Preservation of Records
Dear Automattic Inc.:
Pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 2703(f), this letter is a formal request for the preservation of all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession
regarding the following domain name(s) pending further legal process: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com, http://noconsensus.wordpress.com, and http://climateaudit.org (“the Accounts”) from 00:01 GMT Monday 21 November 2011 to 23:59 GMT Wednesday 23 November 2011.
I request that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber or any other person, other than as necessary to comply with this request. If compliance with this request might result in a permanent or temporary termination of service to the Accounts, or otherwise alert any user of the Accounts as to your actions to preserve the information described below, please contact me as soon as possible and before taking action.
I’ve been contacted by several reporters over the last few days asking what was going on with the seizure of Tallbloke’s computers. I have responded to each by email pointing out some of what seem to be obvious facts in the DOJ case and then adding that they (the reporters) are looking into the wrong crime. I tried to keep the tone nice but wasn’t always sucessful. Several reporters asked me about why I thought it wasn’t a crime to release the emails, to which I replied, we didn’t do it. We simply run climate blogs. It may seem like an excuse to some of the less informed, but there is actually no mechanism for us to prevent the release of these emails. Since we cannot prevent it, how is it that we are suspects in the act itself? Yes, I know they told Tallbloke that he wasn’t a suspect, but does anyone really believe that? Police say crap like that all the time. It keeps the suspect calm while they investigate him.
Of course the police know that it is intimidating to enter a persons home and take all of their personal information but let’s think about this for a moment. Michael Mann who is largely government paid, has been caught colluding with Phil Jones and others to hide data from the IPCC in order to make a stronger than actual case for unprecedented 20th century warming. And by caught, I mean really really caught. Instead of actually looking into his other emials, on his government funded computer, they hold multiple completely fake investigations and clear the whole CRUe. They didn’t go into Mike or Phil’s houses and check their personal computers to find context, instead they go to an anonymous bloggers house and take his machines telling him falsely that he is not a suspect.
What information could they possibly get from an innocent blogger who simply writes skeptically about bad science in climate that they couldn’t get from WordPress – the blog host? There is only one thing I can think of, personal communications with the perpetrator. Tallbloke is either a suspect in collusion with foia.org OR they want him to stop blogging. Of course so are the rest of us on that list in the letter from the US DOJ, and I’m sure a few others are suspects who aren’t on the list.
“No Jeff, you guys are evil deniers.”, the advocates write. “You are complicit in the release of the emials. “
To which I reply — Ok geniuses, tell me how to stop it!
A full twenty five people had downloaded them before I noticed the link and over 160 had downloaded by my first post which was the first on the internet tilted Climategate 2.0. Note the clever title I gave it. I’m sure that the name was illegal somehow. What should I have done instead? Phone the internet and tell it to stop!
My guess is that the police are likely not happy about having to investigate fake crimes. They know these simple facts about internet information very well and unlike the biased media, they can read hide the decline and understand the context quite well. See, the police ain’t stupid. They are used to being lied to and when the climate boys tell them – out of context – it requires a personal interpretation by the investigator to determine whether the suspect is telling the truth. Yes, everyone is a suspect to them. Of course they do have to follow orders from the boss. Have you ever wondered why the Climategate 1 release required the highest and most political levels of the UK police to investigate?
Anyway, I sort of gave an earful to the various reporters that contacted me. I even quoted one guys stuff back to him asking how the emails could be out of context 8 hours after their release when nobody could have possibly read them in that time – let alone attempt to put them all ‘out of context’.
Sara Reardon was hardly alone when she wrote - “There’s nothing really new in a second massive cache of e-mails”, on the same day that the huge pile was released. A “massive” cache with nothing new?….hmm. Just how it is that she knew that is beyond me. But a lot of reporters seemed to teleconnect the same point made first by surReal Climate. I have still read only a fraction (being tired of it) and today we have a unique new bit for the public. Remember those august committees formed by the government to see if the government might have screwed up? Ya know, the ones who decided that the government funded people were innocent of wrongdoing?
One determination by the committees was that nobody had deleted any emails to cover anything up. Well it looks like they may have accidentally gotten the answer right. Instead of deletion, they were copied (cut and paste) to a personal portable USB drive. David Holland has an excellent guest post on the matter at Bishop Hill blog.
We have emails from all in Ch 6 to say the group doesn’t want emails made available.
I’ve read the USB quote by David Holland in the emails. I’ve been slowly compiling them – very slowly. It is fantastically boring reading the work of people who are poorly qualified. In the end, I have to agree with Sara on this one. We already knew they did it, even though the skeptic-deaf adjudicators claimed they didn’t.
I have written often that the UAH dataset is the most accurate data available on the market. Unfortunately its trend runs lower than other datasets excepting RSS in recent years. This does not indicate that there are no problems with it but I do make that statement after a considerable amount of time examining the papers and documentation behind the data. Unfortunately, the low trend makes it a denier dataset in the eyes of the IPCC, a fact evident both in the AR documents as well as the disparaging comments in the climategate emails. Please note, UAH has a statistically significant positive trend which is in agreement with AGW (or natural warming), just not with extreme AGW as presented by the models.
Anyway, Roy Spencer and Anthony Watts are carrying a post which replies to some of the often uninformed advocate critique of their data as well as where it differs from the AGW extremist message. It is very much worth a read. –JEFF
The UAH satellite-based global temperature dataset has reached 1/3 of a century in length, a milestone we marked with a press release in the last week (e.g. covered here).
As a result of that press release, a Capital Weather Gang blog post by Andrew Freedman was dutifully dispatched as damage control, since we had inconveniently noted the continuing disagreement between climate models used to predict global warming and the satellite observations.
What follows is a response by John Christy, who has been producing these datasets with me for the last 20 years:
Many of you are aware that as a matter of preference I do not use the blogosphere to report information about climate or to correct the considerable amount of misinformation that appears out there related to our work. My general rule is never to get in a fight with someone who owns an obnoxious website, because you are simply a tool of the gatekeeper at that point.
However, I thought I would do so here because a number of folks have requested an explanation about a blog post connected to the Washington Post that appeared on 20 Dec. Unfortunately, some of the issues are complicated, so the comments here will probably not satisfy those who want the details and I don’t have time to address all of its errors.
I just had a phone conversation with Leslie Kaufman of the NYT on the ‘hacker’. She was careful to call the FOIA people by that PC name. Rule 1 – Don’t offend the witness unless you want them upset. I didn’t really want to do the interview because these things don’t usually go well for me and it took me several days to make time. Unfortunately my Achilles heel is that I tend to say what I think. — I know you are all surprised.
She asked several questions about the hacker and said that her job was to investigate that aspect and not the climategate emails – which she believed had been covered. Of course I took a little time to explain the science of the issue and even brought up the conversations between the Dept of Energy and Phil Jones. In general, she seemed to repeat the opinions of the climategate committees despite the blindingly obvious problems in meshing any of their conclusions with reality. She said it was well covered that the researchers hadn’t been ‘open enough’. If that is the limit of the curiosity of your audience, it didn’t seem worth getting into. Read the rest of this entry »
Kim left a link to an interesting article at WUWT (originally at Tallbloke’s talk shop). It claims that by integrating convection into the radiative transfer equations, that the surface temperatures of most planets can be calculated. I’m working on other things (as always) and haven’t had time to thoroughly examine the work but I do have several questions, not the least of which is why a parametrized model with convection built in doesn’t replicate the same thing. It is an interesting article though and worth considering for those with more time than myself.
Abstract
We present results from a new critical review of the atmospheric Greenhouse (GH) concept. Three main problems are identified with the current GH theory. It is demonstrated that thermodynamic principles based on the Gas Law need be invoked to fully explain the Natural Greenhouse Effect. We show via a novel analysis of planetary climates in the solar system that the physical nature of the so-called GH effect is a Pressure-induced Thermal Enhancement (PTE), which is independent of the atmospheric chemical composition. This finding leads to a new and very different paradigm of climate controls. Results from our research are combined with those from other studies to propose a new Unified Theory of Climate, which explains a number of phenomena that the current theory fails to explain. Implications of the new paradigm for predicting future climate trends are briefly discussed.
A large set of from the AR5 IPCC zero order draft files was released at the Galloping Camel site. These represent working group II Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability chapters aka – disaster files. This section of the IPCC contains some of the most uncertain “work”, which for the survival of their unstated cause, absolutely must be overstated. These drafts typically get toned down, but not eliminated, through the reviews as reasonable heads make comments. Therefore the expected pattern is first those in charge say what they really think, then it gets chopped down over time, a little closer to what could be weakly defensible in a government court. Often in the past, obvious facts have been ignored. Correspondingly and unsurprisingly, this chapter is filled with some of the most extreme global warming conclusions possible in the eyes of a governmental organization operating in the wildly profitable industry of climate science™ alarmism. If you enjoy political propaganda, with a wealth redistribution twist, wrapped in a package only loosely disguised as science, then these are the files for you.
For example the executive summary of Chapter 5 discusses sea level rise:
Sea-level rise of more than one metre by the end of this century poses the single major threat to the coastal areas. More than 200 million people are already vulnerable to flooding by extreme sea levels worldwide and this population could be increased by a factor of 4 due to rising population and coastward migration, especially in Asia. New information is available on the likelihood of increased rates of ocean acidification. Although acidification is being addressed through international mitigation efforts, coastal policies need to address ocean acidification at the local and regional levels. More detailed and useful information would be required for the implementation of such policies.
It is hard to have any emotion about climate these days. It is like I’ve reached the end of the road and can see over the edge of the cliff. All is in view as far as you can see. They call it green but after Climategate 2.0, all I see is brown.
Pound on more Mannian style math or random proxies, sure -can do, but why? Beat up on a little more Berkeley surface temperature studies, sure, can do. The data dicing is fantastic low hanging fodder. Again, why? Even Judith Curry has not responded to me on the simpler topic of CI. Not even a sentence. What is the point of wasting my limited time on these adventures if the geniuses won’t listen to reason. Beat up on the IPCC for reposting extremist crap? Sure, again easy fodder. How about “renewable” energy – the big anti-entropy lie. Fun stuff, but again why?
Tough times for a technical climate blogger. Lots of the same crap, trees ain’t thermometers, ice ain’t melting, sea level ain’t rising from CO2, no more hurricanes, Antarctic and Arctic ice will still be there, on and on and on. Why not shut down industry!?
Judith Curry has a post including the climate BS awards by Peter H. Gleick which purports to correct the record on climate change. You will not be terribly surprised to read these opening sentences:
The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now.
The only time that I know of where climate didn’t change was when Michael Mann invented it. Of course that lack of change is the point of the hockey shtick handle but we will beat that slow-witted monkey on the head some other time. What makes this stink to high heaven is that this PAC is not a political action committee. It is rather, one of thousands of left wing 501c money funnels which operate tax free while simultaneously pushing a pro-government control high taxation agenda.
After the last US presidential election, thinking people should not be surprised to see yet another violation of the law ignored by the liberal activists. What stinks is the lack of astonishment in the media.
To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.
