Dr. Spencer – Dump the IPCC

I read this post By Dr. Roy Spencer last night with my jaw in my lap.  He may have written this kind of thing elsewhere,  but I’ve certainly never read it from a climate scientist.  There are so many points made which are absolutely true that I had to ask to repost it here.

There is a beast in the corner of climate science.  A big ugly beast, called the IPCC.   It was designed in my opinion to create and express extreme science for the purpose of a specific type of policy.  It was cleverly built on a foundation incenting and even requiring the exaggeration of science.

There are 3 primary questions the IPCC answers every five years in their reports according to their working groups.

WGI  – Assess the amount and severity of CO2 climate change and whether man is causing it.

WGII – Assess the impact good and bad of CO2 climate change including costs and options for adaptation

WGIII – Assess options for mitigation of climate change, look at the benefits and drawbacks of different policy scenarios.

These groups were established well before the consensus that CO2 causes warming even existed, but think about it, you don’t need question 2 if you haven’t already assumed 1 and you certainly don’t need 3 if you haven’t assumed 2.  What’s more is, if the IPCC doesn’t answer all three of these assessments in an extreme fashion, the group itself would be dissolved.  The more extreme the assessment, the more money they control, and more importantly to their intent the more policy they control.

If any of the following were true, the IPCC wouldn’t exist

WG1 – CO2 only causes only very moderate warming — IPCC closed

WG2 – Impacts of warming are mostly good or moderately bad — IPCC closed

WG3 – The solution to CO2 emissions is simple.  Adaptation and adding more nuclear power generation over the next 50 years, fossil fuels will rise in cost on their own due to scarcity. — IPCC closed.

It’s obvious to me that the plan was in place before the group took the first look at the science, but Dr. Spencer says it better than I.

Reposted with permission below.

Dump the IPCC Process, It Cannot Be Fixed

August 30th, 2010

In a recent opinion piece, Ross McKitrick has argued that the IPCC process needs to be fixed. He correctly points out that, “There is too much conflict of interest built into the report-writing process”.

Meeting of the Minds

The recent IAC report was described at WUWT and Fox News as a blasting of the IPCC.  The reality IMO is a bit different.  While the report is more critical than anything anyone anticipated, it has the same bite as a toothless dog, and it COMPLETELY fails to recognize what created the problems in the first place.  Just who is the IAC though.

This is the most time I’ve spent on a non-technical post.  The following names represent the IAC board.  I was curious who they were.

IAC Report on IPCC

I saw the reference to this at CA today.  The IAC produced a number of recommendations to the IPCC for improving their structure.  Of course it doesn’t and won’t address the key issue which is the recognition of the fundamental pressures on the IPCC report conclusions and the resulting motivations of the people in charge but I don’t think anyone expected that level of  understanding.  Unfortunately to me, these pressures require the organization to continue promotion of exaggerated, biased and extremist versions of the science, which it undoubtedly will.

I won’t have time to read the actual report until tonight at least but here is the link and the article which includes a link to the report.

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InterAcademy Council Report Recommends Fundamental Reform of IPCC Management Structure

UNITED NATIONS — The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce its periodic assessment reports has been successful overall, but IPCC needs to fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures to handle ever larger and increasingly complex climate assessments as well as the more intense public scrutiny coming from a world grappling with how best to respond to climate change, says a new report from the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an Amsterdam-based organization of the world’s science academies.

Climate Science Suffers Yet Another Body Blow

It’s been an extraordinary 12 months in climate science, I’ve often said nobody knows how much warming additional CO2 will cause, including me.  The implication being that all the IPCC models could be right. I’ve also often said that the IPCC is a political group before a scientific organization.  These past 12 months have been a series of blows to the body and head of climate science which have left me more skeptical of their conclusions than I ever have been in the past.

First there was climategate, exposing the conspiratorial style corruption of the science, with browbeating for those scientists who weren’t repeating the party line, fear of publishing criticisms, discussion of removal of journal editors with the wrong opinions, blocking of FOI requests for data, hiding of probelmatic data – multiple times.   We’ve all discussed it here endlessly, but it’s real it does exist and it did happen.

