An Important Article on Taxes

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.

Link here.

Back to data.

Industrial Destruction Advocates

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

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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

Sea Ice, Hudson Bay Region

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.

Questions and Motives – The Pendulum Swings

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.

IPCC Draft Law

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.

Hope this helps.

Bias In Arctic Satellite Sea Ice Trend

Updated below.

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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:

Comparison of Northern Hemisphere Perennial and Seasonal Sea Ice

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.

D minus — below average.

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.

 

H/T Doug Cotton.

 

First Order Draft Release IPCC

David Appell has released a copy of a FOD AR5 chapter.

http://www.davidappell.com/AR5

Northern hemisphere non-Arctic sea ice

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.

How to Form a Consensus

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.