The 2011 Winner: Climate B.S.* from all of the Republican candidates for President of the United States
Is it really necessary to be anti-science in general, and anti-climate science in particular, in order to be nominated to lead the Republican Party in the United States? Apparently, yes, at least in the minds of the Republican presidential candidates or their advisors. These candidates can be split into three groups: those ignorant or uninterested in science and its role in informing policy; those who intentionally distort science because it conflicts with deeply held political or religious ideology; and those who blow with the wind, giving their allegiance to whatever ideology seems most expedient at any given moment. There is some overlap, of course: some candidates, such as Rick Perry, have been in all three groups at various times. The third group includes candidates who have at one time or another held positions more or less consistent with scientific understanding, but who in 2011 adopted anti-scientific positions during their primary campaigns. For example, Gingrich, Romney, and Huntsman, at some point in the past all expressed at least a partial understanding about the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change. Yet all three have now retreated from the scientific evidence to faulty but ideological safe positions demanded by the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In October, Romney caved in to conservative pressure and changed his stance on the issue. Just days ago, after pressure from anti-climate-science activists, Gingrich cut a chapter on climate science from a book of environmental essays he had agreed to produce. Ironically, that chapter was to have been written by an atmospheric scientist (Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University) who happens to be an evangelical and speaks regularly to conservative groups. She was also targeted by these activists for personal abuse – a tactic often pursued by climate deniers and contrarians. (For a few of the craziest things the top GOP candidates have said on climate change, see Joe Romm’s recent essay at Think Progress.)
Just in case you think there is some wiggle room for the political agnosticism of this activist group, the next paragraph in their “unbiased” and politically neutral article should clear it up for you:
In short, the choice among the Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, distain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the Republican candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? They win hands down.
Why is it acceptable for an obviously political organization to take literally millions in funding from government donors for the purpose of promoting extremist, left-wing, anti-capitalist propaganda?
The PAC group had $581,000 USD in donations in 2010 ALONE!-after tax. What percentage came from taxpayers?
Agency for International Development $13512
Bureau of Reclamation $14,670
California Public Utilities Commission $25,808
Community Water Center $8,453
Department of Water Resources $73,716
Institute for Social and Environmental Transition $30,487
United Nation Global Compact Foundation $98,145
United Nation Water Mandate $11,198
United Nation Environment Program $32,782
University of Berkeley $ 19,137
State of California Environmental Protection Agency $18,107
Water Reuse $$38,811
It is absolutely sickening to understand that 66% ( $384,466 USD. ) of the revenues of this blatantly political organization are taken at literal gunpoint from American taxpayers. The money is being DIRECTLY spent for political propaganda in a campaign year! The ‘bosses’ work for this group part time of course, lining their pockets with a couple hundred K of candy while simultaneously working other committees. After all, the board of directors must be paid.
In continuation of my investigation of the actions of the tax exempt 501c corporation the “PACIFIC INSTITUTE FOR STUDIES IN DEVELOPMENT, ENVIRONMENT, AND SECURITY”, I have dug deeper into the tax reporting and operations of Peter Gleick. It appears that this organization operates completely above IRS law, employing what appears to be 95% government taxpayer money for the purpose of actively campaigning against conservative politicians and organizations. It is by no means the only group to do so but we have to start somewhere.
First, here is an article by President Peter Gleick on PIS letterhead specifically critiquing policies of conservative presidential candidates. climate_bs_award_2011[1]
Gleick is an extremist political activist by any form of the definition you care to propose. He’s written numerous left wing propaganda pieces on the ‘green’ blog which are so full of pro-leftist disinformation that communist countries probably look to him for his expertise. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with an organization promoting untruths for a political goal, the 501c’s are a leftist heaven for such things. There are also conservative versions, but far, far fewer of them. Conservatives don’t believe in taking government money for these things. The result though has been a huge imbalance in funding for truth in science rather than the pro-government, pro-AGW, type messages. Thus, it seems reasonable that we should shine a little light on them here.
Unfortunately for Gleick, he’s taken the process a step further in this years climate BS awards. Instead of complaining about those amazingly stupid conservatives, he’s actually taken the time to name and critique Republican presidential candidates for their positions on global warming. This was in the last post but is worth reproducing here:
Climate B.S.* from all of the Republican candidates for President of the United States
Is it really necessary to be anti-science in general, and anti-climate science in particular, in order to be nominated to lead the Republican Party in the United States? Apparently, yes, at least in the minds of the Republican presidential candidates or their advisors. These candidates can be split into three groups: those ignorant or uninterested in science and its role in informing policy; those who intentionally distort science because it conflicts with deeply held political or religious ideology; and those who blow with the wind, giving their allegiance to whatever ideology seems most expedient at any given moment. There is some overlap, of course: some candidates, such as Rick Perry, have been in all three groups at various times. The third group includes candidates who have at one time or another held positions more or less consistent with scientific understanding, but who in 2011 adopted anti-scientific positions during their primary campaigns. For example, Gingrich, Romney, and Huntsman, at some point in the past all expressed at least a partial understanding about the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change. Yet all three have now retreated from the scientific evidence to faulty but ideological safe positions demanded by the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In October, Romney caved in to conservative pressure and changed his stance on the issue. Just days ago, after pressure from anti-climate-science activists, Gingrich cut a chapter on climate science from a book of environmental essays he had agreed to produce. Ironically, that chapter was to have been written by an atmospheric scientist (Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University) who happens to be an evangelical and speaks regularly to conservative groups. She was also targeted by these activists for personal abuse – a tactic often pursued by climate deniers and contrarians. (For a few of the craziest things the top GOP candidates have said on climate change, see Joe Romm’s recent essay at Think Progress.)
In short, the choice among the Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, distain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the Republican candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? They win hands down.
The worst part of the above for my heart, is listing Activist Joe Romm as an honest broker of science. The guy doesn’t have a scientific cell left in his body. They have all atrophied to raisins under his need to be green no matter the evidence. Seriously though, 501C’s are specifically prohibited from participation for or against any politician. This violation of their tax free status cannot be tolerated but we have to report it and then it is up to the IRS to determine whether they should be properly prosecuted. Steve McIntyre took the time to see how the PIS group filed last year and noted the boxes indicating that the group had not campaigned for any candidate in 2010. The above quote is from an article dated1/5/2012 so is the tax exempt group ok until 2013 when they will undoubtedly declare they are tax exempt for 2012?
What puts a 501(c)(3) status in jeopardy?
When a 501(c)(3) does not file paperwork with the IRS and/or state or misstates its records intentionally, its tax-exempt status can be jeopardized. Additionally, 501(c)(3) organizations cannot engage in the following activities:
• Conducting extensive lobbying;
• Donating a substantial private benefit to individuals or other organizations for uses not aligned with the organization’s 501(c)(3) purpose;
• Providing outsiders or insiders with personal benefits; • Engaging in any political activity; and
• Having excessive unrelated business income (UBI).
Joe Romm may want to read up on these.
Cornell University actually lists the code. You can read it in full here. In the meatime, it looks like many 501c’s are way over the line for what they are allowed regarding their tax exempt status. Since some formatting came with the text, I’ll put my bold in color below
§ 501. Exemption from tax on corporations, certain trusts, etc.
(a) Exemption from taxation
An organization described in subsection (c) or (d) or section 401(a) shall be exempt from taxation under this subtitle unless such exemption is denied under section 502 or 503.
(b) Tax on unrelated business income and certain other activities
An organization exempt from taxation under subsection (a) shall be subject to tax to the extent provided in parts II, III, and VI of this subchapter, but (notwithstanding parts II, III, and VI of this subchapter) shall be considered an organization exempt from income taxes for the purpose of any law which refers to organizations exempt from income taxes.
[snip]
(c) List of exempt organizations
The following organizations are referred to in subsection (a):
(1) Any corporation organized under Act of Congress which is an instrumentality of the United States but only if such corporation—
(A) is exempt from Federal income taxes—
(i) under such Act as amended and supplemented before July 18, 1984, or
(ii) under this title without regard to any provision of law which is not contained in this title and which is not contained in a revenue Act, or
(B) is described in subsection (l).
(2) Corporations organized for the exclusive purpose of holding title to property, collecting income therefrom, and turning over the entire amount thereof, less expenses, to an organization which itself is exempt under this section. Rules similar to the rules of subparagraph (G) of paragraph (25) shall apply for purposes of this paragraph.
(3) Corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual, no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation (except as otherwise provided in subsection (h)), and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.
The phrase ‘Substantial part of the activities’ for propaganda has become a huge hole in the legislation as that means some fraction of the tax free money can be used for propaganda. Where Gleick (and many others) go wrong is when they list the names of candidates discussing their policies while using our money.
Ok, I’m tired again so rather than break down the tax forms from the PIS institute today, I’ll simply link the information here. Pacific_Institute_990_tax_10[1].The PIS group has received over two million USD, primarily from government sources over the last 5 years. This is equivalent to a healthy 10 million dollar company for profits while employing far fewer people for the result. The two million used by this group in tax represents the full taxation of a healthy 25 million dollar company in the United States. What also stinks is that all he had to do was build something with the employment level of a couple of gas stations and the guaranteed income of taxpayer money.
Note that in section 4 of his corporate tax return, Gleick asserted to the IRS that his group has participated in NO political campaign activities.
Will the lies about non-political status hold water in their 2011 return? Considering that the group has turned over 1o million dollars in profits/contributions (mostly government tax money) in the past 5 years, I think they will take their chances!
Some wonder why I’m tired and grumpy about climate blogging. Wikipedia is a great example. No matter the evidence, they will publish whatever revisionist truth compliments the leftist message. I will never contribute to that group although it could have been a wonderful source, it has become a biased propaganda engine of massive size. They are regularly asking people for contributions at a time when other websites of that size are rife with cash. Gee, does that sound like any newspapers you know? Media groups never seem to recognize that it is the message that is not selling, they always blame something else. Wiki claims that they don’t want adds to influence their content, but a few minutes of review by an unbiased individual reveals that the plain ain’t working. Today at WUWT, James Padgett has a nice post on the Wikirevisionist article on the Soon and Baliunas incident. The same SB paper which led to some insane behavior by the paleoclimatologist community which didn’t like the critique of their blatantly unreasonable methodologies.
I’ve been so frustrated with the constant untruths in media and climate science that it is hard to post anything. Last night I spent a few hours quietly looking back at Ljungqvist 2010 proxies and will likely have a post in the next day or two on that. It seems somewhat removed from the out-of-control political idiocy disguised as science. Numbers are calming.
As many readers are aware, the culture surrounding the climate change topic area of Wikipedia has been a microcosm of climate science for nearly a full decade.
This is not a compliment.
When you read the Climategate emails and see discussions of finding people to investigate and discredit your ideological opponents – that is Wikipedia. When you read about the IPCC’s usage of the WWF and students in composing their Climate Bible (KJV) – that is Wikipedia. When you read about “climate scientists” conspiring to get other scientists fired for challenging the orthodoxy – that is Wikipedia.
In short, Wikipedia does not care about truth, and certainly not doubts, it cares about message.
Apparently sea ice doesn’t agree with the global warming agenda. I haven’t looked in months and would love to update the sea ice videos but I have to re-download the GB of data. Today I took at the Cryosphere site (after literally months) and found this plot:
Sea ice is above average. Despite my belief in CO2 global warming’s effect, I really don’t believe it has had any scientifically discernible impact on sea ice. Nutin!! Now we still believe ice does melt from warmth, at least I don’t think Climate Science™ has changed that yet (apparently thermometers still have branches), but you need a lot more than a few degrees to melt an Earth pole. The same Sun hating environment that makes Star Wars planet Hoth look like a friendly beach resort.
I’m thinking that after I turn in the useless tax-payer sucking 501C we’ve been discusssing, to no useful effect, I’m going to write a letter to god and turn in the planetary poles for not listening to the government. God put us on Earth for a reason, and if Earth doesn’t realize it we ought to do something about it.
Steve McIntyre has an interesting post on how certain members of the most controversial sections of Climate Science™ have influenced the openness and transparency of the IPCC. As usual, he has put considerable time into the effort and discovered a unique chain of events in the public documentation.
The IPCC considers its draft reports, prior to acceptance, to be pre-decisional, provided in confidence to reviewers, and not for public distribution, quotation or citation.