Ice Sheet Loss Cut In Half

Ice Sheet Loss Cut In Half

Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Thu, 08/26/2010 – 13:22

Much concern has been raised by climate scientists regarding ice loss from the world’s two remaining continental ice sheets. Rapid loss of ice-mass from the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are cited as proof positive of global warming’s onslaught. The latest measurements involve the use of satellite gravimetry, estimating the mass of terrain beneath by detecting slight changes in gravity as a satellite passes overhead. But gravity measurements of ice-mass loss are complicated by glacial isostatic adjustments—compensation for the rise or fall of the underlying crustal material. A new article in Nature Geoscience describes an innovative approach employed to derive ice-mass changes from GRACE data. The report suggests significantly smaller overall ice-mass losses than previous estimates.

Smart Grid

More leftist insanity today. I’m sorry but that’s what the world does so thats what we get. The NYT which cannot go out of business fast enough at this point, is advertising THE BENEFITS of VOULUNTARY brownouts.

To Cut Demand for Electricity, Some Customers Agree to Unplug

Electricity use is up sharply this summer, but in a windowless room near Albany that is the nerve center of New York State’s grid, controllers have noticed that something else is not rising: peak load.

How about that fantastic thing.

“You get called a day ahead, and all hell breaks loose when they call,” said Leo Cutone of Cutone & Company Consultants, which recruits buildings and institutions to participate. Common steps are adjusting air-conditioning thermostats, turning off some elevators, switching off lobby lights or starting up emergency generators.

Less elevators, emergency generators!! come on, it’s insane.

UN’s Ideal – Global Government

Occasionally there is a comment left which deserves as much notice as possible.   Unfortunately Bart get’s picked again but you could replace his name with Gavin or Mike Mann or really with Ben Santer just as easily.  There were a couple of items which looked like links from the comment but weren’t.  I’ve removed them.

This is the link to the leaked Copenhagen document.

And never forget the standing ovations received at Copenhagen by Hugo Chavez’s Marxist rant against Capitailism and freedom ,  the most dramatic parts of the video have been deleted from youTube maybe someone else can find it but the words still exist.  When crowds containing global politicians and climatologists stand and applaud for Marx quotes, and evil capitalism quotes, it’s pretty clear what you’re dealing with.

News flash geniuses, Marxism and socialism didn’t work as intended.
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galileonardo said

August 26, 2010 at 9:27 pm e

Jeff, I was leaving for vacation when you ran your “Id’s Crazy” post but unfortunately did not have the time to respond (though I desperately wanted to). I am thus glad to see you are on the subject again and I now welcome the opportunity to chime in and hopefully dispel the false Bartish feel-good notions about helping the poor nations (Bart, if you care to see how the proposed CO2 mitigation will be “very disruptive to the global economy” just keep reading – I even use the UN’s own projections).

I can’t claim to be the friendliest of debaters when going up against what I have at various times called AGW cultists, zealots, control freaks, Luddites, sheep, totalitarians, fraud deniers, etc., but I am a father as well (of a 4-year-old boy) and I’ll be damned if I don’t fight their vision of my son’s future.

Bottom line Jeff: Global wealth will essentially be cut in half under the Copenhagen plan.

Hygroelectric Generation

Hmm..

Electricity Collected from the Air Could Become the Newest Alternative Energy Source

ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) — Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ― much like solar cells capture sunlight ― and using them to light a house or recharge an electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may sound, scientists already are in the early stages of developing such devices, according to a report presented at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Solving a Solution

A common theme from climate scientists is how do we get people to act now.  They want us to act to stop global warming immediately.  They search their brains and write papers and blog posts on how to ‘convince’ the public to take action.

Here is  laundry list of the Copenhagen ‘solution to global warming’.

Form a global organization for detemining the right course of actoin

Set targets by country for co2 emission on a per capita basis

Place tax on carbon use.

Use money for research into global warming.

Send money and technology from wealthy countries to poor countries to help them adapt and pay for damages.

Place incentives on preferred adaptation.

Now I’ve said it before but what does any of this have to do with preventing global warming as it has been posed?  We currently don’t have the technology outside of nuclear to do anything substantial about emissions.   Imagine New York powered by a wind farm! Taxes limit today’s output but don’t accelerate technology.  Implementation of costly non-working solutions is just throwing money down the toilet.