We wouldn’t want anyone pointing out that flawed Steig work was being used as a poster boy for global warming until after it was too late right? After all, Soon and Baliunas needed to go because its method was flawed, not because it was an anti-AGW result. I’m sure that the Berkeley temperature study will also be treated similarly.
S0 I’m actually getting to where I feel better about things and have begun looking at actual data. Then I ran across this.
It is a call to action to limit black carbon emissions, a far more sensible thing to attack than CO2, but the article is so insane that I simply refuse to accept that anyone in the world believes it has any attachment to reality.
Tropospheric ozone and black carbon (BC) contribute to both degraded air quality and global warming. We considered ~400 emission control measures to reduce these pollutants by using current technology and experience. We identified 14 measures targeting methane and BC emissions that reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050. This strategy avoids 0.7 to 4.7 million annual premature deaths from outdoor air pollution and increases annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond. Benefits of methane emissions reductions are valued at $700 to $5000 per metric ton, which is well above typical marginal abatement costs (less than $250). The selected controls target different sources and influence climate on shorter time scales than those of carbon dioxide–reduction measures. Implementing both substantially reduces the risks of crossing the 2°C threshold.
You have got to be completely insane to imagine that a 0.5C warming or the associated pollution will kill a minimum of 700,000 people per year. This is what passes for peer review?!
Jesus…
There is simply no shame in these people’s makeup. Have you ever witnessed such incredibly blatant and false scare tactics? This actually went into a journal.Perhaps if this is the standard for the AAAS science magazine, it should rename itself Charmin.
UPDATE: High speed video from 2004 to present added below.
In response to recent discussions, I’ve taken the time to download the 2.8 gb of data required to plot sea ice. I found a far better software for video creation called virtual dub. And I rescaled the graphs so that the Arctic and Antarctic are plotted on equal grid scales. The pixel resolution is 25km and the satellite ice data comes from the NSIDC Sea Ice Concentrations as collected from the Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave systems. This version represents just a few years of the total dataset and is similar to my previous publicaitons. You may note the higher resolution and frame rate than my previous work. Currently, I’m compiling the complete video for publication tomorrow. The purpose of the project is to first visually see if 2009 – 2011 which is not shown here, has similar weather patterns to 2007. Also, I hope to add sea surface temperature and flow directions to the video – both of which will probably add to our understanding of the sea ice situation. If I’m lucky, there may be some stats to follow as well.
Below is the full length of the NSIDC SEA ice data. From 2.8 gb of data. The graphs of the Arctic and Antarctic are plotted on equal grid scales having a pixel resolution of 25km. The satellite ice data comes from the NSIDC Sea Ice Concentrations as collected from the Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave systems.
Tom Fuller has started blogging again. He used to post at the SF examiner – until he also quit. Many of you will remember that he and I hold different views on politics but I find him honest and a far better writer than me. According to his email, his new blog will focus on energy and climate and appears to be directed at renewable energy. I’m looking forward to his contributions again and expect he will create a comfortable blogging atmosphere where difficult yet reasoned discussions can be held.
Let this be a lesson to new bloggers, it is a trap!
EFFECT OF ATMOSPHERIC MASS AND CO2 ON GROUND TEMPERATURE
Leonard Weinstein, ScD
January 17, 2012
The issue has been raised about the effect of the mass of an atmosphere on surface temperature. It can be shown that if no optically absorbing gases, aerosols, or clouds are present in the atmosphere, that the average surface temperature will be determined by albedo, absorbed surface solar radiation (ignoring small radioactive heating effects), and outgoing thermal radiation at the ground level, and I will not discuss that issue here. The present discussion only considers an atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and for simplicity only looks at the effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Only long time average global average values of temperature are considered, and only at long term constant CO2 levels (i.e., transient responses are ignored).
Some simplifications are made here, as the complete analysis is complex, and requires accurate experimentally measured data values and assumptions that are not well settled. The main simplification I make is the ground temperature sensitivity of the Earth atmosphere to increases in atmospheric CO2 levels. Values from less than 0.5 C/doubling to over 4 C/doubling have been suggested as the result of CO2 increase plus all feedback effects, However I am only describing the CO2 effect independently here, and this has been shown in most studies to give a surface increase of about 1.2 C/doubling of CO2, ignoring all other effects.
I use here is a mean virtual temperature, Tv~250 K that is based on an average temperature between sea level and approximate average location of outgoing radiation to space. This is an approximation, but its exact value has little effect on the comparison shown later. In addition, I use the wet lapse rate (as found in our lower to mid Troposphere) of -6.5 C per km height, even though I ignored the feedback effect of water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere to simplify the analysis.
In an atmosphere, the height from ground to a particular pressure level can be found from the following equation:
The value of H, which differs somewhat for different lapse rates, is called the scale height, and is the height where the pressure decreases by a factor of 1/e. I am using here the value of H ~29.3Tvfor Earth’s atmosphere (based on the actual measured average atmospheric gas properties and Earth’s gravity), so combining this with the value of Tv selectedgives H~7.33 km. Changes in this value would be small enough for different assumptions that it would not change the basic result shown here.
I now examine two simplified cases:
The case of a surface pressure of 1 bar (Earth’s actual value), with present amounts of CO2 (390 ppm), and with the effect of other greenhouse gases, aerosols, or clouds having a constant effect that is independent of atmospheric mass or changes in CO2, and assuming the same albedo as at present.
The case of 2 bars surface pressure, with the same total amount of CO2 as case 1, but with an added equal amount of a mix of N2 and or O2, so that the average specific heat and molecular weight of the atmospheric gases are the same for 1 and 2. The greenhouse heating effect of other greenhouse gases, clouds, and aerosols are considered to be exactly the same as case 1 to separately show the effect of CO2 alone, and the albedo is still the same as in case 1.
The total effect of the present amount of CO2 alone on an increase in temperature above the no-greenhouse gas for case 1 is not accurately established, with estimates for CO2 alone from 5 C to 15 C as compared to the 33 C estimated total greenhouse effect with all gases, clouds, and aerosols. Since some of the CO2 absorption and radiation wavelengths overlap some of the water vapor wavelengths, the effect of CO2 in the presence of water vapor is even less addition than if considered alone. I am examining the effect of only CO2 here. I use an estimated value of the total CO2 effect of 10 C for the present amount as being reasonable (the exact amount is not important as long as is significantly larger than the effect of one doubling). If case 1 has the same mass atmosphere as the present atmosphere, except the concentration of CO2 was 0.5 times that of the present (195 ppm), this would have resulted in a reduction of surface temperature of 1.2 C for the lower concentration, ignoring feedback. Case two does has half the concentration of case 1, but also has twice the atmospheric mass, so the total mass of CO2 is the same for both case 1 and 2, and the only difference is atmospheric mass (and corresponding thickness) of the total atmosphere. The question is: what does this do to surface temperature?
The atmosphere is considerably thicker for case 2 than case 1 due to having twice the mass of gases, and this raises the altitude of some of the (assumed well mixed) CO2 a considerable amount. A simple analogy to see the effect is that if a thin unmixed layer of CO2 containing all the present CO2 mass in the present atmosphere were forced to lie close over the surface, and most of the atmosphere above it had none, the greenhouse gas effect would only raise the location of outgoing radiation a short distance above the surface. Multiplying the average outgoing altitude by the lapse rate would result in surface temperature increasing only a fraction of the 10 C presently possible for mixed atmospheric CO2. While the gases would mix eventually up into the atmosphere, this point shows the effect of altitude of the greenhouse gas as also being a factor.
The equation for the relation between pressure and height for p1/p2=2 gives a value of (Z2-Z1)=5.08 km. Thus the pressure at 5.08 km for case 2 matches the surface pressure for case 1. The fact that a 0.5 change in CO2 would only change surface temperature 1.2 C implies that it only changes the average location of outgoing radiation by 1.2/6.5= 0.18 km if that were the only factor considered. However, the total change of 10 C possible for all of the CO2 alone implies the average altitude of outgoing radiation to space for all the CO2 alone was about 10/6.5=1.54 km. This is nearly an order of magnitude larger than the change due to a 0.5 change of CO2 (i.e., it is the result of the exponential response).
We thus have case 2 with only 0.5 the CO2as case 1 in the lower 5.08 km of atmosphere, but where it has the same total mass of the entire case 1 atmosphere. However, we have on top of that, additional atmosphere with the same total mass of atmosphere as all of case 1, and also with 0.5 the CO2 as all of case 1. This upper layer would be as thick as the entire present case 1 atmosphere. If the upper layer absorbed and radiate all portions of wavelengths absorbed and radiated in the lower 5.08 km, this upper portion alone would have a location (for CO2 alone) 1.36 km above the 5.08 km level where outgoing radiation occurred. The actual solution of the resulting average altitude would require a full radiation analysis, and is not as high as that oversimplified version. However, it is clear that a thicker atmosphere, even without increasing total greenhouse gases over the thinner case, would have increased surface temperature due to the increased average altitude of outgoing radiation. It is also true that it is not the mass or pressure of the atmosphere alone that causes the increase, it is the combination of average altitude of outgoing radiation and lapse rate, and the increase in mass of atmosphere would raise the average location of outgoing radiation by virtue of thickening the total atmosphere. The final increase in surface temperature is the product of average outgoing altitude (including from the ground, greenhouse gases, clouds and aerosols), and lapse rate.
I’ve been spending time working on improved sea ice code. Anthony Watts asked for something and Steve McIntyre helped find the right R function to get it going. I want to also overlay SST data as well as flow direction in the videos. Hopefully it will lead us to some statistical analysis.
I have reworked my sea ice code to account for leap years and to make it easier to read. It wasn’t a terribly easy process but it was useful. Here I will present some plots of sea ice trend as derived from the gridded satellite data. The purpose of this was to verify their accuracy and lay groundwork for future posts on sea ice.
Unfortunate statistically significant growth of ice during unprecedented death-spiral sea ice doom.
Change you can believe in. I’ve wondered often why the assumption of a large Climate Science™ body is so against warmer weather. As many here are noting, I do understand that CO2 will absolutely warm the planet. Still I am more skeptical than many as to whether that warming attributed to CO2 has been, or even can be, detected. Attribution studies are woefully inadequate and not due to inept scientists as much as the difficulty of the problem. The fact that some are even published is due to ineptness though as I have finished papers thinking the answer is – we don’t really know – but you can guess that that isn’t what was written.
Warmer is bad.
Why?
Being a multicellular air breathing organism, I like warm. I do also like polar bears but my guess is that they don’t mind warm either. We are only talking about a few degrees and that is NOT enough to end sea ice. We know for a fact that there are endless positive effects of a warmer planet and have only been able to come up with a few negative ones. The positive includes more plants, more area for animals to graze, more water in the air, less clothing on beaches etc.. Negatives, as written, are unproven. For instance, the melting of the ice caps. We have seen some summer ice shrinkage in the Arctic and some growth in the Antarctic. We have also seen that the caps refreeze every year with an abruptness corresponding to the very cold temperatures of the poles. Shocker!! Not a few C below freezing but several tens of degrees. I frankly don’t see the planetary doom in that.
Antarctic ice isn’t melting any time soon and glaciers aren’t vanishing as advertised. We all know that this isn’t the story the media and scientists are selling but it IS reality.
So what is really wrong with being warmer? What if we do see those temp increases the government organized IPCC predicts? I don’t really understand people’s incredible ability to react to unproven scenarios of destruction, simply because the scenario was stated. Shut off the power because we are worrying about an unproven ‘end of the world’ claim makes as much sense as not eating so we can save ourselves from heart disease. The world isn’t this clean pristine operating room environment which must be left undisturbed. It is a home in which we live and should care for, but that doesn’t mean we have to try and hold its weather static. The Earth doesn’t hold it static itself anyway. It prefers being colder and that is really bad news for us and I would also guess, the polar bears.
The theme which started the URL of noconsensus, was that a consensus is an unnatural state for humanity. People disagree about everything under the Sun. Usually, disagreement is due to lack of information but we all know that many times it is about biased interpretation of information. The only questions in global warming are related to the magnitude of warming, what is causing that warming and whether it is a problem in any way at all. In my opinion, this is just my opinion, those questions aren’t even close to being answered by Climate Science™. Yet if the left wing environmental groups around the country cannot have consensus on the danger and the consequential need to enact anti-industry controls for that danger, their own self-destructive agenda cannot move forward.
Since this blog was started, the environmental activist groups, which are fronts for the most radical anti-industrial agenda, have really exposed their hands. From the president of Greenpeace announcing that they are really anti-capitalist to to 501C 3′s using taxpayer money to take political stances against conservative candidates. Recently in the news, another tax-free entity, Forecast the Facts, has compiled a list of 55 meteorologists who refuse to spout the dangers of climate change. It has long been understood that meteorologists are not inclined to agree with climate science doom predictions. After all, they can plainly see that droughts, hurricanes and storms happen all the time and that there is no trend in the history of these events. Since they are professional scientists who unlike climatologists, don’t make more money and recognition by agreement with the consensus, often times, they simply state reality as their less-influenced scientific minds see it.
As is so typical of those who believe in government control as a goal to be achieved, the extremists will not tolerate free thought and actually believe this as a BIG problem which needs to be addressed. It is unconscionable to them that scientists won’t repeat in unison that the world is ending due to industry and the excesses of modern life. You know, excesses like food, transportation, and heat. To that end Forecast the Facts has made a blacklist of meteorologists who have made anti-message statements and has consequently (predictably) come under a small bit of pressure in the media. In reaction, they recently published a statement of their purpose linked here, but we can read all we need to know about these people by the final paragraph copied below.
Like it or not, that decision puts the AMS squarely in the midst of this conversation. And in our eyes, there is only one way for them to appropriately comport themselves – quickly pass a statement that is consistent with the current scientific consensus, and then vigorously promote that statement to their members. Anything short of this would be a derilection of their duty as a scientific association. That is the conclusion that more than 13,000 people — those who have signed the Forecast the Facts petition — have come to, and we hope that number grows significantly in days to come. Because in the end, Forecast The Facts exists for one purpose — to make sure these people’s voices are heard. We can only hope that the AMS, and broadcast meteorologists across the country, start listening.
I find it amazing that the any person on Earth can read this and consider it a reasonable statement. See, we have no consensus on that either.
Satellite sea ice measurements are comprised of terabytes of data over decades of time and multiple instruments. The literature on the topic is incomplete for those of us who don’t live in the field, yet far better than anything that paleomagicology has ever produced. In my recent sea ice work, I’ve taken the time to correct for leap years in the trend and spent a lot of time insuring that the calculations are accurate. I really want to understand what is happening to cause the melting of the Arctic and growth of the Antarctic and believe I am coming close. I used FileZilla to download all of the EASE grid sea ice data from the NSIDC. If you want the link, send an email and I will give you instructions. We don’t want to download gigabytes of ice data if we are not serious about study.
Anthony Watts was curious about the ice trends above and below the Arctic Circle. It seems reasonable that a large percentage of ice loss would happen at lower latitudes if global warming is the cause of the loss. Contrary to my own theory that warm waters were pushed into the pole, it seems that this general warming is in fact the cause. The jury is not out yet, but IMO the fat lady’s tummy is visible. So here are some of the plots I’ve generated:
This is the ice area inside the Arctic Circle. The decline in minimum is striking, as are the step features in the maximums.
I’m not at all comfortable with the steps in maximum ice considering that the max ice is constrained by land mass.
Ice area inside the Arctic circle.
Consider that the total ice area is this:
Entire Northern Sea Ice
Note that the minimum area never drops to zero. This is an offset in the resulting area which should be considered.
The ice anomaly below the Arctic is:
South of the Arctic circle yet northern hemisphere sea ice.
This plot seems to have an artificial step at 1995. There is a significant satellite switch at that point but I haven’t had time to fully research it. Despite my fondness for the massively funded Sea Ice group, I don’t believe right now that it is a non-issue. Long time readers will remember the step in the UAH RSS data.
I’m tired again, hopefully this is enough to start some thought. MUCH more of this has been done and will be posted in greater detail.
We have been looking at sea ice trends below the arctic circle at the request of Anthony Watts. It is a curiosity of his that he’s been asking Walt Meier of the NSIDC to consider for some time. I am a fan of the NSIDC because their data access is excellent and they answer questions very quickly and reasonably. This post is from the daily sea ice data as presented by the NSIDC on their FTP site. It is several gigabytes so if you are serious, fileZilla is a good free software to facilitate download.
From the video’s produced, it is apparent that a lot of noisy data exists at the extreme lower edge of detection. This data results in sea ice being detected in isolated squares of warm latitudes with no chance of having actual sea ice. The effect is visible in this video showing both poles through the history of satellite ice data.
Accelerating warming failed again. I’ve been waiting for this post because we knew the sat channels had plunged. On reading his post, I learned that Dr. Roy Spencer’s daughter was involved in a serious car accident. I hope everyone will send their regards.
I wrote recently that I wanted to check local regions of inland lakes to look for bias in the sea ice satellite record. Satellites are not long lived creatures. They are built of lightweight materials very carefully constructed to survive in incredibly harsh environments. The result is design lifetimes far shorter than a decade. Why is that important? Because that means that the finest climate trend records, which are satellite based, are comprised of instruments continually re-calibrated to absolute detail but are knitted together wherever any switch of instrument occurs.
All kinds of things can affect measurements, time of day, altitude decay, instrument degradation, signal loss, on and on. Scientists work very hard to correct for these changes but sometimes they are unable to achieve a perfect result. Other times problems are missed.
One of the biggest critiques of satellite temperature data is the known offsets caused by orbital decay of the individual instruments and how they are knitted together during transitions to newer satellites. The details of the corrections are impressive and when things in science are not simple, that often means not certain. In the UAH and RSS series, that means that the scientists use additional data to re-knit the satellites. Less detail is available in knitting of multi-satellite sea ice data.
What is more important is that sea ice data changed sensor types at about 1987. I knew this before but had forgotten in which year this transition occurred.
For this experiment, I chose a section of Canada which included lakes that always will freeze over 100% in the winter and melt 100% in the summer. You would expect that sea ice area for these lakes would produce a sine wave with clipped peaks as the signal reached 100% and 0%.
I can really improve these graphics but this will get the point across:
Total Sea Ice Area - no mask
Purple mask incorporating Great Bear, Great Slave, and Athabaska River Lake.
By running the sea ice code presented previously here and incorporating this purple highlighted mask, we get the sea ice area plot below:
We have often discussed the motives of government employed Climate Scientists™ and the biases which sort their views. The blog is called noconsensus after all. However, we have not spent time discussing motives of skeptics – which appropriately have little consensus. One of the main critiques I’ve received is that I have a conservative viewpoint of the world. I don’t hide it but have been advised at least 50 times behind the scenes that I should. Apparently, in our screwed up world, it is ok to be a wrong-thinking leftist because that is “intellectual” but not so for conservatives. The very existence of something as politically tone-deaf as Climate Progress is a perfect example.
My conservative viewpoint is based on a simple understanding that competition and reward creates hard work. Humans are not soft creatures to which everything necessary should be given without consequence. Nothing can be worse for us as a people than to receive everything necessary with ease and this is a huge danger of expanding technology. We are motivated biological creatures who by nature, fight for every advantage we get in life. We are forced by our existence to look for advantage. From better prices to easier jobs and more pay. Our quality of life has continued to expand with the easy money of union type work, that has led society to this poisonous concept of entitlement. Everyone must eat, be housed, be medicated, be controlled and cared for in all ways by the government. This system goes against human nature and leads to economic poverty in all cases in which it has been tried. There is a balance somewhere as to what government should provide but we are WAY over that line nearly everywhere in the world.
In the face of that cold reality of our nature, a scientist must fight to ignore the personally motivating instincts and focus on the aspect which makes humans special among animals. Our ability to reason. A scientist must overcome his/her personal needs in exchange for truth. Again, our nature demands that there will be no consensus of opinion or result on very uncertain things such as the future climate. And scientifically speaking we are faced with far greater uncertainty as to how (or if) we should react to that uncertain future. Besides other lines of evidence, Climategate has shown beyond a doubt that the climate consensus coordinates as a group to speak in unison for their cause. The conflict of interest between personal success vs truth has never been more evident than in Climate Science™. In an unstable feedback between government programs, personal success and the rejection of their less agreeable colleagues, they have become the puppets of the system they have helped to create.
Email #2009 Keith Briffa – on writing zero’th order draft of paleo IPCC AR4 chapter.
I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!
The pendulum swings left.
Well, people being people, such a biased and forced structure often creates a polar opposite response. The tone of the papers, the conclusions from poor data, manipulation of data, hiding of bad data and finally the unconditional support from others in the field to their colleagues who perform obviously fraudulent acts.
I have to say, it turns my stomach to even write the f-bomb. We don’t do that here.
However, we live in a gray world. The opposite response to these acts can be 100% as bad as the original act itself. Recently, some of us have beaten multiple versions of backradiation to death at tAV with no admission from the ‘skeptics’ that their argument was worthless and backradiation from the atmosphere is a known proven fact. There is a time to admit your failure, change your mind and move forward. Either that or you push the pendulum of opinion back away from reality and toward something else. I prefer to live in a real world.
A US based attorney has written in to the Blackboard on the basics of Copyright law as it pertains to the continuing releases of IPCC drafts. It is unclear to me who could claim damages from the release but this gives some idea of how the process would proceed legally were the IPCC silly enough to pursue some legal course of action.
RickA (Comment#89486) February 9th, 2012 at 7:29 am
I am an IP attorney (from the USA).
Any entity can own a copyright, including the IPCC.
The author of the work owns the copyright, unless their is an obligation to assign or it is a work for hire.
An employment agreement can be a source of an obligation to assign, so we would need to know whether the authors of the IPCC chapters are under an employment agreement or are independent contractors, in which case any agreements they execute need to be reviewed for assignment of any copyrights.
It is very clear that the writing of the chapters of the IPCC reports is a work of authorship in which copyright is created, it is just a matter of whether the copyright remains with the authors or is subject to an obligation to assign.
Work for hire is probably not applicable here.
An example of work for hire is when you hire a painter to paint your portrait. You specify exactly what you want the painting to show, you control the location where the work is done, you control the hours during which the work is performed. Even without an actual written agreement, this sort of arrangement is considered a work for hire.
Another example is an employee (but no written employment agreement executed) who’s job is to write product manuals. That is also a work for hire situation, and the employee will be found to have an obligation to assign any copyrights created to the employer.
Another thing to consider with government entities is whether the copyright is waived and placed into the public domain.
For example, patents are works of authorship, but are considered public domain government documents, which can be freely copied.
Steven Mosher #89484 – you asked “can I assign THEM the same rights that I have already assigned to my employer?”
No – once a copyright is assigned, you no longer own it and can therefore not give any rights to somebody else. Now, if you license it nonexclusively, you can give someone else a nonexclusive license – but an assignment is a transfer of all rights in the property.
Sea ice area, Hudson bay-ish. From the gridded daily data.
No mask
Area Mask
Ice Area Hudson Bay Region - peak to peak variance changes little.
Even though the peaks and valleys are near square waves, warming is causing a statistically significant decline in annual NET area.
Ice Area Anomaly Hudson Bay Region
Besides statistically measurable, the slope is alarmingly fast. It’s time to invest in the new Daytona beach.
Lower edge of Hudson Bay Region Sea ice Area.