It leaves me with a whole lot of questions but the one which really bothers me has to do with ‘developing nations’.

Wider Band Chlorophyll Discovered

I don’t have time for much blogging today.  Geoff Sherrington sent a link to a different article about this a couple of days ago.  It’s interesting because the expanded collection range of this chlorophyll would improve efficiency sligtly for biofuel type solutions. It doesn’t sound like anywhere near enough to make biofuel viable but they’ve only just begun exploring the new chemical.

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Australian scientists discover first new chlorophyll in 60 years

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) — Australian scientists have stumbled upon the first new chlorophyll to be discovered in over 60 years, according to a study published Friday in journal Science.

Found by accident in stromatolites from Western Australia’s Shark Bay, the new pigment named chlorophyll f can utilize lower light energy than any other known chlorophyll. It is the fifth known type of chlorophyll molecule on Earth.

Understanding Climate

I’m not sure what the heck this post is.  I suppose it’s my attitude toward AGW after two years of discussing climate science in blogland.  Perhaps after a couple of weeks of publishing accurate pro-AGW science (not extremist) it’s cathartic to post the rest of the story.

Possible alternate titles:

Gaia in a nutshell

Why be a skeptic

The benefits of blogging

A short term view of the visionary goal

Climate science crystal balls need batteries.

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Climate Science™:  We must act now, the end of the world is coming.

Science minded individual:  That’s scary, what do you mean?

Climate Science™:  The globe is warming from CO2 emissions, glaciers will melt, storms will strengthen, droughts will become commonplace, plantlife will die, the oceans will rise, the polar ice will melt, oceans will acidify, we must act now!

Science minded individual: Wow, CO2 causes all that?  How do you know?

Climate Science™: We have dozens of lines of evidence, Models, measurements, paleoclimate data, environmental data, it’s all in agreement.  We must act now.

Science minded individual:  Let’s see, I’ll start with the paleo reconstructions.  Hmm, it seems that the unprecedentedness is due to your mathematical techniques and special proxies.  Why is it that we can remove  some key data series and the whole thing loses the unprecedented shape?

Climate Science™:  There is uncertainty in science, engineers and physicists have trouble understanding.  These reconstructions don’t matter anyway, there are dozens of other branches and they are all in agreement.  We must act before it’s too late!

Science minded individual: But you agree the paleo reconstructions are in error?

Charlatans of Science Zhao and Running

Ok, this is the latest in global warming propaganda:

Comparison and Critique of Anomaly Combination Methods

This post is a comparison of the first difference method with other anomaly methods and an explanation of why first difference methods don’t work well for temperature series as well as comparison to other methods. The calculatoins here are relatively simple.  First I built 10,000 artificial temp series from 1910 -2010 and another 10,000 from 1960-2010 having the same trendless AR1 noise as the King_Sejong temperature station in the Antarctic.  Why the Antarctic? It was easy for me to access.  I applied a uniform trend of 0.05 C/Decade to both the short and long series with the shorter series offset -.25 C from the first to mimic the offset created by temperature anomaly calculations.  Simple version, two temp stations of different lengths with known trend of 0.05C.

I calculated the same stats for each series and each method below.

Three Views on a Mosque

We all keep reading about the ground zero hundred million dollar mosque.  The news writes what they allege are the mainstream views on the subject.

SNR Estimates of M08 Temperature Proxy Data

Reposted at Climate Audit.

Occasionally when working on one thing long enough, you discover something unexpected that allows you to take a step forward in understanding.  At the ICCC conference, I met Steve McIntyre and took time to ask him how come Mann07 “Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods” didn’t show any variance loss in the historic signal.  The paper makes the claim that CPS is a functional method for signal extraction, which I’ve long and vociferously contested ;) .  Neither of us had a good answer, but I had to know.   In Mann07 – Part II at the Air Vent, the mystery was solved.  The M07 paper uses model data as a ‘known’ temperature signal and adds various levels of noise to it.  While the work oddly uses white noise in most operational tests, it does present the example of ARMA (1,0,0) ρ = 0.32 models, and it showed very little variance loss.  Replicating M07 using CPS wasn’t difficult and the results were confirmed – no historic variance loss so no artificially flat handles for the Mann hockeystick.