Since we know that this region definitely melts 100% (should hit zero every year) and we can see the same step pattern in the lower edge. This appears to be another indication of a definite bias in the sea ice satellite data. How this is handled by the pro’s is an unexplored matter but this data is the final published version from the NSIDC.
Another 501C working for you. As insane as it can be, they are openly advocating working with mid-east countries for oil instead of our friends to the North. It isn’t like the oil won’t be burned. It will be burned by China, while US dollars go to the middle east.
Our brilliant climate leaders – doing the right thing – again.
Dolts
==============================
Feb 13, 2012
Dear Senators Reid and McConnell, and Representatives Boehner and Pelosi,
We are researchers at work on the science of climate change and allied fields. Last summer, we called on President Obama to block the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands. We were gratified to see that he did so, and since some in Congress are seeking to revive this plan, we wanted to restate the case against it.
The tar sands are a huge pool of carbon, one that it does not make sense to exploit. It takes a lot of energy and water to extract and refine this resource into useable fuel, and the mining is environmentally destructive. Adding this on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control. It makes no sense to build a pipeline that would dramatically increase exploitation of this resource.
When other huge oil fields or coal mines were opened in the past, we knew much less about the damage that the carbon they contained would do to the earth’s climate and its oceans. Now that we do know, it’s imperative that we move quickly to alternate forms of energy—and that we leave the tar sands in the ground.
We can say categorically that this pipeline is not in the nation’s, or the planet’s best interest.
Sincerely,
James Hansen, Research Scientist, The International Research Institute for Climate and Society, The Earth Institute, Columbia University John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas Jason Box, Associate Professor, Department of Geography Atmospheric Sciences Program, Researcher at Byrd Polar Research CenterThe Ohio State University Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution Peter Gleick, President and Co-founder Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security Richard A. Houghton, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center Ralph Keeling, Director, Scripps CO2 Program Scripps Institution of Oceanography Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs Climate Institute Michael E. Mann, Professor of Meteorology Director, Earth System Science Center, The Pennsylvania State University James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences, Princeton University Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago Steve Running, Professor of Ecology, Director of Numerical Terradynamics Simulation Group, Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography George M. Woodwell, Founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center
This article on taxes states the truth about Obama’s plans and where America is truly at. There are too many lies by our politicians these days and the ‘rich don’t pay enough’ is the biggest. If you are an Obama voter, at least do yourself the favor of being educated on what taxes you are demanding. Most liberals I have met (not all) are woefully ignorant on the subject of taxation. Of course, until we are taxed, we are all ignorant.
An important story has broken in the mainstream media. Anthony Watts received a 44,000USD pledge to put temperature data on line in an easy to access format. His intent is apparently to make the data easily available to the public. The media reports are centered on the Heartland institute’s donor which pledged the funding of a skeptic.
As usual, the leftist media ignores the massive funding on the advocacy side of AGW, instead chosing that this is a real ‘news story’. Even more amazing is that the media, in their wisdom, has failed completely to notice that the project is NOT in any way a “skeptical” one.
Anthony Watts is being criticized for his name ONLY in what is an obvious attempt to discredit his efforts and ANY efforts by the Heartland institute to influence the climate debate in any way.
The Heartland institute has released a statement on the stolen documents which include funding of Anthony Watt’s temperature project among other things. If you want to see the difference between skeptics of climate change and advocacy groups, this section of the press release pretty well sums it up.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
If the truth doesn’t agree with your message, make something up.
Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.
But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.
I suppose I’m old enough not to be surprised by the behavior of the media anymore, but this garbage coverage of the Heartland scandal has done it again. The media has flatly ignored that the point of the funding for SKEPTICS was to put the temperature data on line. That’s it!! Put it up where people without a computer background can plot it, see it and understand it. How is that nefarious or anti-science in any way?
I’ll answer – it isn’t!
You don’t have to wonder why blogs exist and why Fox News is taking over the news market. People want information, not distortions. Every article I run across has the same tone, the same ‘gotcha’ punch lines about skeptics and the poor naive scientists who were misrepresented in Climategate. They feed this garbage to the public in droves and wonder why their ad revenues drop like stones. It isn’t the paper or internet which is killing the media, it is what they put on it.
In the same place that the nefarious act of publishing the NOAA temperature data is. In the circular bin or the janitorial closet of the New York Times where it won’t see the light of day. There is no need to apologize to conservative groups after all, only to groups that push the correct politics like Media Matters or GreenPeace.
Even though I am regularly disappointed with the biased media coverage of things like Climategate, this time the unprofessional behavior is pretty special. They are only attacking the report because a small amount of money is being donated to a climate skeptic blogger who just happens to be a weather professional!! There is no attempt by the media to recognize that the money was to be put to use to place the primary data, the temperature data so central to the AGW message, on line. Any motivation on the part of the individual after that should be moot. The media and propaganda blogs like DeSmog should be proud to have the dataset on line and pleased that Heartland would invest that money for the common good.
We all should recognize that putting the information on line in a usable fashion, is a strongly pro-science endeavor.
When we read media articles about skeptics, they typically paint us as though we are non-technical, uninformed and motivated by our politics over our minds. “Skeptics need to get real, and do something about climate”, they say. This is despite the in-your-face reality that the IPCC represents exactly those political qualities. The truth is that most of us are technical people from other fields who like to discuss the details of the data and many have realized that there just isn’t much to be alarmed about! Climate Science has failed to alarm us. We are chemists, engineers, programmers, physicists, astronomers, medical professionals, meteorologists, statisticians and even climate scientists. We are not the ones who are uninformed in the debate, we are the ones who are qualified to read the science and where appropriate – disagree. Since we are unfunded by the government for climate and often better statisticians, I would even say we are more qualified to judge the science than those embroiled in the highly funded political morass of “getting the world to do something”. See Real Climate blog for a perfect example of the politics behind climate science.
We read articles from advocate media every day. They are very consistent, and very wrong about people like Anthony Watts. Not much exposes the bias of Climate Science more than the media-wide unabashed smear campaign against him for doing the right thing with data.
I guess I’m still not so jaded that I cannot be surprised. They keep working on it though.
I’m not sure the best way to present these results but I’ll start with just the photos. I was curious how the sea ice looked by latitude band. We know from previous posts that there is a minimum sea ice level which contains some noise bias. This post shows sea ice area in each degree of latitude band by area for each day of the year.
Doug Cotton continues to spam Leonard Weinstein’s thread which changed topic hundreds of comments ago. Leonard is a lot of trouble as a guest post as Climategate 1 broke here on his thread as well.
Sea ice by latitude video. Layman Lurker was able to use online tools to establish that the only perennial sea ice exists above about 72 degrees latitude. This leaves a small 18 degree circle at the north pole for the multi-year sea ice to exist. I wanted to confirm this fact before moving on with an analysis of trends in multi-year ice vs perennial. If we parse the sea ice data at this latitude we can get a better idea of what the sea ice ‘death spiral’ is comprised of.
Anyway, many on the previous thread wanted a video of the plots but the early sea ice years had missing data (every other day) which didn’t agree with R’s plotting function. I have interpolated (linearly) missing data and created the same plots as shown previously in a continuous manner for the existing data.
So in the vein of the Heatland institute funding of Anthony Watts denier intent to put already online temperature data online in a user friendly format, here is another user friendly anti-science video of online data from the NSIDC. – Sorry couldn’t resist.
As regular readers know, we have been using daily gridded sea ice data from satellite microwave sounders published by the NSIDC to discover what we can learn both from and about the data. With Layman Lurker’s help we recently discovered that nearly 100% of the sea ice to the South of 72 degrees North latitude and the equator has melted every year since satellite records started. Since the Antarctic sea ice is known to melt annually as well, we can say that nearly all of the sea ice south outside of 18 degrees from the North pole vanishes every single year. Figure 1 below takes a moment to interpret, but is interesting in that it shows the loss and recovery of Arctic sea ice over a typical year (2003 was chosen at random). This post has a video of all years for your confirmation.
Figure 1
The near complete melt of Arctic ice can be seen at Day of the Year ~250 and latitude 72. The red dot below indicates the visually approximated time and latitude of maximum melt.
Figure 2
So I masked off and ignored all of the data north of 72 degrees representing basically the only multi-annual sea ice on Earth. This assumption corresponds to all of the ice outside of the bright green circle in Figure 3 below. Notice that there is a lot of Northern hemisphere sea ice to the South of this circle.
Gleicks story that he received the primary note first and then was able to get into Heartland’s highest levels to receive more is a little bit incredible. Kind of like the Guardian supporting his insane actions:
A leading defender of climate change admitted tricking the libertarian Heartland Institute into turning over confidential documents detailing its plans to discredit the teaching of science to school children in last week’s sensational expose.
Truly unbelievable. Climategate – not real – Gleick – hero! While other opinions are given in the Guardian article, the vast majority of opinions come from left-wing groups and activists. Does anyone wonder why circulation is down? The Heartland institute seems to have a little more information than Gleick is comfortable with or I doubt they would make a statement this strong. ( My bold):
Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source. This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.
We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days.
Ouch!! It looks like there is more to come.
==============
During the followup to the Heartland institute document release, some bloggers had deduced that government funded activist Peter Gleick had a hand in the mess. His 501C is powered by government taxpayer cash, which is fine, except that he is an activist which uses the money to fund political messages in complete violation of IRS code. Today at Dot Earth, Gleick shed his pseudo-science cloak.
Since the release in mid-February of a series of documents related to the internal strategy of the Heartland Institute to cast doubt on climate science, there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal. Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.
I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.
Now a bigger activist than Gleick is hard to come by, Tamino is in his category but only just.
I am completely baffled as to why these people receive credibility while reasonable scientists don’t. This guy is so far over the top that nothing he writes, thinks, expresses or publishes should be taken without serious context placement. Yet he is a ‘premier’ voice in environmental science.
So, the leftist version of climategate has spun into the ground with all the grace of an acrobatic aerial penguin team. I’m sure that the media will issue few if any retractions as new stories based on the faked heartland document have continued to surface. We know which side owns the airwaves.
Steve McIntyre has an excellent and detailed breakdown of the Heartland documents which like Climategate, again exposes the false arguments of the politically motivated press. If you want your climate news with honesty, blogging has become the premier source. – By default.
While everyone watches in awe as comet Gleick smashes into the Lunar bedrock, I have returned my tired head to the sea ice data. We are slowly stepping toward an improved understanding of sea ice melt here. To that end I have been working on improved graphics. In my long-term self employment, I have programmed a wide variety of data visualization softwares. In all cases, the software was of a far lower level than R code. I am an engineer and creation of robotics, vision systems, and fast statistics packages in the past, were written from scratch. Often, these displays plotted individual pixels, vectors or planes to display 3D objects/surfaces as they were morphed and rotated, but due to the low level nature of the display, my control was complete. In R, the display code is pre-written and the challenge is to figure out the limitations and abilities of the functions.
Below is another re-hash of the sea ice video. However it is rendered in what I call pseudo-3D, in that some basic shading is present. I found the shading contrast created a far more intuitive visualization than my previous work. The view is top down, but is 3d and can be rotated off of this visual axis by adjusting parameters which give it a 3D mountain effect. IMO, the best angle was top down.
Please note the differences in the spatial noise frequency as the video progresses. The limitations of the sensor system may be greater than I understood.
In 1979:
vs 2008
You can see instantly that the difference in noise level is not minor by any means. The good news is that we seem to be improving in our ability to measure. The bad news is that it could make for lousy trend analysis.
I have created a video below but the frame rate is a little fast. I will improve it later but it takes several hours to complete the process.
The Peter Gleick story continues on. An anonymous reader left a link to a Washinton post examiner article indicating that the FBI has been contacted on the matter. Whether they react may be the subject of a “high level directive” at this point.
The only people who compare this to Climategate are those sold on the Mannian “cause”. This was an activist, committing fraud, alleging snail-mail reciept of a document which I fully believe he wrote, who was caught pretending to be a Heartland board member to gain access to any document he could which would put them in a bad light. The liberal press had joined in the chorus full bore, despite the lack of damning evidence like “hide the decline” and now has failed to retract or apologize for any of it.
The Chicago-based free market Heartland Institute has called in the FBI and threatened other legal action against a global warming proponent who has admitted stealing emails from the institute in a bid to embarrass and discredit the group’s questioning of climate change.
Heartland officials tell Washington Secrets that they have been in talks with the FBI over the case against prominent global warming proponent Peter Gleick, co-founder of the respected Pacific Institute. Heartland is getting ready to reveal their probe of the affair, which they hope the FBI will act on.
The media bias on this matter has reached new levels. I’m thinking Gleick is on the Christmas list this year.
I have been debating whether to post this email exchange with the NCSE. In light of the recent Gleick burnout, it seems worthwhile. Readers will recall that I posted on Gleick’s attack on conservative political candidates on behalf of his tax-free 501c3 company. Advertising for or against any political party is illegal activity for a tax-free company in the US (although it is a far too often broken rule). Rarely though, has the attempt reached the magnitudes of Gleik’s letters. Considering that most of his company money comes from taxes taken from business owners, the political aspect of his organization is hard to swallow. I hope to turn him in for tax law violation as soon as he files in 2011.
The NCSE (National Center for Science Education) had focused in the past on evolution science. Something which I think most of us agree. I don’t want to get into “belief” here as this is a settled item in my mind and the focus of different blogs. Still, there are corollaries between evolution and climate science. Both are highly politicized due to individual ‘belief’ rather than science. My point on the matter is that NCSE was on the apolitical side of evolution. Still, they attracted leftist leaders based on the atheist appeal of the science. These leaders failed to recognize that climate science has the same problems as evolution – except in the opposite direction.
Now you may disagree about evolution but this thread isn’t about my opinions on religion. It is about a warning I gave to the NCSE on the extremism of Peter Gleick — well before his recent flame out.
Robert Luhn xxx@ncse.com
Jan 16
to me
Jeff:
Some hot news going over the wire today. Note that Peter Gleick and Mark McCaffrey are both involved in our new initiative:
It’s official: NCSE is now stepping into the climate change arena. We’re expanding our mission and we’re expanding our web site.
What follows is our official release, links to our new mission statement, a video introducing NCSE and our new initiative, links to an exclusive excerpt from “Merchants of Doubt”, and more.
Stay tuned: more announcements coming this week!
Qs? Want to interview executive director Genie Scott or our new climate change policy director? Let me know!
Y
I was surprised at the contact.
NCSE TACKLES CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL
A new initiative in the struggle for quality science education
OAKLAND, CA January 16, 2012
Science education is under attack–again.
This time it’s under attack by climate change deniers, who ignore a mountain of evidence gathered over the last fifty years that the planet is warming and that humans are largely responsible. These deniers attempt to sabotage science education with fringe ideas, pseudoscience, and outright lies.
But the National Center for Science Education won’t let ‘em get away with it.
“We consider climate change a critical issue in our own mission to protect the integrity of science education,” says Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, NCSE’s executive director. Long a leader in the fight to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools, NCSE now sees creationist-like tactics being used in the attack on climate education.
“Climate affects everyone, and the decisions we make today will affect generations to come,” says Scott. “We need to teach kids now about the realities of global warming and climate change, so that they’re prepared to make informed, intelligent decisions in the future.”
In this expansion of its core mission, NCSE will help parents, teachers, policymakers, the media, and others to distinguish the real science from the junk science that deniers are trying to push into the science classroom.
[redacted]
The scientific community is applauding NCSE’s new initiative. Said Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
[redacted]
Added Scott Mandia, the meteorologist who cofounded the Climate Science Rapid Response Team:
“The cavalry has arrived. NCSE, with its passion and experience defending science in our schools, will ensure that teachers can educate students about climate change without fear of reprisal.”
Tackling climate change denial head on
In its initiative to defend climate change education, NCSE will:
* Help parents, teachers, and others fight the introduction of climate change/global warming denial and pseudoscience in the classroom.
* Act as a resource center to connect teachers, scientists, and policymakers with the best information available.
* Provide tools and support to ensure that climate change is properly and effectively taught in public schools.
* Aid those testifying before local and state boards of education, and before local, state, and federal legislative committees.
* Connect local activists with one another, and with scientists and other relevant experts.
New program, new faces
As part of this new initiative, the NCSE has added two key members to its team:
* Dr. Peter Gleick, president and co-founder of The Pacific Institute, joins NCSE’s board of directors. Gleick is a noted hydroclimatologist, an internationally recognized water expert, and a MacArthur Fellow. Gleick’s research and writing address the critical connections between water and human health, the hydrologic impacts of climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization, and international conflicts over water resources.
* Mark McCaffrey, a long-time climate literacy expert, joins NCSE as climate change programs and policy director. Previously at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), McCaffrey helped spearhead a number of climate and energy literacy programs, and the creation of the Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), and testified before Congress about climate and environmental education.
–
Robert Luhn
Director of Communications
National Center for Science Education, Inc.
My reply was a little less positive:
Robert,
I am curious that you contacted me for this. I’m a strong believer in
evolution and believe that if there is a god, it was his way. It is
a real and proven science. Global warming is also a real and proven
effect, yet nobody has made a convincing argument for the amount of
warming we’ve measured that is related to human activity or that it is
dangerous. All arguments against that statement are amazingly weak
from a scientific standpoint. Allowing teachers to repeat the
mainstream nonsense about global doom is not a good idea for our
children.
I wonder why your organization would take the dubious step away from
evolution which is known to be politicized by the religious groups and
relatively apolitical from the science side to a political campaign
like AGW science. Is it about money? AGW currently promotes highly
politicized public-polarizing and flat extremist left wing policy.
The data in climate science is improperly used so often that it can
only be described in the worst of terms, yet nobody in the IPCC can
seem to detect it under their government checks. I am published in
climate science. I believe your group has made a huge mistake which
will backfire in time. Now instead of winning the minds of the
uneducated about evolution, you will have painted yourselves into an
unattractive political corner with extremist left wing environmental
groups on the decline.
Also, incorporating politically extreme personalities in the board
like Gleick is a very bad decision which will take a group with a
proper message about evolution and make it into the politically
unattractive nightmare Greenpeace has become. I fear that there is
little balance left in the leadership group if they cannot see the
insanity of his publicly stated anti-industrial political positions.
Evolution is a strong science with traceable evidence from many paths.
AGW is a weak science based on a kernel of truth that is highly
politicized.
Still, I am curious as to what you think my review of this situation
would help. Negative press is still press but it would be decidedly
negative.
Regards,
Jeff
The reply took a bit of time but here is the main letter:
Extremists in congress have chosen to investigate Heartland institute for discrediting mainstream science. These powerful people who distribute billions of dollars to promote left-wing environmentalism are quoting hundred thousand dollar figures to Heartland in a letter full of innuendo.
Like the genius coverup of climategate, I suppose we are too stupid to see through this one?
If you have ever looked into funding of climate change, finding the total dollars is nearly impossible. Crossing several billions of dollars in funding takes only minutes though. I put a LOW but fake number up for the government side.
Look at that massive Heartland funding in comparison.
This is more than a little telling about the basic state of climate science. Images below are copied from Anthony Watts site. In case you are wondering whether the public is buying into the constant attacks on scientific skeptic blogs by the main stream media and overpaid government scientists.
They are not!
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Congratulations to everyone below, especially WUWT for the huge achievement. Also congratulations are due to the large numbers of interested readers who are scientifically able to parse the politicized scatology so prevalent in climate science from the reasonable parts. It gives me hope that reason will prevail over propaganda.
“The IPCC might have outlived its usefulness. Let’s see what the next assessment report comes up with. But we are getting diminishing returns from these assessments, and they take up an enormous amount of scientists’ time.”
I think readers will enjoy it.
Dr. Curry and I share different views on something. I’m not sure what that might be, but this blog was cut from her blogroll during my critique of the BEST paper confidence interval she coauthored. She had not replied to me on the matter of BEST for months until recently when she said the team was probably too busy with other things but was considering it.
Anyway, I suspect that my politics may be the issue because in my opinion the IPCC never had a useful role in that it was designed from the beginning to do exactly what it is doing. Her opinion is common but in my view, it takes a little political naivete to think the IPCC could ever have been anything except what it is. Readers do not generally like to hear things which sound absolute. There is no discussion then. They prefer endless pedantic discussion along the lines of, ‘well if we just had openness’…. In reality, Climate Science funding would diminish under open operation and that is a means to an end I would like to see, but I prefer to write what is on my mind rather than what is most effective at achieving some goal. Readers may even prefer to hear – well it used to be ok but now it might be bad. Imagine how much fun we could have with that thread! In my opinion, the massive bulk of Climate Science simply cannot afford the change in operation of the IPCC but will be forced into it. They desperately need the center of authority to maintain their money-bloated consensus agenda but my made up global political computer model is predicting some lean years ahead for the fat cats of climate.
No time to write much but these plots are of the Northern Hemisphere sea ice above and below 72 latitude. The split between the area is 50/50. My anomaly timeframe is from about 1988 to present, I think I will address that in future posts.
Reader Chuckles linked to a register article which linked to a nasa website on a new multi-year sea ice paper by Comiso, a coauthor of Steig 09. It is worth checking out. I think we should take some time to look at the differences in the future. There are some interesting graphics at the site though which are worth checking out. He is reporting a perrenial ice area loss in the 15%/decade range. I don’t have the north of 72 total ice area handy but it is approximately 6 million km^2 so we are looking at a total loss of about 274,000/6,000,000 = 4.6% trend loss for north of 72 degrees. A far lower number than he is reporting. His numbers may be quite accurate but that would mean that there is a balancing gain in annual ice area for that same timeperiod.
If someone has access to the paper, please send it to me. We already reported that global annual sea ice trends didn’t reach 95% significance. His result would likely mean demonstration of no trend in global annual ice, offset by a decrease in perennial ice.
When someone sorts just the multi-year stuff, shouldn’t we be able to sort the annual and report its trends?
I have not had a chance to see Tallbloke’s guest post but Nick Stokes wrote a nice rebuttal to it. It discusses basic equations for a sphere in a sphere for blackbody calcs.
I’ve been arguing over at Tallbloke’s. It’s one of those posts where a sceptic does an elementary analysis and makes elementary errors which contradict “consensus” science. A new scientific discovery is announced. Being Galileos, they don’t have to check their work.
The sceptic here is Hans Jelbring. He looks at a simple problem, two concentric spheres without heat sources, and checks their radiation balance to find what the temperature difference should be. Consensus science says, of course, that there should be none, but he found one, and then spent time working out the resulting perpetual motion machine. I’m not sure what was the point of that, but Trenberth was mentioned.
I have sometimes done these analyses myself, being intrigued when what looks like a problem determined by geometry turns out to have a solution constrained by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT). Given the complexity, that can look like a miracle.
The Guardian is stooping to new lows – if that is possible. With recent news that Mann’s emails won’t be released from the University of Virginia , you know the ones they claimed originally didn’t exist, the Guardian has taken this time to produce an article. About Mann’s honesty ………..
Ironically, but not surprisingly, the article itself is less than, shall we say, straightforward, on multiple matters. Be careful reading the title, don’t blow your coffee on the screen.
It was enough that I laughed out loud. His new book, which I haven’t read, is lovingly described -
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is a startling depiction of a scientist persecuted for trying to tell the truth.
It is worthwhile to note that Michael Mann “trying to tell the truth” is not the same as Michael Mann succeeding. One small step for most… whell, you get the point.
Tamino has his crowd all whipped up about sea ice. He has done two posts now declaring how stupid I, Anthony Watts, and by association, all of you, are. Sorry folks, it was a drive-by incident! For him, I’m not enough of a believer and for others, I’m too much. Is it is a good sign when you get it from all angles? Either way, he has made deliberately erroneous claims in an attempt to discredit this blog, and WUWT, which I suppose means we have struck a nerve.
The first thing I would like to clarify is my opinion on sea ice in general. Like many readers here, I have read a large number of papers on the topic, unlike most, I have also taken the time to download and plot satellite Sea Ice data, replicated the trends and examined sea ice on a regional basis. With help, I have identified evidence of minor trend inducing error and will soon be looking at how the online satellite data is knitted together during transitions. From all of these many hours of time, I’m completely unconvinced that man made global warming is causing very much of the observed sea ice decline. I’m also willing to be wrong but the literature appears to support that a substantial portion of the Northern hemisphere decline is caused by a weather pattern change in the Arctic. This opinion is reasonably standard in the mainstream although it is often mixed with the claim that warming weakened the ice and allowed it to flow out of the polar region. The possibility that warming or weather are primary causes of the declining sea ice creates a need for disaggregation. Of course the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive so there is a lot of room for some combination of a variety of factors to be the cause. We also know that something the believers often conveniently forget is that not all warming is CO2 based.
So with all of that said, I don’t think that the effect man is having on the globe is detectable in the ice trend. Detectable being statistically differentiable. That is very different from whether a trend can be detected or whether a trend is caused by natural warming. In his recent two posts, Tamino (aka Dr. Grant Foster) mixes everything together in what has been a successful attempt to whip up his followers. Unlike the Air Vent and WUWT, his crowd is comprised primarily of non-technical readers who often jump at any statement they can find with literally zero understanding of why or what they are attacking.
So, if you have a region like the Arctic, where sea ice is often, but not always, multi-year and that ice is being affected by being either pushed out of the region and melting, simply warming and melting or some combination, and you want to understand the trend in ice levels for the globe caused by surface temperature warming, then disambiguation of the effects is necessary. Therefore measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal than a region reacting to something else.
To that end I made the plot below from gigabytes of satellite data which identified 72 degrees North Latitude as the line where multi-year ice is nearly non-existent. Layman Lurker confirmed this latitude independently (and with less effort) before I finished. Now “nearly non-existent” is different from “completely non-existent” but not by much (see how that works!). Engineers and scientists often approximate things but some in Tamino’s crowd show their inexperience and called this as an error despite having no evidence.
So I then added up all of the single year sea ice south of 72 North latitude in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, plotted all of it including the pole-hole part left out, and referred to it as global single year ice. Unfortunately, the global ice didn’t have enough trend for Tamino (wasn’t quite 95% significant) and he completely wigged. (“Wigged”, is a psychiatric term used to describe the reaction of believers when they discover something is unhelpful to the “cause”. ) What he did to “fight back” was misrepresent the work and show a ridiculous annual refreeze plot in the North region implying that somehow that is equivalent. That was Grant Fosters trick on his readers, who were unwilling or unable to point out the deception. Several of them fell for it completely and their acerbic comments went uncorrected by Grant.
I finally had time to read Hu McCulloch’s guest post at CA on Mann’s fancy new book. His reveiw shows more of that Mannian honesty we’ve all come to know and love. My reading of it brings up some of my favorite history at Climate Audit.
We all know the media constantly reports the standard climate change mantra of increased storms, droughts, flooding, warming, cooling and basically anything they can find and attribute it to climate change – by man. Craig Loehle wrote an interesting post on WUWT which calls out what I describe as the 10 major lies of IPCC climate science. Despite the known – complete lack of damage – caused by global warming, they still insist we shut down CO2 based energy production NOW!
What is a ‘known’ looming disaster is the pending economic strife, poverty and starvation which will be created by these environmentally false policies. As the fat scientific coffers explode with money, those unbiased people demand we listen to the consensus duma, it is for our own good. They know best.
Despite criticisms from the super warmist advocacy guild (aka SWAG), this post is a continuation of our investigation into sea ice from the satellite data. I have never thoroughly vetted the knitting of satellite data from the 5 satellites which form the curves “n07″,”f08″, “f11″, “f13″ and “f17″ are the designators. Unfortunately, the task is quite daunting in that necessary data to do it thoroughly is not readily available on line. Still, we can start with what we have, so to that end, I have re-written the sea ice code again, this time the anomaly is taken over the whole range and leap years are accounted for. It still isn’t terribly clean but it is improving.
Obama – “energy prices would necessarily skyrocket.”
While cap and trade auto-corruption scheme didn’t make the cut, gutting production doesn’t do terribly badly either. I recently heard the stat that the US used to produce 10 million barrels a day and now produces 6. I don’t have time to check the stat. With such massive reserves as we have, this is an insanity forced on us by the envirowhacko left.
We’re still using the oil, there can only be one reason why we don’t use our own. I really hope Americans start paying attention to people who would do something good for the country rather than the constant stupidity this albatross of a government represents. They are killing our future, one stupid policy at a time.
Conservatives live in a fantasy world. Their myths are etched in stone and actual facts can never sway them from their beliefs.
For instance: “Per Capita Government Spending by President: Ranking since Johnson (starting in 1968), and using the first-quarter comparisons, and calculating growth under Obama through 2011Q4, Clinton is the most austere, followed by Obama. The most spendthrift are (1) Nixon-Ford, (2) Reagan, and (3) Bush II. ”
Now, can a conservative deal with those facts? No. They stick to their myth that liberals are the big spenders. Yet history tells us that Democratic Presidents have been *far* more fiscally responsible than Republicans.
Kevin left an unsourced link to a chart which doesn’t seem to match federal budget data. Whether his graph is true or not, spending increases are not the same as deficit spending which is America’s true problem. When you can’t pay your bills, his point is a non-sequitor. If we actually had the money to pay for Obama’s programs, we would be having an entirely different discussion. Either way, as one of those ‘fantasy world’ conservatives. it seems necessary to take a few minutes to correct the record.
From the budget of the US government, the data is easily downloaded. I still wish more people would look at the data themselves rather than trust some leftist newspaper or even a blog. I may have made some mistakes here after all.
Below is the budget deficit by President. I wonder if anyone (on the left) can see any differences?
Now there are all kinds of things wrong with the federal numbers. Certain Military spending and the economic bailouts for instance are not included. Obama has actually spent far MORE than what is shown here. This economic bailout is a post for another blogger but if you are a liberal, and haven’t explored the nature of Obama’s theft and redistribution of wealth under the guise of a bailout, you aren’t doing yourself any favors.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” is in sharp contrast to, “all men are created equal.”
Both concepts are inherently similar, yet have stark differences. Both pre-define humanity with a fundamental understanding. Both have the best of humanity in their intent.
One of the two says – Government can equitably chose both individual ability, and need, based on rational, careful, considered observation. The other conveys simply, that government cannot. The second, more simple statement, is more insidious in nature. Far more cold and devious in fact. Instead of saying, “Here is your comfortable and/or livable future which we guarantee”, capitalism says, “Here are a set of equitable rules. Good luck! We the people, hope very much that you find your way”.
Which is more accurately representative of our human nature?
As solidly factual as the second law of Thermodynamics, Capitalism has a fundamental motivation. Embedded in the meaning of the now-ancient American message is, “give us a ‘governmentally’ equitable opportunity to succeed, and on average, more of us will.” Like hot and cold, the net flow of success will be maximized. It is as much a part of our intrinsic nature as the unstoppable second law of thermal energy.
Across the globe, we must realize by now that sentence wasn’t written by morons. At this point in history, the most control centered person cannot ignore the incredible effect of that first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence on global lifestyle. Give freedom to succeed to everyone, and the poorest of ability, also gain success. A maximization of the collective, through freedom of self-improvement for the individual.
Capitalist freedom is by no means a friendly message, as there is NO guarantee. None for me, none for you, none for even Bill Gates or Elon Musk. In the truest sense, capitalists are individual quanta in a sea of tough love. If Elon Musk keels over tomorrow, he will have left a fire hot source of economic development in his wake. The entropy of which has had a positive effect on the wealthy and poorest of our society, and he did it in America because our government didn’t remember to say, “NO, you may not create a bank, or a ‘stupid fast’ and overpriced short range car, or launch giant explosive cylinders into the sky!”
Like thermodynamics, the capitalist contribution of motivated and wrong-direction individuals (money losing quanta) always contribute to the whole economic energy (temperature) and by the guaranteed laws of probability, are offset by the gains of the successful attempts. Do you think Elon might be working at 9 pm or is he watching Oprah network with the leftist couch dwelling minions of welfare?
So in the Scientific American article linked above, the intellectually elite writer (Gary Stix – likely also not working) failed to recognize what makes us human, and decides the ‘answer’ to the coming global warming, isn’t to understand how to work with human nature but rather to fundamentally change human nature. How insane is that! The mechanism he chooses is as unimaginative as you might expect – build a powerful global government that no human can possibly resist.
How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.?
He continues his un-inventive solution to save the world with ever greater clarity. This guy should have a blog!
But they have never taken on a challenge of this scale, recruiting all seven billion of us to act in unison. The ability to sustain change globally across the entire human population over periods far beyond anything ever attempted would appear to push the relevant objectives well beyond the realm of the attainable. If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though.
Anyway, read the article linked above at your own risk. Like many on the intellectual left, Gary has no understanding of how the world actually works. Also, like far too many on the left, he has a well-funded megaphone.
I wonder why blogs like this are still winning the argument?
Sorry folks but I am way to busy for blogging right now. Perhaps I will get something useful up tonight but political venting is boring now and I want to work more with sea ice – sorry to all SWAG members for both points.
You have to wonder why Fox News would make a big deal about a UN created international fund of a hundred billion dollars per year, having complete immunity from national law. This shouldn’t even be news IMHO. The fund is to protect the Earth, it shouldn’t have to pay taxes, or operate inside the whims and quirks of national governments.
The Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year to lower global greenhouse gases, is seeking a broad blanket of U.N.-style immunity that would shield its operations from any kind of legal process, including civil and criminal prosecution, in the countries where it operates.
Mother Earth has rights too and so far, nobody is standing up for them. The Fox News idiots act like the earth doesn’t own its own property.
In the case of something like the GCF, this is “an issue of extending privileges and immunities to property rights,” in the opinion of Allan Meltzer, a distinguished professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. “And these privileged people will not necessarily protect the property rights of others,” he adds.
It is for the good of the planet though. If we don’t take a stand to protect the Earth, the Earth has no reason to protect us. This is only 0.15 PERCENT of global GDP. We can do better people! We must do better.
Why shouldn’t those tasked with protecting the Earth, be properly protected from human laws?! They are doing the good work for all of mankind, giving guidance, funding, and technology, to the poor nations who are most affected by climate change. We cannot expect Zimbabwe to stand up on its own, without the help of rich nations, to the problems created by those same RICH nations.
The propaganda spread by Fox News drives me crazy.
Does anyone here really think that annually handing four times the GDP of North Korea to a bunch of unelected individuals, who exist completely outside of the law, could cause any problems at all?
It sounds like something straight from a science fiction novel.
It is beyond imagination that the request to be immune from law for a giant eco-fund, isn’t front page news for everyone. These are people who have NO respect for personal property rights, and no respect for industry whatsoever. Giving them no oversight, would be an insanity beyond anything we have seen out of the UN to date. Even the request for no-oversight, should be enough to start the investigation.
I’ve had quite a bit of time to consider what I call rational environmentalism. There is a lifestyle that we live that I don’t believe we need to give back even one bit of comfort on. For instance, not showering when you want in order to save energy, cannot save enough energy to be worthwhile unless you are personally flat broke. Today in America, we have crossed that threshold of reasonable environmentalism into the realm of self-inflicted industrial harm, an area which the politicians of climate science are miserably bad at quantifying. Gas prices are a perfect example. With hundreds of different mixtures, all producing the same CO2 and similar emissions, certain blends have reached shortfall. Prices are therefore skyrocketing, as intended by the president along with supportive members of congress, and the result is a repression of personal lifestyles – for the low income earners. It also results in less jobs for the middle and high income earners but of course they go second.
Most of these effects are unnoticed by the public, as the circular fingerpointing can go on forever. The point should be to get back to what worked but that is not the subject of this post. I do believe in AGW although I’m unconvinced it is dangerous. At this point, I believe warming has been greatly beneficial – not just a little. Still, new energy sources will be found, new high-efficiency devices will be created, new paradigms of better living will occur. Notice I wrote will, rather than must. Even over-controlling government cannot stop it.
These sources will happen out of the general drive for people to make money and better lives for their families, whether we governmentally encourage them or not. This is one more aspect of the IPCC which is completely missing from the discussion. Do nothing IPCC scenarios don’t properly recognize the incentive that drives new energy exists without government. Sure, biofuel might not win, nor would solar implementation, but development and study is more than healthy. The failure of the self-appointed elite to notice the intellect of the masses has gone on since the beginning of human culture. Certainly, there is a lot of dumb in the world. Many people you meet can’t even grasp the simple concepts of a post like this yet there are enough in the world, degreed or not, who are not part of the elite, yet have the wherewithal, and more importantly, the intent to change the world.
This mass of self-improving public intellect set free to improve themselves, is what set America apart in the past. The result was NOT bad for the environment, although SWAG and others would beg to differ. Cleaner power, friendlier farming, better air, have all resulted from the excess profits of capitalistic society, yet we Americans live in an all encompassing media-sponsored message of guilt. Guilted to turn over rights, such that the completely fabricated possibility of global warming doom, doesn’t happen.
The worst part about extremist AGW, is that there is no solution to the problem. Infinite money can be spent, and we still cannot stop the emissions. If everyone on earth were made an instant millionaire for conserving their usage, none of our millions would be worth a sandwich because the economic flow would stop. Redistribution, does NOT work to create wealth.
The goal for the Super Warming Advocates Guild, in my opinion, should be much different than it is. Instead of trying to repress the lifestyles of those who they openly consider ‘overconsuming’, they should be focused on solutions with emphasis on minimal impact to the economy, and general funding of research into new energy. Research for energy, is entirely different than implementation of new energy, and is FAR different from blatantly false “all of the above” rhetoric. Implementation of fake solutions in the form of all of the above, is simply a swag at the true goal of repression of lifestyles. Either a solution works, or it doesn’t, there is not much middle ground.
Despite what the AGW alarmists sell, we can change energy production, without giving anything up. Not one penny. In fact, I fully believe the change will happen, with or without our intent.
Economically, nothing could be more important than providing endless cheap energy to society. The ability to ship, travel, heat and cool are paramount in the improved living standards of humanity. Any brief review of the history of energy reveals this.
The inventions of smelting, steam engines, liquid fuel IC engines, turbines, home electricity, pumped water, centrally retailed goods, all have worked to achieve a better lifestyle for the globe. Free to pursue new interests aside from feeding themselves, scientists study climate, medicine, physics, math, philosopy, etc. at their leisure. This was not possible at our present scale even 100 years ago. A true sign of the excesses of productivity.
From all of this, I truly believe a philosophy of limitation of energy, from any source, is very much counterproductive for the environment, for long-term limitation of CO2 emission, and for the quality of life of our children. I have seen no evidence which contradicts this thought process, and more telling, no evidence which makes a real attempt at it. The IPCC takes a very generalized swing though.
So what is rational environmentalism? It is the minimization of damage to our surroundings while prioritizing the collective health of our economic productivity. Maximizing our economy, naturally leads to maximization of technological growth.
Do you avoid eating meat? – Oh hell no. That’s crazy. Eat what you like and live your life. Cow farts do nothing ‘damaging’ to the environment and the very concept is ludicrous to the point of stupidity.
Do you avoid using paper? – No way! It is a farming industry like corn.
Do you build a solar powered home? No again. The cells take a lot of energy to make and are often dirty. They also cost more than the energy they make. Why? Well if you want to do it, sure, but there is little reason. Wait 20 years and we will all change our minds.
Do you build a more efficient home? Sure, if you have the option, this is cheap and saves cash. Insulation, smart design, can all lead to improved lifestyle and save money. Smart stuff.
Do you buy energy efficient lighting? Sometimes it makes sense, others, it does not. If you heat your house around the clock, the old light emitting incandescent heatball, is hard to beat for efficiency.
What about a green clothes dryer? No way. Water requires a certain amount of energy to evaporate. Use the power.
The whole environmentally friendly decision process I personally recommend boils down to whether you can maintain, or improve your lifestyle, while changing how you live. Our company sells energy efficient products. We sell them on longevity and quality, the efficiency is just another bonus. We are all amused that our company has saved more CO2 than Michael Mann or Jim Hansen ever will. Sure they may have influenced the public, but we have designed, produced, sold and distributed actual product in large quantity. Our customers usually don’t even think about the CO2 they are saving, but they are happy about the secondary savings from lower energy usage.
When you are choosing to conserve, I hope you consider that the saving of CO2 emissions may have NO positive impact on the environment. Despite the known warming signal, the percentage of natural vs CO2 warming is unknown, and not one single instance of environmental damage has ever been directly attributed to the fraction of a degree C we have experienced.
Nothing.
Also, when you choose to recycle, consider that Waste Management makes billions sorting garbage for the good stuff already. When you choose to buy recycled paper, you are driving down the cost of pulp from fresh trees, sustainably farmed everyday, by capitalist necessity, across the world. Sure a few areas are treating their forests poorly, but when they lose their production, the process stops and the trees grow back.
Conservation is a complicated sport which most people get wrong in my opinion. Instead of conserving usage, we should be focused on conserving low cost production and directing some of that profit toward more efficient technologies, expansion of a better way of life across the globe, while insuring that obvious damage to the environment is minimized. By obvious, I mean things like chemical spills, river pollution, particulate emission, etc. If you are a believer in destructive warming, you and I have a big difference of opinion and one of us is wrong, but my point is that by stopping limitation policy and allowing the global economy to continue, technology will develop far faster and we all will realize a new paradigm in energy production far more rapidly than if we pursue the government forced policies of limitation. Less NET CO2 will be emitted and we can all go back to fighting about the important stuff like whether we evolved from monkeys or whether we should be able to defend ourselves in our homes.
This is a repost from Luboš Motl’s blog, the Reference Frame, with permission. I read this when it was originally posted and believe that its message is far too often overlooked in the midst of the global warming alarmism. In all likelihood, we will be working into an ice age in the next 10,000 years and the ice age will be far worse for our survival than any problems we can create by CO2 emission. The Reference Frame’s post is based on a new blog (which I don’t know how Lubos found) sporting the statisticy title “most-likely”. Be careful with this one, it has some serious math behind it. I recommend looking at the spreadsheet linked, although too much of the calculation is missing for my liking, it is very interesting and unlike AGW, does scare me! Er, it scares my (kid’s kids)^20 anyway.
Glaciation cycles – swings of temperature that change the global mean temperature from a maximum to a minimum that differ almost by 10 °C and back – occur in quasiperiodic cycles with periodicities between 20,000 and 100,000 years or so. They may be reconstructed from the concentration of oxygen-18 in the Antarctic ice core.
The time goes to the left on the graph above. Note that the cooling is usually slower and the warming appears more abruptly. Concentrations of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are nicely correlated with the temperature. The reason is that warmer oceans can’t keep gases inside so well, so they release them after a few centuries when the ocean temperature adjusts to the land temperature. Read the rest of this entry »
From a Bob Ferguson email, here is a collection of links to today’s great denier story. A key theme expressed at skeptic blogs including this one is that the climate extremes predicted for so many years doesn’t exist. It seems that the IPCC was forced to admit that non-alarmists have been right all along. Bob also attached a few other links from stories earlier this week.
How can one explain such results, other than to conclude that there is spurious warming in the CRUTem3 dataset? I already see in the comments, below, that there are a few attempts to divert attention from this central issue. I would like to hear an alternative explanation for such results.
I would love to write this work up and submit it for publication, but I am growing weary of the IPCC gatekeepers killing my papers; the more damaging any conclusions are to the IPCC narrative, the less likely they are to be published. That’s the world we live in.
Roy has given blanket permission to use his posts here but this is already being covered at WUWT and his blog linked above.
Earth hour approaches for the United States, with enough participation in the shut off everything campaign, we would actually be able to hard-stop the electric grid. How cool would that be! Days of restarting, tens of millions in cost, now that would send a real message. To um….someone.
I fully intend to ramp up our usage to do my part to offset the morons of the world. The money isn’t important, the CO2 is less so, but the reality is that electrical energy availability is the single greatest advance of humanity in our entire history. Our lifespans have improved so much over the last century that the stupid among us have forgotten why.
They really don’t remember. They cannot recall that people washed clothes with their hands or how important clean clothes are to our health. They take for granted that the lights will go on after Earth hour is finished, so we can learn, read, stay warm, play. Our children used to be enslaved to menial labor that machines do now with a blink. They have forgotten how we used to burn whatever was in our reach for heat, light, dishes. The fools have gone so far now that they actually walk to the control for the previously impossible convenience that they purchased themselves, to turn it off and deprive themselves of the very thing they worked for!
I think we should protest food next.
Nothing in this world is dumber than limitation of energy production. Contrary to public school belief, opposable thumbs are not what saved us from unquantified millennia of strife, the reality is that low cost energy was what saved us. Were we humans a smarter people, we would look at our recent history and do everything in our power to create more of the same. Instead, we have public schools across the globe teaching our children that limitation and conservation are the way to the future.
E=mc^2! We are surrounded by more energy than we could ever hope to use, yet CONSERVATION of energy is what we discuss!
There is the other side effect of cheap energy which goes unmentioned. Cheap energy guarantees power to the individual instead of power to the government. The ability to travel, the ability to communicate, pay for your health, stay warm. Just what is the purpose of government in a world without energy shortage? What do you need government for when everything is being manufactured and provided already?
I wonder if that explains the across-the-globe government resistance to industrial progress.
I have quietly been spending some more hours of free time on sea ice and have a ton of data to present. Previously, we found that there was a nearly statistically significant difference in trend between satellite NOAA 17 and 13 that would create a spurious trend increase. In addition, we found a fairly strong offset in the data which would tend to go in the opposite direction. Post here.
Now I’ve got a quick comparison of NOAA11 and 13 sea ice instruments which have an overlap only 6 months long. In this dataset, the trend is in the opposite direction. Below is a plot of the various satellites in the Arctic.
The plot below shows the overlap region of f13-f11 satellites.
The next graph shows a large nearly statistically significant POSITIVE trend between the NOAA13 sat and the previous #11.
Recall that there was a nearly statistically significant negative trend in the NOAA 13-17 transition.
The only things to conclude from this is that the overlap regions of satellite data don’t have a trend bias in the same direction and there is not enough match between the satellite changes to reliably be within a two-sigma trend. Still, that is more solid than what I have seen around the Internet.
Lots of the same crap, trees ain’t thermometers, ice ain’t melting, sea level ain’t rising from CO2, no more hurricanes, Antarctic and Arctic ice will still be there, on and on and on. Why not shut down industry!? 
H/T Doug Cotton.
